Well, then Red Barrel Chest was saying he didn’t want nothing to change and he didn’t want none of them things the government was offering and I got mad as a hornet. He wanted everything to stay the same – to have his children raised like he was. He was clinging to his old ways same as the master had wanted to cling to his. Them two men was more than twice my age but I figured I knew more than both of them put together: I knew darned well that things is always changing and you got no choice but go along with it. If Mr Delaney had of understood that maybe he wouldn’t have ended up dead, burning like a hog roast on his own front porch.
I was mad enough, and then Red Barrel Chest start saying bad things about soldiers and by the time he’s finished complaining about how we done cut down his trees for firewood I just about got smoke coming out of my ears.
“His trees? His trees?” I says quiet to Reuben. “How does he think we gonna cook? Stay warm?”
Again, Reuben don’t answer. He’s frowning and his head’s on one side like he’s thinking as hard as me. He looks kinda sad and sorry for that chief. Goddammit! It’s almost like he thinks Red Barrel Chest might have a point. So now I’m mad at Reuben too.
“Does that man think he’s president of the whole damned prairie?” I says.
Well, yes, seems he does, because now he’s saying he wants to keep it all. He finishes up by telling Sherman that maybe, just maybe, he’ll let the government build his folks houses when all the buffalo is gone. But there are plenty of them about so it won’t be any time soon.
Then I see the look that passes across Sherman’s face. It’s the same look Jonas give me that last time I saw him: just before he put his hand to his neck and jerked it up like he been hanged. A cold finger run down my spine. I don’t know what it means, but it ain’t good. And I figure maybe Red Barrel Chest should have kept his mouth tight shut.
21.
Red Barrel Chest wasn’t the only one who was none too happy with what Sherman was proposing. The other chiefs said most all the same things. The talking goes round and round and round in circles. After a few days Sherman gets tired of it. He slam down his fist and tell them plain: they ain’t got no choice. Roads is coming, railroads is coming, settlers is coming. He’s building a nation here! Something big, something fine. You can see he don’t much care whether they settle down peaceable, or whether he’s got to kill every damned one of them Indians himself. Either way, progress is marching on and there ain’t no stopping it, any more than there is of stopping the sun or the moon.
There’s more talking and it goes on into the night and it goes on all the next day, and the next and sometimes me and Reuben is on guard duty and sometimes we ain’t. I lost count of how many days it took them to come to a decision but finally them chiefs sign the bits of paper Sherman been waving in their faces and me and Reuben is there to see it.
Bent Back is the first to put his mark down. The moment he done it his folks move off, quick and quiet. On the far side of the river we can see them tepees coming down before the ink’s even dry and then Bent Back is off too, looking over his shoulder at Sherman like he’s afraid, like he thinks the General might jump up and stick a knife in him. I can’t help thinking, Is he crazy? Why’s that man so scared? But there ain’t no one I can ask.
Red Barrel Chest takes the pen next, but he’s looking like he’d rather stab Sherman with it than make a mark on the paper. One by one all them chiefs do the same.
Well, that treaty might have been signed but I got to say things felt about as safe as sitting on a keg of gunpowder with a lighted match in one hand.
I was expecting trouble to break out right away. But it turned out Indians didn’t like to do no fighting in the winter, no more than they liked fighting in the dark. As long as the weather was icy cold we had ourselves some peace.
We was moved on again, north and west this time. Ended up in the same fort as General Michaels and his men. Can’t say we was best pleased to see them again. Especially when Captain Smith says we gonna be stationed here the whole winter. But he ain’t so fussed about it. We was staying put long enough for his wife and child to come out from east to join him. They arrive just before the snow come down.
My experience of white ladies been mostly confined to Miss Louellen. I wasn’t in no rush to know whether Mrs Smith had the same notions when it come to my general lack of trustworthiness. But it wasn’t like our paths would be crossing. I figured it would be easy enough to avoid her. But that child of his? Seemed there wasn’t no getting away from Tiberius Smith.
