Читать книгу Tears of the Mountain - John Addiego - Страница 13

all of a sudden like some gleaming bluebird’s wings as he made his way through the green sea, parting the fibrous waves with his arms like a swimmer, and his heart would pound in his chest. There were entire days of walking silently in that high grass and watching for glimpses of the girl in pigtails, called Cindy by her pretty mother and little siblings, called Lucy by her pale father; there were hours of struggling to breathe and joining Mother on the buckboard to recover; there was the handsome gentleman named Will, his love rival and obvious superior and even, in many ways, his idol, riding his chestnut stallion beside the captain, who called orders from his black mount and urged haste as the water bags shrunk; and there was the huge sky the color of the girl’s eyes, with glistering clouds moving overhead like great white covered wagons themselves.

This was Kansas. There were no more night dances or songs or fires beyond the meager cook sites. There were no more Indian encounters, but cattle kept disappearing, and the emigrants blamed the loss on the Kaw, and some of them thanked the Lord it was just steers and not people getting spirited away in the night by the red man. The family cow took on a desperate expression, her long eyelashes fluttering in panic as Father offered her the daily bowl of water, and later Jeremiah wondered if the poor creature had received some premonition of her imminent death. The poor, lovely, gentle cow that Mother had milked and sung German songs to for some five years, and whose milk was churned to butter in a bucket by the simple rocking of the emigrant wagon, hadn’t a chance. It was hitched to the fate of a cursed man.

The boy was beginning to see how much like Job the old man truly was: misfortune sought him in particular among the tribe of men. His oxen split their hooves and needed tar, which required more firewood; his wagon wheels wobbled and split their spokes, even though he’d been trained as a wheelwright and fashioned them himself; his only surviving son wheezed like death each evening while his daughter sassed his requests and did as she pleased. And when the first Kansas storm hit, it seemed God had seized a special opportunity to punish Daniel McKinley.

One moment there was the bright sun on endless fields of grass and wildflowers, and rich birdsong, especially that of a large new bird that darted through the meadow, a swift hunter called the lark; then, of a sudden, silence, and darkness was on the face of the Kansas plain as on the first morning of creation. Minutes later wind and rain lashed them, and seconds after its onset men and beasts were attacked by a fusillade of hailstones, many the size of a child’s fist. There was a hubbub of yelling and grasping at the wagon roofs, which were trying to take flight like great flapping birds themselves. There was a flash of light, which gave the entire table of land and the frantic emigrants a ghostly aspect, and a sudden clap, which seemed to come from inside the boy’s head.

In Missouri he had known to stay away from the tallest trees during thunderstorms, but in Kansas there was nothing taller than a Conestoga wagon to attract lightning. The bolts spread like spider-webs in the air and now and then boomed in the boiling sky with such force as to shake the soul out of a man. The hairs of his body rose and tingled, and he swore that a blue aura passed along the metal wagon rims and rifle barrels on the buckboard, sizzling like bacon in a pan, though no others could verify this impression.

The boy watched as one thick, crooked finger of light reached down from the black heavens and turned their brown-and-white cow into a lantern. Her wide eyes and horns burst from her steaming skull, her body glowed red-orange, and there was a sudden smell of burned and roasted flesh.

Then the storm passed as quickly as it had come. Old Daniel stood above the twisted corpse of the milk cow and gazed heavenward. “McKinley,” the stinking, homely man in badger fur named Smith asked, “why you suppose it struck only your cow and nothing else?”

The old man made no reply.

THE ICE BALLS were gathered like gold nuggets into pots and pans and saved as drinking water. The cow was roasted on the spot, and by the time her life became sustenance for man the green sea had lifted its battered leaves and was steaming heavenward with the smoke from Daniel’s fire. The old man handed the leather tome to his son and requested an appropriate reading before those gathered about the spit. Jeremiah hadn’t realized that his father even knew of his ability to do so.

“And when the Lord smelled the pleasing odor,” the boy read from Genesis, “the Lord said in His heart, ‘I will never again curse the ground because of man, for the imagination of man is evil from his youth; neither will I ever again destroy every living creature as I have done.’” He could hear murmurs of appreciation among those sharing the meat. He hoped the girl with pigtails might be hidden somewhere behind the grown-ups, and his cheeks burned as he continued, “While the earth remains, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, shall not cease.’”

