Savage Country

by Robert Olmstead

  “He was a real old homicidal Indian,” the wolfer said.

  “You knew him well,” Michael said.

  “I know him all right,” the wolfer said. “I wear my knowledge.”

  “The woman?” Elizabeth said.

  “She has blue eyes,” the wolfer said.

  Elizabeth turned to Michael and asked that they might speak in private.

  “He will not live much longer,” Elizabeth said.

  “No,” Michael said.

  “What should we do?”

  “With her?”

  “Yes, with her.”

  “Do not persist in asking me that.”

  “Why?”

  “There is no right answer.”

  Michael told her they needed to mount a more vigorous watch and she gave him leave to do so. He gathered bedding and moved onto the bluff, where he listened and kept watch with the dogs in the deathlike stillness. After a while Charlie arrived with a lidded kettle and a screw-­top jar of hot coffee wrapped inside a cloth.

  “Mrs. Coughlin sent me,” he said. “There’s bean stew and dumplings.”

  “What is the news down in hell?”

  “Nothing,” Charlie said.

  “Shift your ass,” Michael said, stretching out his legs and digging in. He forked out beans and links of burned sausage. He ate some himself and fed some into the boy’s mouth. By the time Michael finished eating, Charlie had fallen asleep close by his side. He lay on his back, his hands on his chest as if in prayer.

  Michael rolled the boy in his blanket and pulled his coat around him. He looked up into a sky full of stars. He took a drink of coffee from the screw-­top jar and looked to where the moon fell across the sleeping boy like a robe of silver. His thumb was in his nursing mouth.

  In his breast pocket Michael carried a rosary, a silver cross, and two Indian Mutiny Medals with Lucknow clasps. He’d plucked them from Iron Pony’s belt where they dangled on strings of rawhide.

  “I hope they were very hard to kill,” he whispered to the darkness.

  He took a pipe out of his pocket and filled the bowl and tamped with his thumb. The pipe stem gripped in his teeth, he was to strike a match but instead knocked the tobacco into his palm, wadded it up, and stuffed it in his mouth.

  As the night bore on, Iron Pony’s life ebbed away. Elizabeth told the men they should sleep, but they were frightened. O’Malley expounded on the miraculous appearance of Iron Pony and the woman. He claimed the banshees were afield this night and they better beware.

  Iron Pony’s head lolled and tipped at the angle of death. His cloudy eye fell from its socket onto the ground. At his feet the woman began to weep quietly. Elizabeth touched a gentle hand to her back. Her own loss was so recent. A hand was laid on her arm. She turned uneasily. It was the reverend doctor and she was relieved for his presence.

  “We cannot let her go back,” the reverend doctor said.

  “What do you mean?”

  The reverend doctor called for a rope. With all suddenness the woman rose up. She hissed and spit at him, a flash of vicious hatred in her eyes. She screamed and clawed at the air trying to reach his face. Several of the men held her down while the rope was brought and her arms tied at her sides. A twisted neckerchief was tied across her mouth.

  “My God,” Elizabeth cried. Whatever respect she thought she’d gained from him she learned was an illusion.

  “I respect you,” the reverend doctor said, “but in this I know best.”

  “Where is your mind?” Elizabeth said. She would not be bullied. With steeliness in her voice she turned to the penman. “Mr. Penniman, you and your grandson will take charge of this woman. Walk her to my tent and stay with her until I arrive.”

  “You would take this responsibility?” the reverend doctor said.

  “No man will touch that woman,” Elizabeth said.

  “I am afraid you are making a great mistake,” the reverend doctor said.

  “Nevertheless,” she said, “it is my mistake to make.”

  The men snickered to themselves seeing their presumed betters at cross-­purpose. They waited a bit longer and then they stripped Iron Pony of his clothes and all possessions and divided his belongings into lots and would draw from a deck of cards for rights. On behalf of his brothers, Matthew negotiated for the horses and their furnishings, and for this they agreed to drop out of the drawing.

  “What about the other two?” Story said of the penman and his grandson.

