Authors: Alan LeMay
And they had one more idea now. It had been spelled out for them in the loot Colonel Han-non’s troopers had picked up in the wreckage of Bluebonnet’s destroyed village. Clear and plain, once you thought of it, though it had taken them weeks of thinking back over the whole thing before they recognized it. Amos, at least, believed that this time they could not fail. They would find Debbie now—if only she still lived.
Their new plan would carry them far into the southwest into country hundreds of miles from any they had ever worked before. And so long as they had to go south, home was not too far out of the way. Home? What was that? Well, it was the place they used to live; where the Mathisons still lived—so far as they knew—and kept an eye on the cattle that now belonged to Debbie. Mart would always think of that stretch of country as home, though nothing of his own was there, nor anybody waiting for him.
As they rode, a sad, dark thing began to force itself upon their attention. When they came to the country where the farthest-west fringe of ranches had been, the ranches were no longer there. Often only a ghostly chimney stood, solitary upon the endless prairie, where once had been a warm and friendly place with people living in it. Then they would remember the time they had stopped by, and things they had eaten there, and the little jokes the people had made. If you hunted around in the brush that ran wild over all, you could usually find the graves. The remembered people were still there, under the barren ground.
More often you had to remember landmarks to locate where a place had been at all. Generally your horse stumbled over an old footing or something before you saw the flat place where the little house had been. Sometimes you found graves here, too, but more usually the people had simply pulled their house down and hauled the lumber away, retreating from a place the Peace Policy had let become too deadly, coming on top of the war. You got the impression that Texas had seen its high tide, becoming little again as its frontier thinned away. Sundown seemed to have come for the high hopes of the Lone Star Republic to which Union had brought only war, weakening blood losses, and the perhaps inevitable neglect of a defeated people.
On the morning of the last day, with Mathison’s layout only twenty-odd miles away, they came upon one more crumbling chimney, lonely beside a little stream. Mart’s eyes rested upon it contemplatively across the brush at five hundred yards without recognizing it. He was thinking what a dreadful thing it would be if they came to the Mathisons, and found no more than this left of the place, or the people. Then he saw Amos looking at him strangely, and he knew what he was looking at. Surprising that he had not known it, even though he had not been here in a long time. The chimney marked the site of the old Pauley homestead; the place where he had been born. Here the people who had brought him into the world had loved him, and cared for him; here they had built their hopes, and here they had died. How swiftly fade the dead from people’s minds, if he could look at this place and not even know it! He turned his horse and rode toward it, Amos following without question.
He had no memory of his own of how this homestead had looked, and no faintest images of his people’s faces. He had been taken over this ground, and had all explained to him when he was about eight years old, but no one had ever been willing to talk to him about it, else. And now, except for the chimney, he couldn’t locate where anything had been at all. The snow had gone off, but the ground was frozen hard, so that their heels rang metallically upon it as they dismounted to walk around. The little stream ran all year, and it had a fast ripple in it that never froze, where it passed this place; so that the water seemed to talk forever to the dead. This creek was called the Beanblossom; Mart knew that much. And that was about all.
Amos saw his bewilderment. “Your old m—your father wagoned the Santa Fe Trail a couple of times,” he said, “before he settled down. Them Santa Fe traders, if any amongst ’em died, they buried ’em ahead in the trail; so every dang ox in the train tromped over the graves. Didn’t want the Indians to catch on they were doing poorly. Or maybe dig ’em up. So your father was against markers on graves. Out here, anyways. Knowing that, and after some argument, we never set none up.”
Mart had supposed he knew where the graves were anyway. They had been plainly visible when he had been shown, but now neither mound nor depression showed where they were. The brush had advanced, and under the brush the wind and the rain of the years had filled and packed and planed and sanded the sterile earth until no trace showed anywhere of anything having crumbled to dust beneath.
Amos picked a twig and chewed it as he waded into the brush, taking cross-sightings here and there, trying to remember. “Right here,” he said finally. “This is where your mother lies.” He scraped a line with the toe of his boot, the frozen ground barely taking the mark. “Here’s the foot of the grave.” He stepped aside, and walked around on undefined space, and made another mark. “And here’s the head, here.”
