CHAPTER FOUR
1
THE TWO RIDERS’ HORSES PLODDED ALONG IN SILENCE toward the darkness. Moses felt confused and disturbed by the memories Aggie Sterling had raked up and set to flaming inside him and was glad for the chance to think without having to talk to her. She unnerved him, aroused the taboos of his youth. In the shadows that fell before their horses, he conjured old ghosts, and whenever he glanced at her blond beauty, her head slightly bowed over her horse’s neck, he felt deeper stirrings that vied with the anxiety the night and threat of Indians caused. Her questions forced him to remember too much, he thought, and they also caused him to think of her in a way he knew he never should.
Although Moses had helped enough around the plantation with various husbandry chores in his youth and was generally familiar with the process of copulation and procreation, he had had little opportunity to experiment on his own. It wasn’t long, however, before he found his thoughts filled by one of Grierson’s new purchases, Amy. He spied her as soon as Grierson brought her out to the plantation and presented her to his wife as an anniversary present, the last celebration they would enjoy before he left for Virginia and a four-year absence. Although Amy, like Moses, had been the product of forced racial mixed breeding, her skin was almost inky against the white dresses Mrs. Grierson gave her to wear while she went about her household duties. She was young, no more than sixteen, and Mrs. Grierson kept her in one of the house’s lower-floor rooms, near Moses’s own small closet, where she was often summoned upstairs by a bell on a pull cord that led to the mistress’s bedroom.
Moses was captivated by the shy young girl when he first saw her. She was the subject of gossip in the quarters, but even a year later when Grierson and Carpenter turned the slaves over to Thomas, only a few of the house servants had come to know her at all, and Moses had only nodded and tried to smile at her when they passed each other in the hall. She had not, so far as he knew, even been out to the quarters at all.
Following a flurry of parties and preparations for departure which kept all the slaves busy putting up bunting and preparing the grounds for guests, Joseph Grierson and Evan Carpenter rode off to war, and Henry Thomas and Slobberin’ Jimmy came to the Grierson plantation.
Thomas had appropriated the more inviting rooms on the house’s lower floor for him and Jimmy. It wasn’t long before he began sending for the slave girls—“belly warmers,” he called them—and the horror began.
At first the girls went willingly enough, expressing a kind of resigned acceptance of the lot of slave girls. But when they found that Thomas demanded other, unmentionable, and, as far as Moses was concerned, mysterious participation than mere copulation, they balked. Their simple religious understanding could accept the fact that they had no choice in being called to a white master’s bed, but there were some things that they would not do, even for a man as dangerously cruel as Thomas.
If any were so brave or foolish as to refuse the overseer, their punishment was usually long and bloody, and more than one had been bedridden for a week after he was finished with her. Amy, whom Grierson had owned for less than a year before he left and for whom Moses himself had developed an eye, was not the first to be beaten, but her beating was the most severe, and it was the one that changed the way Moses regarded white men forever.
One night, Amy found herself cowering in a corner of the overseer’s room while he bellowed at her and raged drunk and out of control. He cared little whether he was heard by his employer’s family upstairs, for overseers were hard to come by in wartime, and he often asserted the Griersons were almost as afraid of him as the blacks were.
Frustrated by her refusal to obey whatever perverse demands he put upon her, he dragged Amy out of his room by her ankles. He kicked and beat her into the compound in front of the quarters, where he stripped her thin undergarment from her and tied her to the post with her hands behind her, her small, bare breasts lifted taut into the flickering torchlight, her face already bruised and bloody from the beating his fists had inflicted. Her legs dangled helplessly down, barely permitting her toes to touch the dirt.
He roused Jimmy, who rang the bell to assemble the rest of the slaves, and they sleepily gathered, soon becoming wide awake as they saw the overseer, dressed only in underwear waisted in by a belt that carried a Bowie knife, and muttered to themselves their reactions to poor Amy’s shame and the terror they all felt for what was about to happen. He screamed at them to be silent and insisted that the women stand forward of the crowd to watch what happened to “filthy nigger bitches who don’t know how to do what they’re told.” Then he went to work with his whip.
The first blows were light, only teasing, and Amy whimpered from the brief, stinging pain that Thomas expertly inflicted on her exposed flesh. As he worked, his rage and excitement increased, and the whip’s blows became sharper, eventually extracting long tentacles of ragged flesh from the pale girl’s naked stomach and thighs, which now streamed with blood from her wounds, blood that seemed to run black on her brown skin in the torchlight.
