The Romance of Certain Old Bones

by Holly Messinger

  “No!” Jacob bellowed, and then heard Stanley singing, one of those eerie, wailing medicine chants that he’d often heard mocked but never heard for real—just four or five notes repeated but the sound was solid, somehow, it had a meaning that went deeper than words and a damn sight more powerful than language—

  (RISE UP CALL THE THUNDER)

  —that seemed to charge all his bones with purpose. He stood upright, stretching up with the pick-axe to his tallest reach, and he felt the air rend above him, an elemental shifting of the heavens just before the night exploded around him in a blinding flash.

  Next thing he knew he was in the water again, stunned but alert enough to catch onto the nearest crevice before he was swept away. He heard something dying in his head, the mournful lowing of something very old, very thwarted, cursed and cursing as it died. He twisted to look downstream and saw a long, dark shape fetched up against some rocks. Its back was bent in a limp U around an outcropping. It head was submerged below the roiling waters, but Jacob thought he saw its red eye in the murky darkness, envious and burning, in the seconds before it went out.

  Then he realized he was seeing a red glow at the low edge of his vision—small lumps of coal, they looked like, scattered over the ridge of rock where he clung, cooling in the rain but still giving off a hot glassy smell.

  Then the current swelled up and carried them off, and Jacob realized the water was getting higher. The storm was passing but all that rainfall in the upper chimneys was rushing downstream, and he needed to get out of this ravine.

  He looked up and saw only sheer bluff, felt the water dragging at him and the weight of exhaustion and the slickness of the mud under his shredded hands. He rested his brow against the bluff wall and said, Please, God, please, just a little further.

  And a little voice in his head replied, Here!

  He moved his foot instinctively—it was the only limb he felt secure in moving—and found a toe-hold.

  Again. Higher!

  Found a hand-hold above the toe-hold, knobby and easy to grip. Shifted over and found another row of knobs beside the first, just close enough together he could walk up between them, like alternating rungs on two ladders. And his hands recognized the shapes, just as the unwelcome sense in his head put a name to the voices.

  They were the beaver-spirits. He was climbing the Devil’s corkscrews—the fossilized burrows of ancient beavers.

  He began to laugh, for the sheer madness of it. And the hilarity made him weak, so that he slipped and might have fallen except he was right near the top and at that moment a hard strong hand flashed out and closed around his wrist. He slung up his other hand and added his strength to the grasp, and Boz hauled him up, slick with mud and cold sweat, onto a flat grassy plateau where they both collapsed, panting.

  “Where’s Stanley?” Trace asked, when he had some of his breath back and no longer felt like he would puke.

  Boz hesitated long enough for Jacob’s heart to sink. “I don’t know. I lost track of him after the lightning struck.”

  “Aw, man.” Jacob’s head swam, the pain becoming more acute as his eyes welled with grief. “It wasn’t me. Stanley called it down. Used me for a lighting rod, the little bastard.”

  “All right.” Boz got his feet under him and hooked his hands under Jacob’s armpits, getting them both upright, despite Jacob’s legs having turned to rubber.

  “He musta known what he was doin—he was right about the beavers and he was right about the hot rocks. Threw ‘em right down the bulukse’e’s gullet.”

  “All right, buddy.” Boz kept an arm about Jacob’s waist while he ran the other hand through his wet hair, gently probing, until Jacob’s vision went white and he sucked in his breath. “Yeah, I bet that hurts. You got a lump the size of Utah up there.” He guided Trace’s arm across his shoulders and turned them both toward the high center of the tableland, where March’s students and the remaining Yalies had erected a few tents and a massive tepee. “Let’s get you dried out, Shit-for-Brains.”

  21

  “My offer still stands,” Professor March said two weeks later, on the docks at Fort Buford with the broad Missouri at his back. “Even if you won’t accompany us back to Pennsylvania, I’m planning another expedition for the winter, down near Santa Fe.”

  “Thanks, but I’ll pass,” Trace said.

  “Mr. Bosley?” March offered. “Somehow I get the impression he doesn’t speak for you.”

