In the Spirit World, a woman and a man walked through the gray desert. Gray cacti and gray scrub bushes peppered the flat land. Ahead of them, far, far out on the horizon, stood a tall and narrow plateau. Its distant silhouette looked like a tower, or maybe the stump of a world tree. Above them, the stars swirled up and up, a spiral of a milky stream of a divine light flowing skyward to a pinprick of golden light.
The woman and the man’s steps crackled, grinding the loose sand in the hard earth. Gray dust peppered their moccasins.
The man’s black braids dangled over his bare chest. Muscles rippled beneath the curly hair on the back of his wide shoulders and down either side of his spine. He wore a breechcloth and moccasins that went above his knees. He carried a long pipe. The beard of a buffalo dangled from the elbow of the pipe’s clay bowl.
The woman’s hair trailed long past her waist. It was the color of a white cotton shirt, freshly washed and wrinkled, yet spotted with the stubborn stains of sweat and dirt. It billowed in a warm breeze that blew from that remote silhouette of the tower.
She wore a knee length cotton dress that draped over her right shoulder, but the left remained bare. In her arms, held tight to her torso, was the massive skull of a buffalo, horns and all. The white bone had been blackened by fire. It bounced against her chest with each step.
“Isn’t that heavy?” the man asked, his mouth never moving. He was taller than her. His gaze fixed on the horizon.
“I did not think you wished to journey alone,” she slipped her thought into his mind. The wrinkles surrounding her eyes deepened as she glanced at him.
They walked. The thump of their heels beating a rhythm. The plateau’s silhouette never grew larger. It remained the same, as though their steps meant nothing in closing the distance.
“You are old now,” the man said.
“And you are older.”
“But I am still young.”
“And after I die, will I be young like you?”
The man stopped. The woman had taken two steps before she realized he had. She looked back at him and he gazed up at the spiraling stars in the sky. Then, he looked at her.
“Father,” she said.
“I do not know,” he said, walking again. His daughter fell in alongside. He said, “That is for the Great Spirit to decide.”
She looked at the buffalo skull in her arms. The white bone and the black horns. There used to be eyes that watched the sky blaze red and orange as the sun rose above grassy plains. A tongue that once knew the taste of grass, the cooling cleanse of a river. A nose that swelled with the crisp air of a foggy moonlit night. Fur and warm flesh once covered the naked cheeks. Cheeks that used to feel the nuzzling of a calf.
“He always chooses what is best,” she finally said.
Her father’s high brow did not furrow. His flat, wide nose did not wrinkle. His head did not turn toward her. Only his eyes shifted, the dark saucers gliding over the white, cramming into the corners closest to her to sneak a glance. They glimpsed her face then the buffalo skull in her arms. He blinked and fixed his eyes on the far off plateau. “It is odd to see you carry that.”
“There was nothing else,” she said. “We burned your warclub and pipe on the pyre. And your satchel has since rotted. You have been dead a long time.”
He lifted the pipe. “The warclub did not come with me.”
“I see, but at least you have the pipe. Have you smoked it?”
“Not until the Great Spirit called me. Then I did. The ceremony of beginnings.”
“And I will have to sing the song of goodbye.”
“The plateau is still far away. I only started my journey.”
She laughed and it was like the wind over a sunny field of green hay. “You have already forgotten, Father. This is all I have left. Nothing else.”
He gazed at her. “Nothing else?”
They traveled through the gray desert. Holes appeared in the ground. Holes dug long ago by the prairie dog tribe. The gray dirt from the digging was piled in dozens of shallow gray mounds. From out of the holes, peeked the wrinkled heads of goblins, who whispered to one another as father and daughter walked by. The goblins began to emerge completely from their holes where they dropped to their knees and pulled at their strands of wispy hair and tugged at their faces and beat their chests, weeping and wailing, all in ugly mock mourning.
“Brown Bull! Brown Bull!” They cried.
They sniffled. “He was so young.”
“The Great Spirit took him from us too soon.” They pouted.
