The High Divide (8 page)

“But why wouldn't he say anything to
me
?”

Florence laughed. “Does my brother ever say anything he doesn't need to say?”

Gretta couldn't muster a response, only shook her head before asking Florence if she could take the letters with her.

“I don't need them, God knows. Louie, go and get her a paper sack,” she said.

“Aren't you going to take her upstairs, Gramma, before she leaves?” Louie asked.

“Oh.” Florence raised a hand dismissively. “Charlie said he wanted to see you, as long as you're here.” She pointed up toward the second floor and managed a thin smile. “He always thought Ulysses did well by himself—with you, I mean.”

“He did? Well, thank you,” Gretta said.

Upstairs, Charlie was propped against the headboard, chin on his chest, the bony knobs of his shoulders jutting beneath the filthy cotton bedshirt he wore. When Gretta touched her lips to his sunken cheek, he cried from one eye. He reached up with his good arm and pulled her close. The smell of him took her back to Denmark, standing as a girl next to the bed of her dying grandfather.

“Sorry,” he whispered into her ear. “I'm so sorry.”

She pulled away and looked into his eyes, their blue irises swimming in yellow. “Do you have any idea where he might have gone?” she asked him.

Charlie licked his lips, which were skewed to one side and colorless. He shook his head. His voice when he spoke was wet and shallow. “Only that he came back different—from out west. Only that. He came back different.” He lifted his hand again and opened it wide, palm out, and Gretta recalled the day she and Ulysses left St. Paul for Sloan's Crossing, Florence and Charlie standing on the platform as the train moved off, Charlie's hand lifted just like this as he waved good-bye.

Ten minutes later she was back on the car, heading toward Minneapolis and the offices of the Grand Army of the Republic, where she hoped to find names and addresses of men with whom Ulysses had served. Possibly Jim Powers, whose remaining two letters she had already opened and read. They were not interesting, full of masculine banalities, but written nonetheless by a man who likely knew more about her husband's past than she knew herself.

As she watched the city move by, she leaned back and tried to relax. The place may have changed more than she had expected, but the rhythm of the horse's shoes against the brick street could hardly be more familiar. The smells, too. The dying leaves of the sycamores, oaks, and elms, the leather padding on the seats, the sweating horse, and the scent of the people themselves. What brought her back more than anything, though, was the driver, sitting right there in front of her, straight and broad-shouldered, and wearing a canvas jacket. He might as well have been her husband all those years ago, and she half expected him to turn around and give her that long look, his pale eyes cutting into her.

Where are you?
she thought.
Who are you?

Along the Tongue

D
own next to the stream the air was filled with ice crystals, and the ragged blanket of clouds, no higher than the tops of the cottonwoods, dipped and swelled before a small breeze. Last night this valley had been a naked cleft beneath the dome of sharp stars. Now it was a small gray room, cut off from the world beyond it. As Ulysses pounded his feet into the cold-stiffened boots, the ox, attached by its lead to a cottonwood branch, swung its ugly head and made a low, guttural sound, like an old man huffing in his sleep.

“Yes, yes. Give a man the chance to piss, will you?”

He'd leased the animal from Miles City's liveryman, named Church, and so far he was unimpressed. Two days out, and they'd covered thirty miles at most. The ox had a tendency to wander off trail, though the ruts were well established, and come to a full stop every time Ulysses set down the switch for more than a minute. “A good puller” is what Church had said, “not an ornery bone in its body.”

Ulysses buttoned his pants and walked up to the beast. He scratched its hard head. “That doesn't look good,” he said. “Not good at all.” Its right eye, which appeared rheumy yesterday, was covered this morning with a greenish, viscous matter. Ulysses wiped it away as best he could. “I'll be wanting my deposit back on you,” he told the animal, and led it down to the water, where it drank long and patiently, lifting its head a couple times and swinging around to have a look at Ulysses, as if it didn't quite trust a man who used the switch so freely.

“Still here,” Ulysses said, kneeling upstream and bending to drink. The water had a bitter, almost licorice flavor. No color to it, though, and no visible particles afloat—better water, in any case, than much of what passed for drinkable during his time in the wars. After retying the ox to the cottonwood, he went searching for dry windfall, finding what he needed in an aging stand of cedars on the hillside above camp. He set the kindling sticks to flame and put on a pot of water for coffee. Using a small keg of molasses for his chair, he sat chewing on a strap of jerky, waiting for the water to boil and adding branches to the fire. Early moments like these were the dangerous part of the day, when dreams still occupied the mind, and it didn't help being out here alone, no sounds but the small breeze in the dead leaves, the moving water, the crackle of burning wood. He reached out and set the middle knuckle of his fist against the pot. It was getting warm.

