Revenge of the Manitou (10 page)

“Walk straight
in there, friend. Close it behind you, though. You never know who might come
prowling to steal my valuables.”

The little
house was dark and cool, and surprisingly clean and well cared-for. Billy
Ritchie, without his legs, had made his home his whole world, and it was
wallpapered from floor to ceiling with color pictures cut from calendars and
magazines. Every room was a patchwork of scenic views snipped from tourist brochures,
close-ups of butterflies and flowers, religious scenes and snow scenes,
cartoons and classic works of art, all interleaved with center spreads from
Penthouse and Hustler.

“Most folks
comment on every damn picture except the girls,” said Billy Ritchie. “But what
I say is, if an old gent can’t admire some young flesh when he’s past
everything but spitting contests, then it’s a sad world.”

The old man was
sitting in a shadowy corner of the room, his head silhouetted by the light from
the half-closed Venetian blinds behind him. Through the slats of the blind,
Neil could see a tangled garden, overgrown with wild grass.

“
There’s glasses
on the side there,” Billy Ritchie said.
‘Tour me a beer and a stiff one, and whatever you want for yourself.”

Neil went
across to a low sideboard with a decorated glass front and laid out three
glasses. He opened a beer for each of them, and poured out three fingers of
bourbon for Billy Ritchie. Then he sat himself down in an uncomfortable,
yellow-painted, basketwork chair, lifted
bis
drink,
and said; “Good health, Mr. Ritchie.”

The old man
raised his glass in return.
“Same to you.
But call me
Billy, and don’t worry too much about my health. I lost the use of my legs
twenty years ago when I fell off a damn bad-tempered horse, and I’ve been fit
as a damn drum ever since.
Fve
seen a lot, though,
and talked to a whole host of the old-timers, and there isn’t much that’s
passed me by.”

“What do you
know about Bloody
Fenner
? That’s what they called
him, didn’t they?”

“Oh, they sure
did,” said Billy. “Bloody by name and damn bloody by nature. But you have to
judge a man like that by the days he lived in, and those days in the Napa
Valley weren’t easy. This was fine land, and the Indians weren’t too happy
about handing it over. If you wanted to survive, you had to be real tough, and
ready to make the best of things. That was what Bloody
Fenner
was good at.
Making the best of things.”

Neil swallowed
beer and wiped his mouth with the back of
bis
hand. “I heard he was a traitor, of sorts.”

Billy Ritchie
pulled a face. “Not to himself, he wasn’t. He did pretty well in the 1830s,
made himself a fair pile of money, and owned a whole stretch of good land up
along the Silverado Trail. Trouble was
,
the
Fenner
family lost most of their acreage in the late
forties, after the year of the Bear Flag Party across at Sonoma, when the
Californians declared independence from the Mexicans.
Fenner
had gotten along good with the
Mexicans,
on account of
he was smart and wily, and willing to perform a service to any man who paid
him.

But when the
Bear Flag folks took over, they made life so damn difficult for the
Fenner
family they sold out and moved to the coast, and I
guess the land they bought was where you’re living now.”

Neil nodded.
“Part of it, anyway.
My grandfather sold about a hundred
acres during the Depression.”

Old Billy
Ritchie took a mouthful of Old Crow, coughed, and said, “A lot of folks did,
especially around Napa. First, prohibition hit the wineries, then the
Depression. They weren’t good times.” “But what about Bloody
Fenner
?” asked
Neil.

“Bloody
Fenner
?” echoed Billy Ritchie. “Bloody
Fenner
was the best damn brawler and fighter this side of the Sacramento River. He
knew all the Indians by name, the
Wappos
and the
Patwins
, and there were plenty who said that he’d been
initiated in a
Wappo
temescal
.
The stories say that he was a tall man, with a face as fierce as a bear, and
that he could shoot a fly off of a horse’s ass if he was blindfolded and
standing on his head.”

Neil grinned.
“Sounds like that’s one talent that’s gotten bred out of the
family.”