Brown Bull raised his pipe, wielding it like a club, and the goblins laughed. “What if it breaks Brown Bull?” They asked. “How then will you smoke it with the Great Spirit at the peak of His tower?”
“Ignore them Father,” Brown Bull’s wizened daughter said.
“Why doesn’t Buffalo Hump cry?” The goblins whined, hooking their long fingers into the corners of their mouths and pulling them down into grotesque, exaggerated frowns. “She must not love him like we do.”
“Back to your holes,” she said, never breaking stride, and the goblins growled and sneered.
“She ends our fun. The fun is over,” they said, creeping back into their holes. “But the Armadillo Shaman will give us fun. Yes,” they hissed. “We will have our fun with you one day, Buffalo Hump.”
Buffalo Hump and Brown Bull passed through the goblin nest. The prairie dog holes behind them now.
“The Armadillo Shaman still plagues us?” Brown Bull asked.
“He has shifted his wiles to the Coyote Tribe,” Buffalo Hump said. “And he has freed one of the Restless.”
His bushy eyebrows raised. “That is hard to hear. The Restless are for the Great Spirit to judge. No one else.”
Her knuckles turned white as she tightened her hold on the buffalo skull. “Then why doesn’t He judge the fiend now?”
“I do not know. I am not the Great Spirit,” he said. “Have you prayed?”
The wrinkles on her face tightened like a cinched net when she scowled. “I have sweated in the smoke, waiting and waiting. Days and nights I’ve waited. Sweated. But nothing. Only silence. Always silence.”
“Perhaps He has already answered and said, No. Or, worse, waiting is the answer.”
“But the fiend is unkillable! Protected by the Great Spirit till Judgement Day. How am I supposed to help the Coyote Tribe if I cannot fight him?”
“Since when did the Buffalo People care about the fate of the Coyote Tribe?”
Buffalo Hump let her head hang as they walked along the gray desert. “My heart was soft. And I made a promise to their Chief.”
“Is he dead?”
“He might as well be.”
The land ahead of Brown Bull and Buffalo Hump was a series of ditches, some deep and some shallow. Perhaps earlier in the year, a river flowed through the desert, turning and twisting, burrowing like a slithering snake among the sands, but now the river was dried up and the land lay motionless. Some gray banks sloped gently. Father and daughter only needed to be mindful of the slippery river bed at the bottom of these banks, as the dirt on the surface had tried to crust, but the mud underneath was still wet. Other gray banks were steep, where Brown Bull helped Buffalo Hump climb down and up, as she couldn’t put down the buffalo skull. A few banks were like gray walls and they were forced to find a detour. Brown Bull always glanced toward the silhouette of the plateau on the horizon no matter how the river bed turned. At one point, the gray bank rose high like a cliff and he couldn’t see the Great Spirit’s Tower.
Buffalo Hump began to sing and stopped walking.
Brown Bull was two steps ahead of her before he stopped. He listened as she sung, but as she knelt in the river bed, he approached her, and held her by the elbows. “It is not time,” he said, his gaze rising from the buffalo skull to her eyes.
“But you desire to smoke with the Great Spirit.”
“Not yet. Come.” They sauntered side by side.
Eventually the river bed rose and the gray banks shortened. Off in the distance stood the silhouette of the Great Spirit’s Tower. The swirl of stars flowing like a river to its distant flat peak.
“I do not think the Great Spirit resides only on the tower,” Brown Bull said.
“Doesn’t he wait for you?”
“Look at the stars above, like a trail in the sky.” He pointed at the yellow pinprick of light far up in the center of the black sky. “A windy stairway into heaven. Who resides there?”
“The Great Spirit and those he has called.”
“But what makes heaven heaven?
“These are questions for a child.”
“If the Great Spirit has left heaven, is it heaven? Isn’t heaven simply the presence of the Great Spirit?”
“No,” Buffalo Hump said. “Because then His tower would be heaven.”
“You are right. But it is holy ground. Sacred. A place His feet have touched.”
“Since when did spirits have feet?”
