Shaman, p.40
Shaman, page 40
Eli's mouth was drawn hard. It was a hot night, and he wore no jacket, only a plain brown calico work shirt, with a pistol and a knife at his wide brown belt.
"Levi Pope got a letter from his missuz. There was an Injun raid on Victor. You hear anything?" Eli's voice was as flat as the prairie. He sat on Raoul's camp trunk.
"Yes," Raoul said, choking on the single word. "A war party attacked Victoire."
He took a swallow from the jug. A cold, aching space was growing in the pit of his stomach. The whiskey settled in the middle of the ache like a tiny campfire in the middle of a blizzard.
He handed the jug to Eli, and Eli sipped and put the jug back on the table.
"Goddammit, don't just sit there staring at me." Eli displayed his ruined teeth as his lip curled back in a snarl. "What 'n hell happened?"
Raoul picked up the letter in a shaking hand and read aloud—horrible words, written in a flowing black script.
"'It is my sad duty as your sister to send you the news that Clarissa Greenglove and your two sons have perished at the hands of Indians.'"
"Oh, Lord God an' Savior," Eli groaned. His head fell back on his neck, his mouth open. His Adam's apple stuck out.
"'Also that our beloved Victoire has burned to the ground.'"
Raoul went on:
"Clarissa and Andrew and Philip, along with other people who lived at Victoire and in Victor, were murdered on the morning of June seventeenth.
"In your sorrow, may it comfort you to know that your fortified trading post, where we took shelter and defended ourselves, saved the lives of most of us. The cannon that you set in the blockhouse was employed to good effect, even though we hesitated at first to use it, since no one here knew how to fire such a weapon. Nevertheless, fire it we did, and broke the Indians' last charge and drove them off.
"Mr. Burke Russell, whom you placed in charge of the trading post, was killed whilst fighting on the parapet. Mr. David Cooper, whom you also appointed as caretaker, gave us the leadership and strength we badly needed to see us through. He was the only experienced fighting man among us.
"I cannot bear to write more. The sights we saw when we came out of the blockhouse will haunt my dreams forever.
"Though the Indians could not lay hands on our bodies, they destroyed our property. Our house was burned down and our printing press and woodworking machines ruined.
"When it was all over, Frank rode to Galena, though I begged him not to, for fear there were Indians yet lurking about. But he must needs publish his paper. He arranged to have an edition of the Visitor printed on the press of the Galena Miners Gazette, and brought the copies back here on a wagon. I am sending you a copy of the paper under this cover. Frank's account will tell you everything there is to know about the raid, and more perhaps than you would wish to know.
"Our father is well. He and Guichard fought bravely in our defense.
"I do not reproach you. My heart goes out to you, Brother, for I know you must be suffering. Remember that all happens as God ordains. May He grant you peace."
What the hell does she mean, "All happens as God ordains?" God wanted my woman and my kids murdered by Indians?
"Oh, Christ Jesus," Eli said. He shook his head, then resting his elbows on his knees, pressed his hands to the top of his head.
Even Papa had to fight.
Raoul's heart felt bruised, as if beaten with a hammer.
I do not reproach you. That was reproach enough. He had taken every man who would sign up for the militia. He had promised them their wives and children would be safe. He'd led them away in pursuit of Black Hawk, vengeance and glory.
Eli looked up. "What does it say in the newspaper?"
Raoul started to hand it to him.
"You read it to me."
Raoul had forgotten that Eli couldn't read. Clarissa couldn't either. Now she'd never learn. Nor would the boys.
He shook his head and brushed his hand across his forehead. "I can't read this out loud."
Greenglove's eyes were hard as bullets. "You wipe your damned eyes and read that damned newspaper."
Raoul rubbed his eyes and took another pull from the jug. Greenglove held out his hand and Raoul passed him the jug.
Raoul picked up the newspaper, hating the sight of it, and began to read the column headed with the single word, MASSACRE!
Frank's story told how the people in the trading post held the Indians off all day and finally drove them away by firing the cannon. Then came the grievous task of finding and burying those who had not had time to reach safety.
Then, for Raoul, the most dreadful lines of all:
In the ashes of Victoire, it appeared from examination of the charred remains that the skulls of the men and women had been cloven by tomahawk blows. Parts of the children's bodies were scattered about the ruins, as if they had been chopped to bits before the Indians set fire to the great house.
Why hadn't Clarissa gotten away? She'd taken to drinking heavily in the last year, so much so that he'd had to hit her more than once for letting the boys run loose without keeping an eye on them. She had probably been lying abed in a drunken stupor while everyone was fleeing the château, the boys sleeping in the room with her. Hadn't anyone tried to wake them?
Those faithful French servants who loved Elysée and Pierre so much, they didn't give a damn about Raoul's whore and his bastard sons. After all, he had thwarted Pierre's dying wishes. And he had struck his aged father with his fist in front of all those Victoire people.
