Deadville

by Robert F. Jones

  “I’m not going. Look you, Dill, I’m finished anyway. The bullet went through my lungs. Fm bleeding out from the inside. Now get moving; get clear. Once I light this train it’ll take only about thirty seconds to hit the powder charge, because it’s right behind the spot where Dade is hiding.”

  Dade fired again, two shots this time. One of them nicked my shoulder.

  Then we heard moccasined footsteps coming quick down the tunnel toward us, staggering some toward the end. It was Pine Leaf. She slid in beside Owen, silent. He put his arm around her. “Medio tonto,” she whispered.

  “Clear out, Dillon,” Owen said again. And once more he coughed.

  Pine Leaf lay beside him, breathing hard. She, too, was wounded, I realized; must have been hit by one of Dade’s wild ricochets as she came down the tunnel to join the fight. I could hear blood dripping now onto the rock floor of the tunnel where she lay. She began chanting her Death Song.

  “I can’t leave you, Brother,” I said. But I knew that I must.

  “Get going,” he said. He took my hand and squeezed it, hard. “As you love me, get out of here. And take Thump with you.”

  I picked the dog up under my arm and went.

  WE EMERGED INTO full daylight a few minutes later. I put the dog down, and she ran to Gwen and Plover. Spy, Jim, and Jaime were sitting slumped in the sunlight, well away from the front of the mine entrance. Jim looked up, saw me, and rose stiff to his feet. I hobbled toward him, clutching my stomach. He came limping toward me.

  “Where’s Owen and Pine Leaf?” he asked. His wounds were bandaged, but dried blood still lay caked beneath his fingernails. He grabbed me just as my legs caved in.

  “In there settling scores with Lafcadio Dade,” I said.

  He began dragging me back from the cliff. Just then a bellow roared from the cave, followed by a rumble from deep within the earth; then another, nearly synchronous roar shivered the clifftop overlooking the Buenaventura.

  Smoke bloomed from the mouth of the mine, and the face of the mountain slumped in on itself Jim hurried me away from the wall. Then a great, slow slab of rock toppled from the cliff and fell, blocking the entrance and shivering the earth with its impact. …

  WE WERE A long time healing, and in some ways I’m sure my wounds still fester, especially those in my soul. Spy had lost a lot of blood, but Plover closed his knife wound with expert stitches and fed him slowly back to strength, there in the supervisor’s cabin at Deadville, on herbal soups, deer and elk liver, and certain wild roots and barks which she said restored the vigor of the blood. She had learned herbal medicine from a captive Chippewa woman, a powerful curandera of the Midewiwin clan. Jaime’s nicked lung seeped blood for a long while, but his mother dosed him regularly with what she called bear medicine—bitter draughts of pulverized dogbane root boiled in water—and slowly, slowly the bleeding stopped. His collarbone had been cracked by the same bullet, yet Plover’s poultice of wild ginger and spikenard roots, along with the resiliency of youth, seemed to serve him well. A cast fashioned of steamed birch bark, which dries as hard as plaster, kept the boy’s shoulder immobile while the fracture mended. The bullet Jim had taken through his left thigh had not involved bone or the femoral artery, and once the initial bleeding was stanched he quickly recovered. After a week he was scarcely limping.

  I was certain that my own wound would end in a slow, painful death by septic peritonitis. An awful lot of guts and organs are packed into a man’s lower body, and I had no idea which of them had been torn by Chambers’ last shot. The bullet had ripped through my waist from the front left, just under the ribs, to exit above my right hip. It must have nicked a vertebra in its passage—the slow-working injury which more than half a century later would cripple me. For now, though, all I knew was the pain: sullen, intractable, sometimes intense, accompanied by severe nausea that kept me retching into a kettle day and night.

  There were dark times as I lay there on my pallet of buffalo robes in that drafty, smoky cabin that I wanted to call for a pistol and put an end to it. I passed a lot of blood at first, which suggested a kidney or bladder wound, but Plover made me drink a decoction of mashed goldenrod root and water, bitter almost as death itself, and after a few days my urine cleared. The sharp, knifing pain in my left side which, with its sudden, unpredictable severity, caused the worst of the retching, she treated with a warm sludge compounded of young pine sapling chunks boiled together with the mashed inner bark of wild plum and wild cherry and applied as a poultice over the entry wound. The pains gradually abated.

