by David Boop
The flame moved.
Michael was shaking.
“Will you give me back the horses?”
Nothing.
Hiram took a deep breath. “Will you trade the horses with me?”
The flame moved. The ghosts would trade.
But how to find out what to trade?
“Pap,” Michael said softly, a hint of a whimper in his voice, “is that you running your fingers through my hair?”
Hiram’s hand was on Michael’s shoulder. He grabbed the lantern in his other hand and raised it high; as if disturbed by unseen fingers, the boy’s hair moved about on his head.
“Turn on your flashlight,” he told his son, trying to keep his voice calm. “We’re going back to the truck.”
* * *
They finished out the night in a rented room in Heber. Hiram was awake two hours after falling asleep, with the peep of the egg-yolk sun through the paper blind. Michael, despite coming down from Carre Shinob trembling with nerves, slept another four hours.
He was thirteen years old, and Hiram let him sleep.
No response came to the telegram that day. Hiram examined the objects more closely. He learned little, except that the glove was not of home manufacture—it had a tag stitched inside it, faded now into illegibility. He bought a pair of long leather shoelaces at the mercantile and threaded one through the claw, which he then wore around his neck, right alongside the chi-rho talisman that protected him from enemies.
The scrap that contained actual legible words—the name Brigham Young—was the least comprehensible thing to him. He considered driving back up the ridge with a shovel and unearthing whatever lay beneath those stones, but if the spirits involved—and there were definitely spirits involved, and not just spirits, but the ghosts of dead human beings—were disturbed, then digging up the grave would only disturb them more.
They had offered to trade with him. No, that wasn’t quite right, he had asked whether they were willing to trade and they had indicated yes. Or perhaps, the one of them that was speaking had indicated yes. He shouldn’t assume he’d been speaking to the same spirit the entire time, since he hadn’t asked.
But then that spirit, or another of them, had ruffled Michael’s hair.
Had they wanted to trade for his son? Or had they wanted to take Michael? They had said they were Indians. Hiram and his wife had adopted the boy because he was without family—Hiram had been close to the child’s father in the Great War—and because they’d been unable to have family of their own. Not all Indians were happy with white people adopting Indians—did the dead Indians want to take Michael away from him?
Would that involve them killing Michael?
Hiram shook the thoughts out of his head. He needed more information. Short of digging up the grave…
“Are you okay staying here tonight?” he asked Michael. “We’ll lock the door, and I’ll leave you here with milk and graham crackers and all the pulp magazines the mercantile has? As long as they’re not too lurid, that is.”
“I don’t know, Pap.” Michael grinned. “I can handle some pretty lurid stuff.”
* * *
With the sun still up, Hiram climbed up into the saddle of Carre Shinob. There he built a little fire and brewed himself tea, using a packet he always carried in the Double-A, hidden inside a folded state map he never used. His grandmother had called the tea “the devil’s snare,” but she’d taught him to use it. The muddy brown infusion made from the jimson weed opened the mind to the universe. To an unprepared mind, that let in chaos—hallucinations, clowning, madness. To a prepared mind, it could let in revelation.
He put the tea in his thermos flask, just a single cup. It would be enough. He put his hand into the glove, and the claw around his neck. He clenched the scraps of paper and canvas in his gloved hand, and he stood beside the tumulus.
Watching the sun sink, he emptied his mind of all thoughts. He inhaled, focused on Michael’s safety, reminded himself that the boy was in a bright room eating graham crackers and reading detective stories, and exhaled, letting go of that concern. He did the same with thoughts of McCrae’s belligerence, the Oldhams’ indifference, his own physical safety.
With the stage of his mind empty, he placed onto it the questions he had. Who were the ghosts waiting there? What was their connection with the physical objects he held? Why had they taken the Oldhams’ horses? What would they want in return for releasing the beasts?
He drank the tea—hot or cold, it was disgusting, and Hiram wasn’t one to sweeten anything with sugar.
