“Why’d God invent tumbleweeds?” I asked the Sergeant, trying to make a joke to jolly him out of his sour mood. This was a month after Lem had saved my life and gone back to being my friend. I had to yell my question for the Sergeant and I were sitting up top of a stagecoach tearing down the Butterfield Stage route.
The Sergeant didn’t answer. Just kept on glaring ahead at the team of six stout, barrel-chested sorrels. The sound of hooves pounding, wheels creaking, and wind roaring past filled the silence between us.
He was not happy to be on this run, guarding the stagecoach. And he was really not happy to be squashed in next to me, up top with the driver, Rube Burrow. He’d heard about me and Mary and, apparently, had just added that to my disgusting list of degeneracies.
Me? I was singing with my tail up to be out with the Sergeant for guarding the coaches was a prize assignment. Troopers fought for it. The Sergeant could of easily, and rightfully, claimed the duty for himself whenever he chose. Instead, he passed it among his men as a break from the eternal wood runs and mucking out stables. He’d never picked me to make a run. But yesterday, that changed when Drewbott made a rare appearance at assembly and barked out an order. “Allbright, you will make the stage run tomorrow.”
“Sir, I already have two men detailed for that run,” the Sergeant had answered.
“Allbright, did I not make myself clear?” the colonel demanded. “I said I wanted you to make the run, not a couple of your nappy-haired plantation monkeys.” The colonel had been freer of late with his insults, passing along some of the humiliation that Sheridan continued to deal him, for Drewbott still refused to leave the fort and chase Chewing Bones.
You’d of had to know the Sergeant to notice the tiny quiver in his left nostril that meant he was furious. Drewbott’s insults had worn him so smooth that every one went straight to nerve now. But his lips remained sealed tight.
“I cannot emphasize enough,” Drewbott went on, “how important the run tomorrow is. You will be escorting Miss Regina Armstrong into town.” He paused for a second like he expected the name to cause the Sergeant’s eyes to light up. When they didn’t, he added, “The mayor’s fiancée. Precious cargo, Allbright. Precious cargo, indeed.” He pointed my way and added, “Take the sharpshooter with you.”
“Begging your pardon, sir,” the Sergeant answered. “But I don’t think Cathay is the man for this detail.”
It stung that the Sergeant didn’t even want to be alone with me atop a bucking stagecoach driven by some old whipcracker with tobacco juice leaking out of his mouth.
“Are you questioning my order, Sergeant?” Drewbott had demanded.
“No, sir.”
“Good, because this isn’t your usual run, Allbright. We need the best you’ve got. You shall have the honor of safeguarding the passage of the first decent white woman into these parts.”
“Yessir,” the Sergeant had answered then, his mouth puckered as if he was sucking on a green persimmon. “Quite an honor.”
But the day was so spring beautiful and the joy of escaping the fort to sit next to the Sergeant jouncing across the prairie high up on the back of a fine coach was so keen that my stupid riddle about why God had invented tumbleweeds had just bubbled out. Instead of answering, though, the Sergeant looked at me like I was the most miserable speck of nothing on earth.
Rube the driver, though, he piped up, “Finish your damn joke.” Rube was a scrawny fellow had the look of a jockey been put out to pasture. Or a monkey, for though he had nothing much of a body, the long, ropy arms attached to it became part of his whip when he cracked it.
Though the Sergeant had dampened my joke-telling mood, I finished, “So cowboys’d know which way the wind was blowing.”
Rube whooped with delight for drivers looked down on cowboys same way cowboys looked down on soldiers and white soldiers looked down on black soldiers. Truth of it was, pretty much everyone looked down on black soldiers. Especially the stupidly ungrateful settlers whose towns, ranches, and farms only existed because we were out here guarding them and herding the savages onto reservations.
The joke tickled Rube so much he hee-hawed himself into a coughing fit and had to calm himself with a chaw on his quid of tobacco. Like all coach drivers, Rube loved his plug and had two half-moon curves of brown juice on either side of his mouth, staining his white mustache to prove it.
The Sergeant held his silence, glaring out at the rocky terrain and the billows of white clouds puffing up against a sky as blue as a cornflower like he held a grudge against nice scenery.
“Right pretty day,” I finally ventured.
“Oh, it’s perfect.”
He spit that out with so much vinegar, I had to say, “Sergeant, sometimes you remind me of a man I knew back during the Rebellion. Never satisfied. It’d be raining silver dollars, he’d complain about not having his umbrella.”
