The Snake River (24 page)

Craw jerked the
reata
back, swung, and flipped again.

Perfect neck throw.

“Craw!” Flare shouted. “No!”

Craw had already seen and let the rope go slack.

Garrett grabbed the loop and fought it off his neck.

When he got it more than head high on his hand, Craw coolly jerked him out of the saddle.

Garrett swam for the saddle horn, but his mount went plunging ahead. The lad looked back toward Craw, bobbing in the waves, and shook his fist high in the air.

Craw just flipped the loop back to Garrett. It rode up and down in the waves. Garrett grabbed it with both hands. Craw dallied, and the lad came like a pendulum to shallow water.

While Garrett came up the bank yelling at his father, Flare kicked Doctor downstream. Let ’em bellow, he thought. The lad wanted a gesture noble but futile, and perhaps fatal. The father wanted his son alive, breathing, walking the earth.

Downstream, Flare might see something of Innie.

Then he saw Dick James riding along the far bank and waving. Flare stopped and watched. Dick took off his hat and gave the sign for enemies nearby.

So. Damn. The herd didn’t just stampede, it was spooked.

Flare sat his horse and looked across at Dick. He gave a big nod and motioned downstream.

First there was Innie to find. Garrett’s saddled horse to find. And the herd to round up.

And while you’re doing it, he drought, your hair to hang on to.

Chapter Twenty-five

A light tap at the door. Annie Lee Full saw it was Miss Jewel. Her husband nodded at her. It was inconvenient that he had no study where he could consult privately with those who needed him. Another hope for the coming of civilization. Annie Lee held the door open for Miss Jewel, then slipped out into the darkness of the early winter evening.

She walked toward the Wineson cabin. By custom she now walked a little with Jane after supper every night. Poor dear, married to a man anyone could see was mad. Now widowed and left to raise three children alone. Annie Lee gave her no advice on these evening walks, merely human companionship, the solace of fellowship in the midst of pain.

She’d offered solace to Miss Jewel yesterday and been rebuffed. It did not disturb Annie Lee to be rebuffed. Pride was momentary. Life buffeted people, and everyone needed solace sooner or later, and she was glad to give it. Annie Lee had a good heart. She did wonder, sometimes, why she generally felt more pleased to see people hurt and grieving than happy and optimistic. What she never liked to see, though, was people prideful. Like Miss Jewel.

Annie Lee tapped on the Wineson cabin door and turned back down the path toward the mill. Jane would come along quickly.

Dr. Full was going to tell her once more, she knew, that it was all going to be all right. Miss Jewel supposed it was his attempt to make her feel better, which was crazy even for him. Her mind was bedlam, and feeling better was a sea change away. She could barely hear and couldn’t think.

“Miss Jewel,” Dr. Full concluded, “only God is omniscient. I do not know all here. I can only go on what I see before my eyes. What I see, when all is said and done, is a man and a woman. Each makes certain claims. One humbles himself before God, the other stands prideful. One admits sin, the other insists on innocence.”

The look he was giving her was intended to portray a loving but aggrieved friend, she was sure of that.

What on God’s green earth did he think she could do now?

She clicked it over in her mind again. Billy confessed sin, falsely. In so doing he accused her of sin, falsely. Everyone believed the lying man, no one believed the innocent woman. Her only way out was to confess.

She would go insane.

She stood up. Her legs felt mechanical, her body numb. She wondered if she would fall. Somehow she kept standing. She opened her mouth to speak.

Screams came out. Horrible, soul-scoring screams like Miss Jewel heard in her dreams.

Her mouth was open and the room was full of screams.

No, the screams were in her head.

Then Dr. Full bolted for the door.

Screams outside by the river.

Miss Jewel ran, stumbled, then ran hard right behind him.

Annie Lee and Jane sat down on the riverbank, just above the mill. They both liked the mill. Annie Lee couldn’t tell why Jane liked it. She was so peculiar these days you couldn’t tell much about her at all. Anyone would be peculiar if her husband was so crazy he crucified himself. All you could do was be with her a little. She would accept that much.

Annie Lee rubbed the sleeves of her wool sweater fondly. She usually wore this heavy white sweater on these walks because it looked nice in the moonlight.

Annie Lee liked the mill because of the sounds it made. All the little creaks and groans suggested labor to her, effort, painful toil, the stuff of human life. But the sound of the water flowing through the mill, pushing the blades, dripping back into the river, that meant work done, accomplishment. The river shooshed down the millrace and up against the banks and over and over itself and onto the great mill wheel and turned the mighty paddle to do the work. To saw the boards that made the houses that made Oregon fit to live in.

Dr. Full had used the mill one Sunday in a sermon, and the sound reminded her of what he said, which was very different. The mill showed the inexorability of life, he said, the way things flowed on and flowed on and never stopped or changed but just kept coming. Annie Lee felt that about life. To her it was inexorably sad. The grief, the grief rose here and fell there, but like the mill wheel it churned ever on.

