Chapter Six

 

A bounty of one-hundred dollars in heraldic coins had been raised by the clerk in the hotel. He had been forced to wait an hour for the time-release to snap on the floor safe. Then, he had marched the money over to the Sheriff across the street who took the pile with shaking hands. To the Sheriff’s left sat a local sign-painter. The artist had done work previously for a dressmaker and for the old Chinese crone who ran the laundry. Both signs were drawn in lurid pastels and buttressed by fleur-de-lis.

The Sheriff looked at the clerk, “Do you think you could give a description to Mr. Woodman here?”

The clerk nodded. “I’ll try.”

Earlier, the clerk had paced the floor at the hotel, assuring his remaining guests there was nothing to fear and supervising a pair of hired hands who were doing their damnedest to scrub away the bloodstains left by the decedent.

He had lost five or six guests to the twin attritions of rumor and fear, which left him with half a house. They had all but stumbled over themselves to escape the Coronet, as if they had discovered it had built on the burial mound where a vengeful tribe were interred. If this Pferdmann was the spender he was supposed to be, his attendant retinue would fill out the suites nicely.

The clerk had earlier listened as Batty, the local information dowser, kept him abreast of Pferdmann’s past, and his present course along the narrow defile of the Mississippi.

“They say the big German made the first half of his fortune in silver and nickel. He just happened to get into it as wildcat mints were sprouting up all over North and South America. Rumor has it,” and here Batty had lowered his voice, “he even sneaked a few dozen presses to the Secession. Course, nobody can prove it.”

Batty had a quinsy-hoarse voice. It was believed by the townsfolk his mind was half-eaten, that he lived in an outhouse by a sulfur pool, and that his only companion was a mangy husky who limped from a malformed dewclaw.

“And?” The clerk flipped him a heraldic coin, which Batty then caught in his open palm.

“And he made the rest of his fortune, the bulk by speculating on mines here. He fronts the money to cover heavy taxes on foreign influence, and they pay back the investment at prime rates.”

Then Pferdmann Senior had to be smart. Men were often buried with their mines. Dreams of riches could drag a bourgeoisie man into dire poverty faster than any low vice.

“What about all these bullies walking around town? These mercenaries?”

Batty had shrugged. “No one knows exactly. He’s got a stable of vets from the Deutsch Revolution. They’re all seasoned killers.”

“Thank you, Batty.”

The old info merchant had coughed his way out of the hotel’s backroom and on down to his outhouse by the river, richer now one ten-dollar piece.

* * * *

Meanwhile, the old crone barked Mandarin orders at her stable of girls, one stepping on a wet half-cask of laundry, while another ran a white petticoat against a soapy metal board. The girls made thirty-five cents per day, little more than slaves, and they probably worked harder, but it was difficult for the ageing laundress to feel sorry for them. She had only known the world of a prostitute until her looks had faded; and then there had been only the life of a laundress as consolation. These girls at least were being spared the former violation, thanks in no small part to the extra money she had slipped a captain to hide them in the bulwark compartment of a transcontinental trade ship.

She puffed opium from a ruby-stained hookah, the arthritic gnarls in her fingers and decades of pain receding like ice in a spring thaw. Through the cloud of smoke, she saw the buckboard rollicking as it approached, its axles nearing the end of their use. The driver wore an elongated black top hat and a serge blue overcoat.

It had been years since she had seen a horse that beautiful, a real Arabian steed, its long black hair finer than that of most of the women this far west, where bar soap and baths were a luxury, while wind and sand were taken for granted as a constant. The driver dismounted in front of the Coronet, pulling open a footboard for the man in backseat.

Seated next to the man and following him out of the carriage, was another fellow with beige riding gloves, carrying an elephantine gun fit for the Dark Continent. The gun’s barrel widened at its end rather than tapering, much in the manner of a funnel.

The clerk came slavishly from across the street, running to receive the man. The Sheriff and two others whom the Chinese crone did not recognize followed after the pair. After quickly ordering her girls to continue marching in place until their arches flattened and their toes callused, the old woman went out into the street. She let the last of the sweet tar float from deep within her lungs, out into the cold prairie morning air.

