In the Shadow of the Hills

by Madeline Baker

  I never found out how Katherine managed to spring me. Pulled some strings somewhere I guessed. But what really puzzled me was how she found out I was in Yuma in the first place. I hadn’t been in touch with her since I left New York.

  Anyway, in practically no time at all, we were on a train headed east, and it was like I was fifteen years old all over again.

  Walking into the McKenna mansion was like taking a step back in time. The butler met me with the same lofty gaze and I could almost hear him wondering anew why Miss Katherine “ever brought that young pup home”.

  The maids shied away from me, a look of fear in their eyes where there had once been only curiosity and disdain.

  But things weren’t quite the same. Old man McKenna was dead, and Roger Wentworth was now the head of the house. I’d never liked Katherine’s old man, but the house seemed empty without his presence riding roughshod over family and servants alike. Wentworth accepted my presence with good grace, though we had never cared much for each other.

  Actually, the only person who made me feel welcome was my little half-brother, Roger Wentworth Junior. He was cute kid, blond and blue-eyed and fair skinned. Everything I was not. Naturally, my mother adored him. She cuddled him and kissed him, told him bedtime stories, played silly finger games with him, sang him soft lullabies.

  Funny, but as old as I was, as hardened as I thought I’d become over the years, I couldn’t help feeling a faint twinge of jealousy when I saw the way Katherine fussed over him. Once, I would have given anything to feel the warmth of her love, her acceptance. But there had never been any love between us, and there was none now, which made me wonder all over again why she had bothered to get me out of Yuma.

  Those first few days back east were hell. Everything reminded me of Clarissa. The park where we had first explored our growing affection for one another, her favorite restaurant, the waltz we had always thought of as “our” song, the city itself. It was like reliving a nightmare as everything I had tried so hard to forget rose up before me. Everything she had loved was here, but she was gone.

  It took me a while, but I finally worked up the courage to go out to the cemetery. I had made arrangements with the caretaker before I left to make sure that, when possible, there were fresh flowers on the graves. White daisies for Angela. Yellow roses for Clarissa. I stood between their graves for a long time, remembering, and it was like losing them all over again.

  When I left the cemetery, I went by our old house. My mother had decided the property should stay in the family, just in case I ever decided to return to New York. I stood outside the house for twenty minutes or so before I unlocked the door and went inside.

  There was a hard lump in my throat as I walked from room to room, remembering. Standing in the kitchen, I could almost hear Clarissa singing as she prepared dinner. In the nursery, I heard echoes of my daughter’s laughter as I tossed her high in the air and caught her safe in my arms.

  I remembered making love to Clarissa on the rug in front of the big stone fireplace in the front parlor, and standing out in the backyard telling Virginia Randall to go to hell.

  I stood outside our bedroom door for a long time, but I couldn’t bring myself to go into the room where Clarissa had died in my arms. The pain of her death was like a bleeding wound where my heart should have been.

  I smashed my fist into the wall as tears stung my eyes. It had been a mistake to come here, to churn up memories that were still raw.

  Muttering an oath, I ran out of the house, away from the past, away from the ghosts that haunted me.

  Rafferty’s was unchanged. Ordering a bottle of whiskey, I carried it to a back table where I spent the rest of the day working my way to the bottom of the bottle until I was stone, cold drunk.

  As if things weren’t bad enough, that night I started having nightmares about Yuma. Sometimes I woke in a cold sweat, plagued by dreams that were vividly real. It got so bad that I began to dread going to bed because every night my dreams took me back to prison where I relived the five hellish months I had spent behind bars. Trapped in my nightmares, it all came back with crystal clarity - the stink of sweat and excrement that had filled my narrow cell, the clatter of chains that had accompanied every step I took, the tortured cries of men in agony, the iron bars and high gray walls and the faces of men wiped clean of hope.

  I remembered sitting in a puddle of red mud with Earl Anderson, and burying a sick old man in a hole.

