Comanche Moon (26 page)

"It was not these horses with us," Worm said.

"It was the horses we have taken in the raid, and the others, the horses at home." "Why did they squeal--was there a cougar near?" Buffalo Hump asked.

"They were squealing because they were dying," Worm said. "The white men were killing them all, and the sky was black but it was not a storm. The sky was black because all the buzzards in the world had come to eat our horses. There were so many buzzards flying over that I could not see the sun. All I could see were black wings." "Is that the whole prophecy?" Buffalo Hump asked.

Worm merely nodded. He seemed tired and sad.

"That is a terrible prophecy--we need our horses," Buffalo Hump said. "Eat a little of this meat. Then we will go." "We will have to slip along at night," Worm said. "All the whites will be looking for us now." "Eat your meat," Buffalo Hump said.

"Don't worry about the whites. I am going to take you up the Rio Grande. Once we are far enough up it we can go home along the old war trail we used to ride, when we went into Mexico and caught all those Mexicans. I don't think we will see many whites out that way--if we do see whites I will kill them." Worm was relieved. They had travelled far on the great raid, all the way from the llano to the sea. He did not care for the sea, he was tired, and he had no more armadillo meat to eat. But Buffalo Hump gave him a little of his pig meat and he ate it.

When Worm had eaten, Buffalo Hump mounted and led him inland, back through the twisted trees, toward Mexico.

"It's such a far way back, Woodrow," Augustus said. "I swear I wish we hadn't gone so far from town." He said it at night, as they were burying two men whose scalped and cut-open bodies they found just at dusk, at the foot of a small hill. The two men had been travelling in a little wagon, with nothing much in it except axes. The Indians hadn't destroyed the wagon, but they had used the axes to hack the two men open.

"It's far yet, and we can't make no time for burying folks," Long Bill observed. The three older rangers watched as Pea Eye, Deets, and Jake Spoon dug the grave.

The day before, they had found a family slaughtered by a poor little tent. Evidently they had intended to start a farm. There were two women among the six dead. Seeing the women, whom they wrapped in blankets and buried properly, put Gus in mind of Clara, Long Bill in mind of his Pearl, and Call in mind of Maggie. It would be many days before they knew whether their womenfolk had suffered the fate of the two young women just buried, and the anxiety was tiring them all. For three days they had pushed the horses to their limits, and yet they were still ten days from home.

At night none of the older men could sleep.

Images rose up in their minds, images that kept them tense. Call usually went off with his rifle and sat in the darkness. Long Bill and Gus stayed by the fire, talking about anything they could think to talk about. Pea Eye, Jake, and Deets, with no one at home to worry about, said little. Jake had thrown up at the sight of the mutilated bodies.

"I never seen how a person looks inside themselves before," he said to Pea Eye, who didn't reply.

Pea Eye was afraid to talk about the deaths for fear that he would cry and embarrass himself before the older men. The sight of dead people made so much sadness come in him that he feared he couldn't contain it. In death people looked so small--the dead adults looked like sad children, and the dead children looked like dolls. The fury that found them was so great that it reduced them as they died.

"Why will people come out here, Captain?" Jake asked, as they were burying the two men who were travelling in the small wagon. "This ain't farm country ... what could you grow, out here?" Call had often wondered the same thing himself.

Over and over, rangering, he and Augustus had come upon little families, far out beyond the settlements, attempting to farm country that had never felt the plow. Often such pioneers didn't even have a plow. They might have a churn, a spindle, a spade, and a few axes, an almanac, and a primer for the children. Mainly what they had, as far as Call could tell, was their energies and their hopes. At least they had what most of them had never had before: land they could call their own.

"You can't stop people from coming out here," Call said.

"It's open country now." Later, Call and Augustus walked off from the group a little distance to discuss the problem of Long Bill, who was so distraught at the thought that his Pearl might have been killed or kidnapped that he seemed to be losing his mind.

"Bill's always been steady," Call said.

