Days Without End

CHAPTER FOUR

THE TOWNSPEOPLE WERE SET to put on a huge feast to show their gratitude. One short street with a few new buildings each side was the town. Troopers Pearl and Watchorn had been quietly detained by the major and were now in the lock-up at the fort, giving out betimes through the meal hatch, I do not doubt. Major said he would deal with them in due course. The town otherwise was heaving with preparations and general to-do for the following day. They had a bear for to butcher and also deer meat, they said, and a rake of dogs. Seemingly the Indians had a whole pack of them and the townspeople had rounded them up like sheep, drove them back to town, with all the crazy yapping and barking.

The major meanwhile sent back a detail with spades he got off the iron-goods store and we dug two long pits out in the wilds beside the deserted encampment and then we started to drag the bodies to them, and tipped them in. Major was loath to let wolves have them, though the townsmen didn’t seem to mind. Expressed a great deal of surprise at the major’s thoroughness, but the major, while polite, and even-tenored in his voice, wasn’t going just to think like everyone else. Major was of the opinion, and communicated it to us as we lined up reluctantly with our spades for the work, in that hateful and haunted place, that an Indian got a soul just like another man. I would like to tell you how I felt except it was all taking me back to Canada and the fever sheds that time and there’s no use going back there in my mind. Pits that time too, and people put in, thousands, babies too. I seen all that as a child myself. It’s a dark thing when the world sets no value on you or your kin, and then Death comes stalking in, in his bloody boots.

So we dug like frightened heroes. John Cole I noted was the best digger, it wasn’t the first time he had turned the earth, you could tell. So I copied him. I had only ever pulled up potatoes with my hands as a little boy in Ireland, after my father shook the earth around them with his spade, that was just a little patch he had kept behind our house, it wasn’t like he was a true farmer. The frost was still on the ground everywhere and the temperature had started to freeze the little river that wound past the camp, making it I suppose a good choice for a stopping place. The grasses were sere and indifferent really, scratching the horizon of the sky with their sharp stems. That sky was clear and high and the lightest blue. We were four hours digging out the trenches. The troopers were singing as they worked, dirty-worded songs we all knew. We were sweating like window-glass in the winter. The major drove us on in his strange way, sort of cold, indifferent, like the grasses. He was set to do something and he was doing it. In the town he had asked the padre to come out but the townsmen vetoed that. After the hours of digging we were sent then to fetch across the bodies and we brought the bodies of the women and the children to the pit and after that we went to the burnt-out lodge and fetched in among the debris and the black dirt and got whatever we could of the bones of the braves, heads and such. Threw them in. You might have had a worried look when you saw how gently some of the men threw. Others throwing like they was throwing nothing of particular importance. But the gentle ones throwing gently. John Cole for instance. As for talk there were only the usual repartee that means nothing but somehow saves the heart and the day. It became clear to me that many of the squaws and the children had got out of the copsewood, because you could see still the trampling effect of their rushing off on the underwood. I found myself hoping many of the bucks had got away too but maybe I was asking for trouble thinking that. It was such a beautiful spot and the work was so lousy. You couldn’t help almost a more human thought. Nature asks you to go back a little and forget things. Gets under your hardened nature like a burrowing creature. When all the bodies were in, we covered over the pits with the soil we had left, like we were putting pastry tops on two enormous pies. It was wretched. Then we stood and took our hats off at the major’s behest and he spoke his few words. God bless these people, he said, and though we was doing our work as we were bound and ordered, may God forgive us. Amen, we said.

It was dark and we had hours of riding before us and we were not disappointed to mount up and head back.

