Chapter 12

 

A day and a half’s riding brought us back to Green Springs. As we approached One Leg’s cabin, Grey Fox came outside as if she had been expecting us. From a distance I saw her body language change as she realized there were three horses and only two riders. I saw her reach out for support, not looking, not realizing that there was nothing to hold onto. She fell, crumpling to the ground. I saw her punch the earth several times, and even though we were still a distance away I heard her wailing.

 

Grey Fox said, ‘It was the war dance. As soon as he’d performed it and looked at the smoke, he knew something was wrong. He told me he had to follow you. I said “How? You can’t even get on a horse any more.” But he could. The needles had made him feel young again.’ She looked at us and she smiled. ‘You two were fast asleep but we had a good night, that night. After the needles.’

I looked at Jia, and there was such knowledge in our eyes too.

I glanced at the third horse. One Leg’s body was still tied across the saddle. ‘I’m so sorry,’ I said.

Grey Fox looked at her husband’s body, too. ‘Don’t be.’ She turned back to me. ‘He hated not being a warrior any more. This is the way he would have wanted to go. I expected it.’

‘What will you do?’ Jia asked.

‘I will take him home,’ she said. ‘To his people.’

‘And you?’

‘They’re my people, too. Even though they weren’t happy with him marrying me. They said no good would come of it.’

‘He saved our lives,’ I said.

‘I’m not sure that some of his people will see that as good. I’m sorry to say it.’

‘It’s OK,’ Jia said.

Grey Fox looked over at the horses again. She walked towards them, to her husband’s body. Jia and I followed, but we allowed Grey Fox space. She reached out and touched One Leg.

She turned. ‘You know he had to fight to win me?’

I shook my head.

‘I’m young, yes?’

‘Yes.’

‘And he was old and they – none of them – were happy. There was a young one. His name was Wohali – White Eagle. He was handsome and he was strong and there was a lot to be happy about with a man – a boy – like that.’

She turned again to her husband’s body and touched his leg gently.

‘This one was old, then,’ she said, looking at us again but leaving her hand on One Leg. ‘And I knew there was no future. But sometimes . . . well, sometimes it feels like destiny was calling us. He had no money and he was most probably too old for children. But there was something in his eyes and there was something in the way he was with the old and the young, with everyone really. He had been a warrior and there weren’t so many of those anymore.’

Tears formed in her eyes.

‘And he fought Wohali?’ Jia asked.

Grey Fox looked at her. ‘Yes. I don’t think it really was a fight to the death, but that’s what they said beforehand. I felt sure I would end up with Wohali, and that wouldn’t have been bad. In many ways it would have been good. But inside. Here. . . .’ She thumped a fist against her breast. ‘I knew that I felt more for Tawodi. Before the fight started I was already sad for my loss.’

She looked back at One Leg again. ‘It’s how I feel again now.’

The tears spilled from her eyes.

‘Wohali – all of them – should have known that Tawodi had learned and forgotten more about fighting than the youngsters would ever know. They don’t fight any more, do they? They – we – have had the fight beaten from us. But not Tawodi.’ Grey Fox smiled at the memory. ‘He fought hard and fair. His legs might have been slow but his hands were fast and he could read Wohali’s mind, or so it seemed. They had knives and though Wohali cut Tawodi a few times, every time he did so, Tawodi cut him twice, maybe three times. And deeper, too.’

I thought of One Leg watching the bird fight just a few days before. It had seemed terribly cruel and pointless to me, but now I understood why One Leg might like it so much.

‘Eventually Wohali tripped. I think he was tiring, and Tawodi never tired.’

Now Grey Fox looked at Jia and smiled the same smile as she’d done when mentioning the results of the needles a few minutes earlier.

Jia smiled back. ‘A man that doesn’t tire is a good man.’

Grey Fox held Jia’s gaze for a moment. Then she wiped her cheeks with the back of her hand and said, ‘Tawodi could have killed him, but he didn’t. He stepped back and he held out his hand and he pulled Wohali to his feet. I suspect Wohali wished he had been killed. It was a shameful defeat. But then maybe not. Tawodi was . . . special.’

‘He certainly was,’ I said. ‘I will never forget him.’

‘No,’ Grey Fox said. ‘Please don’t. As long as someone remembers him, as long as someone speaks his name, then he is still alive somewhere.’

