“If she had told…” said Mooshum. “If only she had told…and then there was Johann Vogeli. My old friend Vogeli. He was coming back from the barn when he saw his father, Frederic, smoke a cigarette in the middle of the day.”
“What’s so strange about that?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” said Mooshum.
Vogeli
FREDERIC VOGELI WAS standing in the yard talking everyday German to the Buckendorfs. Johann’s late mother had spoken a more complex German. Her voice was fading in his mind, or getting used up, like everything else about her. She had written letters back to her family in Heidelberg and made copies, written love letters to Frederic and notes to Johann himself, and she had kept a detail-filled diary of their little adventures and all that happened in their daily lives — except the beatings Frederic gave her once she got sick: those she hadn’t written down. All the same, Frederic never liked all that writing and he ripped out a page of her diary or used the fine paper of a letter whenever he rolled himself a cigarette. Johann hated to see it.
He came around the corner of the house now, and there they were. The Buckendorfs were also smoking. His father had rolled cigarettes for them. The slender tube of paper and tobacco hung off the younger Buckendorf ’s boulder jaw. As they stood there, talking, Johann watched the men breathe the burning paper into their lungs. His mother’s exact words vanished into their chests and emerged as formless smoke.
Johann walked into the house and hid his mother’s diary in a new place. He had grown about a foot in the months since she’d died and put on muscle. He wasn’t used to how strong he was now. When he walked out again, Frederic grabbed him by the collar and said, “Catch the horses,” then shoved him toward the pasture. He came back with a horse called Nadel and his father made him saddle Girlie, too. As they mounted their horses, his father said, “Now you will see something.” And they rode off after the Buckendorfs.
“So that was old Johann,” I said. “That’s the one you called the Deutscher.”
“Ya vole,” said Mooshum. “The Deutscher. Later on, he told me what happened when he and his dad caught up with the others, and when the sheriff and the old colonel tried to stand in their way.”
Death Song
COLONEL BENTON LUNGSFORD and the sheriff, whose name was Quintus Fells, caught up with the party of men as they were searching out a place that would do for hanging. Oric Hoag had fallen back and approached from a distance. The men were standing at the side of a well, peering down the hole, discussing the problem and testing the rope that held the bucket. The colonel and the sheriff maneuvered their horses in front of the wagon and they blocked the party of men from moving forward.
“Well, friends,” said Sheriff Fells in his easy way, “I see you’ve done some of our work for us.”
“We’re going to finish it, too,” said Frederic Vogeli.
Eugene Wildstrand, a neighbor of the slaughtered family, and William Hotchkiss, a locksmith and grain dealer, stepped their horses close to the sheriff. Some of the men were on foot. Two or three had even ridden in the wagon. Emil Buckendorf was driving the wagon. His pale-eyed brothers sat on the wagon seat with him, their hands in their laps. They looked like oversize boys in a pew.
“Step down,” said Sheriff Fells. “I’m commandeering this wagon and it is my duty to drive the suspects to jail.”
“Commandeer,” said Emil Buckendorf. He snorted through his beard. One of his brothers laughed, and the other, with the big jaw, just stared at his knees.
William Hotchkiss craned forward over his saddle. He was carrying an old repeating rifle. Sheriff Fells had his shotgun out, and Colonel Lungsford had his hand on the revolver he had carried in the Spanish-American War, and kept oiled and clean on a special shelf ever since. The men and horses were so close that they grazed one another as the horses nervously tried to avoid a misplaced step.
“That’s a boy you caught,” said Colonel Lungford to them all. “No more than.”
“That’s a killer,” said Vogeli.
“Don’t you have no conscience?” Wildstrand, holding his horse tight up, spat and coldly addressed the sheriff and the colonel. His eyes stood out black as tacks on white paper. “Didn’t you or didn’t you step in that house?”
William Hotchkiss urged his horse up suddenly behind Colonel Lungsford and he poked his gun against the other man’s back. Colonel Lungsford turned and spoke to Hotchkiss, pushing the barrel of the rifle away from his kidneys.
“Put that thing down, you idiot,” he said.
Vogeli herded Hotchkiss away from Sheriff Fells.
“Sorry, boys,” said Wildstrand. “We got to do what must be done.”
He leaned across the space between them and shot Fells’s horse between the eyes. The sheriff threw up his hands as he went down with the horse. There was the bullwhip crack of bone. The report made everybody jump. The men all looked at one another, and in the wagon Asiginak started toward the sheriff. He was thrown back by one of the Buckendorfs.
“We are done for,” said Cuthbert. He began to gag on the blood soaking down his throat from his nose.
Emil Buckendorf slapped the reins and the wagon rolled smoothly ahead.
“We still ain’t figured out a place to hang these Indians,” said William Hotchkiss. “Maybe we could use Oric’s beef windlass.”
“I ain’t in this!” cried Oric, who’d just caught up. He jumped off his horse to help Quintus Fells. The sheriff was breathing fast and saying, “Whoa, whoa, whoa…” He was still under the dead horse. His eyes rolled up to the whites and he passed out. Lungsford said “damn” and a few other words and got off his horse to help Oric free the sheriff, letting the wagon go by.
Jabez Woods, Henric Gostlin, Enery Mantle, and all the others stood quietly alongside the road watching the men who had guns and horses. Now they began to walk alongside the wagon, down the two-track grass road.
“Maybe over that swell,” said Mantle. “Those trees this side of it are scrawny.”
“All the good trees is back of us, over the reservation line,” said a Buckendorf.
“We just need one tree branch,” said Wildstrand. He looked into the wagon and his face was white around the eyes, like all the blood was gone underneath the field tan.
“We found those people already dead,” cried Cuthbert, stirring Holy Track from a drowsy stupor. Mooshum was listening to everything. “We found them, but we did not kill them. We milked their cows for them and we fed the baby. I, Cuthbert, fed the baby! We are not your bad kind of Indians! Those are south of here!”
“Don’t talk bad of the Bwaanag,” said Asiginak. “They adopted me.”
Cuthbert ignored him and badgered the white men. “Us, we are just like you!”