The Amen Trail

by Sharon Sala

  For just a moment, Letty found herself staring into a pair of black, emotionless eyes, and felt as if she was in the presence of the Devil himself.

  Her stomach knotted. She started to pray.

  “Oh Lord, please… I’ve never asked you for much and expected even less, but I’m begging you now, get us out of this mess… alive if you please.”

  At that point, she felt a loud thump on the bottom of the wagon bed and figured that Eulis was awake.

  “Eulis… is that you?”

  “Jesus God All Mighty!”

  Letty sighed. It was Eulis all right, and he was obviously awake.

  “Don’t move,” she said.

  “Too late,” he mumbled, and started to curse.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked.

  “Other than the fact that I peed my pants and we’re probably gonna die, not a damned thing.”

  “Eulis…”

  “What?”

  “What are we going to do?”

  “Hell if I know, Leticia! I can’t see daylight farther than a foot on either side of this wagon. You tell me.”

  Letty looked about her and shuddered. “They’re everywhere.”

  “What do you mean, everywhere?”

  “They’re as far as I can see in every direction.”

  “Lord have mercy,” Eulis mumbled, then a few moments later, called out. “Don’t panic, but I’m comin’ up.”

  “No! No! What if they see you and start a stampede?”

  Eulis sighed. “I know I’m not as pretty as you, but I ain’t gonna make any sudden moves. Just stay still.”

  Before Letty could answer, she saw Eulis’s hands grip the back end of the wagon and then slowly, he pulled himself up and over, landing with a soft thump on top of Letty’s legs. For once, she didn’t have a thing to say, which in itself was frightening.

  Finally, he got the guts to look and got up on his hands and knees. If he hadn’t already peed his pants, he might have done it again.

  It was like looking at a dark and breathing flood of mass destruction, moving slowly upon the land, and trampling everything in its path.

  He flinched, as if someone had just punched him in the belly and looked at Letty.

  “Eulis?”

  He shook his head. “I reckon we’re done for.”

  She started to cry.

  RESCUE THE PERISHING

  The sun came up, illuminating even more of the disastrous position in which Eulis and Letty had landed. Letty sat motionless with her head down on her knees, too overwhelmed to look or move, for fear of setting off a stampede. The lack of water had even taken a back seat to the fact that they were most likely going to die, being trampled into bits and pieces. Letty wondered if it took longer to get to heaven if your body parts got scattered and you never got buried.

  Eulis, on the other hand, had been so staggered by the situation in which they found themselves that he’d laid down and gone to sleep.

  To Letty’s disgust and dismay, he continued to sleep, even as the sun slid slowly toward the western horizon. With every passing hour, the buffalo continued to move past them in a never-ending wave. Dust was so thick in the air that the horizon was blurred, and even though she couldn’t see them, she knew a pack of wolves hovered somewhere in the distance. She heard them setting off an evening chorale of eerie howls and yips as they hung near the edge of the herd, hoping to pick off a straggler or a calf too young to keep up.

  Suddenly, a massive bull went head first against the side of the wagon, as if pissed off that it was in his way.

  The wagon rocked.

  A mule brayed and then kicked.

  Letty screamed.

  And Eulis woke up, dismayed to find out that he wasn’t back in Lizard Flats having himself a stiff drink after all.

  “What’s happenin’?” he mumbled.

  “We’re dying!” Letty screamed, and then covered her face with her hands and threw herself down into the wagon, unable to face anymore.

  Eulis waited for the end, but nothing else happened. The pissed off bull moved on, and the massive movement of wooly beasts continued to pass, politely parting to accommodate the wagon and mules in their paths. Finally, he reached down and shook Letty on the shoulder.

  “Letty… Letty… I think it’s all right.”

  Letty rolled up into a ball and pulled her bedroll over her head.

  “It’s never going to be all right again,” she said, and started to cry.

