Insouciant as ever.
“Damn you, Captain McKay!”
“Hey, come on, ol’ gal,” he said, still grinning, his bright blue eyes all atwinkle. “Let’s let bygones be bygones. There’s redskins killin’ white folks down there, we gotta pull together, forget our petty squabbles of the past. Here, look . . .” He pointed to his own rifle, lying well away out of arm’s reach, action open and its chamber empty. “I knew you were cornin’ and left my piece unloaded—on purpose, so you wouldn’t think I was layin’ for you. Come on, Jenny, now be a good sport, won’t you?”
“I came here to kill you.”
“Aw, hell,” he said, and the grin began to lose its luster. “Look, I’m damn sorry for. . . what happened that day. I was way out of line, I know it. Eaten up with regret, that’s what I been ever since, Jenny. I was hungover and skunk-mean stupid is all I can say. And I’ll make it up to you, I promise. I’ll take the Pledge, I swear, won’t never touch nary a drop again, long as I live. I been all messed up in my thinkin’, you know, the war and all, too much killin’, men and buffalo both, and if I never hold another rifle in my hands it’ll be too damn soon. I’ve been overlong in the wilds, this country gets to a fellow he’s out in it too long, so empty, nothin’ but wolf howl for company, wolves and bufflers and buzzards and alkali dust and the sun shinin’ clear ever’ day you wake up, no drop of rain, the stink of dead meat, it gets to you, it sure does; and I been thinking it’d be nice to go back East for a while, o1’ gal, I got enough money saved up now, we could buy us a real nice little farm I know up there in the foothills of the Blue Ridge, the old Catawba, the war passed it by and Reconstruction’s hardly touched it, I’ve had my eye on her quite some whiles now, just you and me, Jenny, put out the land on shares, raise us some tabacca, good cash crop that, good rich soil for it back there in the Piedmont, good climate too, none of these damn winters that bite so fierce, good folks thereabouts, you wouldn’t even have to keep house, Jenny, hire us a couple niggers for that, why, you’d be a lady—think of it, ridin’ out of the mornin’ on blooded stock, tall bays, and us ridin’ easy in the dew, lookin’ over the holdin’s, we can get a start on our horse herd soon’s the Injins clear out here now. That Lordship I been workin’ for has good horses: we’ll rope a few and head back East, grow watermelons . . . Why, I could do with a nice cool slice of watermelon right now, couldn’t you, Jenny? . . . A big nice formal flower garden. Not too far from town, a pretty town at that, Tuliptree, North Carolina, three churches, the courthouse, railroad station, a bell tower, even a playhouse where the minstrel show holds forth when they comes through, seminary school for the young’uns. Why, I might could run for judge, McKay is a name well known in those parts, the Honorable Judge McKay and His Ladywife. Hellfire, gal, I love you, don’t you see?—and I’ll love you through all eternity.” He paused for the clincher. “Will you marry me?”
He watched her eyes.
He did not like what he saw there. A hard face, sun-seared. A cruel face, like a red nigger’s . . . Tears welled and spilled down his cheeks. Slowly, smiling weakly up at her in apology, he reached back to his hip pocket and withdrew the ivory comb. He began fussily to reshape his wind-snarled hair.
As if that would help.
God, what a weakling! Jenny thought, sudden rage boiling hot in her belly. She remembered it all now: Raleigh standing over her, undoing his belt, then Milo pinning her arms as Raleigh fell on her, tore down her trousers, forced her legs up and back—his face close to hers, stench of stale booze on his hot, fast breath, his face sagging as he penetrated her, the face of an elderly bloodhound—pinned down, restrained, skewered, hurting and helpless no matter her strength—his weak rebel yell as he spasmed and rolled away. Then Milo was on top of her, even worse, and Raleigh watching and cheering him on—Raleigh, spent, combing his hair with the ivory comb, grinning as he watched . . .
Lieber Gott mach mich fromm das ich in dein Himmel komm’.
“Not in a million years,’ she said, as coolly as she could muster. “But I’ll take a lock of your hair as a keepsake of your gracious proposal—your kind ministrations of the past.”
Raleigh reached behind him as if to repocket the comb. From under his hunting shirt where it had been tucked in his waistband he drew the Whitney. A well-practiced draw.
