Bill Dugan_War Chiefs 04

by Quanah Parker

  In the back of his mind was the thought that the Osage could be haunting the riverbank, waiting to pick off stragglers. It was a remote possibility, because even the fearsome Osage knew the fury of the Comanche, and would likely not wish to linger too near the flames of that rage.

  Deep inside him, a voice kept whispering, repeating over and over the wordless hope that the report was wrong, that some mistake had been made, that it was all a horrible joke. But there was another voice, this one trapped in his skull, that screamed again and again that there was no mistake, that it was all true and that it would be better he cut his own throat and tore out his own eyes than look on the ruins. Nocona knew which voice to believe, and he knew which one he wanted to believe. The warring voices shouting each other down were like two mad women fighting over a man. The louder one screamed, the louder the other responded, until words were useless, and furious volume was the only communication left them.

  He saw smoke now, not much, not enough to suggest a peaceful village, but certainly not left from the slaughter of a week before, either. The sun was darkening, turning the river to blood, as if the village lay prostrate, hemorrhaging the last precious drops of its life into the current. Dead ahead was a steep rise and the village lay beyond it, not more than a mile away. He pulled up then, feeling his sides heaving, the frenzied hammering of his heart almost audible in the sudden silence. Taking a deep breath, he dismounted, grabbing the war rope and curling it securely in his hands and tugging the pony toward the rise.

  The thick grass looked dark, almost gray in the fading light, and felt it crush under his moccasins as he started uphill, the pony jerking its head behind him, as if reluctant to accompany him.

  He felt the urge to run, to let go of the horse and sprint through the long grass the way he had as a child, but it struck him as unseemly, and he shook his head, as if baffled by such a treacherous impulse. The grass seemed to cling to his buckskin leggings, as if trying to persuade him not to climb the rise, to stop and stay where he was, even to go back. But he trudged on, the horse still bucking him with every step. Near the top of the rise, he stopped and turned to look at the sun setting now far behind him. The trees were all tinged with red, bright ruby auras surrounding the crowns of the tallest, as if they were just about to burst into flame. The dark shadows of the trees speared up the rise like so many charcoal snakes.

  He let the pony go, and it shook its head, nickered once, then backed up a couple of steps. Shaking its mane, it turned away from him, but moved no further. He collapsed into the grass, his legs folding beneath him by instinct.

  He was breathing deeply, each inhalation swelling his powerful chest and taking with it some of the terror as it rushed from his body. His hands trembled in his lap, and he looked at them as if they were live things that crept up on him unawares. Lifting them, he held them overhead, blocking the sun and watching as the fingers turned ruby red at their edges. He curled the fingers into fists, shook them once, and let a great shout rush from his lungs. He heard the wordless bellow come echoing back from the hills around him and looked toward the loudest echo as if someone else had shouted to him.

  Shaking his head, he doubled over. A hand closed over his shoulder, and he gave a start, reaching for his knife as he tried to rise, but the hand held him down, and he was too drained to struggle.

  He glanced up then, and found himself staring into the face of Red Owl, the oldest man in the village, a man who had lived more winters than anyone could count, more winters even than Red Owl himself could remember clearly.

  “My son,” he said, “you have come back.”

  “Too late,” Nocona mumbled. “Too late.”

  “You’ve heard, then?”

  Nocona nodded. “Yes, I’ve heard.”

  “It was terrible, terrible. I think maybe you should not see.”

  Nocona shook his head sharply. “And what should I do, then, Father? Should I forget what has happened? Should I pretend that I never lived here? That my family never was?”

  “No. Of course not. But some things are better not seen.”

  “This is not one of them. This I must see for myself. I want to carve it into my memory to scar it, the way a knife scars the skin.”

  “Then I will go with you. We should go now, in the dark, when these terrible things you will see will not blind you.”

  Nocona nodded his assent. He got to his feet and looked then at Red Owl. The old man looked as if he had aged fifty winters since the last time Nocona had seen him. It must be horrible, he thought, to make this old one so much older still.