Still, they'd have been human enough to try to do something. If they'd had time. They'd holler and bang on the door. Try to wake them up. But there wouldn't have been time. A hundred or more Indians galloping down on the château. The servants who saw them coming would barely have time to get away. Some of them hadn't made it. Some of them had died with Clarissa and the boys; maybe the ones who'd stayed behind to try to warn them.
That was how it must have been.
Frank's article in the Visitor said that some of the people in the distant farms had saved themselves by hiding in root cellars or in nearby woods. The Indians were in too much of a hurry to get to Victor to bother searching carefully. One family, the Flemings, had ridden to the shut-down lead mine. Some Indians pursued them to the mine but didn't follow them in. The Flemings hid so deep in the mine they had trouble finding their way out again, but they did survive.
But one person had neither hidden nor been killed:
While the body of the Reverend Philip Hale, D.D., was found in the burnt wreckage of his house, his daughter, Miss Nancy Hale, has not been found. It is feared Miss Hale may have been kidnapped by the Indians. Both the church and the house Reverend Hale built on the prairie were burned down.
As Raoul read aloud the list of the dead, he thought of Nancy and then of his sister Helene. Did they do that to Nancy? The red devils! Probably did. Horrible!
He saw the naked, slashed, violated body lying on the prairie. Nancy Hale's body. Just like Helene's.
But it could be, too, she was alive. And if he kept after Black Hawk, he might be the one to rescue her. There was comfort in that.
A little comfort.
And then a black bile of hatred for himself trickled up into his throat.
Great God in Heaven, this man he was sitting with—he'd had this man's daughter in his bed for six years. And now she was murdered. And already he was figuring how to replace her.
Maybe I am as bad a man as Papa said I was.
That's what Nicole meant by "All happens as God ordains." This was to punish me.
He took a drink to wash that thought away.
He winced when he came to the name Marchette Perrault on the list of dead. Maybe she had died trying to help Clarissa. Did Armand know yet?
Eli stood up. "Well, poor Clarissa. Poor little boys. It was a black day in our lives when Clarissa and me met up with you, Raoul de Marion."
The words tore at a wound that was fresh and bleeding.
"Look here, now, Eli. Don't you know that I feel as bad as you do?"
"No, I don't know that. Clarissa was all I had in the world. I kept hoping you'd find it in your heart to marry her, but you never treated her decent. Never cared enough for them kids to give them your name. Your brother, he did more for that half-Injun son of his than you did for your two that was all white."
All white they were, but half Puke, Raoul thought, feeling his disdain for the man who stood slumped before him.
Puke, a good nickname for Greenglove's breed. Missouri puked up the worst of its people, and they landed in Illinois. Clarissa's breasts flattening and sagging, her shoulders round, her teeth stained by pipe smoke. So slatternly she'd gotten to be, he hardly cared to take her to bed. And Phil and Andy growing up with that same washed-out, weak-boned Greenglove look.
How could I think that way about my own kids? What kind of a man am I? And now they've been murdered, and I'm still despising them.
He had to quit this. He was torturing himself. Wasn't it bad enough? It was the goddamned Indians he should be hating.
"We'll have our revenge, Eli. We'll kill a hundred Indians for each of ours who died."
"Like you murdered them three at Old Man's Creek. I warned you not to do that. That was what got Clarissa and her kids killed. I won't be helping you get your vengeance, Colonel Raoul de Marion. Because if I did stay around you, sooner or later I'd want blood for blood of mine that's been spilled."
Raoul felt a chill, facing Greenglove's implacable, dull-eyed hatred. But he was damned if he'd back down before this human weed.
"You'll leave this company when your term of enlistment is up and not one damned day sooner. You're captain of the Smith County company."
Greenglove's mouth curled in a cold smile.
"By tomorrow there won't be any company. The Smith County boys heard about what happened at Victor. Most of them'll be quitting."
Raoul felt the heat rising in his neck and head.
"The hell they will! My Smith County boys will want Indian blood just like I do. And just like you would if you hadn't taken a notion to blame Clarissa's death on me."
Auguste. The half-breed. Raoul felt his blood boiling as he saw the olive-skinned face mingling Pierre's features with Indian looks. The face he'd never stopped hating from the moment he first saw it. Auguste was dead. Eli, here, had shot him. His body was rotting away somewhere on the prairie behind them.
But the Indians of the British Band were alive—Auguste's people. They snuck up on Victoire, Raoul's home. Burned it to the ground. Tomahawked his woman. Chopped his children, his two boys, Andy and Phil, to pieces.
To pieces.
He saw that, for a moment, too vividly, and almost screamed. He grabbed the jug and burned the bloody picture out of his mind with a swallow.
Auguste's band, skulking around up the river somewhere.
Why, Auguste might have given them the idea. Told them all about Victoire and Victor. Lots of helpless women and children there. A rich trading post. A big white man's house to burn down.
