Loe raamatut: «St. Agnes’ Stand»

DAY ONE …

He was hurt and riding cautiously. Thoughts not quite grasped made him uneasy, and he listened for an errant sound in the hot wind. His eyes were narrowed – searching for a broken leaf, a freshly turned rock, anything from which he could make some sense of his vague uneasiness. Nothing. The desert seemed right, but wasn’t somehow. He turned in the saddle and looked behind him. A tumbleweed was bouncing in front of wild assaults from the wind. But the trail was empty. He turned back and sat, listening.

Over six feet and carrying two hundred pounds, Nat Swanson didn’t disturb easy, but this morning he was edgy. His hat brim was pulled low, casting his face in shadow. The intense heat and the wind were playing with the air, making it warp and shimmer over the land. He forced himself to peer through it, knowing he wouldn’t get a second chance if he missed a sheen off sweating skin or the straight line of a gun barrel among branches.

As his mule climbed, he slowly reached his hands back and pulled black shoulder-length hair out of the way behind his head, securing it with a piece of silk ribbon. Caught in this way, the hair revealed the finely shaped features of his weathered profile. His skin was a dark copper colour and sun lines etched deep into the corners of his eyes and mouth gave his face the look of cracked rock when he smiled.

Without much motion, he slipped the leather thong off the hammer of the pistol hanging at his side, easing the weapon halfway up the holster to clear it, then settling it back down again. The sheer cold weight of it felt comforting.

He had been running for a week, and he was light on sleep and heavy on dust and too ready for trouble. He’d killed a man in a West Texas town he’d forgotten the name of – over a woman whose name he’d never known. He hadn’t wanted the woman or the killing. Nor had he wanted the hole in his thigh. What he did want was to get to California, and that’s where he was headed. Buttoned in his shirt pocket was a deed for a Santa Barbara ranch. Perhaps a younger man would have run longer and harder before turning to fight and maybe die; but Nat Swanson was thirty-five years that summer, old for the trail, and he had run as far as he was going to run.

A covey of mearns quail flushed near the ridge top and glided down the bright mountain air, disappearing in a thick stand of manzanita to his left. He reined the mule in and sat watching. The animal stood with its ears tilted back, then switched them forward and listened up the trail. The mule was desert-bred stock, and Swanson knew it sensed the danger as well as he. The uneasy feeling came over him strong again, and he blew out his nostrils to clear them and then breathed in, scenting the wind. Nothing. But there was something. Mearns quail didn’t flush easy in high winds.

It was early morning and he was perched halfway up a hardscrabble New Mexico hillside, following a deer path that stayed comfortably below the crestline where a larger pack trail ran. It was habit with him never to ride main trails or ridge lines even in the best of times, and this morning, with three riders tracking him, he wasn’t about to start breaking the habit.

He ran facts over in his mind. It didn’t figure that the men who had chased him across miles of hot desert on bad water had magically managed to get ahead of him. Even if they could have pushed their animals that hard, which he plain doubted, they couldn’t have guessed which arroyo he would take into the high mountains. No man was that lucky. There was no sense to it, and he was a man who liked things to make sense.

A sound from behind told Swanson the dog had worked its way up through the brush of the mountain. He looked over his shoulder at it sitting on its thin haunches, its eyes and ears fixed on the trail ahead; at least they weren’t coming at his back. He let the dog take a blow. It stood some six hands at the shoulders, deep-chested, maybe ninety pounds, narrow at the hips. Nature had left its tail long for balance, and somebody else had spiked its ears so they couldn’t be torn off in a fight. Great patches of bare skin showed on its haunches and shoulders where its thin hair had been worn off in sleep against the hard desert. It was as formidable a beast as it was ugly; a fierce and violent mongrel, able to take a man down and able to kill.

Five years before, the dog had thrown in with him in Arizona, swinging silently in behind his mule one sundown in a high mountain meadow a hundred miles from anywhere or anyone. That’s all he knew about it, excepting it was clean, didn’t beg, wasn’t friendly and didn’t make noise; those were things he understood and respected. It had bitten him once, and he had thought of shooting it more times than that.

When the dog was rested, he waved it ahead. It trotted past the mule and began to zigzag in the brush on both sides of the trail. Five yards from the hilltop, it froze. Swanson watched it for a few seconds and then swung painfully down, keeping his right hand free. When he reached the ground he pulled a leather pouch from behind the cantle of his saddle and slung it under his arm; then he loosened the straps holding a crossbow in place, listening hard as he worked, and slipped the weapon across his back. He checked the cylinder on his pistol and started up the trail.