Now there was other officers’ children at that post – enough for one of the mothers to start a school so they could get their lessons. Mornings we could hear them singing out their alphabet while we was on guard mount. Afternoons them kids was free to roam. They be running around all over the place but didn’t none of them ever wander over to the side where we was quartered. Was like there was a line drawn in the dirt keeping them out. The only one who couldn’t see it was Tiberius.
He been there about a week when one morning the reveille sounded. A groan go around the bunkhouse. On one side of me Elijah says, “Hell, it way too early.” On the other Reuben says, “That bugler gone crazy or what? Can’t be time to get up yet.”
I push my blankets back, step out of bed. It’s morning and it’s dark in here and I ain’t entirely awake until my foot lands on something. Something soft. Something warm. Something alive.
“Goddammit!” It just about scares the life out of me. I jerk my foot back. “What the devil is that?”
I’m up on my bed and I got my feet tucked right up under me and I’m yelling, “There something under there! What is it, Reuben? Can you see, Elijah? That a rattler?”
They both up on their beds too because if that’s a rattler come in off the prairie don’t none of us want to go nowhere near the thing. Don’t none of us want to go the same way as George.
All of Company W is wide awake now and ain’t no one volunteering to look so Reuben gets his gun. He starts poking the end into the shadow under me and then the thing starts screaming.
“Don’t shoot! Don’t kill me!”
It’s a high-pitched voice. Child’s.
“Come out of there then. Show yourself.”
Tiberius Smith come slithering out. He got feathers in his hair and war paint across his nose. He been crawling along on his belly under all the beds in the bunkhouse, pretending he was a warrior come to ambush us. Guess he succeeded.
Well, there been so much commotion, and what with him screaming his head off it ain’t entirely surprising that Captain and Mrs Smith come running to see who’s killing their boy.
Mrs Smith’s hair is hanging loose down around her shoulders. Captain Smith’s coat is all unbuttoned. I think there’s gonna be hell to pay. It don’t matter that Tiberius come in uninvited. He’s a white child. We’re all of us gonna be in the wrong.
But it don’t work out like I’m expecting.
Captain Smith tells us to get on and get up because we gonna be late for Stable Call if we don’t get shifting. But before he do that Mrs Smith flush red and apologize for Tiberius disturbing us. She make Tiberius do the same. She tell him to say sorry special to me, seeing as he near scared me to death when I trod on him.
“Hey, it’s fine,” I says. All this fussing is making me feel mighty awkward.
“Shake on it?” says Tiberius. How old is that boy? Four? Five? He’s standing there, hand outstretched and, when I take it, he pump mine up and down like we’re both a pair of fine upstanding gentlemen. The feel of that child’s small hand in mine – soft, trusting – does something to my heart. I’d built me a shell by then, hard as stone. But he’s found a crack in it and wormed his way in.
He looks a whole lot like his ma. He’s got the same sandy-coloured hair and the same dusting of freckles across the bridge of his nose. But his eyes are his pa’s – clear blue, like the sky on a crisp winter morning.
My insides are flipping right over. Them eyes of his
are even more unsettling than the Captain’s. The sight of them has made me recall being up in the branches of the cottonwood tree.
I’m small, real small. My arms and legs are wound around the branch and I’m clinging on for dear life to stop from falling. How did I get there? Can’t have climbed. Couldn’t have reached that far. Someone must have lifted me up. It’s mighty strange. But that ain’t the strangest thing. The strangest thing is that I’m looking down into Jonas Beecher’s face. And there ain’t a trace of fear in me. I’m feeling happy. Because he’s smiling on up at me with just the same look on his face as Tiberius got right now.
Sweet Jesus! It was almost as if Jonas had liked me!
22.
Back on the plantation winters been on the mild side. I hardly ever seen snow. When I did, it just been a dusting that didn’t hang around long. When that snow come down on the fort it was like a big, thick blanket, covering up everything, changing the land so much you couldn’t recognize none of it.
