Days Without End

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

OUT ON THE PLAINS falls a deep sea of snow covering the battle site two days to the north. Covering the Sioux dead till the spring. The few dead troopers were took back before the snows and the burial details been busy in the boneyard. The buglers blown their frosty tunes. Cold clamps the upland and the bottomland with clamps as sure as iron. Tamps down the surge of trees and stills the creeks. Manhandles the bears into their dens I guess. Now from the further country of Montana Territory come the white wolf maybe and the white fox maybe and some say even the white bear. The trail going south-east’s wiped out and all the scratch and scrape of man with it. It ain’t peace because storms stomp madly over it and the upper sky is a smithy for lights and bangs but it ain’t our violent war.

The fort’s full of rumours. I got to wait till my papers is rescinded by the major until I can go. So Winona is lodged by the major in his cold quarters now emptied of all he loves. I guess he feels he must protect her all in all. She takes off that drummer boy’s garb and climbs back in her travelling dress. Major says she can take anything of his wife that fits and he ain’t got no use for nothing now. He says that without showing sorrow which makes me more sorrowful than a bulldog’s face. The whole business wretched and strange. Then getting even stranger when the colonel returns from California. So happens Captain Silas Sowell is his son-in-law so that’s a voice he listens to. Captain Sowell still furious with the reddened fixed face of fury. Harry Sarjohn furious too in that his good faith with the Indians is all shot to perdition. Guess they’re a joint tornado. I get all this from Poulson my friend. Rumour, rumour tearing round the fort. I long to catch that stage down to the new town. It stops just outside the gates and that’s a busy six horses and a rackety coach. Army keeping the road clear so that’s good. Got to have some way to run supplies up from the railroad depot. Going to be a long locked-in winter looks like. Me and Winona can’t be caught here. Then outside of all expectation the major is arrested. Captain Sowell saying he went berserk out there and is guilty of gross misconduct. Vengeful sorrow working havoc on the Sioux. The Sioux was just readying up for a new treaty just as the flag being flown was saying. Caught-His-Horse-First due in Washington with the other chiefs of the plains. Now all this was put into outrageous jeopardy. Yes, that’s so. It were a murderous act, that’s the truth. Weren’t nothing to do with nothing except the major’s grief and that’s most likely.

The queer kick in the rumour also tucks Starling Carlton into the story. Brave captain found dead and Harry Sarjohn says he saw a trooper do it. With a sabre. He don’t kennt that trooper but he can point out his face maybe. Now, I never seen him near us. But he’s sneaky alright. He got the sabre right, God damn it. You’d think he’d be pleased I was trying to protect a Indian since that’s what his other caterwauling was about. So there’s going to be a muster on the parade ground. Well that’s a lot of faces. But I ain’t in the heart’s position to risk such a thing. I got to fold in Winona, I got to. So I goes to the camp barber, a decent man I knew from aforetime, by the name of George Washington Bailey. He a black man, the best barber ever stropped a blade. I ask him to close shave me like he often done and get every mortal whisker off. I’m wearing my hair what’s called Southern long, that is, as long as another man’s sense of right can bear. Then I cross the drear and wind-haggard ground to rouse Winona. Stage leaving four o’clock. Got two hours. I don’t even go get my travelling gear and I got to leave my saddle and my horse. Winona too. Going to be army horses now I guess. Farewell. We don’t lack for the dollars to get us home that’s one thing. I skip in back of the major’s place. Now he quartered elsewhere in the lock-up. So I guess there’s luck in everything even havoc. I keep thinking crazy thoughts like they must of dug one big hole for Starling. I’d a never in my life wish to see that bugger dead and now it’s me that killed him. Might be a small thing set inside that day of killing.

The major’s rooms is quiet and cold and Winona ain’t lit no stove or nothing. So I tell her we going at last but first I got to find a goddamn dress and then she got to help me daub my face. Winona knows where was the major’s bedroom and going in there’s like breaking someone’s tomb. I ain’t got no hearty wish to do it but needs must. Nothing’s cleaned out of Mrs Neale. Her row of dresses hangs in the fancy wardrobe. Feels just like we was robbing her real body. Down comes a dress and God forgive me but I go to search out stockings. I can forgo the damn bloomers and the like because the skirt of the dress is to the ankle but I took the bloomers anyhow. I ain’t robbing no goddamn bloomers anyhow since poor Mrs Neale in truth gone by. Then I pulled my hair tight on my crown and we choose a no-nonsense hat from among a aviary of birdlike fancies. Stuff that down. All the time feeling like a thief. What the hell has life come to, stripping the dead? I got to say I notice Winona don’t see it so. She liked that Mrs Neale and maybe she loved her. Guess a dress is a token of her soul. She sits me at the dressing table and goes to work. Could be Grand Rapids afore the show but it sure ain’t. Smears on the make-up, does the eyes with kohl, and paints the lips, looks at me dubious and shakes powder over all. I look like a ten-cent quick job whore. It’s not going to be stage lights so we got to get it right. She rubs off the kohl so then I look like my best beau punched me. It don’t matter. Tones down the lipstick. Then by God we’re set if ever we could be set. Stuff all that business in her carpetbag and I obliged to steal the major’s razor. I don’t know how long this new-fangled journey will take us but I can’t become no bearded lady.