As he took his morning pipe, he turned in his Bible to the book of the prophet Isaiah, his eyes falling on words from its first chapter: “Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool. If ye be willing and obedient, ye shall eat the good of the land: But if ye refuse and rebel, ye shall be devoured with the sword.” Above him the sky hovered thick and low, like a clever lid fashioned for the sake of keeping his prayers on earth. He prayed anyway, for the past to stay where it was until he could find his way back to it, and for the chance to make good. Then the water was ready, and he drank his morning coffee, which had the effect as always of lightening his mood and improving the look of his prospects. It might be possible yet that all would be fine.

When the sky had cleared enough to show the tops of the hills, he kicked out the fire, rolled up the dusty robe, and packed his gear and the keg of molasses, too. He put the half-blind ox in its traces and set out in the wagon for the Cheyenne agency. It was a long, steep climb, Ulysses urging the ox to the top, but once they had achieved the trail again, their wheels fell into the double-rutted path and they rolled on, squeaking, the Tongue River a mere curving twinkle beneath them. The late September sun had burned off every trace of fog.

By midmorning the back and flanks of the yellow ox were dark with sweat. Ulysses drove with his sleeves rolled to his elbows and shirt collar open to catch the small southwesterly breeze, which kept the dust they raised behind them. From time to time, he took out his mouth harp and blew a few tunes, hymns mostly, with the occasional Army song tossed in for good measure, and long about noon he approached a small cluster of unpainted wooden buildings, a dozen or so, set out on the brown plain. Off to the north on a low rise, he saw a scattering of white tipis. Spitting distance to the south, a group of skinny boys played with sticks and a ball of hide, yelling and spinning and swatting each other. They caught sight of Ulysses on his wagon, and they set off in a run toward him.

All but one of them stopped well short of the wagon. The smallest boy came closer. He reminded Ulysses of Danny, his eyes too large for his head and seeming to take in the entire compass of space around him. He had a crippled leg but managed even so to skitter like a bug around to the back of the wagon, ducking as he went, and then pull himself up by his hands and peek over the backboard. There was not much to see, everything covered with tarpaulin, but the boy's nose twitched at the scent of edible goods.

Ulysses crooked a finger at him and the boy dropped out of sight, then reappeared, moving in a wary arc, circling like a sly mutt around the wagon's starboard side. The other boys—five of them—hung back in a tight knot.

“Bet you're hungry,” Ulysses said. He set the handbrake and crawled back into the wagon's bed, where he peeled away a corner of the canvas, exposing large bags of potatoes. He shook out half a dozen cloth sacks, one after another, sliced open one of the big burlap bags, and put together a bundle of potatoes for each boy, now and then glancing at the little one, who had come up close to watch. He lifted the first sack of spuds and dropped it with a wink into the boy's waiting arms. The boy staggered to one side from the sudden weight of it, then righted himself and trotted back to his friends. One by one the rest of the boys came forward.

“You boys got mamas?” he asked them.

They looked first at each other, then off to the north at the tipis white beneath the noon sun.

“That's good,” he said.

Their faces were wind-burned and gaunt, their cheeks hollow. They stole glances at the sacks full of potatoes, which rested on the buckboard next to Ulysses.

“One more question. Where do I find Adams?”

The five biggest boys turned as one to the small one, their spokesman now, who raised his arm and pointed a narrow finger west toward a long, squat building with a green door.

“Thank you.” He tossed down the sacks of potatoes one by one, then watched the boys run off toward the north and the tipis. He released the handbrake, whistled, and snapped his switch at the ox, which bellowed and swung its head before pulling forward. At the building with the green door, he hauled in and climbed down. A crude sign hung from the eave:
TONGUE RIVER AGENCY
.
He knocked and waited, knocked again, and stepped back into the street, such as it was. Except for the boys, he seemed to have attracted no interest. A hundred feet away a pair of old women sat in the scant shade of a stunted poplar, bent at some kind of handiwork. Ulysses started toward them but hadn't gone a dozen steps before the sound of a dry hinge stopped him. He turned.

A man with a lumpy, turnip face leaned out from the green door, just his head and shoulders visible. “You're wantin'
me
?” he asked.

“I am if you're Adams.”

He emerged from the doorway. He was round like a turnip, too, and stood with his fingers tucked into the front of his dirty pants, thumbs on the waistband, stomach thrown forward.

Ulysses put out his hand, which Adams regarded for a moment before meeting it with a soft, damp grip.

“I'm Pope,” Ulysses said.

“What kind of freight you got?”

“I'll give you a look.”

At the back of the wagon Ulysses pulled back the canvas to reveal the potatoes in their burlap bags, a dozen fifty-pound sacks of flour, a few bolts of cotton in bright colors, and the keg of molasses he'd found on the side of the trail his first day out of Miles City. A few other odds and ends.

“I ain't seen you before, have I?” Adams asked.

“No. But I heard in Miles City that you had need of provisions down here. Heard the government shipments are running behind.”

“Heard from who?”

“Church, at the livery. Also from the bone-man, Slovin.”

“There's a pair of thieving bastards for you.”