The ordeal went on for almost an hour, with Thomas taking time between blows to wipe sheets of sweat from his forehead and to drink from a dipper Jimmy would bring him from the well. All the while he would shout curses at the girl. Her voice now grew harsh with screams, and Thomas, Moses noticed, had developed an erection that protruded nakedly from his ragged union suit and forced him to walk even more awkwardly than usual.
Soon the silence of the watching slaves was broken by a quiet chorus of prayers which some of the women began to utter, beseeching both Thomas and “sweet Jesus” on Amy’s behalf. Thomas glared at the crowd from time to time between the blows and curses, effectively silencing anyone who was speaking, and then he delivered a particularly savage blow with the whip.
Moses felt compelled to do something. But what? To oppose Thomas was to invite the same, probably worse, treatment for himself without shortening Amy’s torture an iota. He knew that the mad overseer wasn’t above killing one of them if he was angry enough, and with Mr. Grierson and Evan Carpenter gone, it seemed, forever, he would likely get away with it. He stood as helplessly as the women, his breath held with each snap of the bullwhip.
Then, as Thomas paused and caught his breath, a slave finally spoke up. “You fixin’ to kill her, Marse Thomas.” The voice belonged to Isaac, one of the oldest of Grierson’s slaves, a man so wizened that even the white employees on the plantation paid him a certain deference.
Thomas swung on the crowd and turned his gleaming eye toward the slave. Isaac moved to the front of the younger men, who grouped together, trying to shield him. He stepped through the line of women, most of whom were on their knees by now, and set his twisted hickory cane down in front of him with a marvelous authority.
“You can beat me, if’n you want. You can kill me. It don’t matter none a-tall to me. But if you kill that gal, Miz Grierson’s fixin’ to be powerful mad with you. An’ you know it.”
There was a murmur of agreement among the slaves, and for a moment, Moses thought Thomas was going to strike the old black man with the butt of the whip. But a gleam rose in Thomas’s eye, and he spun and delivered one final blow to the tortured Amy.
Previously, the whip had found its target on Amy’s stomach, lower abdomen, and thighs for the most part, playing only with the tops of her breasts and chest from time to time, creating little rivers of bloody tracks. But this blow was viciously different. The lead tip of the braided whip snaked out and cracked with an echoing snap that silenced the slaves’ prayers. As it struck her right breast, the studded lead ball licked out and bit into her dark nipple, flicking it off as neatly as if a surgeon had used a scalpel, and for a moment the ground around Thomas and his victim fell totally silent. Blood suddenly rushed from the gaping wound in Amy’s breast, and the girl’s stupor disappeared. Her screams lit the area like a lightning flash. The crowd of slaves turned away in shock and horror. Even Jimmy turned his head away.
Thomas was panting, and his chest heaved. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, stalked over to the girl, and clamped his palm against the bloody hole to stop the flow. Her face turned up to him in an expression of ghastly terror, her mouth open with piercing screams. He reached down and pulled her dangling legs up, forcing himself between her bloody thighs. With the whip’s butt, he forced her chin partly closed and suddenly and forcefully kissed her bloody, chewed lips, ramming his erection close against her torn thighs and thrusting his penis into her. Her body reared against the post, and her legs kicked out wildly. New tears streaked out of her eyes, and the muscles of her neck stood out like ropes. With a half-dozen quick jerks of his hips, Thomas discharged his semen into the helpless slave girl and stepped away, allowing her to collapse and dangle unconscious from her bonds.
The slaves had mostly covered their eyes with their arms and hands after Thomas’s final, hideous blow had fallen. Now they began to look again, but they found nothing to say. Even Old Isaac was quiet as he watched the sickening spectacle before him. Stepping back from his victim’s body, Thomas pulled out the Bowie knife and cut Amy’s bonds. She fell forward into his arms.
The overseer lifted her, the whip dangling from under her unconscious form, and turned to the black eyes that stared disbelieving at him.
