Sacrifice: Chapter 10
Embarkations (NORTH) – Chapter 3. Departures
Tenner gathered together his few belongings, to wit: blankets, a coffee pot charred with long use over open flames and an iron skillet; a scarred Beecher’s Bible carbine holstered in a leather glove sewn onto his saddle and a brace of Colt Dragoon revolvers which he wore directly upon his person; a quantity of ammunition for all three these implements; a length of good rope; a simple brass surveyor’s compass, with an elegant floral design upon the inner ring of the compass face; three books, one bound in leather and worn to pieces with the reading and the rereading; a sturdy knife with a blade a hand’s length and a half; a pair of ivory dice; flint and steel; and what stores he was able to procure from the gutted stores thereabouts. He set off upon his horse at a fair pace, the wolf loping behind him on long legs and glancing about it with sly eyes, sniffing the earth as it went in a punctuated rhythm as though gleaning messages from the dust. They proceeded through lands recently in development about the growing city, which seemed, in the wake of the strangers’ announcements, to have been torn through by some insubstantial tornado that had laid its invisible clutches on men alone and carried away this human flesh, leaving all possessions untouched and in their rightful places – forerunner to the hurricane which must anon sweep down upon the breath of the world to claim all souls in the reckoning that all men should dread and no man can evade.
The land in its human side was gripped by a weird paralysis. Farmlands halfway tilled and deserted, destined now to lay fallow for months and perchance years, and some of them unto perpetuity; edifices of unclear purpose standing erect and destitute halfway through their construction, abandoned at that point where workman and proprietor alike had defaulted their labors in favor of some higher and colder clime; half-built fences, corrals, stalls, the logs and boards of their prospective continuance propped up against them and abandoned to split and warp, an insult against the once-living trees that had borne them unhewn within. Marred land lay there beneath the globe of the sky, plots of earth that had been marked off and yesterday been allotted to pasture; but now beast and the herder of beast alike had dispersed and the land been ceded once more to incipient wilderness. Here and there objects had been simply let to lie wheresoever they had fallen, all things that could serve no purpose in prospecting nor on the path hence. As if the whole land were lying under the threat of an imminent invasion which would soon smash all of this to mud and dust, and the residents, having received forewarning of this coming disaster, had fled ere the sky fell upon their heads. Or perhaps it was some final revelation had been vouchsafed to them, and the futility and frailty and worthlessness of all mundane ventures and all worldly things been at last and indisputably revealed to even the meanest intellect, so that these horribly enlightened men now strayed on toward some Hyperborea to seek that fabled prize of eternal price which alone was worth the seeking, worth the having. And it was marvelous that all of this had come to pass in the arc of but several days, with a speed which could only be reckoned by the power of the message or the fickleness of the minds it met or the two things wed together.
He surveyed and pondered all of this, the dereliction that had been brought by one man’s voice, the wounds those airy words had lain down on the growth of this human life here, and reined in his horse now and then in the midst of these scenes as though to contemplate them and better gain the measure of what had occurred, to formulate some hypothesis upon these events or to gauge their consequences or their meaning. He reckoned he was following in the footsteps of a goaded stampede of beasts that had on a wild whim sundered their ties and foresworn all habit and consuetude, all project and plan, and lain out northward in an urgency which could not be accounted for by any sane calculus. For his part, he did not press his horse but set out perpendicular to the long bowshot of the sun, heading due north at a steady but unhurried pace, following the tracks this desperate and improvised caravan had stretched out visibly before him across the open plains there like a gouge upon the earth which the earth was still busy suturing and would soon heal so far that no man would ever know of this passage, and all of this would be forgotten and swallowed back into the recesses of the world in its native oblivion, and only the sleepless eternal mind of God to reckon or recall it.
He followed the road that had been stretched out over the countryside in a layline that was to be as the forerunner destiny of the swelling town behind him. His aim was northerly, and the early terrain of his journey was not unknown to him. The purple violet bluebonnets with their crowned heads and their manifold of pale eyes were in full bloom in the fields and upon the rolling hills, and in places stood thicker even than the grass itself. They cast a plum veil upon the earth as though the earth had determined to vie with the sky and the sea alike in its hue. Near the hills grew agarita bushes with their thick clumps of yellow flowers, and squat sumac and bur oak that rose out of the plains and appeared to the distance like bands of hulking dark wayfarers clutching their robes about them and making their belabored way through the lakes of flowers; and the twin rails of the road where the horses and wagons had been wont to pass cut through these fields and shored them like a pair of coupling snakes. At one point it seemed there was a fire growing upon that sea where the Indian paintbrushes sprang out in fields all its own, ethereal flame-like petals glowing in burning pools upon the hillside with a color which almost seemed to trespass the visible spectrum itself. There the flame would collect and gather and flood down into the blue and there intermingle, until the bluebonnets had their way of it again at the other side, and a line of mixed tone standing between the two, like the mixture of tones on a painter’s palette.
