Dying Thunder

by Terry C. Johnston

  Just as evil as was the shiny disk with its dancing needle before he smashed it into the white man’s forehead.

  In the days since that attack, he had been leading the war party north by west in a rambling course across the open, rolling countryside without seeing as much as a sign of any more white men. These were good days, with little to concern them, for the soldiers had all marched south of them now, he supposed, sorting through it in his dull way like a bear scratching at a rotten tree stump, clawing away at the ants and bees and grubs he brought to his pink tongue. But those soldiers were chasing after Stone Calf and the rest, trying to herd the slippery Kwahadis onto the reservation. Perhaps, Medicine Water told himself repeatedly, he could even lead his little war party far enough north now to reach their cousins among the Northern Cheyenne: Lame Deer and Little Bear and Two Moons. From the land, they would take what they needed in the way of food. There were antelope and deer aplenty.

  And if they ran across any white men, travelers or settlers, then his warriors would take what they wanted.

  It seemed very simple in his untroubled equation of life.

  “Medicine Water!”

  He was shaken from his lazy reverie atop the back of his rocking pony by the shouts coming from one of the young scouts racing back to the war party.

  “A wagon!”

  “Only one?” he asked, sneering with disappointment.

  The young scout nodded. “Moving west. Not far.”

  “How many men?”

  “One riding. Another walking beside the wagon.”

  “Only two white men?” asked Buffalo Calf Woman, her tongue flicking across her dry lips, dark eyes searching her husband’s.

  This time the scout shook his head. “No, there are others.”

  Medicine Water grinned. “Women?” Then he felt his wife’s eyes on him.

  “Yes,” and he held up the fingers on his grimy hand. “At least that many. Two walking. The rest riding in the wagon.”

  “Do they have a lot for us to steal?” Buffalo Calf Woman inquired, her eyes brightened by the prospect.

  The scout’s head bobbed eagerly.

  “Two men … and five women,” and with the way his mouth watered, and the manner in which he said it, Medicine Water knew immediately he had made his wife angry.

  Buffalo Calf Woman was glowering at him. Then she smiled, playing with a long, greasy sprig of her own hair, an evil glint come to her eye. “Scalps are scalps, my husband. If they are a man’s … even if they are a woman’s.”

  * * *

  She still looked at the world through a child’s eyes. Yet this was to be the fourth month she would again expect the “woman’s surprise,” as her mother called it.

  Four months ago Sophia German had started bleeding. She was becoming a woman—so said her mother and three older sisters. Sophia wasn’t sure she was ready for that just yet. She wasn’t yet ready to let go being a child.

  This great, rolling land offered so much play beneath the deep late-summer blue canopy arching over them day after long, long day of marching west, following Papa’s dream of reaching the Rockies of Colorado. The fifth of seven children born to John and Lydia German, Sophia still looked at things through a child’s eyes. Even this work of coming west, and work it had been.

  She had been born in the spring, thirteen years before on the family farm back in the Blue Ridge Mountain country of northwestern Georgia. And almost as far back as Sophia could remember, Papa had talked about Colorado: the great, yawning, untouched valleys waiting for his plow, a grand land draped endlessly as far as the eye could see below the immeasurable bulk of mountains that ran from horizon to distant horizon, each one still capped with snow in these late days of summer heat. He always told them these wistful tales of that Garden of Eden around the family table, and now at every evening fire—explaining again how he had begun dreaming of this far land back during the war when he had been a prisoner of the Yankees, listening to another Confederate who spoke longingly of the glowing letters he had received from a friend gone to the goldfields in the Rockies two years before the war. Cherry Creek. Cripple Creek. Why, even Denver City itself …

  When German limped home from that filthy, typhus-ridden prison at Rock Island, Illinois, Colorado had already become his obsession. There was nothing left in Georgia—the farm burned and ravaged by Sherman’s troops. So in some way, it seemed to John and Lydia that God had taken away just about everything so that He could make them ready to receive His blessed bounty in the west. The family prepared to make their way across the plains to the seductive lure of the Rockies.

