Infestation (Part II)

Infestation



II.

1.

Major Goodweather remarked that foraging was warfare, just as efficacious in defeating the enemy as cavalry advancing under banners and cannonade or a skirmish-line of infantry attacking across an open meadow. This was something Major Goodweather had learned, so he said, during the Shenandoah campaign during the late war to preserve the union, declaring: "we scoured that valley from one end to the other until there was nothing remaining to provision man or beast." Quartermaster Biggens replied that he had heard about that campaign of which it had been proclaimed that a crow wishing to traverse that valley, made a howling wasteland by the Federal troops, would have needed to pack his own victuals since there was not a grain of corn or wheat anywhere remaining in those Blue Ridge Mountains. "So the Indians (explained Major Goodweather) who have seized our beef-cattle, three of them (as he recollected) have engaged in an act of war against us just as surely as if they had fired upon our troops sent out to gather firewood or burnt the barn of one of the settlers entrusted to this fort’s protection." "But did you not feel a bit like a wild Sioux Indian yourself," Quartermaster Biggens said, "falling upon barns and hamlets and growing fields and putting them to the torch in that way?" "We were proceeding under the strictest orders," Major Goodweather said, sucking a bit on his pipe. "Most assuredly, war is a cruel thing," Lieutenant Williams said helpfully. Dr. Marcus, the camp surgeon, made a clucking sound in his throat, suggesting assent.

"I was at Winchester Station, Kernsville, Cross Keys, Waynesville, Front Royal..." Major Goodweather said. "Pillaging and burning with General Custer and General Sheridan..." He spoke contemplatively and his small hot-tempered eyes softened with his voice.

"War is a cruel thing," Lieutenant Williams repeated.

There followed an uneasy hiatus in the conversation during which the gentlemen could hear the winter wind blowing against the building so that the window frames and joists overhead creaked. The ladies had retired to another room, beyond a corridor dark with cold and menacing shadows. A woman’s voice, accompanied by the pianoforte, sounded in that room. The singer cautiously navigated between notes either too high or too low for her, warbling with vibrato that some might have found tastelessly broad on the tones that came confidently to her.

"It’s a bad night, so cold and stormy," Lieutenant Williams said. "Brutal," Dr. Marcus replied, beaming a little with pride at his wife’s singing in the other room. Major Goodweather, deaf as a result of an artillery bombardment during the War, was indifferent to the music. "I am merely suggesting, my friends," he said, "that we can, perhaps, use this order, which is distasteful to me, as an occasion to pursue the hostiles who have been thieving our cattle."

Lieutenant Williams blinked several times and, then, turned his gaze to the fire burning merrily in the hearth. The fire was big and bright and the flames leaped in a jolly way that Lieutenant Williams found calming. One might comfortably fall asleep watching the flicker of a fire this robust and well-mannered.

"There will be a campaign this Spring, as soon as the ice goes out of the rivers," Major Goodweather said. "That is most assuredly the case. And I am told that General George Custer will lead the force dispatched against the hostiles. So it would seem to me that when we go forth to implement our own orders, we might also keep an eye out for bands of marauding Sioux and, perhaps, punish them for thefts that they have committed."

"It seems a shame to employ fighting men on a relief mission that might just as well be accomplished by church groups or a ladies’ aid auxiliary," Dr. Marcus said.

"I would submit that the entire enterprise is not only questionable, but illegal," Major Goodweather said. "It’s another instance of the corruption and graft afflicting this president’s administration. Shameless pandering to indolent men."

"Illegal?" Quartermaster Biggens asked.

"I am soldier not a warden of the poor," Major Goodweather said.

"An order is an order," Quartermaster Biggens said, "And we have our orders." Quartermaster Biggens lit a cigar and sucked on it. Major Goodweather raised the bottle of brandy and asked them if they would take another drop. Dr. Marcus and Quartermaster Biggens set their glasses on the table in front of the Major and he distributed rations of brandy, pouring out the bottle in three measures.

"And those orders shall be fulfilled. In the due course of time," Major Goodweather replied.

Lieutenant Williams tore himself away from watching the brightly dancing flames in the hearth. "Yes, it would hardly be prudent to set forth in this weather," he said.

"Brigadier General Custer will depart when the ice is melted in the rivers, early April, I presume," Major Goodweather said. "Campaigning is not possible with the ways all clogged with snow and blizzards howling down out of the north. We will coordinate our expedition with his."

"But in the interval?" Quartermaster Biggens asked.

"No man of decent industry will starve," Major Goodweather said. "Isn’t that true, Dr. Marcus?"

The doctor seemed embarrassed to be called upon: "I am sure that you are right, Major. But, of course, one worries about the women and the children. They certainly can not be charged with this misfortune."

"I think rumors of starvation in this country are very much exaggerated," Major Goodweather said. "A man with powder and ammunition should be able to provision his family by hunting. I am told that the deer and antelope are most plentiful even in the areas scoured by the locusts."

"Our settlers are farmers. Not all of them are proficient hunters," Lieutenant Williams said.

"But is there abundant game?"

Lieutenant Williams paused: "That would have to be determined. I’m not so convinced about that. And I will say that the poverty among those afflicted is very severe."

"General Ord has made it clear what we are to do," Quartermaster Biggens said. "We are to enter our storehouses and inventory our material. Then, we are charged to go forth and distribute surplus provisions to those made indigent by the locusts."

"And, thereby, reduce our capacity for campaigning in the field if we are called upon to support General Custer," Major Goodweather said.

"Omaha is making you into grocers," Dr. Marcus said.

"General Ord has already turned his troops in the Army of the Platte into purveyors of dry-goods," Major Goodweather said. "Last year, he had them abroad, distributing ‘old pattern’ uniforms."

"We are a division of the Army of the Platte," Quartermaster Biggens said.

"I needn’t be reminded of that," said Goodweather, "and I am well aware of the chain-of-command."

"Flour, bread and hard-tack, salt pork and bacon," Quartermaster Biggens said. "From our storehouses according to our means to those that are impoverished according to their needs."

"Criminal," Goodweather said. He opened another bottle of brandy, brandishing it like a club.

"But an order, nonetheless," the Quartermaster replied.

Dr. Marcus said: "I think I have had enough." He cupped his hand over his glass.

"No more for me," Quartermaster Biggens said.

"All the better for me," Major Goodweather said, pouring himself another full measure.

In the room beyond the dim corridor, the ladies tired of singing. Mrs. Williams closed the lid over the keys on the pianoforte and Dr. Marcus’ wife set aside her sheet music. Mrs. Goodweather stood up and paused in the doorway, cocking her head to listen to the men’s voice at the end of the hallway. "I hope that they don’t indulge too heavily," Mrs. Goodweather said with a sigh. She heard her husband speaking, a little too loudly and in a voice that she found slightly shrill and, therefore, disturbing. The Quartermaster’s wife looked at Mrs. Goodweather with a sympathy that the Major’s wife thought slightly insubordinate.

For a time, the women talked about their children and the rigors of raising them on this desolate prairie. Then, the doctor’s wife suggested that one of them read aloud to the others. The wind gusted against the house and made the glass panes shudder in their frames. Mrs. Goodweather always wanted them to read from Pilgrim’s Progress but she was overruled in favor of a new novel by George Meredith, Beauchamp’s Career.

"Is it very scandalous?" The Quartermaster’s wife asked.

"Very much so," laughed Mrs. Marcus as she opened the volume and began to read in a clear voice, affecting just the slightest of British accents.

　

2.

The great hailstorm frightened Morgan’s beef-cattle and many of them went astray. In an arroyo remote from ranch house and buildings, one of the cowboys found Morgan’s barbed wire fence buried in rubble where a hillside had collapsed in the torrential rain. Judging by the hoofmarks imprinted in the wet clay, some of the herd stampeded through the ravine onto the open prairie. It was unclear how many cattle were missing. The animals remaining within the fenced property had scattered and had taken shelter in the deepest and most inaccessible pits and cavities in the broken country and remained huddled there, hidden and miserable, their flanks scarred by the thorn and yucca spears through which they had precipitously fled. It took Morgan’s ranchhands more than a week to round-up the beef-cows and, during that time, the Preacher had the bunkhouse, more or less, to himself. As the lightning flashed and the thunder rumbled and rain commingled with hail that was like bright white sparks, Morgan observed to his women that the Preacher’s prayer had, indeed, been efficacious because the black cloud brought wind and water but not locusts and, on that basis, he invited the man to stay with him at his ranch, at least until the awful weather cleared, and the lanes were dry enough for a wagon’s wheels. As he made this invitation, Morgan told the Preacher that he could sleep in the bunkhouse and asked the laundress to make a place for him there, remarking that he hoped the reverend pastor would not be offended by sharing these premises with his rough and ready cowboys, mostly uneducated and rude fellows. "No," the Preacher had replied, "I appreciate your generosity. Jesus made due with fishermen and shepherds and, surely, I can bunk with your vaqueros."

