Tim Curran: Skin Medicine

Hyden chewed his lip, clutched his shotgun tightly. “I guess I’m wondering what’s in there, what’s in that box. I don’t like it.”

“ Dammit, boy, I don’t like what’s in yer head, but you don’t hear me complaining.”

They rode on and the moon slid behind a cloud and the night grew darker, went black to its roots, seemed to gather around them in clutching, sinister shadows.

“ Boy, light that lantern.”

Hyden reached over the seat…froze-up tight when he thought he heard a shifting sound from inside the box…then quickly grabbed the oil lamp and lit it up with a cupped match. The shadows retreated, but the night seemed bunched around them like a fist anxious to grasp something. It hung to either side of the wagon in sheets and blankets of murk. The hold was creeping with stygian forms.

Goode said, “Yer hearing things back there and that ain’t so strange. Not really. This road is bad and that body is knocking around same as us. Don’t pay it no attention, son.”

But Hyden kept hearing those sounds and something was stirring his guts with a willow twig. “I just been thinking is all,” he said, his breath frosting from his lips. “Been thinking on Skull Valley where we got the box from. Kind of creepy up there. Kind of lonesome and desolate…it puts your mind to things.”

“ What sort of things?”

“ Skull Valley…that’s Spirit Moon’s grounds.”

The old man licked his lips slowly, deliberately. “I hear tell Spirit Moon’s dead.”

“ Some say he don’t die same as others.”

Goode laughed. “Bullshit. Besides, Spirit Moon is from the Snake Nation, boy. Skull Valley is Goshute land. What would Spirit Moon be doing there?”

“ The Snake is just Shoshone, anyhow. Goshutes are tight with ‘em. I heard his tribe is up there in the hills, doing what they do.”

“ Maybe, son, but what you heard about Spirit Moon…those is just witch-tales, is all. Injuns think he’s some big bad medicine doctor, but a white man should know better. Just some Snake witch doctor. A damn injun and he don’t scare me none.”

But Hyden didn’t believe that. Goode even pronounced Spirit Moon’s name kind of low in a whisper…like he was afraid the old injun would hear him from his grave. And maybe he would at that.

“ You ever hear of Walking Mist, boy?”

Hyden said he had. Another Snake medicine man, but from years back.

“ Well, let me tell you about him. Walking Mist was a Snake hoodoo man, too, like Spirit Moon. In fact, he was his ancestral granddaddy. Well, back in the ‘30’s, so I was told, up in the Wasatch, Walking Mist got on the wrong side of a couple beaver trappers from Fort Crockett. The three of ‘em were boozed-up and looking for a fight and happened upon Walking Mist who, it was claimed, refused their offers of marriage to his sisters. They shot Walking Mist down, chopped off his head and buried it in a box. They buried his body somewheres else.” Goode’s face was set and stern in the lamplight. “Well, now old Walking Mist he had himself a high yeller girl for a wife, some nigger out of a Baton Rouge plantation. She was said to be one of them conjure-folk. Said she used to make up love potions and cures for the sick. Made little dolls out of clay and burlap, sprinkled the hair and fingernails from someone she didn’t like in ‘em and put the hex on ‘em. Folks used to pay her to do so…horses, skins, rifles, what not.

“ Well, this high yeller girl goes into one of her voo-doo trances and, sure enough, she locates old Walking Mist’s head with a rod cut from an ash tree. She opens that box and old Walking Mist’s head, powerful crazy medicine man that he was, is still alive. Eyes open. He tells her where his body is buried. Not long after, Walking Mist is seen ambling around, head stitched back on, a funny light in his eyes.”

“ And what about them trappers?”

Goode grinned like a bear skull. “They found ‘em one day. They had twenty-foot stakes shoved right up their asses. Up their asses and right into their throats. Just bobbing in the wind up atop them stakes that were driven into the ground. Thing was, nobody never did find their heads.” Goode spit his cigar butt into the night. “I heard that from an old Ute I used to do some drinking with.”

“ I thought you didn’t like Indians?”

“ This ‘un was different.”

Hyden was nodding his head up and down. “That story, I believe it. My grandpappy Joe said that Spirit Moon was part demon and part human, could do anything he set his mind to. Grandpappy said a copper miner lost his hand in a cave-in and Spirit Moon rubbed something on it and called names into the sky and a month later, that hand grew back. Grandpappy Joe said it was true. Said Spirit Moon had eyes like coals. When them eyes looked at you, you were never the same again.”

“ Country’s ripe with bullshit, son.”

“ Some of it’s true.”

“ Maybe.”

“ There was a Paiute from the Cedar Band that had two heads,” Hyden said. “I saw him once. It was true enough.”

Goode laughed. “Next you’ll be telling me you can rope a bronco with yer pecker and still have enough left to make a dance hall gal whistle Dixie in the dark.”

Hyden felt his ears burn like they’d been branded. “If you don’t believe in nothing, then why you tell me that story of Walking Mist?”

“ To pass the time, boy, strictly to pass the time and to see how gullible you are. And dammit, yer gullible. That Ute believed what he told me, but I expected better from you being a white man. If I’d known you were afraid of spooks, I woulda got me another boy to ride shotgun.”

“ My grandpappy Joe-“

“ Yer grandpappy Joe was full of more shit that a privy pit,” Goode said. “And don’t take that the wrong way, son. But he liked to talk is all. Now, enough with this fool yarning, I say.”

And it was enough.

Hyden was thinking about Skull Valley. The day before, they’d pulled into a little Goshute camp situated at the base of a rise punched through with caves. Some young buck in an army shirt and bowler hat was waiting for them with the pine box at the side of the dirt trail. A couple old men in trade blankets were standing in a loose circle muttering some nonsense. The buck-didn’t look like no medicine man-paid Goode without so much as a word, seemed relieved almost. The body was that of some white man who had kin in Whisper Lake. They never learned what the Goshute were doing with it and they didn’t ask. But now, thinking on it, Hyden was wondering what those old men were up to and if that young buck was some kind of shirt-tail relation to Spirit Moon.

Hard to say.

Hyden didn’t know if they were Goshute or Snake. He’d only seen Spirit Moon once. Over at the store in Ophir, Toole County. Spirit Moon had been there with his sons, who were loading his wagon. The old man was wrapped up in a buffalo robe and there were beads and feathers braided into his hair. His face was a maze of tiny scars that seemed to move like writhing maggots. Hyden had turned away then, before the old man looked upon him. Before-

There was a shifting in the box and both of them heard it this time.

They looked at each other in the eerie, flickering lantern light, something like fear cut into their faces. They quickly looked away. Hyden licked his lips, but he didn’t have any saliva left.

Something was happening.

He could pretend otherwise, but something was building around them like heat lightning and they could both feel it. But they were men. Grown men with a job to do and it had to be done.

From the box there was a thump, then a rustling.

“ Boy,” Goode said, his breath not coming real easy, “take a look back there for the love of Christ…what the hell am I hearing?”