  Starting with little, John German ran out of money after getting only as far as Sparta, Tennessee. By hiring out, doing what he could to feed his family for some time, the farmer was finally able to set aside enough so they could press on to Howell County, Missouri, where some of Lydia’s family lived. There they traded their wagon and ox team for a shabby cabin on 160 swampy acres of ground capable of growing little but mosquitoes and ague. For more than two years John German stuck it out and tried his best, watching his children grow sicker with tuberculosis from both the climate and the continued hunger.

  He was determined to move on and seize his dream.

  In Stone County, Missouri, German worked for his uncle across some four months so he could earn enough to reoutfit for the trip he vowed his family would finally make. From there the Germans moved west to Elgin County, Kansas, where both John and son Stephen, eighteen years old, hired out to work the fields on the Osage Reservation.

  After ten months of laboring for other people among the Osage, John German declared he would not be denied his dream of the Rockies. Lydia protested, as did the older children. Sophia herself recalled hearing the angry voices of her father and mother, along with sister Rebecca, who was twenty, and Stephen—the three of them bickering with Papa that they did not want to move on.

  On August 15, a day Sophia noted in her small journal, the Germans pulled away for the distant mountains with what little they owned tucked in a squeaky, much-used wagon.

  “We’ll head northwest from here,” John German had declared to them that morning before he slapped leather down on the backs of the oxen, his eyes afire with the promise close at hand. “When we strike the Union Pacific tracks on the Federal Road, we’ll follow them west. That Smoky Hill Road will get us where we want to go.”

  Sophia remembered looking at the faces of the others almost a month ago now, realizing that for her mother, brother and oldest sister, the Rockies were not where they wanted to go. Still, there had been happiness in last night’s camp among these rolling hills. Yesterday they had met an eastbound party who had informed them that with only another day’s travel they should reach Fort Wallace on the Smoky Hill Route. That meant two days from now they’d be in Colorado Territory. But while it would be many, many miles before they came across a settler’s cabin, they were nonetheless advised to stay close by the river, where they would be assured of plenty of water. Traveling alongside the railroad tracks, on the other hand, while it meant running across more people, also made for a much drier journey.

  Such excitement she had seen written on her papa’s face. Such celebration he made of that twilight campfire, speaking with so much accomplishment of the last nine years and the hard work of all to arrive at this threshold. Then John German had sent his family to bed early so that they could get an early start this morning.

  The dew had lasted longer than normal, so most of the younger ones had been riding, up and out of the tall, damp grass that soaked dry-split boots and knee stockings and dresses. Stephen was walking beside the plodding team, urging them from time to time with some persuasion from his willow switch.

  “Look, Pa,” he called back to his father on the wagon seat next to his mother. “Antelope.”

  John German nodded. “You do have the eyes of a hunter, Stephen.”

  “May I go try my hand, Pa?” Stephen asked eagerly. “Bring back something for Mama’s k
ettle tonight.”

  “Yes—go ahead,” John German replied with a smile. “In fact, I’ll go with you. Here, Lydia.” He handed his wife the reins and jumped to the ground, bounding up beside his son as they took off toward a saddle between two low hills.

  Rebecca and Catherine were both walking beside the wagon, driving the few plodding milk-cows along and wagering who would attract the first soldier to talk with her that afternoon when they arrived at Fort Wallace.

  Sophia laughed behind her hand at that, sneaking a listen to that silly talk of the older girls. Such discussions of young men always made Sophia laugh. She did not know why her older sisters got all cow-eyed when they talked of men, much less why Rebecca and Catherine got all spindly-kneed whenever a young man came around and started paying attention to one or the other of them.

  The air suddenly split with shrieks. Some from her older sisters. Distant warning carried across the waving grass.

  As she poked her head out the front of the wagon over her mother’s shoulder, she heard Lydia say something she knew she would never forget.

  “Dear merciful God in Heaven—deliver us!”

  What Sophia saw next she knew would stay just behind her eyes for as long as she would live.

