A forgotten evil, p.17
A Forgotten Evil, page 17
When at last they reined up, Caleb dropped his arms, his fingers long since dead from lack of blood, his backside afire with the scrub of his horse. Little River took up the reins, leading him and the string into a stand of elm high on a ridge. Sitting him on the ground, he snapped the hobble onto the leg of the first horse and handed Caleb the lead rope. After that, he removed the single action Colt from under his belt and dropped it in Caleb’s lap.
“You are to guard the horses until we return,” he said.
“You can’t leave me hobbled to this string of broomtails, Little River?”
Even as he said it, the lead horse reared, scooting backward, stiff-legged and white-eyed into the horses behind, dragging Caleb into the thick of the trees.
“Whoa! Whoa!” he called out, pulling hard on the rope.
“We will be back by dawn, Woodcutter.”
“By then I’ll be dragged raw, or kilt,” he said, anger in his voice.
“Then take good care of the horses,” Little River said, mounting up.
With the lead rope in one hand and the Colt in the other, Caleb leveled the barrel at Little River.
“I could shoot you,” he said.
“Yes,” Little River said, “but Red Nose has the hobble key and a great desire for your scalp.”
“It’s a point,” Caleb said, lowering the pistol. “Guess I’ll just take care of these here horses until dawn, or until there ain’t nothing left to drag around, either one.”
And then there was only the wind and the ivory trek of the moon as it arched through the sky.
Caleb waited through the endless night, and with every stamp of a horse’s hoof, or snort, or whinny, his heart leaped at the prospect of a frenzied ride through the night while hobbled to a herd of Cheyenne mustangs.
Morning came with frost shimmering in the grass and in the high branches of the trees. Hungry, the horses reached for dried leaves, or shook their heads, or nipped at each other’s rumps in a perpetual round of tag. Time and again the hobble bit into Caleb’s ankle until the wound was raw and his moccasin was blood caked.
Little River rode up the ridge, and Caleb cried out, standing so that he might be seen. Dismounting, Little River took Caleb’s revolver and unlocked his hobble. Little River’s lip was swollen, and a tooth was broken, indelible evidence of the fierce battle he’d fought.
“We go now to the valley,” he said.
As they rode from the ridge and into the hollow, Caleb’s heart broke at what he saw—a half dozen freight wagons strewn about, wheels turning and ticking in the wind, broken barrels of cornmeal swirling in the icy wind, gathering against the soldiers’ bodies. There was about the valley the smell of butchery and death.
“What has been done here?” Caleb said, his voice breaking.
“Tie the crates of rifles onto the horses,” Little River said, “and the ammunition from that wagon there. When you have finished, wait by the horses until I am ready.”
As Caleb carried the crates, a horse kicked out its life in the grass at the bottom of the hill, its leg broken, its cries rising into the valley. All around, the soldiers lay with fixed and dead eyes, frost gathering on the lapels of their coats and on their bloodied scalps. There they lay as if in jest, as if to jump out with a round of laughter at the fine joke they had played. But they did not jump out, or laugh, or move ever again from that final place. And so Caleb worked with eyes cast down, to look away from those quiet faces.
From across the way, Red Nose and the others broke up pieces of a wagon bed to build a hot fire. They gathered about and talked of their exploits, of the coup they had earned with their daring courage, and when all was finished, they ate pemmican and drank whiskey from a bottle found beneath a wagon seat.
When Caleb finished with the crates, Little River came from the fire to where the horses were tied. The wounds on his face had worsened with the hours, his mouth now swollen and inflamed.
“We go back to the camp,” he said. “With these rifles the Cheyenne will have hope once more.”
“There’s a horse down there in the grass,” Caleb said. “Its leg is broken, and it’s suffering something terrible.”
“It will die with the passing of the day,” he said.
“Let me kill it, Little River. It’s what ought to be done.”
Reaching for his pistol, Little River took out all the bullets but one.
