Days Without End

CHAPTER SEVEN

WE’RE SCUFFING ABOUT the camp trying to figure out what happened and looking for clues. We don’t know if the Indians are nearby or coming back. Then a trooper’s found in a wigwam where he must of crawled in. It’s like a miracle and for a moment an exultation floods my breast. He has a bullet in the cheek but he’s still breathing. Caleb Booth’s alive, shouts the man who finds him. We all crowd to the tent door. We fetch him a swallow of water and then the sergeant holds up his head and tries to get him to drink but most of the water runs out through his cheek. We found them early this morning, says Caleb Booth. He’s young like me and John Cole, so he doesn’t understand dying. Probably thinks he’ll come through all right. Wants to tell us the history. Says the Pawnee scouts took off for some reason and then the lieutenant rode them right in and asked the chief was he involved in killing those emigrants. Chief said he was because they was moving over ground that was forbid in the treaty and why was that and had he not by God every right to kill them? Caleb Booth said the lieutenant just lost his temper then at the easy mentioning of the Lord and just shot the man standing next nigh the chief. Then the chief calls out and there is a dozen other braves in the tents unbeknownst and they rush out and start shooting and there’s only time to shoot another Indian and then all the troopers are shot. And Caleb lay in the grass face down and keeps quiet. Then the Indians go off in a big hurry and Caleb creeps into the wigwam as the sun starts to rise higher in the sky since he don’t wish to be fried. He knew we would come, he says, he just knew. Darned glad to see us. So then the sergeant pokes around the wound a bit to see where the bullet went and looks like it went right through and out somewhere. Flying like a gemstone over the plains. Sergeant nods his head like someone asked him something.

Digging holes for nineteen men in earth never ploughed is taxing work. But the bodies are already swelling and we ain’t got a cart to carry them home. We gather up all the wigwams and all the bits and pieces and pile them up and then we fire the lot. Lige Magan says he hopes the Injuns can see the smoke and hurry back to save their dirty rags. He says the best thing to do is bury the men and then light out after the killers. Kill every one of them for a change, he says. I’m thinking but not saying that we don’t have the supplies for that and what about Caleb Booth. They could be a day away and what’s more cavalry can never find Indians like that, they’re wilier than wolves. And Lige knows all that as well as me but he goes busting on about doing it. Tells us what he thinks we can do when we find them. Seems to have a lot of plans. More than likely the sergeant can hear him but the sergeant is standing alone now beyond the wigwams. The grass is so baked by the sun that it looks blue, it shines like blue blades beside the sergeant’s old boots. He has his back turned to us and he doesn’t say anything in response to Lige. Lige shakes his head and goes on digging. Starling Carlton has gone puce-red in the face and is panting like an old dog, but he keeps the shovel moving. Bangs his foot down on it and keeps it moving. They say Starling Carlton killed men in his time outside the law but no one knows for sure. Some say he was a child-catcher, taking Indian children for slaves in California. He sure would give you a clatter if you looked sideways at him. You gotta treat him with due caution. He don’t mind losing at cards and has a jolly aspect to him sometimes but you don’t want to find out the thing that irritates him because it might be the last thing you find out. There’s no one on earth would say he’s a polite man. How he carries his big weight out here on a job like this is anyone’s guess and he don’t seem to eat much more than the next man and he sweats like a cut cactus all the time. It’s washing down his face now and he rubs it away with his filthy hands. He digs nearly as good as John Cole, has a little steady knack to his spadework, which is agreeable to watch even as we mourn. We don’t know rightly what to do with the dead Indians so we just leave them. Sergeant comes over suddenly and cuts off their noses because he don’t want them to reach the happy hunting grounds, he says. He throws the noses out onto the prairie like he thinks the dead might rise to try and put them back. He fetches the papers and them little travelling Bibles and the like off of our boys. Wives and mothers to send them to. On we go, then we respectfully drop the men into their holes and then we cover them up with a bedding of earth and every man in due course has a mound of the same earth over him like eiderdowns in a fancy hotel. The sergeant rouses himself and says a few words appropriate to the moment and then he bids us mount up and Lige puts Caleb Booth up behind him because it’s Lige who has the strongest gelding and then we ride off. No one looks back.

Caught-His-Horse-First and his band is pinned up in barracks as the number one criminal. Sergeant pins the notice up himself. Colonel signs the order. Doesn’t take the terror and the sorrow out of it but puts revenge in beside it as a brother. Like cutting beer with whisky. The Pawnee scouts come in eventually but when they can’t give a good account for hightailing it the colonel reckons it’s as good as desertion and they’re shot. The major don’t like it and says scouts ain’t soldiers proper, you can’t shoot them. Apart from that old and useful phrase nahwah which means howdy, no one speaks Pawnee and sign language don’t cover this. Indians look very puzzled, surprised and offended to be shot but they go to the wall with noble mien I must allow. You can’t have nothing good in war without you punishing the guilty, the sergeant says with a savage air and no one says nothing against that. John Cole whispers to me that most times that sergeant he just wrong but just now and then he’s right and he’s right this time. I guess I’m thinking this is true. We get drunk then and the sergeant is clutching his belly all evening and then everything is blotted out till you awake in the bright early morning needing a piss and then it all floods back into your brain what happened and it makes your heart yelp like a dog.