  Eulis sighed. Considering the plight they were in, he was in no position to argue, and during the hours they’d been stranded, he had been doing some serious thinking. So serious, in fact, that he had come to the conclusion that God had meted out this punishment to them because of their deceit.

  When he’d agreed to Letty’s original plan of impersonating the preacher, he hadn’t given any thought to what God might think about the lie. He’d married and buried and christened and blessed in the name of God, but without any authority. It had seemed like a good idea at the time, but looking back, all he could think about was the fraud they’d committed upon innocent people.

  As hard as he’d tried, he couldn’t reconcile what they’d done as being just, and from the looks of their situation now, God wasn’t in a forgiving mood, either. He’d put them square in the middle of hell on earth.

  Eulis looked at Letty, who was little more than a lump beneath her covers. Even though he knew her lips were cracked and her face was burned bad from the sun, she was still one of the toughest women he’d ever known. If he had to be in this situation, he could not have picked a better partner to have at his back.

  “Letty.”

  She pulled the covers off and sat up.

  “What?” she whispered.

  “Do you—”

  “Sssh,” she hissed, and slapped a hand over his mouth. “Not so loud.”

  He lowered his voice. “What’s wrong?”

  “The better question would be what’s not wrong?”

  “Why are we whisperin’?” Eulis asked.

  A pair of cows suddenly butted heads, slamming one against the wagon bed while the other moved past, satisfied that she’d made her point.

  “That’s why,” Letty said, pointing to the two massive cows. “Do you know what’s gonna happen to us if they get spooked? There won’t be enough left of us to bury. So I figure if we don’t do anything stupid, we might have a chance.”

  “If they don’t move on soon, we’re gonna die anyway. We need water bad.”

  Letty wanted to argue, but she couldn’t ignore the facts. He was right.

  “You know what, Preacher Howe… I think you need to pray. I think we both need to pray.”

  Eulis shrugged. “I will if you will.”

  Letty frowned. “You’re the preacher.”

  “Yeah, and the shit you’re standin’ in is as deep as mine.”

  Another buffalo bumped into the wagon. One of the mules on the other side brayed and kicked, connecting with a large cow who retaliated by knocking the mule completely down.

  Letty gasped, and lunged over the side of the wagon. She grabbed hold of the rope with all her might and started pulling.

  “Help me, Eulis, help me! We’ve got to get the mule up or they’ll trample him.”

  Eulis threw himself forward, grabbed onto the rope and then lunged backward, putting all of his weight into the effort. Within seconds, the mule was up, wild-eyed and chomping at the makeshift halter that tethered him down.

  Letty rocked back on her heels, and then started to shake.

  “That was close,” she said.

  No sooner had their nerves started to calm, than a ripple of thunder came rolling down the valley. Stunned by the sound, they looked up at the quickly darkening sky, then flinched and ducked as a bolt of lightning suddenly ripped across the sky.

  “Oh no,” Letty muttered.

  “What? We need the rain,” Eulis said.

  “Lightning. The lightning is going to spook them. We�
�ve got to do something, and we’ve got to do it now.”

  No sooner had she said it, than the first drops of rain began to fall, splattering hard against the wide shoulders and wooly heads of the great beasts. In response, the movement of the herd perceptibly slowed and they began to draw closer and closer together.

  Eulis and Letty lifted their parched lips to the sky, reveling in the life-giving moisture falling onto them, as did their mules. As they sat with the rain falling on their faces and the herd gathering ever tighter together, Eulis lifted his gaze to the hills, and saw the chance for their only way out.

  “I’ve got an idea,” Eulis said. “Get the harness.”

  Soaked to the skin and half sick from hunger and fear, Letty rolled over onto her hands and knees.

  “The harness? Have you lost your mind?”

  “Probably, but hand ’em here anyway.”

  Letty dragged the harnesses out from beneath the seat. Eulis took them from her, while gauging the motion and mood of the herd against the oncoming storm. The mules eyes were rolling wildly as they snorted and stomped. Even they seemed to sense the urgency of the moment.

