The Winter Family

by Clifford Jackman

  “It could be Lukas,” Bill said. “Wasn’t he in Arizona with his brothers?”

  “He’s too tall to be Lukas,” Winter said.

  Winter had his rifle out and was peeking through the branches. Matt Shakespeare had picked up a pistol and jammed it in the back of his pants and he had another rifle in his hands. Winter might have been able to shoot him then. But if he missed he would give away his position.

  “Let’s go,” Winter said.

  “Not a very profitable sojourn, was it?” Bill said as they jogged away.

  “I don’t know about that,” Winter said. “We don’t got to divide up the money into so many shares now.”

  “What do you think of what the captain said?” Bill asked.

  “How do you mean?” Winter said.

  “Do you think he’s right, Winter?”

  “About what?”

  Bill thought at first that Winter was being uncharacteristically evasive. But that wasn’t it. Winter wanted Bill to say it out loud.

  “That when it comes down to it,” Bill said, “everyone is just like you.”

  Winter’s golden gaze met Bill’s. And then he looked away.

  Back in the Quechan village, Matt Shakespeare stood over Dusty Kingsley.

  “Oh my god,” Dusty said. “I’m going to die.”

  “Who the hell are you?” Matt said.

  “Dusty Kingsley,” Dusty said. “Oh my god.”

  “You’re in the Winter Family,” Matt said. “That was the goddamn Winter Family. I thought I recognized Charlie.”

  Dusty lifted his head from the dirt, looked at the blood welling through his fingers, and then leaned his head back and closed his eyes tightly and let out a groan.

  “Can I have a drink of water?” Dusty said.

  “You can have a bullet between the eyes,” Matt said. “Why were you killing Indians?”

  “There’s a bounty on Apache scalps in Sonora.”

  “But these aren’t Apache,” Matt said.

  Dusty groaned. Eventually, Matt understood.

  “Oh you piece of shit,” Matt said, disgusted, and fired his rifle into Dusty’s brain. Around him the Indians were coming out of their shock, trembling with fear and weeping for their dead. Two of the men approached Matt, stunned and grateful and slightly awed. When the federal marshals and the Pinkertons, on the trail of the Winter Family, arrived in the village, Matt Shakespeare would be gone. But the Quechan would tell them all about him.

  The Winter Family arrived at Hermosillo in the noontime heat, when the air itself seemed to ripple and melt. They made their way through the deserted streets to the Plaza Zaragoza, where they carried their bloody harvest into the State Government Palace, for which they were paid in Mexican gold: the heads of several of Geronimo’s lieutenants, packed in salt and still recognizable, as well as scalps of around a hundred souls, including the scalp of a harmless Quechan youth, and of Homer De Plessey, originally of New Orleans, lately of Phoenix.

  Every society has at its core an animating myth, a guiding narrative, a shared lens through which to view the world, but Augustus Winter had thought that he was different. That he alone among all men had the courage to face the truth of the world, to live according to the laws of nature, to follow the dictates of pure reason. That he alone gazed upon the face of God. And so it was a double disillusionment for him to discover that this belief itself had been his personal delusion.

  When the Winter Family crossed back into the United States, after years of carousing in Mexico, spending their money and wearing out their welcome, they found it much changed. The words of Captain Jackson rang in Winter’s ears when Sitting Bull surrendered and the forests melted away and the railroads wormed across the continent, connecting the clusters of men scattered through the wilderness. The new civilization grew like a crystal, as if guided by an invisible hand. Each acre of land was granted to a human owner, who shaped and developed it according to the formless but unrelenting pressure of economics and politics.

  After another train robbery, the Pinkerton Detective Agency was engaged to track them down and they acquired a new enemy. It was not like in the old days. There were fewer places to hide and their pursuers were stronger, angrier, more determined. The Winter Family divided, some traveling south to Mexico, others north to Colorado, and still others east to Kansas and Missouri. It did nothing to ease the pressure. Everywhere they went had changed, and everywhere they went they were pursued by the most feared Pinkerton of them all, young and gangly as a colt: Matthew Shakespeare.

