Excerpts from the novel The Lists of Billy the Kid — Pamela Ryder                                                                                                                                                       

As The People So Sit  

Chiricahua Apache Pueblo 

September 6, 1874 - The Moon of Leaving Geese

Daybreak.  The night chill persists.  The campfires along the thoroughfare of Silver City have gone to embers.  Smell of smoke and sap of single-leaf pine.  Sun-up bird song along the dry arroyo and around the out pueblo past the town. 

The voice of the cactus wren (Campylorhynchus brunneicapillus) can be heard well before the desert dawn as a series of sharp, staccato notes. 

Here is Singing-Stick.  Peering out from the hide flap of her wickiup on this bright September dawn with another autumn coming on, bearing down, told by a change of wind sliding down the Great Divide, yellowing the aspens in the foothills of Los Pinos Altos and the cottonwoods along the Arroyo San Vincente and sifting a light snow upon the pines that border the upper slopes.  She looks there—to the mountains and to the sky above them—and then to what serves as the dusty courtyard of her habitation where all vegetation—ocotillo, rabbit bush, prickly pear—even the buffalo grass—has long since been trampled flat by those who come to sit in this space well before dawn and wait for her to appear at the entrance of her wickiup.  See, there she is.  She has been spotted.  The People rejoice in their hearts at the sight of her—of what they can see of her:  the sooty hand that holds the flap of hide, the muss of dark hair around her face.  There she is, The People whisper to each other, grateful to The Creator of Worlds that she has lived another day and night, for it is not known how long she has lived.  It is not known if she is young or old.  In the burnishing light of the late afternoon sun before it sets, her face is that of a woman in her prime—or at best that of a woman poised upon the brink of her decline—but a face happy and bright nevertheless, and on other days haggard, grim.  On some days, in good weather, she comes forth at dawn with a firm and steady step, and on other days she is bent and decrepit.  But today, yes.  She is there.  

Singing-Stick, The People whisper to each other, but they do not call out to her in greeting.  Nor would she reply nor begin her work until she sees the bear that comes to sit among this gathering, until she is certain that he has not ambled away during the night to some distant galactic abode, as she knows bears of his kind are apt to do.  But she sees him this morning, sleeping on his belly in the midst of these congregants.  These sufferers of every sort.  Some dragged here on travois of blankets and hides.  Some diminished of flesh and their skins stretched over their bones.  Some with rags wound over their faces stifling coughs or hiding holes of decay.  Some with shreds of cloth bound to their limbs to contain what sloughs.  A man carries a limp and slavering child, its head lolling on his shoulders.  A woman holds a baby bound to its cradleboard, snugly wrapped to contain what foulness seeps, and sprigs of sage tucked into the bindings to cover the smell of decomposition.  Some unable to stand on their own are helped to their feet by the others.  Crutches, canes, sticks.  The ones who have been sleeping are nudged awake.  The boy Billy is one of this number, poked by an old man who leans on his crutch and who bears a maggoty hole in his cheek.  Wake up, says the old man, his tongue alive in the hole.  The old man lifts his crutch and points to Singing-Stick.  There.  The Healing Woman, he says.  Wake up, he says.

I am, says Billy and he stands and shakes the dust from his clothes.  He is small for his age, for his fourteen years, and slight of build, sloped in the shoulders.  