Up the street, near the end of the block, the strange men with the big guns had stepped out of the chinked cabin to look upon the scene at the hotel. The Teutonic men stood at least several hands larger than their American counterparts, who were of hardy enough stock when not juxtaposed to the Germans.

* * * *

“Herr,” the clerk said, bowing.

“My assistant,” Adolph said, removing his own gloves, “will hitch our buckboard to the side of your establishment. If anything happens to it, I assume you will incur the costs.”

The clerk, flustered, shook his head. “That won’t be necessary, Herr Pferdmann. We have several deputized men posted around the town with rifles, should the savages try anything further.”

Adolph Pferdmann looked at his friend with the big gun, remarking after a calcareous wince, “Zu spat fur meine tochter.” He said a few more words to his man, who then spoke to the clerk.

“My employer says he has business to attend to. I will pay you and assist in appointing our room.”

“Oh,” the clerk said, looking from Pferdmann, who walked across the street, back to his employee. As the manager of the hotel, the clerk was at least used to dictating some of the terms himself. It was not his hotel, but like a banker who has handled the notes for so long, he had come to indulge a loyalty, which was not reciprocated by those he tried to please.

Pferdmann’s personal guard and coachman removed a key from a necklace tied around his collar and walked over to the buckboard. He flipped the seat, revealing a hideaway compartment. He inserted the key and turned. The clerk stood on tiptoe to look inside, and saw at once why the size of the gun, and the number of guards, were justified. There was a stack of silver bars, perfectly chiseled like the muscles of thoroughbreds. The man took one in his gloved hand, hefted its weight twice for emphasis, and handed it to the clerk.

“Stimmt so.”

* * * *

Pferdmann entered the office without knocking. The Sheriff and artist stood and looked at one-another. Adolph Pferdmann crossed the length of the room and removed the etching from the sign-designer’s hand. He held it up and studied it. “This man has stolen my daughter?”

“We believe so,” said the Sheriff.

“Wunderbar,” Pferdmann said. “There is one thing wrong with this bulletin however, and you must amend it before it goes out.”

The artist, his craftsmanship and name on the line, scratched his reddish Vandyke and worked up the courage to speak. “That is?”

“You are offering one-hundred dollars in coins to whoever captures or kills this Red man. He rolled up the parchment and handed it to the diminutive artist for revision. “Gentlemen, we are offering quite a bit more than that.”

* * * *

The Huns began gathering outside the Kaserne. What should have been cause for celebration was nothing but a low hour of shame. They smoked as the smell of rabbit and cauliflower soaked in marrow trailed from the kitchen into the back of their den. Adolph Pferdmann eventually made his way from the Sheriff’s office to their den.

A coat of arms hung on the wall, an embossed hybrid of Prussian and Habsburg pride. Two Hessian lions stood on their hindquarters and clawed away at a red cross of Constantine’s Crusade pitched in the center of a shield. A long table, stretching almost from one end of the cabin to the other, traversed the room. A plate of Jaeger schnitzel was set on the table next to a glass bottle of dark brew.

“Gnadiger Herr,” Rainer addressed his employer, “how was Frankfurt?”

“Goethe would weep,” Adolph said, and then picking up nationalistic fervor tinged with an edge of humor, “‘The Sorrows of a Young Nation’ should replace ‘The Sufferings of Young Werther’ on every bookshelf. A man who takes his life over a woman is a fool. A man who gives his life for blut ist eine soldat.”

“It is better,” Rainer said, pulling out a chair for his master, “to spill the other fellow’s blood.”

The master acquiesced by nodding. This was a good omen, judged by the men who best knew his moods. He would not have them for his personal pelts. He did not blame them for her disappearance. So who, his men wondered, did he blame? It was in every set of eyes as they sat, ostensibly to drink and eat. An aptly hazarded guess would have been Klaus in the other room, prodding the red potatoes. Months here, with his only assignment defined as doing what he could do to avoid bringing shame upon his house; and he had failed in even that simple task.

