Tie My Bones to Her Back (6 page)

“And you want to skin a few, do you, young missy?” Peacock asked. “We’ll, I hope you’ve got a strong stomach, I do. And a itchproof hide. I wouldn’t stick a butcher knife into one a them stinkers again for love nor money.” He reached both hands across his chest and clawed at his shoulders. “Why, just the mere idea of it gives me the rampagin’
ek
-zeemer.”

“Miss Dousmann has skinned pigs and sheep and steers on the farm back home,” Otto said. “And plenty of deer, too; even a bear once, when we were hunting up north.”

“A pig comes close to a buffalo for tight,” Peacock said. He leaned his elbows on the wet, dark wood, smiling at Jenny with a teasing look and moving his mouth around playfully. “And a bear for smelly. But there’s nothing like a shaggy for bed rabbits.”

He was flirting with her, Jenny suddenly realized.
“Bed
rabbits?”

“Yes, missy. Linebacks, some fellows call ‘em. Graybacks? Lice.”

Jenny took a sip of her beer. Felt the fizz tickle her nose.

“And buffalo gnats? And fleas? And the maggots come later.” Peacock shuddered. He reached under the bar and brought up a water glass half full of whiskey. “Nope,” he said, “I done it one whole winter, that’s enough.” He drank off a big swallow of the whiskey. “Here, missy, have a plover egg.”

He forked a small egg out of a jar filled with brine and peeled it. Jenny ate it. She was hungry. Then she forked herself another from the jar, peeled it, and popped it in her mouth. The eggs lay like pale pink, bloodshot eyeballs on the grainy rock salt at the bottom of the jar. She chewed down the second egg and forked out a third.

“Well, Otto, she sure eats for a buffalo runner,” Peacock said. He laughed loud and approvingly, then reached under the bar again and brought up a bottle of whiskey. He winked at Otto. “Would you care for a sip of Old Baldface, ma’am, to settle your stomach? Or p’raps a proper cocktail—I do a nice Citronella Jam? It’s on the house.”

“Thank you, no, Mr. Peacock. This beer suits me nicely.”

When they left the saloon Otto led them back to Zimmerman’s. The shop was still open.

“I need a new rifle, and that .44 Sharps looks just fine,” he told Jenny.

“What about me? Something to fight off the bed rabbits?”

“Oh,” he said, smiling, “you can use my old buffalo gun on those fellows.” A thought occurred to him. “No, it’s .50 caliber. Probably kick too hard for you, and it’s only a single-shot rifle. You might need something faster than that.”

“For what?”

“Well, camp meat for one. Unwelcome visitors for another.”

“Are there likely to be bandits?”

“Always a possibility, though a slim one, but it was Hostiles I had in mind. You never know when redskins are likely to go on the warpath.”

Jenny laughed, but Otto remembered the Santee Sioux uprising in Minnesota back in ‘62. During the course of it, the Indians had attacked a small German community called New Ulm, where the Dousmanns had friends. The militia finally fought the Santees off, but not before they’d killed or wounded nearly a hundred townsmen and burned all but a few of the houses. A childhood friend of his had written to Otto about it, just after Antietam, reporting in shocked words that more than seven hundred whites, many of them women and children, had been slaughtered before the uprising was suppressed. The atrocities were too horrible to relate in detail, the friend wrote. Otto had been scornful at the time—at Antietam, the single bloodiest day of the war, some 23,000 men had died or been wounded on both sides. But now, visualizing Jenny as the victim of an Indian attack, New Ulm seemed horrible enough.

“How’s about that little repeater there?” she asked, pointing to a rifle in the window. It was a lever-action carbine, an improved model of the Henry with a loading gate on the side of the receiver.

“
Ja
,” Otto said. “Just the thing. Holds seventeen bullets, .44 rimfire—the same round I use in my pistol. We can share bullets for economy’s sake. You wouldn’t want to use it on buffalo except up close, it doesn’t pack much punch, but for antelope it’ll work just fine. Come on, we’ll go in and buy it. Then we’ve got to get packing for our rendezvous with McKay down toward the Cimarron.”

