Strongheart: The Lost Journals of May Dodd and Molly McGill

by Jim Fergus

  “Martha? Where are we?”

  “In a grand encampment of a thousand tipis—Lakota, Cheyenne, and Arapaho—on the banks of the Little Bighorn river. There has been a great battle here but we did not arrive until it was over. The tribes have prevailed, they’ve beaten the soldiers. The Cheyenne’s great nemesis, Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer, and his entire detachment of the Seventh Cavalry have been wiped out. There has been much dancing and celebrating of our victory, all night they danced. But now we are all busy packing our lodges, for the scouts report that more columns of soldiers are on the way.”

  “And how did we come to be here?” I asked.

  “Phemie and Pretty Nose rescued you, Molly. They brought you here. Don’t you remember?”

  “Phemie and Pretty Nose brought me here? They rescued me? From what? From whom?”

  “Why, from the soldiers who were taking you to the train in Medicine Bow station. Don’t you remember?”

  “Ah, yes, that I do remember … I remember that I escaped the soldiers, Martha.”

  “If you mean leaping from a cliff to certain death below as escape,” said Martha, “then yes, Molly, I suppose you almost escaped the soldiers in this way. However, your actual escape was effected by Phemie and Pretty Nose. They swept in and carried you off, just as you … almost leapt.”

  “Yes, I remember falling,” I said. “But I thought that was in a dream I was having, just now before I awoke. Where is Ann Hall?”

  “Lady Hall decided that she had had quite enough of this adventure,” Martha said, “and she left with the soldiers to take the train at Medicine Bow, the train that was meant to take you away from us. Hannah begged to return here to her husband, but Lady Hall insisted that she leave with her. You know how imperious the woman could be. Poor little Hannah never could withstand her force of character. It appeared that she was to resume her role as Lady Hall’s maidservant.”

  “Perhaps they will both be better off, Martha, resuming their former life across the sea, so far from this violent place. Certainly, the rest of the world has no idea what is happening here.”

  “Lady Hall gave me something for you, Molly,” she said, “the journal she was writing in, the one that Meggie began. And the box of what is left of the colored pencils they used.” Martha reached behind her, brought forth the ledger book, and handed it to me. “She said it would compromise her and Hannah if the soldiers took it, and that you would surely need it here more than she did in England. She wrote a letter to you at the end of her last entry. I hope you don’t mind, but I’m afraid that I took the liberty of reading it. And perhaps you, too, should read it now, as well as the last page of her final journal entry. Together they might help you to remember what happened.”

  I opened the ledger and did as Martha suggested, closing the book when I finished. “But this all poses more questions than it answers, Martha. I still don’t understand.”

  “I’m not sure that anyone involved fully understands.”

  “Is it true that witnesses to the event have different memories of it?”

  “Yes, Lady Hall was quite correct in that assessment. You, for instance, appear to have no memory of it, while Lady Hall seems to have seen some part of both your fall and the rescue. The soldiers, Gertie, and the rest of our group clearly saw you leap from the cliff. As Lady Hall writes in her last entry, there was great wailing and consternation about that.”

  “And you, Martha?” I asked. “What did you see?”

  “I saw quite vividly what Lady Hall described in her journal,” she answered, “though I was considerably farther away than she. I saw Phemie and Pretty Nose ride in at just the right instant, just as you had begun to fall from the cliff. It’s true that they seemed to have suddenly appeared there on the ridge. I feared that Phemie and her horse would themselves slip off the edge of the cliff, so close to it did they appear to be galloping. Phemie held out her arm, and as you began to fall you reached out and grabbed hold of it, and somehow, she managed to swing you onto her horse’s back. The three of you rode off, following the ridgeline into the distance. I watched you go. But none of the others appeared to see that.”

  “Then Ann is quite right, Martha,” I said, “it makes no sense. And where are the others now?”

  “Christian, Astrid, and I all returned here together, Molly.”

  “And the rest of our group are also here?”

  “Carolyn, Lulu, and Maria are here, as well. And, of course, Pretty Nose and Phemie.”

