Tie My Bones to Her Back (12 page)

“How old?”

“From the rust, maybe two years, or less. Hard to say. More if it’s been dry down here.”

“You talk ‘rapaho?”

“Little bit,” Tom said. “We can always talk signs, though.”

“The Cheyenne and the Arapaho are pals,” Raleigh said as they rode away. “They don’t speak the same lingo, but they camp, hunt, and make war together, have for ages. Anyway, whatever the ‘raps did to that wagon happened too long ago for us to worry about it.”

But for the rest of the afternoon Jenny imagined Arapahos over every rise.

T
OWARD EVENING THEY
began to see buffalo, scattered bands at first that fled on sight of them. Then larger gatherings, mostly cows and ungainly, half-grown calves. The calves were a dirty yellowy-red color, like cinnamon, their humps already forming, tiny black horns just beginning to sprout. The farther southwest they rode, the calmer the buffalo seemed. At one point Jenny topped a rise to find a small herd standing not three hundred yards away. She reined Vixen in and waited, watching them. Raleigh, who had been riding behind her, now came up quietly on foot. She saw that his horse stood, its reins dropped on the grass, just under the reverse slope of the swell.

“Ease on back,” Raleigh whispered, placing his palm over Vixen’s muzzle. “Down out of sight behind the hill.” He walked them both to cover, slowly and quietly. She slid out of the saddle.

“Just about time to make camp,” Raleigh said softly. “This bunch looks good for a stand. Wind’s right, from them to us. Come on up with me and see how we do it.” He smiled, close beside her. “Maybe I’ll let you shoot one, Miss Jenny.”

They slipped up to the crest again through the blowing grass, crouched low in the dusk. Raleigh had his rifle and shooting sticks in one hand. With the other he held Jenny’s. His palm and fingers were hot and damp. Or maybe hers were. In a little sag of the hilltop, he pulled her down and lay there beside her. The buffalo still seemed undisturbed, some lying catlike on folded forelegs, some grazing quietly. One larger cow looked up now and then to scan the grasslands and sniff deeply.

“That’s the leader,” Raleigh whispered. “An old cow, as usual. They’re the wariest. If I can drop her, first shot, we might could do it.”

He laid his cartridge belt in the grass close at hand, then slowly sat up to spread his shooting sticks, secured near the top with a wrap of rawhide to form a V-shaped bipod. He eased the barrel of the Sharps out into the V, cocked the hammer, and leaned forward, kneeling, to snug the sights on target. His finger closed on the trigger . . .

Whump!

Jenny saw dust puff from the old cow’s side, about a handspan behind the shoulder. The cow jumped forward a step or two. She coughed. Gagged. Stopped abruptly as bright ropes of blood spilled from her mouth and nostrils. Then she stepped back a pace. She stepped forward again and leaned to sniff at the curious stuff, pawed at it tentatively. More blood poured from her mouth and nostrils.

The rest of the herd had looked up at the shot, watching her, prepared to run if she ran. Now they, too, walked over to sniff the blood, which still poured from the cow’s nose with every breath. She stamped impatiently. Two young bull calves started hooking her with their spike-like horns, then suddenly turned on one another in mock combat. The stricken cow went to her knees. Her haunches gave way, her head swayed slowly to the ground. She seemed to fall asleep.

Raleigh had quickly worked the lever that formed the rifle’s trigger guard, ejecting the spent case. He threw a fresh shell into the breech and closed the lever with a sharp clack.

Whump!

Another cow leaped at the shot, spewed blood, then dropped to her knees. The herd wheeled in disorder, confused, leaderless. Too much, all at once. A younger cow suddenly came to her senses and started to run.

Click, clack.

Whump!

Raleigh stopped the fleeing cow in her tracks with a quartering shot that knocked her sideways. She skidded on her nose through the grass. Flailed around for a moment. Tried to rise, then collapsed.

“Your brother showed me that shot,” Raleigh said. “Pretty, wasn’t it?”

W
HEN ALL WERE
down but one of the bull calves, which stood gazing in wonderment at the carnage around him, Raleigh turned to Jenny.

“Your turn?”

“Lieber Jesus, aber nein
—no!”

She rose stiffly to her feet and started downhill.

“Well then, it’s the lobo’s night to howl, for sure,” Raleigh said. “No mama to protect him, that poor little feller’s a goner. Just as you wish, ma’am. You just ankle on back to the horses. Don’t pay it no heed. I’ll pop the little chap, save him havin’ his guts tore out when the wolves catch him.”

Jenny stopped.

