The High Divide (12 page)

“I thought we might see you,” Two Blood said.

Agnes stepped out from behind him. “He keeps asking me,” she said, “‘where has that Pope woman taken herself?'”

Gretta was unable to muster a smile for them, but the nervous pain in her stomach was already fading.

“You didn't find your men,” Two Blood said.

She dropped her satchel to the ground and let her tired arms hang. Two Blood leaned over and picked it up, then ducked through his doorway. Agnes nodded at Gretta to follow him. The long, single room was like a cave, but dry and warm nonetheless with a slow fire burning in the barrel stove. Agnes sat Gretta at their tiny kitchen table, and Two Blood sat down across from her. He turned sideways to face the fire.

“I don't want to be a bother,” Gretta said.

With a flip of her hand, Agnes shooed away the words. “We saw him moving your things,” she said.

“Bastard,” Two Blood muttered.

Gretta didn't allow herself to make a sound, but sitting at their table her shoulders shook and her tears streamed as Agnes and Two Blood looked down at their hands. When she was done crying, Agnes fried slabs of side pork then mixed a bowl of thick cornmeal batter and set it sizzling in the pork fat. She put it out on plates, and then watched as Gretta ate like she hadn't eaten since Ulysses left in July, leaning into it and drinking cup after cup of the cold spring water that Two Blood replenished from a large brown crock in the corner.

“I don't know what to do,” she said when she'd finished.

Two Blood looked at her, chewing his food. “Where did you go off to?”

She explained about seeing her husband's sister in St. Paul but said nothing about the discoveries she made, the secrets he'd kept for so long about the Seventh Cavalry and his name change, revelations so personal she couldn't imagine putting them into words. The humiliation would be too much to bear. And what would Two Blood and Agnes think of her if they knew Ulysses had been in Custer's regiment?

Agnes, who hadn't eaten yet, sat down with her own plate of food. She said, “He believes Ulysses went that way,” and pointed a finger at the west wall.

“Why?” Gretta asked him. “Why do you think that?”

Two Blood filled his pipe and went over to the stove where he took a long twig and poked it in the coals and used it to light up before coming back and sitting down again. “He and I smoked together sometimes, in my shop. He liked to ask questions about when I was young, about hunting the blackhorns and stealing horses from the Crows. He wanted to hear about the wars I knew and what I remembered.”

“Please, if you know where he went—”

He shook his head.

“Did he ever talk about his own wars?” she asked.

Two Blood drew on the pipe and blew out a long stream with its sharp, burnt-apple scent. “No,” he said.

Gretta thought of how little her pride was worth—how little it mattered what anybody might think about her husband and his secrets. And considering how people in this town treated Indians, weren't Agnes and Two Blood likely able to bear most any injury? She summoned her courage and said, “In St. Paul I learned from his sister that he served out west”—she looked at Agnes then turned to her husband—“with the Seventh Cavalry.”

Agnes glanced over, but Two Blood only lowered his pipe to the table and scratched his long nose. In the distance, a train whistle heralded the arrival of an eastbound.

“I knew about his time in the Union Army, during the Rebellion,” Gretta continued. “But now I learn that he signed up again after the war and stayed till sixty-nine. I met him later in the year he mustered out, and he never told me anything about it. He led me to think he'd been out of the service for years.”

“Sixty-nine?” Two Blood asked, his eyes on her.

“That's right.”

He looked off through the small window, and doing likewise Gretta could see the quarter-moon balanced on the very tip of the Our Savior's steeple. Agnes moved to the corner behind the stove and laid out a heavy robe and on top of this a gray wool blanket. “You can lie here tonight,” she said to Gretta. “You'll stay warm.”

But Gretta wasn't ready to sleep, not even close. She wasn't the least bit tired, and had a feeling Two Blood might have something more to say. Leaning toward him across the table, she asked, “Didn't he talk about himself at all? Didn't he tell you anything about what's happened over the last year? About losing his contracts? Losing his job at the depot? Anything?”