  John German had yanked Stephen around, lunging at the youth. Then her brother showed he was more fleet, running faster, her papa lagging quickly behind, big-boned and heavyset as he was. Abruptly, he stopped, turning slowly to look back at his pursuers, more than twenty-five in all, now pouring through the saddle between those two low hills. Then Papa turned back to look at the wagon, waving his arms wildly, his chest suddenly a blossom of bright red staining that greasy shirt Mama washed and rewashed each week until it was ready to fall apart.

  A warrior, his long, loose hair lifting in the hot breeze that had dried the dew gathered on the tall, brittle stalks of buffalo grass, swept up behind her papa and drove an ugly, nail-studded club into the back of John German’s head as the white man slowed, the hole in his lungs taking its toll. Sophia saw part of the scalp and skull come away with that ugly club, caught among the long nails the way her little hand had looked just last winter, pulling at the bloody placental sacks when their old hound had shed her last litter in the tinderbox beside the cookstove.

  “John!” Lydia shrieked as she bolted down off the front of the wagon, hands drawing up her dress as she raced over the uneven ground.

  A trio of warriors reined up around her, laughing, preventing her from escaping the tight noose of their ponies as she shoved and fought against the animals, fists flailing in desperation and rage. Suddenly Lydia yanked on the bare, dirty leg of one of the warriors, attempting to shove her way to her husband.

  In a flash of glinting sunlight Sophia saw the warrior’s arm piston down against a background of pale blue sky, in his hand a tomahawk. A spray of blood shot from her mother’s head as Lydia collapsed to the grass, the lower half of her face gone, cleaved as horribly as Sophia remembered they would butcher a hog strung up behind the barn back home in Georgia so many years ago.

  Sophia was screaming along with the other girls, listening to their mother gurgle her last protests, then through her tears Sophia watched a grotesque figure rise from the grass behind the horse-mounted warriors. At first she wasn’t sure, blinking her hot eyes—then could tell from the bloodstained, greasy shirt. It was her father. He clambered to his feet, wobbly, the top of his head gone in a dark, shiny pulp. But somehow he stumbled forward two steps, lurched to a halt, then stumbled forward a bit more, one arm reaching out as if he meant to defend his wife and family from these naked, brown attackers.

  Approaching behind him, Sophia finally noticed the last rider, sitting wide and squat atop his pony, kicking the animal forward until the warrior reached her father. The Indian drove his tomahawk down into the back of her father’s head, leaving it there as John German slowly sank to his knees, then collapsed onto his face, disappearing into the grass.

  Rebecca’s terrified screams pulled Sophia around. She dove beneath the wagon bed, banging her head on the possumbelly where they carried extra firewood. A half-dozen warriors had Rebecca surrounded, laughing, playfully lunging at her, then retreating as she swung the firewood axe at her tormentors. Tears tracked the dust on her face as one finally swept in behind her and wrenched the axe free. A second lunged in and with both hands grabbed the collar of her long dress, ripping it downward in a loud rending, so that it hung at her waist.

  A third was there suddenly, his hands pulling and twisting at Rebecca’s breasts, another warrior ripping the dress off the young woman from behind her. Together four of them pushed her to the ground, each holding a leg or arm while a fifth pulled aside his breechclout, holding his stiffened manhood in his hand.

  At that moment Sophia knew she would never forget the sight of that—a man’s privates. She had seen horses and cattle, pigs and dogs and other male animals … but never a man’s. Gulping, wide-eyed and terrified, she watched as the warrior knelt between Rebecca’s outstretched legs and drove that stiffened flesh into her sister’s belly.

  Rebecca was struggling against the four who held her spread and the one who pinned her to the ground, shrieking as the first finished and a second exposed himself, plopping down atop the young woman when a hand suddenly yanked on Sophia’s hair, savagely dragging her from the shadows beneath the wagon.

  Yanked around like a child’s toy top, Sophia immediately recognized her tormentor as the large, fleshy warrior who had driven the tomahawk into her papa’s head, leaving it there as John German fell into the dusty, brittle grass. The warrior was laughing, a huge, stinking hole opened in the Indian’s face. Then something seemed wrong, out of place to the girl.