“You are right again. He is too big for feet. Too big for our words even, for how else can I describe the touch of a spirit? He is too big for the tower. Too big for heaven. He is everywhere. His presence fills every corner of the Spirit and the Living worlds.”
“So this is heaven?”
“No,” he said. “But perhaps it is a taste of its goodness.”
“A single taste can embitter a woman. A wash of delight and then it’s gone.”
“But the meal is promised. It is cooked. Ready on the mat. A man just needs to listen to be called.”
“But why? Why only the taste? Why bless us only to take it away? Why breathe life into us only to speak a curse of death over us? Even now, why is the journey to heaven so long and hard?”
“A good question. One that I do not have an answer for,” he said. “Only guesses. Maybe the taste is to wake that desire for the meal. But the waiting is meant to reveal why we sit around the mat. Do we sit because of the sweet smelling corn? Or, is it because of the glowing face of the Great Spirit?”
Buffalo Hump walked. “He has a face now?”
“You are not alone, my calf,” Brown Bull said. His daughter glanced at him, her brown eyes drifting down to the ground, then fixed rigidly on the horizon. Brown Bull spoke, “After you pass back through the veil, you are not alone. The Great Spirit is too big.”
“But He is silent and I am lost in the dark. His voice could guide me, but He refuses.”
“Then wait. Sit patiently. Sit in the dark. I heard him. And you can as well.”
Buffalo Hump scowled, the wrinkles on her face became like black cuts.
In front of them, the desert stretched flat and bare. One step, there was nothing, only the silhouette of the Great Spirit’s Tower, then, the next step, shadowy figures rose up from the gray sands. They had started small, the four of them, small as the shadows of pinecones, but then they sprang like the erupting waters of a geyser, the black of the shadows flowing skyward into the dark shapes of men and women. Buffalo Hump and her father stopped in their tracks as the newly risen figures approached.
It was one man and three women. They hunched as they trotted, their pink hands held close to their faces. Each one wore a robe of brown fur that trailed along the gray sands. And every robe had a tail, long and white, a poofy tuft at the end. They stopped, cowering in front of Buffalo Hump and Brown Bull. The one man glanced up as the three women clung to him. All four had large bulbous eyes, black as the night sky. No white at all except for the reflection of the swirling starshine. The man had a mohawk puff of white, while the women’s brown hair was cut to chin length and the bangs chopped in a straight line high on their forehead.
“We are waiting,” the man said. His nose was pinched into a tiny pink button. The nostrils flared relentlessly. “Waiting. Waiting.”
Then the three women, their knobby pinky fingers fidgeting, all squeaked. “Waiting. Waiting. Waiting.”
“The Mouse People?” Brown Bull asked.
“Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes,” they all squeaked.
“A warrior of the Hawk Tribe fell upon us,” the man said. “And now we are waiting for the Great Spirit to call us.”
They all squeaked. “Waiting. Waiting. Waiting.”
“So, what do you ask of us?” Brown Bull asked.
“A home,” the man said.
They all squeaked. “Home. Home. Home.”
“What use is a home in the Spirit World?” Buffalo Hump asked.
“The Hawk Tribe could attack again!” One of the women said.
“Yes. Yes,” the other two women squeaked, covering their eyes with their pink hands.
“But we could hide,”the man said, pointing a bony pink finger at the buffalo skull.
“There is no need to hide,” Buffalo Hump said. “You’re already dead.”
“But we aren’t safe until the Great Spirit calls. We still are in danger.”
“Danger. So dangerous,” the women squeaked.
“Your fear has got the best of you!” Buffalo Hump stepped toward them. The four Mouse People leapt backward, stammering and whimpering, cowering, their thin arms held over their heads defensively. Brown Bull caught his daughter by the shoulder. She whipped around, her hard eyes glaring at him.
“My heart is soft,” he said.
“But they are stupid. Blinded by their fear.”
Brown Bull placed his other hand on his daughter’s other shoulder. “I have no comfort to give you. We shared paths for a time, but now they split. I hope that our paths intertwine once more in the stars.”