Pferdmann the Elder finished his dark brew and pushed the ornately carved stein away from his empty plate. Someone picked it up and attempted to bring him seconds, but he waved them off. He removed his paper bib and balling it into an ever smaller wad.

“We are paid or we have been paid thus far, to kill the enemies of this new nation. Though our allegiance is to Germany, our American friends are providing a generous grubstake for our own enterprises.”

He pounded his sternum with a fist, some trapped current in his chest, suppressing a course belch. “We are paid to drive Quantrill and Anderson and the rest back to the hills of Ohio. Our renown rests on our success in Deutschland, back in Forty-Eight, on our fearsome ability to mimic the tactics of the enemy and throw Von Clausewitz to the wind.” A ripple of laughter answered him.

“Now,” he said, “once word circulates I could not prevent my daughter from being kidnapped, and I cannot control my son they will not respect us!” His fists slammed the table. “My reputation will be ruined.” Utensils and tableware shook. The sounds reached his son in the other room, whose shaking hand nudged a potato which had gone soft from boiling.

“When it gets out that I have lost my daughter to one lone Redskin...” He bit his tongue as if repressing an epileptic fit.

He unbuttoned his starched collar and released his cufflinks. His suspenders slid off his shoulders into a drooping pile at his backside.

“You must all tonight go down to the Polizei gebaude and look at dieses bild auf der rote Mann. Though you are each in my salaried employ, the gold coronet bounty and the silver bars from my personal stock will be added as a Weinacht bonus. The poster reads dead or alive. I say dead.”

His mercenaries stared at the table, at their hands, or at each other. Bavarian backwoodsmen for the most part, they struggled to conceal evidence of their own Teutonic pride, silently balking like mules resisting their first shoeing. Ernst Vogel and Jaeger Finn exchanged a quick glance. Both were recent guild acquisitions, hailing from the same heavily wooded gulley nestled at the foot of the Totes Gebirge range. They were used to the darkness of mountains, not that of men.

From the other room, his son at last made his way to the doorway. His father looked up at him. All of the soldiers sensed the two men, father and son, were looking at each other. None had the heart to say or do anything.

Klaus gripped the door posting, shaking.

“Is it a drink you need, or do you fear your father?” Adolph said.

“A bit of both, I believe,” Klaus said, looking at the many others present to witness the little reunion. He entered the room and took one of the steins. He gulped the foam and cider for an uncomfortably long moment before setting it back on the table.

“I once met a sheik,” Adolph Pferdmann related, “who sold his daughters to the Imperial dignitaries, ambassadors, and generals. He even tried to barter his youngest, a flower of nine years, to me in exchange for a Caucus ore concession. When I asked how he could do such a thing, he responded too many female heirs were a sign of weak loins.

“In my case,” Pferdmann the Elder said, “it would appear a single male heir was my undoing.”

The men remained silent for a moment. A clock ticked away, its sound a metronome pregnant with some explosive meaning.

“You have degenerated, shared congress with Schwartz whores, leaving behind Gott knows how many bleached wreckages of half-heirs. Your sister by contrast has lived a chaste and righteous life. Why did you not protect her?”

Klaus dipped his pointer finger in the crown of a red velvet torte. “I was otherwise engaged, Father.”

“Indeed. With what?”

“I was gambling, gaming. Faro. Wine and cigars. The little monthly stipend you provided was enough to entitle me to a modicum of entertainment.”

Adolph breathed as if his air chamber were obstructed by a sliver of erstwhile grist from his evening spaetzel. His molars began to gnash and turn to powder under their enamel and the seismic pressure of their fractious grinding.

* * * *

Klaus wondered for a moment if he were still a beneficiary of any of his father’s empire. He prayed the man would drop dead at the table, face-first into a brownish platter of schnitzel.

