Sudden Country

by Loren D. Estleman

  They capped the horizon, looking as tall as the sparse evergreens that studded that rocky slope and nearly as inanimate, only their feathers and plaited hair moving in the wind. It seemed at first that there were hundreds. In truth they were but a score. In that moment I realized the tales I had read in the Knickerbocker books, of handfuls of plucky frontiersmen standing off hordes of redskins, were not so much outright lies as innocent exaggerations. Fear is the great multiplier.

  The odds were sufficiently daunting. Drawn together though we now were by race and mutual survival, without McPhee and Aintchell we were just fourteen, and they held the high ground with rifles and carbines in hand and the sun in our eyes. They wore, in addition to the traditional savage regalia, white men’s cotton shirts with the sleeves torn off and simple geometric designs painted on in bright colors–the “ghost shirts” of infamy. I did not doubt that this was Lives Again and his band of renegades from Standing Rock; flushed with their late victory over their pursuers, serene in the belief that their charmed tunics would preserve them from harm, the taste of Corporal Panther’s blood still upon their tongues. In my mind’s eye I saw a cadre of vultures circling over my own poor remains.

  Still they did not move. It seemed hours. It was probably moments. I began to hope …

  “Tom, no!”

  Ben Wedlock’s shout brought me around just as he lunged to slap aside the barrel of our young traitor’s rifle.

  In that instant it discharged. Dirt and pebbles spattered one of the horses on the hill. The animal blew and reared. While its rider struggled for control–a war-horse it most decidedly was not–another brave leveled his carbine across his own mount’s neck and fired. Tom cried out and fell.

  There would be no peace that day. More shots followed, whether from our side or theirs I cannot say now and could not tell then, for in the next moment the fighting became general. With brain-curdling whoops and cries the riders charged down the slope, firing under and over their horses’ necks and maneuvering the animals at full gallop between and around rocks and trees as if one brain controlled both horse and rider. Now and then in my sleep I still hear bullets whizzing past me and wake up shouting.

  For me, the fight lasted less than a minute. I have spent many hours dissecting those movements I witnessed and was part of, and have concluded that there were at least twenty. I saw the Deacon, as erect as on those Sundays when he read from the Book of Genesis to all who would listen, steadying his pistol across one forearm and firing in a precise hammering rhythm, with measured spaces between shots; Eli Freedman unlashing the team belonging to Judge Blod’s wagon and shooting one of the animals so beloved of him to create a breastwork; the Judge’s ample backside retreating toward a part of that country not overrun by Indians; Christopher Agnes whirling a sack of snakes around his head and letting fly into the arms of a startled Indian bearing down upon him. These things I saw and more, despite Mr. Knox’s attempts to push me under the wagon while fending off attackers with the pistol in his other hand. Eventually he became too involved in the latter activity, and I moved away from his protection.

  I do not know to this day whether it was a bullet that clipped me or the butt of a long gun, for it was in the nature of those Indians to use their firearms as bludgeons when they were among us. I remember taking aim at a human being for the first time in my life, and I remember that by some miracle I had managed after all to snatch my inherited Navy from the pile. I remember too that my target was a superbly ugly creature with his face painted in halves of black and vermilion, busy closing in upon a distracted Will Asper. After that I remember nothing except an explosion of pain and sudden nausea, followed by a black void.

  Chapter 16

  MAD ALICE

  Reality was a slow dawning through a gauzy window. I lay without moving, seeing objects around me without registering their place or function, while a slothful kind of panic spread through me, of time lost and an appointment of mortal importance missed. So potent was this fear that for minutes I did not notice the pain in my head. When I raised it, lightning arced, blinding me. I fell back with a gasp. A cushion fashioned from some scratchy material sewn inside scratchy material supported my head. I was in a bed of some kind. Mine? Had I, in one of the periodic fevers that swept through my place and time, merely dreamed all of the events from Jotham Flynn on? Would my mother at any moment enter with her unspeakable soup and assure me that all was as it had always been? I cannot say now whether this information would have relieved or distressed me.

