AFTER A STRETCH it seemed Cora and me had been traveling the prairie since the time of Jesus and Mary.
“Do you think we’ll die out here?” Cora asked. Her voice was a small speck in the big old bare prairie, a place bigger and emptier than anything I ever saw. Its exact middle was where we rode along on Aces High, his ears twitching at our voices, waiting for me to tell him it was all right. But I wouldn’t lie to my boy, my good boy who’d carried me all the way from Tennessee, who held his ground firm even when that piss-ant varmint coward Fallon Yancy meant for him to bolt and snap my neck.
“I do not,” I said, and tried with all my might to sound like I meant it. Cora was under my protection and Boyd said a man’s job was to do anything he must to keep those under his protection safe. I was scared enough to blubber like a pint-sized tagalong, scared enough that my innards was tangled up in knotted ropes so I couldn’t move them, even when I squatted to try. But I weren’t about to let Cora see how frightful scared I was. It would be shirking my duty.
For the longest time I didn’t think I could ever love any girl but Lorie. From the moment I first saw Lorie-Lorie, months back on the prairie outside St. Louis, my heart near stopped a-beating. I stared at her in a way that would have made my daddy slap the back of my head, as it was so rude. Stared until I thought my eyes might pop right out and roll along the prickly ground like plums shook from a tree. It was just that never had I seen a girl so pretty in all my livin’ life. Prettier than an angel from heaven. Gus, good old Gus, who was still alive then, had lifted her down from Admiral’s back as careful as you’d lift a child. I was setting on a stump at our fire, yards away; all I could see was the outline of a long-haired girl and so I galloped over fast as my feet could carry me.
When I drew near I caught sight of her face and felt like someone had kicked me in the chest with a booted foot. Her eyes were scared, I could tell, roving from one to the other of us, and Sawyer had been yelling at Gus as Lorie stood between them, acting like he hadn’t been taught his manners, even though I knew he had. I looked at once to my brother, but Boyd weren’t worried and when I saw he weren’t, I weren’t neither. Boyd’s eyebrows was set in lines that meant he found the whole thing a titch humorous; reassured, I turned my gaze back to Lorie’s sweet angel face, seeing her eyes as bright as jewels set in a necklace, blue and green mixed together. From that moment forth I made it my most treasured goal in life, along with owning a dozen horses and as many pistols as I could get my hands on, to one day make Lorie my wife.
I aim to marry her, I told my brother the second night after Lorie joined us.
Boyd had chuckled, half-asleep. He muttered, You always was a dreamer, boy.
It seemed stupider than stupid now. Of course I still loved Lorie-Lorie so much my heart felt near to busting apart, like an August melon split with ripeness, but I knew I could not marry her; it was a fool’s dream. Before long it was plain as raindrops on an uplifted face that Lorie’s eyes was for Sawyer, and Sawyer alone, just as his was for her, and she couldn’t belong to me as well as to him. Thinking of them all just now, of Boyd and Sawyer and Lorie, as Aces High walked over the hard-packed crust of snow, his hooves crunching it until my ears jangled, hurt worse than a rawhide strapping.
I closed my eyes to the sun’s glare and saw the same endless bright snow, but now colored purple-blue, like a new bruise against the back of my eyelids. And then I saw Boyd the way we’d left him, sitting against the base of the broken wagon. He looked so much like Daddy, their voices with the selfsame note, that sometimes when I was especial tired I confused the two of them.
I thought again, I’ll get Cora to safety an’ return for him, fast as I am able. There weren’t no question. Riding away from my brother was worse than being nearly hung to death. Boyd had been struck many times, and he’d been dragged behind the In’jun man’s horse. He’d taken a crossbow arrow in the leg. And still he’d saved me. I’d never seen him look so rough; his blood had left dark patches all over my clothes. I loved him with ever’thing in me but I knew it still weren’t as much as he loved me; Boyd might die so that I might live, I knew this.
Cora whispered, “Are you cold?”
She huddled against me, feeling small as the gray kitten I’d left behind with Cort and Natty, all the miles back in Iowa. Stormy, we named the little critter. The boys promised to keep watch of him for me, and Lorie promised to bring him with in the spring. I imagined Stormy grown fat and sassy, riding snug upon her lap, where I’d rested my head many a time so she’d pet my hair. I longed for Lorie so awful my heart stung like I’d dragged it through a clump of itchweed. I wanted her more than my own mama, whose face sometimes turned into Lorie’s face in my mind. Lorie would take me and Cora in her arms, and hold us safe.