“I’ll do it,” she said.

He rolled to one side and Jenny slipped in behind the Sharps. She knelt on one knee. The bull calf went over to one of the cows and began to bawl. He hooked at her and tried to wedge his head under her flank, to get at her udder. But the cow lay dead and heavy. Jenny’s throat caught. She felt tears sting behind her eyelids.

She had killed many farm animals—chickens, ducks, sheep, pigs, steers—all of them without a qualm. That was their
Schicksal
, their fate, what
Herr Gott
intended for them. To feed men and women. Yes, she had killed grouse, wild turkeys, many deer, and once—in the autumn beech woods, and unforgettable, a great black bear—but that was in the heat of the chase. This was different. It was murder. Worse yet, the murder of an orphan . . .

The cinnamon calf butted and bawled. He was getting angry at his mother for ignoring him. He knew nothing of death.

Jenny lifted the butt of the rifle to her shoulder. Heavy, heavy. The bipod was set too high for her, so she adjusted it, inching the sticks through the grass. Then she looked through the tang-mounted peep sight. The cinnamon calf stood behind the cow, half obscured by its mother’s body.

Jenny steeled herself, took a deep breath, and whistled, once, sharply, through her teeth.

The bull calf looked up.

She saw his face through the peep sight, eyes wide.

She held her breath. Laid the sights on the base of his throat.

She neither heard nor felt the shot, nor did she look to see where the bullet hit. She opened the breech, threw the spent case clear with a musical
ting
, and left the rifle resting in its bipod, muzzle pointing aimlessly into the red westward sky. She walked back down the slope.

Tom Shields was on his way up, whetting the edge of a skinning knife against his steel. He smiled and raised his eyebrows.

“You get one?”

She grunted and walked on past him, not meeting his eyes.

In camp that night she sorted through her clothing. Selected an old ankle-length gray woolen skirt. Cut gores from it, front and back; then, with a needle and heavy thread from her housewife, stitched it into a pair of loose-legged trousers. She was long at her work, beside the fire. Otto and Raleigh turned in early. Tom was out watching the horses. Milo lay in his blankets, watching her with blank, mudpie eyes. They made her feel—
ja, schmutzig.
As if she needed a bath. Then Milo, too, fell asleep, snoring lightly and grinding his teeth with a sound like an emery wheel.

9

R
ALEIGH POURED SOME
more whiskey into his tin cup. It was a good, smooth, red Kentucky bourbon; he kept a keg of it in his wagon, usually having just a drink or two at the end of a hard day’s killing. But this night, camped among buffalo on the headwaters of Wolf Creek between the North and South Branches of the Canadian, with Milo Sykes on watch, Tom Shields and Otto reloading cartridges, and Jenny knitting quietly beside the fire, he had had more than one or two belts. These recriminatory binges—“high lonesomes” Otto called them—occurred, as best Otto could tell, about once every couple of months, Raleigh drinking himself ever deeper into guilt. Imagined sins. . .

“I can, too, be sure,” he said now. “I had him square in my sights. That old .577 Enfield shot true. Have you ever known me to miss, especially at such a range as that? Bead right smack on his chest; then just as I touched off, he twisted to his right, pulling back on that hammerhead pony. His left shoulder took the shot.”

“You sound almost proud of it,” Jenny said.

“Huh?” ‘

“Proud of killing Stonewall Jackson, the South’s greatest general, proud of losing the war. Why else do you go on about it so?”

“Like hell, if you’ll pardon me, ma’am. I never was proud of it . . .”

“Then why?”

Silence. Raleigh reached for his cup, drained it, went over to the tent, and drew another dram or two.

“We could of won,” he said, when he returned.

“I don’t think so,” Jenny said. “Mere generalship . . .”

“You don’t know the first thing about war,” Raleigh said. “Do you know maneuver? Do you know surprise? Do you even know how Blue Light brought it off there at Chancellorsville? Here . . .”

With the haft of his skinning knife, he sketched the battle plan in the dirt beside the fire ring. The coiling Rappahannock. Hooker’s Union line deployed near the hairpin of U.S. Ford. Lee’s main body a series of dashes in the dirt, facing Hooker, pinning him in position. Then the sweeping arc of Jackson’s long march from Catherine Furnace to Dowdall’s Tavern around Hooker’s right flank, following farm tracks and an unfinished railroad-bed through the Wilderness on out to where Oliver Otis Howard’s Hessian division was digging in “with its bum in the air,” as Raleigh gleefully put it—a drove of Dutchmen from New York and Pennsylvania dangling out there all by themselves, with no single feature of terrain, neither river nor hill nor swamp, to anchor their vulnerable flank. The mortal sin of defense. Worse than a mortal sin, for that can be absolved with adequate penance. The
unforgivable
sin. Then Jackson shaking his corps out into line abreast, there in the woods, as the sun sank ever closer to the horizon.

