Authors: Win Blevins
The man on the roof opposite threw his rifle onto the ground. He was unhit. Mac got up and looked at the men in the ruts. One was crumpled up. One was standing, quailing, miraculously untouched. Mac looked everywhere for more.
Scraggle lay on the ground, alternately holding his hip and staring at his hands covered with his own blood. Mackenzie had shot a little low. Scraggle was mewling self-pityingly and weeping.
Thomas was getting up. He looked dazed.
Zach started putting Strikes Foot back in the casket.
Mackenzie came on the run. “There’s one down behind the bunkhouse,” he said. “Makes six. They killed the miller’s man.”
Caseen had wandered down close and was standing there in a stupor. Mac supposed he wasn’t part of it. Plenty of greed, Mac guessed, but not enough guts.
Mac looked down at Peddler. “Thank you for my son.”
The Peddler inclined his head. “You are welcome, my friend.”
“I owe you,” Mac said to Mackenzie. “Without the signal we’re dead.”
“It was a pleasure to kill them,” said the big man. Mac wondered if he was one who enjoyed killing. “I picked up their tracks. Time I saw what was happenin’, you was here.”
“No, no, God, no,” wailed Scraggle’s voice.
Mac ran down the roof to the end of the bunkhouse.
Thomas knelt in front of Scraggle, holding the muzzle of his pistol where Scraggle’s whiskers met his nose.
“Thomas, no!” yelled Mac.
Thomas blew the back of Scraggle’s head out.
Mac screamed, “No-o-o!” For a long moment the world reverberated with the agony of his own scream.
Smith was cradling his head in his hands.
Thomas was taking what was left of Scraggle’s scalp. Mac supposed it was his first one. He wondered if the breath-grabbing fear of that muzzle in his ear had done something to Thomas. He told himself it would do something to anybody.
Mac set to cleaning up. He asked Zach to hammer the casket back together tightly. After a little thought he had Mackenzie take the blunt back of an ax to Caseen’s fine sawblade, tall as a tall man, and shipped all the way from St. Louis or San Francisco. Caseen looked at Mac pathetically. Mac wanted the weakling to hurt, and remember.
At last Mac went to face Thomas. The boy was sitting against the end of the bunkhouse, the bodies of Stocky and Scraggle in front of him, sloppily scalped. Smith was sitting next to him, silent, merely there. Thomas had the scalps hung through his belt, blood running into the hair and onto his pants.
Mac knelt in front of Thomas and looked into his eyes. He saw bewilderment, panic, and crazy glee.
He wanted to slap Thomas’s damned face, hard. He also wanted to put his arms around his son and hold him.
In the end all he did was murmur, “What the hell,” and walk away.
Chapter 7
May, 1865, Shiny moon
Mac could hear them through the door, squabbling like fishwives. No doubt over the usual.
Lisette, the Little One, was a fastidious person. Where she was permitted—the office where she worked and their personal quarters—she kept everything clean as a martinet’s boots, and everything in its place. But Annemarie was amiably sloppy. Not only was she content to live in comfortable disorder, she seemed to feel resentful of order.
Once every season or so, regular as the solstice and the equinox, Mac’s two wives held a pitched battle. They not only shouted, they threw things. Once Annemarie, nearly a foot taller and fifty pounds heavier, rode Little One to the ground and sat on her until her fury turned to tears. Mac had seen Valdez picking up broken crockery behind them as they quarreled. Aside from this ritual, they were best friends.
Standing outside the door of his parlor, Mac looked at Owen Mackenzie. The big breed was grinning above his luxuriant black beard, his eyes electric, his animal vitality palpable.
Mac wished he’d come alone. He’d ridden ahead of Smith, Thomas, and the others to break the news of her father’s death to Annemarie. Owen had said simply, “I need to ride,” and set his horse at a lope alongside Mac’s Appaloosa mare.
Mac opened the door. Annemarie and Lisette paused in mid-shout and mid-gesture.
Annemarie came running. Then she stopped short. “Dancer,” she said softly, and took his hand and put her head on his shoulder. Lisette stayed by the horsehair-stuffed sofa. After Mac was away on trips, Lisette often kept distance between them for a few days.
Mac heard Owen open the door the rest of the way and step into the doorway. Annemarie went rigid beside him. Did seeing the stranger give her a clue that all had gone wrong?
“Strikes Foot is dead,” Mac said gently in her ear.
For a moment she was still. Mac said across the room to Lisette, “Strikes Foot is dead.”
Annemarie let out a cry, a great welling, plaintive wail, the voice of the women of the world when their men leave their life’s blood on the ground. Lisette came to her moaning. They gave forth a Greek chorus of grief.
Mac glanced at Owen. What he saw seemed the most bizarre sight of his life. Owen Mackenzie was amused.
The idiot.
The music of the ocarina floated over the purpling, twilit prairie, emanating from the pubescent girl Mac beheld in love and awe, his daughter Christine. He watched her backlit against the western sky, her body rocking gently with the motion of the horse, her head tilted to the instrument, her face shadowed—and her soul flowing out through the ocarina into the lovely May evening, plaintive and wistful.
