Every Cloak Rolled in Blood

Chapter Fourteen

At exactly midnight a gale shakes the entire house. I had fallen asleep watching the late news on the couch. The inside of the house is black, the television screen dormant. Through the kitchen window I can see flashes in the trees way up the hill, like ball lightning splintering in a swamp. At first I think I’m seeing the reflection of Missoula in the clouds. But the blue clouds on the hill resemble smoke more than fog or impending rain, and also they are too low to reflect the city lights that are over ten miles away.

There’s a quaking under my feet. The pots and pans hanging above my stove are clinking. The handle on the faucet in the sink squeaks and twists by itself and splashes water on the counter and floor, then stops as quickly as it started. The horses are nickering and blowing in the corral, clattering against the rails, the way they do when they smell wolves or a forest fire. My trip string is broken in many places, the aluminum cans scattered by the wind.

I take the gun-cabinet key from my pocket and start to insert it in the lock, then realize the cabinet is already open. I have no explanation. I paid the glazier to replace the glass I broke, watched him leave, then locked the cabinet and have not touched it since. I pull the door open and remove my M1 and pull back the bolt and push an eight-round clip into the magazine. My thumb has barely cleared when the bolt snaps shut. A great brilliance bursts inside the trees up the hill, lighting the barn, the backyard, a small statue of Saint Francis that Fannie Mae had since she was a child, the horses walleyed and terrified and running and kicking each other.

I put on my canvas coat and step into the backyard. The light up the hill seems to emanate from the ground and extend over an area half the size of a football field. I can hear the popping of small-arms fire and smell burned gunpowder and a stench like offal or animal hair going up in flames. I circle around my barn and keep going up the grade. I can hear infants crying and women screaming and horses squealing, maybe going down with their riders or being shot in large numbers.

I splash through half-frozen ice in a streambed, the gunfire growing louder and more sustained until it is one sound rather than many. I can see wickiups burning, blue-jacketed soldiers with fur caps shooting at close range, Indian women tearing open their shirts and exposing their breasts in the hope that they and their children will be spared. An officer with a drawn revolver is pacing back and forth in the firelight. He’s a mustached, grim man and wears a mashed flattop hat and shoulder straps framed in gold. His free hand is knotted in a fist, propped primly on his hip. He watches as an enlisted man shoots an infant through the head.

I kneel behind the trunk of a ponderosa tree and aim through the peep sight at the officer’s back and begin firing, the stock snugging into my shoulder, six inches of flame leaping from the barrel, the ejected shells sticking like darts in a patch of soft snow. Then the bolt locks open with a ping. The magazine is empty. The officer has shown no acknowledgment of my presence.

I take another clip from my coat pocket and press it with my thumb into the magazine and roll the heel of my hand from the bolt. The officer seems to hear the bolt feed the round into the chamber. He turns and looks at me in a quizzical way. Behind him, his men are piling buffalo robes and blankets and clothes and bundles of food on a giant fire. A cone of sparks and heat and smoke and ash twists into the sky and flattens like a greasy stove lid on the tips of the trees. I have the officer’s chest locked inside my peep sight. I begin shooting and do not stop until my second clip ejects.

My right ear is ringing. There’s a coppery taste like blood in my mouth. My back aches when I stand up. But I have changed nothing in the equation. The officer grins at the corner of his mouth and beckons for me to join him. His junior and noncommissioned officers are already gathering around him, as though posing for a historical photograph.

“Never,” I say. “Let your cloak be rolled as fuel for the fire. Let hell be your home.”

I begin backing away, my sniper’s nest scattered with empty cartridges, smoke billowing skyward in huge curds. I cannot keep the screams of the infants out of my ears, or the wails of the wounded and dying. I weep and stumble down the hill, the sparks and ash and the chorus of suffering and pain rising into the darkness, the soot soiling the heavens.