Savage Country

by Robert Olmstead

  “We have a bad situation here,” Michael said to Elizabeth.

  “How is he?” Elizabeth said.

  “Not good,” Michael said. He knew it fell on him to do something. He went into the camp and with the other men he tried to restrain Abel lest he try and bite someone, but Abel broke and rushed into a thicket of willows.

  “Let him go,” Findley said, but Ike would not give up on his brother and threatened to kill Findley for suggesting they do.

  In the morning they cornered him in a little gully. Foam frothed upon his lips and at the corners of his mouth. Veins stood out on his neck and he twisted his head as if to loosen them. His red-­sheened eyes flashed wildly in his swollen and mutilated face.

  “Stay where you are. I am dangerous,” he said, his lifted hand a threat.

  “Abel,” Ike said. “It’s me, your brother.”

  Abel raised himself to his knees and the sun shone with unbroken radiance upon his face. He spoke in a voice that was hollow and unnatural, the tears breaking over his wasted cheeks. He arranged himself into a sitting posture, sinking his face between his knees. From there he rolled to the ground, gnashing his teeth, and more foam came to his mouth. Still, he retained his senses, and this was difficult for them. He was as if a man transforming into a wolf and midway between the two beings.

  “Leave him go to hell,” Findley said again.

  “Mr. Findley,” Ike said, reaching for his revolver, “you have let your tongue run too far.”

  “I have half a mind to kill you both,” Michael said, and the moment passed.

  They went into the gully and Abel begged them not to approach, but they did, and wearing their gloves they bound him with a rope and tied him to a tree, but that night when they returned he begged Ike cut to him loose so he could sleep and Ike did.

  Abel was gone all that next day, but at nighttime he was back. He sat on the periphery of the firelight. He was skinny and pitiful and watched them with his dark gleaming eyes. They could see the animal inside his face. When they looked again he was gone.

  Charlie fetched Michael the next time Abel came back. They captured him again and Michael sent for a chain, but Ike would not let them chain him. He drew his revolver and told them Abel was his brother and he would take care of him. They backed away and in the morning Abel was gone again.

  “For the love of God,” Elizabeth said, “something has to be done.”

  “This is paralyzing us,” the reverend doctor said, looking to Michael. “We must do something. None of us are safe.”

  The next day was hot when Michael rode out. The herd was feeding on the edge of a small valley, drifting across the hillside. The wind was coming straight up the hill, carrying his scent away to the east.

  Michael gazed out toward the grazing herd and saw Abel Gough in their midst, and bent in a posture of rictus, he was crossing the valley. He got down on all fours and began to crawl forward. He stopped and his head suddenly jolted from side to side. Long strings of drool hung from his mouth. He was as if invisible to the buffalo, which grazed all around him.

  Michael threw forward the long, heavy rifle. He placed the barrel in the notch of the sharp-­pronged rest fixed firmly in the ground. His cheek against the stock, he trained the telescopic sight on Abel and found him in the crosshairs. Abel rose up on his knees as if in prayer. Michael watched him try to stand, but Abel sank to his haunches as if waiting. The eye he saw was no longer human, or even animal, but was the vised eye of fear and wildness.

  I have to do this, Michael thought, and under his skin every nerve and muscle began to twitch. When he looked again, two hundred yards away Abel had turned his body and was staring at him. He thought of David and the words he’d written in this place. Here was another man whose mind had turned strange and alien and for whatever reason was leading him to his destruction. He did not try to make sense out it. He did not think what reasons could be.

  There are no reasons in an unreasonable world.

  Michael took a deep breath, exhaled quietly, and squeezed the stiff trigger. The distance was immense, and yet the ball passed clean through the man’s body. Then the sharp booming sound of the rifle was heard, and the man was fallen and weltering in his poisoned blood.

  In days to come he would wonder if he saw what he saw in Abel’s face: expectation, understanding, acceptance. The fleet soul breathed with relief and gently floated away. Michael tried to think it was not so, but it was. He saw what he saw.

  Abel lay among the buffalo, stone dead, a trickle of blood streaming from his mouth, his body stiffening, a hand unfolded and raised. There was a massive wound in his chest and his eyes were wide open with a look of horror in them. Michael dropped the noose of his lariat onto the raised hand and dragged him from the field before Darby arrived. The wolves would find him and feed on his body and the wolfer would kill them with his strychnine before they became rabid.

  THAT NIGHT HE TOLD Elizabeth what he’d done. The reverend doctor entered and in disbelief, asked Michael to repeat himself.

  “I put him down,” Michael said.

  “Dear God,” the reverend doctor said. “I was just comforting Ike.”

  The reverend doctor lifted himself from his chair and stalked off into the night. When he returned Ike Gough was with him.

  “You killed my brother,” Ike said.

  “Yes,” Michael said. “I did.”

  “I want justice,” Ike said.

  “What kind of justice do you want?” Michael said.

  “It makes you hateful,” Ike said, backing down and then walking away.

  “Please, don’t let there be any ill blood between you,” the reverend doctor called after him. “You will shake hands, sir.”

