Redeye

by Edgerton, Clyde

  Cobb Pittman was along, with his dog’s head sticking out his bag. And he had what looked liked six or eight prunes tied to a saddle string. The Englishman asked him about them.

  “Ears,” he said.

  ———

  My job was to be a general handyman, the wrangler. Everybody would be digging in the ruins, and I’d be doing what they told me to, but the Mexicans or Indians couldn’t give me orders. I could give them orders if I needed to. The Indians were the Mescadeys who lived just north of the mesa, Mudfoot and Lobo.

  Night before, I’d helped load the freight wagons—about five feet deep—with four barrels of water, tarpaulins, ropes, bedrolls, oil lamps, axes, pickaxes, fourteen long-handled shovels, grain and baled hay, boxes of canned goods, bags of cornmeal, flour, sugar, crates of canned coffee, a side of beef, slabs of bacon and salt pork, and some goods the Englishman had brought.

  And I’d helped Pete, the cook, load the chuck wagon. It is one fine wagon. I’d never seen it full up. It holds a lot. A four-foot-tall box with shelves was made into the back. That had stuff in it and another box fitted over it, waterproofing it, and it could be separated out and used as a table. Then there is a boot with a hinged door where the skillets, pots, irons, and fire hooks all hang. You can tell a lot of thought went into building it. When Mr. Copeland was working on it, I couldn’t figure where the different things would fit.

  We had four pack mules, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and Jake, three loaded and one unloaded, and extra horses, and two extra wagons for relics. We’d loaded Jake with about two hundred pounds of supplies and Mark and Matthew carried loads of tools and bad-weather gear. Luke was barebacked. The pack mules and extra horses seemed like they knew where they was going and didn’t wander all over like cattle. We used a bell mare.

  Jake—famous Jake, the pack mule—of course didn’t want to get on the ferry, but Mr. Merriwether and me both pulled and we got him on. He jerked his head and snorted the same way he had on our trip to Leesville. It took us four trips in all to get across. The Bishop tried to milk us about what we were up to, but we stuck true to what Mr. Merriwether said to say to him, that we was just exploring.

  The Englishman asked the Bishop questions all about when the river was up and when it was down. He stayed behind and then caught up. We all figured Bishop Thorpe was feeding him Mormonism. Then we found out the Englishman had a sketchbook and had been sketching the ferry. He’d been to college and studied science and collected plants and stuff and his daddy had explored the Amazon something.

  We was stretched out single file with a wagon up front and the Mexicans in the rear. It was one of those clean, cool days with the air bright clear as far as you could see. Mr. Merriwether had wanted to get this big excavation done before the first winter snows. Then he could go back in after the snows but not with all this equipment.

  We rambled along with the sound of the wagons creaking in and out of holes, and the saddles on the horses squeaking, and the soft plop of the horses’ and mules’ hooves. We stopped and made day camp at a campsite in a little bunch of piñon and cedar. The Mexicans were gathering wood for a fire and Pete warmed up beans that he’d cooked before we left. We had some cornbread, beans, jerky, coffee, and canned tomatoes. It was okay except for the jerky which was almost too tough to eat.

  The Englishman had a little fold-out chair he sat on.

  Zack says to me, “He’s got enough gadgets to sink a boat. Have you seen what-all he’s got?”

  “Who?”

  “That Englishman.”

  “I just seen his chair and his pocketknife with all them blades.”

  Then the Englishman stood up, come over, cranked up a conversation with me and Zack.

  “You’ve been up here before?” he asked Zack. “In the mesa?”

  “Few times. Looking for cattle.”

  “Have you been in any of the dwellings?”

  “Me and the boy come up on one last month, but it won’t in here.”

  “How was it—the condition of it?”

  “Just a old Indian dwelling.”

  “Cliff dwelling?”

  “Yeah, it was in a cliff.”

  “How many rooms?”

  “About eight.”

  “What did you find?”

  “About eight rooms.”

  “I mean pottery, relics.”

