Tie My Bones to Her Back (5 page)

O
NE DAY, HUNTING
elk in the timber above the sunflowers, Otto had found a stand of cedars. Returning with his ax, he split out a buckboard load of fragrant red shakes from the stumps of wind-felled trees. With these he shingled the roof of Zeke and Vixen’s stable, and the sloping roof of a porch he built out from the entrance to the soddy. He made a large smokehouse of cedar slabs, where he brined the tongues, hams, hump steaks, and tenderloins of young buffalo in a pit vat lined with a green hide and smoked them over a slow, cool fire of damp alder and cedar chips until they were cured to his taste.

He had seen the smoke of many small fires up the valley of the Saline, where it entered the Smoky Hill River, and knew that a settlement lay under the pall. He scouted a bit and found a well-traveled wagon road, the hoofprints of iron-shod horses. White folks for sure. On a sunny, lazy day when he had nothing better to do, he drove up the Saline with a load of flint-dried buffalo hides, robes, smoked meat, and split cedar shingles.

It was a town called Hell Creek. At the general store he traded his goods for coffee, dried fruit, tins of canned peaches, a crock of molasses, gunpowder, bar lead, a bag of birdshot, priming caps, and a double-barreled shotgun—an English-made 12-bore by Westley Richards. Though the scarred walnut stock and the bluing on the tubes, worn silvery in places, attested to hard service, the insides of the barrels were unpitted and the vents in the nipples looked free of rust. With the permission of the storekeeper, he took the shotgun out to the street, capped it, and fired it, uncharged and unshotted, into the ground.

The dust jumped.

“You want to do some serious bird hunting, that’s your gun,” the storekeeper said. Otto closed the deal.

He went across the road through dust and skittering chickens, past a gaunt, three-legged dog, and into a dramhouse, where he ordered a beer. There was only one patron at the bar, a husky fellow about his own age, clean-shaven, with long blond hair. He wore a heavy gray Confederate officer’s greatcoat and a straight-brim gray hat. His boots had seen some wear.

He would prove to be Raleigh McKay.

He was drinking red whiskey. He looked at Otto’s slouch hat. “You’re one of them black-hat fellows,” he said. “Iron Brigade, wasn’t y’all called?”

Otto nodded.

“I was on the other side,” the Rebel said. “Eighteenth North Carolina. We bumped against y’all a few times, you Black Hats, don’t know who got the best of it, though. South Mountain. Brawner’s Farm. Second Manassas and Fitzhugh’s Crossing—suchlike places. Dutchmen mostly, wasn’t you?”

“Not all of us.” Otto finished his beer. He was unarmed.

The Rebel wore a holstered pistol beneath his unbuttoned greatcoat. It looked like a Whitney five-shot rimfire. He had it rigged for a left-handed cross draw.

“A silent Yankee, ain’t you just? No need to be unneighborly, though, not because we fought once in the ‘way-long-ago. Hell-fire. I don’t harbor grudges, and it weren’t a personal thing, not for me anyways.” He frowned, then smiled suddenly, bright as a sunrise. “Say, Black Hat, I’ll buy you a beer!”

He pushed a cartwheel dollar toward the barman. Then he took off his hat, combed back his hair with hooked fingers, and smiled again at Otto, a boyish grin empty of guile. He drew his pistol slowly and sent it skidding across the smooth wet wood.

“I’ll let the gentleman behind the bar hold on to this for a while,” he said. “I see you’re not carrying one, or at least I trust you aren’t. Now we’re on even terms, I’d be obliged if you’d accept my hospitality. Fact is, I haven’t talked to another white man in a good long spell. Hey, what say ye, let’s tell us a few war stories? And have you a whiskey instead of that swampwater they sell for beer in these parts. Hell ain’t half full yet, or so they tell me . . .”

That was the beginning of his partnership with Raleigh Fitzroy McKay, Esq., late Captain of Infantry, 18th North Carolina regiment, C.S.A.

