Ghostly tendrils of gray smoke still rose from the half-burned timbers.
The valley of Black’s Fork stank, the late-summer air heavy with the stench of those smoldering piles of hides the Mormons had set ablaze.
But nowhere they looked as they slowly advanced on the blackened gates of Fort Bridger did they see a sign of life. Not one of Brigham Young’s Saints. Not a single horse or mule. Not even so much as a wagon or a milk cow left in the paddock of the corral.
“They cleared out, Jim,” Shadrach Sweete said as they all came to a halt at the edge of the cottonwood in the chill of that early morning.
“Appears to me them Marmons put great stock in what your Mary told ’em ’bout her papa bein’ Washakie, chief of the Snakes,” Titus observed. “I figger they woke up with their achin’ heads, an’ got to thinkin’ they didn’t have the stomach for fightin’ the Shoshone. Their kind allays gonna skeedaddle when they gotta fight men even up.”
Sweete said, “I bet they scared themselves, Jim. Once they found Mary gone, figgered she went off to fetch her pa an’ his warriors.”
Bridger said nothing but continued to wag his head as he started slowly toward the smoldering walls of what had been his peaceful bastion in the wilderness. An uneasy silence hung over the valley … not at all the sort of silence the man had settled here to enjoy. This was the utter lack of sound after a piece of ground had been gutted of all life. Not the twitter of a sparrow, the caw of a magpie, or the shriek of a robber jay. Only the occasional whisper of the breeze that kept the last of the embers glowing, their smoke rising, an oily-black stench filling their nostrils as they stopped at the open maw where the double gates had once hung. The charred ends of those timbers lay in a heap on which a small fortune in buffalo, bear, and other skins had been sacrificed to the flames of a bonfire.
A sudden creak made them all spin about, their hearts leaping to their throats … but it was only the dawn breeze nudging what was left of one half of the broken corral gate as it swung on a huge iron hinge. A lonely, forlorn sound. Where once this place had reverberated with life unleashed, now it felt like it was the empty pit of a man’s belly, gone hungry three days or more.
“You cache anything, Gabe?” Titus asked quietly as he stopped at Bridger’s elbow.
“No. Did you?”
Bass shook his head. “S’pose we ought’n look to see if the sonsabitches left anythin’ behind when they set fire to the place.”
Jim sighed, his face long and gray with despair. At least half of every low hut was burned, the logs tumbled to the ground, charred and smoking. About a third of the outer stockade still stood, but the rest had burned nearly to the scorched earth, both the walls around the fort itself and the adjacent corral.
“The wagons’re gone,” Bridger said. “No sign they burned ’em.”
“They took them too,” Sweete declared.
“After they loaded ’em with ever’thing they wasn’t gonna burn,” Jim growled, a fury finally beginning to glow behind his eyes. “After they stole ever’thing right out from under me for Brigham Young.”
“This ain’t right,” Jack Robinson said in a weak voice. “This just ain’t right. Even if they said they come to arrest you for sellin’ weapons to the Injuns … it ain’t right they just up an’ steal ever’thing from you an’ your family.”
“From me an’ my family too,” Titus reminded him.
Robinson muttered, “Stealin’ an’ murder ain’t right—”
“These folks ain’t like you an’ me, Uncle Jack,” Titus interrupted. “Ever’thing these Marmons do agin us an’ our kind … why, they figger it’s the work of their god and his awmighty prophet, Brigham Young.”
“Damn Brigham Young!” Bridger shrieked. “I give him my hand. I offered to guide his people down to a valley where they could settle in peace an’ grow their crops an’ no one’d ever bother ’em again! The night I took supper with that bastard Prophet, he told me he an’ his people was runnin’ from folks what wanted to hang him, folks what wanted to kill all his faithful believers.”
Jim turned to his friends, tears of frustration and rage pooling in his eyes. “Can you believe I was took in by the son of a bitch? Here I was gonna do all I could to help him an’ his folks who he said just wanted a place of their own to live out their lives an’ believe the way they wanted to believe … an’ Brigham Young puts a butcher knife atween my shoulders!”
