Telegraph Days (2 page)

Jackson began to rip boards off the barn. He handed me a pick and a spade, implements I accepted reluctantly.

“Being a lady, I try to avoid picks and spades,” I mentioned.

“I guess you've kissed too many fellows to be calling yourself a lady,” Jackson remarked, picking up a crowbar—or half a crowbar. At some point, mysteriously, our family crowbar got broken in two; this setback annoyed Father so much that he threw the other half in the Missouri River.

“It's not my fault you're off to a slow start in the kissing derby,” I told him.

“Where would I get a girl to try and kiss, living way out here?” he asked.

For once Jackson had a point. My various cowboys could always slip away from their herds long enough to provide me with a spot of romance, but very few young ladies showed up on the Cimarron's shores.

“I expect you'll get your chance once we get settled in Rita Blanca,” I assured him.

Jackson looked a little droopy as he laid out Father's coffin. We Courtrights are, in the main, not a very sentimental lot. But burying brother after brother, sister after sister, and now parent after parent, as Jackson had been required to do, was the kind of work that didn't put one in the whistling mood. I marched over and gave my brother a big hug—he didn't sob aloud but he did tear up.

“I expect I'll miss Pa more than you will,” he said, with a catch in his voice. “Pa, he always had a story.”

“It's just as well he didn't hear you call him Pa,” I reminded Jackson.

Father had no patience with abbreviation, localisms, or any deviation from pure plantation English; but Jackson was right. Father always had a story.

When we were at home, he was always reading stories to the little ones, but once we left Virginia and headed west, the little ones soon commenced dying—a common thing, of course, for westering families, but a heavy grief nonetheless. It broke our mother's heart. All along the Western trails, in the years after the Civil War, families that got caught up in westering died like gnats or flies. Santa Fe Trail, Oregon Trail, California Trail—it didn't matter. The going was deadly. The brochures the land agents put out made westering seem easy—sparkling water holes every few miles, abundant game, healthy prairie climate with frequent breezes—but in truth, there were no easy roads. Death traveled in every wagon, on every boat. Westering made many orphans, and picked many parents clean.

Jackson and I were young and healthy—that was our good fortune. Neither of us shied from hard work. I set aside being a lady and had the grave half dug by the time Jackson finished the coffin. We buried Father in a buffalo robe he had bought from an old Osage man. Then we rolled him in the coffin and eased the coffin into the earth. Dust was on its way to dust.

“We ought to sing a hymn at least,” Jackson suggested.

Hymn singing makes me mopey—I have a good voice but a poor memory for the words of songs. Since Jackson and I had not been churchly people we could not quite string together a whole hymn, but we did sing a verse or two of “Amazing Grace,” and then we sang “Lorena,” in memory of the thousands of fallen heroes of the South. Since our vocal chords were warmed up we finished with a rousing version of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” It was a Yankee hymn, of course—Father, who fought with Lee at the Wilderness and elsewhere, might not have approved, but Father was dead and his fight was over. Maybe it was time to let bygones be bygones—singing one another's songs was a start.

Across the Cimarron, to the northwest, the July sun was shining hard on Black Mesa, the only hill anywhere around. Rita Blanca, the little town we had decided to head for, was more than thirty miles away. Percy, our strong-minded mule, hated long stretches of travel
and would balk and sulk most of the way. But Percy would just have to put up with a lengthy travel, since neither Jackson nor I felt like spending another night in the flea-filled cabin.

“Let's go partway and camp,” Jackson suggested. “It's a full moon. It'll stay light till almost morning.”

Having no one to keep us, or say us nay, that is exactly what we did.

I
N EARLY
J
ULY
, along the Cimarron, the summer sun takes a good long while to go down. Percy began to pretend he was worn out before it was even good dusk. Fortunately we struck a little trickle of a creek, whose water was a good deal less muddy than what could be had from the river itself.

Seven or eight buffalo were standing around a wallow, and one was even wallowing in the dust, exactly as he was supposed to. Jackson and I had with us all the Courtright weaponry: Father's old cap-and-ball pistol, and a ten-gauge shotgun, and a rusty sword. Jackson had killed three geese and a turkey or two with the shotgun, but neither of us had ever fired the pistol.

