The High Divide (27 page)

On Moriah

T
hey'd spent a restless night on hard ground, Ulysses afflicted by competing doubts, pressure building in his chest, while next to him Eli struggled through dreams. As the sky paled in the east, they threw off the big robe, dressed, and approached the camp once more, on foot and leading their horses. There was no morning fire, though, no movement at all. No sounds. “They're still asleep,” Eli whispered, but Ulysses shook his head and pointed downstream at the grassy flat where the men had hobbled their ponies the night before. The ponies were gone. Moving cautiously through the camp, they found bedrolls, a cache of food, and a big meat-pile wrapped in green hide and strung up in a cedar tree, hot embers in the fire.

“Do we go after them?” Eli asked.

“Nope, we wait here. They'll come back.”

Upstream they found a small grove of crooked plum trees where they spent the day, Ulysses going out every hour to check, and finally, when the sun was three fingers above the western buttes, the men returned.

Ulysses pulled his rifle from its boot.

“We're taking our guns?” Eli asked.

“We'd look like damn fools without them, wouldn't we?”

By the time they walked up the creek bank, a small fire was burning, a narrow smoke trail rising straight up, no wind at all this afternoon. Ulysses looked at his son and nodded. They moved to within fifty paces of the camp before he lifted a hand for Eli to hold up. In a normal speaking voice he said, “Haaa-he.”

“You
do
know the language,” Eli whispered.

Ulysses shook his head. “Just to say hello.”

Beneath the shelter of cedar branches a man straightened up and leaned forward in a crouch, his elbows on his knees, fire glimmering in his face. Two other figures showed themselves as well, one next to the fire and the other just outside the shelter, to the north.

“We're coming up,” Ulysses called, and he touched his son's elbow.

They walked right into camp, side by side, the three men watching as they came. A watery pot of something had been set to boil on the fire, and it smelled like pine needles. The crouching man had long braids wrapped in weasel fur and wore a cavalry coat with herring-bone piping on the chest. He had small, hooded eyes, a sharp nose. He was alert but indifferent, his faded campaign hat lying next to him on the ground, the corner of his mouth twisting just enough to let Ulysses know the recognition was mutual.

“You're not alone this time,” the man said. His English, as before, was practiced and careful. The bone-handled Colt was stuck in the waistband of his pants, and his Henry repeater leaned upon a length of firewood an arm's length away. His eyes glanced over at Eli and then came back again.

Ulysses nodded.

On the other side of the fire sat the small man with the tree-bark face and narrow body. Outside the lean-to, propped against the cedar tree, was the third one, his shoulders as wide as a door, revolver still hanging from a cord around his neck. Long, graying hair. After a long moment of silence, the man in the cavalry jacket stood from his crouch and moved to his left, stepping over the Henry to seat himself on a chunk of limestone next to the fire.

“Did you come to bring us more of the United States dollar coins?” he asked.

“No,” Ulysses said.

“So we're not that lucky.”

“No.”

“Before, you were gathering bones. Now you're on a big hunt.” He gestured northeast, toward the permanent camp on Calf Creek.

“We've been riding with them, yes. But we're not interested in shooting buffalo. That's not why we're here.”

Eli, breathing light and fast, leaned close and whispered, “You
know
him?”

“We ran into each other a few days back, down along the Tongue.”

The man said, “I see the bluecoats riding along. What are you afraid of?”

“There's talk among the ranchers of horse stealers and cattle poachers. Crow, they're saying, or maybe Piegan.”

The man laughed at this. “If they were Cheyenne, then there might be cause for fear.”

Ulysses reached into his coat, slowly. “I brought this for you,” he said.

Instead of the beaded pouch, he pulled out a little sack filled with tobacco, a string tied around its top, something he'd bought in Miles City from an old woman who'd fashioned it from the scrotum of a buffalo calf. He gave it to the man, who opened it, lifted it to his nose, then retied the bag and tucked it into the pocket of his jacket.

“Are you here to parley for the buffalo hunters?” he asked.

“No, I'm looking for Magpie. As you might remember.”