  “Let’s go,” he said.

  Red Owl turned and looked toward the crest of the rise, not more than fifty yards above them. He nodded. “We will go,” he said. He started walking, and Nocona made a move to brush past him, to take the lead. Red Owl reached out and closed his bony fingers around the younger man’s wrist. “No,” he said. “I will lead you.”

  “There is nothing there that can harm me,” Nocona argued. “I don’t need your protection.”

  “Everyone needs protection from such things,” Red Owl insisted.

  “And what then, will the dead be less dead because you see them first? Will their hearts still beat, will breath still be drawn?”

  “No.”

  “Then what difference does it make whether you go first or I do?”

  “It is better. Trust me. It is better so.”

  “All right, but get on with it.”

  Once more, Red Owl nodded his head, the long white Sioux-styled braids he favored draping his shoulders and seeming to wriggle like snakes with the movement. He started forward again, this time more purposefully, his short legs whispering in the tall grass with every step. Nocona fell in behind him, leaning forward against the increasingly steep incline. At the crest, Red Owl raised his hands to the sky and mumbled something that Nocona didn’t catch.

  “What did you say?” the young man asked.

  “Never mind, my son. That is between me and the Great Spirit.”

  Nocona moved up alongside him and stared down into the broad valley. The river still had a trace of color, its rippling surface dark red at the center and shading to nearly purple near the banks. The valley was full of shadows, the willows on the far end of the village masses of black as the sun disappeared behind boiling black clouds. Nocona looked up at the spears of blinding light for a moment, half a dozen of them lancing out from behind the gilt-edged clouds and, one by one, vanishing.

  Peering down into the gathering darkness, Nocona could see that it was worse than he had feared. Most of the tipis had been burned, leaving heaps of ash and burned goods, sometimes, too, leaving charred lodgepoles like the rib cages of great beasts. Mounds of shadow lay scattered, and he knew without seeing the details, that they were the bodies of his people, slaughtered like buffalo and left to rot in the sun.

  He started to run then, breaking away from Red Owl, his voice roaring from his lungs of its own volition. His feet were flying through the tall grass and he had the sensation that if he tried to stop, they would go out from under him. Halfway down, he stumbled, fell headlong and rolled over and over, then spread his arms out like wings to arrest the fall and popped to his feet again as if he had meant to fly.

  On the flat, he picked up speed, stumbled once more and this time sprawled on his face, the wind knocked from him by the fall. He turned to see what had tripped him, and realized even as he crawled toward it that it was a body. He closed his eyes, screwing them tightly shut, hoping that he would never have to open them again. But he knew that was no answer. Slowly, he opened them, his hand hovering just over the back of the prostrate figure. The smell was overwhelming and it hit him with all the suddenness of a bird flying into a stone wall.

  The smell of death was everywhere, thick in the air, like a mist that seemed to be coating his skin. He covered his nose, scrambling away from the corpse and getting to his feet. Nocona pinched his nostrils shut. In the last lingering dark gray of twiligh
t, he could see mounds of shadow everywhere he looked. Heaps of belongings lay scattered everywhere, bits of cloth charred at the edge, broken arrows, dried meat in piles in the dust.

  Here and there, Nocona saw the body of a dead horse, its belly bloated, its legs stiff as driftwood. And the flies were swarming around every bloated corpse, dog, horse and human being. Moving toward the ruins of a tipi that lay on its side, its buffalo skin covering charred to wavering sheets of ash, he bumped against a food basket. It fell on its side, and something moved. He thought for a moment that a scavenger of some sort had been hiding in the basket, but whatever it was stopped and lay still only a few inches from the overturned basket.

  He dropped to one knee for a closer look, leaning over the basket and peering at its contents. It took him a few moments to realize it was a human head, the black tongue swollen like rotten fruit in its mouth, the eyes hidden under a pulsing mass of insects.