  Some months later, I asked an army surgeon, young Doc Hicks at Fort Marcy in Santa Fe, down near the Garita where they hang the Spanish bandidos, what organ might have been injured by the bullet to cause me that wracking pain.

  “More than likely your spleen,” he told me, after studying the healed wounds. “The organ serves as a blood filter and emergency reservoir, and is hence greatly vascularized. A gunshot wound involving the spleen is not, however, necessarily fatal, due in large measure to the contractile power of the membrane that envelops it, which narrows the wound and prevents further escape of blood. Or to put in plain English”—and here he scratched his head—“you’re a damned lucky fellow.”

  I’ve often wondered if that trauma to my spleen accounts for my easy irritability these days. Splentic is the word for me lately, all right.

  LATER, AFTER OUR wounds were sufficiently mended, Plover, Jaime, and I went into the hills in search of stray horses. We would need them for our return journey. Most of the horses had forgotten their panic at the gunfire and bomb explosions that had stampeded them during the fight. As we hunted across the scarred, barren mountain face above the minería, Plover stopped.

  “Isn’t this where we buried Yellow Calf?” she asked.

  So it seemed. The peaks and river lined up correctly, but the trees were all gone: cut for timber and charcoal, for gold. We found the stump of the pine tree on which we’d built Yellow Calf’s burial platform. Sifting through the dust, we came upon her remains, just a few of the long bones, leg and arm, and finally her skull. Plover gathered them into a bundle and placed them in an antelope skin. Later she would anoint them with ocher.

  “We’ll take her with us and bury her out with the buffalo,” she said. “This is no place to spend eternity.”

  A few days later we rode for home.

  When we got there a month later, it was to discover that our caretaker, Pánfilo Ramirez, had abandoned his family and absconded with our horses and cattle. It was months before we tracked him out and returned them where they belong. But that’s the way of the West.

  As for Deadville, may the mine and its tragic contents remain buried forever.

  AFTERWORD

  IT’S WINTER NOW, a bad one, perhaps my last on this earth. Things were touch and go there for a while. Back in December I was taken with a bone-rattling ague which old Doc Hicks misdiagnosed as calenture. Yes, the same Doc Hicks I talked to about my spleen more than half a century ago. After retiring from the army he settled in Santa Fe, having taken a Mexican wife. We get together now and then to play pinochle. He said that my fever this winter was perhaps a recurrence of an illness that’s plagued me since a sojourn some years ago into the depths of Sonora, when I ran guns to the Juarista rebels fighting Emperor Maximilian. Instead, the illness proved to be a particulary wicked influenza, and it near did for me. Doc Hicks doubts I’ll be able to ride again when spring rolls around, though I still have hopes for the horse and buggy.

  But things could be worse, I guess. This writing has given me something to live for, and in the process carried me through a very bad spell. For hours on end, whole days, as my pen scratched out this account, it seemed I was young again, strong and fearless, as were my companions. They swarmed about me; I could hear their voices, laughing and cursing and blessing the glorious days; I saw them in action once more, smelled the smoke of old campfires blazing anew.

  Otherwise our domestic situation is fine. The hor
ses and the cattle seem to be managing the winter far better than I, despite more snow and frost than usual. And Speranza has found herself a fine young man, a spruce young cowhand named Nando Copál who used to ride for the Double K over near Bernalillo but now helps her with our herds since I am out of action. They ride my horses in the snowy hills and, unless Fm miss my guess, engage in a little spooning along the way. Or so I hope at least.

  No motor cars putter up the road to the Casa Pequeña these days. None have done so since the summer afternoon that triggered all this reminiscence, and I have yet to lay eyes on my second horseless carriage. All the better, I might add. If Fm strong enough to sit up and raise a rifle come spring, I intend to take station on the veranda and shoot the next one that pokes its ugly bonnet over my horizon.

  I never heard from Wentworth Champion again, and though Fm a faithful subscriber to the Santa Fe Republican have not found within its pages a “mountain man” story over Champion’s name, or anyone else’s for that matter. Perhaps he never made it home and the editor gave up hope.

  If so, alas and amen.