Tie My Bones to Her Back (11 page)

Jenny saw that the water in the washtub was steaming now. Big, fat bubbles seethed and sucked as they rolled from the bottom. She poured in some soap flakes, then threw the foul clothing after them. She stirred the noxious stew with a long, broad spear of cottonwood. Left it to boil. Her greased pans of dough were ready and she put them in the glowing oven. She sat back by the fire, humming to herself, satisfied with the morning. Let the wash cook for a while, then I’ll start scrubbing. This afternoon I’ll do the pie.

For an instant she had an image of her class at the academy, parsing Latin phrases as Dr. Williams looked on, frowning.
Et ego in Arcadia
. . .

She laughed out loud.

Indeed she was there.

O
TTO AND
R
ALEIGH
rode in just shy of sunset. Jenny had water on the boil, ready to clean their rifles. Her apple pie stood cooling near the fire. Raleigh bent down to whuffle up the sweet steam rising from its crisp brown crust.

“Unless my nose deceives me, that ain’t no dried apple pie,” he said, winking at Otto. “You know the old ditty we used to recite in the Yadkin?”

You can spit in my ears
And tell me lies,
But don’t give me none
Of your dried apple pies!

He turned to Jenny with his wide smile and dropped to one knee.

“Miss Dousmann, will you marry me?”

“You’d better ask me first,” Otto said, unsmiling.

Raleigh laughed. “Now why would I want to marry you, old Black Hat?”

The wagon followed soon after. Tom and Milo Sykes saw to the horses, then began stretching and pegging the hides. Jenny helped them. When she lifted the first limp, rolled-up hide from the wagonbed, her knees nearly buckled. It must have weighed sixty or seventy pounds. She stiffened her spine and carried on. When she finished half an hour later, her back was sore. It’s not quite like hanging out the wash, she thought. She went to the fire, where her birds were roasting in a slow oven. The hens were stuffed with crumbled hardtack, onion, and wild Mexican plums Tom had found growing near the spring. Her baking had turned out nicely. On the dropped tailgate of the spring wagon she had tin plates, spoons, and forks arrayed, along with a crock of salted buffalo tallow, a plate of hard rolls, and a loaf of bread with which to mop up the gravy, five tin cups (clean for a change), a full, steaming coffeepot, and two flower-patterned china bowls she had brought from home, one filled with sugar, the other with salt. There were no napkins. To make up for that shortcoming, she had picked some blackfoot daisies and purple prairie asters near the spring, arranging them neatly in an empty Mason jar.

“Quite a picnic,” Raleigh said, coming up behind her with Otto and the skinners. “If it all eats as good as it smells, you’ll have done us proud, Miss Black Hat.”

They helped themselves and dug in. Ten minutes later all her day’s work was undone. What remained of it were gnawed chicken bones, bread crumbs, grease spots, and a pile of dirty dishes. Milo Sykes belched, sprawled on an elbow in the grass, and began picking his teeth with the point of a boning knife. Otto loosened his belt a notch, wiped his mustache with the back of his hand, and sighed heavily. Tom Shields, who had hunkered on his haunches away from the firelight as he ate, rose and slipped quietly into the darkness after scraping his plate into the coals. Raleigh lay against a wagon wheel, feet to the fire, and sipped a mug of coffee, watching the stars pop into being.

Jenny gathered up the plates and went to wash them. They heard her rattling and splashing at the tub behind them, singing some German ditty.

“Scarce thirty hides between us in a whole damn day,” Raleigh said. “It don’t shine, old son.”

Otto grunted.

“Let’s go down to the Yarner,” Raleigh said.

Otto looked over at Jenny. He looked down at his feet. He grunted noncommittally once again.

“What’s that mean, yea or nay?”

“I don’t like it, Cap. Not with a woman along. Especially when she’s my own flesh and blood.”

“We can’t make money up here. Face it, Black Hat, this here now herd is finished. Shot out.”

“He’s right,” Sykes said. “But they’re thick as fleas on a spotted pup ‘twix the Cimarron and the Lodge Pole.” Lodge Pole was another name for the Washita River, where the 7th Cavalry had wiped out a village of Cheyennes five years earlier.

“We’ve never been there,” Otto said. “We don’t know the country.”

