Buffalo Soldier

  So when Reuben pulls me out of that drift we go down to where seven hundred horses are bleeding in the snow.

  Abe’s one of them.

  And the worse thing is he ain’t dead. He’s lying there, real quiet, and I know that when a horse is hurt bad he don’t make no noise because whimpering would be the surest way of inviting a wolf or a coyote to come get him, so I know he’s a goner even before I see the big old wound in his neck. When he sees me he tries to stand but he can’t and he tries to whicker a greeting only the blood burbles out instead of any sound because his windpipe is cut through. And all I can do for my horse is end it for him, because I ain’t letting him lie there and bleed to death. So I take his funny-looking head in my lap and I take my pistol and I do what I need to do. And then I just stay there, sitting in the snow, because I ain’t got the strength to do nothing else.

  26.

  I was sitting there in that snow, with Abe’s head in my lap, and the warmth leaving him and I was grieving too bad even to cry. I couldn’t move. Guess I’d have sat there until I froze solid along with the rest of the dead if it hadn’t of been for Reuben. He come wading through that mess of blood and snow and pick me up by the shoulders and haul me out of there. And he had his arm around my waist and was helping me along like I was wounded, which actually I was, because let me tell you that if you gotta shoot a horse it ain’t especially smart to do it when it got its head in your lap because the bullet goes clear through and slices you across the thigh although I was hurting too bad inside to notice it at the time. And when we get over to his horse he clasps me in a manly embrace by way of telling me he’s sorry about Abe without having to actually say the words. His breath’s hot in my hair. “Why’d they do that, Charley? It don’t make sense. It don’t make sense.”

  Now, grief is a mighty strange thing. I was so deep down sorrowful that the feeling of Reuben’s arms around me had a real powerful effect. One minute my heart’s aching so much all I want to do is lie down and die. The next my heart’s pounding and all I want to do is lie down with Reuben and get real physical. So I find myself returning his embrace in a fashion that ain’t what you might call brotherly.

  I didn’t do nothing but that. Was a hug, that was all. My arms round him. But men can smell lustful thoughts a mile off and Reuben’s sure smelled mine.

  He drops his arms. Steps back. He don’t say nothing. But the look he give me makes my heart shrivel right up inside me. Makes the words die on my lips.

  I don’t get up on his horse behind him. I limp all the way back to the fort. He’s too good a soldier to abandon me altogether. He keep me in sight, but only just. And he don’t say another word to me. Not then. Not later. Not ever.

  I guess I could have told Reuben what I was. I ain’t entirely sure why I didn’t. Guess I was so shook up about Abe I wasn’t thinking straight. Or maybe I was. Either way, telling him just didn’t seem to be an option. What could I have said?

  “Hey, brother! I’m a woman. Yep, I been lying to y’all these last two years. Seemed like a good idea at the time. How d’ya like that?”

  I’d have been kicked straight out of the army. I was in the middle of the prairie in the middle of winter – where in the hell was I supposed to go?

  So I let Reuben go on looking at me like I was some goddamned freak of nature. Soon as we was back he done take himself off for a visit to the laundry. He don’t come back to the bunkhouse all night. When the reveille sound, he ain’t nowhere to be found. When he don’t show for guard mount the Captain says it’s official: Reuben’s deserted.

  Now whether it was because of me, or whether it was because of what we seen in that valley, I don’t know and I couldn’t ask him. I felt in my heart it was my fault Reuben left.

  Shame: that got to be the worst feeling in the world. Eats away at your insides like a bellyful of maggots. Leaves you like a hollowed-out shell. Grief is bad enough. But grief fades. All that sorrow I had for Cookie hadn’t gone, wouldn’t never go entirely, yet the razor-sharp edges been worn off in time. I knew my grieving over Abe would soften too. Sometime. Eventually. But the shame of hugging Reuben: I knew that would never go away. I might bury it, I might put a lid on it, I might hide it, yet whatever I did it would stay as sharp and clear as the day it happened. It would always be there, waiting to ambush me when I was least able to fight it.

