Far as the Eye Can See (24 page)

When we got the fire blazing in the stove again, I got all my things together.

“Where are you going?” Eveline said.

“I’m going to feed my horse and get ready to go.”

“You don’t have to leave right away, do you?”

“First light after new year,” I said. “But I got a lot of things to get done beforehand, and there ain’t much of the days left.” I told them I’d be back in the evening and took the last sip of my coffee. “I thank you kindly,” I said. “Both of you been very good to me.”

Eveline looked at me and our eyes froze for a second. I think she known what I was thinking. I said, so only she could hear it, “You especially.”

She got this look on her face like I slapped her or something.

“I don’t mean about that,” I said.

“About what?” Christine asked.

Both Eveline and me said, “Nothing.” Then Eveline turned her face up to mine and give me a kiss on the lips. Just a soft touch of it. “You are better than any of the men I have known, including my husband,” she said.

Christine set there staring at us. I nodded. I swear my chest felt empty just then, like there was nothing under the bones.

They watched me climb down out of the wagon, but neither said nothing.

The rest of that week it was just me and Eveline in the dark. Christine would read from that Dickens fellow, and then she’d settle herself and go to sleep and Eveline and me would commence to holding each other and loving when we could. It was not animal pleasure after all. It was a frantic attempt to hold back time and what was ahead of us.

On the last day before the New Year, I went and settled up on Cricket and made sure she was well fed and ready. I put the saddle and bridle on her so she’d be used to it by morning and so I wouldn’t have to try and do it in the dark. I went back to the commissary at the fort and bought some sugar, coffee, tobacco, and dried beef. I packed the new supplies on the travois and tied it all down again. I worked right next to the wagon, in the cold, and around four in the afternoon—just before dark—Christine come down out of the wagon with a cup of hot coffee.

“You must be freezing out here,” she said.

“Tell you the truth, I didn’t notice it much until you mentioned it.” I sipped the coffee. It was hot and felt very good going down. When I was done with it, I handed her the cup. “Much obliged.”

“I am sorry about the other day,” she said. Her eyes glistened a little in the cold air.

I rubbed the side of my face. “You pack a wallop.”

“I’m truly sorry.” She bowed her head, like she was looking for something in the cup.

“It don’t matter,” I said.

“My sister—” She paused, looking at me again. “She is a lusty woman. Not to say lustful, but definitely lusty. She is hearty and vigorous. She wants to enjoy life, and out here . . . she understands the life out here better than most women.”

“I guess she does.”

“I expected her to have the decency we were accustomed to in the East. I know now that is impossible.”

“Decency?” I said.

“Maybe I mean decorum.”

“What’s that?”

“I just wanted you to be aware—I wanted you to know—that Eveline may wish for certain things, but she has no expectations or demands where you are concerned regarding matrimony, and neither do I.”

“I guess that’s okay,” I said.

“But you should know she has found it in her heart to abide with you—she has found a place in her heart only for you. She is devoted and will not allow recriminations or reproach to come between the two of you.”

“Sometimes,” I said, “you sound like that fellow Dickens, or Lear.”

“Are you saying you don’t understand me?”

“No, I understand. It just takes a concentrated mind to do it. I got to listen real good.”

She smiled a little. “You know what I’m saying.”

“I do,” I said. “It’s enough that
you
understand all that. I would of liked to hear it from Eveline, though.”

On my last night in the wagon, we all three sat in front of the stove and enjoyed hot brandy. I calculated I’d be leaving before the fire banked in that stove, and every time the wind kicked up a little I wanted to scrunch a little closer to it. Eveline talked about how she figured I wished I was already back out with the army. I told her it damn sure wasn’t no wish but it was going to come true right soon anyway. Now that Christine had said she understood things better, it didn’t seem like such a bad thing to be warm and cozy in front of that stove. It was a mite strange to be a-wondering if Eveline really had no expectations or not. I didn’t even think about my own wishes at first. But then I said, “You know, I guess this here is my home fire. My very own hearth.”

Eveline smiled and Christine nodded slightly, then averted her eyes.

“I have one more Christmas gift,” I said. “I think you will both appreciate it.”

Now they was both looking at me. Eveline’s eyes really seemed to glow.

“I make a gift of Cooney’s part a this here wagon,” I said. “I disavow it.”

Eveline started crying again. But Christine didn’t like it one bit. “Does that mean what I think it means?” she said.

“What?”

“You give us the wagon now. Why?”

“I want to be nice.”

Eveline said, “Christine, what is it?”

“He’s not coming back here in the spring to help us get to Oregon.”

“Now, I didn’t say that.”

“Of course he will,” Eveline said.

“He won’t.”

“I don’t know what would keep me from it,” I said. “Didn’t I just say this here is my own hearth and home? And I’m a-leaving my leather-bound book here for you to keep for me.”

“We will not ever see him again,” Christine said. “Even if he wants to. He shall not come back, I just know it.”

“I will too. And I don’t want you, either one of you, trying to find nobody else to take you, neither. That’s the only part of the promise I
do
want to take back.”

“Something will happen to you. Something awful.” Then she narrowed her eyes and really give me a Indian look. Like she could see my soul and there wasn’t no place for it to hide. “You want to come back now. But will you? Will you?”

“Well, I guess I don’t know,” I said. “All I can say is I’m planning on it. Ain’t that all any of us can say?”

I watched Eveline brush tears from her face. It would of been nice if she’d said something about it all, but she said nothing. After a while she seemed to find it hard to look at me.

“Damnation,” I said. “I’m coming back. I hope I’ll be welcome.”

Now she met my eyes and smiled.

