Embrace the Wild Land

by Rosanne Bittner

  “Well, if this don’t beat all,” Dooley muttered. “Zeke out there searchin’ for one brother, and another one shows up at the door.”

  Wolf’s Blood stepped closer to peek curiously at the wounded man who was an uncle. Dooley removed the man’s coat and shirt, and Abbie gasped at the crude bandages around his ribs. Blood spotted the bandages on the man’s lower right side.

  “Wolf’s Blood, pour some of that hot water that is on top of the stove into a pan,” Abbie ordered right away. “Get me some clean cloths.” The boy moved quickly. “Dooley, go outside and find out if this man still has a bullet in him,” Abbie continued. “If he does, we have to get it out quickly. This is Zeke’s brother. We must not let him die.”

  Dooley nodded and rose, pulling his sheepskin coat closer around his neck before venturing back out into the howling January winds. The man on the floor moaned, and Abbie put a gentle hand to his forehead.

  “You’ll be all right,” she told the man softly. “We’re going to help you.”

  He reached up and took her hand, his eyes still closed. “Pa?” he groaned. “I promise … I’ll stay home this time, Pa. I’ll help … get the corn in.”

  Abbie looked at Wolf’s Blood, who had knelt down beside her with the pan of hot water.

  “Life is so strange, Wolf’s Blood,” she told him, dipping a clean cloth into the water and wringing it out. She bent over the man and gently washed his face. “The very man your father hates, this man loves. Surely he was not that bad of a father.” She looked back at Wolf’s Blood. The boy looked down at the pan of water.

  “I do not understand hating a father. It is something my own father never talked about. It is the only thing he would never discuss with me, except that often he told me how cruel life was back in that place called Tennessee.”

  She sighed and returned to washing Lance Monroe. “Yes. It was cruel, Wolf’s Blood. But a man’s father is his father and it cannot be denied. It will be very hard for Zeke to go back there. I hope he has the courage to go and see his white father. It isn’t good to hate the man who gave you life, Wolf’s Blood. It’s wrong, no matter how badly the man might have treated you.”

  Wolf’s Blood watched her gently wash this white man who was the product of the white grandfather he had never known and would probably never meet. It chilled his blood to realize how much white blood was in him, for he did not want any at all. He would always hate it. Yet he would never hate the mother or the father who had given him that blood.

  Dooley returned, bolting the door and coming to stand over them. “He’s still got a bullet in him,” he declared.

  Abbie sighed deeply. Removing a bullet was never easy, nor was it a pretty sight. “Get your bowie knife, Wolf’s Blood,” she told her son. “It’s the sharpest object in the house. I don’t want to do this, but I’ve done it before.” She bent over and began removing the dirty bandages, remembering a day, many, many years ago, when Zeke Monroe lay wounded in a cave after saving her from outlaws. She had removed a bullet from his side, while he lay biting on a piece of leather. It was a traumatic experience for the young girl she had been then. But she had done it. She would muster the courage and stamina to do it again. How strange that the patient should be his own brother, one she had never met in all these years.

  Zeke yanked on his horse’s reins and pulled back out of the way as an old man and two young women darted past in front of him. One woman slipped and fell in the muddy street, spilling an armload of meat she had just stolen from a nearby store. The windows of the store were broken and the door beaten in. The woman scrambled up again, hurriedly picking up her stolen goods and running off.

  Zeke stared in pity and disbelief as ragged, skeletal people hurried here and there, picking their way through the muddied streets of Nashville, the mud made worse by the thousands of wagons that had churned their way through it on their way out of the city, fleeing the oncoming Union soldiers. The South Zeke had returned to was not the South he had left. The South he had left had been quiet and soft, a wealthy land populated by farmers and plantation owners, its people slow and casual, with little care about what the next day would bring.

