Chapter 15 The company rode on. Jacobs sat tall in the saddle, leading the squad with the scalps of those they had slain. Their ruined march and their ruined hearts. The line of longitude was at once the darkness and the dusk of the day. Some amid their number would have taken a stand but there was no stand to take. They had no argument because there was none. “What kind of Indians was them?” asked the boy as they rode that next day. “Not up on my tribes,” a man said. There was a noticeable blood stench coming from the his skin and clothes. “They all have robes and blankets. Beads, whatever. Good job back there, kid. Did our chores.” The boy nodded. “Just the babies,” he said. “Now which babies are these?” “The ones.” The man lifted his eyebrows at two other men. “You notice any babies?” he asked them. “Not any without a price on their head,” a rider said. The man turned to the boy. Then he looked around. “Anybody notice any atrocities lately?” he asked. No one said anything for a while. Then, as they rode, a man said: “I seen some that was in a cave one time. It was a Lipan burial. Must’ve been a thousand Indians in there, all settin’ together. We stripped ‘em naked. Took whole Indians to our homes and set ‘em in the corner, all dressed up. But they started to come apart when they came out of that cave air. They had to be thrown out. But before that we scalped ‘em and tried to see what we could get in Durango but from those there wasn’t ‘nary a thing.” There was among them an old hunter, and he, at length, said: “They was Apache. Before I fought ‘em I seen ‘em on the plain. Nine years ago. Eight or nine ox teams on the grounds. On this ground alone between the Arkansas River and the Concho there was eight million carcasses for that’s how many reached the rail-yard. Then the last hunt. We ransacked the country. Ten weeks. Finally found a herd of eight animals and we killed ‘em. They’re gone. Every single one of ‘em ever made is gone.” *** The company rode through the clear space in the darkness. They rode on and they were covered with blood. Likeness of lost souls haunt from an old black age. In the evening it began to storm. An arc of lightning flashed over the desert landscape and revealed them in their passing and revealed all the country about them along with the shadows-shapes of them reeling off into the desert, the stones, the canyon, a lone coyote who stood in that temporal day, and then everything snapped back into the darkness from which it had been summoned. They camped in a crater beneath the electric sky and the rain stopped. The sky cleared to reveal the constellations. As they had been, and will be. Again. And again. The boy watched the fire then stood and withdrew to make his bed. He wrapped himself in his own blanket. When he did a man leaned up and whispered in his ear. “I close my eyes,” the man whispered, “I keep seeing it. And the stink. It won’t come off.” The boy turned and looked at him. “How do you live with it?” the man asked. “What are you going to say back home?” The boy said nothing and turned over and went to bed. Before the break of day the company mounted up and traveled further. The boy looked around as they rode. “Will there be food and stuff when we get there?” he asked. Nothing was said. Jacobs thought that they had enough food to get through the mountains but there was no way to tell. The ascension of the sun over the wall of the world made a long phallic shadow across the land, and it climbed into the sky and hammered down, and declined past the stone and bloodied the world and winked away. The darkness dropped down and they rode through the cold and the dark of the night. By now these riders knew that they could not re-kindle in the boy’s heart what was ashes in their own. At length someone spoke to him. “What kind of Indians has these here been, kid?” The boy looked up. “Dead ones, I’d say, what about you, kid?” The boy spat and wiped his mouth. “These here ain’t no kind,” he said.
Posted on: Tue, 18 Mar 2014 08:48:37 +0000
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