The Winter Family (38 page)

Men say that nature abhors a vacuum. But it is civilization that abhors a vacuum, that cannot bear tranquillity, and so it was civilization that eventually came rushing in.

Bill Bread lay flat in the snow and peered over the edge of the hill at the Indian camp about two hundred yards below. The fires flickered dimly through the lean-tos and the smoke was silhouetted against the darker sky. Even the dogs were sleeping. A few horses wandered pointlessly, feed bags strapped over their noses. Past the camp were the trees, and the hills. Other than the wind moving over the snow and his heartbeat thumping in his ears, it was silent.

After a few minutes Bill wormed away from the edge and crept back down the hill to the posse.

“Is he there?” O’Shea asked.

“You call that whispering?” Bill said.

“Well is he?”

“Yes sir.”

“Did you see him?”

“No sir.”

“Then how do you know?”

“I saw his horse,” Bill said.

The men were gathered in a loose crowd, perhaps ten on foot, another six on horseback. A few might have dropped off or joined up since they left the saloon. They had all been drinking but only one or two of them were really drunk.

Not too late to just turn back, Bill thought. Not too late to just let sleeping dogs lie. But it isn’t really about being early or late. It’s about the way things are going to be, in their own good time, whatever you think about it one way or another.

“Shall I cut around?” the cavalry officer asked from his horse. “Circle around so he can’t get to the trees?”

“I think so,” Bill said. “We don’t want him to slip away on us. He lives through tonight, he’s going to kill us all.”

“He’s just a man,” O’Shea said.

Bill looked at O’Shea. Bill Bread was unshaven with a ragged haircut and dressed in clothes that did not seem to fit him even though they did. Colin O’Shea was tall and fleshy and wore a new coat. The rifle in his hands was inlaid with silver.

“Yeah,” Bill said. “But you all know what he did to the town two years ago. I rode with some hard fellows over the years, but not one of them held a candle to Augustus Winter. He’s the most dangerous man I ever saw. We can’t hesitate. Not for one minute. Because he won’t. I can guarantee you that. And he won’t stop. So we can’t either. Once we go over that hill, there’s no turning back.”

O’Shea made an impatient gesture and the cavalry officer wheeled his horse around. “All the horses, follow me,” he said.

Bill felt as if something terrible was going to happen. He knew that what he was about to do would shatter the peace that both he and Winter had found. But there was an inevitable logic to this moment: as tranquil as Winter’s new life was, it had always been destined to conflict with his. So he ran up the hill through the snow that was almost up to his knees and swung his rifle into his hands.

One of the drunks let out a whoop and the Indians’ dogs woke up and started to bark.

“God damn it,” O’Shea said.

Bill sprinted like his life depended on it.

And of course Winter came out of the tent. Of course he did. No amount of whiskey in the world would allow Augustus Winter to sleep through a whoop like that, even out here under nothing but the stars, his past behind him, his self behind him, in a safe place.

“God damn it!” O’Shea shouted.

Bill went down on one knee and brought his rifle up to his shoulder and pulled the trigger. All in one smooth movement.
Crack
. Little flash of light in the darkness. Winter spun around and went down.

“Go!” O’Shea screamed as he charged past Bill. “Kill them all!”

Bill stood up, shaking the snow off his pants, and watched the horses come up on the camp, not from behind it, but from either side. He could feel how wrong it all was. He held his rifle over his head and waded through the deep snow until he came to the first lean-to.

There was screaming now, and the sound of more rifles. Flat and undramatic cracks and pops and people falling bleeding into the snow.

A big Indian came at him, holding a club, winding back for an enormously powerful blow. Bill struck out, straight and short, with the butt of his rifle, and hit him in the throat. The attacker’s eyes came out of his head and his club slipped away as he fell to his knees. Bill kept going, the rifle up at his shoulder, and he came to the place where Winter had fallen. The snow was soaked with blood but there was no body.

“Where is he?” O’Shea roared.

The snow was all trampled down and there was blood everywhere but no tracks. Bill ran from the camp, the way Winter would have gone.

