If your mother was to see him what do you reckon she’d say.
I dont know. She’s dead.
Aint you ashamed?
No mam.
Dont you sass me.
I’m not trying to. You want him just take him. I’ll give him to you. I cant do any more than what I’ve done.
Damn if you aint a sorry specimen. She turned to the other women.
You all help me. We need to bathe him and get some clothes on him. Somebody run get some soap.
Mam, said the keeper.
You all just take him on to the river.
Toadvine and the kid passed them as they were dragging the cart along. They stepped off the path and watched them go by. The idiot was clutching the bars and hooting at the water and some of the women had started up a hymn.
Where are they takin it? said Toadvine.
The kid didnt know. They were backing the cart through the loose sand toward the edge of the river and they let it down and opened the cage. The Borginnis woman stood before the imbecile.
James Robert come out of there.
She reached in and took him by the hand. He peered past her at the water, then he reached for her.
A sigh went up from the women, several of whom had hiked their skirts and tucked them at the waist and now stood in the river to receive him.
She handed him down, him clinging to her neck. When his feet touched the ground he turned to the water. She was smeared with feces but she seemed not to notice. She looked back at those on the riverbank.
Burn that thing, she said.
Someone ran to the fire for a brand and while they led James Robert into the waters the cage was torched and began to burn.
He clutched at their skirts, he reached with a clawed hand, gibbering, drooling.
He sees hisself in it, they said.
Shoo. Imagine having this child penned up like a wild animal.
The flames from the burning cart crackled in the dry air and the noise must have caught the idiot’s attention for he turned his dead black eyes upon it. He knows, they said. All agreed. The Borginnis woman waded out with her dress ballooning about her and took him deeper and swirled him about grown man that he was in her great stout arms. She held him up, she crooned to him. Her pale hair floated on the water.
His old companions saw him that night before the migrants’ fires in a coarse woven wool suit. His thin neck turned warily in the collar of his outsized shirt. They’d greased his hair and combed it flat upon his skull so that it looked painted on. They brought him sweets and he sat drooling and watched the fire, greatly to their admiration. In the dark the river ran on and a fishcolored moon rose over the desert east and set their shadows by their sides in the barren light. The fires drew down and the smoke stood gray and chambered in the night. The little jackal wolves cried from across the river and the camp dogs stirred and muttered. The Borginnis took the idiot to his pallet under a wagonsheet and stripped him to his new underwear and she tucked him into his blanket and kissed him goodnight and the camp grew quiet. When the idiot crossed that blue and smoky amphitheatre he was naked once again, shambling past the fires like a balden groundsloth. He paused and tested the air and he shuffled on. He went wide of the landing and stumbled through the shore willows, whimpering and pushing with his thin arms at things in the night. Then he was standing alone on the shore. He hooted softly and his voice passed from him like a gift that was also needed so that no sound of it echoed back. He entered the water. Before the river reached much past his waist he’d lost his footing and sunk from sight.
Now the judge on his midnight rounds was passing along at just this place stark naked himself—such encounters being commoner than men suppose or who would survive any crossing by night—and he stepped into the river and seized up the drowning idiot, snatching it aloft by the heels like a great midwife and slapping it on the back to let the water out. A birth scene or a baptism or some ritual not yet inaugurated into any canon. He twisted the water from its hair and he gathered the naked and sobbing fool into his arms and carried it up into the camp and restored it among its fellows.
XIX
The howitzer – The Yumas attack – A skirmish – Glanton appropriates the ferry – The hanged Judas – The coffers – A deputation for the coast – San Diego – Arranging for supplies – Brown at the farrier’s – A dispute – Webster and Toadvine freed – The ocean – An altercation – A man burned alive – Brown in durance vile – Tales of treasure – An escape – A murder in the mountains – Glanton leaves Yuma – The alcalde hanged – Hostages – Returns to Yuma – Doctor and judge, nigger and fool – Dawn on the river – Carts without wheels – Murder of Jackson – The Yuma massacre.
The doctor had been bound for California when the ferry fell into his hands for the most by chance. In the ensuing months he’d amassed a considerable wealth in gold and silver and jewelry. He and the two men who worked for him had taken up residence on the west bank of the river overlooking the ferrylanding among the abutments of an unfinished hillside fortification made from mud and rock. In addition to the pair of freightwagons he’d inherited from Major Graham’s command he had also a mountain howitzer—a bronze twelvepounder with a bore the size of a saucer—and this piece stood idle and unloaded in its wooden truck. In the doctor’s crude quarters he and Glanton and the judge together with Brown and Irving sat drinking tea and Glanton sketched for the doctor a few of their indian adventures and advised him strongly to secure his position. The doctor demurred. He claimed to get along well with the Yumas. Glanton told him to his face that any man who trusted an indian was a fool. The doctor colored but he held his tongue. The judge intervened. He asked the doctor did he consider the pilgrims huddled on the far shore to be under his protection. The doctor said that he did so consider them. The judge spoke reasonably and with concern and when Glanton and his detail returned down the hill to cross to their camp they had the doctor’s permission to fortify the hill and charge the howitzer and to this end they set about running the last of their lead until they had close on to a hatful of rifleballs.
They loaded the howitzer that evening with something like a pound of powder and the entire cast of shot and they trundled the piece to a place of advantage overlooking the river and the landing below.
Two days later the Yumas attacked the crossing. The scows were on the west bank of the river discharging cargo as arranged and the travelers stood by to claim their goods. The savages came both mounted and afoot out of the willows with no warning and swarmed across the open ground toward the ferry. On the hill above them Brown and Long Webster swung the howitzer and steadied it and Brown crammed his lighted cigar into the touch-hole.
Even over that open terrain the concussion was immense. The howitzer in its truck leaped from the ground and clattered smoking backward across the packed clay. On the floodplain below the fort a terrible destruction had passed and upward of a dozen of the Yumas lay dead or writhing in the sand. A great howl went up among them and Glanton and his riders defiled out of the wooded littoral upriver and rode upon them and they cried out in rage at their betrayal. Their horses began to mill and they pulled them about and loosed arrows at the approaching dragoons and were shot down in volleys of pistolfire and the debarkees at the crossing scrabbled up their arms from among the dunnage and knelt and set up a fire from that quarter while the women and children lay prone among the trunks and freightboxes. The horses of the Yumas reared and screamed and churned about in the loose sand with their hoopshaped nostrils and whited eyes and the survivors made for the willows from which they’d emerged leaving on the field the wounded and the dying and the dead. Glanton and his men did not pursue them. They dismounted and walked methodically among the fallen dispatching them man and horse alike each with a pistolball through the brain while the ferry travelers watched and then they took the scalps.