Sudden Country (9 page)

"Is that not a Union saddle you have?" I asked.

"I inherited it off a Yankee officer at Second Manassas. I taken the rag for it often enough. If you ride with the stirrups low it's the second next best thing to sitting at home. The next best thing is walking." He took his place in line at the bottom of the ramp to the stock car.

"Did you know Robert E. Lee?"

"Seen him horseback once at Sharpsburg. He looked a vengesome angel with his white hair and beard."

"Did you fight for slavery?"

"Didn't none of us do that. Most of us never seen a slave our whole lives, much less owned any. That war wasn't over slavery. We was fighting for Southern independence. You'll hear different, but they're lies."

I changed the subject, for I sensed that I had struck a raw place. "Will we see Indians where we're going?"

"As well ask will we catch fleas in a kennel."

"Are they as savage as Judge Blod says they are in his books?"

"I don't read much. But some are, some ain't, same as white men. One thing you got to have in bushels with an injun is patience. He'll talk about the weather and his wife's piles and how many buffaloes he seen that week and just about anything but the thing you come there to talk about till he runs out of it. Then he'll get to business. But that's talk. If it's your scalp he admires he'll get to it first thing. They got priorities."

"Mr. Wedlock–"

"There ain't been no Mr. Wedlock since a free nigger named Eustace dropped a rooftree on my paw's head accidental-like back in '56," he said. "I'm Ben if you're Davy."

"Ben. Did you know that man Pike?"

"Seen him in there a time or two. I reckon he got wind there was hiring going on. Mind, if I knew he kept company with the likes of Quantrill and Anderson, I'd of run him out before he ever threw a lip over any glass of mine."

"I'm glad. I don't like what I saw of that border trash."

"Someday when you trust me, I'd hear how that came about."

I hesitated. "It is not that I don't trust you."

"Course you don't. It's the eye. It was a leg or an arm or even what makes a man a man, you'd call me cripple and pay me what's due. When folks look at me all they see's the eye. You'll get used to it. They all do. I did."

His turn came and he mounted the ramp with the sorrel's bit in hand. He handed the reins to a railroad worker sweating in the car and together they struggled against the determined might of the horse, which had set its hoofs and refused to proceed. The railroad man cursed.

"Will I see you in the Pullman?" I called.

"I'd best stay with Nicodemus this trip." Wedlock's voice was strained. "He don't take to travel that ain't his own doing."

Disappointed, I walked down the platform past Marshal Honyocker and two of his deputies, who had evidently been informed that a number of heavily armed men were gathered at the station. The marshal's men were perspiring freely, but in his tight waistcoat and level hat he looked contained in the dry heat. Whatever Mr. Knox and Judge Blod had told him, he seemed satisfied that the situation was moving out of his jurisdiction.

At length the animals were secured, seats taken, and with the conductor's cry of "Board!" the train whistled and slid out of the station. I had a window seat next to Mr. Knox facing Judge Blod, who had begun a log of our journey and was filling pages of foolscap on the tilted surface of an ingenious collapsible writing desk provided by the railroad. His afflicted foot rested in the aisle. I wondered if it would prove a hindrance on the trail.

"Who is meeting us in Cheyenne?" Mr. Knox asked the Judge.

"Major Alonzo Rudeen, the acting commander at Fort Laramie. He has offered us the escort of a patrol as far as the Dakota border. I wrote about him in Rudeen of Raton Pass. It played no small role in his promotion."

"Is there anyone out here whom you do not know?"

"We have not met. I based the book upon newspaper reports and information supplied by the War Department. He wrote to thank me. We have been in correspondence since that time."

The train racketed through countryside that remained constant through that part of the Nations that extends north of Texas, and which has since been renamed the Oklahoma Panhandle; flat yellow earth like crinkled paper, pocked with mesquite and bunch grass, each clump casting a small crescent-shaped shadow looking like the holes that horned toads scoop in the sand just before they vanish beneath the surface. As the day wore on, however, the scenery began to change, subtly at first, then dramatically, becoming green and grassy, the horizon less a straight line as mountains began to take on a deep blue form. I knew then that we were in Colorado. I was now farther from home than I had ever been. Even the air smelled different.

We had an excellent supper in the dining car and retired to our berths for the night. Lying there between the curtains and the curving varnished wall of my wooden womb, I let the car's swaying motion and the mesmeric chattering of the wheels pull me into darkness. This time there were no nightmares, only oblivion.

In Denver the next day, the train stopped for passengers, and we alighted to stretch our legs. I saw Ben Wedlock leading his sorrel down the ramp from the stock car for the same purpose, but as he was deep in conversation with one of the men he had signed in Amarillo, I passed by them after an exchange of greetings. Wedlock seemed refreshed and not at all stiff from what must have been an uncomfortable night in the company of beasts. I saw Christopher Agnes prowling the cinderbed with his stick in one hand and the ubiquitous sack in the other, apparently in vain, for he returned to the Pullman with a dejected aspect.

I was back aboard when a new passenger carrying a worn valise paused just below my open window to ask the conductor if the train was going straight through to Cheyenne. In looks and posture he was ordinary, of middle age and height, with sunburned skin and a brush moustache the color of sand. His store suit and slouch hat were unremarkable and far from new. I could not say what it was about him that interested me. Only when he left the conductor and mounted the next car in line did I place his voice, and even then I was not certain. The West was large, after all. It would contain any number of men whose speech resembled the pleasant tones of Charlie Beacher, one of Nazarene Pike's partners and another of the nightriders who had brought death to my mother's boardinghouse.

