Tie My Bones to Her Back (14 page)

He sliced deep along the lower edge of the hump, to where it sloped down and disappeared into the line of the buffalo’s wide back. Then cut down vertically from the top, along one side of the upright ribs. A thick slab of meat fell off into his hand, about three feet long and the diameter of a man’s thigh at the front end. He laid it across the buffalo’s skinned flank.

“You want to cut out this hunk here.” He pointed with the tip of the knife. “It’s all gristle.” He whacked it away.

He repeated the process on the other side. Jenny looked at the exposed dorsal ribs. They were about ten inches high at the top of their curve, tapering down in size as they went back along the spine and disappeared. Like a catfish, all right, she thought. A one-ton catfish.

“You can take out the backstraps, too,” Tom said. He showed her how. Then he showed her how to section each haunch into three hefty hams, by separating the meat at the seams between muscle groups.

She thanked him and stood her horse.

“When you got you a pile of meat,” Tom said, “cut a travvy. Then horse your whittlins back to camp. Ol’ Vix here ought be able to pull about three hundred pounds on the travvy poles, maybe more. Put your meat in my brine tub if you like. We’ll sort it out later, and I’ll show you how to make your own tub if you want.” He smiled up at her, holding Vixen’s curb rein. “Or we can do our meat together. We can smoke it in my little smoke tepee. You’ll get good money for that meat back in Dodge, six or seven cents a pound for humps and hams, but it adds up. For tongues, if they’re pickled and smoked good, you’ll get eight or nine buckskins a dozen, ‘specially now, just before Christmas. Charlie Myers tells me all the folks back East eat buffler tongue for Christmas dinner. Good money. Buy you some pretty foofa-raw, you know.”

She neck-reined Vixen around, then turned in the saddle to look back at him. Foofaraw? That meant girlish fripperies.

“By the way, Torn,” she asked sweetly, all innocence but suddenly seething, “what do you do with
your
money?”

He laughed again, his bitter laugh this time. He’d caught the nuance.

“What else? Get drunk. Play faro or monte. Maybe go on the warpath a bit. I’m half Indian, ain’t I?”

He turned and walked back to his skinning. He was actually using his money to buy guns, new Winchesters, the 1873 model. He cached them, well coated with buffalo tallow and wrapped in oiled rawhide to preserve them from rust, in a cave near the Pawnee Fork. He had purchased eighteen of them so far. But it was none of her business. No white spiders would know of it, none except the merchant, Herr Zimmerman, and he didn’t mind so long as he got his $45 for each rifle. If he ever talked about the matter, Tom would cut his throat. Herr Zimmerman knew that.

J
ENNY FOLLOWED THE
sound of Raleigh McKay’s rifle and found his killing ground about a mile to the south, on the edge of the Palo Duro breaks. He, too, had located the big scrub-horns. Milo had skinned out about twenty of them so far, and she paused on the rise to watch him. Unlike Tom, who skinned entirely by hand, Milo used his mule team and wagon to help. After slicing the hide with the point of his ripping knife along the insides of the legs, around the tops of the hooves, and again around the neck just back of the ears, he worked it free near the slices. Next he pegged the head down with a long steel spike, using a heavy oak-headed mallet to drive the spike through the buffalo’s nose and into the hard earth. He tied a rope, secured to the rear axle of the wagon, around a knot of gathered neck hide, then chucked his mules forward.

The tow rope tautened, the bull lurched a bit, and the hide slowly peeled away with a sticky, sucking sound. Like pulling off a wet union suit, Jenny thought.

Now and then Milo halted the team, leaped down, and helped the hide along with his crescent-shaped skinning knife, working the adhesions loose as the mules pulled. But still the hide tore in places. Jenny could see that such a shortcut method really required three skinners, one to drive the team and the other two to help the hide come loose with their knives. No wonder so many of Milo’s hides were ripped when he brought them in. Each careless rip, Otto had told her, meant ten or twenty cents off the price they’d get for the hide back in Dodge City.

So far Milo hadn’t noticed her, but when he straightened to rub his back after peeling a hide, he did. He dove without hesitation for the leeside of the wagon, grabbed his Army Springfield musket from where it leaned against the bed, and crouched behind the wheel, peering out like a frightened muskrat.