The old man seemed not to hear Gretta's voice. In the silence she listened to his breathing, and to the soft whistling in his nose every time he exhaled. His pipe had gone cold and lay untouched on the table. Then he turned to her, his eyes as dark as rifle holes. “My father died when I was small,” he said, “but I had two uncles, both good men. They taught me what I needed to learn. My mother's brother, he was a man of words. He told me where we came from, and about the land. He told me about the birds and animals, the weather. He knew how to fight also. He had stories about raids into Crow country and the times he had counted coup. He liked to show his scars, could talk all night about each one. Later, though, after the battles, when they started moving us to the reservations, he understood what was happening and he urged everybody to save themselves, make the change. He said, ‘Put down your guns.'”

Two Blood lifted a hand in front of his face and held it there, as if to divide his head in half, an eye on either side as he stared at Gretta. “Do you hear me?” he asked. When she nodded, he lowered his hand to the table.

“Now my father's brother, he was different. He wasn't one to say things, but showed me how to ride and shoot, and how to stay warm in the cold. And when they tried to make him farm the land, he laughed and rode away—north, over the medicine line. He wouldn't let his shadow fall anyplace near the land they pushed us onto. He was killed at Slim Buttes, along with American Horse. I never heard this uncle talk about battles or raids. I would not call him a man of war. But you see, he wasn't able to live in two worlds, because he was all one thing. That might be the kind of man your husband is.”

Two Blood reached for his pipe and got up from his chair. Agnes called out to Gretta from the darkness. “There's a bowl of water on the cupboard to wash. Privy is out back, up against the fence. The door sticks. You have to push your shoulder into it.”

“Thank you,” Gretta said.

“Get some rest now,” Agnes said. “You need it.”

Gretta didn't sleep, though, not for hours. It was comfortable and warm, lying on the heavy, furred robe and wrapped in the wool blanket, but her mind was working so hard that her brain hurt. Two Blood might well be right about her husband—that he was all one thing. But knowing that didn't tell her where he was. The old man might be right, too, about Ulysses going west. But how was she supposed to find him out there? Her comprehension of that territority was vague, mountains and hard-flowing rivers and vast deserts of buffalo grass and sagebrush, a brown and dull-green world with cruel, empty skies. Gretta had never traveled west of Fargo, which was set down in a land so flat and treeless that the first settlers built their homes out of sod. But now she had to imagine going off into the emptiness beyond it, far beyond it, and going alone—although if she couldn't find some kind of evidence that pointed to where he'd gone to, what was the use in even starting out?

At first it had been hard not to think he'd gone to another woman. That would explain why he left without telling her. And when she'd set out for St. Paul three days ago, she did so bearing the dead feeling in her stomach that she was about to discover a shameful truth. Of course she might still have to swallow that pill, but the nature of her dread had changed in the past few days, shifting inside of her, moving higher somehow, and now it seemed to be centered in her lungs and heart instead of in her belly.

Not that it mattered, because when morning came she'd simply have to continue her search. And wherever it took her, even if she came up with nothing, she would have choices to make: how to start life over again, with or without him—and if without him, whether to take advantage of Mead Fogarty's selfish offer, or do what she'd thought of many times since Ulysses left in July: return to Copenhagen.

What must it be like, she wondered, in the city she'd left at seventeen? How much had changed there? Did her childhood friends still fill their days with talk and with trips to the harbor? Did they still act out their favorite stories in the gardens at Tivoli? Spend their afternoons boating in the canals? Did they ever wish they'd done as she had and gone off to America to start new lives? No doubt they had families of their own by now, husbands and children and houses to keep, their own worries and disappointments, their own regrets. As Gretta slipped finally toward sleep, she thought of how things used to be—recalling her summers there, with the beach at Havnebad brooding in the near distance, she and her mother walking out along its sandy, blue-green shores and swimming in the cool water, naked, on those long evenings when dusk lingered past midnight.