In the dark above their heads the great wheel turned. They saw only a shadow against the sky, but they heard its ceaseless, sibilant shoosh.

Annie Lee listened to Jane jabber. She didn’t say much in these evening talks, really, a bit about the kids, sometimes something about her mother, often something about her childhood. Lots of times what she did say didn’t make much sense. When she talked about being a kid, sometimes she swung her legs over the bank and waggled her feet in the dark above the water and giggled. Those were her best times.

Tonight the river was up. Annie Lee could see the moon dimpled on the water of the millrace just below their toes, and she could hear the extra power of its push against the paddle blades. That was good. A mill put the good Lord’s nature to work for man. When it rained, as it had rained on and on for the last week, nature worked its muscles even harder.

She would have to tell Samuel that, and he could put it into a sermon. Though he didn’t use many of her ideas. It wasn’t her sphere. She knew her sphere, and was pleased with it.

“Look here,” Annie Lee said, “you didn’t see in the dark.” She stood up and flattened her skirt against her spraddled legs. Jane crooked her neck queerly to look, like she was looking around a post that wasn’t there. “It’s a new skirt I made out of that calico that came.”

It was full and had oversize pockets. Annie supposed Jane couldn’t see the dark skirt as well as the white sweater, but she made sounds of approval.

“I made one for you, too,” she said, “the blue instead of red.”

She pulled the folded skirt out of one of the big pockets. Jane took it in a subdued way. Annie Lee had been afraid Jane would act funny and say no. All she wanted was to make the poor woman smile.

Annie Lee twirled and made the skirt balloon, full of the night air.

At that moment a little more of the underside of the bank gently let go and eased into the water. The bank had been doing that since the millrace was dug, and had been doing it rapidly during the past week of rain. This time it was only a small amount, a handful or two or dirt. A moment later Annie Lee put a dancing foot near the edge, and that was enough.

The bank caved in.

The earth cracked and toppled. Annie Lee Full, still twirling, pitched outward. She turned in the air and fell back. Because the water was deep now, her head did not hit the rock hard enough to knock her out.

But it made her woozy. She didn’t think about Jane.

She didn’t think about getting her feet on the bottom and getting out. The wooziness even protected her against the freezing temperature of the water a little. It was cold, but after a moment it didn’t matter so much. She tried to move her arms, but they were too heavy in the soaked wool sweater. There was something acceptable, inexorable about it all.

The current sucked her down the millrace steadily at first, and as she approached the great wheel, she felt its hand take hold powerfully, like the will of God.

When the earth gave way, Jane Wineson started to scream. The water froze the scream in her throat.

She found the bottom, scrambled to her feet, lost the bottom, and went onto her hands and knees under the goddamn freezing water. She clawed for the surface.

She was in a fury. She got to her feet. She was angry at God. She hated the world. She lashed out at it with both hands. She stepped into a hole and lost her footing and went down again. As the current took her, her clawing hands hit roots. She grabbed on savagely.

Exposed roots of a big tree, she saw. She grabbed and pulled herself into the root ball. Farther into shallow water, only knee deep now.

She looked up. She was under the body of the tree, tangled in the roots, caught. She couldn’t go upward, she couldn’t go sideways, and she wouldn’t go back into the deeper water.

She looked around, petrified.

She calmed a little. I’m all right, she thought, the tree has me.

That was when she saw the white blob moving steadily away downstream. And in her mind identified the blob as the sweater, and Annie Lee.

Floating into the mill wheel.

Jane screamed for help. She climbed hard into the roots, but only came against the bottom of the tree. She looked at the dark, icy water, the only way out. She would never be able to go into the water.

She screamed. She found all the agony of her life in her guts and screamed it out.

Miss Jewel sat by the body of Annie Lee Full. It was half in the water. So was Miss Jewel. She was also muddy and cold and terribly, terribly tired.

The life went out of her a little when she jumped into the millpond, she had felt it. Dr. Full had gotten to Jane first, but somehow Miss Jewel knew what had happened and ran downstream of the mill wheel.

She spotted Annie Lee’s white sweater in the still pond below the wheel, floating gently, circling, at peace.

Miss Jewel plunged in, grabbed Annie Lee under the arms, and started to pull her to shore. She looked at Annie Lee’s face, and it was peaceful. Something about the face made Miss Jewel reach out and touch Annie Lee at the hairline.

The skull gave like the white of a hard-boiled egg.

Miss Jewel put her arms around Annie Lee and held her and put her head to her breast.

All at once the cold from the clothing, the cold of the water, and the cold of death sucked the life out of Miss Jewel.

It was all she could do to stagger toward shore, dragging the husk of Annie Lee Full.

