The Comanche Kid, page 11
He looked at Preacher and he said, “Can you help us out here, son?”
Preacher said, “Yes, sir, boss,” and he left to get his Bible.
Tommy Deuce and Shady went for the shovels and Abraham and Bill went to pick up Cliff, but Big Mike said, “No, Bronson and I got this.”
Abraham said, “That’s a heavy load, boss,” so Big Mike relented and all four of them picked up a corner of the tarp and carried Cliff over to where they wanted him buried, the rest of the hands following along in a procession.
When they got to the spot, Tommy Deuce and Shady started digging, Jack Straw and Skinny spelling them. When they hit rocks, the other hands and I got down on all fours and helped pull them out. While we were doing that, Big Mike and Hard Luck Luke Bronson opened up the tarp and went through Cliff’s pockets and found a pocket watch and a tally book with a pencil, but that was all, other than his Bull Durham. Then they folded the tarp over him real neatly. I was glad when that job was done because a man dead by drowning don’t look good. I had to look away, and it was a relief to have him covered.
Then they put him in his grave.
I imagine the funeral was like the one they did for Scotty. Preacher knew just what verses to read, about life and ashes and dust, and he gave a brief sermon about life being short, and we know not when, like a thief in the night, and what a good man Cliff was and how he too was bringing civilization to the world, and he was riding now where horses were fast and the air was fresh and it was summer always.
All the boys were asked if they wanted to say something. Several of them spoke up about something Cliff had said or done, or a blanket stretcher he’d told about it being so hot and dry when he was a kid that the frogs never learned how to swim.
There was silence, and then Bill said, “Shakespeare, what’s Shakespeare say?”
Shakespeare just thought for a moment or two and then he said, “Death doth close his tender dying eyes.”
And that was it.
Everyone was silent again and maybe embarrassed about the tender part, everybody always bragging about what hard cases they were. Then Preacher sang “The Shining Shore” and several of the boys knew it and joined in, and I knew it too. Preacher ended it all with the Lord’s Prayer.
Dirt was shoveled in on top of Cliff and several of the boys took a handful and threw it in as well. When the grave was filled, everyone gathered up as many rocks as they could find and covered the grave with them, making a rocky mound, protecting Cliff from wolves and coyotes. Skinny had made a sturdy cross out of branches, tying the pieces together with rawhide, and it was pounded into the grave.
Then Shakespeare said something else about “flights of angels sing thee to thy rest,” which I thought was real pretty.
Big Mike said, “OK, boys, string ’em out and point ’em north.”
As we moved out, I looked back to where Cliff was buried and it looked high lonesome all by itself, and I wondered if anybody would ever stumble across his grave and wonder who was there and how he died. I was glad he’d had a decent send-off, but I felt bad that Ma and Pa and Jamie hadn’t had the Bible read and a sermon preached and hymns sung and good words said about them as well, and friends to pray for them and tell memories of them, and what a poor job I had done, being in such a hurry to get Sally back. I told myself, maybe I could go back and do it over someday, do it better, although I also felt like I never wanted to go back there again for the rest of my life.
TWELVE
We drove north and the heat was coming on hard now and the winds were constant and powerful, but there was a glory of flowers waving across the windblown prairie, verbena and sunflowers and pinwheels and primroses and such, and when the sun set at night you could have sworn both the sky and the prairie were all aflame.
Things went smoothly, although there was one bad hailstorm where everybody had to get under their horses to keep from getting knocked out of the saddle by hail the size of rocks. There was rain off and on and there were creeks and river crossings and sometimes there were even bridges to cross. The herd would come to a halt by a bridge and Big Mike would call out, “Cowboy!” and a hand would lead twenty steers over the bridge, and when they were across Big Mike would call out, “Cowboy!” and another twenty would be led across, until the whole herd was over. All in all, Big Mike took it slow and easy.