  “Pottery, animal skins, mostly. Heap of corncobs. They didn’t clean up too well before they left.”

  “Did you come across a trash heap?”

  “No.”

  “I’m interested in the trash.”

  “Is that right?”

  “How’d you find out about all this?” I asked him. “The cliff dwellings.”

  “A lady of the Denver Historical Society. She wrote a letter of introduction to Mr. Merriwether for me. But I’d read quite a bit about the Aztec ruins in Mexico.”

  “Lady?” said Zack. “Society?”

  Andrew looked at him funny. He didn’t get it. Then he said to me, “There’s a good chance of finding mummies.” He raised his eyebrows and smiled. “Arid regions, you know, tend to preserve human remains.”

  “Good luck,” said Zack.

  I could tell Zack didn’t, but I kind of liked the Englishman.

  It was the first time the whole group had eat together. The Indians went off a little ways in one direction, and ate squatting down. The Mexicans went off in another direction and ate out of their frying pans and drunk water out of tin cans. The Indians was the two we’d met on the trail that time, Mudfoot and Lobo. Mudfoot works some for Mr. Merriwether.

  Everybody was speaking in their own language except for Mr. Merriwether who could talk to the Indians and the Mexicans. Zack could speak some Spanish and had started teaching me some. The Englishman was took up with the Indian language and he walked over to Lobo after we ate, and pointed to some things, and wrote down some words. Mr. Pittman mostly talked to Redeye.

  THE TRAIL

  “On the trail.” What a ring these three words bring to the air. You cowboys and cowgirls will find yourselves viewing the same vistas that heroes, heroines, and villains of yesteryear viewed as they searched for their destinies among these archaeological wonders. Where, on this holy earth can one find . . .

  BUMPY

  After a long afternoon ride we camped in a wood of low pines where there was grass for grazing. My job was to hobble the remuda.

  For supper we had a good stew from one Dutch oven and rice and raisins from another—Pete called it moonshine. For dessert we had lick dripped over canned Ambassador peaches and biscuits. It was the best food I’d had in a long time. Being outside, eating, tired, butt sore, the sun down, the sky purple, and the air clear and cooling fast, I felt pretty happy and comfortable.

  We sat around our fire and talked for a while and the Indians and Mexicans sat around theirs. Most of the talk was done by Mr. Merriwether and the Englishman. They was sitting across the fire from each other.

  Zack rolled a smoke. When he finished he stuck it against a coal until the end flamed up, then stuck it between his lips.

  “I’d like to know how to do that,” said the Englishman.

  “What’s that?”

  “Make a smoke. Would you show me?”

  “Roll a smoke. Yeah, I’ll show you . . . once. Come over here.”

  With his smoke hanging in his mouth, Zack got out his pouch of Bull Durham and a paper and rolled a cigarette with the Englishman watching. Then the Englishman tried it and spilled considerable, but he thought to put down his wipe underneath and he caught all the extra tobacco and then tried again, and again, and again, until he wore out the paper and asked Zack for another one.

  “A one-armed Mexican taught him,” I said.

  “Maybe that’s my problem,” said the Englishman. He looked at me and smiled. “One too many hands.” Then he asked Mr. Merriwether, “And have you read about the Powell Expedition—down the Green and the Colorado? Powell had just one arm.”

 
“Oh, yes, most definitely.”

  “Weren’t he the Union officer?” said Zack.

  “That he was,” said the Englishman. “And a very conservative man. Which is why he survived it. Several of his men, one in particular, found his methods exasperating. They started with ten men and ended with six,” he said to me. “That those six lived was something of a miracle. One of the other four deserted early in the expedition and three were killed by Indians—west of here, I’d say. Is that right?” he asked Merriwether.

  “Yes. About. About west.”

  “Then he returned a year later,” said the Englishman, “and found a Mormon guide who took him to the very Indians who killed his men, and he smoked a pipe with them, and they told him everything about the killing of his men, and he didn’t raise the first objection. Extraordinary story.”

