Tie My Bones to Her Back by Robert F. Jones Read Free Book Online Page B

anxious crowd. Soldiers awaiting the first bugle calls to battle. It had jostled him out of an uneasy sleep into the cold dark, from another dream of the war. He had been in the woods again, at dusk, with the gunfire growing louder as it neared. Scrub oaks and pines. They lay or knelt behind hastily felled tree trunks, in a semicircle, waiting for whatever was coming up the line to reach them. From off in the murk came rebel yells, rising and falling in counterpoint to the spurts of musketry. Now and then the far thump of cannon. Harsh, indecipherable cries at a distance, an order edged in hysteria, its meaning swallowed by distance, and the thud of his own fast heart. Then the louder, slower thud of hooves through the earth, tiny, palpable punches in his chest and belly. Stronger as the horses neared. They heard the whistle of horse breath, a nicker, the clank of a brass-tipped scabbard against a stirrup. Dim, tall forms moved toward them in the dusk. Swaying. Lumpy. Greasy glint of steel.
    Must be the same damn Dutchmen back again, that wild-eyed screaming Christ-forsaken pig-fucking 8th Pennsylvania Cavalry outfit who’d rid through us half an hour ago. . . . saberswinging-pistolsbanging . . . boys knocked right and left by the knees of horses . . . And were gone, leaving plenty of dead behind them. Both horses and men. They learned the outfit’s number from looting the bodies.
    Blood drips in the leaf mold.
    A sudden spatter of musketry, not far off.
    Panic.
    “Cease firing, you are firing into your own men!”
    “It’s a lie!” in a Tarheel accent.
    A Tarheel accent . . .
    “Pour it into them, boys!”
    He hears the hammers click back all up and down the line . . .
    No don’t! he cries . . . They’re ours! Cease firing!
    But his breath stalls again, as always, in his dry throat. He kneels in the chill. His own thumb is steady on the splayed tang of the Enfield’s hammer. He feels the growing tension of the spring, the click of the locking sear. He sees the barrel, brown and oil-dim across the tree trunk, leveling out into the darkness, the faint evening star of the front-leaf sinking low between the unfocused limbs of the rear sight. The touch of his trigger finger on the curved new moon of steel. The horsemen clatter near, dim forms, then clear in the last, lost radiance of daylight as they enter the open wood, uniforms dark, wide hats; one officer twists in his saddle to talk with the lean, long-bearded officer in a raincoat and scruffy forage hat trotting beside him, starlight on hair; the bead of the Enfield sensing how the junior officer defers to the other and, following in suit to the higher rank, settles square on his chest.
    Squeeze now, squeeze off . . .
    No— not again! Not now! Old Jack — Old Blue Light! Not ever . . .
    The roar and kick of his rifle.
    My God, you’ve shot the general . . .
    It was then that he’d wakened to the tremor of the buffalo. Always the same dream woke him in times of tension. The memory of killing Stonewall Jackson. Raleigh McKay would never live that memory down. In his mind, it had cost the South the war.
    But now he was out to kill buffalo. Finally, they were here. While Otto was away in Wisconsin, McKay had hunted south and west between Crooked Creek and the Cimarron, looking for the main herd. He’d killed a wagonload of hides just picking off the early arrivals, the scouts of the main herd. Never more than fifteen or twenty in a bunch, but they added up. He had sent Tom Shields to town earlier, after hearing the buffalo coming over the horizon somewhere.
    Get Dousmann, if he’s back . Have him hire another cook—a decent one this time, goddamnit, and make sure the cook don’t bring no popskull with him like that damn Harvey Logan—then rendezvous at our old camp on Crooked Creek . Quick as you can get there.
    McKay stayed with the wagon. He had lead and powder enough for the Sharps, so he wasn’t afraid of Indians. Too early yet for Comanches, though maybe