  “Calvin, you never will learn to duck when that crazy piebald scoots under the apple tree.”

  The voice, an aural personification of the creaking inside my head, broke into a wheezy cackle. Decidedly it did not belong to my mother. Out of the corner of one eye I saw a figure seated beside the bed that I will not at this point describe, for fear the reader will think me unrecovered from the blow to my head. I was not certain myself.

  “Swallow this.” A crusty hand stole behind my neck, supporting it as a black spoon that had once been silver came to my lips.

  The odor that filled my nostrils from the liquid in the bowl of the spoon was indescribable, but not unpleasant; and warm. Emphatically, it did not remind me of my mother’s sickbed brew. My stomach growled then and I realized that much time had passed since it had held anything. Obediently I opened my mouth. The flavor was familiar and welcome; a meat broth. Greedily I accepted another spoonful and yet another. No feast was ever appreciated more. I asked what it was. My own voice was nearly as creaky as the one that answered.

  “Venison and something that fell in the pot while I was stirring. I don’t think it was a rat. Lizard, likely. Drink up, Calvin. There’s more where it came from.”

  I declined politely. The explanation had added more ominous noises to those already issuing from my insides. “Who is Calvin?” I asked.

  Cackle. “You’re who’s Calvin, boy! I guess that piebald fetched you up proper. Sleep’s the cure. You just lay back now and let Mother see to your chores.”

  Trying to make sense of the things she said did little for my headache. I think I did sleep. In any case, when next I opened my eyes, the cabin was in darkness.

  I say “cabin.” In truth it was a dugout affair with rounded walls smelling richly of earth, logs laid across the front, and a square of buckskin hanging over what I presumed was the entrance. These things I remember from my first awakening, for they were shadowed now beyond the reach of a rude tallow lamp burning greasily upon a pedestal table of eastern manufacture. Between it and my bed, noisily asleep with its mouth open in a warped rocking chair, sat the creature who had addressed me as Cal-yin.

  This, I had divined, was female, although little about its appearance suggested the gender. Tiny it was–Judge Blod would have seemed a giant next to it–wrapped in a short hide jacket whose sleeves came almost to its fingertips and a skirt of some sturdy dark material, beneath which poked a pair of man’s brogans worn nearly transparent in the toes. They would be concealed completely when the figure stood. At the other end, under a hat with a narrow flat brim overgrown with faded artificial flowers, a comical face with a bulbous nose performed as trumpet for a remarkable scale of snores. Dirty yellow hair slanted down under the hat’s brim all around, like shocked corn.

  This collection would have lifted eyebrows anywhere. I thought of illustrations I had seen in children’s books of gnomes and trolls who dwelt beneath bridges and challenged the right of wayfarers to pass over. But I knew now that she was real; just as I knew, with a sickening sensation of guilt, that through capricious fate I had been spared the destiny of my companions, whose scalps by now were certainly decorating the lances of Lives Again’s renegades.

  Today, whenever I suffer the discomforts of age, I like to remember the night I raised myself from bed with what was probably at least a mild concussion, wanting desperately to drift back into seductive sleep but wanting more (with no real idea of what I would do once I got there) to return to the pl
ace where I had left Mr. Knox, Judge Blod, Deacon Hecate, and the others in the midst of say-ages. Blood sloshed inside my head, made heavy by a coarse bandage wound several times around it. Twice I nearly lost consciousness. Once I lost my balance and fell against the pedestal table, upsetting the lamp and causing the old woman to stir in her sleep and say something that was not much less comprehensible than the things she said when she was awake. I righted the lamp and lowered stockinged feet to a floor of icy bedrock. She had removed only my boots, and these I found when I stepped on one at the foot of the bed. I picked them up and crept unsteadily on the balls of my feet toward the buckskin flap.