"I wouldn't have expected him to get this bad." "He's bad, Woodrow," Gus said. "I guess he's as crazy about Pearl as I am about Clara." The fact was, Call himself had had a number of disquieting thoughts about Maggie since hearing about the raid. Maggie had tried three times to talk about the baby she was carrying, a baby she claimed was his, but in his haste to round up his troop and get them started he had put her off, a rudeness he regretted. Now Maggie might be dead, and the child too, if there really was a child.

"I mean to leave Texas forever, if Clara's dead," Augustus told him. "I wouldn't want to live here without my Clara. The memories would be too hard." Call refrained from commenting that the woman Gus was talking about wasn't his anymore.

If Clara had left Austin before the big raid it was because she had married Bob Allen.

"Let's get off the damn Brazos tomorrow," Gus suggested.

"Why?" Call asked. "There's always abundant water in the Brazos." "I know it--t's why," Augustus said. "Where there's water, there's farmers--or people who were trying to be farmers. It means more people to bury. Me, I'd like to get on home." "It's wrong to leave Christian folk unburied," Call told him.

"It ain't if we don't even see 'em," Gus said. "If we get away from all this watered country we won't happen on so many." It was a still, windless night, and very dark. The three young grave diggers had to bring burning sticks from the campfire, in order to determine if they had the grave deep enough. The spades they were digging with had belonged to the two men who were murdered.

"We could start a hardware store with all the spades and axes scattered around out here," Gus remarked.

Long Bill had not come out with them to the grave site. They could see his tall form, pacing back and forth in front of the campfire, making wavy shadows.

"Oh Saint Peterffwas they heard him exclaim. "Oh, Saint Paulffwas "I wish Billy would hear of some new saints to pray to," Gus said. "I'm tired of hearing him pray to Peter and Paul." "He can't read--I guess he's forgot the other saints," Call said. The grave diggers had paused for a moment--they were all exhausted, from hard travel and from fear.

Call felt sorry for Long Bill Coleman. Seldom had he seen a man so broken by grief, though Pearl, the woman he grieved for, might well be alive and well.

Pearl, though large, did not seem to him exceptional in any way. She had none of Clara's wit or spirit, nor Maggie's beauty of face.

"Pearl must be a mighty good cook, for him to take on about her so before he even knows if she's dead." "No, she ain't," Augustus said. "I've et Pearl's cooking and it was only fair. I expect it's the poking." "The what?" Call asked, surprised.

"The poking, Woodrow," Gus said. "Pearl was large and large women are usually a pleasure to poke." "Well, you would think that," Call said.

In the aftermath of the great raid, much to her distress, Maggie's business increased. No one knew exactly where the Comanches were, but rumours of widespread carnage swept the town.

Some said that Buffalo Hump had killed three hundred people in San Antonio, and one hundred more in Houston. Then a counterrumour reversed those numbers; others thought he had burnt Victoria, while someone had heard that he was already in Mexico. There was a general fear that he might come back through Austin and finish what he had begun. Men went about heavily armed, draped with all the weapons they could carry. At nights the streets were empty, though the saloons still did a good business. Men were so scared that they drank, and, having drunk, discovered that they were still too nervous to sleep.

So they came to Maggie--a stream of men, knocking on her door at all hours of the day or night. She couldn't protest, but she was not welcoming, either. She had been sickly of a morning lately, and was often nauseous or queasy during the day. Her belly had begun to swell visibly, yet none of the men seemed to notice.

They were so scared that only what she sold them could bring them a little peace. Maggie understood it. She was scared herself. Some nights she even went down and hid in the crawl space under the smokehouse. It brought her a little relief, both from fear and from the men.

Maggie longed for Woodrow to show up, with the boys. Once Woodrow was there, the men would leave her be. Although they were only two men, they were respected; the townspeople took much comfort from their presence, just as she did.

Every morning at first light Maggie looked out her window, toward the corrals where the rangers kept their horses. She was hoping to see Woodrow's buckskin, Johnny. If she could just spot Johnny she would know that he was back.

