“My God,” he said, “what a place to take a dump.” Which is what he figured I had been doing in them bushes and what could I do but grin at him. “Git on,” he said, pointing to his horse’s hindquarters. “Don’t it hurt?”
Then I saw from the corner of my eye that the arrow was lodged in my hatbrim, as close across my right temple as it could have been without tearing skin. From the trooper’s angle, feathers fore and head aft, it must have looked as though my skull was spitted. I throwed it away and mounted behind him and we went back to the village.
Now we got in among the tepees at the lower end of camp, and this soldier, he trotted up to a little group of blue-dressed figures, we dismounted, and he saluted a man.
“Sir,” he says, “I scouted the—”
“Just a moment,” interrupts the officer what he has addressed and turns to me. I am standing there apart, getting my bearings, for troops is going hither and yon, looting tepees, herding Cheyenne women and children together into one party, driving captive ponies. I hardly knowed the place where I had lived some weeks.
“Soldier,” orders this officer, “come here.” I seen he meant me, so went to him. He was a right good-looking fellow, tall and well-proportioned, and I recall the collars of his blue-flannel shirt was embroidered with two gold stars on each point. He had a yellow mustache and his fair hair was so long in back, its curls barely cleared his shoulders.
His eyes was icy-blue, and under brows so pale you could see them only by their bushiness. He says in a voice like a rasp across the grain of a board, “Button that jacket!”
I proceeds to do it.
He says: “Consider yourself under arrest. Give your name to the sergeant of the guard.”
Now that trooper who picked me up does me another favor. “If the general pleases,” that soldier says, “I found this man in the brush and had to kill an Injun to get him clear. He was hit in the head by an arrer, poor devil, and is out of his mind, I believe.”
I didn’t need no further cue. I laid my head on the side and sort of goggled my eyes, letting my tongue flap loose.
A spasm of impatience run over the general’s face. “Well, get him out of here,” he said. “This is a field headquarters, not the laboratory of an alienist.”
“Now,” said my benefactor, “if the general will hear the report of my scout—”
“No, I do not intend to,” responded the officer. “It cannot have much value if instead of observing the enemy’s dispositions, you were rescuing lunatics.” He jerks his back to us, and says to them others: “I have decided to shoot the captured ponies.”
One of them officers was a heavy-set, fatherly-looking man with a full head of white hair showing below his hat. I seen him gazing at me with a trace of amusement, as if he knowed the deal. But now he gets disturbed at what the general said and starts to protest.
“There are eight hundred ponies in that herd,” he says. “Had we not better save our ammunition for—”
“I have decided to shoot them,” says the general, “and do not require your suggestions upon the matter, Benteen.”
Benteen gives him a long look of undisguised scorn. Then he says in his benevolent way to the corporal, who was still standing with me alongside him: “You had better collect a detail of fifteen men and go and execute all of our four-legged prisoners. If you run out of ammunition, you might go over on the bluffs and borrow some from the Cheyenne.”
The corporal salutes him, and so do I, and I swear he winks at me. The general never saw it, though, for he was striding vigorously up and down in his smart boots, ordering things of various officers and men, and one of them is the director of the band, I guess, for shortly that group begins to play.
When we had gone on a ways by foot, the corporal says: “I’d think you would of knowed better than to let Hard Ass Custer catch you with your jacket open. He is a real son of a bitch, ain’t he? Goddam, I’d pay the Cheyenne what put a bullet in his brass heart.”
I said, “But that Benteen ain’t bad.”
“Ain’t bad?” exclaimed the corporal, right angry at my understatement. “I know fellows in his company would whip you for saying less than that he is the best officer who ever rode in the U.S. Goddam Cavalry.”
“That’s what I meant,” says I. Actually, at this point I was trying to find a chance to slip away from him and get to where the prisoners had been collected.