Singing-Stick sees that the bear, too, has come awake.  Rolling onto his back.  Stretching his limbs.  Reaching out to hold his feet in his great hands as a child might do.  His coat is brown as fertile earth, each hair tipped in gold, fur ruffling in the morning wind.  He is a mound, a mountain.  He yawns and belches.  The stink of fish.  Likely perch he had fished from out the shallows of the Rio Mimbres or the rivulets of the Arroyo San Vincente where he stood midstream and slapped muskie and steelheads twisting from the water, glinting and silver in the river light.  Eagles on the stream-banks ready to steal what may slip from his paws.  Another belch.  Teeth violently white against the deep red of his maw.  He shakes his head and sneezes violently spraying an ursine slime.  She sees his great clawed forepaw come up and delicately scratch his snout.  The People seem not to notice.  Nor does our Billy.  Not even as the bear raises himself up on his great flat hind feet and stands to his full height, and sways—drifts—from side to side with his great clawed paws held limply before him as if he were a dog taught to stand and balance and beg, lifting his snout and sniffing the air to find the smell of her, for she knows he is an old bear, and his hide shows old cuts, old scars, and what appear to be old sutures on his belly, and although his sight has worsened through his misfortunes, his sense of smell has not.  He snorts and grunts and Singing-Stick snorts back at him and clicks her tongue and then as if he has been told to behave himself and sit down, he is down again, foreclaws raking at the earth to clear away the dung he had passed during the night, and finally sitting himself down on his broad haunches, his great clawed hands on his knees.  As The People themselves so sit.  He tilts forward off his stumpy tail, briefly holds himself in that position, and releases a rumble of foul wind.  Singing-Stick grimaces and waves her hand in front of her nose to fan away the stink, but again The People seem not to notice.  Nor does Billy, at the edge of this assembly of the sick and the wasted and maimed.  It is not possible to know who has been waiting the longest, who arrived first.  The People have not considered nor encountered the concept of lines, of order, of sequence.  They believe their time with Singing-Stick will come when it is meant to come, and that she will know who is meant to live and who will live and who will linger or die, and so they remain in the dusty yard outside the wickiup, wrapped in their buckskins and blankets, some with cloaks woven of palm-grass and reed, and all of them shouldered against the night cold and now the morning chill.

Someone of them has made a fire in the stone circle, the place where Singing-Stick fries her bread and bakes her apples and potatoes and roasts a skinned and skewered rabbit or the butt of a javelina.  Comestibles she has not come by on her own, as Singing-Stick does not hunt and she does not gather or reap.  At last she steps forth from the wickiup letting the flap fall closed behind her.  She places more fuel on the fire.  Pieces of white cedar and pinyon.  The resin sparks and pops.  The air is scented piney this bright autumn morning.  She sets her implements and treatments on the wide flat stone near the fire circle—pouches filled with flower petals and yucca pollen, shards of shell and splinters of bone, sprigs of desert plants she has picked and dried and tied with string.  And beside these she places pieces of birds and pieces of sky—the feathers of passing eagles that spiral down at her feet in the late summer season of their molting, and in the season of the Leonides when the night sky spews stars, the pieces that lay cooling on the desert floor.  These—the pinons of eagles and the parts of stars—these are for intractable cases.  Swimming Cat, who carries a sharp stone in her heart.  Rain Again, who hears the whir of a hummingbird in his head.  Jimmy Bad Drum, born with his right foot turned the wrong-way around and the joint disintegrated, purulent.  They are all here and new ones as well this autumn morning as the pine smoke rise around them, as leaves of aspen are set loose by the wind.  As a strand of geese pass above on their way to winter waters.  The woman bearing the baby on the cradleboard now comes forward.  Singing-Stick hears the bear whine and softly growl, and she nods to him and sorts through her basket for what will be required:  only this—a gourd to hold water, to be hung high on a tree limb beside the small body should its spirit thirst while it goes to bones and waits out eternity bound there in its cradleboard.  The rest come along now, one by one.  Billy on the sidelines, shifting his position as the congregation moves along, letting others of this assembly stagger ahead, wanting to be the last, a witness to this procession of the afflicted, as the bear is witness to Singing-Stick preparing her treatments, dispensing her remedies.  Botanicals.  Powders of flowers and plant parts.  Dust of earth minerals and metals from heaven.  Rags unwrapped.  Wounds inspected, purulence expressed.  Packings.  Poultices.  Brief chants.  Notes on a reed flute.  Tapping on a drum.  Medicinals dispensed, wrapped in leaves that are slit and secured by the petiole run through.  Little wrappings in rawhide.  The sun goes low in the sky.  The last of The People go tottering away or are toted away to their huts and wickiups and adobe homes.  Those for whom she offers no remedy will spend another night nearby bedded by the moon.

And now Billy. 

