Tie My Bones to Her Back (3 page)

“Dock zwar
,” Otto said. “Too true—except on the Buffalo Range. But might you not marry, Hanna? Have no lads come a-courting?”

“
Keine
,” she said firmly. “Not a one, thank God! And by the way, my name is no longer Hanna. I call myself Jenny now—proper American.”

“Tschenny?” He laughed. “No wonder the local boys aren’t coming round. To them you’re a Tenny.’ And don’t stare daggers at me that way. Why are women always so serious about their names? Why have all the girls I’ve ever known felt bound and determined to change them?”

He looked at her and laughed again, winked and composed his face in mock seriousness.

“Well then, with no marital prospects in sight, you could sell the herd and rent out the pastureland. Or keep the herd—fine stock it is—and make an arrangement with some good farmer in the neighborhood to go shares with you on the milk, in return for his labor. Wieland always had his eyes on our herd, as I recall.”

“Ja sicher
,” she said. “True indeed. Frau Wieland has invited me to move in with them, and in return allow Herr Wieland to work our herd. But I won’t live with the Wielands. I won’t be a replacement for her dead Hannelore.”

“Then perhaps we might sell the place,” Otto said, “even at a loss, if necessary—I want no money from this farm, it would all be yours—and you could move to town.” He glanced at her quickly, striding along beside him, and saw the hard set of her jaw.

Suddenly he knew what she wanted.

She wanted to go West with him.

She must be thinking that it would be like those hunting trips they’d made together when he got back from the war. Another lighthearted outdoor adventure. Or perhaps she wanted to be with him wherever he went—after all, she was his little sister, she loved him as dearly as he loved her, and now, with Mutti and Vati gone . . . She was only sixteen, after all. But the West? The only women there were whores and outlaws.

“It’s not like up north, Jenny,” Otto explained quietly. “It’s different out on the prairies. An alien world—there are no trees, only grass. Little or no water, and what you do find is bitter or full of buffalo dung. Rattlesnakes everywhere. Wolves as big as yearling calves. We sleep on the ground most of the time, and the ground is hard. And the wind blows always, always, day and night. Sometimes it’s so cold that mules freeze stiff, standing up. Sometimes so hot and dry that your eyelids crack just from blinking, so hot and dry that your nose bleeds. Often you can’t bathe for weeks on end, out in those badlands where the buffalo are today. You can’t even wash your face or brush your teeth. And nothing to eat but buffalo hump and hardtack, day after day after day.”

“I know.”

Christ, she was stubborn! She
didn’t
know. She’d only read newspapers, or maybe some silly dime novel about valiant, handsome, devil-may-care buffalo runners. If only she could smell one.

T
HE FUNERAL SERVICE
was short but solemn, Pastor Koellner’s words heartfelt. He had stretched the rules concerning suicide, making it sound as though Vati had died in a farm accident and Mutti, in her grief, had returned to the house distraught, grabbed a bottle she thought contained Himbeerschnaps, and taken a fatal draught before realizing it was carbolic acid. No, the Dousmanns were not the first suicides the pastor had buried. America was a hard place.

Otto hadn’t been in the wooden church since before the war. He had gone then only to please his mother, as had Jenny. He recognized many faces in the congregation, but had difficulty at first putting names to them. Herr Albrecht, the stone mason, with his ruddy, wind-scoured face and hands hard as horn. Beside him Mrs. Obst, the schoolteacher—old now and, though dressed in her churchgoing finest, still smelling of chalk dust and India ink. Ursula Frischert, the love of his youth. Beside her stood two sturdy children, redheads both, a boy and a girl, and her husband, Otto’s marching
Kamerad
from the 2nd Wisconsin, Lud Nortmann, balding, he saw, with the stooped shoulders and spidery, ink-stained fingers of a bookkeeper. And when Ursula—whose waist Otto had once been able to span with both hands—turned sideways to whisper something in Lud’s ear, Otto noticed that she was with child once more. With sudden clarity Otto recalled a morning in the autumn of 1861 when Lud Nortmann, younger, slimmer, untried in battle, had been splattered with the brains of a comrade—was it Sergeant Houghton?—on a dusty road in southern Maryland and, while a volley of musket shots sought the Rebel skirmisher in the trees beside the road, had collapsed against Otto, weeping hysterically. They hadn’t killed the Johnny, either.