W
ITH A SUDDEN,
clattering change in the roar of its wheels, the train rolled onto a trestle. They were crossing the Mississippi River. Otto gazed down at the coiling, dun-colored Father of Waters and suddenly felt sad. No, perhaps only apprehensive. This is truly the Great Divide, he thought. The nation east of the Mississippi was now the country of comfort, or at least what passed for it in the America of that day—a land of farms, towns, homes, jobs, libraries, newspapers, churches, schools, a country suited to sensible men, level-headed women, and their gentle children. West of the river lay wilderness, dry plains and bleak mountains, wolves and buffalo and wild Indians, a vast reach of country nibbled at only feebly by the main-chancers and the desperate—railroads, mountain men, hide hunters; soiled doves, homesteaders, gamblers, and cowboys.

He felt at home in that far country, but he feared that Jenny would not. Her presence alone would change things for him, he was sure. The joy he’d felt in his solitude and self-sufficiency along the Smoky Hill River would now be diluted by his concern for her welfare. And how would his partner, McKay, react to her presence? Raleigh was ostensibly an officer and a gentleman, if only by act of the Rebel Congress, but he was also a hot-blooded Southerner and a damned handsome man. Women melted in his company—even tough old horn-hided hookers turned giddy as schoolgirls when McKay switched on his charm. Otto had seen it happen again and again in bawdy houses and honky-tonks from Abilene to Hays City. Well, he’d have to ride herd on Raleigh, that was for certain sure.

With a frown and a sigh, Otto took one last drag on his cheroot and flipped the stub into the river. He watched it fall, spinning on the wind, tumbling, sparking, until it blinked out in the muddy waters.

4

T
HE BONES BEGAN
a mile east of town. They were piled in ricks, twice as high as a man is tall, overarching the tracks on both sides of the right-of-way. The steel rails ran straight through them, as if diving into a skeletal mineshaft that shut out the light of the prairie. High-angled hipbones, bracketed ribs, the concave graceful plates of shoulder blades, skulls gaping emptyeyed with the black sweep of horns hooking up, down, sideways, black splintered hooves, leg bones knobbed like giant clubs, the shallow, knuckled curve and recurve of spinal columns. All tumbled together in the ricks. Some were whiter than others, some tan, some moss green or the hectic pink of diseased gums. Some were a dark, sickly brown, like rotten teeth.

And the straight lines of the steel heading West, right through them.

The train slowed, chuffing, and clouds of steam billowed up through the bones, ghosting out through eye sockets. It was getting on toward dark now and the headlight of the locomotive reflected off the steam.

Otto and Jenny stepped down out of the cars, knocked cinders off their shoulders, and there it was: Buffalo City, Kansas, as they used to call it, now Dodge City. They might have named it Golgotha, Jenny thought, if they’d had any imagination.

“Pfui,” she said, and wrinkled her nose.

“I told you so. It isn’t called the Land of the Stinkers for nothing,” Otto said. “You’ll get used to it, though. The whole West smells like this now, from the Platte and the Republican clear on down to the Cimarron.”

They walked past the bone ricks and the new frame station-house, past the yards of the big hide dealers—Rath & Wright, Myers & Leonard—where the stacks of stiff, flint-cured hides loomed twelve feet high. Smell of hair, dead meat, arsenic. Out onto wide-open Front Street—no blue laws in Dodge.

Otto carried the carpetbag and Jenny’s small trunk along the wooden sidewalk past the lighted saloons with their breath of stale beer cutting sharply into the buffalo smell, the quiet gaming hells, festive honky-tonks, and F. C. Zimmerman’s dry-goods store. Otto stopped to look at the new rifles in the window, a sidehammer Sharps in .44 caliber that took a bottlenecked, 2
5
/
8
-inch cartridge packing 90, 100, or 105 grains of powder, and a .44 Remington rolling-block Creedmore that fired a slightly shorter 90-grain cartridge. Both rifles would throw a heavy, 550-grain bullet with great accuracy, but the Sharps allowed more latitude in terms of powder loads, and certainly it possessed greater range. On the other hand, the Remington looked tidier, racier, more “modern,” with its small center-mounted hammer and sleek, neatly checked pistol grip.

The weapons leaned behind the window against the glass-eyed head of a buffalo. The stub-horn bull stared out into the street. Not mournfully, Otto thought, but resignedly, almost philosophically. As if it knew its days were numbered, as were those of all its kind. Sure, he thought. Philosophically. But at least it made him feel better to think so.

