Chapter Thirty-Four

The weather remained remarkably good, with only an occasional spitting of snow mixed with alternating sunshine and clouds. Cole stopped by Dr. Jellicoe’s yellow clapboard house in a little settlement halfway up a valley surrounded by craggy snow-covered slopes. The doctor’s was the only house that wasn’t built of logs and you could spot the yellow paint from a half mile off. Mattie had given Cole directions and had told him about Dr. Jellicoe’s penchant for the unusual when it came to paint. The air over the valley was smudged with wood smoke drifting out of blue metal stovepipes poking through the shake roofs. Except for the occasional bark of a hound too lazy or cold to show itself, the valley was as peaceful as a graveyard.

Cole knocked on the door of Dr. Jellicoe’s place and stamped the snow off his boots while he waited for someone to answer. In a few seconds the door opened and there was Jellicoe, his walrus mustaches hiding most of his mouth, his eyes rimmed red. Cole could smell the liquor on his breath; it came out warm and sour when he spoke.

“I know you from somewhere?” He squinted at Cole as though he were trying to see him through the bottom of a whiskey glass.

“You dug a bullet out of my side back at Mattie Blaylock’s,” Cole said.

Then the knots of uncertainty fell out of his lumpy face and his big shaggy mustaches lifted in a lippy grin. “Oh, yeah,” he said, “that’s right. Looks like you lived in spite of my operation.”

Cole could hear the phlegm rattle around in his throat as he laughed at his own sense of humor. “So far I’m still walking around, as you can see. You mind if I step in for a minute?”

“No, come right ahead. Mattie come with you?”

“No. Matter of fact, that’s the reason I stopped. I’d like you to check on her in a few days.”

“She ailing?”

“No. She’s fine. It’s just that I’m on my way to Cheyenne and she and the girl are out there all alone.”

“You mean that little tan child?”

“Yes.”

“Where’s the big colored fellow, that friend of hers?”

“He’s laid out on Mattie’s roof.”

“Roof! What’s he doing up on the roof?”

“He was shot and killed.”

“How’d that happen? You shoot him, did you?”

“No, another black man named Kimbo Luke shot him.”

“He seemed like an all right fellow to me. Why’d this Luke shoot him?”

“It’s a long story, one I don’t have time or inclination to go into.”

“I still don’t understand him being on the roof.”

“It was the only way we could make sure the bodies didn’t get molested by wolves.”

“Bodies? There’s more than one?”

“Kimbo Luke’s laid out on the roof, too.”

“Sounds like I left from out there just in time,” Jellicoe said. “Who knows, if I had stayed the night, I might be on the roof along with them other fellows.”

“So, you’ll make it a point to go out and check on Mattie and the girl in a few days?”

He nodded.

“One more thing,” Cole said. “If there’s someone around here who has a wagon, maybe they could go out and bring in the bodies. Mattie doesn’t much care for having dead men on her roof.”

“Don’t blame her. That’s an awful thing to have on your roof, corpses are.”

“Thanks for everything, Doc. I promised Mattie I’d stop back this way. I’ll bring you the ten dollars I owe you for the care.”

He looked skeptical but offered his hand and told Cole to keep an eye on the wound in case it got infected again.

Cole camped that night by a little stream where the water shimmered with blackness against snowy banks. He boiled water and threw in a pinch of coffee from the sack of chuck Mattie had fixed him and cut a slice of dried beef and put it between some crackers. Afterward, he smoked a shuck and drank the rest of the coffee as he sat, cross-legged, on his soogans and listened to the deep silence. The night was black with stars and the moon still had a circle around it. Then from nowhere, he heard the long, mournful call of a gray wolf just as he tossed out the dregs of his coffee and stubbed his smoke. The wolf sounded as lonely as Cole felt.

Cole hoped to make Cheyenne in two or three days of steady riding. He wished then, that Mattie would have thought to slip a pint of mash whiskey in the gunny sack to help ward off the cold and silence, but wishing didn’t make it so. He didn’t much miss liquor, but there were times when he did, and this was one of them. Wind swept down from the Blue Mountains and he didn’t get a lot of sleep that night what with thinking of the coming days. He kept his head on his saddle and his feet toward the fire and managed as best he could.

The next day dawned bright and clear and he rose early. His back and legs felt stiff enough to break if he moved too quickly. He didn’t bother with breakfast.

Late that afternoon, he came to a settlement of sorts. It was just a few homesteads, four or five little log structures. A man was chopping wood out in front of one of the homesteads. He looked up as Cole checked the reins of the bird. He was solidly built with a face full of burnished whiskers.

“Is there a place here I could get a meal?” Cole inquired.

“Depends,” the man said. He had the heavy drawl of a Southerner.

“Depends on what?”

The man looked at Cole, the speckled bird, the trappings. Then his gaze drifted to the stock of the Winchester and back up to Cole. “You a lawman?”

“Would it make a difference if I was?” Cole asked. “About getting a meal?”