“Oh God,” Bill said. “You’ve got to show me where he is. Please God. By everything holy.”

And then there was the rumor of thunder in the air, the feeling that there was suddenly more space as the pressure dropped and lightning arced down. Bill saw the blood in the snow and he followed. After a few paces Winter’s footsteps separated from the general confusion and became distinct.

“Oh Jesus, please,” Bill said.

It was only necessary to look down at the snow from time to time. It was obvious where Winter was going. The trees.

“I need more,” Bill said. “I need more lightning.”

Instead the thunder retreated. Mocking him and all his endeavors. Like an indifferent god. No, not indifferent. A god of sand and war. The god of Winter.

Behind him the women were screaming and begging in the language of Bill Bread’s ancestors. He kept running through the snow, holding his gun over his head so it wouldn’t get wet. And finally he saw Winter, just for an instant. Naked white flesh framed by the darkness of the trees. Bill raised his rifle and fired, and then fired again.

Winter disappeared into the trees.

Bill watched the tree line. He smelled the gun smoke from his rifle and felt its heat in his hands. Saw his breath, white and frozen, in
front of his face. Then he walked to the edge of the forest and peered into the gloom.

“Winter, it’s Bill.”

The wind soughed through the trees. Bare branches moving against the dark sky. The rustling of a thousand pine needles.

“Winter,” Bill called. “It’s me. You’ve got to come here quick before the others get here. I can give you my gun and a jacket. You can’t get far. They winged you and I know you’re naked as a jaybird. I know you don’t have a gun. Winter, they’ll track you. This is new snow and you’re bleeding. You’ve got to trust me, Winter. It’s your only chance.”

The voice came from somewhere in the trees.

“I’ve been waiting on you, Bread.”

It echoed and seemed to come from everywhere.

“I knew you would come! And when I get my hands on you …”

Bill guessed and fired. He must have guessed close because he heard Winter shout. Bill slung the rifle over his back, took the bowie knife from his belt, and sprinted. It was all wrong. Winter could be waiting behind any of these trees with a rock, a branch, his fists and teeth. All manner of things could happen now that they were in the woods.

“It’s over, Winter,” Bill shouted. “You can’t run. You can’t.”

The trees thinned as they headed uphill. Bill could see Winter ahead, limping and bleeding into the snow, ducking and sprinting from tree to tree. It would take too long to get his rifle out again and so Bill just ran, his grip on the knife so tight that his nails were digging into his palm around it.

Winter saw Bill coming and ran faster, straighter. Even though he was the taller man and the snow was high he was hurt bad and out of breath and Bill was gaining on him.

When he came to the top of the hill Winter jumped off a rocky outcropping. Bill cut around to the left side, wary of Winter lunging out at him. But it wasn’t a hill after all. It was a cliff. Winter had jumped into a river that rushed parallel to the cliff for about twenty feet and then turned and dropped away. Bill could see him bobbing and struggling in the freezing white water. He sheathed his bowie knife and took out the rifle again and squeezed off a quick couple of
shots. Winter went under the surface and then he went around the corner and was gone.

Bill stood at the top of the cliff for a while, and then he started to tremble with cold and fear and regret and grief. It was so bad that he had to sit down. He closed his eyes and tears pressed out and when he tried to open them again they were frozen shut. After rubbing them open he made his way back to the massacre.

Winter’s head broke the surface of the water and he bellowed like a bull that had been shot, a deep breathless sound. After the initial shock and agony of the freezing cold something started happening to time.

He was not moving. The water had stopped running and he was suspended in a moment that stretched backward and forward. His arms did not move like he told them to and he went under again and swallowed some water.

There was no pain. He felt as if he were floating. The only trouble was that it was rather difficult to breathe.

A bolt of lightning arced across the sky and he saw it, bright and shimmering, refracted through the river.

And then the devil woke up in Winter, the ego thing, and it wouldn’t let him die. He struggled to the surface and breathed deep, exhaled, saw his own breath, the water freezing in his mustache and beard. Won’t die. Won’t die.