Jenny was quicker. She swung the heavy butt of the Sharps and caught him flush on the chin. He fell back, his eyes rolling upward, unfocused, unconscious. Jenny retrieved the pistol and stuck it in the belt at the small of her own back. Then she pulled McKay’s rifle out of reach and laid the Sharps next to it. She had plans for him. From the sheath at her hip she withdrew her skinning knife.
23
JENNY RODE INTO the swirling smoke. Raleigh McKay’s reddish-blond scalp flapped in the wind, drying on the muzzle of her rifle. She stared around her at the carnage. Flames flickered on burned-out wagons. Bodies everywhere. The scream of dying horses. In the near-distance she saw some Kiowas stripping and mutilating the bodies of men they had slain. Pony Quirts lay dead, his face blown away. Was that Cut Ear, lying so flat, so still beside the wagon wheel? She recognized Milo Sykes’s body in the dust, his belly ripped open. In the smoke a wounded dog yowled. She looked down at Otto. The explosion had burned his face. A long, bright sliver of brass protruded from his left eye, blown there by the blast like a spear point. His other eye stared upward. She saw a flake of hot soot land on it, but he did not blink.
Gott im Himmel, are they all dead? Sheer chaos—the deepest recess of hell. For a moment she almost collapsed. Then she saw Tom, propped on one elbow in the lee of a burning wagon, and her heart leaped up when he looked at her and tried to smile. But blood spilled slowly from his mouth and nostrils, bubbling as he breathed. Yellow Eyes sat beside him, singing to herself and distractedly jabbing at her bare, bloody legs with the point of a knife. Already she had cut off her braids in mourning, and her hair fell raggedly, uneven, across her wet face. Jenny dismounted as Crazy for Horses and Walks like Badger rode up. Tom raised his head again, but his eyes seemed focused far in the distance, blinking reflexively from time to time. She untied the scalp from her rifle and tossed it into his lap. Feeling it hit, he looked down, then up at her.
He smiled.
“Kuh-kuh-kuh,’’ he said, then shook his head in embarrassment and coughed blood. Oh Christ, she thought, a lung shot. But not too bad yet, maybe I can save him. He picked up the scalp with his left hand and gave it back to her, shaking his head: No. He wanted her to have it. She picked it up, spat on it, and threw it into the nearest fire. She pulled McKay’s pistol from her belt and tossed it on the ground. His buffalo rifle she consigned to the flames.
Tom closed his eyes and nodded.
She lifted him onto Vixen’s back, stuck his feet in the stirrups. He swayed back against the cantle, then steadied himself. But he reeled again and she held him for a minute, placing his hands on the saddlehorn. He could not speak, but he looked at her and nodded his thanks.
She lifted Otto’s body, strangely light, draped it head down over the back of Tom’s pony. She remounted Vixen behind Tom and rode out of the smoke. Crazy, Badger, and Yellow Eyes followed, trailing her, with the bodies of Pony and Cut Ear lashed head down across the backs of their horses. They rode toward the Buffalo Butte.
Red Arm, son of Stone Calf, the Southern Cheyenne Peace Chief, watched them depart. He was sad, not because of their leaving, but because he had not died in the fight just ended. He had made his vow. These spiders died too easily. Many of them wept and pleaded before dying. Others went mad and shot themselves before the Indians could get to them. But now they would ride north and east, to the Adobe Walls, where the main group of spider hide hunters had their headquarters. They would rendezvous there with I-sa-tai and the Comanches and make another fight. This one would not be so easy. The spiders had walls to hide behind, their rifles killed far. Surely there Red Arm would fulfill his vow and regain his family’s honor.
WHEN THEY REACHED
the Buffalo Butte, Jenny dismounted and helped Tom down to the spring. She scooped water in her hands and gave him a drink. Then she washed his wounds. The exit wound on his back was ugly, but the bleeding had nearly stopped. At least the bullet wasn’t still in there. She wouldn’t have to probe for it and worsen his injuries—a small blessing. She placed an ear against his chest and listened to his breathing. A rale, yes, but not as severe as she had feared.
Nearby Yellow Eyes sat beside Otto’s body, singing death songs. Jenny noticed blood on one of her hands. She had cut off the tip of a finger in mourning. Tom sighed and tried to sit up.