  Now that South was ravaged and burned, a place where danger lay not just in the cities, but on the plantations and in the remote woods and swamps. Every place he turned, hatred swelled and brother fought brother. People who were once proud and gentle were killing and destroying, grasping at whatever remnants they could find to keep them alive. With the fall of Forts Donelson and Henry, and now with the desertion of Nashville by Confederate troops, Tennessee was falling into the hands of the Federals. To the citizens of Tennessee, such a fate was worse than death, a wound to their pride that might never heal.

  Zeke had at first thought himself lucky in his search for Danny. After leaving Emily at St. Louis, he had ridden into Illinois and paid a prison official at Rock Island to allow him to visit Confederate prisoners to search for Danny. What he saw there was revolting—tattered, wounded men dying of infections and disease, eating food most animals would not eat. He did not understand this war. He could not believe it was just to free slaves. It had to be more political than that. He had vivid memories of the Trail of Tears and what the government had done to the Indians of the South when they chased them west. Now, mysteriously, the slaves would be freed, which was fine with him. But what would be done for them once they were released from bondage? Would the white men who freed them suddenly find a great love in their hearts for the black man, any more than they cared about the Indian? And why was the white man suddenly so concerned about the Negroes, while at the same time they were considering ways to imprison and destroy the red man?

  None of it made sense to him. A man was a man, as far as Zeke was concerned. It was not his color that made him so, or his name. It was merely his human traits, his skill, his courage, his honor. There was no honor in this war, or in what was happening to the Indians. But that was not his problem or concern for the moment. His problem was to find Danny. On that first visit to Rock Island, to his relief, Danny was not there amid the filth and humiliation of that prison. He had come upon one prisoner there who had known Danny at Shiloh. He claimed that Danny had escaped and was probably back with the Confederates again.

  But after hearing descriptions of what had happened at Shiloh, and seeing now what was happening to all of Tennessee, Zeke wondered how Danny could have survived, especially if he was wounded as Emily had been told. His only choice was to cover as much country as possible, searching out Confederates and asking questions. But it was a dangerous chore, for without a uniform he was always suspect, trusted by neither Union men nor Confederates. He had already dodged more bullets than he cared to think about, fired by men who didn’t bother to ask questions first.

  “Gimme that horse!” a man growled then, grabbing the reins of Zeke’s mount and pushing at Zeke. He was a big, bearded man of considerable strength, a man who obviously was accustomed to getting what he wanted by simply taking it. Zeke kicked out at him, sending the man sprawling into the mud. He moved his Appaloosa a few feet back and the man glared at him. “Stinkin’ redskin!” he shouted. “What are you doin’ here? Get the hell out of Nashville, unless you plan to stay here and join the niggers!”

  The man got up and grabbed an old woman who was crossing the street and carrying blankets and a bag of flour. He shoved her down and yanked the articles from her hands and made off with them. Zeke kicked his horse into motion and rode down upon the man, pulling out his rifle and whacking the man between the shoulders with the butt of the rifle. The man sprawled forward, the belongings in his arms flying out in front of him. Zeke quickly dismounted and placed his foot on the back of the man’s head, holding his face in the mud.

  “Mister, there isn’t a war or anything else horrible that could happen to me that would make me push around an old woman. A man with any guts and honor would die of hunger first.” He held his foot hard until the man stopped struggling, then picked his way through the m
ud to pick up the blankets and flour. He walked them back to the old woman to return them to her, setting them down beside her and bending over to help her up. He grasped a thin arm and raised her up, but when he turned her around there was blood on her forehead where she had hit a rock. Her withered face was covered with mud, as was the frayed pink ruffled dress she wore. He knew in an instant that she was dead.

  He did not know her. Yet the way she died pierced his heart. She should have died in peace, rocking beside a hearth and enjoying her grandchildren. Seeing her lying there, dead and muddied and skeletal, suddenly brought terror to his own heart, terror for what might lie ahead for his Abbie. Surely such suffering would one day come to his people. Would Abbie suffer for loving them?