Least Caleb Booth was coming good in the infirmary and that might be a tribute to his innocent belief in the darn permanence of life.

But I was remembering in particular Nathan Noland my friend and John Cole’s. And I remembered John Cole putting a sprig into the hole with Nathan of some goddamn weed he called Wolf ’s-bane but I said it was a goddamn Lupine, don’t he know his flowers? He said he knowed them a heck better than me being a farmboy but we was out in foreign country now and names were not the same here. Wolf ’s-bane was used in New England for poisoning captured wolves, said John Cole. You crushed it up and fed it with meat. I said you can crush that up and try kill a wolf with it but the wolf will bite you because it’s just a Lupine. Then he was laughing. We was sorrowful in the extreme for Nathan Noland and the flower looked good along his bloodied face, Lupine or Wolf ’s-bane or whatever was its name. It was a small stack of purple smoke it looked like lying there and the drear pull of the skin on Nathan’s face was somehow eased a little by it. John Cole had closed his eyes and we was sorry to see his end.

As drear winter returns again we hunker down in the fort and hope our bodies can rise in spring like the bears. Soldiers coming out of winter have those swimming rheumy eyes of drinkers. Their skins is pale from poor eats. Awful endless yards of dry meats from the long cold pantries and maybe for a while potatoes from New York and Maine come out in huge wagons and even some oranges coming back the other way from California. But mostly filthy dreck of things like things dogs won’t eat except in extremities. But Indians too go to ground and God knows how they stretch their goods from fall to spring because an Indian he never plans for nothing. If he got a pile of something he eats it, if he got a barrel of whisky he drinks it. He drinks it till he falls down drunker than a pollen-drunk bumblebee. We’re hoping Caught-His-Horse-First is feeling the same murdering hunger we do. Only the sergeant keeps his swole belly, like a girl six month gone, and of course Starling Carlton never sheds an ounce. The fort is scattered with other Indians, they sit out on the roofs like emperors, and the women work for favours with the troopers. Troopers have red peckers and God knows what the squaws. Troopers that can’t afford even squaws lie with troopers so that’s more devilment to their equipment. Doesn’t do to dwell your mind on it. Major instituted an Indian school for the many children racing about and the offspring of the troopers that have took Indian wives. Most of the three-card tricksters, hucksters, coffin makers, snakebite serum sellers, miracle medicine men, volunteer militiamen, do-anything merchants, and all the candidates for the worst examples of humanity, and so on and so on, hove off east just as soon as the lead dropped in the glass. The major himself went east just nearly alone with a company of ten men because news is he is to be married there to a Boston beauty, so Lige Magan has ascertained, but how we don’t know, unless he reads it in one of those ancient newspapers that crawl out to us with the pilgrims. The buglers and our drummer boys played him out onto the trail and we gave him a friendly cheer for luck. Plenty pilgrims also in the fort putting a lean on the rations, and how many have resolved to return east I don’t know, but nearly every soul here was gone out to California or Oregon and found nothing there they liked, and back they wended eastward, reaching only here before the winter. Guess the Promised Land is draped in hues of grey in the upshot. It’s a hard task to make something out of nothing as even God might attest. Me, sharpshooter Lige Magan, Caleb Booth back from the dead, Starling Carlton, Handsome John Cole, we were keeping a little understanding going that we was a special outfit of friends, for the purposes of cards not least. Starling, heaving with his accustomed fat, in the dead of winter when we might have ate rats heartily enough, we suspected of cheating against himself. Either that or he was losing his famous touch. But our small economy was moving about between ourselves anyhow, our few cents and tokens passing from pocket to pocket and back again, and I remember that winter as one of uproarious laughter. We was on best terms because we had seen slaughter together. Caleb was almost a holy man among the soldiers. He could of taken a collection in his hat every Sunday. A man that comes through murder and horror is a special man, men look at him as he passes and they say such and such about him – there goes Caleb Booth, the lucky man. A lucky man is a man you want fighting near you and he gives the needful sense that the world is a thing of mysteries and wonders. That it’s bigger than you, bigger than all the shit and blood you seen. That God might be in it somehow looking out for you. Troopers maybe are rough souls and the regular padre don’t get much joy out of us. But that don’t say we don’t have things we cherish. Stories that tell another story just the whole while they are being told. Things you can’t ever quite put your finger on. Every man alive has asked why he is here on the earth and what was the likely purpose of that. To watch Caleb Booth come back from the door of death with his mortal wound, well, somewhere in there all mixed up with not knowing was knowing something. I ain’t saying we knowed what we knowed, I ain’t saying Starling Carlton or Lige Magan jumped up and said he knowed something, or anyone else. I ain’t saying that.

