Black Hills (9781101559116) (2 page)

“There may come a time when you'll need a gun, and if you do, you'll need it right then and there; you'll not likely have time to fetch it.” Lulled by the peacefulness that had become their life, try as she might, she just could not take the warning seriously. To appease her husband, she had learned how to use it and could shoot straight if she didn't have to shoot too far. Although she carried it around with her, it was awkward and heavy and usually left leaning against something in her vicinity: a tree, a rock, a sack of potatoes, or it remained in the rifle scabbard on her saddle. It was there now, under the tree at the far end of the field. If only she had listened to him.

A huge, filthy, fat, and ugly man with a large, jagged scar running down the side of his face from his forehead to his chin rode a few feet in front of the others. He smiled a nasty smile, showing crooked, tobacco-stained teeth. Cormac's mother knew the breath coming out of that mouth would be vile.

“This is your lucky day, lady,” he snarled at her. Then, turning his head and nodding toward Becky, he told the other riders, “You can have her. This one's all mine.”

“Run kids!” Amanda Lynch screamed, and broke toward the rifle. It was too far away, but she had to try. Running had always come easily for her. She had won many foot races against her girlfriends in the eastern schools she had attended, but that had not been in the soft dirt of a freshly plowed potato field.

The man's horse was too small for him and near exhaustion from carrying his weight too far and too fast with too little rest, but it was still faster than Cormac's mother, and it quickly cut her off. No matter which way she tried to run, the horse was in front of her. It had, at one time, been a good cattle-cutting horse. Like a cat toying with a caught bird, the man was toying with her, knowing he could do anything he wanted, whenever he wanted. Becky screamed behind her. A realist, she accepted the fact that she would not be allowed to get to the gun. She stopped trying to run and faced her tormentor.

“Please,” she begged. “You and your men can do anything you want to me, and I'll do whatever you want if you'll leave my daughter alone.”

Her tormentor reined his horse to a stop in front of her and looked down, his eyes slowly ravaging up and down her body.

“Lady,” he growled, “I'm going to do anything I want to you anyway, and you'll damn well do anything I tell you. And you ain't goin' to be so damned prissy-purty when I'm done with ya. Women like you always think you're so damned special and don't want anything to do with people like me. Well, today you're going to have a lot to do with me. 'Sides, taint likely they'd stop even if I was to tell them to. They seem to be having a little fun of their own. Look at 'em.”

She became aware of Becky's hysterical crying and the men's laughter; she turned to look, and her heart broke. One of the men was tearing away Becky's clothing while the other two held her, groping the bared parts of her body as they became available. Becky was struggling and trying to pull away, kicking at anything that came within reach.

“Now it's you and me,” the fat man snarled.

Spurring the horse deeply reopened the dried blood on its sides and sent it leaping forward, knocking Cormac's mother to the ground. Before she could regain her feet, the man was off his horse, clamping her wrist in a steely grip with one hand and tearing at her clothes with the other.

Amanda Lynch was petite, standing but five foot one on her tiptoes, but she was agile and had the strength that comes with years of long, grueling hours in the fields. She aimed a knee between his legs and the fingernails of her free hand at his face. Not the nails of a pampered and manicured city woman, these were nails hardened by the leeching of minerals from the soil caught under them while in the fields and the rays of the strong Dakota sun beating on them hour after hour. They were the nails of a hardworking countrywoman. He was expecting her knee and side-stepped it, but with furious strength she raked her nails down hard, and like knives, they cut deeply into the flesh, sending rivers of blood gushing down his face.

“Damn you,” he swore, and swung his huge fist at her face. The punch smashed in her mouth and nose, sending her near unconsciousness and leaving her hovering there, unable to move, but distantly aware of more smashing blows knocking her head back and forth, her clothes being ripped from her body, atrocious acts being done to her, and Becky's cries of pain.

Cormac did not know what to do. His was a life that had never known violence. Protected by loving parents and an older sister who thrived on caring for him, he had never known anything but love and kindness. He stood frozen as he watched his mother's vain attempt to run. But when the men grabbed Becky, he ran to help. One of the men hit him with a hard backhand, sending him reeling into darkness.

When he regained consciousness, he could see a giant of a man doing horrible things to his mother and two other men holding Becky down while a third was on top of her. Both women were naked, and he could hear their whimpering. Rising from the ground, he ran unnoticed to the pile of carefully chosen rocks he had collected yesterday while taking his rest at lunch. All smooth, all nearly round, and all about the size of an egg . . . good throwing stones.

Although his pa had taught him how to use a pistol, a rifle, and a shotgun when he was knee-high to a small Indian, he wasn't allowed to use them without his pa along, so he used rocks—and sometimes in the winter, a frozen dirt clod—to hunt rabbits and squirrels. He tracked them to their hidey-holes and waited for them to show themselves. Cormac had a good eye and rarely missed. Sometimes his mother had to ask him to please stop for a while because they were getting tired of rabbit and squirrel stew, and his pa would tan his hide if he killed an animal that wasn't for eating.

Quickly selecting three stones to hold in his right hand and one for his throwing hand, he ran, still unnoticed, to within twenty feet of the men attacking Becky. With no warning, he threw the first rock as hard as he could, hitting exactly where he had aimed, the side of the head of the man on top of Becky. The man collapsed on top of her.

“What the hell?” one of the men lying beside Becky exclaimed, his hand on her bare chest and his back to Cormac. He rolled over to face Cormac and started to his feet, but a rock square between the eyes put him back to the ground. The man lying on the other side of Becky, with his hand also on her chest, came up with a gun and fired as Cormac launched another stone. Cormac fell into a heap.