“Just as well,
if you ask my opinion,” Billy Ritchie rejoined. “Bloody
Fenner
wasn’t loved by
nobody
, except for his wife, and by
all accounts she was twice as hard-bitten as he was.”

Neil was silent
for a moment, watching the old-timer sitting in his invalid chair, stroking and
stroking that black, furry cat. Then the guest said softly, “Did you ever hear
tell of a battle?
A battle that Bloody
Fenner
might have fought in?”

“Sure. He
fought in plenty. He fought for Jose Sanchez back in the early days, and the
story goes that he helped Father Altamira round up
Patwins
and put them to work for the mission at Sonoma. That was back in the late
1820s, and times were raw then, I can tell you.”

“I’m thinking
of one battle in particular,” said Neil. “A battle where the white men came off
pretty
badly,
and the Indians did well.”

“There were a
few of those,” said Billy Ritchie, shaking his head. “I heard tell of a
massacre of ten white farmers and their families by the
Wappos
up at St. Helena, and there was an ambush of three white squatters by
Wappos
in York Creek. Maybe the worst, though, was the time
they say Bloody
Fenner
took a league of land from the
Wappo
Indians in exchange for leading twenty settlers
and their families into a trap set in the forest up at Las Posadas, close to
Conn Creek.

The settlers
had trusted
Fenner
, you see, and paid him in gold to
act as their scout and interpreter, so that they could lay out claims to
farmland in Bell Canyon. But he took them slap-bang into a
Wappo
ambush, and they were all killed.
Twenty farmers, and their
twenty wives, and fifty-three young children.”

Neil licked his
lips. “Did anyone prove that it was
Fenner
who did
it? Or was it just hearsay?”

“What proof did
anyone have in them days?” asked Billy Ritchie. “The land was rough and the
folks were rougher. You stayed alive if you were hard and dogged and used your
gun without thinking twice. But the stories say that
Fenner
was the only white man who came out of that massacre alive, and that’s
suspicious in itself. He said that he left the settlers, and rode back along
Conn Creek to bring help from his Mexican soldier friends, and there’s nothing
to say that he didn’t. But if he did bring help, it was a sight too late to
save anyone; and what was oddest of all, the settlers’ bodies were all scalped,
and their ears cut off.”

“What was odd
about that?” asked Neil. “The
Wappos
were pretty
fierce sometimes, weren’t they?”

“Oh, they could
be. But what they didn’t do was take scalps, or ears, or genitalia, like some
of the Indians did. It wasn’t their style. They were diggers, not fighters, and
all they cared about was protecting their good agricultural land from the white
men. They weren’t interested in trophies.” “You’re saying that
Fenner
took the scalps? A white man took white scalps?”

“You don’t have
to look so shocked. It wasn’t unusual in them days. In fact, some of the
old-timers say it was white men who taught the Indians to take scalps in the
first place.”

“That’s horrific,”
said Neil.

Old Billy
Ritchie shrugged, and swilled some bourbon down with a mouthful of beer.

Neil said, “Did
you ever see a picture of Bloody
Fenner
?
An engraving or anything like that?”

Billy Ritchie
shook his head. “The only drawings I ever saw of Napa Valley in them days were
landscapes. Mainly forests, it was. But I don’t think nobody ever took it into
their heads to draw Bloody
Fenner
.”

“There’s
something else,” said Neil. “Did you ever hear of a prophecy connected with
Bloody
Fenner
?
Something that was
supposed to be written on a stone redwood tree?”

Billy Ritchie
thought about that, and then shook his head again. “No, sir, I can’t say that I
ever did.”

“Then how about
the day of the dark stars?”

Billy Ritchie
lifted his head slowly and stared at him. For the first time since Neil had
walked into the house, he stopped stroking the cat, and his old hand lay on her
black fur like a dead, dried leaf.

“Did I hear you
right?” he said, in a soft, unsettling tone.

“The day of the dark stars,” repeated Neil.
“That was all I
said.”

The old man
quivered in his chair, as if a cold wind had blown across the room. But the air
was still, and growing stuffy, and outside it must have been close to 100
degrees.