White people looked upon her cerebral palsy, spoken in her spastic gestures, as a repulsive physical affliction. At times like this, though, Mac thought the Cheyennes were right, that she was some kind of spiritual essence sent to live among mere mortals for a time.
He loved to look at her riding. On horseback she looked for once fluid and graceful, her hair waving clear to her waist, her reedy arms held close against her bosom, her fingers moving slowly on the ocarina. Now he could see radiantly beyond her body, and its spasms, to her soul. And she was exquisite.
The ocarina had turned out to be the best treat she’d ever had. Smith had found it in a pawn shop in St. Louis and wanted it for his sister. Mac bought it reluctantly. He and Annemarie and Lisette had tried so many things for Christine, had held so many bright, fragile hopes of finding something she could do well and please herself. And been so often disappointed.
But she had the musical gift, Mac had no doubt of that. She could not speak plainly and made those crazed-looking movements when she talked. But when Little One played the clavichord, the small keyboard instrument Mac had found on the Oregon Trail so many years before, Christine sang. Tunefully. And if you allowed for certain lapses, artfully. She loved singing.
So Mac had bought the ocarina. It was a clay pipe shaped sort of like a sweet potato. That was its common name, the pawnbroker said, and that’s what it looked like, a sweet potato with small finger holes.
Christine took to it wholeheartedly, and from the first she seemed to spend her time on nothing else. She had some difficulty maneuvering her fingers in rhythm, but managed by playing slowly and sometimes covering the holes with the first joints instead of the tips. Soon she was playing songs she made up herself, slow tunes, sustained and mournful. But she didn’t look mournful when she played a new one for the family. She looked exultant. And the sight of her face, delicate and pretty, intensely focused on making the lovely sounds, brought tears to her father’s eyes.
They came to the edge of camp, and Owen came out and helped Christine down. He was always solicitous of her, but Mac had a feeling he thought her affliction amusing. Still, Mac was indulgent of anyone who was kind to her. Owen had volunteered to take her over to see the ancient Indian paintings on the rocks this evening, one of her favorite treats, but Mac had done it himself. Now Owen let her lean on his arm and get a seat by the fire, with everyone else.
Mac crossed near the group and went to his blankets. He knew he should sit up and talk, but he wanted to preserve for a little while the special feeling Christine’s music gave him. He heard Lisette laughing and knew Owen and Christine had sat next to her, and that Owen was flirting with his wife.
He stretched out on the blankets and tarpaulin and looked up at the first stars of the evening.
Christine let fly a peal of laughter, and Mac heard the terrier Punch talking to her in his bark-words. That dog delighted her.
Peddler took her into his confidence about Punch. He taught her the Yiddish words to say and let Christine give commands to make the dog stand on its hind legs, shake hands, or nod its head. The girl was thrilled and begged Mac for a terrier of her own to train.
Mac would have been thrilled for her had he not felt remote and withdrawn this entire trip. He knew he shouldn’t be, but he couldn’t help it. He was carrying the news of Strikes Foot’s death to the Cheyenne people—Strikes Foot’s people, and his own. He felt the burden.
The Cheyennes would be in a time of grief and anger anyway—so many had been killed at Sand Creek. And the young men would be off seeking victims among the whites. A time of bitterness.
So May, usually Mac’s favorite month on the high plains of Montana Territory, was wasted on him. The grass was turning color, as usual, the cottonwoods were leafing, the willows were making their annual change from red to green—the whole world was becoming verdant. The wild-flowers were contributing their vivid colors. Even the prickly pear was getting into the show, speckling the prairie with its fuchsia blooms. And Mac didn’t give a damn.
It was not only the burden of his duty. It was this odd company. Yes, his family, both wives, both sons, daughters. (Zach and Valdez were at home minding the fort.) Plus Peddler and that crazy dog. Plus Red Hand, still numb from what had happened. Plus Owen, who was strange in a way Mac sometimes thought insidious.
Mac would have said no to Owen—No, you can’t go with me to visit my family’s people, like one of us. But Mac owed him. When a man saves your life, and even more your sons’ lives, and you’re Mac Maclean, you don’t act indifferent.
He rolled over in his blankets and wondered again why Owen really wanted to visit the Cheyennes. He’d been around the Cheyennes his entire life. Now he seemed just to want to hang out with the Maclean women. And he was a damned nuisance—all that flirting with Lisette.
Twice in the two decades of their marriage Little One had disappeared with another man for a few weeks, and then reappeared unrepentant, carrying on as though nothing had happened.
Mac admitted to himself that he was afraid Little One was now going to run off again, with Owen Mackenzie. Why not? he asked himself bitterly. Owen was attractive and virile.
Mac was still good-looking, he knew—slender, hard, with a nicely weathered face. And his boyish good looks had always attracted women. Yet Annemarie had borne a child by another man, and Lisette had run away twice. It galled him.
