by Vella Munn
"Yeah, Luash, I think I do."
Of course he did. Not only had he lost the land of his childhood, but as a boy had had to bury his parents. Then he'd entered a world filled with killing and tried to make himself one with that world. If he had succeeded in that, he wouldn't be with her today.
Overwhelmed, she pressed her fingers over his throat, smiling a little when she found the strong pulse there. "You may have believed you had no feelings for anyone except yourself; after what happened at Fort Phil Kearny, that way was safer." She didn't try to plan her words, only let them tumble from her. "But it was a lie. When you hear crying, you cry yourself. When—when my uncle hangs, you will feel my grief."
"Stop it."
He spoke so gently that she was able to wash the words under her. "Just before my people left the Land of Burned Out Fires, you found me in the dark. I think maybe you heard my heart beating. That is not a man who can go back to Custer and aim a rifle at a Sioux."
"Stop it."
"Do you not want to hear the truth?"
His features contorted, making him look first stricken and then angry. "It doesn't matter, Luash. What I do once I'm no longer needed here doesn't matter."
"Yes, it does."
"No." He covered her hand with his, slid her fingers under his uniform so that she now felt his flesh and the strength beneath that. They had done this before, tried to touch each other's hearts. "It doesn't, because... because soon there won't be a Modoc tribe."
No! she tried to scream but the word wouldn't come.
"I hate this. Damn, I hate this! But President Grant wants the Modoc families scattered."
"Scattered?"
"I'm sorry."
Feeling as if she was dying, she yanked free and stumbled backward. He stared at her, his eyes no longer holding anything inside him. One glance told her that he spoke the truth.
Shattered, she whirled and ran, not caring where her legs took her. The growing night whipped around her, sending messages of dark and quiet, of peace. All lies! Finally she came to a stumbling stop because her frantic flight had brought her to the stockade walls. Screaming silently, she began pounding the logs with her fists.
"Don't! For God's sake, don't!" Jed was right behind her, had stayed close throughout her race.
"Leave me alone! Leave me alone!"
"I can't. Luash—"
"No!" If he hadn't held up his hands to protect himself, she would have dug her nails into him. Locked in battle, a battle she knew he would win, she tried to hate him, tried to imagine him dead. "Not scattered. Together we are Modoc. Apart—no!"
"Grant is the president. What he says is the law."
"The law?" Her wrists felt on fire where he gripped them. "Are you its slave?"
"You don't understand."
She understood everything, at least the only things that mattered. "I will die," she whispered. "Alone, we will all die."
Chapter 20
"You're fixin' to go clear across the country? What does Colonel Davis say about that?"
"All he cares is that he gets final word on what he's supposed to do with the Modocs. If I can accomplish that, he'll say I'm a miracle worker."
Wilfred's skeptical look came as no surprise, but Jed didn't care. It had been nearly two weeks since he'd watched Luash try to destroy the stockade door singlehandedly. The day after the trial ended, he'd been dispatched to the site of the Thomas-Wright massacre to make sure everything with any value had been recovered. Once that wrenching chore was over, he'd taken a small troop to the Modoc stronghold, where they'd collected what few belongings the Indians had left behind. He'd asked Wilfred to let Luash know where he was, but when he returned, his friend told him she'd refused even to acknowledge his presence.
Although he had tried talking to her several times in the two days he'd been back, she remained silent and unresponsive. Whenever he walked into the stockade, the captives' fear and disbelief assaulted him and it was all he could do not to tear down the confining walls himself. Was she right? Would it kill her people to be scattered across the country?
"Davis made it perfectly clear that what happens to the Modocs once they leave here doesn't interest him," he told Wilfred. "Just as long as they're no longer his responsibility."
"But you trying to change the mind of the president of the United States."
"Not just him. The secretary of the Interior too. According to what I heard, President Grant and Secretary Delano have been receiving petitions from people like the Quakers, who say the trial was a farce. That reporter, Atwell, told me the eastern newspapers are full of editorials about how Jack didn't get a chance to defend himself, how they all ought to be pardoned. That kind of pressure isn't going to go away. Someone needs to remind politicians of the outcry they'd have to put up with if they order the Modocs torn apart."
"Why should the president of the United States listen to you if, so far, he's ignoring the tide of sentiment against what's happening here?"
"I think it'll be hard for him to ignore a lieutenant who came clear across the country to make his point—a lieutenant not at all opposed to talking to the press, the Quakers, anyone who'll listen."
"Damnation. Jed, you're putting your neck, not to mention your career, on the line. Going against army policy—saying you're questioning something the army did—"
"What do you want me to do? Sit back and let the Modocs have their souls sucked out of them?"
Wilfred rammed his thumbs into his belt and rocked forward. "You concerned about the whole damn tribe or just one of them?"
Good question. Good and hard and a hell of a lot more than he wanted to face right now. He shrugged and shook his head. "I figure, I'll ride down to Redding and then take a train east. I talked to Meacham. When he went there, last winter, the trip took him just shy of three weeks. That'll give me more than enough time to do what I have to before the Modocs are shipped out. Before Jack's hung."
"What about your responsibility to Custer?"
