Rakeheart

by Rusty Davis

  Kane shrugged. “Good and bad in everybody. Every race. Every tribe. Don’t spend much time condemning folks because they ain’t me. Figger it’s their bad luck.” He looked her in the eye and let her read what she would.

  She gave him a very faint smile. The eyes said he passed a test.

  “Do you mind if I ask a question?”

  “After so many others, why does it matter now?” Her glare was intimidating. Her tone, ice. He now felt awkward, but it was too late to retreat.

  “You speak better English than half the people I know . . .”

  “White people, you mean?”

  “Well, yes.”

  “Squaw no use dumb Injun-talk?”

  “I didn’t mean to offend you.”

  “You did. Again.”

  She glared some more as he squirmed.

  “Oh, why should you be any better than the rest of them? Jared taught me from the time he met me. He was a good teacher; maybe if he had done that instead of trying to be a rancher and farmer he would have been happier. He would be . . .” She obviously fought down her rising emotion.

  “I think it started because he was so awkward with me he did not know what else to do. It was how he showed he cared. He taught me; he taught Libby. Of course he taught Jeremiah but that came later. Libby and I can both speak better than most people. Libby can write well. I can understand numbers, but writing is a chore.” She paused. “Jared thought people would treat me as their equal if I talked like one. I don’t think he was right about that, but I do like seeing their surprise when I don’t live down to their expectations.”

  For a second, he lost track again. Focus.

  “Sherman sent me to find out who killed your husband. Guess they were close. Kept in touch a lot.”

  “Like brothers. Jared was a lot older than me. He turned forty-four last year. He was an only child. He didn’t have any family anywhere. It was him and me and that general from day one. He looked up to Sherman like a big brother, a father, and God all rolled into one. Never wrote a letter but to that man. When Sherman wrote back he looked like a little boy, so excited. There’s a box in the bedroom with everything Sherman ever wrote back to him. He saved every last one.”

  “Went both ways, I guess. Sherman takes it personal when things happen to people he likes. I do work for Sherman. Stray things the army needs done that it can’t do on its own ’cuz them rules and the gold braid and the pompous folks get in the way. Never one like this. I need your help to find out who killed your husband. Got any ideas who might have hated him enough to kill him? Range war? That town? Something?”

  An indefinable shadow crossed her face. She silently looked into the fire. Maybe you don’t ask widows questions like that, he told himself. Maybe livin’ way out here she’s afraid.

  Then he recalled Sherman’s caution. Maybe, he realized, she knows something she doesn’t want to tell.

  The silence lengthened. It dawned upon him that she did not plan to answer.

  “Maybe come morning I can look where it happened, maybe you can think of someone he didn’t like or some place I can start tryin’ to figure all this out to tell Sherman?”

  “They all want the land.”

  “Why? Lot of land out here. All looks the same to me.”

  “We came here in ’69. Got the best water. Never come close to running dry. Jared said we’d be sheltered here from northers. He always figured winter would kill off everyone’s herds one year, and he wanted to be the one that survived when it happened. It never did, and now he’s gone. Eighty acres isn’t much, but it is enough. Everybody wants to get bigger. A couple of them said they would come around to talk when my mourning was over. The rest didn’t say it, but they looked around a lot when they came to say they were sorry. Guessing what it would cost to be rid of me.”

  “Think one of them got impatient?”

  “Men are always impatient,” she said. “You ask a Comanche woman about white men and land?”

  She had been looking away from him and then came back with a sharp-eyed glance.

  “You knew before you saw the tattoo. I could see it in your eyes. How? Did someone tell you? You never said. It was more than a childhood memory.”

  “Nobody said nothing. Spent a lot of years along the Yellow River. Traded with a lot of Comanches. Never had a problem with ’em any more’n with anyone else. Prob’ly don’t know a Sioux from a Cheyenne, but there’s somethin’ in the face with a Comanche.”

