The High Divide (28 page)

He wasted no time on details that would be all too familiar, but moved right to the moment in front of the lodge, and the boy with the Colt revolver. “He shot me here,” he said, laying a hand to the right side of his head, where his ear was gone. “He was nine or ten years old. He shot me and then ran into the lodge, and my friend went after him. I went in too. There was a woman there and another boy, younger than the first. Three years old, or four. The one who shot me wasn't trying to hide. He didn't seem afraid. He was looking up at me, fierce, as if he wanted to kill me.” Ulysses paused and touched his own chest. “I shot him here,” he said, his voice catching, “I can't tell you why—out of anger, I suppose. My friend shot the other boy, and then we ran out, leaving the woman there. Your wife. Not long after, we went back for her, trying to gather up everyone who was still alive. But she was gone. The lodge was empty except for the two boys we had killed.” Ulysses paused to breathe. “I'm sorry,” he said. “I'm here to tell you that I'm sorry.”

Magpie hadn't blinked or looked away. The Henry still rested in the crook of his elbow. His hands were loose on his knees now, but there was a tremble in his fingers. He turned to Bull Bear and spoke for a while, his chin raised almost formally, then lifted a hand when his brother took a grip on the pistol that hung from his neck. Magpie turned to Ulysses again. “Yes, that was my son,” he said, his face stricken and pale. “And your friend killed his cousin, my nephew. They were good boys. Their grandmother and grandfather also died that morning. Several aunts and one of their uncles. Many cousins. The boys were found in the tipi, of course, their bodies charred. My wife was floating at the edge of the river. She'd told her aunt what she meant to do. You may as well have killed her.”

Magpie sat for a time, the shadows in his face so deep the shape of his skull was plainly visible—the eye sockets and cheekbones, the abrupt angle of his jaw. “You have a son,” Magpie said, gesturing toward Eli. “And I think you have a wife too, at home?”

Ulysses nodded.

“If Bull Bear and Leather Top went there, and one of them put a bullet through her heart or crushed her head with a club, it would be the same as if I had done it. There is no difference.”

“There is no difference,” Ulysses said.

“Are you prepared to die?” Magpie asked. “Is that why you came? Do you want us to kill you? Because I am ready.”

Ulysses said nothing. All down the center of himself, from the bottom of his throat to his groin, he felt an icy coldness. He had come here for this moment, and it belonged to Magpie, who would do with it as he liked. There was no other way it could be. Ulysses turned to his son, whose mouth was set hard, his eyes full of distance.

“Spare him,” Ulysses said.

Magpie didn't respond. In the cedar tree nearby a pair of crows had come to light upon the hanging meat pile, and now they began to pick and jab at it.

Bull Bear leaned over and spoke into Magpie's ear, his gaze fixed on Ulysses. Magpie shook his head. He said, “My brother forgets how much time has passed, how many things have changed. He wants to know if you see yourself as a good man for coming here and saying these things. He wants to know if you think your god will love you again now. He wants to know if that's why you came here.”

“I was taught to believe that God loves us all, no matter what we do,” Ulysses said. “No, I'm not a good man. But I had hoped to give my sons a father again, and my wife a husband. And I had to tell you I am sorry.”

“You're here to please yourself then,” Magpie said. “It would have been better if you had stayed home. You think because your god suffered, you don't have to suffer. That all has been made smooth, the world is yours to take. You think if there is pain, there must be a way to be rid of it, like a buffalo sheds his winter coat by rubbing on a rock. And that I'm your rock.” Magpie shook his head. “You took a boy's life, but you're not worthy to carry his spirit.”

Ulysses couldn't defend himself. He didn't try. There wasn't a thing the man could say that he hadn't said to himself. Next to him, Eli began to speak, but Ulysses glanced over, frowning, to silence him. Then Bull Bear leaned over and whispered into Magpie's ear again, his eyes fastened on Ulysses.

“My brother tells me your words are like a rifle without shells. That if you mean what you say, you should load it, put a round in the chamber.”

“How? Tell me,” Ulysses said.

Magpie looked up at the darkening sky. He lifted the pouch in his hand and examined it. He said, “I've lived all these years without a son. At one time I thought if I could kill those soldiers who did it, I would want to make children again, a son to take hunting with me. But then Long Hair came to the big camp we had on the Greasy Grass, hoping to drive us back to the reservations. We rubbed him out. I took many lives that day. Bull Bear and I, we killed your friends, and our women cut them up into pieces and took their clothing and their guns and their money. And their watches. What we did was good and what we had to do—but it didn't change things.” Magpie laid a palm across his chest. “Not for me. I could see that even if I did have a son, I would have no world for him.”

Ulysses could feel a buzzing inside his ribs, like a large insect was caught there.