Big heavy sky of threatening snow outside. A huge glob of dark cloud leaning on the roofs. There’s a detail coming in and they make their clatter on the ground. Those boys been out some days and they look pulled and wearied. Shipshape too and sort of trimmed. Strikes me this work is kinda crazy noble and I never had that thought before exactly. Not just on the nose like that. Strange boil of love for them like the trout makes in the river. Their handsome youth given o’er to toil. Troopers paid the clippings of tin. That don’t change. Riding out to chaos and no sign much of that glory. First lieutenant at the head salutes me as I pass, I nearly salute back, strike me dead. Keep my hand stuffed in a muffler. Yep, stole a muffler and a coat to add to my crimes. Winona took a cloaklike coat may have been a daughter’s. It don’t fit well and her arms look long but the cold is vicious-minded. Then out the gates and the sentry also stiffens and salutes. He don’t know me clearly but I guess he thinks all women’s worth a greeting. I’m sweating worse than Starling. The stagecoach is there but it’s more of a mud-wagon. A globule of passengers inside already. Driver won’t have Winona getting in so she climbs up top and I struggle up with her. A dress just a menace to mountaineering. You can go in, ma’am, he says. Just not the Injun. Don’t matter none, I say, I’ll sit up here. I see corporals now going about everywhere. Like I drank bad whisky and seeing visions. Corporals, corporals, everywhere. Out on constable duty, I’ll swear. Everyone I imagine looking for the killer of Starling Carlton. I fetch my eyes forward. Goddamn move this goddamn stage. The huge cloud surrenders and snow washes down, passing at a swirling angle. All that old world of bugles, lice and sabres disappears and the stage lurches off.

It’s just a filthy old affair being thrown about for a hundred miles. You can climb down for victuals but soon it’s the pitching ride again. Round and round till your stomach swole and you’re hurling that set of kippers into the fond air of Wyoming. Three other victims up there with us starting to howl with sickness without making a sound. One a runner for some prospectors said to be sniffing for gold in the back hills. Good luck and yous’ll soon be Indian stew. Another man a scout I recognise, he was on the recent programme of so-called removal. Through chattering teeth Winona talking to him in her own bits of lingo. I ask her what they talking about and she says they talking about the snow. You talking about the weather? I said. Yes, sir, she says.

Big train blowing steam and smoke at the depot. It’s like a creature. Something in perpetual explosion. Huge long muscle body on her and four big men punching coal into her boiler. It’s a sight. It’s going to be dragging four carriages east and they say they’ll go good. The light pall of snow hisses on the boiler sheets. Wish I could report well of the third-class wagon but it’s evil cold and damp and me and Winona got to sit in close as cats. Not an inch to move because our fellow voyagers thought to bring their whole possession with them. We even got goats and the mark of goats is stink. Man next me is a nightmare pile of coats. Can’t say what size of corpse he is he is so wrapped. We’ve bought some pies in Laramie and a bag of that famed cornbread. Famed to twist your belly. We’re told we’ll see a hundred stops or so but the train moves like a giant dancer for all its bulk. Out front the snow-guard parts the snow just like a ship through blustering foam. The snow thrown up pours back across the roofs and in it comes through glassless windows to be brother to soot and sister to choking smoke. Here is new-fangled luxury I guess. We tear on through country would of took long wretched hours by horse, the train traversing like a spooked buffalo. In two three days we’re going to see St Louis. That’s just a blank miracle. We go so fast I believe we leave our thinking parts back the line, only our battered bodies hurtling forward. Dizzy and frozen. If we’d had the dollars handy for first class, by God we would a spent them if they was the last dollars we’d ever seen. At trembling stops we buy grub and the great engine drinks and clanks and shudders. It sure be a manly beast, that girl. Me and Winona talk the yards of time. Her top wish now is to be with John Cole. Something in John is calming right enough. For me over these long years he’s sacred. I never think bad of John, just can’t. I don’t even truly know his nature. He a perpetual stranger and I delight in that.