Now you, she calls to this pinch-faced boy who has kept himself slightly apart from the rest by appearing otherwise occupied gathering sticks for the fire and pitching them in one by one.  Wandering off just far enough to examine a broken wagon wheel and the nest of a cactus wren while slyly watching her.  And she has been watching him.  This slight, squirrely boy.  Teeth somewhat rabbity.  Wiry as a coatimundi.  She has seen men become their spirit animals.  Perhaps that is his, the coatimundi.

He steps up to the wickiup and there the flat stone.  I’m here for someone else, he says.  A white woman.

She sent you.

I come my own self. 

Who are you?

I go by Billy.

Just Billy?

Billy Antrim.  Or Billy Bonney.  Whichever.

What does she go by?

Who?

The white woman.

Antrim. 

Only Antrim?

Missus Antrim.

Only that?

Missus Catherine Bonney McCarty Antrim. 

You are her son.

Some say so, but not likely.  Since I don’t favor her.  She says the Wee Folk brung me.

Who?

Sprites.  They bring the bad boys.  What she says. 

Where is she? 

She’s to home, he says.  That log house we rent out past the dry arroyo, he says.  I seen a roadrunner hunting up and down in there.  

She is alone?

There’s my brother Joseph. 

Your big brother?

Bigger.  But not older.  He goes by Joe. 

Bring her here, your mother.  You and your brother bring her.

I’d sure like to catch me one of them birdies.  

What would you do with it? says Singing-Stick.

Wouldn’t do nothing with it, says Billy.  I’d just have it.  It’d be something to have.  One time I come on feathers blowing in the road and sure enough it’s one of them shot nearly to pieces, says Billy.  Those boys in town they shoot at anything.  It was looking right up at me when I finished it off.  I took a stripy tail feather off it and carried it home, but she was too sick to give a care. 

What kind of sick is she? says Singing-Stick.  

The worst kind, says Billy. You ever see one of them birdies out this way?  They’re awful fast, he says.  He gazes out past the clearing.  He squints at nothing at all.  Shades his eyes with his hand.  Well now looky there, he says.  

Singing-Stick does not look.

There goes one now and damn if it ain’t running backwards!  You seen him? says Billy.

No, says Singing-Stick.

Too fast for you then, was he? says Billy. 

Does she leave her bed?

Not no more, he says and shakes his head.  Me, I’d fly if I had wings, says Billy.  But them?  They’d rather be running.  You ever seen their tracks?  Big X is all.  You can’t tell which way they be coming or going for looking at ’em.  

Which way are you going? says Singing-Stick.

I can’t be going nowhere, he says, and he tells her that he is thirteen now and in charge of this family.  This boy whose mother is sick in her bed in her log house out by the dry arroyo.  Spitting blood, he tells her, just like some of them sick ones I seen coming here and you curing them, says Billy.  

Is she feverish? 

Near burns your hand to touch her. 

Where’s your pa? 

Don’t know is where.  Neither of ’em.  One of them give me a pistol.  I shot a horse once.  Same way I finished off that old bird, I did. 

No, he is not coatimundi, and not rabbit or squirrel, but coyote.  She has seen the ones that become coyotes.  The clever ones.  Cautious, evasive.  This boy.  A trickster setting himself free of the dying, doing what he must.  Killing what he must.  More killing yet to come.

The day has gone cool again.  More wind.  Dust devils twirl up and disperse.  Dusk begins.  The fire has gone to ash but a knot of ironwood still glows.  Singing-Stick scatters strands of buffalo grass over.  She leans in and breathes and a small lick of flame flares up.  Now kindling twigs of tamarisk.  She sees the bear trundle over, then sit himself beside the wickiup and gaze up at the darkening sky.  The first lights of the Milky Way are appearing and he remembers—she knows he must be remembering—the glowing road he took to the stars when he was skinned and his hide was set on the floor of a house and men walked upon him.  

Can you see the bear? asks Singing-Stick.

Bears don’t bother me none, says Billy.

Coyote and bear, says Singing-Stick.

Coyotes neither, says Billy.  

There goes a coyote now, says Singing-Stick.  Too fast for you, was it? 

Nothing too fast for me, Billy tells her. 

She will not live, says Singing-Stick.

You don’t know, says Billy.  

I do, says Singing-Stick.  

