by Sarah Bird
A short while later, Wager returned with his pockets full of prickly pear fruits.
“Look at those beauties,” I said, taking the fruits he handed me.
Wager glanced at me sharply, startled to hear me using my woman voice in front of Lem.
“I know,” Lem trilled.
Wager’s face clouded with anger.
“Don’t worry,” Lem hurried to assure him. “I ain’t never gonna blow.” He wagged his finger from me to Wager. “You two’s sort of made for each other. Ain’t a drop of backdown in either one of you.”
Even Wager twitched his lips in what passed for his smile. We filled our mouths with the sweet prickly pear meat, crunching down on the soft black seeds and letting the red juice run down off our chins. The happiness of being with the two men I loved best and, for the first time, not having to hide who I was made me so giddy that I did something I hadn’t since I was a young girl playing with Clemmie. I giggled. Lem, seeming to have done a right smart of giggling with girls in his time, joined in. Wager snorted something like a laugh and shook his head.
After we drank our fill of water, I helped Lem to his feet. With me steadying him, he was even able to climb out of the arroyo—“Don’t want to foul our drinking water”—and do his business.
Before we went back down into the ravine, he said, “I expect you and the Sergeant have plans for, you know, after your hitch.”
“Plan to make for California,” I answered. “Might set up a laundry. The Sergeant might ship out on a whaler.”
“Oh,” Lem said. “Y’all’ll be all right out there. Heard California’s pretty. Weather’s good. Never had no slavery. Yeah, you two will be happy. You’ll both have someone.” He stared out onto the prairie.
“Lem?” I asked. “You want to come with us?”
“Wouldn’t care to intrude.”
“You wouldn’t. You’re my best friend.”
“A livery,” he suggested, shyly. “I thought a time or two about maybe I could open a livery.”
“Hell, yes. A livery! What you don’t know about caring for horses ain’t worth knowing. Come to think of it, a livery’d suit me better than being a damn scrubwoman. I could do the books, help you however you need.”
Lem glowed and muttered, “I like that plan. Like it just fine.”
I started to help him back down into the arroyo, but he waved me away, saying, “Y’all probably want to be alone.”
I tried to persuade him, but he declined, nodding toward our horses that we’d picketed up top to graze. “Naw, think I’d rather just be up here with the hosses and the stars.” I took his bedroll to him, and Lem spread it there where he could see the stars and hear the horses.
After Wager filled all the extra canteens we’d brought, he hauled them up to the top of the arroyo, so that we would be ready to leave long before the sun rose.
Imagining the livery the three of us would open, I fell asleep with Wager’s arms wrapped around me. Late that night the sound of an animal strangling out its dying cry jolted me awake. I sat bolt upright, my body knowing before my mind could catch up that it wasn’t an animal cry. I grabbed my carbine and scrambled up the slope of the arroyo. At the top, by the light of a pale moon, I saw Lem being driven to his knees by an Indian who had my friend’s hair gathered in one hand and was about to slice his scalp off his head with the other.
I dropped the brave with one shot then fired on the other shadowed forms. Wager reached my side in time to see three braves leading our horses away. It was too dark to hit them, but we came close enough that two of them dropped the reins of the horses they were stealing and rode off into what was left of the night.
I tore off across the prairie after the two loose mounts. Only when sharp rocks and cactus thorns stabbed my bare feet did I realize that I was as naked as the day I was born and my feet were bare. It didn’t matter. If I couldn’t gather up the two horses the renegades had turned loose, Wager and I would die.
Luckily, the horses were old army plugs not given to wandering far from their nosebags. I grabbed their reins and tried to lead them back, but the pain in my feet stopped me dead and Wager had to carry me back.
Lem’s body had slid halfway down the side of the arroyo. He had five arrows in him. One had gone through the yellow kerchief around his neck.
“Put me down,” I asked Wager. “Next to him.”