Sometime later, he heard the sound of a running horse and fought to rouse himself. He succeeded in regaining partial consciousness. Something warm was running across his face and dripping from his nose. He wiped at it, and his hand came away red with blood. With his fingers, Cormac gently traced the flow to its source and found a deep groove in his head running front to back above his left ear.

Rising on one elbow, he was thrilled to see his pa racing toward them. He must have heard the shot and come a-runnin'. Cormac took heart at the sight of the rifle in his pa's hand. A friend of his pa's stopping by to visit once had told him that his pa could shoot the eye out of a gnat at fifty paces. He would put a stop to this. But he couldn't shoot without fear of hitting his wife or Becky. Galloping to within a few feet of Cormac's mother, John Lynch hauled back on the reins and set the horse sliding to a stop on its haunches.

“Take him boys!” the fat man ordered. “I'm busy.” Before the horse had come to a complete stop, John Lynch was off, his momentum carrying him a few running steps toward where the fat man was assaulting his wife.

“You bastards!” he screamed as he staggered to a halt, raising his rifle, “I'll kill y—” Rolling gunfire cut him off and echoed over the hills as three guns cut him to pieces and he collapsed to the ground.

“I'm sorry, honey,” he got out weakly, with tears in his eyes. “I'm sorry, Rebecca.” John Lorton Lynch, along with all of his plans, hopes, and dreams for his family, died, and fourteen-year-old Cormac Lynch gratefully sunk into the darkness of oblivion.

Silence and stillness blanketed the valley. There was no movement in the air or birds singing in the tree. With no breeze to cool its effects, the gentle, warm morning sun had risen into the sky to become a blistering ball of Dakota fire. Stubborn dew hiding in the ruts of the plowed field and on shaded blades of grass under the tree had been quickly baked away, and the freshly plowed, rich, dark soil was now scorched dry and crumbly. The only movement was the growth of the tall grass covering the valley and the surrounding hills stretching upward in its relentless quest for the sun.

In states with mountains rising to thirteen or fourteen thousand feet, they wouldn't be called hills . . . more like bumps. In Dakota, there were hills, and then there were the Black Hills. At a little more than 7,000 feet, they were inhabited by the Oglala Sioux Indians who shared hunting privileges with the Cheyenne and, occasionally, the Arikara Indians, whose home was normally at the mouth of the Cheyenne River. The many pine trees created an appearance of darkness from a distance generating the name: the Black Hills, Paha Sapa to the Indians.

The balance of the Dakota Territory remained mostly flat with small rolling hills, sometimes in groups, spasmodically straining upward out of the flatness of the Great Plains to press against the bottom side of the grass like a rock under a rug with occasional trees here and there. It was in just such terrain that John Lynch had chosen to build his farm and raise his family.

In these surroundings, Cormac slowly became aware that his eye was open. One eye was pressed downward against a potato where his head had fallen; the other was open. Open and staring at Becky's naked, twisted, and bloody body. He tried to close it. He did not want to have to look, but the eye would not do his bidding. Twice the distance away and a little to the side was his mother's body—a short distance farther, his father's. With a terrible, sickening sense of loss, Cormac knew they were all dead. Why wasn't he? He remembered the darkness encircling him and gratefully thinking he was dying. Why had he not?

Dazed and numb, Cormac slowly sat up, dizziness and excruciating pain in his head making him sick to his stomach. He closed his eyes against the waves of nausea and vomited heavily and frequently. Gently, his fingers probed the side of his head and found it covered with dried blood. He found the deep groove from the bullet, and on the ground, a dried pool of more blood. Groaning, he weakly staggered to his feet; only then did he think about the men. Where were they?

Carefully, Cormac looked around the valley, moving his head very slowly, afraid of more pain. The men were gone, only their used-up horses remained; too tired to wander, they were taking advantage of the respite from overuse to rest and graze on the rich grass the best they could while bridled with steel bits in their mouths. Cormac could see that the horses he had hobbled and his father's horse had all been taken. Strangely, he felt no relief at the men's absence. Neither had he felt any fear, he realized; neither then, nor now.

He just felt numb, like an observer looking at a photograph in one of his mother's many books, which she used to educate him. But this was a horrible, grotesque photograph at which he did not want to look; he did not want to see. He wanted to close the book and have to look no longer; but this was not a photograph, this was real, and there on the ground were his mother, his pa, and his sister, petite and pretty seventeen-year-old Rebecca May Lynch: Becky. She had loved the name Rebecca, and Cormac was the only person she tolerated calling her Becky.

How could this have happened? They had been minding their own business, working in the fields and laughing. The sunshine had been warm and friendly on the beginning of a beautiful day. He remembered hearing the birds in the tree. Tomorrow they would have been taking the potato harvest into town and picking up supplies. His mother and Becky were planning to get some material for new dresses while, as always, he looked at the new saddles in the back of the store and dreamed of someday buying his own. His pa would probably have got some store-bought candy for him and Becky. Suddenly, everything had changed. Everything was gone. Four strangers had simply ridden into their lives and taken away everything. How could this possibly have happened? Cormac Lynch did not understand. What right did they have to do that?

He resolved himself to go to Becky. Her resistance to what had been happening to her was evident in the scuffed and gouged soil surrounding her. She had fought ferociously. The more she had resisted, the more she had been beaten, yet she never stopped fighting. There were bruises covering most of her body, front and back; and her face, once so gently pretty and so quick to smile and laugh, had been smashed almost beyond recognition. Her teeth were twisted in her mouth—some were missing, and blood covered most of her upper body.