  He moved his right hand toward her face, drawing in the air as he traced her narrow face from her cheeks to her jaw. She pushed the arm down firmly and moved away from the table before turning to sit in a different spot. Her face was now deeper in shadow.

  “No offense,” he said. “Somethin’ in the walk as well. Your voice got Texas in it somewhere same as mine. You was barefoot; never seen white women do that outside of Louisiana by the swamps. The white beads at the end of your braids. I can see the blessings drawn on them now that we are in here. Put it all together, it said Comanche.”

  “You are more observant than you appear to be,” her voice had a bit of an edge. He had clearly crossed a line.

  He wanted to tell her that being underestimated was the way he worked. He left that unsaid.

  “I do not think there is much to observe. The barn has been cleaned since it happened,” she said. “Kids know he’s gone, but they don’t know a lot, so don’t talk about it in front of them. Clem Ferguson—guess he’s the foreman now, since we have about two dozen hands left—he can tell you more. He talked to the soldier who came. The territory sent a solider to investigate the death of a white man with an Indian wife. No, it was the army. He came and looked and left. He talked to Clem, but not much to me. I guess they thought I scalped him. They—”

  The flow of bitterness stopped as if a tap was shut off.

  “I don’t—” She stopped and looked at him. “I’m an Injun woman in a white world who doesn’t know a thing about cattle. To my face they call me ‘Mrs. Wilkins,’ and behind my back I am a ‘filthy squaw.’ That is how life is in your world.” She accented all the words she found hateful.

  “Want to know what they call me? Not a lot of folks offering sugar and sympathy out there for anybody, ma’am.”

  “You live in a hard world, Mr. Kane.”

  “Only one there is, ma’am. At least you got the ranch. Your men will adjust. Folks usually do.”

  “For now. Clem told me things weren’t good, but they weren’t bad yet. Whatever that means. Calves are born. They eat. We sell them. I don’t know what can go wrong unless they get sick. I have done the ledgers for Jared because he did not like to do things with writing that were indoors, but I don’t know what was behind those numbers. I know that the numbers say we are making money, but there are times it does not feel that way. One day maybe it folds; it ends. I don’t know that I care about the ranch enough to run it.”

  “You got your kids.”

  “I should tell you now so you will not stare the way most white people do when they try to puzzle out the ancestry of a non-white child. Libby’s father was Sioux. She is not Jared’s. The soldiers shot her father about a month after I was married. I was barely old enough to have children, and he never got to be a man. He never saw her.” Wistful, but not for long. No time for that on the high plains.

  “She was Topsannah. That was her name. It means—”

  “Prairie flower.”

  Her eyes met his a long moment. “Very good, Kane.”

  For a moment, the past claimed her. Then it faded away.

  “Jared never cared, though. He was unusual for a white man. The only thing he asked was that Libby have a white name, so I let him pick it. I did not know then it was the same as the Custer man’s wife, but by the time I learned that, it no longer mattered.”

  Kane had a revelation.

  “Not the only thing. Your name was not always Rachel. That’s Sherman’s daughter’s name. He made you change your own name?”
<
br />   “It seemed little enough,” she replied.

  Seeing no reaction in his eyes, she spoke again, this time with more passion. “Kane, can you imagine being so alone, so desperate, and so frightened that it does not matter to you what someone calls you as long as you can be safe and your child can eat and maybe someone will actually care whether you are even alive?”

  Kane shifted from foot to foot. Awkward. There had to be something to say.

  “What was your name? Your real one?”

  “It does not matter.” Her tone said the subject was closed. She compressed her lips as her eyes swept the room. “I have told you what you need to know. Jeremiah is his. All his.” The words were stressed. “He wants to be a cowboy. Or a soldier.” Bitterness dripped from her words. He wondered why. Little boys want to be what their fathers were until they get old enough to know better. Way of the world.

  “Maybe you can hold the ranch for him.”

  “Maybe.”

  Then it hit.

  “What about Sherman?”

  “What about him? Never met him. Jared worshipped him. I suppose he meant well staying in touch with Jared, but that’s over now.”