  That night, when me and Reuben come back to the fort and I lay awake wondering what in the hell he was up to, I got ambushed by things I’d buried so deep I hadn’t thought they’d ever see the light of day again.

  Like that time I was in the garden, pulling onions. I been sent there by Cookie again because Amos had turned up and they wanted to be alone. I was crying, tears of rage pouring down my face, and the tears got mixed with the mud and the snot. I was all mussed up. I rub at my eyes with a dirty hand and the grit go right in so I can’t see nothing. And I’m so taken up with my own misery I don’t hear Jonas coming. I don’t even know he’s there until his shadow fall across me and the air go cold.

  I ain’t been stood so close to him in a long time. My first thought is that he’s gotten tall. He’s taller than his pa. His hair’s still falling in them yellow curls but there’s a golden down on his top lip now where a moustache is trying to break through.

  “Hey,” he says. And before I can run he’s got both my wrists in his one hand and his arm is around me, pulling my back tight to his chest. My ass is pressed into his groin and I can feel something hard trying to shove itself between my butt cheeks. With his one free hand he’s reaching under my skirt, his cold fingers on my warm skin, and he’s panting like a dog.

  Guess he’d have had me right there in the garden if his pa hadn’t been heading to the big house. When the overseer see what his boy’s doing he come running. He pull Jonas off of me. He cup his hand under my chin. For a second – just one second – he look right into my face. I see something so strange in his I don’t understand it, not even now. He says one word. Whispers it. Sounds like “apple”. But it don’t make no sense. He orders me back to the cook-house. Then he turns away and gives Jonas a whack across the cheek with the back of his hand. He don’t hit his boy hard, don’t redden the skin even, but Jonas is so surprised he fall. He don’t make a sound. He lies there, his golden curls in the dust and the dirt, and he fixes me with them sky-blue eyes of his.

  Cookie and Amos was so wrapped up in each other they didn’t hardly notice the mess I was in when I got back. They thought I’d fallen, was all. And I was too shamed to tell them otherwise. Like I was too shamed to tell them the night one of them Yankee soldiers got me up against a tree when I been trying to take a piss. And that time there wasn’t no overseer to go pulling him off.

  I thought I’d had plenty enough of being mauled by men. Didn’t think I’d ever want to go laying down with one voluntary. Guess I’d changed. Grown up, maybe. That one hug had exposed a need in me I didn’t know I possessed. But I’d have to keep a lid on it. Button myself up tighter than ever if I wanted to stay alive.

  There didn’t seem to be anything to laugh at once Reuben was gone. I missed him bad. But, truth be told, I missed Abe more. My horse been like a rock under me. With him gone I was standing on shifting ground. There was nothing to hold onto. Didn’t nothing seem safe. I got given a new one of course, but it wasn’t the same. I didn’t give it no name other than “Horse”. I was planning on not getting attached to nothing or no one ever again.

  A couple of days after I been back in the fort Tiberius come running across the parade ground after school finish and press a piece of paper in my hand. There are two white streaks through the dirt on his face where the tears been running.

  In one heartbeat it carry me back to the time I seen Jonas like that: curled up in a ball, being eaten alive with sorrow. He’d wrapped himself so tight he was smaller than I was. I’d edged up to him, my hand reaching out, not knowing what to do, only knowing I wanted to ease that pain. Comfort him.

  Soon as my fingers touc
hed his skin: that was when he’d first turned on me. He changed in the space of one heartbeat. In one heartbeat there been enough hate in Jonas’s eyes to feed every soul in hell.

  Looking down at Tiberius I’m suddenly scared. But he don’t say nothing. Don’t even glance at me. Just run off before he start crying again. When I look at the paper he give me I see he done me a drawing of Abe. And underneath it he wrote, “Sorry about your horse.” Broke me in pieces. Couldn’t stand to look at it. I folded it up. Put it in my pocket. Buried it deep. Didn’t never take it out.