“Get back to bed,” he ordered from a mouth ringed with the collapsed girl’s blood. His hand pressed against the open wound on her breast, and blood flowed from between his fingers. “Tomorrow’s a workin’ day, an’ they’ll be a good whippin’ for any nigger’s that’s draggin’.” With that, he carried Amy across the dirt yard to the big house and left the crowd of slaves standing in the bloody aftermath of Amy’s ordeal.
Moses remained standing in the compound long after the rest of the slaves retired. He felt hammered into the ground while emotions danced around his mind and fought for supremacy. Finally, one emerged as the strongest: hate.
He vowed there to kill Thomas. It was an oath he never repeated aloud, and one that frightened him almost as much as had Amy’s torture. Harming—let alone killing—a white man was unthinkable, unimaginable. But his conviction to carry out his promise was based on an idea that sprang from deep inside him. It was, in a sense, born of philosophy, for it made a distinction he had never considered and possibly never would have except for Grierson’s lectures and oral musings.
They never saw Amy again. Daniel told them later that Mrs. Grierson was furious with Thomas. But the mistress of the big house never saw Amy and had no idea of how terrible her punishment had been. She took Thomas’s word for the lie that he had caught her “rollin’ round in the hay with two young bucks, stark naked an’ half drunk on sherry stolen from the pantry.” The story redeemed him from his employer’s displeasure, if, indeed, he ever feared it.
With the mistress’s permission, Thomas sold the slave girl downriver to New Orleans, Moses heard, but he also heard that Thomas shipped her off to a friend of his in San Augustine, where she was rented out to other white men. In any case, she never came back, and the beatings, although never again that severe, continued, and the slave girls who were called to Thomas’s room late at night learned to shut down their sensibilities and comply with whatever the overseer wanted them to do.
FOR A LONG TIME Moses worried daily about how he could murder Thomas, even when he stalked deer in the nearby forest, shackled as he was by chains and followed by Jimmy. The thought obsessed him, but it wouldn’t form solidly, and his reveries tended to make his hunting suffer. He found that Thomas’s rage was inspired when he returned with only small game for the white table, and more than once the black hunter felt the sharp blow from the overseer’s cane. He knew that Thomas was just waiting for an excuse to give him a real beating, and when he returned after four days in a row with nothing at all in his game pouch, he discovered that the time had come.
That evening, Thomas rang the bell and assembled the slaves for Moses’s punishment. Moses resigned himself to die strapped to the post. He knew that Thomas’s hatred for him stemmed as much from his status as Joseph Grierson’s particular pet as it did from the fact that Moses was a crack shot and competent tracker who had access to the study and the guns, something Grierson had forbidden the overseer. That Thomas announced that it would be Jimmy, not Thomas himself, who would handle the whip did nothing to relieve Moses’s fear. Jimmy weighed twice what Thomas did, and his contempt for the young hunter was profound and obvious.
As he was led to the center of the compound, Mory, a diminutive girl who had been one of Thomas’s early victims and had learned to comply with the overseer’s sexual urges, stumbled and fell in front of him. Moses tripped over her and went down on one knee; she pressed his hand quickly before jumping up. As she moved away she pointed to her mouth, and Moses found that in his palm was a wine cork. He shoved it into his cheek, and when Jimmy began, he moved it over and bit down hard on it.
The first blow of the whip sent a streak of pain coursing from his left shoulder blade all the way down to his toes. The second and third blows were hotter and more painful than the first, and Moses tried to concentrate on biting the cork, on the stinging pain of the thongs that bound his wrists, on the gritty soil beneath the soles of his feet, but when the fourth and fifth and sixth blows followed, he found that his whole mind was a sunburst of hurt and dread. How could Amy or any of the slaves have borne more than this? he asked himself. Jimmy struck him twice more, and Moses felt the wetness of blood seeping down his back and into his trousers. Somewhere there was the sound of horse’s hooves, the jangle of spurs, but all he could think of was the next snapping burn of the whip. It didn’t come.
Jimmy’s pleasure was interrupted by a man who rode up and asked to hire some slaves for work in the city of Jefferson. As the overseer and the unexpected arrival walked over to discuss the matter, Moses struggled to breathe. From the corner of his eye, he could see Jimmy anxiously coiling the whip, ready to start the punishment anew. The air seemed to burn his lacerated back, and he understood that as soon as Jimmy resumed his work, whatever pain he had endured would only be a preamble. Moses cursed the man who had interrupted the torture and given Jimmy a chance to renew his strength. But he soon found himself cut down and dumped into the same trough by which he had vowed to kill the overseer a few months before. Mory and others fished him out and hauled him back into the quarters, where his back was dressed and crudely bandaged. It took them a long time to pry his jaws open, so deeply embedded were his teeth in Mory’s cork.
