A Cold Day in Hell (5 page)

“Is he …,” Samantha started to ask.

“Is he all right?” Elizabeth Burt repeated, still at work there between the knees. “Of course he is, Sam. He’s just fine. Got all
the right equipment, if that’s what you mean. All his fingers and toes. Everything else. Just one thing.”

“W-what?” Seamus asked in a gasp, twisting about suddenly, frightened at the sound of that.

The child began to squall, high-pitched and rhythmic, like nothing he had ever heard before. Now he was worried. Truly worried.

“Don’t know what his folks are going to do,” Elizabeth said gravely, but a smile betrayed her face, eyes twinkling, “seeing how he’s come out about as homely as his father.”

With a reassuring gush all three midwives chuckled at that and went back to their duties at the foot of the bed as Seamus bent low, helping Sam tug the blanket back from the child’s face all the more.

“Lemme have a look, Sam,” he whispered as he planted another kiss on her lips glistening with her tears.

He straightened slightly and began to slowly peel back the folds of the blanket. Beneath it lay the red, squealing, wriggling child—all arms and legs and mouth. The child clenched his eyes in that crimson face as he bellowed in protest.

“It’s a boy, Sam,” he cried, sensing his own tears begin to sting his eyes.

“Yes!” Elizabeth Burt exclaimed with genuine joy as she gathered more of the bloody sheets into her arms and passed them on to Nettie Capron. “Just listen to the set of lungs this’un has! My, my—never have I ever heard such caterwauling!”

Seamus repeated over and over, almost unbelieving how beautiful such a tiny creature could be, “A boy, Sam. A b-boy!”

Tears welled from his eyes now, his lower lip quivering as it never had before, even as it had in those last few minutes of bachelorhood before he stepped beneath that sheltering oak tree in Sharp Grover’s yard near the Texas panhandle country, prepared to take this woman to his side forevermore.

She asked him, “You approve, Seamus?”

“Oh, yes—yes! A girl, a boy,” he answered in a rush, leaning over to kiss the tiny infant’s wrinkled forehead, gently brushing that thick crop of hair with his lips. “Anything—long as you both made it through, Sam.”

“We made it through,” she whimpered wearily beneath him, her eyes thickly pooling with tears, her lips smiling as she cried in joy. “We both made it through just fine.”

“He’s beautiful,” Seamus explained as he glanced up at the
three midwives. “Don’t you think he’s just about the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen?”

“Yes, he certainly is at that, Mr. Donegan,” Elizabeth Burt said, still at work there at the foot of the bed. “And if I know anything about his father, Sam: I’ll bet that little one is going to be a real hellion before you know it!”

S
itting Bull’s Hunkpapa called him “Big Leggings.”

Among the white man he carried the name Johnny Bruguier.

And ever since the last days of summer Johnny had been running from the whites. They wanted to hang him for murder.

In the crisp chill of autumn Bruguier stirred the fire before him at the center of the huge lodge he shared with Sitting Bull’s family. The old man and everyone else still slept this morning, exhausted from yesterday’s crossing of the Elk River.
*

But Johnny could not sleep. It had been like this nearly every night since he’d fled the Standing Rock Agency,
†
Each time he closed his eyes the nightmares returned to haunt him. He awoke in a sweat. Afraid to close his eyes, afraid of those awful dreams, he instead sat up and tended the fire through much of the night, thinking. Brooding on all manner of things. Mostly on the white men who would hang him. And hating his mother for hooking up with a drunken white trader at the agency more than two decades ago.

Life had been tough for a half-breed at Standing Rock. So many times while he was growing up had he felt pushed outside the Hunkpapa band. At the same time the whites closed their
arms and cloaked their hearts to him. He damned his mother for choosing to bed down with a white man, damned her for ever giving birth to him. Damned himself especially now, for the way things had turned out at Standing Rock.

Because of his two bloods, Johnny was brought up knowing both languages. His mother knew some English, more than enough to cuss like the agency employees and the white teamsters who came and went. Likewise, his French-Canadian father knew enough Lakota to sweet-talk the agency Sioux out of most everything they owned, in trade for a handful of blue glass beads or a tin cup of whiskey, which the man had buried among his stores of treasures.

Able to speak both tongues, but feeling at home in neither world, Bruguier had reluctantly attempted to make a home for himself there at Standing Rock for the last few winters. He was one of the agent’s three interpreters—at least that had been his life until he’d rubbed up against the wrong white man.

The one with the eyes so cold, he figured the man was already one of the “walking dead.” No emotion had shown in those icy eyes, until a young woman had walked into the trader’s store one late December afternoon. On such winter days most of the agency employees sat by the iron stove, whittling, telling stories, sharpening knives, drinking if they had pay coming on account.

This morning Johnny could feel the sweet tang of winter coming again to the high plains. The sharp teeth of winter were closing in upon them. His fire felt especially good this morning before the sun rose, as he remembered last winter. Remembered the woman. And the one with the walking dead eyes.

To the white men it would have been nothing more than an argument over a woman. Those things happened in that world. Among the Lakota, it had been a matter of the young woman’s honor. How the white man had shamed her and defiled her when she’d nervously walked into the trader’s store with her grandmother that cold winter afternoon almost a year gone now. No one else was going to tell the white man to take his hand off the woman’s arm. No one else was going to tell the man he should not have cuffed the old woman aside when she’d cried out, trying to remove the white man’s claws from her granddaughter’s arm.