  It wasn’t long after Reuben took off that one of them laundry women started paying me some attention. Spicy was her name and judging from the way Reuben talk about her she been his particular favourite. I guess that girl was missing the money she got when he come calling. There wasn’t nothing loving in the way she made up to me. She just grab me by the crotch of my pants. Leastways she try to. I step aside mighty quick.

  “Come on, trooper,” she says, soft and silky. “Wouldn’t you like some comfort on a cold night?”

  I try to be civil. I says, “No”, but I don’t say it nothing like loud enough for her and she try again.

  “Ain’t Reuben never told you about me? I can make a man feel real warm.” She lunge again and I sidestep but I’m terrified she gonna find out what’s in my pants – or rather what ain’t in them – so this time I’m shouting when I tell her I ain’t interested. Captain Smith hears it all good and clear as he passes by and the next thing I know I’m being summoned to the officers’ quarters.

  He call me in, and first off he commend me for my fine soldierly ways. See, even though me and Reuben failed to deliver the mail like we was supposed to it hasn’t troubled him none. I couldn’t tell him about Abe – didn’t trust myself to speak on the matter – so he didn’t know we’d fetched up in that Indian camp. The Captain done put two and two together and make about three hundred. He figures we was lost in the blizzards then attacked by hostiles and my horse was killed and I was wounded in the course of carrying out my duties – and I just let him go right on thinking it. Next thing I know I’m being complimented for my gallantry. Then he says, “I heard what took place just now, Private. Don’t approve of loose women, eh?”

  “No, sir!” I says. And he finds the sincerity I put into my reply highly satisfying. It wasn’t strictly true. I wasn’t in no position to judge a person for the way they chose to get by. I had nothing personal against them girls. But I generally found it was easier to tell white folks what they wanted to hear.

  So he goes and gives me a promotion. All of a sudden, I’m Corporal O’Hara and I got me a stripe on my arm. I got me some power. I got me some authority. And there’s the Captain thinking I’m a fine, upstanding soldier of unimpeachable moral fibre and there’s Reuben running off all on his own across the prairies in the snow because he thinks I’m some kinda freak.

  It might have been funny if it hadn’t of been so damned sad.

  Reuben wasn’t the only trooper to desert that year. The winter was terrible bad. A bunch of General Michaels’ men run off too. I might even have considered it myself if I hadn’t found Elijah in the bunkhouse about a week after I got promoted. He was sitting close by the stove and he was shaking like he got the typhoid fever or cholera or something. I figured he was sick and trying to get warm, but then I seen what he was dropping in the fire.

  Them animals. All them ones he carved. Eagle. Wolf. Deer. Buffalo. Horse. Into the flames. They lick round one. It flares. Blackens. Crumbles into ashes. In goes the next. One by one. The whole damned ark full.

  The Captain had given Elijah some news. Seemed that about the same time General Michaels been killing them Indians, a bunch of civilized white men been doing much the same to Negroes back east. Only back east it lasted six days. And at the end of it, four hundred was dead. Elijah’s wife and son was two of them.

  He stayed. I stayed. There was no place else to go.

  27.

  The fine gentlemen in Washington was sick and tired of trying to fix the “Indian Problem”. They had decided enough was enough. The army was under new orders. We got to break the Indians by whatever means possible. That was why General Michaels had took his men down along that valley. It was what he called a “pre-emptive strike”. Guess he was doing what Sherman done in the war: destroying everything the enemy cared about. What made Indians happy wasn’t big houses and sprawling plantations. It was their families. And their horses.

  I didn’t like what General Michaels had done but it sure was effective. Come the spring – before Company W could start in on them – hundreds of wild Indians was drifting in off the plains and settling themselves down voluntary where the government told them to. Bent Back was dead. Seemed that the heart been ripped out of the rest of them. In a few weeks there was thousands camped around the fort.

  They been promised food when they signed that treaty – I been there, I heard what been said – but supplies was awful late in coming. We had to sit and watch them Indians getting skinnier and skinnier.

