by Bill Brooks
She caught a movement out of the corner of her eye, something that passed by one of the windows. She nearly dropped her glass. She held her breath, afraid almost to the point of screaming. She listened. Fire crackled in the hearth. The rooms were warm with light but outside all was blackness and wind. Pellets of snow pecked the windows.
Her imagination? Still, she held her breath, listening. There was nothing but the wind, it seemed. She went and checked on the girls. They were asleep in their beds. She felt suddenly tired, the brandy having turned her blood sluggish, making her limbs heavy.
She checked the bolt on the door to make sure it was secure, even though the doors were rarely locked. She went then into Bill’s study, where the hideous mounted heads of animals he’d slain looked down from the walls at her with glass eyes, and she took a pistol from a case—one that General Custer had presented him—a long-barreled pistol with ivory grips. She didn’t know what sort of pistol it was, but Bill had shown her once how it should be used—“Make sure you got shells in it is most important,” he teased. And he showed her how to cock the hammer back, explaining that it was a “single-action”—that the hammer had to be thumbed back in order to pull the trigger.
“Now, you be mighty careful, Lulu, you don’t shoot yourself or one of the girls.”
It was heavy.
She carried it upstairs with her. It was, in a way, a comfort to her and, in a way, it frightened her all the more that she might need to use it.
She undressed and used the chamber pot and climbed into bed, unsure of just where she should place the pistol to keep it handy. Then a terrible thought occurred to her: What if in the night one of the girls got up and came into her room and she mistakenly shot the child as an intruder?
Oh God.
She rose and took the pistol and put it into a drawer in the bureau on the other side of the room. Far enough away not to make such a fatal mistake, she told herself, and yet not so far away that she couldn’t get it if need be.
Once in bed, she turned onto her side and lay there staring at the dancing little flame inside the lamp’s chimney. As always, it mesmerized her. And in spite of her fears, she soon fell into a weary sleep.
But then, sometime during the night, she awakened without reason and lay there staring into the dark, the lamp without oil and thus without flame. She lay there barely breathing, certain that someone was there in the room with her.
“Bill,” she said softly. “Is that you, Bill?”
Silence.
She could sense someone there but the room was completely dark and the storm still raged and the windows still rattled and the wind still moaned along the eves.
Her whole being began to tremble and she thought what a terrible mistake it was to have put the gun in the drawer across the room.
“Orra,” she said. “Irma, Arta? Is that you, darlings?”
The house creaked.
She tried desperately not to scream.
She thought that surely her heart would stop.
It did not.
She made a desperate lunge from the bed, scrambled blindly to the door and, flinging it open, went running down the hall to her daughters’ bedroom. Her motherly instinct was to protect them first.
She found the lamp in their room, the box of matches, and lit the wick. The room glowed with buttery light and her daughters were as she’d left them, sleeping little angels. She felt such great relief. She’d been foolish, a frightened child herself. She quickly left before she awoke any of them and, carrying the lamp, went cautiously back to her room, turning the flame up higher.
She looked around and saw no one there.
It was just some silly old dream I’d been having. This storm has ruined my nerves.
She moved toward the bed. She guessed by the level of the oil yet left in the lamp that there would be enough to burn until dawn. No matter. She told herself she probably wouldn’t sleep any more this night. Perhaps she would go downstairs and bake cookies for the girls and biscuits for breakfast. Yes, that is exactly what she would do. It would take her mind off things and if she needed to sleep eventually, she could do it during the day.
Still telling herself how foolish she’d been and feeling better, she started out of the room, then remembered the pistol and turned and opened the bureau drawer where she’d put it.
It was not there.
Oh, dear. My nerves have truly betrayed me. Had it been a dream that she’d brought the pistol up to the room with her and placed it in the bureau drawer? Oh, she was so confused.
Well, if someone were in the house, they surely would have killed her in her bed by now, for that was the nature of monsters who broke into other people’s houses—to kill them in their beds and rob them blind.
Oh, you’re just being a foolish old ninny.
Steeling herself with the absurdness of her wild imagination, she went downstairs and into the kitchen to bake cookies and biscuits and otherwise spend away the last hours of night and wait for the dawn to come, and with it, she was sure, would be a nice sun and crystalline sky. A new day where no wolves or ghouls or crazy women or murderous house-breakers would be found.
He was sitting there in the kitchen at the table and he had a gun and was a very young man with black hair and dark features and he said, “Ma’am. Are you Mrs. Buffalo Bill?”
She thought she might scream but something in his manner warned her it was better if she did not.
“Have you come to murder us all?” she said, surprised at how calmly she’d asked him the question.
“No. I’ve come to kill your husband, is all.”
She swallowed, trying to relieve the dryness in her throat.
“My husband is not here,” she said.
“I know,” the young man said. “I already looked around.” And she realized that he had been in her room when she’d awakened and she saw now that the gun he was holding was the ivory-handled pistol she’d placed earlier in the bureau drawer.
“I’d like a cup of coffee and I’m very hungry,” the young man said.