No one, that is, except Johnny Bruguier.

As he looked back now, he thought how things had a way of sweeping him up and carrying him along before he knew it.
Like a spring torrent of winter runoff rushing between two narrow creekbanks. He had his own knife at work on a piece of ash, carving a new stem for an uncle’s pipe. How the old men loved to spend much time with their pipes and telling stories this season of the year. When the bad words and the loud talk started, Johnny already had his knife out. When the white man pulled his knife, everything hurried by in a blur.

He remembered the girl being flung aside, landing in a heap atop her old grandmother. He remembered the size of that white man’s knife as he lunged for Johnny. And the last thing Bruguier was ever able to recall was the look in those walking dead eyes as the two men grappled. Those eyes no longer seeming dead at all, but lit with a bright, cold fire—such hate Johnny had never before seen.

Nor had he ever thought he would see so much blood pour out of a man. Something inside Bruguier had told him to put out the fire in those eyes, but Johnny did not know how he’d accomplished that, for he could remember nothing more until he was standing over the white man thrashing on the floor, bleeding from a dozen or more serious wounds, the floor beneath him slicking with dark puddles of blood and a greasy coil of gut. Too much blood, he had told himself. Too much for any man to lose and still live.

The white man died at Johnny’s feet, his thrashing stopped, rolling onto his back to stare up at Bruguier with those walking dead eyes. But now he would no longer walk. And the fire was gone from them as they gazed blankly at the half-breed who had killed a white man before so many witnesses.

How the trader had started hollering, reaching under a counter for his big two-shoot gun. How Johnny had looked at the others, both Lakota and half-breed there in the store, sensing instantly that they would not dare tell the truth about what had happened. Afraid. Cowed. So shamed by their need for the moldy flour and rancid pig meat that they would not tell the truth.

Johnny fled Standing Rock on a stolen horse. And had been running ever since.

First to Bear Butte to find solace and help for his troubled spirit among the religious places he had heard so much about. Not that he had never been religious—certainly not like his father’s Catholicism. Nor had he paid much attention to the beliefs of his mother’s people. But he had remembered enough to know about Bear Butte, enough to feel the place call out to him.

For most of that hard winter he had clung close to the slopes of Bear Butte, hunting, sleeping, keeping an eye out in those early days for any from Standing Rock who might follow him. Only with the waning of winter did he finally relent and allow himself to believe no one would come for him.

So he wandered south to the Black Hills, that country the white man’s government wanted back from the warrior bands so all white men could come and dig for the yellow rocks that made them hungry for whiskey and whores. It was no problem finding work in those settlements just beginning to dot the Black Hills: unloading wagons brought up from the rail depot at Sidney, Nebraska; helping build sluice boxes; cleaning up after all the puking white men in those great saloons covered with tent canvas, closed-in places that smelled of urine, sweat, and the desecration of that sacred land. There was work enough for any man willing to work. Johnny worked.

Until that summer afternoon he was tapped on the shoulder by his white employer. Bruguier straightened over his mop and slop bucket.

“You know anythin ‘bout this?” With a crackle the man noisily unfolded a stiffened parchment with a likeness of Johnny printed on it in black ink. Words, too.

“What’s this?” Bruguier had asked.

“Says you’re wanted, mister.”

“For what?”

“Murder. You kill someone?”

His eyes must have given him up when he looked away, unable to look the white man in the face.

“Tell you what, mister,” the white man continued, “you best be on your way and now. These here posters is going up all over town. They’ll be up all over the hills afore the sun sets tomorrow. Likely you’ll be as easy for others to spot, just as easy to catch. Then some miner’s court decide to hang you.”

To this day Johnny remembered clear as sunrise how that white man with dirt caked down in those deep wrinkles on his face and the wattle of his neck had pantomimed a rope dropping over his head, tightened, then strangled at the end of that noose. As calmly as he could, Johnny had nodded and set his mop against the wall. Then turned away, not once looking over his shoulder.

He stole another horse that day, the biggest one of those tied at the side of the saloon. Not one of the horses out front at the rail, but back in the shadows, an animal with a blaze face and
two front stockings. It looked strong enough to carry him fast and far. But the best thing that made Johnny decide on the horse was what was tied behind the saddle: a thick blanket roll, wrapped in an oiled slicker, along with those two saddlebags stuffed to their limit. Plain to see that horse and rigging were ready for the trail.

Bruguier kicked the animal into a gallop as soon as he put the last tent behind him, heading west toward the setting sun. East and north meant trouble. That’s where the white men were, with their pictures and their stories of murder, the nightmare of their hanging ropes that choked off the only chance his spirit could fly out of his mouth when he breathed his last. No man must die that way.

The only direction for him lay to the south and west. There was damned little of the white man north of the Platte or south of the Yellowstone, clear to the Big Horn Mountains. Especially that summer after the Lakota and Cheyenne had whipped the pony soldiers something fierce in two big fights. He set off to find sanctuary among his mother’s people—that, or this journey would be his suicide.