The High Divide (14 page)

“By no means. I'll have an Army escort from Fort Keogh, and I've hired a few cowboys, one of whom I'm meeting tonight, right here. A Mr. Sully. Tomorrow he and I will be going on to Miles City, northwest of which, I have reason to believe, there is small herd of bison still intact. Up near Big Dry Creek. Wild, empty country. Buttes and badlands and high plains.”

“That's where our dad is, Miles City,” Danny said.

Eli gave his brother a sharp look but could not deny his own wish to level with this man, whose posture and careful way of speaking somehow inspired trust.

Hornaday pushed back in his chair and with an index finger adjusted the spectacles on his nose. “And tell me, what is it your father is doing out there?”

“He might be gathering bones,” Eli said, “but we don't rightly know. We're not even sure he's there.”

“That's where Mrs. Powers told us he was heading,” Danny added. “And we've got to find him so Fogarty doesn't take our house away.”

Hornaday pulled a watch from his vest pocket and flicked it open. “It's just after ten,” he said, “and Mr. Sully is supposed to be here at ten forty-five. Until then I'm yours. I believe it might be best if you start from the beginning and just lay things out for me. Who knows, maybe I can be of some help to you. How about it?”

Eli omitted a good share of what led to their father's leaving, though he briefly described the family's money troubles and Fogarty's move against them. He told about that last morning and how their father had left with the rooster and never come back, and about the vague note they found the next day. He told about their own departure, by train, and the visit with Mrs. Powers in Bismarck. Hornaday sat straight in his chair across the table, eyes wandering the room as he listened. When Eli finished, the man remained quiet for a minute, staring into the middle distance.

“I would be inclined to take his old friend's widow at her word,” he said, finally. “Your father's likely pursuing some kind of venture out here—bones or otherwise—and I bet he means to return home and settle his accounts. But there is something we don't know, isn't there. Some reason he didn't tell you he was leaving and has not contacted you since. Was there any trouble with the law that you haven't mentioned?”

“He spent a night in jail for throttling a man,” Danny said. “Busted his mouth and a couple of ribs.”

Hornaday lifted a brow and turned to Eli.

“He was working at the train depot and one of the passengers started pushing some folks around,” Eli said, but didn't explain further, not sure whether Hornaday would share his father's sense of justice.

“You said he was a carpenter, a house-builder.”

“He was . . . before that. Before he went to work at the depot.”

Hornaday waited.

“Before he said some things at a church meeting that made folks upset. Last winter. That's when he lost the contract for the new schoolhouse.”

“All right.” Hornaday shook his head, raising a hand for silence. He closed his eyes and scratched his beard, then folded his hands together under his chin. “Now please, the gospel truth here. Did you leave home with or without your mother's permission?”

They both sat up a bit taller, unable to look away, the man's eyes holding them in place.

“I see. And now I don't have any choice but to help you, I suppose. Which makes me an accessory in this crime against your poor mother.”

“We're doing it for her,” Eli said. “And you don't have to help us.”

Hornaday laughed. “Don't be a fool, son. Of course I do—I owe you that much at least.” He snapped up his spoon and in a matter of moments polished off the rest of the custard. Then he said, “Here's a lesson for you boys. Whenever you've got something over on a man, like you have on me—when he owes you something, I mean—you've got to make damn sure that you get everything out of him that you can. Because how else are things going to be accomplished in this selfish world?”

They slept that night on the floor of the room Hornaday was sharing with the cowboy Sully, whose outfit had finished a drive that day. Sully was a large man with a face like a baked apple, riven and dark, who spent the better part of an hour cleaning his teeth with a length of horsehair and then his toenails with a Bowie knife. Finally he put on a long cotton nightshirt before turning out the lamp and climbing into his corner bed. In a low, scraping voice that defied argument, he said, “I trust you boys won't be keeping me awake tonight.”

He snored like an engine, naturally, and for hours Eli couldn't sleep, trying to see in his mind what his father would be like after so long, more than two months now. He would look older, probably, and harder, the bones of his face sharper than before, his restless eyes even less at home in his skull. Not for a moment had Eli believed that something dire had happened to his father, that a calamity or mishap was responsible for keeping him away. But he did go back and forth between thinking his father would be happy to see his sons and fearing he might be grieved by their coming. It could be that he had found a life that looked better to him than the one he had. Or that he'd just gotten tired, taking care of a wife and two boys. Maybe he liked the peacefulness of being alone—unless he'd found somebody else, like Herman Stroud said he had. The image of Mrs. Powers came to mind, her yellow dress and her fine-boned, pretty face, and he couldn't help wondering how much of what she'd said—about their father, about herself—was true, and how much was contrived to cover truths she couldn't bring herself to tell them.