In the pursuit of the strays following the thunderstorm, everyone was very busy and, then, there was an encounter with a band of Sioux spiriting off a pair of Morgan’s cows, an incident in which rifle-shots were exchanged, although at a comfortably long-range, and this episode required Morgan with his foreman to ride up to the fort to petition Major Goodweather for increased vigilance and protection against the hostile savages. In that discussion, Major Goodweather told Morgan that he construed the Indians’ activities as a form of forage and that forage was an act of war, something that he had come to understand during his service with the Federal troops in the Great War to save the Union. During all of this time, the Preacher was, more or less, forgotten in Morgan’s bunkhouse, eating each noon and evening with the servants of the house and, forming a close, even, intimate association, with one of the laundresses, Irish Annie, the girl who had rushed forth to cling so tightly to him after his prayer that the heavens withhold their scourge of locusts from the rancher’s pastures.

By the time, the strays were all rounded-up and the beef-cows numbered and accounted-for (except for the pair snatched by the hostiles), the north winds were blowing continuously and the sky spitting sleet that turned to snow. Then, the country was mostly impassible, the tracks and lanes, such as they were, buried in wind-driven drifts of snow and the days alternating between bitter, deadly cold and warm thaws that flooded the roads traversing the badlands with axle-deep mud. During this time, Morgan, making a virtue of necessity, deputized the Preacher to conduct twice-daily Bible studies with his daughters and, sometimes, in the evening, the Pastor discussed theology with the rancher and, even, spent some hours attempting to teach the rancher’s wife the fundamentals of New Testament Greek. By this time, the Preacher was taking most of his evening meals with the rancher and his family, although he still breakfasted and ate his dinner with the other servants of the house.

Morgan’s bunkhouse consisted a half-dozen cell-shaped cubicles that opened onto a central room with field-stone fireplaces at both of its ends. The poor weather kept the cowboys inside most of the day and the men passed the time in the common room playing endless games of poker. At first, the cowboys invited the Preacher to play cards with them, but he demurred thinking that gambling might reduce his authority as a pastor and counselor to Morgan’s wife and daughters. Nonetheless, the Preacher sometimes circled the card table, looking on enviously, and commenting to himself how he would play this hand or that, and the cowboys, who also drank beer and whiskey while shuffling and dealing their cards, suspected that the reverend had more knowledge about the game than he had admitted. Certainly, he watched their play with a glittering eye and, after an hour or so, would vanish without excusing himself, slinking across the farm yard to the smoky shanties where the laundresses lived with their children.

Sometimes, poor people, ragged as beggars, with their ankles bloody and frost-bitten from trekking through the ice, came to the shacks where the laundresses lived. The Preacher saw them himself when he was visiting Irish Annie. The poor people asked for a little bread, some oat meal, perhaps, or a basket of potatoes or apples and the laundresses gave them the food as well as worn-out garments that the cowboys or the ranchers family no longer used. Winter and starvation had made the poor people half crazy and, although they spoke the same English as the Preacher, he always felt that poverty and inanition had altered their tongues so that they were, in fact, speaking an entirely different language, words that sounded familiar to the Preacher but that had completely different meanings in the discourse of the indigent. One of women who came to beg at the laundresses’ shanties brought with her a bright, blonde-haired boy. The boy eyed the tallow soap that the laundry girls used for their work with glistening, eager eyes. He was so hungry that the women were afraid that the boy would pocket the lumps of fatty soap and try to eat them somewhere in the barren country between the ranch and their devastated farmland. "I told my father," the boy said, "that everything we had went into the hopper." "The hopper?" Irish Annie asked. "The grasshopper," the boy said, laughing in a high, strained voice. He had a bad cough and the laundresses thought that he should stay overnight with them in their shacks, but the boy’s mother said that there were invalids at home and that she had to return and care for them and, so, they left before sunset, walking through the thigh-high drifts of snow toward the distant hills. "The cowboys will find them out there," Irish Annie told the Preacher, "frozen stiff as boards in all this frightful snow and ice."

"Oh no," the Preacher said, "the bodies will not surface until Spring."

"Someone should help those people," Irish Annie said.

The Preacher caressed her thigh and belly. "God will provide," he said. "God will provide."

"I hope to heaven that is true," Irish Annie said.

The Preacher could adduce a half-dozen well-attested proofs of divine providence, including the child that he had raised from the dead at the silver camp at Creede, but all of these examples involved mercies extended to himself and, perhaps, demonstrated nothing more than the he was one of God’s elect.

A couple weeks later, Irish Annie whispered to the Preacher that she thought that she was with child. The Preacher embraced her heartily and, then, went to the bunkhouse where the cowboys were playing one of their never-ending games of cards. He insinuated that one of the men was cheating and there was a brief, vicious fistfight between the players that greatly pleased the Preacher because it showed him that most people are worse than brutish animals. Then, the Preacher went into his cell and kneeled next to his cot, praying with all his might. Three days later, Irish Annie announced to the Preacher that she had miscarried.

　

　

　

3.

Major Goodweather’s weakness for strong drink was well-known and, so, Dr. Marcus suggested that the gentlemen join the ladies where the temptation to carouse would be decidedly less. The Major ignored this proposal and declared that he would gladly give up his command at the fort to serve as an adjutant, or, even, an enlisted man in General Custer’s summer campaign against the Sioux.

"I see nothing but ignominy here," he cried and, it seemed for a moment, that his small eyes, half-closed under the influence of liquor, produced a half-dozen tears that wet his cheek.

"Come, come now, Major," Dr. Marcus said. "The duty of a soldier, and, I suppose, his glory is in executing orders."

"That’s so," Major Goodweather affirmed.

Quartermaster Biggens asked: "If you were ordered to lead troops in a dawn assault on an Indian village so to destroy their lodges and shoot their horses and carry out the slaughter of all men and boys present in that encampment, would you carry out that directive?"

"Undoubtedly," Major Goodweather said.

"Because it is a just and good order you deem strategically sound or because it is an order?" Quartermaster Biggens continued.

"Because it is an order."

"Then, why is it abhorrent to you to act as ordered in supplying salt pork and blankets and flour to your fellow white men?"

Major Goodweather paused. "I distinguish between the two orders on the basis of their accord with human nature. I am soldier and my business is war and war requires that we fight and kill. War is the mother of all of manly virtues and the natural state of the world."

"Some might disagree with you on that point, sir," Quartermaster Biggens said.

"There have always been wars," Dr. Marcus said mildly. He looked to Lieutenant Williams.

Lieutenant Williams said: "A soldier is bound to execute only those orders that have a lawful intent and purpose."

"Nonsense," Major Goodweather said. "An order is an order."

"So why the hesitancy to perform the order to offer charity to your fellow white men?" Quartermaster Biggens asked.

"Because the demand that I distribute my supplies to civilians weakens my capacity to fight and, further – and this is most important – is destructive to the very men that it would aid. It’s contrary to human nature."

"I don’t see how," Quartermaster Biggens said.

"Have you read your Emerson, sir – Self-reliance?" Major Goodweather said. "The struggle for existence requires fortitude. If, now, we distribute charity to these farmers, don’t we strip them of their manhood? And don’t we insure that the next crisis that ensues will result in further petitions for charity and further reliance on the beneficence of others?"

"But these are special circumstances," Lieutenant Williams said. "Three years of grasshopper infestation. The crawling larva in the Spring and, then, the great swarms of them in Summer and Fall."

"I unwilling to cede such influence to a mere insect," Major Goodweather said.

"An insect that comes in the billions, in swarms that are a mile high advancing across a front that is the width of a county?" Quartermaster Biggens said.

"I haven’t seen that," Major Goodweather replied. "Indeed, I think the accounts of this plague are much exaggerated."

"The fort’s been spared," Lieutenant Williams said.

"Poverty is a direct consequence of improvidence and indolence and..." Major Goodweather paused.

"...and ‘intemperance’ you were about to say?" interposed Quartermaster Biggens.

"I do so much fancy a drop of strong spirits, that much I’ll concede," the Major said smiling.

"If it is known that the army is distributing its materials to the poor," Dr. Marcus asked, "won’t we attract all manner of riff-raff to the fort? And, then, won’t there be bitter rivalry among the beggars for our largesse?"

"Charity encourages habitual beggary, it has ever been thus..." Major Goodweather said. "Beggary and confirmed mendicancy increases the tribe of the idle and vicious."

"But there are people in this country who are boiling grass and weeds for their soup," Quartermaster Biggens said. "If their poverty were the result of an invading foe, you would supply relief without hesitating."

"Upon the order of a proper authority," Major Goodweather said.

"In this case, the invading foe are the locusts," Lieutenant Williams said.