  The air outside was cold but dry. Under a tattered moon the familiar rounded shapes of the Black Hills crawled against a charcoal sky. That much was comforting, although I did not know from which direction I was looking at them or whether I was scant yards or several miles away from the place where I had seen them last. Where to go?

  Even in my foggy state I knew that it did not matter where I went if I did not have a horse under me. Surely the old woman’s poor brogans could not carry her the distances she would have to travel to survive in that wilderness; nor could someone of her diminutive stature have carried me very far on foot. I looked for a stable, and found one. A poor thing it was, constructed of crooked poles arranged in a stockade against a pile of fallen rocks with a roof intended more to provide shade from the sun than for protection from rain and snow, but I detected restless movement between the poles and heard a shuddering snort. I pulled on my boots and started that way.

  I tripped on something, barking a shin, and threw out a hand to break my fall. Halfway down it grasped something rigid. Pushing myself erect, I saw that I was standing in a patch of wooden crosses, one of which had arrested my descent. There were five, each protruding above an oblong mound of stones. I had stumbled into a small graveyard. I felt a chill. Were these victims of the old woman, and was a sixth cross intended for me?

  Circling the patch hurriedly, I undid a crude latch and stepped through a door into manure-sodden darkness. A large animal blew and shifted its weight. Very slowly my eyes adjusted to the moonlight sifting in between the poles overhead. The first thing I saw clearly was a man stretched out on the ground at my feet.

  I lunged backward, bumping the back of my bandaged head against the door. A red wash obscured my vision; again I almost fell, and clutched at a pole for support. The enclosure swayed. The animal wickered and fiddlefooted to the opposite side.

  “Please don’t do that again. I have not come this far to be trampled to death.”

  In my delirium the voice sounded familiar. As my sight returned–more slowly than the first time–I saw in the striped moonlight that the supine figure wore a cavalry tunic over leggings. Above it, one eye rolling white, stood a fine big tawny drayhorse, very old. The man appeared at first to be lying comfortably with his hands laced behind his head, but then I saw that they were tied with a thong to one of the poles that supported the roof. His hair was long and dark and unfettered.

  “Corporal Panther?” I whispered. This, I knew, was the proper tone in which to address a ghost.

  “Who are you?” There was hope and suspicion in his voice, most un-ghostlike.

  “David Grayle. I am–was–with Deacon Hecate’s party. Are you alive?”

  “The prospectors. I remember.” Irony now. “I have not passed over just yet. Was?”

  “We were set upon by renegades. I woke up here. The others–” I changed the subject. “We thought you were dead.”

  “I thought the same thing when my horse was shot out from under me.”

  I knew now why the vulture had been circling. “Lives Again?”

  “Mad Alice.”

  “Who?”

  “The old woman. Star-Touched Woman, she is called among the Sioux. I’ve heard stories about her all my life. I assumed she was long dead.”

  “Who is she?”

  “No one knows, really. The whites call her Mad Alice but if she even remembers her right name she’s never been heard to use it. They say she came out here in the fifties in a wagon with her husband and three children. Blackfeet slaughtered the others, raped her, and left her to die, but she fooled them and survived. By then she was crazy, or maybe she always was. Crow warriors built the dugout and this stable to please the Great Spirit, who favors the insane. I imagine this old nag is another bit of tribute, stolen as a colt from some long-gone farming family. How she’s lived this long is beyond me. Maybe the Crow were right.”

  “She called me Calvin.”

  “That’s the name on one of the graves outside,” he said. “I saw that much while she was marching me in here at the point of a musket as old as my father. She must think you’re one of her dead sons. That explains why you’re not trussed up.”

  “Why are you?”

  “The Sioux and Blackfeet are old enemies. She seems to think the Blackfeet are holding her family and that she can bargain for their release by offering to turn me over for torturing. That’s when she remembers me at all. When she put her horse in here yesterday and saw me she almost shot me. I had to remind her of her plan.”

