Death Rattle (54 page)

Magpie was eight and a half years old now, he thought, surely old enough, responsible enough, to care for someone’s child—

Then Flea sprinted up, his copper cheeks red from his dash across the icy snow.

“Flea!” he cried, releasing Magpie so he could crush the boy who would soon be turning six. “Oh, Flea!”

He unwrapped one arm from around the boy and held it out for the tall girl, reminded how long-legged her mother must have been at the same age. Magpie stepped into that embrace he gave both of his children.

“Y-your mother?” he stammered. “Where?”

Flea pointed with his grimy hand at the far lodges, then held the hand up for his father to hold. “Come. I take you.”

“No, son,” he stood, nudging the boy against his leg. “Here. You will be old enough to serve as a pony boy one day soon. So you must take care of my horses for me.”

He looked at the long string, blinked, then looked up at his tall father. “Horses, Popo?”

“Bring them behind me.” Bass turned to Magpie and swallowed as he blinked his stinging eyes. Already the tears were beginning to stream down his sun and windburnt cheeks. “Take me to your mother.”

Gazing up at her father in wonder, Magpie laid her head against his side a moment as he enfolded her against his rib cage. She closed her eyes briefly. Then opened them. “We thought you … everyone believed … Mother knew you did not come back because you were—”

“I am not dead, little one,” Titus interrupted and
squeezed her gently against him as they started walking toward the last of the lodges at the end of the camp crescent. “We need to show your mother what you can clearly see for yourself—I am far from being a ghost.”

Which suddenly caused him to remember. “Stop a moment.” Then he whistled once, and a second time. The dogs appeared among the lodges. “These are yours, my children.”

“Your dogs, Popo?” asked Flea as he stopped the saddle horse and sank to one knee, putting out his arms for the darker animal.

“That one is named Digger, son.”

“D-digger?” Flea repeated.

“Yes. It is the name of a poor tribe that lives far beyond the reach of the mountains. Out on the desert where little grows but cactus and scorpions, where those people have little to eat but rabbits and crickets.”

“Crickets?” Flea repeated. “They eat insects?”

“When they are hungry enough,” Titus told his son. “What they love to eat most is a stolen horse!”

The light-colored dog brushed against Magpie’s leg as it stopped by its master. “What do you call this other one?” his daughter asked.

“Ghost. Look at his eyes, and you will see his ghost eyes.”

“So these dogs followed you all the way back home?” Magpie inquired.

“Yes, I picked them out for you and your brother. They are your dogs now. But come—take me to your mother so she will see that I am not dead—”

His voice dropped off as the realization struck him every bit as cold and hard as an iron maul driving a wedge into a troublesome oak stump. His daughter’s long hair was gone. Uneven, shoulder-length tatters rustled in the cold breeze. It had been crudely done, hacked off with a knife as proscribed in mourning rituals. And Magpie’s hair wasn’t clean at all. Many of the greasy sprigs were still clumped with ashes now that he inspected her.

Titus quickly grabbed Magpie’s thin wrist and pushed up the loose blanket sleeve to expose her brown forearm.
A lattice work of old, half-crusted wounds climbed from wrist to elbow in crude, parallel gashes, most nearly healed.

“How … how long ago did you cut yourself?”

“M-m-many days.” Her eyes began to tear as she slowly slipped her wrist from his hand. She started to step backward from him when he caught her and went to his knee.

“Magpie. You did not do wrong. Nothing to be ashamed of. I am proud of you—because you did this for me. Mourned me like your mother—”

He bolted to his feet, freeing her arm again. “Take me to your mother—now.”

Inside his belly, his guts felt as if someone had thrown alum on them, they pinched so bad. Shriveled up like a hide forgotten or ignored by a hunter, a hide that wouldn’t be salted for tanning.

“Hurry, Magpie,” he urged her as they lumbered past some of those last lodges in the crescent.

After all those miles and months—he suddenly couldn’t cross these last few yards fast enough. Afraid. Downright terrified at what Waits-by-the-Water believed had happened to him.

“There, Popo,” she said quietly as she came to a stop.

He halted beside her, looked into her face.

Magpie pointed. “There.”

