Beauty for Ashes Read online

  ‘And whiskey as a gift of friendship,’ confirmed Sam. Last night they’d cached all the kegs of whiskey but two, which they would share with the Pawnees. It would lubricate the trading.

  Raven talked with the Big Bellies in Pawnee. After a while he said, ‘Tomorrow we move camp to the forks of the river, where we stay for the winter. Come there and we will trade with you.’

  Ashley looked at Fitzpatrick. “Forks of the Platte are a couple of days upstream. Fine camping place, plenty of feed.”

  “Tell him,” Ashley said to Sam, “we will be glad to join him at the forks.” Sam did.

  Raven nodded his acceptance, and Sam could see he was ready to rise and close the meeting.

  Impetuously, Sam signed, ‘Where is Third Wing?’

  It was a risk. Changes that Sam didn’t like registered in Raven’s eyes. He glared at Sam.

  ‘A foolish young white man with white hair,’ Raven signed, staring blackly at Sam, ‘was captured by my young men at the time when berries get ripe. Third Wing, even more foolishly, helped him escape. Since then he has not been well.’

  ‘I want to see him.’

  Lightning flashed in Raven’s eyes.

  Ashley butted in. “Tell him you regret what happened last summer. You regret killing that sentry. It was all a misunderstanding. You had to get your rifle back or die.”

  Sam signed that much. Raven paid close attention, but did not look mollified.

  Ashley said, “Remind him you let his young warriors live when most men would have killed them.”

  Sam signed it. Letting those Indians live, in fact, had been controversial among his own friends.

  Now Fitzpatrick jumped in with words to Ashley. “Have Sam tell Raven that Sam is important to you. You will give tobacco to the family of the sentry killed, and blankets, and a horse to express your sorrow at their loss.”

  Ashley nodded to Sam, and Sam signed it.

  Raven said with his fingers, ‘I cannot speak for the family. You must talk to them.’

  Sam knew that meant it would be all right. He ventured again, ‘May I see Third Wing?’

  Raven stared at Sam, then signed, ‘When you have spoken to the family of the fine young man Two Stones, Third Wing maybe will come to your camp.’

  Sam and Fitz glanced at each other. “The line we’re walking with these Pawnees is narrow,” said Fitz, “and would be easy to fall off.”

  TWO STONES’ FATHER and mother, waiting in front of their lodge, wore their mourning on the outside. The father had chopped off his hair crudely, and the mother bore scars on her forearms where she had hacked herself in her grief. They said nothing but seemed pleased by the gifts. Sam guessed that the kind and amount of the gifts meant nothing to them, but the fact of Ashley making this gesture did. They seemed willing enough for Sam to stay on the planet.

  But the teenage brother half-hid inside the tipi, his face bristling with hatred. Sam knew he better check his back trail against that one.

  The parents never did speak, which gave Sam the willies. Ashley handed over the gifts and ended things.

  On the way out of the village Ashley said unnecessarily, “Don’t get to feeling complacent, not for an instant.”

  No chance, thought Sam.

  BACK AT CAMP the men were gathered around fires for a noon meal. Food and company were Sam’s great yearnings. On his long walk from the Sweetwater River to Fort Atkinson, nearly three months alone, he’d missed people as much as food.

  Ashley’s twenty-five beaver hunters grouped themselves loosely into units of six or seven around the four leaders, the general, Fitzpatrick, Clyman, and Ham. And they ate heartily when the eating was good—next week might be starving times. Sam had lost thirty pounds on his long walk alone, regained it, and lost fifteen more on the way up the river this month. Feast or famine, for sure. Men wandered from fire to fire as the spirit moved them. Some didn’t like Coy, claiming a coyote would sooner or later turn vicious, and they stayed away from the fire where Sam and Coy usually sat, Fitzpatrick’s.

  Through this meal Sam barely noticed the buffalo meat. He was thinking about Two Stones and his parents. Odd how knowing a name made the killing feel different. Back then Two Stones was just an obstacle between Sam and his rifle, The Celt, his only hope for survival on the plains. The creeping approach and swift knife to the throat had been a primitive exultation.

