“I just spoke to Sally,” I said.
He gave me a look.
“And if anything happens, I will make certain things known.”
“I’ll see you boys this evening,” he told the men. They got up as one and left.
“Whatever you are about to say, do not say it. In fact do not even think it.”
“Stop her from coming.”
“I have nothing to do with that,” he said.
I shook my head.
“Anyone but that girl, Pete. In fact I would like it if you got every wetback in town pregnant, because unless I am given a proper Goodnighting, my days of prodding are over, and I could use a few more heirs.”
“We have nothing to worry about from María,” I said.
“I know that.”
“Then tell Sally to stay away.”
“You know, if you were a Comanche you could just cut Sally’s nose off, and throw her out, and get married to the new one.”
“Her name is María.”
“Unfortunately you are not a Comanche. You are subject to the laws of America. Which means you should have gotten rid of Sally before signing this other one on.”
“I’m embarrassed for you.”
“The feeling is mutual,” he told me.
“S
O YOUR WIFE
is returning?”
I look at her; there is no point denying it. “Don’t worry about her,” I say.
She shrugs. I can see she has been crying. “I knew it had to end sometime.”
“It doesn’t,” I say.
She turns from me.
I try to hug her but she shakes me off. “It’s fine,” she says.
“It’s not fine.”
“I will be fine.”
I realize she is not even talking to me.
A
FTER SHE FELL
asleep I took a bottle of whiskey and walked out into the chaparral until I reached Dog Mountain, which is nothing more than a large hill, though it is the tallest around. At the top is a large rock with a backrest cut or hacked into the stone and I climbed up and lay against it. The house was a mile or so behind me; I could see a few lights, but otherwise, it was dark.
When I had sat long enough I began to get a strange feeling. This has always been a warm place and men had likely sat on this exact rock for ten thousand years at least, as it provides the best view of the surrounding country. How many families had come and gone? Before there were men there was a vast ocean, and I knew that far beneath me there were living creatures turning to stone.
I thought of my brother, who has always pitied me for my temperament, who spends his life inside, obsessed with his papers and bank accounts. When the agarito ripens he can’t smell it, when the first windflowers bloom he will not see them. As for my father, he sees everything. But only so he can destroy it.
A
UGUST 7, 1917
Sally arrived this morning. She kissed me politely on the cheek, then greeted María. “Nice to see you again, neighbor.” Then she laughed and said: “This heat can make for strange living arrangements.”
She said she would take a bedroom on the other side of the house and had her things brought up there.
Meanwhile, I was supposed to spend the day with Sullivan, as we have hired a crew to do more cross-fencing.
I intended to tell him he would have to do it without me, but María assured me it would be fine.
“Your wife and I are going to have to be alone at some point. Better sooner than later.”
W
E MET THE
crew at the gate and drove to the middle of the ranch, explaining what we wanted done. Gates here and here and there . . . after a few hours I was so antsy my hands were shaking. I told Sullivan I had to go.
Back at the house, Phineas’s Pierce Arrow was parked in the driveway. I got a terrible feeling. Phineas, Sally, and my father were all sitting in the parlor, waiting.
I went from room to room, calling for her, the kitchen, the great room, the library, then searched every closet. Consuela was in my bedroom, stripping the sheets off the bed. She would not speak. I went back downstairs and found the three of them still sitting there.
Sally said: “María has decided to go back to her own people.”
“I am her people.”
“Apparently she felt differently.”
“If you hurt her,” I said, “either one of you,” looking at Sally and my father, “I will kill you.”
They looked at each other and something crossed their faces, some expression of humor. If I’d had a pistol, they both would have died an instant later. There was a red mist and I took my jackknife out of its sheath, opened it, and stepped toward my wife.
“I will cut your fucking throat,” I told her. She smiled and I stepped closer and she lost all her color.
“And you,” I said, pointing the knife at my brother. “Did you know about this?”
“Pete,” he said, “we offered her ten thousand dollars to move back with her cousin in Torreón. She decided to take it.”