Scratch swallowed as he turned to watch Flea come up, leading the saddle horse. More than two dozen people approached on both sides of his pack string. They stopped in silence, not uttering a sound as he quickly licked his parched lips and stepped over to the entrance of that lodge where a tiny tendril of smoke crept upward through a gaping, black opening between the smoke flaps. Already his hands were trembling when he reached out to rest his rifle against the lodge skins and shoved the door flap aside.

Ducking inside, he stood, waiting, adjusting his eyes to the inky darkness. Outside one of the horses snorted, and he heard the quiet murmuring of voices. Then it grew quiet enough that he could hear her breathing.

“Waits?”

There was no answer. But as his eyes grew accustomed to the darkness, he was able to locate her in what dim light was radiated by the still-glowing embers in the fire pit. No fire, not even any low flames. Nothing more than a few coals left in that rocky circle.

Bass quickly knelt and found the firewood that she always stacked just to the left of the doorway. If their mother was in severe mourning, then Magpie and Flea would have gone in search of wood, collected water too. His hands felt along several small branches, then turned in a crouch and laid them on the coals. Grabbing his long hair with one hand to hold it out of the ashes, Titus bent low and began to blow on the coals. It took some doing, but after a few moments the dry wood leapt into flame.

Still on his hands and knees, Scratch crabbed around the fire pit toward the rear of the lodge—guided by the rasp of her labored breathing. Waits-by-the-Water lay beneath a buffalo robe, no—two of them lying askew and rumpled where she had crawled beneath them for warmth.

Frightened so much his own breath froze in his chest like a tightened fist, Titus pulled back the robe, finding her heavy winter moccasins. He instantly leaped in the other direction and dragged back the robe from her head. She had her face turned from him as she slept, her labored breathing hard and shallow.

“Waits … I’ve come home.”

When he had whispered, Scratch lifted her shoulders, pulled her upper body across his lap, turning her gently
so that
he could peer into her pox-ravaged face. The eyelids fluttered as he pushed some of the ragged shreds of her once long and beautiful hair from her eyes, her cheeks, the corner of her mouth where the lips were cracked and oozy. She smelled of old fires. Cold ashes. A stale, noxious odor of things dying was strong about her, permeating her hair, smeared on her face and neck.

“Is it really you?” she creaked in a voice so weak it reminded him of the time he almost lost her to that Blackfoot pox. “Not a ghost come to haunt my heart?”

“I am h-here, woman,” his voice cracked as the tears began to seep from his eyes anew. “Here, touch my face. Know that I am real.”

With one of his hands, he searched under the robe for hers. Finding it, he brought her fingers to his cheek, quickly guided it over his eyes, down his nose, from ear to ear in that graying beard. Then—consumed by his need to know—his fingers inched down her wrist to her forearm … feeling the striations of her self-wounding. Long ridges of new scabs intermingled with older scars where the bloody crust had aged and sloughed itself off over time. Reaching down, he gently ran his hand the length of her calf. It wasn’t as scarified as her forearm, and the scabs on them were older. No recent slashes.

So he wrapped her in his arms, squeezed her tightly against him, enfolding her as he cried. Rocking, rocking. Crooning to her one of those lullabies he made up and used to hum to their children as he cradled them in his lap—just the way he was holding her at this moment.

And she cried. Waits-by-the-Water reached up to touch his face, fingers brushing his eyelids, feeling his lips as he sang in a whisper. While she sobbed, her chest heaved with great convulsions.

“I was so afraid,” she eventually managed to choke the words out. “In the middle of the summer, when you did not come back—I began to worry. We had been together so many summers, I know it is never a good time for your trapping.”

Yes, she did know so much of who he was. More than any other person—man or woman—could ever know. His tears began to stream freely now.

“I hoped you would come back from the mountains for to trade with Tullock at his fort,” she whispered raspily, quaking against his chest. “But, I worried even more when the weather began to cool, and the leaves began to d—die.”

Bass bent his head and pressed his lips against her forehead, tasting the old, rancid ash she had smeared on her flesh. “It was unfair—what I’ve done to you and the
children. I did not realize my journey would take so long.”

