Savage Country

by Robert Olmstead

  “He is not hungry,” the reverend doctor said.

  “It’s a poor conclusion,” the man said to his son after taking the heavy coin and then, “Good luck to you,” and he turned his limping gait up the road and hobbled on without looking back.

  Chapter 10

  Elizabeth closed her eyes against the sunlight. For a time she’d fallen asleep in the saddle from sheer exhaustion. When she startled awake the reverend doctor was riding beside her.

  “I must have fallen asleep,” she said.

  “I was prepared to catch you,” the reverend doctor said.

  “Your constant friendship is a great boon to me,” she said. “You are very understanding.”

  “The heart is not so complicated.”

  “No,” she said. “I do not suppose it is, though it seems it should be.”

  “Vanity of vanities,” he said. “Man is mere breath and his days like a passing shadow.”

  “Yes,” she said, then laughed aloud, her mind strengthened for how simple it could be.

  They stopped to rest in the heat of the day. There was a fire started under the wash pot and each man was to bring his own armful of wood to keep it going. Charlie stirred with a barrel stave as each deposited his clothes on his way to the creek. There were washboards, coffee, and a basket of gingersnaps from Aubuchon’s traveling kitchen. A small looking glass was hung from a branch for shaving.

  They’d been out six days and had run through the liquor. The penman was the first to show symptoms of withdrawal. He was shaky and complained of headaches. He vomited and sweated profusely. He’d blackened his hair with boot polish and in the heat it streaked his face. Like so many, he dreamed and compromised and this was the pattern of his failed life. Now he was brittle and crumbled to dust, his mouth dry and his saliva thick as mucous.

  When Michael rode in he sought out the penman to check on his condition and found him staring blear-­eyed at a newspaper he’d found in the packing. On his breath was the chemical smell of his gut desperate for liquor.

  “I am a helpless reader,” the penman declared in greeting, a smile working his mouth.

  “What is that you’re reading?” Michael asked.

  “The Cincinnati Daily Commercial.”

  The penman let the newspaper slip. He mopped his brow with a threadbare handkerchief. He told Michael he was badly swindled by a man in Cincinnati who took subscriptions to begin a school in his name and absconded with the money. It required every bit of his small savings to pay off the debt and avoid prison. The shame of it was unendurable.

  “You and your grandson will not make it,” Michael said.

  The penman, rheumatism in his hands, tapped his forehead when he spoke.

  “We have nowhere else to go.” Tap. Tap.

  “You must think me indifferent,” Michael said, “but I really don’t mean to be.”

  “Willy’s father died in the war, and after his father was killed, his mother, my daughter, poured boiling water on herself and shot herself. She was declared insane and sent to the lunatic asylum at Columbus. When she came out she threw herself into a threshing machine.”

  “I am sorry,” Michael said.

  “You have lost too,” the penman said. There was an intricate network of wrinkles around his eyes. He was shaking and sweat was running down his chin and neck. Waving a trembling hand before his eyes, he shooed away something only he could see.

  “We all have,” Michael said.

  “You understand, Whitechurch will try to kill you,” the penman whispered.

  “I know.”

  “It’s what I heard when copying his documents. He would have me make certain fabrications. I went for my dinner and did not return. I thought it best to leave town.”

  “You are not safe from them either.”

  “No.”

  “Mrs. Coughlin knows all this?”

  “I told her everything when I made my petition to join,” the penman said.

  “If you cannot make it, that is your fate,” Michael said, chafing at the burden of responsibility. It wasn’t due to Elizabeth they were here. It was because of his crossing the threshold of Whitechurch’s office. That crossing—what else he’d set in motion he could only wonder.

  “Young man, sympathy for others is something inside all of us.”

  “I know you believe that,” Michael said.

  Michael joined Elizabeth and the reverend doctor eating beneath an awning they’d hung. They’d spread a cloth and unfolded canvas chairs. There was a table with legs that folded. Beside them the creek shimmered in the light, and beyond was the land in the heat waves and an occasional cloud of red dust. There was wine to drink and the reverend doctor brought a bottle of whiskey to the table.