But, morning after morning, there was no sign of the rangers. Maggie found Call's absence almost too much to bear, at such a time, with the baby in her. Just as she was hoping to give up whoring forever, all the men wanted her to do was whore, and she was afraid to refuse. The dark thought struck her that Woodrow might be dead. He had left with only five men, and the Comanches numbered more than five hundred, some said. The rangers might all be dead, and likely were.

Even to think it made Maggie feel hopeless.

If Woodrow was dead she would have no father for her baby. Then the whoring wouldn't stop: the men at the door, the men on top of her, the men who counted out money and waited for her to lay back and pull up her skirt. She would go on laying there, lifting her skirt to men who were none too clean, who stank and vomited, who had violence in their eyes, until she got sick, or was too old to be worth the money they counted out.

She thought she could have borne all the worry and all the doubt a little better if Woodrow had just had time to talk to her about the baby, to give her some hope that he would marry her, or at least help her with the child. He hadn't seemed to be angry about it; just a few ^ws would have been enough. But he had been in a hurry, usually was. Maggie could not find it in her to tax Woodrow too hard for his failure to speak; she rarely taxed Woodrow too hard about any of the things that bothered her. He was a captain now and had many responsibilities. Her hope was that he would come round to liking the idea of a child, or at least to not minding it much. When Woodrow Call did get angry with her a coldness showed in him that made her question whether happiness would ever be hers. He could be so cold, when angered, that Maggie wondered how she had ever come to care for him anyway. He had only been a customer, after all, a young man with quick needs, like many another. The older whores had all warned her not to get attached to customers.

One named Florie, who had taught her something of the business, had been emphatic on that score.

"I've known whores to marry, but it's a seldom thing," Florie said. "It's one of those things that if you look for them you won't find them." "Well, I ain't looking," Maggie declared --she had been much younger then. It wasn't entirely true: she had already met Woodrow Call and already knew she liked him.

"I looked once, but not no more," Florie said. "I just take their money and give 'em a few jerks. It don't take much longer than it takes to wring out a mop, not if you set your hips right." The next year Florie stumbled coming down her own steps and broke her neck. She had a big basket of laundry in her arms--it was the laundry that caused her to misstep. She was lying dead at the bottom of the steps with her eyes wide open when they found her. A goat had wandered over and was eating her laundry basket, which was made of coarse straw.

Maggie, despite Florie's advice, had gone on and got attached to Woodrow Call, so attached that she would sometimes put her hand on her belly and imagine that there was a little boy inside, who would look just like him.

One morning when she had gone out early to draw a bucket of water, she was surprised to see the sheriff limping up her stairs. The sheriff was named Gawsworth Gibbons; he was a large man and, in the main, kindly. Several times he had taken Maggie's side in disputes with drunken customers, a rare thing for a sheriff to do.

Despite Gaw Gibbons's kindly attitude, Maggie was always a little disturbed to see a sheriff coming up her stairs--it could mean she was going to be asked to move, or some such thing.

The sheriff had a bad limp, the result of a wound sustained in the Mexican War. It took him some time to mount the stairs--all Maggie could do was stand and wait, wondering what she could have done to prompt a visit from the sheriff.

"Why, what is it, Gaw?" she asked. She had known Gawsworth Gibbons long before he became a sheriff; before the Mexican War he had made his living shoeing horses.

"Has somebody complained?" she asked.

Gawsworth Gibbons smiled his large, kindly smile and followed Maggie into her room before answering.

"No complaints, Mag," he told her.

"All that's wrong is just what's apt to be wrong with any feller." To her shock, Maggie saw that he had money in his hand--he was coming to her as a customer, something that had never happened in the years she had known him.

It took her a moment to adjust to the notion.

The sheriff, out of consideration, turned his back as he lowered his pants. Even from the back, though, Maggie saw that the skin on his legs was twisted in a strange way. The skin had black specks in it, as if Gaw Gibbons had been peppered.

Then she recalled that what she had heard about his war wound was that he had been severely burned--a keg of gunpowder had blown up while he stood near it, blowing gunpowder and bits of the barrel into his legs.

"My wife, she's about give up on me, Mag," the sheriff said. "I expect she just can't tolerate these burned legs no more." "Oh, Gaw," Maggie said.