Guy Vanderhaeghe - The Englishman’s Boy

Five. Grace had said five Indians. He and Grace had done for two. That left three in the bush.

He had the strange feeling of fading out of the scene, standing apart from what was happening to him. Where had this second set of eyes come from? He felt himself floating, peering down from above. He saw old Grace lying dead behind him. The horse dead. The Indians dead. He could see himself scrunched as small as he could make himself. He saw it all. God, but didn’t he look small. Didn’t old Grace look small. Didn’t they all look small. He wondered if maybe he weren’t dead too, maybe a ghost, seeing as he could picture it all. He bit his tongue, fiercely, and the salty tang of blood in his mouth told him he wasn’t no spectre yet.

They’d started yelling at him from the bush. Indian jabber. You could tell by their voices they were young ones. But a youngster had killed Grace. Youngsters might kill you dead as any buck, give them their chance. The musket clapped again and he ducked and grovelled as it dully smacked saddle leather.

He started to yell back. Every unholy thing he’d ever heard anyone give tongue to in a stable or grog shop. It came out of him like pus from a lanced boil. He yelled until he was hoarse, trying to out-yell the three of them. The blood of his bitten tongue kept welling in his mouth and he had to keep spitting it so as to be able to keep shouting back. The blood was of no account. Nothing was of no account.

Now they were singing the same song the other had in their cracked boys’ voices, singing like very angels of death. He commenced to singing too. Roared “John Brown’s Body” back at them. He knew when they had done their own song they would be ready to come for him; he was letting them know he would be ready to give them their fitting welcome. He ran through his song beginning to end twice before they give it up. Then he give it up too.

In a long minute of anxious silence, he heard somebody sobbing. Grace? He looked back. No. It wasn’t coming out of Grace’s throat but his own. He croaked at them to come. “Come on, you clappy whoresons! Come on!” he screamed.

They did. He didn’t trust his aim with no short gun. Give it to them at spitting distance. Colt locked steady in both hands, forearms propped on the saddle-seat.

They flew for him, dogs for the throat. One red bastard tripped, picked himself up, gimped after the others, plucky but slow on a sprained ankle.

At five yards he put two shots into the lead runner. The second was on him as he was cocking the hammer the third time. There was only time to stab the Colt against the belly and jerk the trigger. It blew the Assiniboine back over the horse with the weight of the lead, the thrust of expanding gases.

The third one was still coming, hop-step, hop-step like a grasshopper, hunting lance poised in his hand. The Englishman’s boy centred the bead on his breastbone, squeezed the trigger. The hammer fell with a click. He cocked and squeezed again. The hammer snapped hollowly. Breaking the revolver, he fumbled a bullet out of his belt. Dropped it. His eyes ran back and forth between the Indian closing on him and the bullet at his feet.

His eye caught the sabre-handle. He grabbed it and tugged. It came hissing out of the sheath just as the Indian thrust, driving the lance through the heavy tweed of his jacket below the armpit, popping open his coat in an explosive spray of buttons. The blade grazed his ribs, snagged in the back of his jacket, wrenched it off his shoulder. He snatched the shaft with his left hand just as the enemy tried to withdraw it, yanked it hard toward him, and lunged with the sabre.

They stood locked together, the Englishman’s boy’s fingers knotted on the lance-shaft, the Indian spitted on the sabre, his mouth gasping like a fish out of water. In the second before his face altered irrevocably and his legs melted in a slow collapse, the Englishman’s boy recognized who it was: the saucy boy who had sat the horse by the creek that morning, counting the wolfers as they passed.

He began to sag on the blade, dragging it down with a great heaviness beyond the tug of gravity, the greatest weight the Englishman’s boy had ever supported, a profound dream-like mass which slowly bent his arm like water bends the dowser’s wand. The Englishman’s boy was fighting it with all his strength, fighting to keep the dying Assiniboine on his feet every bit as hard as he had fought to defend his own life. Because he knew that when his arm finally bowed to the earth, it would bow to a grave.

He’d seen some tough doings in his short life, but nothing to compare to this. When the Assiniboine had finally cut and run, the wolfers crept out of their hidey-hole, sniffed the air like cautious dogs before they commenced to scalping. It was like an egg hunt, Easter morn. They ran back and forth in the grass and bush searching for bodies, cutting and tearing off scalps with one almighty jerk of the arm, foot planted on the body. They whooped and pranced and shook the bloody hair they’d lifted. Vogle, laughing, plunked a scalp on top of his hat and started to sashay like a society lady in a new bonnet. Now and then the Englishman’s boy heard shots when they located a wounded Assiniboine in the grass.

They lost some of their swagger when they went down into the Indians’ ravine. It had a turn or two in it and maybe some hurt brave was lying around a corner with a musket, ready to take a white man to the Mystery World with him. They had totted up eighteen dead on the flat and found twelve more corpses in the coulee. The five youngsters dispatched in the fight at the hill brought the grand total to thirty-five.

When they came to lift the hair of the Englishman’s boy’s Indians he swore he’d shoot any man laid a hand on them. Nobody dared gainsay him, on account of the dreadful look in his eye. The boys who had fought in the War between the States had seen men who would go thankful and joyous after surviving some terrible battle while others went broody, black, and contrary. It didn’t do to meddle with the black ones.

Neither did he accompany them when they rode to complete the destruction of the Assiniboine camp; he just sat in the grass alongside Grace, waving the flies off him with his hat. Grace was too big a man for him to lift onto a horse and carry back to the fort. He needed help for that, but Hardwick said they’d take care of that business when more pressing work was finished.

He watched the teepees catch fire and burn like tallow tapers, one by one. A black pall of smoke crawled sluggishly into the sky, showing a little yellow in it here and there, like a four-day-old bruise. After a bit, he heard a passel of shots. A little later, he spied Vogle capering about with something stuck on a long pole, maybe a lance. Some of the smoke came creeping his way, sickening whiffs smelling like spilled grease frying on a stovetop. That was Hardwick burning the Indian’s store of pemmican. He had said he was going to follow army procedure, destroy their lodges and supplies, so they had no reason to come back.

After an hour, they all rode back in a laughing, lightsome mood for finding Little Soldier in his lodge too drunk to stir when the women had cleared the camp. There he had sat, a bottle of whisky in one hand and himself wrapped up in Old Glory, trusting in the Bluecoats’ medicine flag to save him. The joke was they’d pumped a shot into him for every star of the Union. When they had finished emptying their weapons, Vogle had chopped his head off with a hatchet, stuck it on a pole, and marched him up and down through the burning village so he could get his eyes full of the consequences he had wrought by being unmannerly and by trifling with a white man’s property.