Ein’ feste Burg ist unser Gott
. . .

L
ATER SHE STOOD
beside him, dry-eyed, the grief leached out of her. All that remained now was the graveyard. She’d weather that. Then Otto would go down to the bank and speak with Herr Sauerweiz. He would gladly accept Otto’s money in payment of the mortgage. Why, he must have dozens of farms on his hands by now, what use would another be to him? Otto would make some kind of arrangement regarding the farm with Herr Wieland. He was an honest man, Herr Wieland, and he knew as well that if he cheated the Dousmanns, Otto would simply return and thrash their money out of him. There were advantages to a soldierly reputation. When those matters were out of the way, along with her packing, Otto and Jenny could depart for Milwaukee, Chicago, St. Louis, Kansas City, Topeka, and the Great West. Otto had said that the buffalo herds should be moving by now. There were “shaggies” to slaughter, money to be made, a whole new direction to her life. She had known her brother could not refuse her, no matter how grimly he described the West. For the first time in days she felt hopeful again.

T
WO DAYS LATER
they were on a train. Jenny sat in the swaying car, her arms crossed beneath her breasts, jaw set, eyes hard, so firm in her childish convictions, Otto thought—so clean and sure in her crisply starched shirtwaist, her neatly pleated wool skirt, her pert little cap with a stuffed bobolink perched on top. The true West would be a rude awakening.

They had left Chicago that morning and now the train was rolling through rich Illinois farmland. Cow corn stood tall in the fields, hardening off for the silos, pumpkins bright between the rows. Big red slate-roofed barns and trimly painted white houses rested content beneath the shade trees, elms and oaks and chestnuts, and tall, sweet grass surrounded the farmhouses, with herds of fat Holsteins and Guernseys grazing knee-deep in it, staring mindlessly at the passing train. Look at this, Jenny! he wanted to say. This is
your
America. Brooks and creeks and rivers full to overflowing with clean, cold, fast Midwestern water. Towns clicking past the train windows, the glint of plate-glass windows, righteous women walking the streets, shopping baskets on their arms, their children trailing obediently behind. Schoolhouses built of brick. Prosperous farmers coming to town with hayseed in their beards, their wagons drawn by matched pairs of glossy draft horses. Tall-steepled churches. Paved streets and sidewalks. How could she want to leave all this for the stink of the Buffalo Range?

“It’s not adventure, Jennchen,” he told her once again. “It’s not even hunting, not the way we did it in Wisconsin when you were a girl. That was sport. This is business. It’s ugly.”

He thought of the skinned, raw carcasses of buff so thick along the Arkansas River and the Pawnee Fork, where they’d shot them when they came to water, that a man could hop from carcass to carcass for a mile without touching the ground. Rattlesnakes coiled in buffalo skulls. Buffalo putrid on the Smoky Hill River, or the Solomon, or the Platte when the skinners were finished with them, shining on the sandy slopes like the windows of a great city reflecting the sunset. Poisoned wolves bloating in the sun, skinned out and reeking to high heaven. The stink of arsenic and strychnine and rotten meat.

“The whole damn prairie stinks,” he said. “Here, you can still smell it on me, smell it—and I’ve been away for more than a week.”

He thrust his hand under her nose. She turned away, silent, obstinate.

“And the redskins, there’s the Hostiles to worry about, too. Constantly. Cheyenne, Arapaho, Shoshone, Satanta’s Kiowas sometimes, up from Texas, young bucks out for ponies and scalps and some fun. Or Comanches—even worse. They’ll take a man’s pizzle for a trophy.”

“Oh, please!” She turned to stab a look at him, grimmer still. Then she laughed. “And anyway, I have no pizzle to worry about.
Nein
, Otto, you can’t frighten me with Red Indian tales.”

“Das ist nicht komisch
, Jenny. Not funny at all.”

He rose to his feet and shrugged his jacket straight on his shoulders, hitched up his trousers, and grabbed his hat. He felt himself reddening, with anger or perhaps with shame.

Pizzle!

He’d been too long in the Army.

“I’m going for a smoke,” he said.