“I think you might live,” she told him. “You know?”
He smiled and tried to laugh. She could tell, if only from his eyes, that it hurt. He would never moan. Unable to speak, he signed her for more water. She brought a bucket from her packhorse, filled it at the spring, and set it beside him along with a tin cup. He reached for it with his wounded arm, flexing the fingers slowly. They worked. The shock of the bullet was wearing off. He filled the cup and drank.
“E-hyoph-sta,” he croaked. “Jenny Dousmann.” Then chuckled at the way he sounded.
She felt relief for the first time in hours.
“You were right,” he whispered. “The fight was foolish. It was too easy.” He gasped for breath. “Wolf Chief fought beside me. He killed both Sykes and the Englishman. He was brave. He called me his brother.” He rested awhile, then frowned.
“But we didn’t get what we came for.”
“What was that?” Jenny asked absently, searching through her war bag.
“My father wanted the Gatling gun—the Gun-That-Shoots-All-Day. Wolf Chief and I captured it, killed with it. But then he went after Sykes and the fire blew up the wagon with the Gatling.” He gestured to the sky. “Gone.”
In the war bag Jenny found a parfleche sack of Cheyenne medicines Strongheart had given her. She packed Tom’s wounds with moldy moss, then cut a strip of buckskin and bound it on as a bandage. She could do nothing about the lung, but if it was only a nick, as she hoped, it might heal by itself, with plenty of rest and no movement.
The other Elk Soldiers cut saplings from the grove of cottonwoods growing beside the spring and built a rough wickiup. She helped Tom inside, out of the afternoon sun, and covered him with a saddle blanket, setting the cup and bucket beside him. She propped his head and shoulders on a folded buffalo robe.
“Rest now,” she said. “Lie still, to keep the blood from your mouth. We must ride north as soon as possible.”
“But you’ve got to go into the butte,” Tom whispered. “Maheo’s buffalo are in there. You must bring them out, and we’ll take them north with us. At least I can bring my father some prize.”
“They won’t be in the butte,” she said. “But I’ll go there, anyway. I found a spring at the foot of it and a passageway through the water that leads to a cavern inside. That’s where I’ll bury Wolf Chief.”
“The buffalo will be there,” Tom assured her. “I know you’ll find them. You should have kept McKay’s scalp for an offering.” He coughed, breathed cautiously, but no blood came to his lips. “Or are you still a spider at heart?”
“I’m enough of a Cut-Arm to know that I couldn’t keep McKay’s hair. He didn’t die bravely. He wept at the fear of death. I only took his hair to show you I had avenged myself.”
Tom nodded.
“And his body—did you bury him as the spiders do?”
She laughed and shook her head.
“Let’s just say that I left him as he left so many buffalo—hairless and cold, good only to feed the wolves,”
THAT NIGHT SHE slept close beside Two Shields, naked under a buffalo robe. Her body kept him warm in the prairie chill. He was still sleeping, breathing easily, when she went into the butte the next morning just at dawn. She swam into the rocks from the spring pool, through a reed-masked crevice in the sandstone wall. The water was cold, but she did not feel it. She had brought Otto’s body, trailing behind her, with one hand locked in his hair. Between her teeth she carried a knife.
There was, as she’d figured, a big cave inside the butte, and a pool with the morning light flooding red from the hole in the wall where she’d skidded the rock. The channel widened out into a pool, shelved at one end with flat sandstone. She climbed out of the water and dragged Wolf Chief’s body up onto the cold rough rock.
As the light strengthened, she saw that there were offerings in the cave, the horned skulls of buffalo arrayed around the pool, some of them painted in cryptic designs of ocher, red and yellow, black and white, wood-ash and marl. One great skull—so old it was furred in luminous mold—had long, long horns, longer even than those of the Texas cattle she’d seen driven north. A giant buffalo from the dawn of time. The cave had been a place of worship since the beginning. She thought of the song the young cowboy had been singing when they killed him—Tie my bones to her back, he had mourned—and she felt the depth of that time, along with the infernal chill, a time when the buffalo blanketed the Great West and the People lived happily among them, killing and eating and dying and being born again, over and over through unnumbered eons.
Her brother would be another offering to the spirit of the buffalo. Perhaps the last vain prayer for peace.