I touched my friend’s face gently, curling my palm against his cheek, loving him the way he’d wanted to be loved. I took his broad hand in mine. It was gloved in calluses from his years of pounding out horseshoes. I lifted it to my lips, pressed it against my face and the tears ran over his knuckles.
I don’t know how much time passed with me kneeling beside my friend, clutching his hand, before Wager said, “We have to go now. They’ll be back.”
Wager buried Lem as best he could, marking the grave well so that we could return and give him a proper burial when it was safe. When Wager saw my feet, he winced and took the bindings that had flattened my breasts, soaked them, and tender as a Massachussetts nurse, wrapped my wounds. He set me atop the brown, then went to fetch the extra canteens.
He returned a few moments later having found only one canteen. “We can’t waste any more time. We’ll need to ride hard for a day or so. Keep the renegades off our trail. Can you do it?”
I nodded but said nothing as only sobs would of come from my mouth had I opened it. Wager spurred his mount and I followed. As we rode toward the light of dawn I saw what was left of the canteens, trampled and crushed by horse hooves in the attack, their spilled water already dried away.
Chapter 80
After a long ride, we reached a meadowland bursting with wildflowers. A creek cut crooked through it. I turned and asked Lem, who was riding beside me, “Have you ever seen such pretty country?”
Lem answered that he never had and started singing the song we’d learned back in Hempstead. I joined in, and we sang it the way that made sense for Lem.
Oh his eyes are bright as diamonds,
And sparkle like the dew.
You may talk about your Dearest Joe,
And sing of Johnny Lee,
But my brave man of Texas
Beats the beaux of Tennessee.
We were laughing at singing out his secret when I heard someone shushing me and remembered that I was in church and the white folks’ preacher was yelling Bible verses at us. “Slaves are to be submissive to their own masters in everything; they are to be well pleasing, not argumentative, not pilfering, but showing all good faith, so that in everything they may adorn the doctrine of God our Savior.”
Old Miss and Old Mister sat on either side of the preacher nodding. My heart thundered for I was a captive again. Heat poured over me as I was in hell and had never escaped.
“Cathy, wake up. Cathy.”
I came to my senses and remembered. First about Lem, then about my feet, the pain in my body mixing with the pain in my heart to bring me so low that I couldn’t tell which hurt the most. We were riding back to camp, back to Wager’s men, with only one canteen, and I didn’t have the energy or wit to fight that bad decision. It took all I had to stay mounted, for hot pain was creeping up from my feet, through my legs, and into every bone in my body. And then the pain stopped until I came to with Wager holding me.
“You’re sick, Cathy,” he whispered. “You have to rest.”
We stopped atop a high mesa where we could see for three hundred and sixty degrees in all directions. Wager scanned behind us with his spyglass for Indian pursuers, but didn’t see so much as a puff of dust. We rested in the dappled shade thrown by a couple of mesquites. He unwrapped my feet and cursed the festering mess he found. Both feet had swollen until the skin was tight and pus spilled from the cactus cuts and mesquite thorn punctures. They were useless for standing or walking.
He felt of my head. “You’ve got fever. Do your bones ache?”
I nodded.
“Infection.” He used too much of wh
at water we had for wetting down the wrappings. I tried to stop him, told him to save every drop. But he shushed me and put all the salt we had left on the wet wrappings to help draw out the poison.
When I had been tended to, he staked our horses out to graze. We still had my brown and Wager’s horse, a mare he called Belle.
Wager sat with me atop the ridge where we caught the breezes that swept up from the valley below. He pointed out how the land was starting to slope down toward the Rio Grande. I leaned against him and he put his arm around my shoulders. I closed my eyes and the visions started right up again. Solomon, Mama, Iyaiya, Old Mister with his black hand, all the wounded boys lying beneath their Dying Tree, noble King Ghezo and crazy King Andandozan with his hyenas, they all returned.
I don’t know how much time had passed when Wager tensed beside me and I jerked awake. He sprang to his feet and squinted at the horizon. I tried to see what had riled him, but nothing appeared. He grabbed the spyglass from his saddlebag, fit it to his eye, and announced, “A rescue squad. Cathy, they’re coming for us.” He handed me the glass.