Good, Jenny thought. He’s willing to let me hunt. She had worried that he would keep her campbound day and night, cooking and cleaning.

Later, at Durgen’s Livery, she waited outside with the bags and the newly purchased rifles, humming happily to herself while Otto settled his bill. He led out a pair of mules and she helped him harness them to a light wagon parked in the corral. He tied his saddle horse, Vixen, to the tailgate.

“So I
may
hunt?” she asked as they drove out of town. She wanted confirmation, his word on it, so that he couldn’t change his mind.

“Ja sicker
,” he said, “certainly. Not buffalo, or at least not at first, but camp meat surely. There are always prongbucks or turkeys to be found in the country we’re headed for. They’ll make a welcome change from a steady diet of buffalo meat. And I want you to keep your rifle close at hand.” He turned to look at her. “My partner and I will be out all day, along with our skinner, scouting or shooting or working the hides, and there are dangers. Wolves or bears, you know, attracted to the smell of meat. And snakes. And always the chance of, well, Indians.”

“Who’s the skinner?”

“His name’s Tom Shields, a good worker. You’ll meet him tonight if McKay’s found buff.”

Otto’s camp was a few miles west of Dodge. They saw the looming light of its fire in the dark hills along the Arkansas River and the mules pulled for it at an eager trot. Jenny was chilled and weary by the time they arrived. A man rose from beside the fire, a rifle in his hands, and stepped back into the shadows as they approached.

“It’s all right, Tom,” her brother shouted. “I’m home at last.”

The man stepped into the firelight, lowering his rifle. Jenny jolted wide awake, her shivering stopped. Tom Shields was a red Indian.

“Any word from Captain McKay?” Otto asked.

“He’s found ‘em, sure enough,” the Indian said. “He’s still out there with ‘em. And he wants us to come quick, while the killing’s good.”

T
HAT MORNING
R
ALEIGH
McKay was standing on the bales of hides piled in the wagonbed, scanning the horizon with field glasses. No buffalo in sight. Not even a tree. There was no horizon. In the middle distance, sky and grassland blended to a pale tan monochrome. To the east, low, the morning sun glinted like the stud of a silver finishing nail tacked to the wooden sky. He lowered the glasses. They were excellent, long and heavy, made by B. H. Horn of Broadway, New York City. He had taken them from the body of a dead Yankee major, eleven years earlier, near White Oak Swamp on the way to Malvern Hill. The brass was scratched in places, the blacking rubbed through with use, but the lenses were still clear. McKay could never have afforded them himself back during the war, much less before it. Even now, when he found himself rich beyond counting, he would hesitate to lay out the gold eagle necessary to buy even these battered binoculars. Hell, and he had all of five thousand Yankee dollars in the bank back at Leavenworth.

He raised the glasses again and swung them slowly in a full circle. Still nothing. Not a dot of movement, no dark wavering line wriggling like a worm through the far frost haze. Squinting from the lens-gathered glare, he decided that perhaps the haze was a bit thicker to the northwest. Maybe they were coming from that direction. Even here, standing on the thick bed of hides, he thought he could feel the tremor of their movement.

It was that faint quivering of the ground which woke him before dawn, a subtle vibration, directionless, almost imperceptible, as if the atoms of earth and sky were shivering together ever so slightly, colliding like the shoulders of an anxious crowd. Soldiers awaiting the first bugle calls to battle. It had jostled him out of an uneasy sleep into the cold dark, from another dream of the war. He had been in the woods again, at dusk, with the gunfire growing louder as it neared. Scrub oaks and pines. They lay or knelt behind hastily felled tree trunks, in a semicircle, waiting for whatever was coming up the line to reach them. From off in the murk came rebel yells, rising and falling in counterpoint to the spurts of musketry. Now and then the far thump of cannon. Harsh, indecipherable cries at a distance, an order edged in hysteria, its meaning swallowed by distance, and the thud of his own fast heart. Then the louder, slower thud of hooves through the earth, tiny, palpable punches in his chest and belly. Stronger as the horses neared. They heard the whistle of horse breath, a nicker, the clank of a brass-tipped scabbard against a stirrup. Dim, tall forms moved toward them in the dusk. Swaying. Lumpy. Greasy glint of steel.

