by Lisa Wingate
That smile stays with me through the day and into evening. I watch him ride away from the wagon, then back, then disappear over the hills. Time to time, I spot him on the horizon. I feel safer, knowing he’s there.
It’s when we’re stopped to camp that the uneasy comes over me again. The animals fret at their pickets, toss heads and twitch ears. Juneau Jane takes the halter of a big gelding and strokes its nose. “They have a sense of something,” she says.
I think about Indians and panthers and coyotes and the Mexican gray wolves that howl on the prairies at night. I hold Missy’s old reticule close, feel the weight of the derringer tucked inside. It’s some comfort, but not much.
Elam Salter comes into our camp, and that’s more comfort, yet. “Stay between the rocks and the wagon,” he tells us, and then talks quiet with the men on the other side of the wagon. I watch their hands and bodies move, pointing, looking.
One of the soldiers hangs a blanket between two cedar trees for our necessary, and another cooks on a small stove at the wagon.
There’s none of Elam’s friendly talk or smiles that night.
When we bed down, he’s disappeared again. Don’t know where he goes or if he sleeps. The dark just grabs him up. I don’t hear or see him after that.
“What does he search for?” Juneau Jane asks as we settle in a tent with Missy twixt us. I tie Missy’s ankle to mine, case she’d take a mind to get up and wander…or I would in my dreams.
Missy’s asleep quick as she can get flat on the blanket.
“Don’t know what he’s after.” I think I scent smoke on the wind. Just a hair of it, but then I ain’t sure. Our cookstove’s been out for hours. “Reckon the night’ll pass all right, though. We got five men looking out after us. You and me been in tougher spots.” I think of the swamp and not knowing if we’d live to morning light. “We ain’t alone, at least.”
Juneau Jane nods, but the lantern light through the cloth shines on a brim of tears. “I have left Papa. He is alone.”
“He’s gone on the other side of the door. He ain’t in that body no more,” I tell her. “You sleep now.” I pull the blanket up, but I don’t find rest.
Sleep finally comes like a summer dry river, a trickle that’s shallow and splits around rocks and downed branches and tree roots, dividing and dividing, till by morning it’s the thin bead of gathered morning dew, dripping lazy off the army tent overhead.
On rising, I think I smell smoke again. But there’s barely enough fire in the stove for coffee, and the wind scatters it the other direction.
It’s only your mind, Hannie, I tell myself, but I make sure we all three get up together and go behind the blanket to see to our necessary. Missy wants to pick snowball flowers there, but I don’t let her.
Elam Salter comes in from wherever he’s passed the night. He looks like a man who ain’t slept. He’s keeping watch for something, but he don’t ever say what.
We eat pilot biscuits, dunking them in our cups to soften them up for chewing. Missy fusses and spits hers out. “You’ll go hungry, then,” I tell her. “You need to eat for—” I catch for the baby in my throat, and swallow hard.
Juneau Jane meets my eye. This baby won’t hide much longer. Missy ought to visit a doctor, but if her mind ain’t better soon, any doctor we ask will want to send her away to the asylum.
When we move out, Elam points his dun gelding up and across a rise. I see him there with his spyglass as the sky breaks a full dawn that’s like coals from the underside. Red-pink and rose yellow and lined in gold so bright it stays in your eyes when you blink. The sky is wide as the earth, from one end to the other.
Elam and the horse look at home against that fire, against that wide alone. Our wagon circles the hill and wobbles down into a rough draw, and Elam disappears bit by bit.
I keep watch out one side of the wagon, then the other, trying to hold on to the sight of him, but he’s soon gone and we don’t see him again, rest of the morning.
By noon, I take the little derringer out of Missy’s reticule, check it, then set it in reach. Still not sure if it’d fire at all, but I feel better having it there.
Juneau Jane slides a glance over the gun, then at me.
“I was looking at it,” I say. “That’s all.”
We pass a wagon or two on the road time to time through the day. Farmers and freighters. A mail wagon. Horsebackers and, near the towns, people on foot going to their farms and back. Here and there, riders take a wide path round us. I wonder what kind of folks those are that don’t care to be seen up close by the soldiers.