She stood frozen, not quite sure what to do. Perhaps he did not know about her sleeping children and, like a mother hen, she thought it best if she distracted him from her little brood by being cooperative, and if he was going to murder someone, let it be her and not her daughters.
“It will take me a few moments to make coffee,” she said.
“I’ve got all the time in the world,” he said.
She went about preparing him coffee and fixing him something to eat—some slices of salted beef and he sat there, calmly watching her. She felt brazen and vulnerable being watched by a complete stranger while she was dressed only in her nightgown and robe. But he surely was too young to have such lascivious thoughts and she surely was too old.
Finally when she poured him a cup of coffee and handed him the plate of salted beef, he said, “Please sit down. There.” He waggled the pistol’s barrel to an empty chair across from him and she sat immediately.
She watched him eat and could see sorrow in his eyes.
Why, he can’t be more than sixteen or seventeen, she told herself.
“If you’ve come to rob us, we have so little but take what you want.”
He shook his head as he chewed.
“No. I haven’t come to rob you,” he said. “I’ve come here for only one reason and that is to kill your husband.”
“May I ask why you want to kill my husband?”
“Because he killed my father. Blood for blood. That seems fair, doesn’t it? Don’t white people believe in that sort of justice—an eye for an eye?”
She shrugged.
“Who was your father?” she said. She really didn’t want to know any of these things, of course. She didn’t wish to be having this conversation or to be sitting here in her own house with a stranger holding a pistol. This was the sort of madness that men like her husband and his friends attracted—men of violence, men with guns and crazy ideas.
He told h
er his father’s name was Yellow Hand and that he was once a great Cheyenne chief and that his killing must be revenged. He then told her that after he killed Buffalo Bill he was going to the land of his people and reclaim his heritage.
“You speak awfully well for an…”
“Indian,” he said, completing her sentence. “You’ve got pretty children,” he said.
She gasped.
“Don’t worry,” he said.
“How can I not when you’re sitting there holding a gun and have broken into our house?”
“It’s cold outside, that’s why I broke in. That, and I wanted to find that husband of yours.”
“Please,” she said. “Don’t hurt the children.”
He looked at her then with a certain disdain.
“I don’t kill people if I don’t have to.”
She didn’t say anything.
He said, “Can I have some more coffee, please?”
She thought him an awfully strange and frightening young man but went and got him more coffee nonetheless and prayed that Buffalo Bill’s uncanny luck would hold for a time longer and spare her and the girls a horrible fate.
Chapter 33
A blue dusk settled over the land as they rode into camp. White Eye and Jane had started fires while the women had helped Yankee and John re-pitch the tents that had blown down in the storm. They all stopped and looked up at the approach of the riders.
John saw that there were three, not four. He saw what they were hauling on a travois. The women saw it too. John stepped in front of them and said, “Easy.”
Rudolph Banks spurred his horse ahead and rode into camp first, rode up to where his wife stood with Anne and said, without dismounting, “Something’s happened to Edgar.”
They looked at him, then back toward the mounted riders—Billy and Teddy—who stopped just shy of the camp, not wanting to bring the corpse all the way in.
“Best we drop him here for the time,” Billy suggested.
Teddy looked back ’round and saw that the body was still bundled tightly inside the buffalo robe, then dismounted and Billy did too, both of them weary from the long eventful ride.
Emma stood with her hand on her husband’s knee, not fully comprehending what had happened to Edgar, disbelieving that anything could have happened to him. Anne stood next to her, her gaze going from the object on the travois to Teddy Blue walking toward the fire.
“He’s dead,” Rudolph said to the women. “He was killed in a horrible accident.”
Yankee and White Eye and Jane came over from the camp and stood among the others.
“It was a bear,” Billy said, then dropped his gaze.
Then for a moment there was just the stillness of the falling night.
“Oh, Edgar,” Emma said, almost as a whisper, a prayer, but one that wouldn’t get answered.
“We thought it best to bring him back,” her husband said. “It just didn’t seem right to leave him out there,” and he turned halfway in his saddle and looked back into the direction they’d just come, into the pale darkness that would soon be pitch night.
Emma began to cry but not loudly. Anne’s face turned to a frozen mask of disbelief. For while she wasn’t sure at all that she’d loved Edgar, this seemed like an unbelievable fate.
John said, “There’s hot coffee and supper will be ready soon. I imagine you boys had it pretty hard.”
Nobody said if they’d had it hard or not.
“I’m truly sorry,” Billy said to the women. “I truly am.”
Rudolph Banks dismounted at last, his motion like that of a hundred-year-old man. And when his wife put her arms around him, he began to cry and nobody thought any less of him because he did.
Everyone began to ease back to the camp, toward the fires, toward light and life, such as it was and away from the cold encroaching darkness. Everyone but Teddy and Anne.
He didn’t know what to say to her, nor she to him.
“I want to see his face one last time,” she said finally.
“You sure?”
