Death Ground

by Ed Gorman

  Kriker said to the priest, “What the hell’s he talking about?”

  “He’s right, Kriker. She’s got cholera and so do several other people in the settlement. We’re having a meeting in half an hour.” The priest paused. “That’s why we need you to clear out. Because we’ve got to bring in a doctor, and when he sees the cholera, he’ll bring in the law. They’ll want to make sure this doesn’t spread any farther than it has to.”

  “I won’t leave without her.”

  The priest touched Kriker’s arm. The huge man in the dirty buckskins and the wild hair looked lost suddenly—as if his eyes could not focus, his tongue and lips unable to form words.

  The priest said, “They’re going to vote.”

  “Who is?”

  “The people of the settlement.”

  “On what?”

  “On you.”

  “Me?”

  “Whether to force you out.”

  “I founded this place. I felled the trees and cleared the fields. There wouldn’t be any settlement if it wasn’t for me.”

  “But now you can destroy it, Kriker, and you can’t see that. The law is looking for you because they think you killed two men in town and that means they’ll destroy this settlement to get you.”

  Kriker swung around to Guild. “Is this why you come out here, bounty man?”

  Guild said, “Yes.”

  “They’re offering a reward because I’m supposed to have killed two men.”

  “Yes.”

  “What men?”

  “Rig and Tolliver.”

  “Rig and Tolliver? I didn’t kill them.”

  “I know you didn’t. But the Bruckner brothers have convinced the sheriff you did, and they came out here to take you in.”

  “They’d shoot me.”

  “Sure they would, Kriker. First chance.”

  “I didn’t kill them men.”

  “I know.”

  Kriker said, “Shit,” and slammed his right fist into the palm of his left hand. He glanced at the girl. “I’ve got to get her out of here.”

  “Why don’t you go back with me?” Guild said.

  “What?”

  “Talk to Decker. I’ll make sure the Bruckners don’t get to you, and you can tell your side of things.”

  “I helped stick up the bank. Me and Rig planned it. Tolliver and the deputies was part of it.”

  “Tell that to Decker.”

  “They’ll still arrest me for robbery.”

  Guild said, “It’s easier than running, Kriker. You’re not young anymore and running isn’t easy. It isn’t easy at all.”

  Kriker, still seeming dazed by the events of the past half hour, said, “They need to get to me.”

  “Who?”

  “The Bruckners.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I got the bank money hid.”

  “Why don’t you turn it over to me?”

  For the first time, Kriker laughed. “You’re some hopped-up sonabitch, aren’t you? You goddamn bounty men. A little girl is layin’ here sick and two deputies are coming to kill me and all you can think about is the reward.”

  “Winter’s coming,” Guild said. “I’m no younger than you and I need money.” He shrugged. “It’s my job.” He nodded to the priest. “Besides, the priest is right. If you don’t want to deal with Decker, then you should leave clean. Pack up and head out fast. By the time the Bruckners and Decker catch up with you, you’ll be long gone.”

  “How come you don’t want to take me in?

  “I want the robbery money. I return that, I’ve got my reward. Plus I think I can convince Decker that you didn’t have anything to do with killing Rig or the Tolliver kid. I owe the kid and his mother that much.”

  Kriker glanced at the sleeping girl. She was moaning again, her face white except for the cheeks where the fever was deep red fire.

  Kriker said, seeming to forget everything they’d been talking about, “She needs some more water.”

  He went over to her and poured another glass and then knelt down.

  He touched her head, kissing her, and this time there could be no mistaking the sounds he made.

  Kriker was sobbing.

  He was old enough to remember when a white Canadian named Theophile Brughier had married the daughter of the Dakota Sioux Chief War Eagle and thereby brought a measure of peace, however temporary, to the area.

  He was old enough to remember when Indian women did the gardening with antler rakes and hoes made from bison shoulders.

  He was old enough to remember when Indians were not farmers at all but were hunters. It was the white man and his reservations who had turned hunter into farmer, and failed farmer at that, for now Indians not only his age but Indians small as infants waited in line at army posts for scraps of food and the quick pitying smile of the blue-coated supply sergeant.

  He was old enough to remember when he could have erections he did not even want and old enough to remember what this part of the Territory had been like before the buffalo were killed and before the blue sky was crosshatched with telephone and electrical poles and before the river bore the taint of ore from the factory waters upstream.

  His name was Pawashika and he was coming to see his friend, the priest at the settlement. The seventy-nine-year-old Indian had begun coughing up blood again, and last time the priest had told him to come at once if this happened again.

  So even tonight in this cold without mercy, he had left his soddie downstream and come up onto the area of rock, his dun slipping on the soft snow, up over the hill, and down to the settlement below.

  At first he imagined the sickness that came with the coughing blood was playing tricks on his ears. That and the whipping wind.

  Hunched down inside the robes, he imagined he could hear sounds. Desperate sounds. Human sounds.

  He stuck his face outside the robe draped over his head.

  In the cutting snow, it was almost impossible to see. Even given the curious silver illumination of the full moon.

  He did not see the men at first. He did not even see the tree.

