Heaven and Hell (88 page)

"Thirty lodges," he said, his eyes fluttering shut, his voice reedy.

"They are eating their horses now."

"Where, Grandfather?" Gray Owl asked.

"They meant to push up the Sweet Water. Whether they did, 1

don't know. I know your face, don't I? You belong to the People."

Gray Owl seemed heavily burdened. "Once long ago."

"Age has rotted my flesh. I could not keep up. I asked them to leave me, whether or not the soldiers found me. Will you help me die?"

They hewed down branches and fashioned a burial platform in one of the strongest cottonwoods. Charles carried the old man up to it, with Magee bracing him below. He could barely stand the stench but he got the grandfather settled with his few possessions and left him with warm sun shining on his old face, which was composed and even showed a drowsy smile.

As they rode out, Gray Owl said, "It was a generous thing to help him to the Hanging Road. It was not the deed of the man they named Cheyenne Charlie. The man who wanted to kill many."

"There's only one I want now," Charles said. "I think our luck's changed. I think we're going to find him."

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The Hanging Road 557

That was his blind hope speaking again. But the sunshine and the springtime buoyed him, and so did the possibility that Red Bear's band of holdouts might have seen a white man. Gray Owl warned Charles and Magee that Red Bear, now a village chief, was formerly a fierce Red Shield Society chief, which no doubt explained why he'd balked at giving up along with the others.

They found the village far up the Sweet Water's right bank. The Cheyennes made no effort to hide themselves. Cooking fires smoked the sky at midday and from a rise, -through his spyglass, Charles saw several men with raggy animal pelts on their heads shuffling in a great circle around the edge of the encampment. The wind brought the trackers the faint thumping of hand drums.

Magee used the spyglass. Uncharacteristically sharp, he said, "What the hell have they got to dance about? Aren't they starving to death?"

"Massaum," Gray Owl said.

"Talk English," Magee said.

"That's the name of the ceremony," Charles said. "They put a painted buffalo skull in a trench to represent the day the buffalo came to earth, and the dancers pretend to be deer and elk and wolves and foxes. The ceremony is a plea for food. The old man said they're starving."

Magee

rolled his tongue over his upper teeth. "Damn mad about it, too, I guess."

"You don't have to go in with me."

"Oh, sure. I came this far to be a yellow dog, huh? That isn't the kind of soldier somebody trained me to be." Staring at Charles's haggard eyes, at the long pointed beard nearly down to his stomach, Magee suddenly winced. "I'm sorry I sound sore. I just think all this is hopeless.

Your boy's gone, Charlie."

"No he isn't," Charles said. "Gray Owl? Go in or stay?"

"Go." The tracker eyed the village, but not in a comfortable way.

"First, load all the guns.."

It was a splendid balmy day. The wrong sort of day for the tragedy of a lost son or a starving belly. The wind floated fluffy clouds overhead
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and the clouds cast majestic slow-sailing shadows. In and out of the shadows, in single file, the three rode in the Z pattern Jackson had taught Charles.

One of the pelt-clad dancers was first to spy them. He pointed and raised a cry. The drumming stopped. Men and women and children surged toward the side of the camp nearest the strangers. The men were middle-aged or elderly; the warriors were undoubtedly off somewhere 558 HEAVEN AND HELL

searching for food. Well before Charles was within hailing distance, he saw the sun flashing from the metal heads of lances and the blades of knives. He also saw that no dogs frolicked anywhere. The tipis were weathered and torn. There was an air of despair about the village beside the Sweet Water.

The wind still blew in their faces. Charles smelled offal, smoke and sour bodies. He didn't like all the gaunt angry faces lining up behind the dancers, or the truculent expression of the stout old warrior who strode out to meet them with his eight-foot red lance and his round red buffalo-hide shield. The horns of his headdress were red but faded; he had distinguished himself in war many winters past.

Charles held his hand palm outward and spoke in their language.

"We are peaceful."

"You are hunters?"

"No. We are searching for a small boy, my son." That touched off whispers among some of the grandmothers. Magee caught it too, raising an eyebrow. Those starved old women with their watering eyes acted as if they knew who Charles was talking about. "May we come into the village a while?"

