I don’t know but I have curious thoughts about myself, as I was going along there, a young girl in a boy’s britches, steering her mule through the twilit streets of Paris. With my gun and my knife. Didn’t I feel in that peculiar moment fearless enough, a girl that should have been all fear at that time? Rended by someone and in the cold parlance of the preacher, no doubt, ruined? No girl less ruined than me. I was beginning to feel myself a very monster of courage. How did that happen? All the chill raiment of fright and doubt dropped from my shoulders. I wondered would it ever rise up from the cold earth to drape me about again?
I felt I was fit for anything, I felt I was on the cusp of great deeds.
That was because having taken in my poor six-year-old heart and found it rattling and empty Thomas and John had stuffed it up with courage.
When I stopped at the wide door of the livery I saw a pulsing light. I dismounted and went in. John Perry the blacksmith from the other side of Court Square must have dragged in his travelling forge because there he was working the bellows, so that the wind being pushed into the enclosed box swelled the flames and then by preference the flames subsided. The livery had become a huge mouth, breathing in and out with all the horror of a dragon. Frank Parkman was bent over at the hind of a fine black horse, cradling one of the hooves on his lap and knees, and with his pincers was prising out the remnant nails of a lost shoe, and with a twist of his wrist firing each one into the dark abyss of the livery. As he worked he was speaking across the void to John Perry, a huge dark man looking even huger and darker in the infernal flames and shadows, obliged indeed to shout out above the busy roars of the furnace to answer him. What they were saying I couldn’t tell. Just the easy back and forth of working men. I peered about the livery, wondering had I indeed been in there before, and with no answering information coming from what I was seeing. I had no feel of dread and remembrance anyhow. Now John Perry plucked out a horseshoe with his iron grips, laid it on the ground for a moment, where it set the wet sawdust storming with smoke, drove in some kind of an iron frame, and used this to hand it to Frank Parkman, like a child offers toast on a fork. Frank Parkman gripped the hoof again and set the glowing shoe against the horn of it, so that the very bone seemed to go on fire. I was watching all this, so fascinated I nearly forgot why I was there. Then there was trimming and the using of the file, and then the fresh nails driven in anew, and then twisting and cutting and firming. My own people since they lived on endless grasses never had a need for an iron shoe. It was the iron shoe thrown in by the Yankee story had done us so much mischief, I thought. The iron shoe and all the damnable accoutrements that came with it.
Lana Jane Sugrue wasn’t the only dame spoke bits of French.
Then the scene of fire and smoke calmed down and I suppose a great service was done the horse at least. Frank Parkman was lighting his lamps now where they hung on the great beams, and slowly the light showed more and more of the cavernous stables, and eventually showed me to Frank Parkman. He straightened up and examined me assiduously from about twenty paces off. He looked like he was thinking for a little, maybe sizing me up for danger. Or wondering, ain’t I seen this Injun afore? Well, he must have decided he hadn’t.
‘What can I do for you, chief?’ he said.
John Perry paid no heed to lamps nor Indians, and was dragging his little furnace away again into the street where he tipped it and out spilled his burning coals in a flashing leaping vee of commotion. With a wild sweep of his arm, he heaved up the furnace on a long iron bar, and swung it with amazing deftness through the air, and pitched it into one of the water troughs of the livery. There it exploded in a crazy boil of smoke and steam and I heard John Perry laughing as if this was his favourite moment in all the ancient task of shoeing a horse. Naturally Frank Parkman and myself were obliged to wait out this violent spectacle before I could answer him.
Neither my head nor my mouth was that full of a question, I must allow. What did I want to know from him? Did Jas Jonski your good friend drag in his little Indian girl here a month back and – well, I was not even sure I had the word for the next thing. Ravish, ruin, disgrace, attack, murder, hurt, make wretched, burn bad as a heated horseshoe laid against her groin?
CHAPTER EIGHT
‘Well, Cochise?’ Frank Parkman said.
