Gabriel's Story (11 page)

James laughed nervously.

The old woman said something and the girl nodded, not taking her eyes off James.

“What'd she say?” Rollins asked.

Jack spat before he answered. “Shit, every redskin's a prophet these days. Said you're not long for this world, James.” He shook his head as if it were barely worth going on. “The old dog barks backward and the moon is a piece of cheese with gold inside.”

“She said all that?”

“Shit, no, she didn't say that.”

“You just said she said it.”

Jack looked at Rollins with infinite disgust.

They all lapsed into silence once more. The girl said something that Jack refused to translate. She motioned for James to follow her.

“She wants me to go with her?” He looked beyond her to the structures that passed as homes. “I'm not going over in there. Somebody else go.”

“You don't like girls?” Rollins asked. “Or is it squaws you ain't got a taste for? Or . . . Don't tell me you ain't ever wet your pecker yet. Look, boy, there ain't nothing to it. Just go on with her and do like she says and come back smiling.”

James studied the girl again. “This the way Injuns do?”

“Don't know and don't care. Injuns do or they don't. I can never tell why and it don't pay to ask. I reckon poverty'll make a person do near anything. It's gonna cost you, though.”

“She ain't asked him for anything yet,” Jack said. “Just made the offer.”

James again discovered the humor in the situation and looked to Gabriel for guidance. Gabriel offered him none.

Marshall had sat quietly through these exchanges but spoke up now. “Let's go,” he said. “They can eat grasshoppers, for all I care. James, back up in the wagon.” He urged his horse forward twenty feet or so, paused, and wheeled around. Nobody had moved. “I said let's go. These people are diseased. Look at them. They're castoffs from their own people. They're the wretched dregs of a wretched race, and all they want from us is to drag us down with them. You ain't doing that on my time. Let's go.” He turned again and rode off without looking back.

James stood, unsure what to do, his hand still clasped in the girl's.

“Come up, boy,” Bill said. “I reckon Marshall knows a sickness when he sees it.”

With this, James gently withdrew his hand from the girl's. He climbed up on the wagon and sat next to Gabriel. Bill snapped the oxen into motion and the cart moved off. James looked back at the girl, but she didn't watch the cart pull away. She had bent down and was writing something in the dirt with her finger. The rest of that motley entourage turned and made their way back to their hovels, lacking either the energy or the faith to beg more heartily.

Jack rode up next to the wagon. “You don't know what she said, do you?”

“I couldn't understand a word,” James said.

“She said you had beautiful skin. Called it ‘skin the color of the first earth.' ” Jack pursed his lips as if he were preparing to spit, then changed his mind and didn't. “They got a funny way of saying things. In the future, you ought best not listen to old Rollins. He got hisself a case of shrivel-dick some time back. Says he's been cured of it, but ever since he's been trying to introduce others to the pleasure of it. Vengeful son of a bitch, he is.” With this he kicked his horse into a trot and moved away from the wagon.

THAT EVENING THEY CAMPED beside a thicket of tamarisk trees on the southern bank of the Red River. Rollins prodded James with questions about his sexuality, hypothesizing that the boy suffered from some unnatural disorder. James did his best to keep away from him, going further than necessary to gather wood. The man might have turned his attentions toward Gabriel if Jack hadn't observed that they'd soon be back on much-loved Texan soil. Rollins's mood turned. He smiled and hooted at the thought of that, lauding the virtues of that once free republic and quickly spiraling into a tirade against all things Mexican.

Gabriel ate with little appetite. The wooden spoon felt unwieldy in his fingers, the stew blander than usual. He followed the men's conversation with little more than half-interest, musing on the events of the afternoon, the Indian girl and her family, the mixture of loathing and pity that this conjured in him. Dunlop's voice brought his attention back.

“It's a sad state of affairs with those people, and it's only gonna get worse.” The Scot shook his head and prodded a log into the fire with his foot. “They've been done a mighty wrong, if you ask me. It's indecent, is what it is.”

