by Sarah Bird
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“I will kill you, strangle you with my own two hands, if you get yourself laid out. You hear me?” Though she spoke hard, tears trembled in her eyes.
“I am not gonna get killed.”
“You might have to go after the renegades. Only the idiot whites believe those bloodthirsty savages see a dime’s worth of difference between white and black. They’ll come after you, Cathy. If they ever get hold of you…” Her anger cooled and she whispered, “A woman? Lord.” She’d heard the stories, too. “Killing’d be the best thing they could do to you.”
“Me?” I said. “Don’t you know I am killproof? Already had one army, one gang of bushwhackers, and one Old Mister try to get the big job done. And they all failed, didn’t they?”
She smiled and hugged me. This last I didn’t resist for every single man gawking at us would of given up his crossed-saber cap for so much as a kind glance from my sister and there she was lavishing me with affection. For them to behold an actual hug and water running from the eye of the prettiest woman in the state on my account? Well, that was sure to do my standing as a man a power of good. With everyone except Vikers, of course. For, there he was, sneaking around as usual, watching our farewell hug with his head tipped to the side, trying to work out what was really going on.
Dust hadn’t settled behind our visitors before the Sergeant passed along Sheridan’s order that we were to “map, blow up, or poison every location where a redskin might get a sip of water.” He read off a list of those he’d chosen for the expedition. To our surprise, me and Lem were on it. It seemed that my “romance” with Clemmie had taken the degenerate stink off me.
I gathered up my gray wool blanket, ground cloth, Spencer carbine, and one-quart canteen. Since it was a warm April with the barrel cactus already dotted with yellow flowers and the prickly pears blossoming pink, all of us on the detachment left our heavy overcoats with their handsome shoulder capes behind.
We were each issued sixty rounds of ammunition and five days’ rations. A pound of hardtack and three-quarters of a pound of salt pork. Knowing how tedious this fare could become, I traded Pinkney two gourds of pulque for a couple of onions and three potatoes. Once we got our personal gear stored, we used every minute of the remaining time overhauling our horses and their gear.
I had Bunny’s saddle and bridle gleaming bright as the day they were issued. And Bunny, herself, I groomed until she was pretty enough for the state fair.
We were ready to take to the field.
Chapter 63
When we rode out in the dark, chilly hours before dawn, the country smelled like spring, like the earth getting ready for warmth and growing. We knew that the heavy hammer of summer heat was about to fall on us again, so we enjoyed shivering a bit in the saddle before the sun came burning up.
The Sergeant divvied us up into three details of ten men each and sent us out to scout water holes, springs, seeps, any place the savages could get a drink. He kept me, Caldwell, Greene, another fellow whose entire job was to lead a mule carrying two crates of black powder, and five others in his unit of ten. The Sergeant handed me a little notebook and the stub of a pencil, told me I’d be marking down his sightings from the sextant, and we hit the trail.
Bunny loped along next to the Sergeant’s mount with a right jaunty snap to her step. Caldwell and Greene and the rest kept well back, which was fine with me for I had hard feelings about that pair that time had not, and never would, soften.
Just like when I was keeping accounts for him in his office, the Sergeant was silent for a good while as he studied the plains, here and there bouqueted with wildflowers, a few glistening with the last drops of morning dew, before starting in the way he did, as though I’d been privy to the conversation he was carrying on in his head. “It couldn’t have come soon enough, right?”
“That’s right,” I agreed, knowing he was talking about finally getting out of the fort and putting some miles between us and Drewbott.
“I love this country,” he observed. “Open and wild and free. Endless possibilities.”
“Yessir, being able to see a hundred miles in any direction does have a freeing effect on the mind. That and being west of the cursed ninety-eighth meridian.”
“You remembered,” he said.
“Sir,” I answered. “I remember every word you have ever spoken to me.”
I’d never of said something so personal if we’d been indoors. But he was right, this country was freeing. And it had the same effect on him. He responded, “You have a fine mind, Private. You’re not like any other freed slave I’ve ever met. You go your own way.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“It’s not a compliment, Cathay. Not for a soldier.”