“You just say it,” Titus offered. “I’ll ride with you to the valley of the Salt Lake so you can strangle that evil son of a bitch with your own bare hands, Gabe.”
“Th-there ain’t near ’nough of us no more,” Bridger said quietly. “Time was, we could ride out in the four directions an’ be back inside of two weeks with more’n a hunnert … likely two hunnert trappers. Time was we could’ve rid right down on Salt Lake City an’ dragged Brigham Young out of his house—quakin’ an’ shudderin’ an’ blubberin’ for me to spare ’im before we dropped a rawhide rope round his fat preacher’s neck … but not no more.”
“There ain’t a hunnert of our kind in these mountains anymore,” Titus declared. “Ain’t nowhere near half that many, not all the way from the Marias on the north to Taos an’ Santy Fee on the south. Them what ain’t gone west to Oregon like Meek an’ Newell, or run back east to what they used to be … the rest is standin’ right here with us.” He swept his arms around the group. “Lookit us, fellas. Just lookit us. We’re all that’s left of a glory breed … an’ ever’ last one of us is barely hangin’ on to what was by our fingernails.”
Slowly the handful of men drifted off in different directions, not one of them uttering another word, each of them wallowing in his own thoughts, recollections, memories of a brighter day, shining times when they were still kings of this mountain empire, before the big fur companies choked the very life out of the beaver trade … long, long before the settlers’ wheels cut through the heart of these mountains. Long, long before these self-anointed Saints came to murder, plunder, and steal everything worth living for.
Funny, Titus thought as he and Waits-by-the-Water walked arm in arm toward the smoldering log hut near the southeastern corner of the stockade, the one that Bridger had turned over to them, but that night back in ’47 when Gabe had supper alone with Brigham Young by the crossing of the Sandy, the Prophet had swayed Jim with tales of how the Saints had been persecuted by the majority of folks wherever they had attempted to build their temples and live out their lives according to the dictates of their holy leader. Funnier still it was, now that Brigham Young’s Saints had come to this land and through the sheer strength of their numbers had become the majority for the first time in the history of their church.
But what did these Saints do when they finally found themselves totally powerful over others already living in these free mountains? Did they let those other folks be, let others live their lives according to their own beliefs? No—Brigham Young’s holy, self-righteous people turned out to be murderers and thieves even worse than those who had hounded the Mormons out of every city back east … for the Saints committed their evil, stole from Gentiles, staining their hands with the blood of innocents—all in the name of their gods!
There wasn’t much of anything the Mormons had left behind. They had plundered everything of any value: blankets, clothing, weapons, cooking vessels stolen from every hut. And what they hadn’t loaded up on Bridger’s wagons before heading south for Salt Lake City, they had destroyed. Waits bent to pick up the remains of a brass kettle, smashed in half by the butt of a rifle or the heel of a boot, then stabbed with a bayonet until it could never be used again.
All that he and his woman had managed to acquire over twenty years together was gone in one fit of murderous thievery. Even when the Blackfoot, Sioux, or Cheyenne had raided, none of those tribes had ever completely stripped Titus Bass of everything. He gazed around, his heart aching and his eyes stinging with bitter tears. All it seemed they had left were their children—
Waits-by-the-Water suddenly hunched over in a spasm of pain, huffing loudly.
“Mary!” he cried from the ruins of what had been their little cabin as he threw his arms around his trembling wife. Sensing the volcanic quake shudder through Waits-by-the-Water, he hollered again, with even more urgency. “Shell Woman! Mary! Someone, come help us!”
Titus heard the footsteps pounding up behind them. Still holding her tightly against him as she caught her breath, her knees gone watery, Scratch peered back over his shoulder from the charred ruins, finding their children frozen in place, their wide eyes locked on their mother. Jim and his wife ran up and ground to a halt with Toote and Shad, the smoking timbers staining the air.
Seeing that frightened look in Mary’s eyes, Scratch realized the woman knew what they were up against.