  He looked around at others who scurried here and there with their loot, people who would not normally even consider robbing and plundering the property of others, but people who were now desperate and starving. No one seemed to notice the old lady. Apparently no one was particularly concerned and surely none of them was family.

  In the distance he could hear cannon as the Union soldiers approached. He picked up the old lady and layed her over his mount, then climbed up and rode north into the hills. Someone should bury her. He could not bring himself to leave her lying in the street, only to be shoveled into a mass grave by the Federals.

  He headed his mount into the woods north of Nashville, a place that was quiet and overlooked the city. He took a spade from his gear and started shoveling. It would take a lot of time and work with nothing bigger to work with, but he was determined and angry. He shoveled hard and dirt flew as he struggled against tears that he could not explain. Why should he care so much for this old woman he did not know? Was he missing Gentle Woman, his own Cheyenne mother? Yes. He always missed her. Yet somehow that was not what this old woman reminded him of. It was something else. He knew deep in the hidden crevices of his mind what it was, but he refused to believe that he might be worried about his father—his real father. Old and lonely, Emily had told them. “He truly did love you, Zeke,” she had said. “He longs to see you again before he dies.”

  He shoveled faster until the hole was finally deep enough. Then he gently laid the old woman inside of it and started shoveling the dirt over her. Soon the pink dress and withered face disappeared. In the distance below, Union soldiers rode into Nashville, followed by freed Negroes who were singing songs of joy, men who would now look to their “saviors” to guide them in their new life.

  Zeke fashioned a little cross from sticks, sure the old white woman must have been Christian. Again he thought of Abbie and her Bible and her prayers. She would have wanted him to bury this woman and put a cross at her grave.

  He rose and mounted up, watching for a few minutes the Union troops move into Nashville, the Negroes trudging faithfully behind them.

  “Don’t expect any help from your new white friends,” he muttered. He turned his horse and gazed out to the south—south … where the old farm was, where his father was. For a moment he considered going there, but then he headed out in another direction. He was here to find Danny and for no other reason. He headed east. He would make his way toward Virginia, where he had heard General Lee and a great Confederate fighter by the name of Stonewall Jackson would carry out major defenses. Finding Danny would be like finding a needle in a haystack. Perhaps the man had died of his wounds after escaping. This was a much more difficult task than he had anticipated, but he hated the thought of going home with no news of his brother.

  He headed out into the woods, leaving the fresh grave behind him, trying to not think about the fact that time and weather would someday destroy the little marker, and no one would ever know the little old woman was buried there. He wondered how many other unmarked graves this war would leave through the hills and farmlands of the South. This was indeed a bloody and cruel war.

  Abbie sponged Lance’s face again, her heart aching at the man’s pain. Through the night he had groaned and sweated, but in the early morning he had seemed to sleep well. Now it seemed the pain was returning. Major Mayes stood warming himself by the stove, glancing periodically at a watchful Wolf’s Blood and feeling nervous under the boy’s defensive gaze. The boy had not slept or put down his rifle since the arrival of the soldiers. The boy’s Indian features told the major that it must be true that his father was a half-breed. The possibility of the man being a half-brother to Lance Monroe seemed incredible, matched only by the fact that the beautiful white woman who had removed Lance’s bullet and nursed him faithfully through the night was actually married to the half-breed and had mothered the wild-looking lad who watched him now.

  “I can’t begin to express my gratefulness for giving us a place to hole up and for helping Private Monroe,” the major spoke up to Abbie. “We will leave you as soon as Lance can travel.”

  Abbie looked up at the man. “Will you see that he gets home to his father’s farm?”

  “I’ll do what I can. But we’ve lost our stronghold in the West, ma’am. It will be difficult just to get out of here alive. We’re surrounded by Unionists. I don’t even know where the closest Confederate encampment is. We’ve lost contact. But if we can just get through to Tennessee, he can go on from there.”

  “Is it really that bad, Mister Mayes? The war?”