The words had no effect on him. “What name do you go by?” he asked.

“Ulysses Pope. And this is Eli, my son.”

“Does your son also have matters to discuss with Magpie? Or maybe he's looking for a watch.”

Ulysses only smiled.

The man looked around at his two friends and spoke for a few moments in their own tongue. It sounded sharp and smooth, rushing and hard at once, like fast water over rocks. The men got up and moved off, the small one with tree-bark skin going down toward the horses, the big one uphill to a table of limestone, where he began to clean his rifle with a rag.

“You must be hungry.” The man ducked out from under the lean-to and walked over to the hide-wrapped meat pile hanging in the cedar tree. He opened it and carved off several big strips then came back and fixed the meat on skewers at the edge of the fire. It started sizzling. He motioned for Ulysses and Eli to join him, and soon they were all three chewing the tough, juicy meat and washing it down with dark tea that tasted like licorice.

“You don't seem to mind eating from the old bull. Your friend with the beard, he might be unhappy. Does he come from the east?”

“Yes,” Ulysses said, “from Washington.”

“I've been there, I didn't like it much. Why does he wait to come shoot them now, after they're all gone?”

“He's trying to save their memory.”

The man frowned, waited.

“You've probably seen how dead animals can be made to look as if they're still living,” Ulysses said. “There are men who know how to take out their insides and fill them up with sawdust and make them look real again. That's what he plans to do with the animals he shoots.”

The man reached out with his foot and pushed an ember toward the center of the fire pit, where it flamed up. “Your people seem to think it's necessary to remake the world of their fathers into something all their own. I've noticed this. Your children will do the same. And theirs will, too—and then they will wonder who you were, and how you lived. It's a sad thing. But the buffalo, it wasn't yours to begin with.”

Ulysses couldn't find a suitable answer. He asked a question instead. “Are you Magpie?”

“I might tell you that if you tell
me
something first.”

“All right.”

“Was your brother with Custer at the Greasy Grass, the way you explained to me on the Tongue?”

“No,” Ulysses said.

“I didn't think he was.”

“Why not?”

“You don't look angry enough.”

Ulysses wondered if he was being toyed with. It occured to him that it wasn't too late to get up and leave, take his son away from here—although very soon that possibility would have run out. He said, “No? What do I look like, then?”

“Like you've been watching over your shoulder too long. Like you're trying to understand what you believe.”

“I've answered your question,” Ulysses said.

“So you have. And you know the answer to yours.” With long, blunt-tipped fingers he fiddled with the collar of his coat, unbuttoning it. The lapel flopped down, and then he buttoned it again. “Why have you come out here?” he asked. “And this time please tell the truth.”

“To finish something I started,” Ulysses said.

“Something you started with Magpie?”

“You could say that, yes.”

“How did you find me? Who did you speak to?”

Ulysses described his search among the reservation Cheyenne and then his evening with the old woman in the cabin on the Tongue, the antelope shank she was roasting on her woodstove. “By that point I started to wonder if you were a ghost,” he said. “No one else knew anything, or so they claimed.”

Magpie laughed. “
She
should know. She is my mother.”

Ulysses stroked his beard. A picture came to mind of her old face, upside down against the morning sky, staring at him as he lay in the bed of his wagon, her eyes fixed on the beaded pouch. “So you knew I'd be coming,” he said.

“She sent word, yes, but didn't tell me what you were looking for.”

The big man above them on the rock had finished cleaning his rifle and started ambling toward them. Magpie waved him off.

“I have something else for you,” Ulysses said, and now he could feel his lungs rising into his throat. In order to get enough air, he had to focus his mind on the act of breathing.

“Before you let me see it,” Magpie said, “tell me something else. Tell me if your god sent you here. The one who allowed the men to kill him. The god you killed.”

Ulysses breathed. He was aware of a sudden lightness, as if the crown of his head were lifting away. He placed the heels of his hands against his temples and squeezed, forcing himself to think.
Let me say this right.
“God doesn't speak to me in a way I can be sure of” was how it came out.