Quietly, calmly supporting his trembling wife, Titus Bass said, “Mary—we’re gonna need your help. This baby’s comin’ too early.”
He had asked Waits-by-the-Water if she wanted to come with him, but he knew that no matter how strong she was, she still was in no condition to straddle a horse.
He could have cut some saplings and tied together some sort of travois to carry her in … if she had wanted to go along with him into the hills.
But she had shaken her head, bit down on her lower lip almost hard enough to draw blood to keep from crying out loud, and buried her face against him until it was time for him to go. Alone.
They didn’t have much they could do for a proper burial shroud, what with the Mormons stealing most everything and burning what they didn’t take with them when they cleared out of the valley. But Jim Bridger did manage to find some scraps of flour sacks his wife, Mary, and Shell Woman quickly stitched together with some delicate and narrow leather whangs until they had a piece of coarse burlap big enough to wrap twice round the tiny corpse. Into this mourning sack they sewed the infant, this one and only garment the child would wear on this earthly veil. Soon enough, he thought as Gabe helped his wife with those stitches, soon enough the burlap would fall to tatters beneath the howling winds of this coming winter … then the tiny body would begin to go the way of all flesh. Back to dust, set upon the winds for all time to come.
When the little bundle was ready, Jim came over and nodded, then turned away. Neither he nor Shad had been able to say anything, their grief was so palpable.
“I will go now,” he said to her as the fire’s light flickered on the sheen across her wet cheeks.
“Say the prayers,” she begged him in Crow.
She didn’t have to. “I know the prayers to say. Through the seasons, I have said the words over so many. Over your father, and your brother too. These same prayers we both said over the grave of my grandson. And finally … the words spoken over the body of your mother too.”
“Wh-why?” she whimpered again, grinding her face into his shirt. “Did we do something wrong to bring all this pain? Is there something we could have done to change this—”
Pressing two fingertips against her lips, Titus reassured her with words he did not yet believe, “This is not about us—not about what we did or what we didn’t do.”
“How can this be about that little man who died coming too early?” she asked in a husky whisper, her throat sore from the hours of hard breathing and the difficult labor.
“It isn’t about our son either,” he said. “It’s about whoever makes these choices. Who decides what’s to live … and what’s to die.”
“Will we ever know?”
He squeezed her shoulders against him for a long time, then finally said, “If we’re lucky, we might figure it out one day. But … I don’t think we ever will know why it was us, why it was here and now … why it was that little boy of ours.”
She sobbed for several more minutes; then her trembling slowed until she finally pushed herself back from him enough to gaze up at her husband’s eyes. Waits said, “Make it a safe place for him who has no name. Make it a very, very safe place.”
He leaned down and kissed her on the forehead, right where her hair began, and drank in the fragrance of her, then slowly peeled himself out from under his wife and stood. Without a word he passed by his children and went to untie the reins to his horse.
As Scratch put his left moccasin into the big hole of the cottonwood stirrup, he stopped, stood still, feeling so damned weary. Then without turning to look back over his shoulder, he said, “Flea, I want you to bring me the body of your little brother.”
With great effort, Titus dragged himself into the saddle, settled himself down, and toed his right foot into the stirrup as the tall, muscular Flea took the tiny bundle from Shell Woman’s arms and brought it over to where his father sat on the horse.
“I can come with you, Popo.”
His eyes were wet, tears falling down his leathery cheeks as Flea laid the burlap shroud across the crook of his left arm. “You stay with your mother. Sit with her. Do anything she needs of you. I … I must do this alone.”
Not able to choke out anything more, Titus Bass dragged the reins to the right and heeled the horse in a quarter turn. The animal slowly carried him away from the smoking rubble that remained of Fort Bridger on Black’s Fork in the valley of the Seedskeedee. The stars were still in bloom early that morning as the sky began to gray in the east. Just the faintest hint of rose at one spot on the horizon. A reddening, deepening, bloody rose that so reminded him of the smears running up and down the newborn’s body, of that blackening pool of blood there beneath his wife’s buttocks as her legs quivered in pain and exhaustion while she delivered the tiny lifeless body.
