Facing the end is a mighty strange thing. The idea of it coming calm when you’re in bed asleep don’t trouble you none. Sometimes the notion of crossing the line into the blackness and not waking up seems welcoming. But knowing it’s gonna happen in a heartbeat or two and it ain’t gonna be gentle and it sure ain’t gonna be painless – generally there ain’t nothing like that for making you want to cling to life with both hands and I been in enough situations like that when I fought like a cornered bear to keep myself this side of the line. But there in that ravine it was different.
Now I can’t explain exactly how I felt. I just knew in my heart the time’s come. I’m giving up. I’ve had enough. More than enough. This is it.
I was about to die. When them bullets started coming I didn’t do nothing. Didn’t make no attempt to fire back. Wasn’t no point. Can’t see no one up there. Was like we was under attack by the land itself. The notion of them rocks turning homicidal amused me some. Guess I was a little crazy by then. I started to smile.
See, there was just me and her there. The ravine come to a halt. Behind her was a rock face that she might have climbed and I guess that was her plan, only she’d gotten herself clipped by a ricocheting bullet that had torn across her wrist.
My horse getting shot from under me woke me up some. Sank down with a dying wheeze, blood burbling from its throat. When we was on the plains a horse dying wasn’t no bad thing: you could use its body to give you cover. Sometimes we had to kill horses for just that reason. But that day all that horse did was block the canyon. Them warriors was so high above me wasn’t no protection to be had, not from the horse nor nothing. Wasn’t long before I took a bullet in the thigh and the pain made me pass out.
When I woke up it was quiet. Or at least the firing had stopped. That woman was still there and I wondered why she wasn’t moving – she only had a hurt wrist, after all. But then I seen the sweat on her brow and I figured her baby had started coming for real, which made me want to laugh because it was so darned crazy. Having a child there in all that death? What in the hell was that baby gonna breathe in when it sucked air into its lungs for the first time?
Well, I couldn’t walk none on account of that wound to my leg so I figured I’d die real slow of hunger or thirst or maybe something worse if the coyotes found me, let alone them Indians. Hadn’t Bill Hickey said that when they was feeling mean they got to hanging folks upside down and lighting a fire under their heads, roasting them alive? That they’d cut off a man’s privates, stick them in his mouth before he was even dead? Then I thought what a goddamned surprise they were gonna get if they tried that on me! I started laughing all over again, only then I heard something that wipe the smile off my face.
Footsteps. Coming up behind me. They’re so loud I know they ain’t no Indian’s. They’re army boots.
Hellfire! Look at that! Would you believe it? Jonas Beecher has survived that massacre and come looking to see who else is standing. He’s injured his right hand, is all.
Company W been wiped out. It’s just the two of us now. Me and him. Just the two of us. Him and me. I’m so crazy with the pain in my leg it’s turned my head inside out. I’m sitting there, thinking, Hey, now I can talk to him. I mean, God Almighty, we’re family, ain’t we?! I can tell him who I am! Ain’t no one listening now. I can ask him all those things I been wondering. Like, what happened to my ma. Did she die? She get sold, or what? And what about Cookie? Did she know who my pa was? Why didn’t she never say nothing? And what in God’s name been happening to Mr Beecher all these years, anyhow? Is he still alive, even?
I got my mouth open to speak, but Jonas get in first.
“Shoot her.”
“Sir?”
“Shoot her, you goddamned, filthy, stinking nigger!”
Shoot her.
My mouth’s dry and my tongue’s sticking to the top of my mouth and I can’t seem to get out no words. I’m gonna kill a woman who’s trying to bring her baby into this big, bad, crazy old world and that baby’s gonna die before it’s even seen the light of day or drawn a breath of air or felt its ma holding it tight; it’s gonna die in the dark of her belly – darker than night, darker than solitary, darker than a yam cellar – and I can’t stand it. I can’t get up on account of my leg, but I can fire my rifle, Mr Cody’s 1866 Springfield Second Allin conversion, and this is the army and he’s my superior officer and orders is orders and I don’t make up policy I just has to enforce it and it ain’t like I got no choice – I ain’t never had no choice about nothing – and if I raises an objection he’d have me court-martialled and I’d get myself hanged or shot before a firing squad for insubordination and he’s screaming at me to wipe her out or else he’ll do it with his one good hand and he’s cussing and calling me a damned moke and a worthless ape and I can’t do nothing about none of it so I cocks the hammer and my finger’s on the trigger and I takes aim because when all’s said and done I just ain’t got no choice…
Excepting that I have.