Then he lay down on the grave.
It wasn’t comfortable, but it was necessary. This, too, was an old technique he’d learned from his grandmother. Solomon had practiced it, she’d told him, sleeping in the Temple of the Lord until Jehovah himself appeared. The Greeks knew it, and the old Arabs. Mind open, heart focused on his questions, Hiram Woolley lay on the rocky mound and waited to see ghosts.
He touched the Saturn ring on his finger. It was made of lead, forged by Hiram himself from a simple mold, and scratched by him with the sign of Saturn while that planet was strong in the skies. Saturn ruled melancholy, and dreams, and insight.
He fell asleep.
* * *
Hiram saw a man on a horse. Around his neck, the rider worse a necklace of teeth, claws, and bones. Several of the talons might have passed for the one Hiram had found on Carre Shinob. Two young Indians, a boy and a girl, led the horse by its reins, and the man sat stiffly, staring down at them.
Hiram looked down at himself. Wool trousers, muddy boots that weren’t his. But he wore fingerless leather gloves on each hand—gloves he recognized.
Whose eyes was he seeing through? Whose memories were these?
He looked again at the rider, and realized with a shock that the man was a corpse. His legs were strapped to the animal and his back was strapped to a plank that rose from the saddle behind him, the whole arrangement keeping him upright in death. The dead man’s fist was clenched around a sheet of paper.
A sheet of paper that had once been signed by Brigham Young? But why would a dead man carry such a thing?
To prove his status? To prove to his ancestors, or to his gods, that he, too, was a mighty chief, a person worthy of a friendship with Brigham Young, famous chief of the Mormons?
It was only a guess, but if felt right to Hiram.
He stood on a high bluff, but this was not Carre Shinob. A wide valley full of yellow grass stretched out to the west. This was not the Uintas, it felt more like Beaver or Parowan, with lower hills and cultivated land.
He heard weeping. There were words, but not in a language he knew.
Looking about, he saw that a man standing beside him also wore a wool suit, and had the craggy face and pale hair of a northern European. Everyone else on the scene, maybe as many as fifty people, was Indian. Hiram knew enough Navajo to recognize their dress and a few of their words, and this was another people.
The two weeping children led the horse to a hillside tomb, a small natural cave that had almost been bricked in with stones and mortar. Indian men untied the corpse and carried it inside.
But the glove? It remained on Hiram’s borrowed hand, outside the tomb.
And there was no canvas in sight.
Here was only part of the answer to Hiram’s riddle, at best.
Brother Morley, the other European man said in an urgent whisper, you cannot allow this to happen!
Allow what to happen?
Shut your mouth, Hiram found his body saying. Do you want another war?
The other man was sullen, silent.
Then let them have the foolish traditions of their fathers. I will speak my eulogy and keep my vow.
Let them have their traditions, aye, no matter what?
No matter what.
The dead man arranged, the Indians stood in front of his tomb. Two women stood in the open doorway itself, and though the others fell silent, they continued a feverish chant under thei
r breaths.
One of the men nodded to Hiram.
Colorow was a great man, Hiram said. He made war on the Mericats and the Mormonee, and he was a mighty leader in war. Then he made peace with the Mormonee, and he was mighty in peace as well.
The Indians nodded, satisfied.
Then the warriors standing to either side of the chanting women stepped forward. With long knives, they slit the women’s throats.
Hiram wanted to scream. The body whose eyes he borrowed panted and sweated, but did nothing.
Could this be a lying vision? Jimson weed was called the devil’s snare for a reason, and could send dishonest dreams, as well as true ones.
But no, Hiram had a strong mind, and he was prepared.
And the vision had answered some of his questions.
The killers laid the two murdered women—sacrificed women—inside the grave with the chief’s body. As they finished bricking up the opening, the onlookers returned to weeping and song.
Hiram still wanted to scream, but he forced himself to keep watching.