"If anybody chooses to lie down and be eaten up by the grasshoppers, I don’t much care if he is devoured body, boots, and breeches," Major Goodweather said. "But if he fights and keeps on fighting, I am convinced that the cases in which he will require the charity of others will be rare, very rare indeed."

Dr. Marcus exhaled a cloud of pipe-smoke: "In the majority of cases, our pioneers are robust fellows. I have no doubt that, in the majority of cases, they will pull through just fine. And those who don’t –"

"It’s providence, my dear fellows, it’s the decree of God. If you are to be eaten up by locusts, that is the ordinance of the almighty and who are we to interfere with such ordinances," Major Goodweather said.

"At minimum, I suppose, the fellows who we succor should agree to pay us back for the loan of food and blankets and seed," Dr. Marcus said.

"That’s what the Sutler says," Lieutenant Williams replied. "Mr. Berwyn told me that the other

day. He advised that General Ord’s orders to the Army of the Platte insofar as they mandate charity to private individuals is unconstitutional. Goods may be provided to the destitute but only upon the execution of promissory notes and other instruments for repayment with interest."

"Interest?" Major Goodweather said. "Are we all Jews here?"

"Is Mr. Berwyn of that persuasion?" Lieutenant Williams asked.

"I spoke figuratively," Major Goodweather replied. "Although Mr. Berwyn would insist on usury."

"The valiant pioneers will depart the land devastated by the locusts," Dr. Marcus said. "They will go to earn their way in the pineries of Minnesota or in the gold fields of the Black Hills. I believe that we will find only the weakest and most feckless remaining on their farms when your columns go forth to render aid."

"Of that I am sure," Major Goodweather said.

A candle borne by one of the women came down the darkened corridor. In the shadows, the woman’s face shone like an angel, eyes and hair illumined by the flame that she carried.

"We’re tired of reading," the woman said. "The ladies ask that you join us."

"So the nymphs will receive us," Major Goodweather said. "Arethusa and her sisters await."

Major Goodweather stood up unsteadily. He swayed to and fro, his feet planted far apart to keep him upright.

"We should make a punch, a rum punch, to share with the ladies," Major Goodweather proclaimed.

"That’s not necessary my good fellow," Dr. Marcus said.

"It’s essential, essential," Dr. Goodweather said, mispronouncing the word a little.

"My dear friend..." Dr. Marcus began.

"No, it’s essential, really essential – a good rum punch..."

"Not at all," Quartermaster Biggens said.

Dr. Marcus took Major Goodweather’s arm and steadied him. The candle withdrew a few feet, loitering in the dark hall and the wind outside snarled against the windows and flung sleet at the glass panes. Major Goodweather said something in Latin.

The men stood and Dr. Marcus half-bowed to the lady holding the candle and, then, led by Major Goodweather they began their march down the dark corridor, a campaign through the dark accompanied by the wail of the wind outside. After eight or nine steps, Major Goodweather lost his footing and slid sideways so that he fell onto the floor, cracking his head hard against the wainscoting.

Major Goodweather’s wife hurried to her husband’s side. Her skirts rustled against the floor and the dry air conducted a spark upward from the place where she touched him. The spark flashed so briefly that it was impossible to tell whether it was white or orange or violet.

"My husband has been a bit indisposed this week," Mrs. Goodweather said.

"Idleness is the curse of the true soldier," Dr. Marcus said softly and his wife nodded her head in agreement.



4.

Major Goodweather reckoned that his baggage train should consist of no fewer than four heavily laden freight wagons of Conestoga manufacture together with a touring buckboard for the provision of ammunition and rations to the relief column. Ten infantryman were to accompany the wagons to protect against raiding Indians and starving pioneers who might be inclined toward theft or riot. Lieutenant Williams was to lead a six cavalry troopers. The mounted men, with a Ponca scout, were to reconnoiter the country in advance of the relief column in the hope of encountering and, perhaps, suppressing hostile Sioux rumored to have kidnaped a child and known to have rustled several beef-cows from pastures near the Fort. Because he opposed the order from Omaha to provide welfare to the locust plague victims, Major Goodweather intended to accompany the column for the purpose of writing from personal observation a report to his superiors that he expected to be both scathing and eloquent. Major Goodweather had been an accomplished horseman when he was younger and had spent days in the saddle during the War between the States but he had grown fat with idleness at the Fort and gouty, an affliction that particularly troubled the commander when he was in his cups.

On the morning of the expedition, well before dawn, the Conestogas were drawn up in a file on the parade grounds, loaded by soldiers who used the touring buckboard and two small wagons usually deployed for gathering wood to convey provisions to the big freight wagons. On inspection, the running gear of one of the Conestogas was found to be fractured, the broken weld rendering the wagon impossible to turn in any reasonable radius. Major Goodweather ordered that one of the freight wagons owned by Sutler Berwyn be requisitioned for the mission. Berwyn protested and set an impossibly high rental price on his rig. Several teamsters were dispatched to retrieve Berwyn’s wagon from the Sutler’s compound. Sutler Berwyn protested and said that the wagon was being taken to impoverish him and drive him out of business so that the government would have the monopoly on sales to the friendly Indians and local pioneers who traded at the Sutler’s store. Not quite at gunpoint, the wagon was commandeered by the armed men from the fort, driven to the parade ground and duly loaded with blankets, boots, bedding and canvas tents, as well as several barrels of salt-pork.

After the sun rose, George looked at the sky and, then, stamping his feet on the ground because it was very cold, said that the day would be dry and windy and that the nights would be cold enough to freeze the water in the marshes and lagoons by the river. At least in the morning, when the earth was still frozen, the relief column should make good progress overland on its mission of mercy. At Major Goodweather’s order, the cavalry rode forth, very quickly crossing the prairies and breaks near the fort to attain sentry positions on the buttes at the horizon. The wagons would attain those heights midday so that the cavalry might, then, range forth again as the column moved north and west toward the river. The heavy freight wagons lumbered forward very slowly with Major Goodweather slouched on a horse at their head and, when the marching men turned to look over their shoulder, it seemed that they had made almost no progress away from the buildings of the fort behind them. A number of ragamuffins and scarecrows were standing idly by the Sutler’s compound, warming themselves at the embers of fires lit the night before. (Mr. Berwyn had given them permission to rake through his potato field harvested the previous year in the hope that they might find some vegetables still lingering intact in the frozen ground.) When the ragged men learned that the wagon train was driving north and west to provide relief to the starving pioneers, a sort of cheer was raised so that the dogs at the encampment barked and the Indian children came from their huts and lean-tos to race for a quarter mile along side the Conestogas.

At three homesteads, the wagons halted. At each place, Major Goodweather asked the settler to attest that he was "absolutely destitute" and had neither livestock nor seed to plant. The first two settlers were willing to stipulate as to their poverty and signed affidavits to that effect. At the third farm, the homesteader said that he was destitute and would so attest under penalty of perjury. Major Goodweather noted that the man had a dilapidated-looking ox standing in his pasture, a beast that seemed not to have eaten for some time and that seemed unsteady on its legs. "But, sir, you have livestock," Major Goodweather protested. "How am I to travel or put in my crop this Spring if I am not allowed to retain my ox?" the farmer asked. Major Goodweather shook his head and said that relief was granted on the condition of absolute impecuniousness and not on any other grounds. "So am I to surrender my animal to you?" the farmer asked. The man’s haggard face was red but white around his nostrils. "Not at all," Major Goodweather said. "I am merely without authority to render any aid to you." Goodweather climbed back on his horse a bit clumsily. His gout afflicted him and he was limping. The column proceeded away from the farmstead. The farmer’s wife emerged from their sod dug-out and sobbing raised her infant so that Major Goodweather could see the child swaddled in a rags. Two troopers went to the final wagon in the baggage train and, loading their arms with as much bacon and hardtack as they could carry, brought the food to the woman and spread it out at her feet. The baby howled and Major Goodweather, whose foot was throbbing, watched out of the corner of his eye but pretended not to see what the men had done.

At noon, having made good progress for wagons so heavily laden, the baggage train reached the pine-clad heights where the horsemen were waiting for them. Major Goodweather asked if the men had seen any trace of hostile Sioux. Lieutenant Williams said that they had not encountered anyone and that much of the territory seemed to have been abandoned. He remarked that there was a company of pioneers foraging on a table-land about three miles to the north, pointing to a ridge crowned with stony palisades harboring snow in their fissures. "They seem quite self-sufficient," Lieutenant Williams said.

Major Goodweather was interested in collecting evidence that most of the farmers, at least of the better sort, had not been so much inconvenienced by the grasshoppers, and, so, after their noon repast, he led the train in the direction of the mesa where the settlers were said to be located. Major Goodweather told the cavalryman to range widely across the country as far north as the breaks at the river, but to rejoin the caravan at the Pilgrim Holiness church where several country lanes intersected.