She sat with him for a long time on the cold wet rocks beside the pool and thought long thoughts, of Tom and the Sa-sis-e-tas, of Raleigh McKay, but mostly of the buffalo. She saw them moving across the plains as she’d first seen the great herds, traveling against the wind, an undulant black blanket, roaring in high summer like thunder from a cloudless sky. She saw them in winter, digging through the snow for the wind-dried grass. She saw the bulls battling, their heads thudding together and their curved black horns searching for one another’s vitals. Then the titanic mating. Then yellow calves tottering to their feet for the first time, their mothers licking them dry. For a moment she even imagined she could hear them answering her silent call—E-hyoph-sta’s prayer—and the buffalo coming at her bidding from the depths of the earth, the rattle of their dewclaws, the bulls roaring, cows chuffing, the yellow calves bawling as they ran to keep up, a huge herd, many thousands upon thousands of buffalo, Maheo’s cattle in their millions, coming up from the bowels of the earth, out of the water, to erupt onto the prairie and spread themselves again, unending, until the world was covered once more with buffalo. For one thrilling minute she believed . . .
She laughed again, the short, bitter laugh of an Elk Soldier.
There were no buffalo coming. It was only the dawn wind.
You can’t get them back, she thought, not by magic—not even you, E-hyoph-sta—from the belly of the earth. You have to fight to keep them, for otherwise the spiders will kill them all.
She rose and walked over to where she’d laid Wolf Chief’s body. He stared up at the vaulted ceiling of the cave, sightless yet fierce of visage, his one remaining eye hard as a spear point, the hole in the other reaching toward the center of the earth. A warrior to the end, she thought. Yes, but also my brother. And now at last she wept, remembering Otto Dousmann as once he was. Young, strong, calm, loving. Impervious to peril. She remembered their hunting trips together, up north in the big woods, and her fears for him during the long years of the war. She remembered the farm, the sweet-smelling cow byres, the songs at night when Vati played his violin and she and Mutti washed dishes, while the cold of winter creaked outside the window. But the cold had caught up with them at last. She remembered how it took Vati and Mutti, then Otto—first his heart, then his limbs, then his mind, then finally his eye, and with them all his life itself.
She closed his eyelids and found pebbles to keep them sealed. She leaned over and kissed his cold, hard mouth. Then she picked up her knife from where she had laid it on the edge of the rocks. With one strong stroke she cut off the tip of a finger. It would remain with her brother in the buffalo cave, an offering to whatever gods might be.
She turned and dove back into the spring.
24
ALONE ON THE empty prairie, Raleigh Fitzroy McKay, Esq., late Captain of Infantry, 18th North Carolina regiment, C.S.A., marches unarmed toward the moonrise. His face sags away from the severed wires of his skull. In a slurred, dry voice he sings a song of defiance.
Oh, I’m a good old Rebel
Now that’s just what I am
And for this Yankee nation
I do not give a damn.
I’m glad we fought agin her
I only wish we’d won
And I won’t ask no pardon
For anything I done.
Three hundred thousand Yankees
Is stiff in Southern dust.
We got three hundred thousand
Before they conquered us.
They died of Southern fever
And Southern steel and shot.
I wish they were three million
Instead of what we got.
I won’t be reconstructed
I’m better now than them
And for a carpetbagger
I do not give a damn.
So I’m off for the mountains
As soon as I can go
To find myself a rifle and start for Mexico.
He walks through an endless boneyard—horned skulls, vaulting rib cages, the warped sine curves of chained vertebrae. The scattered hooves of countless dead buffalo. Vultures disturbed by his passage flap up from the carcasses that loom to the horizon, translucent against the evening light. Others, less timid, hold their ground. They spread their wings and hiss at him.
On his spoor the white wolves follow, lured yet lulled by his voice, hungry, timid, working up courage—biding their time.
Awaiting their moment.
Bibliographical Note
In writing this story, the author gained valuable insights and information from many works, most especially:
W. Philo Clark. The Indian Sign Language, with Brief Explanatory Notes of the Gestures Taught Deaf-Mutes in Our Institutions for Their Instruction, and a Description of Some of the Peculiar Laws, Customs, Myths, Superstitions, Ways of Living, Code of Peace and War Signals of Our Aborigines (1885).
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