No Eye Can See (17 page)

The big man on the sorrel wiped at his own face, then scraped his fingers across the woman's mouth and nose, pinching off the spittle he'd just put there, leaving white pressure marks where he had rubbed her face. He grabbed at the girl, then yanked her up in front of him onto the big horse, sidesaddle, the slap of her thighs cracking against the pommel, her arms still tied behind her. With one arm, he pulled her neck into his chest.
Now she might bite him good,
David thought, but she didn't.

Instead, the woman stared straight out, never blinking, as the man
in white, his own jaws clenched, breathing through his teeth, wove the horse out through the still-laughing crowd.

David stared at her. He wanted to drop his eyes, to disavow that he'd even been here to see this happen, but he couldn't. He thought for just a moment that she caught his eye, but it was as fleeting as a fawns tail disappearing out of sight.

As the big horse moved to the edge of the laughter, Oltipa, the Wintu woman, thought of things she loved: the taste of acorn soup, sweet upon her lips, the memory of wind sighs soothing high in the yellow pine. Soft ferns pressed against her face, not the silk of this man's scarf. She smelled memories formed of scraped hides, not the scent of this white man's sweat. Through eyes set far away from here, she could see the yellowed grass, short now after spring's burning so there would be new grass for the deer, so the land would give no fuel to fire the trees if lightning struck in the dry summer, so the waters of the rivers would stay clear and the salmon strong. She let her imagination take her, her eyes gazing far beneath the oaks and pines. She would not let herself see this sea of men, would not let herself hear the laughs and jeers, would not allow herself to belong to the man who owned her body now if not her spirit. This man sat closer to her than any other man had ever been, except for the father of the child she carried. But he was dead. She blinked back tears.

She could not be owned, she decided, despite what some might have thought. As long as she held her stories in her heart, this man could not own her soul. This man could own her labor, her hands, even her body. But never her.

As they roped their way through the parting crowd, the men laughing and moving toward the building smelling of sweet scents of bread baking, she caught the gaze of the boy with kind eyes the color of
spring water, eyes that did not approve of what was happening here, this ripping and tearing of spirit and soul. For just a moment when the bidding began, his eyes, as gentle as the father of her child's had been, those eyes had sent hope like an arrow over the heads of these drooling savages.

But in the time it took a hawk's wing to slice the wind above her, she knew he would not raise his hand, could not buy her and set her free.

The rider who held her jerked his hand to settle the horse, squeezing her with his arm. She grunted with the pain. Oltipa reminded herself not to accept blame for being snatched when the Modocs took her from her village in the shade of the big mountain, ripped her from the rushing sounds of Winnimems Arm, the McCloud River, as the white men called it. Someday, she would go back to that acorn soup place where she and her baby could stay alive.

They brushed past him, the man with kind
eyes
staring. Her ragged dress stretched across her legs, cutting into her thighs, exposing her limbs. She heard the heartbeat of her captor, racing; smelled the horse's sweat. Her hope flew away.

David worked the braid of the cracker draped over his thigh, but he saw only the Wintu woman's eyes. He'd bathed and shaved and changed his clothes and bathed again, somehow not able to get the smell and grime from his skin the first time. He ate his supper at the way station, and now he sat beneath the sloping roof of the stable, bent over his work. He heard a few pelts of raindrops on the tin roof and smelled the scent of horses mixed with the smell of old straw and manure. The rhythm of the spans of horses grinding grain in their teeth soothed his thinking, helped him return to routine. He'd be ready for the trip north to Red Bluff tomorrow, rested and ready.

But he couldn't get the Wintu woman from his mind.

He couldn't have bought her, even if he had more than a thousand dollars, which he didn't, and probably never would have saved, not on a jehus wage. A jehu. David smiled, then spoke out loud for the benefit of the horse. “And the driving is like the driving of Jehu the son of Nimshi; for he driveth fiir-i-ous-ly.” He always stretched out the last word of the verse from chapter nine, verse twenty, Second Kings, from which the drivers took their name. It was what the jehus were known for, driving briskly through rain-swollen streams or up snow-slickened grades, keeping their commitments, getting people where they planned to be.

Knights of the Whip they were called too, and sometimes “Charlie” if someone didn't know a fellows name. But jehu fit them best, he guessed. They were paid in wild and furious adventure more than currency; in living at the edge, in wondering what washout might appear around the bend, what bandit might decide to hold them up if he wasn't alert to places along the trail ripe for ambush. They took their wages in wit and risk, experiences that massaged the senses.