In the valley at the foot of the pine-sprinkled ridge, the relief column came upon a settlement with several buildings all of them scarred and wrinkled and half-burnt away by fire. On the side of a granary, someone had written in chalk-white words GRASSHOPPERED.

By mid-afternoon, it was warm and the sun was high in the sky, burning brightly over the barren land. On a small knoll, the column saw three wooden crosses with the word STARVED written on each of them. The snow in the pockets between the brittle-looking cliffs overhead melted and the ravines were slick with mud so that it took the big wagons a long time to attain the heights.

The top of the mountain was a grassy expanse encompassing sixty or more hectares and the flat prairie was strewn with the white and brown bones of bison. A man with two women in tattered shawls stood near a small cart to which four hungry-looking dogs were tethered. The man had a shovel in his hands and was loading the buffalo bones into the cart. The women sorted through the bones, now and then, finding something that must have been a prize because that specimen was set aside in a special burlap sack. The dogs rooted through the bones under their paws and, where calves had been shot on the day of the great buffalo massacre, the dead animals had not been skinned so that half-mummified and leathery carcasses rested here and there among the skeletons.

Major Goodweather’s wagons crushed the bones under their wheel rims and went forward slowly, a crackling sound of femur and rib breaking that sometimes made a loud report like a rifle-shot. The man waved at the relief column and, then, came toward Major Goodweather.

"We have come to render aid to anyone who is in desperate and impecunious straits," Major Goodweather said.

"I won’t deny that it’s been lean," the man said. His eyes were grey and immobile and, when he spoke, his jaw didn’t move. The words came from a hollow place in his rib cage twisted through lips like thin, pale laundry mangles. "It’s a hungry spring, nothing ripe yet except these bones."

Major Goodweather noticed that the women brushed back their hair and, even, cast coquettish sidelong looks at his soldiers. Although they were wearing heavy, malformed boots, foot-ware that looked as if it had been cast out of lead, their ankles and calves were bare to the knee.

"The railroad buys bones, a dollar a ton with a premium for horns," the man said.

"These bones been picked over," one of the women said. "You don’t find many horns."

"Sometimes, but not often," the other woman said. They looked like they were sisters.

"Do you have children at home?" Major Goodweather said. "We can grant you some assistance for the sake of your children."

"Not any more," the man said.

"Got no home," one of the women said. "We’re ‘hoppered’ out of hearth and home."

Major Goodweather looked at his plump fit soldiers and the fat oxen drawing his heavy wagons.

"We don’t think it fitting to ask for charity," the man said. "God will provide."

"God will provide," both women said echoing him.

A gunshot cracked nearby, loud and piercing so that Major Goodweather almost fell from his mount. He raised a fist in the air enraged. The dogs tethered to the bone-cart cowered and some of them whimpered.

"I didn’t give any order to –"

One of the soldiers stood up from where he had crouched to rest his rifle barrel across the back gate of the wagon. He grinned uncertainly at Major Goodweather, eyes blinking in the faint bluish haze of gunsmoke around his shoulders and head.

"I shot one of them grey fellers," the soldier said, pointing across the field of bones to a furry humped mass sprawled on the ground. "I’m sorry, sir, but I thought –"

"Wolf," another soldier said. "Nosing around to steal these bones from these folk."

The two women looked up at Major Goodweather with their red eyes and, then, set out toward the fallen wolf. Major Goodweather saw that they limped slightly as if their feet were injured and their hips not entirely trustworthy, a slow, swiveling gait that seemed somehow indirect and crooked.

"Are you sure you don’t need assistance?" Major Goodweather asked again. "We are prepared to issue some rations, provisions."

"We have no money," the man said. "And we’re not accustomed to buying goods on credit."

"This is charity," Major Goodweather said. "We don’t expect payment."

"It’s a hungry moon," the man said. "You know, the Indians call this month the "hungry moon", before the grass is green and when the game is gaunt, the rabbits famished too, earth too cold to dig up roots, no nuts or seeds on the trees."

"That’s why we’ve come to render assistance," Major Goodweather said.

"God will provide," the man said. "Anyone who accepts charity blasphemes against his heavenly father – God will provide."

He pointed to the dead wolf. The two women were squatting next to the carcass. Then, he began to cough. The cough racked him and, after a minute or two, he sat down in the bones.

Major Goodweather did not descend from his mount. The gout in his foot hurt him and he didn’t want to put weight on his swollen toes and ankle.

"No weapon is to be fired without my order," Major Goodweather shouted to his men. Then, he signaled that the column should continue its march.

A half mile from the hilltop covered with bones, one of the men asked another soldier if there was a way to butcher and eat a wolf.

"Oh, yes," the other soldier said. "The old mountain men did it all the time. It’s no different from eating dog. The Indians eat their dogs when they can’t find game."

"Dog?" the soldier asked.

"It’s hard to imagine," the other infantryman said.

One of the men set a little cairn of salt pork and boxes of biscuits on a knoll. The man tied a red bandana to pile of provisions so that the bone-collectors would see it. Far away, on a pyramidal mound of earth, three wolves sat overlooking the bone-strewn mesa. One of the troopers, Private Glasgow, raised his rifle and sighted it on the wolves.

The oxen drawing the wagons smelled the wolves and seemed skittish, pulling toward the side opposite the animals.

"Better not shoot," Private Thompson told Private Glasgow.

"They are mourning their brother," Private Glasgow said, shouldering the weapon.

　

5.

Mr. Morgan debated with the Preacher whether the locusts would come again. The Preacher said that afflictions like the locust swarm were special manifestations of providence and akin to the year of jubilee – a sabbatical plague arising at intervals with a refractory period during which all would be well. "If the plague were continuous and unremitting, it would lack authority as a decree from the All Mighty," the Preachers said. "But we have had the grasshoppers in swarms for two years now and I see no reason why they would not return once the weather is temperate this year," Mr. Morgan said. The Preacher said that there had been very little snow this winter and that the temperatures had been cold and he supposed that the frost had destroyed the eggs in the soil where the grasshoppers had deposited them. "Surely, the cold will have spoiled the egg beds," the Preacher said. "I am not so certain on that point," Mr. Morgan answered.

Mr. Morgan had collected a variety of recipes for roast and fried locusts and said that if they came again this Spring, he would make a curry of them. "They are perfectly edible," Mr. Morgan said. "But to avoid unpleasantness, you must remove the wings and legs – those members will stick in your craw." "Disgusting," the Preacher replied. "Oh not at all," Mr. Morgan said. "I have tried them cooked with garlic and onions, salted or fried with bacon – the mature insects have a most delightful nutty flavor. You will concede that John the Baptist subsisted quite comfortably on them, together with wild honey." "So it is recorded," the Preacher replied.

A baby cried in another room. "It’s nice to have a baby in the house again," Mr. Morgan said. "My children have been grown for many years." The Preacher knew that the rancher’s sons had studied engineering in New England and, now, worked in industry in Pittsburgh and Chicago. One of the laundresses who had just given birth to her own child went into the nursery to attend to the baby. "Poor little Alpheus," Mr. Morgan said.

It had been a propitious thing to have the Preacher in the household when the infant was delivered to them in the sleet and storm. At first, the baby seemed scrawny, ill-tempered, tormented by the colic, and, for several weeks, the child was despaired of and Morgan, who kept his distance at that time, recalling his own grief at the illness of his children when they were little, thought that the baby had been brought to his ranch only to die there, an unhappy and unlucky thing and, possibly, the sort of misfortune that might draw locusts out of the sky. Mr. Morgan was convinced that the locusts were the materialization of certain forms of misery and that grief and unhappiness summoned them and, so, he did not even look at the foundling child, didn’t hold the baby or dandle it on his knee, for fear of bringing calamity upon the ranch. Morgan decreed that the Preacher baptize the child but, then, prepared himself for the infant’s funeral, obsequies that he intended to avoid. But, after a few weeks, the foundling rallied, fattening on the milk of the laundress, and Morgan, with his wife, were so bold as to, even,

name the infant. Morgan knew a bit of Latin and had read Virgil, although mostly in Dryden’s translation, and, so, he named the child "Alpheus."

The laundress acting as wet nurse to the infant told the other women that the Preacher’s prayers and baptism had saved a baby that was otherwise marked for death. The laundress who had miscarried her child said that there was sorcery, for both good and ill, associated with the man and that he had certain powers, that much was irrefutable. Ponca women with sick women sometimes came to Morgan’s ranch and asked that the Preacher bless those children and he prayed over them and, even, encouraged the mothers to become Christians. The Preacher said that, when the snow was gone and the grass reestablished on the hills, he would go forth and resurrect the Pilgrim Holiness Church – he told Morgan that he would build the church anew from its ruins with the help of the rancher and his cow-hands and found a congregation in the wilderness so that, when the pioneers returned to the land that they had deserted, there would be a consecrated place for their baptisms and weddings and burials.

