Philipp Meyer - The Son

Shaw said: “May I humbly suggest to the boss that his attitude is outdated. By about four years.”

I passed the glasses to Fisk. He was the oldest of us; he had a big family back in Refugio.

“This is a dumb idea.” He began to wiggle back down through the rocks.

“Where are you going?”

“I gotta write a letter,” he said.

“Same here,” said Shaw. “Let me know if y’all change your mind. Otherwise you’ll find me and my horse heading down that draw we came up.”

I looked at him.

“I’ll be back at the camp,” he said. But he wasn’t smiling.

Then it was only Busque and me.

“What do you think,” I said.

“I think it’s stupid.”

“It’ll be high livin’ if it goes off.”

“You know they’ll find some way to take it off us.”

“That is a sorry attitude.”

“It’s time to piss on the fire and call the dogs, Eli. For all we know, Jeff Davis is already a cottonwood blossom.”

I didn’t say anything.

We continued to watch the bluecoats, who had stripped down to their underwear and were lying in the grass, enjoying the sun, gambling on saddle blankets or writing in their journals. Others were skinning the sheep, getting a fire going.

“I feel sorry for those Indians,” said Busque.

WE WATCHED AS the Federals ate their supper, we watched them watch the sunset, we could still see them even as the first stars came out, passing around a bottle, enjoying their jobs, acting like there wasn’t any war.

Most of the tents were in a small depression, their wagons and horses on the outskirts. Around midnight we shot arrows into their pickets. Then we stampeded the horse herd through the tents and it became a proper massacre; the Federals were easy to pick out as they were all wriggling under collapsed sailcloth or looking about confusedly wearing bright white union suits. We came into the bowl from all sides, shooting with our repeaters while the Cherokees raced around, ululating and smashing heads with their flint axes. Most of the Yankees died before they even knew who was tormenting them and I began to feel sorry for them, it was not even an honest fight, and then Flying Jacket was trying to get my attention.

A dozen of the Union men, all in their underwear, had escaped to the rise where the cannon was parked. They were fetching things from a wagon, making no attempt to stiver off, and I thought they had lost their heads. Then their gun started up and I knew why they hadn’t run.

One aimed it while others worked to feed it or watched the flanks and the gun was popping so fast it was like twenty men shooting at once.

Some Cherokees made a charge on horseback and then there was a second charge. The gun had not stopped firing since it started and Shaw and Fisk and I hunkered in some scraggly brush on the other side of the meadow. The Federals were on a rise directly across from us and in the grass below were dozens of trampled tents and dead and dying men and horses and the sound of moaning like a cattle auction.

They ran out of targets. They began to work over the wounded. The moon was bright and Fisk shot a man standing near the gun and then the branches overtop of us were swaying and crackling and Shaw said, “Leon’s hit,” and went quiet.

There would be a shot from our side and the Federals would see the flash and put twenty or thirty rounds in and get their credit. Shaw’s face was dark and I reached for Fisk. He was wet. One of the Cherokees broke cover but the gun caught him, then came back to me. I pushed up against a rock no bigger than a saddletree and the bullets were slapping against it, something punched my arm, my face was stinging, and then they were working the bushes over my head. The ground all around me was flat and open and I knew my medicine had run out. I tried to remember the death song. I’d forgotten it.

The gun stopped again. Flying Jacket was yelling something. I looked for a ditch or rock or dead horse. There was a flipped wagon but it was too far, and there was an Indian behind the wagon shooting his bow nearly straight up, and then more Indians were doing the same and the air above the gun began to shilly and waver, as if there were heat from a great fire. The loaders were shrieking and calling out and then all the Indians were shooting and the gunner was alone firing blindly into the dark.

THE CHEROKEES WERE moving among the tents, finishing off the wounded with clubs. There was an occasional shot farther down the valley.

I bandaged my arm, then I found Busque and Showalter. We went to the gun. The ground around it was stuck with hundreds of arrows — the Indians had shot them almost straight up so that they would fall on the Federals from above and there were scattered bodies with the switches sticking into them at strange angles, into the tops of their shoulders and heads.

One of the bodies began to move. A man slid out from under it. He appeared to be unhurt.

“I surrender,” he said. He held up his hands. “Are you bandits?”

“We’re with the Confederate States of America,” I told him.

He looked at us strangely. Then he said: “I’m a civilian. I’m a sales representative.”

Busque said: “What does that even mean?”

“I represent the Gatling company. We’re not under contract with the army, but we offered a few production samples for their use, as I… as I believe we had difficulty contacting your government.”

The remaining Cherokees were beginning to gather.

“How does that gun work?” said Busque.

“It’s actually very simple. You take a standard paper cartridge, insert it into this carrier…” He picked up a small metal cylinder from the ground, where hundreds or thousands were littered. “The cartridge and carrier unit then fit into this hopper at the top of the gun, like so.”

Flying Jacket had come up.

“Who is he,” he asked. “A deserter?”

“He works for the company that made the gun. He says he is a salesman.”

Flying Jacket cocked his head as if thinking. He said something to his men. Six or eight of them rushed forward and stabbed the sales representative to death.

THE INDIANS ATTEMPTED to take the gun apart so that it couldn’t be used again. But they couldn’t make sense of it in the dark and instead began to bash it with rocks.

Flying Jacket took me aside and led me to the other wagons, where a crate had been pried open.

“This is heavy but it does not look like gold. It looks like wheat.”

“That’s gold dust,” I said. “That is gold for sure.”

“There is a lot of it.”

“How much?”

“Hundreds of sacks like that one. Hundreds at least.”

The sack looked to be about two pounds.

“We’ll have to bury some of it and come back later.”

“Why?” he said.

“It’ll be tough to move it all.”

He looked at me.

“What?”

“Eli, did the sight of that gun not convince you of anything?”

“No.”

“I believe that you are not telling the truth. Did you know of the existence of this type of gun?”

“Not exactly.”

“So you did.”

“I didn’t know they were in production.”

“But you knew the other side would eventually have them. A gun with which one man can kill forty.”

I looked off into the dark valley below us and the mountains beyond it. I wondered if we would make it home.

“Ah, Eli. Our band is nearly a thousand women, children, and old men. When we began this trip there were nearly two hundred warriors to support them. It was not enough. Now there are perhaps forty.”

“It’s a tragedy,” I said. “I am extremely sorry.”

“It is an even greater tragedy that we are on the losing side of this war. The land we have been given by the federal government, which was not very good, and which we hoped to improve by fighting, we may lose entirely. Just to see that gun fired it is clear.”