“But here is what you can do, if you mean to settle this wrong you have done me.” Magpie turned his face toward Eli. “You can give me
your
son. He is close to being a man but still boy enough to learn. Give him to me, and then I will know that you have heard your god. I'll know that your heart is as good as you think it is.”

“I didn't say I thought my heart is good.”

“But you want it to be good. That's why you're here.”

“Yes.”

Magpie grabbed hold of the beaded leather pouch that his wife had made and lifted the strap over his head. He lowered it to his lap and clutched it in both hands. “If you won't do this,” he said, “you can take your trinkets back home with you. They have no meaning by themselves.”

Ulysses looked straight ahead. He felt ill suddenly, damp all over his back and neck, yet cold at the same time.

“Your son, he wants a father he can be proud of, a man with honor,” Magpie said.

Next to Ulysses, Eli cleared his throat. He said, “My father
is
honorable.”

Across the fire, Bull Bear's broad face was hard with anger. Magpie's was open, waiting. Ulysses got up on one knee, an action that brought pain to his joints, then he stood and said to Eli, “Hand me my gun,” which Eli did. “Get up,” he told his son. Eli rose to his feet. Ulysses went around the fire and reached an open hand down to Magpie. “All right then, give it to me,” he said.

Magpie seemed unable to move at first, still holding the beaded pouch on his lap. Then he shot air through his nose and handed it over. Next to him, Bull Bear twisted around to snatch his rifle from the ground, but Magpie extended an arm in front of his brother, a palm flat against the man's thick chest.

Ulysses turned and took his son by the elbow and led him down the bank past Leathertop, snoring in the lee of a stunted juniper, and all the way to the creek's edge, careful not to hurry. Upstream, their horses whickered at their coming. He and Eli mounted up and headed northeast for Calf Creek on the High Divide, riding until well past dark, drawing up finally in a stand of little pines, a good enough place to sleep, Ulysses all this while uttering just four words to his son—“What could I do?”

To which Eli had no response.

Sawdust

B
y the height of the quarter moon it must have been three or four in the morning. There was no light in the east, and though his father was finally sleeping, Eli couldn't keep his eyes closed. As quietly as possible, he unwound himself from his blankets, slipped his pants and boots and coat on, and crept over to the horses, which were cropping the rimy grass in a willow-rimmed swale. He pulled the picket pin, bridled the mare, and led her away, his escape all but silent, his father's gelding snorting just once.

He waited until out of earshot before swinging up on the mare's back and easing her into a fast walk. Beneath a clear sky, the way back wasn't difficult to find, the moon casting faint shadows behind the greasewood trees and skunkbrush, behind the occasional stunted pine or outcropping of rock. Although Eli had been frightened yesterday—terrified, certain he was going to be killed—he wasn't frightened now. Nor did he examine, as he would in later years, the reasons compelling him to leave. It seemed like a simple thing. He'd left home to help his father, and now there was no other way to do it. This had to be finished. The moment seemed inevitable, his decision less a choice than a reflexive act, and he was calm, almost joyful, as he covered the miles, glancing time and again over his shoulder for the first sign of morning. He kept thinking,
Don't let him wake up yet.
And,
Don't let them break camp too early.

He arrived with nearly an hour to spare.

All was still as he sat the buckskin mare at the edge of the creek below their camp. No wind down here in this shallow valley, and no sound except for water flowing over pebbles. At the first sign of movement on the table rock and the flaring up of the fire in the lean-to, Eli picketed the mare and walked up the bank, no one speaking as he came on, none of the three pausing in their morning routines, Magpie stitching a broken seam in his moccasin, Bull Bear carving at the meat pile, Leather Top feeding the fire. Magpie nodded at the cedar stump next to him, and soon they were all four chewing on strips of the roasted meat, which tasted even better this morning, and drinking from the pot of bittersweet tea.

“I didn't expect he would send you back,” Magpie said.

“He didn't send me back,” Eli told him.

Bull Bear handed Eli another piece of meat and spoke a few words to Magpie. Leather Top leaned his head back and laughed, his face squeezing into a furrowed map.

“My brother wants to know if you brought your war paint. He says he was your age when he took his first scalp.”

Eli said nothing.

“He likes making jokes,” Magpie said, then he nodded toward the Spencer carbine resting on Eli's knees. “Did your father teach you how to use it?”

“Not this one, no. It's from the fort.”

“That one isn't much better than the rifle they used in Custer's troop. Those shot a single bullet then had to be reloaded. And once the barrel heated up, the cartridges stuck in the chamber. Not that some of those boys knew how to use them anyway. Farm boys. And poor men working for money. Toward the end there were those who threw down their guns and lay on the ground, waiting for death, staring up at the sky. Others shot themselves or shot each other. I almost felt sorry for them.”