I see you handing out cures.  So you go on then and give me the medicine like you’re supposed to or you tell me where’d you get them from.

From the Old Ones, says Singing Stick.  They built their cookfires in the earth before the world was made.  But they are gone now.  A long time gone. 

Gone where? says Billy.  

They climbed out and ran away.

Then you give me the cure and you tell me what I need to do.  Mix it up, eat it, smoke it, drink it, rub it on.  I can read and write.  I can write it down.  I can make a list. 

Sundown.

Evening fires are lit.

Now in this month the Apache call the Moon of Leaving Geese, the People who wait at the wikiup hear the honk and yelp of the birds beginning their migration, calling to one another as they pass overhead and under the stars. 

Crackle of burning mesquite.  Smell of cedar. 

Leaf-nosed bats have been seen flitting above the smoke, their fanged and dark-furred faces briefly lit by the flames below and their tiny eyes glinting like pairs of rising sparks.                                                     

The x-shaped track of the roadrunner (Geococcyx californianus) does not reveal the direction that the bird is traveling, thereby confusing its predators and any malignant spirits that pursue it.

***

The First Cold Winds Coming

Silver City, New Mexico

October 1, 1874 – The Moon of Yellow Trees

He was asleep, back in the empty log house, having nowhere else to go when the first wind of winter swept down from the mountains of Los Pinos Altos and rode above the waters of Arroyo San Vincente in that space the river makes.  The sliver of new moon quaked and dished in the eddies along the banks where the cottonwoods turned their catkins loose and acorns rattled down from the chinquapins.  The wind was scarcely a sigh in the last of the leaves, a hush in the needles of the ponderosa pine and upland pinyon, although for some—those on the brink of things—it came as a whistling, as the low and somber notes from an ancestral puebloan’s bird-bone flute to summon up Brother Coyote or Big Owl, or a shaman’s composition to carry a soul to the Land of Ever Summer, even now in this cold season and a greater cold coming, this month the Apache call the Moon of Yellow Trees. 

He heard it in his sleep, hollow and resonant, coming as it had for as long as the rivers were and the mountains were and long before The People were, and loud enough—this harbinger of winter’s misery—loud enough for a lone coyote to hear and answer with the first gust-ruffling of its fur and then to stop mid-trot trot along the hunt-worn path he followed through the chapote brush and sage, past the dens where the ground squirrel and the apache pocket mouse will winter until the coyotes dig them out and take them in their sleep.  But now with day breaking, the hunt has ended and the new moon is descending.  He turns off the hardpan path and takes to the road at the edge of the end of the town.  He pauses with forepaw raised, poised, his ears aswivel, his snout testing the air.  And yes, there it is—the scent of the kind of cold that will split rock and stop a river and snap a sinew.  Yes, it’s come.  Winter and the new moon, both—just a bit of a moon, a scant rib of a moon in moonset as he utters a low whine of lament.

Billy hears the song in the stovepipe.  He had not shut the damper and the flue shook as freezing air poured down into the room through the open woodstove door.  He had not built a fire.  There should be no smoke rising from the chimneystack of a house where the tenants had moved on.  He lay on the bare slatted bed he had shared with his brother and he listened.  Daybreak birdsong.  The rumble of a wagon coming on.  Louder now.  Passing by.  Rumbling away.  Then nothing.  Then the bark, then the whine.  Billy crept to the window and raised himself up to eye level at the sill and looked out.  Now in the dim light of dawning, cowbirds crouch and peck in the roadside dust.  But a larger shape beyond.  At first he was not sure what it was, that shape a ways down the road.  Small deer or big rabbit or dog.  But none of these, no.  He had never seen a coyote standing still.  And this one seemed to be gazing at him, seeing the little bit of Billy that showed above the sill.  But he knew this could not be so—it was too far away.  And he knew it could not be so when it seemed to Billy that he became coyote, clever coyote, stopping in the road and seeing himself peeking from a window in an empty house, cold but too cautious to lay a fire in the stove and wondering what sort of life would his new life be but knowing what was left of it would be without restraint and lived in joyful desolation.