The evenings got back to normal and one night the boys started talking about rattlesnakes, and Bill said he knew a fellow who cut the head off a rattler and still got bit by it. Then they all had stories about rattlesnakes crawling into someone’s bedroll and there was a debate about the best treatment for snakebite, most of them agreeing that Spanish dagger was best. Tommy Deuce said a rope around your bedroll would protect you from snakes, but Hard Luck Luke Bronson spoke up, saying, “Hell, that isn’t any more true than saying you can stop a stampede by throwing salt in front of it.” Then the two of them would start arguing again. Then someone told a windjammer about a roadrunner shoving prickly pear cactus into a snake’s mouth to kill it, and Skinny said a roadrunner would surround a rattlesnake with prickly pear and the snake would bite itself to death rather than crawl over the thorns of the prickly pear, and Tommy Deuce said, “Is that true? Is that true?”
Shakespeare went back to his story about the girl cast up on the shore and disguising herself as a boy, and sometimes he’d tease the boys and get them to say the words, him telling them what to say, and they got into it, one acting like a prissy butler and another acting like some lady talking in a high voice, and one acting like a big fat bragging drunk named Belch, and everybody laughed at that. Then he said, “Hey, you, Kid, read this speech here,” and he tried to hand me his book.
I said, “No, I don’t want to do that,” but Shady grabbed me and dragged me out in front of the boys, them saying, “Yeah, read it out loud, Kid!”
Shakespeare said, “It’s real easy, everybody’s been doing it, so you go too, just read this part here.”
So I took the book and I started reading where he pointed, and it was a speech to the duke where she, or he, says, “Say that some lady, as perhaps there is, hath for your love as great a pang of heart as you have for Olivia … ” and I thought, Boy we are on dangerous ground here given how I feel about Shakespeare.
Then Shakespeare, as this duke, has this bragging speech about how no one can love as great as he can, and I thought, Don’t that just sound like some man so full of himself, like Tommy Deuce bragging about his way with the soiled doves.
I continued on where Shakespeare was pointing, saying, “My father had a daughter loved a man as it might be, perhaps, were I a woman, I should your lordship … ” And again I thought, Is Shakespeare—and by Shakespeare I meant the cowhand not the writer—is Shakespeare trying to tell me he knows something about me? Is he trying to hint at something? I went on to read, “She never told her love … ” And then she goes on to talk about being melancholy and being someone named Patience who smiles at grief, and I thought that was pretty dumb because who smiles at grief?
And then Shakespeare, as the duke, asks if my sister died of grief, and I read back to him—and here all the hands are real quiet and leaning forward—I start reading, “I am all the daughters of my father’s house and all the brothers too … ” And then all I could think about was me being Pa’s daughter and Jamie being my brother, and now I was saying I was Jamie when I really wasn’t, and none of these boys even knew my real name, and I started getting all choked up and I thought, Here you go, what fourteen-year-old boy is going to break down weeping in front of a bunch of Texas cowhands?
Then Shakespeare took the book away and said, “Sorry, Kid. I keep thinking you’re some tough old Texas ranny, and I keep forgetting what happened to you.”
I said, “It’s OK, Shakespeare.”
Then he told the boys how the scene ended so I didn’t have to read it, and I went off and sat down and tried to gather myself together, wanting to run away, but I knew that would make me look even worse.
Everybody was silent around the fire, and then Abraham started singing some spiritual song, singing, “When death has come and taken our loved ones leaving our homes so lonely and drear … ”
And Bill joined in with him, singing, “Often I wonder why I must journey over a road so rugged and steep … ” and then there was a part that went, “Farther along we’ll know all about it, farther along we’ll understand why, cheer up my brothers, live in the sunshine, we’ll understand it all by and by.” I realized it was something they might have sung by my family’s graveside as a way of saying good-bye, and they were telling me everything was going to be OK. I appreciated the effort, but in my heart I thought, That’ll be the day. There’ll be no understanding.
Later on we were all in our bedrolls and Shakespeare was only a few feet from me, and I heard him say real quietly, “Sorry, Kid.”
