Then again, during that autumn when we were at Medicine Lodge, there were a lot of things Skywalker despised. By his surly manner, it was becoming more and more apparent that I was one of those things. Something was going on between us, something I didn’t understand, and until he felt ready to share the problem, I was treated not like a friend, but as someone he didn’t care to know. When he spoke to me, he snapped, he ordered.
Ordinarily this attitude would have hurt me deeply. On that day, it simply made me mad, for there I was, gagging on account of that putrefying body while he spoke in a demeaning manner, thoroughly unfazed by Buug-lah’s whiffy remains. While we were thus engaged, The Cheyenne Robber was putting his tracking skills to good use, looking for any type of sign.
Skywalker looked back at him while I annoyingly brushed flies away from my eyes. “What do you see?”
The Cheyenne Robber circled the area, confusion marring his features. “I can’t find anything in this grass.” Then he yelped. “Wait! Here’s something.”
“What is it?”
The Cheyenne Robber stood to his full height, shook his head. “It looks like a deep cut.”
Skywalker rose and went to join his brother. Studying the mark, they remained unnaturally quiet. “It’s the heel of a boot,” Skywalker said. Squatting down, he placed his hand just above the mark.
“Anything?” The Cheyenne Robber quizzed.
Skywalker’s hand became a fist. “Nothing. Too much time has passed. No images are coming to me.” Raising his head he declared, “It would seem our one hope is Tay-bodal.”
Nervously I cleared my throat. “I—I need help. I ask for Hawwy.”
His eyes narrowing, Skywalker simply stared at me. I hated it when he got like that. His silences always made me feel defensive. Feeling a degree of malice in that stare, I felt extremely defensive.
“Hawwy is a doctor too,” I said, hating the nervous edge in my tone.
Skywalker still said not a word. His mouth slowly compressing into a tight line. All right, I thought, if he wants to be mad at me, then he should be that in a better time and place. Steeling my nerve, I said more forcibly, “Hawwy is a fair person. We are lucky to have him. And as we do have him, we should use him.”
“Tay-bodal’s right,” Hears The Wolf said.
Skywalker turned his silent tactic on Hears The Wolf. I was glad to see that he responded to it no better than I, but as Hears The Wolf was Lone Wolf’s chosen leader of this little expedition, he didn’t have time to worry about Skywalker’s apparent displeasure. Lifting his chin in Hawwy’s direction, he shouted, “Hawwy wants to help. Look at his face!”
Skywalker’s gaze traveled sluggishly toward Ha-we-sun. His hands still raised even with his head, Hawwy was looking at the body on the ground with a concentrated expression. Skywalker stood and went over to where Hawwy was, stood right in front of him but spoke to Billy, keeping his voice low and even.
“I know you understand the problem of our finding that man dead. Tay-bodal says he needs Hawwy’s help. I think you should take time to explain to him just how important his complete cooperation will be.”
Even though his face was partially obscured by the wide brim of his hat, I saw Billy flinch. After a moment’s deliberation, he nodded, then turned and addressed Hawwy.
Hears The Wolf and The Cheyenne Robber tied up the remaining Blue Jackets, having to grapple first with Sergeant Cullen. During the scuffle William had edged closer to Lieutenant Danny’s side. William’s face was streaked with tears that, in the strong sunlight, shone like silver lines on his dark face.
When Hears The Wolf and The Cheyenne Robber started after Little Jonas, they were expecting a huge fight, but the man, staring off at William, was oddly compliant. He made not one defensive gesture. Because he was so indulgent, Hears The Wolf and The Cheyenne Robber took their time deciding just which scrub tree wasn’t likely to be uprooted by Little Jonas’s use of brute force. Once the five Blue Jackets were settled and secure, Billy nodded to Hawwy. At last able to move without fear of being shot, Hawwy tied a cloth over his face and came to me.
He hunkered right down, his dark brown eyes above the mask, eager as he said excitedly, “This not man. Clothes no fit.”
