Blood Sky at Morning

Chapter 10

General Grant sipped his whiskey, then signed the paper on his desk. He handed it to General Crook, who was seated on the other side, in a high-backed, upholstered chair that he was sure had come out of a medieval torture chamber. His sword jabbed him in the thigh, and the armrests were too small, too low.

“I want just you and me to know about this, George,” Grant said.

“Understood, General.”

Crook read the paper.

“You sign it, too,” Grant said.

“Of course. Gladly.

Crook leaned over Grant’s desk and lay the paper flat. Grant handed him a quill pen. George signed his name with a celeritous flourish.

“I don’t want this man wearing a uniform,” Grant said. “He might as well wear a red flag draped around him. No, Cody will be more useful to us if our enemies don’t see a soldier walking up to them carrying a rifle and a sidearm. Give him rank, but disguise him as a civilian.”

“As you wish, General,” Crook said. “I’ll make Zak Cody a colonel, fair enough?”

“Fair and appropriate, General Crook.”

“This is the last thing I wanted to accomplish before I took the oath of the presidency,” Grant said. “I think Cody will prove himself out, don’t you?”

“I have no doubt, General.”

That was the story Zak heard as told to him by General Crook when the general pinned the oak leaf clusters on his uniform.

“This is the last time you’ll see these on your shoulders, Zak,” Crook said. “Tomorrow, you’ll be a civilian. I want you to see that the Indians of this country get a fair shake.”

And that was how it had started. Those same thoughts recurred time and again in Cody’s mind whenever he doubted himself or his mission.

Now, as he rode through the night, he wore the mantle Crook had placed on him and it was beginning to weigh heavy on him and give him an itch. He reported to no one, but he also had no guidance but his own. He hoped he was doing the right thing, but he was a tightrope walker working high above the crowd without a net.

Sometime before midnight he made a dry camp, no fire, grass for Nox, a small hill in the open, and hid his bedroll just below it. He ate for the first time that day, filling the hollow in his stomach with beef jerky, hardtack, and water. He was used to such fare, and going for long periods without food was no hardship. He had lived worse, in deep winter snows, high above the world in the Rocky Mountains or in the Paha Sapa, the sacred Black Hills.

If his father’s spirit had ridden with him that night, it was the spirit of his mother that he felt now, as he lay under a canopy of stars with the light zephyrs whispering through the cholla and the yucca. He remembered looking up through the smoke hole of the tipi at night and seeing those same stars and how, over time, they journeyed in circles, the sacred circles so revered by the Lakota.

Her name was White Rain, and she told him once how she had come to be called by that appellation. She did not speak English well, but his father had taught her a few words because he loved her dearly and his Ogallala was not the best. Zak came to know both languages, and others, for his ear was tuned early to languages and dialects.

“When I was born,” his mother told him, “my skin was so pale that the old woman who drew me from the belly of my mother said that I must have been washed by a white rain as I made the journey to this world.”

“Your mother, was she Hunkpapa or Ogallala?”

“No, she had skin like mine. The red clay had been washed away. She was a captive girl, taken from the white eyes, and my father, War Shield, took her as his wife, as your father took me. My mother’s Lakota name was Yellow Bead by the time she had grown into woman.”

His father would not tell him much about his mother, and his few memories were hazy. He had only been with her until the Black Robe came and told his father he was going to take Zak away before he turned pure Indian. Black Robe told Russell Cody that there was a white woman at Bent’s Fort who could raise the boy and teach him to read and write, to converse properly in the English language. Russell had reluctantly agreed after White Rain died, when Zak was almost eleven years old.

He had never seen a man grieve so, as his father had, after his mother died. Russell worked the trap-lines long after the last rendezvous. The market for beaver had vanished, and most of the mountain men, the free trappers he lived and hunted with, had gone back to St. Louis or St. Joe, or died of sadness and old age.

“Pa,” Zak had said, “why do you sit and stare at nothing for hours? And you cry at night. I hear you. I hear you call out her name.”

“When White Rain left me, son, it felt like she took part of me with her. A big part. And I don’t know how to get it back. When I look out at the world, there’s a big empty spot where your ma once stood. Just an empty place wherever she walked.”

“But I miss her, too, Pa.”

“I know you do, Zak. You came out of her. You were a part of her. But she and me, we were just one person like. I don’t know how to explain it no better’n that. She’s done gone and I’m half a man.”

“No, you ain’t, Pa. You’re the same.”

“Outside, maybe. Not inside. She squeezed my heart, that woman. Squeezed it real hard whenever she smiled, whenever she put her hand on my arm, whenever she kissed me or lay by my side on the robe.”

“You don’t take me hunting no more, Pa, and I’ve had all that book learning. You sent me off with Black Robe and I wanted to be with you and Ma. I cried every night down at the fort. For a long time.”

Russell put his arm on Zak’s shoulder.

“I’m sorry son. I thought it was for the best.”

“Maybe Ma don’t want you to cry for her no more, Pa. Maybe she wants you to hunt with me, fish with me, ’stead of sittin’ around this Sioux camp like one of the old ones with no teeth, just waiting to die.”

“You got your ma’s sensibility, son, I reckon. No, she wouldn’t want me to be a lie-about-camp. She’d tell me to get up off my ass and make meat. But the trappin’s all played out and the buffalo are as thin as the mist on the Rosebud. Ain’t no life for me no more.”