Chief Red Bear thrust his shield out. "No. I know that man beside you. He turned his face from the People to go and help the white devils of the forts. I know you, Gray Owl," he exclaimed, shaking his shield and lance. One of the dancers with a scrap of pelt on his head sank to a half-crouch, his knife moving in a small provocative circle.

"You are soldiers," the chief said.

"We are not, Red Bear-- " Gray Owl began.

The chief pointed his lance at the trackers and shouted: "Soldiers.

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Call Whistling Snake from the Massaum lodge."

Magee brought up his Spencer from the saddle where he'd been resting it. "Don't," Charles said in English. "One shot and they'll tear us up."

" 'Pears they'll do it anyway." There was a slight quaver in Ma gee's voice; Charles feared that what he said was so. More than a hundred people confronted them. In terms of physical strength each of the Cheyennes was no match. Hunger had shrunk them and age enfeebled them.

Numerically, however, they had the fight won before it started.

"Do you know this Whistling Snake?" Charles asked Gray Owl.

"Priest," Gray Owl replied, almost inaudibly. "Ugly face. As a young man he scarred his own flesh with fire to show his magical powers.

Even chiefs like Red Bear fear him. This is very bad."

Small boys darted forward to pat the horses. The animals sidestepped nervously, hard to control. Indian mothers chuckled and nudged one another, eyeing the trackers as if they were so much contract beet.

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Charles didn't know what to do. He had bet on having an ace face down and turned over a trey.

One last try. "Chief Red Bear, I

repeat, we only wish to ask if

anyone in your village has seen a white man traveling with a small -- ''

The crowd parted like a cloven sea. There was a great communal sigh of awe and dread. The old camp chief's gaze was curiously taunting.

Along the dirt lane fouled with human waste came the priest, Whistling Snake.

Madeline's journal

April, 1869. The school has a new globe, a world map for the wall, eight student desks to replace the homemade ones. A party of distinguished Connecticut educators plans to visit next month.

Prudence insists we must clean and refurbish the place.

The rasp of the mill saws and the rattle of the mining carts I hear amidst the sweet noise of house construction remind me that we can afford windows to replace the schoolhouse shutters. Andy will glaze them. Prudence and I and one or two of the youngsters
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can do the other tasks at night. It is suitable work for lonely women: demanding, tiring. Prudence, strong as a teamster, grows a little stouter every month. Though she still quotes her favorite passage from Romans, I now detect a sadness in her eyes. I think she knows she will remain a spinster. As I will remain a widow. To work until the body aches is the best medicine for the loneliness that seems to be one of God's great blights on existence.

I share sadness of another kind with Jane. She told me that despite long effort she cannot conceive a child. Prudence, the Shermans, Orry's dying as he did, senselessly -- they are all linked somehow. Is it because they all testify that we are never guaranteed a happy life, only life itself? . . .

Encountered a. man, young and poorly clothed, riding a white horse on the river road. He gave no greeting, though he stared as if he knew me. Despite his youth there was a cruel aspect to his face. He is no good-hearted Northerner come to inspect our school, I think. . . .

. . . Andy saw him this morning.

And again I met him. I hailed him. He charged his white horse at me as if to trample me down, forcing me to throw myself aside and take a bad tumble in the weeds. For one moment his face flashed by above me, a perfect study of hatred. . . .

. . . No sign of him for two days. I suspect and hope he has gone elsewhere, to terrorize others. . . .

I

560 HEAVEN AND HELL

The small Negro cemetery overlooked the Ashley in the scrubs outside Charleston. The ground around the grave mounds was a musty carpet of brown decaying leaves. Bunches of wilted sunflowers and even a few brown dandelions lay on the graves; the place was poor, and poorly kept.

Des LaMotte knelt and prayed before a wooden marker from which he'd chiseled a shallow circular depression. Into this he had wedged a common-looking plate, chipped at many places on the edge and showing a long crack. On the marker, above the slave's plate, he had carved an inscription.

