Savage Country Page 5

  “Men earned their money when they worked for Major Coughlin,” she said, “and with me it’ll not be any different.”

  What little she knew of these men she did not want to believe. Summers of hope, winters of despair, she knew as well as anyone, people were in their straits for one reason or another. They were men without masters and desperately in search of other masters.

  “You cannot deny them their liquor,” Michael said.

  “I am afraid if I do not the bottle will be handled too freely.”

  He reminded himself he’d agreed to the venture. He would keep his word. His concerns were navigation, arms and ammunition, the security of the stock, their camping ground, posting of the night watches, and killing the buffalo if they should get that far. His job right now was to go in advance and spy out the land. Preparation was prevention. Caution was protection. He’d rely on old habits and practices proven with time.

  “They are men like everyone else,” she said, “with a desire for something to have. They are committed to making money.”

  “I hope that’s enough.”

  “Isn’t it always?”

  “What does the penman have to say?”

  “We have talked,” Elizabeth said. “He has quite a story to tell. He would simply like the chance to prove himself and I said he could. It’s necessary for them to keep together, for the boy to look after the old gentleman, who is very shaky on his feet.”

  “And what of the boy?”

  “He costs us nothing and his grandfather wants him to become a man.”

  “If he can’t keep up, it becomes an issue,” Michael said.

  “Not for you,” she said, and with that he was dismissed.

  The days were running sunny and very warm. Determined to husband the stock, the men took them on short and easy drives so that the teams would become habituated to the work. They would travel twelve to fifteen miles a day and when the roads were fine possibly twenty miles.

  When the departure day arrived each stood by waiting for the command to begin. The men yawned and grumbled a little, and stretched themselves violently, and yawned again as they waited.

  By the setting sun Michael was in the saddle and Elizabeth astride Granby with her broad-­brimmed hat, man’s shirt, an old cavalry jacket, leather chaps, and heavy congress boots. A holstered revolver hung close at hand, the ivory-­handled butt of the big weapon ready to the grasp. In her breast pocket was a pair of French gray spectacles.

  “Are you ready?” he said. The moon would soon rise above the trees and the light would be soft and white, bathing the country they would travel.

  Her cheeks flushed at the question and she turned, her eyes on the road to town. There was a glow in her hair. She began to breathe, some emotion rising up inside her, and then the Reverend Doctor Purefoy rode in. Under his coat he wore a black vest and his churchman’s cravat and collar. Elizabeth had asked him to accompany them as her personal and spiritual adviser and by chance he wished to see the country, and if possible, spread the light of the Gospel in that far wilderness and for that purpose a crate of Bibles was stowed in the wagons.

  “Ready,” she said.

  The night was hot and sultry and without a trace of wind.

  Michael rode out and shortly thereafter the teams started their loads and the wagons were moving. The oxen bellowed and the men cried gee and haw and came the clang of cowbells, the jarring and croaking of the wagons, the whiplashes cracking in the air as the great elongated body began to move.

  They’d travel across the plain in a southwesterly direction and then due south, seeking the southern herd below the Kansas line. Somewhere between the north fork of the Canadian and Red Rivers of Texas, and from about the 100th meridian to the eastern border of New Mexico, the last herd of buffalo moved.

  Chapter 9

  After holding the same course for three days, the train of wagons parked on a small creek near a thicket of cottonwoods and red willows. The banks were low on each side and the stream not too deep and shaded. The land beyond was a broad interminable sheet of blazing white. Soon the air was sweet with wood smoke and dripping fat from skewers of meat. Aubuchon had prepared a grouse soup thickened with flour and flavored with bacon. He took his own lunch alone and walked in the afternoon along the creek, where he found bullfrogs fifteen inches from nose to toes and several soft-­shell turtles and these he’d turn into a fricassee.