“I knew you had to be dead because you had never been gone from me, from your family, for so long.”

“Never again,” he promised.

“Sometime late in the summer, I realized it could not be the trapping that kept you from returning to us,” she continued, dragging a hand across her own cheek grown muddy with tears that streaked the ashes rubbed there. “It had to be something more than the trapping—”

“I rode far, very far away to steal horses.”

“Alone?”

“I went with old friends … and men who were my enemies too. We went to the land of the Mexicans.” And he spoke that last word in English.

“Mexicans?” she repeated in his tongue. “You went south to Ta-house to steal horses … where Magpie was born?”

“No, to the other land of the Mexicans. Far to the west, by the big water.”

“W-was it a pretty land?”

“To some it would be a pretty country,” he admitted, lifting her chin with a finger so he could stare into her red, punished eyes. “But, there is nothing so beautiful as this high land of rugged skies, far prairie, and tall mountains.”

“Did you bring your Mexican horses with you to Absaroka?”

“No. The ones I brought with me are better than any Mexican horse, because they are older than those we stole. I traded them from the Cheyenne down at Bents Fort.”

“I remember you showing me the fort of dirt walls when Magpie was a suckling baby.”

“All the rest of those horses I no longer wanted, I traded away for a few goods.”

“You are going to be a trader now, like Tullock?”

He finally felt relieved enough now to chuckle a little. “No. I could never be a trader, woman. The goods I brought back are gifts to my family, gifts to your people
who watched over you and our children while I was away for so long.”

“So you did not steal many Mexican horses?”

This time he laughed louder. “Oh, we took nearly every horse we could find from those Mexicans—and they have many! Let me tell you that my old friends and me started out of the land of the Mexicans with more horses than all of Yellow Belly’s village has in its herd, twice as many!”

She stared at him in the firelight with such seriousness, gazing from his good eye to the bad one for some sign of betrayal. “No. There could not be that many horses except … except if you raided the land of the Blackfoot to the north—or maybe the Lakota far to the east.”

“I tell you the truth,” he said with pride. “We took more horses from those Mexicans than ever was taken from them before!”

“I cannot believe the Mexicans had that many you could steal from under their noses without a terrible fight.”

“Oh, they were sorely mad at what we had done and sent their fighting men after us—but we pushed them back and started across a great wasteland.”

“What is this waste … land?”

“Where there is little water, little vegetation, no food for the horses. We lost half of their number before we reached the mountains, crossed over, and started down to the fort.”

“So you had only a few by the time you reached the land of the Cheyenne?”

He gripped her shoulders as he explained, “My share was …”—and he grappled with finding the Crow term for so great a number—“more than any warrior of your people has ever owned before.”

She quickly put her hand over her chapped mouth. “You are making fun with me,” she snipped at him.

“It is true. I would not lie to you.”

For a long moment she gazed into his face, steadily—as if reading something of import there. “This was a dangerous trip you had.”

“No more dangerous than any trip I ever made with you at my side.”

She snuggled against his elkhide coat. “The most fearsome trips you ever made were always the ones without me. Because I am not beside you, I know you take chances you would not if I were with you.”

Scratch had no rebuttal, because she spoke the truth.

In his silence, she continued, “So, I have decided that—because you always do dangerous things without me along—I simply won’t let you go on any more journeys without me.”

“I won’t argue with you on that,” he relented immediately. “Never again will I go anywhere without you and our two children.”

She straightened a little and asked, “You saw Magpie? Flea too?”

“Yes, both of them—”

“Did your daughter have the baby with her?”

“Yes,” he soothed, remembering that tiny infant Magpie had on her hip. “She held someone’s young child in her arms. Carrying it when she came up to embrace me. Whose child is this—who our young daughter would be caring for?”

Waits’s eyes narrowed, staring at him strangely a moment, then quietly asked, “Ti-tuzz, did you look at this baby Magpie carried when you rode into camp?”

“I-I did not look at the child, no,” he apologized. “More than anything I wanted to hold Magpie and Flea—to assure them I was not dead, then find where your lodge was pitched so I could come hold you. I had no interest in someone else’s child—”