  “Not him. Your son.”

  The look she gave him would have frozen a fire.

  “You ain’t got a son you named after the general?”

  Now she was puzzled. She shook her head, braids dancing with the Comanche designs at their tips, and glared back fiercely. “I think I would know that.”

  “General thinks you got a son named Sherman. Very pale. Very light hair.”

  “That’s Jeremiah.”

  “Says your husband wrote that he named his son after the general. Boy maybe eight or so now if I recall it right. Pretty sure ol’ Uncle Billy mailed your husband money to help his namesake get brought up eatin’ regular.”

  Understanding flared at the word “money.” He could see the rage build even as it was contained.

  “Jeremiah is nine. And that is his name. Every now and then there were letters Jared brought from Rakeheart that I was never allowed to see. I never saw anything he mailed except for once he was hurt, and I had to write for him. He told this general he named Jeremiah after him? He said we had a son named Sherman?”

  “General said so. He don’t make up things like that.”

  She put her face in her hands a moment. Then glared at Kane.

  “When I met Jared, he would never have done that. He changed. That place. Rakeheart. It changed him. It drew him and changed him. It was as though he drank from a poison well. The longer we were here, the more he was doing things that were no longer good for him. He wanted to be important. He wanted approval.” She paused. “Perhaps in the end, Kane, he wanted more than an Indian wife could give him.”

  She rose, tight-faced and angry. She had clearly had enough for one night.

  “Dawn comes early here. Chores never stop. The barn is yours. Everyone in the crew is out, so no one will disturb you, but I don’t know who might ride in. I don’t know whose things are where in the bunkhouse, and I know what happens when you cowboys fight over someone moving things that you have not moved in months, so I would prefer to avoid a gunfight by having you sleep in the barn.”

  He stood also. “Barn’s fine. Goodnight, Mrs. Wilkins.”

  The fire caught a wetness in her eyes.

  “Good night, Mr. Kane. Next time we meet, call me Rachel. It is the name I will prefer to hear.”

  She turned and moved to the wing of the house where he could see a room had been added. A blanket blocked the doorway. He let himself outside. Stabled Tecumseh.

  The cool night air was refreshing. Rachel Wilkins was a puzzle. Comanches could bury emotions as deep as a well, but whatever she was burying in relation to Wilkins, it was gone without a trace. It didn’t add. There was something off.

  Sherman told him that Wilkins doted on the woman. But Sherman had suspicions that sprang from something, and, in a place like this, the most likely people to shoot someone were people already here, not middle-of-the-night riders. Rustlers might use the darkness to steal, but this was different. What had Sherman gotten him into?

  Wilkins had lied to Sherman about his son’s name. That was clear. Was there a whole different version to the truth beyond that one fact? Rachel seemed surprised. Maybe he was easy to fool. If there was a truth out there, how would he find it?

  Doubts and darkness surrounded him, with the light very far away.

  There was the smell of coffee when he awoke. She was waiting with a steaming cup as she watched him kick off the blanket and dust off the hay from his clothes. Her hair was loose. She had on a light-brown dress. She looked more like a rancher’s wife and less a Comanche. He glanced down. No shoes.

  “I do not handle company very well,” she said, handing up the cup to his outstretched hands. “I will not live up to your standards for widows, Kane. I have lived life with loss since I was a girl. I was fourteen when I was married, and I was a widow before I was fifteen. I know white women weep and wear black and carry on. This is not my way. If I had done so, there might not be a ranch today. For the children to survive, I must survive.”

  He could see her better in the light. Her face looked different. Lighter? He did not know he was staring until she spoke with some irritation in her voice.

  “I was told my mother’s grandfather was part Spanish, so, yes, Kane, I am lighter than many Comanches. Now can you tell me why the exact color of an Indian’s skin makes you white men so fascinated?”

  Any further conversation was—fortunately for Kane—interrupted by yelling voices. Rachel strode purposefully to the house. Kane gulped down a deep swallow and felt a wave of relief. A man never knows how much trouble he can find simply by being there.