"I don’t think the settlers will return," Morgan said. "The country is too harsh for them and the rain too unpredictable." The laundress brought the infant, freshly changed and clean smelling, into the room where the men were sitting and Morgan held the baby on his lap. The baby looked at Morgan’s beard with interest and, then, fell asleep. "You mean," the Preacher said, "that you own so much land in this territory that there will be no farmsteads for the pioneers to acquire."

"It’s true that I’ve acquired a great amount of land due to the depredations of the locusts," Morgan said. "But I’ve always thought of myself as helping the destitute by purchasing their ruined farms."

"Indeed, that is true enough," the Preacher said. "But you now own a very vast preserve here."

"It’s a patchwork," Morgan said. "Not all of the tracts are contiguous. And I would consider relinquishing the more remote parcels, I think, if I could trade or exchange property to connect my lands adjacent to this property."

"The pioneers will return," the Preacher said.

"It will have to be new men with new families," Morgan replied. "The men who have gone to the gold fields and the silver mines are ruined for agriculture. The lure of the ore destroys the husbandry in them. Consider this child – do you think we will see his father again?"

"It’s unlikely," the Preacher said.

In his sleep, the baby winced slightly as if he knew that the men were speaking about him.

The day before the child was brought to the ranch, the sun shone and there was a general thaw so that the creeks rose and, where the land was eroded, the meltwater ran in innumerable muddy rivulets down into the pockets and craters in the land. But in that season, warmth only presaged the advance of cold weather, icy winds from the north, and the dark clouds scudding over the badlands brought freezing rain first, then, sleet that fell slantwise out of the skies, and, then, after dark, blizzard winds and snow. In the midst of that chaos in the elements, one of Morgan’s cowhands, riding the fence-line to retrieve livestock baffled by the storm and wandering far from their accustomed pastures, came upon a farmer huddled under a buckboard wagon with its wheels frozen hub-deep in the mud. A ox rested on its side at the head of the wagon, just skin and bones frozen into an armature of icy sleet. With his body, the farmer was sheltering a baby, probably two months old, but appearing to be much younger, a pink and scrawny thing with a cry that was like cloth being ripped.

The ranch-hand helped the farmer onto the back of his horse and they made there way back to the house. The farmer said that he had been ‘hoppered,’ successive swarms of the locusts, both the crawling nymphs and the flying insects and, that, just as he was about depart the land, his rations depleted to a barrel of pickled sauerkraut and a few dozen moldering potatoes, his wife, being pregnant, had been seized with labor pains and rendered unable to travel. The woman gave birth to the child, but it was a difficult travail for her, accomplished alone in the man’s remote sod-house and, afterward, his wife’s mind seemed disturbed and she spoke of strangling the child nursing at her breast and worried that she would act on thoughts that were troubling her. The farmer said that he did not think that his wife would injure the child but that she became increasingly distraught and angry, demanding that the farmer load his gun and bring her meat to eat – "You brought us to this place," the woman said, "and you must provide for us." The farmer was afraid to leave his wife alone with the child and stood for hours at the threshold of the sod bunker carved into the hillside, his gun at his side in the hope that some animal suitable for hunting would wander near enough so that he could shoot it. In fine weather, deer came down from the hills and had to be driven away from their corn and squash patch, but the land had been swept clean by the crawling and flying locusts and the game had fled from this part of the county. At last, his wife said that she was so hungry that she would go herself into the hills and see if she could find some roots or seeds to devour, maintaining that on a distant hillside there were orange and red flowers that grew from bulbs buried in the sandy soil and that those tubers could, perhaps, be boiled and eaten. And, so, his wife left the baby lying on the floor and went outside and, before he could stop her, she ran very swiftly across the dooryard and, then, into the broken sticks and brambles where the locusts had destroyed the brush along the stream near their home. The farmer was concerned that the woman was running, lunging forward, when she had so recently given birth and had been so badly starved as well, and he shouted to her to return and that he would kill one of the two oxen remaining to draw his buckboard wagon so that they would have meat. But she didn’t respond and so the farmer gave chase, following up the stream bed into the close embrace of the hills.

Then, as the farmer told Morgan at the ranch-house, the locusts came again and fell from the sky like flakes of snow. The insects made a vortex around them and the farmer lost his way in the clouds of flying locusts. When the swarm lifted from the earth and departed, the farmer found himself in an unfamiliar country, staggering along the edge of creek that ran brightly over agate-like stones of many colors. He saw his wife’s footprints, small and distinct, in the soft sand along the edge of the water that rippled down from a cave opening into the side of a rocky hill. The farmer followed his wife’s footprints to the mouth of the cave where there were slabs of reddish sandstone like quarters of beef resting against the walls of the grotto. Beneath the rock overhang, a round eye-shaped pool brimmed over its edges so that cold water cascaded down the terraces of sandstone to form the creek in its agate and jasper stream bed. The farmer knelt to cup water in his hands and carry it to his lips. The stream slipping down the sandstone ledges seemed to whisper to him in his wife’s voice. This creek, the farmer told Morgan, did not exist before the locusts had come and, somehow, their devouring jaws had cut through the foliage and the grass to expose the water rolling down from the rock. The spring seemed fresh and newborn and his wife’s foot prints in the sand and soft reddish soil led directly to the edge of the water and, then, ended. The farmer said that he thought that his wife had fled the locusts, creatures that disgusted her, and that, in order to avoid their attack, she had been transformed, metamorphosed into the spring, this source of water that had not existed in this place before. And the more that he thought about his wife’s metamorphosis, the more he imagined that she had become the freshwater rolling sweetly down from the cave and the more he was convinced he could hear her singing, as she had during happier days, where the water babbled over the bright, many-colored stones. He wanted to linger by the spring in the hills forever but knew that the baby was alone at home and, probably, dying, and so he felt he had to return to that child and, at least, hold the baby in his arms before it passed away.

On his way back to the farm, following the stream that his wife had become, a watery guide that led him home, the farmer found a female goat wandering in the wilderness. Then, he was confused because he thought that, perhaps, he was mistaken about the creek and that his wife had been changed into a goat. But he led the goat back to the sod house and found that he could express milk from the animal’s dangling, triangular udders and, so, the baby did not die. Then, the weather changed and ice and snow clogged the trails. In the thaw, the farmer thought that he could, perhaps, escape to Morgan’s ranch, but his ox was greatly weakened by starvation, and, ultimately, unable to pull their wagon through the blizzard. The farmer expected to perish under the buckboard and had said his last prayers when the cowhand came upon them stranded in the mud.

When the farmer had been fed and, after he had slept for several days in a room warmed by a fire burning merrily in the hearth, he told Morgan that he was willing to sell him his homestead in exchange for enough money to buy a mule and some provisions for an expedition to the gold fields at Deadwood Gulch or Rapid Creek. At that time, the baby was expected to die and so Morgan said that he would care for the child until his father returned from the Black Hills with his fortune. The farmer told Morgan his name so that a quit-claim deed could be properly drawn and executed. When Morgan asked the man about the child’s first name thinking about a gravestone for the infant, the farmer said that his wife had been too sick and weak to name the baby boy and that he had not settled upon a name himself because he thought the child was sickly and would soon be in Heaven. "Well, then, I will name your boy," Morgan told the farmer.

Morgan said that the spring in the hills was like Arethusa, a fountain of freshwater rising on the very edge of the salt sea in Syracuse. Alpheus was a river in Greece much praised by shepherds and the naiads that they pursued and, as legend maintained, the course of the stream buried its head and hair of running waters in the earth on the edge of the Greek sea and, then, flowed under the ocean to emerge once more on the island of Sicily in the harbor of Syracuse. So Arethusa and Alpheus were related, although in a hidden way. The farmer had drawn a map to show Morgan where Arethusa’s fountain arose in the badland hills, the source of a stream with waters of abiding and pure sweetness. When the weather cleared, and it was Spring, Morgan said that he would find that place and, then, acquire it for his ranch. The Preacher commended this idea and the child slept peacefully on the rancher’s lap.

　

　

　

6.

