Butcher's Crossing

by John Williams

  Once, also, they saw a small herd; and again it was Miller who pointed it out to Andrews. The herd was little more than clustered specks of blackness in the light green of the prairie; Andrews could make out no shape or movement, though he strained his eyes against the bright afternoon sun and raised himself high in the saddle.

  “It’s just a little herd,” Miller said. “The hunters around here have cut them all up into little herds.”

  The three of them—Andrews, Miller, and Schneider—were riding abreast. Schneider said impartially, to no one: “A body has sometimes got to be satisfied with a little herd. If that’s the way they run, that’s the way a body has got to cut them.”

  Miller, his eyes still straining at the distant herd, said: “I can recollect the day when you never saw a herd less than a thousand head, and even that was just a little bunch.” He swept his arm in a wide half-circle. “I’ve stood at a place like this and looked out, and all I could see was black—fifty, seventy-five, a hundred thousand head of buffalo, moving over the grass. Packed so tight you could walk on their backs, walk all day, and never touch the ground. Now all you see is stragglers, like them out there. And grown men hunt for them.” He spat on the ground.

  Again Schneider addressed the air: “If all you got is stragglers, then you hunt for stragglers. I ain’t got my hopes up any longer for much more.”

  “Where we’re going,” Miller said, “you’ll see them like we used to in the old days.”

  “Maybe so,” Schneider said. “But I ain’t got my hopes up too high.”

  From the wagon behind them came the high crackle of Charley Hoge’s voice. “Just a little bitty herd. You never saw nothing that little in the old days. The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away.”

  At the sound of Charley Hoge’s voice, the three men had turned; they listened him out; when he finished, they turned again; but they could no longer find the tiny smudge of black in the expanse of the prairie. Miller went on ahead, and Schneider and Andrews dropped back; none of them spoke again of what they had seen.

  Such interruptions of their journey were few. Twice on the trail they passed small parties going in their direction. One of these parties consisted of a man, his wife, and three small children. Grimed with dust, their faces drawn and sullen with weariness, the woman and children huddled in a small wagon pulled by four mules and did not speak; the man, eager to talk and almost breathless in his eagerness, informed them that he had driven all the way from Ohio where he had lost his farm, and that he planned to join a brother who had a small business in California; he had begun the journey with a group of other wagons, but the lameness of one of his mules had so slowed his progress that he was now nearly two weeks behind the main party, and he had little hope of ever catching up. Miller examined the lame mule, and advised the man to swing up to Fort Wallace, where he could rest his team, and wait for another wagon train to come through. The man hesitated, and Miller told him curtly that the mule could not make it farther than Fort Wallace, and that he was a fool to continue on the trail alone. The man shook his head stubbornly. Miller said nothing more; he motioned to Andrews and Schneider, and the party pulled around the man and woman and the children and went ahead. Late in the evening the dust from the small mule-drawn wagon could be seen in the distance, far behind them. Miller shook his head.

  “They’ll never make it. That mule ain’t good for two more days.” He spat on the ground. “They should of turned off where I told them.”

  The other party they passed was a larger one of five men on horseback; these men were silent and suspicious. Reluctantly, they informed Miller that they were on their way to Colorado where they had an interest in an undeveloped mining claim, which they intended to work. They refused Charley Hoge’s invitation to join them for supper, and they waited in a group for Miller’s party to pass. Late that night, after Miller, Andrews, Schneider, and Hoge had bedded down, they heard the muffled clop of hooves circling around and passing them.

  Once, where the trail skirted close to the river, they came upon a wide bluff, from the side of which had been excavated a series of crude dugouts. On the flat hard earth in front of the dugouts several brown, naked children were playing; behind the children, near the openings of the dugouts, squatted half a dozen Indians; the women were shapeless in the blankets they held about them despite the heat, and the men were old and wizened. As the group passed, the children ceased their play and looked at them with dark, liquid eyes; Miller waved, but none of the Indians gave any sign of response.