Behind the lights of the town continued to glimmer and enlarge in glow.
Sometimes you don’t see maggots in a lump of old meat till you shift it. Now I was standing full of strange fear in a place of fear. It was the very shifting state of my poor head that was starting to confound me. Confound me in my purpose, as the lawyer Briscoe might say. How alone I was, in Thomas McNulty’s trews. With a man in front of me that just wanted to slake his thirst maybe after the turmoil of shoeing that horse. I noticed again it was a beautiful, glistening black gelding. Now in the gathering light of the lamps his coat was almost leaping with the colour black.
‘That some beautiful animal,’ I said, suddenly able to speak.
‘That sure is,’ said Frank Parkman. ‘Lady from Nashville came up on that. All by her lonesome. I ask you, why did she not take the Nashville train or the Mills Point stage? I ask you, stranger. Ain’t fit times for a woman to be riding alone.’
‘I guess,’ I said.
He wasn’t the Frank Parkman who had ridden out to the farm. He wasn’t half smiling and half joking. He went over to a water butt and pulled out a drink in an old tin cup. It was so old the enamel was half a memory on it. Then he drew out his little clay pipe and his pouch and started to stuff the little bowl. Then he startled me and himself by striking his parlour match so trustingly that the head flew off and crossed the stables like a shooting star. Now he did laugh and cursed a little and struck another. He was eyeing the flight of the first match because he didn’t want to burn down his place of work.
‘This your place?’ I said, though I knew it could not be.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘My pappy built it. Dead now, God rest him. Jesse James docked his horse here when he came with Quantrill.’
‘You Jas Jonski’s friend?’ I said, emboldened to get another surprising answer.
‘Yep, I know Jas,’ he said. ‘Why you ask, chief?’
‘Just asking.’
‘So, you just asking. No charge for that,’ he said. Now he had his pipe going well and he leaned up against the old weathered centre beam of the livery and puffed away. Then he indicated the fine black horse. ‘That Jas Jonski’s mother’s horse, as a matter of fact. Fancy. And you just asking about him.’
He smoked on for a few minutes. He was looking at me with all the easiness of friendship. It was mighty strange.
‘Well, I going to close up now. I got to get my supper.’
‘You leaving the horses?’
‘Just for an hour. They don’t mind.’
He had about fourteen or fifteen guests, all inserted into their allotted stalls.
‘You can watch them if you like. I give you a fifty cents for that,’ he said.
I was caught off guard by this remark. Kindness? Maybe he thought I looked like a poor scrawny Injun boy. Needed fifty cents for his own supper.
‘I could do that,’ I said.
‘You ain’t no horse thief or nothing?’
‘I ain’t. I got my own mule outside.’
‘I saw that skinny vehicle. Anyhows. You dead right. I should never leave them. Maybe I just go fetch a pot of stew and bring it back and I can share that with you.’
I said nothing. Frank Parkman bestirred himself and put the livery doors nearly closed and winked at me and then went on his way. I was surprised again by him, that he had left me there and entrusted me with his kingdom. I was surprised and confused by his whole manner. I was glad to get the chance to look about without him being there. I was trying to get my mind to go back and tell me something. I was just not familiar with the place. Even with whiskey in my body I felt sure I would remember something just by being there. But no memory was stirring.
/> Again to my further astonishment Frank Parkman came back with a cuddy-bowl of stew from the chophouse. He divvied it up army fashion and gave me my share on the back of a piece of scrap metal that had a little dome hammered into it. As it happened it was excellent stew, just as good as Rosalee’s.
‘I thank you for sharing your food,’ I said.
‘Well, bible obliges us to feed the wayfarer,’ he said.
‘Not every soul wants to feed an Indian,’ I said.
‘A lot of foolish thinking afflicts the world,’ he said.
Then he finished eating and went over to the doors again and pulled them shut. There was a big iron bar for a latch but he left that alone. He took my excuse for a plate and set it down and then he stood in front of me.