  Now Sam’s head jumped with pictures of blood spurting between his own hands, vital life bursting out, ended forever. Sometimes his mind’s eye rotated the faces of Two Stones’ father and mother, bleak and forlorn. The holes in their hearts had been ripped by Sam’s hands.

  “Black life we live, no?” Gideon usually saw Sam’s moods, in the way of friends.

  “Yeah. Black.”

  They were still eating, Beckwourth too, after the other men had finished. “You people use ‘black’ like it means evil, forces of darkness,” said Jim. “I don’t care for that.”

  Sam cocked an eyebrow at his friend. Beckwourth concentrated on the buffalo meat on the tip of his knife. All three were quiet for a moment, preoccupied.

  “What you think it means,” Beckwourth asked, “when Raven says he’s friendly and wants to trade?”

  “Nothing,” said a voice behind them. It was Tom Fitzpatrick. He squatted and sliced a hunk off the spitted buffalo roast above the fire.

  “Nothing?” This was Beckwourth.

  “The Arickarees traded with us and then attacked us,” Fitz said. Sam and Gideon had been there.

  Beckwourth looked at Sam.

  “Nothing,” Sam agreed.

  “Treacherous bastard.” Beckwourth pushed the words out over the meat in his mouth.

  “I don’t think so,” said Sam.

  Everyone looked at Sam. Raven had tried to torture and kill him.

  “I agree,” said Gideon.

  Sam threw Coy a rib with some meat on it. “Looks to me like every tribe has pretty much the same name for themselves—the people, the true people, something like that. And pretty much the same name for everybody else—others, outsiders, enemies. That’s how the tribes see the whole world. To Raven there are Pawnees, who are like him, and there’s everybody else. His job is to protect the good people, his, against everything and everybody who’s not Pawnee.”

  “So he don’t hate us while he kills us?” Beckwourth gave an ironic grin.

  “No,” said Sam. “He doesn’t hate us, period. Maybe he hates the Sioux and the Cheyennes—hostility there goes back generations. But he doesn’t hate anybody else. We’re just the others. To him we don’t count.”

  “All Indians be like zis,” put in Gideon.

  Sam looked at his friends. Funny conversation this was, between a Pennsylvania backwoodsman like himself, an Irishman, a colored man, and a French-Canadian whose father was a Jew and mother an Indian.

  Fitz pitched in. “Everybody’s like this. Your father’s people do it too. They’re Jews and everyone else is a gentile.”

  Gideon shrugged. “My mother’s people, the Crees, ze same.”

  “You white people are that way to us colored,” said Beckwourth.

  Sam looked into his friend’s face. Sometimes he couldn’t tell Jim’s moods.

  Sam said, “It’s crazy. Look here. I like Hannibal.” They’d all heard about the combination Delaware Indian and classical scholar more than once. “I like the Shawnees I’ve known, and despise General Harrison, who destroyed them for no reason. I love Meadowlark, a Crow, and like her brother. I didn’t hate Two Stones, the Pawnee I killed, nor the ones I let go. But I’m damn mad at the Arickarees—they killed my friends.” He looked Beckwourth candidly in the face. “I would fight for you against any white man, or red man, or black man.” He turned his eyes to Gideon. “You too.”

  Said Fitz, “Next you’ll be wanting us to love prairie wolves.” He grinned and threw Coy his bone, too.

  “Mine’s different.”

  “He probably thinks you’re not bad either, mi coyo
te,” teased Fitz. “For a two-legged.”

  “Sometimes we have to kill,” said Sam, “sometimes we choose to kill.” His head still hurt with the memory of Two Stones.

  “Hmpf,” grunted Beckwourth loudly. “My pappy taught me something about that. Everything that lives, it kills and is killed.”

  “I rode to St. Louis on the steamboat with a scientific Frenchman,” said Fitz. “He studies plants that grow in water. He had a microscope, showed me some Mississippi River water in it. Water’s full of living creatures, little fellas, way too small to see with the naked eye. Every time you take a drink you kill a hundred or a thousand of them.”

  “Every time I take a drink,” Sam pondered that.

  “Every time, mi coyote,” repeated Fitz.

  Sam broke the silence. “When I kill, I don’t like me much.”

  “Do it anyhow,” said Beckwourth.

  “If you want to partner me,” said Gideon.

  “But don’t get to liking it,” added Fitz.