With the tomb sealed, the two wailing children were led forward. With a shock, Hiram realized that theirs was not the obligatory crying of a professional mourner, or the general sorrow of someone whose tribe has lost a leader, but was caused by real terror.
They knew what was coming.
Then sacrificers drove long iron spikes into the stone to either side of the tomb. They shut iron collars around the necks of the two children, and then with short chains, they shackled the children to the tomb.
The dead chief’s tribe turned and walked away, singing.
The man with the gloves and his white companion went with them.
The cries of the shackled children rose piteous to a deaf heaven.
* * *
Coming up out of the jimson weed trance, Hiram felt cold. He ached from the rocks and his blood pulsed sluggishly in his veins, ineffective against the freezing Uinta night.
He couldn’t let himself come up, he needed to see more.
He tightened his fists around the scraps of paper and canvas.
More, I need to know more.
He forgot the cold, and sank again.
* * *
He found himself under a swollen moon, standing on the same high ridge beside the Indian chief’s tomb.
You stood the earlier passage, Hiram was saying. He leaned closed into the face of the craggy blonde man he’d seen before. The earlier passage was worse.
In that murder, and heathen sacrifice, are worse than grave robbing, aye. The other man was furious. But don’t pretend that what you’re proposing now ain’t a sin, just the same.
They’re asking us. His brothers. It isn’t robbing, it’s just moving the dead, to keep him safe, preserve his honor.
Hiram pointed at four Indian men as he spoke. Everyone wore long wool coats, and their exhaled breath puffed up in tiny clouds.
The blond man shook his head, shoulders slumping in surrender, and Hiram and the others got to work.
With slow movements and chanting a song Hiram didn’t understand, the six men knocked in the stones that bricked up the chief’s tomb. Hiram and his fellow white man stood back, and the Indians crept into the tomb holding a white canvas sheet.
When they emerged, there were three bodies in the sheet.
Them, too? Hiram asked, pointing at two small skeletons lying outside the tomb. Years must have passed, because the flesh had all fallen—or been eaten—from their bones, and the collars around their necks had fallen off, together with their skulls.
The Indians nodded.
Hiram helped gather up the children’s bones. Picking up one of the skulls—the boy’s?—he found it still covered with a thick mop of black hair. He ran his fingers through it and felt tears trickle down his cheeks.
They bundled all five skeletons into the canvas and then together the six men hoisted the bones up onto the back of a buckboard wagon. Hiram climbed into the seat and took the reins, shushing his uneasy horses.
Where are we taking the chief? he asked.
North and east, one of the Indians said. Far. A place called Carre Shinob.
* * *
Hiram drove into Heber with ache in his bones and disquiet in his stomach. A chief had died and been buried somewhere in the west, and then reburied here. The man’s grave had been disturbed by McCrae and the Oldhams’ horses, and his ghost had taken the herd.
The chief would give the horses back, but after seeing the man’s funeral, Hiram’s fear that what he wanted in return was the life of his son Michael intensified.
A light in the telegraph office drew him to park there in the gray dawn light, setting the handbrake of the Double-A and shuffling into the creaking wooden building. The clerk’s desk was vacant, and Hiram stood gratefully in the heat of a coal stove in the corner, feeling its warmth slowly burn away the frost that had sunk into his bones.
The clerk dragged himself to his place behind the desk, blowing his nose through a drooping mustache and into a yellowed old handkerchief. “I got a pot of coffee, if you want some.”
Hiram shook his head. “Thank you for the stove, though. I only stopped in because my boy’s still sleeping, and I wanted to see if I’d had an answer.”
“Oh yeah, you’re the fella with the queer words. I gotta say, you look more like a farmer than a…whatever kind of man would be sending telegrams like that one.”
“I am a farmer. Beets. Down at Lehi.”
“That explains it. Let me check.”
“Thank you.”
The clerk dug into his clip stand of messages and came up with one. “Here you go, came in last night while Jensen was working. He didn’t have an address to send it on to. Looks like your answer’s just about as strange as your question.”