“You don't hear him?”

“Not in the way I'd like to.”

For a long moment Magpie was silent. It was impossible to read his eyes, narrowed as they were, shiny slits. He said, “Well, then,” and elevated his chin, squared his shoulders, and sat up straight. He looked like a man preparing himself for his own execution, though his hands were quiet on the ground beside him.

Ulysses glanced over at Eli, whose expression showed nothing. He would have liked to reassure his son, tell him all was going to be fine. Instead he reached for the beaded pouch that hung inside his coat, below his left arm. He pulled it out and lifted the strap from around his neck and held it on his lap where the last of the sun was caught in the blue and yellow beadwork.

Magpie sat still, his eyes holding fast to the bag. He leaned to his right and took hold of the Henry and rose to his feet, all in a single movement. Then he crooked the rifle loosely in his right elbow, barrel pointing at the sky. He stared hard at Ulysses, who was aware of his own rifle propped beside him on the ground. No one moved. Then Magpie leaned over and plucked up the pouch from Ulysses and walked uphill and out of sight beyond a heap of limestone. Ulysses looked around to see where the others had gone but there was only the smaller man out in the middle of the creek, his chest bare, his arms wet and glistening and extended out on the surface of the water.

“Where did he go, what's he doing?” Eli whispered.

Ulysses shook his head.

“What, we just sit here? Let's go, leave while we can.”

“No.”

Ulysses saw himself at the center of a storm. He imagined himself waiting through the final moments before a battle, when you know your lot has been decided, your future beyond any control. Turning, he looked into his son's face, where he saw fear and defiance both. He put an arm around Eli's shoulder, but Eli shrugged it off. It may have been a quarter of an hour that Magpie was gone, or twice that, but when he came back down the hill, tobacco pouch slung across his shoulder, the Henry balanced in his elbow, he wasn't alone. Behind him walked the man with the barrel chest and graying hair, his eyes shining like two black stars.

“This is Bull Bear, my brother,” Magpie said, and the two men sat.

In Magpie's face Ulysses saw something new, the kind of distance he'd often seen in Danny's eyes when a headache was coming on. Bull Bear set his rifle on the ground and picked up a stick and began to jab at chunks of burning wood. A pulsing blue vein stood out on his forehead.

Magpie cradled the Henry on his lap. He touched the buckskin pouch, which rested at the center of his chest. “Where did you get this?” he asked.

“At the Washita.”

“You rode with Squaw Killer then?”

“I did.”

“Do you know who made this pouch?”

“Yes.”

“How could you know?”

Ulysses explained about the old woman he'd met at Camp Supply during the week following the massacre, one of fifty-three hostages Custer had taken that day. And how she had recognized the beading pattern of the pouch and identified its maker.

“My wife's aunt,” Magpie said. “She lived. My wife also survived the attack that morning, so I was told. She made her way safely across the river. Did her aunt tell you that too?”

“Yes.”

“That's how it was. She was in the lodge with our son and our nephew, her sister's son. The soldiers killed both boys, but my wife escaped and swam across the icy channel. To no purpose. Later that day she lost her courage and drowned herself. It was that or tell me about my son. Her old aunt told me this.”

Magpie cleared his throat, and for a while there was no talking. Ulysses sat looking at his hands, thinking,
I asked for this, I asked for this,
while opening in his mind was the smallest peephole into that day, a view more than adequate for the purpose. Next to him, he could feel Eli holding his breath. Absurdly, a pair of ducks began to scold each other in the creek below.

“How old was your son?” Ulysses asked, finally.

“You want to know if you killed him. But no. You tell
me.
You tell
me
what happened. Tell me what you did.”

Ulysses looked across at Magpie sitting there rigid and grave, his skin taut, fists gripping the lapels of his faded blue coat. It was impossible to account for the coincidences and for the years of grief that had led to this moment, preposterous to hope that a minute from now the two of them would still be alive and sitting here across from each other. And yet there was nothing to do but go on, to speak, which Ulysses did, half convinced his words would choke him, catch in his throat like dry stones.