At that, he turned to study me straight on. What he saw did not please him. He checked to make sure Rube was occupied in wrangling the team for we were passing over ground so rough that the coach was pitching like a little boat riding out a bad blow. Though there was no chance Rube could hear him, the Sergeant still leaned in and whispered, “I thought you were smart.”
I didn’t know how to answer that and so I did not.
This seemed to make him even sourer than he already was about being forced into my degenerate company and he hissed, “Do you know what we’re carrying back there?” He nodded down at the passengers.
“A drummer, a captain and his wife bound for Fort Bliss, and Miss Regina Armstrong,” I answered, saving for last the name of our “precious cargo,” a beribboned and furbelowed woman well into her spinster years. Though she might have been a bit shopworn, and lightly mustached into the bargain, she carried herself in a fancy, high-nosed way. “And a dozen or so sacks of mail,” I concluded, wondering what the Sergeant’s true purpose was in having me recite an inventory that he knew well.
“We’re carrying,” he said in a low, harsh voice, “the end of the West for black folks.”
“What are you talking—” I started, but he interrupted.
“It is over for us, Cathay. Once their ‘decent white women’ arrive, it is over for the black man.”
“What about the officers’ wives already here? They’re decent enough.”
“They’re army. That’s different. They’re not permanent. They’re not living in town. It’s the towns where the trouble starts.”
“What kind of trouble? We’re Union soldiers, Sergeant. We got the blue suits, the horses, the guns, the whole damn Union Army behind us. We’re safe.”
“That’s what those three black troopers in Fort Hays thought,” the Sergeant said. “Pulled out of a jail cell by a vigilante mob and lynched.”
“But Sergeant,” I said, for I had heard about the Fort Hays incident. “Those troopers shot a civilian to death. Black barber testified he heard them swear they were gon shoot the first white men they came across.”
“Did I say those men were angels?” he asked, hotter than need be. “Am I saying any of us are angels? Not much doubt they did it. Lot of murdering in Hays City. But when it’s whites doing the killing, they don’t get hauled out of the jail and strung up on a railroad trestle way those three black troopers were.”
“Well, that’s Kansas,” I said, feeling that the state was a world away.
The Sergeant snorted out a bitter laugh before he set me straight. “Cathay, open your eyes.” He stabbed a finger at the rocky ground rolling beneath the coach’s high wheels. “This? Where we are right now? This Lone Star State? It’s the most colorphobic of them all. Not enough of the war took place here to beat the fear of federal troopers into these un-Reconstructed Rebs. Didn’t you hear about that civilian over near Fort McKavett who murdered a black private name of Boston Henry? Also shot Corporal Albert Marshall and Private Charles Murray dead when they went to bring him in?”
I shook my head. I hadn’t heard a word even though Fort McKavett was less than three hundred miles away.
“And you know what kind of sentence the jury, the all-white jury, in Austin gave that civilian who laid out three of our men?”
I knew I wasn’t gonna like the answer.
“None. They set that murderer free. Blue suit don’t mean shit when it’s on a black body. Soon as they can, they’ll get rid of all of us.”
“Beg pardon, Sergeant, but that’s crazy. Matanza, none of these little towns could even exist without us. They need us.”
“For what?” he asked. His anger was too hot for him to keep on freezing me out. “Why do they need the black man? To kill the red man so they can steal his land for other white men.”
It knocked me sideways to hear the Sergeant talk this way. “You sound like John Horse. I thought you said he was a traitor.”
“A traitor to who?” the Sergeant asked. “I’ve come to see that the man who is true to his own people is no traitor.” The sourness had peeled away to show a misery beneath that had nothing to do with me. As always, his real friends and enemies were the big ideas battling it out in his head. “Once we do their dirty work, then what?”
“Then we get us some land. We have us our own towns.”
“Do you really think they’re going to let that happen?”
“Sure. Look around.” I waved my hand at the open prairie rolling on forever in all directions. “All this land. Has to be a corner we can tuck ourselves into and have a decent life. Has to be.”
He shook his head, pitying me for my stupidity.
“Sergeant?” I asked, thrown hard by his change of heart. I waited for him to explain, but he just shook his head like the job of setting me straight was too big for him to take on.
Though Matanza was only ten miles from post as the crow flew, the ride took hours for the trail was gullied and, in a couple of spots, we had to climb down and shove away boulders that blocked our way entirely. Through it all, the Sergeant was so lost in whatever big argument was raging in his head that we didn’t exchange another word.
Instead of heading into the stage depot in the center of town, Rube halted at the edge of Matanza where a welcoming committee, led by the mayor, waited. Behind them was a new church. Though it was hardly bigger than an outhouse, it was a church, and I figured that the mayor thought a house of the Lord’d make a better first impression on Miss Regina Armstrong than the saloons and bawdy houses we had to pass to reach the depot.