  When the supply wagons finally rolled in me and Elijah was detailed to hand out rations. We was giving over sacks of flour when one split. Some spilled over my boots. When I bent down to brush it off I seen that flour was cut with sand. Worse, it was peppered with mouse shit and alive with weevils. Cookie would have screamed the place down if someone had tried passing that off on her.

  I look to where Isaiah and some others is giving out meat. They a way off but I see it’s green and gristly and even from where I’m standing it don’t smell so good. I look at Elijah and Elijah looks at me and we both look at the Indians all standing in line real quiet and don’t none of them say nothing. They take what they’re given and they go off. Who was they gonna complain to?

  Now up until that point I been thinking all the trouble that come their way was their own doing – that they brought it down on their own heads. I guess when misfortune come to someone, folks is always inclined to blame the victim. You get sick? Must have been something you ate. You fall over? Should have looked where you was going. Your baby dies? You didn’t look after it good. You get strung up? Well, you should have been running, not standing there singing. Your folks get attacked by the army? Hell, you must have done something to deserve it! Whatever it is, if something bad happens to you, it’s just got to be your own damned fault.

  Folks don’t like change, but folks don’t like chance neither. The notion that things can come sneaking up and turn your life on its head without you having done nothing at all? The idea that you could be living peaceable, minding your own business, just getting on with life, and then some stranger comes riding out of nowhere and starts hurting your family, killing your folks? That’s way too frightening to accept. Goddammit, no, that just can’t happen! You’ve got to be blamed. You’ve got to be responsible.

  But when I seen that flour, well, maybe it was then I started to think a little different.

  The fort wasn’t big enough to handle all them Indians camping around it so we get orders that a new one has to be built. There been a big piece of land set aside: a brand-new reservation provided by the government so them wild Indians can settle down peaceful, stop hunting, start farming and become tame like them Cherokees.

  The Captain’s family stay put but Company W is moved about fifty miles north and we found ourselves sitting in the middle of that new reservation, living in tents what been condemned as unfit for General Michaels’ men to use.

  We’re on fatigue duty on and off for more than a year while we’re building that fort. We don’t get to see a scrap of combat in months. I’m a Corporal now, so I’m doing some of the supervising which suits me fine because when it come to heaving slabs of stone I just ain’t got the same muscle power as Elijah. But I don’t get to use Mr Cody’s rifle for months and I miss it bad. It’s like we been turned from soldiers into labourers. Field hands.

  Our third army Christmas is a sad and lonesome affair without Mrs Smith making decorations a
nd Tiberius making merry. But come the following summer we’d made ourselves a fine set of buildings with stables and storehouses and officers’ quarters and a strong stone-walled corral, which was something to be proud of, I guess, although I recall thinking that if Reuben was right – if freedom meant not having to do no work – we was as far from having it as we ever been.

  When we done building, General Michaels and his men get posted there alongside us, which is real unfortunate. They come riding in like they own the place – like it was them built it up out of the ground from nothing. Their first guard mount Private Creech give me a look that says he ain’t forgotten and he ain’t forgiven me for being a better shot than him. This time I ain’t got Reuben watching my back. But with him gone, with Abe gone, I find I’m caring a whole lot less about getting a knife slid between my ribs. And this time I’m a Corporal. The look I send back to Private Creech makes him blink, drop his head. He don’t look in my direction again.

  The Captain’s family come along too. The girl’s walking and talking by now and they got a new baby boy a few months old. Tiberius is a whole lot bigger and he’s riding a different pony because, he tells me, Mighty Spotted Warrior upped and died on him during the winter.

  “He was just lying there in his stall one morning. Wouldn’t wake up.”

  I want to say to him, “Sorry about your horse.” But I can’t get the words out. So I don’t say nothing.

  One morning Captain Smith send me over to his quarters with a note for his wife.

  I’m knocking on the door when I hear a scream. It was a frightened one to begin with. I thought maybe she seen a spider or a mouse. Hope to God it ain’t a rattler! But then the tone of it kinda changed. Turned into something like fury. And she start yelling and hollering and she sound real mad.