I twisted the focus ring on the glass and a fresh troop of soldiers jumped into my vision. Leading them was John Horse, who must of seen the way of things and gone for help when him and his men’d skinned out the night Drewbott took them into custody. And now he was leading the soldiers first to water, then to us. Tender green shoots of hope sprouted in me. With John Horse there to tell the true story, we’d be safe.
Excited, Wager said, “If we leave now, we can intercept them before dark. We’ll get fresh mounts and you and I can ride back to the men with what water we have, while this detachment goes to the spring to fetch more, and,” he added, “to retrieve Lem’s body.”
I couldn’t take the glass from my eye and was staring at our deliverance when, before I even knew what I was seeing, something deep in my belly clenched. I kept staring, trying to make what I had seen disappear. But it would not and joy dropped off me like green leaves gone dead and brown fall away in the chill of winter.
“Cathy?” Wager asked.
“No, Wager,” I finally said. “We’re not going back. We are never going back.”
“Yes we are,” he answered as though that ended the discussion.
When I didn’t move, he knelt beside me, and, recalling that fever was playing with my mind, he added patiently, “Cathy, we’ve been over this. I don’t agree with everything the army does or how they do it, but I will not be a deserter. I took an oath. I will honor that oath. For myself. For those who come after me. I stopped believing for a while, but this rescue squad proves that Douglass was right. We shall have our day in court and justice will prevail.”
I knew then that the reason I truly loved Wager was that he had been blessed. He’d been born free and raised strong. He had the luxury of believing and I was about to take that away from him. “Wager,” I told him. “Maybe, someday, justice will prevail. But not today. Not for us.” I handed him the glass and said, “Look careful. At the man riding point. Tell me what he’s carrying.”
He held the glass to his eye and studied the trooper I’d pointed out.
Wager didn’t answer, but his jubilation fell away as he kept studying what he was seeing but could not yet believe.
I told him what he already knew. “Man’s toting a Sharps rifle. Nearly four foot in length, no mistaking it. Sticks out near a foot more from his scabbard than the carbines the others are carrying. Shoot today, kill tomorrow,” I muttered and said no more. Wager already knew that that was what they called the Sharps as nothing came close to it for long-range accuracy. Buffalo hunters were just starting to use them. Set up on a tripod, they could drop a full-grown bison six hundred yards out. But that man down there, he wasn’t a buffalo hunter. He was a soldier toting a long arm with a telescopic sight and Wager knew what that meant.
“Sniper.” Wager pronounced the word that was his death sentence. All the big ideas in his head fought to boot this one terrible new fact out and he argued, “But we went for water. And we’re riding back to tell them where that water is. To save the men. No jury would convict us for that.”
“It’s not a question of a jury, Wager. That sniper is here to make sure that you never stand in front of a jury and tell the true story of how Colonel Ednar Drewbott was an incompetent jackass who nearly killed every man in his command. If you truly believe that they sent out a sniper for any other reason, and you want to bet your life and mine on it, then let’s ride out right now to meet them.”
Wager kept staring at the Sharps through his glass, trying to make the evidence of his own eyes square with all the noble beliefs that he’d built a noble life around.
Gently, I said, “Wager, you’ll never have a day in court. That man has orders to kill you on sight. And probably, anyone with you.”
Only when I mentioned myself did Wager take the glass from his eye, mash it shut between his palms, take a deep breath, and ask, “How much water do we have?”
“Maybe half a canteen between us.”
“Half a canteen of water, two played-out nags, and you crippled,” Wager said. “What chance do we have?”
“About what a pig in a dog race’d have.”
“I doubt we can make it to the border.”
“Impossible.”
“Of course, I’d never have thought a woman could survive two years in the Buffalo Soldiers.”
“Do we ride?” I asked.
“We ride,” Wager answered.