“I just hope I’ll be welcome,” I said again. “Look for me come June. You just look for me. I’ll be here to bury the general and retrieve my copy of Shakespeare.”

I wanted to run my fingers through Eveline’s hair, but I figured under the current circumstances it might be a bit awkward.

Chapter 15

Major Brisbin did not like my travois. That was the first problem. “You can’t travel with us dragging that thing. You’ll just slow us down.”

“Indians move pretty quick when they have to.”

“You’ll be the only one out there with a packhorse.”

“A Indian lodge beats the hell out of them army tents you’re carrying.”

“How?”

“A squaw could put this thing up in half the time one a your men takes to assemble a two-man tent. And she can take it down even faster.”

“I don’t believe it.”

“I’ve seen it with my own eyes.”

“You don’t have a squaw with you.”

“I don’t need one. I learned how to do it.”

He known I was right. “I guess if you want to be a damn fool, I can’t stop you.”

That first day, as we rode along heading east, he tried not to look at me, because every time he did, he’d lose his temper a little bit.

We was the vanguard of a pretty big force. The biggest I’d been with since the war. Since I known the terrain, my job was to lead them on the best trails while we searched for what Brisbin called “hostiles.” To him, all Indians was hostiles, except for the Crow scouts in my troop. When we located a Indian encampment, we was to leave a detachment of scouts to watch and track them, and then get back to Gibbon to let him know where they was. Brisbin had about sixty cavalry­men with him, and Gibbon was coming behind us with the infantry. He had twelve wagons and four hundred troops, all walking in the wet snow on the trail. I had twenty scouts in my troop. It was a regular campaign. Brisbin said we was to keep moving east until we run into General Custer and General Reno coming up from the south. We was all going to collect every hostile in the whole territory. Brisbin said we’d stay out there until spring and even the summer if we had to. When he said that about the summer I almost said, “I ain’t staying out here beyond the month of May,” but I kept quiet. Working as a scout for the cavalry was a job, and I known I could quit any time I wanted to.

The first night I missed Eveline. Soon as I finished putting up my tepee and had time to sit in front of the fire, I heard her name in my head like a song.

It took me a while to set up the tepee. I had no trouble with the poles, but once I had them all arranged, I had to wrap the buffalo skin from the top by attaching it to one of the poles, then hefting it up and hitching it there. Once that was done, I’d just walk around the thing, unfolding the skin as I went and securing it to each pole. The problem was, I couldn’t get it to hitch at the top. Morning Breeze done it with no trouble at all, and quick too. I known Brisbin was paying attention, so I hated having the problem.

When I was done, I collected a bunch of buffalo chips and built a fire in the middle of it and commenced to fix things to eat. I cooked up some cornmeal in a pan and made a pot of beans. I heated a piece of sowbelly on the tip of a stick and eat some of that too. When I was done I smoked a pipe and watched the fire for a while. I got kind of sad thinking about Eveline, in that wagon with her sister, missing me. I sipped a little of the whiskey, then curled up by the fire and went to sleep. In the dark of morning I made coffee and cooked some more sowbelly in a pan on the fire. I eat the meal real slow, wishing I had a biscuit, and watched the sun rise in a cold mist over the mountains before us. I had faced the opening of my lodge east, as the Indians always did. I was warm in that tepee, sitting there watching the light curl around everything dark and start to lighten it. The weather was warmer, and when I heard the camp beginning to stir, I packed up and was ready to go by the time the sun come up full.

We’d only been on the trail about a day and a half when I got into a little bit more of trouble. We’d traveled about thirty miles, and was getting far enough from Fort Ellis that Colonel Brisbin wanted me and my scouts to start fanning out and searching for signs of Indians. I sent five of my scouts south and five north, and I went east with the other nine. While I was gone, Gibbon’s top sergeant come riding up to talk about where the general expected the colonel to be during the first days of the campaign. Turns out the top sergeant was a fellow named Garrison who was in the Union army during the war. We both served under General Thomas in the second half of the war. When I come riding back to let Brisbin know there wasn’t nothing in front of us, I was shocked to see Garrison a-setting there on his horse, waving his white-gloved hands in a friendly conversation with the colonel. I wasn’t sure he remembered me at first, but then he stopped talking and got to studying me a mite and then he said, “I’d know this red head anywhere. James. Christopher James.”

This was right when Brisbin was getting ready to introduce me. “James?” Brisbin said.

“I been called that,” I said.

“This fellow is Bobby Hale,” Brisbin said.

“That’s my name now. I changed it a few times.”

Both of them known what for right away. They looked at me like I just murdered a child right in front of them. “So, a bounty jumper,” Brisbin said with contempt.

“It was your army,” I said. “Your war.”

“Do you have no convictions, sir?”

“No. I was never tried for no crime.”

“That’s not what I meant,” Brisbin said. “You are a deserter.”

“Multiple times,” I said. “But I fought too. I was at Fredericksburg. I fought in Tennessee, at Chickamauga with General Thomas.”

“I suppose you can prove that,” Brisbin said.

“I don’t have to.” I looked at Garrison. “Not now.”

“He was there,” Garrison said. He looked down at his saddle horn, seemed to grimace in pain. Then he said, “At Chickamauga. Fought bravely too.”

I nodded. Brisbin give a little kick to his horse and started off. Garrison and I followed. We was all three riding in front of the troops. Cricket was a little taller than the other horses so I found myself looking down at the other two as we rode along. It was a windless, damp afternoon. I didn’t look at Brisbin directly. I waited to see what he would do. I wasn’t worried about being punished for my crimes. The war was long over, and anyway, I was a good soldier when I was forced to take that occupation on full steam.