Ride the Moon Down

by Terry C. Johnston

  “C-carry the child w-with you,” she whispered, her voice low and raspy. “I am v-very … tired.”

  He watched her wearily pull herself into the saddle, then her eyes smiled weakly at him. He knew she had to be exhausted from her harrowing ordeal. Bass turned with Flea’s blanket and robe cradle across his arm, starting for his pony when Magpie screamed in fear and the warriors cried out in warning.

  Whirling just as Waits-by-the-Water pitched from her saddle onto the frozen ground, the white man darted first to Stiff Arm. “Hold my son,” he croaked with dread. “His … his mother—”

  At her side Bass slowly rolled the woman over, pulled her across his lap, cradling her head against his chest. Gazing into his wife’s eyes, he yanked off his mitten, then laid his callused fingertips to her brow.

  “I have the fire of this terrible death burning in me,” she whispered. “Now I will die.”

  “No … no you won’t,” he sobbed.

  “Leave me here—”

  “I can’t do that.”

  “Our children, they must not see me die,” she pleaded.

  For a long moment Scratch peered at Magpie, silently watching the child’s terrified eyes. Gently he started to pull his legs from under the woman’s shoulders as he said, “I will tell her, then send the others away, back to the village while I stay with you.”

  “You must go with the children, to care for Magpie and—”

  “I will be at your side while you are sick,” he whispered against her ear, “just as I promised I would be at your brother’s side.”

  “The others, they will take our children?” she asked weakly.

  “Yes, Pretty On Top, the others, they will care for our children until we can come for them.”

  “Tell Magpie I love her.”

  Bass stood, quickly moving across the crusty snow to the horsemen. “Stiff Arm, you must go on without us.”

  His eyes were heavy with concern. “You are staying till your wife dies?”

  “She will get better, then we will come,” Bass said angrily.

  Pretty On Top clearly read the frustration and anger in the white man’s face. “We will go back to our village, and wait for you to return.”

  Gratitude filled Bass’s eyes when he gazed up at his young friend. “My children—take them both to Crane. She and Bright Wings will watch over the children until their mother and I rejoin you.”

  “The children will be safe with us,” Pretty On Top vowed.

  Taking a step backward, Bass’s eyes touched the front ranks of those horsemen, then he went to Magpie’s knee.

  “Popo?” she whimpered, still frightened.

  “Your mother is too weak to ride now,” he comforted, stroking the girl’s blanket legging. “We will come to be with you soon. Stay with your grandmother and your aunt. Help care for Flea as your mother knows you can. She will rejoin you both very soon.”

  “How long, popo?”

  Swallowing, he did not want to lie to his child again as he had in the blizzard. But in matters of life … and death, he would. “We will be coming right behind you. Magpie, do not be afraid now—because you are with those who will protect you, care for you. For your mother’s sake … remember to take care of your little brother, always.”

  “Until you come back to us?” she asked plaintively.

  “Take care of him always.”

  She sobbed, “You will come back?”

  “Yes,” he promised. Then reached up to pull her face down to his. Bass kissed the little girl on the cheek. “You will see me soon.”

  Stepping aside to Stiff Arm’s pony, the trapper pulled back the blanket flaps and kissed his son’s forehead. Looking up at the warrior, he whispered, “If I do not return, you will see that my son is raised to become a warrior like the rest of his people—like his uncle, and his grandfather?”

  “Your son is Crow,” Stiff Arm said. “But he will always know of the good American who was his father.”

  Slowly taking three steps back, Bass waved to Magpie. “Go now—all of you. While you have so much of the day left for your journey.”

  Most of the warriors gave some signal to the trapper as they turned their ponies away and started back up to the pass, but not one of the horsemen uttered another word as the animals snorted, their unshod hooves crunching across the icy snow glaring with the day’s new light as the wind soughed through the heaving boughs of wind-gnarled cedar and spruce.