  “This time, I’ll allow it,” Boz said.

  March pressed his address on them in his overbearing way and shook both their hands before he climbed the Rosey Rita’s gangplank, bellowing for his students, who had wisely made themselves scarce in the steamboat’s saloon.

  Hope had gone his way the day before, with only Matheson, Clark, and Walsh to wrangle the specimens onto a smaller steamer and see them home. Duessler had disappeared somewhere along the trail, taken his belongings and walked off one night while they were camped along the Yellowstone. Either he had decided he could get home faster on his own or he had decided he couldn’t take any more of the long silences, the averted glances, the stiff embarrassment of his classmates.

  Some men could put away a secret between them and agree never to bring it out into the light. Others couldn’t live with the constant reminders. Jacob had seen both kinds during and after the war, and he couldn’t honestly say which was the wiser method.

  Hope, on the other hand, was the type who wrote himself a more palatable version of history and clung to it against all reason. He had shed copious tears (crocodile tears, Trace thought, with queasy humor) over Ryan’s battered corpse, which the Yalies had retrieved from the ravine the day after the flood, along with the crumbling bones of the mosasaur fossil, which—according to Hope—Ryan had died trying to save.

  Boz told Jacob this while he was still flat on his back, nauseated from the throbbing of his head, and everything still tasting of metal from the lightning that had passed through his bones (though Boz insisted the bolt had struck behind him, he wouldn’t be alive if it had gone through him, and what was he thinking, holding that pick-axe in the air during a thunderstorm?) but Stanley had ducked into the tent after Boz was gone, and reported in a whisper that the bulukse’e was well and truly dead this time.

  Jacob’s grip on reality had been pretty weak during that first day and a half, so when Stanley’s ghost came in and sat down cross-legged on Boz’s cot, he didn’t have the heart to send it away. “That’s good,” he muttered. “That’s good, Stanley. I just wish you’d got out of the way first. Had to be a way to kill that thing without you dyin, too.”

  But Stanley’s ghost just laughed and leaned over to pat Trace’s cheek, with slightly sticky fingers that smelled of peppermint. “Wake up, maxpé man. You think I’d be dumb enough to die saving your hide? I don’t like you that much.”

  Trace opened his eyes and focused on the boy, sitting there brown and mischievous as one of the elves Jacob’s mother used to tell him about. “Stanley? How’d you get off that ledge?”

  “Same way you got off yours—I climbed. But I was on the other side of the ravine, had to wait for the water to go down so I could get over here.”

  “Thank God,” Trace murmured, cupping the boy’s hand to his face. “Thank God.”

  So they had their guide back, and a couple of days later when Trace could sit a horse they left the Badlands for good. It took them ten days to get to Fort Buford, largely because they were short a wagon and team and Hope couldn’t be persuaded to leave any of the fossils behind. They had to rig a travois, which was slow going and hard on the mules. March proved unexpectedly gracious in that regard, especially the morning they discovered Duessler had left, when he’d set his boys to shifting their own loads around and making room for some of Hope’s specimens.

  Hope had been bitterly resentful, of course. Some people were never happy, but then March’s condescending jibes hadn’t helped matters much.

  Trace was glad to see the bac
k of both of them, and even more gladdened by the wad of cash March pressed on him when he was trying to persuade them to come east. “This was promised to my guides and to Mr. Pond as payment for leading me to his quarry,” March explained. “Since you and Mr. Bosley led us out I guess it’s yours. And there’s more where that came from, if you’d care to be retained as my field agent?”

  Trace declined the offer but took the money, and after a very little discussion with Boz they gave half of it to Stanley. Trace also invited him to come to St. Louis with them, but he refused.

  “I’m going back to Minnesota,” Stanley said, hefting his shoulder-strap higher. It looked heavy. And he was wearing moccasins for walking.

  “As in, now?” Trace asked him. They were having this conversation outside Davis’s livery, where Boz was settling their account on the rented mules.

  “Yeah. Going back to school.” Stanley gave a grim smile. “With any luck I’ll run into an Indian agent and they’ll fetch me back part of the way.”