  “Here goes nothin’,” he said, threw a leg over the side of the wagon and slid down until he was standing between the mules with the harness in his hands.

  He began buckling the first mule into the gear as if nothing was different from any other day. He didn’t look up. He wouldn’t look around. He couldn’t let himself acknowledge the danger he was in and still do what he had to do.

  “Okay, Letty, now hand me the other one.”

  Letty handed over the rest of the harness as rain began to fall in earnest. Another shaft of lightning struck high on the hill above. The herd shifted en masse, moving slightly to the right, then slightly to the left, as if testing for the best track to run.

  “Hurry,” Letty said, and then went over the side after Eulis, knowing that, if they survived, it would take both of them to make this work.

  Working side by side, they finished harnessing up, then Eulis took a deep breath and looked at Letty.

  “You ready for this?”

  “As ready as I’ll ever be,” she said.

  Eulis nodded, but still he hesitated. He looked at her then, studying her in a way he’d never done before, and saw past the hardened woman that life had repeatedly kicked in the teeth, to the little twelve year old girl, hiding in an abandoned badger hole from the Indians who’d killed her father. He thought of the nights after she’d grown up when she’d gone out onto the balcony of the White Dove Saloon to listen for the call of the Whippoorwill—keeping alive a ritual that her deceased mother had begun. She was a survivor who stood as tall as any man he knew.

  “Uh… Letty?”

  “What?”

  “Just so you know… I ain’t sorry about nothin’.”

  A lump of emotion swelled in Letty’s throat.

  “Swear?”

  He nodded. “Swear.”

  “Then let’s do this,” Letty said.

  They took the mules by their harnesses and slowly began moving through the herd to the front of the wagon. They had been exposed to the herd for so long that they’d taken on their scent and since the buffalo behind them sensed nothing foreign, and the ones in front had no way of knowing that the pressure to move forward was anything other than more of their own, the herd gave way and they had the mules in place. With shaking hands and silent prayers, they hitched the team to the wagon.

  “All done. Now let’s see what happens,” Eulis said. When Letty started to walk around one of the mules to get into the wagon, Eulis grabbed her. “Stay between the mules,” he said.

  “But the harness…”

  “Step over or crawl under, but don’t get out from between these mules.”

  She nodded, and slowly, they both made their way back to the wagon, then up into the seat.

  It wasn’t until they were sitting high on the wagon that the herd saw them as something more than an object to walk around. They began pawing and snorting and more than one challenged their presence by going head on with the wagon or ramming a wheel. It was only a matter of time before the man-made wagon gave way to the bison’s might. Added to that, the rain was falling harder now. With less than an hour before sundown, time was not on their side. Thinking matters could not be worse, they were soon proven wrong.

  Eulis flipped the reins, signaling the mules with a series of clucks to move forward. Nothing happened. Exhausted, dehydrated, and stressed to the point of hysteria, the mules wouldn’t budge.

  Letty moaned as her shoulders slumped.

  “We’re done for.”

  Eulis sat for a moment, studying the situation. Then suddenly, he grabbed Letty’s shoulder and gave her a push.

  “Get off the seat.”

  “But—”

  “Do it now!” he said, and shoved her backward into the wagon bed. Once she was down, he handed her the reins. “Hold on to these and no matter what happens to me… don’t let go!”

  Letty grabbed the reins, watching in horror as Eulis climbed down from the seat, then slipped between mules until he was standing with a hand on either head. He rubbed the spot on their foreheads between their ears, then leaned forward and whispered something in each mule’s ear.

  Eulis turned around once and looked straight into Letty’s face.

  “We can do this,” he said.

  “I’m right behind you,” Letty said.

  Eulis was surprised by what those few words meant to him as he slipped his fingers beneath the straps and curled them tight around the leather.

  “Come on, Rosy. Come on Blackie… let’s go.”