  At those times, when the dreams were stronger and more terrible than reality, I left the house and went outside where I breathed in great lungfuls of the cool night air and reminded myself that it was over. I was free again.

  Katherine surprised me by being unusually sympathetic to the hell I was living in. Several times, she came outside and kept me company, and even though I would have preferred to be alone, I never sent her away. She talked to me of trivial things, inconsequential things that drew my thoughts from Yuma, from Clarissa, and back to the present.

  One particularly bad night, she brought me a cup of strong black coffee generously laced with brandy. It was the first kindness I remembered from her hand.

  We had a long talk that night, the first conversation we had ever had where we talked to each other instead of at each other.

  I can’t say I was suddenly overcome with a surge of filial love for the woman who was my mother, but I did learn to understand her a little better. During that memorable conversation, she told me about her childhood in New York, and how she had longed to be a great lady like her mother, surrounded by an adoring husband and smiling, well-behaved beautiful children. She told me how, when she was fourteen, she had been on her way to visit her maiden aunt in San Francisco when her stage coach had been attacked by Indians and how my father had claimed her for his slave.

  “It was dreadful, all that shooting and killing,” Katherine said, and I could see that the memory still haunted her. “They murdered all the other passengers. At first, I was afraid they were going to kill me, too. Later, when I realized that your father meant to make me his...his wife, I was sorry I hadn’t died with the others.”

  Katherine ran a slender hand through her hair, and I noticed her hand was trembling.

  “You can’t imagine how awful it was for me, living there among hundreds of Indians, not understanding what they were saying, not knowing what they expected of me. Everything was so strange. The food, the language, the customs. It was awful. Your father expected me to cook the most disgusting things, to clean his lodge....I had no knowledge of how to keep a house, let alone a filthy hide lodge. It was awful,” she said again, “simply awful.”

  “Yeah, I guess it must have been,” I muttered, and I could understand a little of how scared she had been because I’d been some scared myself when I saw New York for the first time. Belatedly, I felt a rush of gratitude because she had insisted I learn her language. At least I had been able to communicate, to understand what people were saying to me. And about me.

  “And then I got pregnant,” she said with a sigh. “I was only fifteen at the time, and I knew less than nothing about childbirth. The whole ordeal was a nightmare. I was sick all the time. Sick and afraid. Two Indian women came to help with the birth. I was so frightened.

  “Don’t take this personally, John,” she said, placing her hand on my forearm, “but you came as an awful shock. I was expecting a baby with blue eyes and fair hair and then you came along. You were a beautiful baby, in your own way, but you were so...so...”

  “Indian,” I supplied flatly.

  “Yes. You looked so much like your father. I knew he would never let you go. And I couldn’t bring myself to leave you, not even when I had the chance.”

  Even now, I remembered how surprised I had been that she hadn’t gone off with old Rusty Johnson. “Why not?” I asked, unable to keep the bitterness out of my voice. “There was never any love lost between us.”

  “John...”

  “Don’t deny it! I’m not blind, or deaf. I k
now you’ve never loved me.”

  “I tried,” she said miserably. “Truly I did. But you were so much like your father. And even though he was never cruel to me, I was always afraid of him.”

  I stared past her into the darkness, thinking she was really quite a remarkable woman. Most captives eventually embraced the Indian way of life. Some refused to be rescued when the opportunity presented itself. Some became more Indian than the Indians themselves. But not Katherine Margaret Elizabeth McKenna. She never forgot who she was, who she wanted to be. She had never given up on her dream of returning home, of becoming a great lady. And when she finally made her way home, she had slipped back into her old way of life, virtually unchanged by her years in a Cheyenne lodge. In spite of years of living with my father’s people, she was as charming and gracious as if she had spent her entire life in the lap of luxury. She had everything she had ever wanted: a big house, a wealthy devoted husband, a little fair-haired boy she loved as she had never loved me. I envied her those things because everything I had ever wanted, ever loved, was dead.

