Gabriel watched him, smiling faintly but showing no joy. He couldn’t help wondering how one knew when to follow one’s own mind and when not to. James joined them, and the three sat quietly for a few minutes. Eventually Gabriel asked, “You ever shoot that grizzly?”
This brought a new smile from Dunlop. “I haven’t—not yet, at least. I saw one once, though, up in Nebraska. Even had my sights on it.”
“You miss?” James asked.
“Not exactly.” The Scot looked between the two boys, something hidden in his eyes. He shrugged and stood up. “I don’t know, lads.” He motioned in the air before him, a brief explanation in two sharp twirls of the wrist. He proceeded as if the meaning of this gesture should be clear to all, or clear to none, depending. “Anyway, if I’d bagged the grizzly, I’d have completed my mission. I’d have had to pack up and head home, and I’m not ready to do that just yet. I kind of like this place, strange as it is.”
GABRIEL BEDDED DOWN ON THE EDGE OF THE CAMP, placing the wagon between him and the rest of the men. He rolled himself tightly into the worn woolen robe that Marshall had given him and lay with his head hard on the bundle that served as his pillow, his eyes roaming from that strange angle across the horizon. The moon had just risen above the earth’s rim, hauling itself up with tired resilience and casting pale light across the plain.
The boy watched the moon’s progress for some time, wondering if the same moon might be viewed this evening by his mother or brother, stepfather or adopted uncle. If so, would they wish to share such a sight with him? Or would they turn against him, a unified front that would spurn him just as he had them? What sins against family will be forgiven, and what punished here on earth as in heaven?
He awoke late in the night. The moon was gone now, having progressed its full course across the sky and retired. The landscape was much darker. The fire behind him simmered low and the voices were now silent, turned instead into a chorus of nasal breathing. Gabriel saw nothing new before him and closed his eyes. He held them that way for several seconds, then eased them open again.
His eyes picked out movement in the dim light. A creature emerged from the cover of grass and waddled across a clearing of bare ground into view. An armadillo—a young one, it would seem. Its rotund body caught the dull glow of the starlight and projected an image of monstrous girth in relation to its tiny head and thin snout. It moved clumsily, waddling, and yet somehow it conveyed complete confidence in the correctness of its form. It paused at one point, contemplated a subterranean sound only its sharp ears could hear, then dug into the soil to reach the delicacy hidden therein.
Gabriel watched it work at this for some time. After a while, the creature made its way over to him and brushed up against his body. The boy didn’t move, and neither did the creature retreat from his foreign smell. It nuzzled into the wool, rustled around for a few seconds, then lay still. Before long it seemed to sleep. The boy watched its scaly back rise and fall, rise and fall. He moved not a muscle, like a father who fears waking his slumbering child. Some time later, while still contemplating this steady rhythm, Gabriel too drifted into slumber.
He awoke to the early rays of morning light. There was a commotion behind him, Rollins cursing the pain of heat transmitted through metal. The armadillo was gone, having left no trace, sign, or footprint. The boy stared at the spot in which the creature had sheltered, then closed his eyes once more and feigned sleep for as long as the illusion would hold.
GABRIEL AND JAMES WALKED BESIDE THE WAGON, their strides easily matching the slow rotations of its wooden wheels. They had risen to a sky clouded over with the threat of rain, but as the morning passed the clouds did likewise. Gabriel felt the hard-packed earth through the worn soles of his boots, and he couldn’t help but compare it to dried skin, blistered by so many days without rain.
Marshall roused the boy from his thoughts. He rode by them at a canter, tipped his hat, smiled as if addressing polite company, and moved on up to converse with Caleb.
James leaned close to Gabriel. “What do you make of Marshall?”
“Don’t know. Reckon he knows his job all right.”
“Yeah, he does that,” James said, although his tone indicated that this answer was not in keeping with the thrust of his question. “Don’t he seem strange to you? Like he thinks one thing one minute and then the exact opposite the next.”
“How’s that make him different from any other white man?”
“Well . . .” James found it hard to argue with this.
“They think what suits them and change their minds when it suits them. That’s how come they’re white.”
