Wager. Wager. Wager. Wager.
Only in the dark of the barracks when all around me were calling out in their sleep for their beloveds could I allow his name back into my head. And then only to heft it for the weight of the hope and the worry it brought and to calculate if I could bear either for another day. Another day that would bring me one step closer to finishing out my hitch, getting that pension, having a life with my all in all.
In July news came that helped knock my worries aside: Chewing Bones and his band had left the reservation and were raiding and massacring again. The news and rumors flew so thick and heavy that it was impossible to tell what was true. If I was to believe every tale of atrocity told in the barracks after lights out, I’d of had to give Chewing Bones credit for more devastation than what was wreaked upon the entire Shenandoah Valley by Sheridan and the Union Army.
Every night the rumors got more gruesome. Like the settler who was clubbed in the back of the head as he tried to run away then had his scalp lifted. And would of lived except that screw worms burrowed into his bald skull and ate his brain.
“Mutilation” was everything the savages did beyond the regular scalping and porcupining someone with arrows. The strikers brought the best stories back. With a fiendish glee that came straight from the officers’ dinner tables, we heard of the renegades chopping off fingers, hands, ears, eyelids, entire human hides. Chewing Bones himself was said to have hacked one fellow’s heart right out of his chest, leaving him alive long enough to see it give its final beat. Stories of such butchery, however, were always just a warm-up for the accounts of the ultimate outrage: when a man got his parts chopped off. In the mathematics of the barracks parts getting chopped off equaled up to a couple dozen killings by any other means.
And then there were the endless kidnappings and violations of “innocent white women and girls.” The nastiest stories always came by way of the colonel and his wife. They told of brave pioneer wives being hauled out of their cabins by the hair for all the braves to have a go at. Then they’d stake the white woman out in the sun with her eyelids cut off. The braves’d kidnap whatever girls were of age, or close to, to take back to their squalid teepees and use at their leisure. Or to let their women henpeck to death. Or, ransom back to the whites. Usually via a gang of comancheros who’d also use her in highly imaginative ways.
I’d heard variations on this tale so many times, I stopped paying attention until, one night, Vikers said, “The worst depravity has to be what happened to a young girl by the name of Matilda Lockhart who was carried off by the Comanche to the Guadalupe Mountain. She wasn’t but thirteen years old, though already well developed with a fine, high bust.”
Fine, high bust. Vikers played the barracks boys like a fiddle.
“The savages held her captive for two years. Every one of those lustful heathens used that little girl in the most despicable of ways.”
In the dark, I made a sour face thinking of how, night after endless night, they did nothing but brag on the despicable ways that they themselves used women.
“But the squaws,” Vikers droned on. “Those redskin squaws were even worse. They beat little Matilda constantly. Even when she tried to sleep they’d torture her. Many a time they woke her by pressing a hot coal against her tender flesh. Especially her nose.
“When her family got her back after two years, her nose was burned down to the stump. She was so utterly degraded by those beasts that she couldn’t hold her head up again in civilized society and died two years later.”
I could of let this story go, should of let this story go for my own good, but Vikers had whipped even the Georgia boys up.
“Animals,” Tea Cake said, genuinely outraged.
“Rabid animals,” Ivory added. “Need to put them down like mad dogs.”
“First redskin I get my hands on,” Baby King swore, “I’ma burn his nose off, you just see if I don’t.”
The frenzy kept building until I had to point out, “You all know that this happened back in eighteen and forty, don’t you? This Matilda Lockhart y’all so het up about’s been dead now lot longer than she was ever alive, and yet she’s still got the U.S. Army and every settler ever headed west slaughtering Indians for her. And one other thing. It was the Comanche took her. Chewing Bones’s pack is Apache.”
“So what?” Greene said. “They’re all bad.”
“Eighteen and forty?” Tea Cake asked. “That true, Vikers?”
Vikers gathered himself up and came back, “I doubt that one true thing’s ever come out of Stanky’s lying mouth.”
“Yeah,” Caldwell said, “he got too many other things stuffed all up in there.”
Oh, they howled and slapped their thighs at that reminder of the unnatural acts I was supposed to be getting up to. When the cackling subsided, Lem spoke up and said, “Cathay’s right, I been hearing ’bout this burnt-nose white girl since I signed on. Seems a world of heathens been shot up, burned out, and starved on account of her. Now here we are gettin’ riled up all over again over little Matilda been dead longer than I been alive. It sets me to wondering. Makes me to ask y’all a question. Didn’t none of y’all never see a master do near as bad or worse to one of our girls? Back where I come from, they got used any way Master saw fit. And weren’t never no army riding out to venge those sweet baby girls.”
I remembered then. It was an afternoon in late fall when gray clouds hung low and a chilly wind sliced across the yard, blowing bits of dried tobacco leaves and twine left over from tying up the bundles. I was working beside Mama that day. We were all out, rechinking the oldest curing barn on the place, and our hands and arms were white and whiskered up to the elbow from the ash and hog bristles mixed into the mortar we’d been daubing onto the chinks.
Across the yard, Clemmie was on the porch, sweeping the stairs. As she stepped down onto the bottom one, the sun cut through a slit in the clouds and shone directly on her. She was waving at us, smiling, when Old Mister came out of the house and put his hand on her shoulder. Instant he touched her, the smile dropped from my little sister’s face. He turned her around, led her back into the house, and shut the door behind them.
I saw it again, Old Mister’s hand on my little sister’s shoulder, guiding her up the steps, into the house, into his bedroom, and the rage roaring through me melted and ran out my eyes.
Tea Cake noticed and nudged Ivory. I lowered my head and waited for the bullyragging to commence. But it didn’t. Instead, I heard them whisper, “Cat-hauled,” to one another like that explained everything.
Late that night, when I couldn’t sleep, I went to the window and stared out across the drill field to Wager’s quarters where his lantern shone behind the drawn curtains. I was feeling so low and mournful that I didn’t even care who might see me mooning there. Let them take me for a sodomite, I thought. It’d be worth it for just a glimpse of his shadow passing behind the curtains.
I held my post until day broke.