Tie My Bones to Her Back (10 page)

Tom was shirtless now, too, lugging a barrel of molasses to the tent, the rain pelting his hard tan chest and shoulders. He had white, mouth-shaped scars on his ribs—old arrow wounds? How dark he was. How pale, almost marble-smooth, was Raleigh McKay.

She wished she could join them in their dance, peel off her stale, sticky clothing and pirouette naked and clean beside them in the downpour.

7

T
HE LINE STORM
blew through after dark. McKay and Otto walked out to survey the damage. Stars had broken clear, spread cryptically across the night sky in a great frozen matrix—here comes Orion slouching toward the zenith. Prairie wolves yipped up at the moon from the east. The drying hides lay sodden between their pegs. Gray moths swarmed, flapping damply in the gloom. Fresh arsenic was indicated. The cavvy had weathered the storm in good fashion, as always. Indeed, the horses and mules, even the drowsy-eyed oxen, looked cleaner and sprightlier than they had before it struck.

It hadn’t been much of a supper. Cold hump steak. Cold beans. Stale ship’s biscuit. Impossible to start a fire. The buffalo chips slumped in a soggy pile beside the tent, Jenny grim-faced with frustration. She must have had such plans, Otto thought.

“Keep away from my sister,” he said to McKay.

“Why,
I’ve
got no designs on her, hoss.”

“Like hell you don’t. You may not know it now, though. I’ve never seen men alone—in war or peace—who didn’t have designs on the first woman they saw, once they’d been in the field a few weeks.”

They walked out onto the prairie. Not a fire in sight.

“Any sign of Mister Lo?”

“Not for a while,” Raleigh said.

“We had some Snakes up the line. Tom took care of them.”

“He’s a good ‘un.”

“Too bloody, though, too much the savage.”

“You know the Cheyenne. Just like Bill Sherman. Make war so terrible that no one wants to fight you.” Raleigh laughed. “Old Bill, he sure showed all us Southrun folks—from Georgia to the sea. The whole damn nation, for that matter. ‘War is hell.’ As you Yankees are only too glad to remind us.”

They walked on.

“What are the buff doing?”

“Not much. Thinner on the ground than I hoped they’d be, just like last winter. Maybe we’ve shot ‘em out in these parts, like the do-gooders back East say we have. I came on a herd last week, thought they might be the vanguard, as of yore, but they blew right through with nothing followin’ along behind. Not all that many of ‘em, really. Headin’ to join their kinfolk across the Red. All noses pointin’ southwest for Texas—the Yarner. There’s still plenty of shaggies down that way, for sure.”

The “Yarner” was what Texicans called the Llano Estacado, the Staked Plain of the Texas Panhandle. Southerners like Raleigh were damned if they’d wrap their tongues around foreign words.

“But Texas is way across the Dead Line,” Otto said. “The government says we can’t hunt them down there. The Army will stop us.”

“No, it won’t, old son.”

Raleigh turned in the darkness and smiled at Otto. His teeth looked luminous in the brittle light of the stars.

“Wright Mooar and John Webb went down below the Cimarron to the Yarner this summer, or early fall, it might of been. They went right across the Dead Line, through the Indian Territory, and clear to the North Fork of the Canadian, then west across Wolf Creek. Nary a soldier boy interfered with ‘em. They saw buff like in the old days. There’s another whole herd down there, big anyways as the Republican River herd we’ve been killin’ these past few years. By treaty it’s Lo’s herd, I guess, but what the hell. The Medicine Lodge Treaty’s goin’ to get broken just like all the rest of ‘em. Mooar and Webb went back up to Kansas and talked to Colonel Dodge at the fort. Asked him straight out, they did, asked what’d happen if the bluelegs caught buffalo runners south of the Deadline. The Colonel, he just looked out the window. Said, ‘Boys, if I was huntin’ buffalo, I’d hunt where the buffalo are.’”

He slapped Otto on the shoulder. “How do you like that, Black Hat?”

“I like it fine,” Otto said. “I just have to wonder how old Satanta’s going to like it. Or Quanah or Tall Bull or Whirlwind, for that matter. There’s Apaches and Kiowas, Comanches and Cheyennes and Arapahos galore down there, all on the prod, not to mention the so-called Civilized Tribes. If we start on their buff, it’ll be hell to pay and the pitch not hot.”

