Skin Medicine

But thinking of the farm…he could see his old man sitting on a willow stump one morning, dirty and sweaty and beaten from trying to wring a living from the thin soil. “Tyler,” he said. “Yer my only boy. Ye ain’t the smartest I’ve ever done seen, but damn if ye ain’t the most determined. I figure ye’ll do okay. At least, I shore hope so. But whatever ye do…don’t ever let another man own ye…”

And Tyler Cabe never had and never would.

He figured if he had nothing else, he always had his self-respect.

Wilcox let him keep his Bull Durham, papers, and matches, so he rolled himself a cigarette and felt sorry for himself.

Damn, he thought, old Crazy Jack was going to love this one.

Locked-up, eh, Cabe? Killed a man, did you? Still the same hotheaded old Southern boy you was back when, ain’t you? Figured it would come to this, boy. You ain’t got the brains God gave a piss-drunk rooster.

Damn.

Water was dripping down on him, just a few droplets, but he figured he’d be soaked by morning. Soaked and freezing and didn’t he just have that coming?

“ Cot’s not bolted down,” a voice from the next cell said. “Slide it over to the other wall or your blanket’ll be frozen stiff come morning.”

Cabe struck another match, held it up to the bars off to his left. He saw an old Indian sitting cross-legged on his own cot. He was dressed in a blanket coat and campaign hat, his hair long and steel-gray. His eyes were black dots set in a worn face with more wrinkles in it than an unmade bed.

“ Just a suggestion,” the Indian said. “I’m good with suggestions, but not much with following them.”

Cabe smiled despite the pounding in his head. “Name’s Tyler Cabe…you?”

In the gray darkness, Cabe saw that the old man just stared dead forward like he was seeing something no one else could. “You want my injun name or my white name?”

“ Injun name would be fine.”

The old man adjusted his hat. “No, you couldn’t pronounce it and I can’t remember it. In white tongue it meant “One Who Waits”. Something like that, I recall.”

“ And what is it you’re waiting for?”

“ Don’t know rightly. Figure I’ll stay around until it comes to me.”

“ Just keep waiting, eh?” Cabe said.

The Indian shrugged. “Surely. I’m always waiting for something. When I was a free-running injun, I suppose I was waiting for the U.S. Government to take my land away. When they did that I used to wait on the reservation for my beef ration, my flour and corn. Never came too much, but I always waited for it. Now I wait here in Whisper Lake. But if I wait in any one place too long…some white-eye feels the need to kick me around. But that’s life as an injun: You wait long enough, something always happens.”

Cabe didn’t know what to make of all that. The old man seemed to be joking and to be dead serious at the same time. But Cabe knew from the Cherokees back home that they were not like white men and you could not read them as such.

“ What’s your white name?”

“ Charles Graybrow,” he said. “Graybrow…that’s injun, too. Means man with gray brow.”

“ Really? I’d have never figured it.”

“ Learn something every day, Tyler Cabe.”

Cabe rubbed his temples again. Christ, it was a doozy, that headache. Older he got, harder the liquor was on him. And Graybrow wasn’t helping none…Cabe got the impression that he was being insulted and befriended at the same time.

“ Here,” Graybrow said. “This’ll help your head.”

Cabe lifted his hand and a small leather pouch was passed to him. The Indian’s fingers felt very rough like untreated hide.

“ What is it?”

“ Injun head-magic,” Graybrow said. “Though some whites just call it headache powder.”

Cabe washed it down with water, splashed some more water in his face. He passed the pouch back through the bars.

“ Why were you locked-up, Tyler Cabe?”

Cabe grunted. “For being a damn fool, I suppose. I stopped by the Cider House for a drink. Next thing I know, I killed a man. Shot him. Virgil Clay was his name, they tell me. Hell, one less speck of trash in the world.”

“ Virgil Clay?” Graybrow clucked his tongue. “That’s bad medicine there, I tell you. Oh…when an injun says ‘bad medicine’ it means the shit’s about to fly and you’re gonna catch some.”

“ Don’t say?”

“ Yep.”

Graybrow told him that the Clay’s were an ornery mountain clan from back east in West Virginia. Something happened to them during the Civil War and they pretty much had to leave their beloved hill country or face prosecution. Graybrow couldn’t be sure, but he thought he’d heard something to the effect that the clan had been doing more than a little murdering and horse-thieving and most of the county had hounded them out. They’d ended up in Utah Territory, attracted maybe by the mountains. Most of the clan was gone now. As far as Graybrow knew, only a few of ‘em lived up in the high country and they didn’t cotton to strangers poking about…as more than one miner or trapper had learned the hard way.

Cabe asked about Virgil.