He thought of the bygone days, of the razor-stropping and his now-deceased mother soaking his rump in iodine. How it burned. There was no way to escape the pain as he shifted at his wooden desk, while his Latin tutor advised him to remain still in his seat. It had been difficult to think of cognates and Romance languages when each slight movement brought the thorny sting of his father’s corporal dominance to the edge of each one of his nerves. He smiled now, hoping it would make the old man’s heart explode, which of course would lead to the chintzy unveiling of his skinflint pittance. Or even worse-He saw the words appear in his mind:

And to my son, I leave NOTHING.

* * * *

The missionaries had dubbed it the Isle of Sol Invictus, the land where the Red Men of the Northwest came to pray to the sun. During the time of the spring rituals, they would trade their bonnets for large corn-laden headdresses. They scored their flesh with black rocks, making gill-shaped incisions on their arms and legs; and then they would hold their arms, freely flowing blood, toward the rising white star.

This was before the time of the Big Knife, four hundred moons ago, when the priests with the long coats had arrived at the same time as the traders. Half-Man had been only a boy during those flush years, living among the Flatheads, where it was not uncommon to receive the news that roughly four-thousand pounds of beaver pelt had been traded to the Hudson Co. for nearly sixty-thousand American dollars.

The Long-Coats had decided the muddy atoll would make the perfect flagship in their war against the pagans. The priests had used the shacks left by those who had slaved in the atoll’s limestone cavern before them, presumably searching for gold. In less than a year, all of the priests were gone, their disappearance written off as a mystery. Some said they had been eaten. It was a feast of man corn to placate the sun gods whom the robed men had so offended with their Jesus.

Those had been beautiful times. Half-Man still remembered those waning days. Whipped buffalo blood pudding. Men old enough still remembered the first horses they had seen. Half-Man laughed now as he rode with the German girl lashed to Delilah’s sore back with rope withes. Elk dogs, big dogs. The grandfathers of Half-Man’s adopted tribe had thought the horses were freakishly giant versions of the stray wolves that hung at the edges of the camp when there was a fire, and grew bolder in their incursions when the night was dark and there was no flame. Horses were not some animal introduced by trade and travel. They were dogs who had gotten hold of some elusive cavern mushroom which had made them grow to incredible heights.

Those times it seemed possible the White man was a temporary infestation, something that would be banished with the changing of the season, like hornets or wasps. It wasn’t until decades later, when Half-Man had a child of his own, that the ghost stories which parents used to keep their children well-behaved had come to substitute the White man for former ghouls.

If you steal your father’s horse without his permission, the White men will come for your scalp in the night.

If you continue pulling your sister’s hair, the Old Men will come and give you the fever blankets which killed half our neighbors.

In its next iteration, the island of the sun had been the site of another experiment, which also ended in accursed failing. A group of Mennonites, or perhaps Quakers, it translated to essentially the same thing, had traded some of their farm holdings in exchange for a group of Negro slaves. They had promptly freed the slaves and paid them an hourly wage to construct a jute mill on the island.

The slaves’ days were spent in docility, learning the Good Book, sharing spiritual chants with their Mennonite rescuers, and sleeping peacefully at night. They knew should they bring a child into the world, it would not be fated to end up on the docket. Unfortunately, whether some saboteur was paid or whether it was an accident, word was mixed on the subject, a spark had caught a bolt of cloth in the factory and everyone inside-workers, stewards, and owner had burnt to death.

The husk of the factory still stood, the windows charred and blotted to a bituminous coal shade. The slumped skeletal remains of a man were propped against the outside of the building. A bit of tarred, congealed flesh had melted to a clump of cloth hanging from one of his rib tines. The white woman struggled with her bonds.

Half-Man dismounted Deliah. He wouldn’t have to bother to hitch her. She feared water, and would not risk navigating that thin finger of land to escape from this hidden Thule all on her own. Besides, the path was covered with waist-high bulrushes. As for the woman, she didn’t seem any more eager to escape. Should she run from him, she would soon find herself lost, crossing an expanse of Arapahoe and Osage country where a party of six well-armed White veterans of the Indian Wars stood a good chance of returning to town at half-strength. For a solitary White woman, there could only be a bad end.

