Giving Up the Ghost (10 page)

Delaney pulled open the freight door, sat down on the floor with his legs dangling outside, then twisted around and eased himself down the three feet to the track bed. McCarty and Calder followed, and then Calder turned, picked me up from the doorway, and placed me on the ground beside him.

Delaney gave me a questioning look.

“That was practicality,” I said. “Not courtesy. My legs are shorter than theirs.”

“I thought it somewhat chivalrous,” Calder said.

McCarty laughed.

“Engineer Skeen and his crew will secure the train on the runabout track between the depot and the hotel,” Delaney said. “We are about three-quarters of a mile away from the depot. Just a short walk on a pleasant afternoon.”

We began to walk down the middle of the tracks, because the shoulders were a bit too steeply sloped to easily traverse. A quarter of a mile on, we encountered a road that intersected the tracks at an acute angle, and Delaney said we should take the road the rest of the way into town. It was welcome news, because I had quickly grown tired of adjusting my stride to step from one railway tie to another, and the dirt of the road was kinder to my feet.

We had gone only a few hundred yards when McCarty stopped.

“I'm sorry, I have become unaccustomed to exertion,” he said, breathing a bit heavily. “Too many late hours and an irregular diet. This makes a poor recommendation for my capabilities as a physician, doesn't it? Please, go on. I'll catch up.”

“Nonsense,” I said. “We can take a rest, here, in the shade.”

There was a wide grassy spot, with several oaks, and a towering cottonwood, near a stream not far from the road. On the opposite side of the stream was a field of cane sorghum, five or six feet high, mature now and awaiting harvest. Calder took his pocket knife, cut a stick of cane, and chewed on it like candy.

“Sweet,” he said.

McCarty sat down on a log, and I sat next to him. Delaney found a rock.

Calder did not sit, but stood near the edge of the sorghum field, keeping an eye on the road, and chewing bits of cane and occasionally spitting out the pits.

“How do you feel?” I asked McCarty.

“I'm fine, just fine.”

“You've looked better,” I said.

“Pleasant spot,” McCarty said, changing the subject.

“It hardly looks like Kansas, it is so pleasant here,” I said.

“Oh, all of eastern Kansas is green, with rolling hills, but this area is particularly fertile, and with good water from natural springs,” Delaney said.

“It reminds me of home,” I said.

“Home?”

“Where I grew up,” I said. “My family had an estate, just below Memphis. It was different there, more lush and with different vegetation, but at least this isn't the flat and unyielding prairie we have at Dodge.”

“We're in the Flint Hills,” Delaney said. “Stretches from northern Oklahoma and across Kansas, nearly to the Nebraska border. It's plenty treeless when you get away from the streams and river valleys.”

“The city is named for Florence, Italy?” I asked.

“No,” Delaney said. “It's named for Florence Crawford, the little girl of Samuel Crawford, our former governor. He founded the town company in 1870, after learning the Santa Fe would cross the Cottonwood here.”

“You sound like a regular tour guide,” I said. “Why do you know so much?”

“Because the railroad is as much in the business of selling land as it is moving people and freight,” Delaney said. “The government gave the railroad twenty miles on either side of the tracks through here.”

“This is not such a bad place,” I said.

“Three passenger trains a day stop at Florence, and many more freights,” Delaney said. “During an ordinary day, of course.”

“How are you feeling, Doc?”

“Passable,” he said. “Let's continue.”

Calder held out his hand.

“Wait,” he said, just above a whisper. “There's someone coming.”

“So?” I asked.

“It looks like a renegade. Well, sort of.”

“From the reservation?” I asked. “This far east?”

Calder held a finger to his lips and we waited.