Then she sat. Just sat by the body. A couple of men ran up and asked what was happening. She told them. Astonished, they touched the body, felt for signs of life. Then they ran off to take care of Jane.

Poor Jane. Miss Jewel had seen her, trapped there in the roots. But there was nothing for Miss Jewel to do there. From the shouts she knew one of the men was going to Jane with a rope. But Jane wouldn’t take it. The fellow had to hoist and carry her out.

After a few minutes Dr. Full came and squatted and held his wife’s dead hand.

Someone else, Elvira Upping, held a burning rag stuck in a cup of congealed bacon grease over Annie Lee’s face. Funny, in that light the face didn’t look beaten up. Beneath, the skull was crushed, but the face looked reposeful.

Miss Jewel looked at Dr. Full’s face. It was fixed. Distant. Utterly unreadable.

She got up and walked toward her cabin.

She sat in the open doorway and looked out at the wilderness. At midnight she couldn’t see much, but she knew what was there and what wasn’t. Beyond the buildings and clearings of the settlement, there was nothing but trees, and mountains, and desert, and mountains, and rivers, and plains stretching beyond sight, beyond imagination, beyond hope. Two thousand miles of it.

This was a place of death.

There was no way out.

Involuntarily, Miss Jewel jumped.

The cold of Annie Lee’s body had run through her like an electric shock. She waved her arms and waggled her knees to make sure they worked.

Would her voice work? Rasping with fright, she tried. “I am lost.”

Again, louder. “I am lost.”

Thought: Right now she would give the world to see Michael Devin O’Flaherty.

A voice came back from the shadows. “Miss Jewel?”

“Who’s there?” she cried. “Sima?”

He came into the moonlight. Sima. Lisbeth behind him.

Maggie ran to him, hugged him, babbled at him foolishly, wept. Lisbeth put her arms around both of them, weeping. They were a six-legged animal, rocking and hugging itself.

These were her children, the only children she would ever have, they were precious. She had been angry with him. He’d disappeared from school for nearly a week without warning and wouldn’t say where he’d been. She would never be angry with him again.

They went inside. Sima made hot tea while Lisbeth helped Miss Jewel change her clothes.

They talked. And talked. The two teenagers stayed up all night with her. They talked about everything. Sadly about the Winesons. Mockingly about Dr. Full. Regretfully about Annie Lee. Happily about Flare. She told them about Billy’s lies, and somehow it got funny, and they all laughed raucously and foolishly.

It was crazy, but when the sun came up, they felt like they’d survived something. They were exhausted and happy.

Chapter Twenty-six

Flare found Innie floating in an eddy about half a mile downriver. Floating face up, which Flare had never seen before. His eyes had a strange look, like he was halted in the midst of doing something, about to raise a hand, maybe, or just say, “Hey!”

The face and head were trampled, bruised, cut, what you will. One hand was boneless as cabbage leaves. When Flare dragged the body out, it felt limp as a rag doll. He didn’t open the clothes to look.

He looked a last time at those eyes, ready to speak or holler or frown or…whatever. Innie’s traffic with life was interruptus, unfinished, fruitless, pointless.

Nothing was as peculiar as life.

He left the body. The others would want to have a burial, maybe. After they found all the horses. Flare had to get along and teach some Indians a lesson, and get some horses back.

The tracks didn’t tell much. Neither Flare nor Skye knew the Indians of this country much. American fur men never spent any time here. Dick James, who knew them a little, said the moccasin prints of the Klamaths, the Rogue Rivers, and the Umpquas looked the same to him. He also said they were ornery, unpredictable Injuns.

Like all Indians, thought Flare, until you knew their minds.

Skye and most of the men took on the job of getting the horses together and moving them north. Flare, Dick, Craw, and Garrett tracked the Indians. The bastards had fifteen or twenty head, no more. They were headed over the divide to the Shasta River, from the look of it. Why had they spooked the herd down the canyon, across the river, instead of running it up the canyon? Stupid, maybe, or murderous.

Time to lift some hair.

He looked at the little camp through the Doland. Right handy a Doland was, and he would keep a telescope if he could stay sober and not gamble it away, or get it lifted by Indians like these.

It had been plain easy. The tracks ran over the divide, down into the Shasta River Valley, and upstream. High, wide, and handsome. Not that there was any way to hide the tracks of that many horses. They were making time, but Flare and his outfit were making better. He had come up on them at dusk, as he planned. They might not like to fight in the dark.

But this was pathetic, a sign of what the Indians had come to.

Flare knew how it would go among most Indians who still were Indians. A warrior would have a dream, or other medicine insight: He should lead a raid, and on that raid such-and-such would happen, and the raiders would cover themselves with honors. He would go to the men of his choice, tell what his medicine said, and ask them to join him on the raid. Then, if they didn’t have medicine leading them to do something else, and if they had confidence in his medicine, they would join the party. In a few days a bunch of warriors would be agreed on, likely including a teenage boy or two to hold the horses while the warriors did the work. They would make medicine to assure success, and go.