“Mr. Sykes, it’s me—Jenny Dousmann!” she yelled. My God, he must have taken me for an Indian, she thought. Not a hundred yards away. Must be nearsighted. Blind as a bat. That’s why he doesn’t shoot buffalo, only skins them. He can’t see far enough to shoot a shaggy.

He was fiddling with a wheel nut when she rode down, pretending nothing had happened. He looked up, more sullen than usual.

“What do you want?”

“I want to take the humps, hams, and tongues from Raleigh’s buffalo,” she said. “I plan to smoke them and bring them back to Dodge with us.”

“Them aren’t the captain’s buffler no more,” he said. “Not after he shoots ‘em. Moment they hit the ground, they’re mine. That’s our contract.”

“But you’ve taken the hides,” she said. “You never bring in the meat. It just lies out here to rot, or to feed the wolves and buzzards.”

“It’s still mine. I can do with it what I please, jest like that red nigger Two Shields does with his. Keep ‘em or let ‘em rot, it’s up to me. Cap’n said so. It’s in the contract.”

His eyes narrowed shrewdly, mud in the cracks of a sidewalk.

“But I reckon I could sell the meat over to ye, if ye want it that bad.”

“And if I don’t want to pay you?”

“Well, leave it rot, then,” he said. He turned his back on her and snorted.

“Mr. Sykes, you said it was
nigger
work to cure and smoke that meat, that’s why you wouldn’t do it. Well, I want to do some nigger work. You won’t be losing any money by letting me take that meat, which would otherwise just go to waste. You’re already getting half again as much per hide for skinning as Tom Shields, who’s a far better skinner than you are. What’s more, while you’re out here in our employ, your room and board come free of charge. Perhaps in return for your generosity I should start charging you for the meals I cook and serve to you, and the filthy clothes I wash. I’m not only your landlady, Mr. Sykes, I’m also a partner in this corporation. And I
will
have that meat.”

She rode to the farthest skinned carcass, dismounted, and pulled her butcher knife. Just as she was about to make her first incision, Sykes came stumping up at a run. He grabbed for her shoulder, his face working, white as a bleached skull as he wrenched her around.

“You nigger-lovin’ honyock bitch . . .”

He raised an arm to swat her.

She wrenched herself away, crouched, and flashed the butcher knife. Held it low, point first, toward his belly.

“Keep your hands off me or I’ll cut you. By God, I will. I’ll rip you like you rip those hides.”

“Hey-hey, what is this?” Raleigh yelled. He trotted down to them on his sorrel. “What’sa matter here, Miss Jenny? Milo?”

“This bitch tried to steal my meat,” Milo said. “It’s in our contract . . .”

“Enough about that
verdammter
contract,” Jenny said. “This meat’s just going to waste, and this redneck skunk . . .”

“An’ you wanna make some Christly money off it, you cunt!”

“Easy now,” Raleigh said. “Put that knife away, Miss Jenny. Let’s not be cuttin’ anyone. Now, Milo, you ease up on the profanity and leave her have that meat if you got no use for it. I’ll give you a nickel more a hide to make up for it. Thirty-five cents a shaggy. How’s that?”

“Well . . .”

“Das stinkt
, Captain McKay,” Jenny said. “He’s already being paid too
verdammt
much, and you’re skimming part of that extra nickel from my share of the profits.”

“Now, now.” Raleigh smiled, eyes twinkling. “You just go ahead and take your meat, Miss Jenny. Milo, come over here with me.”

They went toward the wagon.

Jenny bent to her work. Her heart was pumping hard. She would have cut him,
ja
sure. Like butchering a hog.

B
Y THE TIME
she was finished, Milo and Raleigh had hunted on, out of sight. She straightened, stiff, and held her hands to the small of her back. She stretched. This wasn’t like doing dishes. It wasn’t even like kneading bread dough. Yet it had seemed so easy when Tom did it.

She was just looking around for the nearest stand of trees, figuring to chop poles for a travois, as Tom had suggested, when she heard the squeak of wagon wheels. Tom came over the rise.

“Thought I’d take your meat back to camp in the wagon, if you were still here,” he said. “I’m going over to help your brother with his skinning and then head in—save you a bit of heavy hauling.”

“Appreciate it.”