“Maybe you think to kill me now,” he said, handing him the pistol.
“Yes,” Caleb said, turning to what he must do. “It crosses my mind.”
The horse lifted its head from the grass, its blazed face and eyes of glass. Caleb clicked up a round and cocked the hammer. Even as he fired, the horse relaxing in death, Caleb realized the terrible truth before him.
A few feet away, Jim Ferric lay dead, his red beard white with morning frost. An arrow grew from his throat, another from the calf of his leg, and his great chest lay opened and shamed under the prairie sun. Diligent black ants worked at his scalp wound, frenzied by their unaccountable luck. His powerful arms lay at his side, his hands opened and soiled from the black of his forge. When from up on the hill Little River called, Caleb touched his old friend’s face.
He walked from that place with clenched fists and fought back his tears. This he swore to Jim and to all who had died that day: he would escape from this enemy and pay his dues. This he swore and damn the cost.
Chapter 16
For the next several days, the band drove south. Armed now with rifles, there was a renewed defiance and urgency among them. The drums raged at night, and the warriors danced, cast under their throb and spell. At the edges of the camp’s light, the women moved to the beat, with arms linked, with eyes down, with bodies undulating to the pulse of the drum. But for Caleb, he was never more alone than in those moments, his own isolation heightened in the unity of their dance.
As the days passed, Little River grew more distant. The pressure for him to remove from Caleb increased with the anger and strength of the band. Even though Caleb pleaded with him to remove the hobbles, he refused, folding his arms, looking away as if not to hear. Soon he quit coming to Caleb altogether, leaving an old woman, who smelled of hides and rotting teeth, to deliver what food she may.
The band drove south as if obsessed, sometimes riding into the night under the full of the moon. Even so, there was little complaint from anyone, including the women who walked long hours alongside their travois, or the children who slept as they rode, tied to their ponies so as not to be lost in the darkness.
Without time to hunt, the food soon diminished, with little left to eat but cornmeal stolen from the supply train or an occasional rabbit or bird caught nesting in the brush. Caleb’s meals were often no more than what pickings remained or were neglected altogether, and the arduousness of the trail soon took its toll. The new buckskins sagged on his thinning body, and his eyes sank dark and ponderous in their sockets.
On this evening, Caleb lay on the open prairie, his blanket about him against the chill. The old lady came and set down a bowl of cornmeal gruel, cold and tasteless and tainted with fly. Caleb ate it with his hand, sucking at his fingers for the last morsels of corn. The old lady watched on, the flare of sunset in the blackness of her eyes.
“I’m starving,” he said in broken Cheyenne, pushing the empty bowl back to her with defiance. “I want more.”
Grinning, she showed him the few remaining stumps in her mouth, worn low in her gums, sunken away in the absence of teeth.
“Here,” she said, slipping a sagging breast from under her shawl, “it keeps our babies from crying in the night.”
She laughed, scornful of his weakness, and turned back to the camp.
For the next several days the pace was relentless, as if now some purpose befell them or some deadline must be met. Camps were pitched late and without the comfort of fire in the cold fall. Too exhausted to search for protection from the winds, Caleb slept wherever they stopped, pulling his blanket about him to shiver through the night.
Sometimes he thought about what the old woman might bring. Sometimes he thought of Jim Ferric, butchered and dead, of his corpse so hopeless and still, of the swarming flies and open wounds. Sometimes he thought of the hobble cutting now to the white of his bone, but most times he thought of nothing at all, his mind numbed from the cold, the hunger, and the relentless trek south.
It was a windy and chill dawn that broke. Clouds, pink with sun, raced headlong across the sky. Standing over Caleb, Little River waited for him to stir.
“Woodcutter,” he said, “gather fuel for a fire.”
Climbing from under his blanket, Caleb shivered in the morning cold.
“We’re going to have a fire?”
