0525427368 (7 page)

It was such a wild crazy pleasure simply to eat. To champ on
actual sustenance. It was like the first time we ever ate. Mother’s milk. Everything we were that had started to seep away because of the hunger was returning. Men were talking again and then the laughter was returning. The sergeant was affecting to be angry and perplexed. Said the meat was likely poisoned. But it weren’t poisoned. Sergeant said no one ever likely understood Indians. They’d had their damn chance to kill us and they hadn’t took it. Goddamn stupid Injuns, coyotes had more sense. The major must of decided to say nothing. He was quiet. The two hundred sets of teeth chewing away. Swallowing the big blackened lumps, bellies growling.

Well, I gotta say, said Trooper Pearl. I be thinking well of Indians now.

The sergeant looking at him with a wolf ’s eyes.

I gotta say, thinking well of them, Pearl says again.

The sergeant gets up in a big huff for himself and goes off a piece and sits by himself on a grassy mound.

It got to be accounted a happy day.

We were four or five days from the frontier, we reckoned, just a bit of a ride now to Missouri and what we called home, when a storm came in over us. It was one of those bleak ice storms, everything it touched freezing, including the bits of our bodies showing. I never rode in anything so cold. We had nowhere to shelter and so were obliged to push on. After the first day the storm decided to go worse. It made the world into a perpetual night but when the real night came the temperature maybe was down to forty minus, we didn’t know exactly. Our blood said bottom of the scale. It’s a queer wild feeling, that freezing. We
laid neckerchiefs across our mouths and chins but after a while little good it did. Our gloves froze and soon our fingers were fixed fast around the reins like our hands had deceased and gone to their reward. Couldn’t feel them which was maybe just as well. The wind was all icy blades and might have shaved the beards and whiskers of the men but that they had already froze to metal. We all went white, frosted from our crowns to our toes, and the black, the grey, and brown horses were all turned white now. The blankets of chill white rheum over everything was not warming. Picture us, two hundred men riding into that wind. The grasses themselves crackling under the hooves. Above in the black sky torn and rent by invisible violence just now and then fleetingly the burning white orb of the moon went flying. We feared to open our mouths for one second or the moisture would freeze them ajar. The storm had a lot of prairie to cross and all the days of the world to do it. It must have been as wide as two countries. It passed over us and through us. But for the Indian victuals we would of died in the second day. It was just enough belly fuel to carry us out the other side. Then we saw other trouble. Big sunlight followed the storm, and our clothes seemed half-melted, like unravelling felt. Many of the men were in atrocious pain just as soon as the ice melted off them. Trooper Watchorn’s face was as red as radishes and when he pulled off his boots we could see his feet were no good either. Next day his nose was black as soot. It was like he was wearing something on it, burning dark and sore. He couldn’t put his boots back on for any money and he wasn’t the only one in travail. There were dozens in a bad way. Soon we come to the river that marked the
frontier in that part and we push the column forward into the shallow waters. The river was two miles wide and about a foot deep all the way. The horses threw up the water and soon we were drenched. That didn’t do Trooper Watchorn much good, howling now. There was pain in him like no man could bear. There was others as bad but Watchorn had headed further in his brain somehow and when we reached the far bank the major was required to pull him from the horse and get him trussed up somehow, because he wasn’t no human creature now exactly, Watchorn. We were spooked as hell. That howling man, and pain so painful we seemed to feel it too somehow. Then they trussed him up because he was banging his face with his hands and he had to suffer the indignity of being lashed belly down to his mount. Then in a strange mercy he sank into a stupor, and in that condition we reached our destination much bedraggled and harassed. In the fort hospital in the coming months men lost toes and fingers. Frostbite the doctor called it, frost carnage more like. Trooper Watchorn and two others didn’t live past the summer. Gangrene got in and that’s a dancing partner no trooper chooses. And then they were in the funeral parlour like I told, all decked out in spare uniforms, and additions made to their losses, Watchorn with a wax nose and shaved clean as a stone courtesy of that embalmer. But looking dandy enough. It sure took the proverbial cake.

I guess poor Trooper Pearl had the worse fate. The major hadn’t forgotten after all. Court martial and even though the officers presiding had no real notion of what his offence might have been given that Trooper Pearl was a victor in an Indian
engagement something about the major’s high moral tone got into proceedings and then Pearl’s goose was cooked. It was me and five other troopers were gave the job of dispatching him. He made a noble end of things. Looking a bit like Jehovah now because he had grown a long black beard in captivity all down his breast. We shot him through the beard to reach his heart. Joe Pearl went down. His father came in from Massachusetts where they was from and took the body home.

John Cole said he might have enough of Indian fighting just presently but we got to serve out our term agreed and we were content to do that because we got to be. We sure getting poorer and uglier in the army but better than be shot, he said.

C
HAPTER
S
IX

Y
OU
CAN
BE
TIRED
all you like of something I guess but the Fates say you got to go back out and rub your nose in it. How come we left cosy Jefferson again to traipse back just next and nigh the way we had come with so much hardship might have been a question. That just the army way. Well we had got three months in barracks and that was a fine endowment. Wise old hands brought their bearskins. They weren’t going to freeze again like the late Trooper Watchorn. Army had no good clothes to give us for the cold. Meant to give us wool jobs but we never seen them. First bloody Sergeant Wellington said we was cunts deserved to die of frostbite. Every man Jack got a printed sheet showing us the saving outfits which was supposed to arrive at barracks instanter. Never damn did. Can’t wear a picture, says John Cole, my beau.