I hated even thinking it, but it seemed them Indians had the right idea about not doing no fighting when the snow was on the ground. They was hunkered down in them tepees, sitting about the fire and telling each other stories. While they was snug and warm, we was out chasing damned fool men who was doing damned fool things. Outlaws and cattle rustlers was preying on settlers like vultures. Preying on the army too, when they got the chance. They needed hunting down and bringing in because we was there to keep the peace and bring law and order to the west.
Finding them reprobates wasn’t no problem at all – each time they thieved something they left a trail about as wide as the wide Missouri in all that snow. So when they took thirty head of beef from the fort it wasn’t remotely difficult to track them down. The difficult part was the shoot-out which come when we caught up with them because when your hands is so cold that you can’t feel your fingers and you done forgotten you ever had toes it’s real hard to pull a trigger. Was easier to just whack them whiteys over the head with the butt of my rifle. I confess I took a certain amount of pleasure in doing that.
It was hard being out on the prairie chasing reprobates but it was a whole lot better than being stuck inside that fort with General Michaels’ men and their foul-mouthed remarks.
If you’re fighting for America, you got to belong in America, don’t you? If you’re good enough to die for your country, ain’t you good enough to live in it?
Captain Smith told us we was. But there was only one of him. All them others couldn’t never pass any of us by without spitting words which ain’t fit to repeat.
And it didn’t matter how well we done in the field and how many hostiles we’d gone and killed, General Michaels plain refused to believe any of us could have done good. Wasn’t nothing Captain Smith could do about it. He just shrugged his shoulders and had to whistle for his ten dollars.
But it wasn’t long before Christmas was on its way and the Captain was making plans for us to have a celebration in the recreation hall. Me, Reuben, Elijah and Isaiah was put to cutting and bringing in greenery for decoration. Things was going along fine and we was all looking forward to some rest and relaxation but then General Michaels pulled the rug out from under us.
When he seen what the Captain was planning he calls his officers and men together. And the upshot of their conversation is that they refuse to share the hall with “a bunch of mokes”.
The Captain can’t go fighting a superior officer so he don’t say nothing but he sure ain’t gonna let us miss out on no festivities neither. He begs and borrows a load of lumber and tells us to go and build ourselves a stage in the barn. He even get hold of a stove so we don’t go freezing to death while we do it. Isaiah supervises the construction.
Truth be told, none of us was what you might call surprised about General Michaels and his men. The surprising thing was having Mrs Smith get some old blankets out of the Quartermaster and stitching them up to make curtains for a stage.
It turned out Captain Smith been a music teacher before the war come along. He got the band practising carols and as Christmas Day got closer it was all downright festive and the more General Michaels and his men looked like they been sucking on a bushel of lemons the more we was determined to have ourselves a good time.
Mrs Smith didn’t just sew them curtains. She made a heap of real dainty decorations and hung them on a tree. When we walk in on Christmas morning her kindness took my breath away. When it come to singing them carols and giving thanks to the Lord I done it with all my heart.
Back on the Delaney place all Christmas meant was harder work for Cookie and me. We was at it from before sunup to way after sundown for days on end. When we was following the Yankee army, when we was hunkered down in that stinking cabin, when I was all that time on the road walking – I guess two, maybe even three Christmases had passed me by altogether. This was the first time in all my born days I got to sit down to a Christmas dinner.
We had ourselves turkeys and oysters, venison and tinned tomatoes, and plum pudding. Was the finest meal I ever ate. Then there was more singing, and we was banging out carols but across the way General Michaels and his men was trying to outdo us and they sure as hell wasn’t singing about peace on earth. They was roaring out the words to “Sam Hall”. Jonas used to whistle that tune through the gap in his teeth. I’d never heard the words before, but now they was so loud I could catch every single one of them.
My name it is Sam Hall
And I hate you, one and all
I hate you, one and all,
Damn your eyes!