  Michael had ridden thirty-­five miles out and back and again, changing horses evening, morning, and before noon. He took a tin cup of coffee from beside the campfire. He walked away to the water’s edge where he drank off the coffee in his cup and dipped it full of water.

  He unfolded David’s sketch maps illustrating their journey, a scale of twelve miles to the inch, the physical features of the land penciled in. He found the complementary pages in David’s journal written two months ago and began to read.

  June 8.—The route today has been a rolling prairie, in many places covered, with the dwarf oak bushes. Saw many deer but had no desire to hunt them. Encamped upon a creek of clear and wholesome water. I am homesick. A bad spirit has again taken possession of me. As always, I am a victim of my own imagination. It comes over me a black tide. My spirit is being undone and I try not to forget virtue and beauty, I but think I must end my sorrowful life . . .

  I am a gloomy character these days and so painful to be around. I am unsettled in my mind and there are days I feel to be as crazy as a bedbug. I do not know how much longer I can endure the moodiness, dejection, and despair.

  I try to think how good it is to be alive. I can now see more clearly than ever in my life before that I have been striving and working without any end in view.

  The Lord gave me a cup so bitter. If the farm were not so deeply in debt, the land and the buildings so heavily mortgaged . . . The wolf is at the door and I have sunk into a horrible mistrust of myself.

  His heart beating wildly, Michael began tearing out the sad pages as he read them and letting them float away on the current to a place where they would never be read again.

  Some days I feel to be lifted above the mere accident of life, and other days, blue days, life is chaos and too much to survive. My sleep is broken and troubled and full of fearful dreams. The terrors come to me so naturally. Old wounds have come back to ache again and the past, the scars of conflict, seem unbearable. An unnamed fear haunts me. How can the days seem so brief and yet interminable at the same time, immense, monotonous? How can I ever again lead good men? I hold no dream of return. They say he who believes will have everlasting life. Maybe that is enough. I have written to Michael. I will pray to God tonight that he will come.

  Sabi came to lie beside him and in her sleep she dreamed of birds and whimpered softly. He pulled low the brim of his hat, still seeing his name on the page in his brother’s hand. He tried to think of other things. Today he had come across two antelope skulls, their antlers locked together, and later he’d watched an antelope kill a rattlesnake. When they left the train in Lawrence, Kansas, they had good hunting all the way and he saw meteors in the evening, principally from the northwest. One day they encountered a man hanging from the beams that supported a bridge. It was on this day he first glimpsed the black runner and the big sorrel and would see them again and again as he made his journey west. All along the way, the land was being broken and towns were being built. In one town a pawnbroker was murdered. They found him dead in his bed as well as his wife and baby, all three with skulls crushed. It was a bustling, money-­getting world, America. There was so much ambition, so many bold and reckless spirits flocking to the frontier: freed slaves, crippled navies, broken soldiers, outlaws, poor immigrants. The times were truly volatile.

  After lunch, Elizabeth rode along the creek a half hour and a half hour back. She rode in and out of shade, the heat waves rising beneath her. She saw glimmering mirages, sheets of delusive water, a cloud of dust, antelope, and wild horses. For some the deceptive and inhospitable landscape might
be unsettling, but for her it was liberating. Riding Granby felt therapeutic, an aid to the healing she desperately sought.

  When she returned, the men were in the short grass along the water’s edge or lying in the shade of the trees and bushes scattered over the alluvial flats. She found Michael holding a piece of paper and reading from a book he held in his hands. He folded the paper over and then folded again, slipped it inside his shirtfront, and fastened the button.

  She’d pulled on a wrap to cover the linen shift she wore. A towel was draped over her shoulder. She turned her face to the sun, closed her eyes, and then opened them. She waited and then he noticed her.

  “What have you been doing today?” she said.

  “I am out for a walk,” he said, removing the wire-­framed green glasses he wore. The skin around his eyes was white and the rest of his face was burned by the sun and wind and dusted with sand and grit. “You should never leave camp alone, even for a stroll.”