But now was the season for all those hopeful hearts going out to pick up gold nuggets as they thought from the ground of forsaken places. This year more than was seen before. If you ever set eyes on three thousand lily-faced white boys and their families you’ll know what I mean. Was like they was going to a picnic but the meadow was six weeks off and death guaranteed for
many. We was told in St Louis to take a northern route because every blade of grass was eaten between Missouri and Fort Laramie. Them thousand thousand horses, cattle, oxen, and mules. Lots of new boys in the 6th, lots of forlorn Irish, usual big dark boys. Joking, all that teasing Irish do, but somewhere behind it the dark wolves staring, the hunger wolves under the hunger moons. We were to augment the military presence in Fort Laramie because there was to be a great gathering of Indians out there on the plains. The major and the colonel is going to ask them to stop killing the goddamn emigrants.

The colonel sends out messengers to every tribe he knows of ever set foot on the whiteman’s trail. Thousands come, driven in by want and hunger. The whole thing is set up a few miles north of the fort in a place called Horse Creek. The colonel puts the army on the lower bank of the river. Up go our rows of tents. The summer sun leans down on everything and bakes the canvas and if you can sleep at night you must be deceased. Nice easy-going river there and not much bother to cross it, and the colonel he ranges the government men and the quick-chance traders over a ways and across the water itself he requests the tribes to be establishing their wigwams. Now there was maybe three four thousand pointed dwellings bedecked in painted skins and banners. The famed Shoshone, the lofty Sioux boys both Teton and Oglala, the Arapaho, the Assiniboine come down from Canada, blazed out in the midday heat in all their finery. Major knows the Oglala because it’s the same crowd fed us in our time of trial. That same chief ’s here, Caught-His-Horse-First. And the noise that come up from the whole lot of them is a tremendous music
in itself. A special awning is erected and the officers in their best bibs assemble there on chairs. At length the cloaked backs of the chiefs was seen ranged darkly in the shadows and the sunred faces of the officers sort of bleakly looking out from under hatbrims, everyone starching theyselves up into a mighty fit of seriousness. Big speeches is made, while the mounted infantry and the cavalry respectfully stood off at a distance, and on the other bank the tribes seat themselves in a silence such as you might know just before a thunderstorm, when the land draws in its chest and holds a limitless breath, and across the valley drifts the voice of the colonel. Annuities and food supplies is offered in exchange for the emigrants to be let through. The interpreters do their work and agreement is reached. The colonel looks mighty pleased. We were all thinking that a new day was dawning on the plains, and we was happy to think it might be so. Them Indians is wore out from slaughter and so are we.

Starling Carlton, one of the fellas in our company, says there’s so much hot air in the colonel it’s a wonder he don’t float off. But soldiers like to take the dim view. It cheers them up. I won’t say what the sergeant said of all this, the only truly unhappy man.

Empurpled rapturous hills I guess and the long day brushstroke by brushstroke enfeebling into darkness and then the fires blooming on the pitch plains. In the beautiful blue night there was plenty of visiting and the braves was proud and ready to offer a lonesome soldier a squaw for the duration of his passion. John Cole and me sought out a hollow away from prying eyes. Then with the ease of men who have rid themselves of worry we strolled among the Indian tents and heard the sleeping
babies breathing and spied out the wondrous kind called by the Indians
winkte
or by white men
berdache
, braves dressed in the finery of squaws. John Cole gazes on them but he don’t like to let his eyes linger too long in case he gives offence. But he’s like the plough-horse that got the whins. All woken in a way I don’t see before. The
berdache
puts on men’s garb when he goes to war, this I know. Then war over it’s back to the bright dress. We move on and he’s just shaking like a cold child. Two soldiers walking under the bright nails of the stars. John Cole’s long face, long stride. The moonlight not able to flatter him because he was already beautiful.

Next morning was a final gift-giving to the Indians. A man called Titian Finch had arrived with a daguerreotype machine to make a record of these clement days. The tribes is photographed in great assemblies and the major has his picture done with Caught-His-Horse-First like they was old friends. A sunlight as white as a maiden’s bosom floods the country. They have to move real close. A naked Indian and a braided major. They stand beside each other in casual earnestness, the Indian’s right hand gripping the major’s silver-threaded sleeve, as if to alert him to some danger, or guard him from it. Titian Finch bids them both hold still as stones, and for one eternal moment they are there, the very picture of human equanimity and gratitude.

Then these friendly acts were done and the Indians dispersed and we was returned to ordinary days. Nathan Noland, Starling Carlton, Lige Magan the sharpshooter, these was boys of the regiment that came close to us in that time, me and John Cole. Because it was now that John Cole started to show the illness
that afflicted him. He was obliged to lie quiet for days because there weren’t one cup of steam in him. Doc had no name for it. A rattlesnake could of trailed across his breast and he couldn’t a done nothing about it. The boys abovementioned was the ones that shown regard for John Cole in his extremity. Handsome John Cole they called him. Got the cooks to make him broth and so forth. Bringing it in to him like he was a emperor. Not to say that Lige Magan and the rest weren’t broken-backed moaning clap-ridden drunken loons betimes. Man they was. Lige Magan I liked best I can say. Elijah was his full name so I guess he was a wonder worker. Nice ox-faced boy of some forty-five years out of Tennessee. His people had hogs there till the bottom fell out of hogs. The bottom was always falling out of something in America far as I could see. So it was with the world, restless, kind of brutal. Always going on. Not waiting for no man. Then John Cole would wax good again and it was like nothing had ailed him. Then down again. Then up again. We was dizzy.