She sniffled. “Mother waits for you.”
“And you, our calf.”
She gazed back at him, gazed into his dark eyes. They shimmered, like moonlight on a river. “Now can’t be the time. Not this way. Not for them.”
They looked at the four cowering Mice People. “Here. They are safe,” Brown Bull began. “The goblins would frighten them forever and too much fear makes it hard to hear the Great Spirit’s call. We can give them peace.”
“Father?”
“You made a promise to the Coyote Tribe.”
“Once I place your skull on the ground, I…”
“You mourn as though I’m dead. You hold my skull, but here I am.”
Buffalo Hump’s chin wrinkled and trembled.
“Words are too small.” Brown Bull said, and then he began to sing the song of goodbye. A tear welled in Buffalo Hump’s eye and rolled along a wrinkle, followed the curve of her cheek, and beaded at the base of her chin. When she began to sing, the tear fell on the blackened forehead of the buffalo skull at her chest.
For a while they sang. Stamping their feet in the bittersweet rhythm. The soft words flowing from between trembling lips. Tears streaked their faces. But on they sang. Sang as Buffalo Hump knelt and placed her father’s skull on the gray sands. She stood. They gazed into each other’s teary eyes. They hugged and she nuzzled her head into her father’s cheek.
They let go and behind Buffalo Hump the veil between the worlds appeared. It billowed, moved by the warm breeze. Daughter and father stood silent. The Mouse People raised their heads, sniffing the air, their nostrils flaring. They inched closer. Little by little, their eyes fixed on Buffalo Hump and Brown Bull. The Mouse People waited and watched, but when neither Buffalo Hump and Brown Bull moved, they flung their brown fur robes over their heads. The four of them shrank and shrank, till four desert mice scurried to the buffalo skull, scrambling into the empty eye sockets. One of the mice, one with a tuft of white hair on top of its head, peeked out of an eye socket and squeaked, then vanished back into the cavities of the skull.
Brown Bull broke the gaze. He turned his back to Buffalo Hump and began walking toward the silhouette of the Great Spirit’s Tower. He sang the song of goodbye, his voice fading as he journeyed farther and farther away. Buffalo Hump couldn’t sing. Sadness formed a knot in her throat. But, she hummed, turning her back on her father. She glanced over her shoulder as she passed through the veil.
The world spun. Big Nose Kate’s eyes fluttered, only glimpsing the darkness all around her. She felt the straw on her back. Heard the clattering of the train wheels, the rumbling of the car, the rattle of wooden crates and pallets, even the bleating of a couple of sheep. Sweat rolled down her temples, tickled the sides of her neck, and filled the holes of her ears.
Then she dropped out of consciousness, be it swoon or sleep, and stood encompassed in a void, a world of fissured black skies, where dream images struck like lightning. A bolt streaked across the blank sky.
Mr. Doolin on the ground, bound to a chair, and his head misshapen. The image burned in the black sky, but only for a second, then those vivid colors of Mr. Doolin’s corpse faded into red and green stains that flickered. Another flash. And a revolver streaked across the sky. Its barrel aimed directly at her.
Footsteps brought Kate back to the train. She laid there on her back, on a bed of straw piled on the ground, jostled by the rickety movements of the car. Her nose stood tall like a prairie dog on its hind legs, sniffing the dust of the straw, the stink of the sheep. A clammy sheet was draped over her body, clinging to her toes, knees, and hips like strips of paper mache. Towers of crates blocked the sunlight filling the one, small window she could see from where she lay. The footsteps approached. Several men. Their leather boots tapping on the wooden planks echoed off the rumbling walls as they surrounded her. Her eyelids were as heavy as soaked towels. Try as she might, she could only snatch glimpses of blurred silhouettes gathering in the dim light. Figures that bent over her, murmured over her.
Fever…
…dirty blood…
…bandages need changing…
………infection…
Gangrene…
……might not make it…
The words they uttered were as hard to catch as a housefly, but she fought hard to speak, pried apart her fused lips, and struggled against the dead fish that was her tongue.