“By God it was great,” Raleigh said, his eyes electric beside the fire. “Here’s us hid in the woods”—he thumped the dirt with his knife haft—”with the Bluebellies down there below us—no offense, Black Hat, but you boys called us Graybacks, didn’t you, like unto some lowly vermin?—their rifles all neatly stacked, you see, Miss Jenny, the mess sergeants gettin’ their cookfires goin’, big Dutch butchers with their shirts off slaughterin’ beeves to fry up for supper, other Dutchmen choppin’ trees for breastworks, still others playin’ cards or smokin’ or singin’ songs of home and mother, one gang on toward the back just lazily knockin’ a baseball around, and couriers gallopin’ hither and yon, and work parties diggin’ latrines like as if you Bluebellies was there to stay. All convinced Bobby Lee was retreatin’. But we was all set, near on twenty-six thousand of infantry in butternut and gray, stacked in a line two miles wide, astraddle the turnpike, everyone locked and loaded, bayonets bristlin’, and we moved out.
O grand, grand!
Deer and rabbits spooked out ahead of us, warblers and sparrows and a flock of wild turkeys even, out of the cat briars and the steepletop brush. When the Yankees seen the animals come into your lines, some of ‘em whooped and hollered, runnin’ for their ramrods, lookin’ for to pot a nice bit of meat, others wavin’ their caps like they was spectatin’ at a parade. Hah! they shut up, though, soon as they seen us, you bet you—skedaddlin’ hell-for-leather away as we come a-crashin’ down the hill. Some of ‘em slashin’ the knapsack straps off their backs as they ran, I seen it. And all of us cornin’ on, bayonets flashin’, barefoot and awful and whoopin’ that grand old caterwaul . . .”

He gave a joyous, drunken rebel yell, which startled Milo Sykes and set the horses and mules all a-flutter. Then Raleigh drank off his cup once more, grinning awfully and wonderfully, whiskey trickling down his chin.

Jenny felt a stab of fear. Not from the rebel yell, but from the wild look of him—a vein pulsing thick on his forehead, his hectic cheeks, the palpable heat pouring off him in waves that matched his rapid pulse. He was living it all again. His blood was up. He had ignited. Now she knew how men looked in war. She had seen the same fire in the eyes of a pair of battling bulls, at home in Wisconsin, slamming and hooking into each other even as their lifeblood flowed away, unheeded. Vati could never have felt that hot. Had Otto lit up that way in his battles?
Herr Gott
, but of course . . .

T
OM
S
HIELDS SAT
at the edge of the firelight, listening. He liked to hear Captain McKay speak of the war. Captain McKay fired up like a Cheyenne Elk Soldier. Tom could feel, even at a distance, the captain’s joyous love of combat. The tactics and strategy, though, made no sense to him. He and his friends, if they were to attack an enemy, would have gone straight for him. Spent that joy directly at close quarters. Honorably. Not sneaking like cautious prairie wolves around the enemy’s rear to hit him from behind. Those tactics were better suited to stealing horses or women. Tom had heard massed gunfire of the sort the captain mentioned only once, at Sand Creek in Colorado. He had been just a boy when Chivington and his Volunteers hit the Cheyenne encampment. The spiders were likkered up plenty that morning, you could smell them coming. They fired a lot of bullets, but few of them hit. Their big weak horses charged wheezing through the village, knocking lodges askew, trampling some of the older people who could not dodge them. Recalling his own emotions at the time, Tom could honestly say he was not frightened. Cautious, yes, and quick to take cover under the bank of the creek. But not frightened. A spider trooper had ridden at him as he ran for the creek, tried to ride him down, swinging a saber at Tom’s head. Tom had calculated the horse’s approach, ducked easily under the clumsy swing, then picked up a rock and bounced it off the trooper’s head as he galloped away. It was like counting a coup. What he regretted about that morning was that he had not had the presence of mind, after dodging the saber, to leap up and snatch the reeling trooper from his horse by his long, greasy hair, then brain him with another rock and lift his scalp. It was reddish-yellow hair, rather like Captain McKay’s, and though the Cheyennes rarely took spider scalps, because white soldiers wore their hair too short, this one would have looked good on a lodgepole. Perhaps one day he’d get another chance.