Jory Sherman - Blood Sky at Morning

“I probably should give up.”

“Pa, what’s a ‘squaw man’?”

“Where’d you hear that?”

“At the fort.”

“That what they call me?”

Zak dipped his head and nodded.

“Well, that’s from folks who just don’t understand about livin’ in the wilderness, son. They can call me a ‘squaw man’ all they like, but your ma was a special woman. And her ma, too. A white gal gets captured by an Injun and white folks don’t want nothin’ to do with ’em. Treat ’em like dirt. Worse than dirt, like cur dogs.”

“Did you feel sorry for Ma?”

“No. I saw who she was. Where she come from. Her ma was just a child when she was took. She didn’t know nothin’ of white ways after a time. So she became a Sioux woman. It takes a mite of courage to change like that, give up what you was and become somethin’ else.”

“I think I know what you mean, Pa. I remember Curly Jack told me once that he became a mountain man because it was a better life than he had back in Tennessee. Said a man had to become an Indian if he was going to live through a winter in the mountains.”

“Curly Jack said it right, Zak. We all came up here to trade with the red man. Once we tasted their life some, we got to lookin’ at things different. We saw white people for what they was, and red people for what they was. We never learned any of that in no school down on the flat.”

Zak thought about his schooling and realized that, while he had learned a lot about numbers and words and foreign countries, he had also learned that the white race hated the red men and didn’t think of them as being human at all. He began to realize that he and his father lived in two different worlds. It was a sobering thought and went deep with him and stayed there all this time. That was probably why he and Crook had gotten along so well. Crook was a man who could look into both worlds and see the worth in each, as well as the worst in each.

He fell asleep thinking of White Rain and how his father had begun to recover and get back to life after that talk they had. They hunted and fished together, traveled the Rockies as carefree as a couple of kids let out from school for the summer, and they had grown close. That’s when he found out that his father had been collecting gold in the Paha Sapa and saving it up, not for himself, but so that he could have a life of ease someday if he chose to live in the white world.

Neither of them had realized the path Zak would take, or that the country would take, going to war over slavery and states’ rights, brother killing brother, father killing son, son killing father. Neither of them could foresee the future, but both knew what they both had lost when the beaver played out and White Rain died.

Zak could look back and see that all the signs were there, like signposts on roads that wound through the Badlands. Changes. New paths. The old ones blown over by wind and weather, the new ones dangerous, treacherous, dark.

Neither had seen a man like Ben Trask come down the trail, driven by greed, bent on torture and murder. Trask had intruded on their world as surely as the white man had intruded on the world of the Plains Indians and all the tribes in the nation. Such thoughts tightened things inside Zak, turned him hard inside, like the granite peaks of the Tetons, like a fist made out of stone.

The war changed him, too.

He had seen men torn to pieces by grapeshot and shrapnel, heard their screams and cries, seen the surgeons saw off gangrenous limbs and battlefields strewn with the bodies of young men, some with peach fuzz still on their faces, taken from life long before their allotted time, and it was all horror to see young men march into clouds of smoke and die by the hundreds.

Yet he had escaped harm, somehow, with bullets and minié balls whistling past his ear, bombs bursting all around him, horses shot from under him, and stronger men falling, left crippled for life. He thought of his mother and father often during those years, appreciating them both more than he ever had, missing them in those dark hours when he heard only the moans of the dead and dying while crickets struck up their orchestras in the blood-soaked grasses of woodland havens.

Zak fell asleep thinking back through those years, and feeling just as alone now as he had when the rattle of muskets and the clank of caissons were like a horde of metal insects marching across the land, leaving destruction in their wake, those desolate and deserted burnt lands where corpses stiffened in the sun and wild animals fed on them at night.

And the first kill strong in his mind, that bleak moment when he had shot a gray-clad soldier in the eye, seen him fall and later gaze up at him with that one sightless eye, his stomach churning with a nameless grief for the life he had taken, and the hollow feeling afterward, knowing something had changed inside him, something that could not be spelled out or described or explained.

His dreams picked up strands of these thoughts and wove them into a mysterious tapestry hanging in a great empty hall where the coyotes sang songs of the dead and White Rain smiled at him, great tears in her eyes, and his father stood knee-deep in a beaver pond filled with blood, holding up a rusted trap from which dangled a water snake with a human head that bore a strong resemblance to Ben Trask.

Chapter 11

Sergeant Leon Curtis bellowed down from the driver’s seat.

“Who’s in charge here?”

Hiram stepped off the porch. Trask stood there, eyeing the three soldiers he saw in the lantern light. Two on the seat, one on horseback. Two horses were on lead ropes behind the coach, unsaddled.

“I’m Hiram Ferguson. That’s one of my coaches you’ve got there.”

“Sergeant Curtis, sir. Returning your coach from Fort Bowie.”

Curtis set the brake, wrapped the reins around the handle, picked up his carbine and started to climb down.

“Where in hell’s my driver, Danny Jenkins?”

Curtis said nothing until his boots touched the ground.

“Inside the coach,” Curtis said. A trooper untied his horse from the back of the coach, led it out, toward the sergeant.

“Jenkins,” Ferguson called. “Danny? Come on out.”

“He can’t hear you no more,” Curtis said.

“Huh?”

“The man in that coach is dead. Been embalmed and everything by the post surgeon.”

“Dead? How? Somebody kill him?”

“Yes sir, somebody sure killed him.”

“Who?” Ferguson asked.

“Man drove the coach into the fort with the lady come to teach the Injun women and children. He shot Jenkins. Said it was self-defense.”

“Damn it, Sergeant, I demand to know who killed my driver.”

“Man name of Cody. Zak Cody.”

Ferguson shook his head. “Who in hell is this Cody? I never heard of him.”

“Well, sir, we sure as hell heard of him. The man has quite a reputation. None of it proved, of course. But I wouldn’t want to go up against him. Your man Jenkins had the drop on him, according to the ladies who heard the story from Miss O’Hara, and this Cody feller shot him plumb dead.”

“Shit,” Ferguson said. He did not look up on the porch where Trask stood. But he could feel Trask’s eyes on his back, burning holes in it.

Curtis pulled a sheet of paper from his pocket, handed it to Ferguson.

“What’s this?” Ferguson asked.

“A receipt, sir,” Curtis answered. “For the coach. To show that I delivered it.”

Ferguson held the paper up to the light as Curtis produced a pencil, held it out for him. Ferguson signed the paper and handed it back to the sergeant.

“That all?” Ferguson asked, anxious to open the coach.

“No, sir.” Curtis pulled an envelope from inside his tunic, handed it to Ferguson. “From the acting commandant.”