Little Big Man

by Thomas Berger

  Well, Olga and Little Horse come in again and cooked that dog and served him up, and my ex-wife bawled Younger Bear out from time to time and give me no more notice than she had before, and I reckon if Little Horse had told her anything about me, it was some fantastic story that would never remind her of Jack Crabb.

  Somehow I ate enough to be polite and when done even extended the return invite that manners called for.

  I says: “I am married to the daughter of Shadow That Comes in Sight, who you know was a great warrior.” I had some pride, too, and it had begun to get me that this Indian was bragging about having my white wife in his tepee. Though I wasn’t angry at him, really, and if I hated him, it wasn’t in the fashion that I had imagined I would hate the man what held Olga. For he wasn’t detaining her: that much was clear. And though she seemed in a foul mood, it was the kind a female finds strangely satisfying. She had something on him; had found out probably, I guess from Little Horse, that he had showed the white feather at Sand Creek and was never going to let him forget it.

  I hadn’t seen this side of Olga when we was married, thank the good Lord, though I realized now that I might have, had she known about that business flop I suffered in Denver. But she hadn’t. She never knew about anything in them days but keeping house and tending to Gus. She hardly knowed any English, I believe that’s why. But by Jesus how she had took to Cheyenne life! After cooking that dog, she had went out and worked alongside and bantered with them other Indian women and beyond her skin and hair you’d never been able to distinguish amongst them.

  I be damned! Excuse my cursing. It’s just that it was a wonder to me and I don’t know how to express the measure of it. I wasn’t sad and I wasn’t mad. I wasn’t even embarrassed, though I might have been if I hadn’t been wearing that buffalo hat and face paint. For it was Jack Crabb who had lost his wife, not Little Big Man; that was the way to look at it. You might think I should have been dying for the details of the final moments in which that little group of whites was overrun by the Indians down on the Arkansas and Olga and Gus was carried off; I should have wanted to discover from Younger Bear the name of the brave what had sold them to him, and go kill that Indian to protect my honor.

  But none of that occurred to me at this time. No, seeing my wife and boy in Younger Bear’s tepee, both of whom was apparently prospering in their own style, I was impelled rather to make that announcement of my own marriage to Sunshine. I done more: I boasted that, because her father was dead and she didn’t have no brothers, I didn’t pay nobody a single horse for her.

  Now like most braggarts, Younger Bear couldn’t stand to hear nobody else steal his thunder. He commenced to pout and chewed forever upon the same fragment of gristle. His eyes had got more Oriental as he grew older, and now they almost disappeared beneath the bulge of his low forehead and the underlying tear-sacs traced in paint that hadn’t been altogether washed off by his bath. I had had a feeling all along on this visit that he didn’t recognize me—that is, of course he knowed I was white though dressed like a Cheyenne, but did not connect me with his boyhood. The only other time I had seen him since the old days had been that once when he was a Contrary, lost in his backwards scheme.

  Well sir, he don’t say a thing now until we finish off our chuck and wipe our hands upon our garments and go outside, and there is Olga and some other women fleshing a fresh hide that is staked down upon a spot from which they have swept the snow—her big bottom is pointed towards me, and I would never have recognized it, for back in the old days Olga was robust but never portly. And little Gus runs by, ducking an imaginary bullet fired from a stick-gun by a brown playmate who he must have euchred into impersonating a white enemy. Only a son of mine could have pulled off such a trick, and damn me, that incident touched me more than anything so far. That was the closest I come to calling him, saying: “I’m your Pa, boy. Don’t you recall your old Daddy?”

  But of course I never, for it wasn’t the place nor the time, and how in hell would I ever explain the get-up I was wearing to a five-year-old. I’m telling the truth here, and the truth is always made up of little particulars which sound ridiculous when repeated. But I’m prepared to say that maybe I didn’t take back my wife and boy because I was wearing them buffalo horns, when everything was said and done.

  Well, I took leave of Younger Bear and renewed the invite to come and eat at my lodge the next day and went so far in a bravado intended to cover up the emotion I felt on seeing Gus as to add: “And bring the whole family!”