Chapter 81
Wager dragged a leafy mesquite branch behind us to blind what trail we might leave on the rocky ground as we rode down off the mesa, descending to the valley below. My feet smelled like something a surgeon in the war would of cut off. Long red streaks crept up my ankles, pus leaked from the cuts and if a feather’d lit upon them, I’d of screamed in agony. But I had to ride. Since I’d been the one to see the way of things and talk Wager into deserting, it was my obligation now to save him. That gave me the strength to keep my mind right.
We rode all that night, pushing hard for the border.
When daylight came, I couldn’t stop peering over my shoulder, fearing the sight of a plume of dust on the horizon closing in on us. But there were no signs of life other than the lizards that scurried past, their tails cutting curlicues in the dust, and the vultures that always seemed to be spiraling around overhead, the feathers at the tips of their wings reaching down to us like fingers.
We came down off the high plains into the heavy heat that hung over the lowland. The few breezes we’d caught up on the mesa were gone now, the air turned too thick to breathe. Heat from my ruined feet rushed up through my legs until every bit of me throbbed. Fever sweat poured off me though I’d had but a few swallows to drink. And then, of a sudden, the pain stopped. The sun grew brighter and brighter until the vultures overhead were wisps of pale gray winging through a white sky. The air was light and I breathed easy.
Creatures I’d never before seen on the prairie appeared. A leopard prowled about me on spotted legs that ended in feet made of the skulls of enemies. A pack of hyenas tore apart the bodies of both Mary the whore and the mother who’d pulled the plow. A lion crushed the golden curls of Custer between his bloody teeth. General Sheridan ordered the lion to turn the Boy General loose. An elephant, roaring and snorting, stampeded toward him. Iyaiya chased behind, holding her shield low and her spear high. My grandmother threw her head back and shouted joy to the heavens. I was in the band of warrior girls singing back to her. The elephant wheeled about and charged my grandmother. I lifted my spear to save her then remembered that my feet had been amputated and only the pain was left.
“Cathy, swallow. Come on, darling, take a drink.”
Mama held a cup to my mouth. Iyaiya hovered behind her. Another voice called me. I ignored it and Mama and Iyaiya and I were floating in the cool, green water and nothing hurt anymore. They’d been waiting for me. Helping me all they could. It was time to be with them again.
&nb
sp; “Cathy, open your eyes, heartstring. Please. We’re almost there. Don’t leave me now. We’ll rest on the other side. Cathy, don’t die. Please open your eyes.”
Mama and Iyaiya were so close. Just a minute more and we’d be together again. And Lem! And Solomon! I swam toward them, my mother, my grandmother, my baby brothers and sister, all the ones I’d lost. They looked back at me, smiling. Even Solomon and Mama smiled. They held their hands out, urging me to hurry.
“Private! This is a direct order! Open your eyes!”
I snapped my eyes open. They all vanished.
It was too bright to see anything, then a face came into focus.
Wager.
He gathered me into his arms, brought his canteen to my lips, and I took the last swallow.
“See that, Cathy?” He pointed down to the valley, stretching out at the base of the bluff we sat atop. “That low ridge off in the distance that’s turning pink now in the sunset?”
The sun was setting, but through the haze of dust and distance, I saw the pink ridge a few miles away and nodded.
“Cathy, that’s Mexico. See the silver thread running along in front of it?”
I nodded.
“That’s the Rio Grande River. That’s the border. We cross that and we’re safe. Once we’re on the other side, they can’t come after us. The sovereignty of the United States stops there. We’ll be safe. We’re almost there. We’ll rest here a few hours then push on.”
“Why did you stop?” The words felt like razors cutting out of my throat and the world tipped and spun whenever I raised my head.
“You were raving, Cathy. Out of your head. I had to get some water into you or you wouldn’t have made it. You’re still in danger.”
I put my hand on his. He brought it to his ravaged lips, kissed it, and said, “We’ll rest here a bit. As soon as Belle is ready, we have to push on.”
I glanced over and saw Belle slewing her head back and forth as she cropped off wads of grass. My mount was nowhere in sight. “Where’s the brown?”