We heard the clop of hoofs and the rattle of tack, and then a man riding a mule came into view, heading toward town. The mule was old, with a gray nose, and it had a straw hat, with cutouts for its pointy ears. The man wore a hat, too—a broad, floppy leather hat, with a band made of rattlesnake skin and a long turkey feather tucked into one side. Beneath the hat was a red kerchief, tied in the back. He had denim trousers and a fringed buckskin shirt that was dark with age and stains, and around his neck was a necklace made of animal bones and bird claws and porcupine quills. His face and hands were the color of walnut, but his eyes were blue, and he had a neatly trimmed white beard.

Across his saddle was a rifle. It looked very old and its octagonal barrel was brown, instead of the blue-black or shiny nickel that I was used to seeing in Dodge. There were brass tacks driven into the side of the butt in the shape of a heart, and a couple of turkey feathers and some beads hung from a loop of leather near the tip of the stick beneath the barrel.

“That's no Indian,” McCarty said.

“Well, I see that now,” Calder said.

As the man rode closer, he gave no indication he saw us until he had drawn abreast, and then he eased back on the reins and the mule obediently stopped in the middle of the road. The man leaned forward, and turned his head slowly, taking us all in one at a time.

“Sadie,” he said to the mule. “We have some fellow pilgrims here.”

“Howdy,” Calder said, keeping an eye on the muzzle of the ancient rifle. “Nice piece. Fifty?”

“No,” the man said. “Fifty is good for whitetail or a mulie, but a might puny for elk. Meet Old Ephraim with merely a fifty and you want to have all your prayers said and a letter to your next-of-kin in your pocket.”

“Old Ephraim?” I asked.

“Grizzly,” the man said, reverently.

“There are no grizzlies here,” Calder said.

“There are where I'm going.”

“Where's that?” Calder asked.

“The mountains,” he said. “My home's in the mountains.”

Calder nodded.

“What's your name?”

“Fogarty Ezekiel Fannin.”

“You're Foggy Zeke?”

“Do I know you, son?”

“No, but I've heard of you,” Calder said. “Along with Bridger and Carson and Jed Smith. Why don't you come down from the mule and palaver with us a spell.”

“Like I said, I got business,” he said. “In the mountains.”

“You're riding east, Zeke,” Calder said. “The mountains are behind you, some six or seven hundred miles away.”

Zeke made a fearsome face.

“All good civilized people look to the east,” he said. “I saw the signs, and I know the time is at hand. The entire sky lit up all night like a magic lantern show. I'm going home to the mountains, but before I go, I have to visit Granny Doom, the power doctor at Doyle Creek. And, son, my mountains are ahead of me, not behind.”

Calder nodded. “What do you mean, ‘power doctor'?” Calder asked.

“That one is fooling, ain't he?” Zeke asked.

“Afraid not,” McCarty said. “I'm a physician myself, and I've never heard the phrase.”

“Why, what kind of healer are you?” Zeke asked. “Never heard of a power doctor.”

“I'm an allopath,” McCarty said. His face was red and his mouth must have been dry, because he was licking his lips frequently. “I treat diseases by prescribing remedies.”

“That's what the power doctor does,” Zeke said. “Has a madstone, taken from the stomach of a white deer, that will suck the poison right out of you. Works for rabies and snakebite and other poisons, as long as the prayer is righteous. Do you pray?”

“Sometimes,” McCarty said.

“Doc,” I said, “what he's talking about is magic. Anybody who grew up in the South would know what he's talking about, or the Ozarks, or in the Appalachias. Power doctors are like yarb doctors—similar to nature healers and voodoo priests—except power doctors have a direct connection to the Almighty. A yarb doctor might be able to fix up your sour stomach with a tea made of some things picked at night in the woods. The healing is in the stuff itself. A power doctor might fix you the same tea, and make you drink it, but the healing is from the Holy Spirit. A power doctor treats the body and soul, but somebody must always pay the cost.”

“Voodoo,” McCarty said. “Witch doctors.”

“When you pray over your patients,” I said, “does it work?”

“Often enough to keep me doing it,” McCarty said. “But I'm praying for the medicine to do its work, and for me to have the wisdom to know what to do, and the skill to do it.”

“It's no different with power doctors,” I said.