  THIRD WING DIDN’T show up that afternoon, or the evening either. Sam looked for him the next day as the Crows formed a long line of horse-drawn travois and rode upriver. The young men policed the line and kept lookout, but Third Wing wasn’t among them. The mountain men, riding behind, said they’d seen no sign of any straggler. It was the same story the next day, and the third day, when they reached the forks and made camp. Sam walked over and over from the beaver men’s camp above the north fork and the tipis of Raven’s people. No Third Wing.

  For a week they rested and fed their horses and themselves. Every day they traded with the Indians. Each Pawnee who came to camp kept his eyes open, but none acted hostile. The trading went well. Ashley got fifteen horses and a lot of pemmican. Some of the men even got squaws for the night. But no sign of Third Wing, and Sam did not dare to ask Raven.

  Still Raven managed, talking to Ashley, to roll a stone into the garden of Sam’s hopes. The chief and two Big Bellies said the route up the south fork toward the mountains had plenty of feed for the horses and plenty of wood for fires. But the north fork, they claimed, did not.

  Ashley sent Sam for Clyman and Fitzpatrick. None of them had been up the south fork. On his long walk Sam came down the north fork, never saw the south fork until he got right here.

  The whites squatted and scratched rivers and mountains in the dirt until it looked like what they’d seen. The Pawnees added the south fork and showed how it ran straight at some other mountains to the south. The north fork looped around the end of the same range.

  Coy whined to come forward and show the two-leggeds how to dig in the earth, but Sam staked him several steps away.

  They looked hopefully at Raven and the Big Bellies. ‘On the north fork,’ signed the Indians, ‘little for the horses to eat, little wood for the men to burn.’

  ‘Seemed like enough to me,’ signed Sam.

  ‘No. Too many men, too many horses for winter on the north fork. Must use south fork.’

  Then the Big Bellies showed them where to cross the mountains when the snow melted, a line from the south fork to the northwest.

  “It’s the long way around to the Siskadee,” Sam told Ashley.

  The general looked at Clyman and Fitz.

  “True enough,” said Clyman.

  “But it’s only way now,” said Fitz.

  Sam made a face.

  “What’s wrong?” asked Ashley.

  Sam just shook his head.

  “Sam’s counting on seeing Meadowlark this winter,” said Fitz in a kindly tone. To Ashley’s questioning face he added, “Look at his gage d’amour.” Which meant the beautiful beaded pouch that hung inside his shirt. “Our coyote keeper has a Crow woman.”

  Ashley gave the briefest glance at the pouch, normally a gift an Indian woman used to signal her affection. He said, “I’m sure these Indians are telling us the truth. It’s the south fork for us.” He turned back to Raven and the Big Bellies. “Thank you.”

  Sam hung his head while he made the signs.

  Then he flashed his eyes into Raven’s face. He signed, ‘Where’s Third Wing?’

  ‘He has not been well,’ Raven signed back. His smile was superior, his eyes amused. ‘Maybe he does not want to see you.’

  SAM KICKED A snow-covered stone into the stream, the main river below the forks. Since it hurt, he kicked another one. “Very satisfying,” he told Coy, “but I’m damned if I know why.”

  He looked through the graying evening at the western sky. It was the color of the mustard Katherine’s mother made back home, and the lavender his mother grew to keep under your pillow for a calm mind and good sleep. Which seemed far away to Sam. His spirits felt the way the sky looked, battered and bruised.

  He was well rid of Katherine—his brother Owen was welcome to her. And he didn’t think he’d see his mother again. Pennsylvania was a long ways off, and he wanted to be in the mountains. Among the peaks and valleys that still lay to the west of these flat plains. He wished he could see the mountains from here.

  Coy splashed into the river and lapped up the cold water. The sunset colors rippled with the colors of Sam’s pain. He gazed at the western horizon. The lavender was a thin line of clouds hiding the last of the sun, not her mountains.

  He seldom said the name Meadowlark, even in his thoughts. The picture of her, the touch of her, these came to his mind familiar as campfire smells, but he didn’t let himself think her name.

  “No Crow camp this winter,” he said to the pup bitterly. “Let her down again. ‘The white man can’t be trusted,’ her parents will tell her. She’ll make a tipi for another man.”