  “What if she goes through with it?”

  “There haven’t been any Blackfeet in this country for years. I’ll starve to death before she gives me to them. She hasn’t fed me in days.”

  He sounded desperately weak. I saw then that his coat was stained and that the wound in his side had broken open. “You’re bleeding!”

  “Never mind that. See if you can untie me.”

  I bent and worked at the knot. The thong was made of rawhide and I scratched at it with my nails until they bled. Finally he said, “You’ll have to cut it.”

  “I haven’t a knife.”

  “Get one from the dugout.”

  I paused. “She’s in there.”

  “That’s no problem for a loving son.”

  I stared at him, but there was no trace of humor in the Indian features. I straightened and left the stable.

  The old woman was still snoring fearsomely. In silence I lowered the buckskin flap behind me, retrieved the tallow lamp, and conducted a search on tiptoe of the dugout. This did not take long. It was scrupulously neat for an earthen construction and contained only the bed, her chair, the table, a barrel of meat packed in salt, some scorched pots under the smokehole where a fire had burned recently inside a circle of rocks, a homemade broom, and a chest of drawers suggestive of some eastern parlor, but which had dried and cracked for lack of oil. Inside the drawers, amidst an incongruous conglomeration of silver-backed hairbrushes, sacks of black powder, button hooks, hide-scrapers, jewelry, and fifty-caliber musket balls, I found my Navy Colt’s and the leathern sack containing the Confederate note with Jotham Flynn’s map sketched on the end. I stared at the last in the flickering light. Recent events had chased all thoughts of Yankee treasure from my mind. Finally I returned the note to the sack, pocketed it, selected a paring knife with a chipped bone handle from among the utensils in the top drawer, and thrust it and the pistol inside my belt. I turned to go.

  “Calvin, you bad boy. How many times have I told you not to play with things that don’t belong to you?”

  So caught up was I in my search I had failed to notice that Mad Alice had stopped snoring. Now I faced the tiny old woman, standing bright-eyed behind a flintlock musket with a bore as big around as a fifty-cent piece. And then, studying me closely, she squinted one eye and said three words that scant hours ago I would not have believed could chill me as much as they did.

  “You ain’t Calvin.”

  Chapter 17

  THE FIFTH GRAVE

  I had, I confess, a sudden urge to deny her assertion. The ancient weapon was fearsome, and life as her son appeared more gratifying than the prospect of my entrails ornamenting the earthen walls of her home. However, mad though she may have been, to assume stupidity on her part as well could have been instantly fatal.

  I said, “My name is David Grayl
e. I am a prospector.”

  “I remember. I scraped you off the ground with a ditch alongside your head deep enough to strike water. At the time I thought you was my boy. Renegade white, I expect. Nobody prospects these hills, two yards deep in Blackfeet. That your tribe?” The musket twitched. I had no doubt what an answer in the affirmative would bring.

  “My party was attacked by Indians. You must have seen that a fight had taken place.”

  “I seen sign.” Memory grappled with her demented state for control of her face. “Sure, there was a dead one close by.”

  My chest constricted. “An Indian?”

  “White. Who was it done the attacking, Blackfeet?”

  In my anguish over which of my companions she had found slain, I very nearly made the response I sensed she wished to hear. At the last instant I said, “No, I think they were Sioux.”

  Immediately I realized how close I had come to annihilation; for after a pause she lowered the musket, keeping the hammer in firing position. “I smelt Sioux. You said Blackfeet, I’d of knowed you was one of them. These here times you can’t be too…”

  Her voice lost definition. The room spun and the bedrock floor opened beneath me.

  When my vision returned, I was back in bed. Mad Alice was in her chair. There was concern in her humorous features. The room had lightened and I knew that I had slept away the night at least. I wondered, with the sudden clarity of understanding that sometimes comes upon awakening, if to her I was her boy Calvin once again, and that I would have to go through the same process a second time. Her first words laid that fear to rest.