  This one was not dressed like the others. This warrior was not naked on legs and chest as were the rest. No—this one was not a warrior at all, but a woman. Her large, unbound breasts heaving as she laughed, that stench coming from her mouth as she dragged Sophia close, locking an arm cruelly around her neck.

  Elsewhere nearby, the other four sisters were by now captured, each held by a pair of warriors, forced to watch the brutal gang rape of Rebecca, made to listen to Rebecca’s screams, her begging the others to help.

  Sophia turned away, refusing to watch, seeing then the patch of browning blood high on Catherine’s left thigh. Her sister’s dress was torn around the leg wound, the broken, splintered shaft of an arrow still embedded in the girl’s thigh.

  Around Rebecca the brown-skinned men laughed, jumping and cavorting about, each taking their quick turns atop her naked, white body, her legs trembling now from pain and rage and terror, the creamy inside of her thighs flecked with blood from the manhood parts of the warriors, blood collected beneath in the thirsty soil. Yet something told Sophia some of that blood came from Rebecca’s own insides.

  At last it looked as if the brutalizing was over when one of the older warriors strode up, growling something to the others. They were done with Rebecca—done with their fun as the older one shooed the rest away. The eldest daughter was sobbing, rolling onto her hands and knees, calling out to her sisters as she clawed through the grass to retrieve the shreds of her clothing when the older warrior suddenly wheeled, pointed his pistol at her head, and pulled the trigger.

  The grass beneath Rebecca splattered with blood and brain as the naked white body collapsed, quivered, then lay still.

  The other five girls screeched in terror, having watched Rebecca’s fate as the older warrior walked up to them all, one by one fingering their hair, walking slowly from girl to girl, as if assessing the color and length.

  Sophia lunged for Joanna as her fifteen-year-old sister was pulled away from the others, led to the far side of the wagon. When other warriors were dragging Sophia and the rest of her sisters to the front of the wagon, she jerked to hear a single gunshot.

  Wildly kicking, Sophia tore away from her captors and rushed to the back of the wagon. The older warrior who had killed Rebecca stood hunched over Joanna,
his knife slicing off her long chestnut hair. It’s because her hair is the longest, Sophia thought—because Joanna’s hair is the longest.

  Then the warrior woman yanked Sophia off her feet, pulling her own hair, swinging the girl around to slap her brutally across the mouth. She collapsed, sobbing, near Joanna’s bloodied head as the warriors clambered into the wagon for the first time, tossing out boxes and crates and satchels and bedding. Clanking and banging and thudding, everything went onto the ground. These few possessions her father and mother had accumulated in their life together lay scattered on the prairie in a matter of seconds.

  Sophia smelled something burning, and turned to find two warriors had started a fire in the foot well of the wagon. Another four or five cut the team loose and drove the lumbering animals some distance from the wagon before they brought them down, yelling and yipping as if it were great sport to run down the slow, plodding oxen.

  “Oh, dear God—”

  Catherine’s quiet expression caused Sophia to turn back to the wagon where the bodies of her mother and father were being dragged up by their ankles, plopped into line with those of Rebecca, Joanna and finally Stephen’s. Sophia grew sickened as they scalped the last four, then a warrior went through her brother’s pockets, and finding nothing, slashed open his pants, cutting off Stephen’s manhood and jabbing the bloody flesh into her brother’s slack, gaping mouth.

  Sophia collapsed to her knees, retching, at long last loosing the biscuits and salt-pork they had eaten that morning for breakfast at dawn, her father excited to get on the trail to Fort Wallace.

  The back of Sophia’s head cried out in pain as the warrior woman yanked her to her feet, yellow vomit dribbling down the front of Sophia’s dress as she fought to get her legs beneath her and struggled not to look at the butchered, bloodied, defiled bodies of her family. Instead, she forced herself to look at the face of the Indian woman, studying the dirt caked in the deep crevices of her face. Then Sophia shuddered as she finally gazed into the woman’s eyes. She had never seen human eyes shine the light back at her quite like that. Only animal eyes.