“I planned to come in to pick it up.” Hiram tipped the clerk a precious nickel and took the telegram. The telegram was from Mahonri, and it was much longer than the question. Mahonri behaved as if he had an unlimited budget for sending telegrams; since Hiram was the beneficiary, he couldn’t complain.
Carre Shinob is legendary place where chief Walkara’s bones were moved. Walkara also known as Colorow and Walker as in Walker’s War. Most famous horse thief in history rustled 3000 horses in California in a single day. What are you doing up there?
“Thank you,” Hiram said again, and headed for the boarding house.
* * *
“They think I’m crazy at the slaughterhouse,” McCrae grumbled. The foreman carried a large bag slung over his shoulder and grimaced from the weight as he climbed the ridge to Carre Shinob.
The bag was full of horse bones.
“Did you tell them you wanted to make soup?” Hiram squinted at the sky. In the evening’s last blue-gray light, a sheet of glowering clouds gathered. In the east, over the higher Uintas, he saw lightning flash, and then the ensuing thunder crawled past him.
That should help, if anything.
But the storm made him even more glad he’d left Michael a second night in the boarding house.
“Yeah, I tried your joke. That’s why they think I’m crazy.”
“Well, if this doesn’t work, you don’t get your job back, and then I guess you’re out of options, and you’ll have to leave town. So as I see it, the opinion of the slaughterhouse crew shouldn’t worry you much.”
“And if I do get my job, I stick around, and I get the reputation of an eccentric who makes horse soup.”
“You could have told them the truth,” Hiram suggested.
They reached the saddle of the ridge, and McCrae set down his sack. “And what is the truth?”
Hiram set down his sack, which contained wooden rattles, a small hand drum, and a square of sheet metal, bowed over to squeeze it in. “Some would call it magic. My grandmother would have denied that.”
McCrae spat thick phlegm into the dirt. “And what would she have called it?”
Hiram looked up at Chief Walkara’s grave mound. “She’d hav
e said that when you need to get something done, you do what works. A cunning woman or a cunning man is just somebody who knows what works.”
“I guess on the whole I’d rather be known as the fella who wants to drink horse soup. Shall we get this started, then?”
Thunder rolled across the ridge, fat drops of rain splattered on their faces, and Hiram nodded. The heliotropius was said to be able to call rain. Sadly, it had no power to dismiss rain clouds.
They commenced at the far end of the ridge from the relocated bones of Chief Walkara. With the peals of thunder becoming more frequent, until they almost seemed to roll over the top of each other, the two men inched down the ridge. Elbert McCrae shuffled slowly, shaking his head and trying not to look at Hiram.
Hiram danced, kicked his toes into the softening dirt. He also whinnied and snorted, making all the horse-like noises he could.
McCrae carried the sheet metal, and he flexed and shook it. The sound he made was closer to the thunder’s noise than to the sound of actual horses. Hiram beat the drum, shook the rattles, and clapped his hands in turn. It was his best imitation of the sound of a running herd, but it was rude and childish at best.
Would it be enough?
He kept his eye fixed on the tumulus, but saw nothing.
As they climbed toward the site of the grave, McCrae traded the sheet metal for the sack of bones. He shook his head. “That’s the weakest damn horse imitation I ever heard, Woolley.”
Hiram chuckled. “I’m trying, but I’m more of a mule and truck man, myself.”
“A horse sounds like this.” And then McCrae began to neigh and whinny for all he was worth.
And he really did sound like a horse.
They climbed the promontory prancing together. At the top, rain mixed with hail pounded down on them as they trotted three times in a circle around the stones, McCrae scattering the bones from his sack all over the knob of earth.
Then Hiram stopped, and McCrae stopped with him. The foreman wore a surprisingly cheerful grin.
“We brought you these horses, Chief Walkara!” Hiram cried, addressing the low mound of stones.
Lightning flashed, illuminating the top of the hill—it was still empty of life other than the two men.