 

We were exhausted, as were the horses. After leaving Grey Fox – gracefully turning down her offer of a place to sleep for the night – we made it only as far as the Silver Spur. We needed food and clothes and to clean and dress my wound properly. We both wanted to wash the smoke from our bodies. But there was an echo of something Moose Schmidt had said still bouncing around inside my head.

‘He said he was going to St Mary’s Gap,’ I said to Jia. ‘To see my mother.’

I was drinking whiskey. Jia said she’d try a whiskey, too. It made her cough. But after we’d both finished the first one she’d been happy to have another. I think it surprised her how good it made her feel.

‘It was just talk.’

‘We don’t know that.’

‘He thought we were going to die. He was enjoying the moment. He wanted to make it even worse for us than it was. That’s what he does. He enjoys it the worse it is.’

‘I don’t know.’

‘And anyway. . . .’

‘What?’

‘He might be dead. One Leg said. . . .’ She let the words tail off. We had both heard One Leg’s last words. But had they simply been words of reassurance, rather than fact?

It had been impossible to see anything once we had burst from the house. The thick smoke had been billowing around the doorway and the flames had been like a wall. But One Leg had been there calmly steadying himself and shooting at something.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘He might be dead. But he might not be.’

‘We need a night,’ Jia said. ‘The horses need a night.’

I drank my whiskey.

‘Anyway, St Mary’s Gap is not like here,’ she said. ‘It’s not like Mustang. It’s . . . civilised. Your mother isn’t alone.’

‘Another whiskey?’ I asked.

‘Are we staying?’

‘One night,’ I said.

‘Then I’ll have another whiskey,’ Jia said.

 

We shared a room, and we shared a bed, but we didn’t make love. It was partly exhaustion and partly drunkenness. But it was also that One Leg was dead, and although that fact had helped ignite our passion the previous night, when our bodies and our minds had needed a release from the emotions of events, tonight the fact made us melancholy and respectful.

So we slept, and in the morning we ate breakfast, and we took our leave of Green Springs, and we headed home.

 

As we rode I told Jia the details of my father’s death. She knew some of it, but I filled in the gaps. I told her of how Schmidt had tricked my father and then used his own son as a shield from behind which to shoot. I told her of how I’d seen One Leg at death’s door all those years ago, and of how it had seemed to me at the time he’d been fighting so hard to stay alive.

‘Sometimes I wonder if it isn’t all ordained,’ I said. ‘Destiny. Like Grey Fox and One Leg.’

‘I think so, too.’ Jia looked around as we rode, at the distant horizon, the vastness of the landscape, the stunted and dead trees, the dryness of everything. Eventually her eyes landed on me. She smiled and said, ‘Yuánfèn.’

Her smile looked sad to me. I could understand that. Inside I was sad, too, and I’m sure I looked that way on the outside. I could still picture the tears on Grey Fox’s cheeks.

‘Yuánfèn?’ I said.

‘Fate,’ she said. ‘It was yuánfèn that we found each other.’

But I knew that it wasn’t quite like that. We hadn’t casually chanced upon each other.

‘You found me,’ I said, and she nodded as if the real meaning of yuánfèn was indeed something else.

Much later we came upon the old surveyors’ huts again. We could have pushed on to St Mary’s Gap but we were tired, and the darkness pressed heavily upon us. It was cold, too, and the horses were exhausted even though we had ridden slowly. My leg was hurting and we were both hungry.

The huts looked inviting enough that we stayed. We made a fire and we cooked the food we had bought in Green Springs and we boiled water and drank tea. Jia cleaned my bullet wound again, and though it was still painful, there was no sign of any infection. The bullet had gone through flesh and muscle, tearing me up a little, but not hitting and smashing any bones.

We lay our blankets on the floor of one of the huts, and the moon, just beyond full, cast a silver light across those blankets. Outside, we had talked a lot, but now we were quiet. My arm was around Jia and her head was resting on my chest. I could hear the slowness of her breathing. My heartbeat seemed to adjust itself to match with her rhythms. I kissed her hair and she murmured something. Her hand was resting on my stomach and she slipped it beneath my undershirt and laid it on my skin. She moved her fingers gently and I felt our matched rhythms started to change. She turned her head upwards and in that silver moonlight she was beautiful and young, flawless and yet somehow so heart-breakingly sad. We kissed and her lips were soft and moist and her hand pressed harder against me.

