Every Cloak Rolled in Blood

Chapter Thirty-Four

The hillside is strung with deer trails that zigzag through the trees in long angles up to the crest and have been compacted and smoothed by the hooves of wild animals for centuries, and now stick figures are building bonfires on them and dancing around the flames, while at least a dozen drums are pounding in the background. At the bottom of the hill, another bonfire leaps into the air, crisping the needles in the fir trees. I can see the dancers clearly now, impervious to the cold, bodies slick with greasepaint, feathers in their hair, and round deer-hide shields on their arms, the shields hung with scalps.

They whirl in individual circles as they collectively rotate around the bonfires, raising their knees, rattling gourds and animal skulls filled with loose bones. Some hold stone clubs; some trade axes sold to them by the white man, others brown bottles of whiskey that glitter in the firelight. Some carry Spencer or Henry rifles or spears mounted with a steel point. The song or prayer they chant is repetitive and hypnotic. The fires grow bigger and more intense, and the tree trunks are filled with dancing shadows as well as people. Then the drumming stops, and the dancers raise their arms and weapons toward the heavens. The effect upon my visitors is harrowing.

“What’s happening, Mr. Broussard?” Sister Ginny says.

“We’re on the other side of the veil,” I reply.

“What?” she says.

“Look around us. Except for my house, the twentieth century isn’t there.”

“I don’t understand.”

“It’s been airbrushed off the painting, Miss Ginny. We’re in the past. We’re among the unborn.”

Her eyes are full of confusion. “I just wanted to help Jack.”

Save your sympathies for yourself, madam, the major says. That misplaced piece of semen is the cause of all this. He and his brother stole the drugs and gold from Kale after they helped Kale kill his own employees. Then they hid it under the scribbler’s chicken house. I thought you knew all this.

“Jimmie told me. He wanted to make up with my boy.”

Jimmie Kale is a fucking liar, madam. What were you doing with a cretin like that?

“I was in his band. I was gonna have a career in the movies.”

I think you’ve fucked yourself with a garden rake.

“I’m going back home now,” she says.

You’re not going anywhere, madam. Those are savages out there, not actors in a play. They’ll stake you out. A three-day experience if you’re fortunate.

“That’s not true, Major,” I say. “Those are Heavy Runner’s people. They harmed no one.”

Don’t give me your shite, Mr. Broussard. I’m bloody sick of it. I’d like to round up all you bleeding hearts and flay you alive.

“Don’t speak to me like that, sir,” I reply.

He pulls his revolver. I’ll strike you across the face.

I step closer to him. His body seems to tremble, as though it’s an image projected on mist. “Why do you fear me?” I ask.

He’s breathing heavily, his eyes as black as coals. Then I realize he’s not looking at me. I turn around and see hundreds of Indians working their way down the hill, the women walking with the men, many of them carrying babies. They flow through the tree trunks and around giant boulders and off the trails and back on them and through the gullies and sinkholes, breaking down underbrush and saplings and fallen cottonwoods that crack apart like rotten cork, finally stamping flat the smooth-wire back fence on the pasture. They are led by an Indian who I believe is Heavy Runner. At his sides are Ruby Spotted Horse and Fannie Mae.

Ruby is dressed in a white beaded deerskin robe. The area around her left breast is soaked in blood. She has a trade ax in her hand. Fannie Mae carries no weapon and is wearing jeans and a train engineer’s cap and a bomber jacket with Bugs Bunny on the front. I’m happy she has no weapon. Perhaps I should feel otherwise. But to my knowledge she has never deliberately harmed a person or an animal in her entire life. Her pacifist attitude was not even a virtue; she was simply incapable of hurting anyone or anything.

The others do not share her view. The first I see die is Culpepper. His AR-15 has jammed and he’s beating on it with the flat of his fist, yelling, his mouth open wide. An arrow sails out of the dark over the heads of the mob and into his mouth and embeds in the back of his throat, the shaft shaking between his teeth, the steel point protruding from the back of his neck.

The Indians are in the corral and all over the back and side yards now. They show no mercy. They slash and gouge and fire point-blank into the faces of people on their knees. Ruby’s legs and moccasins are drenched with blood from walking through the dead. Her hair is streaked with it, her face aglow.

I wade into the midst, Grandfather’s Peacemaker back in my pocket, my arms in the air, trying to pacify mothers whose infants were murdered and pregnant women who were shot through the stomach and old people who were left to freeze in the snow and whole families who drowned in the ice floe on the Marias. Then Fannie Mae is at my side, pulling my arms down, yelling in my face. Not ours to change, Pops. They signed up with Baker. They’re stuck with the bastard forever.

“Where are we going?”

Chief Joseph already said it. “The place where I go is the place where I will be.”

“What about Jack Wetzel or Sister Ginny?”

What about them?

“They’re not all bad.”

Don’t count on that.

The slaughter is spilling into the front yard, through the maple trees and across the dirt lane and past my secondary barn and onto the sandy banks of the Bitterroot. Sister Ginny is by the veranda, rolled into a ball, her hands clamped on her head and her knees tucked under her body, as though surrendering herself to a storm, arrows sticking from her back and neck like quills on a porcupine. Jimmie the Digger is screaming inside a circle of Indians whose axes and knives and spears rise and chop several minutes before his screaming stops. His arms and legs have been severed but not pulled from the torso, causing his clothes to sag on his body, like a broken mannequin. Someone has set his severed head in the fork of a maple tree.

Major Baker’s men and some surviving bikers and women I’ve never seen are being clubbed and shot and pushed into the water. They sob and try to bargain with their arms outstretched, the current and ice surging up to their chests, their faces pinched with cold. The fortunate are shot through the head and float around the bend, their clothes puffed with air. The major is standing on a sandbar in the middle of the river, shouting incoherently, his pants tucked inside his cavalry boots, his saber raised to the sky. Ray Bronson lies at his foot, half in the water, staring at the top of the vortex, his genitalia stuffed in his mouth.

Fannie Mae takes my arm. We have to go, Pops.

“What is Baker yelling about?”

He says he’ll be back.

“You haven’t told me where we’re going.”

In your house. Your home. Where else would you want to be?

I know the answer to that question, but I will not tell her. “Then we had better go there,” I say.