My uncle kicked me off the land, Auguste might have said. Avenge me. Go kill his woman and his children and burn his house down. And while you're at it, kill every one of those white dogs in Smith County.
Sure, he probably put the idea in those devils' heads before he got shot.
It hadn't been enough to kill Auguste. Wasn't enough.
He had to kill off every last one of Black Hawk's Indians. Exterminate the whole band—bucks, squaws and papooses.
And he would shoot any shirker who refused to go with him.
Greenglove shrugged. "Go chase Injuns, then, if that's your heart's desire." Then he smiled in a knowing way Raoul found strangely disturbing. "But you'll maybe find a surprise waiting for you up there in Michigan Territory. Almost makes me want to stay with you, just so's I could see the look on your face."
Raoul felt a chill. Why the hell was Greenglove grinning like that?
"Damn you, you can't just walk off, Eli! You took an oath. You signed up for another thirty days when your enlistment was up in May. I can have you shot for desertion."
"Go ahead. Shoot me yourself."
Eli slowly raised the tent flap and stood there a moment, turning to give Raoul one last, strange, unmirthful smile. Raoul eyed the pistol at Eli's belt. Most likely all primed and loaded. His own pistol, unloaded, was hanging from a tent pole behind him.
If I went for my pistol, that'd give him an excuse to put a ball in me. And he'd do it before I could even get a damned cap in place.
Eli gave Raoul one final nod, as if he knew what Raoul had been thinking, and let the tent flap fall behind him.
Raoul reached for the jug. It felt light in his hand, and he shook it. Empty.
Everything. Empty, empty, empty!
He got up, weaving slightly, and walked to the opening of the tent.
"Armand!" he shouted.
Oh my God, now I'll have to give Armand the news about Marchette.
* * *
Raoul awakened, sweating. One side of his tent was glowing white, the sun beating down on it; he had been sleeping in an oven. He sat up, and his vision went black and his head spun. He swung his feet, still in dirty gray stockings, over the side of his cot. He nearly stepped on Armand, who was lying flat on his back on the straw-covered floor, his beard fluttering as he snored through his open mouth.
Standing, Raoul saw Nicole's letter and the Victor Visitor lying on his camp table beside a burned-down candle and four empty jugs. He remembered what had happened at Victor. He fell back onto his cot and pounded his fist on his chest, trying to numb the pain in his heart.
God damn the Sauk! Damn them! Damn them!
Armand, when he learned what happened at Victoire, had not blamed Raoul as Eli had. He'd wept over Marchette—whom he'd beaten almost daily when she was alive—and had sworn vengeance on her murderers, the British Band. And he had sat with Raoul till both of them were drunk enough to sleep.
Raoul's head and body felt as if they were on fire. His fingers curled, grasping at empty air.
He buckled on his belt with his pistol and his Bowie knife, stumbled out of his tent and stood beside it, pissing in the tall grass.
He was facing the Rock River, less than a quarter-mile wide here, a sheet of sparkling blue water bordered by forest. Lined up along the bank before him were a dozen big box-shaped flatboats. The tents of his own militia battalion and of two others were spread over the grassland around him.
He suddenly sensed that something was wrong. He hadn't heard the bugler blow the dozen notes signaling the start of the day. He saw now that the men weren't assembled but were wandering aimlessly about the camp.
What the hell was it Greenglove had said?
By tomorrow there won't be any company.
Down near the flatboats a big crowd was gathered. One man, standing on a barrel, was addressing them. His voice, shrill and insistent, carried to Raoul on the warm June air, but he couldn't make out what the man was saying.
Raoul didn't like this. He didn't like this at all.
He started walking toward the river and found Levi Pope and Hodge Hode squatting in front of a fire, making coffee simply by boiling water with coffee grounds in it.
"Sorry for your loss, Colonel," said Pope.
Hearing Pope speak of what happened at Victoire was like being kicked in a spot that was already bruised. Raoul had to pause a moment before he could speak.
"Thank you. Your family come through all right?" He dreaded what he might hear in answer.
"Your sister wrote a letter for my missuz," Pope said. "They came through tolerably. Thanks to the way you fortified the trading post. That was mighty foresighted, Colonel."
Raoul's chest expanded and he felt a little better. This was how he'd hoped the men would react, not blaming him for the tragedy as that bastard Greenglove had.
"Levi's letter told as how my boy Josiah made it to the trading post too," Hodge said. "Mr. Cooper even let him do some shootin' at the redskins."
Mr. Cooper? Since when did David Cooper get to be so high and mighty?
"I need some of that coffee," Raoul said. Hodge strained the grounds out of the coffee by pouring it through a kerchief into a tin cup and handed the cup to Raoul.
The black liquid scalded Raoul's lips and tongue, and didn't treat him any better when it bit into his whiskey-burned stomach.