Moses knew that regardless of the fear of killing white men, even men who were nothing more than animals such as Thomas and Jimmy, he now had no choice. He had to slaughter them, just as he had slaughtered animals in the wild. He now only waited to pick his time.
When Thomas volunteered in the spring of 1864 to go and meet the Union invasion in Louisiana, Moses was robbed of his chance to take revenge against the overseer. Going along with the pick of Grierson’s firearms collection in tow, he followed the now Sergeant Thomas along the road across the Sabine into the heavily forested countryside near Mansfield, Louisiana. There, on the first morning of the battle, almost with the first shot, Thomas was cut in two by a cannonball and Moses was relieved both of his duty to the overseer and of the burden of revenge he carried.
Soon he was back in Jefferson. Slobberin’ Jimmy took Henry Thomas’s place, and the slaves noticed only a small difference between their individual brands of tyranny: Jimmy left the slave girls alone. But his beatings and maimings were, if anything, more cruel and more frequent than his predecessor’s had been, and his corruption was less cunning and more obvious.
To Moses, though, it was all part of a single piece. It would be years before he could exact his revenge against Jimmy, but by then he found that he had been unable to feel anything for any white man again. He also steeled himself against the obvious flirtations of available girls in Jefferson and elsewhere. The devastation he felt when he watched Amy’s beating, the helplessness that bound him as certainly as she was bound, also taught him the dangers of putting his faith—or his love—too far out in front of him. From the time he was a free man, he had wasted no tender feelings on women and had visited brothels only on occasion. He had so successfully avoided the feelings, that now, in the presence of this pretty, friendly white woman, they aroused terror in him. They came to the surface of his thoughts easily and bothered him more than the danger he knew they put him in.
But he had a sense that he could not avoid them any longer. Tonight, as they rode, his emotions were connected to her, and, he figured, so was a lot of trouble when they returned to the train. This was not something he could ride around, but he was at a loss for a way to deal with it.
2
“HOW’D YOU LEARN ABOUT INDIANS?” AGGIE ASKED, interrupting Moses’s thoughts once more.
He started, concerned suddenly that he might have spoken aloud.
“I don’t know much, Ma’am,” he replied, relieved to be once more focused on the immediate situation. The memories around him faded away, and he fought the temptation to put their horses into a lope and hurry their return to the wagons and relative safety. “I don’t know no man that does.”
“You seem to know lots,” she went on. “You traded with ‘em back there.”
“Well.” He felt tempted to boast, but then he thought better of it. “You pick up some things here an’ there. I listen good, an’ I try to remember what I hear. Most of it’s no-‘count brag, you see, but ever’ now an’ again somebody says somethin’ worth hearin’.”
“You hate Indians?”
“I met some I hate. But I met some that was all right. For Indians. You can’t never trust ‘em. That’s ‘bout all I know for sure ‘bout ‘em. They do as they please. That’s for sure. ‘Specially Comanche.”
“Why’re they so mean? Why’d they do what they did to them folks back there? They could of just took what they wanted. Might of even killed ‘em, ‘specially if they’d fought over it, but why . . . why hurt ‘em that way?” She paused. “I mean, even the women, an’ the . . . babies.”
“That’s just the way Comanche is. Ever’body’ll tell you that. They always been like that. Nobody ever could do a lick of good with ‘em. They beat the Mescans, an’ they beat the Spaniards ‘fore that, an’ they been beatin’ the Apache for longer’n anybody can remember. The Sioux an’ the Arapaho, the Kickapoo an’ the Blackfoot. All of ‘em hates ‘em. Scared of ‘em, too. Seems like the only ones not scared of ‘em is the white man. Or maybe he jus’ don’t have the good sense to be.”
“You don’t seem scared of ‘em. I seen you talkin’ to that chief, an’ you didn’t look a bit scared.” She smiled at him.
“Maybe I don’t have good sense either.” He smiled back. “Or maybe it’s ‘cause I ain’t white.” Maybe a black man can deal with them, he thought. Maybe a black man might be able to make them understand that they were more alike, that they had a common enemy, common fears.