  The Bear suddenly come from his coma and says to me, very keenly: “You have decided to stay.” So he did recall me.

  “I never thanked you,” he says, “for bringing extra food to me while I was being taken as a prisoner to the fort. I want to do that now.”

  I was afraid he would next start in on that old business about owing me a life, so I fixed to leave, but he says: “Wait. I want to apologize for the rudeness of my wife. She is a good woman, but she just cannot stand to be in the presence of white men, because they killed her father and mother.…

  “Listen,” he says, “on the way here we crossed a fresh trail made by white soldiers. I think they are looking for this village, though the chiefs touched the pen and we are at peace.”

  Younger Bear had the peculiar ability always to remind me of my proper race. I should have been armed against him, but I never was. When no issue was made of it, I’d generally be pro-Indian; and also if Old Lodge Skins or Sunshine was registering the complaint, maybe because they were sort of my kin. But the Bear always drew my blood on this subject.

  “Maybe,” says I, “they are trailing the big war party that has just come in from raids on peaceful ranches along the Smoky Hill River. Or they could be looking for that white woman and child held by the Kiowa.”

  He set his jaw real stubborn. “I don’t know about those things. I am not a Kiowa but a Human Being. I have not been raiding along the Smoky Hill River. Yet I suppose if a soldier sees me he will shoot at me all the same.”

  He was right enough in that, and I for one didn’t know how to explain it. However, I resented his unstated suggestion that it was my fault. And there I guess you have the issue between me and Younger Bear. If to a soldier one Indian was the same as another, no matter if they belonged to altogether different tribes, so to the Bear I was responsible for what all other white men did, even though I was at present living in this village and dressed as a savage.

  I went back to my own tepee. Now I haven’t mentioned yet that while Sunshine’s father was dead and she didn’t have brothers, she did have three sisters, and they lived with us. One of them was also a widow and had two little kids. I was the only grown man in the establishment and had to hunt for the whole bunch. In return, them women done all the other work, and I reckon I could also have laid with them had I a mind to, though I never did with anybody but Sunshine, on account of until she got pregnant she alone exhausted me, and so far as since then was concerned, I might be a bit of a prude, but keeping a harem was never to my taste.

  As I lay on my buffalo robe and looked at the swell or Sunshine’s pregnant belly, all I could think of was how Olga might at this very moment be carrying the seed of that savage in her. She was forever soiled. I could leave my lodge at any time, go back to civilization, take a bath, and be white again. Not her. The Cheyenne was inside her. Indians sure made me sick. I could hardly breathe for the smell inside my own home, where them sloppy women I supported stirred up the muck we was going to eat for supper. We didn’t have no fresh meat, on account of instead of hunting that afternoon I had set and ate dog prepared by my natural wife in the tepee of her unnatural husband.

  While I was in this poisonous mood, little Frog toddled over and handed me the tiny wooden horse I had carved for him. He was now about the age of Gus when captured. I handed the toy back to him. He just looked real solemn at me and then at it, and put it down very careful on my bed and goes away. That was the first indication I got of the atmosphere insi
de the lodge, but then I noticed the women was all unusually quiet and the children of my widowed sister-in-law, a boy and a girl, who I might joke with or tell stories to before the meal was served, were keeping to their own area.

  Sunshine served me up a bowl of roots mashed up with some berries. These ingredients had been gathered the previous summer and saved in a dried version. It was like taking a mouthful of mud.

  “Where’s that cow haunch I brought in yesterday?” I asks in bad temper.

  She looks scared but corrects me. “That was three days ago.”

  “If I say it was yesterday, that’s when it was, unless you’re looking for a beating, woman.”

  She quickly begs my pardon, saying: “You are right, yesterday. I am a stupid person and—”

  “Oh, shut up,” I says. “There are too many mouths to feed around here. That’s why I can’t ever keep us in meat. Why don’t your sisters get married?” The women all put their heads down. I coughed to free my windpipe from a swallow of that sludge.

  “If you think I am going to lay with you,” I addressed them generally, “you are crazy.”