“You see how he looked at Custer? He don’t give a damn for him, I’ll tell you that. You can’t fight rank, but you don’t have to put your nose up in it, either, and the Colonel won’t. He’s right worried now over Major Elliot. Hard Ass won’t send out a patrol to look for him. That was what I was really doing out there when I run into you. You see anything of him?”
“Not me,” I says. That was when I realized it was probably Elliot and his command that the Cheyenne had wiped out and butchered in the grass across the river. I had been wise to throw away the badge from my hat.
“Benteen and Elliot served together in the War,” he says. “Well, we have to get shooting them horses. And you best find you a carbine if you can and praise your luck that Custer didn’t notice you’d lost yours. He’d of spread-eagled you in the snow.”
“I left it with my bunky,” says I, for I had learned the lingo when I was with the soldiers after the Solomon battle. “I’ll go fetch it.”
“All right, and then you get back on the double, for I got my eye on you,” he says, assuming the style of a noncom now he had work to do. That’s how it goes with rank, among the whites; I had forgot how quick relations can change.
Soon as I got some men and horses between him and me, I headed for the prisoner’s corral, which I found to be several tepees they had let to stand near the center of the camp, into which the women and children had been collected. I could hear them singing that doleful death dirge of the Cheyenne as I approached. These lodges was of course ringed by a guard of soldiers, and I looked for some difficulty in gaining access there, for I wouldn’t want to tell my purpose in so doing.
In addition I never wanted to get caught again by anybody and put on special duty. My late uneasiness as a white man among Indians was nothing beside the feeling I had now, slogging along in the enormous boots, with only my ears holding up that hat, and the jacket stood away from my body as if it was an empty hogshead.
But then I remembered Old Lodge Skins’s stunt in walking through that crossfire, which by the way was the only time I could recall his medicine working against the whites. He had kept up his assurance, that’s why; and I reckon being blind had helped; he wasn’t distracted by anything he saw. Well, I didn’t close my eyes but I did put myself in a state of concentration: I swelled up to fill that uniform, somehow, and I walked hard and smart up to a sergeant standing at the door of one of them tepees.
“General Custer sent me to interrogate the prisoners,” I said.
“All right,” he responds, and steps aside. But then before I could enter, he grabs my elbow and puts his mustache into my ear.
“Listen,” he says, “you say a word for me with one of them young squaws and I’ll make it worth your while. I mean, being you speak Indian, it wouldn’t be no chore. Tell her after dark to come and whistle out the flap, and I’ll give her a present.” He slaps my shoulder, and I go within.
That lodge was packed solid with Cheyenne women and children, too crowded for anyone to sit down. They stood looking at me, with their blankets drawn close and a good many of the wives had undone their braids so their hair would hang free to be torn out in mourning. Some had scratched long rents down their cheeks for the same reason, and the wailing, rise-and-fall of the death songs did not diminish for my arrival. But when the smaller children saw my uniform, they grasped their mothers’ legs and buried their little brown heads in the blankets.
One old woman was crying in high-pitched shrieks that at length would exhaust her air and then she would gasp and cry in a different tone on the in-breath till her lungs was filled
and back to the positive weep. After a minute or so of this, during which I had not spoken, she breaks off and says to me: “Go away and let us die of sorrow.”
It turned out that this sentiment, while it may have been sincere enough in the long view, had also the particular aim of ascertaining whether I could understand the language. For no sooner had I indicated that I did, she hangs upon the sleeve of my jacket and wails again, but alternates it with the following.
“I am the sister of Black Kettle. I told him we would be punished if he did not stop our young men from raiding the whites. But he would not listen to me. ‘Shut your mouth, you foolish woman,’ he would say. Well, was I not right? Black Kettle is dead, and all our warriors, and we helpless ones will be put to death by the soldiers. I told him it was bad to make war on the white people, who have always been our friends. They are wonderful people, good and kind, and I can understand why they punished the wicked Human Beings. But we helpless ones could do nothing, and now I suppose must suffer for our bad men.”