  The West closed down around them, as fences went up and herds of cattle swarmed over the plains and the Indians vanished. News spread like lightning across the telegraph wires. The Winter Family regrouped; it was all they could do in the face of constant, relentless pressure from their enemy. All around them, pressing from all sides, the people, the people, the people. Soon the only free space left was the Indian Territory, and even that was slowly being subsumed into Oklahoma. The Winter Family was hiding there when it was finally approached by Colin O’Shea.

  O’Shea was ten years old when he’d come to America to escape the potato famine. He fought in the War Between the States and used his money to buy land in Georgia that had been devastated by the March to the Sea. Then he spent fifteen years fighting Confederate veterans and the Ku Klux Klan to keep it. In the end, he prevailed.

  He had a prosperous farm but it wasn’t enough, and his ambitions were blocked in the Redeemed South, where former Confederates had bullied and intimidated their way back into power. In Oklahoma, the land was just opening up and they were practically giving it away. He sold his farm in Georgia for a substantial profit and went to Oklahoma at the head of a small company of men of all races. Instead of waiting for the land runs with the rest of the suckers he crossed into the territory and seized the best land for his own town, to be built according to his personal vision. Bitter men, men who were too slow or too timid, tried to challenge him through the Department of the Interior or otherwise. In the end they were all silenced.

  O’Shea invested in the foundation of a town, and the arrival of new settlers drove up the price of land. He lent money to new arrivals or leased them land with an option to buy. He owned the bank and the general store and the post office. He was even in negotiations with the railroad companies.

  There was more land, though. There always is. To the east, just across the border into Indian Territory, officially forbidden and out of reach, there was acreage that O’Shea needed to ensure that the railway ran through his town and not some other. However, the Indians who lived on it would not cooperate. O’Shea was not a man to be balked. He discreetly contacted his old friends, Union veterans, to find someone to help him get what he wanted. In 1889, he retained the Winter Family.

  The Family’s betrayal of him would have destroyed the town, had not Bill Bread, in turn, betrayed the Winter Family. The survivors scattered and fled, to seek refuge in a world that was now without refuge, for it had become too much like them. Winter himself melted into the wilderness, but the wilderness could not hide him much longer.

  83

  The sky seemed bigger over the plains. The snow buried jagged edges and hid distinctive features of the landscape, making everything uniform and clean. A bird circling high in the sky, a deer glancing over its shoulder and bounding away. On the earth there were the people. Everything else was gone.

  Winter’s life was simple, but precarious. If they did not find food they would die. There were no other complications, no politics or social hierarchies. Everyone had to be useful. Everyone put everything he had into the common; everyone took from it whatever he needed. The individual vanished but the people would live forever.

  Winter was useful to the people. He could hunt, he could run for hours without tiring, he could make things with his hands, skin a deer, start a fire. He was, of course, a fearsome warrior. And in return he took all the good things in life: women, horses, food, and whiskey. Their language was the lang
uage of dreams, and when he sang their songs, it was as if he had sung them all his life.

  There was no Winter any longer. He didn’t exist. That monstrous ego, that endless hunger, the needs and jealousies and hates and loves, they were all gone. In their place there was not happiness but a healthy emptiness, something calm and pure that filled him as the sky filled up the vacant space on the horizon. Happiness, or what had passed for it, had been a part of the other Winter’s life, in the moments of triumph, the pinnacles of ecstasy, and the sweet, numbed aftermath. That life was gone, and no new life had taken its place.

  Men say that nature abhors a vacuum. But it is civilization that abhors a vacuum, that cannot bear tranquillity, and so it was civilization that eventually came rushing in.