A great gawky bunch of chaparral grew in the middle of what must be the side line of the grave. Mart stood staring at the bit of earth, in no way distinguishable from any other part of the prairie surface. He was trying to remember, or to imagine, the woman whose dust was there. Amos seemed to understand that, too.
“Your mother was a beautiful girl,” he said. Mart felt ashamed as he shoved out of his mind the thought that what ever she looked like, Amos would have said that same thing of the dead. “Real thin,” Amos said, mouthing his twig, “but real pretty just the same. Brown eyes, almost what you’d call black. But her hair. Red-brown, and a lot of it. With a shine in it, like a gold kind of red, when the light struck through it right. I never seen no prettier hair.”
He was silent a few moments, as if to let Mart think for a decent interval about the mother he did not remember. Then Amos got restless, and measured off a long step to the side. “And this here’s Ethan—your father,” he said. “You favor him, right smart. He had a black-Welsh streak; marked his whole side of the family. It’s from him you got your black look and them mighty-near crockery eyes. He was just as dark, with the same light eyes.”
Amos turned a little, and chewed the twig, but didn’t bother to pace off the locations of the others. “Alongside lies my brother—mine and Henry’s brother. The William you’ve heard tell of so many, many times. I don’t know why, but in the family, we never once did call him Bill.... William was the best of us. The best by far. Good looking as Henry, and strong as me. And the brains of the family—there they lie, right there. He could been governor, or anything. Except he was less than your age—just eighteen….” Mart didn’t let himself question the description, even in his mind. You could assume that the first killed in a family of boys was the one who would have been great. It was what they told you always.
“Beyond, the three more—next to William lies Cash Dennison, a young rider, helping out Ethan; then them two bullwhackers that lived out the wagon-train killing, and made it to here. One’s name was Caruthers, from a letter in his pocket; I forget the other. Some blamed them for the whole thing—thought the Comanches come down on this place a-chasing them two. But I never thought that. Seems more like the Comanch’ was coming here; and it was the wagon train they fell on by accident on their way.”
“You got any notion—does anybody know—did they get many of the Comanches? Here, the night of this thing?”
Amos shook his head. “A summer storm come up. A regular cloudburst—you don’t see the like twice in twenty year. It washed out the varmints’ trail. And naturally they carried off their dead—such as there was. Nobody knows how many. Maybe none.”
Waste, thought Mart. Useless, senseless, heartbreaking waste. All these good, fine, happy lives just thrown away....
Once more Amos seemed to answer his thought. “Mart, I don’t know as I ever said this to anybody. But it’s been a long time; and I’ll tell you now what I think. My family’s gone now, too—unless and until we find our one last little girl. But we lived free of harm, and the Mathisons too, for full eighteen years before they struck our bunch again. You want to know what I think why? I think your people here bought that time for us. They paid for it with their lives.”
“Wha-at?” No matter what losses his people had inflicted on the raiders, Comanches would never be stopped by that. They would come back to even the score, and thus the tragic border war went on forever. But that wasn’t what Amos meant.
“I think this was a revenge raid,” Amos said. “It was right here the Rangers come through, trailing old Iron Shirt’s band. They cut that bunch down from the strongest there was to something trifling, and killed Iron Shirt himself. So the trail the Rangers followed that time had a black history for Comanches. They come down it just once in revenge for their dead—and Ethan’s little place was the farthest out on this trail. And it was a whole Indian generation before they come again. That’s why I say—your people bought them years the rest of us lived in peace....”
Mart said. “It’s been a long time. Do you think my father would mind now if I come and put markers on them graves? Would that be a foolishness after all this while?”
Amos chewed, eating his twig. “I don’t believe he’d mind. Not now. Even could he know. I think it would be a right nice thing to do. I’ll help you soon’s we have a mite of time.” He turned toward the horses, but Mart wanted to know one thing more that no one had ever told him.