At night we camp, and the men tell us to stay near, so we do. Come morning, we break camp and roll off again. Do the same thing the next day and the next and then again. Sometimes Elam joins our camps or rides alongside the wagon, but mostly he ranges. When he does come in, he’s watchful and quiet. I know he’s found signs of something out there.
The days go by as we push hard from first light to last, while the weather’s fair.
A storm comes finally, and we pull the wagon curtains down tight. The horses and mules plod along in the rain and the mud till finally we make our way through it, and it stops quick as it started. I look out for Elam, but don’t see him. Hadn’t all morning and that vexes me.
We meet a man on the road who don’t speak to the soldiers, but stands his saddle horse just barely aside. Once we’re past, he sidles his mount forward to get a peek through the rear gap of the wagon bonnet, see if there’s anything in here he wants. The bold way of him leaves me bad skittish, and I look at the little derringer again. The light shines on its carved silver roses, and Missy reaches for it, and I swat her hand away.
“Don’t you touch that,” I scold. “It ain’t for you to have.”
She squeaks and scrambles out of reach and stares at me narrow eyed. I tuck that pistol down under me where she can’t get it.
Near middle of the day, we come on a water crossing.
The sky has started to rumble again, so we go ahead to make the ford instead of stopping to rest the horses and mules first. The current is fast, but ain’t deep.
“Keep them moving right on up at the slope!” the sergeant yells, circling a fist above his head. “We’ll stop on the other side and rest and water the stock then.”
The sergeant leads, then the driver whips up the team, and the soldiers come along either side to make sure the mules don’t stop and let the wagon drift. The streambed is rocky, so the wagon box rises and sinks, side to side. It falls hard into the deep spots. Missy hits her head and cries out.
I move all us closer to the back of the wagon, where we can get out if it swamps. This ain’t supposed to be a hard crossing, but it is.
Leaning out the keyhole gap over the tailgate, I see Elam. He keeps well back up the slope, but he’s there.
The mules get belly deep, and little seeps of water come through the wagon bed.
It’s then I hear a sharp crack like a wheel or axle broke.
The canvas shudders above our heads. I turn to look over my shoulder, see a round hole and sunlight. Another crack echoes out. Another hole in the canvas.
“Bushwhack!” one of the troopers yells. The mules jerk forward. The driver goes to the whip.
My fingers slip on the tailgate and I tip forward, fall halfway out the back of the wagon. The tailgate pushes the breath out of me, and water rushes just under my chin. A hand grabs my dress. It’s a big, strong hand, and I know it’s Missy. Juneau Jane scrambles to get me, too, and they haul me up, and we all tumble toward the wagon bed. It’s when I’m falling that I see Elam Salter and his big dun horse go straight over backward. I don’t see them land. I hear a horse scream, hear the whine of a bullet, then a soldier’s groan, a splash in the water. Hooves clatter away and up the bank. The soldiers return fire at whoever’s come on us.
The wagon’s got no way
out but forward over the rocks, and the mules lurch through the water, the wagon rocking wild like a child’s toy as they scrabble up the bank to dry land. I gather Juneau Jane and Missy, hold them down flat and push my head twixt them. Splinters of wood and dust and canvas rain down.
I say my prayers, make my peace. Might be after all that’s happened, this is how it ends. Not in the swamp from a wildcat, not at the bottom of a river or on a freight wagon in the wild country, but here in this creek, waylaid for a reason I don’t know.
I lift my head enough to search with my eyes, to find Old Mister’s pistol.
Can’t let them take us alive if this is Indians or road agents, is my only thought. Heard too many stories since we been in Texas, tales of what can be done to womenfolk. Seen it, too, with Missy and Juneau Jane. Lord, give me the strength to do what’s needed, I pray. But if I find that pistol, it’s got only two shots, and there’s three of us.
Give me the strength, and the means.
Everything’s shifted and turned upside down, and the pistol is no place I can see.
