Oh brother, what have you done
The smell of death rode on the wind. John Altar crested the hilltop and brought his horse to a stop. He’d smelled it a ways off, but the breeze had all but stilled some time ago. The stink remained. He whistled low and the dog that had been his companion for a while, some kind of wolf half-breed, sat on its haunches close on his left. The fat gray clouds overhead threatened rain, and no wind stirred the thick expectant air, which was hot.
As he stared down the slope, he cut a hunk of tobacco from his plug, sliding it off the blade directly into his mouth. The leaf was hard and dry. It had been wrapped in a cloth in his saddlebag for a time. Spit washed over the scrap and the bitter flavor crept into his senses.
Below, at the bottom of the slope, a series of double tracks had been worn into the earth by scores of wagons over the years. Upon that trail were the remains of some homesteaders who had been on their way to what they’d hoped to be a better life. Nothing moved down there, except the black flutter of buzzard’s wings as they fought over bloated corpses. He couldn’t tell how many settlers there had been, and by the butchery, he figured more scavengers than just the buzzards had visited this site.
Being that it was going on late summer, this seemed kind of late in the season for pioneers to be this far down the trail. Unless of course, they were Mormons. They wouldn’t be going all the way to Oregon or California.
Still don’t see many Mormons moving west this time of year, Altar thought, but there were always those late to the party. Seemed like most who’d wanted to migrate had already done so, no matter how austere the conditions might be.
He had to wonder if he was going to find Bobby down there. He’d been dogging his younger brother, and the collection of dirty, low-down, no-account Johnny Rebs Bobby had taken up with, for weeks. Could those ne’er-do-wells be responsible for the carnage down below?
Could Bobby?
Or his brother might be among the dead.
Only one way to find out, he thought.
Altar steered his horse forward, despite the animal’s reticence to approach the field of death. He reached out and patted the horse’s neck in reassurance.
“Easy, boy. I’m not liking this any more than you do, but we got to go down there.”
The inevitable dread of what he might find weighed as heavily on him as an anvil around his neck.
He yanked his blue handkerchief from his back pocket. Unfolding it, he rubbed the cloth on the horse’s sweaty flesh and got it good and wet. The lather smelled strong, but it probably wouldn’t help much gauged on the putrid odor lingering in the air from this distance.
He gave the chaw a grind with his molars to break it apart and moistened the results with spit. Then he spat some of the ground tobacco and juice onto the blue fabric and roughed it in hard. He fastened the cloth in place around his head, bandit style. He was hopeful, as the mixture of animal and tobacco odors made him wrinkle his nose, that the powerful smell would somehow mask the overwhelming stench of the charnel house below. But as he made his way closer, he knew it wasn’t going to be much help.
The only sound was the buzzing of insects, the swish of his horse’s tail, and the not-so-distant rumble of thunder.
A storm must be coming.
He looked at the dog. “Stay.”
The dog settled onto its belly and laid its head on crossed forelegs, ears ever alert.
Altar drew his Henry repeating rifle and laid it across his lap as his horse started forward with the slightest nudge from his knees. Nothing was moving on the horizon, no dust clouds. He wove his horse all the way down the incline through the scrub, all the while watching everywhere, alert for any movement or sound out of place.
Safe at the bottom of the slope, Altar studied the gruesome scene. The settlers had apparently taken no defensive posture, no circled wagons, no firearms strewn about, though those could’ve been stolen to be sure. Not much of value remained after a massacre. The area was a wide-open expanse. They sure should have been able to see the attack coming. Why hadn’t they at least circled their wagons?
But his gut spoke to him, and he suspected he knew what had happened here. God knows he’d seen its like in the war. Looks like they got bushwhacked.
Bobby, what have you done?
As he neared, the reek grew worse, and he could practically taste it. Lots of distended green-blue bottle flies buzzed nearby.
He dismounted at the end of the carnage and looped his reins around a broken fragment of wagon wheel jutting from a groove in the dirt. The horse snorted and bucked at the pervasive odor of nearby death. Altar patted the animal once more and scanned the horizon again.