“You worry too much, old son. What the hell, we’re here to make money, aren’t we?”

A
T DAWN
M
C
K
AY
and Otto caught their horses and rode out to kill buffalo. The horses puffed smoke as they trotted away and a thick hoarfrost rimed the prairie. Milo Sykes, a wiry, sourmouthed Georgian with muddy eyes, rode after them in the skinner’s wagon. Deep pockmarks on his cheeks gave his face the texture of a walnut. A strange old coon, Otto thought. Skinny as a skeeter hawk, his chin hobnobbing with the tip of his pointy nose, Milo always walked or rode with his head bent forward, looking at the ground. When he spoke, which was rarely, his voice had a high, dry, whining quality, like fingernails on slate.

Tom Shields stayed in camp to poison and repeg the damp hides and help Jenny through her first morning. The sun rose white in the east, promising a fair day. Jenny straggled out of the tent and collected what dry sticks she could from under the cottonwoods. Not many.

A number of trees had been snapped off at their boles by last night’s storm. She went to the tent and found the ax. She began splitting spear-shaped slabs of heartwood from the cottonwood stumps, carrying them back to the tent in her apron. She kindled a fire with her few dry twigs and quickly piled thin slivers of heartwood upon the flames. In a short while she had a good blaze crackling. The heat of the fire felt good. She clapped her hands and said,
“Juch-he!”
A whoop of triumph.

“My mother used to say that.”

She turned and found Tom Shields behind her. He was smiling his nice smile again.

“Well then,” Jenny said brightly, “she must have been German!
Kannst du Deutsch
, Tom?”

“Oh no, just a bit.
Nur a bissel?
I understand it better than I talk it. She used to speak that lingo to me when I was very small. Before she died, you know.”

“You can’t have been that young, if you remember some of it.”

“Well, I was little then,” he said, suddenly embarrassed. “You remember a lot from when you’re little.” He turned and walked away to busy himself with the hides. Jenny wondered what had set him off this time. Perhaps his mother had died when he was older than he said. Maybe it was too painful for him to think about her and that’s why he pretended he couldn’t speak German. Perhaps she’s still alive and he’s afraid that if the Army finds out, they’ll go and rescue her . . .

Two magpies swooped down from the cottonwoods and began squabbling over a chunk of buffalo suet she had placed by the fire. They leaped in the air in a flurry of white wing patches and struck at each other like gamecocks, screaming indignantly. She ran to shoo them off, but they’d ruined the suet anyway. She threw the battle-scarred remnant after them. Who knew what those filthy beaks had been into last—probably a rotting buffalo carcass. She placed a fresh piece in the sunlight, next to the fire, and covered it with a large curl of cottonwood bark. That should keep the pirates off. She was softening the suet to make dough. It would be saleratus bread, because she hadn’t had a chance last night to mix up a batch of sourdough. She had brought along from Wisconsin the family “barm,” which Mutti said dated back to the dawn of time, there in the Old Country, perhaps (Vati added sarcastically) to the days of the Nibelungs. Jenny carried the fabled starter West in a patented Mason jar, a big one. But today she would merely bake bread and hard rolls, and perhaps a pie with some of the fresh apples she’d bought before they left Dodge.

But what for meat? The antelope was finished and she was sure that Raleigh and Sykes were tired of buffalo hump.

After setting her dough to rise and rigging the sheet-metal reflector oven to heat over the fire, she tidied up the tent, then placed a tub of water beside the oven to heat. Tom showed her where a spring lay hidden in the jumbled rocks near camp, so she needn’t use the water they’d brought along in barrels. She found a lopsided square of hard, dry, homemade soap, took her vegetable grater from the big wooden crate that contained the cooking utensils, and grated the soap into flakes, catching them in an empty hardtack box. She would wash the men’s clothes later. She liked washing. The smell of it, the soft feel of hot soapy water. Her mother had hated washing clothes. Perhaps she would, too, in time.

