The High Divide (18 page)

“I don't know how to tell you this next part, Eli—what happened then and what my life became, after. An act of forgetting is what it was, and then of hating myself, and then of hating people whose crimes were nothing compared to my own. Do you see? One thing grows into the only thing. That's how it works. I don't want you to be hearing this, I don't want to be telling it. A boy stepped from a tipi and drew down on me, both hands on this big Colt revolver, which jumped and boomed. I felt a blow on my head, right here, like someone had struck me with their fist.”

“Your ear,” Eli said.

“Yes. And my horse wheeled and reared, and I brought it back around. And then the boy was gone, back inside the tipi, or so I figured. I might have let him go—I like to think I would have—but my friend Jim Powers was there beside me, and he swung off his horse and went in after him. So I jumped down too, angry as the pain started in, blood all over my right side now, filling my right eye, and I followed him. I ran inside, and I saw two little boys, not one but two, the other one not more than three or four years old. And a young woman also, their mother. The boy who'd shot me was standing beside her, not trying to hide behind her either, but facing me straight on, the Colt hanging from his hand. He didn't lift it or point it at me. It must have been out of shells. He couldn't have been more than ten years old, Eli, smaller than your brother. And his face—there wasn't fear in it, only hate. I had every reason to walk away and let that boy live, but the pain in my head was screaming and the hate in that boy's face was burning in me, and I shot him, right here”—Ulysses touched his own chest—“and then Jim shot the other boy, I don't know why, and we ran out of there, my gun hand weighing more than the rest of me put together. A few minutes later we couldn't help going back. We went back for the mother, to get her out of there. But she was gone already, only the two dead boys were left. That's when I took the buckskin pouch, it was hanging from the lodge pole. Jim took a pair of beaded mocassins.”

“You killed a boy,” Eli said. He looked pale and sick.

“Yes.” Ulysses covered his face with a hand. “And that was not all. The mother, too, we killed her.”

“You said you didn't kill her. You said she was gone when you went back.”

“No, we killed her. We killed the whole family.” He paused to breathe, his nostrils full of the blood smell, full of burning flesh, his stomach cramping from it. “Among the prisoners we took that day was an old woman who knew the beadwork of the pouch I had. She knew the maker of it—the mother of the boy I'd killed. She told me the mother survived the attack that morning. Avoided capture too. But instead of waiting to tell her husband what happened—he was out with a hunting party, as were many of the men that day—she drowned herself in the river. So her death, too, it's all mine.”

Ulysses forced himself to look at his son, who sat with his knees against his chest, hands clasped in front of his mouth, gaze focused on a point in the distance. Eli didn't move a muscle—and though Ulysses wanted to reach out and put a hand on his shoulder, close the space between them, he couldn't bring himself to do it. He cleared his throat to go on, but Eli, coming back to himself, spoke first.

“We used to play with it, remember?” he asked, picking up the pouch, which lay between them on the willow branch. “And you always got mad at us.” Eli weighed it in his hand, as if considering how far into the current he might be able to fling it, as if that might solve the whole problem.

Ulysses reached out for it, and Eli, handing it over, said, “What are you doing out here?”

“That's what I'm trying to tell you,” Ulysses said. “Listen.”

He tucked the pouch inside his coat then recalled for his son how afterward they gathered everyone up, all those who were still living, fifty-three women and children, and marched them back to Camp Supply. But first how they rounded up the horses, seven hundred animals, and shot them dead, each one. And burned the lodges and all the supplies of dried meat. Burned their stock of tobacco. And, later, how Custer claimed a great victory—a hundred and three warriors killed, a lie apparent to anyone who'd been there, the battlefield a carnage of women, children, and old men, some of them backshot, some trampled, some of the bodies burned inside their lodges.