A moan was all that came out. She tossed on the straw. No sentence was going to come out, only a single word could she manage. “Magnus.”
Again and again she said his name.
“I’m here,” she caught the gentle voice, glimpsed through the flicker of her eyelids, the gangly figure in white stooping beside her. His fingers curled about her left hand, lifted it, held it against his chest. The pulse of his heart permeated through to her knuckles. “Open your mouth.”
She did nothing, but lay there, feeling Magnus wiggle a leather strap between her teeth. It was soft and worn.
“As gently as possible,” he said to the men gathering around.
A pair of hands squirmed their way under her back on her right side. The wound ached. She felt its pain throb. A warning. Another pair of hands burrowed under the small of her back, as Magnus’ free hand cradled her head.
1, 2, 3…
She screamed as the men lifted and rolled her onto her left side. Her head rocking up onto Magnus’ lap. The wound in her right shoulder raged. Like a flaming dagger dug into her shoulder. Like red hot tongs peeling at the flesh of her arm. Like molten steel, glowing white and steaming, oozed from her shoulder and down her chest. Her muscles tensed and the veins in her neck surged, nearly ripping through the skin.
Magnus hugged her head close to his chest, telling her repeatedly, “Bite down on the strap.”
And she did. Tears streamed. Her screams muffled.
“We have to change the bandage and then the straw, Kate,” he said, petting her head. “It’ll be over soon.”
The bandage was nothing more than ripped strips of linen, tied and wrapped and as best Magnus could manage. As it unraveled, the men gasped. A sheep bleated and the train car rumbled. A foul smell wafted from her shoulder. Kate lifted her head in an effort to see, but Magnus hugged it closer. “Keep working,” he said to the men.
“There’s no hole back here,” one of them said.
“Bullet’s still in her arm then,” another man said.
“That don’t bode well.”
“It’s infected. Real bad.”
“That’s why you’re changing the bandage,” Magnus said. “Do it.”
The wad of bandage was petrified by dried blood and pus and glued to the scab. Kate whimpered as they peeled it back. An odor swelled her huge nostrils. A malodor, sweet and sour, like a rotting deer carcass under a mess of blooming honey suckles. She felt blood trickle down her arm. Someone wiped it.
There was another pause. Another bout of silence from the men and Magnus, as the train wheels clattered and the car rumbled. Glimpsing up from the folds of Magnus’ purple shirt surrounding her head, she saw his mouth hang open. Kate bit down on the leather strap and wailed.
Magnus barked an order and the men set back to work. They dripped water over her arm. The wound burned. The stiff skin tugged as they dabbed a handkerchief around the tattered hole. They covered it with clean linen.
“Sorry, Ms. Kate,” one of them said, as they lifted her arm to wrap the new linen strips around her shoulder and the upper part of her arm. Then again they counted and gently rolled Kate onto the fresh bed of straw. Magnus removed the leather strap from her mouth as she continued to moan, wince, and writhe. He pulled the clammy bed sheet back over her, thanked and dismissed the other men. Sitting beside her, he dipped a purple handkerchief in clean water and dabbed her forehead.
The waves of fiery pain had stirred Kate. Her eyes were open and she saw clearly. She was hot, sweating all over. The pain in her arm was still there, a throbbing pain like when she smashed her thumb with a hammer. She grimaced.
“Don’t let them take my arm.”
“Shhh,” he said, wiping the sweat from her neck.
“Promise me.” The pain surged in her arm. Her eyelids fluttered. The world began to spin. She was so hot. “Promise me that you won’t let them take my arm.”
“There’s no need, Kate,” he said. “Everything will be just fine.”
She tried to kick her feet out from under the sticky bed sheet, but pain rippled through her body. “You don’t know that. You’re no doctor.” She breathed heavy. Her nostrils flared like bellows.
“You’re right. But, you need to rest,” he wrung out the handkerchief and dabbed fresh, clean water onto her forehead.
