Tie My Bones to Her Back (9 page)

He drank some coffee and sighed.

“This is the ugly part,” he said. “When an Indian kills another Indian, he goes the whole hog. He not only ends the man’s life in this world, he makes sure the poor blighted heathen won’t have much fun on the Spirit Road either. After he’s scalped his enemy, if he’s got the time, he’ll gouge out his eyes, slice off his nose, knock out his teeth, yank out his tongue, cut off his hands and feet, take out his brain and lay it on a rock. They do tricks with other body parts as well. That way, when the dead man gets to the Happy Hunting Ground, he can’t see, smell, or talk with his comrades, eat buffalo meat, or even make babies. More important, without hands or feet or a brain to plan it with, he can’t take revenge on his killer when that unfortunate finally shows up in the sweet by-and-by. It has a warped sort of logic to it, I guess, if you believe in an afterlife, but the worst part is that after all this jolly whittling is finished, he’ll leave those items standing around on rocks or logs or on the victim’s body, to taunt the fellow’s friends when they find him later. The more grotesque the array, the better.”

He put both his hands on Jenny’s shoulders, stepped back, and looked her in the eyes.

“Don’t go down by the horses, Jennchen. Take my word for it. Our Tom has a fiendish sense of humor when it comes to the human anatomy. Let’s just pray that he never takes a notion to practice his heathen folkways on us.”

Snakes, Jenny thought. She recalled the hand sign he had used. When Tom warned me to look out for “snakes” yesterday, he must have known those Indians were around here. That’s why he followed me with his rifle.

“What was the Fetterman Fight?” she asked.

Otto looked at her in surprise. “Why do you want to know?”

“When Tom saw my rifle last evening, he said his father had had one like it, an older version, that he’d come by at some battle called the Fetterman Fight, up north of here somewhere.”

“The Fetterman
Massacre
,” Otto said. “Up in Wyoming Territory, about six or seven years ago. You never heard of it? Out here folks can’t forget it. Some young bad faces of the Oglala Sioux under a chief called Red Cloud, along with a few Cheyennes, lured eighty-one men—U.S. Army troops and a couple of civilians—into an ambush, killed the lot of them. Just before Christmas, it was, in ‘66. The Army was building some forts along the Montana Road, what some call the Bozeman Trail. It runs smack through the Indians’ sacred hunting grounds. The forts were supposed to make it safe for the miners heading to the goldfields around Virginia City. The government was trying to negotiate a right-of-way through the Big Horn Mountains and the Indian Territory beyond, and most of the Sioux agreed. But Red Cloud and his Oglalas, along with some of Tom’s people, wouldn’t allow it. They kept sniping at the Army work parties, didn’t want the white eyes, as the Sioux call us, cutting their sacred groves, or some such thing. At any rate, there was this hotheaded captain named William Judd Fetterman, bragged that if the Army’d just give him eighty men he’d ride clear through the whole Sioux nation. So one day, when the Hostiles were acting particularly stroppy, the commanding general gave him eighty men and he rode out. But he didn’t ride through the Sioux nation. The Oglala branch of it rode through him.”

“Killed them all?”

“Every last one, and in only about half an hour. Then they did to the bodies what our Tom did to those Snakes last night.”

“Could Tom’s father have gotten a rifle like mine there?”

“Certainly. The two civilians, Jim Wheatley and Ike Fisher, had Henry rifles and apparently they did the only real damage to the Hostiles. The Army troops were armed mostly with singleshot Springfields left over from the war. Slow-loading, no match for arrows and lances at close range. I was up that way when they brought Ike Fisher’s body back to the fort, he looked like a porcupine. Had 105 arrows in him. Tom’s father could have recovered one of those Henrys. Hell, Tom could have been there himself, for that matter. He’s old enough. These boys start on the warpath when they’re fourteen or younger.”

He looked over at Tom Shields yoking up the oxen. A good hand with draft animals. Very patient. Gentle and sure with his voice and his movements. Viewed from behind, he might have been any Western stockman, perhaps even a Wisconsin farmhand preparing for a trip to town on market day. A good-natured country yokel—you’d enjoy drinking a lager with him down at the local tavern. Maybe even spin a yarn or two. But turn him around and you’d see the face of a killer.

“The only way to make a Cheyenne quit the warpath,” Otto said dryly, “is to shoot him off of it.”