Eli thought of his father's brooding ways, the nights he'd sat at the kitchen table long after everyone else turned in, and how Eli had often sneaked down from the loft to watch him there as he blew on his mouth harp or simply studied his hands, turning them over in the lamplight as if trying to decide if they were capable of the work he needed from them. Or sometimes reading his Bible, elbows on either side of it, the heels of his hands working his temples. Other nights he went off someplace, out through the back door, and didn't come home for hours. Eli would get up from bed and go down to the porch to wait for him, listening for his step in the dark, sniffing the air for the smell of the pipe he smoked at night—and at the first sign of him, slip back inside and scramble up into the loft next to Danny. He wished that his father had talked to him more, explaining things, and he liked to think that Ulysses felt eyes on his back on those nights he sat late at the table, that he must have seen a shadow waiting on the dark porch when he came walking home late. And it was that yearning of Eli's that stopped him from believing that his father intended to stay gone, from believing that he did not want to be found.

Scratchings in the Sand

S
he had a compelling face, a glorious face, and the first time Ulysses saw it—the first time he saw
her
—he'd known he would either marry her or suffer miserably. She was standing out front of the stone church on Summit Avenue that morning, waiting, thank God, for him. He stopped, offering a hand as she stepped up into the horse-powered streetcar he drove, and caught her eye. She looked away, her fair skin coloring, and he turned to watch as she moved past him toward an empty seat, not taking his eyes from her until she had settled there and glanced up, this time meeting his stare. Did she smile? He still believed she did, though she'd sworn he imagined it. Her cheekbones were prominent and her lips as ripe as plums. Wheat-yellow hair. Dark eyes. Dark eyebrows. He took her all in but said nothing that day, nothing the next day either, afraid she might disappoint him, afraid she might not be the girl her face and eyes told him she was: innocent and yet fully conscious of the soiled world.

After letting her off and watching her walk away down the street, head high and hips oscillating subtly beneath her blue skirt, an image had come to him that he'd long forgotten, a memory from five years before, during his time with Minnesota's Ninth Regiment, the Battle of Nashville. Not from the battle itself but the day after. As he'd moved through a shattered settlement on the southern fringe of the city, he came across a large house, seemingly untouched and standing up straight amidst the ruin, its unbroken windows reflecting the devastation surrounding it. That was what he'd seen in this girl, a beauty that allowed him to perceive the waste and blight infecting the world, himself included. It was as if she'd experienced life's hardnesses and cruelties, yet had remained somehow untarnished by them. How was it possible?

In the years to follow, seventeen of them, what he'd learned about his wife had mostly supported that early judgment. She had lost much in her first eighteen years—her family, her country, her city—everything familiar to her. And yet that hadn't broken her. She was strong-willed, adaptable, capable. And beautiful, yes. But her survival had to do also with a ruthless capacity for self-protection. As far as Ulysses could tell, she refused even to think about her losses, and didn't commit her sympathies beyond the point at which they might cause her damage, this marshaling of herself extending to him as well. There were times he'd resented her for this. But now, gone for so long and able to see her in a softer light, Ulysses understood, as he couldn't before, the weakness beneath her strength.

The sun was low, dusk approaching, and his stomach had shriveled to what felt like the size of a buckeye. He hadn't eaten since last night. Earlier he'd missed an easy shot at a goose floating on the river, and before that a mule deer bounded away before he could lay a hand on his rifle. There were times, no matter if you followed every impulse you thought was right and sacrificed the very things that gave meaning to your world, it still felt as if the hand of God was turned against you.

At least my cart is full,
he thought—and after just a single day's worth of gathering.