  “River Indians,” Miller said contemptuously. “They live on catfish and jack rabbits. They ain’t worth shooting anymore.”

  But as their journey progressed such interruptions came to seem more and more unreal to Andrews. The reality of their journey lay in the routine detail of bedding down at night, arising in the morning, drinking black coffee from hot tin cups, packing bedrolls upon gradually wearying horses, the monotonous and numbing movement over the prairie that never changed its aspect, the watering of the horses and oxen at noon, the eating of hard biscuit and dried fruit, the resumption of the journey, the fumbling setting up of camp in the darkness, the tasteless quantities of beans and bacon gulped savagely in the flickering darkness, the coffee again, and the bedding down. This came to be a ritual, more and more meaningless as it was repeated, but a ritual which nevertheless gave his life the only shape it now had. It seemed to him that he moved forward laboriously, inch by inch, over the space of the vast prairie; but it seemed that he did not move through time at all, that rather time moved with him, an invisible cloud that hovered about him and clung to him as he went forward.

  The passing of time showed itself in the faces of the three men who rode with him and in the changes he perceived within himself. Day by day he felt the skin of his face hardening in the weather; the stubble of hair on the lower part of his face became smooth as his skin roughened, and the backs of his hands reddened and then browned and darkened in the sun. He felt a leanness and a hardness creep upon his body; he thought at times that he was moving into a new body, or into a real body that had lain hidden beneath layers of unreal softness and whiteness and smoothness.

  The change that he saw in the others was less meaningful to him, and less extreme. Miller’s heavy, evenly shaped beard thickened on his face and began to curl at the extreme ends; but the change was more readily apparent in the way he sat his saddle, in his stride upon the ground, and in the look of his eyes that gazed on the opening prairie. An ease, a familiarity, a naturalness began to replace the stiff and formal attitude that Andrews had first encountered in Butcher’s Crossing. He sat his saddle as if he were a natural extension of the animal he rode; he walked in such a way that it appeared his very movement was caressing the contours of the ground; and his gaze upon the prairie seemed to Andrews as open and free and limitless as the land that occasioned his regard.

  Schneider’s face seemed to recede and hide in the slowly growing beard that bristled like straw upon his darkening skin. Day by day Schneider withdrew into himself; he spoke to the others less frequently, and in his riding he appeared to be almost attempting to disassociate himself from them: he looked always in a direction that was away from them, and at night he ate his food silently, turned sideways from the campfire, and bedded down and was asleep long before the others.

  Of them all, Charley Hoge showed the least change. His gray beard bristled a bit more fully, and his skin reddened but did not brown in the weather; he looked about him impartially, slyly, and spoke abruptly and without cause to all of them, expecting no answer. When the trail was level, he took out his worn and tattered Bible and thumbed through its pages, his weak gray eyes squinting through the dust. At regular intervals throughout the day he reached beneath the wagon seat and drew out a loosely corked bottle of whisky; he pulled the cork out with his yellowed teeth, dropped it into his lap, and took long noisy swallows. Then, in his high, thin, quavering voice he sang a hymn that floated faintly through the dust and d
ied in the ears of the three men who rode before him.

  On the sixth day of their traveling, they came to the end of the Smoky Hill Trail.

  III

  The dark green line of trees and brush that they had followed all the way from Butcher’s Crossing turned in a slow curve to the south. The four men, who came upon the turning in the midmorning of their sixth day of journey, halted and gazed for some moments at the course of the Smoky Hill River. From where they halted, the land dropped off so that in the distance, through the brush and trees of the banks, they could see the slow-moving water. In the distance it lost its muddy green hue; the sunlight silvered its surface, and it appeared to them clear and cool. The three men brought their horses close together; the oxen turned their heads toward the river and moaned softly; Charley Hoge called them to a halt, and set the brake handle of the wagon; he jumped off the spring seat, clambered from the wagon, and walked briskly over to where the others waited. He looked up at Miller.