COMING TO THE PLATTE was less like coming to a river in the boy’s mind than arriving at a place where a part of the sky had fallen to earth. It was so wide and shallow that men and beasts walked its surface like an immense blue highway. After the privations of Kansas this highway of life was the sweetest blessing imaginable, and he knelt and drank like any beast of the field and praised the Lord of that Bible from which various emigrants now made requests of his reading by campfire.

At the first river camp the women set about washing and stringing clothes between wagons, and Jeremiah made himself present as the pigtail girl was stretching on her toes to hang her father’s long johns. “Can I help?” he asked, rushing toward her.

“Well, sure. You look tall enough.” It was true. Since Missouri his pants had crept from ankle to calf. He took the wet garment from her hands and strung it across the line. “What’s your name, and what school did you attend back home? You read beautifully.”

His face burned. “I’m Jeremiah.” He concentrated on the wet union suit as it were an object of grave importance. When he looked at her face from the deliriously close proximity of her passing along the next garment for the laundry line, their fingers touching in the process, his tongue seized within his throat.

“I just turned fifteen,” she said, “and Father wants to marry me off quicker than tomorrow, and I just don’t know, it’s all so confusing right now.” He remained nearly silent, nodding or grunting as she chattered until the task was finished, and he took his leave on heavy feet, thinking, Fool, fool, fool! For he had heard enough to know that she was a young woman with a formal education and breeding, a beautiful maiden promised to a handsome gentleman from the South, and he was a boy a year her junior, raised on a backwoods farm, far from schools and cities and culture.

THAT NIGHT the captain had them form a circle with their wagons on a large island right in the middle of the knee-deep river. The fires crackled and died in its center, and the Platte gurgled and tumbled over stones all around, and the people’s voices were subdued after supper. Jeremiah heard them whisper of savages far more dangerous than the Kaw, of Pawnee and Sioux. He and Father stretched their bedrolls in the sand near the wagon as the women bedded inside it, but the boy couldn’t sleep. As the night deepened and the embers were outshone by the vivid jewelry of stars he heard a haunting music, a ghostly, quavering chorus that had about it something so melancholy and disturbing, as of madness come of the despair of great loss. At first he wondered if this were an Indian war party set to avenge the man Smith had killed on the Kansas plains, and he sat bolt upright listening to the eerie voices sing their despair from the distant bluffs until his father suddenly appeared above him in silhouette. “Coyotes,” the old man said. “They might worry them cattle, but they can’t hurt a man.”

DAVID TOOK to accompanying their family on the trek, teasing and talking as much to Ruth as to Jeremiah as they walked beside their oxen. He said he was going to share sentry duty soon to watch for Indians.

“Probably shoot some poor cow thinkin’ it’s a Pawnee,” Ruth said.

“One good supper-shout from your sister would scare them redskins out of their moccasins,” David said.

Jeremiah asked if he’d ever seen the likes of these bluffs, hills with nary a tree, and the young man admitted that he never had. They speculated as to the height and distance of one such sandstone formation on the horizon, agreeing that ten minutes by horse would be enough to reach it, while Ruth guessed it would take twice that time and all day long to actually climb the stupid thing. At midday camp time they were allowed by the captain to go explore it while hunting up some rabbits.

He sat behind David on the roan, holding both rifles across his lap. Jeremiah had always been good with the flintlock, and he bagged three hares in the first ten minutes, hopping down from the horse and charging the powder quickly. Something like an hour of riding passed, and it seemed that the bluff never got any closer. “What the hell,” the young man asked, “is the damned thing moving away from us?”

“Maybe it’s a Spanish galleon floating down the Platte,” the boy suggested.

“This country is just a hell of a lot bigger than it looks.” David turned the roan enough to look back toward camp. The wagons were barely visible. “A guy could get good and lost out here, even without trees.” The roan took an opportunity to graze as they sat, and Jeremiah asked to dismount. Among the tough grass stalks were some kind of brush, and stuck to a branch he found a lump of black fur, or hair. “What the hell is that?” David called to him.

“Looks kind of like a bear’s fur,” the boy replied. He brought it to the young man.

“Can’t be no bears living out here,” David said. “Can there?”

The boy stretched the fur between his hands like a cat’s cradle of black strings. “Sure ain’t rabbit,” he said.