I put my chin against Cora’s soft cheek, finding it chilled. My heart beat hard against the back of her borrowed coat. I said, “I ain’t cold,” and kissed her cheek. Our air made clouds when we talked or breathed, puffs of clouds that melted together so our breath was combined. I knew that someday I would marry Cora and together we would have children. It was different than the way I thought I’d marry Lorie. I knew I would marry Cora because my bones knew it. My bones felt the same truth in her bones, like a bridge built between our two selves. One we could walk across and then into the other. Cora’s eyes looked at my eyes and I understood things without any words at all. Cora lay beside me at night, beneath the wagon, and it seemed like her body might just become a part of mine and there’d be no space between us anymore, like butter stirred into cream.
“Are you hurting, Malcolm?” she asked, worried for me, as always.
“I am not,” I said, and I wasn’t just now. Later, once the sun sank over the edge of the big prairie ahead of us, due west, the cold, and hurt, would come. I had to get us as far as Aces was able, before then. Boyd thought we were less than a week from the fort on the Missouri River and I aimed to keep riding until we got there. Aces could do it. He was the best horse I knew. He was strong and he loved me, just as I loved him. I knew he wouldn’t let me down. I was a-counting on it. On we rode, over the prairie that weren’t near as flat as it seemed from a distance; Aces would walk up a little, low hill and down its other side, the land shaped like waves on stirred-up water.
Cora said, “You might not tell me the truth because you think I’d worry.”
“I wouldn’t neither,” I said, contrary now. Cora’s words often made me contrary. “I tell you true.”
“It’s bright,” she murmured next, shading her eyes with both hands, long sleeves dangling into her face. She wore Grady’s heavy wool shirt, which swallowed her frame. At the thought of Grady, my teeth came together with a clack I felt deep in my skull. I’d watched as Virgil rose from the ground and shot through Grady’s spine with the pistol I’d tried to grab before the In’jun man struck my head. Grady was dragging himself across the grass and kept going even after Virgil shot him. Virgil’s wrist stump flapped about like a startled bird but his left hand, holding the pistol, shot two more times, until Grady stopped moving. I’d watched while the In’jun man secured his rope around Boyd, who cursed and fought him.
Fallon Yancy had kept his pistol pointed at me and I couldn’t stop any of it, Grady being shot or Boyd being dragged, and I felt the sickness of these truths staked out way inside my heart, where I couldn’t reach it. Boyd was the bonniest fighter I ever saw, a walloping good puncher, and he’d near killed the Yankee on the roan gelding, with just his fists. I thought the In’jun man would drag Boyd to death. I was so ill at this notion I’d hardly cared when Fallon and the beat-to-hell Yankee got me up on Aces and meant to stretch my neck. But I’d thought, I can’t die. I’d leave Cora without me.
Boyd needed me to be strong, there in that clearing beneath the oak tree, and now, riding Cora to safety across this damnable empty prairie, he needed me even more. My brother needed me to stop being a boy and be a man. I kept the thought of Boyd’s strength in my mind. Boyd took care of me and
always traveled without complaint. I thought of Sawyer, who had ridden without letup, hard across the miles to find Lorie. Like Boyd, Sawyer never complained. I remembered the night back in the state of Missouri when our horses was stole by men intending to kill us, and saw again the burning fury in Sawyer’s eyes as he mounted Whistler to ride hell-for-leather. To get to Lorie, to do what needed to be done, no matter the cost.
Sawyer! Boyd had yelled at him, grabbing for Whistler’s bridle. You’ll be killed. You got no one to watch your back.
If I don’t get to Lorie, I am already dead, Sawyer had said. His face was grim, set as carved wood. No compromise was in his voice. He gripped Boyd’s hand, holding fast for a final second, and then heeled Whistler, taking her into a breakneck canter, leaving Boyd and me alone on the Missouri prairie – but that had been summer, not late autumn, and Missouri was a state with law in it, not a territory where there was no law. Sawyer always did what needed doing. And Boyd did what needed doing. That was a man’s job, and I was now a man. Even if I didn’t feel much like one, scared as a stupid old hen with a winter-starved fox nearby. Cora would understand if I admitted to this, but I didn’t want her feeling any more fearful than she was already.