  “They ain’t here, are they?” Ike said.

  “No.”

  “Well, there’s six of us, we voted and that’s their loss.”

  Left to the men were collectible items: the robe of jaguar skins, rings, earrings, heavy silver armlet, eagle plumes, a disk of beaten gold embossed with a turtle, bear-­claw necklace, knives, ice pick, rifle, bow and quiver with a clutch of arrows, clothes, glass eye, scalps, the dead hands, and his ornamented braid measuring eleven feet long.

  “What about the woman?” Findley said. “She’s worth something. I know of a trader that deals in returning white women at profit.”

  “What’s one worth?” Ike said.

  “Some will pay any price to get their people back. You ransom them and then you resell them to their people,” Findley said. “He does a brisk trade.”

  “How much do you think she’s worth?”

  “Depends on who wants her back.”

  “There ain’t much left to want. She looks like she’s been worked to death.”

  Ike riffled the deck. He was impatient to get started. “If I was you,” Ike said, “I’d take it up with Lady Coughlin,” and to this they all laughed.

  ALONE WITH ELIZABETH INSIDE the tent, the woman seemed lost in profound abstraction and was undistracted by anything that surrounded her—the chairs and the table, the desktop, the reading books and account books, bundles of papers tied with red tape, bottles of ink, pewter inkstand, quill pens. From time to time she concentrated her eyes upon Elizabeth without appearing to see her, even as she unknotted the rope.

  “I am sorry for your loss,” Elizabeth said.

  The woman’s eyes began to shine. They lost their vagueness. She was returning from wherever she’d secluded herself. Her grief renewed and swept through her with heart-­stopping force. She shook and gasped for breath.

  “We are both widows,” Elizabeth whispered, and beyond that there were no more words to express the sadness of her heart. Try as she might there were no consoling thoughts, no balm for the black despair.

  The woman keened and it seemed to gain inside her.

  Elizabeth too began to cry. She cried on behalf of this woman and she cried on behalf of herself.

  From her clothes the woman took a small knife. She hacked at her braided hair, then slashed at her arms and breasts, drawing thin streams of blood from beneath her skin. She went to the ash bucket and with her blood painted her face and arms, then lay down and curled small. Elizabeth draped a blanket over her and took another to a chair by the door.

  It was around midnight when the woman whispered something as if afraid of her own voice, her English slowly returning. She accepted a cup of tea and fingered the tablecloth on the tea table, the muslin curtains that divided the tents. She touched at the calico coverlid until finally letting her hand rest on the cloth and telling her story to Elizabeth.

  She did not know how many years, maybe thirty, she was just a girl when her family was killed and she was carried away. There were five taken, including a baby, and when rescuers closed in she was the only one not killed. They traveled for days until they reached the mountains. It was soon after that Iron Pony took her for a wife and she gave up the idea of return. She’d lost a baby, but she still had two sons with Iron Pony and they were many days to the west in the winter canyon. She remembered a brindled dog and a black-­and-­white cow. She remembered her bed of blue-­and-­white-­striped ticking.

  Before dawn Elizabeth found Charlie asleep in a wagon and sent him to saddle t
he woman’s horse. Charlie told her that Matthew and his brothers now owned the horse.

  “Find me a horse that can travel,” she said sternly.

  She stirred the woman from her sleep and told her it would soon be light. The horse Charlie brought was a large-­boned chestnut named Lancaster. She went down on one knee, her other knee a bench. The woman grabbed Lancaster’s mane, stepped onto Elizabeth’s knee, and vaulted into the saddle. The horse edged away as the woman took the reins and suddenly she was at speed, splashing across the creek and ascending the bluff.

  Michael stood and watched as she rode by. He followed her flight until she disappeared in the west as if she’d never been.

  AS THE MORNING SUN flooded the plain, from the creek the gurgle of water, the reverend doctor met Elizabeth coming up the path.

  “What have you decided on?” he said.

  “She said she was going home and I let her.”

  The reverend doctor flushed with shock and anger. He raised his open hands to his face. He squinted his eyes and his lips moved as if he were counting.