THEY PRESSED ON for another half hour or so and came within the shadow of the great white butte. Another ten minutes winding among house-sized slabs of rock brought them to the steep, loose base of the giant. They dismounted and stared up the conical slope to the vertical cap of sheer cliffs. After some silence, David whistled.

“What do you reckon?” Jeremiah asked. He’d started to have some difficulty breathing but didn’t want the young man to notice, and now he was taking careful sips of air as he stared upward.

David pulled on the wisp of his chin whiskers and clucked his tongue. “Well,” he began and lapsed into silence again. After a minute or more he whispered, “God almighty.”

The cap of stone was straight and vertical as any piece of masonry made by man, but much bigger than anything within the experience of either of them. “I’m a guessing,” David finally drawled, “that we could scramble two hour up this loose rock to that ’ere cliff and kind of peer around her shoulder.” He plucked a long stem of grass and chewed it. “Howsomever,” he continued, “we might not make it back by nightfall, and we might git lost. And if we survived, your sister would kill me, anyway.”

They started back in the lengthening shadow of the butte, picking their way slowly among boulders and chunks of fallen cliff, and Jeremiah asked David to hold up as he spotted something shiny in a rock cleft. It was an old frying pan half buried in sand, and just beyond it something odd poked upward like a brownish-black mushroom.

It was a human toe. Attached, and half buried in sand, was the rest of a desiccated body, naked and multicolored, here a pinkish-yellow, there deep brown and dried like jerked venison, the head a mottled, eyeless husk with huge yellow teeth and a grotesque aspect, pancake-flat, too close above the eye sockets.

“Scalped,” David said. “Missing part of his head. Sweet Jesus of Nazareth.”

THEY RODE BACK quickly and were received near sundown with much alarm in camp, their story eclipsed by the encounter they’d missed an hour earlier between a band of savages and a contingent of emigrants who’d awkwardly given a calf, three steer, and various provisions to the demanding natives. “Most disturbing of all,” William explained to David and Jeremiah in his mannered drawl, “was the confusion about what could and could not be bargained between our two races.”

“How do you mean?” David asked.

“They wanted our white women.” William chuckled bitterly and spat into the dust. “Savage animals. One even took your Ruth by the elbow, but she shook him off quickly enough.”

David cursed and kicked at the ground.

AFTER THE WAGONS had once again formed a circle, perhaps a half mile from the river, and the cook fires flared beneath pots of beans, the captain appointed a dozen men and boys to share sentry duty. Jeremiah, recognized now as an excellent shot in pursuit of rabbits and pheasant, proudly joined the guard with David for the first three hours of darkness.

And he thought a certain darkness had enveloped his heart and made him anxious to be the first to shoot some sneaking Indian right between the eyes. He thought that maybe this was manhood coming to him, this steel in his veins giving him the strength to do what Badger Smith had done, only now the captain would be proud of him. He pictured the Kaw who had tried to steal the family flintlock, which he now leveled at the desert darkness, and he imagined that small man grabbing not his sister but the beautiful girl of his dreams, standing among willows as he’d first seen her, hanging wash. In his night reverie the savage had already sneaked up on William and slashed his gallant throat before snatching Lucy by the elbow in the river willows. Her scream brought Jeremiah to the clearing where the Indian’s horse waited, and as the villain tried to throw the girl onto the stallion’s back Jeremiah brought him down, clean as any hare. Oh, Jeremiah, she cried before fainting in his arms. It’s all right now, he said, carrying her to her wagon. You’re safe, my dear. You’re safe.

“Hey, old man.” It was William giving his shoulder a shake. “You’re off duty.” Jeremiah opened his eyes. Will and David leaned over him in the moonlight, chuckling softly.

“Works better if you stay awake,” David whispered, “but we won’t tell the cap.”

“You have my word,” William said, “as a Southern gentleman.”

THE NEXT MORNING the boy heard thunder in a cloudless sky. Being a good fifty yards off to the side of the noisy train, trying to befriend Badger Smith’s mangy dog with a rabbit bone as it slunk through the sparse grass and prickly brush, his ears had an advantage. In fact, the dog’s tiny round ears lifted before the boy heard the faint rumbling, though nary a cloud showed across the miles and miles of blue. The moccasins his mother kept trying to patch to accommodate his growing feet had just developed another toe-hole, and the bare appendage made him think of the body he and David had found, which led by association to the snagged scrap of black fur. And that black fur, and the dog’s nervous gaze, connected thought to the black stream between the train and a towering butte.