The relief column returned to the Fort. George told Major Goodweather that the Sioux raiding party, with a white child hostage, had broken its winter camp and was moving again. George said that the Indians were not attacking the pioneer encampments or farmsteads because the locusts had seized everything from the settlers and there was no point in robbing beggars. Major Goodweather drafted a report critical of his orders and the mission to supply food and blankets and seed to the impoverished farmers. He put the report in his desk drawer, because he thought it might be construed as intemperate, and, then, re-read his writing a few days later. The report was honest, Major Goodweather noted, and laconic in a soldierly manner, but he detected a troubling incongruity in his account of the expedition. Although he was critical of the objectives of the relief mission, it seemed to him that his narrative account of the expedition thoroughly supported the orders that he condemned as distasteful and "questionable from a military perspective." This mismatch between Major Goodweather’s opinions and the circumstances that he had encountered during his relief expedition suggested that either he had misrepresented the facts or his views of the mission were mistaken. Principles, it seemed, yielded to specific instances of poverty: facts were different from ideas and, often, thwarted them although that did not necessarily make the ideas wrong. It seemed to him that he could rewrite the report in such a way as to eliminate this incongruity, but this would be difficult and time-consuming and, in any event, a supply train of provisions had just reached the fort, the big wagons driven by teamsters hired at the rail-head, and, at the same time, new orders from Omaha had arrived requiring that Major Goodweather use those supplies to mount another charitable expedition. So the Major put the report that he had prepared aside and, once again, told his men that they were going to venture north toward the river and the badlands, ostensibly to provide welfare to the farmers ruined by the locust infestation, but, in fact, with the objective of employing their Ponca scouts to track the hostile raiding party so that the cavalry could pursue those Indians, rescue the white hostage, and punish those renegades.

The snow had melted in the last hideaways in the rough terrain and the streams ran swift and clear in their green gutters meandering through the land, all the brush budding green with tender young leaves. Hungry deer and antelope appeared on hillsides grazing on the bright grass. The mornings were cold and crisp, but by afternoon it was warm and the wilderness seemed to close its eyes and luxuriate in the sun overhead, somehow self-contained, dreaming of its own abundance, the haze of green leaf in the folds and seams of the land shielding from view a million busy little factories where new life in fur and feather and seed and flower was being built. The blue of the sky was so intense and unclouded that an alert eye could see the moon and stars shimmering in the transparent and glassy depths of the heavens.

Major Goodweather’s column made rapid progress to Morgan’s ranch where trenches full of stagnant camphor and kerosene encircled the ranchhouse and the barns and the neatly made outbuildings. The Major was invited to dine with Morgan and, after they had eaten, the men retired to the veranda above the home’s front door to enjoy the temperate evening. Major Goodweather praised Morgan’s industry in combating the pests. "I don’t know if I have been successful on my own account or simply lucky," Morgan said. "Fortune favors the industrious," Major Goodweather said, looking out over the landscape of flower beds and lawn and the trim stables and bunkhouse.

Morgan said that he benefitted from the presence of a Preacher and that the man had said several prayers to prevent the locusts from descending upon his ranch and, further, had breathed life into an infant recently rescued from the wilderness and, otherwise, everyone concurred, doomed to die. Major Goodweather said that he wanted to meet this interesting fellow. "He has left only a day or two ago," Morgan said. "Departed to rebuild a church and congregation at Pilgrim Holiness. He is certain that the pioneers will return and flourish and that the plague of locusts has now ended."

"There are rhythms in nature," Major Goodweather said, blowing a cloud of bluish cigar smoke around his head, " and the strange perpetuation of these pestilential swarms seemed to violate nature’s rhythms."

"We must continue to pray that the do not descend upon us again, this third year," Morgan said.

The next day, the relief column moved across land, now flowering, that the locusts had devoured. People came to greet them, emerging as if from caves dug into the earth, arising from the ground itself, it seemed, haggard and ragged, their mouths red from bleeding gums, with glaring eyes like lanterns. There were many of these people, more than Major Goodweather expected, and they were all in dire need and weak with starvation. These people were the remnants of homesteaders who had come to populate the imaginary villages and cities platted by the railroad companies. They staggered about like corpses reanimated by galvanic energy, showing yellow jaundiced eyes and faces peppered with sores and scabs, but, when the soldiers approached, the emaciated people grinned, opening their mouths to show the hollow darkness behind their bleeding and loose teeth.

Troops set up tents from which blankets and foodstuffs could be distributed and the starving farmers squatted near the encampment, bony knees rising above the men’s brittle-looking skulls, legs crooked like those of the grasshoppers that had reduced them to this state. The farmers whispered to one another and some of them fell sideways and seemed to sleep in the bright sunlight, snoring loudly. Rations were distributed according the capacity that the starving people had to carry away the provisions that they were given – it would do no good for a badly weakened man to be given a hundred pounds of flour only to collapse, and be injured, by the weight of provender that was supposed to save him. Major Goodweather surveyed the scene and wrote notes and said that he would, perhaps, write a book indicting this policy while, at the same time, acknowledging that, at this precise location and this exact time, there seemed little alternative to the mission of mercy that he was superintending. Indeed, that was his dilemma: although the policy of rescue seemed misguided and, even, pernicious, in the abstract, Major Goodweather felt forced to concede that these measures were, perhaps, justified in particular cases and this troubled him.

The cavalry scouts returned from their reconnaissance. They reported that the Preacher was on the height of land a few miles away, a windy ridge where there were burnt ruins. Major Goodweather went that way, sickened by the filth and poverty of the farmers clustered around his tents. He ordered that his men strap together the branches of several trees to make a pole at least thirty feet high so that a flag could be displayed from atop that makeshift lance, green with leaves and thrust up into the sky. The white canvas of the tents and the big, glistening and polished wheels of the Conestogas looked bright and efficient and clean next to the mob of ragged beggars clustering around the encampment – the white people were dirtier and more abject than any Indians Major Goodweather had ever seen, another observation that he noted for his report, but expected that he would suppress when it came time to complete that document.

A rocky trail, just barely accessible to his horse, climbed toward the sunny ridge-top where fire had burned the Pilgrim Holiness Church to the ground. The preacher had built a lean-to propped against a timber and lathe wall of the church that was still partly upright, the shack nailed together from bits of broken and burnt wood. Next to the shanty, the preacher had raised a cairn of soot-darkened foundation stones. By the cairn, a big bronze bell rested on a bed of ashes. The Preacher had cleansed the sides of the bell and polished the bronze until it shone in the ashes with an incandescent light, catching the beams of the sun and reflecting them out across the barren country.

Major Goodweather shook hands with the Preacher and commended him upon his work. A man in tattered clothing was assisting the Preacher, digging with a spade in the wreckage of the church. Burnt bibles were strewn about the ground and hymnals split open to show notes and words within their pages and a few rough-hewn pews were heaped up in a pile as to provide fuel for bonfire. Major Goodweather dispatched his orderlies down the trenched, pebble-slick sides of the ridge to report his location to the men in relief camp.

"It’s an impressive view," Major Goodweather said, surveying the land around the hilltop.

"Yes, that is why the church was built here," the Preacher replied.

A green grasshopper, half the size of the Preacher’s thumb, leaped clumsily from underfoot. The grasshopper landed awkwardly, deflected by the edge of a thistle plant so that the insect sprawled on its side. The man in the tattered clothing lifted the grasshopper by its crooked and protuberant hind legs. The insect’s head was black with two large eyes and it had stubby antennae like the prongs of an antelope. As the man held the grasshopper, a slick of tobacco-colored froth came from its jointed and complex jaws and, further, seemed to exude from the armor plating on the insect’s abdomen. The man held the insect up to his eyes and inspected it.

"Ain’t much to look at," he said.

"This is Jeremiah," the Preacher said to Major Goodweather, gesturing at the man. "He had a place down in the valley, a mile from here."

"Sweetgrass ranch," Jeremiah said. "In the Sweetgrass Valley. That’s what the railroad men at the land office called it."

"Sounds promising," Major Goodweather said.

"It was the prettiest place in the county," the tattered man said. "I had the prettiest house and fields in the prettiest place in the county. Orchards. I distilled my own spirits from fruit that I raised. Where it was stony, I grew berries on the vine."

Jeremiah cast the locust aside and it was blown like a leaf away from them.

"Most of their lives," Jeremiah said, "they live underground. They are really a beastly subterranean, mole-like burrowing animal."

"Is that true?" Major Goodweather said.

"Oh, yes," Jeremiah said. "They emerge to plague us from underground. Otherwise, they are content to spawn and excavate in the depths of the earth. Creatures of darkness."

"That was a nymph," the Preacher said. "It doesn’t have wings yet. They fly only during the last days of their lives. They go into the air in a kind of panic, I think, because they know that death is upon them – they sense it somehow."

"They start in the soil and end in the air," Jeremiah said.

"I don’t think we’ll see them this year," Major Goodweather said. "I am quite convinced of that."

"I’m sorry to disagree," the Preacher said. He turned to the tattered man who had seated himself on a barrel of provisions that the Preacher had been given at the ranch. "Tell him what you saw," the Preacher said to the ragged man.