Nothing yet, besides the approaching clouds every bit as bloated at the feasting flies. His ever-alert dog was still quiet up on the ridge.
The clouds, and the flashes of lightning, were the only things that looked threatening. He pulled his slicker from his saddle and unrolled it. The heat was stifling, but he put it on anyway.
Prairie schooners, mostly covered, had been overturned, their canvas torn, and the cargo, what wasn’t worth taking, was strewn across the trail. Oxen had been killed; and in a couple of instances, steaks had been cut from their flesh. There was even a dead dog. A horse or two had been killed, which was unusual, but he suspected most of the quality animals had been stolen.
A smattering of rough arrows, fletched with feathers he didn’t immediately recognize, were prominent on some of the dead animals. Men lay dead, too, the tops of their blond heads shorn to the bone, and their soft bellies torn open.
He came across an old woman’s body. She lay on her back with her skirts up around her head. She’d also been scalped, and her lady parts had apparently been mauled, probably by some wild critter. They were only doing what any hungry critter would do, and he couldn’t really fault them for that. Might as well get mad at the clouds for raining.
But it wasn’t no animal that hiked her skirt up like that, Altar thought. That was done by a two-legged kind of varmint.
A baby lay under her. It was dead too, but from what he couldn’t tell.
These were among the worst killings he’d ever seen, but he couldn’t really hold no ill will with the animals.
A fat raindrop splattered on the back of his hand, and then another. It wasn’t until the moisture brought his mind round back to the present that he realized he was gripping his Henry so hard his scarred knuckles were white. The skies unleashed a torrent of rain as he stood and stared at the butchery that lay before him. Even the cold rain didn’t divert his attention from the slaughter.
He reckoned no amount of water would wipe away the stain of this massacre from the earth. At least nothing short of the forty-days and forty-nights rain that his momma read to him and Bobby about from the Bible. He stowed his rifle back in its saddle boot and covered the Henry with his blanket, even though some blue sky was already visible over the hills to the west. He turned back to the trail and set his teeth. He had a grisly task ahead of him.
Oh, Bobby, he thought, were you a part of this? Am I gonna find you?
Would it be better if his brother were among the dead, rather than having participated in this slaughter?
Perhaps so.
But on to the task—time to bury the dead.
* * *
He hadn’t stopped for anything but water until the sun was about set, then he cobbled together a fire halfway to the top of the rise, upwind from the dead. The material for burying them all had been almost conveniently close thanks to the nearby rocky expanse, but any appetite he’d worked up was long gone. He settled for some pan coffee and hardtack soaked some in the dark liquid.
All of the dead looked to be pilgrims. At least none had been his brother, nor had any of the others appeared to be the ne’er-do-wells he’d heard Bobby was now running with. While that was a relief, it also made him ask what the hell had happened to his brother. The boy he once knew would never have participated in anything like this. What had happened to him in the war?
The war.
The damn war… So many lives ruined.
Altar had served with the Union, and Bobby had gone with the South.
The brutal conflict between the states had divided his family and how many others?
He fished the oilcloth-wrapped locket from his saddlebag. He cradled the bundle in his hand for a long moment, and then opened it. The orange-red flames flickered in the reflection on the small metal oval. He thumbed it open and gazed at the shadowed picture within, not really seeing her likeness as much as some remembrance, though those had faded, like the picture, to near nothing.
How many times had he opened this same locket in the field?
When he fought in Missouri or out west, after some battle or skirmish, when his thoughts were dark with death and dying, he’d found comfort by opening it. At one time, memories of her had driven some of the horror from his mind. Though the time apparently had driven memories of him from her mind as well. She’d married someone else while he was away fighting.
Married some farmer with a hundred head of dairy cattle or some such. Why couldn’t those images fade with time, as was the case with his memory of his love?
That thought brought him back around to the massacre. He hadn’t found anything that led him to believe the wagon train had been herding any livestock, other than a few oxen. That was strange. Most of the wagon trains he’d known had at least a hundred head of cattle or sheep with them.