Each day we find a quiet spot and wield the razor. Forgot to bring the strop so it slowly blunts. Cuts lines and nicks across my face like I was breaking into yellow fever. Winona daubs me good. Crazy thing is I’m cold and wet and sore but I’m growing happy since we moving far from Death. That’s what it seems. Winona loosening too, and laughing now. She just a girl and should be laughing regular. She should be playing maybe if she ain’t too old. Certainly acts the lady and knows how. We like mother and child right enough and that’s how it plays. I give thanks for that. Maybe in my deepest soul I believe my own fakery. I suppose I do. I feel a woman more than I ever felt a man, though I were a fighting man most of my days. Got to be thinking them Indians in dresses shown my path. Could gird in men’s britches and go to war. Just a thing that’s in you and you can’t gainsay. Maybe I took the fortune of my sister when all those times ago I saw her dead. Still as a scrap of seaweed. Her thin legs sticking out. Her ragged pinny. I had never seen such things nor suspected there could ever be such suffering. That was true and it will always be true. But maybe she crept into me and made a nest. It’s like a great solace, like great sacks of gold given. My heart beats slowly I do believe. I guess the why is dark as doom but I am just witness to the state of things. I am easy as a woman, taut as a man. All my limbs is broke as a man, and fixed good as a woman. I lie down with the soul of woman and wake with the same. I don’t foresee no time where this ain’t true no more. Maybe I was born a man and growing into a woman. Maybe that boy that John Cole met was but a girl already. He weren’t no girl hisself for sure. This could be mountainous evil. I ain’t read the Book on that. Maybe no hand has ever wrote its truth. I never heard of such a matter unless from us prancers on the stage. In Mr Noone’s hall you just was what you seemed. Acting ain’t no subterfuge-ing trickery. Strange magic changing things. You thinking along some lines and so you become that new thing. I only know as we was tore along, Winona lying on my breast, I was a thorough-going ordinary woman. In my windblown head. Even if my bosom was my army socks stuffed in.

Now in St Louis we see changes since the old times. Vast wharf-houses as tall as hills. All the freedmen sprung up here like a crop of souls and near every face you see along the river be black and brown and yella. There ain’t nowhere their work don’t touch. They doing the hauling and the hooking and the roping. But they ain’t looking so much like slaves no more. The boss men is black and the shouting roars out of black lungs. No whips like heretofore. I don’t know but this looks like to be better. Still, me and Winona don’t see one Indian face. We ain’t lingering to find out the weevils and the bad worms in these new visions. But we flick through and there were something there don’t offend though in all truth St Louis smacked into desolation by the receding war and shell-ruined houses here and there still these times even if a-building. Sense of two worlds rubbing up. Am I American? I don’t know. Me and Winona take our place with the other mudsills in the fifth-class section. It’s a damn pleasure to do a bit of river travel. That old Mississippi is a temperate girl most times and her skin is soft and even. Something so old is perpetual young. River never crinkles and creases or if she does it’s storms. We got clement days though the woods along is clamped with ice and endless miles of white foliage festooning. Vines climb into the halted trees and frost wraps round their limbs till you think the woods be full of icy snakes. Then the great expanses of the farms and cotton fields all waiting for the errant sun and the baccy grounds sheared by fire. Those skies that God loves to show and can’t but favour with a gorgeous pallid light. Though still I gaze about and fear we’re followed I do find succour in these powerful waters.

Now healing from the sights of slaughter my fond Winona blossoms back to talk and she like a flower now that scorns even spring. A famous flower that likely blooms in frost. A lovely child with her scented breath and up from her limbs rising a smell of life and beauty. I guess she might be fifteen years, my daughter, but who can say. I call her my daughter though I do know she ain’t. Let’s say my ward, my care, the product of some strange instinct deep within that does rob from injustice a shard of love. The palms of her hands like two maps of home, the lines leading homeward like old trails. Her beautiful soft hands with tapering fingers. Her touches like true words. A daughter not a daughter but who I mother best I can. Ain’t that the task in this wilderness of furious death? I guess so. Got to be. My breast is surging with a crazy pride to be bringing her back homeward. We’ve sent a telegraph from St Louis to say that we return since till we reached the river I never dared to stir a nest. I can see John Cole take that news and stand with trembling heart in anticipation of her coming. Out on the porch gazing for us returning birds. We’ll be walking in part from Memphis since some links in the stages broken. But we’ll make steady progress walking on and watch the farms and feel steadier and steadier the approach of home. No matter what dangers and evils roundabout we will reach that moment of meeting again. These was my thoughts. The wide river slipping under the flat bottom. The songs of the chorusing passengers, the card-players’ silences. The blacks working all the tasks of the boat like they was bringing these exempted white souls to paradise. Something stopped, something in between. Sweet river travel.

Get down to Memphis. I know my clothes just stink. Bloomers urinous and shitty. It’s got to be. But we take a night’s rest in a boarding house and wash ourselves and then next morning as we stirring to go was that queer feeling of greeting the lice moving back onto clean limbs. They was residing in the seams of our dresses all night and now like those emigrants along that old Oregon trail they creep across the strange Americas of our skins.

Then the long cold walk to Paris. Then the farmhouse in the distance. Then John Cole’s arms around us.