The cowbird (Molothrus ater)does not raise her own young, but instead lays her eggs in the nest of another bird species (the host) when the owner of the nest is momentarily absent.  The cowbird egg hatches before the eggs of the host bird, and the hatchling then pushes the other eggs out of the nest and is raised by the host bird.  Occasionally, if the host species recognizes the cowbird nestling as an intruder, she will refuse it food, seize it in her beak and fling it to the ground, or peck it to death. 

***

1874 and 1875 – A Year of Apache Moons

Cold mornings.  Grackles warm themselves on chimney rims.

The colors of dawn light the rifted hills facing east. 

Now the days of Billy astray in Silver City.

He was seen in the thoroughfare, and along the dry arroyo, and walking the pueblo road.  He was seen in the restaurants, wiping tables, pouring coffee.  He washed plates and platter in the kitchen of the Cave-In Café and peeled potatoes in the Tiltin Timbers.  He swept the floor at the assay office and mucked out the stalls in the livery.  He hauled water for the water-seller, nails for the farrier.  He ran hot meals from the Timbers and the Cave-In to the guests in the Dance Hall and to both the desperate and the devotees at the tent meetings and to the miners at their diggings.

Dr. Arthur Broadwater caught sight of him hurrying along with a canvas delivery bag on his back and rows of lunch buckets and baskets slung shoulder to shoulder on a pole.  He noted that the boy was thinner and not dressed for winter.  He watched him take orders from the men lined up at the assay office and vendors at their wagons and people in the street.  Yes, sir.  That’s four orders of beefsteak and fried potatoes.  Whiskey, beer, or water?  Thank you, much appreciated.  They’ve got some nice pie over at the Timbers.  Could fetch you a few, save you the trouble.  Apple or pear?

The doctor had been sitting out front of his medical tent, feet up on his display table (a few bottles of his Bodily Rejuvenator at the ready for purchase by passers-by) and reading the morning edition of the Silver City Sentinel when he spied Billy on the other side of the thoroughfare, gazing at the sky.  He lowered his newspaper, and, as folks will do, looked up.  A hawk was flying over, small varmint of some kind—mouse or ground squirrel or rat—in its talons.  Billy watched until it was high away and out of sight, then fetched a folded paper from his back pocket and a pencil stub from his hat band.  He leaned against a post and added the red-tailed hawk to his list. 

Dr. Arthur Broadwater folded away his newspaper and crossed the street.

What was that? said Dr. Arthur Broadwater.

What was what? said Billy, and he slid his list back into his trouser pocket.  

That what just flew over.  Some kind of buzzard was it?

Hawk, said Billy.  Red-tailed.

Well now, said Dr. Arthur Broadwater.  They all look pretty much the same to me.  How do you know?  

It has a red tail, said Billy.  That’s how.  

You don’t say, said Dr. Arthur Broadwater. 

Billy reached up and tucked his pencil stub back under the hatband. 

I attended to your mother, said Dr. Arthur Broadwater.  It’s nearly a year now she’s gone, isn’t it? 

I’ve got to git, said Billy.

Where is it you’re staying these days? said Dr. Arthur Broadwater. 

Here and there, said Billy. 

I see.  And where might that be? said Dr. Arthur Broadwater.

Here, mostly.  Sometimes there, said Billy.  Depends. 

My place is right over there, said Dr. Arthur Broadwater.  Fourth tent down.  See it?

I know where, said Billy.  Been there.

There’s a spare cot for folks coming in for doctoring, but most times they send someone to fetch me out.

Well, said Billy.  

Folks pay me in pies and potatoes, if they pay me at all.  I’ve got plenty, if you’re hungry.  Are you?  

Am I what? says Billy.

Hungry.  

Ain’t everybody? says Billy.

Listen.  Even if I’m not there, just let yourself in.  Anytime.   

Just might, says Billy.

You come by then, said Dr. Arthur Broadwater.  Come say hey.

 Now I’ve got to git, says Billy.  

Plumage of the red-tailed hawk (Buteo jamaicensis)is variable except for the tail which is consistently brick-red above and orange below.  A “red-tail” will take small rodents and snakes in its talons and swallow them whole, but other birds it has hunted and captured are first beheaded and plucked.