  “What did you two talk about?” Elizabeth asked Michael.

  “He doesn’t talk much,” Michael said.

  “What’s wrong with him?” the reverend doctor said. “Is he ill?”

  “He is very friendly and I am sure he is honest,” Elizabeth said.

  “I would say they are all drunks and they need their liquor,” Michael said.

  “They’ve handled their bottles too freely and now it’s gone,” the reverend doctor said. “More is the last thing they need. I say it’s the sun. I myself had a slight sunstroke today. Poisoning from the sun can be very dangerous. I said to young Gough the other day, You are drunk, sir, and he said to me, No, sir, it is the sun.”

  “Actually, it is something they do need,” Elizabeth said, and explained that many of the soldiers in hospital were addicted to liquor. Many went into battle full as a goose and were wounded and suddenly without the bottle they succumbed to the torment of delirium tremens and often died. In response she and the other nurses began to secretly provide a drink or two and slowly weaned them of their dependency.

  “I suppose it’s no use,” the reverend doctor said. “You start by opposing intoxicating liquor and you have to settle for no habitual drunkenness.”

  “We must separate the sin from the sinner,” Elizabeth said.

  “These men are paid to work and when they are drunk they cannot work. They are therefore stealing from you.”

  “You speak the truth,” Elizabeth said. “But such men as these are haunted by a thousand devils.”

  “We can’t fool away time with a drunken man,” the reverend doctor said.

  “What’s one to do?” she said with a sigh.

  “Let them drink,” Michael said.

  “So much for the progress of temperance,” the reverend doctor said.

  “I see it must be done,” Elizabeth said.

  Michael leaned back in his chair and watched a small whirling dust devil as he smoked. Elizabeth took out her pocket watch and looked at it, the press of time always upon her. Someone was blowing a hooo-­hoooing noise across the mouth of an empty bottle and someone else started yelling.

  “They are worse than children,” Elizabeth said, snapping her watch. Every second ticked away the three months promised.

  “If we are lucky, they will laugh themselves to death,” the reverend doctor said, and he laughed when Elizabeth smiled.

  “Watch your mouth, you yappy bastard,” Ike Gough yelled. “When you have hurt your back the last thing you want to hear about is someone else hurt their back.”

  Then a great cry went up and men were high-­stepping and they were hollering, “You son of a bitch . . . Damn you to hell . . .”

  Revolvers were drawn and shots fired. Michael came forward in his chair. He told Elizabeth to stay where she was.

  When he came on the scene there was a gunnysack and a tangle of rattlesnakes slithering from its interior. Men were moving as fast as they could as snakes writhed at their feet. One was coiled at the shoes of the penman’s grandson, the boy paralyzed with his fear. Michael caught the snake’s neck in his fist and carried it off the ground. The snake slashed its tail about and twined its body round his arm.

  With his knife, Michael cut off the head and
still it twisted and rolled and its mouth opened and closed. Another he snatched by the tail and whipped on the air, breaking its neck. The rest were shot or hacked to death or escaped.

  It was Abel Gough who had carried the sack into their circle and opened it. The brothers thought it very funny and they snorted with laughter and their eyes brimmed with joy.

  “Don’t cry. Be a man,” Ike Gough said to the penman’s grandson. The Gough brothers stood shoulder to shoulder, their faces dull and their emotions drained. The glare in their eyes was loaded.

  Elizabeth came up with the reverend doctor’s bottle of whiskey. She announced she would give up her prohibition. They could have their liquor and she urged a drink upon each, but she would not tolerate any more fighting.

  “Take it slow,” she said to the penman as she poured a drink. “Is that better?”

  “Happy as a butcher’s dog,” the penman said for the serenity he felt.

  She filled their glasses, and then again, and when the bottle was almost empty she asked Aubuchon that he fill a pitcher from the brandy keg.