This was a bunch of teenage boys. Klamaths. None of them could have any medicine to amount to anything. They were just out looking for trouble, out of control. The older men would reprimand them when they got back. If Flare let them get back. In the old days—even ten years ago, Flare thought, before the diseases played havoc with them—the customs of the tribe would have kept these lads in check.

He watched them through the Doland. There were four in sight. They’d built a squaw fire. The horses were in a rope corral back in the trees. Probably one more there, on watch. Maybe another, no telling where.

Flare slid back from the crest of the hill and told his companions what he saw. He said nothing about his sadness, but Craw and Dick would know.

“Let’s take ’em,” said Garrett. Garrett was angry. Garrett had lost a friend. And he was scared. He’d seen death up close, maybe for the first time.

“What are we waiting for?” he said.

So Flare laid it out.

Why Flare didn’t kill him he didn’t know. The sentry had his back propped against a fir, whittling with a white man’s pocket knife, alert as a stump.

Flare moved up on him stealthily, in utter silence, step after slow step. He carried his pistol cocked. If the sentry heard him and reacted, Flare would shoot him. At the sound of gunfire, Dick and Craw and Garrett would open fire on the camp.

Maybe inalertness wasn’t dumb. Maybe it would save the life of the sentries and his mates. By accident.

Flare took a step no more than every half minute. The soft fir needles made no sound, or less sound than the scrape of pocket knife on wood. Flare eased up until he was behind the fir the sentry leaned against, so close he feared the bastard would hear his breathing.

Then he clunked him solidly with the hammer of his tomahawk.

The kid rolled his head a little and dropped.

It was crazy. It was dumb. Flare did it anyway.

He tied the kids’ hands and hoisted him on a shoulder and walked within conversation distance of the fire. The others must have thought it was the sentry coming back. They didn’t notice the extra heaviness of the step. Their ways would get them killed one day.

He held the kid in front of him with his left arm. Titillating, to stand there in the shadows and watch them and listen to them. Stand within their ken, unseen.

In the Chinook trade language he said loudly, “Don’t move or I’ll kill your brother.”

He held a cocked pistol against the sentry’s head and grinned fiercely.

“Don’t move or I’ll blow your head off,” came from the darkness. Dick’s voice in Chinook.

“This child’ll make sausage of ye.” Craw, in English.

Even Garrett got into the spirit of things. “I’ll cut your balls off.”

Flare heard the three of them coming through the darkness. Someone was shuffling his feet and beating them double against the ground, to sound like two enemies. Probably Craw; he had that trick.

When they got into the firelight, Dick told the Klamaths to get down on their faces in the dirt. Warriors would have spit and told the whites to do their worst, which the whites probably would have done. These were kids, so they lay down in the dirt.

“What you wanna do, Flare?” Craw asked.

Flare asked Craw to tie the kids’ ponies nose to tail, to be taken along. Garrett took all their weapons and possibles. Dick tied them hands and feet.

Why are ye soft, old man? Flare asked himself. Why leave them alive? They killed your friend. He didn’t know why. But maybe the tribal fathers would be less angry this way. Or maybe Flare didn’t have a taste for killing anymore.

Flare worried about Garrett. He- looked like he was about to bust with animal rage, or fear, or something. Flare told him to go help his dad.

When they were ready to go, Garrett raised an opposition. Didn’t want to give them such a good chance, he said.

Not a good chance, Flare answered, afoot and without weapons. Might not ever get home.

And might get out of these ties in ten minutes, said Garrett, and come after us. He wanted to knock them cold.

Craw agreed with him.

Flare nodded at Garrett. One by one he clunked them.

When the lad was done using his tomahawk, Craw spoke up.

“Ye’ve killed that un. Tell by the sound on the skull.” It was the sentry. “Since he’s dead, scalp him.”

Even in the firelight Flare saw the lad pale.

Then he took the knife off his belt and stepped over the body.

Craw instructed him. “Take the crown part of the hair.” Garrett grabbed too much. “A hand span’s worth mebbe,” said Craw.

“Now pull it taut. With your left hand.” Garrett switched. “Where it wants to raise the scalp, cut a circle right around. Good.”

Flare noticed that one of the captives could see what was happening. His eyes were full of rage.

“Now sit down and put both feet against the head. Not right on the part you’re gonna pull. Good. Now give it a good, clean snap with both hands.”

Garrett took three or four jerks. Finally the scalp came with a THOCK.

Garrett threw himself to the side and vomited.

“Good,” said Craw. “Now mebbe you’ll grow up be better’n your pa and not do it.”

But Craw made him take it along. To remember, he said.