When first we’d met, she was fearful near all the time. She’d kept her chin down and didn’t raise her voice. I learned that her eyes embarrassed her with their two different colors, because people always seen fit to comment on them as though she couldn’t hear their words. She told me about it, quiet and low, while we rode on the wagon seat with Quill, who sometimes passed the reins to me and dozed for a spell. I knew Cora was right fond of Quill but I liked when he dozed so her and me could talk. I learned how she loved her daddy, the only kin she ever knew.
In turn, I told her of waking from the typhoid sickness, having been brought to Mrs. Elmira’s house across the holler, to find that Mama and Daddy was gone, that they’d passed while I lay in fever dreams. I wouldn’t have believed Mrs. Elmira’s words if not for seeing my folks later that same day, laid out proper-like for burial by Mrs. Elmira and her eldest daughter, Mrs. Beulah. Mama’s lips were gray and stiff, her honey hair arranged into a coronet of braids. Daddy’s closed eyes looked sunken but when I touched his beard it was still soft. They were dreadful thin, their bones close to the surface. We’d been near to starving.
I told Cora of how I’d wanted to be dead along with my folks and wondered why I was spared; I felt my body should be carried with theirs to the Carter plot on our farm, out near the blackgum grove, to be laid to rest alongside Beaumont and Grafton, and Granny Rose. Back then, late in the War, there’d been no word from Boyd for many months. Cora asked if I remembered the sound of Mama’s and Daddy’s voices, and I explained to her what Lorie said, about the singing. Lorie and me sang to remember our mamas’ voices, and so I’d sung for Cora on the wagon seat, while Quill laughed, or snorted in his sleep, or sometimes played his harmonica.
And all those times, riding along on the wagon since September, Virgil had been sleeping in the pallet bed, no more than a few feet away. He never yelled at us, or told us to pipe down because he needed his rest. He lay quiet. All that time I never figured he was capable of turning so terrible against us. Of shooting Grady, a man who’d been his friend. Of riding away to let us die. Had Virgil reached the Lawsons’ ranch? I had trouble thinking of the Lawsons as Cora’s kin. Would Virgil and Fallon, and their party, ride back this way to be certain we was dead? A coldness that had nothing to do with weather gripped me – what if they came upon Boyd before I got back to him? He hadn’t a weapon besides firewood. Not even a blade. And them buzzards had swarmed.
“We shouldn’t a-left,” I said over the snow crunching under Aces’ hooves, and I couldn’t find room to be shamed that my voice sounded high as a little girl’s. If Aces threw a shoe we was good as dead, but I couldn’t think on that now.
“We can turn back,” Cora said. Her hands were curled into Aces’ thick mane, for warmth, but she slipped them free and gripped my knees, as if to make certain I knew she meant her words.
Instead of answering I put my face against the back of Cora’s head, only just lightly, for comfort. Her curly hair was full of snarls and smelled like wood smoke, warm on my cold mouth. I wanted to be a man, to make my daddy and my brothers proud, but there was a secret part of me, close to where my heart beat, that wanted to be watched over. That felt safest when Boyd and Sawyer was near, knowing the two of them would make the decisions and would let no harm come to me. I’d seen Boyd get almost killed to stop harm from coming to me, but I knew not even he could stop all harm. I knew I had to depend on myself, that this was part of becoming a man. I thought of the drizzling day Boyd and Sawyer rode up to Mrs. Elmira’s house in the holler, riding through the rain to come for me. Gladness just about burst apart my ribs that day.
I had no gladness now. I wanted to cry. I was thirsty as the devil in a dry spell. I wanted Sawyer and Whistler to ride up and save us. I wanted to be back in Iowa, in Mrs. Rebecca’s dooryard with Cort and Natty, who were my friends. I wanted Boyd, my bold brother who clamped me into headlocks and knuckled my scalp. Who liked best to laugh, who wouldn’t let me curse and scolded me six ways from Sunday on any given day, who played games with me, games like trying to sweet-talk Mrs. Rebecca into making fried chicken, or walnut cake with whipped cream frosting. Boyd meant to ride back to her before Fallon found us. Boyd wanted Mrs. Rebecca for his wife. He loved her dearly, I knew this to be true. He’d always looked at her like she was a meal he intended to lick his plate over. But he wasn’t here; he was left behind, waiting on me, and all decisions sat on my shoulders.