He meant, of course, that this couldn’t possibly be Buug-lah because the clothing looked too small. Hearing this, Skywalker ran to join us, coming to stand just behind Hawwy. Looking up at Skywalker, seeing the eagerness in his expression, I wanted to hit Haw-we-sun. His saying that was just like throwing mud clods into a perfectly clear waterhole. How was I suppose to convince the others that his help was necessary if he went on making idiot statements like that? All right, the dead man’s face was split in half and I was having a hard time keeping the black cloud of flies stirred so that they wouldn’t resettle and cover up the wound. But even in these appalling conditions I could tell that this man was once Buug-lah, for, having watched him for days and simply out of curiosity, I clearly remembered the dead man’s face. Hawwy hadn’t known him at all before coming to Medicine Lodge and to my knowledge, had only looked at him twice. But only once, on the day he picked him up and brushed him off, had he shown the living man any interest. Now he was basing his iffy identification on the way the body was clothed, giving no thought at all to the ruined facial structure.
Despite the malodorous air, I heaved a wearied sigh.
A decomposing human is an awful sight. Worse than any species of dead animal. With all things formerly living, death has distinct stages but these stages are more apparent in humans. There are other stages for bodies left to molder in deep water, but as the body I am telling you about was on dry land, I will be brief, horrifying your mind only with those details.
In the first twelve hours, the body cools enough to feel cold to the touch. During about half of those twelve hours, blood settles in whatever position the body is left to lay. If it’s on the back then blood will seep in that direction, but the blood will not collect in the places of contact. For example, if the body is on a hard surface, like the ground as in the case of Buug-lah, then the shoulder blades, the buttocks, the back of the calves, and the heels will be flat and white while the remainder of the body will look a vivid red.
Also in the first twelve hours the body becomes rigid, beginning in the jaw and neck, finally making the body as stiff as wood. Oddly enough, after another twelve hours the body goes limp again and the blood which was like a jellied mass, will turn liquid again, weeping from cavities like the ears, eyes, and so on—anyplace excess blood can escape. It is not unusual to find bloodred tears on a dead man’s face, or to see blood trickling out of the mouth. This display will not tell you how the man died; it merely gives an idea of how long the man has been dead.
When a body is two to three days old, the lower abdomen becomes puffy and the leached skin around the abdomen will seem to have been painted with the colors purple and green. Two days more—making four total days since death—the veins are huge, grossly distended. Also, the purple and green colors are no longer confined to the trunk, but have spread like a blotchy disease toward the neck and limbs. In this stage, the body has become fully bloated, which explains why the dead man’s clothing looked too tight, prompting Hawwy’s idiotic guess that the body was some other poor soul done up in Buug-lah’s ill-fitting clothing.
Take all of this and apply it ten times over to a corpse left out in the grueling sun, totally exposed to the sun’s relentless blaze. The skin not covered was blackened, causing the victim to appear as if he had been tortured with fire before being killed. This hadn’t happened, but not even Hears The Wolf was ready to believe that one—another reason he’d immediately captured the Blue Jackets.
Actually, his doing that was a good thing, for if the soldiers had gotten away and reported even half of what they had seen, Medicine Lodge would have become the site of an unprecedented massacre. At Medicine Lodge we had almost as many generals as there were soldiers, plus important Washington men, and newspaper reporters. Th
e loss to the white culture would have been staggering. I can only guess that the ensuing rage against the Kiowa Nation would then have been met with the aim of our total extermination. So, as things worked out, it was to everyone’s benefit that Hears The Wolf had moved so quickly to capture those soldiers and tie them up good and tight.
But Hawwy had another concern. He was still on about the too-tight clothing, and like one of the hardheaded mules he had handed over to secure his marriage with Cherish, he would not be persuaded from that opinion.