“Her cousin is dead.”
“She knows other people down there.”
“Where is she now?”
“She’s in a car.”
“Son,” said my father, “it’s for the best.”
I went upstairs to my office. I loaded my pistol and was making my way down the hall when I saw the dark figure, leaning on the banister, waiting for me. The sunlight was on him and I stood for a long time watching: first he had a face like my father’s, then it was my own, then it was something else.
I went back to my desk.
Waiting for them to make the car ready. Leave for Torreón in an hour.
Eli McCullough
June 1865
T
he Federals stuck to our tracks all winter and by Christmas we’d lost half our number. It was plain that if we didn’t leave Kansas we would all end up either shot or hanged; Flying Jacket and the remaining Cherokees decided to absquatulate west to the Rockies. The five RMN men—Busque, Showalter, Fisk, Shaw, and me—decided to go with them. The last we’d heard was Sherman had taken Georgia. If there were other bands of Confederates, we’d stopped running into them.
T
HE
C
HEROKEES COLLECTED
a few Ute scalps but we avoided the Federals entirely, camping at tree line and generally sticking to the owl-hoot trail until one afternoon in the Bayou Salado we chassed into a small regiment. Normally this would have sent us scurrying over the next ridge, but there were two dozen wagons for only a few hundred men, and they all had eight-mule hitches, and this was not lost on Flying Jacket, either. We hunkered in the rocks and watched them.
“They are pulling something heavy,” he said.
I stayed quiet. I knew exactly what they were carrying but unless Flying Jacket agreed with me, it was pointless. He was near fifty and he’d insisted on being called a colonel and that’s why they made me one as well. He wore his jacket with the oak leaves even when it was a hundred degrees out.
“They’re going to the assay office in Denver,” I said. The war had been nothing like I thought—even the judge was nearly bankrupt—but the longer I watched the wagons, the more I wondered if something might yet be saved from the wreckage. I thought about Toshaway and the raid we’d made into Mexico and I could not see why this was any different.
“If they’re not carrying hides,” Flying Jacket was saying. “Or timber. Or, who knows, perhaps they’re simply that strong now. Perhaps they ride this way for fun.”
“Well, they won’t make the pass at that pace. They’ll have to camp on that bench.”
We continued to watch. The men riding the wagons got off to walk as the road got steeper. It was gold country and they were pulling something heavy. Of course, it could have been anything. But Flying Jacket was coming around.
“I hope we don’t go in and find it’s just a pile of rocks.”
“If we do,” said Flying Jacket, “it will just be a continuation of my entire life.”
He called a few Cherokees over and they talked. Then he turned back to me.
“This cannon they are pulling?”
“Probably a mountain howitzer.”
“With canister shot, if they are worried about being robbed.”
“Yes, but they only have one shot, and they will be firing into their own men.”
“And yet it is strange,” he said.
T
HEY MADE THEIR
camp where we thought they would. There were butterflies in the grass, a hundred-mile view of the mountains, a cold stream running past them. We were at the tree line. It was rocks and dust. The Union men were relaxed, taking their time to set up their tents, making bets on the bighorn sheep, which were white dots on cliffs high above them. A few had Sharps rifles. Once in a while one of the white dots would come tumbling off the mountain, looking like a falling snowman.
A
LL THE BOYS
were against it. Except for Showalter, who was down with the Indians, we were on our bellies in the rocks, passing the field glasses back and forth.
“This might be a persimmon above our huckleberry,” said Fisk.
“Well,” I said, “it’s what the Indians want, and it’s what Jeff Davis wants, and it’s what we’re going to do.”
“Listen to the fire-eater. The living legend.”
Shaw said: “May I humbly suggest to the boss that his attitude is outdated. By about four years.”
I passed the glasses to Fisk. He was the oldest of us; he had a big family back in Refugio.
“This is a dumb idea.” He began to wiggle back down through the rocks.
“Where are you going?”
