Still Life With Crows

Corrie swallowed. If something bad was going to happen, it was going to happen now.

Pendergast halted. “I understand you are Mr. James Draper, great-grandson of Isaiah Draper?”

At this, Brushy Jim straightened slightly. The look of mistrust did not go away. “And?”

“My name is Pendergast. I’m interested in learning more about the Medicine Creek Massacre of August 14, 1865, of which your great-grandfather was the lone survivor.”

The mention of the massacre wrought a dramatic change in Brushy Jim’s countenance. The suspicious glare in his eye softened somewhat. “And the young lady, if that’s what she is? Who’s she?”

“Miss Corrie Swanson,” Pendergast replied.

At this, Jim stood even straighter. “Little Corrie?” he said in surprise. “What happened to your pretty blonde hair?”

Ate too much eggplant,Corrie almost said. But Brushy Jim was unpredictable, and he had a hair-trigger temper, so she decided that a shrug was the safest response.

“You look terrible, Corrie, all dressed in black.” He stood there a moment, looking at the two of them. Then he nodded his head. “Well, you might as well come in.”

They followed Brushy Jim into the stuffy confines of his house. There were few windows and it was dark, a house crammed full of shadowy objects. It smelled of old food and taxidermy gone bad.

“Sit down and have a Coke.” The refrigerator threw out a rectangle of welcome light as Brushy Jim opened it. Corrie perched on a folding chair, while Pendergast—after a quick scan of the premises—took a seat on the only portion of a cowhide sofa not stacked with dusty copies ofArizona Highways. Corrie had never been inside before, and she looked around uneasily. The walls were covered with old rifles, buckskins, boards with arrowheads glued on, Civil War memorabilia, plaques displaying different types of barbed wire. A row of moldering old books ran along one shelf, bookended by huge pieces of unpolished petrified wood. An entire stuffed horse, an Appaloosa, worn and moth-eaten, stood guard in one corner. The floor was littered with dirty laundry, broken saddle trees, pieces of leather, and other bric-a-brac. It was remarkable: the entire place was like a dusty museum devoted to relics of the Old West. Corrie had expected to see mementos of Vietnam: weapons, insignia, photographs. But there was absolutely nothing, not a trace, of the war that reputedly had changed Brushy Jim forever.

Brushy Jim handed Corrie and Pendergast cans of Coke. “Now, Mr. Pendergast, just what do you want to know about the massacre?”

Corrie watched Pendergast set the Coke can aside. “Everything.”

“Well, it started during the Civil War.” Brushy Jim threw his massive body into a big armchair, took a noisy sip. “You know all about Bloody Kansas, I’m sure, Mr. Pendergast, being a historian.”

“I’m not a historian, Mr. Draper. I’m a special agent for the Federal Bureau of Investigation.”

There was a dead silence. Then Brushy Jim cleared his throat.

“All right, then, Mr. Pendergast. So you’re FBI. May I ask what brings you to Medicine Creek?”

“The recent homicide.”

Brushy Jim’s look of suspicion had returned, full force. “And what,exactly, does that have to do with me?”

“The victim was a relic hunter named Sheila Swegg. She’d been digging in the Mounds.”

Brushy Jim spat on the floor, twisted it into the dust with his boot. “Goddamned relic hunters. They should leave the stuff in the ground.” Then he looked quickly back at Pendergast. “You still haven’t said what the murder has to do with me.”

“I understand the history of the Mounds, and the Medicine Creek Massacre, are intertwined. Along with something I’ve heard referred to locally as the ‘curse of the Forty-Fives.’ And as you may know, a large number of Southern Cheyenne arrows were found arranged with the body.”

A long time passed while Brushy Jim seemed to consider this. “What kind of arrows?” he finally asked.

“They were of cane, feathered with bald eagle primaries and tipped with a type II Plains Cimarron style point of Alibates chert and Bighorn red jasper. A matched set, by the way, in almost perfect condition. They date to around the time of the massacre.”

Brushy Jim issued a long low whistle, and then fell into silence, his brow furrowed with thought.

“Mr. Draper?” Pendergast prompted at last.

For another moment, Brushy Jim was still. Then, with a slow shake of his head, he began his story.

“Before the Civil War, southwestern Kansas was completely unsettled, just Cheyenne and Arapaho, Pawnee and Sioux. The only white folks were those passing through on the Santa Fe Trail. But settlement was rolling this way from the frontier, which at that time was eastern Kansas. Folks had their eye on the good range in the valleys of the Cimarron River, the Arkansas, Crooked Creek, and Medicine Creek. When the Civil War broke out all the soldiers went off, leaving the territory defenseless. The settlers had been brutalizing the Indians and now it was payback time. There was a whole string of Indian attacks along the frontier. Then when the Civil War ended, a lot of soldiers came back, armed and bitter. They’d seen war, Mr. Pendergast. And I meanwar. That kind of violence can do something to a man. It can damage the mind.”

The man paused, cleared his throat.

“So they came back here and began forming vigilante groups to push the Indians west so they could take the land. ‘Clearing the country,’ they called it. There was a group formed over in Dodge, called the Forty-Fives. ’Course, it wasn’t Dodge then, just the Hickson Brothers ranch. Forty-five men, it was, some of the worst dregs of humanity, murderers and crooks pushed out of settled towns farther east. My great-grandfather Isaiah Draper was just a boy of sixteen, barely in long pants, and he got sucked into it. I guess his thinking was he’d missed the war, so he’d better hurry up and prove his manhood damn quick while he still could.”

Brushy Jim took another noisy sip.