  “Please do not underestimate me,” she said.

  She’d watched him closely these first days on the road and was learning how strange and capable he was. He had a capacity for silence and was rarely surprised by what he came upon. When tired, he coiled down in sleep and Sabi snuggled egglike into his body, and at any time he was liable to get up, day or night, and have coffee and smoke. Whereas David had been capable of disappearing inside himself for days at a time, Michael always seemed to be alert, present, and expectant, and unlike his brother, he seemed to require just enough for himself, the horse, and the dogs.

  “You might wash your face, young man,” she said, her mouth a smile, and then asked that he escort her while she bathed.

  He dropped his rifle into the hollow of his arm and followed her into the cottonwoods where she shrugged off the wrap, and barefoot, she stepped into the glittering thread of current. The shift floated along behind her as she left the shore and walked into the stream.

  At the edge of his vision she was merely a giving of movement. He waited for her and when she came from the creek she carried the sodden pages from David’s journal, where she found them caught in the waterside sedge, washed of ink and thought them such a curiosity, paper in the water, so far from anywhere.

  Indifferent to the paper she held, he made a shooing gesture with his hand, a flying insect. He lit a cigarette and smoked in silence and then said, as if lost in thought, “We are being followed.”

  “How can that be?” she said. She carried her own glasses on the trail and had formed the habit of scanning everything that moved just as he did.

  “We will have a stranger here before long,” he said.

  “How do you know that?”

  “I have been watching him.”

  A few hours later a boy came in barefoot and bareheaded. He wore a cowhide jacket and his trouser legs were ragged at his ankles. He was tall, long-­armed, and lathy. He had a rash on both cheeks and scales on his head. He carried his toothbrush in a buttonhole, a corncob pipe in another, and about his neck a clasp knife on a leather thong.

  “What route do you take from here?” the boy said.

  “Are you going home or leaving home?” Michael said.

  “Just traveling.”

  “Somewhere particular?”

  He recognized the boy who sold him the envelope of scissored stars. Michael calculated his age as not yet fourteen.

  “Why do you follow us?” Michael said.

  “I am all alone.”

  “You must go back to your people.”

  “I do not have any.”

  “Whose boy are you?” Elizabeth said.

  “My father and mother are dead. Hey, you wouldn’t let a fellow starve would you?”

  “What is your name?” Elizabeth said.

  “Charlie.”

  “What is the second part?”

  “Poteete.”

  “Do you shave yet?” Michael said.

  “No,” the boy said, and smiled.

  For however rough he’d lived, Charlie seemed still boy-­hearted with a goodness in his soul. He began to fidget. Apparently he carried birds in his pockets, and possum babies, and these he began to shift around and some he set free. The birds, they lit from his fingers like tiny flames and the possum babies he stroked and petted and found a deeper pocket.

  “Who is your father?” Michael said when Charlie turned back his attention.

  “He is a beeliner,” Charlie said. A last bird emerged from his cuff, and surprised, he tossed it in the air where it took flight.

  “And your mother?” Elizabeth said, expecting another bird at any moment.

  “I have never seen her.”

  “Why not?”

  “She is dead.”

  “What set you on the road?” Michael said.

  “My father put an apple on my head and was to shoot it off.”

  “What kind of work can you do?” Michael said.

  “When I do something I do it properly,” the boy said, working a finger into his nose.

  “Such as what?”

  “I can see in the dark.”

  “What else can you do?”

  “I can do this,” he said, and dropping to the ground he put both heels behind his neck and walked about on his hands.

  “What else can you do?”

  “Most anything. Find me a bee cave or a bee tree and I’ll show you what this ol’ boy can do.”

  “Come and eat,” Elizabeth said. “I believe there is a little leftover.”

