Tie My Bones to Her Back (13 page)

_____

O
FTEN AT NIGHT
, while Jenny was washing the dishes and Tom was out checking the stock, Otto and Raleigh would sit beside the campfire, sipping tin cups of whiskey from Raleigh’s jug and singing old, familiar songs from the war. Milo didn’t sing—
Gott sei dank
, Jenny thought—but accompanied the others on a harmonica. He surprised her with his virtuosity. These songfests often turned into friendly musical duels, the two Southerners needling Otto with spirited renditions of “Dixie” or “The Bonnie Blue Flag” while her brother countered in kind with “John Brown’s Body” or “Hold On, Abraham” or, best of all, “Marching Through Georgia.” That song really burned Sykes up.

Raleigh had a strong, sure baritone voice, a far better sense of pitch and key than Otto. Jenny liked to watch him from the safe precincts of the dishpan. She liked the way his blue eyes sparkled. She liked the winsome twist that came to his lips, the playful lilt to his words that subverted the proud, high-flown sentiments of the more patriotic songs. His parody of “Yankee Doodle” always delighted her.

Now Yankee Doodle had in mind
To whup the Southern traitors
Because those Rebels wouldn’t eat
His codfish and pertaters.

Yankee Doodle, fa la la,
Yankee Doodle dandy,
So keep your courage up, my boy,
And take a drink of brandy
. . .

I’ve shot a pile of Mexicans
And kilt some Injuns, too, sir,
But I never thought to draw a bead
On Yankee-Doodle-doo, sir.

Yankee Doodle, fa la la,
Yankee Doodle dandy,
And so to keep his courage up
He took a drink of brandy.

She wandered over to the fire one evening as he was finishing the tune. Looking up, Raleigh winked at her and offered his cup.

“No, thank you,” she said, suddenly stiff and flustered. Then chided herself. He certainly meant no harm by the gesture. You’re acting like a silly schoolgirl, she thought. Well, of course—until recently that’s just what you were.

Raleigh grinned, asked Milo if he knew a song called “The Southern Soldier Boy.” Sykes nodded. “Miss Jenny might like this one,” Raleigh said. “I’ve changed the words some, but that’s a soldier’s due.” He took a sip of whiskey, cleared his throat.

Raleigh is my sweetheart’s name,
He’s off to the wars and gone.
He’s fighting for his Jenny dear,
His sword is buckled on.

He winked at her again, then put on a solemn face.

He’s fighting for his own true love,
His foes he does defy.
He is the darling of my heart,
My Southern soldier boy.

Oh, if in battle he were slain
I’m certain I should die . . .

Then in a deeper voice, his eyes twinkling—

But Milo here will come, my dear,
To dry your weeping eye.

Raleigh guffawed, Milo cackled, and even Otto joined in. Jenny felt herself blushing. She pulled herself together. “All right, now it’s my turn,” she said. She stood beside Otto and took his hand in hers. “I’m sure Mr. Sykes knows this tune, it was popular on both sides during the war. ‘Was My Brother in the Battle?’ And I’ll take a sip of that ‘brandy’ now, Captain McKay, just to warm my throat.”

Milo tried a few bars, knocked the spit out of his mouth harp against the palm of one horny hand, then nodded his readiness. Jenny’s sweet alto sounded in the darkness. She stared straight into Raleigh’s eyes.

Tell me, tell me, weary soldier,
From the rude and stirring wars,
Was my brother in the battle
Where you gained those noble scars?

Was my brother in the battle
When the noble highland host
Were so wrongfully outnumbered
On the Carolina coast?

He was ever brave and valiant
And I know he never fled.
Was his name among the wounded,
Or numbered with the dead?

Was my brother in the battle
When the Black Hats boldly came
To the rescue of our nation
And salvation of our fame?

Did he struggle for the Union
Midst the thunder and the rain
Till he fell among the bravest
On that bleak Virginia plain?

Tell me, tell me, weary soldier,
Will he never come again?
Does he suffer with the wounded
Or lie silent with the slain?