"I'll send him a wire."
"Saying what? That you'll go back to hunting Sioux once you've pleaded for the Modocs?"
* * *
All through the hard two-day ride south to Redding, Jed kept his mind on what he would say to the most powerful man in the country—if he could get an audience with Grant. When he bought a train ticket and settled himself in for the long, muscle-jarring ride east, he told himself he wouldn't, under any circumstances, think about Luash, but it was a damned lie. The train had no sooner pulled out when he realized he wasn't looking at the scenery.
Instead, he remembered the look in her eyes when he forced her to listen to what he had to say. He was going to travel three thousand miles for her, he'd told her. He was going to sit down across from the president of the United States and tell the man that he couldn't break the Modocs apart as if they were stale bread being thrown to chickens.
"A powerful man three thousand miles away cares about a Modoc heart? It will never be," she'd said.
He hadn't bothered to try to argue her down. Instead, he'd stood with her, just outside that damnable stockade, and fought his body's demands. She wasn't his to take. She didn't want him anymore, if she ever had.
He was making this trip to settle his conscience; it wouldn't be like that if she hadn't shown him her world, hadn't given him a feather to carry next to his heart.
Jed reached the capital during the second week in August. Trying to ignore the heavy heat that made him long for a mountaintop, he checked himself into a hotel room—for the first time in his life—and then began making inquiries. Thanks to contacts made available to him as an army officer, he was granted an audience with both the president and secretary of the Interior. However, arranging for that appointment had eaten up ten days. While waiting, he met several times with officials of the Quaker church and the Universal Peace Group who'd petitioned for clemency for all Modocs. He talked to the press.
He also sent several cables to Wilfred asking about Luash. Wilfred's r
eplies came sooner than he expected: Luash and the rest of the Modocs were fine physically. Although there'd been a lot of wrangling about it, the Indian Bureau finally had been assigned responsibility for providing the prisoners with new clothing. Many of the soldiers brought in for the war effort already had been deployed elsewhere or were being released from service. Those left were being kept busy with endless marches and the fort had been policed until it looked as clean as a parson's parlor.
"No one minds that the Modocs roam all over the fort these days," Wilfred concluded. "The ringleaders are still locked up of course, but Luash is free to go wherever she wants. She spends a lot of time in the mountains."
Looking for Eagle, Jed concluded. He no longer questioned the connection between the bird and the woman; he wasn't sure he'd had any doubts after the first time he saw them together. If it was in his power, he'd rope and hogtie that creature so it would always be there for her.
Only tied up, the eagle would probably die.
Just like her.
The thought of Luash losing her will to live sent a shudder through him and forced him to concentrate on the argument he needed to present to Grant and Delano. Despite the closed-in smell of the little hotel room, he remained bent over his notes until he'd done the best damn job he could. He went to bed that night with the window open to catch what little breeze came his way. There was no ignoring the contrast between the hot, still air here and the wild wind that claimed the Land of Burned Out Fires.
A little before noon the next day, he was ushered into a high-ceilinged, dark-paneled room in the nation's capital. Despite his nervousness, he was glad this moment had come. No matter how things turned out, at least he would have fulfilled his vow to Luash—and to himself.
Behind a desk that looked as if it weighed as much as a train car sat a somber-eyed man with a full, graying beard and receding hairline. In the man's firm expression, Jed easily found the former Union general who'd defeated Robert E. Lee. At the side of the desk sat Columbus Delano, sweating in the dark suit that was a near twin of the one worn by the president. There was another man in the room, obviously brought in to record whatever was said.
Jed began by explaining that he'd been assigned to the Modoc campaign just before the Indians had been driven from Lost River back in November. If the renegade Modocs had been treated with respect by an organized, thinking army, instead of having their homes burned, he insisted, there wouldn't have been a war.
"You haven't seen the Modocs," he pressed. "I have. I've kept an eye on them for months, crawled into one of the caves where they were forced to spend the winter. I watched their homes go up in flames and was myself wounded when General Canby was killed. As I said when I petitioned for this meeting, I know firsthand the worst that an Indian is capable of." He ran a finger over the scar along his hairline. "If I, who have spent my adult life fighting Indians, believe the Modocs should be shown some basic human concern, I trust you will feel the same way."
When neither man said anything, Jed took a deep breath and continued. He first outlined what it had cost him in terms of time and expense to come here, his conversations with the various groups concerned with the Modocs' welfare, his interviews with the press. Then he detailed the Modocs' present conditions. His eyes fixed on the president, he described the exhausted woman and baby who'd surrendered to him.
"There are fewer than fifty able-bodied men among them and none have any fight left in them. They're beaten, Mr. President. All they want is to try to rebuild their lives."
"They went to war against the United States," Delano said. "They have to be punished, so other Indians won't try the same thing."
Jed had prepared himself for that argument. "Thanks to the reporters assigned to cover this war, folks know what happened, at least the reporters' version of what happened. Yes, people were outraged when a general was killed. They also laughed at the notion that it took nearly a thousand bumbling soldiers to break no more than a hundred Modocs, women and children included. If you rip the tribe apart now, will it bring Canby back? Will voters applaud your decision, or will they see this as a deliberate and cruel attempt to destroy what's left of a once-proud people?"