“It's a terrible thing, Eli, but a man can live with blood on his hands. I've learned that. You pretend you had no other choice, tell yourself you did only what someone else would have had to do or that you were better than those you killed. Nighttime is the hardest, safe inside your house knowing that
your
family's under no threat of attack or death—and unable to understand how such a thing is possible, something that undeserved. Then at first light, all the petty cares come back, and along with them the certainty of knowing you're a good man after all, who takes care of his wife and his children.”

He looked into his son's face, but Eli was gone beneath a mask, impossible to read.

“It went on like that till Reverend Pearl pushed my head beneath the surface of the Plainwater. You remember, don't you? I came up and looked around, and first thing I saw was you standing next to your mother, and Danny on the other side of her, the three of you, and though it's awful to say this—I've never to put it to words—you all had bloody holes in your chest, same as that boy I shot, and you looked at me the same way he looked at me, with hatred and anger. With no recognition at all for who I was. Since then I've come to see that I need to search out the ones I've wronged, that it's not God alone I have sinned against. If you steal ten dollars from a man, and God convicts you of your sin, it's not enough to make your confession, is it? No. You have to give that ten dollars back.”

Beside him, Eli stirred on the willow trunk. He said, “You can't give back a life.”

“No. But you can find the person you stole it from and tell him that you've been paying for it out of your own soul, that you'd give it back to him if you could. And in that way you might bring God into the place where He's needed.”

“You believe that?” Eli asked.

“I do, yes.”

“So you're looking for the man whose family you killed.”

Ulysses described how the old woman had also given him the name of the dead boy's father: Magpie. He explained, too, about the story from the St. Paul paper, and how the writer had interviewed an Indian veteran of the Custer battle, a man Ulysses believed to be this selfsame Magpie.

“He was at the Little Bighorn too, all those years later?” Eli asked.

“Eight years. Yes he was, as far as I can tell.”

“But you haven't found him.”

“I'm getting closer.”

“And what happens when you do?” Eli asked.

“I'm not certain.”

Eli stifled an ugly laugh. There was scorn on his face, too, now, and Ulysses couldn't bear to look at him. And yet he couldn't help being angry with his son. He had no grounds for it, he knew that—but the boy should have stayed out of this. If only he had stayed home.

“Why didn't you say anything before you left?” Eli asked.

“Did you say anything to your mother before
you
left?” Ulysses said, ashamed as he spoke for making such a childish argument.

“You could have sent word to us, explaining where you were, telling us you were coming back.”

“I'm sorry,” Ulysses said.

“You ought to be. Can't you see? You're punishing us for the thing that you did?”

“Yes.”

Ulysses wanted to say more, but his mind was blunted by his son's anger and by his own dumb response to it. He wanted to describe his old fear that Gretta and the boys, knowing the truth, wouldn't want him any longer. He wanted to explain that leaving, finally, had seemed like the only way possible to keep them. He wanted to say that every day he'd been gone had made returning home seem less possible, his wife and sons less his own, himself less deserving of them.

“So you're going to find Magpie,” Eli said, “show yourself to him and give him the beaded pouch. He'll probably kill you.”

“There are worse things than dying,” Ulysses said. “Now let's get back. We need to look in on your brother.”

“You just don't want to talk to me anymore.”

“Come on, let's go,” Ulysses said. He made no move, though, to rise from the willow trunk, glad for a moment of quiet with his son, the morning warming nicely, the clouds like puffs of milkweed in the sky. Finally, he got to his feet and stretched out his stiff bones. Then he offered Eli a hand up, and together they walked up the bank to the dugout.

The High Divide

F
or all his bold talk of not letting his father out of sight, Eli had little choice, when Ulysses headed off to bargain with the liveryman, but to stay behind in the low-ceilinged shack and watch Danny ride out his storm, doing what little he could to make his brother comfortable. He wasn't sure how to live with what he'd just learned. Although he'd spent his life imagining the parts and pieces of war, nothing he had ever dreamed prepared him for this. The battles he had conjured, with their chaos of noise and stink and death, seemed like nothing now. Eli knew his father's dark broodings, and he knew his rage, too. Yet he'd always believed that for anything else he might be, Ulysses was a good man. A man who used his fury—or whatever it was—to good ends. Now he wasn't sure.