  He gagged then, and his stomach emptied itself before he realized what was happening. He lay there in the dust, his body wracked by convulsions, and he knew that he had to find his own tipi, knowing that there was no point, knowing that any hope White Heron or Little Calf might have survived was foolish, but still, he had to see for himself. Getting to his feet again, he staggered toward the center of the village, his eyes darting this way and that, fixed dead ahead rather than on the wreckage all around him.

  He found where his tipi had been, and saw that it, too, had been overturned and burned. The hide covering was charred ash, the lodge-poles like black bones in the fading light.

  He found her almost at once, lying on her back. Her head, at least, had not been severed, but her buckskin dress had been torn, and her legs were splayed wide. Her throat had been cut, and her fists were clenched in the agony of her dying.

  He knelt beside her, his head falling to his chest. He didn’t want to look at her, but he couldn’t not. Steeling himself, he opened his eyes again, brought his fingers to his lips then reached to brush hers with the tips. An angry fly buzzed, landed on his hand for a second, and he swiped at it with his other hand, the sharp crack of the slap echoing off into the night, the mocking buzz of the unharmed insect darting past his ear for a moment then disappearing.

  He looked at the sky then and knew that everything he feared was becoming real. Things had to change, and kneeling there next to the body of his wife, the wreckage spreading around him all the way to the edge of the world, he no more knew how to change them than he knew how to fly.

  He would learn.

  But not before the Osage were made to pay.

  Chapter 6

  May 1836

  ELDER JOHN PARKER STOOD on the rough wooden porch, his hands already dirty from morning work, although it was not yet eight o’clock. He looked at the sun a moment, then turned to holler back through the open door behind him.

  “Looks like another scorcher of a day, Granny. A little hellfire to keep us honest.”

  Mrs. Parker joined her husband on the porch, drying her hands on an apron. “Sometimes I wonder why we came here, John. The weather can be so unbearably hot. Lord knows, there’s not a whole lot to recommend this place.”

  “Never easy doing God’s work, Granny,” he said. “You ought to know that by now, if you know anything at all. Nobody ever said it would be easy work bringing the Good Lord to the heathens.”

  “And we have precious little to show for all that hard work,” she said. “You haven’t made one convert in the year and a half we’ve been in this godforsaken place.”

  Parker shook his head. They had had this conversation a thousand times before. And deep down, he was almost as discouraged as his wife, but there was no way he was going to let her know that. “Come on with me a minute, Granny,” he said, reaching back and closing a big fist on her apron, then tugging her gently but firmly toward the single step down to the hard-packed ground.

  Already, the sun was heating things up, its silent hammer blows flattening everything in sight, like a berserk blacksmith venting his rage on whatever came to hand. Once on the ground, he turned to make sure Granny was following him, and let go of the apron.

  She had a stiff back when she wanted to, and John Parker knew better than to take her compliance for granted. It was a hard life he had chosen, not just for the two of them, but for a couple of dozen others, including his sons, Benjamin, Isaac, and Silas, and daughters-in-law and their children. And if he could be said to have learned one thing in the last eighteen months, it was that Texas was nothing like Illinois, and Kiowa or Comanche nothing like Papists or Presbyterians. But he wouldn’t give up because giving up was no more a part of him than a third eye or a pointed tail.

  Moving toward the tall gate mounted dead center in the wooden palisade surrounding their settlement, which, by default had come to be known as Fort Parker, he quickened his pace, glancing once or twice over his shoulder to make sure her resolve hadn’t kicked in.

  When he reached the tall gate, he slid the heavy log that served for a bolt aside, and backed away, grunting, as he tugged the gate open. The sun came pouring in through the widening gap and when the gate was all the way open, it rode almost dead center, as if the gate had been positioned like some primitive temple entrance to greet its rising.

  “John, what in tarnation are you doing?” Granny shook her head watching the stubborn old man she’d married so long ago as he strode confidently out through the open gate and spread his arms wide.

  “Come on out here, Granny,” he said, turning smartly on his heels and waving impatiently. “Come on, now, come on out here and have a look.”