Skulls and femurs and chains of vertebrae, curved ribs the size of hay-rake tines, bones of every sort, most of them sun-bleached, though some with clinging patches of hide. He'd fitted them into the wagon with care, like a puzzle, so as to make the heaviest load possible. The more he sold them for, the more he would be able to offset the money stolen from him. What had him worried now, though, was the ox—he wasn't at all sure the creature had a day and a half's worth of pulling left in its lungs and legs. The coughing had worsened, the animal stopping every quarter-mile or so to arch its back and extend its neck forward to blow air and phlegm. The skin along its back and belly was turning yellow, scurfy. And now
both
eyes were leaking a viscous fluid, pinkish and foul-smelling. Yet the beast still responded to the switch, and Ulysses had hopes for at least a partial recovery. From his days growing up on the farm in St. Paul, he remembered animals with a similar malady, and there were some that had struggled through the illness and lived on. These, his father explained, suffered infection in only one of their lungs.

It was full dusk when the smell of roasting meat stabbed Ulysses in the jawbone, just below the ear, and made him pull up, yanking on the handbrake, his mouth filling with water. For a long minute he couldn't see it, but then a thin line of smoke gave it away: a hut made of vertical logs, down beneath the trail, dug into the side of the riverbank and well hidden in a stand of snarly hackberry trees.

The door was made of buffalo hide, dusty and mud-stained. “Hello,” he said. “Anybody home?” He was off the wagon now, walking right up to it, the smell so strong—venison or antelope, he wasn't sure which—that it clouded his vision. He imagined entering his own kitchen and finding his wife at the cook stove in her green apron, putting his arms around her waist as she tended to the cast iron pot.

A hand appeared at the edge of the hide door and drew it aside to show an eye, dark and deeply set in a brown, lined face, a steady eye that regarded Ulysses without fear or curiosity, as if he were an animal common to these parts, a hare or a fox. She pushed the door farther aside to show him the rest of her. She was tiny, not more than four-and-a-half feet tall, and dressed neck to ankle in darkly aged buckskin. On her small feet she wore coyote-fur boots. White braids no thicker than strands of twine lay slack against the front of her shoulders and followed her flat chest and belly to her waist. She held back the door and stepped aside, indicating with a nod and a crooked hand that Ulysses should come in. Which he did, stooping low.

The room was warm. A kerosene lamp burning some kind of pungent fat hung from a hook in the middle of the ceiling, and in one corner stood a crude stove, a barrel with an iron box set into its top, above which, fixed to a skewer, was the thigh and rump of what looked like an antelope, hissing softly, its surface shining and golden above the fire. The smell of greasy meat was nearly overwhelming. The old woman pointed to a straight-back kitchen chair next to the stove. Sitting down, he was still taller than she was, standing. The width of her shoulders was hardly more than the span of a man's outspread fingers.

“I'm sorry to bother you,” he said, “but I smelled your supper. Hard not to come and have a look.”

She was at the stove, leaning into the skewered meat and breathing in its smell. She seemed neither comfortable nor uncomfortable about Ulysses being here.

“I'd best unhitch my ox,” he said, rising from the chair.

She moved her head enough that he could tell she heard him but not enough to let him know she understood what he said.

When he came back in, she lifted from a low shelf against the wall a turquoise plate, elegant with gold filigree around the edge, and handed it to him. Then with a knife from the back of the stove top, she made a quick flourish at the roasting leg, her blade flashing in the lamplight. Leaning forward, she dropped a long strip of meat indecorously onto his turquoise plate.

“Thank you,” Ulysses said, but didn't touch it until she cut a piece for herself and sat down on the small bench against the wall. The antelope meat was spiced with a bitter herb that cut the grease, and he was surprised by its tenderness. He ate quickly, and when he was finished and licking his fingers, she hopped up and cut him another, this one longer and thicker than the first.

“It's good, very good,” he told her.

She shrugged a tiny shoulder.

Afterward she took a pottery bowl from her shelf and with both hands carried it to the hide door. Ulysses followed and held the door aside for her, watching in the fading light as she nimbly ascended three wooden stumps of increasing height that formed a stairway to the rain barrel at the corner of the hut. She filled the bowl, trotted back down, and handed it to him.

The water was sweet and cool, and it tingled through his arms and pricked at the tips of his fingers. He drained it without taking a breath.

“And I have something for you,” he said.

In the back of the wagon he rummaged through what was left of his stash of gifts and came up with a green drinking glass and a red bandanna. He brought them inside, where she smiled her thanks, showing four teeth left in her gums—one on the top, three on the bottom. She held the glass above her head, peering through it at the hanging lamp, turning it this way and that before setting it carefully on her shelf. She returned to her little bench, where she set about wrapping the bandanna around her neck and making an elaborate knot at the front of her throat.