Jeremiah blinked at him and looked as if he were about to cry. "You have to understand about my son. I wasn’t gonna be driven off my stake by vermin. I resolved to stay and so, after my son died, I sent my wife back home on the train and I told her that I would remain on the land and protect our boy’s grave and that since my son was buried near our cabin I wasn’t about to desert that home and my fields and the grave where my boy was resting. I told my wife that I would send for her and, then, I hunkered down and waited to see if I would starve but I didn’t, somehow I made it through the winter; I had jars of the home-brew and I traded them with Indians, I won’t deny that – traded the booze for dried meat and berries – and so I survived the cold months. Then, the sun came and warmed the ground, made the soil fruitful again and the land turned green and..."

Jeremiah paused and gulped air, blinking at them in bright sunlight.

"Then, I stood by my son’s grave and I looked at the earth raised up over him, just a little hillock, and it was all seething, it was bubbling and blistering and hoppers were hatching, coming right up out of my son’s grave, I saw them splitting through the surface of the soil, green joints like a thousand fingers suddenly straightening from being crooked and extending to poke up through the soil. I picked up a rock so large that I had to hold it in both hands and I battered the hoppers to pulp but they kept coming, spearing up through the dirt and, then, crawling away, millions of them..."

"You see," the Preacher said. "They’re swarming. They don’t have wings and can’t fly but they are swarming on the ground."

"When I saw that my son’s grave was their hatchery," ragged Jeremiah said, "I decided that I had seen enough, that this was a sign to come here and await the end. I had two bottles of strong spirits and I brought a bucket of spring-water up here and I’m not going to deny that I had the devilish scheme to use that home-brew to drink myself into oblivion. But I found the Preacher was already at the church. I found him praying here on his knees. He was ahead of me and so I put aside my wicked plan and together we found the bell and hauled it out of the ruins at least as far as you can see here. The Preacher took the spirits – I don’t know if he spilled it out upon the ground or broke the bottles in that gorge..."

"It’s a mighty heavy bell," the Preacher said, gesturing at the curved, female profile of the bronze lying in the cinders.

"I came up here with the thought that I would establish a camp in this place," Major Goodweather said, "but the land is too broken. There are too many ravines that might afford shelter to the Sioux were they to set an ambush for us. If I put a camp here, the Sioux might occupy that coulee and pour fire upon us from that shelter."

Major Goodweather pointed to a hollow place in the hilltop where the land slumped down to deep trench vivid now with small bushes and trees just tall enough to raise their uppermost leaves above the ravine’s edge.

"I agree," the Preacher said. "It is not really defensible. The Indians could come up from the ground, out of the gulch and shoot at us."

"Come down to my camp," the Major said. "It will be safer there."

"God will protect us," the Preacher said. But he went to his mule grazing in the shade of a tree, and loading his leather satchel on the animal, made ready to depart.

"They have kidnaped a white boy," Major Goodweather said. "And rustled a number of our cattle, taken them away from the fort."

The Preacher patted the satchel draped over the mule. "He’s right, Jeremiah," the Preacher said. "Let’s not tempt fate here. We’ll go down to the camp."

"Tomorrow, I’ll dispatch a team of oxen here," Major Goodweather said. "And we will retrieve that bell from the ashes."

　

　

7.

The wagons were drawn into a fort. Several sentry posts were established, a few hundred yards from the circled Conestogas and the soldiers lit small fires at those places to warm themselves. The tents and provisions and the congregation of emaciated settlers were outside of the ring of wagons. When it was dark, bugle calls sounded and the flag was retrieved from the tall pole made of branches strapped together by the simple expedient of tilting the makeshift flagstaff out of the earth and setting it on its side on the turf.

Jeremiah was shivering and said that he felt feverish and so he rested on his side close to the large campfire inside the wagon-fort. He wrapped himself in a cocoon of blankets: "I am weary," he said. "I am very weary and my bones ache me so."

After eating, Major Goodweather and the Preacher went for a stroll, walking across the dark moist prairie between the far-flung campfires set by the sentries, making, as it were, a tour of inspection. At one of the small fires to the northwest of the wagons, a couple of men were playing cards while two other soldiers peered uneasily into the dark. The fire was bright enough to make it impossible to see if you looked away from the blaze into the night and, because the two sentinels watching were interested in the card game, they looked back and forth from the area lit by the flames and so blinded themselves as to the vast darkness surrounding them. Major Goodweather and Preacher came quite close to the men and, indeed, shouted out a hallo to the sentries startling them.

"Be more attentive, men," the Major said. "You must be more attentive."

One of the soldiers warned them to stay near the fire. "There is a cliff in that direction," the trooper said, gesturing toward a place where the night’s fabric changed subtly, a decrease in the density of the shadows where the prairie fell away into a steep eroded slope.

The Preacher was carrying a satchel and his Bible and prayer book.

An hour or so, later, Lieutenant Williams rode up to the sentinel campfire where the Preacher and Major Goodweather were sitting. The four soldiers were distant from the flames, huddled together and watching the darkness with sleepy eyes.

"I am making my evening report," Lieutenant Williams said.

In the flickering light of the campfire, Major Goodweather looked sweaty and his face seemed to be flushed. The Preacher was sprawled on his left hip leaning on his arm next to the fire and there was a jug between the two men.

"All well?" Major Goodweather asked.

"All is well," Lieutenant Williams said.

"Beware," the Preacher said. He gestured at the darkness. "There is a cliff over yonder."

Lieutenant Williams nodded and made his horse bow slightly.

"I am telling my friend," Major Goodweather said, "that our mission is to destroy all manliness and courage among the pioneers. Our mission is to end by our charity what is known as the race of self-reliant men. We are the last survivors on this prairie. It is the end of humanity."

Lieutenant Williams did not dismount but hovered over them on his big horse and its eyes caught the flame-light so that they glowed in an unearthly manner.

"The victims of our charity will multiply like locusts and they will devour all the earth," Major Goodweather said. "I am quite confident of that."

The Preacher nodded.

Later, after midnight, Lieutenant Williams heard the sound of voices singing, men’s voices raised raucously in an old hymn, "Come thou fount of ev’ry blessing." The singing came from the northwest sentry post. The little point of fire there seemed to wriggle helplessly in the immense darkness.

"The Major is drunk again," Lieutenant Williams said to George. The Indian looked at him with dark, expressionless eyes.

　

　

8.

The dawn was clear and very still. As the darkness lifted from the hilltops and slid slowly down into the ravines, the wet, vibrant air close to the dewy grass and archipelagos of prairie flowers

warmed and, as it warmed, the dense, sweet air close to the ground seemed to be elevated, lifted on high, rising to an immense height in the cloudless sky. This displacement left a breathless vacuum, close to the surface of the earth, a vacancy of wind and odor, without breeze or scent or any sort of motion at all, not a leaf rustling or stirring, but rather a great suspension, as if all the land were holding its breath.

The little campfires of the sentries established far from the wagon fort oozed trickles of smoke rising straight upward from the prairie and, far away, on the hills and slopes, Lieutenant Williams could see the starving pioneers, little groups of them guarding the booty that they had received from the soldiers. For the most part, their packs of seed and flour and saltpork had been too heavy for them and they had set the provisions down in the grass and, then, spent a hard and cold night protecting their supplies, huddled close to them, and, now, Lieutenant Williams could see them stirring, rising to readjust their parcels so that they could continue on their ways home.

"The Major is in his cups again," Lieutenant Williams told Private Anderson. Of course, he would deny being hungover and would say that it was his gout tormenting him and, during the day’s march, the Major would have to ride flat on his back in the jolting wagon, his horse led alongside the Conestoga by a soldier. The Major would be wrathful and, therefore, it was best to make certain that all aspects of the camp were properly policed and maintained in a soldierly and disciplined manner and, with that thought, Lieutenant Williams had the flag once again laced to its leafy pole and, then, lifted up above the prairie where the banner dangled limp as a wash rag in the great silence between heaven and earth.

One of the starveling farmers still squatting in the shade of the wagons pointed to a hillside a couple hundred yards away. Lieutenant Williams saw that the hillside was covered with fallen leaves, indeed, so thickly shingled with the green and brown leaves that the buffalo grass on the slope was entirely concealed. A brisk wind seemed to be driving the leaves before it, causing them to scuttle along in windrows, waves of fallen leaves that shuddered to a stop and, then, started again under the impulse of a breeze that must have been both intermittent and powerful. But the spectacle, at first seeming so familiar, became strange to Lieutenant Williams when he thought that there were no trees anywhere on the hillside from which the leaves could have fallen and it was the wrong season for leaves to fall, and there was no wind stirring, not even the faintest breeze.

"Hoppers," the starveling farmer said. "The wingless ones."

"On the march," Private Anderson said.