  “Trail turns here with the river,” Miller said. “Follows it all the way up to the Arkansas. We could follow it and be sure of plenty of water, but it would put us near a week off getting where we’re aiming at.”

  Schneider looked at Miller and grinned; his teeth were white in his dust-encrusted face.

  “I take it you don’t aim to go by the trail.”

  “It’d put us a week off, maybe more,” Miller said. “I’ve gone across this country before.” He waved toward the flat country in the west that lay beyond the Smoky Hill Trail. “They’s water there, for a body that knows where it is.”

  Schneider, still grinning, turned to Andrews. “Mr. Andrews, you don’t look like you ever been thirsty in your life; real thirsty, I mean. So I guess it won’t do much good to ask you what you want to do.”

  Andrews hesitated; then he shook his head. “I have no right to speak. I don’t know the country.”

  “And Miller does,” Schneider said, “or at least that’s what he tells us. So we go where Miller says.”

  Miller smiled and nodded. “Fred, you sound like you want an extra week’s pay. You ain’t afraid of a little dry stretch, are you?”

  “I’ve had dry stretches before,” Schneider said. “But I never have got over feeling put out when I saw horses and bull-oxes being watered and me with a dry throat.”

  Miller’s smile widened. “It takes the grit out of a man,” he said. “It’s happened to me. But they’s water less than a day from here. I don’t think it’ll come to that.”

  “Just one thing more,” Schneider said. “How long did you say it’s been since you went over this bit of land?”

  “A few years,” Miller said. “But some things don’t leave a man.” Though the smile remained on his face, his voice stiffened. “You don’t have no serious complaints yet, do you, Fred?”

  “No,” Schneider said. “I just thought there was a few things I ought to say. I said I’d go along with you back at Butcher’s Crossing, and I’ll go along with you now. It don’t matter to me one way or another.”

  Miller nodded, and turned to Charley Hoge. “Reckon we’d better rest the stock and water them up good before we go on. And we’d better carry along as much water as we can, just in case. You take care of the team, and we’ll get what water we can back up to the wagon.”

  While Charley Hoge led the oxen down to the river, the others went to the wagon and found what containers they could for carrying water. From a broad square of canvas that covered their provisions, Miller fashioned a crude barrel, held open and upright by slender green saplings that he cut at the river bank. Two of the more slender saplings he tied together and bent into a circle, and tied again; this he attached near the four corners of the square canvas with leather thongs. The shorter and stubbier saplings he cut to a length, notched, and attached to the circled saplings, thus forming a receptacle some five feet in diameter and four feet in height. With buckets and kettles that Charley Hoge used for cooking and with one small wooden keg, the three men filled the canvas barrel three-quarters full; it took them the better part of an hour to do so.

  “That’s enough,” Miller said. “If we put any more in, it would just slosh out.”

  They rested in the shade beside the Smoky Hill, while the hobbled oxen wandered along the banks, grazing on the rich grass that grew in the moisture. Because of the intense heat, and because of the dry country over which they would be traveling, Miller told them, they would begin their second drive somewhat later; so Charley Hoge had time to cook up some soaked beans, sowbelly, and coffee. Until the afternoon sun pushed the shade beyond them, they lay wearily on the grassy bank of the river, listening to the rustle of the water that flowed past them smoothly, coolly, effortlessly, that flowed back through the prairie through which they had worked their way, past Butcher’s Crossing, and onward to the east. When the sun touched his face, Andrews sat up. Miller said: “Might as well get started.” Charley Hoge gathered his oxen, yoked them in pairs, and put them to the wagon. The party turned to the flat land upon which they could see neither tree nor trail to guide them, and went forward upon it. Soon the line of green that marked the Smoky Hill River was lost to them; and in the flat unbroken land Andrews had to keep his eyes firmly fixed on Miller’s back to find any direction to go in.