It was on some late winter sunrise Singing-Stick caught sight of Billy when she peered out from the flap of her wickiup—Billy there, beside the stone circle where she made her fire, setting down a bundle of fuelwood.  She saw him again at the rubbish heap, shaking a dusting of snow from throw-away clothes.  She did not see him at all the next spring, and she did not see him that summer.  She never left the pueblo and he did not come to her.  It was not until the autumn one day at dusk when the cottonwoods had already gone yellow and her crowd of the failing and infirm were dispersing that she saw him.  It was Jimmy Bad Drum with his festering foot who spotted Billy silhouetted on the ridge above the Chiricauhua pueblo and called to her and pointed:  Look, look there. 

There.  Billy on the ridge, sighting the birds crossing the continent ahead of the coming cold, some from as far north as the Yukon and boreal forests, as far east as Labrador and Thunder Bay.  Some from as near as the Pecos Plains and La Luna Blanca and summer habitats in the Sangre de Cristos and the Sonora and the basins of the Chihuahua.  He knows them by their songs and even by their dark shapes against the sky and by the ways they made their way through the air:  the rapid wing-strokes of buffle-head ducks, the undulating flight of finches, dropping and rising, dropping and rising like mechanical birds he once saw in pot-shot arcade.

Bufflehead ducks (Bucephala albeola) will escort their newly hatched ducklings to the water from the nest, but that is the only time in their lives that they will walk on dry land. 

They passed above him on the updrafts off the ridge as a scattering of birds in loose flocks, and geese in skeins of hundreds, and passenger pigeons in clusters so dense they seemed to be billows of smoke or swarms of bees or locusts on the move, shifting position in unison—a thousand birds—no ten thousand, and together flashing grey to white to gone with a wing-tilt and turn.  

Some birds in pairs.  Some solitary flyers, alone amid the multitudes of their kind, but all summoned away from what had been home for a spring and a summer by the new slant of the sun, the yellowing of the leaves, and the first hoarfrost on the grass.  High and lonesome came their calls over lakes and plains, over rivers and ranges, against headwinds and through the high thin air, their causeways created by the pull of the poles on the magnetized bits of the planet in their brains and motions of the stars.  He heard the bleating of geese, plaintive and piercing his heart as it would—it must—the heart of anyone who understands that his journey’s end will be sepulcher or earth or urn.  That laceration of the heart might be cleanly made as if by flint flaked to a deadly point, or the kind of cut that festers with regret, suppurates former despicable deeds, and thereby kills slowly with the seep of decay and despair spreading through the body—and why would it matter which?   

There, Jimmy Bad Drum called to Singing-Stick.  Up there, he said, pointing to Billy on the ridge.  Jimmy Bad Drum watched him as he knelt and pressed the folded paper to the level of his leg above the knee.  Adding names and the numbers to his numbered list. 

He’s the one who came for his mother, said Jimmy Bad Drum.  The one who leaves the wood.  

Singing-Stick looked to the ridge.  There the leaves loosed of the cottonwoods and spinning in their disorderly courses but the birds unswerving.  All against a sky the color of sunset.  But it was not Billy that she saw there in silhouette, not Billy in the shape of Billy, no—but instead the boy in his coyote shape, sitting on his haunches then rising and moving along the ridge.  Birds above him.  Sniffing the wind. 

A harrier hawk flies beat-beat-glide as the sky goes dark as smoke. 

Mice and voles are the preferred prey of the northern harrier hawk (Circus hudsonius) but it will also take geese and rabbits, killing these larger animals by carrying them to water and plunging them under.

A lone thrush calls from its perch atop an ocotillo. 

A pair of javelinas and four piglets snuffle in a patch of prickly pear.

Townsend’s solitaire (Myadestes townsendi) often goes unnoticed.  When it is observed, it is alone, as its name implies.  Its call-note has been likened to the tolling of a distant bell.  It frequently sings during flight. 

 ***

Pamela Ryder is the author of two novels in stories and a short story collection. As The People So Sit, The First Cold Winds Coming, and A Year of Apache Moons are excerpts from a novel in progress, The Lists of Billy the Kid.