Their eyes met and he walked out with her to the body and took out his knife and cut one of the upper ropes and with his good hand pulled back the hide enough so she could look at Edgar’s face. His flesh was bloodless now but for where the bear had raked and bit him. The dry frozen blood was the color of rust. Teddy had not lowered the hide enough for her to see the throat.
Anne knelt there in the snow next to the body and kissed the tips of her fingers and pressed them to Edgar’s lips, noting as she did how like ice they felt. Teddy eased the flap back over the face, said, “Enough, don’t torture yourself with this.”
Something broke in her and he thought she would cry, but she did not and he helped her to her feet.
“It is payment for my sin,” she said. “I was unfaithful to him and now this is God’s punishment.”
“You don’t believe that,” Teddy said.
“Then tell me what it is I’m supposed to believe, Mr. Blue? Tell me why he had to pay for my sin with his life and now I must live with that fact?”
“I don’t have any answers to questions like that. I just don’t think it’s what you think it is. This is hard country, Anne; there are a hundred ways to die out in this country. It could just as easily have happened to any one of us. Sin hasn’t got anything to do with it—yours or mine.”
He looked down at the robe.
“And whatever sins he may have committed had nothing to do with it either.”
She turned away and walked back to camp and he followed her.
There was silence around the fire and Teddy came and stood close because he’d never been so goddamned cold in his life as he was that very minute. John came over and stood next to him and looked at the binding around him and said, “What happened to you?”
“I think I broke my shoulder.”
Billy spoke up and said, “He was shooting that bear off Mr. Rice and it swiped him and broke his shoulder.”
He saw the way Anne looked at him when Billy said that.
“Come on in my tent and let me doctor you,” Jane said. “Go grab a bottle of liquor, Yankee.”
White Eye looked at her, looked at Yankee, looked back at her.
“I can get it,” he said.
But Yankee already had gone off to the supply wagon and was pulling a bottle out of it.
Inside the tent Jane and Yankee helped him off with his coat, then his shirt, and he almost bit his tongue off when they did. Yankee thrust the bottle at him and said, “Start working on this, old son.”
Teddy drank while Jane washed the parts of his flesh the bear’s claws had raked. She pulled out fragments of his shirt from the blood-crusted places and washed it with some of the whiskey, then handed him back the bottle as she applied fresh bandages, saying, “You’ll need a real doctor to fix that shoulder.”
They eased him back to a reclining position on the blankets and then covered him with more blankets and Jane rubbed warmth into his feet while Yankee squatted on his heels and watched and drank some of the liquor too.
“You feel like eating?” Jane said.
He shook his head.
“Maybe come morning you will,” she said. “You just rest here tonight. I’ll sleep in your tent.”
He was amazed at how utterly exhausted he felt.
One moment, he could hear them all outside talking and see the flickering lights of the campfires through the canvas walls of the tent, and the next he found himself falling in and out of sleep.
Rudolph announced to the women that because of what had happened that they would be starting back for North Platte at first light and once arrived would catch the first flier east. And also that he would have Edgar’s remains shipped home with them to be buried back in New York.
He said all this with a steady sonorous voice as though he was making a business decision and no one disputed his plans.
“We owe a great debt to Mr. Blue for risking his own life to save that of Edgar’s
,” Banks said. “Colonel, I want to make sure that he is rewarded financially for his efforts, something we’ll discuss in more detail later.”
Then Banks looked at his wife and said, “I’m all in. I can’t go another step tonight. Will you help me to our bed, dear?”
They stood together and walked off to their tent, the eyes of the others watching them.
Billy was still trying to warm his feet and had asked White Eye to retrieve them each a bottle of liquor from the wagon, and White Eye gladly did. The lot of them sat around with their eyes full of firelight, passing the bottles back and forth between them. Nobody said much. The mood was somber and black as the night itself.
And when at last Billy stood and walked to his tent and climbed in it, John stood and said, “Mr. White Eye, since Teddy’s not up to standing night watch, I wonder if you’d split it with me?”
White Eye wasn’t in much position to turn down such a request, seeing as how things had gone so far on this sorrowful evening.
“Yes, sir. You want me to stand first watch or second?”
“I’m best when I’ve slept a few winks first,” John said. “I’ll take second watch.”
Then John stood and went to his own tent, taking what was left of one bottle with him, leaving the other three there at the fire.
White Eye looked at Jane and he looked at Yankee and he could see there was something transpiring between them, and even unsaid, it was plain enough what it was that he didn’t want to see any more of it. He got up and walked over and took a rifle and an extra blanket and off from the camp to stand watch.
He climbed up the sand hill and settled into the snowy notch with the blanket pulled over his shoulders and sat there watching down on the camp where the fires burned and he watched until he saw Jane stand up and walk over to the empty tent and crawl inside. Then he saw Yankee stand up and walk over there and crawl inside too.
He thought he ought to feel a lot worse about it than he did. But somehow he didn’t and it troubled him that he didn’t, for he was until that moment sure that he was in love with Jane about as bad as a man can be in love with a woman.
