Tie My Bones to Her Back

by Robert F. Jones

He was ever brave and valiant

  And I know he never fled.

  Was his name among the wounded,

  Or numbered with the dead?

  Was my brother in the battle

  When the Black Hats boldly came

  To the rescue of our nation

  And salvation of our fame?

  Did he struggle for the Union

  Midst the thunder and the rain

  Till he fell among the bravest

  On that bleak Virginia plain?

  Tell me, tell me, weary soldier,

  Will he never come again?

  Does he suffer with the wounded

  Or lie silent with the slain?

  Raleigh watched her intently as she sang, his eyes misting slightly at the sentimental words, then brightening to the barbed humor of the “Black Hats” reference. “Just beautiful, Miss Jenny,” he said, applauding. “Though I do believe you got the words a bit wrong. Those were Rebels fighting for Old Blue Light. Ask your brother.”

  Milo Sykes rose to his feet. “HI go out and check the hides one more time,” he said. “Can’t trust that redskin to do it proper.”

  “Sho’,” Raleigh said. Then to Otto and Jenny: “How’s about ‘Lorena’? That’s a song we can all agree on, not a danged word about the war in it.” Their three voices joined in harmony . . .

  Oh, the years creep slowly by, Lorena . . .

  Milo walked out into the dark. His eyes, too, had filled at the words of Jenny’s song. Damned Yankees. You bet my brothers were in the battle. Two of them, Hod and Virgil, dead at Chickamauga; Cyrus—the youngest and most promising—blown in half by a cannonball on the slopes of Kennesaw Mountain.

  Wolves were singing in the hills to the east of camp. The music attracts ‘em, Milo thought. They’d sung like that near his camp in the Bayou Salado every night when he played his French harp. He liked to hear them. That meant more hides. He’d been wolfing then, right after the war. Every evening he shot an antelope or a buffalo, laced the carcass with strychnine, which he carried in a little blue bottle around his neck, and then in the morning went out to skin the dead wolves that had fed on the meat. Stiff, snarling faces. At night he’d play the harmonica, more wolves would be drawn to his camp, and the next day he’d start all over again. Good wages, wolfing. But it was too dangerous now, Injuns on the warpath. A man alone in the mountains wouldn’t stand a chance.

  10

  THEY HUNTED THEIR way to the Yarner, taking their time, gathering hides as they traveled. Near the headwaters of the Prairie Dog Fork of Red River they saw the Llano Estacado rising ahead of them from horizon to horizon as if the earth had suddenly broken on a north-to-south line, one part of it rising like a cracked china platter half a thousand feet above the prairie floor.

  They made their way slowly up the escarpment and found buffalo beyond counting. Jenny had never seen a bigger sky, or a bleaker one. The winds, even on warm days, blew cold and steady from the northwest. She expected to see the ghosts of Coronado’s conquistadores trotting on horseback over the prairies in casques and breastplates, their bones shivering. Raleigh had explained the plateau’s history to her. “It’s so big and flat that Coronado’s men had to drive stakes every few miles so that they could find their way back. That why it’s the Staked Plain.” ‘

  Otto and Raleigh called a halt two days later. They had swung north along the Yarner and made a semi-permanent camp near Palo Duro Creek, a small dribble that assured them a permanent though muddy water supply. From here, if the Indians made trouble, they wouldn’t be too far from Camp Supply or even Fort Dodge to make a successful fighting retreat.

  EACH EVENING WHEN Tom and Milo rolled in with the day’s take, Jenny walked over to what they called the hide yard—a level, stoneless patch of sunny ground selected by the men to peg the skins on—and stood in the wind to make notes in her ledger. She wrote down the numbers and size of the buffalo Tom and Milo had skinned that day. Some days they managed only twenty or thirty between them, some days twice that, one very long day (and well into the moonlit night), in excess of 120. She wrote her totals in a very precise hand and showed the figures to the skinners when she was done and asked them to make their marks in the margin. That way there could be no arguments later.

  The agreement Otto and Raleigh had reached with the men called for Milo to receive thirty cents for each buffalo skinned, Tom twenty.

  “But that’s not fair,” she protested to Otto, out of earshot of the skinners. “Tom’s faster than Milo, and he never tears a hide.”