  That one hurt him sharply, right in the groin.

  He stared at the horizon blankly. The sun was down, the light fading, like his chance with…her.

  “Hnnn.”

  He spun around. A voice. Whose? Where?

  His hair prickled. If it wasn’t a friendly voice, he would already be dead. Still…

  “Hnnn.”

  Then he saw. A man figure moved out of the grove of cottonwoods into the open. A scrawny, haggard Pawnee.

  He gaped. He could hardly believe this was Third Wing.

  Chapter Five

  SAM BUILT THE fire for the two of them on the riverbank, well away from camp. His companions might get grumpy about having both a coyote and Pawnee as dinner companions. He made the fire roar. Normally, he’d have built a smaller one, but he kept looking at Third Wing and wondering what had happened to…his friend?

  Was “friend” the word for a man you’d only been around a few hours? But if he saved your life, what else could you call him?

  Coy thought he was a friend too. Though the pup stayed clear of most people, he went to Third Wing right away and lay down against his foot like it was a corner of blanket, or a warm rock.

  Third Wing flaunted Sam’s hair at the world, two big hanks of white draping down his gleaming sheet of black onto his shoulders. That had been the price of Sam’s life. Sam had never understood what Third Wing wanted with the hair. But there was a lot he didn’t understand about Third Wing, or any Pawnee, or any Indian. Maybe any person.

  Coy licked Third Wing’s hand and accepted a few pats.

  Mountain life was strange, and Third Wing was Sam’s strangest experience. Last summer he’d been walking down the Platte alone, the river the Indians called Shell River. A hard time—Sam had gotten separated from his brigade, and very lost. Then Arapahos took his horse. He had only eleven rifle balls left, so couldn’t get much food. And he guessed—only guessed—that the settlements were a seven-hundred-mile walk down river.

  After maybe six weeks of walking, he was training Coy one afternoon, teaching him to jump up and take a stick from the hand. Some young men of the Loup Pawnees sneaked up on him, captured him, and took him back to camp.

  The people were very curious about Coy and his tricks, so they wanted to keep the pup. The council of Big Bellies decided, though, that Sam would be given a choice for tomorrow�
��die quickly, or show brave as you die. Showing brave meant demonstrating how much pain you could stand without complaint. Never moan, never ask for water, never beg for death. The women did the torturing, because they gave a man a chance to be very, very brave.

  Third Wing rescued him. Third Wing spoke English, so he promised to watch the captive overnight. At his tipi Third Wing fed Sam and offered him a deal—give me your beautiful white hair and I’ll help you escape. Sam wondered if the Indian was out of his mind. But that didn’t matter. Sam let the Pawnee cut his hair off right down to the nubs. He also held out for taking Coy with him. In the darkest hours, a shorn Sam followed Third Wing out of camp and to the river.

  But he couldn’t keep going. Without his rifle he would starve. One of his young captors had stolen it. So the next night Sam crept back into camp, killed a sentry—dammit, Two Stones, not just a sentry—and stole his rifle back.

  Then he had to spend several days running and hiding from the angry Pawnees.

  At that time Third Wing was a stocky man in his mid-twenties. Four months later he looked like a half-starved, half-frozen relic.

  They sliced meat off a spitted roast and ate in silence. Third Wing attacked food the way Coy did, like this was the last bite he’d ever get. Sam waited for him to say something. Maybe the fellow had gone the rest of the way crazy.

  After a while, observing Sam feeding Coy fatty or gristly pieces, Third Wing did the same. He tossed the scraps with an odd smile, like he savored the irony of a half-starved man feeding a well-fatted coyote.

  He ate for a long time after Sam quit, which was a good sign, but still said nothing.

  When Third Wing let Coy lick the grease off his fingers and wiped his hands thoroughly on his hide leggings, Sam said, “I’m glad to see you. I thank you again for saving my life.”

  Third Wing flashed that same crazy grin at him. “Dumbest goddam thing I ever did.”

  Sam swallowed hard. To cover his feelings, he reached for the small white clay pipe in his gage d’amour, filled it with tobacco, and used sticks to get an ember and drop it onto the tobacco. When Sam had the pipe going, he handed it to Third Wing. The Pawnee took it shakily, overeager.