Gloryland (21 page)

It was the path coming out of Bloody Canyon, one place in particular that was kind of falling away, so you had to move your mule close to the uphill side or the trail might give way underneath you. Death was waiting for you to forget that the ground couldn’t always be depended on.

It was all the creeks you had to pass in the high country, little streams that flowed into the Merced or the Tuolumne, silent and dry by late summer but hell to cross in the spring when they were violent with snowmelt. I’d turn my mule upstream trying to find a safe place to ford, but each time I got a slightly different view of death compared to the ones downstream.

It was the bear tracks I’d find in my camp in the morning after sleeping soundly, wrapped in blankets to shut out the night. I’d wake up to a beautiful day with no thought of danger, then realize Death had crept up to me in the middle of the night, taken a sniff, decided I wasn’t interesting enough, and left.

Death was also people. Like the father and son who’d shot a deer outside the park boundary, they said, and the deer just ran back into the park to die. They didn’t shoot it inside the park even if it looked
that way, they said, and if I was from around here I would know they’s just good people doing what they been doing for a long time, and it ain’t their fault the government come into the mountains and start calling it a park, make it hard for a man to feed himself, feed his family. Cause that’s all they was doing, and it weren’t no crime before the soldiers came.

And he didn’t have nothing against no colored soldiers, though he couldn’t figure why the government expected people to obey rules in a place where there weren’t none before. And put colored soldiers here to enforce the rules when good people aren’t used to taking orders from colored people, whether they’re in uniform or not. The father smiled saying this, but his eyes had the coldness of death.

So when this kind of death came near, I’d try to take it easy on them, see what it was like for them, though they could’ve cared less what it was like for me. And I’d tell them not to look at the color of my brownblack skin but at the blue of the uniform I was wearing, ask them if they recognized the color. They’d get all upset cause their eyes were working just fine, they said, they could see that I’m a nigger but not see that I’m a soldier. Nature hadn’t prepared them to see both. Then I’d ask them to see not just the uniform I was wearing but the sergeant stripes on my sleeves, which meant I was in charge, not them, the stripes that gave me authority over them and also the right to give orders to the corporal or the private, who were armed with carbines and who would follow my orders without question. I learned that people’s vision always improves if there’s a weapon brought into view.

And finally this father and son saw that we were bound to do our duty and that we meant no harm by stopping them cause they were poaching, cause they was on the wrong side of the boundary. And it wasn’t their fault or ours, the father said, it was whatever officer drew a line on a map through these mountains, a line they couldn’t see and neither could this poor deer. He agreed it would help if they chose to hunt well away from the park boundary next time, but we didn’t let them take the deer cause it was inside the park now, and
they didn’t seem like the kind of people who would do anything illegal. They went along with that, sort of, and left, and the entire time it felt like thunder was building up in the sky. Though there were no clouds, I saw plenty of lightning in the eyes of that father not wanting to back down in front of his son, but he knew we’d do what we had to do, and that meant them going home without dinner.

Before leaving, though, he gave me and my men a look that was hard enough and small enough to slip into a pistol.

Death went hungry that day, but I knew we’d run into him again farther down the trail. He’d be a big rock coming down after a rain, or a tree in a part of the forest where there’d been a fire. He’d drop without a sound right in front of us or behind us, to remind us he was never too far away.

It wasn’t that I thought about death all the time, cause I didn’t. It’s just that every second of my life in Yosemite it was clear that things were dying and other things were coming to be. Everything flowing like a current in swift water, and anything not mindful of itself getting pulled in like leaves or twigs or pebbles, and going away. None of that ever comes back.

Something coming into the world may make a little noise, but it don’t usually try to kill you. But God Almighty there’s a show going on when something’s heading out, and it always seems to want company.

It’s pretty here all right, so pretty you can get stupid looking at it and forget to pay attention to Death, who walks up wearing Yosemite as if it were a fine suit of clothes, and while you’re admiring the cloth and color, there’s Death standing in front of you and smiling, considering all the ways he’s got to kill you. Yeah, death hides in beauty.

I
’m not saying it was hatred of colored people that led to what happened on that Saturday in May of 1903, cause a lot of things can make an otherwise good man pick up a firearm and shoot a stranger in the gut. Naw, I don’t remember it being color at all. I think it had to do with Ben Bane being a teamster. Some people don’t like what other people do for a living. It can irritate them, make them unpleasant to be round.

I’d only been at Camp Wood for a couple of weeks when a group of us were ordered to go to Raymond to pick up some supplies Lieutenant Rubottom had ordered. Raymond, a little town we’d passed through on the way to Wawona, was also the shipping point for any army regiment in Yosemite. It had saloons, which meant whiskey, which meant soldiers. I already missed the saloons in San Francisco, and even the gambling tables. I never gambled myself, but it was interesting to watch other soldiers risk a month’s pay on the throw of the dice.

Though it was still early spring, the weather was already hot, so by the time we finished loading up the pack animals, some of the men felt like getting a drink, and I went along.