She laughed at his remark, and her voice rang across the empty darkness. “How did you learn what you know?”
“I was a Army scout.” It wasn’t easy, he admitted to her, for a black man, a former slave, to become a scout, but he had managed to do it. He remembered how lost he had felt when he first signed up to scout for the Army. Part of the problem had been his name. He had just been Moses, nothing more. Some of the slaves had taken the Grierson name after they were freed, and Moses had used it a time or two himself when a last name seemed called for, but owing partly to the stolen guns he carried and to some sense of guilt for having taken them, he didn’t feel comfortable with it.
He took the name of Franklin, his natural father, not because he had any affection for that memory either, but because it reminded him of his mother and seemed in some way to connect him to something substantial in his past.
Aggie listened to him go on about his adventures as a scout, interrupting him often to ask more questions—some about him and some about Indians themselves—until they actually found themselves laughing and talking easily.
Moses’s emotional discomfort disappeared in the presence of this strong-willed, frank girl who had braved her father’s wrath as well as the talk of the whole train by staying behind with him. He entertained the fantasy that it wouldn’t matter ultimately. They were as innocent as any two children, exchanging small jokes and stories, commenting on the night sounds that grew around them, comparing horses and wagons and even labor. Moses was surprised to learn how much she knew about field work, about saddle and draft animals, and he went along with her assumption that as a slave he had spent most of his time tending corn and cotton instead of working rifles and pistols.
“My daddy hates you,” she said flatly after a while. “He said so ‘fore we left Jefferson. He said Mr. Graham’s hirin’ you was ‘bout the dumbest thing he ever heard of.”
“Don’t I know that!” Moses remembered the first argument he had had with Sterling over the wisdom of trying to take even a small herd along on a wagon train. He didn’t tell her that the argument had grown out of his suspicion that the cattle were stolen. “I can’t say I blame him too much, though. He sure does prize them cattle.”
“Oh, it’s not the cattle. He likely stole them,” she said as if she read his thoughts. “He hates you ‘cause you’re a nigger.”
Moses suddenly understood that she meant no insult. It was just a word she had always heard.
“You see, we’re from all over. Tennessee, Mississippi, Arkansas, Louisiana. We had farms here an’ there, an’ Daddy traded cattle an’ horses ‘fore the war. Even ‘fore I was born. Anyhow, we never owned no slaves. Daddy says he never believed in it, nohow. But when the war was over, we kept gettin’ put off our farms, an’ a bunch of Yankees—Redlegs, I think—burned us out. Then a bunch of Rebs burned us out ‘cause they thought we was foolin’ with Yankees.” She paused and seemed to let her thoughts range a moment. “An’ Daddy said it wasn’t no good tryin’ to have anythin’, ‘cause as soon as you do, a bunch of carpetbaggers’ll come along an’ give it to the niggers. Just like that. We had a real nice place in Louisiana for a spell, but we lost that, too. So finally, we moved up to Arkansas, ‘cause we thought Daddy’d run off for good. But it wasn’t no better. It seemed like the niggers had ever’thin’ locked up there, too, for a while. But then I met this fellow. Todd. An’ he was fixin’ to marry me, but then Daddy come back, an’ Todd run off to hunt buffalo. But we’re goin’ to meet up in New Mexico, he said. He said he wasn’t scared of Daddy.” She bit her lip. “I think he was, though. A little, anyway.”
The speech ended, and Moses peered through the dark at her. She was clearly not a girl given to telling her story; it was a jumble of events that hardly went together. But he did gather the important thing. She didn’t care much more for Jack Sterling than he did, even if he was her father. That seemed to create a bond between them.
“I ain’t scared of Daddy, neither,” she went on all of a sudden. “But here we are, goin’ to New Mexico with him. There wasn’t nothin’ left to do. I sort of had to come even if I didn’t want to, not just to meet Todd, but ‘cause of Mama an’ Jason an’ Annie. Least out in New Mexico, maybe there’ll be a chance for decent white folks to get ahead. Least that’s what Daddy says. So here we are.” There was an edge to her voice. “But I ain’t scared of him. Not even a little.”
Moses coughed. “I don’t think you’re scared of him, Ma’am,” he said. It seemed to please her.