“Yessir.”
“On the other hand,” he continued, the way he did when he was chewing something over. “Our people will never be free if we always obey.”
“No, sir. I figure on obeying much as I can right up to the point where I get me that pension. That’ll be the last day I ever ‘sir’ anyone.”
“What will you do after?”
I hadn’t actually given much thought to the matter of after. But the Sergeant had a way of causing dreams you hardly knew were there to crowd in and I piped up as though I’d had it all planned out for months. “I propose to have my own little business.”
“Yes! A business,” he exclaimed, like I’d come up with the right answer to a tough problem. “It’s just like Brother Douglass says, ‘We must acquire property and educate the hands and hearts and heads of our children. Races that fail to do these things die politically and socially, and are only fit to die.’”
It puffed me up considerably that me and Brother Douglass were of a mind.
The Sergeant asked if I’d stay out West when my hitch was up and I said I would. “Nothing for me back East. Even less down South.”
“Nothing for any of us, Private,” he agreed. “And every day it gets worse as President Johnson shows how deeply he is in the pocket of the planters. With a few strokes of his pen, he continues to give back with ink what was won with four years of blood. There is no hope for a decent life in the South. Not with a bunch of defeated Rebs who are determined to use the law to enslave us again.”
For a minute or two the only sound was the clopping of hooves as we made our way across a high mesa. Finally he spoke, asking, “You know where you should head?”
“Can’t say as I do.”
“San Francisco,” he answered. “My father told me stories of how all the races mingle freely there. That’d be the place to open a business.” His eyes gleamed at the prospect. “You could bring Clemmie if you two have an understanding,” he added. “As for me, I have a feeling that I will find my own heart’s darling waiting for me there by the sea.”
It hurt me to think about this heart’s darling he’d be finding.
“What sort of business do you have in mind?” he asked.
“I was thinking about a laundry.”
“Oh, no.” He cut me off. “Not a laundry. Where’s the dignity in that?”
“It wouldn’t be me doing the scrubbing,” I corrected him. “I’d hire some gals.”
“No, no, why, you’d be barely better than a slave owner then. No, what you want to do is open a small dry-goods store.”
I agreed that that was a fine idea, but it had one hitch. “I’ll never have enough money to rent a place with high shelves, much less stock those shelves. I figure I could swing a couple of washtubs and some lye soap. But ever have enough to open a dry-goods store? Uh-uh. I’d as soon catch a weasel asleep.”
“Not if you had a partner.”
“A partner,” I repeated, thinking I’d misheard or heard what I’d never even dared to dream about.
“Why not? If we throw in together, our pensions along with what we’ve saved up, we could swing it. Our hitches are up at about the same time. I trust you. I think you trust me.”
More than
anyone I’ve ever known, I wanted to say, but didn’t for fear of sounding candy ankle.
“Think about it, Cathay,” he said, riding back to gather up the stragglers for we had come to the edge of the mesa.
Farther on, the ten of us picked our way down a series of ravines that led to a canyon the like of which I’d never seen. It was a trough with walls that rose far overhead and had a floor of sandstone that bathed the cliffs in a reddish glow. Hooves clattered on the hard rock bed. The orange cliffs on either side were wavy as buttercream icing slumping off a cake on a hot day. Lost in gaping, I fell behind the rest. I was having my doubts about finding water for every inch of stone was sunbaked with not a patch of earth nor tuft of grass.
“Cathay!” The Sergeant’s call echoed back. I rode forward and damn if he wasn’t standing beside a little pool, pretty as a round looking glass reflecting the blue sky high overhead. A series of such seeps, none much deeper or bigger than a red clay washbasin, stair-stepped down the canyon, trapping whatever little rain or dew ran into them. The dust around each one had been disturbed by the unshod hooves of Indian ponies.