Buffalo! The dog barked, and Jeremiah shouted and ran to the wagons, finding William astride his stallion.

“I’ll be damned,” the young man said. “I’ve never seen them before. Hop up behind me, old man, and let’s tell the captain we have meat on the hoof.”

Jeremiah placed his hands on William’s broad shoulders and thought of the girl’s fingers resting on the man’s body as she danced with him, and thought of the pleasant smells of tobacco and corn whiskey trapped in the fabric of the gentleman’s waistcoat. His own clothing consisted of long underwear, one pair of stained and faded pantaloons, and one shirt, each made of sacking last winter by his mother, each far too small. Even his one buckskin coat, which he wore only in the coldest weather, came to his elbows. The stallion galloped smooth as a dream, and soon he and Will were directed by the captain to alert some of the cowhands far in the lead.

Will gave a high-pitched yelp as he rode, which made the boy shout with joy. The black beasts were coming near, a voluptuous river of monstrous power, a natural force wild as a raging storm, and it wasn’t until the man had reached the first cowboy that a sense of danger crept up the boy’s spine. The beasts’ heads were overlarge, their movement swift but erratic, rocking and weaving as they flew forward; a malevolence in their aspect touched some ancient source of fear, and it spread among men and beasts, causing the cattle to stampede, walleyed, clumsy and slow in comparison with their wild ancestors, directly toward the covered wagons. For a moment the cowboys shouted and whipped at their stock, and then the black herd was among them like a flood. Will and Jeremiah took to riding with the flow of mad stampeding, the stallion following some instinct for self-preservation. The monsters’ wool, even the tip of a horn, brushed against the boy’s bare leg, and once the horse began to rear on its hindquarters, but Will brought its head down immediately.

They were caught in a roaring current, a tiny boat on a river’s rapids, and heading straight for the emigrant train. Men and women were scooping youngsters and dogs and tossing them into the covered wagons before leaping aboard themselves, but at least one frantic woman ran among them, apparently unable to locate her child. Jeremiah and William charged toward them like turncoats who’d joined invading marauders. The boy thought for sure the river of monsters and cattle would crash directly through the wagons and crush his family, but he was sore relieved to see the beasts weave among the wagons nimbly, with much more grace than he’d imagined possible for such creatures. Only one wagon got hit, its leeward wheel buckling, and almost as soon as the stampede had passed through the pioneers the herds spread out, and William was able to reverse their course.

He rode directly to Lucinda’s wagon, and Jeremiah’s heart fair burst through his chest to see her there, alive and beaming from the buckboard beside her dour father. But that great relief was suddenly darkened by the keening moans from a group of women nearby, and even as William dismounted and took Lucinda in his arms the girl’s radiant smile turned to a gasp of alarm.

It was the young mother they’d seen running among the wagons. Her toddler had been seized and carried to safety by a girl from another family, but the mother’s body was crushed. There was no other way to describe it in Jeremiah’s mind: all flesh and bone were ground into the soil like apple pulp in a cider press.

The emigrants pressed around the young father, a boy not much older than Jeremiah. The tragedy seemed somehow in keeping with the experience of these older women, even though Jeremiah couldn’t imagine their ever finding a corpse so grotesquely misshapen. The young father kicked the earth, hollered, collapsed, cursed, and the ladies corralled him while they organized the men in preparing a proper burial site.

And so Jeremiah was called upon, once again, to read a passage from the Book as the sun set among the citadels of sandstone rock to the west, and he looked to the wretched young widower kneeling on stones and pawing at the sand near his wife’s grave, and to his grim father and anxious mother, and he opened to Job:

“Why is light given to him that is in misery, and life to the bitter in soul, who long for death, but it comes not, and dig for it more than hid treasures?” He paused as the wind swept the hair across his eyes. “Why is light given to a man whose way is hid, whom God has hedged in?” And he could hear women sniffling and a strange guttural moaning, which, he realized, came from his father. Jeremiah’s voice seized, and he struggled to finish: “For my sighing comes as my bread,

and my groanings are poured out like