“There’s a few buffalo stragglers spotted to the west,” he said. “Red Nose will stay behind and is in charge of the camp. Gather enough wood to smoke the meat and for another night’s stay.”
“Reckon you couldn’t take this hobble off?” he asked, showing his swollen ankle to Little River.
“We’ll soon have meat,” he said. “With these rifles the hunting will be easy.”
“Could I ask what our hurry is, Little River? The Washita has been there a long time, ain’t it?”
Little River mounted his horse and looked off to the south.
“The Cheyenne must know that they are still warriors. It is something you could not understand.” Reining up his horse, he said, “When you have finished with the wood, make yourself small, Woodcutter. Red Nose’s blood runs hot, as you know.”
Caleb searched for wood throughout the morning. In a draw not far from camp, he found a dead elm, its wood light with decay, and down the hill, a hackberry of considerable size. The axe was heavy, his arms aching with weakness, but by noon he’d finished with the task.
Red Nose looked up at him with disdain and pointed to where the fire was to be built. And when the fire was roaring, the women gathered around, holding their hands to its warmth, and soon laughter filled the camp. Red Nose stood among them, folded his arms over his chest, a rooster among the hens.
Caleb kept to the edge of camp, as Little River said, and busied himself sharpening his axe on a chert fragment he’d found while gathering wood.
Walking about the fire, Red Nose watched him as he worked, turning to the women, who now sat about making repairs on their moccasins and clothing.
“We attacked them from above on the ridge,” he said, “riding into their midst, and even then they did not know us.” He looked over his shoulder and checked to see if Caleb listened. “The white soldier is like a jackrabbit who freezes in the face of his enemy.” Squatting, he poked the fire with a stick and then blew the flame from its end. “He dies even before he fights.”
One of the squaws stirred at a pot, the smoke from the fire finding her eyes. Rubbing them with the backs of her hands, she looked at the other women.
“Red Nose now has more coup than any warrior,” she said. “He would make a brave leader.”
“I killed three of the soldiers with my knife,” he said, “one here in the heart, another here in the kidney, and the big one with the red beard here. Like a great stupid bear, he stood as I cut his throat.”
Gathering up his hobble, Caleb turned his back against the words, his heart pounding at the lie.
“Red Nose is a fearless warrior,” the squaw said, drawing her blanket about her. “Someday he will be chief, of that I have no doubt.”
“He begged me to let him live,” Red Nose said. “It’s the white man’s way to beg for his life in the face of his enemy.”
“It’s a lie,” Caleb said, his own voice a stranger in his ears.
Red Nose stood, his rifle cradled across his arms. “Did you say something, Woodcutter?”
“I said it’s a lie. The big one was killed with arrows, in his throat and another in his thigh. I saw it myself. I knew this soldier, and he would never beg for his life, and he would never lie about taking someone else’s life.”
Even as he said it, Caleb knew that he was dead, that his miserable life was at last at an end. There was relief in that knowledge, in the knowing of the moment of his own death.
Crossing the distance in an instant, Red Nose brought the butt of his rifle into Caleb’s uplifted face, a stunning and pitiless blow. Caleb dropped like a felled tree, unhindered, onto the prairie floor.
The sky was the color of blood, red-clabbered clouds and flashes of light, and his stomach swelled with nausea. All he could see was the women’s skirts as he hung upside down from Red Nose’s lodge pole. Gasping for air, he tried to speak, but his lungs collapsed in panic, dry bags of fear, and his eyes bulged in their sockets. Blood oozed from his nose and dripped into the sand. Saliva drooled from his lips, gathering cool in the cups of his ears. Above him, smoke drifted and stirred in the sky, its succor lost in the knowledge of his demise.
“No man calls me a liar and lives,” Red Nose said from somewhere above him.
Caleb coughed and spat blood from his throat, filling his ragged lungs with air. “Jim Ferric died a man to the end,” he said.