Then they sat for a while, a few feet apart, Ulysses on the chair, she on her bench. Her eyes closed, and her chin fell against her chest and remained there.

“If you don't mind,” he said, “I think I'll go outside and try for a little shut-eye. First light, I'll be moving along.”

She didn't respond, but when he cleared his throat one of her eyes fluttered open.

“I do have a question for you,” he said. “I was wondering if you know of a man called Magpie.” He repeated the name, “Mag Pie,” as if it were two words.

Her second eye snapped open.

“Magpie,” Ulysses said again.

In a scratchy, unused voice—it was the first time he'd heard her use it—she said, “Magpie,” lifting an eyebrow and pointing a crooked finger at Ulysses and shaking her head, as if to say,
That's not your name.

He touched his chest. “
I'm
not Magpie, no,” he said.

The old woman closed her eyes again.

Outside it was cold, heading toward a good frost. He climbed into the bed of the wagon and pulled his big quilt around himself and the heavy canvas tarpaulin on top of that. He lay on his back, looking straight up at stars so thick some giant hand might have skimmed cream from the pail and tossed it up against the firmament. He could make out Orion and both dippers, big and small. Also Pegasus, Cassiopeia, and Gemini.

He closed his eyes, turned on his side, and curled up tight, pulling his covers close around himself. Fifteen yards away the ox was breathing with less difficulty than before, and Ulysses dared to hope it might have turned a corner, that tomorrow would be better, or at least no worse. From downriver a goose called. Seconds later a coyote answered with three long howls, but Ulysses didn't hear it—he was already sleeping.

In the morning he woke with the sun in his face and knew it was past his usual time to rise. His feet tingled as they did whenever he slept hard and well, but the strap of the beaded tobacco pouch was biting into the skin of his neck, and so he threw off the canvas and the quilt too, and he pulled the strap from where it was binding and settled the pouch at the center of his chest. He breathed in the smell of the dry grass and of the river that sighed and muttered just yards away. For a minute he lay there with his eyes closed, not willing just yet to let his day begin. He might have allowed himself a bit more rest except that he sensed a presence. When he opened his eyes, what he saw—no more than a foot above his face—was the old woman staring at him, her face upside down, her wrinkled mouth pursed and disapproving. She was perched on the buckboard of the wagon, her hands gripping the back of it, and she was looking down squarely at the beaded pouch that rested on Ulysses's chest.

Instinctively, he brought a hand up to cover it, and no sooner did he move than she pulled her face away and scrambled down off the wagon to the ground. Ulysses sat up and watched her move quickly through the grass and sage to the sand along the edge of the river, where she turned around and looked back at him, setting her fists on her waist and tilting her head. She lifted a long willow stick and waved it in the air, motioning for him to join her.

“All right,” he said, and pushed himself up from his hard bed, every joint creaking. It felt as if his bones were detaching from each other. He climbed down from the wagon and joined her in his stocking feet on the cold sand.

“What is it?” he said.

She pointed at the river with her stick and then at the sand in front of her and made a line in it, about a foot long and parallel to the river's flow. Then as if to say,
Hear me now,
she pointed once more at the river and again at the line she had drawn in the sand.

“I see. So that's the Tongue,” he said, gesturing toward the line she had made.

She drew a second line, this one perpendicular to the other, making what looked like a capital T, though the horizontal top line was longer than the vertical one she'd drawn first. She performed her work carefully, bent over double at the waist, and when she was finished, she looked up at Ulysses, her eyes bright and snapping.

He said, “If your first line, there”—he pointed to it—“is the Tongue, which flows north, then that one”—he pointed again—“has got to be the Yellowstone, which the Tongue feeds into. Am I right? The Yellowstone?”

She stepped back from her scratching and blinked for a few moments, as if thinking hard. Then she bent over and started in again with her willow stick, this time drawing a series of small lines—tributaries, Ulysses had to assume—all of which led into the Yellowstone from the north. From time to time she glanced up to be sure he was paying attention.

“Yes, yes,” he said.

When she was done, she tossed the stick aside and stepped forward to the ground on which she had drawn her map and crouched there, making herself so small that from a distance she might have been mistaken for a child. With her tiny fingers she began to construct mounds of sand like small soup bowls turned upside down. She worked quickly, not glancing up at all, intent on her excavations, and when she had created half a dozen of these mounds, which were scattered among the tributaries beyond the Yellowstone, she finally looked up, her face cocked and waiting.