Come Sundown

by Mike Blakely

I made the pony ride right up to the scaffold, though he didn’t like the looks of it. I stood on his back and grabbed one of the four upright poles, almost totally mad with fear. I shimmied up the pole as I began to moan unintelligibly and uncontrollably. The scaffold was not made for someone to climb, and it swayed under my weight. I heard screams back at the camp, for what I was doing was ghoulishly unthinkable.

  The body atop the platform was wrapped in a bloodstained blanket, tied up tightly with ropes and strips of rawhide, and lashed to the platform with more of the same. A great, bad buzzing sound filled my skull as I drew my knife to cut the ropes that ran across the shoulders and head of the corpse. Quanah had followed but stayed beyond the burial grounds. He scolded me from afar, but I could not even hear his words. I unfolded the top of the blanket as tears began to fill my eyes. I had to look. I had to see. I had to know.

  I pulled the blanket back and saw the lifeless face of my beautiful wife, and I screamed in an inhuman voice that still wakes me sometimes in nightmares. I felt my fist clenching my knife so hard that it hurt, and some instinct I possessed for survival made me throw the weapon away for fear that I would plunge it into my own guts. I drew a breath that rushed into me like wind tearing a ragged battle flag, and forced the same air out, all black and boiling, in a scream of heartbroken anguish. Pieces of my soul came out in that scream, never to be reclaimed.

  I felt myself falling. I hit the ground hard, and lay there stunned in every way a man can take a beating. Nothing was good inside me. My brain would not think, my heart would not beat, my blood flowed backward in my veins. My chest rose and fell in great sobs as I slipped into some sort of state of semiconsciousness that I embraced like a furlough from Hades.

  A comforting sensation enveloped me. It was neither cold nor hot. I felt no pain. It wasn’t dark, though neither was it bright. It was all very pleasant, though I still remembered the crippling pains of the real world—the world that I considered real. Then I heard the deep voice of a man laughing in such an easy, joyous way, that I did not at first recognize the voice until he spoke: “Plenty Man,” he said in a chuckle. “Plenty, Plenty, Plenty … Man, Man, Man …”

  It was Burnt Belly, speaking in a singsong voice I had never heard him use.

  “You take too much care upon yourself. If only you knew. Your time there is but a blink. You are a shooting star—just a fleeting moment of brightness in a single night of all the nights of all the seasons of all of creation. You are the shadow of a soaring eagle that passes across the face of a sleeping man. You should go and find a tree that knows ten times the summers you have passed, and listen to that tree. Only then will you begin to know. You are one drop of rain, one breath from a newborn child. Yours is one small cloud that drifts across the moon. That is all. Nothing very bad ever lasts very long. You will see. I went ahead of you to tell you this. Westerly, too. We have not left you so very far behind. You will know in time, grandson.”

  He began to chuckle again, and I felt my pain returning. The envelope opened and poured me out like fetid water, back into my world of pain and sorrow. But just before I left the comfortable place behind, I heard Westerly’s laughter traipse through the vacuum of the Great Beyond—easy and carefree—and it gave me a moment of respite from my grief. Then I fell into one of my deep, absorbing trances, leaving all feeling and consciousness behind.

  I AWOKE SHIVERING. Taking my usual time to look about and get moving, I found myself on the open plains, alone. The day was cloudy, the wind cold. I sat up and saw my horses staked down in a little draw. My personal belongings were on the ground beside me. I noticed the tracks of a pony drag trailing away, and reasoned that someone had transported me here on a travois. I got up and took care of my personal necessities. I had no motivation to do anything else but sit there. I admit that I cried some, but at least I no longer wailed like the madman who had fallen from Westerly’s burial scaffold. All I could do to keep my sanity was to cling tenuously to the gossamer strains of Westerly’s laughter that I had heard in my vision of the beyond.