3

H
E WALKED TO
the rear of the train and stood on the platform in the cold rushing air. He lit a cheroot and drew the smoke deep into his lungs. The bite of the smoke felt good.

Well, it was done; he had tried his best. There was no dissuading her. He’d better learn to live with it. After all, she was a good, strong, tough-minded girl. He doubted he could have handled the death of their parents as well as she had. Not the way they died. She wasn’t struck helpless in the face of blood or death, so far at least. Anyone could handle its ugliness, he’d learned that in the war, but those who were queasy took longer to learn. The fearful, after they had mastered their fear, often became unnecessarily cruel, or took too many heedless risks.

He’d been a good soldier, and he was proud of that. But it had ruined him for real life. He couldn’t abide a farm when he returned to it. Nor a town, for that matter. He couldn’t abide the rootedness of it. He had to move, to march, to shoot.

The Great West suited him, with its alkaline water and searing winds, buffalo grass and sandstone buttes, its promise of challenge over every horizon. Even its cheapjack towns and pox-ridden women, the wasted drunks pissing their lives away in some rat-squeaking, flea-bitten road ranch. The brash young drovers up from Texas, pistoled down in honky-tonks and brothels from Abilene to Ellsworth. Dodge would no doubt be their next slaughterhouse. Saddest of all, the failed homesteaders who’d come West with dreams and returned East, penniless and broken, as if fleeing a nightmare. “No place for a white man,” they said.

Strangely enough, though, he had prospered in the Great West. At first when he left the farm he’d been content repairing farm machinery in western Minnesota, but the work got too steady, so he sold shoes door-to-door for a while in Iowa, then cut firewood in bulk near Omaha, drifted north one winter to run a trapline on the Niobrara River, and finally landed a job with the Union Pacific, bossing a gang of Irish, Norwegian, and German gandy dancers laying steel for branch lines along tributaries of the Platte. The U.P. was organized on military lines and its officers liked his soldierly bearing. But when the railroad advised him, as a salaried employee, that he must vote for Grant in ‘68, he quit. He would have voted for General Grant, his old commander, in any event. But not on the railroad’s orders.

With the $373.68 he’d managed to save on the U.P., Otto bought a five-year-old chestnut mare named Vixen; an elderly mule named Zeke, whom he knew to be steady in the traces; a light spring wagon with outsized iron-rimmed wheels; a stew kettle, frying pan, coffeepot, and tin cup; five pounds of coffee beans, twenty of flour, another ten of dried fruit (apples, apricots, prunes), thirty of soldier beans, a slab of fatback, two fifty-pound kegs of rock salt, a small bottle of arsenic with which to rid the hides he took of vermin; a pewter spoon, a butcher’s knife and sharpening steel, four woolen blankets that still bore a faded U.S. Army stencil and the stench of Southern dirt upon them: an ax, pick, and shovel, bar lead, a bullet mold, a swage, a primer punch, a wad cutter, and a cast-iron pot in which to melt the bar lead for bullets; a large round carton containing a thousand Berdan primers, four dozen reasonably new 1¾-inch brass cartridge cases in .50 caliber, a twenty-five-pound keg of Du Pont Fg-grade black powder, and a Model 1866 .50-caliber Sharps military rifle, modified to accommodate center-fire cartridges, whose full stock had been cut back to 10 inches, then capped at the end in German silver. The barrel had been shortened as well, to 29 inches from its original 30¼, thus improving the rifle’s balance as well as its appearance. A tang sight was mounted on the wrist of the oiled walnut stock, just behind the sidehammer. Its vernier elevations were graded out to 1,300 yards, but that was sheer vainglory. With 72 grains of Fg loaded behind the 457-grain grooved ball, it shot accurately at ranges only slightly in excess of 400 yards, and the big, slow bullet tended to drift quite atrociously in a crosswind even at that piddling range. Yes, he thought, I love rifles, perhaps too well.

Vixen had a split in her left hind hoof, but it hadn’t yet reached the frog. Because of that fault, which Otto knew he could quickly heal with the application of warm tar and tender, careful handling, he was able to talk the seller—a meat hunter for the railroad who was going back East soon to marry his childhood sweetheart—out of a Texas stock saddle as part of the deal.