  He merely continued on up the rocky hill, his dun now no faster than an aged burro.

  Then for a moment—as if a fabric had been torn and his gaze allowed to see inside—he saw the two men lashed to the scrubby pine tree on the deep slope of the hill.

  At first he did not slow the course of his dun at all. The two men were white, and he had learned long ago never to become involved in a white man’s affair unless you had absolutely no choice. White men were crazed, and even those who seemed friendly were capable of turning on you suddenly, the way animals suddenly and for no reason turn on humans.

  He went on.

  But they continued yelling, their voices slapping at him on the downdraft of the snow wind, and so finally he reined the dun to a stop and turned around and peeked out of his robe again at the two men.

  “We won’t make it through the night, Grandpa!” one of them shouted. “Please help us out.”

  Pawashika turned his horse to the right, toward the tree. He had a coughing fit then and simply let the horse walk over by the tree.

  “Who tied you up?” the Indian asked from his horse.

  The two men writhed against their lashes. The one without the burned face said, “Robbers. We’re deputies and they captured us. You help us out, Grandpa, and we’ll see that you get part of the reward.”

  The old man shook his head. “It is not good to help white people. They turn on you.”

  “Please,” said the one with the burned face. “We won’t last the night. It’ll get in our lungs and we’ll die of pneumonia.”

  “Look at my goddamn jacket, old man,” the other white man said, shouting above the wind. It was as if they were in a tunnel and the tunnel was roaring with wind.

  And then the Indian saw it. The shine of silver—the white man’s badge of authority.

  “You are law?”

  “Law. Yes. Jesus.” The man w
ithout the burns sounded frantic.

  “I will be in trouble if I don’t help you, then,” the old man decided.

  “Very bad trouble,” the man without the burns said.

  Pawasshika began choking with a cough spasm again.

  Finally he got down from his dun and went over to the two lashed men and cut them free.

  The man without the burn did not wait long. He grabbed the Indian’s knife away from him and then said, “I want your rifle there, Grandpa.”

  “My rifle?”

  “And your horse.”

  “Horse? But why?”

  But the white man said nothing. He simply walked over to the horse, helped the other white man up, and left Pawashika standing there to think of the days when he had been a hunter and when nobody would ever have been able to take his knife that way, let alone steal his rifle and horse.

  But then he fell to coughing and the blood was thick and hot now, spilling down the front of his cotton shirt.

  He went over and picked up the hide robe they had flung from the dun as they’d set off up the hill.

  The Indian wrapped himself in the robe and started off walking.

  The way he was coughing, he wondered it he would have strength enough to reach the settlement.

  Chapter Eleven

  The bird was a barn swallow trapped by the granny woman fifteen minutes ago and brought here to the cabin where the sick girl lay.

  The priest had gone several cabins away, where the meeting between the settlement people was taking place.

  Kriker with his rifle and Guild with his sense of helplessness stayed here. Sometimes he watched the little girl and then recalled the little girl he’d shot. Life was fragile enough, but for children it was doubly so. He thought of small hands reaching out with no grasp strong enough to save them.

  Kriker, now sitting by the girl in a chair angled so that he could watch Guild with no problem, said to the granny woman, “You better hurry up. She’s hotter than she was an hour ago.”

  “I got no guarantees, Kriker.”

  “You said you could handle it all right.”

  “I said I could handle it all right if the demons wasn’t in her.” She shrugged aged shoulders. “If the demons is in her, ain’t much I can do.”

  “A doc could help,” Guild said. “She needs a doc.”

  “You shut up, bounty man. I’m sick of you already.” Kriker glared up at the granny woman. The kerosene lamp still cast strong shadows and the wind slammed like a fist against the burlap of cabin windows.

  The girl started up in bed abruptly and began vomiting. Guild went over to her and without a word held her frail little shoulders as the puking jerked her about. Kriker held a pan under her mouth.

  When she was done and Kriker had laid her back down again, he looked at Guild and said, as if surprised by Guild’s tenderness, “Thanks.”

  “She’s a nice little girl.”

  “She’s a beautiful, lonely little girl. She never complains.” The he dropped his gaze to her again and shook his head and whispered “Son of a bitch” at whatever gods he held responsible for this.

  The brown barn swallow was little more than a chick, and so the area of its breast was small and the location of its heart difficult to find. “I’m gonna need one of you to hold this bird for me,” the granny woman said.

  Kriker said, “I’ll do it.”

  He got up and went over to the table where the granny woman worked. He clamped big hands on the tiny bird that gazed up at him with terrified alien eyes.

  The granny woman stabbed the bird in the breast area. Some kind of mucus ran out of the bird’s mouth. The eyes grew very large and then a thin membranous haze covered its gaze and then it was dead.

  The granny woman worked efficiently now. She cut out the innards and searched with hard white hands through the soft red innard until she came to the heart, which was smaller than a pea. She had been boiling milk in a pan on a small fire in the corner. She took the hot milk and poured some in a tin coffee cup and then dropped the tiny heart into the burned crust of milk floating on top.