  “Ja dock zwar,” Otto said. “True enough. But Milo has a wife and five children back East. Tom isn’t married and he doesn’t really need the money. What would he do with it? Just drink it up or gamble it away, like all the red devils.”

  “Have you ever known him to drink or gamble?”

  “No, but they all do. Ask anyone. Ask Tom.”

  Jenny thought privately that it was foolish for Otto and Raleigh to pay the skinners at a fixed rate per hide. Jobless men were now pouring onto the Buffalo Range, killing buffalo right and left. Because of the Panic the railroads had ceased laying track. Farms and small businesses were failing across the nation. Those who were out of work looked increasingly to the West for a chance to scratch up a living. At this rate the hide market would soon be glutted. The price paid by the big buyers in Dodge City, from $3 to $5 per hide, was bound to decrease. It was probably falling right now. Better to pay the skinners a percentage—say, perhaps, 5 percent—of the price received for their hides.

  Otto and Raleigh also allowed the skinners to keep the meat not required for camp use. Each evening when he returned to camp, Tom Shields had a pile of choice tongues, hams, loins, and humps stowed beneath the rolls of hide in the wagonbed. These he brined in a pit he’d dug, lined with green hide, then cured slowly over a cool, smoky fire enclosed by a hood of tightly woven willow withes overlaid with bull hide. Milo Sykes left his tongues, hams, loins, and humps to rot, even boasted about it.

  “Nigger work,” he’d say, watching Tom busy at the brine tub. “A white man oughtn’t be eatin’ that buffler tongue anyways—why, he’d start jabberin’ Injun talk.”

  But Jenny’s thrift could not abide the waste. One morning after cleaning up around camp, drawing water from a small creek a quarter of a mile back in the cottonwoods, baking the day’s bread, setting a pot of stew to bubble slowly near the fire, roasting green coffee beans and then cranking them through the patent grinder, she saddled Vixen to ride out in the direction of the guns. By now she could distinguish the heavy boom of Raleigh’s Big Fifty from the more rifle-like crack of Otto’s .44-90. Milo skinned with Raleigh, so she rode for the sharper sound. She was looking for Tom Shields.

  She found him hard at work in a little swale where more than a dozen gigantic black bulls lay slain, all in a heap. The spring wagon was off to one side, the mules cropping dried grass, oblivious of the dead buffalo. Otto was nowhere in sight. She looked at the buffalo. She had never seen full-grown bulls before.

  “Herr Gott, these are the biggest we’ve shot so far!”

  “Yah,” he said. “We found ‘em just this morning. Been looking for the grown-up bulls all along, but they keep away, out in the hills. From the Deer-Rutting Moon until a few weeks after the Hard-Face Moon, these big bulls, what we call scrub-horns, they hang by themselves. Like a war party. Only come to the cows again when they want to make some babies.”

  “What are those months in American, that Deer-Rutting thing and the other one?”

  “Cripes,” Tom muttered, looking away. “I never can remember the English words. Uh—November, yah! That’s when the deer fuck. To maybe February?”

  “Rut,” Jenny corrected him, feeling suddenly prissy and school-marmish. Yet the simple, unaffected way he had said the ugly word, without leering or sniggering, made it not quite so shocking.

  “Well, they certainly are big, much bigger than the cows and kips we’ve been killing,” she said. “But what I wanted to
ask you, would you show me how to butcher out the choice cuts? Milo leaves all those buffalo to rot. Doesn’t even take the tongues or humps.”

  Tom nodded. White spiders waste everything, most of them. There had been times, in the Moon of Hard Faces, when he and his family would have given their rifles, probably even their ponies, for a single rancid buffalo haunch. But this white-eye woman, maybe she understood. Maybe she wasn’t a waster.

  “Tongues are easy,” he said. “I once seen a greenhorn try to cut one out by reaching down the buffalo’s throat.” He shook his head. “Took him forever, and he cut his hand about ten times doing it. Here’s the right way.”

  He stuck his knife hilt-deep beneath a dead bull’s chin, slit back toward the throat, reached in with his free hand to grab the base of the tongue, then slid the knife blade in below the grasping hand and sliced across the tongue’s root. He withdrew the heavy piece of meat. He laughed, delighted with himself.

  “You get you a good edge on your knife and keep it that way,” he said. “That’s all there is to it.”

  “What about the hump?”

