Buffalo Soldier

  I told Elijah, “He was different when he was a boy.”

  “Don’t mean nothing. Me and the master played together when we was small. Didn’t stop him whipping the hide off me when his horse gone lame.”

  “What you do to it?”

  Elijah is suddenly madder than I ever seen him. “You think I done something? You think I deserved it? Hell, Charley! You crazy? White folks is mean! I ain’t never met one who wasn’t, excepting Captain Smith. They don’t need no reason to act that way. It in their blood. In their bones. It the way they born!”

  Elijah was talking sense and I knew it. Yet I couldn’t shake that notion. Until I seen that sack of flour full of weevils; until I smelled that stinking green meat and seen them slaughtered buffaloes, I thought them Indians been savages who liked fighting and thieving for the sheer hell of it. I knew different now. And if they had reasons for doing what they done, well, maybe, just maybe, Jonas did too.

  36.

  Things wasn’t looking good for Company W even before a bunch of Apaches gone running off that godforsaken reservation. Truth be told, when we was sent to bring them back in they was the least of our problems.

  We been told to pick up their trail and keep on right after them until we catch up. Only that was a whole lot easier said than done. We wouldn’t even have found the trail in the first place if it hadn’t of been for them Indian scouts. We’d be looking at a patch of land and there wouldn’t be no sign at all that anyone had passed that way, but then one of them would give a shout because they see a stone turned over here, a broken blade of grass there – things only an Indian, or someone raised by them, would notice.

  To begin with, them runaways been travelling together but when they got a mile or so from the reservation boundary they’d split up into five or more groups and headed in different directions. There was no way of knowing which one we was supposed to follow so them scouts picked the strongest trail and off we went.

  Now I didn’t much care if every one of them got clean away into Mexico. They be someone else’s problem then. Let the Mexican Army deal with them! I had other things on my mind. First was Jim, of course. Second was Jonas Beecher.

  That man could cuss powerful bad. I ain’t never heard such a stream of it. He didn’t speak to none of us without saying we was apes or baboons or goddamned dirty monkeys and worse. Much worse. Every single order he give was followed by a cuss. And all the time there was Bill Hickey, cussing right alongside him. When Jonas wasn’t cussing he was whistling “Sam Hall” through the gap in his teeth and Bill was singing right along, singing his heart out.

  We been issued with six weeks’ supplies but from what Bill Hickey been saying about the godawfulness of trying to catch Apaches it looked like we might be out in the field a whole lot longer than that. Them army rations kept body and soul together but they wasn’t what you might call good eating. When we been with Captain Smith – unless we was hard on the heels of hostiles – if a turkey or jackrabbit or some such thing cross your path you was expected to treat it as an act of divine providence. So when a big, fat turkey fly up in my horse’s face I shoot without giving it a thought.

  Only this ain’t Captain Smith we’re riding with, it’s Jonas. And he’s madder than a nest of hornets about me acting without his permission. He goes crazy. He take his knife and he cut off my sergeant’s stripes. Just like that, I’m demoted all the way back down to private. He decides that it ain’t enough punishment. He take a lariat and he rope that bird onto my back. And I ain’t allowed to ride no more. I gotta walk along at the back end of the column until the whole damned turkey rots off.

  Well, what with the flies and the stench and the feathers and the heat – it got bad. Mighty bad. But it would have been a whole lot worse if Jim hadn’t come over real quiet and give me a wad of something to chew on. It tasted so strong it took most all that stench away. Don’t know what it was. Didn’t ask. Didn’t look too close at it neither. My mind was more taken up with the way his palm pressed against mine. Set my blood racing. Sweet Jesus, it was a powerful feeling!

  Thinking on him was a whole lot more pleasing than thinking on Jonas Beecher. I didn’t want to be too near Jim – that was way too unsettling – but I watched him from the corner of one eye.

  So when something shift in him, I can’t help but see.

  We was in the middle of one of them flat plains. The haze was rising off the dirt and there was buzzards circling way above. Guess the stench of that old turkey was drifting up to them and they was hoping for a piece.

