Daughter of a Daughter of a Queen

by Sarah Bird

  I was shoving the door open, could see Bunny hitched up outside waiting for me, was all but gone when hands fell on my shoulders and stopped me.

  Caldwell and Greene shoved me back to Vikers, who looked me up and down, and said, “Well, well, if it isn’t our old friend Stanky. You’ve been laying pretty low. Hiding out. Don’t recall seeing you about much. You boys,” he asked Greene and Caldwell, “you recall seeing Stanky much? Like, oh say, the washroom?”

  Oh, Lord Jesus, not again.

  “Sure don’t,” Caldwell chimed in.

  “Nope,” Greene agreed. “Never knowed anyone as soap shy as this here nancy boy.”

  “Maybe it’s time we give him that bath was interrupted before. Allbright’s not here to save his pet,” Vikers said. “Strip him down, boys.”

  I struggled, but there wasn’t any point. Vikers’s game had caught on with the drunk cowboys and they’d all joined in. I thought about how they nearly quirted a white woman in this place just because she showed the disease that had been shoved into her by these very men, and I did not want to think on what they’d do to me once they got my britches off.

  I fought like a cougar, but my jacket was half off when Lem drew his sidearm, pointed it at Vikers, and said he’d burn him down unless I was turned loose.

  “Look who we have here, boys,” Vikers said, happy as a cat with a new mouse to torture. “It’s Mr. Fancy’s wife, Mrs. Fancy. I thought the happy couple’d broken up. But here he is ready to defend his sweetheart’s honor. Is that what you’re doing, Mule? Defending your sweetheart’s honor?”

  “Leave him be,” Lem said.

  The drunk cowboys crowded in, waiting for Vikers to give the word. Knowing Lem didn’t have it in him to pull the trigger, Vikers said, “Have at him, boys,” and they lunged for my pants. I was grabbing around for a gun or knife to kill myself with when Lem fired off a round, and the mirror behind the bar shattered.

  Everyone halted. The jackals dragging at my pants and the fellow with his fist cocked back ready to chug Lem in the face, they all froze.

  “You want to know why Cathay don’t wash with us?” Lem demanded. “Because I know. I know something none of y’all know.”

  Of course Lem knew my secret. He probably figured it out while he was trying to have his way with me. If he was ever going to throw me to the wolves and tell my secret, now’d be the time. The mob was about two seconds from finding it out for themselves anyway. I hoped that telling on me now would help Lem a mite. That’d make what was to come worth the dying.

  Vikers, seeing a way to stretch the torture out a bit, said, “Tell us.”

  “It’s because…” Lem looked over at me with so much hurt and betrayal in his eyes that I near accepted what was coming as my due. “It’s because…”

  He’s a woman. Say it. Get it over with. Least I won’t have to face Iyaiya as a suicide.

  “It’s because,” Lem started again then paused until the men holding him turned him loose. “It’s because he’s been cat-hauled.”

  The hands dropped off me like I was on fire. Every slave had heard the whispered tales of cat-hauling, the most wicked of all the wicked tortures visited upon our captive bodies.

  This worst of penalties was reserved exclusively for the slave who could not be broken. When whips and chains failed, the blackhearted master would tie the rebel to a tree, bare his back, and drag a furious tomcat across his naked skin. And that is only where the pain started. The true agony began when every cut made by that filthy, shit-burying animal inevitably went bad and festered. The smell, that’s what they said was the worst. The smell of a man rotting to death.

  Lem had every ear when he spoke again. “Cathay never wanted anyone to see those terrible scars.”

  The men turned us loose and, eyes averted, they backed away. Though shame bowed the others a bit, Vikers continued staring straight at me, eyes narrowed, trying to figure out what angle I was playing. Finally, he said, “That being the case, Cathay, I would like to apologize, for you have suffered enough. In addition, I would like to do something to make it up to you. I would like to give you a reward for surviving the cruelest of tortures.”

  I did not like the way his lips twitched in the start of a smile. I tucked in my shirt, grabbed my hat, said, “No need,” and was heading for the door when Caldwell and Greene grabbed me again.

  “No, I insist,” Vikers said. “It would be my honor. I, Justice Vikers, insist upon treating you to a poke.”

  This idea caught on fast and the soldiers crowded back in around me.