  After a while, though, my thoughts of grief hardened into anger. I thought of John Chivington and his soldiers attacking the very people to whom they had promised protection and peace. In my mind, Chivington himself had fired the bullet that mortally wounded my wife and made her last days on this earth a living hell. My mind rolled like a hoop on the plains that touched places of grief, then hope, then anger, then sorrow, then blood lust. I began to get the idea that the only way things would ever be right again with all of humanity was for me to find John Chivington and kill him dead.

  At length, I saw Quanah returning to me over a hill, his pony still dragging the travois. It surprised me to see him coming, for I thought he had abandoned me as a madman. I pulled myself together and wiped the tears from my face. When Quanah came near, I saw a load of sticks and buffalo chips lashed down on the travois, as well as a young antelope carcass. He had bloodstains on his hands and face. My stomach growled, and I realized that I was still alive, and hungry.

  Quanah looked at me fearfully. “Are you crazy?”

  I shook my head. “No, nephew. I am not crazy. I know I acted that way for a while, but I am better now. I will not be going crazy like that again.”

  He looked as if he believed me. “That camp was full of bad spirits. I believe one of them got inside you.”

  I nodded. “Yes, but it is gone. I heard a vision, and that cured me.”

  “You heard a vision?”

  “It is possible. When you hear a coyote far away in the dark, can you not see it in your heart?”

  Quanah smirked and glanced across the bare hills. “That crazy woman at the camp wanted me to take something from her to give to you. I was afraid to touch it, so she put it in your parfleche bag.”

  “What is it?”

  “I do not know. I was afraid of it. It is wrapped up in a piece of deerskin.”

  “I will look at it, then I will help you with that antelope.”

  He lifted his chin in approval, and jumped down from the horse to remove the travois. I went to my parfleche bag that carried my food and herbs and opened it carefully. I saw the deerskin, wrapped around the shape of a cylinder. Untying the thong around the deerskin, I found several sheets of paper, rolled up. They were pages torn from a Bible that had probably been given to some Arapaho or Cheyenne by a missionary. Aside from the printed words of the Gospel, these pages had handwriting on them, and my heart leapt when I realized that it sprang from Westerly’s hand. Her lines of cursive ran counter to the printed lines in the Bible. The pen she had used seemed to have been a simple quill. The ink could only have been blood. I straightened the pages and turned them so that I could begin to read the difficult script. Before I even deciphered a letter, I could see that Westerly had been in pain, her hand trembling. She had written in Spanish, her favorite. “Mi amor …”

  My love,

  I know everything you feel just now. Anger, sorrow, pain. Let the caress of every West Wind that touches you carry it all away from your heart. Shed those feelings like cottonwood leaves in the autumn, right down to the strong, graceful branches that we grew together. When the winter passes, as it always does, tender new buds will grow. There is a place for us in the Shadow Land, and you must do your duty until it is time for us to be together again. Do not think of revenge. That is not your duty. Do not let your heart grow black. Do as you have done all along. Help the People. Even when you despair, help them. And know that I have loved you from the moment I saw your face and heard your voice. Do not change the things I love. Do not let them change you. Everything you touch rings like the note of a songbird. You are the best thing that ever came to me, and without you my life would have meant nothing. Always remember that I think of you with every breath. Behind all my cares and joys, you are there, a beautiful warm comfort inside of me. Even now, my love. Even now. I smile, because of you. I leave you now, but only for a while. Mi alma will stay with you, and the spirits will bring us together ag
ain in time. Our love is too strong to die. Trust me. I love you. Westerly.

  In Spanish, the word alma can mean either “heart” or “soul.” Or both. She had chosen her words well, even in her agony. I had to turn my face away to keep a tear from falling on the paper. During the reading of that letter my heart had swollen with a longing to hold her. It must have been so hard for her to pen those words with her own blood, yet she knew they would bring me relief and comfort and wisdom. I missed her even more now, and I knew I would for a long, long while.

  Yes, her words had made me feel loved beyond my ability to convey the sensation to you. But do not think my difficulty would end there. I had many bitter days before me, and much hardship of the heart to suffer.

  I looked up at Quanah. He was skinning the antelope. He glanced at me, a bit fearfully. I rolled the letter and, wrapping it again in the deerskin, I replaced it in my parfleche bag.