  “Where’d you hear all this?” asked Zack.

  “Papers presented at geography meetings and such. I get many of them by post. And Powell was quite the speaker—is quite the speaker. A good man.”

  We were quiet for a while.

  “Do they have polecats in England?” Zack asked the Englishman.

  “Polecats?”

  “Satchel kittens. Skunks. Little black animals with a white stripe down the back.” He was working his teeth with a toothpick.

  “No, we don’t.”

  “Well, if you see one tonight, leave him alone.”

  “Ah. The animal with a terrible scent. I’ve read about them—something like a badger.”

  “Well, don’t mess with them.”

  Zack fetched his bedroll from the wagon. Pete headed to the chuck wagon.

  “Isn’t Zack a Mormon?” the Englishman asked me.

  “I think so,” I said. “But he’s from a different brand.”

  “Would that be the ledger for relics?” the Englishman asked Mr. Merriwether. He was pointing toward a big flat book.

  “Yes. Yes, it is.”

  “May I be so bold as to ask about your method of recordkeeping?”

  “Of course. Here, I’ll show you.”

  “I’m turning in,” said Zack.

  Mr. Merriwether and the Englishman spent the next hour or so haggling back and forth about how to keep records. The Englishman had his ideas on how it needed to be done and Mr. Merriwether listened to him. They had built up the fire, then turned their backs to it and leaned the big ledger book up against a rock between them so the fire lighted up the pages. I was across the fire from them. It passed through my mind to show them the jet frog I kept in my pocket, but I decided not to. It was my good-luck piece.

  I listened close to what they was talking about—they talked about every little tiny detail about everything.

  Mr. Pittman had gone over to talk to the Indians.

  Zack got up after he laid down and dragged his bedroll over to a spot next to the chuck wagon out of hearing distance. There was something that he didn’t like about the Englishman but I couldn’t exactly tell what. And then with him gone and just the fire, with the Englishman and Mr. Merriwether talking, and everything else quiet, I finally started wondering what it was going to be like up in the ruins.

  Anyway, what they decided on—the method they decided on was this: They would draw a map with a number one at Eagle City, and then put two, three, and on like that at any other ruins they worked in. They’d draw out a plan of each ruin on a separate piece of paper—all the rooms and sections, everything, like you was looking down at it from straight above. Then they would take a photograph of each dwelling and each room before it was touched. The map would have the spot marked where they took the photograph from, the exact spot where they was standing. That was the Englishman’s idea. So somebody else could take a photograph from the same spot. Then they’d take a photograph of every important relic they found. The Englishman had a new Kodak box camera and a canvas bag full of nothing but picture film.

  There was a lot of numbers involved. A number for the ruin, a number for the sector, a number for the room, the article, a number for how deep it was, and then a big space for remarks. They was still talking when I fell asleep.

  COBB PITTMAN

  Blankenship is one key. What he needs is to believe that somehow getting me and Thorpe up in there together can do him some good. Some kind of joint expedition that he thinks he can make money on. Then I can do my work in peace and quiet.

  I believe Thorpe is my man. If I can see him smile I can tell. I think he’s Calvin’s brother. I’ll know for sure when I see his turn of lip when he smiles. His and Calvin’s were the same.

  And now it’s a matter of not tripping the trap until his leg is way down in it, and it seems to me that with this mesa and this little city back up in there, God is handing me the perfect trap. Get him up there in them ruins and get him alone and kill him, slow, with Redeye committing his act of love. You got Redeye hanging on to a bull’s nose or a coyote’s nose, but a man’s nose will come off. It ain’t as substantial. Thorpe deserves not one speck less than that, and while he’s dying I need to be reading him the confession. I can say it, or read it.

  The unconvinced among them were won over and they followed our orders. They loaded their wounded and weapons into wagons, and we led them along the road back toward Cedar City. First were the wagons with weapons, then wagons with babies and small children and the wounded, then the women and children walking, and behind them, the men walking. About twenty paces separated the men from the women.

