The Beginning of "Pony"

I guess it's not really fair (or smart) to post portions of a story without the beginning. Here's the start of the last two posts... it sets the stage for all that follows.

June 11, 1863

In the hour before dawn the German lifted his blankets and rolled out from under the wagon to stretch and yawn.  Fog thickened the darkness until his eye could discern no shape beyond arm’s length, nor could he hear a sound beyond his own movement.  He felt the cool, wet air on his face as he made his way to the back of the wagon and reached inside the canvas cover, feeling for the dragoon pistol he left there the night before. 

As he took it in his hand his wife’s hand closed over his.  Her face appeared at the canvas opening.

Lorenz?

Lisbeth.

Wie gehts?

The mules… wasser.  I take them to the river now.  Then  some grain to make an early start.

I’ll wake the children.

Nein.  Sie schlafen.  Now some coffee.  Then wake them.

She leaned out from under the canvas and kissed him.  He stuck the heavy pistol in his waistband and turned away from the wagon.

Lorenz.

Ja.

We catch up to the other wagons?

Nachmittag, Ich denke.

She heard his voice again as the fog swallowed him.

Kaffee, bitte.  Schnell.

Lorenz Bauer stepped into the grainy darkness and paused, listening.  He had bought the six big-bellied, square-built mules for three hundred dollars in Independence.  He was skeptical of their short legs until the dealer told him they were Mexican mules that would thrive on nothing more than pine straw and cactus, and would still out-pull any animal the Lord had fashioned since time began. 

So far they had proven to be even-tempered and strong enough, but they were quiet animals too and in the dark Bauer strained to locate his picket line.  He moved slowly until he heard a tail swish.  He drifted toward the sound and almost walked into one animal as it dozed - its looming shape suddenly appearing through the mist, ears canted like horns on its anvil-shaped head.

By the time he had them haltered the fog had begun to lift.  He smiled.  In the distance he could almost make out the silhouette of the cottonwoods that lined the Platte River.  The trees comforted him.  Both he and Lisbeth were raised near Stuttgart, only a few kilometers from the Schwarzwald. 

It had been nearly a year since they left Germany, and the sadness of their departure was still vivid in his memory.  It had not been an easy trip.  When they arrived in St. Louis a letter brought news of the death of Lisbeth’s mother.  To assuage his guilt Bauer entertained thoughts of returning to Germany, but when he broached the subject Lisbeth refused to consider it.  Think of the cost, she said.  With tears in her eyes she reminded Lorenz that even if they returned, they could not bring mutti back.  Lisbeth was nothing if not a practical thinker, and she would not accept his vision of life in America as a pipedream.  In Oregon he would provide for both of them and the children with his brains and the labor of his hands.  It was a future of hope. 

Such were his thoughts as he led his mules to the river.

Shrouds of fog clung to the trees that marked the wide, braided flow of the Platte.  Already the eastern horizon glowed; within the hour the crisp air would be warming.  Bauer led his mules through a willow thicket to the edge of a sand bar on one of the slow-moving channels.  This was not like the rivers of home – the Rhein and the Elbe - mighty, blackwater rivers of commerce.  A man could wade across the Platte’s shallow seepage.  Good only for watering stock and wetting one’s feet. 

Oregon will be different. 

Bauer knelt and removed his hat.  He splashed his face and watched the throats of the mules glide gently up and down as they sucked great draughts of the dark liquid.  He calculated he had made 30 miles since Fort Kearny.  If the family pushed hard today they would catch the previous wagon train by three o’clock that afternoon.

Then one of the mules raised a dripping muzzle and turned its head to the east, velvet nostrils flaring.  The animal stretched its neck, and loosed a hoarse, grinding bray that carried Bauer’s attention downstream.

A man stood at the edge of the river, rim-lit, a gray shape in the light gathering behind him.  He was not tall.  His physique reminded Bauer of the Missouri blacksmith who had shod the mules - bandy-legged, with long arms, a square-shaped head, thick neck and sloping shoulders.  Bauer stood up and opened his mouth to speak, but hesitated.  The stranger was silent and Bauer squinted to see better and took a step into the river to improve his sightline.  The weak light revealed little detail, but Bauer could see the stranger was nearly naked, with strands of long hair hanging loose on both sides of his head.  In his right hand he held a heavy cudgel.

The stranger had watched from a thicket downstream. When he saw Bauer kneel in the sand he stepped out and walked forward until he was within fifteen paces.  The white man was ignorant of his presence for much longer than he anticipated – proof that his attention was elsewhere.  Alone, but for his woman and two small children.  Foolish.

The stranger carried only a club, his preferred weapon, and a Green River knife, and was naked except for breechcloth and moccasins.  He was that summer in his thirty-third year of life, and his oiled, blue-black hair, unevenly-cropped in mourning, was drawn back loosely in a tangle and tied behind his head.  Around his jaw his dark, copper-colored skin glowed with vermilion paint in a pattern he had used many times, carefully applied to appear just as it had on his uncle, whose reputation in battle was well-remembered in the stories of his people.