Next day we were risen early at the fort and we washed off all our dirt at the water butts and put on our finery for the feast. That was, our usual uniforms brushed down best we could, and Bailey the barberman cut as many of the hairs as he could and shaved as many of the faces as he could too. There was a big line of men in their vests, waiting. The hair was bagged up in a linen sack and burned because of the nits carousing there. Then we were nigh ready, and rode with what grace and style we could muster back into town. It is a fine thing to see three hundred men riding, and we all felt the fineness in it, I suppose we did. Some of us had drunk our livers clean in half, though we were young enough still. I weren’t even eighteen. Lower backs ground away by the hard saddles. Pain everywhere on waking. But the little grandeur of the line of riders affected us too. We were about the people’s business, we had done something for the people. Something like that. Puts a fire into your belly somehow. Sense of rightness. Not justice exactly. Fulfilling the wishes of the majority, something along those lines, I don’t know. That’s how it was with us. I guess it’s long ago now. Seems to sit right up in front of my eyes just now though.

Major let Watchorn and Pearl out for the festivities, he seemed to think that was the right thing to do. He said he would tend to them later. Where were they going to run? Wasn’t nothing around us only nothing.

I would have to say it was lovely how the town composed itself to welcome us. They had set banners all along their little street and they lit lanterns they had made from old packing paper, the candles burning in them like souls. The padre made a huge prayer out in the open and the whole town went down on its knees, right there, and praised the Lord. This was the section of humanity favoured in that place, the Indians had no place no more there. Their tickets of passage were rescinded and the bailiffs of God had took back the papers for their souls. I did feel a seeping tincture of sadness for them. I did feel some strange toiling seeping sadness for them. Seven hours off buried in their pits, the redwoods towering, the silence pitted by birds and passing creatures. The solemn awfulness of it maybe. There weren’t no padre praying in exultation for them. They were the boys with the losing hand. Then niceties all done, the town rose and cheered wildly, and then it was a maelstrom of meat eating and keg broaching, and all the usual mayhem. We were dancing, we were clapping backs, we were telling old stories. Men were listening with their ears cocked, till they judged when they could let loose the laughter. Time was not something then we thought of as an item that possessed an ending, but something that would go on forever, all rested and stopped in that moment. Hard to say what I mean by that. You look back at all the endless years when you never had that thought. I am doing that now as I write these words in Tennessee. I am thinking of the days without end of my life. And it is not like that now. I am wondering what words we said so carelessly that night, what vigorous nonsense we spoke, what drunken shouts we shouted, what stupid joy there was in that, and how John Cole was only young then and as handsome as any person that has ever lived. Young, and there would never be a change for that. The heart rising, and the soul singing. Fully alive in life and content as the house-martins under the eaves of the house.

The army had in mind for us to brave out the winter in the fort and then come spring be seeing what else could be done for to pacify the country. Although I have given the impression that them Yuroks were small and ineffectual people nevertheless listening to the townspeople did put us in suspicion that the Indians were not always so tolerable. There were stories everywhere of rapes and robberies and sudden and vicious visits on out-of-the-way premises. Unless you were a witness how could you say what was true. Anyhows in due course a herd of some hundreds of cattle arrived, driven up from southern California on an army requisition docket. That was for our sustenance. On the saint’s day of St John I get a letter from Mr Noone just as he promised. All his news. There was good water under the thickening ice. All the stores would keep fresh in those low temperatures. There was a forest of wood to burn. We washed our shirts and trews and when we went out to get them off the bushes, they were as stiff as corpses in the cold. Some poor cows froze where they were standing like they had peered into the face of old Medusa. Men lost the wages of three years hence at cards. They bet their boots and then pled for the pity of the winner. The piss froze as it left our peckers and woe betide the man with an obstruction or hesitation to their shit, because soon they had a brown icicle on their arse. The whisky continued its work of eating our livers. It was as good a life as most of us had ever knowed. Watchorn and Pearl mingled with the rest, as if the major had forgotten their offence. The Missouri men sang their Missouri songs, rough Kansas men sang theirs, and those queer New England types sang no doubt the ancient songs of England, who could tell.