  With a pair of hooks, Aubuchon lifted a pot of meat, beans, and potatoes from the fire pit. From the mess box he brought bread and a cherry pie, and the boy dug in. Soon his face was shiny with grease and crumbs of bread. He’d look up, the face of a starveling, his eyes blinking like an owl, and dig in again as if afraid he’d never see food again.

  “Do you like that?” Elizabeth said to Charlie.

  “Oh, ma’am, it is very good,” Charlie said, taking bites from the stew and the cherry pie.

  “Have you not eaten in some time or do you have a hollow leg?”

  “A hollow leg?”

  “He lost his leg, you know,” Elizabeth said, pointing to Aubuchon.

  “But he has two legs.”

  “Yes, he must have found it then,” she said, and then she sent him to the creek to bathe.

  When washed he was a fair-­haired and delicate boy with sloping shoulders and a contracted chest. He was bony but he stood erect and his eyes were bright. By the bruises he wore on his torso, he’d recently received a terrible beating. He asked for tobacco to fill his pipe and Michael tossed him his pouch.

  Michael told him to wait where he was. When he returned with Elizabeth she made the boy turn around. The bruises were black and blue, yellow and purple. They were on his shoulders, his ribs, and his back. She made him take down his trousers and they were on his buttocks and the backs of his legs.

  However dangerous their journey, she’d not send him back. There would be use for a boy such as him. He could take his turn performing the night guard. He’d watch the oxen as they grazed upon the pasturage. He’d fetch and be sent on errands. In time he would improve and with the right kind of influences even prosper.

  “Can you milk cows?” Elizabeth said.

  “If I want to.”

  That evening after Michael rode off to scout the trail ahead, a man came into camp looking for the boy. He was moody and blear-­eyed, his skin the color of oakum. He conveyed the sense of a dark, vindictive spirit, of cherished hatred. He too was barefoot, with the bottoms of his pants rolled up several inches. He was lame in one leg, his foot deformed by injury.

  “Who is he?” the reverend doctor asked.

  “He’s the worst man of his name,” the boy said from the shadows.

  “Why does he walk that way?”

  “He was cutting down a bee tree to get the honey. His foot got caught and he crushed it.”

  “What has that birdbrain been saying to you?” the boy’s father wanted to know.
His voice was loud and nettlesome.

  “He was telling me about your foot,” the reverend doctor said.

  “Did he tell you I started a fire and with my own knife seared the bleeders? That I lay in the forest for three days and then I walked home?”

  “Apparently your boy would throw in with us.”

  “He’s an id-­jit,” the boy’s father said, and he cuffed him about the ear, knocking him to the ground.

  “Shame on you,” Elizabeth cried.

  “That boy is God’s own fool.”

  “You will not hit that boy,” Elizabeth said.

  “He is my son and it is my right to do as I please.”

  “He is always teaching me manners,” Charlie said. He righted himself to stand with his mouth open and his hands clasped before him.

  “The boy wants to do everything, but he doesn’t want to do anything long,” the man said.

  “You were a boy at one time,” Elizabeth said.

  “Where are you headed for?”

  “The buffalo pastures.”

  “I wouldn’t go there unless I wanted my throat cut,” the man said.

  “You always said ’tis the land of milk and honey, a place where a man might make a new start,” the boy said to his father.

  “If he is so simple a boy and a good for nothing, what do you want him for?” the reverend doctor said.

  “You have a bad heart if you think I’d sell my son,” the man said, looking off.

  The reverend doctor took out a leather pouch and shook the coins inside.

  “Maybe we can be friends,” the man said, turning to him. “Maybe we could do bid’ness.”

  “Is he a hard keeper?”

  “No. I wouldn’t say that.”

  The reverend doctor handed the man a twenty-­dollar gold piece. “Take it or leave it,” he said.

  “Your hand is against me,” the boy’s father said. “I won’t have it.”

  “Stop your sniveling,” Elizabeth said.

  “Your bones will rest there,” the father said, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. “All of you.”

  “You will eat something before you go?” Elizabeth said.