James smirked. “Is that why? I thought it had something to do with skin color.”
They walked on. Just after eleven o’clock Gabriel noticed that something was happening. Caleb galloped out ahead, and Marshall hefted his rifle and rode with its barrel against his shoulder. Bill motioned to the boys. “Come up, we got us company ahead.”
And thus Gabriel rode the wagon into the first settlement of Indians he’d yet seen. It was not the sight he would have imagined. Their homes huddled in the earth like the dens of creatures only half gifted with the knowledge of carpentry, part turf and part skins and part cave. There was only one teepee, massive compared to the other structures but weatherworn, shredded by heat and wind. As the caravan drew near, forms rose up from the hovels and walked out to greet them. Dogs followed the people, more like the protected of this tribe than protectors. In front walked an old man and woman, a couple so aged and wrinkled as to be kin to the first humans. Behind them walked several more of different ages and sizes, all clad in rags and stray garments, one with a cavalry shirt and one sporting a hat of buffalo fur, which seemed strange, as the day was warm.
The old man hailed the wagon in his own language. With a nod from Marshall, they halted and listened to the man’s words, sounds thrown together and meaningless to all but Jack. The Indian spoke with gestures that seemed both beseeching and instructional, as if he would ask them for something but must first explain the premise he proposed and provide the background and other salient details.
“They’re Kansa,” Jack said.
“Are they?” Marshall asked, though he seemed little interested. He took off his hat and worked its shape with his fingers. He looked ahead of them. “What do they have to say?”
Jack and the old man spoke for a few moments. The old woman interrupted twice, punctuating some point of the man’s with her own emphasis, nodding her gray head and reaching up toward Marshall with gestures that were difficult to interpret. Jack thought for a minute before translating. He seemed to process the conversation at full length, and he spat before he spoke. “They want food. He says they’re starving. They been eating grasshoppers.”
“Grasshoppers?” Bill said. “Shit.”
The woman nodded.
Marshall stuffed his hat back on his head. “Better than nothing, I guess. They got anything to trade, or they just appealing to our sense of Christian decency?”
Jack shrugged. “You got eyes, Marshall. You figure they got anything to trade?”
A girl stepped forward from the back of the group and touched the side of the wagon. Bill looked down at her, suspicious, but the girl looked around him and studied James. Her hair hung straight and black around her face. Her eyes were black also and large, more like the eyes of a deer than of a person. She might have been as old as sixteen or as young as twelve. It was hard to tell. She reached out and touched James’s knee. She caressed it and looked up at him with eyes that were both inviting and curious. James drew back from her and brushed against Gabriel.
“Looks like the squaw fancies coloreds,” Bill said, with humor in his voice but a frown on his face. “Never could make sense of Indians.”
“Go on and get yourself some if you can,” Rollins said. He glanced at Bill and shared a smile with him. “She’s clean. You can see that. Clean and sweet, I’ll bet ya.”
“Get me what?” Jame
s asked.
“Get what she’ll give you,” Rollins said. “Or sell you. She can’t cost much out here.”
James hesitated. He looked at Gabriel like a man soon to be guilty of some crime seeking forgiveness. He would have asked his friend something, but the urging of the men and the girl made him climb down from the wagon. The girl held his hand in hers and looked him long in the face. She reached out her other hand and touched his chest, slid her fingers over his collarbone and out to the muscles of his shoulder.
James laughed nervously.
The old woman said something and the girl nodded, not taking her eyes off James.
“What’d she say?” Rollins asked.
Jack spat before he answered. “Shit, every redskin’s a prophet these days. Said you’re not long for this world, James.” He shook his head as if it were barely worth going on. “The old dog barks backward and the moon is a piece of cheese with gold inside.”
“She said all that?”
“Shit, no, she didn’t say that.”
“You just said she said it.”
Jack looked at Rollins with infinite disgust.
They all lapsed into silence once more. The girl said something that Jack refused to translate. She motioned for James to follow her.
“She wants me to go with her?” He looked beyond her to the structures that passed as homes. “I’m not going over in there. Somebody else go.”