“We can’t turn back,” I muttered, in despair. “Boyd would be angered.”
“Then we must get to the fort,” Cora said.
BOYD’S ESTIMATION was off by a few days; we reached a settlement on a late afternoon only four days after leaving him behind. I was ragged-tired, ready to fall headlong out of the saddle. Aces was limping. His back and belly were saddle-sore and I was sick over it, but we couldn’t stop. Cora hadn’t spoken since yesterday, her head lolling against me. Neither of us had been able to move our bowels since before the attack on our camp. It had sleeted like the dickens since noon, hard ice collecting on our shoulders and sticking to Aces’ mane in thick clumps, but a rising wind tore apart the clouds and let the sun break through as we came upon the settlement, winking red in Cora’s hair. Tall bluffs stood high at the edges of the Missouri River, a flat, dark blue mirror in the distance; the sudden sun speckled its surface. My hands were raw around the reins, but we’d made it here.
I thought, You done a man’s work.
From a distance we saw the tidy line of a stockade wall, and hide structures that looked like cones set on their flat ends, long poles jutting from the top along with smoke, all clustered together, dozens strong. Curious faces of the few who’d ventured out in the storm, each and every one In’jun, dressed head to toe in leather, some with bear-hide robes, peered from behind hoods lined in thick fur. The scent of roasting meat on the air made my stomach cramp into knots too tight to be untied.
Our passage towards their camp caused the sort of gossip-like flutter that strangers in Suttonville had occasioned; Cora and me hardly looked a threat but we were unknown to them, all the same. Two men with long braids and rifles in the crooks of their elbows rode out to greet us. I drew Aces to a halt when their horses were twenty strides distant and lifted my hands to show I had no weapons. I was no danger to them. But just as quick I had to grab Cora about the waist, as she almost fell without my arms holding her in place.
“We need help!” I tried to call out, but my throat felt as dry and rough as if I’d been eating sand. The two men heeled their mounts and cantered to us, talking to each other in their own language. Tired and half-witted as I felt at present, their words flowed like sap from a tapped tree, warm and thick around my head. I whispered to them, “Please help us.”
Up close I saw their bold and impressive faces,
broad and red-brown, quick black eyes missing nothing. Noses like knife blades jutting. One of them was tattooed across his cheekbones so detailed I wanted to stare at the pattern made of little black shapes, circles and arrows and such, but I did not wish to be rude. They bristled with armaments – Springfield rifles, pistols in cross holsters, hatchets and neck knives stowed in pouches decorated with beads. They wore leather moccasins beneath leather breeches, fringed and also brightly beaded, the beads painted with colors to dazzle my eyes. After I spoke, one leaned near and asked plain as day in English, “Who are you?”
“My name is Malcolm Carter, sir.” I tipped my hat brim, holding Cora steady with my other arm. She did not stir and I felt the heat of fear. “This here is Cora Lawson an’ she’s near froze through. We rode a piece to get here, mister, please help us.”
“Wagon?” asked the other, motioning back the way we’d come. He lifted a hand to his mouth and then mimed eating something.
I nodded. “We did leave a wagon behind. We ain’t had no food in days.”
“Come,” he said, gesturing with his head.
Within short order, Cora and I were guests behind the stockade wall, a small, timbered square surrounding a cluster of cabins built of stacked logs, with thick gray-white chinking between each log. More of the In’jun structures was pitched inside the stockade, which had a heavy gate that was not latched. People, white and red, moved freely between the inside and the out. There were plenty of In’jun women with crow-black braids and I wondered if they looked like my Aunt Hannah would look, when I finally saw her. A flagpole with a flapping United States flag was positioned near the front gate and the cabins inside had been built with their doors facing to the middle. I was so cold I could not climb down from Aces after one of the In’jun men lifted Cora, holding her the way Mama would have held a newborn babe. People gathered around like we was a carnival come to town, all a-chatter and a-flutter.
Grace of a Hawk Page 28