  Probably with a beating on the side, Trace thought. “Stanley, if you want to go to school, there’s plenty of places that won’t—“ He hesitated over the ugliness of reality, not even sure if he was telling the truth or weaving some fantasy he wished were real.

  “Treat me like a red nigger?” Stanley suggested. Trace grimaced, and Stanley shook his head, smiling a little. “The priests at St. Pierre aren’t that bad. I’ve heard worse stories from Charlie and some other Indians. You Christians are just so… afraid of the Creator. Your priests won’t even let you talk directly to Him. And it seems to me it’s just a way to teach some people to bow down to others.”

  Trace nodded ruefully. “That’s about the size of it.”

  Stanley gave him a quick rake of his eyes and looked away toward the horizon. “It’s good for people to remember the lessons of their fathers, but bad to get caught in those lessons so you never learn anything for yourself. I think that’s what my grandfather wanted me to learn out here. I have to help the other kids learn about the white man’s world, but not forget who we are. And I need to learn Latin and French so I can read the white man’s books and to use their own words to fight them, when the time comes.”

  He was trying on the mannerisms of a wise man, Trace thought with an inward smile. And he spoke with the zeal of a young man who had not yet been worn down by the endless indifference of the world. Good luck, Trace wanted to say to him, but instead he thought back on his own lonely youth, after his mother had died, and said, “Find a nun. One of the motherly ones. Let her make a pet of you. She’ll make sure you get the book-learnin you want.”

  Stanley gave this a thought and a nod, adjusting the satchel-strap across his breast. There was something square and heavy weighing it down, like a book, but before Trace could fully form the suspicion in his mind Stanley said, “‘Trace’ is a good name for you. It’s good that Boz calls you that.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “You’re still hunting your destiny. Most people give up. Or they find one thing, like Hope, and defend it like a badger. But you’re still looking.”

  “I been lookin thirty-three years. Am I gonna find it soon?”

  Stanley made an ambiguous motion with his head. “You’re closer than you were three months ago.”

  Trace grinned and put out his hand. “You be careful, Many Tongues.”

  The boy took Trace’s hand and leaned closer, smugly. “It’s ‘Calls the Thunder’ now.”

  “Stanley Calls the Thunder.” Trace considered. “I like it. Suits you.”

  Stanley nodded, pleased, and then took a step forward and flung his arms around Trace’s middle.

  Trace hugged him hard. “Benedictio Dei,” he said, his voice shaking a little, “omnipotenti Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti, descendat super te et maneat semper. Amen.”

  Stanley drew away, blinking. “You too.” He took two steps back, smiled, and strode away up the street.

  Trace resisted the urge to wipe at his own eyes. He watched the boy until he was swallowed up by the crowd, then turned and ducked into the cool shadows of the livery.

  Boz and the owner were out of sight behind the hayrick, but their voices carried off the hard pine walls.

  “He’s all right,” Boz was saying. “He bout lost his own neck savin those boys out there.”

  The liveryman, Davis, harumphed. “Bunch of rich white boys. You think he do the same for you, if your fat was in the fire?”

  There was a pause, during which Trace imagined Boz’s head-tilt, the pursed lips and eyes cast skyward. “Yeah. I do.”

  Trace scuffed his boots on the flagstones before he rounded the corner.

  Boz stepped away from the livery owner and approached Trace. “Stanley take off?”

  “Yeah. Couldn’t talk him out of it.” He accepted the sheaf of bills Boz offered. “We done here?”

  “We’re settled up as far as the season goes,” Boz said. “Told him we’d stay here another night, buy supplies in the morning. I figured you’d rather ride home than take a boat.”

  “You figured right. You find us a room?”

  22

  It was back to Simpson’s—the saloon where they’d met Hope. They secured a room with no fuss, paid extra for a bath apiece, and by nightfall sat down for another terrific steak dinner and some light entertainment, provided by a singing girl and her partner at the piano. The singer was a tiny little blonde thing, pretty as a Dresden figurine, and Trace found himself admiring her white shoulders and diminutive waist with an interest he hadn’t felt in a long, long time.