  He listened to the sound of those hooves disappear as he held his wife, gently rocking her against him while the sun flooded across that timbered slope.

  Later, when it grew quiet but for the wind in the trees, Waits-by-the-Water asked, “My children?”

  “They will be safe,” he promised her. “The others are taking them back to the village.”

  “He-Who-Is-No-Longer-With-Us?”

  He cleared his throat and said, “They will put him on a warrior’s scaffold, to honor him before his family and the rest of his people.”

  “I know this sickness will not kill you,” she said softly. “It comes from the white man … so the white man won’t die.”

  “Many, many of my people still die—”

  “No,” she cut off his words. “You must promise me our children will not die because they were born with white blood in their bodies.”

  Her eyes implored him so, their hollow, teary recesses begging him for reassurance. Bass realized he had already lied to his daughter in matters of life and death. So he would lie to her too.

  “Yes. You are right. Our children will be safe.”

  “The white man just grows sick for a time before he gets better,” she whispered some of the words he had told her long ago. “But the white man does not die.”

  “He gets better,” Bass vowed. “Just as you will grow better.”

  “Take me away from the fire,” she begged, clearly growing weaker.

  Placing his hand against her neck, Titus felt the fury of her fever in his fingertips. “I will move you away from the fire so you can rest while I make camp.”

  She closed her eyes. “Bring me some water soon?”

  “Yes. I will be back with some water, soon.”

  Gently pulling himself away from his wife, Bass got to his feet to peer up the rugged slope of scree and loose gray talus toward the pass. Squinting in the glare of the reflected sunlight, he watched the tiny dark column snaking its way toward the open saddle far above him.

  Gazing down at his wife who lay at his feet, Scratch turned and started toward the trees for firewood to melt snow into water. He moved away quickly now.

  He did not want her to hear him crying.

  28

  Bass swatted at the mosquito, then rubbed a fingertip across the tiny red bump raised on the back of his walnut-brown hand. “I don’t figger them Blackfeets gonna bother nary Americans no more.”

  Unfolding his big kerchief of black silk, old friend Elbridge Gray wiped sweat from his forehead and the ridge of his round bulb of a nose more pocked with tiny blue veins every year. “Come spring, we run across more’n one camp of them bastards. Lodges filled with dead’uns getting picked over by the jays, bones getting dragged off by the wolves. Bridger figgers what Blackfoot ain’t been kill’t off by the pox gonna be cowed but good. Won’t dare make trouble for us now.”

  With a sigh Scratch nodded. “Ain’t like it was afore, Elbridge. Bug’s Boys ain’t the fearsome bunch no more.”

  “For sartin the Blackfoot country’s open to Americans now,” Rufus Graham added, hissing his s’s between those four missing front teeth, two top and two bottom. Then he glanced self-consciously at the woman who sat nearby cutting moccasin soles from the thick neck hide of a buffalo robe. “After you and your wife rubbed up ag’in’ them Blackfoot what had the smallpox … how you two ever come out by the skin of your teeth?”

  Titus didn’t answer for a hot, still moment, watching the woman at work over her hide. She must have felt his gaze, for she turned to glance
at him for but an instant before she smiled and resumed her work.

  For the longest time now she had refused to let others look at her, hiding her face beneath the hood of her capote, even as spring warmed the land and dispelled all evidence of winter. It wasn’t until early in that second summer after healing from the pox that she had relented and no longer kept her face in the shadow—about the time they started south from Absaroka for this rendezvous on the Green.

  For more than a year and a half Waits-by-the-Water had lived her life all but hiding out each day. Ashamed of how the disease had ravaged her face, the woman rarely emerged from her sister-in-law’s lodge until twilight. If she did venture out to scrape hides or gather wood and water, Waits tied one of Bass’s large black silk kerchiefs just below her eyes, covering most of her disfigurement. It wasn’t until Crane died late in the spring of 1839 that Waits heeded the praise of others, finally coming to believe that somehow she really was, in a most tangible way, a heroine to her people.