  “And you, John?” she asked after a while. “Have you been happy drifting around the country all these years like a ship without a rudder?”

  “No.”

  She accepted that with a slight lift of her delicate brows, but did not pursue the matter.

  “Prison life must have been very hard for you,” she remarked. “Even as a little boy, you could never abide being cooped up in one place for very long. You were always on the go, always exploring new horizons.”

  “I don’t want to talk about it,” I said testily. “How the hell did you know I was in prison anyway?”

  “I’ve followed your, ah, career quite avidly,” she replied dryly. “You’re quite a celebrity, you know? Why, I was even interviewed by a newspaperman who wanted to know what it was like to be the mother of the fastest gunfighter in the west.”

  “And?” I was suddenly tense as I waited for her to go on.

  “I told him I had always known you would excel in whatever line of work you decided to undertake.” She laughed softly. “He said that ‘undertake’ was certainly the right word, as you’d been responsible for sending many a gunman to Boot Hill.”

  Her somber blue eyes probed mine. “Tell me, John,” she said quietly. “Did you really think I would deny that you were my son?”

  “Yeah. And I wouldn’t have blamed you if you had. I guess I’ve always been an embarrassment to you, one way or another.”

  “Much as I was to you when you were a little boy,” she replied. “I know how hard it was for you, having a white woman for a mother. I know it would have been easier for you if I could have accepted the Cheyenne way of living, but I couldn’t. I had to be Katherine. Do you understand?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, it’s all in the past now, and I think, at least I hope, that we’ve both grown up enough to put the past behind us, where it belongs.”

  “Whatever you say, Ma,” I muttered, flashing her a wry grin.

  Katherine looked at me oddly, and I saw there were tears in her eyes.

  “John,” she whispered hoarsely, “do you realize that’s the first time you ever called me mother.”

  “I called you Ma,” I said, unnerved by the sight of her tears, and by the first genuine rush of affection I had ever felt for her.

  “It’s the same thing,” she insisted and then, suddenly self-conscious, she wiped the tears from her eyes. “Mercy, I’m getting maudlin in my old age.”

  “I don’t think you’ll ever be old,” I said, and I meant it. She was as beautiful now as she had been when I was a little boy. I knew she was pushing forty, but her skin was still smooth and clear, her hair was still long and honey-gold.

  Katherine blinked, obviously pleased by my compliment. Unexpectedly, she said, “John, tell me about Yuma.”

  “No, dammit, I told you I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “But you’ll feel better if you do,” she insisted, and I could almost hear old man McKenna telling her the very same thing the day she came home after the Chivington massacre at Sand Creek.

  So I took a deep breath and I told her about Yuma. I showed her the scars on my back, and told her about the beatings I had received. I told her about Fargo and the ten days I had spent in solitary confinement. About Anderson and the mud hole, about the old man who had died digging a hole in the middle of the desert. I told her about the lice and the heat, about the putrid food and the tepid water and the anger that had burned within me.

  And when I was through, I did feel better.

  “I never thanked you for getting me out of there,” I said, “but I’m more grateful than you will ever know.”

  Katherine gave me a warm smile. “Goodnight, John,” she said softly. “I’m glad we had this talk.”

  I nodded. “Yeah, me, too.”

  She stood up, hesitating. To my surprise, and hers, too, I guess, I stood up and gave her a quick hug. She started to say something, swallowed the words, and hurried back to the house.

  After that night, all the old anger and bitterness I’d been harboring melted away, and I felt kind of clean inside, like I had been reborn. Best of all, I never had any more nightmares about Yuma.

  Katherine left me pretty much to myself for the next couple of weeks, and then she started talking about finding me a job in one of the McKenna enterprises.

  “I’m sure we can find you something suitable,” she said cheerfully. “Tell me, John, what kind of job would you like to have?”

  “I don’t want a job.”