‘I don’t know if you would be kind enough to let me kiss you,’ he said. He spoke very gently, very softly – very kindly.
If I was confused before I was in a maze of confusion now. Did he know who I was after all? It didn’t seem so. Guess he was a man like John Cole, who didn’t abhor to kiss another man. A man like John Cole, who had made it his life’s work to love Thomas McNulty.
I stared back at him. Truth was, I was frightened.
‘I got a knife in my boot, just so you know,’ I said.
I felt the closed doors behind me with the force of an imprisonment. But I was wrong to feel that maybe.
‘I got a gun too,’ I said.
‘If you don’t care to, I don’t mind one whit,’ said Frank Parkman, laughing, or nearly laughing. ‘If you don’t ask in this world you don’t get.’
‘I never been kissed in my whole life,’ I heard myself saying. ‘I guess I should be going now.’
‘Sure thing,’ he said. ‘You ever have a yearning to be kissed by me, you come back. Come back anyhow, anytime. You a nice soft boy.’
I nodded to him. I thought any moment he was going to turn wildcat on me and fire off a punch or something – just like the head of that lucifer. But he didn’t.
I turned to go and right enough the livery doors opened easily to my touch.
‘Hey, Cochise,’ he said. I turned again to him just on the cusp of going out into the town. ‘You not offended?’
‘I ain’t,’ I said.
Then he nodded his head and seemed satisfied.
*
In our efforts to heal Tennyson, Thomas McNulty asked me would I mind if we boiled up some merriment that night for him. A huge swathe of the planting had now been done and it was a great weight taken off for such a long job to be nearing its ending.
‘I would like that, greatly,’ I said.
‘Well, sweet child, so would we all,’ he said. ‘I am mindful, ever mindful, of what befell you, daughter.’
‘I know, Mamma,’ I said.
That night the floor was swept and the few sticks pushed back to the walls and Lige Magan disinterred his fiddle from the top of a cupboard and shone it up with wax and tightened his strings and off he flew with his Tennessee jigs and reels. Tennyson Bouguereau stood on the floor with face agape and he stamped his feet and applauded and hooted, and Thomas was asked to do his lady’s dance that earned us our dollars in Grand Rapids if without the dress as of yore and he obliged and the room widened to the width of the firmament and our faces glowed in the lamps and there was laughter and sweating and good fellowship. Still there was not a note in the great singing bird that had been Tennyson.
I swirled and stamped as good as the next man. How I loved to swing about in a dance. I let my limbs be crazy and there was no civilised name for how I did. Not waltzing or the like. John Cole and Thomas threw me from one to the other and Rosalee like a blooming flower not just threw caution to the wind but was the wind. Her lovely body glistened and leapt and she threaded herself through the air like a lithesome black swan. Her brother stayed rooted the while but maybe we hoped the root itself would work down into the timbers and the dry earth of Tennessee and fix him.
Late in the night the way people do we settled down like horses after a long gallop and enjoyed the blazing fire and felt pretty comfortable in our dark cabin under the stars and for that while my heart was not sore and Lige Magan turned to the medicine of lullabies and laments on his fiddle and the four strings vibrated their lovely music and our hearts were full. I thought of all the woken and sleeping animals in the woods beyond and wondered if their ears were cocked to us and whether something in the music was for them too.
*
Colonel Purton made progress too – he wasn’t long finding names and bringing them to the lawyer Briscoe. The lawyer Briscoe was much intrigued by Colonel Purton. It seemed to me the moment he arrived that the lawyer Briscoe delighted in him. His rank came from his days strangely enough in the butternut army but he was no rebel now and that previous governor himself of Tennessee had set him to hunting renegades. This was not a fashionable endeavour in most quarters, these days, said the lawyer Briscoe. But it seemed the colonel was going to go on doing his given duty till he was told otherwise.