Raleigh watched her intently as she sang, his eyes misting slightly at the sentimental words, then brightening to the barbed humor of the “Black Hats” reference. “Just beautiful, Miss Jenny,” he said, applauding. “Though I do believe you got the words a bit wrong. Those were
Rebels
fighting for
Old Blue Light.
Ask your brother.”

Milo Sykes rose to his feet. “HI go out and check the hides one more time,” he said. “Can’t trust that redskin to do it proper.”

“Sho’,” Raleigh said. Then to Otto and Jenny: “How’s about ‘Lorena’? That’s a song we can all agree on, not a danged word about the war in it.” Their three voices joined in harmony . . .

Oh, the years creep slowly by, Lorena
. . .

Milo walked out into the dark. His eyes, too, had filled at the words of Jenny’s song.
Damned Yankees. You bet my brothers were in the battle.
Two of them, Hod and Virgil, dead at Chickamauga; Cyrus—the youngest and most promising—blown in half by a cannonball on the slopes of Kennesaw Mountain.

Wolves were singing in the hills to the east of camp. The music attracts ‘em, Milo thought. They’d sung like that near his camp in the Bayou Salado every night when he played his French harp. He liked to hear them. That meant more hides. He’d been wolfing then, right after the war. Every evening he shot an antelope or a buffalo, laced the carcass with strychnine, which he carried in a little blue bottle around his neck, and then in the morning went out to skin the dead wolves that had fed on the meat. Stiff, snarling faces. At night he’d play the harmonica, more wolves would be drawn to his camp, and the next day he’d start all over again. Good wages, wolfing. But it was too dangerous now, Injuns on the warpath. A man alone in the mountains wouldn’t stand a chance.

10

T
HEY HUNTED THEIR
way to the Yarner, taking their time, gathering hides as they traveled. Near the headwaters of the Prairie Dog Fork of Red River they saw the Llano Estacado rising ahead of them from horizon to horizon as if the earth had suddenly broken on a north-to-south line, one part of it rising like a cracked china platter half a thousand feet above the prairie floor.

They made their way slowly up the escarpment and found buffalo beyond counting. Jenny had never seen a bigger sky, or a bleaker one. The winds, even on warm days, blew cold and steady from the northwest. She expected to see the ghosts of Coronado’s conquistadores trotting on horseback over the prairies in casques and breastplates, their bones shivering. Raleigh had explained the plateau’s history to her. “It’s so big and flat that Coronado’s men had to drive stakes every few miles so that they could find their way back. That why it’s the Staked Plain.” ‘

Otto and Raleigh called a halt two days later. They had swung north along the Yarner and made a semi-permanent camp near Palo Duro Creek, a small dribble that assured them a permanent though muddy water supply. From here, if the Indians made trouble, they wouldn’t be too far from Camp Supply or even Fort Dodge to make a successful fighting retreat.

E
ACH EVENING WHEN
Tom and Milo rolled in with the day’s take, Jenny walked over to what they called the hide yard—a level, stoneless patch of sunny ground selected by the men to peg the skins on—and stood in the wind to make notes in her ledger. She wrote down the numbers and size of the buffalo Tom and Milo had skinned that day. Some days they managed only twenty or thirty between them, some days twice that, one very long day (and well into the moonlit night), in excess of 120. She wrote her totals in a very precise hand and showed the figures to the skinners when she was done and asked them to make their marks in the margin. That way there could be no arguments later.

The agreement Otto and Raleigh had reached with the men called for Milo to receive thirty cents for each buffalo skinned, Tom twenty.

“But that’s not fair,” she protested to Otto, out of earshot of the skinners. “Tom’s faster than Milo, and he never tears a hide.”

“
Ja dock zwar
,” Otto said. “True enough. But Milo has a wife and five children back East. Tom isn’t married and he doesn’t really need the money. What would he do with it? Just drink it up or gamble it away, like all the red devils.”

“Have you ever known him to drink or gamble?”

“No, but they all do. Ask anyone. Ask Tom.”