  He made a clucking sound with his tongue and leaned forward, using his weight as well as the sound of his voice to urge them on.

  At first nothing happened, then finally Rosy, the lead mule, took a step. Trained to follow, Blackie could do no less. The wagon’s creaking wheels and Eulis’s voice were lost in the wind and the rain.

  And so they went, with Letty crouched down behind the seat with the reins wrapped tight around both wrists, and her feet braced against the back of the seat as Eulis led them through the tightly packed herd.

  The rain was blowing horizontally now, pushed by the gust front of the oncoming storm. Ironically, the storm which they feared would detonate a stampede was also providing a distraction as it came upon them in full force.

  Thunder rolled over them in a loud and long roar, deafening them to each other’s voices. There was nothing to be heard but the rain hammering against the animals’ backs, and the wail of the wind.

  Eulis could smell the fear and anxiety of the herd, but the buffalo had gathered so tightly together that it was difficult to move any faster. His plan was to aim for the higher rim on the right—betting their lives on the fact that the herd would move with the rhythm and shape of the earth just as water seeks the lowest level. And so they went, moving through and with the herd while pressing constantly left and upward.

  Letty rode with her feet braced beneath the wagon seat and a death grip on the reins. She could see the back of Eulis’s head through the space between the seat and the wagon bed, and she fixed upon that sight, knowing her life depended on his presence. She couldn’t let herself think of what it would mean if he suddenly disappeared—of knowing that he would be trampled beneath the herd. She knew it could happen, yet she couldn’t look away.

  The downpour had flattened his hair to his face, while the brim of his old black hat, weighed down by the rain, had unrolled. He looked as trail-worn as she felt, but his shoulders were broad, and the last glimpse she’d had of his face had been one of determination. It occurred to Letty that Eulis Potter had changed in more ways than that of living under another man’s identity. The extra weight that he’d carried for years was gone. Deprivation and hard work had toned his muscles and lengthened his stride. He no longer shuffled when he walked, but moved with his head up, and his shoulders straight. His hair hung well below the collar of hi
s shirt and he was days in need of a shave. He looked rough and was in serious need of a bath, as was she. But now that his personality was no longer numbed by liquor, she’d come to appreciate his sense of humor, as well as his convictions.

  Eulis Potter—once a childhood victim of outlaw Kiowa Bill—then the drunken gravedigger of Lizard Flats—had, through a series of unbelievable circumstances—become his own man.

  Letty didn’t know when she’d started depending on him—even trusting him—but it had happened. She knew, as surely as she knew her own name, that if they got out of this mess alive, it would be entirely due to him.

  Then, when it seemed that nothing could get worse, she felt the first pebble of hail against her face.

  “Thank you, Lord, for reminding us that you’re still in charge,” she muttered, and grabbed the reins even tighter.

  As she did, it was as if the sky opened and hail spilled from the sky like marbles out of a can.

  The mules bucked in harness. Caught unaware, Eulis lost hold and went down. One moment Letty was looking at the back of Eulis’s head and then he was gone.

  “No!” she screamed, and jumped to her feet, hauling back so hard on the reins that she felt a bone break in her wrist. The pain was sharp, but nothing compared to the fear of losing Eulis.

  The mules stopped. Hail fell so thick and so hard that Letty knew they were in danger of being killed. Still, she couldn’t let herself panic. Blocking out the pain in her injured wrist and the ice pellets peppering her, she tied off the reins, crawled over the seat, and slipped down between the rigging. The animals were bowed up with their backs to the force of the wind and their heads down, enduring what they couldn’t escape. Hail hit repeatedly against the back of Letty’s head and neck as she ducked between the mules in search of Eulis.

  She saw him then, lying full length on his back between the mules legs while hanging on to the double tree with every ounce of strength he had left. She went down on her hands and knees, crawling between the harness and the mules legs without care for her own safety, and then grabbed him by the ankles.