The man’s tongue came out and licked at his lips, the moisture freezing on the tips of his wiry beard. “Step on down,” he said.

Cole followed him inside the log hut. A woman sat nursing a baby in one corner of the room. She looked up when they entered but made no attempt at covering her breast. The baby had a pale head with veins as blue as ink. The infant made a sucking sound, then sighed, then started nursing again.

“Maylou, man here lookin’ fer a meal.”

She was as pale as the infant, like neither of them had ever seen sunshine. She had a thin face, high cheek bones, and hollow eyes, like the infant had sucked most the life out of her. “There’s beans,” she said. “That’s it. Just that pot of beans. Got a little sow belly in it.”

“Look,” Cole said, “I don’t have any money, but I have a good watch I’ll give you. Maybe it would fetch three or four dollars from someone that needs a good watch.” He reached into his pocket and took out the Ingersoll and laid it on the table. He’d bought that watch in Laredo from a man with a clubfoot who was selling them on a street corner one summer afternoon. It kept better time than half the railroads.

Neither one of them said anything. The man took a plate down from a plank shelf and ladled out some beans from the kettle hanging in the fireplace. He set the plate down next to the watch. Then he picked up the watch and examined it.

“Say it keeps good time, does it?”

Cole nodded. The beans had little taste, but they were hot and warmed his belly and that’s about all he could ask for. He didn’t encourage conversation, concentrating instead on the plate of beans, figuring to eat and get on his way.

The man said: “That a Colt pistol you’re wearin’?”

“Remington,” Cole said. “Forty-Four-Forty center-fire. Self-cocker.”

“Had me a good pistol once. Big Navy. Thirty-Six caliber. Had pearl grips.”

“You in the war?” Cole asked. “That where you come by the Navy?”

“Rode under Mosby,” he said. “Some of us had Navies. Cap and ball models. I ended up having to trade mine after the war for a mule to plow my ground with. The mule died before I could plant. Ever’thing went plum to hell the day that war ended. I wish now I’d never traded my pistol for that mule.”

“It was a hard war in lots of ways,” Cole said.

“You don’t sound like you fought for the gray,” he said. “The way you talk, I mean.”

“I didn’t.”

Something bitter and hurtful flashed in his eyes like he had suddenly opened up a drawer filled with tintypes of dead loved ones. Then he snorted and said: “I shot a lot of you Yankees in that war with that Navy of mine. I’d still be shootin’ Yanks if Marse Lee hadn’t turned over his sword to that little hide tanner, Grant.”

“Yeah, well,” Cole said, “I guess that war’s been over a long time.”

He grunted. “Some of us is still havin’ to live with it.”

Cole knew what he meant.

“You want another plate of beans?”

Cole nodded. His belly had been scraping his backbone all day. The woman was watching him. Her hair was the color of dusty wheat, long and stringy and uncombed.

“That pistol,” the man said, setting the plate of beans in front of Cole. “You be willin’ to trade it?”

“No.”

“You ain’t heard what it is I got to trade fer it,” he said.

“I have need of my gun, mister. It’s not for trade.”

He swallowed. Cole could see the fever of excitement burning in his gaze. “Trade you a turn with Maylou for that pistol,” he offered, his voice hoarse. He wiped a knuckle under the tip of his nose.

“Like I said, the pistol’s not for trade.”

He jerked his head around, glanced at the woman. She simply stared back.

“How ’bout whiskey, then?” he said. “You got a jug in your saddle pockets? I’d trade you a turn with her for a jug.”

“No whiskey,” Cole said, feeling a knot form in his stomach. “You make it a habit of trading your wife to strangers for pistols and whiskey?”

“She ain’t my wife,” he said. “Sister-in-law. Least she was till my brother died. Hit hisself in the leg with a axe choppin’ firewood. Gangrene set in. Died from it. Left her with a belly full of kid. Took her in is what I done. She needs to earn her keep same as the rest of us. Hard fact, but that’s the way things is out here.”

“That war must have done something to you it didn’t do to the rest of us,” Cole said.

His brows knitted. “You was a Yank,” he said. “How would you know what that war did to us who lost?”

“I wouldn’t,” Cole said. “But don’t insult me again.”

“You ain’t invited here no more!” he flared.

Cole laid the fork down and stood up. The woman continued to stare. The infant at her breast had fallen asleep, its head tilted to the side, the small lips pursed. A pearl of milk lay in the corner of its mouth. It didn’t look like it would survive the winter. Maybe in that way, Cole thought, it was lucky.

He still had two days of riding ahead of him before he reached Cheyenne. There wasn’t much he could say or do to a man who had lost everything in the war including his soul. The woman would have to figure it out at some point and make her own decision. The Rebel had been right about something. It was a hard life.

Cole mounted the bird. The saddle leather creaked from the cold.

The man said: “Don’t come back ’round here, mister!”

Cole touched his spurs to the bird. The sooner he got to Cheyenne and finished his business with Bill Longly, the better.