  “It is not a black-­and-­white world,” she said, turning to Michael.

  “In some ways that’s true,” Michael said, holding out his glass for the last of the reverend doctor’s whiskey.

  The penman swore after this day he would ride the water wagon for the rest of his life. But once you start drinking something wakes up inside you and you cannot make it go back asleep. That night on the trail the penman complained of feeling bothery and awfully muddle-­headed. His body seized and his teeth clenched and he was taken with the delirium tremens. He was twitchy and anxious and he cried out with each vision of the mental hallucinations that held him captive. They tied him up, loaded him into a wagon, and kept on across the plain.

  Chapter 11

  Michael adjusted his direction by compass and the going was favorable. His brother’s maps and journal were trustworthy guides and he referenced them often. Each day they kept on in darkness and in the first days traveled a made road and the going was slow and easy, the route plainly mapped. Still, he lived in constant watchfulness. He rode out and back and made his instructions. He changed horses and rode out again. He returned in the earliest morning and when he left he took with him one of the lead horses. When he returned again he brought deer or turkey. Sometimes Meadows and Cochran would drive to meet him and return with a side of beef or a hog bought off a farmer.

  They were not the only ones on the road. His brother’s journal warned him of mischievous, cutthroat infidels, who well deserved to be shot, hung, and imprisoned for life. They say that gamblers and all sorts of “toughs” follow a new road. I met today with a wagon train of consumptives having left the east for the drier climate of the west. There are signs of Indians everywhere. We have been dodging them all day long.

  There were big freight trains hauling grain to the forts, the outposts, and the mail stations, and in the sacks of oats they smuggled whiskey. They sold freely the government stores of grain and the whiskey, and Michael kept their party supplied with both.

  That afternoon he ate a meal to last through the night. By morning he wanted to make fifteen miles and so he rode until the sun fell. The night came on and was intense and the air was close. He rode through the darkness, the dusty road, the abandoned farms, the ghost villages of failed enterprise, and in the early morning when the deer came to water, he shot one, and when the others flared and sheered, he took steady aim and shot one more. He grallocked both deer and slung them over the packhorse already festooned with the turkeys he’d shot.

  The pale gray of the eastern sky began to grow red.

  He consulted his brother’s map and journal. Most of the farms and villages, being built near water, lay hidden in the folds of the ground. There were directions to one such farm and the names of four boys. Their mother named them each John for the disciple Jesus loved most and they went by their middle names. The oldest was John Matthew, sixteen; and then John Mark, fifteen; John Luke, fourteen; and John John, twelve.

  A low line of hills rose from the plain to the east, gradually increasing in height. He opened his pocket compass and it showed him the direction he was determined to go. The first faint glimmering of dawn lit the sky in the east. He bent to the creek and some distance off the road there was smoke in the air. Having been in the saddle since nightfall, he was weary and rode slowly, Khyber sleepy, as they picked their way along the sandy trail. He followed the smoke until he came to a rusty stovepipe thrust through the turf. In the field brown stalks rattled in the wind. Evident all around was the blighting presence of the locust. The early morning air was fresh and the ground cool. He descended a draw and came to a lone window hung with calico and a door sunk deep in the bank.

  Across the draw was a little log stable where draft horses and mules stood quietly. The stable looked more habitable than the house might be. There were seven cows, chickens and a hog pen, the frame of a half-­built windmill. The corncribs were full and waiting for some freighter to empty them. Fat Emden geese toddled about. A rooster of beautiful plumage gave his voice to the morning. He stepped loftily and crowed again, his tail feathers carried high and graceful.

  When he looked once more a woman stood in the door with a revolver in her hand. It was clear she’d never spared herself. She was tall and raw-­boned. Her hair was gray and her face weather worn and wrinkled as if scarred.

  “What is wanted?” she said.

  “Coffee?” he said, pulling on a rope that let the deer slump to the ground.

  “Is that red dog yours?”

  “He is not so much mine as I am his.”