  “Put your eyes back in your head, son,” Boz said, amused, and Trace grinned at him. “You like the little fair ones?”

  He considered: his wife had been auburn-haired, but she had not been one of a type. His modest collection of conquests were of a pleasing variety. “Smart. Mostly I like ‘em smart.”

  “That must make for some lonely nights.”

  Before Trace could decide if that was a swipe at his particular lack of intelligence or a commentary on womankind as a whole, two meaty hands smacked down on their tabletop. A wild-haired, red-nosed bear of a man breathed gin fumes over them as he slurred, “You ain’t lookin nasty at that gal, is you, boy? Nigger like you ain’t got no call lookin at a gal like that.”

  Boz glanced at the man, and at the bouncers standing away from the wall in case of trouble, and sat back in his chair, casually. “Naw, sir. Not my kind at all.”

  “Damn right she ain’t,” the drunk said. He lingered a second, appeared to feel the proper ground had been conceded, and staggered away toward the bar. A moment later one of the bouncers approached him, offered a hand to shake—any drunk would shake hands, Trace knew from experience—and deftly maneuvered him out of the room and presumably out of the building.

  Boz went on eating his steak, unperturbed.

  “How do you do that?” Trace asked.

  “What?”

  “How do you—soak up all the ugly people lay on you and not let it change you?”

  Boz swallowed the bite he was chewing, took a drink of beer. “I don’t soak it up. Let go past me, over me, ‘round me. Got nothin to do with me. I decided long ago who I was gonna be. Nothin since change that.”

  “That simple, huh?”

  “That simple.” Boz wiped his fingers on a napkin. “Some times easier than others.” He pursed his lips, tongue working the steak out of his teeth. “My wife got took by slave-stealers,” he said, as mild as before, though Trace felt a frisson of shock and disgust. “Bout a year before the war started. Drove myself half-crazy lookin for her, and when she couldn’t be found I started hirin myself out to the war effort—runnin supplies and munitions for the Union out of St. Louis. After a while I got in good with Captain Lyons. He used me to run messages across the lines… you know?”

  Jacob reckoned he did. He’d heard stories of blacks working as spies for the Union, using their anonymity to slip in and out of Confederate territory. Getting caught wou
ld have meant an instant death, at best.

  “Then in sixty-eight, soon as I heard they was formin colored regiments, I joined up. Spent five years buildin barracks and butcherin half-starved Indians. But somewhere in the middle I got to thinkin it’d be less work just to put a gun in my mouth. None of what I was doin brought Sarah back, and I was doin the dirty work of cowards in the meantime. So I started thinkin maybe I’d save my own life for a change, instead of givin it away to men who’d just as soon see me dead. And there ain’t no shame in that. You don’t owe God nothin just cause you choose to keep kickin.” Boz fiddled with his beer glass. “So I guess what I wanna ask you, partner, is do you make a habit o’ that sort of thing?”

  “Gettin struck by lightning?”

  Boz smirked, but there was no humor in it. “Riskin your neck. Huntin out weird stuff. Thinkin you got to save everybody.”

  “No,” Trace said. “No I do not. I seen enough of that shit during the war.”

  Boz accepted that with a nod. “So how you reckon that gator got so far north?”

  Trace stared at him for a heartbeat or two, wondering if that was a joke, and then realizing it was anything but. “I dunno. Escaped from a traveling show, maybe. Or some rich swell took one for a pet and got tired of feedin it.”

  “Who keeps a gator for a pet?”

  “Rich people. I heard tell of an Italian count out in Wyoming with a whole menagerie—tigers and orang-utans. I hear he’s even got an elephant.”

  “Now I know you’re pullin my leg.” Boz grinned, but his eyes were relieved. They had just agreed upon their own version of history, Trace realized, and it made him feel oddly comfortable, not least because it meant Boz wouldn’t be asking any difficult questions.

  Still, when the little songbird finished her number and the men were stomping and whistling their approval, Boz said under the racket, “You know some day you’re gonna hafta explain to me what happened out there.”