No, sir.

Late spring’s bringing the first of the wagon trains and also the major with his new bride. She ain’t riding side-saddle. Kitted out in proper ladies’ britches. In the gates she comes like a message from a far far country, where things is different and people eat off nice plates. Country opens like an enormous parcel and the plains is sparkling with ten thousand flowers and you can feel that first tincture of healing warmth in the days. And across this great carpet of colours has come the major and his bride. God Almighty. He carries her indoors as custom demands and we all stand in front of his quarters and give a cheer and throw our hats into the air. We don’t hardly know what else to do. We feel as happy for the major like it was us that married her. John Cole says he never saw a woman to match her. He’s right. Major hasn’t said a word but the fort gazetteer says her name before she wed were Lavinia Grady so I guess there must be Irish in her anyhow. Major’s name is Neale so I guess she’s Mrs Neale now. I was surprised to note the major’s Christian name because I don’t believe I knew it rightly till that moment. Tilson. Goddamn Tilson Neale. Which was news to me. But that’s how you learn things I guess.

Well the major is a new man now and he is as happy as a duck in the rain, I do not lie. It is good to see what marriage can do for a man like him who feels the world as a burden he must carry alone. She don’t even come out the next day in a dress so I guess she must be intending to stick to the britches. I notice it is sort of a skirt divided into two pieces really. I never seen the like before, I guess the east is getting very forward and all sorts of new things are shooting up. Also she favours these little Mexican jackets, she must have ten of them because every day is a new colour. As a one-time professional girl I can’t help wondering what her underwears may comprise of. In my day it was all frills and satinised cotton. There’s something sleek about her, like a trout moving through the water. Her hair is glossy as pine-needles, pitch-black, and she wears a diamond-spangled net over it, like she was ready for business. She carries one of them new Colt guns in her belt. She’s better armed than we are. Guess we think Mrs Neale is top-notch alright. It warms my heart to see how much she is kind to the major. They link arms about the place and she talks like a geyser. Every little thing she says has grammar in it, she sounds like a bishop. I seen the colonel meet her for the first time and he stammered like a schoolboy. I don’t blame him. It’s like being bathed in flames just looking to her, and I ain’t even that sort of man would like to kiss her. It’s like meeting a bit of sharp weather. Blowing against you. She’s a peach among women, I guess. There’s other officers’ wives in the fort and even the sergeant has an old nag of a wife for his sins, but she ain’t like that. There’s leagues for everything, doubtless.

It’s strange how close I watch her. But I want to find out something. I want to see how she wears her arms, how she moves her legs, little things no one else gives a damn about maybe. Guess I was fascinated by her. How she held her chin up when she talked. How she flashed her eyes without knowing maybe. Like she had candles in them. She has a bosom like a small earthworks. Smooth, defensive. Them Mexican jackets was stiff with stitchings all across it. Made her look like something soft and good was being armoured up. I had in my days of being a girl considered the phrase ‘feminine mystery’ because I had been obliged to try to turn my hand to it. Here was the sockdolager of goddamned feminine mystery.

Goddamned lady, says John Cole. Guess she is.

Caught-His-Horse-First must of gone down into Mexico or Texas raiding because we don’t hear nothing about him for a long time. Things just go on. Lot of life is just like that. I look back over fifty years of life and I wonder where the years went. I guess they went like that, without me noticing much. A man’s memory might have only a hundred clear days in it and he has lived thousands. Can’t do much about that. We have our store of days and we spend them like forgetful drunkards. I ain’t got no argument with it, just saying it is so. Two years, three pass by, and only change I can put a clock on in my head is the major’s two girls. Babies that Mrs Neale pushed out. She pushed them out and then was going about the fort as usual just a day after like she was a squaw with work to do. Twin girls but they didn’t look just alike because one had black hair and other sand-yellow like the major’s. I can’t even recall this moment what they called them, they was only little anyhow. The black-haired one was nicknamed Jackdaw later on account she liked to steal shiny things. No, I do recall their names of course I do. Hephzibah was the black-haired girl and the fair one was Angel. I couldn’t forget Angel. Major would be on his porch cooing at them in the cot. Why shouldn’t he, they was his.

Then news came in from our new scouts which was a good set of Crow Indians from over Yellowstone direction that Caught-His-Horse-First was seen riding north-west of Laramie. So they follow him up there and after a day’s riding he enters all unknowing he is being watched into a new village, about thirty wigwams the Crows counted. Sergeant must of been waiting for that because he has a requisition order for a field gun already dated back a year so he furnishes this to the ordnance quartermaster who is a man more placid than Caesar without needing to bother the major and by dawn of the following day we are setting out in good heart to see if we can locate the village, the svelte gun making a sort of merry rattle along the way.