PHILO HECATE

"J
udge, I must urge you to reconsider this excursion." Major Alonzo Rudeen was in his middle thirties and inclined toward stoutness, with a mealy complexion and red muttonchop whiskers that underscored the begin-flings of jowls. He wore the full cavalry uniform and gauntlets and a fawn-colored hat with the brim pinned up on one side. His saber slapped his heels as he strode across the Cheyenne platform to shake Judge Blod's hand. If the Judge found Rudeen's person less heroic than he had imagined, he did not betray disappointment. "Has the situation deteriorated that far?" he asked.

"It has. Moreover, it is still deteriorating. The newspapers have whipped Washington into a fine lather. I expect orders to report with my command to Standing Rock any day. I cannot warrant that you would not be leading your band of civilians into the middle of a war."

"What news of Sitting Bull?"

The major regarded Mr. Knox with a watery stare that he evidently considered martial. "Boiling roots and making dreams in his cabin on Grand River, just as he did at Little Big Horn. Who are you, sir?"

Judge Blod apologized for his poor manners and introduced the schoolmaster and, as an afterthought, myself. I had noticed a distinct drift in his affections away from me since the Joe Snake affair. While he was not precisely hostile, I sensed a distance between us, as between a boy and a man who had no use for him. This sentiment appeared to be shared by Rudeen, who ignored me.

"Young men on the Standing Rock reservation have been observed purchasing arms and ammunition from contraband traders," he said. "Sitting Bull and Wovoka, the Paiute charlatan, have convinced them that if they dance until they drop from exhaustion, the Indian slain will rise, the white man will withdraw from their ancestral lands, and the buffalo will return in numbers. The Sioux believe exclusively that the mystic symbols painted on their shirts will protect them from bullets, which is the most disturbing thing about this entire business, as it means that they are spoiling for a fight. It is a preposterous stew of Christian thought and pagan superstition that can have but one outcome. You would be placing your party in extreme jeopardy if you set out for the Black Hills in this climate."

"Are you ordering us not to proceed?" There was defiance in the Judge's tone.

"I have not that authority. However, I can withdraw my offer of an escort."

"The Rudeen I wrote about was a man of his word."

"I have acknowledged my debt to you, with reservations concerning your more creative flights," said the other. "I am extending this counsel in partial repayment. If you insist upon continuing, I cannot in good conscience refuse protection. I must impose a condition."

"Indeed."

"You know that I may not accompany you into Dakota without orders. This would expose you to the most perilous part of your journey without military protection. I would rest easier knowing you had a guide who is familiar with the country and the current situation. The man I have in mind is a short walk from this place."

"We will welcome the exercise." The Judge caught the attention of Ben Wedlock, who separated himself from the group from Amarillo and came over. "Ben Wedlock, Major Rudeen," said the Judge. "I am placing you in charge until we return. See that no one wanders off."

"Count on me." Wedlock had his good eye cocked toward Rudeen. The major met his gaze with spine straight and chin lifted, and I could feel the barrier between the man in the Confederate hat and the officer wearing the uniform of the Republic.

We took our leave. I paid attention to the people milling around the platform, but did not see the man who had joined us in Denver. He had ridden in a different car, and although I had not seen him alight at any of the stops between, neither had I laid eyes upon him since he came aboard. Assuming that I had made a mistake, I congratulated myself for my decision not to inform Mr. Knox and the Judge of my suspicions. At the time I had been loath to arouse the contempt of Judge Blod–not because I valued his good opinion any longer, but because I valued Mr. Knox's and worried that the other's skepticism might influence it.

Cheyenne had been a cowtown and still smelled like one, but most of the ramshackle saloons and storefronts had given way to brick buildings and, perched on hilltops overlooking the city, ornate houses with turrets and gables and gingerbread porticoes built by railroad men and the wives of cattlemen who spent more time with ledgers than with cows. When our way led toward a saloon of an ear-her vintage I supposed that was our destination–Wedlock's Golden Gate and Jed Knickerbocker's accounts having educated me upon the haunts of frontiersmen–but Major Rudeen took us past it and into a frame house down the street. A sign on the porch read HOUSE OF THE BLESSED LAMB.

"Gentlemen," said the major, removing his hat, "allow me to present Deacon Philo Hecate."

It was a long room with a plank floor and two rows of fresh-sawn benches standing on either side of a generous aisle, at the end of which stood a pulpit just as new. Two pointed window openings in each side wall awaited glass. Even as we entered, a man wearing a canvas carpenter's apron planed an eighteen-inch curl off the edge of the pulpit, felt the edge with the heel of a brown hand, and set aside the plane to untie his apron. Beneath it he wore a black cassock and white clerical collar.

He was excessively lean, and would have appeared emaciated but for the strength in his face–clean-shaven, burned dark as ironwood, and made up of flat sections that themselves looked as if they had been planed. His hair was pure white and thick and he had eyes of a disturbing blue clarity, like one of those mountain streams that smoke in the heat of summer and burn one's hands with their iciness. His shoulders were high and thin, his jaw long and square, his mouth a horizontal fissure. When it opened, the words that came out crackled like sticks in a hearth.

"Even Lucifer uncovers in God's house," he said.

Mr. Knox, Judge Blod, and I snatched off our hats. I think we had all forgotten we were wearing them.

" 'And I will raise me up a faithful priest,' " said Deacon Philo Hecate, " 'that shall do according to that which is in mine heart and in my mind: and I will build him a sure house; and he shall walk before mine anointed forever' "