“Where did you
hear about the day of the dark stars?” he asked Neil. “I lay my life I didn’t
believe I’d ever hear that phrase again.”

“I don’t know,”
said Neil, reluctant to tell the old man about Toby until he knew what the “day
of the dark stars” was, and why the mention of it seemed to be so unnerving. “I
guess I just kind of picked it up.”

Billy Ritchie
looked at Neil as if he knew that he was only telling him half of the truth,
but then he piloted his wheel chair across the room, and silently poured
himself another large shot of bourbon. As he screwed the cap back on the
bottle, he looked up at Neil, and said: “The first and last time I heard of the
day of the dark stars was from a trapper I met when I was a young man up in the
Modoc Forest. This man was old and he was thin as a polecat, and he had scars
on every spare inch of his body from fighting Indians and animals. We spent two
nights and two days together, and then we went our separate ways.”

“But what did
he tell you?” asked Neil. Billy Ritchie’s eyes were rheumy and distant. “He
told me all about the old days in Modoc country, just so that I could pass his
stories on, so they wouldn’t be lost. What he said was that once the Indians
knew they couldn’t hold back the white man any longer, they kind of bowed their
heads and accepted their fate after a fashion, because they always knew that
their gods would give them revenge. It was a
Wappo
belief, for instance, that for every Indian who died from cholera or smallpox,
or was shot down by scalp hunters, a white man would die in return.

They said that
it might not happen in a month, in a year, or even in twenty years, but that
one day the stars would go dark because they would call down the most powerful
and evil Indian demons there ever were, the demons they didn’t even dare to
call down in their own lifetimes, like
Nashuna
and
Pa-la-
kai
and
Ossadagowah
,
and that the demons would slaughter a man for a man, a woman for a woman, a
child for a child.”

Billy Ritchie
took another swig from his glass, and then he said, “The way I heard it,
Nashuna
was the demon of darkness, and Pa-la-
kai
was the demon of blood, and
Ossadagowah
was a land of a beast-thing that nobody could even describe, a kind of a wild
demon that scared everyone witless.”

“You sound as
though you believe it,” said Neil, carefully.

The old man
gave a wry smile. “I’d believe it before I believed some of the words I read in
the Bible,” he said, quietly. “Them Indians knew their lands, you see, and they
knew their skies and their waters, and they knew all about the spirits and the
demons that dwelled in those lands and those skies and those waters. The way
that trapper told me, the day of the dark stars was going to happen before the
twentieth century turned-he wasn’t sure when, but that was what he was told.”

Neil raised his
eyebrows. “Sounds scary, doesn’t it? But who’s going to call these demons down?

I’ve been to
powwows at a couple of Indian reservations, and there’s an Indian who comes
down to Bodega Bay to fish, and it seems to me that there isn’t much magic left
in any of today’s red people.”

“It’s not
today’s red people you’ve got to worry about,” said Billy Ritchie. “It’s the
spirits of the red people from out of the past. What this trapper told me was
that the greatest of all the medicine men, the twenty-two most powerful
wonder-workers from all the main tribes, all of their spirits would come
together, God knows how, and they’d call down the worst demons they could, and
get their revenge.”

“You mean the
ghosts of twenty-two old-time medicine men are supposed to be getting together
to punish us? Come on, Billy. That’s a tall story and you know it.”

Billy Ritchie
didn’t look offended. ‘People have said that before,” he said, philosophically.
“But let me show you something, before you make up your mind that all those old
Indian legends were nonsense.”

He propelled
himself across to a small bureau which stood in the far corner of the room and
opened the top drawer. He shuffled through a heap of untidy papers and news
clippings while Neil watched him silently and drank his beer.

“Here we are,”
said Billy Ritchie, after a while, and wheeled
himself
over. He gave Neil two black-and-white photographs, full plate size, and told
him, ‘Take a close look at those.” One of the photographs showed a street scene
in Calistoga. It was hard to tell when it was, because the town had hardly
changed in fifty years. There were horses and buggies, and men in wide-brimmed
hats, but it could have been taken any time between 1890 and 1920.