“You don’t like girls?” Rollins asked. “Or is it squaws you ain’t got a taste for? Or . . . Don’t tell me you ain’t ever wet your pecker yet. Look, boy, there ain’t nothing to it. Just go on with her and do like she says and come back smiling.”
James studied the girl again. “This the way Injuns do?”
“Don’t know and don’t care. Injuns do or they don’t. I can never tell why and it don’t pay to ask. I reckon poverty’ll make a person do near anything. It’s gonna cost you, though.”
“She ain’t asked him for anything yet,” Jack said. “Just made the offer.”
James again discovered the humor in the situation and looked to Gabriel for guidance. Gabriel offered him none.
Marshall had sat quietly through these exchanges but spoke up now. “Let’s go,” he said. “They can eat grasshoppers, for all I care. James, back up in the wagon.” He urged his horse forward twenty feet or so, paused, and wheeled around. Nobody had moved. “I said let’s go. These people are diseased. Look at them. They’re castoffs from their own people. They’re the wretched dregs of a wretched race, and all they want from us is to drag us down with them. You ain’t doing that on my time. Let’s go.” He turned again and rode off without looking back.
James stood, unsure what to do, his hand still clasped in the girl’s.
“Come up, boy,” Bill said. “I reckon Marshall knows a sickness when he sees it.”
With this, James gently withdrew his hand from the girl’s. He climbed up on the wagon and sat next to Gabriel. Bill snapped the oxen into motion and the cart moved off. James looked back at the girl, but she didn’t watch the cart pull away. She had bent down and was writing something in the dirt with her finger. The rest of that motley entourage turned and made their way back to their hovels, lacking either the energy or the faith to beg more heartily.
Jack rode up next to the wagon. “You don’t know what she said, do you?”
“I couldn’t understand a word,” James said.
“She said you had beautiful skin. Called it ‘skin the color of the first earth.’ ” Jack pursed his lips as if he were preparing to spit, then changed his mind and didn’t. “They got a funny way of saying things. In the future, you ought best not listen to old Rollins. He got hisself a case of shrivel-dick some time back. Says he’s been cured of it, but ever since he’s been trying to introduce others to the pleasure of it. Vengeful son of a bitch, he is.” With this he kicked his horse into a trot and moved away from the wagon.
THAT EVENING THEY CAMPED beside a thicket of tamarisk trees on the southern bank of the Red River. Rollins prodded James with questions about his sexuality, hypothesizing that the boy suffered from some unnatural disorder. James did his best to keep away from him, going further than necessary to gather wood. The man might have turned his attentions toward Gabriel if Jack hadn’t observed that they’d soon be back on much-loved Texan soil. Rollins’s mood turned. He smiled and hooted at the thought of that, lauding the virtues of that once free republic and quickly spiraling into a tirade against all things Mexican.
Gabriel ate with little appetite. The wooden spoon felt unwieldy in his fingers, the stew blander than usual. He followed the men’s conversation with little more than half-interest, musing on the events of the afternoon, the Indian girl and her family, the mixture of loathing and pity that this conjured in him. Dunlop’s voice brought his attention back.
“It’s a sad state of affairs with those people, and it’s only gonna get worse.” The Scot shook his head and prodded a log into the fire with his foot. “They’ve been done a mighty wrong, if you ask me. It’s indecent, is what it is.”
“Yeah, there’s something sad in it,” Marshall said. He spoke absently, the greater part of his attention engaged in rolling a cigarette. He shredded tobacco between his fingers, strung it out upon a brittle sheet of rolling paper, and rolled it closed with one smooth motion of his hand down his pants leg. “It’s a sad world and the red man’s been given a raw deal in it, but some sad things must come to pass in the betterment of society and mankind in general. You ever given that a thought? Ain’t nothing could’ve been done with the Indians than what has been.” He pulled a stick from the fire and lit his cigarette with all seriousness and then tossed the stick back into the flames. “Tell you what. I wish them boys up north speedy progress in dealing with the Sioux and their likes. You may think I’m being coarse, Dunlop, but you weren’t born and raised in this country, were you? The story of Rebecca Dary should be enough to prove my point.”