  Lem was the first to grab me. He slipped his gun into the deep pocket of my sack coat before I was swept upstairs. Vikers led the mob that halted outside the last door at the end of the hall. Vikers hailed the occupant inside the room. “We’ve got a customer for you, Mary.”

  “Not Mary!” I screamed as the mob shoved me into the room of Mary the Murderer.

  Chapter 66

  I was in a fix, no two ways about it, and was about to jump straight out of Mary’s window when the little whore emerged from her swamp of dirty bedclothes, propped herself up on a pile of ratty red velvet pillows fringed in gold and ordered Vikers and his boys, “Get out!” Mary the Murderer looked a lot more like a puny brown girl dying of consumption than she did a bloodthirsty harlot. She seemed harmless right up until you noticed all the straight-edge razors she had tucked here and there about the room.

  With surprising energy, she leaped up, plucked an especially wicked-looking blade from beneath a pillow, flipped it open, and swished it to and fro at the men crowded at the door. “I told you donkey-balled, dirt-eating, fart-lickers before. One at a time. No shows ’less everyone pays.”

  All the boys except Vikers backed up.

  “Especially you, you card-sharpin’, bottom-dealin’ sneak,” Mary added, making to slice up Vikers’s nasty face. Preferring my odds with Mary, I hopped in and snarled at Vikers, “You heard the lady! Get the hell out fore she slits your throat!”

  Soon as the door was shut, Mary slumped back down, hiked up her skirt, and exposed a pair of legs so bowed and coppery brown that I knew she’d grown up ahorseback, making her, most likely, an Indian. She wore no underclothes of any sort and when she threw her legs wide, she exposed her parts to me and all the world. They were of a purplish-brown color not too dissimilar from my own.

  Hearing muffled scratchings and whispers, I flung open Mary’s door and Greene and Caldwell stumbled in, pushed forward by the crowd behind. I pulled out Lem’s sidearm, a .58 Remington, the finest percussion pistol ever made. The sight of that piece caused the hall to fall silent for they knew it could blow a dandy hole through a two-by-four.

  “I am going to shut this door, count to three, and start blasting. You still the other side, you will meet your Jesus tonight.” The pack was gone and down the stairs before I could slam the door shut, lock it, and stuff my yellow kerchief in the keyhole.

  “You shoot up my door,” Mary snapped. “You gon buy me another one. Don’t want no shot-up door.”

  I slid the .58’s cylinder out and told her, “That won’t be a problem. Gun’s not loaded.”

  Mary pulled her filthy skirt up even higher, and said, “Well? What you waiting for? I ain’t got all night. Get your damn pecker hard and do your business.”

  I turned away for she’d started thrusting her hips in a fashion she fancied would put me on the prod but which gave me the creeping willies. “Yeah. Okay,” I said, thinking hard for Vikers would be sure to demand a full report of my performance from Mary. “Give me a minute. I need to get in the mood.”

  “‘The mood’?” Mary repeated as though hearing the word for the first time. “You got thirty seconds, then I scream for your friends to come and drag you outta here!” This last Mary hollered at the top of her lungs to the audience I could hear scraping around again outside her door. The pack had returned. Mary added, “Perverts like them outside pay for such details. The more humiliating, the better.”

 
Oh, Mary was a vicious little guttersnipe. The prospect of humiliating me perked her up to an alarming extent and Vikers’s trap closed in around me even tighter. I had to shut Vikers up now, tonight, or I might just as well take one of Mary’s razors and open up a few veins. I looked around her room, desperate for a way out.

  “You’re costin’ me money, nigger,” Mary grumbled. “And you or Vikers is sure God gon make it up to me. My medicine’s expensive.”

  Mention of her medicine inspired Mary to refresh herself with a healthy swig of laudanum. A moment later, she drifted into a light doze and started snoring like a little kitten.

  Hoping to find something of use, I quickly studied the few bits of girlishness atop Mary’s dresser: a locket with one half of the heart broken off; a tin of lilac talcum powder; a small glass vial with the gooey amber mess of what had once been perfume clogged inside; and the lacy remnants of a dainty hankie.

  I picked up the hankie and found my salvation hidden underneath: a set of the strange beads exactly like the ones the General used to say his prayers on. Recalling their power to make even that hardened warrior blubber, I grabbed the pearly string by the tiny bleeding Jesus drooping on a cross at its end.