Jenny thought privately that it was foolish for Otto and Raleigh to pay the skinners at a fixed rate per hide. Jobless men were now pouring onto the Buffalo Range, killing buffalo right and left. Because of the Panic the railroads had ceased laying track. Farms and small businesses were failing across the nation. Those who were out of work looked increasingly to the West for a chance to scratch up a living. At this rate the hide market would soon be glutted. The price paid by the big buyers in Dodge City, from $3 to $5 per hide, was bound to decrease. It was probably falling right now. Better to pay the skinners a percentage—say, perhaps, 5 percent—of the price received for their hides.

Otto and Raleigh also allowed the skinners to keep the meat not required for camp use. Each evening when he returned to camp, Tom Shields had a pile of choice tongues, hams, loins, and humps stowed beneath the rolls of hide in the wagonbed. These he brined in a pit he’d dug, lined with green hide, then cured slowly over a cool, smoky fire enclosed by a hood of tightly woven willow withes overlaid with bull hide. Milo Sykes left his tongues, hams, loins, and humps to rot, even boasted about it.

“Nigger work,” he’d say, watching Tom busy at the brine tub. “A white man oughtn’t be eatin’ that buffler tongue anyways—why, he’d start jabberin’ Injun talk.”

But Jenny’s thrift could not abide the waste. One morning after cleaning up around camp, drawing water from a small creek a quarter of a mile back in the cottonwoods, baking the day’s bread, setting a pot of stew to bubble slowly near the fire, roasting green coffee beans and then cranking them through the patent grinder, she saddled Vixen to ride out in the direction of the guns. By now she could distinguish the heavy boom of Raleigh’s Big Fifty from the more rifle-like crack of Otto’s .44-90. Milo skinned with Raleigh, so she rode for the sharper sound. She was looking for Tom Shields.

She found him hard at work in a little swale where more than a dozen gigantic black bulls lay slain, all in a heap. The spring wagon was off to one side, the mules cropping dried grass, oblivious of the dead buffalo. Otto was nowhere in sight. She looked at the buffalo. She had never seen full-grown bulls before.

“Herr Gott
, these are the biggest we’ve shot so far!”

“Yah,” he said. “We found ‘em just this morning. Been looking for the grown-up bulls all along, but they keep away, out in the hills. From the Deer-Rutting Moon until a few weeks after the Hard-Face Moon, these big bulls, what we call scrub-horns, they hang by themselves. Like a war party. Only come to the cows again when they want to make some babies.”

“What are those months in American, that Deer-Rutting thing and the other one?”

“Cripes,” Tom muttered, looking away. “I never can remember the English words. Uh—November, yah! That’s when the deer fuck. To maybe February?”

“Rut,” Jenny corrected him, feeling suddenly prissy and school-marmish. Yet the simple, unaffected way he had said the ugly word, without leering or sniggering, made it not quite so shocking.

“Well, they certainly are big, much bigger than the cows and kips we’ve been killing,” she said. “But what I wanted to ask you, would you show me how to butcher out the choice cuts? Milo leaves all those buffalo to rot. Doesn’t even take the tongues or humps.”

Tom nodded. White spiders waste everything, most of them. There had been times, in the Moon of Hard Faces, when he and his family would have given their rifles, probably even their ponies, for a single rancid buffalo haunch. But this white-eye woman, maybe she understood. Maybe she wasn’t a waster.

“Tongues are easy,” he said. “I once seen a greenhorn try to cut one out by reaching down the buffalo’s throat.” He shook his head. “Took him forever, and he cut his hand about ten times doing it. Here’s the right way.”

He stuck his knife hilt-deep beneath a dead bull’s chin, slit back toward the throat, reached in with his free hand to grab the base of the tongue, then slid the knife blade in below the grasping hand and sliced across the tongue’s root. He withdrew the heavy piece of meat. He laughed, delighted with himself.

“You get you a good edge on your knife and keep it that way,” he said. “That’s all there is to it.”

“What about the hump?”

Tom went over to a bull he’d already skinned. The naked hump stood pink and solid, marbled with white tallow. He slapped it and grinned.

“All muscle, sweet meat,” he said. “There’s ribs that stick up along the center of it, inside, like the spines on the top fin of a catfish, you know? Here, you do it like this.”