Cottonwood Blowdown

O
ut here, though, all these years later, her husband moved through a harder country, a place he would never look back on with longing, no wind to speak of today and no sounds either, except for the ox's hooves against the hard ground and the creaking of the wheels. Powdery dirt lingered in the air, filling his mouth and eyes with grit. The day had warmed enough that he'd taken off his coat and rolled up his shirtsleeves again. Before him, to the north and east, an endless series of gray-brown hills—some rolling, some broken—shimmered beneath a blue sky so bright it made his eyes ache. Behind him, though, in the west, purple clouds were massing, and he figured by late afternoon the weather was going to catch up to him. An autumn thunderstorm, a good hard one, too, by the look of it. And so he kept a sharp eye out for a place to take cover, a shelf of rock or a stand of cedars. Every so often he stung the ox's bony rump with his willow whip, but the animal only flipped its tail and sauntered on.

Two days he'd spent on the reservation, stopping at every lodge and speaking with every man, woman, and child he saw, passing out the jerked beef as he went and sometimes offering other gifts as well: colored hand scarves, glass beads, and the tumblers he had made from wine and whiskey bottles he found back of the First Chance Saloon in Miles City then sawed off with a fine-tooth crosscut. No one had heard of anybody named Magpie, or at least so they claimed. Nor did anyone ask Ulysses what he wanted with the man. It made him wonder if they knew more than they were willing to let on. Of course if somebody had said, “What does this Magpie have that
you
want?” Ulysses had been ready with an answer. He would have explained about a recent newspaper story on the Custer fiasco, written for the ten-year anniversary—an article for which the writer had interviewed a Cheyenne battle veteran who'd later joined the Buffalo Bill Show and toured all through the Eastern states. “Here's how it is,” Ulysses would have said. “My brother died at the Little Bighorn, and I think the man might have some answers to the questions I've got.”

In fact, there had been such a news story. It was published in the
St. Paul Daily Globe
in June, and when he'd come across the name Magpie, he read it three times. Ulysses didn't have a brother, of course. Nor had he been close to the battle himself, having mustered out years before Custer led his paltry troop against Sitting Bull's confederacy of nations. But this remained: on the worst day of his life Ulysses had, in a fashion, crossed paths with the man whose beaded tobacco pouch he kept hidden beneath his coat, the pouch he'd never been able to rid himself of, as much as he would have liked to.

“God forgive me,” Ulysses said, and stung the ox's bony rump with his willow switch.

The storm, as it happened, came on slow, allowing him to reach a cottonwood blowdown where years ago a twister must have come through and yanked out a grove of trees and laid them down in knots. Some were locked together like the antlers of rutting elk. Others were piled like matchsticks, their trunks smooth and white. The downed trees formed a curving palisade, seven, eight feet high, a natural protection from the north, and Ulysses pulled the wagon close to allow a network of dead branches to form a roof above him. He unhitched the ox, which he picketed nearby, then cut boughs from a cedar tree and laced them into the branches that overhung the wagon.

His plan was to wait out the rain and get an early start for Miles City in the morning, picking bones along the way—ten dollars' worth, he figured, more than enough to defray the cost of leasing the ox and rig. After wiring home twenty-five, two months' worth of payments on the note, he would still have something left to stake his trip to the southern agency, the only other place he knew to look. Luckily, he understood the country down there from serving in the campaigns of sixty-seven and sixty-eight, riding as courier for the Seventh, sometimes as far as a hundred miles in a day. Forts Leavenworth, Harker, Hays, Larned, and Dodge, and south into Indian Territory. Empty plains and sand hills, high plateaus, magnificent bluffs. The tribes had still been on the move then, if nearly impossible to find, and the large herds had yet to be annihilated by the money hunters. Once, between the Cimarron and Arkansas Rivers, he was forced to lead his mare into a high tumble of limestone to keep from getting trampled. He'd been watching the herd come on for an hour, their dust rising purple in the east, and as they poured past him on either side, their great heads and humped backs plunging and surging, the earth shook so hard he'd felt like his flesh would come loose from his bones.