  Kane emerged from the barn to see Rachel moving fast out of the house, with her shotgun cradled and ready.

  Four young men had reached the gate of the ranch house.

  “Hello, Rachel,” called one, laughing at his wit as only drunks and the young can do. He leaned severely from side to side as he waved, a sloppy grin on his face.

  “Go away, Chad,” she called back. “You and your friends are drunk. Again. That’s why you got fired.”

  “You need protection,” he said. “We’re here to protect you against . . .”

  “Against all comers,” said a dark-haired young man flashing a sloppy grin.

  “Them Injuns might steal you back, missus,” said a third young man, as the fourth kept silent, his posture showing he had misgivings about his adventure.

  The one called Chad started to dismount.

  “Don’t,” she called out. “You got fired for being drunk, and you and your drunken friends should all go away. You spent the night drinking in Rakeheart, you can spend the morning sobering up there, too. Go. Now!”

  Chad continued navigating his way off the horse as though she had not spoken, completing the task with difficulty.

  “But you need to be protected,” he said with his grin sharp. Then a shadow crossed his face, and he frowned. “Let me show you. I have a gun, and I know how to use it. See?” He started to reach for the weapon.

  The bark of a rifle set the young men still mounted back in their saddles as Chad tumbled into the dirt.

  Rachel turned on Kane.

  The Winchester cocked as Kane walked to the sprawled youth, who was sadly contemplating his right boot, now missing the heel Kane had shot off. He’d been aiming at the dirt by the other foot. Oh well. Ought to shoot the new gun more if he wanted to hit what he aimed at.

  “Shouldna done that,” Chad scolded.

  “Sleep it off, sonny,” Kane said. He motioned to the others. “One of you get him on his horse. Then git.”

  The two who had spoken to Rachel dismounted. One side glance. Two.

  Three.

  As they neared Chad, they clumsily reached for their own guns. Before they could fumble them free, Kane had moved the ten feet separating him from them to knock the weapons
from their hands and shove the youths hard. They rocked into their horses. One struck out with a hoof, catching the dark-haired one in the left thigh. The other looked on uncertainly, dimly understanding that this lark had gone sour.

  “Edward.” Rachel spoke sharply to the fourth youth. “Your friends appear to have had an accident. Help Mr. Kane get them mounted and then get out. When they sober up, tell them I will shoot first the next time I see any of them. I hope you learn to choose better company.”

  “Yes, Miz Wilkins. Sorry.”

  It was not the first time Kane had piled a drunk atop a horse. Soon, with Edward leading the rest, the young men were heading down the path back from a misadventure gone wrong.

  Rachel turned. Kane was gone.

  “No man lets good coffee go to waste,” he said, beaming with the cup in his hand as she approached him.

  “Did you think an Indian woman could not handle four drunk white cowboys who are about as mature as you?” she asked. “I tell Jeremiah that when guns are shot, people can get hurt, and you have to show him the exact opposite. Of course he saw every bit of that. Do you think this is the first time some silly boy drunk out of his mind wanted to protect me?”

  “Sensible woman never leaves a loaded gun around little kids,” he said. “Noticed it was unloaded last night. Empty barrel got backlit when you cocked it. Thought I’d help. You know how we men are. Got to show off in front of a lady.”

  “I keep the shells by the door,” she said, opening the gun and showing him it was loaded, as she dumped the shells into her hand. “I cannot shoot like you cowboys, but when I am close enough, it does not matter.”

  Kane, again feeling shallow and stupid, wisely said nothing.

  A young boy was in the doorway, as fair of hair and skin as the older girl behind him was dark. The sun was full on their faces, allowing him to pick out the details. The boy looked excited at the commotion. The girl scanned the scene with eyes that knew more, stopping to examine Kane before she focused on her mother, then back to the stranger who had come out of their barn.

  “Good morning, Miss Window Spy,” Kane said to her, tipping his hat. “I’m Kane.”