  A cough and the shuffling of feet came from outside the door. The pack was closing in, hungry to rip me apart if I failed to prove myself a real man.

  I went to Mary’s bedside and dropped to my knees. Her eyes flickered open. I whirled the tiny Jesus in front of my head and shoulders the way I’d seen Sheridan do, kissed the tips of my fingers, bowed my head, and started working those beads through my fingers. With the heat of a true believer, I repeated, word for word, what I remembered of the Mary prayer Sheridan had said so many times.

  “Hell Mary! Full of grapes. Blessed Arthur. And blessed is the fruit that I won. Oh, Jesus! Oh, Jesus! Oh, Jesus!”

  Staring at me dreamily, Mary asked, “Are you Catholic?”

  I was glad for all the times I’d put on Sheridan’s Paddy accent to try and get a smile out of Solomon, for it came right back to me and I answered, “And what else would ye be thinkin’ I am, lass?” I used Mary’s moment of stupefaction to pull her skirt down and cover what ought be covered.

  “I didn’t know there was no nigger Catholics,” she said.

  “Oh, hell yes, they’s a mess of us,” I shot back, quick. Too quick, for I’d left off the accent. I hurried to replace it, asking, “Shall we be praying together to Hell Mary, me dear child?”

  Something about the accent or the beads or the laudanum, or maybe it was just being spoken to kindly, but Mary puddled up. Big tears pooled in her dark eyes, making her look even more like a child, one haunted by things she never should of seen. Her lips trembled and, in a small voice, she said, “You sound like the Black Robes back on the reservation.”

  “Will ye not kneel beside me, my child, and ask Hell Mary for forgiveness?”

  She dropped her head and tears splashed down onto her bosom. “Forgiveness? For me? After all I done?”

  The way Mary bowed her head down in shame for what she’d been forced to do reminded me of Clemmie. After Old Mister A spasm of anger gripped me, and I said, “You only did what you had to do to survive. Nothin’ wrong in that. Come on now. Jesus and Hell Mary love all their children.”

  Mary was too lost in sorrow and memory and laudanum to notice that I’d let the accent slide. She lay there, propped up on those red pillows, crumpled into herself, sniffling away. Finally, in a little mouse voice she squeaked out, “Even me?”

  “You more than anybody.” Mary looked so pitiful and lost that I added, “Let me tell you something I don’t tell just anyone.”

  She lifted her eyes a bit and asked, “What?” in a voice sharpened by all the times she’d been lied to in her young life.

  “I am a bona fide minister of Hell Mary.”

  “You are?” She sniffled.

  “I am. You want Hell Mary to forgive you, come on down here and pray with me.”

  After a moment of debate, she slipped out of bed, kneeled beside me, and commenced to pray. Mary mumbled the way a poor reservation child, kneeling in one of those big, stone Catholic churches with a sad-eyed, bleeding Jesus looking down on her, would have been taught to do. But mumbling was not what I required at that moment and I demonstrated what was needed by calling out, “Oh, Hell Mary! Mary! My God! Mary!” I punctuated my cries by jiggling the bedsprings loud as I could.

  Mary joined in, yelling out to Hell Mary. I suggested that maybe she should try appealing directly to Jesus and she switched, calling out, “Oh, Jesus! Oh, dear Lord! Lord, God Almighty!”

  I led her in some selected prayers, my voice rising to a shout then dropping to a whisper as I said, “OH, GOD! Please hear our prayers. I AM COMING, OH, HELL MARY, to ask forgiveness for your sweet daughter who has been lost and now is found. I AM COMING! I AM COMING! I AM COMING to ask you to welcome her back into your love.” To Mary, I whispered, “You might want to second the request.”

  “Yes, dear Lord,” she added.

  “Got to show Him you mean it,” I suggested.

  I led her on a rising crescendo of “yesses,” that climaxed with my telling her that her sins had been forgiven. Upon which Mary slumped, crying, onto the bed.

  In the silence that followed, I heard Caldwell say in his deep, bass voice from out in the hall, “Well, shoot a bug. Whenever I topped Mary, she ain’t never said shit. Cathay be a sissy, make me a dog damn mule!”