  One of them come over to Sunshine and whispered in her ear, and then my woman says: “My sister will go out to trade her beaded dress for meat, if you will wait.”

  I happened to know of the one that made this offer, that the shirt was the sole item among her possessions for which she could have got any more than a dried bone. And it wasn’t much itself, being stained and patched and there was places where the beads had fell off. We wasn’t a rich family, I can tell you that, having only one man in the place, and that man me, who never did no raiding of the settlements, and we didn’t have association with the traders, who I wouldn’t have wanted to see me anyhow, and I didn’t own any horses apart from the pony give me by Old Lodge Skins.

  “No,” I says now. “I am not hungry.” I was some ashamed, but ashamed to show it. I knowed why none of them had got married, too. Because they was living in the tepee of a white man, and the Cheyenne braves would not come and hang about such a door and play their medicine flutes in courtship. Especially since, as the years had gone on, there was an ever greater surplus of females in the tribe, owing to so many men having been killed. I had put a curse on them girls, I reckon. But whose idea had it been to take Sunshine for a wife? Not mine.

  “I am sorry you are angry with me,” says Sunshine now. She had put in a full day’s labor, including the chopping of firewood and then drug a great load of it on a buffalo robe for a quarter mile to our lodge. She was all ready to have that kid any time now. When the moment came, she would throw down her hatchet, retire behind a tree, and have it in the snow, and then chop the rest of her quota and bring back both child and cottonwood logs.

  “Sit down here and eat,” I says. “I’m not angry with you.”

  Which she did, shoveling in that mush with a big horn spoon, and the rest of them likewise, with a sound like an army tramping through a swamp. If I hadn’t been a fool at business back in Denver, by now I could have been setting in my own big house, dining off porcelain and silver and sent me to England for a baldheaded butler wearing a swallowtail coat. If my Pa hadn’t been crazy, God knows what I would have been. I guess everybody toys with ideas like them.

  When Sunshine was finished and had picked off her dress the bits of grub what slipped off the spoon, and also some from the earthern floor, for she was still bothered—they all was, even though my mood had sweetened—when she done that and took her bowl and mine to go clean them, she hesitated and says in a low tone:

  “When will you kill him?”

  “Who?” I asks, getting irritated all over again, for I knew very well what she meant, and remembered my earlier aim though I didn’t wish to, which accounted for my annoyance. “You just better,” I says, “keep out of what doesn’t concern you.”

  Sunshine squats and smooths out that buffalo robe next to mine. “I’ll make a nice bed for her,” she says, “and give her my best red blanket. And the white boy can sleep next to our nephew Spotted Pony, if he likes it there.”

  I says evenly: “The white woman with Younger Bear is not my wife and the boy is not my son. My family was killed upon the Arkansas River.” I reached for a bow that was hanging from a lodgepole behind me, which I used to hunt when saving powder and lead. And I says: “If I hear any more talk about the matter from you, old woman, I’ll give you a beating that you won’t forget.”

  Sunshine had took on considerable flesh with her pregnancy—though even so she was slimmer than Olga—and showed a real moon-face as she now grinned. And directly the rest of the women and the kids cheered up, though I had spoke softly and they was eating loud, and they commenced to chatter and laugh like they did normally, for it was ordinarily a happy lodge.

  See, they had all thought I would rub out Younger Bear and take Olga and Gus back and that accounted for my earlier meanness: that I was working myself up for the killing, and I don’t wonder they figured I might not have stopped with the Bear but murdered them all as well, for Cheyenne women knowed where high passion could lead a man.

  Well, they could set their minds to rest, for Little Big Man was not a-going to make any trouble for anybody. On the other hand, I was more or less obliged to honor my invite to entertain Younger Bear and his family on the morrow. After that, I was done with the matter. I had no intention of getting in thick with Mr. & Mrs. Bear and going on exchanging dinners one after the other. I didn’t expect Olga, the way she changed, ever to find out the true state of affairs—for I’d be wearing that buffalo hat and black facial paint, and she never would be looking for me—but one of the Indians no doubt would smell it, for they was keen about such matters. Not Younger Bear, in his stupidity and conceit, but Little Horse, probably, or one of my own women. Or maybe Gus, and that would kill me.