  She had survived—not only the brutal capture and abuse of an ancient enemy—but Waits-by-the-Water had endured the slow, cruel torture, and what should have been the sure death demanded by the pox.

  “The men of your tribe, they are proud of their sacrifice scars, yes?” Bass asked her, tapping a finger against his own breast to indicate the sun-dance torture.

  Waits had nodded her head in the firelight of the lodge where she and the children stayed with Strikes-in-Camp’s family while Titus was gone trapping in the hills for days at a time.

  “And the Crow men,” he had continued, “they proudly mark their war wounds with vermilion paint—showing everyone just how brave they were, how great their courage to bear up in the face of death?” Titus waited for her to nod again.

  “Yes.”

  “To your people you are just as brave as a warrior. You faced death but did not die. Wife, you do not have to paint a red war circle around a bullet pucker, a knife scar, or a hole made by an arrow shaft. The great battle you waged against the terrible sickness is a battle none of your people ever win. In your victory that battle has marked you with its scars that show you were every bit as brave as a Crow warrior.”

  Even though she began venturing out in the day without her black silk kerchief, Titus knew how frightened she had to be—afraid of what other Crow would say or ask when they saw her, afraid more of those who wouldn’t say a thing about her face but would instead look upon her with disgust or revulsion—worse yet, pity. The deep scars had marked her cheeks, pitted her forehead and nose.

  Yet Waits-by-the-Water’s battle with the disease had left her scarred far deeper than the surface of her skin. She had healed from the scourge. Eventually she had begun to live again without hiding her face. But this woman would be a long time in healing the inner wounds.

  “I never come down with the pox,” Bass explained to that dwindling circle of old friends gathered with him at that rendezvous near the mouth of Horse Creek on the Green River. “Only way I figger the woman come through it … maybeso God Hisself knowed how much we needed her.”

  “Your chirrun?” asked Isaac Simms, brushing back some of his gleaming platinum-blond hair that continued to successfully hide the fact that he was graying.

  “They was fine,” Scratch declared. “Cain’t callate how Magpie come out so good—’thout the sickness getting hold of her the way it done to her mam, what with them both being took together by the Blackfoot.”

  He glanced in wonder at the woman again, noticing once more how the curvatures of her hips and backside had begun to round out her dress as she worked over the hide on her hands and knees. She had been slow to put back on most of the weight she’d lost to those weeks fighting the pox. No longer was she a raw-boned skeleton with her skin sagging over her joints like proper folks’ bedsheets draped over a split-rail bedstead. For a long time there he hadn’t believed someone so frail and thin, so downright cadaverous, could ever have the strength to fight off the scourge.

  “She’s a lucky woman,” Solomon Fish observed. “Had you to care for her, pull her back from death’s door.”

  Scratch nodded, taking his eyes from the woman to look at Solomon’s long beard of blond ringlets. “I’m a lucky man. She’d done the same to save my life.”

  And that’s what had kept him going through those first hours, then those first long, seemingly endless, days and nights as she grew hotter, weaker, sicker. He kept reminding himself that she would never give up on him, that she would be the sort to chide him and scold him and yell at him to fight back even as he grew weaker.

  So he had done just as he knew she would do for him. Always reminding her of the children, of all the four of them had to live for. Over and over doing his level best to convince her of the years left them both.

  “I kept that fire going day and night,” he said quietly in the shade of those cottonwoods as the flies droned about them. “Didn’t sleep much them days—couldn’t.”

  He had been scared, too afraid to rest more than a few minutes at a time even when he grew so weary he could no longer keep his eyes open, no longer able to cradle her head in his lap and wash her face with the scalding hot water that sometimes made her whimper and moan, sometimes made her wail and thrash against the grip he had on her.