Even hurt, he was deceptively light on his feet. He wore soft, mule-eared boots and moved with a grace and power that told of years not spent in a saddle but on foot in mountains like these. His buckskin leggings and his four-button blue flannel shirt were soft and noiseless as he walked. He knew the dog had a scent but the wind kept it confused, and he watched it now turning and sticking its nose up, then turning again. He continued climbing.

The dog was nowhere in sight as Swanson eased over the crest of the trail. The pain was bad in his leg. He lay still for a long time in a patch of dried hopsage and listened to the hills. No sound. The morning sun burned into him. He squinted his eyes and searched for movement. The wind had died. Just heat and dust and gravel. The flies and gnats hadn’t started in yet. The air felt pure and clean and hot. He crawled forward until he was overlooking a wide canyon that fell sharply away from where he lay concealed. At the bottom he could see a rocky flat and a dry river bed; a line of stunted tamarisk trees, parched and almost leafless, bordered the waterless course of the river. Nothing looked alive.

He had not spotted them before he heard the popping of a musket. Seconds later, there was a louder, sharper bark from what sounded like a Hawken. He squinted and searched the canyon until he located the white smoke drifting in the air, and after a few minutes more of searching he saw the Indian who had fired the musket. Ten minutes later, he had marked the positions of thirty Apaches, and seen their prey.

Two freight wagons lay overturned in a V against a cliff at the edge of a narrow road. Swanson pulled a telescope from the leather pouch and scanned them. The remains of a water barrel indicated the standoff would be short, Hawken or not. The wood looked dry. But maybe whoever was behind the wagons still had water. For their sake, he hoped so.

He glassed the road again. It was going to be a game with only one end: the freighters were eventually going to go crazy from the heat, the thirst, the fear … and one night they were going to try and escape. They wouldn’t make it.

He gave them three days, maybe. They were probably Mexicans; two to a wagon and armed with muzzle loaders and single-ball pistols. The Hawken might mean their cargo was valuable. It didn’t matter. No one would come to help them. They knew that. They knew the Apache. Their people had brutalized one another from time out of mind. They were muerto. The best they could hope was not to be taken alive. He couldn’t help them.

He held the telescope on some rocks near one of the wagons. The Indians had started a landslide in an attempt to knock the closest dray off the road, but it had missed. The stones lay in a mass higher than the wagons. The Apaches had seen this and two stood behind the rocks motioning for a third to climb up and take a shot.

Swanson focused the scope on this Indian. He was wearing a red shirt strapped at the waist with a leather belt, a white breechcloth, bare legged with deerskin boots. He looked no more than sixteen, but from the easy way he carried the musket in the crook of his arm, the way he strode confidently up the rocky slope, it was obvious this was their marksman.

Swanson studied him closely: the respect he was being shown by the others, his arrogance, and the comfortable manner in which he handled the weapon said he knew how to shoot. With just yards separating the mound of rocks from the wagons, he was going to give the people behind the wagons jessy; it would be like plunking thirsty horses at a water hole.

Swanson didn’t love Mexicans, but he liked them somewhat better than a stacked deck. Even so, he figured it wasn’t his funeral. He was calculating on pulling back and staying out of the fight, when he saw the Indian in the red shirt, a cock-of-the-walk grin on his poxed face, standing on the road in clear view of the wagons, urinating; daring the trapped Mexicans to do something. He wasn’t twenty feet from the closest wagon. It seemed incredible. Swanson waited for the Hawken to bark; waited for the pissing Apache to fly backwards, his chest blown open. Nothing happened.

He couldn’t figure it; why don’t they just shoot the sonofabitch, he wondered. Like jack rabbits cornered by the dog, they must be frozen with fear. That, or they’d already killed themselves. He had heard of that happening, though he didn’t know whether to believe it or not; it seemed impossible an armed man would shoot himself rather than die fighting. But long ago he had learned there was no figuring fear in man or beast.

Still, this act of pissing at men who were going to die, men cornered and outnumbered and who didn’t have much of a fighting chance left, men who had maybe just a little bit of dignity left inside their pinched up guts, didn’t set well with him. Fact of the matter, while Nat Swanson was slow to anger, this made it for him.

He limped half-crouched down a ridge top to some boulders and squatted behind them, tightening the bloody bandana on his thigh, groaning quietly from the pain. Then he pulled the crossbow off his back, his hands moving over the coffee-coloured wood with familiarity bred over a lifetime. It had been his grandfather’s. Swanson knew the hearth stories – the old man had used it to poach deer and boar off the great English estates around Kent in the late 1700s. It must have been a wonderfully efficient weapon for that purpose: powerful, accurate, silent as soft wind through spring leaves.