They passed a dovecote. The girls, some of them older than Frau Wieland, looked out the door and giggled as Otto and Jenny walked by. The soiled doves made little O’s of their painted mouths, and one of them flipped her skirt to display her unclad nether parts, grinning and saying,
“Whoops!”

They hurried on, Otto glaring back at the fallen women, Jenny a bit flustered by the display. No girl in Heldendorf was that brazen, not even Gretel Schlimm, who had been known to flirt in church.

“Where are we going?” she asked.

“To the livery stable. Then camp—about an hour west of town.”

“Can’t we eat first? Or anyway, get something to drink? I’ve got coal smoke in my
Kehl’.”

“Plenty of coffee out at camp. Clean, cold water. And buffalo steaks. Over at the Cox House they’ll give you thin, lukewarm coffee, canned pork and beans, yesterday’s bread with pepper sauce to disguise it, and then charge you six bits for your supper. A man would have to skin out three buffalo to pay for a meal like that, though he’d still be wolf-hungry half an hour later.”

He walked on glumly, his back stiff with suppressed anger. At what?

“Another thing,” he said, “you’ve got to stop talking half Deutsch, half English. You sound like some Dutchy peasant fresh off the pickle boat.”

“I’ll try,” Jenny said as humbly as she could. “But at least let’s stop for something cold and wet right now. Even if it’s
nur ein Bier
—sorry, just a beer.
Bitte,
Otto, please, it won’t take long.”

“I hate this town,” Otto said gruffly. “All towns, for that matter.”

But he was unstiffening a bit. She vowed to speak only English from now on, if it would make him happy.

Ahead of them a man strode along, slow and full of himself. He was tall, pigeon-chested, with a wide black flat-brim hat, a tailored broadcloth suit of pinstriped gray, hand-tooled boots with high heels, and when he turned quickly to look at them they saw a ruffled white shirt with a black silk string tie. His flabby upper lip stuck out, sparsely mustached, under a long, sharp nose. His eyes, close-set, were rheumy but quick. The ivory grips of two Colt pistols stuck out of his waistband, sharp-curved against the dark figuring of his waistcoat.

“Why, Otto, you old sausage stuffer!”

“How’s you doing, Jim?”

“Just fine, feller. How were things back East?”

“Crowded. They’re all still talkin’ about you, though.”

“Sure,” the man said in a scoffing tone. But he laughed in his long nose nonetheless, pleased, for all his self-deprecation.

Then the tall man tipped his hat politely to Jenny, spun on his heel, and walked on, mournful and sudden as his earlier smile.

“Who’s that?”

“Duck Bill Hickok.”

“Wild
Bill?”

“So they call him,” Otto said. “His real name’s Jim.”

T
HE BARMAN SLICED
the head off two lagers with a single slash of his spatula, then topped the schooners. He slid them over, along with the free-lunch bowl. A drunken teamster was weeping at the end of the bar. Six cowboys played poker at a corner table, but quietly. The evening was young.

“You got you a ladyfriend,” the barman said to Otto, smiling. “Don’t believe I’ve had the pleasure.”

Otto took a long pull at his beer and wiped his mustache with the back of his hand.

“This here’s my sister, Miss Jenny Dousmann,” he said. “Jenny, meet Fred Peacock.” They nodded across the bar, Peacock still smiling playfully. “Jenny’s going to hunt with me and Captain McKay this winter; she’ll rustle for the outfit, maybe skin some.”

And shoot, too, Jenny added silently.

“You look for a good season?”

“Good as last year, anyway,” Otto said. “We sold Rath & Wright about three thousand hides all told, and McKay figures this year to be better.”

“Not around here,” Peacock said. “They’re mighty thin on the ground up along the Arkansas, I hear. Say, I can remember when Bob Wright and me shot buff from his corral, to feed his pigs with. Down at the feedlot they had to hire guards to keep them durn shaggies away from the haystacks in the winter, right here in town, and that’s not long ago.”

“We’ll probably hunt farther south this fall,” Otto said. “Plenty of buff down toward Indian Territory. McKay’s scouting the Cimarron country right now. He’ll sniff out them shaggies wherever they are.”