“I don’t suppose—” he said—“well, maybe you might know. Could you show me where I was when Pa found me in the brush?”
“Your Pa? When?”
“I mean Henry. He always stood in place of my own. I heard tell he found me, and picked me up....”
Amos looked all around, and walked into the brush, chewing slowly, and taking sights again. “Here,” he said at last. “I’m sure now. Right— exactly—here.” The frost in the earth crackled as he ground a heel into the spot he meant. “Of course, then, the brush was cleared back. To almost this far from the house.” He stood around a moment to see if Mart wanted to ask anything more, then walked off out of the brush toward the horses.
This place, this very spot he stood on, Mart thought, was where he once awoke alone in such terror as locked his throat, seemingly; they had told him he made no sound. Queer to stand here, in this very spot where he had so nearly perished before he even got started; queer, because he felt nothing. It was the same as when he had stood looking at the graves, knowing that what was there should have meant so much, yet had no meaning for him at all. He couldn’t see anything from here that looked familiar, or reminded him of anything.
Of course, that night of the massacre, he hadn’t been standing up better than six feet tall in his boots. He had been down in the roots of the scrub, not much bigger than his own foot was now. On an impulse, Mart lay down in the tangle, pressing his cheek against the ground, to bring his eyes close to the roots.
A bitter chill crept along the whole length of his body. The frozen ground seemed to drain the heat from his blood, and the blood from his heart itself. Perhaps it was that, and knowing where he was, that accounted for what happened next. Or maybe scars, almost as old as he was, were still in existence down at the bottom of his mind, long buried under everything that had happened in between. The sky seemed to darken, while a ringing, buzzing sound came into his ears, and when the sky was completely black it began to redden with a bloody glow. His stomach dropped from under his heart, and a horrible fear filled him—the fear of a small helpless child, abandoned and alone in the night. He tried to spring up and out of that, and he could not move; he lay there rigid, seemingly frozen to the ground. Behind the ringing in his ears began to rise the unearthly yammer of the terror-dream—not heard, not even remembered, but coming to him like an awareness of something happening in some unknown dimension not of the living world.
He fought it grimly, and slowly got hold of himself; his eyes cleared, and the unearthly voices died, until he heard only the hammering of his heart. He saw, close to his eyes, the stems of the chaparral; and he was able to move again, stiffly, with his muscles shaking. He turned his head, getting a look at the actual world around him again. Then, through a rift in the brush that showed the creek bank, he saw the death tree.
Its base was almost on a level with his eyes, at perhaps a hundred feet; and for one brief moment it seemed to swell and tower, writhing its corpse-withered arms. His eyes stayed fixed upon it as he slowly got up and walked toward it without volition, as if it were the only thing possible to do. The thing shrunk as he approached it, no longer towering over him twice his size as it had seemed to do wherever he had seen it before. Finally he stood within arm’s length; and now it was only a piece of weather-silvered wood in a tormented shape, a foot and a half shorter than himself.
An elongated knot at the top no longer looked like a distorted head, but only a symbol representing the hideous thing he had imagined there. He lashed out and struck it, hard, with the heel of his right hand. The long-rotted roots broke beneath the surface of the soil; and a twisted old stump tottered, splashed in the creek, and went spinning away.
Mart shuddered, shaking himself back together; and he spoke aloud. “I’ll be a son-of-a-bitch,” he said; and rejoined Amos. If he still looked shaken up, Amos pretended not to notice as they mounted up.
Martin Pauley was taken by another fit of shyness as they approached the Mathison ranch. He was a plainsman now, a good hunter, and a first-class Indian scout. But the saddle in which he lived had polished nothing about him but the seat of his leather pants.
“I tried to leave you back,” Amos reminded him. “A couple of burr-matted, sore-backed critters we be. You got a lingo on you like a Caddo whiskey runner. You know that, don’t you?”
Mart said he knew it.
“Our people never did have much shine,” Amps said. “Salt of the earth, mind you; no better anywhere. But no book learning, like is born right into them Mathisons. To us, grammar is nothing but grampaw’s wife.”