_____

D
ESPITE
O
TTO’S ADMONITION
, Jenny could not resist having a peek at Tom’s handiwork. She waited until the men were busy rearranging the loads in the wagon, then slipped down to the streamside meadow, where the horses still grazed. The hum of a thousand flies led her to the bodies. They hung over the scene like a blue-gray cloud. She edged closer, fearful of what she might see. It wasn’t as bad as she had feared. The blood had dried and blackened by now, and the mutilated corpses, despite their fearful wounds, looked like strangely painted wax mannequins, certainly no worse than the freaks of nature she’d sneaked in to see at a raree show near Heldendorf—she still had occasional nightmares about the Lipless Woman.

A footstep sounded behind her. Turning, she saw it was Tom. He stood there staring at her, his face impassive, and for a moment she felt a tingle of fear.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “You’re not my enemy.”

“How could you do this?” she snapped, angry that he had seen her fear.

“They’d have done the same to me,” he said. “To all of us, if they’d had the chance. They were brave boys. Especially that one.” He pointed to an emasculated body whose head stood eyeless on a nearby rock. “Even with a bullet in him he came at me with his knife. I had to club him down with the rifle butt.” He swung the Springfield to show her. “He was still alive when I took his hair, his eyes open, looking up into mine. He knew he was finished, but he smiled. He never cried out. He never begged for mercy, even when my knife went into his heart. He was a
man.
By-and-by, if I ever get back to my people, I’ll tell them this story. I shall dedicate the Scalp Dance to his memory.”

T
HEY REACHED THE
rendezvous shortly before noon. McKay wasn’t there, but his hides were. He had left them, neatly baled and covered with a tarpaulin, beneath a lightning-blasted cotton-wood where Otto and Raleigh had made their camp most of last spring.

“How come he left the hides behind, unguarded?” Jenny asked.

“Well,” Otto said, “he’d probably killed all the shootable buffalo in the immediate vicinity and thought it best to hunt on elsewhere, to make the most of his time. He couldn’t carry all these hides in that light wagon he’s driving, so he left them here until we arrived with the big ox wagon. He knew Tom and I would be coming soon. And there’s not much danger of the hides being stolen. All of us hide men in these parts know one another. We’re friends. Honor among thieves, and all that.”

Under the tarp was a note in the captain’s spidery Rebel scrawl.

Good, Otto thought. There’ll be plenty of rifles if the Hostiles come looking for trouble. Old Raleigh. No wonder the South lost the war. Most of Lee’s officers couldn’t spell to save their souls, much less write a clear battle order.

They pounded south for an hour, two hours more. The country was all creosote bush and dust. Odd-shaped clouds boiled over the plain. The wind had died a slow death through the morning, working gradually toward the west, then a bit north of west. A great blue-black cloudbank that looked like a range of mountains reared slowly behind them. At the top of a swell, Otto reined in. He signaled the wagons to halt. He wanted silence, no squeaking wheels. He looked to the south and listened.

There it was. The sporadic thud of buffalo rifles, far off through a yellowish haze of dust that thickened to tan on the horizon. Within the haze he could make out a blurred snaky line, vague, almost ephemeral, that would be the Cimarron River . . .

At the base of the rise, Tom Shields had dismounted from the hide wagon and knelt with his face near the ground.

“Listening for buffalo?” Jenny asked him.

“No, looking,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“Come over here, I’ll show you.”

She climbed down and walked to where he knelt in the dry grass. He pointed to a dull black tumblebug that stood rigid in the turf, its quivering antennae angled forward.

“Buffalo beetle,” Tom Shields said. “Where he points, that’s where the buffalo are. I don’t know, maybe he feels them through his feet or those twig things on his nose. But when he finds them, he goes over there. He and his tribe. To make balls out of the buffalo’s shit, you know? Whenever you see an Indian climb off his pony and put his face sideways to the ground, he’s not listening, he’s asking this fella for directions.”

T
HEY FOUND THE
alkali flat easily. Otto would never forget it. A hunter named Tobe Graham and his crew—two skinners and a cook—had been slaughtered here last winter by Comanches. The Comanches had tied Graham and his men alive and naked to the wheels of a wagon and built a fire at their feet, feeding it with flint hides and corncob-sized chunks of tallow. But not before scalping them. Graham was from Chicago, where he’d been a streetcar conductor. He had a wife and half a dozen children and couldn’t support them with what he earned on the cars. At least not in any comfort. His wife, he said, had prayed and pleaded with him not to leave her for the Buffalo Range, she couldn’t stand it all alone with the babies in that cold, cruel city.