From what I had learned about Haw-we-sun, he had been in the war between the Blue Jackets and the Gray Jackets. As a doctor, he had seen hundreds of dead and dying soldiers. The problem was, he had never seen them in the advanced stages of death. The common soldiers were promptly buried, whereas the bodies of the officers had been ingeniously preserved to allow shipment back to their homes for burial. And even then, as Hawwy had explained, the caskets had been sealed. No one, not the doctors and most certainly not the grief-stricken families, ever saw the dead in a moldering state. He did assure me, however, that he had dealt with dead people in a place he called Medical College. In this place, they cut open corpses in order to examine the internal organs. Isn’t that gruesome?
As Hawwy was so determined to take a wife from among the true humans, he needed a good talking-to, needed to be told that bragging about cutting up the dead was an improper thing to do. But, as I didn’t have time to broaden his education in that moment, I simply stayed with my argument that the dead man before us was most certainly Buug-lah. That Hawwy shouldn’t be in such a hurry to base his opinions on the evidence of straining buttons or the sausagelike appearance of arms and legs trapped inside that uniform.
I attempted to tell him all of this between shallow breaths. Too shallow. The fetid air barely reached my lungs. My head was swimming and deep in the pit of my stomach, nausea roiled. I needed clean air or I was going to pass out. Besides, with Hawwy’s limited language skills he couldn’t, or wouldn’t, understand a word I managed to say. So I addressed Skywalker, who was now crouched beside Hawwy and looking up at the sky.
“Could we please discuss this at a distance? I’m not feeling very well.”
Skywalker’s puckered lips moved to the side of his face as he kept right on studying the sky. “No.”
“Why?” I shouted.
In a flat tone he answered, “Because it’s going to rain.”
FIVE
Cold air moves down from the north with amazing speed, engulfing the vast prairie lying open and helpless. Overnight, snow as deep as a man is tall can shroud every mile of the plains. On the other hand, this same wallowing, near-treeless expanse is subject to blasts of warm air from the south. When the warm winds come, the snow melts, turning the prairie into a bog. If, however, there is no offering from the south, then the snow has been known to stay put for a span of days, sometimes weeks. When Indian people became tired of living with all that snow, they turned their faces to the south and prayed for the north wind’s enemy, the south wind, to come out and fight.
The winds from the north and south have fought an ageless war, a war so old that during the days when my grandfather was a boy, he heard the ancient wise men of his youth talking about the north and the south winds battling it out over the prairie. The fighting can be so severe that it wakes up the Great Hind Leg, the swirling cloud known to whites as a tornado. To the Kiowa, it is known as Hind Leg of the Great Horse because when the first horse was found by my people, they didn’t know what it was. Not recognizing its value, they threw it away. This angered the Creator because He had sent the horse as a gift. Having that gift shunned was an insult, so, from the hind leg of that horse, He made the tornado, and sent it to tear up the villages of His ungrateful children. That taught them a big lesson and soon after that, whenever they found a horse, they kept it.
When they discovered just how useful the animal was, they began to steal more, eventually learning how to breed them. But still the damage against the Creator’s pride was not appeased and since those days, the hind leg of the first horse has continued to rampage the earth. Sometimes it isn’t just the hind leg that appears. During one really bad storm I once saw all four legs running and great shafts of lightning spitting out from the huge black body. It was a thrilling sight, I watched that storm for as long as I could before having to run away.
Now, some young men never run away. To prove their courage they chased the storm, throwing lances at the hind leg. Older, wiser men, offered up shredded tobacco to the whirling cloud, apologized for the ignorance of their fathers, and for the arrogance of the young men too anxious to be called heroes for chasing the danger away from the people.
One young man I knew a long time ago, payed dearly for this arrogance. That was during the time three bands of us were in the Texas Panhandle. That’s a bad place to be during a tornado. Too much sand. That young man didn’t care about that, either. He had wanted more than anything, even more than his life, to be a hero and have great songs sung about his courage. With four other warriors who were also in a hurry to prove themselves, he mounted up, waved his lance around, and said, “From this day, Little Bluff himself will say my name with great respect.”