She turned to look behind them, and in the glow of the new moonlight that now outlined them and cast long shadows on the silvery grass, he saw her mouth make a hard, thin line under her blue eyes. “I’ll tell you some-thin’,” she said. “I made up my mind a long time ago not to be scared of no man. White or nigger.”
“Ma’am, I don’t much like that word.” Moses hadn’t meant to say it, but his mouth worked before he caught himself. His body tingled with a sense that he might have spoiled the mood that had grown up between them.
“What word?”
“We’re colored, Missy. We like to be called ‘colored.’ ” He hoped she wouldn’t ask him why, for the truth was he didn’t know why he—they—liked to be called “colored” instead of other things.
“Oh, God!” she said. “I’m sorry!” She lowered her head. “I knew that. How stupid of me! Colored!” she repeated.
“It’s all right,” he heard himself mumble.
“I’m truly dumb sometimes. But sometimes, I’m not! Daddy doesn’t like me much either, I should tell you. But”—her voice carried a smile—“I think he’s scared of me. A little. At least I hope so.” The smile vanished into a darker tone. “At least, he better be.”
Moses recalled the deadly determination he had seen in her face when she held the knife on Graham and Sterling back at the cedar grove. He remembered her telling her own father to go to hell with a conviction that suggested that she was prepared to send him personally. There was something there to be careful of, he thought, if not frightened.
“He says I’m more boy than girl.” She brought the careless lilt back into her voice. “An’ if he hadn’t brought me forth from Mama’s womb by his very own hands, he says, he’d swear Mama was tryin’ to fool him by sayin’ I was theirs.” She was silent for a moment, and then she added in a soft voice, “That’s just an excuse, though. I know that. Truth is, I ain’t really his. That’s why he’s scared of me.”
Moses wondered what she meant, but he decided it was better not to ask. He was already involved too deeply with this girl, and he tried to lighten the mood. “I think I know what he means, Ma’am.” He laughed.
“Well, I don’t think it’s funny. I don’t like bein’ a girl very much. I mean, I like bein’ pretty. Who wouldn’t? An’ I know I’m pretty. Todd told me so. Ever’body tells me so, goodness knows. But I don’t like doin’ girl things. You know, sewin’, washin’, cookin’, stuff like that. An’ the Lord knows I’ve done enough of them.”
“You’ll learn to like it soon enough,” Moses replied. “When that boy comes for you, you’ll think it’s a pleasure.”
“You know, what I really like is man stuff. Like ridin’ this horse, or shootin’ a gun. I really like that. I also like tellin’ men what to do. I ‘specially like that.”
“Most women do, Missy,” Moses said, now watching the darkness for a sign of campfire lights. They should have reached the train camp long ago, he calculated, but the steady tracks in the grass were still guiding their horses, and he was certain they hadn’t passed the wagons.
“Mr. Franklin,” she said, “I’ve shot a lot of guns, an’ I’m pretty good with Daddy’s shotgun, the one Jason had back there.” She acknowledged her brother’s armed support of her position without emotion. “I’ve handled a pistol, too. But I’ve never shot one of them big rifles before. Could you . . . uh, would you let me try it sometime?” Before he could answer, she added, “I don’t mean now, tonight! Lord, we’d wake up ever’ Indian for miles! But ‘fore we get to Santa Fe, would you let me try it just once?”
She was right about one thing, Moses thought, she didn’t talk like a girl.
“I don’t think your daddy would much take to the idea, Missy. He’s goin’ to be mad ‘nough ‘bout us comin’ in after dark as it is.” Alone, he silently added with an uncomfortable recollection of the reality of their situation.
“That’s the truth.” She laughed. “I’m not even s’posed to talk to you, or no nig—colored man. In fact, you know when I brung you out that cup of coffee? Well, that wasn’t my daddy’s idea at all. It was mine! I felt sorry for you sittin’ out there all by yourself.”
“You’re somethin’ all right, Missy. You are.”
“Oh, pooh!” she spat. “I’m just a girl who tells fibs. I wanted to see your rifle close up was all. An’ that’s the truth.”
The horses moved closer together, and he thought about handing the big rifle over to her, but at that moment his eyes picked up the flicker of campfires in the black distance. The wagons had found another of the isolated cedar groves and had made camp inside it, pulling them in tight to fort up. The fires were telltale, but at least Graham had shown some sense, he thought.