  In the days after his brother was killed Ike became scornful and brooding. Privately the other men were grateful, but publicly they commiserated with Ike and they asked of each other what god made Michael the judge and jury of Abel Gough? What would stop him from deciding their lives and deaths.

  The next night Elizabeth asked Michael to sit with her until dinner. Michael took off his hat and went inside. His face was still black with powder and his clothes rough and dirty.

  Elizabeth was in her dressing gown and her hair was gathered in a ribbon and fell down her back. However much it was her office with inkstand and ledger books, it was a woman’s place. Unfolded near the fire was a collapsible bathtub, the water still warm, and he thought how nice it might feel.

  She poured him a drink of whiskey.

  “The men, they are gossiping,” she said.

  “It’ll pass,” he said.

  She studied him. She tried to gauge his thinking, but she could not.

  “How many more days do I have you?” she said.

  “Six or seven,” he said.

  “Perhaps for the best.”

  “Perhaps,” he said. “Ike will not leave things as they are. He must be sent away.”

  “He would have charges filed against you so it can be settled.”

  “Ike?”

  “The reverend doctor thought if only it could be adjudicated.”

  “A judge and jury?”

  “I begged him not to,” Elizabeth said.

  “You don’t have to worry about me,” Michael said.

  “But I do,” she said.

  He would tell her he’d trust no American to ever decide his fate, but he didn’t. When the time came he’d be gone and away in the blink of an eye. He did it before and would do it again.

  “The reverend will propose, you know,” she said.

  “You are not suggesting on my behalf you’d marry him?”

  “I know you don’t like him,” she said.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Michael said. “You’ll strike no bargains on my behalf.”

  He wanted to say more, but her intimation that she should sacrifice herself in marriage to protect him was beyond his understanding. He wondered if sacrifice was her essential and deepest nature. The thought of her marrying
the reverend doctor struck him far more deeply than he imagined. He wondered on his own heart and what it wanted, something he’d not done in a very long time.

  Chapter 25

  The next day Michael was in the buffalo again with 250 cartridges and both rifles. Across the plain, Pastor Starling was approaching Ike Gough. Ike bent his head while he listened to what Starling was saying. Starling was smiling, his hands were out, his palms at angles to the sky. There was something feral in Ike’s posture, the way his body held itself curved, the way he stared out from below his forehead. Their faces shined with sweat.

  “Back away,” Michael said. “Back away,” he yelled. “Back away.”

  They conversed but a moment longer when Ike raised his revolver and shot Pastor Starling in the face. Pastor Starling collapsed to the ground.

  Pulling his horse together, Michael gripped with his knees and urged it forward across the plain, the horse gaining speed as it went. When he rode onto the field, the men were gathered around in silence, their mouths open as if to speak but saying nothing.

  “What happened here?” Michael shouted, and they all shrank away from him. “Who saw it?”

  His questions were met with stony silence. The men, both white and black, looked down and shuffled their feet where they stood.

  “What happened here?” he said again. “Who saw it?”

  “He threatened me,” Ike said, shaking his head. His eyes jerked with panic. “I don’t want to get on your bad side.”

  “That is not true,” Henry Ward Beecher said.

  “You are no judge of white men,” Ike said, stepping in his direction.

  “I say what I please.”

  “Stop your jaw,” Michael said, turning on Ike, “or I’ll smash your damned mouth.”

  Michael knelt down beside Pastor Starling. He leaned in close and listened. His ear caught a faint hollow moan, more like a humming sound. There was the sound of shallow air moving inside his chest. There was a hole in his cheek, but his heart still beat and his lungs were making breath. He was alive but made no response in his arms or legs or any part of his body. There was an emptiness in his eyes.

  “Do you think he’s dead?” Story Miller asked.

  “I will ask one last time. Who saw what happened here?” Michael said. He stood and turned to Ike. He could smell the whiskey on his breath.

  “They’ve been taking hides what’s not their own,” Ike said, his words grudging and malevolent.

  “You didn’t have to kill the man.”

  “He ain’t dead.”

  “His brain is turned to mush,” Story Miller cried.

  “I saw what you did,” Michael said, and pointed off to where he’d been.

  “He threatened me. Did you hear that?”

  Michael spun fiercely and struck Ike a backhanded blow to the side of his face, breaking his lip and knocking him to the ground.

  “You shut your mouth or I will cut your guts out and hang you with them.”

  The men of Pastor Starling’s came forward and lifted Pastor Starling into the wagon and settled him down on a bed of green hides. They silently turned away and started off for the clearing where they lived.

  “It’s time for you to go,” Michael said.

  “Where am I going to go?” Ike said.

  “Wherever you came from.”

  “I’m stayin’ right here,” Ike said, his voice weak and thin.

  PASTOR STARLING SLID IN and out of consciousness. His fingers would stretch, his eyes would clear, and he would respond to those around him and then his eyes would close and he would be out for another few hours. For six hours he did not move from his pallet, tended by the women, and then he was gone to God.

  Everyone knew Ike had shot Pastor Starling to revenge himself on Michael. He could not challenge Michael so he’d killed the pastor.

  “He ought to be tried and hung,” the reverend doctor said.

  “We don’t hang people,” Elizabeth said.