Annemarie clumped down next to him. He could feel her anger even through the earth, it seemed.
Mac knew what was bothering her. She had come to him last night beyond the firelight, where Owen was entertaining Christine and Felice and Lisette and had them all enthralled. She whispered harshly, “You’ve got to get rid of him.”
Mac had been taken aback by his wife, as congenial a person as he’d ever known. He looked into her eyes, looking for a reason, but saw only anger and frustration. Well, she was always mysterious to him in some ways.
Besides, Annemarie sometimes seemed to look at Owen speculatively. He never seemed to pay her any mind.
I would do something about Owen, Mac told himself, except that decency, honor, and pride say I can’t.
Annemarie was turned with her back to him. Mac spooned up close behind her. Even through the blankets she felt good.
At bottom, he thought, I can’t run Owen off because I’m jealous, and too proud to admit it openly.
The last sound he heard was Lisette giggling like a schoolgirl.
Peddler liked to talk as he walked. The miles of the Great Plains were yawning, were seemingly infinite. Since he mostly walked alone, he talked to Punch. Out of loneliness he even taught Punch to talk back, a simple act of ventriloquism. On command Punch would open and close his mouth and turn his head from side to side, as Peddler did the voice-throwing trick.
You might think that a man spending his years walking about a vast country alone—almost alone—would yearn for company. But as Peddler walked toward the Powder River country with the Maclean family, he often drifted back, or off to one side, and simply put one foot in front of the other ceaselessly, or talked with Punch. He was doing his mechanical walk when Smith rode over.
Peddler spoke to Punch in Yiddish. The little terrier immediately bounded from the cart to the rump of Smith’s horse. The horse skittered a step or two, but was somewhat accustomed to the dog. Punch sometimes preferred the rhythmic motion of a horse to the bumping of the cart.
“What have you done these twenty years?”
“I have walked and looked.”
“What have you seen that was beautiful?”
“Human beings walking in love.”
“And terrible?”
“I was at Sand Creek. I saw children shot down, men and women hacked apart for souvenirs.”
Smith rode in silence for a moment.
“Have you always peddled?”
“No, I traveled with a roving puppeteer once, and another time with an animal trainer. They were enjoyable, but I prefer being alone.”
Smith switched. “I know about the road of war, and about the good road of peace.” Smith glanced sideways at Peddler shyly. “De Smet tells us about the Jesus road.” Smith waited; Peddler let it sit. “We don’t hear anything about the road of the Jews.”
“The road of the Torah,” said Peddler, nodding.
“Tell me about it,” Smith said amiably.
Peddler knew Smith brought more to the question than idleness and boredom on a long ride—Smith had a good mind. He was an appealing young man with a sly way of pretending to be a country bumpkin, or ignorant redskin. But Peddler had given up such discussions.
“It is an ancient wisdom.”
“Like the Jesus road.”
“More ancient.” Punch jumped down and trotted out in front of Peddler.
“Like the wisdom of my people, the Cheyennes.”
“Yes.” Peddler had noticed that Smith identified most readily with his mother’s people, perhaps in defense.
“What would you say is good about the road of the Torah?”
Peddler gave it thought. “It speaks of men’s responsibility to each other.”
“And bad?”
Peddler glanced up at Smith with a quick smile. “Perhaps nothing.”
Smith shrugged.
Peddler spoke to Punch. The terrier turned, walked on its hind legs, and said, “It’s a superstition.”
“Who doesn’t see the world through superstition?” asked Smith rhetorically.
Men and animals walked in silence for a moment. Peddler was thinking Smith was a young man to be valued, valued highly.
“What do you like about the Cheyenne road?” asked Peddler.
“They live…beautifully. At peace with themselves.”
“And you don’t like?”
Smith didn’t speak for a moment. “They don’t understand. They think angels or some such make watches and guns and cooking pots.”
Peddler adjusted the thick cart strap around his middle. “And you don’t like what about the white road?”
“I can’t believe how they cheat and fight and murder each other. They live ugly.” He sounded sure of that.
“And you like?”
Smith waited a long while and spoke as though reluctantly. “They’re becoming masters of the world. Because they figure out how it works. Steamboats and trains. Talking over the telegraph. Three-story buildings. Telescopes. Who knows what next?”
On cue, Punch turned toward Smith and said,
“Wissenschaft!’
“What?”
“Science,” Peddler translated.
Smith considered. “And what does that mean, really?”
Here Peddler was at ease. “To abandon supernatural ways of looking at the world. To put experience of the world above all beliefs. To seek natural explanations of what you see, not supernatural.”
Smith looked interested but stumped. “What does all that mean?”
“Give up ‘The gods make water flow downhill.’ Change to ‘It is the nature of water to flow downhill—why?’”
At length Smith nodded.
“I hate philosophy,” growled Punch, and hopped back on the cart.
“Thank you,” said Smith, looking at Peddler thoughtfully. He touched his spurs and loped back toward his father.
Peddler thought a seed had been planted. Whether for a noxious weed or a lovely flower he didn’t know. But a seed, still.