His eye now trained to see the armies of grasshoppers, Lieutenant Williams looked around the wagon fort and saw that the prairie was seething with them, wide greenish-grey columns that surged forward with what seemed to be purposeful intent. In some places, the wingless insects advanced in a continuous writhing carpet, obscure currents flowing through hordes to cause them sometimes to splash upward like corn popping in a brisk fire, small detonations along the line of their advance. In other areas, the grasshoppers moved in yard-wide columns, phalanxes of them flowing forward to braid around other streams of insects. The creatures didn’t really darken the prairie. Rather, they seemed to decorate it with fluid patterns, mats of nymphs that divided and, then, divided again before coalescing into a great irresistable flood. In places, the insects appeared to move in accord with some kind of strategy directing their green and dusty-grey regiments, flanking motions and enfilades executed with military precision.

"Do they have kings and generals?" Lieutenant Williams asked Jeremiah.

"Of course," Jeremiah said, "but no one has detected them – the marks of their ranks are concealed."

"They move with surprise speed," Lieutenant Williams said.

The farmer said: "You must dig trenches around your wagons."

"Why?" Private Anderson asked. "What if we are overrun?"

"They will eat your flour and seeds and devour the reins and leather holding your teams to the wagons and, then, the oxen will fill their bellies with them – your oxen will eat them as if they were grass and this will cause the animals to bloat and many of them will die. I know – I’ve seen this happen."

Lieutenant Williams ordered an assembly and entrenching tools were distributed. The farmer said that the soldiers should scratch 18 inch deep concentric channels around the wagons and in front of the insects, ditches into which the grasshoppers would fall and accumulate until they had filled the trench, then, rolling forward over the creatures writhing in the moat to encounter the next channel grooved in the prairie. In this way, the progress of the nymph army might be arrested or, perhaps, diverted. The men stooped over their spades, cutting the sod and prairie grass, as the sentries approached from their look-outs, wild-eyed, out of breath, clawing locusts out of their eyes and hair. The oxen in their corrals bellowed.

One of the sentries reported that Major Goodweather had fallen asleep near their post and, as the grasshoppers encircled them, the commander could not be found despite their search accomplished by wading ankle-deep through the horde of nymphs creeping across the ground.

"Most repulsive," a sentry said. Several locusts clung to the brim of his forage cap.

"There is a cliff near the post," another sentry told Lieutenant Williams. "Perhaps, he wandered off and fell from the cliff."

Lieutenant Williams mounted his horse and rode in the direction of the sentry post. A ribbon of rising smoke rose marked the fire that had been set at that look-out and Lieutenant Williams went toward that place, zigzagging across the prairie to avoid the great rivers and green, squirming lakes of insects. His horse was frightened, eyes showing white and wild, and the animal lunged and bucked when Lieutenant Williams ventured too close to the grasshoppers. A gentle slope ascended toward the campfire, a black, sooty rip in the closely woven tapestry of insects and when he reached the edge of the grasshopper army, Lieutenant Williams’ horse balked, setting front legs into a stiff skid that, almost, unseated the soldier. Williams was flung against the pommel and twisted sideways on the mount to avoid falling and, then, cursing, he dismounted and left the horse behind him, standing baffled and bristling on the edge of the advancing horde.

The grasshoppers burst upward underfoot, enveloping him in a peppery cloud of insects that whirred as they flung themselves into the air. Lieutenant Williams felt the hooked legs of the creatures clinging to the flesh of his wrists and ankles, braided chains of them interlocked and hanging down from his hair and ears. The air smelled like rotting silage and the nymph army made a peculiar sound, a great hissing, bubbling respiration that was something like water boiling. The insects were all around him, crushed beneath his boots and billowing up in clouds around his face and shoulders as he moved forward. At the campfire, embers glowed and the burned place was like a wound ripped in the living flesh covering the ground, locusts venturing too close to the cinders sizzling like bacon in the remnants of the fire. Lieutenant Williams stood with his boots in the ashes, clawing the locusts off his lips and sideburns.

From within the charmed circle of the burnt-out sentry fire, Lieutenant Williams heard a sound like a waterfall. A half-dozen yards away, the grasshoppers were pouring in a continuous cascade off the rim of a low cliff, a place where erosion had eaten away part of the hill and formed a declivity. As the insects fell they batted against one another, clawed legs clasping together to form jagged stars and lacy veils of falling nymphs. At the base of the raw place eroded into the hill, the grasshoppers were a yard deep, a great drift of wriggling insects rolling like a slow, syrupy wave down the hill. Williams was stunned by the spectacle and the sound of the creatures rasping against one another as they dropped from the cliff and, as he stared at this wonder, he seemed to see a knobby, huddled form, entirely blanketed in grasshoppers wriggling fitfully ten or twelve feet from the hot cinders in which he stood.

"Major Goodweather," Lieutenant Williams cried.

For a moment, he stood motionlessly, paralyzed. The grasshoppers were devouring Major Goodweather. Was this possible? If he fell into that writhing, ankle-deep mass would they eat him alive too? Revulsion and panic filled him and Lieutenant Williams’ breathing was disordered as if he couldn’t get enough air to his lungs and he felt dizzy, as if trembling at the edge of a precipice. There was nothing for him to do but go to the aid of his fallen comrade, although he hesitated.

Then, Lieutenant Williams charged forward and bent over the form enshrouded in the plump, large-headed nymphs. Millions of black eyes bulged out of the surging mass of insects and their jaws made a sound like the wind rushing through a forest in the winter. Major Goodweather was entirely clad in the insects, wearing them over flesh and fabric like a living, wriggling chain-mail. Sometimes, he opened a red eye and peered indignantly out through the writhing tangle of insects covering his face. His jaw moved spasmodically , the lower part of the mask of bugs twitching as he chewed them up between his teeth and vomited them out in a wet paste of brown and green legs and wings and carapace. A sort of snoring noise came from the Major and Lieutenant Williams slapped at the supine man’s face and forehead, knocking off the grasshoppers that had come to suck the sweat from his brow and cheeks. The fallen man beneath the insects stank of alcohol and it occurred to Lieutenant Williams that the insects feeding on his sweat must have become drunk and torpid as well – they seemed to slide away from this throat and chest and skull in thick plate-sized masses, scabs of entwined nymphs that drizzling off the man as Lieutenant Williams dragged him upward, pulling at his hair to yank him into a seated position. Major Goodweather groaned and growled and vomited out another porridge of chewed-up locusts and, then, Lieutenant Williams took him over his shoulder, staggering through the clouds of locusts that crashed against him like hot, buzzing hail.

It seemed a long way to the place where the pony was waiting, terrified, the horse’s tail batting against its flanks, as it backed-up, shying away from the flood of insects rolling down the slope. At last, Lieutenant Williams emerged from the grasshoppers, now dragging Major Goodweather by his booted heels over the turf, and, then, rolling him to crush the insects still clinging to his uniform under his body. Major Goodweather sputtered something that sounded like words, but that Lieutenant Williams could not understand.

Three troopers came from the fort of wagons, dragging a canvas litter through the streams and channels of grasshoppers. They carried Major Goodweather back to the Conestogas and set him in the center of the circle of wagons.

Around the fort, the soldiers worked silently to cut trenches in the prairie.

One of the men asked Lieutenant Williams if the grasshoppers had been eating Major Goodweather. A bucket of water was poured over the prostrate man and the grasshoppers still entangled in his hair and beard and caught under his clothes, at his collar and between his belt and belly, were plucked away. His skin was raw under his chin on his throat and his wrists seemed chaffed as if he had been bound by coarse fetters of rope but, otherwise, the drunken man seemed uninjured. He glared up into the deep, empty sky, the high heavens into which all the air on earth seemed to have withdrawn, his eyes red and filled with rage.

"I don’t think they can eat you," Lieutenant Williams said.

The bootleather on Major Goodweathers shoes was rubbed away in places and his belt looked gnawed.

"They can’t eat you," the emaciated farmer said. "They just eat everything around you."

"They can’t eat you," Lieutenant Williams said to the trooper who had asked if the insects were devouring Major Goodweather.

"They’re cannibals," the farmer said. "I have seen them eat one another in a kind of frenzy."

"We must move away from this place," Lieutenant Williams said. He ordered the men to desist from their entrenching work. The oxen, catching the scent of the vast tide of approaching nymphs, bellowed loudly and pawed at the earth. As the first grasshoppers began to dash themselves against the big iron-rimmed hoops of the wagon wheels, Lieutenant Williams ordered their retreat.

Bedded in one of the wagons, Major Goodweather muttered something, then, he cried out, half-choking on the words.

"What is he saying?" Private Anderson asked.

Lieutenant Williams said: "He’s blind drunk. A fine thing! A drunk for a commanding officer!"

Major Goodweather continued his litany: names of towns and villages and crossroads, recited as if he were reading from a map.

"Shenandoah valley" Lieutenant Williams continued. "He was a young officer there with George Custer and Phil Sheridan."

"Why is he naming those places?"

Major Goodweather clawed phantom locusts from his cheeks and eyes.

"I don’t know," Lieutenant Williams said.