“Yeah, there's something sad in it,” Marshall said. He spoke absently, the greater part of his attention engaged in rolling a cigarette. He shredded tobacco between his fingers, strung it out upon a brittle sheet of rolling paper, and rolled it closed with one smooth motion of his hand down his pants leg. “It's a sad world and the red man's been given a raw deal in it, but some sad things must come to pass in the betterment of society and mankind in general. You ever given that a thought? Ain't nothing could've been done with the Indians than what has been.” He pulled a stick from the fire and lit his cigarette with all seriousness and then tossed the stick back into the flames. “Tell you what. I wish them boys up north speedy progress in dealing with the Sioux and their likes. You may think I'm being coarse, Dunlop, but you weren't born and raised in this country, were you? The story of Rebecca Dary should be enough to prove my point.”

“I've heard the story, Marshall,” Dunlop said.

This gave the man pause, but only for a second. “You boys ever hear of Rebecca Dary?”

Gabriel and James shook their heads.

“Well, listen here.” Marshall didn't begin speaking immediately, however. He waited a few moments to let a suitable silence build, then he reminded everyone that this was no story of the distant past but was little over a decade old. He first painted a picture of the young Rebecca's upbringing in the East, among the cultured society people of Philadelphia. He told of manicured trees and streets paved and daily swept. He told of her long and beautiful auburn hair, of her fair eyes the color of the sky, and of her figure straight and comely. This woman, he said, might have planned nothing more for her life than to reside in that city. She could have married and borne young, watched them tutored and sent on to a fine university. She could have aged gently, feeding her mind on poetry, English novels, and polite conversation.

“Her life could've went that way,” Marshall said, “cept then she fell in love, took a fancy to a man of adventure.” He was a dashing youth, the young Mr. Dary, with dreams as big as the continent and full faith in his ability to make them happen. They were wed. In a year's time they had quit the East and staked a claim in central Kansas. She bore a child, a baby boy, and with this young one in tow their life progressed.

Marshall paused to look around the fire and challenge each man's eyes to differ with him on any part of his tale as thus far disclosed. Only silence answered him. He went on. In the spring of the Darys' third year, things changed. The previous winter the Kiowas had suffered and starved and died in great numbers. They had seen their food sources destroyed and their lands eaten into by an endless parade of palefaces. They had lived hard and unhappy, and a band of their braves decided to even the score. They began their warpath in southern Kansas and swept north. They killed, scalped, raped, and spread mayhem wherever they could. When they came upon the Dary homestead, they found the husband tilling a field and cleaved open his forehead with a hatchet. They found the baby toddling in the dirt by the front porch and lifted him by the feet and stove in his skull on a fencepost. And Rebecca they found poised in the doorway with a shotgun aimed pointblank at them. She shot two of them dead before they knocked her unconscious and strapped her to the back of a horse and rode off into wild country, about as far from the reach of whites as possible.

Marshall paused again here and looked at his audience. The men sat tensely, as if they thought that this story shouldn't be taken too seriously but were finding that hard to do. Caleb was barely visible, half hidden in the shadows. James had huddled up close to the fire and warmed his hands there, looking at Marshall and waiting. Gabriel too sat listening. There was something in the quality of Marshall's voice that he found intoxicating, something as solid as the written word, and as irrefutable. He kept his eyes on the fire, trying to focus on the flames and the magic of their dance. From the outside, he seemed to have no interest save for the fire's motion, but the man couldn't have held the boy's attention any more completely.

Marshall went on to tell of the early days of Rebecca's capture, when her hair was shorn and handed out to the squaws. She was tied to a post before the teepee of the brave who captured her, and for three weeks she received no food except for what she could steal from the dogs. Each day when the brave returned from his hunts, he would untie her and lead her inside to quench his desire. This done, he lent her to others, who had her one after the other till she was bruised inside and out and numb and could feel no more. This went on for weeks that turned into months and looked to last forever. At some point the brave took a deeper liking to her and stopped sharing her with his companions. He fed her well and took her into his teepee and made her equal to his other wives. They accepted her also, for she was kind and demure and yet showed a strength of character that they admired.