“Tom does,” Raleigh said. “He’s got Southern Cheyenne kin in those parts. And Sykes was down that way in ‘68 with Custer, weren’t you, Milo?”

“Right down on the Lodge Pole,” Sykes said, nodding. “In Black Kettle’s very camp. November it was, just like now, only colder: we rode through ‘em at dawn with the whole damn regimental band playing, b’God. ‘Gary Owen,’ can you believe it? Lifted some hair that day, b’God.” He spat in the fire. “Them Dog Soldiers won’t be bothering us no more.”

“B’God,” Otto said.

Raleigh laughed, then said, “Aw, Black Hat, your sister will be safe. Tom knows the lingo, Milo knows the country, and you and I know how to shoot. Hellfire, I’ll look after your sister myself, her personal bodyguard, with your say-so, of course. I’ll vouch for her safety, on my honor as an officer and a gentleman.” He winked, then continued more seriously. “If anything happens to her, you can lift my own hair and I won’t even whimper.”

Otto laughed and shook his head. “No, thanks. Some redskin will lift it first.”

He rose and stretched. “But you’re right, there’s no money to be made hereabouts. And we’re here to make money. Okay, let’s do it. Tomorrow we’ll find someone to take our hides back to Dodge, or failing that, we’ll cache ‘em. Then on to the Yarner it is.”

8

T
HE WAGONS ROLLED
at noon. They hauled the hides over to Wright Mooar’s camp a mile or so to the west and left them with that trustworthy Vermonter. Mooar said he thought that Charlie Rath might be down to the Cimarron soon with a wagon train to buy hides on the spot and agreed to sell theirs to the trader along with his own. “Soon as Charlie shows and I sell our hides,” Mooar said, “I’ll be headin’ down Texas way myself. Probably a few other outfits will come along. Ayuh. More of us the better.”

From the way Tom and Raleigh spoke of him, Jenny had expected Mooar to be a crusty, grizzled old-timer. Instead, she saw a young, blond-bearded, sour-mouthed fellow with close-set, pale-blue eyes, stingy with his speech, a veteran of the Buffalo Range though only in his twenties. Not much older than Tom. He never even looked at Jenny.

“Mooar wandered West in the late sixties like so many of us,” Otto told her as they headed down to the Cimarron crossing. “Worked the wheat harvest in Illinois at first, carpentered a bit, I guess, later chopped firewood in Kansas over by Walnut Creek, south of Hays. He and his partner sold to the Army for two dollars a cord, about what I got up in Omaha. Then they switched to buffalo, shooting meat for the Eastern market at three cents a pound.”

He laughed.

“Doesn’t sound like much, does it?” he said. “But I did it, too, on a smaller scale. It adds up. There’s lots of meat on a buffalo—a big bull will weigh nearly a ton, a cow about six or seven hundred pounds. Cows taste better, more tender. The saddles alone, hump and tenderloins, weigh up to two hundred pounds apiece. We were earning $90 or $100 a day, when you average it out. Hell of a lot more than for firewood, and a lot less work.”

There was no market for the raw, untanned hides back then, Otto said, though some fellows traded with the Indians for their soft, brain-tanned robes, laboriously scrubbed and thumped and worked up by squaws. These elegant robes brought from eight to sixteen dollars apiece in the cities back East. The Indians would trade a dozen robes for a pint or two of rotgut whiskey. This whiskey, of course, had been diluted by half with creek water, then fired up with ample doses of paregoric and red pepper.

“The tanneries back East said raw buffalo hide was too thick and spongy to make good leather. So we usually left the skins on the prairie, or sold the butchered meat unskinned to middlemen at the railheads. We’d chop a buff in half lengthwise after gutting it, sling the halves on the train just that way, hair and all. But market hunting’s a seasonal trade. In the spring and summer the buff are out of condition and the meat tastes awful.

“All that changed in the spring of ‘71. A hide dealer in Kansas City named DuBois sent out circulars all across the range, offering to buy flint hides for good money, any time of the year. He’d found some tanners in Germany who had a process for making good leather out of them. Lobenstein in Leavenworth jumped on the bandwagon right away, along with a slew of other dealers, and the big-time killing began. Wright Mooar sent some hides to his brother John, in New York, and he found takers, too. Suddenly everyone wanted buffalo hides—for everything from leather drive belts in factories to saddles and harnesses and furniture upholstery. I hear the swells in New York and Philadelphia even paper the walls of their parlors with it.”