“Sounds like your past talking,” McCarty said.

“I'll forgive you that, Doc, because it looks like you're pretty sick yourself.”

“What do you need from the power doctor?” Calder asked.

“Sun's hot, even though the air is mild,” Zeke said, and he took off his hat, and the red kerchief beneath.

I gasped.

Delaney's eyes grew big and McCarty stared with professional interest.

There was neither skin nor hair on the greater part of the old man's head, just white bone that reflected the sunlight. We could even see the sutures where the plates of the skull met.

“Forgive my friends,” Calder said.

“Don't bother me none,” Zeke said, mopping his face with the kerchief.

“So the story is true,” McCarty said. He was up from the log now, and standing beside the mule.

“Lost my topknot to Old Ephraim when I was thirty-six years old,” he said. “It was near Coulter's Hell and I was running traps with a filthy Frenchman named Guy in the winter of forty-three. We took
beaucoup
plews, even with the Crows trying to kill us.”

Zeke leaned forward in the saddle, as if to better see the past.

“But one morning while Guy was in the water putting stink on the traps, a grizzly about the size of a freight wagon came out of the mist. It was on me before I could swing my rifle, and it knocked me to the ground and got my head in its mouth. It ripped the scalp off the back of my head like it was peeling an orange. But before it had a chance to bite my head clean off, Guy was out of the water and finally to his rifle, and he put a ball down its throat. He said he missed, because he was aiming between my eyes, to put me out of my misery.”

“How did you survive?” McCarty asked.

“Too mean to die,” Zeke said. “The filthy Frenchman nursed me for a month, before leaving me with a woman at a Flathead village. Don't remember much of the first couple of weeks, because of the fever.”

“Does it hurt?” I asked.

“Can't feel anything,” he said.

“Then why do you need the power doctor?” I asked.

“Because it ain't clean,” he said.

“Looks downright shiny to me,” I said.

“Oh, no, there's dirt and sweat and whatnot,” Zeke said. “I can't feel it, but I know it's there, and it's driving me mad. I can't scrub up there, because I can't see it, not even in a mirror, because my eyes don't swivel that way. Even if I could get an angle on it, I'm afraid I would peel away the edges of the skin I have left. So I need the power doctor to clean it, and put some ooze on it, and say a few words over me.”

“So you're really talking about spiritual dirt,” I said.

“When I meet Him that made me, I want to be presentable,” he said. “I was presentable once, up in the mountains when both me and the world was new, but this plains living down here in the dirt has made me old and filthy.”

“Looks like there are spots where the bear's teeth pierced the skull,” McCarty said. “That may have been what saved you, because those holes relieved the pressure. Otherwise, you'd have died from the swelling of your brain a few days after. Can I touch it?”

“Usually it's kids that want to do that.”

“But I'm a doctor.”

“That's what you say.”

“He's all right,” I said. “His hands are clean.”

“All right,” Zeke said, and he leaned down.

McCarty ran his hand over the skull.

“Remarkable,” McCarty said. “Thank you for obliging me.”

Zeke put his hat back on.

“Wish I hadn't let my niece and that fool of a husband of hers talk me into settling down on a farm, because it's no country for me,” he said. “The air is too damn thick in summer. In the winters, the snow is too damn wet. The farmhouse is too stuffy and I can't see the stars at night and nobody has any use for this child of thunder. I wish I could have spent my last days in the mountains, where I could have seen God's own light and heard His trumpet while the fools that toil on the plains were still in darkness.”

“Zeke,” Calder said, “it's not the end of the world.”

“He's right,” McCarty said.

“But the signs,” Zeke said.

“Natural phenomenon,” he said. “Auroras.”

“I've seen the northern lights,” Zeke said. “This weren't them.”

“No,” McCarty said, “but something similar.”

“A rift, we think,” I said. “In the luminiferous aether.”

“Go back to your family,” Calder said.

Zeke grimaced, and put a hand to the side of his head.