This was also the only body of water around for miles. If Adele fled from Half-Man and the island, then death by dehydration was not impossible. He knew she might try to steal his macana while he was asleep, but the weapon was not easy to swing. He would wake up as likely as not at her first stirrings. From experience, he knew for her to fire a shot with the Chevalier rifle, she would first have to master the convoluted wrapping of his sling. There was a shot already prepared in the barrel, ramrodded and ready to kill, but he doubted her resolve to use it.

He sliced her withes and she sat up on the horse. She rubbed her wrists where they were red and then clutched her thin clothes to her chest. The woman yawned and stretched, placing the back of her calf against a rock glazed with phosphorescent green lichen. She stroked the horse gently on its hide. It tilted its head and hissed with a mouth full of giant white teeth, suspicious of affection.

“Don’t get used to it. We might have to eat her if our situation becomes lean enough,” Half-Man said, “unless a stray dog happens by.”

Ignoring his advice, she continued petting the horse. As she reached the cinch ring of the Spanish saddle, she caught the mildewed edges of his books. She pulled them from their case and undid the red ribbon around the three.

Half-Man checked the urge to defend his books. He had been with them for so long, placed so much store in their power, but they had turned on him. Stories were meant to be told orally, not committed to paper. It was the White man’s way to attempt to freeze eternity and then to keep it for himself. He remembered the reaction of the older Red men when they had glanced into the window of the shop and seen a replica Daguerreotype of a solar eclipse. They were impressed, but in the wrong way.

She held out the Bible. “Gott?”

“Oui,” Half-Man said. “Deo Gratis.” He roasted some scrounged filbert nuts over the fire. She set the Bible down and opened the Washington Irving. She flipped through the pages. She scratched at an errant mite working its way through her hair. “Ich kann liest dieses roman nicht.”

“Apologies,” Half-Man said, dribbling a bit of fatback into a pan of nuts, “I cannot speak French. I don’t understand you.”

“Ich verstehe du nicht,” she said.

“You’re not by chance familiar with any of the Plains Savage dialects?”

Apparently the humor didn’t translate. “Savage? Du bist ein Red skin savage.”

“Yes, me Wild West Indian Savage. You White woman. Me stealum White woman. Too much firewater.”

She viewed him askance, perhaps finally understanding he was having a joke at her expense. She looked frustrated.

“Meine Vater?”

“Father?” He replied.

“Er ist sehr reich. Und gefahrlich.”

The bit of translation effected was lost. Father-Vater had broken some kind of barrier which the next few words had restored. “Geld,” she said. “Money, dollars. Meine Vater geld.”

Half-Man held up the haul from the Coronet Hotel. “Money, I have money. I don’t want money. I want...” He trailed off, thought for a moment. “I want my nuts back.” He took back the plate of melted hazelnuts which she had taken from him moments ago. Then he continued eating for a moment. Then he set the remainder of the food down and cast the money stolen from the hotel into the center of the fire. She watched him throw the money into the fire, her nose upturned, thoroughly confused. He stood and left her there.

He walked the perimeter of the island barefoot. He was stripped to the breechclout he had bartered from the man with the mule. There seemed to be ample life on this island to sustain them. Delilah would live for a time, and any dogs who came to his camp searching for food would not suffer the irony of in turn becoming food themselves.

She slept as he worked through the day. He nudged her awake with his foot some time later. Beside him, there was a large pile of logs and clumps of grass and sod. To the other side of him were several pike-shaped spears. He held a Basque jacket and a frilled underskirt in his arms.

“I found these hidden in a cave.” He dropped them into her lap. “Apparently they didn’t want to go the great hummock in their Sunday best.”

“Danke schon,” she said.

“You’re welcome.”

The sun had risen again over the new morning, a violent counterpoint to the gentle way the moon had coddled them to sleep with its mysterious tidal power. He raised his arms to the sun and screamed with all of the air in his naked chest. He cursed McGuffy readers, crucifixes, and other manacles meant to bind the will of the Red man into subservience of the white gods of progress. The torture of corsets and the false hopes medicine brought when death took its toll regardless of the quackery; he was going home to his grandfather who had been murdered by the Flatheads, where the buffalo weren’t forbidden by the laws of St. Peter’s papacy, to ascend with their hunters.