He laughed again, shaking his head. They were into the stink now. Dead buffalo lay all around them, on the hillsides and in the muddy wallows, some still pink, others going black or green with rot. Vultures on the carcasses bated at them as the wagons passed, hissing and flaring their wings. Tendrils of intestine festooned their hooked beaks. Bluebottle flies hummed everywhere. Coyotes slunk away, and a pack of fat lobos lolled on a nearby ridge, sated.

“You’re seeing the results today. Buffalo hammered year round, all ages and sizes of them, anywhere they run. They’re gone from the Republican clear down to the Cimarron, and now we’re going South to do the same to the Texas herd. It’s worse than the war. In the war at least we buried the dead. The whole West is a
Schlachthof
’, a slaughterhouse. But more wasteful by far than a slaughterhouse. Nobody gets to eat the meat.”

“Why don’t you quit?”

He looked at her, his eyes sadder than she’d ever seen them.

“What else could I do?”

“Farm. Open a shop somewhere. A business, you have money enough now to start one. Or maybe study the law, or go to Deutschland and practice medicine. Get married to some nice girl and raise a family, like most people do!”

“I’m not cut out for that kind of life, Jennchen.”

No, she thought sadly, you’re
schwach
—a weakling, like Vati. Brave only against nature and other men. Soft, though, when it comes to complex things. More meaningful things. A household. A woman who loves you. Children, no matter how foolish they seem. A
ch,
men—you cannot endure!

Yet you mourn for the buffalo, when any fool can plainly see that they’re doomed.

“Vati didn’t have to kill himself,” she said abruptly. “So what if the bank took the farm? We could have moved back to Milwaukee, where he certainly could have written for the German newspapers again. I could have found work, too. It would have been enough. He let the bank beat him, he let it kill him.”

Otto stared at her. “Jennchen . . .”

She halted the mules, handed Otto the reins, unhitched Vixen from the lead shank, and mounted the pony.

“You drive,” she said. “I want to ride for a while.”

She chucked the mare into a canter, on past Sykes’s wagon and up toward McKay, who pranced ahead of the column on his tall, fiery-eyed stallion.

T
HEIR WAY FROM
Mooar’s camp to the new hunting ground led now through bur oak and sage, over loose wet soil deposited by the river. Through it the Cimarron swung red with the line storm’s runoff, roiling upon itself in glutinous coils. Filthy clots of foam skittered crazily across its surface, driven this way and that by the wind. They forded the river with difficulty. The hide wagon bogged twice in quicksand. The men had to unhitch the mules from the lighter wagons and add them to the ox teams to pull it free. Jenny watched from a bluff on the far bank, the Henry resting crosswise on her pommel. She had braided her hair. A kerchief knotted in pirate fashion covered the top of her head clear down to her eyebrows. Her lips were dry, cracked, and bleeding from the wind. Raleigh was up to his chest in the rushing water, his clothing plastered against his taut muscles, blond hair wet and wild.

The country rose slowly as they climbed away from the river, heading southwest along an old wagon track grown over with prickly pear and bunchgrass. When the wagon track suddenly stopped, she and Raleigh swung out in circles. They found a few pieces of burned wood half buried in the drifting sand. The partial rim of a wagon wheel protruded from a dune. Raleigh dismounted and kicked at the soil. He turned up a bone, a large one, then another. A few big yellow teeth, immensely long.

“Mule or horse, one,” he said. “This is about as far as they got.” He looked around in the distance. Nothing but prairie. Jenny hoped he wouldn’t dig further. He might turn up human bones as well. He kicked over one of the charred boards and wrenched something from it, held it up for her to see. A rusty iron arrowhead, broken off short on the shaft.

“Arapaho,” Tom said when they rode back to show it to him. “Pockmark People.” He cupped his hand and tapped the center of his chest with the fingertips. “See the binding?” He pointed to the translucent leathery wraps that secured the arrowhead to the shaft. “They use rattlesnake gut, supposed to be more deadly, you know?”