  Twilight came upon them. Had it not been for his tiredness, and the awkward, shambling weariness of the horses beneath the weight they carried forward, Andrews might have thought that the night came on and held them where they started, back at the bend of the Smoky Hill. During the afternoon’s drive he had seen no break in the flat country, neither tree, nor gully, nor rise in the land that might serve as a landmark to show Miller the way he went. They camped that night without water.

  Few words were exchanged as they broke the packs from their horses and set up the night’s camp on the open prairie. Charley Hoge led the oxen one by one to the back of the wagon; Miller held the large canvas receptacle erect while the oxen drank. By the light of a lantern he kept careful watch on the level of water; when an ox had drunk its quota, Miller would say sharply: “That’s enough,” and kick at the beast as Charley Hoge tugged its head away. When the oxen and the horses had drunk, the tank remained one-fourth full.

  Much later, around the campfire, which Charley Hoge had prepared with wood gathered at their noon stop, the men squatted and drank their coffee. Schneider, whose tight impassive face seemed to twitch and change in the flickering firelight, said impersonally:

  “I never cared for a dry camp.”

  No one spoke.

  Schneider continued: “I guess there’s a drop or two left in the tank.”

  “It’s about a fourth full,” Miller said.

  Schneider nodded. “We can make one more day on that, I figure. It’ll be a mite dry, but we should make one more day.”

  Miller said, “I figure one more day.”

  “If we don’t come across some water,” Schneider said.

  “If we don’t come across some water,” Miller agreed.

  Schneider lifted his tin cup and drained the last dreg of coffee from it. In the firelight, his raised chin and throat bristled and quivered. His voice was cool and lazy. “I reckon we’d better hit some water tomorrow.”

  “We’d better,” Miller said. Then: “There’s plenty of water; it’s just there for the finding.” No one answered him. He went on. “I must have missed a mark somewhere. There should have been water right along here. But it’s nothing serious. We’ll get water tomorrow, for sure.”

  The three men were watching him intently. In the dying light, Miller returned each of their stares, looking at Schneider at length, coolly. After a moment he sighed and put his cup carefully on the ground in front of Charley Hoge.

  “Let’s get some sleep,” Miller said. “I want to get an early start in the morning, before the heat sets in.”

  Andrews tried to sleep, but despite his tiredness he did not rest soundly. He kept being awakened by the low moaning of the oxen, which gathered
at the end of the wagon, pawed the earth, and butted against the closed tailgate that protected the little store of water in the open canvas tank.

  Andrews was shaken from his uneasy sleep by Miller’s hand on his shoulder. His eyes opened on darkness, and on the dim hulk of Miller above him. He heard the others moving about, stumbling and cursing in the early morning dark.

  “If we can get them going soon enough, they won’t miss the watering,” Miller said.

  By the time the false light shone in the east, the oxen were yoked; the party again moved westward.

  “Give your horses their heads,” Miller told them. “Let them set their own pace. We’ll do better not to push any of them till we get some water.”

  The animals moved sluggishly through the warming day. As the sun brightened, Miller rode far ahead of the main party; he sat erect in his saddle and moved his head constantly from one side to another. Occasionally he got off his horse and examined the ground closely, as if it concealed some sign that he had missed atop his horse. They continued their journey well into the middle of the day, and past it. When one of the oxen stumbled and in getting to its feet gashed at its fellow with a blunt horn, Miller called the party to a halt.

  “Fill your canteens,” he said. “We’ve got to water the stock and there won’t be any left.”

  Silently, the men did as they were told. Schneider was the last to approach the canvas tank; he filled his canteen, drank from it in long, heavy gulps, and refilled it.

  Schneider helped Charley Hoge control the oxen as, one by one, they were led to the rear of the wagon and the open tank of water. When the oxen were watered and tethered at some distance from the wagon, the horses were allowed to finish the water. After the horses had got from the tank all that they were able, Miller broke down the saplings that gave the canvas its shape, and with Charley Hoge’s help drained the water that remained in the folds of the canvas into a wooden keg.