  “Do you know what have you gone and done?” he said, upon composing himself.

  “You needn’t look at me so,” she said. She was exhausted, and try as she might to hold them back, her eyes filled with tears. She was silent for a moment and then spoke again.

  “She said she would return to be with her sons,” Elizabeth said.

  “She was a white woman.”

  “What difference does that make?”

  “I do hope your trust and kindness will be reciprocated,” he said, and then, “They always revenge themselves.”

  “My Christian friend,” she said. “What’s done is done.”

  “My feelings right now I cannot express.”

  “You have been a dear to me, but what you did last night was a disappointment. It cut me to the heart.”

  “God, forgive me. I am sorry,” he said. He turned gentle and soft-­spoken. “I did not realize. My intentions were only the best.”

  She wanted to say, I do not know if I can ever forgive you. But what was the truth worth if it could not be understood?

  Instead she said, “I would still have your counsel. We are both learning.” She let him take her hand in his. She looked at the ground. “I am sorry too.”

  She could think of nothing else worth saying. She understood the warmth of his feelings, but he was a man of faith—rigid and, in this matter, punitive.

  The reverend doctor returned to his writing desk. He held a new nib to the candle’s flame and another he slipped in his mouth. He would have saved the woman from what she did not know. He would have learned from her and returned her to her family, to her God, to civilization.

  He took up his pen and resumed his writing.

  When I first saw her, she stared upon me with such a look of hope, of doubt, of fear, and of madness as I shall never forget. There were hollow shadows under her dusky eyes. She was nude except for the shredded remnants of her wedding dress. She was badly frightened and threw up her hands in an appealing way. Her arms crept round my neck and all the humane characteristics I ever possessed came to the front of me, and old campaigner that I am, I confess I shed tears.

  “Thank God, you came in time,” she said.

  “You poor lost lamb,” I murmured.

  “Where are my people?”

  “Murdered by the savages,” I said.

  “Every one of them?”

  “Your sister yet lives.”

  Long, ragged sobs shook from her spasmodic, quivering body and I whispered words of comfort and gently stroked her golden hair.

  “Poor girl,” I said. “What can I do for you?”

  “Something to cover my body,” she said.

  His penmanship had become uniform, perfect. He wrote two more lines and then sharpened the nib more finely. From somewhere to the west the metronomic booms of the .50-­caliber rifles were breaking the atmosphere. He startled when he heard Charlie cry, “Eighty! . . . Eighty! . . . Eighty to the northeast!”

  A whiplash cracked the air and then another and someone bellowed, “Draw you devils . . . Draw!”

  Chapter 24

  Even though it would soon be December, the men still slept outside in the hammocks they’d strung for the healthfulness of the cold fresh air. The fresh air fumigated and sobered them. They claimed they could hear better, see better, sleep better, wake better.

  While they slept a mother skunk led her four kittens into camp. She found an arm hanging down from over the side of a hammock, the hand dangling quite close to the ground and she began to feed on it. After a while she climbed onto the sleeper’s chest. She scratched back the blanket and found the soft meat of his cheek.

  There was a scream of horror that rent the night. The men were yelling and there was running. Then there were gunshots and then another scream, and Elizabeth’s deepest fears rose up inside her. The shooting kept up until someone cried, “I’m shot! I’m shot!” and then Temple Miller was at her tent and Michael, by instinct, was headed for the bluff.

  “My God, what is it, man?” Elizabeth said. She could not help herself. She’d become so impatient with recent events.

  “It were a skunk.”

  “I’ll be right there,” she said.

  The skunk had bitten Abel Gough. His fingers were gnawed and he was eaten at the cheek and he couldn’t get the animal to release its sharp white teeth. It had clung to his face as it spewed its sulfurous fluid in a wide radius.

  “Who saw it?” Elizabeth said, a handkerchief to her nose, the smell so overpowering.

  “Were it a phoby cat?” Abel cried. “Were it?”

  “Settle down,” she said. “We will get it sorted.”