He replaced the locket in his saddlebag and went to sleep with his freshly oiled rifle next him and his revolver tucked partially under the saddle upon which he laid his head.
The wind shifted in the night, and he awoke with the death stench heavy in his nose and mouth. He rose and hiked up to the top of the hill. The sun’s rays were breaking over the hilltops in the east, but the bottom of the slope was still obscured in darkness.
A shadow for the dead, he thought. Just as well.
The dog loped up to him and sat, its tongue lolling out. Altar stood there and let the rays reach him, warming him against the chills of the past night. When he turned to go back to his makeshift camp, he gazed again at the ruins below, now basked in radiant sunlight.
The way he read the signs, these homesteaders had died with their killers most likely hiding among them. And not like they were overrun by Indians or butchered by marauding men on horseback. Even though scavengers had been at the bodies, they hadn’t done enough harm to make it look any different than it was. It didn’t seem as if these people had time to even panic, let alone run, just die.
And what about the smattering of random arrows?
Indians?
Some of the folks had been scalped, but the arrows in some of the animals hadn’t been what killed them. The feathered shafts weren’t driven in deep. It was more like they were stabbed in by hand, not shot from a bow. No, this hadn’t been the work of Indians, although measures had been taken to make it look that way. All the tracks of the living he’d found had been wearing boots, nary a moccasin among them. And the horses that had rode off were all shod. He’d never known an Indian to ride a shoed horse.
Altar knew what had really happened. And he had a real good idea of who was responsible. It made him sick to his stomach. He reckoned these pilgrims had been killed by the men he’d been tracking, and they’d tried to make it look like savages had done it.
The men he’d been trailing… The men his brother had joined up with after being released from the prisoner of war camp in Chicago. Up until now, he’d only thought of them as outlaws, stealing and the like, not murderers. The tactics were like what he’d seen the guerillas in Missouri use during the war, infiltrate and destroy from within.
As he stared at the debris a while longer, the way the wagons had been overturned seemed more suited to men doing it deliberately as opposed to panicked animals. The battleground didn’t look like any Indian attack he’d seen in his years in the army. But it sure did look like how the Confederate guerillas had burned some communities to the ground in and around Missouri. And the people killed.
“These folks got bushwhacked,” he said aloud. The dog looked up at him. Altar nodded as if the animal understood.
“A damn shame,” he said. “But there’s something eviler if men make it look like someone else done it, getting people all riled up at the wrong folks.” He started down the incline, back to his fire and bedroll.
“If we hadn’t of happened along, Dog,” he said, “whenever this here got discovered the Indians would’ve been blamed. And people would’ve been happy to believe it.”
He shook his head as he kicked dirt onto the coals.
“Talking to a damn dog, guess I been on my own too long.” He grinned. “But it ain’t like them homesteaders been talking much.”
He looked in the direction the tracks led off. It didn’t seem right that no one was doing nothing about these people.
Hell, once he left here, would anyone even know?
Altar sighed and placed the blanket and saddle onto his horse’s back. The nagging question remained in his gut like solid stone.
Had Bobby been a part of this?
When Altar had begun this journey, he’d just been looking to bring his brother back home to their farm in Missouri while their mother was still alive. But now, he didn’t know what to think. The little brother he knew before the war would never have been involved in anything like this, but the war did strange things to people. Still, he didn’t want to think it had turned Bobby into the kind of man that could do what he’d seen these last two days.
He took his hat off and wiped his brow with his shirt sleeve and looked at the dog.
“Mama always said I looked for trouble, even when it wasn’t none of mine to begin with.” He twisted in his saddle and looked back at the site of the carnage. “I know it would kill her, for certain, if she thought Bobby was involved in some way. So would his hanging for it.”
A grim smile suddenly overtook him as he mounted his horse.
There I go talking to that mutt again, he thought.
But as he rode away, his mother’s reproachful voice kept echoing in his mind: Go find your brother, John. Bring him back to me before I die.
I’ll do my best, Mama, he thought.
Altar pulled his reins over and set off after the tracks of the killers, including his little brother.
