Metro Pulse/Cover/Southern Literature Festival

Comment
on this story

Introduction

Author Bios

Fiction

They Come to Me
by Pamela Schoenewaldt

From Gideon Jones' Journal

Poetry

Sunsphere Shots
by Daniel Roop

Flamboyans
by Marilyn Kallet

Drunk in the Orchard
by Steve Sparks

'now is the drinking'
by Patricia Waters

My Treaty With Chief Bones

An excerpt from the beginning of a novel, The Forsaken.

by Allen Wier

My first day in the true wilderness, miles beyond the protection of civilization, I passed hour after hour traversing a wide, undulating ocean of prairie where nothing altered my view. Late into the afternoon and still I marked no landmark, nothing by which I could gauge my progress. Anxious with anticipation—of desert heat and savage beasts and even more savage natives—I resisted feelings of panic, a kind of reverse claustrophobia brought on by the boundless grass and sky in which I felt forgotten by even the Lord above. My oxen and I seemed the only sentient creatures in the universe.

The Creator took my fear for prayer and placed on the distant horizon two dark spots. I turned my wagon directly toward the tiny shapes. Slowly, steadily they drew closer, two stationary humps—not the appearance of an Indian raiding party, I convinced myself. The humps grew larger and shaggy on top—maybe I was approaching buffalo. I cleared wind-blown dirt and grass from the barrel of my Hawken rifle. I was not sure how to dress a buffalo, but I figured I'd skin the hide for cold weather, and hack off and roast cuts until I learned by taste which to keep. By the time the unmoving shapes had become a solitary pair of trees, my mouth watered for buffalo steak. When at last I drew close, the horizon was streaked purple and orange. Of a sudden, the trees cried out. Shrieking black leaves lifted—a shimmering cloud of birds—rose clear of the treetops, then sank back onto the limbs. A poor sketch of these shrieking, rising trees, leaves I drew as dark wings and long beaks, is the first entry in my journal of westward adventure.

Beneath the trees, my oxen, tired as they were, moved faster, and I saw the pool they had smelled for miles. The water's edge was packed mud bearing animal prints. Beneath the pale-barked trees lay leaves serrated like the blades of knives. Scattered about were myriad bones and flat rocks with brown-red stains that I knew from my stint in a Baltimore asylum were of blood.

I pulled hard against the reins but couldn't slow the team. If this was bad water, my oxen were goners. I knelt at the pool's edge. The mud and bent grass was stained red. My knee sank in the earth as I cupped a handful of warm water to my nose even as I wondered what poison water smells like. In the middle of the pool, deep as their bellies, my oxen stirred brown clouds. I swallowed, tasted grass. Grit settled on my tongue and caught between my teeth. I would have to filter the water through my shirttail into my keg and canteen. When the animals had drunk their fill, I managed to get them out of the water and the sucking mud. I unhitched them and with two lengths of rawhide hobbled them in tall grass beyond the trees.

"Left Ox," I said, "you watch out for Right Ox." The beast lifted his muzzle and showed me what looked to be a questioning frown. "Yes, you are your brother's keeper. You too, Right Ox. You look after Left as well." Right Ox loudly pulled grass with his big yellow teeth, snorted, and ignored me.

I built a fire on the killing ground and boiled a pinch of coffee. There is no twilight out on the frontier; by the time my water boiled the heavens were full dark, poked through with stars. Closer above, roosting in the trees, the hundreds of birds ignored my fire. After a while came the loud fall of rain, rain I soon discovered to be the steady droppings of the birds. Of necessity a beast of burden, I took up the yoke of my wagon and pulled it from beneath the birds' sudden storm. Not ready to give in to sleep, I gathered four fallen sticks, bound them together, and set the ends ablaze. Holding the burning fagot above my head, I explored one side of the watering hole. The ground was littered with bleached bones that reflected my flickering light as scattered shards of the moon. There were hoof prints I guessed to be buffalo and prints resembling a dog's, yet larger. The sputter of my torch in a sudden breeze darkened and tilted the earth, and thinking the ground sloped up I stepped hard only to stumble forward over the same flatness.

When the breeze expired, a flare of light illuminated something I saw for an instant as an ivory harp discarded by a careless angel. I knelt closer to what were the perfect, curved bones of a human rib cage disappearing into tall grass. Before I could make any deductions, I parted the grass and stared down at a skull staring back at me.

I lowered my fagot. The skull lay cushioned in grass, the ribs sunk like the beached prow of a boat into the earth. He or she, white or black or red, someone small if not young, blinked and grimaced in the jerking light, arms and legs stretched out restlessly into grass and dirt, the prairie reclaiming one of its own. I walked back toward the coals of my cookfire, a dying star come to earth a hundred yards away. I collected my pot and tin cup, re-hitched my oxen, and brought the wagon alongside my new comrade.

"Right Ox, Left Ox," I said, the words from deep in my chest and as breathy as the beasts' mastication, "come meet a gathering of empty bones."

My new friend was mostly still intact—one hand was unconnected at the wrist but had not wandered far, one finger was missing altogether but might have been lost long before this place. The teeth were uneven and ground to stubs, maybe the teeth of one who'd hankered as much as I after sweets. The skull revealed no cut marks so I reckoned he died with his scalp undisturbed.

It did not take me long to unearth and load him (male—an Indian chief, I decided) into my wagonbed. My kinship with oxen thus expanded to include the chief in our little prairie family. If you think me strange in my hospitality to a skeleton, I reveal that my origins are not fully known to me. Orphaned, I toiled for years at the asylum where I grew comfortable with the charms of the dead, preparing many of them for their final journey. No doubt solitude is an influence that inclined me toward the mortuary arts. And, mark this, I see undertaking and journal writing as companionable occupations. The first preserves the corporeal; the second preserves the cerebral.

I threw onto the fire the one large, fallen tree limb I could find—to build up flames to last long enough for me to sneak away what I guessed was three to five miles. Safely moved, I once more unhitched and made fast for the night. I lay down beside my silent bedfellow and slept until moonlight waked me. All around, grass rippled in bone-colored light, seed pods bright as the foam of ocean waves I had never seen. I built a fire of grass and twigs and once more put distance between myself and where I had been. At my next mooring place I crawled beneath my wagon to escape the moon's scrutiny and managed only fitful sleep, chased in my dreams by bands of horse-riding skeletons wearing feather headdresses and brandishing bloody hand-axes. My subconscious must not share my conscious bravado about dealings with the dead. When I waked, the enormous sky was faintly light in the east—the direction I would have guessed was west, so turned about was I from all my relocations the night just past.

"Well, Chief, how did you sleep?" I asked as I examined my bony companion in the light of dawn. "Your cronies rode after my scalp all night long. No doubt you claim credit for my escape?" The breeze sang a soft tune over the grass and faintly whistled through tiny gaps between the Chief's teeth, giving voice to his assent. "All right," I said. "So long as you keep away savages and bad spirits, you can rest your bones in my wagonbed, see the sights with me." I re-affixed the Chief's hand and with knife probe and grass brush cleaned out his joints and sockets. "You could use a good washing," I told him—though that would have to wait for the next water hole. After a breakfast of bacon and coffee, we continued on our way. My Indian passenger was as congenial as my oxen. The wagon bumped and bounced along, and Chief Bones' skull jiggled and rattled, nodding agreement with whatever I declared. His yellowed maw was fixed with a look of sage understanding. Having determined that he was the perfect critic, I vowed I would test on him, mine own Boswell, the effects of each entry I wrote in my journal. "Chief," I said, "you're welcome to applaud, but should I read you something you don't like, keep your opinion to yourself."