We know them sentiments is aimed at us. Thomas is near crying with rage over it, but Reuben calm him down. “Hey, this is Christmas! We’ll just sing louder to drown them out.” Then some of us pick up the band’s instruments. Reuben’s got a natural talent for the bugle, which pleases the Captain no end. But I can’t raise nothing out of none of them excepting a sound like breaking wind. It make Tiberius giggle so much he get the hiccups. Mrs Smith go red in the face, she so mortified. After that, folks got to talking and telling stories.
Elijah was real good at that. He sits there with Tiberius crouching in the dirt at his feet, whittling this tiny little deer for his own boy while he talks. The night was drawing in and the cold come creeping back so we huddle closer to the stove and Elijah’s voice just flows along like molasses. He’s telling the story of how this fox hates this rabbit so much he done set a trap to catch him. The fox makes a baby out of tar and sets it down on the side of the road where the rabbit is sure to see it. When the rabbit comes a-hopping down the track he stops to talk to the tar baby, which, not being real, can’t answer him none. So the rabbit gets mad and he gives the baby a smack, right there on his nose, but his paw gets stuck to the tar so the rabbit gets even madder and he hits it with the other paw and it ain’t no surprise that it gets stuck too. So now the rabbit is madder than a hornet and he’s trying to pull his paws away but he just can’t do it, so he tries kicking it with his back legs.
We was all grinning our heads off at the notion of this rabbit stuck-up with tar. Thomas had took one of them blackened sticks from the stove and was drawing a real fine picture of the rabbit in his pocket book and I was so busy watching the shape coming to life on the page that I didn’t see Mrs Smith was behind me.
Elijah goes on with the story. The fox come along and catch the rabbit and he’s wondering whether the rabbit would taste better fried or roasted.
But that rabbit’s smart. Smarter than that old fox, anyhow. He tricks the fox by begging and pleading. “Oh, please don’t throw me in the briar patch! Anywhere but there! Throw me in the fire, throw me in the river, but not there! Don’t throw me there! Anywhere but there!” And that fox hate that rabbit so bad that’s exactly what he does. He chuck him in the briar patch and the rabbit wriggle through and escapes, easy as eating cherry pie.
When Elijah gets to the end we all laughing like crazy but I hear this big old sigh right behind me and I see Mrs Smith standing there. She a
in’t laughing. Ain’t smiling, even. She’s got her hand on her husband’s arm and her eyes are looking real sad and she’s saying softly, but not so softly that I can’t hear every word, “That’s what we’re fighting, isn’t it? A huge tar baby. The more we fight, the more we cover ourselves in pitch.”
I don’t know what she means, but it give me an uncomfortable feeling inside – that same uncomfortable feeling I got when Reuben looked kinda sorry for Red Barrel Chest. I got enough problems of my own to deal with, and I just don’t want to be bothered with a feeling like that. So I take it in my hands and I crush it right down into a ball and then I tuck that ball into the deepest, darkest corner of my head so I don’t have to look at it.
23.
We passed a pleasant Christmas but that was only one day in a very long winter. When we was out in the field chasing outlaws time passed quick enough. But in the fort the days dragged bad and the nights dragged worse. On duty we went from one bugle call to the next: reveille, stable call, breakfast call, guard mount, drill call. Sometimes the space between each one stretched out so long it felt like there was days dividing them; like twenty-four hours was twenty-four weeks, twenty-four months, twenty-four years. And when we was off-duty? Well, there ain’t a whole heap of things to do at a military post when the snow’s thick on the ground. There was whisky to be had from the post store so long as you kept it quiet, but that didn’t hold no attraction for me. And then there was the women who done the laundry. Some of them was happy to keep a fella warm for a few coins. Reuben was friendly with one or two but it wasn’t exactly the kinda pleasure a man with my attributes could go indulging in. That winter, mostly I was just sat on my butt freezing half to death.