Must be the same damn Dutchmen back again, that wild-eyed screaming Christ-forsaken pig-fucking 8th Pennsylvania Cavalry outfit who’d rid through us half an hour ago. . . .
saberswinging-pistolsbanging
. . .
boys knocked right and left by the knees of horses
. . . And were gone, leaving plenty of dead behind them. Both horses and men. They learned the outfit’s number from looting the bodies.

Blood drips in the leaf mold.

A sudden spatter of musketry, not far off.

Panic.

“Cease firing, you are firing into your own men!”

“It’s a lie!” in a Tarheel accent.

A
Tarheel accent
. . .

“Pour it into them, boys!”

He hears the hammers click back all up and down the line . . .

No don’t!
he cries . . .
They’re ours! Cease firing!

But his breath stalls again, as always, in his dry throat. He kneels in the chill. His own thumb is steady on the splayed tang of the Enfield’s hammer. He feels the growing tension of the spring, the click of the locking sear. He sees the barrel, brown and oil-dim across the tree trunk, leveling out into the darkness, the faint evening star of the front-leaf sinking low between the unfocused limbs of the rear sight. The touch of his trigger finger on the curved new moon of steel. The horsemen clatter near, dim forms, then clear in the last, lost radiance of daylight as they enter the open wood, uniforms dark, wide hats; one officer twists in his saddle to talk with the lean, long-bearded officer in a raincoat and scruffy forage hat trotting beside him, starlight on hair; the bead of the Enfield sensing how the junior officer defers to the other and, following in suit to the higher rank, settles square on his chest.

Squeeze now, squeeze off . . .

No—
not again! Not now! Old Jack
—
Old Blue Light! Not ever
. . .

The roar and kick of his rifle.

My God, you’ve shot the general
. . .

It was then that he’d wakened to the tremor of the buffalo. Always the same dream woke him in times of tension. The memory of killing Stonewall Jackson. Raleigh McKay would never live that memory down. In his mind, it had cost the South the war.

But now he was out to kill buffalo. Finally, they were here. While Otto was away in Wisconsin, McKay had hunted south and west between Crooked Creek and the Cimarron, looking for the main herd. He’d killed a wagonload of hides just picking off the early arrivals, the scouts of the main herd. Never more than fifteen or twenty in a bunch, but they added up. He had sent Tom Shields to town earlier, after hearing the buffalo coming over the horizon somewhere.

Get Dousmann, if he’s back
.
Have him hire another cook—a decent one this time, goddamnit, and make sure the cook don’t bring no popskull with him like that damn Harvey Logan—then rendezvous at our old camp on Crooked Creek
.
Quick as you can get there.

McKay stayed with the wagon. He had lead and powder enough for the Sharps, so he wasn’t afraid of Indians. Too early yet for Comanches, though maybe a few hunting parties of ‘rapahoes might be down this way, killing along with the herd. But whatever their tribe, they’d be back toward the rear of it, and it went north for miles.

An hour later he saw them, first the frost cloud of their hot breath crystallizing in the cold morning like the smoke of a distant grass fire, then the wormlike wiggle dark under the thickening cloud. He heard them, too, the rumbling minor thunder of a thousand hooves on the hard earth, the roaring of the rutting bulls. It always took him aback, this first sight and sound of buffalo. As if they’d emerged suddenly, full-grown, from some fissure in the prairie, a kind of smelly, dusty, woolly afterthought to a volcanic cataclysm, stupid-eyed, the long curls of their dung-caked hair swaying rhythmically beneath their clumsy humps, horns poking spikes at a sky obscured by their dust. All of them covered with dollar signs.

It would be hot work for the next month or so.

He watched them just long enough to ensure they were definitely headed south, then hitched the team, checked the lashings on the load, and lined out toward the rendezvous.

For the moment, at least, the dream and the war forgotten.

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