He placed the butt on his stomach and, grasping the slack string in both hands, yanked back hard, grunting at the hurt in his leg, bending the short metal wings until the string caught in the trigger lock; then he notched a bolt snugly in place and rose slowly over a waist-high boulder, resting the weapon on the stone. He guessed the range, sighted a fraction high, and pulled his breath in. No wind. The Indian was atop the boulders now, making a show of sighting his musket on the two wagons. Swanson let his breath out, then held it and pulled softly. There was no recoil, no sound to speak of, only a soft twang as the string slammed forward.

For a fleeting moment, he glimpsed the white fletching arcing through the bright morning sunlight, then he lost it in the shadows of the cliff. One second. Two seconds. Suddenly the Apache’s head smashed against the rocks, the body sliding limply to the roadway. It had been a clean kill.

The two Indians who had beckoned the younger brave were crouching against the side of the cliff, searching for who or what had slain their comrade so efficiently, so silently. The heavy one lunged from the wall and yanked up the dead man’s arms, dragging the body quickly down the rocky slope, while the second one scrambled after the precious musket. They had no idea where the bolt had come from and that would keep them from climbing the boulders for another shot, for a time.

When it was safe, Swanson studied the wagons again through the telescope, curious. The Indians were still fanned on the slope, but they looked more alert and less confident. He brought the circular field of the lens to play on the wagons and wondered again if there was anyone still alive behind them. There was no movement, but that didn’t prove anything; a man would be a damn fool to show himself with Apaches watching. But if they were alive, why hadn’t they killed the pissing Apache?

He was moving the circle of glass slowly along the space between the bottom of the wagons and the ground, trying to catch a movement of some kind, when he saw her. He couldn’t believe his eyes. A woman’s face, not pretty, not young, but a woman, nevertheless, stared out directly at him from the gap between the two wagons, staring as if she were looking straight into his eyes. Then she was gone. Swanson searched the area where he had seen her for another hour, but she never reappeared.

It was blisteringly hot where he hid among the rocks; the gnats had retreated but the flies had taken their place and they were driving him crazy, and he was getting a little wild for water because he’d bled a good deal from the wound. It didn’t take much for him to make up his mind to pull out. He just did it. He’d done all he could for the people in the wagons. He had bought them precious time. He was surprised and sorry there was a woman involved, but there wasn’t a single logical thing he could do to save her.

He struggled to his knees and put the telescope on the wagons one last time. She wasn’t to be seen, but he knew she was there; her face seemed oddly burned into his memory somehow. He guessed it was the surprise of seeing her in the first place, which caused her face to keep flashing in his thoughts. Getting her out would be impossible. Only a fool would try. He was no fool.

The mule was where he had left it. When he had finished restrapping the crossbow and the leather pouch to the saddle, he stood a while, listening for danger and sipping from his canteen, figuring his options. His biggest concern now was the three men behind him. Having lost half the day, they had to be close; and they too would take the road to Fort Rucker, since it was the only place in a hundred miles for fresh horses and supplies.

If he were smart, he would strike west along the Gila River into Arizona Territory; with a little luck, he could make it and the Texans weren’t likely to follow him deep into Apacheria. After a week of trying to lose them over hard rock desert and shifting sand that didn’t leave much trail sign, and failing to do so, he knew the three men tracking him weren’t new at this game, and they certainly weren’t fools. They wouldn’t want anything to do with the Apache if they could avoid it; not even to avenge the death of a friend.

The Gila was his best chance and quickest route to California; but as he stood there next to his mule, he knew he couldn’t take it. Not right off, anyhow. First, he would head for Fort Rucker; he owed the woman at the wagons that one chance. He didn’t owe her his life, however, and he promised himself he would turn west the first time his pursuers broke out between him and the fort. Having scouted for the army, he’d take no chance some second-jack cavalry officer would side with the dead man’s friends and turn him over to be hung. His mind made up, he didn’t expect to have his hand forced quite as soon as it was.

The dog had rejoined him on a trail leading down out of the arroyo, and after he had given it water he had looked up and spotted his pursuers crossing a ridge top half a mile ahead. The sun was behind Swanson and there was little chance the men would see any reflection off the glass, so he stood and put the telescope on them.

They were outfitted and looked like typical Texans, lean and tough, strapped with the new Walker Colt pistols that were making their way into the territory and carrying a selection of different rifles under their legs. One rode a big, high-stepping pinto with a broken tail and a nice singlefoot. It was an animal he might have traded the mule for, and he watched it admiringly. The men’s faces were shadowed by large hats, and he couldn’t see them; but the way they rode, letting their horses pick the trail, taking care to lean forward over the necks of their mounts whenever they climbed to go easy on the beasts’ kidneys, he understood them. And, under different circumstances, he would probably get along with these men. But the circumstances weren’t different; he had killed a friend of theirs and now they aimed to kill him, so he waited until they disappeared into a chaparral-filled arroyo, then he mounted and struck west towards the Gila.