He passed amidst the flowers, to where the two throngs met. To his eyes that juncture seemed the meeting of two great hosts arrayed in the garb and apparel of war itself, joining combat upon the hillsides to determine the issue of some great conflict, which banner and which color would hold the land in its dominion, be it the blue or the red. He stood in the road for a long time gazing at these scenes, something alert and melancholy upon his features as though beauty itself were a sorrow to him. The wolf sat and opened its ears to sound out the terrain and looked up at him with its head cocked as though attending his decision. Then he whistled to the horse and the wolf alike and so spurring them made his way.
He encountered no one on that road, but by and by it crossed another, this heading east, to which he deferred and upon which he made his first camp, bedding down in the fields beneath the star-strewn depths of the open sky. The day following this same road led him across the waves of the blue and sweeping plains beneath a sky so vast and open and pale that it seemed to be a final confirmation of that solitude and estrangedness to which man has been fated, until at last his eye distantly glimpsed a human settlement in that seemingly endless plain and beneath that seemingly endless sky. It stood out dark against the blue below and the blue above, some plot of final earth parceled out to a community of survivors after a deluge, some island hovering between one sky and another and isolated in its cosmic insularity.
He rode into the town at aught past noon with the sun hanging over him like an obsessed voyeur to his each and every movement, and hitched his horse to a wooden post in the shadow of a cluster of mesquite trees and tied the wolf to the same post with a length of sisal twine, securing it about its neck with a bowline knot. The wolf had its ears slicked back against its skull and looked up at him with its yellow eyes wide as though it would hypnotize him and persuade him to take it along. But he fastened the twine and slapped the animal’s ribcage heartily twice and whispered words of comfort, then turned and walked away. The wolf circled twice in its confined range and settled into the dust and watched him go from a sitting position, its head up and its ears slightly cocked, its eyes following him fixedly.
He made his way across a wide dirt plaza toward another grouping of old mesquite trees on the far side, their pale serpentine trunks rising up from the earth and showing amidst the tiny shadow-green leaves like petrified strands of ash-colored smoke that had been paralyzed in its movement skyward. In the shade of them a group of men was loitering in conversation, seven of them standing about in a loose crescent. They fell silent at the approach of the stranger, looking him up and down with eyes that seemed somehow doleful, as if he were the bearer of bad news which they had long been fearing. They called out words of greeting which he, lifting his hat a moment in salutation, acknowledged.
“Can we do for you, stranger?” asked one of them
“Gentlemen, goodday to you. Pardon this interruption of your discourse, but I have intention to cut up northward, direct toward Washington Territory, and am seeking sound counsel on the terrain I can expect to encounter. I don’t reckon any of you gentlemen has experience of the land north-west of here?”
The smallest of them, who looked as well the oldest, grinned and guffawed slightly. “Why,” he seethed, “I’d bet my own mother that yo’re after the gold up yonder, following all them fool tales.” He was grinning into a grizzled beard from under an over-sized wide-brimmed hat with the brim folded up at the front and pinned to the crown as though he had no need of its shade and wore it only for the style, and he had a tooth missing from the front of his mouth which showed a black spot through his grin. He had the appearance of a wild and ungovernable gnome wandered in out of the desert.
“In a manner of speaking,” allowed Tenner.
“Well you missed the Gawd-damn gravy train,” wheezed the gnome, evidently amused.
“Had no intention of ever catching it,” smiled Tenner mildly.
“You’ll pardon ol’ Grandpa Stan here,” put in one of the younger men quickly with a nervous glance. “He’s been alive longer’n most in these parts, but in all that time he never did learn him any manners.” “Manners hell,” muttered the old man, glaring at this new speaker in sudden ire, but the younger man paid him no mind, and continued hastily. “At any rate, they — the prospectors, I mean — are heading up north-east, stranger. If I understood ’em, they’re aimin’ to skirt the Comancheria, along the Red River Trail to the west and double back on the ol’ Santa Fe from there to hit the Oregon Trail. They procured themselves an Indian guide from the reservations, and I am sure you will do the same. It’s a wide passage, but it’s a safe ’un, and I reckon you had best follow in their footsteps. If you ride fast enough you might even catch ’em, as they are loaded down with provisions, and will surely be moreso when they venture out onto the great Oregon.”
“I am much obliged, but I have set intention to cut through the high lands.”
The young man looked at him carefully as though seeing him just now for the first time. “You intend to beat ’em to it, stranger?”
“That will be as it will be. T’has no bearin’ on my path.”
“’Cause you sure as hell ain’t going to beat ’em to it by running up through that land… It is hard land up there, still frigid and snowy at this time of the year. You’d be riskin’ your hide for naught but a longer and more parlous road.”