Then rain began to fall in an extravagant tantrum. High up in mountain country though we were, every little river became a huge muscled snake, and the water wanted to find out everything, the meaning of our sad roofs for instance, the meaning of our bunk beds beginning to take the character of little barks, the sure calculation that if it fell day and night no human man was going to get his uniform dry. We was wet to the ribs.

Crazy California weather, how come anyone ever come out here? said John Cole, with the voice of one who has not exactly chosen this destination.

We was lying out on the aforesaid bunks. Now the spring was supposed to be afoot was just as well as no one had dollars left to lose at cards, except the damn sergeant, who had won most of it. There were sharks in other segments of our unit too, Patterson and Wilks, both evil good card-players. Now they were likely struggling to keep their winnings dry. Those Yankee dollars were inclined to rust. The high snow melted and down that came too.

Next morning John Cole was shaking my arm to wake me. You need to do something other than lie there, he says. Sure enough the water was up over his bunk and just about to engulf mine. There was a smell of rats’ urine if you ever smelt that. Now that I think of it, we saw dozens of the critters swimming for their lives. We sloshed out onto the parade ground so called. Men were coming out of the sheds trying to hitch their braces. Well we had no high ground to go to. How come we got a flood here, we were saying? The way some genius built this place. True enough, now that we had the rain and meltwater to show us, the camp was kinda built in a odd way. If you can imagine a great scallop shape there, and the hills behind, and what was formerly the helpful little stream going past the boundary wall. Now blotted out. The night pickets were standing on the wall looking very doubtful. Some brave bugler bugled reveille but damn it we were all reveilled by then. The major was actually swimming up the way. Now the three hundred were looking to get up on the roofs, seemed the only way, and dozens of others shimmied up into the shade trees, if they were dizzy from heights they didn’t show it, up they went like monkeys in uniform. Myself and John Cole pushed over through the lead-heavy water and clumb a tree likewise.

We weren’t even all up there when something queer was stirring in the distance. No one had ever seen the like. It looked like someone had put the ocean on top of the forest, just thrun it down there, and now the ocean was doing the inevitable in the scientific way and was hammering and surging down towards us. We felt like three hundred very small and foolish creatures when we saw that, standing as we were on a bunch of low roofs. Major almost screams out his orders, and then the sergeants were echoing him, and then the men were trying to respond. But what had the major said? What had the sergeants called out? Where to go? We were already the citizens of a shallow sea. That coming wave looked like twenty feet of death. The flood came so quickly you couldn’t have laid a bet on it. You couldn’t a got the book open quick enough to mark the wager. Then the wild vicious thing reached our camp and spread itself over it carrying half of the forest with it. Trees and branches and bushes and bears and deer and God knows, birds and alligators, though I never saw alligators up there to be truthful. Wolves and mountain cats and snakes. Everything was gone then with the flood, that was able to be unmoored and move. Those fellas on the roofs had the shittiest cards in the deal, it was like nature’s hand just swept them off the table. I could feel our shade tree bending with the force and it was twelve feet round at the base. Man, it bent. Then unbent. Now we were nearly arrows being fired. Hold on there, John Cole! Hold on, Thomas! So we held, we gripped, we fastened ourselves, the great old tree whanged in the boiling waters, I doubt I will ever hear such a sound again, it was well nigh musical.

Dozens of troopers musta drowned. Maybe Watchorn and Pearl might have wished to be among them, but they survived. Me and John Cole. Thank God, John Cole. The major, and two hundred others. It was the men in the trees was mostly saved. Those roofs too low. We found bodies for the next weeks, lower down, as the flood waters fell. The townspeople came down and helped us with the burying. They hadn’t been so crazy as to build their town in a flood path anyhow. Guess we knew then what had scalloped out that ground. Goddamn engineers.

Then a queer fever went through the camp. Maybe it was yellow fever, something like that, something that liked a lot of wetness. Our cattle were gone of course and all our dry goods were wet goods. The townspeople gave us what they could but the major said we had to go back to Missouri even though the grass would only be coming small on the prairie.