It was the most natural thing in the world to make love. It was different to the first time. Then it had been an affirmation that we were still alive. It had been a release from the fear and the closeness of death, both our own and One Leg’s. This time it was much more about each other, about knowing each other, discovering each other. We weren’t shy and we weren’t rushed and it was the most physically wonderful thing that had happened to me in my life. But underneath it all, even as it felt as good as I could imagine anything in this world could ever feel – and I knew Jia was experiencing that wonder, too – there was something else.

It felt like the end of something, not the beginning.

We had known each other for less than a week, although unbeknownst to us our lives had been entwined long before that, through Moose Schmidt. But in that week we had lived a lifetime, a whole story, and this moment, making love, with the moonlight casting a silver sheet over us, felt like the culmination of all that had gone before. It felt like the end of the story, and that was why it was so powerful, and so good. The sadness would come later.

Afterwards we lay in each other’s arms and a while later I felt Jia drift on into sleep. The moonlight shifted across our bodies and worked its way very slowly over the floor of the hut.

I closed my eyes, not worrying about sleep. Sleep would come or it wouldn’t. I was happy in the moment, although somewhere inside I was anxious, too. Anxious about what Moose Schmidt had said when he thought we were going to die. The more I thought about it, the more I felt Jia was right – it had simply been Schmidt enjoying some extra cruelty, trying to eke every last ounce of suffering from the trap he had led us into. I thought of One Leg, too. He believed he may have killed Schmidt. One Leg had already taken on a kind of supernatural status in my and Jia’s minds. We had spoken about him outside earlier. The way he had lived for so long after taking a bullet that would have killed most men – any man – instantly. The way he had been able to ride a horse so easily again after not being able to ride for years – although I insisted that was down to Jia and her needles, not to some mystical Indian ability. Then there was the smoke he had raised during his war dance. It had told him something and that something had been the truth. If a man like that believed he had killed Moose, then surely he had? Although the more I thought about it, the more I thought that if that been the case then wouldn’t One Leg’s last words have been more definitive?

So I was a little anxious, but the wonder of my time with Jia over-rode it all.

Then something made me open my eyes, and as they adjusted to the darkness, I saw a face looking in the hut window.

 

It took me a moment or two to realize what I was seeing. By the time the image made sense, the face was gone. It had been a man, a young man, I was sure of that, even though the face had been silhouetted. Had he seen us? He must have done, although the beam of moonlight had cycled across the hut floor and was no longer resting on Jia and me.

I wanted to jump up and rush outside, but I was naked. My gun was somewhere on the floor.

It took me a minute to slip out of Jia’s arms without waking her, to pull on my breeches, grab my gun, and get outside. The door hinges squeaked and I glanced back but Jia never woke.

There was no one within the square made by the huts.

I ran around to the back of the hut where the window was, ratcheting the hammer of my gun with my thumb as I went. Stones cut into the soles of my bare feet. The cold night air raised goose bumps on my naked chest.

There was no one there.

I moved left and right, looking at the angles beyond the huts. No one.

However, it seemed to me that there was dust hanging in the still air, just about visible in the moonlight, raised by something or someone that had passed through. It may, of course, have been my own feet kicking up that dust. Or it may have been imagination.

But there was something else, too.

A smell of smoke. The same smell of smoke that had permeated my hair and my skin and my clothes until I had cleaned up in Green Springs.

The smell hung in the air, very faint, but very real.

I wondered, for a brief moment, if it had been One Leg. Maybe he was still looking over us and his very soul was forever tainted with smoke.

But no, such thoughts were just a reaction to the conversation that Jia and I had had earlier, when we had made One Leg out to be some kind of mystic.

This smoke was real.

I walked to the edge of the huts and looked out towards the south where we were heading. There were low hills and distant rises. There were silhouettes of trees and the sky was heavy with clouds that took just that moment to obscure the moon. I couldn’t see anyone.

It didn’t mean they weren’t there.

I circled the camp and looked in all directions.

No one.

By the time I got back to our hut the smell of smoke had vanished from the air, carried away by the cool night breeze. If, I thought, it had ever been there.

But I didn’t get to sleep that night.