I take aim. I pull the trigger. I blow half a human head clean away.
Only that head don’t belong to no Indian woman.
It was Jonas Beecher’s brains I blasted over them rocks.
42.
“Got ya!”
I lay my rifle down. “Got ya!”
I’m done. Don’t much care what happens now. Not until I see Jim, slipping and sliding down the rocks towards me.
He been up there the whole time. He was the reason I hadn’t got killed stone dead in that attack. The bullet I been hit by was one that bounced off the rocks. No one was aiming to get me. Because of him. He been protecting me. Watching over me. Like an angel.
For a long time we just look at each other.
I was bleeding bad and I couldn’t move and there wasn’t nothing for it but to let Jim fix me up because I was getting real dizzy. He kneels on down beside me.
We keep our backs turned on that woman, baby coming being kind of a personal matter, but she don’t make no noise. When the baby’s here it don’t neither. While Jim’s seeing to my leg that baby take a breath, take a feed and gets on with living. Seeing that tiny thing in its mother’s arms was like having a wound ripped open in my chest. I was so thankful it didn’t die before it been held like that there ain’t nothing I can do to stop myself and before I know it I’m sobbing like a child.
Jim stare into my eyes like he just can’t pull himself away and I guess I must have been something of a sight, swollen-faced and runny-nosed. Yep. I sure must have looked appealing.
But then that man done something that knock the breath clean out of me. He pull off his headband and bunches it into a ball and he wipe my face, real gentle. He trace the outline of my cheek with his finger, running over the diamond scars Miss Louellen give me all them years back. And I been so long on the frontier by then and ain’t no one never touched me, leastways not like I was a woman and now here’s this man being so tender it just about turn my heart inside out. I want to grab him and never let go but after what happened with Reuben I’m too darned scared to move so I sit there, looking up at him.
Slowly – like he thinks I’m a wild horse that might go skitting off – he leans forward and he press his lips on my forehead and I guess it might have been a kiss, only I ain’t never felt nothing like that so I didn’t rightly know what to make of it – other than the feel of his mouth bring a lump to my throat so big I was like to choke on it.
Jim start to laugh. He laughs so hard the tears are rolling down his face. Now whether he was laughing because he figured I played the biggest God Almighty joke on the US Army or whether he was laughing because I’d blown the head off of Jonas Beecher I don’t know and I never did ask – my leg was troubling me too much. I just watched them tears sliding down over his cheeks and I remember thinking what a heavenly, beautiful sight that man was and about three seconds later I passed out.
By the time I come around again Jim had made a carrier for that tiny baby and it was strapped tight to its m
a’s back and she was about ready to move off. There was one horse and three mules left alive and the horse was Jonas Beecher’s. That woman loads a mule up with as many guns and as much ammunition as it can carry and she climb up on that horse and she ride off to join the rest of them Apaches, and for some reason that I can’t entirely fathom Jim decides to stay with me and for a while I just sit there trying to figure out what to do next.
See, I knew if anyone found Jonas it was gonna be real easy to tell he been shot from below at close range. Wouldn’t take a whole heap of figuring for someone to work out it ain’t been done by no Apache, not when all them other men been killed by bullets raining down from above. And seeing as I was the only trooper left alive, well, you can see why I wasn’t keen for my brother to be found quick.
So when Jim hold out his hand I take it, and he pull me up, or at least he tries to – I can’t stand good on account of that bullet wound. He fetch one of them mules instead and it’s painful getting up on its back but I do it, and then, well, seemed to me the simplest choice in the world was to follow wherever that man led.