There was also the revelation, delivered only this morning, over coffee, that their real name was Popovich, not Pope, and this tormented Eli as well. The name didn't sound right or match his notion of who their family was. It reminded him of the farmers back home by the name of Vorckovich whose field of potatoes flooded each year without fail—a family of eight boys, none of them healthy, their mother dead of typhus, their father given to taking long afternoon naps on their sagging front porch.

At noon Danny's fever spiked, and Eli hauled him out of the shack and down to the river and laid him in the shallows to cool off. Although it didn't bring him back from the place he'd gone to inside his head, it did seem to ease his pain, and by late afternoon when Ulysses returned with a bony workhorse in tow, Danny's fever had broken, and he was lying half asleep, breathing easy, a dim smile on his face.

“You pulled him through,” Ulysses said.

“How did you finagle that?” Eli asked, pointing at the horse.

“Gave the man half my money. Which wasn't enough, so I told him I had a mind to sue him for leasing me a sick animal.” He patted the front pocket of his pants. “Even got my watch back.”

Ulysses prepared a supper of boiled potatoes and wild onions that Eli had to admit tasted as good as anything he'd eaten in days, and Danny was able to finish off a plateful himself. His face was still pale, but his eyes were clear again. They didn't have that dull, old-glass finish anymore.

“Your coming out here like you did is as brave a thing as I've seen,” Ulysses told his younger son. “I'm proud of you, Danny. But tomorrow, after you've had a good night's rest, I'm sending you home. You need your mother. Riding straight on through, you'll be home in twenty-four hours.”

Danny looked up, blinking, and for a moment Eli thought his little brother was going to stand up to their dad. His nostrils flared and he opened his mouth as if to speak—but then he gave a little nod.

“All right,” he said.

THE NEXT MORNING WAS
a clear fall day, their breath frosty in the air. They all three walked uphill to the depot, where Danny boarded an eastbound, Ulysses having spoken with the conductor, who promised to keep a close eye on the boy. Eli could see that Danny was relieved to be going back home, smiling for the first time in days—although at breakfast in the dugout he gripped his father's arm with one hand even as he spooned cold potatoes into his mouth.

“Tell your mother we're fine,” Ulysses instructed him. “Tell her not to come looking, but to wait for us. We're going to make a couple more bone runs, until the weather turns.” Ulysses paused a moment before taking a roll of dollar bills from his pocket and pressing it into Danny's hand. “And make sure you give her this, for next month's payment.”

Not until the train pulled into the station did it occur to Eli how solitary this trip would have been without his brother, how daunting and lonely. More than that, without Danny they might well have missed their father altogether. In the Pullman car he set a fist on his brother's scrawny shoulder and said, “Don't talk to anyone but the conductor.”

The boy was settled in his window seat, sunlight covering his face and sparkling in his long, sandy lashes. His hands were pressed together palm to palm and squeezed between his patched knees. His eyes were clearer than Eli remembered ever seeing them. He looked stronger, too, despite the pallor of his skin and the leftover pain wrinkles in his forehead and lips. The train jerked forward then and started moving, and they had to hurry to the end of the car and down the steps to jump free. On the platform they waved at Danny but couldn't see him through his small window, which showed nothing but the sun's dazzle. They stood watching until the last car was out of sight, then started back through town.

As they walked past the Drover House, Eli ran up the steps for a look inside and spied Hornaday in a far corner of the lobby, holding court with a cluster of men surrounding him, several in cavalry blue, one draped in a filthy, ankle-length coat. The hunter, McNaney.

“Eli? Is that you?” Hornaday called out.

Eli waved.