  We’re heading in a straight line right across towards the mountains and Jim’s just off to one side near some low-grown scrub when Jonas call a halt. Seems he ain’t so used to the heat or the hard riding as we was and he’s near to dropping. We’re waiting for him to take in water and recover some when I notice Jim.

  Now why it made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up I plain don’t know. He didn’t do nothing. Didn’t say nothing. It was like watching that deep, dark pool. The surface is still, but way beneath there’s a current whirling. You can just feel it. And I couldn’t help myself. I had to go on over and see what was stirring him.

  I told Elijah I needed a piss. Headed for that little patch of scrub. When I got there I see there’s one of them deep gulleys. It’s a crack in the ground and you can’t see it until you about ready to fall in. Wasn’t visible from where Jonas was. Which was maybe just as well. Because there was a little old Indian woman in there and two kids. One was the girl I give the pouch back to. The other couldn’t have been more than two years old. All three was scrawny as hell. Sitting, still as rocks. Not even blinking.

  What I should have done was train my rifle on them. Call for help. Take them in. That was what I was being paid for, after all.

  But what would have happened next unfolded in my head like a blanket. I could see the pattern clear as day.

  Jim hadn’t said a word. If I spoke up the first thing I’d do would be to land him in a whole heap of trouble. And Jonas would claim credit for picking up three hostiles. Whether they’d reach the reservation alive was anybody’s guess. The thing with the turkey showed that he was crazier and madder than I ever known him. And I figured he was the trigger-happy kind. If any of them three made one wrong move they’d be shot, and Jonas would say they was trying to escape whether they was or not. Alive or dead, it didn’t matter none to him.

  I had a bird’s stinking carcass strung across my shoulders. Right then I wasn’t feeling inclined to give Jonas Beecher nothing to brag about.

  So I turn my back on them three Indians. I unbutton my pants, make like I’m taking a piss. When I’m supposedly done I button up again. Out of the corner of my eye I see Jim’s back stiffen. He’s scared about what I’m gonna do. I don’t even glance his way. I look over at Jonas, and I says real quiet but loud enough for Jim to hear, “I ain’t handing no one over to that cuss.”

  Me and Jim was strapped together tighter than ever after that. Couldn’t neither of us move without the other one feeling it. We couldn’t go sitting around talking to each other for hours at a stretch. Wasn’t no chance of that. Jim kept himself to himself mostly and so did I. Yet there was moments, here and there, in the days and the weeks that followed. Enough to keep me going. I learned so many things off of that man. I started looking at the territory through Jim’s eyes. I got to notice them small patches of green in the wide, flat desert where you could go digging for water. Which cactus leaves you could split and bind to a wound to heal it. Which rocks would be hiding rattlers.

  What had seemed an empty patch of nothing started to look full of life, full of colour. Lord above, that stretch of sand started to look beautiful! Sunrise. Sunset. The whole place would be flooded scarlet and gold. I’d lie on my back just looking, marvelling at the splendour of it all. Was half expecting a crowd of angels to appear.

  As for them mountains: Jonas would be cussing that the trail was too steep, the way too hard-going but I’d be sitting there, liste
ning to them birds, watching the pattern of light dancing through the trees, thinking no wonder them Apaches didn’t want to give this land over. If I’d have been one of them I’d have fought to the death to hang onto it too.

  37.

  That first time we rode with Jonas we was out in the field for eight weeks or more. He has us on half rations and then quarter rations and when the supplies finally give out we got to turn back. We ain’t caught up with no hostiles. Didn’t even get within sniffing distance of them, leastways as far as he was concerned.

  Sometimes we’d pass a ranch or come across a wagon train and we’d be told they been seen someplace, but by the time we got there they been seen again, this time back in the place we was before. They was running rings around us. And we was going in circles, chasing our tails. So Jonas was in a mighty ugly mood. Guess he was wondering what he was gonna tell his superior officers. And this time it’s Elijah who crosses him.

