Every Cloak Rolled in Blood

Chapter Five

That night I sit alone in the darkness of my kitchen and try to think my way out of the situation I have stumbled into. No, “stumble” is not the word. I’m the creator of my troubles, and I entered into them with enthusiasm and forethought. I confronted an ignorant and probably dangerous man and took the consequences to a woman who, to all appearances, cares for abused and neglected animals. Now I must decide if I should keep silent about my experience when I neared her cellar door. Even more distressing, what should I do about the plea on the notebook paper? The childlike penmanship belongs to someone very young or frail or very old. To deny that person help could blacken my soul forever, and I mean forever. The message is so simple and earnest that I cannot get its plaintive desperation out of my head. But must I report Ruby Spotted Horse to her superiors — the same police officer who gave me her phone number because she worried about my safety?

Had not her people paid enough dues? She said her ancestors had been at the attack on the Nez Perce at the Big Hole and at the Baker Massacre on the Marias, two of the cruelest and most unwarranted examples of inhumanity in our national history. In January 1870, a drunkard named Major Eugene Baker attacked a sleeping village of innocent Blackfeet in subzero weather. The soldiers slew them without mercy, and the ones they slew in largest numbers were women and children. The suffering and misery imposed on the survivors has no equal in the Plains Wars. They were driven into freezing water, their wickiups and clothes and food burned. That afternoon, prisoners who tried to escape were chopped to death with axes to ensure the others did not attempt the same. Others had to find their way in arctic conditions to Fort Benton, seventy-five miles from the massacre site. When it came to fighting the Indians, General Sheridan had formally instructed Baker to “hit them hard.” Baker was hailed as a hero and never charged for his crimes or the sadistic and mindless way in which he committed them. Is it surprising that Hitler made use of our racial attitudes in support of his own in Mein Kampf?

Chief Joseph was one of the most gentle and spiritual people among the Indian nations, to say nothing of his moral superiority to the politicians and land-grabbers who promoted the extinction of the buffalo herds in order to starve the Indians onto the reservations. Joseph’s only crime was his desire to take his people into Canada — called “Grandmother’s Land” by the Indians — and live close by Sitting Bull and the Sioux, who had fled the country after the Battle of the Little Bighorn.

The Nez Perce fought a running battle of eleven hundred miles across Washington State and Idaho and into Montana and outwitted the army at Lolo Pass and, in the dark, filed across the land my house is built on, the women carrying their babies on their backs, the wounded and the sick dragged by travois and Appaloosa ponies. Then they entered the wide magnificence of the Bitterroot Valley and, for the first time since they left Washington, began to feel they had eluded the army or, better yet, the army had tired of them and given up. They even bought clothes and supplies from the white traders in the valley without incident. Perhaps the warm late-summer haze on the meadows and the silence in the hills were signs that the war’s ferocity had burned itself out.

They headed for the Big Hole, a high-country paradise of rolling foothills and meadows filled with game and arroyos strung with fir trees where they could hunt grouse. The countryside seemed magical. The mountains in the distance were capped with snow and turned as red as a jewel in the sunset, and the riffles in the Big Hole River so cold among the rocks that the broad lateral stripe on the rainbow trout was a brilliant purple.

At dawn on August 9, 1877, General Gibbon’s men waded quietly through the fog on the river and, once on dry ground, formed into squads and knelt on one knee as though about to pray. But the white man’s most favored prayer was a gun, in this instance a single-shot trapdoor .45–70 Springfield rifle. The Springfields were heavy and cumbersome and had been converted by the army from Civil War muskets to save money, and they did not have the rapidity of fire that the Henry did. But on the perimeter of an unsuspecting people wrapped in warm dreams, they would do just fine.

In unison the soldiers fired three volleys blindly into the wickiups. The effect was devastating. Women clutching as many children as they could ran for the cover of downed cottonwoods or dunes along the riverbank or a gap in the rocks above. The slaughter was on, aided by a howitzer. The braves stood and fought, and the women and children ran. And ran. And ran. The oddity was their silence. They were obviously terrified, but they fled in groups like desperate shadows on a rock wall, without sound, as though they already knew their fate because they had already lived it. They ran anyway, until they were shot down and their children thrown wide-eyed from their grasp, the .45–70 rounds whining into the distance.

These thoughts and images do not give me rest. I know they are associated with depression. I pace my living room floor. I want to drink, and I think about women, and I think about death and wonder if it isn’t a better choice than the life that has become mine. I speak out loud to Fannie Mae. When I hear no response, I ball my fists until my nails cut my palms. The moon is high above the Bitterroots and streaks the yard with shadow and paints the veranda the color of tarnished pewter. I can see the aluminum cans in which I poured pebbles out of my palm and strung through the trees three inches above the ground. They might tinkle when the wind blows or a rabbit crosses the yard, but I know the difference between the innocent work of the wind and animals and an ankle or a boot catching on the wire and rattling cans all over the yard. When the latter does not happen, I’m disappointed and at the same time feel shame for the secret fires that have been with me since Pork Chop Hill. A car passes on the highway, probably a late-Sunday-night drinker on his way down to Ravalli County, where the saloons and casinos stay open until two and no one worries about distancing or masks.

Where are you, Fannie Mae? Why are you not with me in my darkest hour?

I unlock my gun cabinet and remove my M1 and push back the bolt with the heel of my hand and, with my thumb, press an eight-round clip into the magazine, then remove my thumb quickly so it doesn’t get caught when the bolt snaps shut. I try to convince myself that my behavior is thespian. True, I hate the violent history of the Holland family, and I hate the martial mentality of those who love wars but never go to them. Why am I arming my M1? I fit the front sight under my upper teeth and touch the roof of my mouth; I can taste and smell the oil and the coldness of the steel. My heart is beating, my thumb on the trigger. Oh, God, don’t let me do this.

I pull the barrel from my mouth and prop the M1 against the divan and call a friend in the Missoula Sheriff’s Office named Jeremiah McNally. He’s in his late thirties, educated, taciturn, unmarried, handsome, genteel, a former DEA agent, although no one knows why he gave up his position. He wears a suit wherever he goes and doesn’t use profanity and plays bingo at a Catholic church.

I ask him to meet me tomorrow at a café near the courthouse.

There’s a pause. “What’s going on?” he says.

Before I can reply, I hear a woman’s voice speak in my left ear: Don’t tell him. I not only hear the voice, I also feel it, like the tickle of a feather against my skin. I look around me and open and close my mouth to clear my hearing. “It’s about meth on the res,” I say.

“Small creatures with no eyes are living in my in-basket,” Jeremiah replies. “Can you just tell me what the problem is?”

“Not over the phone.”

The wind buffets the house, and a pinecone pings on the roof of the veranda and bounces into the yard. Tell Jeremiah he’s the only friend you have in the courthouse, the female voice says, and this time I have no doubt whose voice it is. My mouth is dry, my windpipe like a hose someone just stepped on.

“Are you all right?” Jeremiah says.

“Sure,” I lie. “I need to see you. In person.”

“The CIA has a tap on your phone?”

“You’re my only friend in the courthouse.”

That one works. “Okay, ten o’clock at the café across from the courthouse,” he says. “Who’s that with you?”

“No one.”

“Really?”

“You actually think you heard someone?” I ask.