I whispered back, “It’s OK,” even though it wasn’t.
He was silent, and then he asked, “How’d they die?”
“Badly.”
I turned away from him and closed my eyes, wondering how it was that I could like him and still be mad at him so much of the time.
One night we were eating supper by the campfire when Big Mike sat down by me with his plate and said, “I got something for you to think about.”
I said, “What’s that?”
“Fort Griffin is a little over a day’s ride from here and the weather looks like it’s going to be fair. If you want, I can give you a few hands for protection and you can ride to the fort and talk to the commanding officer about the bands that come in for their annuities, and you can ask whether or not anyone has seen your sister and they could send out word to the other outposts and the civilian authorities to look for her. What would you think of that?”
I almost choked on my bait. In my heart I’d almost given up on finding her, even though I knew I’d never give up looking for her. I said, “I’d appreciate that, but how would you get by with so few hands?”
“Oh, we’ll manage, you just make sure you turn around and head back as soon as you’ve talked to them.”
I said, “We surely will.”
“OK,” he said, and then he turned to the hands and told them what we were talking about and he asked for volunteers to go with me.
Right away Jack Straw said, “I’ll go.”
Shakespeare said, “Count me in,” but Big Mike said he would need him as horse wrangler, but Shakespeare pointed to Tommy Deuce and said he could do the wrangling just fine, and he said, “Besides, I owe the Kid a favor,” and he tapped his shirt pocket where he kept one of his small Shakespeare books, and he winked at me.
Tommy Deuce just shrugged, so Big Mike said, “OK.”
Then Abraham said, “I’ll go,” and Shady, he was the one who took his red sash off and spoke to the Comanches the time they took Paint back, said he would too, and that made four.
Big Mike told us to take our bedrolls and our weapons and he told Monty to make sure we had some bait. At that he got up and cleaned off his plate.
There was silence around the campfire and I said, “Thanks, boys.”
Jack Straw said, “Always glad to help the Comanche Kid.”
I finished everything on my plate knowing I’d need my strength, and I had to quiet my heart from hoping something good might come of this. Little red sparks drifted up into the sky from the campfire, and I asked myself if they were the flicker of hope I felt in my chest, or were they just burning embers that would spark out and turn into nothing in the black night.
And Pa’s voice said, “She has to be somewhere, angel, and if she’s somewhere, she can be found.”
That was just like him, even with the war being lost and him being wounded, he always thought things were going to be OK, and whenever things were hard he used to say, “Now, look at me, made it back to all of you with a bullet in my leg, didn’t I?”
At the time I was just a kid and I believed him, thinking, if you just believed everything would turn out all right and worked hard enough, everything would be OK. Now I knew that wasn’t the case, that it didn’t matter what you believed. Nothing got guaranteed. Ask Scotty. Ask Cliff.
We were up long before dawn and Monty had coffee and flapjacks and salt pork and airtight peaches ready. I chose Buck for the journey because he’d already proved himself when things got hard, so I trusted him the most. I also didn’t want anyone recognizing Dancer or Blood, just in case we run across the band they come from.
We tied our bedrolls on the back of our saddles and stuffed our saddlebags with biscuits and dried apples and fried salt pork. I holstered the Schofield in Cliff’s gun belt and I put the Spenser in Pa’s scabbard and checked that I had shells on board. When we were all mounted and ready, Big Mike came up and said, “Damned if you all don’t look like a bunch of hard cases.”
Jack Straw piped up and said, “Hell, we look just like a bunch of horse marines or one of those Texas Ranger outfits, don’t we all!”
“Damned if you don’t,” Big Mike said. “If you stop for the night, no fires. Keep a guard out and keep your mounts tied to you. You don’t want to end up dead or afoot,” and to Abraham he said, “Keep an eye out on the Kid.”
“Hell, he’s already killed five of them,” Jack Straw said. “It’s his job to keep an eye out on us!”