"And what happens if this so-called vanquished people decides to arm themselves again?"
It was all Jed could do not to laugh. "I've done everything but live with them, Mr. President. I spent hours with Captain Jack's niece while she told me of their heritage, their beliefs, their dreams. They don't want guns—they want something to believe in. I'm absolutely convinced there's no fight left in them. If you scatter the families, you'll rip what's left of their hearts from them. They might not die as fast as they would from smallpox or malaria, but they're going to die. It's one thing to face a warrior in battle. It's quite another to have to tell an unarmed man he's never going to see his father or mother again."
Grant and Delano exchanged glances but didn't speak.
"I'm not a religious man, Mr. President. I lost whatever faith I had a long time ago. I'm not going to quote the Bible at you. I'm simply here to tell you what I've seen, and that's that the war is over. All the Modocs want is a chance to live. I believe they deserve it."
"Are you saying you want them set free so they can go back to living the way they did before the war?"
With Luash's eyes haunting him, that was exactly what he wanted. "No," he forced himself to say. "The way of life that once sustained them is over. The land they buried their ancestors on and took courage from, the land they think of as their mother's breast has been taken over by whites; there's no going back. What I'm saying is, if they can't have that land, the least they deserve is to be surrounded by the people who mean the most to them."
President Grant asked if those at Fort Klamath knew how much pressure he was getting from religious groups and others to commute Jack's sentence. Jed acknowledged that he had heard some rumors before he left, but it was hard to keep in touch from a train. Delano reminded Jed that, as secretary of the Interior, he had ordered the Peace Commission to be formed and had directed its operation throughout its attempts to end the war; thus he knew a great deal about the situation.
"With all due respect, sir," Jed said, "you weren't there. I was. I've buried soldiers who shouldn't have died. And I saw Captain Jack's people react when they realized their leader was going to hang. The Modocs are no different from you and me. They cry; their hearts can be broken. They're also people who want to get on with the act of living, wherever that might be."
"They lost the war; they're prisoners of the U.S. government, subject to its laws and wisdom," Delano said.
Wisdom? So far he'd seen precious little of that. "You're talking about a family here. Men, women, children. Newborn babies and old folks. People used to depending on each other for survival and companionship. Take that from them and there's not going to be anything left for them to hold on to. They'll die."
"You're convinced of that?" Delano pressed him.
"Absolutely. Sir, it's one thing to hang Jack and the other ringleaders for war crimes. It's quite another to rip their souls from women and children and old men." Souls. "I don't want to think about the outcry that'll take place if there aren't any Modocs left in a few years."
The meeting, Jed guessed, lasted no more than a half hour. When the president stood up, indicating he'd heard enough, it was all Jed could do not to demand to know what had been decided. But the government, he reminded himself, was a lot like the army. Nothing happened without everything first being laboriously weighed and debated. He asked what message he could take back to northern California and was told that any presidential orders would be wired to those in charge of carrying out policy.
* * *
Luash stood outside the guardhouse where Kientpoos was being kept, trying to imagine what was happening inside. Although her uncle and the five others who'd been condemned to death remained locked up, they were allowed visits from their families.
Whe-cha had gone to see him right after breakfa
st. Now it was afternoon and she was still in there. Luash prayed they'd be able to laugh together, to find a few moments when their thoughts weren't on the chains still around Kientpoos's ankles.
Sweat ran down the back of her neck, and her throat felt dry. After looking up at the hot, heavy sun, she headed toward one of the water barrels. Her shoes—white man's shoes—slapped dully on the dust; the sound settled into her heart to add to her lethargy.
She hadn't seen Jed for nearly two moons. His friend had told her he'd had a conversation with his president and was now on his way back. One day soon he would ride into the fort and she'd have to look at him, somehow conceal from him how unbelievably hard the days and nights without him had been.
After drinking from the wooden dipper, she turned her gaze toward the mountains. It was too late in the day to climb up to the eagle's nest, and even if it wasn't, the heat pressed down on her shoulders and stripped her of energy. Still, she would love to be where she could hear baby eagles' loud demands for food and watch patient parents in their never-ending quest to feed them. Maybe if she swept her heart clean of all sorrow and regret, Eagle would bless her with his presence.
And maybe he would simply go on caring for the winged family she had gone to see time and time again while waiting—endlessly waiting.
She'd caught the white strand of hair at her temple between her fingers before she realized what she was doing. Gallows were being built to hang her uncle and the others. For two days now the awful hammering had found its way into her dreams. If only Jed would return—
But his presence wouldn't tear down the gallows or put dirt back in the six mocking graves that had been dug in front of the guardhouse. All Jed could do was momentarily distract her from reality by covering her hungry flesh with his man's hands.
Sick, she turned her back on what the carpenter was doing, but there was nowhere she could run—not unless she was willing to spend the rest of her life alone.
When she became aware of eyes on her she couldn't say. It began like a slowly developing storm. First she had only the faintest awareness, then she grew more and more certain until she knew.