  His eyes saddened. “It’s the worst thing I’ve ever seen or hope to see again. Plantations and cities are ravaged and it’s getting worse. The Federals have us surrounded. They come up from the south by sea, down from the north on the rivers, and now they have the West. I’ve seen battlefields red with blood. Citizen and soldier alike are starving, dying of disease and exposure. Yes, ma’am, it’s a terrible thing, with son turning against father, brother against brother, old friends plunging bayonets into one another.”

  She sighed and swallowed. “And … what about those who do not choose sides, like my husband?”

  Mayes twisted his hat in his hand. This woman was alone with seven children to care for, a woman who had lived in this lonely, savage land for many years. “I’m … sure he’ll be all right, ma’am.”

  She smiled sadly. “I thank you for your kind lie, Mister Mayes.” She looked back down at Lance, who stirred and opened his eyes for the first time since he had been brought to her. “He’s awake!” she exclaimed, putting a cool cloth to his forehead again. “You must lie still, Lance,” she spoke up softly.

  He looked up at her lovely face through blurred vision, totally unaware of where he was and thinking perhaps he was dreaming that he was warm and a woman’s soft voice had just spoken to him. In spite of his pain, Abbie could not help her terrible curiosity. She must know.

  “Tell me,” she told the man as he looked around the room, blinking and trying to get his bearings. “Your last name is Monroe.” The man looked back at her and frowned in confusion. “Are … are you related to a Danny Monroe, and a Zeke Monroe? Is your father Hugh Monroe?”

  He swallowed. “My … brothers … Danny and … Zeke. Lenny. And my father … Hugh.” His body shuddered. “Am I … home?”

  Abbie could not stop a sob from jerking at her shoulders. She sniffed and swallowed. “My God!” she whispered, bending down and placing her cheek against Lance’s. He breathed in her feminine smell and was comforted. “I am … your brother’s wife … Zeke’s wife,” she told him. “You’re in Colorado Territory. You’ve lost a lot of blood, Lance. Just lie still.”

  She pulled back and Lance stared at her, his vision more clear now. How lovely she was! Had God brought him to this place, to the wife of the brother he had not seen in twenty years? So this was she! The mysterious white woman Zeke had married and who had agreed to live in Indian-territory for his sake.

  He quietly studied her, his eyes moving over her lovely form. She wore a plain cotton dress, choosing to dress as a white woman around the white soldiers, to ensure they afforded her proper respect. She was shapely and well-preserved, and Lance was surprised, half expecting a weathered, tired woman who had ag
ed before her time. But she was the prettiest woman he had seen in quite some time.

  “You … you’re … Abigail?” he asked.

  “Yes.” She took his hand. “But I’m sorry to say Zeke is not here. How wonderful it would be if he could see you! It seems so ironic. He has gone back East to look for Danny. We learned that Danny was wounded at Shiloh and taken prisoner. Zeke went to see if he could locate him.”

  “Danny? Shiloh?” He closed his eyes. “If he was … at Shiloh.… he can’t be alive. I heard … about Shiloh.”

  She squeezed his hand. “Don’t worry about Danny,” she told him. “You have no idea the kind of man Zeke is. He’ll survive, and he’ll find Danny and get him back to the farm. And that is where you must go when you’re healed. Your father needs you, Lance.” She thought about mentioning Lenny’s death, but perhaps he did not know yet. This would be a bad time to tell him. “With … with all his sons gone off to war, he’s a lonely man. You must get back home and let him know you’re all right.”

  He turned his eyes to study her again. “You’re … truly Abigail … Zeke’s wife?”

  She smiled softly. “I truly am.”

  “Danny … wrote us about you … talked about you a couple of times … when he managed to get back home. The wagon train … how you lost your family and met my brother.” His eyes moved around the room, coming to rest on Wolf’s Blood. “Zeke! He’s right there!” he said in a weakening voice.

  Abbie looked at her son then laughed lightly. “I suppose the way you remember him when he left, you would think so,” she told the man. “That is Wolf’s Blood, our first-born and oldest son. He looks very much like Zeke.”