Jenny had noticed Otto’s shotgun case lying in the tent. Maybe she’d mosey out through the grasslands beyond the alkali flat and try for a few prairie hens. They would make a nice change from buffalo for the men. She could hear Raleigh and Otto shooting now, not more than a mile or two from camp, it sounded. The chance of Hostiles nearby was remote, Raleigh had said. But Tom insisted on coming with her anyway on her bird hunt, just to be on the safe side.

It was a fine morning, crisp and bright, and beyond the alkali flat the prairie seemed to roll on forever. Small birds sang and flittered through the swaying grass. An animal she recognized as a badger shuffled away on short, bowed legs. It was paler than the badgers she’d seen in Wisconsin, with an upturned snout and small, beady black eyes, dirty white stripes down its sides. She thought that badgers came out only at dusk, and perhaps that was true in populous Wisconsin, where the beast was hunted mercilessly for its stiff, thick bristles, which were used to make shaving brushes, but apparently on the Buffalo Range, where they had little contact with men, they roamed around in daylight as well.

Well, they would learn better.

“Why didn’t you shoot it?” Tom Shields asked.

“What for?” she said. “You can’t eat them.”

He laughed, puzzled, and shook his head. Apparently her way of thinking was as indecipherable to Tom as his was to her.

“Indians eat ‘em,” he said finally. “At least the Sa-sis-e-tas do. They’re not bad. But the badger is very powerful, too, very wise. You can use him as a looking glass, to see the future.”

“How do you do that?”

“Well, if a war party comes across a badger they’ll kill it and take its guts out, then lay it on its back in a bed of white sage. The blood pools up inside there, you know, and come morning, they go by the badger and look at their reflection in the blood. If they see themselves white-haired and wrinkled, they’ll live to be old. If they see themselves skinny and pale, they’re going to die from some sickness. If they’re going to die in this raid, their eyes will be closed. If they’re going to be scalped, their heads will be bald and bloody. You know, like that.”

“Did you ever try it?”

He looked at her and smiled a little, then nodded.

“Well, what did you see, Tom?”

He laughed and would not tell her, and they walked on.

“T
HERE THEY ARE
,” Tom said quietly, crouching suddenly beside her. She followed suit.

“Where? What?”

“Wikis”
he said. “Birds. You stay here, I’ll sneak around behind them and make them come to you.”

He disappeared on his belly into the grass, quiet as a housecat. She waited. She could hear rustling ahead of her, then saw some movement—quick forms like elongated chickens, barred brown and white, scuttling through the dense stems. She cocked the double hammers of the shotgun. She thought of shooting into the flock while it was still on the ground, but realized she might hit Tom where he crawled somewhere behind them. Then the birds rose with a loud, slurred rattle of wings, pouring toward her low and fast over the waving seed tops. She stood and swung with the lead bird, leaning into the weight of the gun the way her brother had taught her with partridges back home, swinging on with the leader until he was abreast of her, then she pulled the forward trigger. The gun bucked tight against her shoulder—that pleasant solid thump she’d grown to enjoy, clear down to her toes. She continued to swing around through the billowing white smoke, the momentum of the heavy barrels carrying her around smoothly, following two birds close together toward the rear of the flock. Fired again as they went away . . .

Tom whooped. It was the same whoop she’d heard when he killed the Shoshone horse thieves.

“You shoot good!” he said. He came toward her with a wide, happy, white man’s smile. “Two shots, four birds! I never seen a woman shoot so good.” He held two of them aloft, then stooped to pick up the remaining pair. “I can’t shoot ‘em that good, not when they’re flying.”

“The shot pattern must have spread just right,” she said, pleased at his praise. “I only fired at two. But Otto taught me how to swing with them, and he must have taught me well. Up north, you know.”

Tom carried the gun on the way into camp. He killed two more prairie hens, but only as they were running on the ground ahead of them. Back at the tent, he cleaned the gun while Jenny plucked and drew the birds. She hung them head down in the shade of a giant gnarled cottonwood. Remembering the magpies, she covered the grouse with burlap sacking. Tom ate some cold hump and hardtack, swallowed the last of the morning’s coffee, then hitched up the ox team and rolled out to help with the day’s skinning.