One arm forward and then the next, swimming with the current as his heart skipped unsteadily in his chest. No feeling in his hands or feet.

Will not die.

If they aren’t there. If they moved the tent. Then I will.

No. It will be there. I am forcing the tent to be there, Winter thought as he swam, his breath moving through the ice around his mouth. It is there.

The muscles in his legs spasmed but there it was, the big tree, leaning out over the water. It was difficult to steer against the current but he tried to lift his arms out of the water to catch hold of a branch. They betrayed him, stiff and numb, and the current swept him past.

Winter flailed like a madman and turned toward the riverbank. His nerveless feet banged against the rocky bottom of the riverbed and then he was floundering to the shore, the water only to his waist and the wind scalding his upper body.

“Oh God!” he screamed. “Oh Jesus! Ah God.”

Now he was in the woods, the snow and ice cutting his bare feet, his arms wrapped around his chest to keep some warmth in him. He stumbled and for a moment he was sure the tent was not there, he looked at the place where it was supposed to be, and it was just not there, but he kept moving forward like an automaton, and eventually he smelled the smoke and saw that the tent was only camouflaged by a layer of snow.

There was no time to find the entrance. Winter dropped to his hands and knees and crawled under the canvas and came up into the oppressive heat and stink. The contrast went to his head and he almost blacked out.

“Help me,”
he said in the language of the Cherokee.
“Help me.”

Joseph Bird was lying with his old wife at one end of the tent while his children slept at the other. All of them woke up and looked at Winter.

“The fire,”
Winter said, clenching his teeth so they didn’t chatter, stumbling closer toward the fire on his dead hands and his knees.
“Build up the fire. Come close to me.”

“Winter?”
Bird asked.
“What has happened?”

“Come close to me,”
Winter said to Bird’s wife.
“Get close to me, or I’ll die.”

She was draping a blanket over him. Winter impatiently threw it away.

“Get down here you stupid hag,”
Winter said.
“Blankets will only keep the fire away.”

“Lie with him,”
Bird said.
“Do as he says. Gray, get more wood for the fire.”

The old woman leaned down reluctantly. Winter caught her wrist and pulled her to him.

“Ay ay ay! He’s too cold!”

“Shut up,”
Winter said. He clutched her tight as if he would suck the heat right out of her in his overwhelming desire to live.

One of the boys threw more wood on the fire and it leapt up higher. A young girl lay down behind Winter and rubbed his extremities. He was shaking now, convulsing uncontrollably, but his golden eyes were fixed on the flames and never wavered, never weakened. He was going to live.

“They killed them, Bird,”
Winter said.

“They killed who?”

“All of them. All of the people.”

“Who killed them?”

Winter shook and as the feeling came back into one of his hands he screamed.

“Who killed them?”

“Men looking for me. They killed them all.”

Bird’s wife began to weep.

“My sister,”
she wailed.

Bird stood naked next to the fire, fat and calm and almost hairless.

“All of them?”

“They were looking for me.”

“Then why did they kill all of them?”

All of a sudden Winter felt very sick, and he threw up. The old woman he was holding in his arms cried out and struggled free. It felt as if the tent were spinning, the ground rising and falling, everything changing place. Winter dug his fingers into the ground and stared into the fire.

“For justice.”

The heat was beating into Winter in waves. I won’t die, he thought, but everything was moving around so much, and the pain was so overwhelming, he couldn’t stay awake.

O’Shea and the other men on horseback rode ahead. Those left behind were mostly hands or the sons of farmers, all charged with the thrill at having fought and lived. They were laughing and talking and passing a bottle back and forth. They knew that Winter had gone naked into the river and they were sure he must be dead.

The sun rose behind them in the east, lighting up the snow, making everything glow.

The party kept losing men to the farms as they made their way to the town. Hearty farewells, waving. Toasts. Bill smiled but did not wave or speak. Just smiled.

The town O’Shea had built with his money was laid out neatly. One road ran straight north and south while the other ran from the west to east and ended a few miles outside of town in token deference to the sovereignty of the Indians. To the north lay a tall dark forest of pines, running next to the road for miles.