“So, how ‘bout it?” she persisted. “Can you show me sometime?”
“We’ll see, Ma’am.”
“An’ one more thing,” she said. “I won’t call you ‘nigger’ if you’ll stop callin’ me ‘Missy’ an’ Ma’am.’ One makes me feel too little an’ the other makes me feel too old.”
“Yes, Ma’am,” Moses said automatically, and then, to cover his embarrassment, he stood up in his stirrups and yelled, “Riders comin’ in! Don’t shoot! It’s me an’ the girl!”
3
EXCEPT FOR A HANDFUL OF DYING FIRES AND A POOL of coal-oil light around Graham’s buckboard, the wagons were dark and quiet. Aggie dismounted and led her horse over to Graham’s wagon, and without a glance in Moses’s direction, she faded off into the makeshift compound’s darkness.
Moses found himself so bone-tired and hungry that he could barely remove the saddles from the horses and begin the elementary grooming that was so necessary for the mounts’ well-being. But as he finished brushing them down and was worrying about where he might beg a bag of oats, Graham wandered up.
“Well, I see you got back.” The wagon master’s words slurred, and Moses recognized that he had been drinking. It was something of a shock. He knew Graham sometimes drank, found it natural to see him tilt back a bottle he kept under his wagon seat, but he had never seen him drunk. The black scout said nothing and grabbed up a nose bag from under Graham’s wagon. He started off to search for some oats. “Where’s Hawshaw an’ Newsome?”
“Don’t know,” Moses said without turning around. “They took off back toward the east. I reckon they went to pick up some of their stuff.”
“An’ you just let them go?”
“Didn’t ask my leave,” Moses said as he unfolded the bag. “They just snuck off durin’ the storm. If they’ve still got their hair, I reckon they’ll be ‘long direc’ly.”
“Directly,” Graham said flatly and finally. There was a long silence, and Moses knew that he was going to have to finish fussing with the bag and turn around. “You get the greasers planted nice an’ decent?” Graham called out to him as if he were a long way off. Moses continued walking, noting from the corner of his eye that Graham was stumbling after him.
“You have a nice time with that little gal? Nigger boy.”
Graham caught up with the retreating back of the scout, and Moses wheeled suddenly and lashed out with the nose bag, catching Graham full in the face, knocking him down.
He was sick of all the tension of the day, and he shocked himself with his sudden action. He had struck white men before, but usually it was in the heat of a brawl, a fight where everyone was hitting everyone. This was personal, and he was breathlessly aware of the significance of the blow. He had started something now, and he was going to have to finish it. Graham was too drunk to let him apologize and back down even if he felt like it.
“Why, you nigger son of a—” Graham sputtered from the ground, but before he could get to his feet, Moses stepped forward and placed a kick just under the white man’s chin, knocking him completely backward. Graham’s revolver slipped from his holster, and Moses took the chance to kick it as well, knocking it under a wagon and out of sight.
Graham scrambled around in the trampled damp grass that looked preternaturally golden in the coal-oil lamps’ glare and tried to regain his footing. He spat blood from his lip, which he had bitten in his fall backward, and he dug his stumped arm into the dirt beneath him. Moses stepped back and squared his shoulders for the fight he knew was coming.
“Hold it,” Jack Sterling’s voice commanded from behind the black scout. His order was punctuated by the audible click of the hammer on his Colt’s .44.
Moses turned and faced Sterling, who stood with his legs spread wide and his left pistol drawn and leveled at the scout’s chest. The gun was cocked and ready, and in spite of the fact that Sterling’s red-rimmed black eyes betrayed the whiskey that he too had been drinking, his gun hand was steady and his jaw covered by the half-grown beard was set.
“Just twitch, nigger,” he said, “an’ I’ll put you in hell so fast, your mama won’t know you was ever gone.”
Graham struggled to his feet and wiped blood away from his mouth.
“Put it away, Sterling,” he said in a steady voice. Sterling looked at the wagon master with surprise and disappointment. “I said, put it away. Nobody’s gettin’ sent to hell tonight.” Graham’s voice betrayed nothing more than a heavy weariness. He sounded like a man who had just come awake after a long, drunken sleep. At least, Moses noted with relief, the brawling had sobered him.