The woman's eyes came back to him. Some knight he was, letting her go like that. And yet what would he have done with her? He didn't know any jehus who had ties, who were married. Most were orphans, like him, and the stage owners said that was what they preferred: no complications then when someone died, as they did pretty regularly, now that he thought of it. A Wintu…girl and him. He brushed the shock of dark hair from his eyes, leaving behind the scent of leather. He hoped to shake away the image of her. The oil felt slick on his fingers as he rubbed it into the bridle.

He might have taken an advance against his wages, maybe. And if he had, he might have found someone who would take her in, care for her. He looked down and realized he'd worn an open blister onto the pad of his thumb with his rubbing, something he'd never done. He put his finger in his mouth, aware of the taste of leather and oil mingling with the torn flesh on his tongue.

But if by some miracle he had bought her, wasn't that saying he condoned
the practice of selling flesh? Didn't that make him just like the slaveholders his father had railed against before coming to California? Wouldn't his purchase just add fuel and fire up the tribes that took captives? And what good was helping one poor Indian woman anyway in the midst of so many who needed it?

“It would be good for her,” he could almost hear his mother say. “No sense worrying about all the rest being too much to manage. You can just do what you can do.”

Just do what I can do,
David told himself. He tried that with his sister and had failed, hadn't had the wherewithal to bring her to him when she was left all alone. He hoped she was happy. The Wintu's face flashed next to hers; if he couldn't care for his own sister, how could he expect to care for an Indian girl? Well, he hadn't seized his opportunity yesterday, and now she was gone and there was nothing to be done for it. He should not have been there at all. He held the Wintu woman in his heart for a moment, not exactly saying a prayer, holding her in his mind. Maybe she would feel again the thoughts sent when she lifted her eyes, when he almost made a bid. Maybe she would feel a wash of kindness in a world lurking with sin.

David looked over the whiplash, turning it in his hands. A good driver never touched an animal with a whip, not once; but a crack of it beside the horse's head told the animals to make shifts and moves at rapid speeds, sometimes with just seconds to avoid a hole or rock that would otherwise tip the stage over. And the cracker, thin little rawhide strips at the far end of the whip, always needed rebraiding at the end of a trip. Hung out there at the end of the whiplash, the crackers took the greatest hit. “Like some of us,” David said, “all frayed way out here at the end of things.” Still, those tiny threads did good, strong, important work. He wouldn't have managed the big teams without them. They just needed daily tending, doing what they could do.

Light from the kerosene lantern glinted off the band of silver that marked his whip handle. He'd had it custom-made by a silversmith now in Shasta. That's where his jehu money went. A horse nickered low from
a stall behind him. “I hear ya,” David said, “I hear ya. Give me a minute and I'll come scratch.”

The horse nickered again, and David stood, leaned the whip against the stall, and reached to soothe his friend. It was his mother who'd showed him where a horse liked scratching most, on that bone between his ears. His mother was on his mind tonight, reminding him of the things that truly mattered.

He was glad his mother wasn't alive to see western people turn to slaving. Even the so-called Treaty of Peace passed last year at Major Reading's ranch up north had resulted in not a single Indian being protected from the masses. So what was the good of it?

“It's a beginning,” his mother might have said if she had lived to know it. “And sometimes just beginning a thing allows Providence to move it forward.”

But to what end? What good did Providence do bringing him and his father south, consumed by the gold rush, only for his father to just disappear one day?

“We just don't always know what's in store for us,” his mother said once. She patted flour into a ball that would raise and fill their little cabin with the scent of baking bread. “We just have to keep our heads.”

Keep our heads. No one seemed to be keeping a sane mind when it came to the Indians. His mother'd always had a heart for them.

At least his mother had never seen such an auction or known such a despicable law even existed. It was the only good thing David could think of about his mother's death. That, and that she'd never suffered. The doctor said the arrow that took her had been swift and sure, and she'd never known what hit her.

Zane rode the horse hard out K Street, away from the river to Second and then beyond, away from the laughter and jeers. He rode until the
horse tired at last, until he could no longer hear the taunts of the crowd. They were crows calling now, nothing more. As soon as he was out of sight in the dusky night, he set that purchase down, hard, tied her hands in front of her, then led her with a rope.

“Perhaps walking a bit will put you into a better frame of mind,” he told her.

Knowing she was there pleased and calmed him. He controlled her with a rope long enough to let her to fall if she got too far behind, but short enough to make her wonder if the horses hooves might hit her as she breathed in the animal's dust.

By early evening, Zane tired of talking himself through the episode—that was all it was, just a minor glitch in his day. If the crowd remembered him at all, it would be for the size of his bid, not the foolishness of the woman. After all, it was she who was the captive, not him. And he had a plan for her. That was what mattered, not the jeers of faceless men.

A light in the distance told him they were nearing the city again. A way station, two stories high with a wide veranda and white picket fence, was set off the road just ahead. He could rid himself of this horse there and take the morning stage with the settled-down woman.