“Shut your mouth, you foolish woman,” I says. I knowed her, she was called Red Hair though hers was gray, and frankly I never heard before that she was sister to the chief. I won’t say that was a lie, but if it wasn’t, it was the only particle of truth in her whole harangue. I’m not blaming her, see, for it was a good line to take and I believe she used it a little later on General Custer himself with some success, but I had better fish to fry.
Quicklike, she stops her weeping and says: “Would you like a beautiful young girl to bring the moon and stars into your lodge tonight?”
All this while of course I had been surveying the faces roundabout, but I did not see Sunshine.
“Now, they aren’t going to kill you,” I says, “so you can stop working your tongue two ways. If you weren’t busy lying, you would see who I am. You know I’m not a soldier. I have just come back from helping get the rest of our people safely downriver, and am dressed like this so I may pass among the bluecoats.”
The old hag squints cunningly at me. “Certainly, I know who you are. I just believed you had become a traitor.” This is a free translation. What she actually said was she thought that at the sight of the white man’s meat I had become their dog.
“I am looking for my wife and child, old woman, and I want to find them before they grow to such an age as yours, when the mind shrivels, falls into dust, and blows out the earholes in the night wind.”
She was beginning to enjoy this exchange, the way harpies of that sort do, and come back at me with doubts about my manhood, etc., as if we was bantering in the midst of normal Indian life a thousand mile from the U.S. Cavalry, for them Cheyenne Women were tough and got more so with age. She was a hard-bitten old bitch, and give her a knife she would have slit that horny sergeant from belly-button to breastbone if she thought she could have got away with it. As it was, I reckon she might function as procuress for him. She’d last as long as she could, and I take my hat off to her.
However, she never knowed what become of Sunshine, and I looked through them other prisoner-tepees with the same result, and then, with a terrible apprehension clawing into my vitals, I went to the upper end of the village where my lodge had been. But nothing was there save the ashes of our fire, a strip or two of deerskin, some buffalo hair, and the like. The soldiers had drug down all the tepees and burned them, with all therein that was left after looting, in one great blaze upon the Washita banks, the smoke from which I had seen earlier. By now that bonfire was down to a steaming heap of gray and black, and the snow melted off roundabout in a great circle of yellow.
In the meadow, they had started to shoot eight hundred ponies, and that was a mess, for some of the fellows on the killing detail must have got excited by the rearing, coughing, bleeding animals trying to kick each other’s guts out as the lead seared within them, and pretty soon the bullets commenced to fly through the camp, and cursing consternation come from the troops on the other side. I reckon they griped to Custer, for I saw him ride by with an officer trying to talk to his stiff back, but as usual he wasn’t listening, and what he did when he reached the herd was to dispatch a few of the ponies himself with his sidearm, I guess to show them the right way.
The band was still playing. Next place I went was to where they was digging a burial trench for the Indians what had died in camp: the bodies lined up side by side, still dressed except for the smaller articles that made souvenirs: necklaces and such. Very few of them was scalped, and I didn’t see no mutilations at all. That should be said: this wasn’t Sand Creek, and these troops was Regulars, not Volunteers; professional fighting men are always less bloody than amateurs.
I seen Black Kettle again; his silver medal was gone. And then I seen young Wunhai, and I seen Digging Bear.… Seventy-eighty bodies there might have been, and I expect more in the brush and timber which they wasn’t bothering about, and then the Indians from downriver might have recovered some others.
Corn Woman and her children and little Frog, they must have escaped down the Washita; they wasn’t here. But what of Sunshine and Morning Star? Thank God, I couldn’t find them among these dead; on the other hand, when I went to help Old Lodge Skins, they had been still under the buffalo robes. Had they gone into the river at a later time, I would have seen them when myself below the horseshoe bend.