  Now when we been on the prairie there was times we had tents rolled up with our blankets and tied to our saddles. They wasn’t no more than a square of canvas and a couple of poles. When the weather was dry didn’t none of us bother with them. They mostly all had holes in any case and at the end of a hard day’s riding it was easier just to roll up your coat, shove it under your head and lie right down on the ground. Out here, this was one tough old territory to be riding in and all them tents would have done was weigh down the horses, make the going harder on them. So we didn’t have none. We was well used to sleeping out under the stars and – since I’d laid eyes on Jim – I’d come to like seeing the sky spread so big above me.

  But Jonas Beecher didn’t follow the same line of thinking. He had to have himself an officer’s big tent and a nice camp bed and a whole heap else besides.

  One morning Elijah been ordered to take it all down, get it packed. We didn’t have no wagon to load it onto on account of us being up in the mountains and the trails being too narrow and too steep to go driving a wagon along. Elijah has to load everything onto a mule and that thing has the same godawful temperament as Yeller done. It’s trying to snatch bites out of Elijah’s leg so I give him a hand, grabbing its halter to stop it wheeling around.

  Now Elijah was a thoughtful man. Everything he done was slow and thorough – I never did see him do anything sloppy.

  But Jonas starts up complaining that Elijah ain’t loading them tent pegs right and how he ain’t never seen no moke do a decent job.

  I’m keeping my head down and my mouth shut. But Elijah finish what he’s doing and then he look at his Captain. That’s all he does. Look. But he look him in the eye. Direct. Straight. Man to man.

  Jonas regard that look as an act of insubordination and he shout at Elijah, “You worthless dog! Don’t you stare at me like that.”

  Elijah hadn’t hardly spoke a word to a white man since his family been killed. But he break his silence now. Couldn’t have picked a worse time to do it.

  Elijah put his shoulders back and he says, “Captain Beecher, I ain’t no dog and I sure ain’t worthless. I’m a soldier in the United States Army.”

  Now if Elijah had left it at that, maybe, just maybe Jonas would have let it go. Maybe not. Didn’t get a chance to find out. Because Elijah says, “I’m a soldier, sir. Same as you.”

  Well, that drive Jonas right over the edge. He give Elijah a lick across the face with his whip, hit him so hard that Elijah fall down in the dirt. His whole face is near split in two. Jonas kick him in the throat. Once. Twice. And I can’t do nothing but stand there, screaming inside, watching and praying for it to stop. Then he order Elijah to be gagged and handcuffed and tied behind the back end of the mule. He only just out of the reach of its hooves. Elijah stays chained like that the rest of the time we’re out and when he was too tired to walk, the thing just drag him along all the way back to the fort.

  When we get there we find the place in uproar. A couple of settlers have come riding in and they’re shitting their pants, which ain’t surprising because Indians have attacked a ranch a couple of miles away. A family of seven been killed, they say. Mother. Father. Five kids. They found one of them hanging from the wall. A little yellow-haired girl. Dangling from a meat hook punched through her head. She was still alive and twitching when they fetched her down.

  Them men say they seen the Indians’ trail and they was heading in this direction. They must be real close.

  Now the General ain’t about to go sending none of his men out when night’s drawing in: there just ain’t no point. Instead he calls Jonas over and wants a report on what we been doing the last eight weeks.

  The fact we ain’t had no success finding them hostiles ain’t Jonas’s fault, of course; it’s ours. We can hear him telling the General we’re a goddamned useless bunch of monkeys and how in the hell is he expected to make any progress? We’re cowards and incompetents and, according to him, can’t none of us even shoot straight.

  General Howker don’t disagree, but he ain’t exactly impressed either. He ain’t saying much at all. So Jonas Beecher’s mood is blacker than pitch when he tell us what we’ve got to do. And whether the idea was his or whether it was the General’s I don’t know. All I know is that we’re done for.

  Now it didn’t take much for us to work out that there’s only one reason them hostiles would come so close to a fort. They’re short of guns. Short of horses. They’re coming thieving. And Jonas Beecher decides to make things real easy for them.