The Sergeant pulled his sextant from a saddlebag and proceeded to calculate latitude and longitude. I wrote down the numbers he reeled off in my notebook so that they could be mapped later.
“Are we going to blast them?” I asked, for that was why we’d brought along the black powder.
His right eye clamped to the sighting mechanism, the Sergeant answered, “I hope that’s not a serious question, Private. We’d have to drill into sandstone to plant the cartridges. Then where would we run once the fuses were lit? Not to mention the danger of creating a rock slide. And for what?” he asked, sliding his sextant back into the saddlebag. “To blow up a few shallow basins?”
We clopped along the canyon until it opened out into a gully with a thin trickle of water running in it. Pitiful as it was, the Sergeant shot the coordinates anyway and I wrote them down.
For the next few days, we ambled about a newborn world waking up from winter, mapping anything wet we came across. On the fifth day, the Sergeant told the others that at dawn the next morning him and me and a couple of packhorses’d be heading out alone. “There is supposed to be a spring fifteen or twenty miles due west. Cathay and I will make better time and use less water if we go alone.”
That evening, I filled a bucket with water from one of the kegs and took it along with a flake of hay to where I’d staked Bunny for the night. She dipped her head into the bucket, soaking her floppy ears, as she guzzled her nightcap. I broke up the flake and, whiskery muzzle twitching, she gathered the dry stalks into her mouth and ate, her jaw slewing from side to side. As she mulched up the hay, I groomed her, and whispered the good news about how the Sergeant had picked me.
We were up the next morning before any of the others except Lem, who had named himself camp cook. He had coffee ready and brought cups to me and the Sergeant. It was to be a short foray and we were traveling light. Allbright had his canteen looped over his saddle horn and a spyglass in its leather case on a strap over his shoulder.
The day dawned bright and hot, the sun already flexing for the summer to come. Like the rest of the men, the Sergeant wasn’t wearing his jacket. Of course, I was. But no one passed comments anymore as I was known as either modest or crazy and “Bill’s ways” had come to be accepted.
“Y’all take care, Bill,” Lem hollered after me. It was unusual for one man to call another by his first name and I didn’t like him yelling it out like that. It sounded nancy boy, and I didn’t want to put that thought back in Allbright’s head after Clemmie had taken it away. So, though I could picture Lem behind me, waving good-bye, waiting for me to wave back, I never did turn around.
After a few hours on the trail, the land began, ever so gradually, to slope down. We continued poking our way through the typical assortment of vegetation bent on stabbing or crippling us. The day turned so warm that the Sergeant took the liberty of unbuttoning his shirt. We went to a gallop for a bit to feel a breeze on our sweaty skin and his shirt flew open, baring his chest and shoulders.
Lord.
I had to look away.
We settled into an easy walk so that the Sergeant could tip over to the side in his saddle, and study the ground. He was cutting for signs of redskins. This wasn’t like tracking back home, though, where a deer’d leave a tidy set of hoofprints clear as a map in the soft earth. No, here he studied what looked to me like bare rock, searching for “disturbances” and for “what’s not there.”
He halted at the top of an arroyo so deep it was almost a little canyon and tilted his ear down toward the ravine, listening for the bird chatter that wasn’t there and the prairie-dog alert barks far ahead that were. Then he looked to see what was disturbed. Leaves crushed. Twigs broken. Thorns sprouting hair from a horse’s tail. When Bunny nickered, Allbright held up his gauntleted hand, ordering silence. I leaned down and rested on Bunny’s neck, stroking her black mane to keep her from getting snorty. Clouds moved in and provided a bit of shade to cool us off.
We rode on, following the arroyo below us. Within its shaded recesses, I spotted several jacks and a couple of white-tailed deer stirring amidst the desert willow and shaggy salt cedar that sprouted along the creek bed at the base of the ravine. We came to an old cottonwood that had been swept away when some long-ago flash flood rose up, then dropped the fallen tree here. A covey of quail skittered out from beneath the whitened branches of the dead tree and fishtailed after their mama to safety farther on down the ravine.