The Apaches had won; the woman had lost. It was that simple. There was nothing he could do about it.

He had been riding for half an hour, checking his backtrail periodically, when he came over a bluff and saw the cloth. The sharp colours against the dull taupe hues of the hills seemed to physically slap at his senses. Hundreds of feet of brightly coloured calico cloth were strewn in all directions over the tops of the brush at the bottom of the small valley. Some Apache braves had had fine fun on horseback.

Out the corner of one eye, he saw a thin trail of smoke threading its way into the sky, rising from what appeared to be a third wagon that had broken through the ambush and made it this far. His muscles tensed and a searing pain shot up from the gash in his leg. The dog was standing a few feet in front of the mule, its hair rising in a stiff ridge down the length of its back.

He pulled his pistol and checked the cylinder, then waved the dog into the valley. The air around him was bright and cheerful, filled with the sounds of water and birds. After a quarter hour, the dog returned and flopped down on the trail. He was soaked and satisfied looking and Swanson knew he’d been swimming. He tightened the bandage on his leg and swung down. He had stiffened up, but fortunately the leg had mostly stopped bleeding. Quietly, he worked his way down the slope.

The freight driver had been dead for at least two days and what was left of his head was blackening in a repulsive mass in the heat. Swanson kicked a turkey vulture off the corpse. The bird’s ugly bald head and neck were glistening with grease and blood and it was too heavy to fly. It stood off a few yards, its wings outstretched and its mouth open, hissing at Swanson.

The man had been buried to his neck in the soft sand a few yards from the wagon, but not before his privates had been cut off and stuffed in his mouth. His face had been brutally disfigured; his eyelids, nose and ears cut off, an eye gouged out with a stick. Then he’d been used for target practice with lances and arrows. It had probably been over in half an hour, and made him the lucky one. They had taken longer with the woman. Her white skin looked obscene in the sunlight, and Swanson covered her with a black robe he found in the dirt near the wagon.

He had no time to bury them; the Apaches would be back for the cloth and the other goods in the wagon. After taking a long drink and filling his canteens and a deerskin bag, he soaked his head in the clear pool of water, cleaned his wound, and then let the mule drink his fill.

He rode through half the night, putting good distance between him and the valley. Five hours before dawn, he made a cold camp in thick mesquite. He hobbled the mule and unsaddled it, drying the animal’s back carefully with a cloth; then he turned the blanket over to the dry side and resaddled, half tightening the cinch so that he could still mount if attacked. He cocked the crossbow and slipped a bolt into the firing groove, then he threw a tarp on the ground and lay down in what was still hundred-degree heat and tried to sleep. The feeling of the deed crinkling in his pocket was good.

Sister St Agnes had been praying in the dark for over two hours; she held the crucifix her mother had given her forty-seven years before, on the day she had taken her solemn vows. She had turned twenty that day. The memory flooded in. She could see it vividly: snow had fallen in New York City and her mother and two younger brothers, Matthew and Timothy, had looked so cold and alone standing outside the convent of the Sisters of Charity where she had spent her novitiate, shaking in their winter coats, while she in contrast had felt so warm inside, so at peace. She had known then God was real; He lived. It had been that simple for her. That feeling of peace had never left her; not even now, on this dark, hot night with the shadows of death so near, was she without the peace.

Even so, she was deeply troubled. She rubbed the crucifix gently in her fingers, the way she always did when she needed a special prayer answered. And on this night, in this black and lonely place, hundreds of miles from succour and safety, she needed a very special prayer answered; not for herself, she thought. She was ready to join her Lord. Her prayers, as usual, were simple and were for others. She had two this night and she had been repeating them in different ways over and over again.

The first prayer was for Sister Ruth. She had not made it to safety. Sister St Agnes had watched a group of Indians overtake the fleeing wagon as it rolled down the road; one had shoved Sister Ruth down when she stood up in the back. Sister St Agnes knew instinctively that Sister Ruth was lost. She had not told the others what she had seen; Sister Ruth was their only hope; they had visions of her and the Mexican driver hurrying toward Santa Fe and help. And as long as she did not have to lie, Sister St Agnes would not destroy their hope.