JUB A

"thou hast been faithful

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over a few things, I will

make thee ruler over many things"

Matt. 25,21

Where the trees opened on the water, a silver-colored sky shone with a strangely threatening luminescence. The wind, a rising nor'easter, streamed in from the Atlantic. It was too cold for spring. Or maybe Des was feeling the effects of time, and poverty, and his strange inability to come to grips with his enemy. After the travail of war and the passage of years, he no longer wanted vengeance so ferociously. Honor was less important than bread, or keeping possession of his tiny room in town, or preserving clothes he couldn't afford to replace. "LaMotte honor" now had the queer sound of a foreign phrase impossible to translate.

His old ties to the past were gone. Ferris Brixham, dead. Sallie Sue, dead. Mrs. Asia LaMotte, dead; a year and a half now, her insides a feast for a cancer. Now Juba; the last. He had been so crippled at the end, he couldn't crawl from his pallet. Des had fed him and bathed him and cleaned him as if he were some expensive artifact, the last artifact, from a razed house. Juba had died in his sleep, and Des had stared at the corpse by the light of a candle for nearly an hour. His servant's passing reminded him that the human body was frail enough without deliberately endangering it. The hotblood who'd confronted Cooper Main on the plank bridge seemed like a foolish and very distant relative who didn't understand life's realities and whose ideas no longer had any pertinence. Des was old; he was sick; he had fought long enough.

He got ready to stand up. It required mental preparation because he knew his knees would creak and hurt. Strange that the same arthritic The Hanging Road 561

trouble that had tormented Juba had now fallen on him, and at a much younger age. He could no longer do a formal dance step gracefully.

That was another part of his life that was over. His face, drawn down into sad lines, reflected the attrition of the years, and so did his carroty hair; the white streak was broader, and forked into a trident.

As he started to stand, he heard a horse walking into the cemetery.

A hoof snapped a fallen branch. He groaned as he rose and turned, expecting to see some black sharecropper riding his sway-backed animal to a family grave. He was startled to discover a white man. Behind the man the clouds boiled like black soup in a hot kettle.

The stranger was young, scarcely more than twenty. He wore plow
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shoes and an old black coat with the collar turned up. He had shaved closely, but his black beard showed. The sun had burned his nose and upper cheeks and hands; they looked raw. When the young man climbed down from his milky horse Des saw the back of his neck. Red, from field work. .

While the young man walked toward Des, other details registered.

Something was wrong with the stranger's left eye; it had the fixed look of blindness. The horse made Des think of Revelations: And his name that sat on him was Death.

"You are Desmond LaMotte?"

"I am, sir."

"I was told I'd find you here."

Des waited. There was a suppressed ferocity about the stranger.

Somehow it fit with the rawness of his red face, red hands, red neck, ghastly staring eye; it frightened Des badly.

He saw no sign of a weapon, but his long legs shook when the stranger began reaching into various pockets of his threadbare coat, saying,

"I am Benjamin Ryan Tillman of York County, sir. I have ridden here with instructions to speak to you."

"York County." That was a long way; above Columbia, at the North Carolina border. "I don't know anyone in York County."

"Oh, yes," Tillman said, presenting what he'd found in his pocket.

A news clipping already yellowed. The headline startled Des.

THE KUKLUX

DISCOVERY OF THE REMAINS

OF DETECTIVE BARMORE

Des's fear sharpened. The nor'easter snapped the corner of the clipping, which came from some paper in Nashville. "I don't understand this, sir-- " he began.

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"I'm here to explain it to you. The story says the man's body was found in some woods, along with an empty pocketbook and part of his
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K.K.K. rig."

"What does that have to do with me?"

"I am here to explain that, too. This white man, Barmore, he failed to carry out an order from the Grand Dragon over there in Tennessee."

Tillman plucked the clipping from Des's pale hand. "The Grand Dragon of Carolina wanted to show you that the Invisible Empire won't be disobeyed."

Des felt a keen, hurting urge to make water. The stranger's good eye had a fanatic glitter. The wind, near gale force now, shot leaves past them in swirling clouds. Old tree limbs creaked. One broke off and sailed away.