“I gotta write a letter,” he said.
“Same here,” said Shaw. “Let me know if y’all change your mind. Otherwise you’ll find me and my horse heading down that draw we came up.”
I looked at him.
“I’ll be back at the camp,” he said. But he wasn’t smiling.
Then it was only Busque and me.
“What do
you
think,” I said.
“I think it’s stupid.”
“It’ll be high livin’ if it goes off.”
“You know they’ll find some way to take it off us.”
“That is a sorry attitude.”
“It’s time to piss on the fire and call the dogs, Eli. For all we know, Jeff Davis is already a cottonwood blossom.”
I didn’t say anything.
We continued to watch the bluecoats, who had stripped down to their underwear and were lying in the grass, enjoying the sun, gambling on saddle blankets or writing in their journals. Others were skinning the sheep, getting a fire going.
“I feel sorry for those Indians,” said Busque.
W
E WATCHED AS
the Federals ate their supper, we watched them watch the sunset, we could still see them even as the first stars came out, passing around a bottle, enjoying their jobs, acting like there wasn’t any war.
Most of the tents were in a small depression, their wagons and horses on the outskirts. Around midnight we shot arrows into their pickets. Then we stampeded the horse herd through the tents and it became a proper massacre; the Federals were easy to pick out as they were all wriggling under collapsed sailcloth or looking about confusedly wearing bright white union suits. We came into the bowl from all sides, shooting with our repeaters while the Cherokees raced around, ululating and smashing heads with their flint axes. Most of the Yankees died before they even knew who was tormenting them and I began to feel sorry for them, it was not even an honest fight, and then Flying Jacket was trying to get my attention.
A dozen of the Union men, all in their underwear, had escaped to the rise where the cannon was parked. They were fetching things from a wagon, making no attempt to stiver off, and I thought they had lost their heads. Then their gun started up and I knew why they hadn’t run.
One aimed it while others worked to feed it or watched the flanks and the gun was popping so fast it was like twenty men shooting at once.
Some Cherokees made a charge on horseback and then there was a second charge. The gun had not stopped firing since it started and Shaw and Fisk and I hunkered in some scraggly brush on the other side of the meadow. The Federals were on a rise directly across from us and in the grass below were dozens of trampled tents and dead and dying men and horses and the sound of moaning like a cattle auction.
They ran out of targets. They began to work over the wounded. The moon was bright and Fisk shot a man standing near the gun and then the branches overtop of us were swaying and crackling and Shaw said, “Leon’s hit,” and went quiet.
There would be a shot from our side and the Federals would see the flash and put twenty or thirty rounds in and get their credit. Shaw’s face was dark and I reached for Fisk. He was wet. One of the Cherokees broke cover but the gun caught him, then came back to me. I pushed up against a rock no bigger than a saddletree and the bullets were slapping against it, something punched my arm, my face was stinging, and then they were working the bushes over my head. The ground all around me was flat and open and I knew my medicine had run out. I tried to remember the death song. I’d forgotten it.
The gun stopped again. Flying Jacket was yelling something. I looked for a ditch or rock or dead horse. There was a flipped wagon but it was too far, and there was an Indian behind the wagon shooting his bow nearly straight up, and then more Indians were doing the same and the air above the gun began to shilly and waver, as if there were heat from a great fire. The loaders were shrieking and calling out and then all the Indians were shooting and the gunner was alone firing blindly into the dark.
T
HE
C
HEROKEES WERE
moving among the tents, finishing off the wounded with clubs. There was an occasional shot farther down the valley.
I bandaged my arm, then I found Busque and Showalter. We went to the gun. The ground around it was stuck with hundreds of arrows—the Indians had shot them almost straight up so that they would fall on the Federals from above and there were scattered bodies with the switches sticking into them at strange angles, into the tops of their shoulders and heads.
One of the bodies began to move. A man slid out from under it. He appeared to be unhurt.
“I surrender,” he said. He held up his hands. “Are you bandits?”