The buffalo stared at us, and we stared back at them. Percy indicated, by a series of snorts, that he didn't care for their company.

“Buffalo liver's said to be mighty tasty,” Jackson observed.

Of provisions we had none.

“I suppose we could bring one down with Father's pistol,” I said. “But I don't know that I fancy trying to cut up a buffalo this late in the day.”

“Be bloody work, wouldn't it?” Jackson said, in a tone that was none too polite.

I had long ago learned to ignore impolite remarks, and I ignored Jackson's pettish tone.

“I suppose you're afraid that if you ride into Rita Blanca all bloody, that sheriff you're so keen on might not want to marry you, after all,” my brother said.

The sheriff he was referring to was named Bunsen, a sturdy young man about my age. Sheriff Bunsen had ridden out to propose to me half a dozen times.

Each time I politely turned him down. One of my grounds for refusing Ted was that he sported a silly-looking walrus mustache that I suppose he probably thought made him look important—ignoring the fact that it tickled when he kissed me. Of course, if Teddy Bunsen had been really important he would have been sheriff of a town better than Rita Blanca, a dusty place on the plains where people stopped when they just absolutely didn't have the strength to travel another step toward Santa Fe or wherever they thought they wanted to get to.

Father had hoped to hire a full complement of servants in Rita Blanca—after all, what plantation lacked servants?—but nobody in that miserable community even came close to meeting Father's standards. We were servantless our whole time on the Cimarron, which was probably a good thing, since it forced Jackson and me to acquire skills such as gardening and carpentry which we never would have been allowed to use if we had been stuck in Virginia, being minor gentry.

Be that as it may, we were, for the moment, camped on the prairie with nary a bite to eat.

“There's bound to be prairie chickens around here close,” I told Jackson. “If you were to hurry up before it gets dark you could probably knock one over with a rock. If you do, I'll cook it.”

“I'm a near orphan now,” Jackson said, plaintively. “If you marry that dern sheriff I'll have no family at all.”

“Wrong, you'd have more family—a new brother-in-law,” I pointed out.

But Jackson was just in a mood to be gloomy—after all, we had buried Father that day. The buffalo had drifted off in the dusk. I walked over toward the river, armed with a couple of good rocks; within five minutes I had knocked over two slow-moving prairie hens. These I promptly dressed and spitted.

While we were finishing off the birds, that huge yellow prairie moon came up, and soon the coyotes were making their yippy, rackety music. Jackson hobbled Percy, a mule that could not be trusted. After supper, I suppose, I must have nodded off. When I woke up my little brother was curled up in the buffalo wallow, snoring like a sow, and that moon that had been so big and yellow was high up in the sky and white again.

T
HE NOT-SO-DISTANT
booming of a buffalo gun brought me out of my restless slumber, though it failed to wake up Jackson, who could have slept through Shiloh. We got on our way in time to observe that the buffalo we had surprised at twilight didn't make it much past dawn.

Father's good friend Aurel Imlah, the smelly but neighborly local hide hunter, killed every one of the buffalo while they watered from the Cimarron. Two of them, both bulls, had actually fallen in the water, which presented something of a challenge for Aurel's two-man skinning crew. They were muttering and upbraiding one another in a language I could not understand.

“It's Polish,” Aurel informed me, when I inquired. Aurel's beard was so long and filthy that I wouldn't have been surprised to see a small bird fly out of it. Aurel's brother Addison was the postmaster in Waynesboro, Virginia, ancestral seat of the Courtrights. The actual “seat” was a big yellow manor house whose fields hadn't been properly tilled since before the war.

I like Aurel Imlah, though I did my best to stay upwind of him when he came to play chess with Father. He had gentle eyes and a bemused expression.

“Mr. Imlah, Pa hung himself to death!” Jackson blurted out, at which news Aurel frowned.

“Damnit!” he said. “I expect you'd welcome breakfast.”

Looking at the eight skinned corpses of the buffalo dulled my appetite for a minute—the poor dead beasts looked so nude somehow, now that their skins were off.