“You could have let them live,” Eli said.

“Can I see it?” Magpie asked, gesturing toward the Spencer.

Eli handed it to him, and Magpie got up and walked over to the jut of rock against which the lean-to was built. He gripped the end of the rifle's barrel, spun himself around and struck the weapon against the rock, splintering the wooden stock and separating barrel from breech. He tossed it away.

“Piece of shit,” he said. “Here”—he signaled to Leather Top, who came over with his own rifle, which Magpie offered in turn to Eli, a Winchester lever-action, similar to one of the guns Two Blood had in his shop. He motioned for Eli to follow him down to the creek. There he tossed cedar sticks for Eli to fire at as the current floated them away, urging him to shoot as fast as he could, levering in round after round, the sticks exploding and leaping in the water, until the magazine was empty and the hammer made a hollow click against the firing pin. The weapon was warm in his hand, the stink of gunpowder sharp in the air. Eli liked how the Winchester felt in his hands, he liked the smooth quickness of the action.

“That big soldier horse you're riding,” Magpie said. “Is she a battle horse or a plow puller?”

He told Eli to mount up and ride hard along the creek, full gallop, and fire a shot down into the water. Eli had never ridden no-hands. He held the reins tightly in his left, the rifle in his right, kicked his mare into a gallop and then at the last instant looped the reins around his wrist, raised the rifle to his shoulder, and got off a quick shot without aiming. The mare veered right at the sound, away from the blast, and Eli pitched left and landed at the creek's edge, managing at least to keep hold of the rifle. The men laughed and hooted, pointing, then watched him as he got up and chased down the mare, remounted and came trotting back.

“Try one of our ponies,” Magpie said.

Eli swung off the mare and Magpie walked over, looking him up and down. He ran a hand over the arm and shoulder Eli had landed on, his fingers squeezing to the bone, and then brushed the dirt from Eli's coat. “Nothing broken,” he said.

It was a dark pony, a stallion with a white face and a white tornado shape along one side that started by the withers and ended at the hip. A small animal, compared to the buckskin mare Eli had been riding, only thirteen or fourteen hands, but big-boned, wide, with sturdy legs and a straight back, its eyes large and vigilant, as if watching to see whether Eli knew what he was doing. Magpie demonstrated how to grab its mane and leap onto its back—not a hard thing for Eli to do, as it turned out, and the pony didn't seem to mind, only tossed its head and took a little jump-step to the side. The bridle was a single length of soft leather rope that ran through the mouth, tied beneath the jaw, the two ends coming back along the pony's neck as reins. There was no saddle at all.

“Hold on with your knees and use them to turn him—he knows what to do. And this little boy, he likes the crack of your rifle. You'll see.”

Magpie was right. The little stallion stayed on a line, running fast and smooth, without swerving at the boom of the rifle, while Eli held tight with his knees, getting off three shots into the creek. They broke camp and followed a dry ravine that led them out of the valley and up to the tableland above, where they rode west toward a line of buttes that looked like the silhouettes of three people, their heads and shoulders unmistakable against the sky, two parents on the outside, with a small child between them.

Pointing, Eli asked if they had a name.

“Walking with the sun,” Magpie said, and though Eli wondered if he meant sun or son, he didn't ask.

They moved at a brisk trot through the cool day, their breath steaming in the air, Eli's buckskin mare packing the meat pile and tied on a lead behind them. Midmorning they stopped to water their ponies at a fast-running stream. The three buttes were closer now, the middle one a distinctive coppery color, the larger, flanking ones gray-black. In the shade of a cottonwood the men chewed on cold meat. Upstream from the horses they filled their hide bladders. Then Leather Top rode to the top of the next ridge, jumped off his pony and stood there eyeing the country before remounting and riding back down to rejoin them. He gestured, talking fast.

“We're close,” Magpie said. “Yesterday he tracked the herd your friends were chasing, and we should be on them soon.”

Within the hour they'd ridden to the top of a rise from which they could see below them a stream that widened into a green pool and next to it twenty or so animals grazing, among them a black-maned bull that every so often rose up and looked around. As they watched, he put his shaggy head down and plowed forward, twisting a horn into the soft earth near the water, then lifting up and swinging his head, throwing a torrent of mud. He finally went down to his knees, fell to his side, and rolled in the muddy wallow.

Magpie sketched out his plan, using a stick in the dirt and gesturing to Bull Bear and Leather Top. He pointed at himself and Eli, and then to the ridge on which they sat, which extended in a hogback toward the stream. The place where it fell in a hard decline toward the water marked the southern edge of the grazing animals. Magpie spoke briefly to the men, and then turned to Eli and explained. Bull Bear and Leather Top would go first and drive the herd south, squeezing it between the water and the hogback, down from which Magpie and Eli would ride to fire on them as they tried to escape along the water.