“She’s just a little wee lass, from near Belfast,” he had told Otto. But Graham had promised her it would be only for the winter, no more, no more, and when he got home they’d be rich as lords. Five bucks a hide for shaggies . . .

Raleigh had pitched his big white canvas Union Army supply tent, purchased last fall from the sutler’s store at Fort Dodge, under a stand of cottonwoods half a mile from the alkali flat. Buffalo hides lay pegged out all around it. Tom Shields wheeled the big wagon in a tight circle and parked beneath the trees. Jenny reined in beside him. They set about unloading gear, racing against the coming storm. Already they could hear a sullen cannonade on the horizon and see ragged, dirty-white whorls of storm wind careering along the tops of the blue-black thunder-heads, and occasional flashes of lightning.

Raleigh rode in before sunset, just as they finished.

“Huzzah, the late arrivals!” he bellowed. “Whatever become of that far-famed Dutch punctuality? We’ve killed all the shaggies in these parts, so you might as well pack up and get back to town, old hoss.”

His white teeth gleamed within a dry, dusty, wind-burned face. Jenny watched him from the mouth of the tent. He had a wide smile, and eyes that crinkled around the edges as he grinned.

Raleigh swung down from his horse—a tall sorrel stallion—and turned it over to Tom Shields for unsaddling, along with his buffalo rifle. He walked across to Otto, still smiling widely. He was shorter than Otto, but of a heavier build, with wide shoulders and a deep chest. He wore an unfringed doeskin hunting shirt and bandoliers across his chest, tightly fitting sky-blue cavalry trousers striped yellow down the sides, knee-high black boots, and a blue bandanna knotted loosely around his throat. The blue matched his eyes, Jenny thought. His dusty hat was cocked back on his forehead. A sheath on his belt held two long-bladed skinning knives and a sharpening steel. She noticed that dried blood caked his hands and wrists, disappearing up his forearms into his shirtsleeves.

“Where’s the other wagon?” Otto asked.

“Should be right behind me,” Raleigh said. “I hired a spare skinner from Billy Ogg’s crew. Milo Sykes—you know him from up on the Pawnee Fork.”

As if on cue, Sykes and the wagon rattled out of the sunset, the mules in a stiff-legged canter.
“Racing to Beat the Storm
,” Raleigh said. “Make a nice study for Currier & Ives.” Tom ran over to help unload the fresh hides. They would have to be protected from the rain.

Raleigh McKay turned toward the tent and noticed Jenny for the first time. He nodded gravely and doffed his hat to reveal an unruly mop of wavy blond hair burnished almost red in places.

“Well, I see you took my note to heart and hired us a real live professional to be our chief cook and bottle washer.”

“More than that,” Otto said. “Pending your approval, she’s a full partner in this enterprise—my sister, Miss Jenny Dousmann.”

Raleigh wiped his fingers carefully on his shirt, took Jenny’s hand, and kissed her fingertips lightly. He smiled into her eyes. It was a formal gesture, but his eyes belied it.

“Most pleased and honored to make your acquaintance, ma’am.”

“If it’s all right with you,” Otto told McKay, “I figured we’d cut my sister in for a quarter of what we earn on each wagonload of hides, less the skinners’ pay. You and I will split the remainder, fifty-fifty.”

“Sounds fair enough,” McKay said, smiling. “Though the mere presence of such a charming feminine soul in our rude camp is of course beyond price.”

A great rattling boom of thunder exploded above and around them.

“Here she comes,” Raleigh said, looking skyward. “A right gullywasher, I’d guess. We better be getting inside . . .”

Then he sniffed himself, looked over apologetically at Jenny, and smiled once again.

“Or maybe not. I’m afraid, at the moment, I don’t quite rival the prairie rose for fragrance.”

A cold rush of wind enveloped them. Then the rain swept down in a gray roaring blur that obscured the world from horizon to horizon. As Jenny peered out from beneath the canvas, she saw Raleigh McKay barefoot and shirtless cavorting in the slashing rain, his cavalry britches plastered to his legs, scrubbing himself with a bar of fancy store-bought soap and whooping a joyous rebel yell. He applied the suds most assiduously to his hair—of which he seemed inordinately proud, Jenny thought.