  That night Michael thought how the American war was not the end of something but the beginning of learning how to kill more easily, learning that however destructive, however much destruction they did, they were capable of even more. The world would be a warring place. The nations would form and they would take everything they could. The new world would be the old world, only worse. The regimes of wealth, the blood drinkers, the men who glory in their shame—they would determine who had the right to live free. If people would not be used they would be murdered.

  The next night Darby came to talk with Elizabeth.

  “I have come,” he said, “to tell you good-­bye. They are going away and I am going away with them.”

  “To where?” she said. “Where are you going?”

  His eyes were distant and his mouth firm and set. She’d known him since he was a boy. It made no sense to her.

  “Wherever they will go,” he said.

  She looked at him, unable to believe that he was sincere, yet she knew his mind was made up.

  “Please do not leave,” she begged. “I need you here with me.”

  “They need me more,” he said, his eyes wetting.

  “The dangers are so many.”

  “I have made up my mind,” Darby said.

  “Take them to Meadowlark,” she said suddenly, then, “If you could only wait a few days.”

  “They will not wait in this place. They believe this land is cursed and so do I.”

  “You will need a wagon and several yoke of oxen,” she said. “Rifles and provisions. Take them. Take whatever you need.”

  “Thank you,” he said.

  She studied his face. This place was as if a minister of truth revealing, and those truths were simple and hard and cared little for the manners of human beings. She felt inside the breaking of whatever faith she possessed in mankind. Whatever she’d thought the potential of progressive values and scientific education, human evolution, maybe it was all a kind of foolishness. For all the slave lords the war had killed, a new generation was born in their ashes and born inside the new generation was the enmity of the old.

  The reverend doctor came from his quarters, pen in hand.

  “What is happening?” he said.

  Her spirit seemingly gone, the shadow of a smile formed on her lips. She lifted his pen hand.

  “It’s nothing,” she said. “I must go. I will explain all to you when we gather for dinner this evening.”

  Michael was with Khyber, leading her about in a tight circle, smoothing her flanks with a brush he held. He stopped when he saw Elizabeth coming.

  Why are you crying? he wanted to say, but he didn’t. It wasn’t his place to intrude.

  “Darby is leaving,” she said. “I begged him not to.”

  “Walk with us for a while if you’d like.”

  “I’ll leave you to your walk,” she said.

  “Please,” he said. “Come along.”

  She gave in and they crossed the creek and went onto the bluff. He told her he thought her decision was inspired and Meadowlark was the place for Starling’s people. They continued to walk west in silence into the last daylight. Soon the skinners would be returning.

  “I am afraid Darby will hardly get back on his own,” she said.

  “There’s nothing you can do,” Michael said. “He’s made up his mind.”

  “Then you spoke to him?”

  “He came to me.”

  “You’ll go out in the morning?” she said.

  “Yes,” he said. “I will take Matthew and Mark.”

  DAY BY DAY SHE’D witnessed Michael’s recession. Day by day she’d watched him as he hardened and she knew he needed to leave. If only he could hold out a little longer, time enough for Matthew and Mark to learn what he knew.

  That night Elizabeth wanted to remember or forget, but she was not sure which, and it was not a decision she could make for herself, but soon the decision was made and she was remembering and then she was remembering too much.

  She r
ecalled the letters she received from the wounded, long since dwindled to a few a year. I remember the great work you did during the war. You nursed me when I was sick and wounded nigh unto death back to life and health.

  I saw your war, she thought. I saw it every day for three years: cups of coffee, ladles of soup, linen; blood, pus, broken backs; the sick, wounded, and crippled; human bodies shot, ripped, and torn in every conceivable way . . . the great laundry kettles, the mangles driven backward and forward by wheel with rack and pinion, ironing machines and other machines for laundering on largest scale.

  And earlier in the war, on the edge of shifting battlefields when shot and shell fell into the hospital, the men and boys in unbearable agony. At night, under the white flag, into the fields with stretchers, listening for the groans of wounded men left behind. In snow and blizzard, in rain and wind, with storm lantern to find the men bleeding and dying and bring them in. Sixteen-­year-­old babies, weak and wasted, with unwashed bodies wrapped in flannel and fouled by fever and disease, their dead faces and sightless eyes.

  Writing bedside farewell letters, collecting the watches and money and any little thing to be sent home: lockets, rings, pins, and brooches they carried into battle; the precious photographs of mother, wife, children, sister, sweetheart; the photographs of hundreds of thousands of orphans, widows, and boyless mothers. Men who fought had left pieces of themselves strewn across the earth and everywhere they went they hopelessly looked for themselves as ghosts are said to do. What awful scenes in my mind. Sleeping or waking they are with me. I hear the cries and the moans of each and every one of them as they went down to the gates of death and passed through to the other side or came back out forever changed.

  What victory for me, she wondered. What noble defeat? What memories of comrades in the field singing around the campfire? What whores and liquor? What plunder? What gain? What profit? What glory? What glory?

  And yet here she was and in the pursuit of liberating herself she was making decisions that killed men and beasts. It was as if she’d led Daragh to beneath the lightning and Abel to the rabies and Pastor Starling to Ike.