  “Well, you’ve got to do something,” she countered. She folded her hands in her lap, and I knew she was trying to be patient with me. “You can’t spend the rest of your life loafing around the house.”

  She was right about that. I was going slowly insane from boredom.

  I took to spending a lot of time with my little brother. I took him horseback riding and taught him how to swim. I even taught him a few words of Cheyenne: meko for head; maexa for eye; maevo for nose; mahtse for mouth. When Katherine wasn’t there to hear it, he called me tsehe-neheto, my older brother.

  That kid really thought I was something special, and he stuck closer to me than my shadow. He copied everything I did: how I walked and talked, the way I combed my hair. He even begged Katherine to let him grow his hair long, because that was how Cheyenne warriors wore their hair.

  I’d been in New York about a month when he asked me to stay by his bedside until he fell asleep. I grumbled a little, but I did it, and it was a good feeling, sitting there, holding his hand in mine. After that, I saw with him every night. I read him fairy tales, and sometimes I told him Coyote stories, or about my childhood with the Cheyenne.

  Katherine and Wentworth were happy together, just as I had known they would be. Sometimes, watching them play with their son, hearing their laugher, I felt a sharp sense of loss. I was lonely, for a woman of my own, a family of my own.

  I was almost twenty-six now, and tired of drifting. I didn’t relish the thought of taking up my gun again. I was tired of killing, though I felt no remorse over the men I had gunned down. Most had come looking for trouble, and I had obliged them.

  Reflecting, I realized every time I had killed a man, I had been trying to get even, trying to get back at my mother for not loving me the way I thought she should have; trying to get even for all the cutting remarks and dirty looks that thoughtless people had cast in my direction for as long as I could remember; trying to hurt others the way I’d been hurt when Clarissa and my daughter passed away.

  I guess what it all boiled down to was that my mother was right again. I had finally grown up enough to accept the past and put it behind me where it belonged.

  I could think of Clarissa without pain now, remembering the good times we had shared. I knew I would never love like that again. I also knew I would never be happy living in the east. I was homesick for the Plains, homesick for land that wasn’t crowded with people and buildings.


  Katherine tried to convince me to stay, but the more she talked, the more anxious I was to leave.

  A week later, I left New York for the last time.

  A month later, I was surprised to find myself part of a wagon train headed west.

  It was June 1875.

  Chapter 16

  I hadn’t meant to get involved with the wagon train that was preparing to move out at the end of the week. Green pioneers and gullible settlers had never been my cup of tea, and I heartily wished they would all go back east where they belonged.

  I was sitting in a saloon in St. Louis late one night, nursing a beer, when a tall, thin man entered the place looking for someone to help drive his wagon across the Plains. He was a sick man; you knew it the minute you looked at him. There was an unhealthy pallor to his kin, and he had a dry, hacking cough.

  I had no intention of volunteering to help the man, but the next thing I knew, I was shaking his hand. He introduced himself as Lemuel Stoddard, from Rhode Island.

  “I can’t pay you much,” Stoddard said, “but I need someone to go along with us, you know, another man who’ll look out for my family in case...” He took a deep breath. “In case I don’t make it.”

  “I’ll ride along,” I said. “I’m heading out that way myself.”

  “I’d surely appreciate it,” Stoddard said sincerely. “What would you consider a fair amount for riding along?”

  “You don’t have to pay me. I’d consider it wages enough to share your food. I never did care much for my own cooking.”

  Stoddard nodded, smiling a little, and we shook hands to seal the bargain.

  * * *

  I kept pretty much to myself as we made our way westward. I’d gotten to be something of a loner during my gunfighting days, but that was only natural. Gunmen didn’t make many friends. Decent folks didn’t cotton to me in my line of work, and I had no use for the gamblers and con men I had run into as I drifted from town to town, job to job.

  But then, being alone suited me just fine. I had no real desire to mingle with my fellow passengers, or participate in the nightly dances and sing-a-longs that buoyed up their spirits after the wagons were circled and the evening chores were done.