It had all finally become very simple. Buffalo had as much soul, maybe more, than man, and the sun was the only god. That yellow candle held in the Sky Man’s hand could burn a cross to cinders and a Messiah with it, roasting him as easily as a skewered squirrel over the mouth of a bonfire.

He walked the girl to the edge of the island and stopped roughly ten feet from the corral-like chert shore. He mimed running, pumping his arms as he did. “You run,” he said, speaking slowly so she could grasp the cause and effect logic of his pantomime. “Then you fall.” He kicked the surface of the grass floor, revealing a large trench, a fifteen foot drop into a pit of closely-gathered spikes, a mob of pickets crowing for the blood of a careless man.

“Do you understand?” He tapped the side of his head with one finger.

“Ich verstehe du,” she said.

“I hope so,” he said. “Because,” he waved his hand so as to encompass the whole atoll in the gesture, “there are three more of these around the island.” He took her hand and led her back to the fire pit. He grabbed a handful of brown earth. “Stay where the land is brown. Verstehe? Bu-roun? Bu-roun? Brown?”

“Brown,” she said. “I understand. Brun.”

“Ah,” he said. “Gut.”

He opened the doors to the jute mill an hour or so later. The smell of decay wafted out into the morning air. He wished it was as cold as it had been a few weeks ago, so the bodies would at least be preserved in ice, the next best thing to embalming. He hated to touch the corpses with his hands, and would have preferred to give them a proper burial; that was one thing he and the Whites still had in common. Here, most of the land where the soil had enough give to allow for digging had been converted into buffalo falls, awaiting the men he was sure would eventually come looking for her.

That left only the water, a turquoise sheet covered with an impenetrable surface as opaque as milk. It received the petrified skulls and empty fingers of the skeletons with the patient current of an iceberg burial floe. The bodies were carried to other shores. Some remained bobbing where vultures balanced themselves against the chopping waves, searching for one last bit of flesh. He washed his hands with berry juice and boiled a pot of lake water, which he allowed to cool until it could receive his hands. Still, even after wiping his fingers dry, the woman recoiled when he offered her a fish he had caught at the end of one of the few pikes he hadn’t decided to use in his pit.

He cooked while she read and attempted to learn English from an adulterous king with a penchant for decapitation, and from a horseman who hailed from her land and bore a pumpkin in lieu of his head.

* * * *

Two of Adolph Pferdmann’s men had been ordered to carry the bruised and bloodied body of Klaus Pferdmann to the local doctor’s home. They rang the doorbell at his Texas house, where the servant girl informed them the doctor had left for the Sheriff’s office no more than thirty minutes ago. They thanked her for her time, turned with the waifish body still in their hands, and accidentally bumped his head on the rock fence as they attempted to reverse course.

Klaus continued moaning until they brought him to the Sheriff’s door. They had to wait there, as men filed out of the building one by one with newly pressed Wanted posters in their hands. When there were only five or six men left in the room, the two Germans helped ease Klaus inside.

“We need eine Artze.”

“What?”’ the Sheriff frowned.

The doctor didn’t need a translator. He left the Sheriff, Deputy, and the other four men and ran to Klaus’s side. He gripped the boy’s arm, touching it along the humerus and getting a scream for his troubles that could only mean one thing. He tore the shirt material away and even the mercenaries had to wince at what they saw. It was all visible under the light of a weak lamp, the bit of splintered bone, glazed with marrow, glittering from a compound hollow.

“My god,” the doctor said. “Get him to my cattle ranch at once.”

The Germans looked at the doctor for a moment. He shooed both of them with his hands and turned to the Sheriff,

“It is of course every Christian man’s duty to defend White womanhood against Negro and Savage onslaughts, but I must now unfortunately recuse myself from your endeavors and wish you luck in forming your posse.” He shrugged, the last bit of his apologia trailing him out the door. “Duty calls.”

The doctor pulled a Havana short from his hickory evening shirt. “What the devil happened to him?”

“He fell,” one German responded.