“I suppose you've heard about General Custer,” Mr. Imlah added.

“Georgie Custer, what about him?” I asked.

“The young fool overmatched himself, finally,” the old hunter informed us. “He was wiped out with some two hundred and fifty men at the Little Bighorn, which is a creek in Montana, I believe.”

“Who got him?” I asked—I was not at all surprised that someone had.

“A huge passel of Indians got him,” Aurel told us, before turning his attention to his Polish skinning crew. One of them was waving a knife in a manner that his boss did not care for.

“Poke a hole in that skin and you're fired,” he told the man.

The Pole looked defiant for a moment, but then thought the better of it and finished his task without comment.

“Georgie Custer is dead?” Jackson asked, shocked. “Why, he used to come around plenty, courting Nellie.”

I took the news about Georgie Custer in stride. Georgie had always been the soul of recklessness—why the army had let him ride off with two hundred and fifty men was a mystery to me.

All I could say about his courting was that it was crude at best. He was apt to corner me on the staircase and subject me to big sloppy kisses, which I declined to enjoy. Then I discovered that he had also been kissing my big sister Millicent, who now lies in her lonely grave near Council Grove, Kansas. I was not about to share Milly's menfolk—Georgie Custer never caught me on the staircase again. Being dead probably served him right, though of course it didn't serve his soldiers right.

“We could sure use breakfast,” Jackson admitted. “You wouldn't have any buffalo liver, would you?”

“Son, I don't,” Aurel said. “My Poles gobbled those livers down before sunrise. But we might have a few tongues left—and if you'd not acquired a taste for tongue I can chop off a tasty rib or two.”

Neither of us much cared for tongue, so Aurel did chop off some hefty ribs, which he soon had dripping over a fire.

The Poles, now laggards, had already loaded their small hide wagon and set out for Rita Blanca.

Aurel Imlah seemed a little surprised that neither of us was very upset about the fate of Georgie Custer.

“It's a big thing,” he said. “A big thing! I expect for the Indians it'll be the last big thing!”

He shook his head grimly, as if puzzled that such a tragedy could happen. “He shouldn't have underestimated the Indians,” he added.

“Seems to me the army shouldn't have overestimated Georgie,” I added. “Cuts both ways, don't you think?”

Mr. Imlah looked at me solemnly, for a long time.

“You're smart, Nellie,” he said. “That's good.”

The old hide seller had always been especially fond of Jackson. Since the Cimarron was only a short walk from our place, he often took Jackson fishing, and taught him how to make fish traps, which he considered more reliable than the pole and the hook. Mr. Imlah had been raised on the Chesapeake Bay and often talked to us about what delicacies the Chesapeake terrapin were. Our old darky woman Della was said to be able to make a fine dish of terrapin but she passed away on the boat between St. Louis and Westport. Jackson caught plenty of turtles in his trap, but none of his catch resulted in wonderful meals.

“I expect you'll be needing a job,” Aurel said to Jackson, as he was getting ready to lope off toward Rita Blanca—Percy's pace was far too slow for Mr. Imlah.

“Come see me at the hide yard,” he suggested. “I can usually find work for a stout young fellow like you.”

Jackson, I could see, was about to burst out with thank-yous—but I had other plans for my little brother. Working with hides was smelly and I couldn't hope to stay upwind of a brother all the time.

“That's most kind, Mr. Imlah,” I said. “You're a true gentleman. But the truth is, Jackson's already secured employment—I believe Sheriff Bunsen means to make him his deputy.”

Aurel Imlah was hard to surprise, but Jackson Courtright had his mouth so wide open a bat could have flown into it.

“If this mule don't fail us my brother hopes to start work tomorrow,” I continued.

“That is fortunate … I consider Sheriff Bunsen a fine man,” Mr. Imlah said.

Then he tipped his cap to us and rode off east.

“What are you talking about, Nellie?” Jackson asked. “I haven't been offered a position with Sheriff Bunsen.”

“No, but you soon will be,” I assured him. “Have a little faith in your big sister.”