Hornaday came up and shook hands with Eli first and then with Ulysses, who was taller than Hornaday by a head. “I have to say your son's a man to be reckoned with. I imagine he's told you, he got me out of an awkward pinch.”

“He gave me the short version, yes.”

“No doubt you've had other matters to discuss.”

“We have.”

“Where's your other boy?” Hornaday asked.

Ulysses looked down at the man, scowling, distracted. In fact he'd seemed preoccupied all morning. Even as they'd gotten Danny squared away at the depot and seen him off, Ulysses was only half present, eyes staring off in the distance. Eli knew that his father's mind was on what came next.

“We sent Danny back to his mother,” Ulysses said.

“That's good, that's good. Your son tells me you're out here on a business venture. It's been fruitful, I hope.”

“You've got a lot of questions.”

“I apologize—it goes with my job. Tell me, Pope, do you have experience hunting big game?”

“Not to speak of, no. A few whitetail deer back in Minnesota, for venison.”

“I'd like to offer you a job.”

“I prefer working for myself,” Ulysses said, but he took hold of his bottom lip with a thumb and forefinger and gave the man a careful look.

“I'm in need of a man who knows his way around guns and horses, and I can pay ten dollars a week. I would make it twelve for you, since you'd be coming aboard at last call. You won't find better wages out here.”

“I can do better picking bones.”

“Possibly. But there's always a risk for the businessman. I offer sure money and cover your board besides. Not only that, I'd hire your boy too and pay him half a wage.”

“Why do you want
us?
”

Hornaday laughed, lifting his head and showing a knuckly adam's apple. Then he adjusted his spectacles on his nose and frowned. “You might say I'm desperate. My cowboy Sully is under the surgeon's knife as we speak, for what looks to be an overripe appendix. We have already waited an extra day on account of him, and now it's clear he won't be riding. I need someone in his place.”

“My son tells me it's buff you're after,” Ulysses said. “It seems a shame to take from the few still left out here.”

“I couldn't agree with you more, Mr. Pope, and appreciate the sentiment. But those I'm after would be killed by others, if not by me—you can bet your last dollar on that. Eli may have told you where I work and where my interests lie.”

“He did.”

“Then I'm sure you can understand. Short of intervention from the government, it would be foolish of anyone to assume the species will survive the next decade. And in fact I am going to do everything in my power to see that it does. But meanwhile, I have little choice but to obtain whatever specimens are still available. For mounting.”

“Maybe you're right. Maybe not.” Ulysses shook his head and gestured toward the north. “There's a lot of country up there, rugged country and hard to reach. What makes you think they won't find canyons and valleys to raise their young, start over again? That's what creatures do, isn't it? And the hunters, they've all gone back home.”

“You're an optimist, Mr. Pope.”

“No, I'm not.”

“You sound like one.”

“Tell me.” Eli saw his father's eyes narrowing. He was tugging on his bottom lip again. “This expedition of yours. Where's it heading? Which direction from here?”

“North, northwest.”

Ulysses waited, watching him.

“The rough country between the Yellowstone and Missouri rivers. The divide between those two watersheds. I scouted it this spring. It's full of rugged ground, like you say—coulees, buttes, and badlands, with a little dry-grass prairie thrown in. The High Divide, they call it. You've probably been up that way, bone hunting.”

“No, I was south, along the Tongue. I went all the way to the Cheyenne Agency and back.”

“There's a rancher by the name of Phillips, eighty miles or so northwest of here. I've been in contact with him since spring. Two weeks ago his men reported a herd of some three dozen up around a creek called the Big Dry. Those are the ones I'm after.”

Eli was aware that his father was holding his breath. A hint of a smile twitched at the corners of his mouth. He reached out and laid a hand on Hornaday's shoulder and spoke to the man quietly.

“I'll take the job,” Ulysses said.

Hornaday tipped his head back and blinked at him, pushing the spectacles higher on his nose. “You will?” he asked.

“And my son will be coming too,” Ulysses said. “When do we leave?”