  Reluctantly, she wrapped her hands in the apron once more, even though they were already dry, then, when she could delay no longer, she stepped through the gate.

  He walked back to meet her, dropped one thick arm heavily over her broad shoulders and swept the other in a wide arc, like a salesman with a fish on the line. “Just look at that,” he said. “Look at all of it, not just the fields, but the wildness, the trees and the river, the flowers across the valley. The lilies of the field. And if you listen, you can hear the birds singing, Granny.”

  As if to give her the opportunity to verify his claims, he lapsed into sudden silence. “All I hear is bugs,” she said. “Flies and beetles wondering when we’re gonna leave them be and let them eat everything we planted.”

  Parker laughed. “It’s not that bad, Granny. We got a good-sized crop of corn in, and beans and peas and potatoes. We got some livestock, not much right now, I’ll grant you, but it’ll increase, just like the good book says.”

  “And you think we’ll be here to see that, do you, John Parker?”

  “I don’t just think it, Granny, I know it. I have faith in the Lord, and He won’t let us fail.”

  Before Granny could answer, she heard footsteps on the hard ground behind her, and turned to see Michael Frost and Hiram Hardee shuffling toward the gate.

  She nodded to Frost, and he returned the acknowledgment with a nod of his own. When the two men were close enough, Hardee said, “You folks are up mighty early this morning. Anything the matter?”

  Parker shook his head. “Just trying to get Granny out of her funk, is all. She woke up with gloom in her eye this morning, and I was just trying to show her the bright side of things, cheer her up a little, that’s all.”

  “Well, Mrs. Parker, I’ll allow that I sometimes get a little testy my own self. Especially out there bent over a hoe when that sun starts to feel like a great big hot rock sittin’ on my shoulders. But all I do is take a look around and see how far we come in so short a time, and I get to feelin’ better pretty quick. “

  “And what about your Sarah, Hiram? She feel better then, too, does she?”

  “I don’t reckon I ever discussed it with her, to tell you the truth.”

  “Maybe you ought to. You men are all alike. You see what you want to see, and the rest of it might as well not even be there. A lot of foolishness, I think.”

  “Those ar
e some pretty hard words, Granny,” Parker said. “I don’t think Hiram come out here to get a lecture from you or me. I figure he’s got some work to do, and we ought to let him get to it.”

  Frost grinned. “From the looks of that sun, John, I don’t think I’d mind listening to Granny all day long, if it meant I could stay in the shade to do it.”

  Parker smiled. “You underestimate her. Granny can flay a whole herd of cows when she gets that tongue of hers to flappin’.”

  “You hush up, John Parker,” she said, snapping his leg with one tail of her apron. “I was just saying what was on my mind, is all. I’m a little scared. It doesn’t seem like to me that the Indians around here have much use for us. Seems like to me they’d as soon see us under the ground as tilling it, if you ask me.”

  “Now, you know that’s not true, Granny. They’ve been friendly enough.”

  “The two or three we ever see, maybe. But what about the rest of them? Why do you think they haven’t been here pounding on the gate to get in? Did you ever stop and think that maybe they aren’t particularly interested in the white man’s God? ‘Cause it sure has occurred to me. More than once.”

  “You have to have faith in the Lord, Granny,” Hiram Hardee said.

  “I have all the faith I need, thank you, Hiram. I just don’t see that it’s made a whole lot of difference to the Comanche, is all.”

  “That’ll change. You just wait, Mrs. Parker. They’ll come around.”

  “There isn’t anything else to do here except wait, Hiram. So, I suppose I’ll have to do that. But I don’t have to feel good about it. Or do I?” She turned when she heard a familiar voice calling to her.

  “Granny, Granny!”

  It was her granddaughter, Cynthia Ann, who came racing toward her, followed in succession by her grandson, John, and her son, Benjamin. Cynthia Ann’s little legs were pumping as she dashed across the open plain of the compound, a rag doll flopping in one hand, its arms and legs flailing every which way as it dangled just above the ground.