  So I figured to run off right after dinner on the following day and go back to the railroad. I had now got what I rejoined the Cheyenne to find, such as it was.

  That was the state of mind in which after a while I pulled a number of animal skins and dirty blankets over me and tried to sleep. The women and children had also retired, but the fire was banked with enough logs to keep it burning all the night, otherwise we would have froze even within our multiple wrappings, for frigid air entered between the door-lacings and from beneath the lodge skin. Occasionally I could hear my pony stamp against the cold outside. I had picketed him near the entrance rather than meadowed with the rest of the herd. Being he was my sole animal at this time, I couldn’t afford to have no Pawnee run him off; though I had not heard of any in the area.

  As to the report of a soldiers’ trail by Younger Bear, I took that to be some more of his foolishness. We was down here now on the reservation assigned to the Cheyenne at the Medicine Lodge council, so why should they be after us? I mean Old Lodge Skins’s band. If they looked for anybody, it would be that war party that had come in to the villages downriver. But the whole business was unlikely in this weather. Nobody fought in the winter, least of all the U.S. Army, whose big horses could never negotiate that crusted snow.

  I thought about a lot of stuff like that, for I couldn’t get to sleep. I might have determined to be done with the matter of Olga and Gus, but it was far from done with me. The veins in my temples was throbbing, and my groin was giving me trouble. I mean it felt as if I was pursing up there, like a dried apple. After a time it occurred to me that I was feeling lust in a different form from any I had hitherto knowed, especially while with the Indians. I have told you it was Sunshine who was ardent, rather than yours truly. Well, now I reached over for her, completely forgetting her present condition.

  What I touched was the summit of her big belly, through the robes, and she was awake right smart, getting out her hand and rubbing mine.

  She says: “Wunhai’s feelings are hurt by what you said.”

  That was the sister what offered to sell her beaded dress for meat. Her name meant “Burns”; maybe she had singed her finger whe
n a girl or something. She was right comely and the youngest of Shadow’s offspring, a couple years beneath Sunshine and favoring her as to the eyes and glossy hair but slim as a willow wand. When I thought of it she recalled for me my old girl friend Nothing before she got married and turned fat and ill-tempered; poor Nothing was another killed at Sand Creek.

  Anyway, I had up to now regarded Wunhai as a sister-in-law, white fashion, never having adapted the Cheyenne view of such things. What Sunshine meant had hurt Wunhai’s feelings was that statement I had made earlier to the effect that I would not lay with any of them other women.

  I patted Sunshine’s belly and withdrew my hand. As usual, my trouble lay in deciding whether I was finally white or Indian. If the former, I had ought to go to sleep: Olga’s having went savage was her problem, not mine. On the other hand, I commenced to realize the responsibility I had for Sunshine’s sisters: it wasn’t enough to support them. On account of me they was old maids. I had ought to do something, for they was a good bunch of women. Maybe I was being hypocritical, I don’t know; you figure it out. Next I remember, I had rose and slipped through the fireglow halfway around the circle of the tepee and was kneeling by Wunhai’s robe. Her eyes gleamed through the shadow I threw across her.

  “I’m sorry for what I said,” says I.

  She says: “I hear you.” And opens up her covers on that side and I enters thereunder, against her slight brown body, which happened to be naked and burning hot after my chilly journey without my breechclout. There was a sweet girl. It turned out she had never knowed a man before, being a real fine example of the high morals of the Human Beings, but her instincts was sound. My oh my. I reckon she was about eighteen years of age and very lithe.

  Well, I won’t hazard a guess on how long I was engaged in discharging my brother-in-lawly duty, but it was a spell, and finally come a point when little Wunhai had received sufficient apology to drop off to sleep in my arms. O.K., I climbed out and tucked her in, experiencing an odd sensation when a cold draft flushed through my loins. I reckon I shivered, and another sister-in-law of mine who slept nearby sat up and beckoned to me.