  Elizabeth washed his fingers and face and told him it was no more dangerous than the bite of any other little animal. Ike insisted on a red-­hot iron to the site of the wounds to prevent the rabies.

  Michael came in from the darkness. He rolled a cigarette. He held it up to the reverend doctor, who accepted. He rolled another and placed it between his lips. The whiskey bottles were coming out one by one. The men were liquoring up again and soon they’d be reeling about.

  “Go on to sleep,” Michael said to Elizabeth. “We’ll set out a while.”

  “It isn’t good?” the reverend doctor said.

  “No, it isn’t,” Michael said.

  “We need to put out more strychnine,” she said.

  Then Abel was screaming as Ike pressed the glowing iron to his brother’s cheek and again when his hand went into the fire.

  Not long after, Ike came to them. “We need to find a mad stone,” he said.

  “You’re drunk,” Michael said. “You couldn’t find your own prick in the dark.”

  “I need a horse,” Ike said.

  “I will not have you killing any of these horses.”

  Ike lost his balance and moved his feet quickly to keep from falling. His stomach lurched up and he swallowed it back down.

  “Please help me, Mrs. Coughlin,” Ike cried. “He is my brother.”

  “What is it?” she said.

  “The gallstone from the gut of a white deer,” Michael said. “You soak it in milk and apply it to the wound where it draws out the poison. After it is saturated with the poison you put it back in the milk and the milk turns green and you apply it to the wound again.”

  “Does it work?” she said.

  “In Africa I knew an elephant hunter in Matabililand who possessed a snake stone that saved the lives of people and horses. His daughter was bitten by a cobra. She turned nearly black before the stone was applied. They placed the stone in a glass of ammonia and the poison looked like a thin white thread coming from the stone. When no more poison came from the stone it was placed again on the wound until all the poison was extracted.”

  “You saw this?”

  “No.”

  “Faith is letting go,” the reverend doctor said. “I will look for this mad stone.”

&n
bsp; “We can try,” Elizabeth said to Michael.

  Michael relented and the Millers agreed to go as well. The men rode out in different directions. Michael rode east and the reverend doctor west. The Millers crossed the creek to the south and Ike went north.

  Having reached an outer bend of a creek, Michael stopped. Above the eastern verge of the sky was a streak of cold red sky. There were deer emerging onto the curly grass, pausing at every step. They were coming single file. There was no white deer, it being exceedingly rare, so he settled for a buckskin and shot it.

  When he rode in he learned that Ike had already found one.

  “Even a blind hog finds an acorn once in a while,” Ike said, and a knowing look passed between them.

  From one of the cows they stripped out a quart of warm milk and began the application of the mad stone to Abel’s cheek. Quite drunk already, Abel became jolly and voluble and said he could feel it working.

  But the next day Abel, who by nature was morose and surly, was even gloomier and more silent and lagged behind the rest. His brother encouraged him on, but he said he wished to be left alone. He had a headache and a small fever. This made him more irritable and quarrelsome than usual and he went about swearing at everyone.

  “That’s the grippe,” Ike said. “It’s been comin’ onto you all week.”

  Abel said it was true. He’d been feeling the grippe days before he was skunk bit. This cheered him up some and for fun he began to growl and grovel and spit. He chased Charlie about and threatened to bite him and laughed and Ike joined in his charade.

  Five days later Abel’s arm lurched into the clutch of an intolerable tingling, his throat constricted, and his brain felt strangely wet inside his head. He knew that death was inevitable.

  “I am afraid Abel’s gone bad,” Ike said to Michael.

  “I am sorry,” Michael said. All his life he’d known men like the Gough brothers, born complete, instinctual, fated, potent. They rarely gave or accepted quarter.

  “He’s suffering bad,” Ike said.

  “You know what must be done,” Michael said.

  “No,” Ike said. “No.”

  Toward night, his throat muscles spasming, Abel became raving mad and the symptoms of furious rabies could not be denied. He slavered at the mouth, and unprovoked, he attacked Ike, trying to bite him and claw at his face.