  “Dogs can study out many things better than men can. Dogs and horses know the people who care for them.”

  “I would agree with you,” Michael said.

  “Come,” she said.

  He entered through the doorway in the draw side, the deep crack in the earth where they lived. The room was plastered and whitewashed, the plaster laid directly upon the earth walls. In a corner were the spades and shovels they’d used to build their house.

  Four strapping boys in cotton overalls with suspenders sat at the table.

  They were fair skinned and freckled from the sun and their heads were shaved bare. Their father sat on a bench cut into the earth behind the stove, idly chewing on a tuft of straw-­colored beard he held between his teeth. His mind and his thoughts were so clearly somewhere else. On a shelf over his head were a Bible, a copy of Virgil, and a Greek grammar. There were the collected books of Washington Irving.

  “My husband and my four noble sons,” the woman said.

  There were plenty of biscuits and a large kettle of beans smoking hot that she swung from over the fire. She ladled him a bowl with a fat chunk of salt pork. There was coffee and for the boys there were cakes covered with sugar and cinnamon.

  “You’ve had a bad accident here?” Michael said.

  The boys dipped their heads as their mother told how her husband was digging a well for a neighbor and injured himself and never fully recovered. But it seemed more than that. His heartiness was gone. There was a trouble in his mind, a weakness, an eccentricity. She did not know.

  “He’s never been of a lazy sort,” she said, her eyes as if fixed on a mystery.

  “They say that danger follows a new road.”

  “They say true. We have been here since eighteen sixty-­five and we have seen it.” She told him how last fall several of their cattle drowned in a miry place, another one strangled herself, and a week ago the Indians butchered four of their neighbors while they were digging potatoes. They were hacked to pieces by their own hoes and then the hog pen was opened up and the hogs let onto them to eat their bodies.

  “But I am not one to bury my face in my hands,” she said.

  “My brother was to hire your boys,” Michael said.

  Her mouth softened, but her eyes were still brilliant. Her face pinked.

  “The boys are very good?” he said.
/>   “They work with right goodwill,” she said.

  “Do they have shoes,” he asked, and she nodded yes, they did. “The place we are going will be a dangerous place.”

  “Ma, we must take our chances,” Matthew, the oldest, said.

  “I don’t give a damn how dangerous it is,” Mark, the next oldest, said.

  She swatted at him across the table. “You wash your dirty mouth,” she said. “Get the man a feed of corn for his horse.”

  When they stood from the table they filled the room. They were stout, well-­grown boys for their age with clear blue eyes and open, intelligent faces. The four of them walked off in silence and Michael was alone in the house with their mother and her husband who’d let go of his beard and was fretting with a sliver he found in his thumb.

  “I am surprised he’s not come sooner,” the woman said.

  “He has died.”

  “He was a good man,” she said. “Most people are bad but not him.”

  A sound floated through to him, a sweetness. One of the boys at his work was singing beautifully, “Oh my luve’s like a red red rose.”

  “Where are you taking my boys?”

  “The Wolf Creek country south of the Canadian is full of buffalo.”

  “Not safe, they say.”

  “There is no denying the risk.”

  “We are all poor folks here and don’t hardly make enough to keep up. They wish to have a better future,” she said.

  Her hands on her cup were whitened and creased from the wet and cold. For so long she’d feared the coming of this day.

  “You will be all right here?”

  She set down her cup and unbent her fingers, her hands to the wood of the table and wandering over its surface.

  “I will,” she said, folding her fingers into her palms.

  When the boys returned he asked them again if they were still thinking of going.

  “How long do you think we may be gone?” Matthew said.

  “Through the winter,” Michael said. He knew they had no choice and he felt a pang in his heart for their mother. He was taking them away from her.

  She moved toward the open door, sunk in a moment of despair. She remained in the light huddled in the opening. The boys looked down at their feet. One of them searched after something in his pocket. The rooster was standing at their mother’s feet, looking inside. His plumage of green, orange, and purple showed in the sunlight like burnished metal.