Just because a man is colored and he gets shot in the belly don’t mean there wasn’t no call for it. Mr. Bill Dunn was the proprietor of that saloon and a respected citizen of Raymond, so there’d be no reason for him to attack someone unless it was deserved. Ben Bane must’ve had it coming. He should’ve known better than to speak rudely to a white man, but I guess he didn’t.

After all, Bane wasn’t a soldier. He wasn’t Ninth Cavalry, he was
just a colored worker hired by the Ninth to do a job, and he was good at that job but rough like wood that ain’t been worked properly or that’s just cross-grained from the start. Ben Bane wasn’t smooth enough for Bill Dunn, and Dunn turned him inside out for it. You could see what had been inside Bane on the floor of that saloon. It wasn’t pretty, but when is blood beautiful? When it stays inside where it belongs.

He should’ve seen it coming. California’s not Florida or Mississippi, but it ain’t the promised land either. Boy should’ve known better than to speak out that way, but sometimes you get angry, and anger’s a wild mustang that don’t want a bit in its mouth, so that horse starts bucking, taking you someplace you never intended.

I figure that’s what happened in the bar. It wasn’t bout a white man who shot a colored man in self-defense. No, it was bout what a word’ll do when it’s heard at the wrong time by the wrong person. Maybe you can only hear
nigger
so many times in your life before you crack. Like a furnace stoked with too much wood, you get too hot and blow up.

Colored people who blow up in South Carolina get taught a lesson, but it ain’t a lesson you can use. You’re gone, and you won’t be coming back. It would be so much easier if you had a chance to correct your mistake. If that’s how things were, I wouldn’t have this clear, lasting memory of a colored man lying in a pool of his blood on the dusty floor of a saloon in Raymond, California, where things weren’t all that different from South Carolina in some ways. Ain’t no plantations round there, but you could still get whipped or called
nigger
.

Ben Bane didn’t deserve a bullet. The man just wanted a drink!

I think it must’ve happened cause Bane walked into Dunn’s saloon with us. He was in the company of seven soldiers of the Ninth Cavalry. All of us had fought in the Philippines and knew Death personally as a foul-smelling bastard with no sense of humor. Why would we be nervous about entering a saloon? Bane probably figured he was in good company.

But he maybe didn’t notice that we were a little on edge when we
walked in. We were veterans, been round long enough to know how important it is, walking into a place where you may not be welcome, to look hard but not seem like you’re looking, listen but not seem like you’re listening, and smell the air for blood that hasn’t been spilled yet. Animals that get hunted know this, that violence is a thought before it’s a deed, a kind of stink mixed in with sweat that you got to learn to smell. It’s what it feels like the second before stacked logs burst into flame. You got to know the fire’s coming if you don’t want to get burned.

What I’m saying is that all of us were nervous except Ben Bane. Bane was thirsty and he wanted a drink. It was his idea to go inside that saloon. It didn’t seem like a bad idea at all.

I remember hearing from a first sergeant bout another group of Ninth Cavalrymen who went into a bar in Texas. Those soldiers were there protecting the town, but it didn’t matter. They had a right to a shot of whiskey, but they forgot they had no rights a white man was bound to respect. Some of them died cause of what they forgot.

We walked in. Seven of us remembered who we were and what we were. Ben Bane forgot. He stood at the bar, talking loud, and he couldn’t see the smoke coming off Mr. William Dunn, who was already close to exploding, couldn’t see how Dunn hated the sight of us colored men, nigger soldiers wearing the uniform of the United States of America. His country. Us walking into his saloon was enough to light his fuse.

When you light a fuse, usually you hold a flame to it and then back away fast once it catches. You don’t stand there casually gripping a glass of whiskey while the fire slowly eases up that fuse to the dynamite. But that’s what we did, even though we knew an explosion was coming. We sipped fire slow and easy, like it didn’t matter that Dunn was behind the bar muttering under his breath, obviously bout us.

And that’s all it took. Ben Bane pulled out a long wicked knife from somewhere I couldn’t see, pointed it right at Dunn so there was no mistaking who the words were for, and said in a clear loud voice, “I’ll carve your heart out!”

It was only then I realized that Bane was just as angry as Dunn. Dunn’s clear hate for us had set a fuse burning in Bane, hot as the fire already raging in Dunn.

The sound of “out” had hardly left the air when Dunn reached down and quickly brought up a pistol, aimed, and fired point-blank at Bane.

Bane yelled and clutched at his gut, doubling over as he fell, and then he was down on the floor, his legs pumping up and down like he was running, and rolling from side to side, trying to plug the hole in his gut with his hands. It wasn’t working, and through his red fingers I could see what I didn’t want to see.

My pistol was still in its holster, and so was everyone else’s. Bill Dunn waved his back and forth at us, saying, “Go on, go on, I’ll shoot all you sons of bitches, you—!” and he cursed some more, but none of us moved. Each was probably hoping someone else would make a move, take a bullet so the others could get the bastard, but no one made that sacrifice.