Late afternoon, the storm arrived. In minutes a false green night eclipsed daylight, then a hard wind blew in from the east, driving an icy rain left to right across his vision. Wrapped in a canvas tarpaulin and hunched in the wagon's bed, he stayed more or less dry, thanks to the breastwork of woven branches. He was thinking about lying down and trying to sleep out the storm when a mortar-blast of thunder boomed. The ox tossed its head and kicked its hind legs as if fighting off a pack of wolves. Then lightning struck close, casting in its silver glow three men on ponies, side by side by side, thirty feet away and straight ahead. Ulysses waited, the outlines of the men burned in yellow on his retinas. He put his right hand on the .476 Enfield revolver he'd picked up in Miles City and which he wore inside his jacket on a sling. The rain turned to sleet and rattled against the dead wood. When Ulysses could see again, the men were still there, sitting their mounts, watching him. Rifles in their scabbards.

The one in the center was wide-shouldered and sat tall on his pony. Ulysses waved him forward out of the rain, and the man swung to the ground and tied off the pony on a cottonwood limb. Without speaking, he climbed into the wagon across from Ulysses—the knees of the two men separated by less than a foot—then glanced over his shoulder at the others, still waiting on their ponies. They came in, too, now, one taking his place in the wagon next to the first, across from Ulysses, the other climbing up on the buckboard. No one spoke. Beyond their small world, the rain obliterated everything.

The first man, the tall one, wore a campaign hat faded to purple and a cavalry coat with herringbone piping across the chest, epaulets on the shoulders. His dark braids were wrapped in strips of white weasel fur. There was an old single-action Colt tucked in the waist of his buckskin pants. He looked forty or forty-five, hard and fit, the lids of his eyes hooded like a snapping turtle's, his nose hawklike. The one beside him in the wagon was small, no bigger than a boy, though his old face was rough like the bark of an elm tree. He had on a crumpled cowboy hat, faded cavalry pants, moccasins with beadwork. The bone handle of an ancient revolver stuck out from the holster at his side. The third, perched on the buckboard, was barrel-chested with massive hands and long, graying hair. A pistol tied to a leather string hung from his neck like a chunk of jewelry. They were likely Cheyenne or Crow—Cheyenne, Ulysses decided—off the reservation in either case and armed for hunting. Their booted rifles looked like Henry repeaters.

Ulysses shrugged himself free of the canvas, and making sure to let his sidearm show, leaned toward the front of the wagon to grab a quart jar of pickled eggs from underneath a blanket. He removed the lid and handed the jar across to the tall man, who took it and sniffed, his slitted eyes watching Ulysses carefully. He reached in with his long fingers and lifted one out, brought it up to his nose, and then took half the egg in his teeth and bit it off. Frowning, he chewed and swallowed. Then he popped the rest of the egg in his mouth and this time swallowed without chewing.

Minutes later the dozen or so eggs were gone. The sleet had passed but the rain continued, pounding the ground and drumming on their makeshift roof and beating against the surface of the river behind them. Finally, though, the sky began to lighten west to east like a day doubling back on itself, and the rain slowed until the only sound was the light ticking of water from the cottonwood deadfall.

“You've gotten some use out of our camp,” the tall man said, raising a hand and touching the roof of cedar boughs. “Good of you to share it.” A smile twitched at the corner of his mouth.

“My pleasure.”

“I was a boy when the wind came,” the man continued. “My father and I watched from there.” He pointed southeast, where a light-colored butte rose from a forested line of hills. “It came down out of a black sky like a finger. The trees jumped and they flew.”

Ulysses nodded.

“We expect travelers who stay here to pay a fair price. A rent, you call it.”

“Yes? And what's a fair price?”

“Whatever the man carries. If he carries a dollar, he pays a dollar.”

“I see.”

“And what do
you
carry?” The man glanced around at his friends, who sat watching but seemed less than interested. The big one, up on the buckboard, had drawn a loop of plug tobacco from his chest pocket, and he sliced off a piece of it with his knife.

“I carry more than a dollar,” Ulysses said.

The second man, the small one with the corrugated face, leaned forward, the vinegar from the pickled eggs strong on his breath. He said something in his own tongue, Cheyenne it sounded like, but Ulysses could not be sure. His teeth were the color of weak coffee, and his eyes watched the place beneath Ulysses's jacket where the Enfield was slung.