  Tom went over to a bull he’d already skinned. The naked hump stood pink and solid, marbled with white tallow. He slapped it and grinned.

  “All muscle, sweet meat,” he said. “There’s ribs that stick up along the center of it, inside, like the spines on the top fin of a catfish, you know? Here, you do it like this.”

  He sliced deep along the lower edge of the hump, to where it sloped down and disappeared into the line of the buffalo’s wide back. Then cut down vertically from the top, along one side of the upright ribs. A thick slab of meat fell off into his hand, about three feet long and the diameter of a man’s thigh at the front end. He laid it across the buffalo’s skinned flank.

  “You want to cut out this hunk here.” He pointed with the tip of the knife. “It’s all gristle.” He whacked it away.

  He repeated the process on the other side. Jenny looked at the exposed dorsal ribs. They were about ten inches high at the top of their curve, tapering down in size as they went back along the spine and disappeared. Like a catfish, all right, she thought. A one-ton catfish.

  “You can take out the backstraps, too,” Tom said. He showed her how. Then he showed her how to section each haunch into three hefty hams, by separating the meat at the seams between muscle groups.

  She thanked him and stood her horse.

  “When you got you a pile of meat,” Tom said, “cut a travvy. Then horse your whittlins back to camp. Ol’ Vix here ought be able to pull about three hundred pounds on the travvy poles, maybe more. Put your meat in my brine tub if you like. We’ll sort it out later, and I’ll show you how to make your own tub if you want.” He smiled up at her, holding Vixen’s curb rein. “Or we can do our meat together. We can smoke it in my little smoke tepee. You’ll get good money for that meat back in Dodge, six or seven cents a pound for humps and hams, but it adds up. For tongues, if they’re pickled and smoked good, you’ll get eight or nine buckskins a dozen, ‘specially now, just before Christmas. Charlie Myers tells me all the folks back East eat buffler tongue for Christmas dinner. Good money. Buy you some pretty foofa-raw, you know.”

  She neck-reined Vixen around, then turned in the saddle to look back at him. Foofaraw? That meant girlish fripperies.

  “By the way, Torn,” she asked sweetly, all innocence but suddenly seething, “what do you do with your money?”

  He laughed again, his bitter laugh this time. He’d caught the nuance.

  “What else? Get drunk. Play faro or monte. Maybe go on the warpath a bit. I’m half Indian, ain’t I?”

  He turned and walked back to his skinning. He was actually using his money to buy guns, new Winchesters, the 1873 model. He cached them, well coated with buffalo tallow and wrapped in oiled rawhide to preserve them from rust, in a cave near the Pawnee Fork. He had purchased eighteen of them so far. But it was none of her business. No white spiders would know of it, none except the merchant, Herr Zimmerman, and he didn’t mind so long as he got his $45 for each rifle. If he ever talked about the matter, Tom would cut his throat. Herr Zimmerman knew that.

  JENNY FOLLOWED THE sound of Raleigh McKay’s rifle and found his killing ground about a mile to the south, on the edge of the Palo Duro breaks. He, too, had located the big scrub-horns. Milo had skinned out about twenty of them so far, and she paused on the rise to watch him. Unlike Tom, who skinned entirely by hand, Milo used his mule team and wagon to help. After slicing the hide with the point of his ripping knife along the insides of the legs, around the tops of the hooves, and again around the neck just back of the ears, he worked it free near the slices. Next he pegged the head down with a long steel spike, using a heavy oak-headed mallet to drive the spike through the buffalo’s nose and into the hard earth. He tied a rope, secured to the rear axle of the wagon, around a knot of gathered neck hide, then chucked his mules forward.

  The tow rope tautened, the bull lurched a bit, and the hide slowly peeled away with a sticky, sucking sound. Like pulling off a wet union suit, Jenny thought.

  Now and then Milo halted the team, leaped down, and helped the hide along with his crescent-shaped skinning knife, working the adhesions loose as the mules pulled. But still the hide tore in places. Jenny could see that such a shortcut method really required three skinners, one to drive the team and the other two to help the hide come loose with their knives. No wonder so many of Milo’s hides were ripped when he brought them in. Each careless rip, Otto had told her, meant ten or twenty cents off the price they’d get for the hide back in Dodge City.