He was disappointed by the general lack of interest in his defiant pronouncement, for while he was declaring it, the entire camp was scurrying in all directions, more intent on finding shelter than standing around listening to a young man puffing himself up. The last words anyone heard him say were, “I’ll show all of you.” Then he kicked his horse and rode out after the storm.
For a while, he and his friends were doing a fine job of chasing the leg away, but then, it turned. The young man was farther out in front, so while the other four were able to pull up, turn around and flee, the unfortunate man couldn’t. That leg was on him before he could do anything. The others bore witness that that young man and his horse were sucked up inside that leg—a leg made black by all that terrible brown sand.
He was found a day later, his dead and broken body completely scoured. Everybody cried and carried on about him being dead, but as a doctor, I felt that his being killed was the best thing that could have happened. His being alive would have been too awful to contemplate, for he had no eyelids, ears, nose, or lips. It was as if his entire face had been rubbed off. There was a little bit of hair left on his head, but basically his skull was worn as smooth as a creek bedrock.
* * *
That young man is still talked about, but his courage is rarely mentioned. He is an example used to impress children that the prairie is a dangerous place—that being caught off guard, even for a moment, will kill or cripple. As I tell you about all this, it comes to mind that Skywalker was a good example of this, too. He’d been caught off guard, and the result was the fall from his bolting horse, leaving him with terrible headaches and the loss of two vital senses. Having survived this lesson, he took great care never to be caught off guard again.
So when Skywalker said, in that matter-of-fact tone of his, that rain was coming, I didn’t doubt him for an instant. I didn’t even bother to glance up at the sky. Instead I barked for Hawwy to help me dig in the softened earth around the body and sift that dirt through his fingers. He had no idea why he was doing it, he just jumped to respond to the urgency in my tone, busily digging and sifting the way I was doing.
And all we came away with was gritty dirt.
We couldn’t bury the body because I wasn’t finished with it.
Skywalker was covering it up with an expendable blanket just as fat drops of rain began to pelt the dry earth. The drops quickly became a deluge. Hears The Wolf yelled orders for us to move to safer ground, away from the few trees. Of course, this meant untying the soldiers. We were all prepared for trouble from either Little Jonas or Sergeant Cullen, but when lightning struck close by, that big black man and that mean white man were instantly too afraid to cause trouble.
Hears The Wolf let the horses go and they ran away like their tails were on
fire. Throwing blankets over ourselves, we made our bodies just as flat as we could against the ground. The rains fell faster, pummeling us, winds tearing at our feeble protection, trying to take the blankets away. To prevent this, we rolled ourselves up in our blankets, the way some worms are able to roll themselves up before making the magical change to butterfly.
I can tell you this: It’s very unnerving to be under only a blanket while lightning is striking all around and thunder is booming so loudly you can’t even hear yourself scream. Mercifully, the storm lasted only about a half an hour, rain-laden clouds taking their own time wafting toward the encampments at Medicine Lodge. But for those of us caught out in it, the brief time seemed like a week, each lightning strike bringing with it the certainty of immediate death. When it was finally over, we sat up, threw the blankets off of our heads. Then we just looked at one another, duly surprised that we were all still alive.
* * *
Hawwy called Lieutenant Danny’s condition “shock.” I’ve always called it Mind Going, for in times of great stress, the mind goes blank, and if it stays gone for a good length of time, the body shuts down and the victim dies. As the last thing we needed was one more dead Blue Jacket, we hastily made a fire, fueling it with whatever was handy, which after the storm wasn’t very much. Grubbing around among the soaked scrub trees, The Cheyenne Robber found a few partially dry dead branches and a limited supply of as-good-as-dry buffalo chips, and Little Jonas helped him bring these things back to us. Billy concerned himself with searching through our soggy food bags that had been hurriedly removed along with the saddles from the horses.
Murder at Medicine Lodge Page 6