He studied the pile of tongues, humps, hams, and backstraps. “You did pretty good, first time.”

“Thanks.”

He hadn’t laughed. Perhaps she
was
doing well.

“But that’s a lot more than three hundred pounds,” he said. “Good thing I come by.”

_____

W
HEN HE FINISHED
his killing for the day, Raleigh left Sykes to skin out. He rode northwest toward where he’d last heard Otto’s shots. He had tried to soothe Sykes’s ruffled feathers, but the cracker-eater was still all swole. Angry words had passed, and finally Raleigh had been forced to conduct Sykes through a brief but strenuous exercise in military discipline. He’d knocked Sykes on his ass and taken out a tooth with the punch. It was the only form of instruction his kind would understand. Raleigh knew this type of man. Deep down he was one of them himself—a hardscrabble Southern plowboy raised on red dirt and hookworm, grits and greens.

Not anymore, though. By Act of Congress he’d been pronounced an officer and gentleman of the Army of Northern Virginia, Confederate States of America, and though he often made light of that fact, he still carried in his war bag the parchment to prove it, with Secretary of War James Alexander Seddon’s signature across the bottom, dated June 16, 1864. Sure, he thought, but no Congress left to vouch for its validity, no C.S.A. left to defend, in gentlemanly fashion or otherwise. His commission was worth no more than a bankroll of Confederate shin-plasters. Good enough to patch bullets with, or perhaps start a fire.

H
E FOUND
O
TTO
and Tom on a windy slope, skinning the last of their buffalo. The spring wagon sagged with the weight of the day’s hides. Big scrub-horns, all.

“We near got enough for a run to Dodge,” Raleigh said. “I tumbled more than seventy today, and it looks like you did just as well.”

“Sixty-eight,” Otto said. “This new rifle shoots true, even in a wind, but only for the first couple of hours. Then it starts fouling something fierce. I think it’s these damned bottleneck cartridges, make the bullet fit too snug on the lands, and they scrub the soft lead right off it.”

“Go back to your old Fifty.”

“Too much drift in this wind,” Otto said. “I haven’t got your eye for Kentucky windage. Maybe I’ll get me a Ballard next time we’re in Dodge, or one of those new Remington rolling-block .44s, see if it shoots any cleaner.”

“Anyways, we ought to send some hides back north,” Raleigh continued. “You and Milo could go up there, get you that new rifle while you’re at it.”

“I don’t need one
that
bad.”

“Well, one of us ought to go along with Sykes. He had a little run-in with Miss Jenny this afternoon, she wanted to save the meat from his buffalo and he got all hot about it. Though the dim redneck bastard won’t stir his bones enough to butcher it out, let alone brine it himself. I tried to calm him and he got sassy with me. Had to knock him down, finally. Skinned my knuckles on his rotten teeth, hope I don’t get poisoned.” He showed Otto the barked fist. “Anyways, I can’t ride north with him, the mood he’s in, and if we send him alone he might make off with the money once he’s sold our hides. I suppose Tom could go along, but he couldn’t stop Milo from swipin’ our money, not in Dodge he couldn’t. Mister Lo don’t swing much weight in that town.”

“
Ja, doch zwar.”

“You could leave here tomorrow, head up north-by-east past Owl’s Head Butte to the Cimarron, then cut the road from Camp Supply. Ought to make Dodge in a long three days, if it don’t rain none.”

Otto scanned the sky. “Doesn’t look like anything’s coming our way. Hey, Tom—is it going to rain or snow in the next few days?”

Tom didn’t even look up from his skinning. “Nope,” he said. “You never know with a norther, though.”

Raleigh said, “When you get to Dodge, why don’t you fire Sykes and sign us on a new skinner? Maybe two. We’re into the big bulls now.”

W
HEN
O
TTO TOLD
Jenny that he’d be leaving for Dodge with the hides the following morning, she felt a momentary qualm. “I’ll be gone only a week,” he reassured her. “And I’m taking Sykes with me. Heard about your run-in with him today, so he won’t be here to make trouble. Tom’s a good lad, though, and Raleigh—as he never tires of telling us—is a Southern officer and a true gentleman. He’ll take care of you.”

“Don’t worry about me,” Jenny said blithely, but she was embarrassed that her concern had shown.

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