  “I will make fire,” I said. “Then I must burn some fir needles for smoke. The smoke will purify me, and protect me from the bad spirits of that crazy camp.”

  “Good,” Quanah said. “I will pray with you, uncle. We should make a sweat lodge.”

  “We can do that later. There is no time now.”

  He looked at me, confused. “We have no hurry.”

  “Nephew, I must go back to that camp.”

  His eyes flared with fear. “Why would you go back there?”

  “I do not want to go. But I must. I have medicine. I have powers that heal. That man with the bad leg—I can save him. And probably others, too. You do not have to go.”

  “Are you not afraid of that place? You went crazy there.”

  “My medicine is stronger now. I am not afraid. The bad spirits will run from me like rabbits. You do not have to follow me.”

  He carved at the meat for a while in silence. Finally, he said, “If I go back there with you, we must build a sweat lodge after we leave that place, so we can purify ourselves.”

  I nodded. “Yes, that is the way. That is good. We will help those people, then we will sweat.”

  Fifty-Four

  I did what I could to soothe the wounds of the people at the Bad Camp on the Smoky Hill River. The man with the wounded leg survived because of me and the things Burnt Belly had taught me. I saved a few others, but some were beyond my powers to help. Some of the wounds were horrible, and the suffering of the victims prolonged and severe. This served only to deepen my hatred for the leader of that massacre—John M. Chivington.

  I said my prayers at Westerly’s burial scaffold every morning and every evening, sometimes wailing right out loud like others at the camp. I knew my mourning had just begun. I missed my wife, the moments we shared, the love we made, the things we learned from each other. She was gone and I could not understand why it had to be so. She had brought no harm to anyone. It was the ultimate injustice that she had been taken from the world at all. That she had been taken from me was a crime against everything right and moral within the realm of men and gods. Someone should pay, I thought. What kind of man would let this go unpunished?

  Quanah and I stayed for twenty-one days at the camp on the Smoky Hill. We heard many stories of Sand Creek, and began to piece together the story of the massacre. Westerly had gone there to visit her mother. When the attack came, Westerly’s mother had been shot down instantly. Westerly escaped at first and ran up the creek but was shot in the back by a horseman. In my mind it had to have been John Chivington himself. She feigned death for a while until the attackers galloped past her, then she crawled into the creekbed where the survivors dug pits and mounted a desperate defense until nightfall. Unable to walk, Westerly had been carried away by rescuers after dark.

  The survivors told heart-wrenching tales about that night. Bitterly cold wind whipped across the plains where the few people who remained unhurt attempted to save wounded men, women, and children by building fires of grass. Few people had had time to dress warmly before the dawn attack came, and almost everyone had lost robes and blankets fleeing for their lives. The adults covered poor, crying, naked, wounded children with mounds of grass in an attempt to keep them from freezing to death.

  Westerly was one of these sufferers. My shame at not having been there to protect her at Sand Creek was almost enough in itself to kill me. I had been doing what I thought my heart dictated: saving the Comanches from a surprise attack by soldiers. And yet I had left my wife behind to fall victim to a far worse attack, unprotected by me.

  Other details about the massacre began to take shape. Chivington began his attack by cutting the unsuspecting Indians off from their horse herd before dawn. At sunrise, he had loosed the staggering firepower of four howitzers upon the sleeping village, then charged seven hundred mounted soldiers into a camp of six hundred Cheyenne and Arapaho, two thirds of whom were women and children. Even children were shot down and scalped.

  I also learned that the Bent brothers, Charles and George, had been present during the massacre. George had been wounded in the hip and had stayed at this very camp on the Smoky Hill for a few days before going to look for his brother. Some witnesses said that Charles, who had been living with the Indians, and fought as one of them during the battle, was captured by soldiers. Fearing that his younger brother had been executed, George had left the Smoky Hill to find out what had happened to Charles.