The Sergeant said that we were close and we couldn’t risk the horses giving us away, so we left them tied to the fallen cottonwood and continued on foot. Now that I was closer to the ground, I could see what the Sergeant had been following. What had looked like nothing from horseback, showed itself to be a trail that had been brushed over with a leafy branch. Here and there, part of a hoofprint appeared.
The wind started kicking up then and long strings of gray clouds flapped across the sky. The clouds erased our shadows and the wind whipped away any sound we might make. Bits of blown grit and sand stung my face. I snugged the hold bead of my hat up tight under my chin to keep it from blowing off and peered up at the sky. The entire northern horizon behind me was blanketed in towers of clouds that rose up into dark gray anvils.
“Sergeant,” I said. “Begging your pardon, sir, but I think we got some weather moving in.”
He barely glanced up from the trail to peek at the clouds and say, “We’re getting close.”
At the leading edge of the massive anvil cloud was a thin line of bright blue. I’d heard of such a thing before. “I believe, sir,” I said, “that this is what’s called a ‘blue norther.’”
He mumbled, “Hmmm,” and carried on. The Sergeant had what you might call a one-track mind and his was roaring down the rails toward mapping the water hole the prints were leading us to. “Not much farther now,” he said again, hiking the straps of the spyglass and sextant cases up farther on his shoulder, and setting off at a ferocious pace.
But it was farther. Far enough that I wished we hadn’t left the horses behind. Far enough that the temperature started dropping like a rock. The wind turned chilly and I knew we’d be cold the instant we stopped. Especially the Sergeant without a jacket and hardly enough fat on him to keep a sparrow warm.
After an hour or so, he stopped suddenly and dropped to his belly. I lay down beside him close enough that a seam of warmth opened up along my side where it touched him. He pulled the spyglass from its case, rested on his elbows, and made a tripod of his arms. He put the glass to his eye and peered down the ravine that ran straight before us. A wind funneled up and blew the brim of his hat back so that it was mashed up flat against the crown. His body next to mine tensed at what he saw and I knew we’d come upon a party of Apache.
Chapter 64
As I lay there, waiting for the Sergeant to speak, every story the old sergeant back at Jefferson Barracks had told us an
d every one of the telegrams I’d heard read out came back to me with the words “mutilated,” “raped,” “unmanned,” and “burned alive” jumping out. My blood galloped through my veins harder than it had in my moment of cowardice back at Cedar Creek. Redskins were even more terrifying than Rebels, for at least Rebs weren’t murdering savages like the redskins, who were more animal than human, who gloried in killing the way a wild animal would.
“Have a look,” the Sergeant whispered.
With a trembling hand, I put the glass to my eye, and braced myself to see a treacherous brave, his mouth still red from eating the heart of one of his victims. Instead, the glass filled with the sight of a young mother gazing down at the infant sucking at her breast with a tenderness to break the hardest heart. Her long, black hair, parted in the middle, framed a face gentle and wary as a doe’s.
I glanced about at the rest of the band, camped out amidst a heavy growth of brush with a wallow dug in its center that had filled with muddy seep water. I counted half a dozen women and old men and twice that many youngsters, skinny specimens slinging rocks at each other with leather pouches. A small remuda of Indian ponies was picketed a ways down from the band. The women and old men sat with stiff blankets tented around their shoulders for the wind had picked up even further and was howling now so strong that we could of started shouting and they’d of never heard us.
This band wasn’t at all the fearsome gang of bloodthirsty murderers described by the old sergeant. First off, they were all half starved. The old ones were down to gristle. A couple only raised their heads to cough. Still, I reminded myself, sad and pitiful as they might seem, they’d slice my throat soon as look at me.
My heart was hardening toward them again when Iyaiya whispered to me, They were here first. They are warriors. They fight the enemy. They will not be captives.
As I took one last look, a big wind gusted up and lifted the mama’s long black hair so it rose off her blanketed shoulders like a raven taking wing.