  He don’t let us corral the horses. They been worked hard the last eight weeks, he says; they need a good night’s grazing. He give the order that they’ve got to be turned out. They ain’t hobbled, they ain’t on picket pins, they’re wandering loose. And then he set three of us watching them. Just three. Me, Elijah and Isaiah. Everyone else – including Jim and the rest of them scouts – get confined to quarters. Ain’t none of them allowed to move a muscle.

  We wasn’t given no saddles nor no rifles. Jonas take Mr Cody’s Springfield off me. He said I wouldn’t be needing it if all we was doing was watching horses. We was riding bareback and all we got to defend the whole herd is one pistol each.

  We know them warriors are gonna come – it’s as predictable as the fact the sun’s gonna rise the next morning. As predictable as the fact that we won’t be alive to see it when it does. We got no choice but follow orders. If we don’t we’ll be court-martialled and end up shot in any case. Either way, we’re dead.

  “You still think he can be turned good?” says Elijah. The cut on his face has scabbed over, but the back of his head is rubbed raw from being dragged along behind that mule.

  “What?” says Isaiah. “Who we talking about?”

  “Captain Beecher. Charley here know him from the old days.”

  “Guess he was a crazy cuss then too, wasn’t he?”

  “Mostly.”

  “Charley think the Captain got a heart of gold, deep down.”

  “That so?”

  “He just keeping it well hidden.”

  “It in there, all right,” I says. “Maybe I need a pickaxe and shovel to find it.”

  “Hell, it gonna take more than that. That heart of gold buried so deep you gonna need to dig a mineshaft to fetch it out.”

  “A hundredweight of dynamite.”

  “Team of mules.”

  We’re laughing so much I get to thinking, Hey, well, maybe if I got to die, doing it here, tonight, with these two either side of me, ain’t gonna be so bad. If it wasn’t for Jim, I’d have welcomed it.

  It was a long night waiting for that attack to come. The moon was big and bright, shining almost like day. On the prairie they’d have called it a Comanche Moon. A good night for raiding.

  Guess them Indians thought it looked too easy. Probably figured we had extra men hidden someplace, ready to ambush them. By the time they done creeping around and seen it was truly just the three of us it was almost dawn.

  I already said how fear is inclined to loosen my bowels. I was off shitting my inside
s out when them Indians finally come crawling on their bellies through the scrub.

  First I knew of it was when the hairs on the back of my neck stood to attention and I could feel deep down in my belly that things was wrong. I froze, still, not moving, and then one of them warriors slithered right by me, so close I could have put out my hand and touched him. And in the moonlight I see hair that’s silvered grey with age and I see that man’s scrawny as hell. My throat goes so tight I can’t breathe. I’m there, pants down about my ankles, and all I can think is, Folks will see. Folks will know. Bill Hickey will know. Jonas will see. The notion of dying, my privates exposed to the sky, was too much to bear. My bowels turn to water all over again.

  I couldn’t get to my pistol, couldn’t do nothing. That warrior turn and look straight at me and I see it ain’t a man at all. It’s that little old woman. The one who been hiding in that gulley with them kids. The one I never told on. She got a knife, gripped between her teeth. Any second now, I think, she’s gonna stick it in me. But she don’t. She give me a look and slither on by. And I’m so goddamned surprised I don’t do nothing. I don’t even call out a warning. She grab Elijah’s foot and tip him off his horse. I see her cut his throat. And still I don’t yell. I try to. But my tongue ain’t working. I can’t get no noise out.

  Isaiah gets his throat cut too. They was both dead before they knew we was even under attack. And then all them horses get driven off real quiet and orderly and there wasn’t nothing I could do about none of it.

  I lay down beside Elijah, pressed myself up against his back and tried to keep the life from leaving him. Didn’t work. I took Isaiah’s hands in mine thinking if I could only hold them tight enough I’d keep him here, get him cracking his knuckles again. I’d have given anything to hear that sound one more time. I wept and I prayed and I begged the Lord to take me instead. But He didn’t. So I called on the Devil, told him if he’d only give Elijah and Isaiah back their lives, he could take mine. He could throw me into the deepest pit of hell, roast me, burn me, punish me for all eternity. But that didn’t work neither. The Devil didn’t want me no more than the Lord.