This little tour is done, he said, drily. The major’s wit. It was the driest thing in the camp.

Now winter was tightening her noose on the world everywhere and we were headed back for Missouri. To say we were a bedraggled troop is not quite saying enough. Maybe we were being punished for our shabby acts. There was no game below the mountains this time and soon our bellies were gnawed by hunger. It was weeks of a journey and now we were a-feared of what hunger might do. A hunger knower like myself was a-feared more than most. I seen the cold deeds of hunger. The world got a lot of people in it, and when it comes to slaughter and famine, whether we’re to live or die, it don’t care much either way. The world got so many it don’t need to. We could have starved out there on the badlands, on that desert that wasn’t a desert, on that journey that wasn’t a journey so much as a fleeing eastward. Thousands die everywhere always. The world don’t care much, it just don’t mind much. That’s what I notice about it. There is that great wailing and distress and then the pacifying waters close over everything, old Father Time washes his hands. On he plods to the next place. It suits us well to know these things, that you may exert yourself to survive. Just surviving is the victory. Now that I can no longer exert myself in that way, I think back to that lonesome troop of soldiers, trying to make it back. Desolate, and decimated though we were, there was something good there. Something that couldn’t be extinguished by flood and hunger. That human will. You got to give homage to it. I seen it many times. It ain’t so rare. But it is the best of us.

Now we were praying like priests or virgin girls that we would meet some wagons plying west. Except, by the time they passed us, they might be lean on victuals also of course. But we just gotta see other human faces. Mile upon mile of the sere little bushes of America and the scraggy up-and-down terrain. In the far distance to the south sometimes we thought we could see piled-up square hills, we knew we mustn’t go down there. That was Apache and Comanche country certainly. Boys would eat you for their supper quick as see you. The major knew the lean Apache boys, he had fought with them for fifteen years, he said. Just about the worst devils you will ever hear about or see, he said. He said they was going down regular into Mexico, chewing up farmers. Kill everyone they could find, take the cattle, horses, women and oftentimes children back to their countries. Be gone a month, riding like ghosts through the spectral lands. You could chase after them with men and guns but you would never find them. Never even see them. You’d wake in the morning and there wouldn’t be a horse tethered no more, fifty of them vanished in the night, and the pickets dead as stones where they had been sitting. He said they took you prisoner you would regret it. Take you back to their villages for sport, the women with their little sharp knives cutting you with a thousand cuts, the slowest death in the book. Bleed out on the warm prairie dust. Or bury you to the neck, let the ants eat your face, the dogs gnaw your ears and nose, if the women hadn’t cut them off already. Thing was, a warrior was never to cry out. Show how brave you were by not crying out, that’s what they thought was a decent exit. But white men, troopers, they’d be roaring just to see the women coming with the knives. Anyhow, you died either way. Thing was, if a warrior was missing something important, if the head was parted from the trunk for instance, there was an opinion among them that you wouldn’t be able to reach the happy hunting grounds then. So they were careful not to take too much. Just little bits. The ear and eye, say, or trim off the bollocks. So you could still reach heaven. But the trouble was, Mexican bandits, and rough riding white men of any description, evil outlaws, murderous rustlers, all those wild class of beings that were ubiquitous in that time, they thought they better cut up an Indian when they killed him. Took off the hair firstly, hair was a big thing for an Indian. Scalping. Long silky black hair down to the waist and the skin on top of the head with it. Chop off the head with a machete. Chop off the arms. That didn’t show no respect and no thought either for the warrior’s aftertime. That sort of thing inflamed the Apache, the Comanche, then he was out on a revenge spree. He was going to take your fingers off one by one. He was going to take your toes, and then your balls, and then your pecker. Slowly, slowly. You better not get in his way then.

White men doesn’t understand Indians and vice versa, said the major, shaking his head in his even-toned way. That’s what brings the trouble, he says.

Well, now we were fearing the Indians just as much as the hunger, though the hunger was winning too.