“This will happen fast,” Magpie said. “We'll take cows for their meat and let the bulls run.”

Leather Top and Bull Bear jumped on their ponies and rode straight downhill at a full gallop, calling out in high, shrill yips. The buffaloes lifted their heads and poked up their tails and started to move, slowly at first, the whole mass of them together, but then with gathering speed. By then Eli and Magpie were running their ponies along the hogback, side by side. The surface of the ground was dotted with stones the size of hammerheads, but Eli's pony ran without hindrance, as if racing on a dirt track, Eli hanging onto the reins, his knees gripping the animal's wide back so hard that his groin burned with pain. Magpie glanced over, a smile widening his face, his teeth shining, one hand on his rifle, the other wrapped in the pony's mane, the reins tied off and flapping. He might have been caught up in holy zeal, or a man returning from a far-off place and just now catching sight of home. He lifted his rifle in the air and pumped his arm.

They were on the downhill now and closing with the herd, at the front of which was the black-maned bull, running as if to kill itself—the ground thundering like a storm beneath them and the men singing, their bright voices high above the shuddering noise of the herd. Then Magpie's pony surged ahead as if flung by a giant sling and moved up next to the bull. Magpie leaned over, way over, horizontal in the air, and he took a grip on the bull's curly, mud-caked mane with his fist and gave it a shake, just as neat as that, before letting go and allowing the animal to pound away with the herd. He rode back alongside Eli and pointed out a big, hard-running cow and shouted, “Go and put her down,” his face glistening.

“For my son—now!”

Eli kicked his pony but didn't need to. The animal was already going flat out, galloping straight for the big cow, which huffed and blew, white foam spraying in clots and jets from its shovel-size nose. Eli let go of the reins, the pony knowing this sport and edging close enough for Eli to put the barrel of the Winchester almost smack up against the monster's heaving ribs. Before he got off a shot, though, the big cow cut away and the pony followed in a hard pivot, leaving Eli to grab at the flying mane for balance, ashamed of his hesitation and clumsiness. But there was almost no break in rhythm, no slowing the chase at all—and there was no other place to be but here, fixed by the violent, bloodshot glare of the cow's left eye. Eli heard himself yelling in a voice he didn't know he had, high-pitched, ecstatic, and this time he got off a shot, missing wide. He jacked the lever of the Winchester and shot again, barrel jumping, and a small puff of hair leaped from the very top of the cow's humped shoulder. The animal stumbled, recovered, and charged on. Eli's third shot, though, was true, entering behind the shoulder and staggering the animal, which pulled hard to the left. Eli's pony cut fast in a sort of rabbit hop to stay clear of it.

Magpie came up alongside him, and together he and Eli watched the big cow go round in a steep curve until it was coming back at them, seeming to gain strength as it came, head lowered and wagging its black horns. Abruptly it fell to its knees. Blood poured from its mouth into the brown grass. A quarter of a mile ahead another cow fell out of the herd, and Bull Bear reined up as the rest of the buffaloes rumbled away, dust hanging over them like a rain cloud.

A couple of hundred yards back, Eli saw two other cows down, close together, Leather Top already at work over one of them. His own, meanwhile, had tipped over dead. It lay on its side, lifeless eye staring dully at the sun, which stood just past noon. From head to tail the cow was eight feet long, and its girth at the shoulders brought it just past Eli's waist. The curved, black horns, if straightened, would have equaled the length of a man's forearm. Magpie pried open the mouth and deftly carved out the tongue, which he set aside. Then he made a deep cut all around the neck before slicing straight down to the vent and around the tail.

“If we want to get at the best parts, we open up the back,” Magpie said. “But we want to save the robe, so we do it like this.”

They removed the entrails and organs first—the grass-engorged stomach almost large enough to crawl inside of, the twisting mass of purple intestines, and then the flaccid liver and steaming red heart, both of which they put off to the side, along with the tongue. The smell was rank and lush, but Eli had gutted enough whitetail deer that he wasn't bothered by it. Magpie sliced off a piece of the hot liver and handed it to Eli, then cut some off for himself and took a bite of it, the blood dripping from the corners of his mouth. Eli did so, too, the taste metallic and strong, something like the blood sausage his father used to buy from the butcher in Sloan's Crossing—though this was spongier, tougher, harder to chew and swallow. “Now you'll do some work,” Magpie said, and while he scraped and nipped with his skinning knife, separating hide from fascia, Eli pulled and yanked on the slippery skin to expose the top side of the fatty yellow carcass. Together they pulled away the entire half-skin and drew it back on the grass. With the help of Magpie's pony, they turned the animal over, the stiffening legs swinging up in the air then whacking down on the other side, and before long, the entire bloody hide was free, the hulking carcass naked and white.