“My friend wants to know how much more,” the tall one said.

There was nothing in Ulysses that wanted a fight. He wanted nothing to do with killing men over a sum of money, although if it meant protecting his life, he believed he could take them—all three. His double-action revolver gave him the edge over the two in the wagon bed, with their older weapons. They would be dead before the third man, busy on the buckboard with his plug of tobacco, had a chance to marshal his pistol, which hung too high on his neck for easy use.

“How much more?” the tall one asked.

The money was in a pocket sewn to the inside of his coat, and Ulysses reached for it now, wishing he'd tucked the notes and silver into a sock, or hidden them someplace on the wagon. On the other hand, it was better to keep things simple, to do whatever was required to avoid trouble. He opened his coat and removed the money, all of it, and then turned the pocket inside out to prove it was empty. He laid out the money in front of him, on the floor of the wagon.

The men glanced around at each other, as if trying to understand this man's lack of compunction about letting them see his wealth. The tall one reached forward and with his index finger counted and sorted. Then he said, “Thirty?”

Ulysses agreed.

“Or is there more someplace?”

“No, that's all I have.”

The man's turtle eyes widened enough to show bright black pupils. “Our rent this time is thirty dollars. And we let you keep the ox and wagon. Is that a fair price?”

“It's fair if you say it is. Of course I will have to charge you for the meal of eggs. And I suppose you have wives at the agency.” He aimed a thumb in the direction from which he came. “I gave them some of the best jerked beef you'll find, after your friend Adams tried to steal my potatoes from me. How about this. I'll give you these”—he separated a dozen silver dollars from the pile and pushed them forward—“and I'll keep the rest for myself. Then we part as friends.”

“Adams,” the big man grunted from his perch on the buckboard. Then he spoke for a moment in his own tongue.

“He says you should have done like the women do when Adam tries stealing from them,” the tall one declared. “Kick him in the seeds.”

“I'll remember that next time.”

“We'll take these, too,” the man said, sweeping the rest of the coins—seven silver dollars—back into his pile. He yanked the brim of the campaign cap down over the dark slits of his eyes and added, “You keep the paper ones.” He gathered up the coins and put them into the side pocket of his coat, then pushed to his feet and swung over the edge of the wagon to the ground.

“Time to let our wealthy friend go his way,” he said. “He must have bones to gather.”

The other two followed his lead and climbed down off the wagon. They all watched as Ulysses hitched up the ox and prepared to leave, filling his canteens with drinking water from the rain bucket, folding up the tarpaulins, and taking his time to squeeze some grease into the wagon's wheel housings, just to show the men he was not in a hurry to leave on their account. Finally he climbed up on the buckboard and released the hand brake. The air smelled good after the rain. And it was cooling fast as evening came on.

“You'll need a fire,” he said to the tall one, who'd taken a cottonwood stump and sat there with his rifle on his lap. “Dry out those wet clothes.”

The man looked up at him, squinting.

“I was wondering,” Ulysses said, watching the man's eyes. “Have you ever heard of a Magpie?”

The man sighed and looked away. “Sometimes they're mistaken for crows, but they're not the same bird. The magpie has white shoulders and a white belly. And is smaller than a crow.” His mouth turned down at the corners, as if the idea of mistaking one bird for another disturbed him.

“No, I'm saying Magpie as the name of a man. He's Cheyenne.”

“I've heard that name, yes.” He leaned forward, elbows dropping to his knees. Then he raised his head and called out, “Bull Bear, Leather Top, do you hear this?” and spoke for a few moments, rapidly, a fast stream of words, Magpie being the only one Ulysses recognized.

The big man with graying hair, standing behind the wagon now, brushing out his wet pony, grunted and nodded. He answered in a low voice.

“Bull Bear said Magpie is part of the southern tribe, that he knew him in better days, but can't say where he might be found. Down in the territories, probably. Or up north in the breaks. He wonders what you want him for.”