“I appreciate the warning, but I will judge of that my own self. I intend to cut through the high lands.”
“The boy’s right, stranger,” put in another man, a wide-jawed fellow with close-knit eyes. He scratched his beard nervously as Tenner’s attention turned to him. “There ain’t anything up there but mean rattlesnakes and meaner redskins and starvation. May be a mountain man or two, but they are far and few between and yo’re not liable to run into one o’them. Now if you are just dead set on heading out west, you might follow the trail over to Los Angeles and strike north from there. Ain’t nobody’s been in portions of them inner lands prac’ly since Lewis and Clark, exceptin’ of course them redskins. And as for Lewis and Clark, to my thinkin’ they come out by a kinda miracle, and prolly on’y cause they din’t run into the wrong Injuns. Or maybe cause the Injuns din’t figure what they was. But by God they know now.”
“Say, sir, is that there animal yourn?” The man to so suddenly utter these words had been eyeing Tenner and eyeing his horse and eyeing his wolf this whole time, as though attempting to reckon which one of these three figures he fancied least. Tenner looked round to see that the man had indicated the wolf, and said it was his. At this intelligence, the man brushed his fingernails against his grey waistcoat crisply three times like he was polishing them and knocked the round flat brim of his flat-crown planter hat up as though to better let in the light, so as to perceive the man before him with greater clarity. “That looks one hell of a strange dawg.”
“Likely so. Haint no dog ’tall.”
“Looks a wolf to me.”
“You’re not mistaken.”
“I despise the wild things, sir.”
“Then you have sure chosen yourself a curious place of residence.”
The man frowned into his mustaches and shook his head. He lifted an admonishing finger into the air as though calling a point of order. “Contrary. I done chose me the best place of residence as could be found, for no where else can a man be so sure as to strike down the wilderness with a hard hand and put it to a good order. I am, sir, a proud member of the Texas Rangers, and have been commissioned by Gawd and gov’ment to keep the peace. You keep a watchful eye and a short leash on that beast there, stranger, for if he missteps—”
“He shall not misstep, sir.” Tenner’s voice rang hard and he had thrown his chin up. The company was looking at the two of them as though measuring out the sudden tension between them. The man gazed at Tenner a moment and then nodded curtly and spat into the dust. “See to it that it does not. It would not be the first wolf that Sam Witherington has shot down. Sir I have slain me wolf and bear and coyote and bison and rattlesnake and javelina and lizard and scorpion and spider and rat and tat and Injun and just about ev’ry oth’r foul creepiecrawler any man has ever chronicled in these parts and I aim to make a scourge of it and purify this land for the good people of this town and this nation. It is the destiny of our great country to civilize this rough and barbaric wild’rness and I aim to do my part in that holy cause. Sir I have covered my walls in the pelts and skins and scalps of my quarry as a reminder of how far I have gone and how far I have yet to go and I mean to see it through to the end, for these here beasts is the harbingers of wickedness itself, and it is my aim to harrow them to their extermination.” He gazed out at the wolf there in curled in the shadows and glared at it, awaiting it would seem but Tenner’s acquiescence to the justice in his words, that he might stride over then and there and put a close to this beast as well.
“To all appearances you have your work cut out for you, for nature has made a strange provision of such creatures hereabouts,” was Tenner’s only observation, his lips curling beneath his mustaches.
“The works of the devil are pow’ful and extensive, sir,” nodded the man solemnly, cold to the irony of his interlocutor. “Me and my Division are seein’ to the Comanchees, and they are just about the scurviest varmints of the many scurvy varmints hereabouts. We will do for the rest as well in due time. It is a matter of the time and the will alone, and the time and the will there is a plenty. We have already proven our will in the late Battle of Ant’lope Hills, and we shall see this thing through to the end in as many like engagements as are necessary to close this affair forever.”
A young man there had been listening intently could no longer restrain himself. “Say, Lieutenant With’rin’ton,” he burst out, “was you up there at the Battle of Ant’lope Hill yo’self?” The Ranger looked at the boy and nodded gravely. “I was,” he affirmed with a grave nod of his head. “I was proud to stand beside Captain John Ford, both before and during and after that battle, and by Gawd I will stand with him again when time comes to strike down more of them impish redskins.”
And the Ranger took the boy’s query for an invitation to palaver and began to recount these events, no longer so much as glancing at Tenner, as though he had wholly forgotten the stranger’s question or even his merest existence, or else had settled on the worthlessness of the both and determined to consign them to the outer periphery of that lighted circle in which he stood, erect in the glow of his pale honor, as he crafted his tale.
You have just read a chapter of the serial novel SACRIFICE, by John Bruce Leonard. A new chapter will be published each week. Subscribe below to receive new chapters directly in your email.