The weather helped us by blowing up a big storm later on that day. It wiped out all them tracks leading towards that ravine. If my luck held, wasn’t nobody going to find them bodies in there until after the coyotes and the vultures done their work. We had time to get away.
We was both wanting to put distance between ourselves and that ravine so he take us deeper into them mountains.
We didn’t say hardly nothing that day. We didn’t need to do much talking. There was a mighty powerful feeling between us and it was enough to ride along on that mule knowing it wasn’t just the loss of blood that was making me feel so light-headed. I been yearning towards that man ever since I first laid eyes on him and when you been wanting someone that bad for that long – well, the way you feel when they actually touch you is enough to make it seem like the whole world’s changing shape or changing colour or something. And if I been feeling all that desperation, he been feeling it too, which seemed to me to be some sort of miracle then and it still does now.
We was moving between rocks and some of them are so tight together that we have to get off the mules. Jim lift me down tender as tender and help me through and then go back for them mules who have to scramble and squeeze and it take some persuasion but they manage it. Then Jim go back again, picking traces of mule hair off them stones and rubbing out hoof prints because if we get followed those are the kinda things that are gonna lead scouts straight to us. I ain’t never been nowhere so high and suddenly we’re riding along where there ain’t no path, just sloping rock, and on one side of us the land falls away down maybe a thousand feet or more. I keep my eyes fixed firm between that mule’s ears because if I start staring into that ravine I’m like to lose my balance and if that mule sets a foot wrong we’re both dead. For the very first time in my life I’m real grateful to a mule for being so sure-footed.
Jim’s ahead now and he’s going over a ridge and while I’m watching he disappears sudden and for a second I think him and his mule have fallen and when I come up the ridge on my animal I can’t see him nowhere and panic just about drowns me. My mule start sliding down the slope and it’s so steep the thing’s sitting on its haunches like a dog and there’s no stopping it and I can’t see Jim or his mule. And that’s it, I think to myself, we’re gonna end up broke to pieces at the foot of that gorge and that’s what you get for killing your commanding officer. I don’t mind for myself but the notion of Jim being bloodied and broke is enough to make me weep. Only then I see him and he’s on foot. He reach out and he tug at the reins of my mule and he’s pulling it to the left and when it feels level ground under its feet it gets up. Then I see we’re under an overhang and behind Jim is a cave big enough for both them mules and both of us. It’s darn near invisible from above – you’d only know it was here if you was an Apache – and I wish to God the army had never recruited none of them scouts because if it wasn’t for them we could stay hidden here for ever.
He lift me off that beast and I ain’t never felt so downright female as I done then. He lay me down and he check on my wound which is bleeding and hurting bad but not smelling, which is something to be grateful for. Then he does some praying and chanting and he wipe yellow dust on me like that old medicine man done. Turns out that yellow dust is pollen and it’s sacred because I can feel the power of that charm working right away.
At the back of the cave he lights a real small fire because night is coming on and it’s getting cold and he gives me a strip of dried meat and I ain’t never tasted nothing so good as that before or since.
When we done eating he unbutton my jacket and he lift up my shirt and he take his knife from his belt. Lay it flat against my skin and slide it up under them bandages I been winding round my chest all these years. With one cut he set me free.
It was like beginning a whole new life, in a whole new body. There ain’t words big enough to describe the deep-down joy I had in loving that man, touching him, feeling his warm skin on mine, breathing in the smell of him. That night, when we lay wrapped together, our bodies twined so tight you couldn’t tell whose limbs was whose, I swear I could feel the earth’s heart beating under us and hear the stars singing up above.
Come the dawn, I watched him sleeping, his hair spread across my belly and I was so thankful I would have fallen on my knees and praised the Lord, only that would have meant moving and I couldn’t tear myself away from Jim.
The days, the weeks, that followed, I learned so much. Not just practical things, although in time I could chip an arrowhead and fashion a bow almost as well as Jim could.