“They told me wrong?”

Adams pulled one small hand from the front of his pants and rested it on the top of his belly. He lifted his eyes to the empty sky as if searching for something there.

“They said considerably more than that, truth be told,” Ulysses said. “About hungry people and the cold weather coming on, nothing in the storerooms. They said there's been talk of men getting restless and going off the reserve to hunt for game that's already hunted out.”

“You got an earful then.”

“I did.”

Adams turned south, in the direction of a cluster of men who had gathered across the dirt road and stood between a pair of squat log buildings, watching. The old women beneath the poplar tree watched now, too. Adams hawked and spat.

“You're not interested in what I've got?” Ulysses asked him.

“That ain't what I said. It gravels me, though, when a fellow I don't know from Judas comes rolling in on a Sunday morning, overestimating the value of his load.”

“We haven't talked about the value of my load. And what does Sunday morning have to do with it?”

“Day of rest and all—shit, not a thing,” Adams said, breaking a smile. “Remember, though—I'm a Indian agent, not a banker. And the federal sons of bitches have me drawing from a well that's near to dry.”

The men from across the road were coming forward, their feet raising little puffs of dust in the air. Seven of them. The pair of old women got up from beneath their tree and followed after. They all passed close enough to have a look at the cargo before they went to stand in the shade of the agency building. Ulysses reached into the bed, right behind the buckboard, and shoved a couple bags of potatoes toward the back, exposing a woolen blanket, which he tossed aside. On the wagon's plank bed was a layer of oilcloth packages, each a foot and a half in length and as big around as a man's arm. He lifted one out and covered up the rest with the blanket, then walked past Adams, unwrapping the package as he went. The men were old, most of them, or getting there, gray hair to their shoulders, faces lean and wrinkled. A couple had wide-brimmed hats, pulled down low. The old women were thin, too, and just as wrinkled. They were barefooted. Ulysses stepped toward the women first and offered the opened package of jerked beef, each strap of it as thick as cinch leather. The smell of grease, pepper, and smoke was sharp. The women reached out, nodding their thanks. Ulysses moved toward the men.

From the wagon, Adams said, “Hey, What's-your-name—you don't just
give
the shit away!”

“Well I don't plan on hauling it back to Miles City.”

“Here now, let's talk.” Adams lifted his hands in the air like a preacher inviting his congregation to stand. “I believe you and I can work something out. Strike a reasonable deal. Come on now.”

Ulysses distributed the entire package of the beef, the women securing several lengths each, and then he bunched up the oilcloth and tossed it back in the wagon.

Adams pointed at the buckboard. “Jump up there now, man, you hear me? And pull it around back.”

The old men were tugging at the beef with their teeth, chewing and swallowing, their eyes steady on Adams. The women meanwhile headed north toward the tipis. Taking his sweet time, Ulysses climbed up on the buckboard and picked up the driving lines, snapped them against the animal's back, and clicked his tongue. The ox didn't budge. When he touched the switch to its rump, though, it bellowed and stamped, then grudgingly stepped forward. Adams ran ahead, rounding the corner of the building and pointing the way toward a door that opened at the back. “Right over here,” he said.

The ox, catching the smells of tobacco, gunpowder, and lard, put its big nose in the air and pulled the wagon right up close along the wall, next to the door. Adams angled a pair of two-by-ten planks to stretch between the back of the wagon and the threshold of the doorway then put his body in motion. Ulysses wouldn't have guessed the man could move so fast or work so hard—grabbing the large bags of potatoes, one under each arm, and bouncing along the planks into the storeroom. Each time he reappeared from inside, he blinked against the bright sun and rubbed his hands together like a fly. In ten minutes the wagon was empty. Sweat ran in dirty streaks down the fat man's face. His shirt was soaked through.

“You'll load it all back on if I don't like your price,” Ulysses told him.

Adams tipped his head straight back and squinted at the sun. “Let's go in and sit down,” he said. “I'm thirsty as a mule in hell.”

He led the way, ducking into a sunnier room at the front, where he lifted a jug from a cupboard and set it down upon the table. He pointed Ulysses toward a hoop-backed chair, then grabbed a pair of cloudy drinking glasses from the windowsill, pinching them together with his thumb and first two fingers. Pouring from the jug, he filled both to the top, handed one to Ulysses, and drank off his own like it was water.

“Whuff,” he said and smacked himself on the chest.

“You all right there?”

“Oh God, that's good. That's so good. Give it a go.”

“Looks dangerous,” Ulysses said. But he lifted his glass anyway. The whiskey tasted the way turpentine smelled, strong enough to curdle a man's liver. He set it down and looked at it. Specks of black, like pepper, floated in the dark brown liquid.

“She's got a kick, don't she,” Adams said.

Ulysses could feel a slight pressure, like oozing oil, settle across the crown of his head and begin seeping down into the roots of his hair. He blinked a couple times and pushed the glass to the middle of the table.