  Muttered agreement was followed by the clomping of boots as the men abandoned their posts. I kneeled beside Mary, patting her back, and telling her that her sins had been washed away. We continued on in this way for such a long time that several customers came and pounded on the door saying it was their turn. Mary yelled for them to go eat owl shit and carried on praying and calling on the Lord. After she was worn out on confessing her sins and me washing them away, she curled up on her bed, took a nip of her medicine, and dropped off to sleep.

  It was near dawn when Bunny and I made it back to the fort. Only then did I realize that I had left my yellow kerchief stuffed into Mary’s keyhole. It was too late to go back for. I slipped into the barracks, crept over to Lem’s bunk, and placed both his sidearm and my scrimshaw razor on his pillow.

  An hour later, at first call, I awoke to find two sugar plums on my pillow and Lem back in the bunk next to mine.

  Chapter 67

  “Why’d God invent tumbleweeds?” I asked the Sergeant, trying to make a joke to jolly him out of his sour mood. This was a month after Lem had saved my life and gone back to being my friend. I had to yell my question for the Sergeant and I were sitting up top of a stagecoach tearing down the Butterfield Stage route.

  The Sergeant didn’t answer. Just kept on glaring ahead at the team of six stout, barrel-chested sorrels. The sound of hooves pounding, wheels creaking, and wind roaring past filled the silence between us.

  He was not happy to be on this run, guarding the stagecoach. And he was really not happy to be squashed in next to me, up top with the driver, Rube Burrow. He’d heard about me and Mary and, apparently, had just added that to my disgusting list of degeneracies.

  Me? I was singing with my tail up to be out with the Sergeant for guarding the coaches was a prize assignment. Troopers fought for it. The Sergeant could of easily, and rightfully, claimed the duty for himself whenever he chose. Instead, he passed it among his men as a break from the eternal wood runs and mucking out stables. He’d never picked me to make a run. But yesterday, that changed when Drewbott made a rare appearance at assembly and barked out an order. “Allbright, you will make the stage run tomorrow.”

  “Sir, I already have two men detailed for that run,” the Sergeant had answered.

  “Allbright, did I not make myself clear?” the colonel demanded. “I said I wanted you to make the run, not a couple of your nappy-haired plantation monkeys.” The colonel had been freer of late with his insults, passing along some of the humiliation that Sheridan continued to deal h
im, for Drewbott still refused to leave the fort and chase Chewing Bones.

  You’d of had to know the Sergeant to notice the tiny quiver in his left nostril that meant he was furious. Drewbott’s insults had worn him so smooth that every one went straight to nerve now. But his lips remained sealed tight.

  “I cannot emphasize enough,” Drewbott went on, “how important the run tomorrow is. You will be escorting Miss Regina Armstrong into town.” He paused for a second like he expected the name to cause the Sergeant’s eyes to light up. When they didn’t, he added, “The mayor’s fiancée. Precious cargo, Allbright. Precious cargo, indeed.” He pointed my way and added, “Take the sharpshooter with you.”

  “Begging your pardon, sir,” the Sergeant answered. “But I don’t think Cathay is the man for this detail.”

  It stung that the Sergeant didn’t even want to be alone with me atop a bucking stagecoach driven by some old whipcracker with tobacco juice leaking out of his mouth.

  “Are you questioning my order, Sergeant?” Drewbott had demanded.

  “No, sir.”

  “Good, because this isn’t your usual run, Allbright. We need the best you’ve got. You shall have the honor of safeguarding the passage of the first decent white woman into these parts.”

  “Yessir,” the Sergeant had answered then, his mouth puckered as if he was sucking on a green persimmon. “Quite an honor.”

  But the day was so spring beautiful and the joy of escaping the fort to sit next to the Sergeant jouncing across the prairie high up on the back of a fine coach was so keen that my stupid riddle about why God had invented tumbleweeds had just bubbled out. Instead of answering, though, the Sergeant looked at me like I was the most miserable speck of nothing on earth.

  Rube the driver, though, he piped up, “Finish your damn joke.” Rube was a scrawny fellow had the look of a jockey been put out to pasture. Or a monkey, for though he had nothing much of a body, the long, ropy arms attached to it became part of his whip when he cracked it.

  Though the Sergeant had dampened my joke-telling mood, I finished, “So cowboys’d know which way the wind was blowing.”