The water was cool, if only for a moment. A drop of relief. Her heavy eyelids fell, but still the world spun. Blindly, with her left hand, she reached for Magnus. He grabbed her hand and she squeezed his palm. “Never thought I would have to trust a snake oil salesman,” she said.
“And I never thought I’d be bathing a bullet riddled blacksmith.”
“If they take my arm,” her words lingered in the air as her breath slowed. “I won’t be.”
The train car rumbled. A sheep pawed at the floor. Towers of crates rattled.
“Sleep, Kate.”
Sheriff Bull survived the gunfight with the stranger in black. A few weeks he would have to lay in bed. But, it beat Deputy Broomstache and Deputy Handlebar, who were laid out permanently. The undertaker had nailed them in their coffins. Four funerals were held the following morning. Folks dressed in black gathered in the little graveyard of Esau to mourn Mr. Doolin, the two deputies, and the cowboy that died trying to rescue Mr. Doolin. They said a prayer for Big Nose Kate and even the snake oil salesman.
Later that day, outside in the street in front of the undertaker’s parlor, the undertaker helped the photographer tie the corpse of the stranger to a chair as a crowd gathered and watched. The sun was high and bright. Not a cloud in the blue sky.
The undertaker held the dead man up as the photographer wrapped a rope around the bullet ridden chest and chair. The dead man’s head, though, was spun all the way around. The undertaker reckoned the neck snapped when he was flung from the horse at full gallop. The crowd grimaced as bones cracked when they twisted it back the way it ought to be, facing the camera, but the head flopped like a cooked spaghetti noodle. Thankfully, the photographer foresaw this inconvenience. He took his head-rest clip and positioned the stand so it was hidden behind the seated corpse.
“Ugly son of a gun,” the photographer said, shoving the dead man’s bald head between the tongs of the clip. “You think it was one of those fellas on the train that shot him in the head?” He adjusted the metal tongs that hugged where the neck connected to the base of the head, so that they were concealed by the ear lobes.
“That’s what I suspect,” the undertaker said, shooing off a couple of young boys trying to get a closer look. “But note that there ain’t no blood. Not a single blasted drop on his entire body. He was shot close to twenty times.” The undertaker stuffed the dead man’s tongue back in the mouth, but the broken jaw wouldn’t close and the tongue kept flopping out.
“He’s so pale,” the photographer said, staring into the half open rheumatic eyes. They were dull and red. “Like he ain’t never seen the sun.”
“And now he’s going back into the ground, never to see it again.”
The photographer and undertaker stepped back toward the camera, unveiling the perched dead man ushered the crowd back. Women gasped as the sun gleamed off the dead man’s bald, clammy head. “The first photo is just going to be the corpse. After that, it’ll be 5 cents if you want your photo taken with the Esau Slayer!”
The photo was taken. A tintype. Printed in the local paper and sent off to a dozen more in nearby parts. The undertaker dumped the Esau Slayer into a coffin and placed the lid on. He only used two nails. No reason to waste money on a murderer. With help from local boys, they buried the Esau Slayer in a corner of the little graveyard. The undertaker took off his dusty hat and prayed, with a righteous clearing of his throat, “Father, this man stands in the hard stare of your judgment now. A part of me pities him. But a larger part revels in the fact that he will burn like the chaff. He didn’t fear you in life, but he sure as Hell fears you now.”
The undertaker and the boys left the graveyard.
Days passed. Sunrises and sunsets.
But one night, the moon crept up from the horizon, beginning its slow crawl across the world. A spotted owl swooped into the little graveyard and pinned a yellow rat snake to the loose dirt above a recently dug grave. The snake writhed in the owl’s talons, dodging and hissing at the pecking beak. Clumps of clay shifted under the owl, startling it into frantic, fleeing flight. The snake wriggled out of the distracted talons and slithered under a rock.
The loose dirt over the grave heaved, pulsing like a beating heart. The ground humped. A mound rose as a white hand erupted through the clay and dirt, clawing at the night air.