‘Tennessee so dangerous now,’ said the colonel in a queer way of speaking that made it hard to say where he was from, ‘it growing difficult to love.’
It was only then I realised that the top of the colonel’s mouth was cloven because you could just see that on the lip under his fulsome moustache. That gave him the queer way of talking. Then a few moments with these words floating between us in the dark office.
‘But we must continue to love it.’
So I had to think that the work of Colonel Purton was for the lawyer Briscoe a holding of things in the right direction and he was inclined to assist him in any way. Of course, it was Colonel Purton doing the assisting to him just then.
They spoke about their schooling at the Paris Male Academy which they had both attended in different years.
When folk he valued highly visited the lawyer Briscoe he was inclined to show great hospitality. He would most likely disappear into his chamber too for a little and comb and oil his hair. This for the lawyer Briscoe was the highest step of civilisation even if the smell of it only made me think of cabbages. Then he would open his finely carved cabinet where his best whiskey was kept. Even Lana Jane Sugrue, who never dropped anything because, as the lawyer Briscoe put it, she was too close to the ground, was not entrusted with the decanting and the pouring of alcohols. Maybe Colonel Purton thought he treated all his visitors likewise but it was not so. Rascals were given brief counsel and nary a glass – and then the quick exit urged by nodding and hurried words that amounted really to nonsense.
The colonel was tall, strange, and ravaged. His skin was mottled and dark, and half his face was marked by the famous port-wine stain, which gave him a peculiar double appearance, depending on which way he was facing you. I never saw a man so thin and could still be called hale. His voice was reedy and hoarse all at once, which would have been fatal to his theatrical career in Mr Noone’s establishment in Grand Rapids, not to mention the harelip. But his business was not the theatre or play-acting, but the deep dangerous drama of the times.
He stood in the middle of the lawyer Briscoe’s office wearing a high pair of black leather riding boots. Maybe this was why his voice was pinched so. He still wore his officer’s sword, maybe for courage, or to impress his enemies. It was decorated all down its thin length with enamel the colour of lupins – the flower of my people. All in all he was wonderful and tremendous and I, though the silent Indian at the small table, felt a surge of strange optimism to view him.
‘Asking questions about nightriders in Tennessee in these times,’ the colonel was saying, ‘used to be a fairly safe occupation. Asking questions now can get you killed quick enough. But we’re in that business. We just have to know how to shoot back, I reckon.’
The lawyer Briscoe couldn’t help but quietly chortle. I mean no disrespect to him by saying chortle. He was a chortler.
Then the colonel went on to describe the camp of the nightriders over at West Sandy Creek.
�
�I say camp but I should say city – they have built a bunch of houses there as brazen as you like, since they fear no justice now, just sitting there by the waters and the woods, and a nice warm feeling in their bellies that the world is going their way,’ said the colonel. ‘That what I hear about it. I ain’t seen it with my own eyes.’
The lawyer Briscoe was listening without interrupting, swirling around the whiskey in his glass, so that the small lights of the room were catching in it.
‘Who this boy here?’ said the colonel, adverting to me, no doubt with sunken body in the corner, listening the while for clues and sparks of facts.
‘This a young Sioux person of great ability,’ said the lawyer Briscoe, giving me a shock of pleasure. I was happy with both ends of that opinion. ‘Who keeps my books and does a damn fine job of it.’
‘Too young to serve in the late war,’ said the colonel in his stately manner. ‘I was commissioned to command the 1st Cherokee Mounted Rifles. I bore witness to the courage and horsemanship and marksmanship of the Indian.’
The lawyer Briscoe chortled again. He liked to hear a man praise another man. It was part of his good nature.
‘Many years ago,’ said the lawyer Briscoe, in an effort to add to the general praise of Indians it seemed, ‘this young person was obliged to shoot a member of the Tach Petrie gang. Only a child at the time, ain’t that right, Mr Cole?’
‘That right,’ I said, blushing. Mr Cole.
A Thousand Moons Page 6