Big Mike did that half smile of his and he said, “Good luck, hurry back.” Then he nodded at Abraham and said, “Ride on.”
We pulled out of the camp and it wasn’t long before the sun was rising, making a bloodred dawn. We rode at an easy lope, the wind in our face and Buck’s black mane shining so beautifully. I ran my hand down his neck as we rode and he talked horse to me, saying it was good to be out and to run. I told him he smelled good, just like a horse smells, and I felt almost giddy, as if something good was coming.
The prairie was a world of flowers, all of them at their fullest. There were poppies and coneflowers and Indian blanket, and I swear blue and red and white and purple and yellow and orange had never seemed so bright. That’s what hope will do, I thought, make everything seem alive and possible. Don’t trust it, I kept telling myself.
We stopped and watered our horses at a small, clear-running spring creek and threw water on our faces and run water through our hair and put a wet neck scarf around our necks. We ate a biscuit and a few dried apple slices, then mounted up and headed on. All the boys kept an eye out on the ridges and hills, and once Shady pulled up and stared into the distance and Abraham said, “What?”
“Maybe nothing,” Shady said, “but keep your eyes open.”
Then a few hours later on Abraham did the same thing and said, “Two of them. I think we’re being scouted.”
“Not surprising,” Shady said. “What we don’t want is to run into fifteen or twenty of them.”
Late afternoon we come across a burned-out wagon on its side, what wood was left looking like blackened bones, and nearby were the whitened bones of four oxen. Pretty wildflowers and green grasses were growing up through the remains of the wagon and the bones, so the attack must have taken place a year or two ago, maybe more. We all rode over to look at it and it looked awful, like the violence was still there, still happening.
Shady surveyed the ruins and he said, “They shot the oxen, killed the men, burned the wagon, and outraged the women.” He made it all sound so simple.
We dismounted and walked around it and Jack Straw asked, “What was they doing all alone way out here?”
And Abraham answered, “What are any of us doing way out here?”
I thought to myself, What were Ma and Pa doing way out where something so awful could happen to us, and it made me mad at Ma and Pa, and terrible words kept coming to me. I felt ashamed for feeling that way, like I was betraying them to think those things.
We kicked at the burned wood and looked around us and up into the hills, as if whoever had done this might still be around, then Shady said, “Look at this.” He stood by a charred wheel, the rear one, facing the sky, at the end of a burned axle.
Abraham said, “What is it?”
“Right here,” Shady said, and he pointed at what was left of the rim, and there was the burned remains of rawhide cords. He said, “See, there’s four of them,” and he pointed them out, all four, spaced around the rim.
Jack Straw said, “Dear God.”
Shady walked up to the front wheel, just as badly charred, and he said, “There’s four here too.”
I asked, “So what? What’s that mean?”
“They tied them to the wheels and then they burned them alive,” Shady said. “Someone’s come along and taken the bodies away, or more likely buried what was left, probably somewhere near here.”
At that I just felt sick and I had to turn away, thinking of their screams and wondering, did they burn them at the same time or did they burn one and make the other watch before they burned that person too? The hands stood there looking at it all, and I couldn’t help but think, at least my family didn’t have to go through that.
With my back to them I asked, “How do you know they were burned alive?”
“If it was you,” Shady said, “how else would you do it?”
And at that they all turned away and we mounted up and rode on in silence, leaving the remains there in the middle of the bright green prairie grasses, the flowers colorful all around.
When the sun was going down, Abraham said, “We’ll ride until it’s dark. There’s not much moon, so if they’re watching it’ll be harder for them to see where we are. We’ll look for a grove of trees and pull in there so if we get hit we’ll have some cover.”
And that’s what we did. We pulled our bedrolls off our mounts and had our weapons handy, and everyone cut off a piece of fried salt pork and ate that with a biscuit and more dried apples. Abraham gave me first shift as guard and he said, “You know what happens if you fall asleep on guard duty, don’t you”?