  Guild shook his head. It was too late on the frontier for anybody reasonable to still practice granny medicine, and yet tens of thousands of people still did. Day in and day out their patients died after drinking tea made of water and the cleaved-off tail of a black cat or eating a handful of fish worms or tying the nail of a coffin to a foot to take care of rheumatism.

  The little girl was dying and they were feeding her the heart of a barn swallow. He hated them for their mountain-born stupidity and yet he was moved by their grief and their earnestness.

  “You hold her head and I’ll pour it down her,” the granny woman said.

  “This better work,” Kriker said.

  “It will, Kriker,” the granny woman said.

  But she glanced anxiously at Guild, and he saw that she looked afraid because she knew what Kriker would do to her if the girl died.

  The granny woman stuck a stick in the tin cup. “We want to get the blood good and stirred,” she said.

  “Good and stirred,” said Kriker. He sounded dazed again.

  They went over and gave the girl the heart of the barn swallow.

  Guild looked back at the bird’s carcass on the table. The blood didn’t bother him so much as the eyes. They were open and staring, and he went over and closed them.

  The little girl puked up the milk less that three minutes after they give it to her.

  He was not really a priest, of course, and those in the settlement knew it. He had come here eight years ago, the law back in Chicago interested in his part in the murder of a cardsharp (John Healy was himself a cardsharp), but he found both himself and the settlement in need of a priest and so he became one.

  At first they did not honor him. They would scoff and curse and deride him. But a woman, whose baby strangled at bloody birth, was comforted by the fake priest, as was her husband, and so Healy made two converts among the forty or so settlement people. Then a woman asked Healy to baptize her infant and then a man asked him to give his consumptive wife last rites. And then, Healy having long worn the black cassock and white collar now, children began calling him “Father.” There came a flood and Healy offered succor as well as prayers spoken in a tongue touched with brogue, manly and fine, here in the forest where they’d fled. And at planting season he stood as Jesus had stood, arms wide and praying to the blue sky for bountiful harvest and the balm of friendship. By then even the adults had come to call him Father Healy, and now there was no question that he was a priest. The settlement, wanting its own form of civilization, wanting its children to learn the secrets of print on paper and the ways of men who did not beat their wives and work their children as slaves—the settlement had forgotten utterly about a man named Healy who’d been a Chicago cardsharp. They knew only a Healy who was a priest, and a good one.

  Father Healy himself had only one problem with his role. He knew the society necessity of the settlement having a priest, yet he did not believe in God. He tried. He held the most delicate flowers and splashed in his hands the purest of water and watched unblinking the steep and unfaltering arc of the hawk against the blue summer sky. He saw all the evidence of a God, and yet in his heart he could not believe in one.

  He blamed this on his boyhood near the Union Stockyards in Chicago, where his father came home day after numbed day bloody as a stillborn babe, the entrails of dead animals clinging to him like the white larvae of maggots to spoiled meat. What a place the Union Stockyards had been. Two million dollars to construct. Three hundred fifty-five acres alone of cattle pens. And the animals themselves. Twenty-five thousand cattle. Eighty thousand hogs. Twenty-five thousand sheep. All this carrying the stench and sound of hell itself, for it was estimated that ten thousand animals a day died there, that on some killing floors the blood was so deep it splashed the knees in waves.

  This was how the young Healy came to think of life and death. The men who owned the yards got you
and they killed at their whim. And then, as with the sad-eyed cows and the plump pink pigs and the sweet frightened lambs—then there was just the darkness. Just the darkness.

  He had been forced to be a priest because he saw early on that he had none of the skills the other settlement men could claim. He was too clumsy for farm work and too unskilled for building. But he spoke in his fine voice and he knew how to read, and his gambling days had left him with gift for reassuring others (nobody needing more reassurance than a man you were cheating), and so it was that Healy followed in the footsteps of Jesus and tried to believe in Jesus but did not—even on the most overpowering of star-flung spring nights—much as he so desperately prayed to.

  But it was important for him to be a priest because there was no other thing he could be for this settlement, and it was important for the settlement to have him be its priest because even the strongest of men were frightened of the things that lay just beyond daylight. So his words soothed them the way a baby is soothed in the lap and arm, even though the words are often meaningless to the parent uttering them, just soft imbecile songs of reassurance on the long night’s air.

  During all this time, Kriker had been the unquestioned master of the settlement and great deference had been paid to him.

  But now, years of his robberies, years of the settlement’s dreading an invasion by law, had come to an end because now the settlement was faced with something that not even Kriker’s rage could manage—the prospect of cholera.

  Crowded into the largest cabin now—the cabin usually used for meetings—were twenty men and women dressed in shabby winter clothes, shirt piled on shirt, town gloves pulled over raw knuckles. Yet in all there was a sense of purpose and pride that their stay at the settlement here had given them. They had been thieves and worse, and now they knew the satisfaction of real work. They had been plunderers, and now they knew the joy of having families and protecting that most precious gift of all, children.

  And now they stood facing Kriker. Father Healy was between him and the others, while Kriker leaned against one corner of the cabin, smoking a cob pipe, his face drained of its unusual animation because only five minutes before he had seen that the girl’s condition continued to deteriorate.