The boy had never breathed.
Scratch let out a long sigh, watching the thin, gauzy wisp of breathsmoke trail from his mouth as he began to sob again. This tiny son of his had never taken a breath, never known the simple joy of tasting life in his lungs.
First Maker breathed His spirit into each of us, he thought as he started the horse upstream toward the lion’s head rocks where he and Gabe had waited out the Mormons’ sacking of the fort. So it was the Indians of these mountains believed. The Creator of all blew His breath into the mouth and nostrils of every newborn at the moment of emerging into the world so that the child gasped with the powerful spirit that infused the tiny lungs and made the babe cry out with life.
But where had the First Maker been for this child he clutched, here in the crook of his left arm, just beneath his broken heart? Where was this all-powerful Creator, this Grandfather Above, whose place it was to watch over the tiniest and most helpless of creatures? Where had the First Maker been when Mary and Toote sat staring down at the child’s lifeless, blue-tinged body, lying limp across Shell Woman’s arms until Bass desperately shouldered Mary aside and took the child into his own hands, pressed his open mouth over its tiny nose and lips … where had the Creator been as he desperately fed his tiny son the breath from his own body?
With that one hand gently laid on the babe’s chest, Titus had felt each of his breaths make the tiny chest rise. After each attempt, Scratch had stared down into the wrinkled face, looking for some flicker of the eyelids, some cough and sputter, some bawling response as the legs and arms would start to flail … but instead his child lay still and lifeless, no matter how he breathed into its lungs or rubbed its cold, blue body. So helpless, so goddamned helpless as he had started to sob, his tears spilling to mingle with the thick, milky, blood-streaked substance smeared all over the limp newborn.
Titus had pressed the tiny body against him as his head fell back and he let out a primal wail that shook him to his very roots. As he rocked and rocked and rocked there by his wife’s knees, Waits-by-the-Water cried, clutching Mary and Shell Woman, clawing at their arms in grief, finally burying her face in the Shoshone woman’s lap. Finally Bridger came up and knelt beside him, put his arm around Bass’s shoulder.
“Let me take ’im, Scratch. I’ll hol’t ’im for a while.”
“No,” he had growled, like a wounded animal with its paw caught i
n the jaws of a trap—hurting, angry, and preparing to chew off his own foot to free himself.
But this was not the sort of pain he could swallow down and be shet of it. No bloody chewing through the gristle and bone, fur and sinew, would make this loss any better.
“G-get me something to bury the boy in, Gabe. Just you do that.”
Bridger had risen there beside him and moved with Shadrach off to locate the charred pieces of those once-used flour sacks. He had brought them back and showed them to Mary and Toote. When Titus nodded that they would do, the two women had slowly inched away from Waits while Scratch went to sit at his wife’s shoulder. Propping her against him, Bass laid their stillborn son in her arms and rocked them both in his.
“Day’s comin’,” Bridger said before he turned away with Shad and the women to see to the burial shroud and to give them privacy. “Couple hours, maybe three at the most.”
“I’ll go when you’re done wrappin’ the boy up,” Titus whispered.
“What if it’s still dark out there?”
“Even if it’s dark, Gabe. I’m gonna do this right by the child.”
Holding her, embracing both of them, from time to time he asked Flea to bring in some more firewood. Waits-by-the-Water felt as cold to him as the tiny stillborn. He knew she had to be freezing, shaking the way she was. Just keep the fire going so she did not die on him too. He didn’t know what he would do if that happened … couldn’t possibly go on without her. Wouldn’t even want to go on without her, even if he could.
Strange now that the light of a new day was coming, brightening out of the east at his back, even though he felt his own spirit withering, shriveling, darkening like a strip of rawhide left out in the elements to dry and twist and blacken. Should have been that he went to bury this little body after dark, with the coming of night instead of the start of a whole new day. The way life had of giving a man a new chance all over again every dawn.
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