All my life I been wondering what in the hell folks meant when they talked about freedom. I’d fetched up thinking the notion of liberty was one big damned lie.
Well, it wasn’t. With Jim, I was free. I was whole. There was no hiding. No pretending. No keeping a lid on things. No pushing thoughts away where I couldn’t see them. I could think. Feel. Laugh. Cry. I could be me. All of me. Each day I could feel my soul expanding, getting bigger. I was transforming into something better and brighter than I’d ever dreamed possible. It was like I was finally growing into the person the Lord intended.
I wasn’t alone no more, just me, struggling to get by. But it wasn’t just the two of us helping each other along neither. We was more than that. Much more. We was part of something: something big and something truly fine. Jim rooted me to the land: I saw every blade of grass, felt every breath of wind, heard every chirruping cricket – sweet Jesus, even the solid rocks seemed alive! I began to think that maybe freedom wasn’t owning land or making a mark on a place: it was being one tiny speck in this God Almighty huge and wondrous world, with everything in its place, everything bound together, everything fitting, everything making sense. Freedom was something in your mind, in your heart, in your soul.
We didn’t never talk about the past. There was too much pain in that for both of us. Didn’t never talk about the future neither – there was too much fear in what might lie ahead. We just lived right here, right now, with this breath, this heartbeat, this pressing of skin on skin: there wasn’t no place else to be. I ain’t never known happiness like it.
But we was running. Couldn’t never forget that.
Weeks turned into months and months turned into years. We was always moving on, never stayed nowhere for longer than three, four days. One time we come to where the land give out altogether and there’s water as far as the eye can see. Jim ain’t never seen the ocean before, but I had. We’d reached the western shore and I realized that in my time I’d gone all the way from one side of America to the other. And I was only just beginning to feel it was where I belonged.
Mostly we slept out under the stars and when it got too cold on the mountains we moved down onto the plains and all the while we was both watching the horizon for clouds of dust because that’s a sure-fire way of knowing where the army is. For three years we kept one step ahead of them, just one step.
None of it was easy but it was the best time I ever had.
Maybe we’d have stayed living that way, just us. If I hadn’t done such a damned fool thing we might have hid out there for ever. All I had to do was tend that fire. Tend that fire and stay awake. Couldn’t have been nothing easier. Only I didn’t manage to do neither.
43.
I guess our baby must have started growing inside me although I didn’t know it then. I recall feeling sick most all the time and so darned tired I could barely walk ten steps before I wanted to lie down and sleep again. I didn’t know what was ailing me so I was scared as well as tired.
It was the time of year the mescal plants come into bloom and if you take the hearts and bake them they make good eating. Jim was telling me that before the white folks come the men would dig a real deep pit maybe seven feet across and three, four feet deep and the women would go out harvesting all the plants they could get and they’d stuff them in there and bake them for days on end and you could get enough that way to feed the tribe all winter.
But there’s just the two of us and we’re keeping ourselves quiet, not wanting to get noticed by no one, so the hole Jim dig is a small one and he just cut a couple of plants that won’t get seen by no scouts. Jim set the fire burning and he cover it over and leave them things to steam themselves into being edible. And then he go off to see if he can’t catch us a jackrabbit and all I have to do is sit there on my haunches keeping still and silent and making sure that fire don’t get out of that pit. Only the sun is warm and I’m feeling real sick and I can’t help myself. I lie down. And I pinch myself and I slap my face to keep from sliding under but it don’t do no good because the next thing I know is Jim’s back and he got a rabbit dangling from one hand but I can hardly see him on account of all the smoke because that fire’s escaped and it’s spreading over the grass and it’s rising high and it’s like a goddamned signal fire and if there are soldiers anywhere near by – and just about the entire US Army are all out looking for hostiles, so of course there are – there ain’t no way they can miss it. We’re out on the plains and there’s nowhere to run and nowhere to hide and this beautiful, magical, precious life I been living is all over and it’s my own damned stupid fault and I feel so heartsore I want to weep and wail and scream and cut myself the way that little Indian woman done.
Buffalo Soldier Page 23