“Maybe I should just give up, too, then, Pa.”

“Give up? I never said you should give up.”

“Well, Ma’s just as dead to me as she is to you. And now you might as well be dead, too. I come back and the braves are still talking about fighting the Crow and going after buffalo and making the Sun Dance. They’re living in the past same as you. I learned that much when I was staying with Mrs. McKinney down at Bent’s.”

“I ain’t give up.” Stubborn old bastard. Beard stubble on his face like mold growing on rancid deer meat. Grease worried into his buckskins so deep it would never wash out, his moccasins full of sewed up holes, and half his beadwork, White Rain’s beadwork, gone, the rest hanging on sinew thread, ready to fall into the dirt. His hair long and full of lice, dirty as a dog’s hind leg.

“It looks like you have given up, Pa. I can’t say it no plainer than that. You got old real fast, and next your teeth are going to fall out and you’ll go blind staring at those empty places all the time. You got to get up off the robes and walk up the mountain with me, make the elk come to your call, the deer to your grunt. You got to hear the crack of your rifle again and see if the beaver have come back up on Lost Creek or over in the Bitterroots.”

“I probably should give up.”

“Pa, what’s a ‘squaw man’?”

“Where’d you hear that?”

“At the fort.”

“That what they call me?”

Zak dipped his head and nodded.

“Well, that’s from folks who just don’t understand about livin’ in the wilderness, son. They can call me a ‘squaw man’ all they like, but your ma was a special woman. And her ma, too. A white gal gets captured by an Injun and white folks don’t want nothin’ to do with ’em. Treat ’em like dirt. Worse than dirt, like cur dogs.”

“Did you feel sorry for Ma?”

“No. I saw who she was. Where she come from. Her ma was just a child when she was took. She didn’t know nothin’ of white ways after a time. So she became a Sioux woman. It takes a mite of courage to change like that, give up what you was and become somethin’ else.”

“I think I know what you mean, Pa. I remember Curly Jack told me once that he became a mountain man because it was a better life than he had back in Tennessee. Said a man had to become an Indian if he was going to live through a winter in the mountains.”

“Curly Jack said it right, Zak. We all came up here to trade with the red man. Once we tasted their life some, we got to lookin’ at things different. We saw white people for what they was, and red people for what they was. We never learned any of that in no school down on the flat.”

Zak thought about his schooling and realized that, while he had learned a lot about numbers and words and foreign countries, he had also learned that the white race hated the red men and didn’t think of them as being human at all. He began to realize that he and his father lived in two different worlds. It was a sobering thought and went deep with him and stayed there all this time. That was probably why he and Crook had gotten along so well. Crook was a man who could look into both worlds and see the worth in each, as well as the worst in each.

He fell asleep thinking of White Rain and how his father had begun to recover and get back to life after that talk they had. They hunted and fished together, traveled the Rockies as carefree as a couple of kids let out from school for the summer, and they had grown close. That’s when he found out that his father had been collecting gold in the Paha Sapa and saving it up, not for himself, but so that he could have a life of ease someday if he chose to live in the white world.

Neither of them had realized the path Zak would take, or that the country would take, going to war over slavery and states’ rights, brother killing brother, father killing son, son killing father. Neither of them could foresee the future, but both knew what they both had lost when the beaver played out and White Rain died.

Zak could look back and see that all the signs were there, like signposts on roads that wound through the Badlands. Changes. New paths. The old ones blown over by wind and weather, the new ones dangerous, treacherous, dark.

Neither had seen a man like Ben Trask come down the trail, driven by greed, bent on torture and murder. Trask had intruded on their world as surely as the white man had intruded on the world of the Plains Indians and all the tribes in the nation. Such thoughts tightened things inside Zak, turned him hard inside, like the granite peaks of the Tetons, like a fist made out of stone.

The war changed him, too.

He had seen men torn to pieces by grapeshot and shrapnel, heard their screams and cries, seen the surgeons saw off gangrenous limbs and battlefields strewn with the bodies of young men, some with peach fuzz still on their faces, taken from life long before their allotted time, and it was all horror to see young men march into clouds of smoke and die by the hundreds.

Yet he had escaped harm, somehow, with bullets and minié balls whistling past his ear, bombs bursting all around him, horses shot from under him, and stronger men falling, left crippled for life. He thought of his mother and father often during those years, appreciating them both more than he ever had, missing them in those dark hours when he heard only the moans of the dead and dying while crickets struck up their orchestras in the blood-soaked grasses of woodland havens.

Zak fell asleep thinking back through those years, and feeling just as alone now as he had when the rattle of muskets and the clank of caissons were like a horde of metal insects marching across the land, leaving destruction in their wake, those desolate and deserted burnt lands where corpses stiffened in the sun and wild animals fed on them at night.

And the first kill strong in his mind, that bleak moment when he had shot a gray-clad soldier in the eye, seen him fall and later gaze up at him with that one sightless eye, his stomach churning with a nameless grief for the life he had taken, and the hollow feeling afterward, knowing something had changed inside him, something that could not be spelled out or described or explained.

His dreams picked up strands of these thoughts and wove them into a mysterious tapestry hanging in a great empty hall where the coyotes sang songs of the dead and White Rain smiled at him, great tears in her eyes, and his father stood knee-deep in a beaver pond filled with blood, holding up a rusted trap from which dangled a water snake with a human head that bore a strong resemblance to Ben Trask.