After a long ride, we reached a meadowland bursting with wildflowers. A creek cut crooked through it. I turned and asked Lem, who was riding beside me, “Have you ever seen such pretty country?”
Lem answered that he never had and started singing the song we’d learned back in Hempstead. I joined in, and we sang it the way that made sense for Lem.
Oh his eyes are bright as diamonds,
And sparkle like the dew.
You may talk about your Dearest Joe,
And sing of Johnny Lee,
But my brave man of Texas
Beats the beaux of Tennessee.
We were laughing at singing out his secret when I heard someone shushing me and remembered that I was in church and the white folks’ preacher was yelling Bible verses at us. “Slaves are to be submissive to their own masters in everything; they are to be well pleasing, not argumentative, not pilfering, but showing all good faith, so that in everything they may adorn the doctrine of God our Savior.”
Old Miss and Old Mister sat on either side of the preacher nodding. My heart thundered for I was a captive again. Heat poured over me as I was in hell and had never escaped.
“Cathy, wake up. Cathy.”
I came to my senses and remembered. First about Lem, then about my feet, the pain in my body mixing with the pain in my heart to bring me so low that I couldn’t tell which hurt the most. We were riding back to camp, back to Wager’s men, with only one canteen, and I didn’t have the energy or wit to fight that bad decision. It took all I had to stay mounted, for hot pain was creeping up from my feet, through my legs, and into every bone in my body. And then the pain stopped until I came to with Wager holding me.
“You’re sick, Cathy,” he whispered. “You have to rest.”
We stopped atop a high mesa where we could see for three hundred and sixty degrees in all directions. Wager scanned behind us with his spyglass for Indian pursuers, but didn’t see so much as a puff of dust. We rested in the dappled shade thrown by a couple of mesquites. He unwrapped my feet and cursed the festering mess he found. Both feet had swollen until the skin was tight and pus spilled from the cactus cuts and mesquite thorn punctures. They were useless for standing or walking.
He felt of my head. “You’ve got fever. Do your bones ache?”
I nodded.
“Infection.” He used too much of what water we had for wetting down the wrappings. I tried to stop him, told him to save every drop. But he shushed me and put all the salt we had left on the wet wrappings to help draw out the poison.
When I had been tended to, he staked our horses out to graze. We still had my brown and Wager’s horse, a mare he called Belle.
Wager sat with me atop the ridge where we caught the breezes that swept up from the valley below. He pointed out how the land was starting to slope down toward the Rio Grande. I leaned against him and he put his arm around my shoulders. I closed my eyes and the visions started right up again. Solomon, Mama, Iyaiya, Old Mister with his black hand, all the wounded boys lying beneath their Dying Tree, noble King Ghezo and crazy King Andandozan with his hyenas, they all returned.
I don’t know how much time had passed when Wager tensed beside me and I jerked awake. He sprang to his feet and squinted at the horizon. I tried to see what had riled him, but nothing appeared. He grabbed the spyglass from his saddlebag, fit it to his eye, and announced, “A rescue squad. Cathy, they’re coming for us.” He handed me the glass.
I twisted the focus ring on the glass and a fresh troop of soldiers jumped into my vision. Leading them was John Horse, who must of seen the way of things and gone for help when him and his men’d skinned out the night Drewbott took them into custody. And now he was leading the soldiers first to water, then to us. Tender green shoots of hope sprouted in me. With John Horse there to tell the true story, we’d be safe.
Excited, Wager said, “If we leave now, we can intercept them before dark. We’ll get fresh mounts and you and I can ride back to the men with what water we have, while this detachment goes to the spring to fetch more, and,” he added, “to retrieve Lem’s body.”
I couldn’t take the glass from my eye and was staring at our deliverance when, before I even knew what I was seeing, something deep in my belly clenched. I kept staring, trying to make what I had seen disappear. But it would not and joy dropped off me like green leaves gone dead and brown fall away in the chill of winter.
“Cathy?” Wager asked.
“No, Wager,” I finally said. “We’re not going back. We are never going back.”
“Yes we are,” he answered as though that ended the discussion.
When I didn’t move, he knelt beside me, and, recalling that fever was playing with my mind, he added patiently, “Cathy, we’ve been over this. I don’t agree with everything the army does or how they do it, but I will not be a deserter. I took an oath. I will honor that oath. For myself. For those who come after me. I stopped believing for a while, but this rescue squad proves that Douglass was right. We shall have our day in court and justice will prevail.”
I knew then that the reason I truly loved Wager was that he had been blessed. He’d been born free and raised strong. He had the luxury of believing and I was about to take that away from him. “Wager,” I told him. “Maybe, someday, justice will prevail. But not today. Not for us.” I handed him the glass and said, “Look careful. At the man riding point. Tell me what he’s carrying.”
He held the glass to his eye and studied the trooper I’d pointed out.
Wager didn’t answer, but his jubilation fell away as he kept studying what he was seeing but could not yet believe.
I told him what he already knew. “Man’s toting a Sharps rifle. Nearly four foot in length, no mistaking it. Sticks out near a foot more from his scabbard than the carbines the others are carrying. Shoot today, kill tomorrow,” I muttered and said no more. Wager already knew that that was what they called the Sharps as nothing came close to it for long-range accuracy. Buffalo hunters were just starting to use them. Set up on a tripod, they could drop a full-grown bison six hundred yards out. But that man down there, he wasn’t a buffalo hunter. He was a soldier toting a long arm with a telescopic sight and Wager knew what that meant.
“Sniper.” Wager pronounced the word that was his death sentence. All the big ideas in his head fought to boot this one terrible new fact out and he argued, “But we went for water. And we’re riding back to tell them where that water is. To save the men. No jury would convict us for that.”
“It’s not a question of a jury, Wager. That sniper is here to make sure that you never stand in front of a jury and tell the true story of how Colonel Ednar Drewbott was an incompetent jackass who nearly killed every man in his command. If you truly believe that they sent out a sniper for any other reason, and you want to bet your life and mine on it, then let’s ride out right now to meet them.”
Wager kept staring at the Sharps through his glass, trying to make the evidence of his own eyes square with all the noble beliefs that he’d built a noble life around.
Gently, I said, “Wager, you’ll never have a day in court. That man has orders to kill you on sight. And probably, anyone with you.”
Only when I mentioned myself did Wager take the glass from his eye, mash it shut between his palms, take a deep breath, and ask, “How much water do we have?”
“Maybe half a canteen between us.”
“Half a canteen of water, two played-out nags, and you crippled,” Wager said. “What chance do we have?”
“About what a pig in a dog race’d have.”
“I doubt we can make it to the border.”
“Impossible.”
“Of course, I’d never have thought a woman could survive two years in the Buffalo Soldiers.”
“Do we ride?” I asked.
“We ride,” Wager answered.