  84

  Bill Bread lay flat in the snow and peered over the edge of the hill at the Indian camp about two hundred yards below. The fires flickered dimly through the lean-tos and the smoke was silhouetted against the darker sky. Even the dogs were sleeping. A few horses wandered pointlessly, feed bags strapped over their noses. Past the camp were the trees, and the hills. Other than the wind moving over the snow and his heartbeat thumping in his ears, it was silent.

  After a few minutes Bill wormed away from the edge and crept back down the hill to the posse.

  “Is he there?” O’Shea asked.

  “You call that whispering?” Bill said.

  “Well is he?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “Did you see him?”

  “No sir.”

  “Then how do you know?”

  “I saw his horse,” Bill said.

  The men were gathered in a loose crowd, perhaps ten on foot, another six on horseback. A few might have dropped off or joined up since they left the saloon. They had all been drinking but only one or two of them were really drunk.

  Not too late to just turn back, Bill thought. Not too late to just let sleeping dogs lie. But it isn’t really about being early or late. It’s about the way things are going to be, in their own good time, whatever you think about it one way or another.

  “Shall I cut around?” the cavalry officer asked from his horse. “Circle around so he can’t get to the trees?”

  “I think so,” Bill said. “We don’t want him to slip away on us. He lives through tonight, he’s going to kill us all.”

  “He’s just a man,” O’Shea said.

  Bill looked at O’Shea. Bill Bread was unshaven with a ragged haircut and dressed in clothes that did not seem to fit him even though they did. Colin O’Shea was tall and fleshy and wore a new coat. The rifle in his hands was inlaid with silver.

  “Yeah,” Bill said. “But you all know what he did to the town two years ago. I rode with some hard fellows over the years, but not one of them held a candle to Augustus Winter. He’s the most dangerous man I ever saw. We can’t hesitate. Not for one minute. Because he won’t. I can guarantee you that. And he won’t stop. So we can’t either. Once we go over that hill, there’s no turning back.”

  O’Shea made an impatient gesture and the cavalry officer wheeled his horse around. “All the horses, follow me,” he said.

  Bill felt as if something terrible was going to happen. He knew that what he was about to do would shatter the peace that both he and Winter had found. But there was an inevitable logic to this moment: as tranquil as Winter’s new life was, it had always been destined to conflict with his. So he ran up the hill through the snow that was almost up to his knees and swung his rifle into his hands.

  One of the drunks let out a whoop and the Indians’ dogs woke up and started to bark.

  “God damn it,” O’Shea said.

  Bill sprinted like his life depended on it.

  And of course Winter came out of the tent. Of course he did. No amount of whiskey in the world would allow Augustus Winter to sleep through a whoop like that, even out here under nothing but the stars, his past behind him, his self behind him, in a safe place.

  “God damn it!” O’Shea shouted.

  Bill went down on one knee and brought his rifle up to his shoulder and pulled the trigger. All in one smooth movement. Crack. Little flash of light in the darkness. Winter spun around and went down.

  “Go!” O’Shea screamed as he charged past Bill. “Kill them all!”

  Bill stood up, shaking the snow off his pants, and watched the horses come up on the camp, not from behind it, but from either side. He could feel how wrong it all was. He held his rifle over his head and waded through the deep snow until he came to the first lean-to.

  There was screaming now, and the sound of more rifles. Flat and undramatic cracks and pops and people falling bleeding into the snow.

  A big Indian came at him, holding a club, winding back for an enormously powerful blow. Bill struck out, straight and short, with the butt of his rifle, and hit him in the throat. The attacker’s eyes came out of his head and his club slipped away as he fell to his knees. Bill kept going, the rifle up at his shoulder, and he came to the place where Winter had fallen. The snow was soaked with blood but there was no body.

  “Where is he?” O’Shea roared.

  The snow was all trampled down and there was blood everywhere but no tracks. Bill ran from the camp, the way Winter would have gone.

  “Oh God,” Bill said. “You’ve got to show me where he is. Please God. By everything holy.”