At first he was not aware of the pain, so keen and exquisite was the blade that slid down his belly. But when it came, it was a fire, an unbearable inferno and anguish. Bile rushed his throat, and his bowels loosened under the collapse of his will. A scream of agony fell across the prairie, and all who heard could not but know the extent of its terror.
“Take him down,” someone said.
Caleb searched for the voice, for the savior to release him from this torment, and he saw Little River’s moccasins, the beading long since faded and worn from the trail.
“He’s called me a liar and must die,” Red Nose said.
“The woodcutter is my property.”
“Then I shall trade for him.”
“The woodcutter is not for trade. Take him down.”
When the hobble was released, Caleb dropped in a heap, gathering himself up on shaking legs. Blood wept from the split in his stomach, and his eyes were blackened slits in his swollen face. Black Kettle watched on from across the way, his horse dancing with excitement.
“Did you call him a liar, Woodcutter?” Little River asked.
“He said that he killed the big soldier with his knife, that the big soldier begged for his life. He’s a liar. The soldier was killed with arrows and was not Red Nose’s coup. I saw them myself.”
“The woodcutter has hunted with us,” Little River said, tossing his knife at Caleb’s feet, “has saved my life from the buffalo bull. I give him the right to defend his honor.”
Even as Caleb bent for the knife, Red Nose whirled about, his own knife, still stained with Caleb’s blood, held high at his side.
“It is good that I do not have to trade a Cheyenne horse for this worthless woodcutter,” he said.
Caleb took his stance, mimicking his enemy, who now circled with knees bent and eyes fixed. Perhaps it was better to die fighting than to die hoisted on Red Nose’s lodge pole, but at that moment, it seemed a meager choice. The fighting skills of Red Nose were renowned among the tribe, and Caleb knew that his chances were slim. It was in the power of his own arms, the swing of his axe, that Caleb was master, but he was weak from the lack of food and the burden of the trail.
The jump was swift and high, like a deer exploding from the bush, and Red Nose’s knife slit Caleb’s thigh, a gaping and white wound, but his rebound was off-center, leaving him vulnerable for that single moment. Caleb dropped his knife and pulled Red Nose in, his arm about his throat, his other hand warding off the thrust of Red Nose’s blade. Entangled, they trembled in combat, one against the other, Red Nose pulling with all his power against Caleb’s strangling hold. But even as Caleb’s strength waned, and his mouth flushed hot with exhaustion, he did not let go or acknowledge defeat, because to do so was to die with certainty under Red Nose’s knife.
How long they struggled Caleb did not know—hours and eons and mind-numbing eternities. But when in that moment his arms turned to stone, exhausted and bloodless stumps, when in that moment he no longer controlled their grasp, or knew them as his own, when in that moment the voices of his past whispered and wept in his ear, the first grunt of abdication issued from Red Nose’s drooling lips, a gasp and resignation to his own impending demise. Caleb brought up the last of his will from deep within, and Red Nose’s head fell forward, his muscles jerking in the final throes of death.
Afterward, Little River helped Caleb to the edge of camp and covered him with his blanket, and later, in the darkness, the old woman came, but this time with buffalo hump from the day’s kill and a tender cut of the tongue.
“This is what we give warriors,” she said, “who have proven their courage in the field of battle. This meat is for such a man.”
From under his blanket, Caleb took the meat, chewing with swollen and fevered mouth. When he looked up to thank her for the meat, for the words, for the single act of kindness, she was gone.
That night as he struggled to sleep, his wounds throbbed, and the drums beat their farewell to the fallen Red Nose and to the courage that he had known.
When sunrise broke, the camp stirred with excitement. Caleb climbed from under his blanket and stood for the longest time, uncertain whether he dare try to move. The wound across his stomach was shallow but painful, and each movement of his body fired down its length like a streak of lightning. The cut on his thigh was deeper, having bled a large stain into his buckskins during the night, but at least the pain, too, was severed in the depth of the wound.