Of a sudden, the air goes quiet. The gun thunder and screams stop like they started. Powder smoke hangs thick and silent and sour. The only noise is the slow groaning of a horse and the terrible death rattle of blood-smothered breath.
“Ssshhh,” I whisper to Missy and Juneau Jane. Maybe they’ll think the wagon’s empty. The thought’s gone quick as it comes. I know better.
“Come out!” a voice orders. “Some of these soldier boys might live to fight another day, you come on out peaceful.”
“Your choice,” another man says. It’s low and plain, and my ear knows it in a way that turns me cold inside, except I can’t put a place to it. Where’ve I heard that voice before? “You want four dead soldier boys, plus a dead deputy marshal on your conscience? Ends the same, either way.”
“Don’t—” one of the soldiers hollers. There’s a crack like a gourd getting split, and he goes quiet.
Juneau Jane and me look back and forth to each other. Her eyes are wide and white-edged. Her mouth trembles, but she nods. Beside me, Missy’s already getting up, I guess because the man said to. She don’t understand what’s happening.
I feel for the pistol again. Feel for it everyplace. “Coming out!” I holler. “Might be we’re shot already.” I’m scrubbing the floor with my hands. The pistol…
The pistol…
“Out now!” the man hollers. A shot fires off and tears through the canvas not a foot from our heads. The wagon jerks forward, then stops. Either somebody’s holding the mules or one’s dead in the harness.
Missy scrabbles over the gate.
“Wait,” I say, but there’s no stopping her. No finding the derringer, either. Don’t know what’ll happen now. What kind of men are these, and why do they want us?
Missy’s on her feet and moving away from the wagon by the time Juneau Jane and me get out. My mind slows, takes notice of each thing—the soldiers on their bellies, one bleeding from the leg. Blood drips from the head of the wagon driver. His eyes open and close, and open again. He tries to wake, to save hisself or us, but what can he do?
The sergeant lifts his head. “You’re interfering with a detail of the United States Cavalry in—” A pistol butt comes down hard.
Missy moans like it was her that got struck.
I glance at the one holding the pistol. He ain’t much more than a boy, might be thirteen or fourteen.
It’s then I look past the boy and see the man come out from the brush. A rifle rests comfortable over his shoulder. He moves in a slow, easy stride, satisfied as a cat that’s got its next meal cornered. A slow smile spreads under his hat brim. When he tips it up, there’s the patch on his eye, and the melted scars on one side of his face, and I know why his voice caught me. Might be this is the day he finishes the job he started at the river landing.
Missy growls in her throat like a animal, gnashes her teeth, and chomps at the air.
The man tosses his head back, laughing. “Still a biter, I see. I thought maybe we’d worked that out of you before we parted ways.”
That voice of his. I sift memories like flour, but they fly away, carried off by the storm winds. Did we know him before? Was he somebody Old Mister knew?
Missy growls louder. I reach up and grab her arm, but she strains away from me. I try again to place the man. If I can call his name, maybe it’d catch him by surprise, throw him off long enough the troopers could get at the boy that’s closest, grab his gun.
I hear horses splash through the water and scrabble up the bank behind us. But I keep my eyes on the man with the rifle. He’s the one to worry about. The boy with him looks crazy and blood hungry, but it’s this man who has charge of it all.
“And you.” He turns to Juneau Jane. “It is a shame to dispatch a perfectly good yellow girl. Especially a fetching one who has…a certain sort of value. Perhaps it is a fortuitous turn of events that you’ve managed to survive, after all. Perhaps I’ll keep you. A final recompense for all the loss I’ve suffered at your father’s hands.” He holds up a left glove with missing fingers sagging down, then he passes across the eye that’s gone.
This man…this man believes Old Mister’s to blame for his disfigurings? Why?
I let go of Missy, scoop Juneau Jane round behind me. “You leave this child be,” I tell him. “She ain’t done nothin’ to you.”
He cocks his head to see me better, looks at me for a long time through the one good eye. “And what is this? The little boy driver Moses told me he’d done away with? But none of us are what we seem to be, are we?” He laughs, and there’s a familiar sound to it.