Those stories, in part, had shaped the man’s life and brought him to that riverbank.   War was his trade, yet among his kindred he was regarded as a man apart - a particularly reckless fighter who would risk taking a blow to deliver one.  On his left breast, two fingers’ width above the nipple he bore a maroon swash of scar tissue where, as an adolescent, he had been pierced by an Assiniboin lance, the first of many battle wounds he received.   Because of this no one, not even the man himself, had expected his life to continue as long as it had.  But in this matter fate held its own counsel and in the passage of time the man had married and fathered a child, a daughter, whose brief life was the fillip in the events which unfolded on this morning.

       

Slowly he moved forward.  He could see the white man’s fear beginning as his right hand drifted toward the pistol butt in his waistband.  But Bauer’s lack of caution predicted his inability to react quickly - with violence - and his fingers had barely touched the pistol when he was struck by the first arrow.

It came from behind, entering just below his right shoulder blade, shattering two ribs before traversing the thorax.  The impact knocked Bauer to his knees in the water, unnerving the mules, three of which backed up into a willow thicket, white-eyed, heads tossing.  Time slowed; Bauer coughed hard twice, the spasms bringing bright lung blood bubbling over his lips, gobbing his chin with large, crimson curds that strung down to the water’s surface.  He flailed the air with his left arm, gasping as he tried to regain his feet.  His chest was on fire.  He lifted himself to a crouch and was struck again hard in the hip.  He spun away from the water to stagger sideways onto the sand, where he fell on his right side.

Two Indians emerged from the willows upstream, and then three more.  They held short bows, arrows nocked.  They watched as the wounded man rolled onto his chest, the protruding arrow shafts wagging like quills on a porcupine.  He groaned and lifted his head, which bobbed and trembled.  He weakly moved his arms and tried to gather himself when the one who first appeared downstream reached him.  He placed one foot in the middle of Bauer’s back and pushed him down.  He grabbed the German’s hair and pulled his head upward to bring his face into view.  The Indian’s eyes bore black, bottomless corneas and sclera the color of rust.  Windows without interiors.  Pitiless.  The Indian raised his right hand and brought the stone-headed club down hard on the German’s skull, exploding blood and brain across his dark forearms, chin and throat.  Then he turned the body over and withdrew the pistol from the waistband and inspected the caps and cylinders, blowing on them to clear the grit. 

The other Indians gathered the mules and tied them to branches of driftwood that marked the apex of spring floodwaters against the shallow bank.  The warriors moved quickly, exchanging neither spoken word nor gesture.  In turn they examined Bauer's body, every man touching the corpse by hand or with a bow. 

Then the sun broke the horizon, and in its flat, silvery light the tribesmen mounted their ponies and rode in the direction of the German’s camp.

 

The children of Lorenz and Lisbeth Bauer were slow to rouse that morning.  Meta, age 8, and her brother, Franz, 6, whimpered softly and snuggled back under soft quilts when their mother gently uncovered them and kissed their ears.  The grinding fatigue of the overland trail typically appeared first in the youngest travelers, accumulating over time like wet clay on a boot, growing heavier until each day’s advance seemed a weight almost impossible to bear.  By the time they reached Laramie, many emigrants didn’t bother to wake the littlest children for travel.  As long as they ate well, the small ones were allowed to sleep through the day, roused only when the train confronted a difficult river or a steep grade.  The Bauer children were showing the signs of trail weariness, but Lisbeth suspected her mother’s passing had an affect as well. 

What she didn’t know was that the news of the death of Grossmutti had not really saddened the children; their memories of the wizened, bespectacled woman centered on her pale, furrowed skin, and the bony, claw-like fingers that dug into their cheeks and ears when she greeted them.  In fact, she reminded them of an engraving they had seen of eine Zauberin, and they had always been uneasy when left alone in her presence for long.  They were frightened of her cackling laugh and the silent rooms of her creaking, drafty house, with its strange, musty smells and the several, multi-colored Kätzen that darted from room to room and perched on the deep window sills.  No, they did not miss her.

But before St. Louis they had never seen their mother press herself into their father’s shoulder, nor witnessed the tears that rolled slowly down her cheek as he spoke softly to comfort her.  What affected Lisbeth’s children was not their grief, but hers.  After the letter came Lisbeth had barely spoken for days, and it was not until their father announced they would be joining a train out of Fort Kearny that their mood lightened; mama had smiled as he told them.  What they did not know was that her smile was not about the train, but other news.

After a few minutes Lisbeth called to the children to hurry; she would make griddle cakes.  She heard them squeal inside the wagon as she lifted her heavy cast iron skillet from the side box.  This day they would eat a hearty breakfast; it would be a special day.  Today she would tell them about the baby she would have when they reached Oregon.

She was removing the coffee pot from the fire when two of the mules trotted around the corner of the wagon, leads trailing in the short grass.  Lisbeth watched the animals as they moved away, their heads sawing from side to side, ears aslant, as if listening to a trailing sound. 

Lorenz? she said softly, turning back to the wagon.

She looked up and saw the killers as they closed in, mounted in a line abreast.  The light behind them carried a fresh, spectral glow, rimming their feathers and bows and shields as they rode, sparkling in the dew-tipped coats and vaporous breath of their ponies.

Mein Gott, she whispered.  The coffee pot slipped from her grasp and she sank slowly to her knees, spilled coffee steaming in the grass, her pink hands reaching up to her cheeks, moving across her eyes to block the next moments from view.

One of the killers raised her husband’s revolver slowly.  Vehoe, he said, and pulled the trigger.