  “I don’t have me no idea how it helped, but chopping the wood, boiling the snow, washing her over and over every day and every night … it kept me busy—so busy I didn’t have much time to worry. I had to keep doing what I could do to keep her alive one more day. Then another come after that, and I knowed I had to keep her alive that day.”

  The sun had warmed the earth that first morning after Stiff Arm’s rescue party left as Titus gathered wood close to their camp, brought the horses close, and started scooping snow into her new brass kettle to heat over the flames. That night, like all the nights that followed for them on the side of that mountain, the temperatures sank well below zero. With it too cold for a man ever to sleep for long at all, he repeatedly awoke throughout each long stretch of darkness to prop more wood on the fire, dragging the kettle near the heat again, repeatedly dipping the coarse linen scrap into the scalding water where he boiled slivers of snakeroot, then scrubbed the woman’s face and neck as she grumbled, sometimes screamed—but soon grew too weak to push his hands away.

  He had convinced himself the ugly, ofttimes oozing, pustules were filled with a loathsome poison as surely as a gangrenous wound would fill with the poison capable of killing. Over and over he cleaned the sores with the snakeroot broth, gently scrubbing each sore open so he could get at the foul ooze, cleanse it from her body in the hope he could prevent the poison from killing her.

  They had begun as red spots, then became hard, angry welts lying just beneath the surface of the skin until the first one erupted as he scoured the coarse linen across it. There were many more by the next morning. And by that night it seemed her whole face had been taken over by the noxious pustules.

  Yet he persisted, doing what he could to clean each one with the scalding water that soothed the bones in his bare hands aching so with the intense cold. Slowly too, doing his best to remember that he must wash each pustule separately so that he did not rub poison from one into the next. Each time he finished bathing her, he trudged out of the firelight with that kettle of water and dumped it in the same spot, downwind of camp. When he returned, he draped the coarse linen scrap over the end of a tree branch and held it over the coals of their fire, turning it the way he would a thick slab of elk loin so that the heat killed the poison, cauterized every inch of the cloth.

  Rituals so intricate and consuming that they kept him this side of that fine line of insanity, rituals practiced with such fidelity that they prevented him from going mad with the terror that he was going to lose her.

  At times Bass hunted when she slept, never venturing far. Twice each day he made soup in their old cast-iron kettle, boiling snakeroot with the meat of a bighorn goat he’d shot, later a small cinnamon bear—even the goa
t and bear bones—making a hearty broth he forced her to sip day after day after day as her cheeks began to sag: that ravaged, pitted, bloodied skin of her face … her almond-shaped, oriental eyes growing more sunken, red-rimmed, bags like liver-colored fire smudge wrinkled beneath them both.

  Every few hours the fever made her delirious. At times Waits even mumbled with a swollen tongue—so bloated it cruelly reminded him of that deadly desert crossing back when he and McAfferty fled the Apache on the Gila. Plain to see the damned fever was boiling all the juices out of her. She had to drink. He never let her refuse, pouring the cool water over her tongue until she coughed and sputtered, or holding a horn ladle of warm broth against her chapped, cracked lips as she struggled to turn away. But he didn’t let her—couldn’t let her.

  Even now he would not tell these old friends how he cried, or how he cried out at her too every time he had to lock her head beneath an arm, doing his best to scold or cajole some liquid past her lips.

  Sixteen long days they remained there. He whittled a notch for each one in the handle of a camp ax. Sixteen days and nights, awaking fearfully from his troubled half sleep, afraid she had died. Anxious to see if she still breathed, resting his fingers over her nose and mouth each time he returned from his hunt through the surrounding timber, or among the boulders and tundra, often times with no more than a marmot or two.

  With each morning’s arrival he watched the sun climb off the far edge of the earth, thankful that she still breathed in her fitful sleep, that she had survived another day, somehow endured another bitterly cold night. As weak as she became, to find her alive there against him, still breathing shallow and raspy wrapped in his arms, it became no small celebration for his heart.