The handbrake screeched as Burrow set it. The seat bounced beneath us when he hoisted himself down. The mayor, himself no more of a prize than his bewhiskered fiancée, having a pair of hunched vulture shoulders and but a few strands of hair, which required coatings of axle grease to remain plastered across the bald dome of his head, was a perfect match for Miss Regina Armstrong in the fancy airs department. He actually bowed as he held his hand up and helped his fiancée to step out of the coach. Hats swept off the pale, untanned tops of the men’s heads, and they shook the tips of Miss Regina Armstrong’s fingers, welcoming her to their “it’s not much, but we call it home.”
Through it all, the Sergeant, glum as a toad, sat up top with me. Far out on the other side of town, a plume of dust rose high into the still noontime air. I nudged the Sergeant. “Look, the inbound’s coming in from the West.”
The Sergeant and I climbed down off the stage and set out to catch the inbound back to the fort as was the practice on special short runs like this. Soon as our feet touched the ground, though, the dozen or so men in front of the church clustered around Miss Regina Armstrong like she was a sparkling jewel and us a couple of thieves. The mayor, his eyes held tight on us, scurried off to chew Rube’s ear. The Sergeant and I had hardly gone more than a few steps when the driver called after us, “Uh, boys, uh, hold on there. I need to talk to you.”
The Sergeant stopped dead, but he didn’t turn around. He made Rube hustle over to us on his stumpy jockey legs.
“What is it, Rube?” I asked. “We got to get to the depot before the inbound leaves without us.” Though the icy looks being directed our way by the mayor and his cronies chilled the mirth right out of me, I gave a fake chuckle and added, “Long walk back to the fort.”
“Well, now, that’s the thing,” Rube, who stood half a foot beneath me, started off. “The thing is…” He put a hand on the back of his neck where it had to have been prickling, nervous as he suddenly was. “That is … Well, dammit, the mayor thinks it’s time for a change.”
“Change?”
The Sergeant grinned in a mirthless way and looked up at the clear sky like he was reading every word that was to come up there.
“Shitfire, boys,” Rube went on. “Were up to me, wouldn’t be no changes. But that damn mayor … What with ladies coming in and all … Well, the long and the short of it is, he don’t want all y’all on the stage anymore.”
“All us what?” I demanded, commencing to heat up. “All us soldiers of the United States Cavalry?”
“No,” Rube answered, his face pickling up like the words he had to spit out were sour. “Dammit, you know. You Aunt Hagar’s children.”
“Us what?” I asked for I had never heard that one.
“The Affrish,” he muttered. To his credit, Rube was embarrassed, and hurried to explain, “This ain’t my idea, I had no part in it. But, well, fact is, mayor and the sheriff and them”—he pointed a thumb back at the men glaring at us—“they’d prefer it if all y’all’d keep out of town entirely.”
The anger jumped into me so sudden that I yelled at those brave townsmen who’d sent a jockey to do their talking for them, “You want us United States Army soldiers who are out here keeping the Indians from scalping every damn person in this damn town to keep out? Is that what you’re saying!”
The men all started bunching together, putting themselves between us and Miss Regina Armstrong, as if the Sergeant and me were lusting to get at that withered-up hank of mustachioed gristle.
“You got something to tell me,” I hollered. “Step on over here and say it to my face!” They packed in tighter but made no movement in my direction. “Or are you too chickenshit? Makes sense. Bunch of Rebel deserters, appears you’re still too scared to face the United States Army.”
Even as I was stomping it into the dust, I knew that I’d crossed the line. Instant I did, that bunch of fine, upstanding gentlemen protecting their first upstanding white woman turned directly into a lynch mob.
Rube hurried away from us as fast as his stubby legs would allow, clambered back up onto his seat, tossed down his canteen and bedroll, tipped his chin toward the men, and said, “You two best head for the high line, right quick.” He cracked his whip like a clap of thunder and rolled on, leaving nothing except wheel tracks between us and the welcoming committee.
The Sergeant stared straight at the citizens, daring them to come on ahead.
They moved forward.
The instant the danger pointed at the Sergeant, I grabbed hold of his jacket and tried to pull him away, but he didn’t shift.
“Sir,” I pleaded, trusting that he’d do for one of his men what he wouldn’t for himself. “I don’t want to die today.”
He kept staring hate and vengeance at the mayor until I begged him again, my voice cracking for the word “lynch” had bored into my brain. Only then did we start putting distance between ourselves and the cracker assholes of Matanza.