  I pieced together what I could about Sand Creek, and did my best to heal the wounded at the Smoky Hill camp until one day a roving band of Cheyennes showed up with food and medicines to further care for the recovering wounded. As I had done all I could do for the people there, Quanah and I decided to leave. We had been there twenty-one days and it was time to move on. I cast a last gaze toward Westerly’s funeral scaffold, and turned away. I knew she was no longer there.

  Farther down the Smoky Hill River, we found some timber and, using bent willow boughs and buffalo robes, we made a sweat lodge just big enough for the two of us to crawl into. Quanah came out pure. I was not so sure about myself.

  I had no one left to me but my Comanche family, yet I could not bring myself to go home to the Crossing and Adobe Walls for reasons I did not at first understand. At length, I realized that I wanted to linger in the country of my wife’s people, the Cheyenne. I drifted aimlessly on the plains for a while, looking for trails to follow. It dawned on me that I was gravitating toward Boggsville, where Westerly’s sister, Amache, lived with her husband, John Prowers. But I was not yet ready to risk showing my face there for fear of being arrested as a traitor. I was a fugitive again, destined to wander aimlessly in the wilderness. Quanah stayed with me. He did not even ask where we were going or what we were doing. He just rode with me and made himself useful.

  One day we cut the trail of two Indian ponies in the snow, and followed the trail north. Finding the camp of the riders, we approached cautiously, and discovered the brothers George and Charles Bent huddled around a small cook fire, roasting a hare. They stood, and George greeted me in Cheyenne, saying, “Come, warm yourself, Plenty Man.” His eyes looked troubled. Charles’s eyes looked half-wild. He did not speak to me at all. They were dressed in full Cheyenne regalia, having shed all vestiges of the white man’s clothing.

  They shared their food with us and we all ate in silence. Finally, George wiped his fingers on his buckskin leggings and spoke:

  “I must tell you something, Plenty Man.” His eyes looked up from the ground between his feet.

  I raised my hand to spare him the task. “I have come from the camp you left on the Smoky Hill River.”

  “Then you know?”

  “Yes, my friend. I have been mourning since I found that wretched place.”

  “I would have stayed to help her, but she would not have it. She told me that she was beyond help, and that I should go look for my brother. She was a very brave woman. She told me that she was not afraid to die, but that she did not want to go without seeing her husband. Did you …”

  I shook my head in sorrow and shame. “I got the
re a day too late. She wrote me a letter in her own blood.”

  We sat in silence for a long time, and Charles angrily threw some more sticks on the fire. Every move he made betrayed his ire with life.

  “Tell me about Sand Creek,” I said. “And whatever you know about what happened to Westerly.”

  George sighed. “Some Cheyennes were camped up the Purgatoire, near Boggsville, and your wife went to visit them. They said that they were going to Sand Creek, where they had been told by the soldiers that they would be treated as friendly Indians. Your wife heard from these Indians that her mother was in that camp, so she decided to go visit her mother. Your wife’s other sister, Amache, almost went, too, but John Prowers would not let her go. Charles and I were in the camp at Sand Creek when your wife arrived.”

  “Did you speak to her then?”

  “Just briefly, to welcome her to the camp. She got there just three days before the attack, and she spent all of her time with her mother. Now, back on the Arkansas, the day before the attack, Chivington showed up at my father’s stockade and threw a guard around the place to keep my father or anybody else from riding out and warning the Cheyennes. Your brother-in-law, John Prowers, happened to be riding down to the stockade that morning to visit my father, and he saw what was going on. He tried to escape so he could ride to warn the Cheyennes, but the soldiers overtook him, and Chivington had him arrested and put under guard.”

  “Chivington arrested John? On what charge? By what authority?”

  George could only shrug. “Whatever the charge was, it was dropped after the attack. John hates Chivington now. His wife lost a mother and a sister in the massacre. John is already talking about a court-martial, and he’s not the only one.”

  “A court-martial is too good for that murdering bastard,” I said. “A quick bullet through the brain would serve justice much quicker. Like you’d dispatch a coyote in a leg trap.”