  Fifty armed men from the militia then joined the three of us. We told the Gentiles that we were to act as guards against the Indians. There were over one hundred Gentiles in all. The men among them shook the hands of our militia, who then marched beside them. I was walking beside the wounded and it was my job along with the other men to shoot them at the appropriate time. When the train of all of us reached the spot in the road where the Indians were hidden in the brush, the signal was given and the act was committed. I was spared the trouble and pain of killing anyone by a misfiring gun.

  We were told to save the children too young to talk, and to see that only Indians destroyed the women, so that Mormons would be spared the possibility of shedding innocent blood. Just after we thought the ordeal was over, I saw a girl some nine or ten years old covered with blood, running towards us, from a place in the rear. An Indian shot her at about ten yards out. That was the last person that I saw killed on that occasion.

  Signed: Christian Boyle

  on this 3rd day of

  October of the year of

  our Lord 1859

  MUDFOOT

  Merriwether is one who has use of the mesa for his cattle and who is interested in the ways of the Mescadey and lives by putting himself beside our people but not above our people as do the other white men who come from the other parts of the land to this our land that they have no blood with.

  Pittman is the one with the smoked spectacles and sick eyes. He dresses in the black clothes and carries a dog in the bag hanging from his saddle. The dog’s eye is full of blood and he may be full of the evil spirit of those who had red coals placed in their eye sockets because they slept while watching for the enemy. Pittman has asked me in the language of my people if I know of the Mountain Meadows Battle and I tell him that I have heard that the Mormons were at war with other white men and that the Mormons asked the Paiutes and others to kill the enemy whites, but that the enemy was very good with rifles, the old long-barreled rifles, and the Mormons tricked the enemy to come out of their corral. The Mormons had been told to do this by their god. To kill everyone but the children too young to speak. The U.S. Army later came to take the children. Some were not too young to remember. I have not understood the Mormon god ordering the Mormons to ask the Indians to do what they could have done themselves.

  The white man, like my people, has many gods which have been brought from many places beyond the far horizons to this land, across great bodies of water. This has been told to us by the good man Powell, and by the good man Merr
iwether.

  White men, like my people, have those among them who have within them the good spirit and those within them who have the bad spirit. The gods have kept a secret about how it is decided who gets which spirit. Sometimes many spirits inhabit one man. I believe the dog Redeye contains many spirits for at times he is playful and at times he has the mood of the spirit of death. He has stalked my horse.

  Who can fathom how long the natives of these hills and plains, the Indians (Redskins), have inhabited the Great West? Who can fathom their ancient customs? Will the paths of the “White man” and the Red man converge on some distant plateau of mutual understanding? Can they learn our ways? Our language? Our . . .

  “Lobo,” I say, “the dog with the red eye has stalked my horse.”

  “He stalks you, not your horse.”

  “If he stalks me, then he has more in him than the dog spirit.”

  “He has in him the sun and the moon and the black of all nights.”

  “Have you been drinking the whiskey?”

  “I had only enough for a red ant. No more.”

  “I believe you have had more and I believe it has gotten into your head.”

  “Which head?”

  “The head on your shoulders. The other head is no bigger than the head of the red ant.”

  “Ha. You lack all sense of proportion. You suffer from a mixed-up lineage. Your father was the father of your mother who was your grandmother.”

  “Your tongue is loose. Be glad my fist is not loose.”

  Lobo wants to drink more whiskey but I tell him that Merriwether will not like it. Merriwether has a god that is different from the god of Thorpe and the Mormons. The god of Merriwether has not talked to the white man in the settlement New York in the same way that the Mormon god has talked with the prophet Joseph Smith at that place. The god of Merriwether is called a Quaker god. The Quaker god is more distant away than the Mormon god and does not say to Merriwether what is true with the force of the Mormon god. But neither did the spirit who spoke to our forefathers. I ask Lobo, “Do you believe the old gods of the white man know the old gods of the red man?”