“I’ve heard the story, Marshall,” Dunlop said.
This gave the man pause, but only for a second. “You boys ever hear of Rebecca Dary?”
Gabriel and James shook their heads.
“Well, listen here.” Marshall didn’t begin speaking immediately, however. He waited a few moments to let a suitable silence build, then he reminded everyone that this was no story of the distant past but was little over a decade old. He first painted a picture of the young Rebecca’s upbringing in the East, among the cultured society people of Philadelphia. He told of manicured trees and streets paved and daily swept. He told of her long and beautiful auburn hair, of her fair eyes the color of the sky, and of her figure straight and comely. This woman, he said, might have planned nothing more for her life than to reside in that city. She could have married and borne young, watched them tutored and sent on to a fine university. She could have aged gently, feeding her mind on poetry, English novels, and polite conversation.
“Her life could’ve went that way,” Marshall said, “cept then she fell in love, took a fancy to a man of adventure.” He was a dashing youth, the young Mr. Dary, with dreams as big as the continent and full faith in his ability to make them happen. They were wed. In a year’s time they had quit the East and staked a claim in central Kansas. She bore a child, a baby boy, and with this young one in tow their life progressed.
Marshall paused to look around the fire and challenge each man’s eyes to differ with him on any part of his tale as thus far disclosed. Only silence answered him. He went on. In the spring of the Darys’ third year, things changed. The previous winter the Kiowas had suffered and starved and died in great numbers. They had seen their food sources destroyed and their lands eaten into by an endless parade of palefaces. They had lived hard and unhappy, and a band of their braves decided to even the score. They began their warpath in southern Kansas and swept north. They killed, scalped, raped, and spread mayhem wherever they could. When they came upon the Dary homestead, they found the husband tilling a field and cleaved ope
n his forehead with a hatchet. They found the baby toddling in the dirt by the front porch and lifted him by the feet and stove in his skull on a fencepost. And Rebecca they found poised in the doorway with a shotgun aimed pointblank at them. She shot two of them dead before they knocked her unconscious and strapped her to the back of a horse and rode off into wild country, about as far from the reach of whites as possible.
Marshall paused again here and looked at his audience. The men sat tensely, as if they thought that this story shouldn’t be taken too seriously but were finding that hard to do. Caleb was barely visible, half hidden in the shadows. James had huddled up close to the fire and warmed his hands there, looking at Marshall and waiting. Gabriel too sat listening. There was something in the quality of Marshall’s voice that he found intoxicating, something as solid as the written word, and as irrefutable. He kept his eyes on the fire, trying to focus on the flames and the magic of their dance. From the outside, he seemed to have no interest save for the fire’s motion, but the man couldn’t have held the boy’s attention any more completely.
Marshall went on to tell of the early days of Rebecca’s capture, when her hair was shorn and handed out to the squaws. She was tied to a post before the teepee of the brave who captured her, and for three weeks she received no food except for what she could steal from the dogs. Each day when the brave returned from his hunts, he would untie her and lead her inside to quench his desire. This done, he lent her to others, who had her one after the other till she was bruised inside and out and numb and could feel no more. This went on for weeks that turned into months and looked to last forever. At some point the brave took a deeper liking to her and stopped sharing her with his companions. He fed her well and took her into his teepee and made her equal to his other wives. They accepted her also, for she was kind and demure and yet showed a strength of character that they admired.
One day the brave killed a buffalo. He cut out its tongue and rode across the miles and brought it to Rebecca and fed her with it, raw and warm from the grip of his palm. Another day they brought in a captured cavalryman and administered to him all forms of degradation. Rebecca was there, watching, with no recognition of a kinship to this man on her face. She was garbed as an Indian and thought as an Indian and spoke the Kiowa language as if she had known no other. She spat on the captured soldier and told him in her foreign tongue that she knew him not except as the bastard child of the creator, a scourge cast by accident into the world and spread like the plague. “And I’m quoting verbatim,” Marshall said.
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