She closed her eyes tighter and prayed fervently for Sister Ruth’s soul; she did not pray for her death. Even though she knew of the things that the Apache did to women captives, her faith would not allow her to pray for death. But she could pray for Sister Ruth to have the strength and the peace of the abiding Almighty, and she did. Then she prayed over and over again for Ruth’s precious soul. When she was done, she felt weak and alone. She asked the Saviour to comfort Sister Ruth in her hour of need, and she began to talk quietly to her, the way she had once talked at night in her heart to her own father when she was a novice in the convent. She had been deeply troubled then as well.

She felt a gentle warmth inside at the thought of her father. Sister Ruth and he were similar in so many ways. They were both possessed of great pride; not evil pride as some have, but rather a sense of rightness in their actions and being. Stubborn, too. Sister St Agnes smiled at the thought and her mind drifted effortlessly to her father, now dead, whom she loved so much. A Baptist minister, he had never spoken to her after she had become a Catholic and entered the convent.

She was silent for a few moments, and then in a soft, mothering tone she said, ‘Sister Ruth, forget where you are now, forget everything, let go of this world. Let Jesus hold you and comfort you. He’s coming for you, Ruth, turn away and run to Him.’ She was sobbing softly now, not in sorrow, not in joy, simply in farewell. She was smiling through her tears.

After she had composed herself, Sister St Agnes began her second prayer. She appeared to straighten her small body somewhat and she squeezed the crucifix tightly between the palms of her hands. ‘Jesus,’ she whispered, her voice intensifying, ‘I have never asked for a miracle. I have never deserved one. I’ve never asked for a thing for myself, though You Yourself, Lord, said: “Ask and it shall be given.” I am willing to die in this place if that is Your will … but …’ Her words failed her. She clutched harder at the cross in her hands, and for the first time in her life, she felt herself sweating beneath her habit. She shuddered as if a hand had touched her, and the desert night felt oddly cold and penetrating. ‘Dear Saviour Jesus, send one who will deliver the others from this evil.’

Sister St Agnes slept.

Nat Swanson sat bolt upright in his sleep, and yelled. The dog came close to him and stared into his face. He reached a trembling hand out toward it and it growled at him and moved away. Swanson was drenched with sweat and he stood up, shaken. He had never yelled like that before in his life and he didn’t like it. He sat down on a rock and tried to piece together what had caused it. He looked at his hands; they were still trembling. It was a beautiful, starry night. The dog came and sat down a distance away and watched him, curious. The moon was three-quarters full and seemed to move among brilliant white clouds.

Swanson knew he had been dreaming. That in itself was strange, since he could not recall having ever dreamed before. But he was certain that he had been dreaming. About what, he didn’t know. Except that he knew it had something to do with the woman at the wagons. He had seen her face again – a face surrounded by utter darkness – and he had yelled a yell that felt like it had been trapped inside of him all his days. Swanson shook slightly. He called the dog but the animal only stared at him, its fur up on its back.

Three hours before dawn, Nat Swanson cinched the mule up tight and started on again. He rode chewing on a piece of jerky; he tried to stay alert to the trail and the surrounding hills, but his mind kept drifting back to the wagons and the woman. An hour later, he stopped and sat thinking. He felt oddly chilled. The dog was watching him closely, giving him a wide berth.

He rubbed his eyes; he couldn’t shake the memory of her face. She didn’t look like anyone he had ever known. She wasn’t handsome. She wasn’t marrying age. He could no longer remember what his own mother looked like, so she couldn’t remind him of her. It didn’t make sense. There was a new life waiting for him in California. But now, strangely, it was on the periphery of his thoughts. Try as he would, he couldn’t get his mind off the face at the wagons. He just sat there, the mule grazing, the dog watching him.

When dawn came and he was still sitting there, still thinking about her, he turned the mule around and started back to the canyon.

He stood glassing the arroyos and ridgebacks, looking for a way he could reach the wagons. There was none that wouldn’t get him killed, unless he waited until dark, and by that time, he figured, it would be too late. The Apaches were growing bolder. Nine of them were standing on the road, some behind the rocks, some in plain view of the wagons.

Two young bucks who walked like they had been drinking mescal marched boldly out in front of the wagons, turned and pulled their breechcloths up and then, tauntingly, slapped their buttocks. The Hawken rifle barked again; and, startled, the two darted unceremoniously for cover down the rocky slope, their comrades laughing at them. Swanson shook his head, amazed anyone could miss with a rifle at that distance.

Minutes later, the Apaches were tossing fist-sized rocks over the wagons and yelling taunts. Twice on the wind, he heard their word for whore. This wasn’t going to last much longer; soon a brave would get high enough on peyote or mescal, grab a lance and rush the wagons, others would follow, and it would be over.