He steps in closer. “I might just keep you, too. A good set of slave irons, and you’ll be no trouble. Your kind can always be broken. The infernal Negro. No better than a mule. No smarter. All can be broken to harness…and to other uses.” He studies me in pure meanness, but that’s familiar, too. “I think I knew your mammy,” he says and smiles. “I think I knew her quite well.”
He looks away toward the men coming up from the river. My mind tumbles back, and back, and back. I see past the scars and the patch on his eye, take in the shape of his nose, the set of his sharp, pointed chin. I grab the memory, see him crouched beside the wagon where we’re curled in the cold with Mama. His hands catch her, drag her out, her arm still chained to the wheel spokes. The sounds of her suffering bleed into dark, but I don’t see. “You keep down under the blanket, babies,” she chokes out. “You just stay there.” I push the blanket hard against my ears, try not to hear.
I cling to my brothers and sisters, night after night, eight, then seven, then six…three, two, one, and finally just my cousin, little Mary Angel. And then only me, curled in a ball underneath that ragged blanket, trying to hide.
From this man, Jep Loach. Older, scarred and melted so that I didn’t know his face. Right here is the man who took my people away. The man Old Mister had tracked down all them years ago and had dragged off to the Confederate army. Not killed on a battlefield someplace back then. Right here standing.
Once I know that much, I know I’ll stop him this time, or die in the trying. Jep Loach can’t steal one more thing from me. I can’t stand for it. I can’t live past it.
“You take me instead of her,” I say. I’ll be stronger without Missy and Juneau Jane to look after. “Just me alone.” I’ll find a way to do what needs to be done to this man. “You take me and leave these two girls and these soldier men be. I’m a good woman. Good as my mama was.” The words rise up my throat and burn. I taste hardtack and coffee, soured now. I swallow it down, and add, “Strong as my mama was, too.”
“None of you are in a position to bargain,” Jep Loach says, and laughs.
The other men, the two behind us, laugh along as they circle on opposite sides. I know the one to the left, soon’s he comes into view, but I can’t ma
ke my eyes believe it even after all I heard about him throwing in with bad men. Lyle Gossett. Back from the dead, too. Not turned in for a bounty as Elam Salter thought, but here with his uncle, two men cut of the same cloth. The black cloth of Old Missus’s people.
Lyle and the other rider, a skinny boy on a spotted horse, stop behind Jep Loach, turn their mounts to face us.
Missy growls louder, bites the air and bobs her chin and hisses like a cat.
“Shut…shut her up,” the boy on the paint horse says. “She’s givin’ me the botheration. Got a demon. She’s tryin’ to…to witch us or somethin’. Let’s just shoot ’em and go on.”
Lyle lifts his rifle. Raises it up and points it at his own sister. Kin against kin. “She’s gone in the head, anyhow.” His words come cold and flat, but there’s pleasure in his face when he rests his thumb on the hammer and pulls it back. “Good time to put her out of her misery.”
Missy’s neck tucks, her chin swaying against the collar of her dress. Her eyes stay pinned to Lyle, bright blue circles rolled up half under the lids, white underneath.
“She’s pregnant!” I holler, and try to pull Missy back, but she rips herself out of my hand. “She carryin’ a child!”
“Do it!” the other boy hollers. “She’s witchin’ us! Do it!”
“Stand down, Corporal,” Jep Loach yells. He looks from one boy to the other. “Whose command is this?”
“Yours, Lieutenant,” Lyle answers, like they’re soldiers in a war. Soldiers for Marston. Just like Elam talked about.
“Do you serve the cause?”
“Yes, sir, Lieutenant,” all three of the boy soldiers say.
“Then you will obey your superiors. I give the orders, here.”
“Marston’s been caught by deputy federal marshals.” One of the cavalrymen on the ground tries to speak up. “Caught and jail—”
Jep Loach puts a bullet through the man’s hand, then takes three quick steps and stomps a boot on his head, shoving him face-first into the mud. He can’t breathe like that. He tries to fight, but it’s no use.