  So far Milo hadn’t noticed her, but when he straightened to rub his back after peeling a hide, he did. He dove without hesitation for the leeside of the wagon, grabbed his Army Springfield musket from where it leaned against the bed, and crouched behind the wheel, peering out like a frightened muskrat.

  “Mr. Sykes, it’s me—Jenny Dousmann!” she yelled. My God, he must have taken me for an Indian, she thought. Not a hundred yards away. Must be nearsighted. Blind as a bat. That’s why he doesn’t shoot buffalo, only skins them. He can’t see far enough to shoot a shaggy.

  He was fiddling with a wheel nut when she rode down, pretending nothing had happened. He looked up, more sullen than usual.

  “What do you want?”

  “I want to take the humps, hams, and tongues from Raleigh’s buffalo,” she said. “I plan to smoke them and bring them back to Dodge with us.”

  “Them aren’t the captain’s buffler no more,” he said. “Not after he shoots ‘em. Moment they hit the ground, they’re mine. That’s our contract.”

  “But you’ve taken the hides,” she said. “You never bring in the meat. It just lies out here to rot, or to feed the wolves and buzzards.”

  “It’s still mine. I can do with it what I please, jest like that red nigger Two Shields does with his. Keep ‘em or let ‘em rot, it’s up to me. Cap’n said so. It’s in the contract.”

  His eyes narrowed shrewdly, mud in the cracks of a sidewalk.

  “But I reckon I could sell the meat over to ye, if ye want it that bad.”

  “And if I don’t want to pay you?”

  “Well, leave it rot, then,” he said. He turned his back on her and snorted.

  “Mr. Sykes, you said it was nigger work to cure and smoke that meat, that’s why you wouldn’t do it. Well, I want to do some nigger work. You won’t be losing any money by letting me take that meat, which would otherwise just go to waste. You’re already getting half again as much per hide for skinning as Tom Shields, who’s a far better skinner than you are. What’s more, while you’re out here in our employ, your room and board come free of charge. Perhaps in return for your generosity I should start charging you for the meals I cook and serve to you, and the filthy clothes I wash. I’m not only your landlady, Mr. Sykes, I’m also a partner in this corporation. And I will have that meat.”

  She rode to the farthest skinned carcass, dismounted, and pulled her butcher knife. J
ust as she was about to make her first incision, Sykes came stumping up at a run. He grabbed for her shoulder, his face working, white as a bleached skull as he wrenched her around.

  “You nigger-lovin’ honyock bitch . . .”

  He raised an arm to swat her.

  She wrenched herself away, crouched, and flashed the butcher knife. Held it low, point first, toward his belly.

  “Keep your hands off me or I’ll cut you. By God, I will. I’ll rip you like you rip those hides.”

  “Hey-hey, what is this?” Raleigh yelled. He trotted down to them on his sorrel. “What’sa matter here, Miss Jenny? Milo?”

  “This bitch tried to steal my meat,” Milo said. “It’s in our contract . . .”

  “Enough about that verdammter contract,” Jenny said. “This meat’s just going to waste, and this redneck skunk . . .”

  “An’ you wanna make some Christly money off it, you cunt!”

  “Easy now,” Raleigh said. “Put that knife away, Miss Jenny. Let’s not be cuttin’ anyone. Now, Milo, you ease up on the profanity and leave her have that meat if you got no use for it. I’ll give you a nickel more a hide to make up for it. Thirty-five cents a shaggy. How’s that?”

  “Well . . .”

  “Das stinkt, Captain McKay,” Jenny said. “He’s already being paid too verdammt much, and you’re skimming part of that extra nickel from my share of the profits.”

  “Now, now.” Raleigh smiled, eyes twinkling. “You just go ahead and take your meat, Miss Jenny. Milo, come over here with me.”

  They went toward the wagon.

  Jenny bent to her work. Her heart was pumping hard. She would have cut him, ja sure. Like butchering a hog.

  BY THE TIME she was finished, Milo and Raleigh had hunted on, out of sight. She straightened, stiff, and held her hands to the small of her back. She stretched. This wasn’t like doing dishes. It wasn’t even like kneading bread dough. Yet it had seemed so easy when Tom did it.

  She was just looking around for the nearest stand of trees, figuring to chop poles for a travois, as Tom had suggested, when she heard the squeak of wagon wheels. Tom came over the rise.