I left that burial place before they lowered Wunhai and Digging Bear and shoveled earth upon them. I recall feeling disorderly at the time, like if I had stayed, I would have thrown myself into the trench alongside. Wunhai looked like a dead wren, but Digging Bear had not died easy as I had thought —— I don’t want to talk of it, I had been fond of them women. They was maybe just Indians, but they had been mine and small use I was to them.
I searched the timber and I searched the brush, and I found three bodies but none of them was Sunshine, and I wandered so far as to come below the bluffs and the Cheyenne watching there seen me and started down, and I had to run for it. There was sufficient of them up there to retake the village, especially while the troops was shooting ponies, burning property, herding prisoners, and all, but Custer knowed how to put Indians on the defensive. It was winter, and he burned up their robes. They lived by their riding, and he killed their horses. He held captive fifty of their women and children. They watched him helpless.
Now they was afraid he would go after the camps along the lower Washita, and he knowed they was, so had determined to move in that direction and by posing as a menace to the downstream villages he would keep them too worried to counterattack. This I found out later. At the moment, back in the timber, I heard the bugles sounding assembly call. I reckon it wasn’t no more than a half hour afterward that the whole regiment commenced to march downriver, carrying with them the captives on ponies saved for that purpose from the massacre of the herd, and naturally the band was blaring.
I never come from concealment either to cheer them off or see what they was doing. Easy enough to follow the latter by ear. Take a river valley hardened by winter, you can hear a gunshot about five mile away: think of the distance a brass band will carry. The Cheyenne had left the bluffs in a panic to get to their families. Custer had the knack, all right. Everything he done said to all other living creatures: I win and you lose.
Well, when it sounded like the rear guard had reached the horseshoe bend, I returned to where our camp had been. Before leaving, the army had also pulled down the tepees where the captives was held and put them to the torch. These was still burning. The dead bodies of eight hundred horses lay in the meadow, here and there a hoof still jerking. Owing to the cold, they had not yet gone ripe enough to attract the carrion-feeders, though I seen three coyotes lurking a half mile up the valley and a raven or two high in the cottonwoods. The raw wind of late afternoon lifted black fragments from the refuse pile on the riverbank.
Custer had also shot such dogs as didn’t run with the fleeing Indians, and them little bodies was strewn about amidst spent shells and arrows and the other litter. Considerable bl
ood had spattered upon snow and earth, and when in shadow it froze bright red, soaking in and browning only where in sunlight.
Of the several hundred souls that occupied the place of late, I alone stayed quick. I set down upon the cold bank of the Washita. Though the river had earlier known some blood, them red bursts and filaments never last long in a flowing stream but join the mix and move on, and someplace a thousand miles away a fellow will drink himself some water and unbeknownst imbibe a particle of somebody else’s juice of life. The sun was falling behind a blue ridge of smoke fringed with gold, like a sash hung across the western sky. You might have said that Custer flew his personal colors even on the horizon.
I wasn’t setting there in self-pity, mind you, nor anger. I was just trying to figure it out. Circumstances seemed to disintegrate upon me shortly after I had got settled in them. I was twenty-six years of age, yet as I could recall, this here was the first time I could ever locate the source of my troubles in one individual.
I would have lived in that camp on the Washita throughout the winter, and when the new grass come up in the spring we would have broken the treaty and moved north, got us buffalo and Pawnee en route, and maybe run one of them antelope surrounds again if Old Lodge Skins was up to it and if the railroad hadn’t scared away all the game, and so on up to the Powder River for some good fights with the Crow, and bear hunts and lodgepole-cutting in the Bighorn Mountains. All the while I’d have had them four women tending to my every little wish.
I seen General Custer as responsible for my loss. And I didn’t yet know how nor where I would do it, but I decided to kill that son of a bitch.
CHAPTER 19 To the Pacific and Back
WHAT BECOME OF SUNSHINE? If I couldn’t find her body she must have got away; probably waited till the cavalry had swept past the lodge, then slipped out and made it to the bluffs. She was a resourceful and resolute woman, and better than me at that sort of endeavor.
Little Big Man Page 33