One day the brave killed a buffalo. He cut out its tongue and rode across the miles and brought it to Rebecca and fed her with it, raw and warm from the grip of his palm. Another day they brought in a captured cavalryman and administered to him all forms of degradation. Rebecca was there, watching, with no recognition of a kinship to this man on her face. She was garbed as an Indian and thought as an Indian and spoke the Kiowa language as if she had known no other. She spat on the captured soldier and told him in her foreign tongue that she knew him not except as the bastard child of the creator, a scourge cast by accident into the world and spread like the plague. “And I'm quoting verbatim,” Marshall said.

He stopped here and backtracked to make sure all around him understood the full import of the story thus far. She had seen her husband murdered. Seen her son swung up by his ankles and smashed against a post so hard he was nearly beheaded. She had been raped and raped again and enslaved and had her culture, her decency, and even her hair stripped from her. And yet she spat on that soldier and named his place of origin. Marshall said these things slowly and clearly so that all might hear.

A full year and two months after her capture, she was traded back into civilization as the bounty paid for several chiefs the whites held. She found herself embraced by the white world, drawn into culture and religion and the English language. She was saved from her tormentors and delivered back to her own.

Marshall paused here once more. This time he looked not at his fellows' faces but straight into the fire. When he spoke again, his voice had dropped so low all the men had to lean forward to catch his words.

Later, when she was asked and interviewed over and over again, she said little about her capture or rescue. People said she was ashamed, horrified by it, and didn't care to live the nightmare again for anyone's sake. “But do you know what she said one time when pestered just a little too much by some concerned citizens?” He held the group on the question and looked around as if earnestly expecting one among them to have the answer. “She said,
I wish they'd never found me.
They thought that she was talking about the savages when she said that. But is that how it sounds to you? That's not how it sounds to me. Sounds to me like those redskins had filled her mind so full of their blood logic, pumped her so full of their juices, whispered so long in her ears, that she had become one of them. Worse than one of them, because she had once been one of us. They stripped her of two thousand years of civilization in one year's time, left her nothing but a naked savage. One year, that's all it takes. That's why we've no choice, never before and still not now, other than to exterminate that beast among us. Tell me I'm wrong if you can.”

If Dunlop found any fault in the man's story, he expressed it silently, by shaking his head and tossing his coffee grounds into the fire. James raised his hand like a pupil posing a question to his teacher, but then he changed his mind and made to get up. Marshall had seen the hand, though, and set on him to speak his mind.

James was slow to talk, but having been prompted, he did. “I thought you said you admired them in some ways.”

Marshall stared at the boy so long that James was forced to look away. Only then did he speak. “You don't understand a damn thing, do you? Yeah, I said I admire them. But I admire wolves too. You ever seen the way they hunt in packs? They got their own kings and queens. They cull the herds of the weak and let the strong prosper. Shit, they're smarter than most people are. I admire them, but put one in my sights, and I'll shoot it dead and hang its head on my wall. They may be God's creatures, and for all I know the reds may be God's lost tribe, but what place do they have in this world right here, in my world, in the white man's world?”

James could think of no answer to the question and replied only with the faintest of shrugs. The others sat still. Marshall leaned back and lit a cigarette. He seemed content with the silence he'd created and only broke it once more. “Yeah, some things are best admired hanging from a nail.”

Before long the coyotes swept over the land on patrol, calling to each other and sharing their ownership of the night with joy or sorrow, it was hard to tell. Marshall walked off onto the prairie, rifle in hand, to converse with himself away from human interference. The tension eased with his absence. Dunlop patted James on the back and said that Marshall was just the argumentative type—“Should have been a politician.” James smiled timidly at this and looked over at Gabriel, who met his eyes for only a moment.