  And then there was the rumor of thunder in the air, the feeling that there was suddenly more space as the pressure dropped and lightning arced down. Bill saw the blood in the snow and he followed. After a few paces Winter’s footsteps separated from the general confusion and became distinct.

  “Oh Jesus, please,” Bill said.

  It was only necessary to look down at the snow from time to time. It was obvious where Winter was going. The trees.

  “I need more,” Bill said. “I need more lightning.”

  Instead the thunder retreated. Mocking him and all his endeavors. Like an indifferent god. No, not indifferent. A god of sand and war. The god of Winter.

  Behind him the women were screaming and begging in the language of Bill Bread’s ancestors. He kept running through the snow, holding his gun over his head so it wouldn’t get wet. And finally he saw Winter, just for an instant. Naked white flesh framed by the darkness of the trees. Bill raised his rifle and fired, and then fired again.

  Winter disappeared into the trees.

  Bill watched the tree line. He smelled the gun smoke from his rifle and felt its heat in his hands. Saw his breath, white and frozen, in front of his face. Then he walked to the edge of the forest and peered into the gloom.

  “Winter, it’s Bill.”

  The wind soughed through the trees. Bare branches moving against the dark sky. The rustling of a thousand pine needles.

  “Winter,” Bill called. “It’s me. You’ve got to come here quick before the others get here. I can give you my gun and a jacket. You can’t get far. They winged you and I know you’re naked as a jaybird. I know you don’t have a gun. Winter, they’ll track you. This is new snow and you’re bleeding. You’ve got to trust me, Winter. It’s your only chance.”

  The voice came from somewhere in the trees.

  “I’ve been waiting on you, Bread.”

  It echoed and seemed to come from everywhere.

  “I knew you would come! And when I get my hands on you …”

  Bill guessed and fired. He must have guessed close because he heard Winter shout. Bill slung the rifle over his back, took the bowie knife from his belt, and sprinted. It was all wrong. Winter could be waiting behind any of these trees with a rock, a branch, his fists and teeth. All manner of things could happen now that they were in the woods.

  “It’s over, Winter,” Bill shouted. “You can’t run. You can’t.”

  The trees thinned as they headed uphill. Bill could see Winter ahead, limping and bleeding into the snow, ducking and sprinting from tree to tree. It would take too long to get his rifle out again and so Bill just ran, his
grip on the knife so tight that his nails were digging into his palm around it.

  Winter saw Bill coming and ran faster, straighter. Even though he was the taller man and the snow was high he was hurt bad and out of breath and Bill was gaining on him.

  When he came to the top of the hill Winter jumped off a rocky outcropping. Bill cut around to the left side, wary of Winter lunging out at him. But it wasn’t a hill after all. It was a cliff. Winter had jumped into a river that rushed parallel to the cliff for about twenty feet and then turned and dropped away. Bill could see him bobbing and struggling in the freezing white water. He sheathed his bowie knife and took out the rifle again and squeezed off a quick couple of shots. Winter went under the surface and then he went around the corner and was gone.

  Bill stood at the top of the cliff for a while, and then he started to tremble with cold and fear and regret and grief. It was so bad that he had to sit down. He closed his eyes and tears pressed out and when he tried to open them again they were frozen shut. After rubbing them open he made his way back to the massacre.

  85

  Winter’s head broke the surface of the water and he bellowed like a bull that had been shot, a deep breathless sound. After the initial shock and agony of the freezing cold something started happening to time.

  He was not moving. The water had stopped running and he was suspended in a moment that stretched backward and forward. His arms did not move like he told them to and he went under again and swallowed some water.

  There was no pain. He felt as if he were floating. The only trouble was that it was rather difficult to breathe.

  A bolt of lightning arced across the sky and he saw it, bright and shimmering, refracted through the river.

  And then the devil woke up in Winter, the ego thing, and it wouldn’t let him die. He struggled to the surface and breathed deep, exhaled, saw his own breath, the water freezing in his mustache and beard. Won’t die. Won’t die.