“But, Jesus, Graham,” Sterling argued, “he was kickin’ you! I mean, you just can’t let no nigger kick you an’ get away with it.”
“I can let him do whatever I want,” Graham said. Moses saw that there was no anger left behind the wagon master’s eyes, only exhaustion and worry. He’s scared, Moses thought, but not of me. He’s got too much on his mind to worry about me. “Put the gun away an’ go tend to your daughter,” Graham ordered.
“I ain’t got no daughter. I give her up for dead today when she took up with a nigger. No daughter of mine would ever—”
“She didn’t ‘take up’ with nobody,” Moses said, wondering if he stood any kind of chance with this drunk, angry man. If he drew on him, Sterling would get off the first shot, that was sure. But Moses knew that men like Sterling—especially drunk men like Sterling—seldom hit what they shot at. “We jus’ did a decent thing. That’s all. Nothin’ else. The others up an’ left us. That weren’t our fault.”
“Decent, shit,” Graham said. “You risked this whole damned train for a bunch of dead Mescans nobody even cared about enough to piss on. You know that?”
“I say let’s just hang him from the first real tree we come up on an’ be done with it,” Sterling said. His eyes moved quickly from Moses to Graham, and the scout wondered if he could draw his pistol and kill him in the instant that he looked away. He figured he could. But again, Sterling might just get lucky. If he was hurt or wounded, Graham wouldn’t even find a good piece of shade to leave him in. He would just lie where he fell and bleed to death.
“Just shut the hell up, Sterling,” Graham said loudly. “You an’ your cows an’ your whole damn family have caused enough trouble for one day. Just get the hell away from me an’ leave me alone.”
Sterling held his position for another few seconds and stared at Graham. There was a conflict here, Moses saw, that went deeper than the troubles of this long day or even the weeks since they had left Jefferson. He thought once more about Sterling’s storming out of the saloon in Saint Jo. Sooner or later, whatever was between them would erupt, and Moses hoped that he wouldn’t be in the line of fire when it did.
Sterling lowered his gun, swore, and walked away. The scout heard him ease the hammer down as he faded off into the darkness.
“You got any oats?” Moses finally broke the quiet, picking up the nose bag from where he had dropped it near Graham’s feet.
“There’s some in Frank’s wagon,” Graham replied. “You get them an’ get some sleep. If we don’t make your fancy crossin’ by tomorrow, we’re buzzard meat, an’ you know it.”
Moses started to move off, but Graham stopped him. “When we get to Santa Fe, I’m goin’ to kill you,” he said, but there was no threat in his voice, only the deadly assurance of a man who meant exactly what he said. “If I—if we—didn’t need you right now, you’d already be dead.”
Moses didn’t know what to say. He didn’t fear Graham, but he knew that only his usefulness had saved him from dying or having to kill both Sterling and Graham. He also knew that had he done so, the rest of the train would have lynched him on the spot, if not for killing the two white men, then for what they imagined had happened between him and the white girl.
“Nothin’ happened,” he said. “Nothin’. We got caught by the storm an’ waited it out. The others left while it was still rainin’, an’ we didn’t see ‘em go. They could of took her with them, but they didn’t. We jus’ got on our horses an’ come on soon as we could. That’s all.”
“It don’t matter,” Graham said. “I don’t care what some little slut does, or who she does it with. All I care about is gettin’ these folks to Santa Fe without losin’ all of them to a bunch of redskins because of a bunch of nigger foolishness.”
“I don’t see it as foolishness,” Moses replied.
“I don’t care what you see it as.” Graham waved him off and turned to look for his pistol. “I’ve come too far, done too much to get this far, to let you, especially you, foul things up now. An’ I don’t much care what you think or what you do besides get me an’ this train to Santa Fe.” He spotted the gun butt under the wagon and went down on his knees and retrieved it. Standing erect, he holstered the Colt’s and turned to face Moses. “You’re on a short string, boy. And why you’re not dead right now is something you’d best think on for the next few days. Don’t get me wrong. I’d as soon shoot you as spit on you, and if you give me cause, I’ll do both. Santa Fe be damned. But I call the shots hereout. Do you understand me?”
Moses nodded. He didn’t trust himself to speak. “See that you do,” Graham said, and Moses turned away to see about the horses.