  “What about Susie and Meggie? Where are they? Are they alright?”

  Even before she spoke, I knew from Martha’s face that they were not alright.

  “Those girls did a strange, but courageous thing, Molly,” she said. “Before the attack upon the soldiers, they dressed in their full battle regalia, their faces painted fiercely, their red hair released and wild about their heads, as they always ride to war. Yet the one thing they were lacking when they led the Strongheart warriors in the charge was their weapons. They carried no pistols, no rifles, no bows and arrows, no knives, no lances, no clubs, not even their shields. They rode unarmed into battle against the soldiers, far in advance of the others, hollering the eerie song of the kingfisher, their animal protector.

  “All who witnessed the charge thought they were very brave, and that they were making this display in order to count coup and gain honors. But that wasn’t the reason, Molly. It was Carolyn who told me, for they came to her that morning to say good-bye. They told her they did not wish to kill any more soldiers, that the anger that had driven them since the loss of their babies had finally been exhausted. Without the cold spirit of vengeance that kept them going for so long, they felt they had nothing left to live for.

  “Meggie said to Carolyn,” Martha recounted, now assuming a voice so like the Kelly twins that it was chilling to hear: “‘So we’re just goin’ to ride at those boys, and scare the shite out of them one last time.’ And Susie, she said: ‘Aye, Carolyn, it’ll be the final charge of the fearsome Kelly twins, scourge of the Great Plains. And when they see us, those soldier boys’ll drop their guns, piss their pants, and run to the hills cryin’ like lost babies for their mamas.’ And Meggie, she said: ‘Right ya are, sister, and they’ll write about us in the history books, the mad Irish banshees from Chicago who took on Custer’s army single-handed, and with not a weapon between ’em.’

  “Can’t you just hear those girls, Molly?” Martha said of her uncanny performance, and I saw the tears flooding her eyes, as they were mine.

  “Some of the soldiers,” Martha continued after she had composed herself, “who must have heard the tales of the Kelly twins, did indeed drop their weapons and run, just like Susie said they would. But, of course, others held their ground and fired steadily upon them. Carolyn, who was watching the charge from a hillside above with some of the other women, heard Meggie and Susie laughing wildly as they rode in ahead of the others, bullets flying all around them, kicking up bursts of dust from the ground.

  “They seemed to ride right through the bullets for a time, and Carolyn watched as they nearly reached Custer’s men before both girls were almost simultaneously shot out of their saddles. They fell to the ground, Molly, crumpled and motionless. Their horses flared off and though both were wounded by bullets, they survived. Meggie’s and Susie’s bodies were recovered after the battle, while the old men and women went about the terrible business of scalping and mutilating the bodies of the soldiers, as is their way to ensure that our enemies go to Seano without certain body parts intact. The twins lie now atop a single burial scaffold, ending their life as they had begun it in the womb, and as they lived it after they were born, side by side forever.”

  “Strongheart women to the end, Martha,” I said. “I believe it was a kind of Christlike gesture on their part, sacrificing themselves as an example to teach the rest of us a lesson. Will you take me to their scaffold to pay my respects, and also show me the battlefield where they died?”

  “I
will take you to the scaffold, Molly,” she said, “but the battlefield is a ghastly scene. I will show you where it is, but I have not gone there myself, nor do I recommend that you do so. I am told that the old men and women outdid themselves in their rage against the soldiers, whose butchered remains still lie there, beginning now to fester and bloat in the sun.”

  “I’ll go alone, Martha, I don’t mind. I need to see it for myself.”

  “Meggie left something for you with Carolyn,” Martha said, “and Carolyn gave it to me to pass on to you.” She picked up what I recognized as Meggie’s beaded medicine bag and handed it to me.

  I rubbed the soft deerskin of the bag gently between my fingers. “That was sweet of her,” I said. “I will look at it later, but right now, I need to stand, I need to move, and I desperately need to pee. I’m so weak, Martha, can you help me up?”

  I rose unsteadily with her support. I felt like I’d been drugged and asleep for days, but as Martha led me to the Kelly girls’ burial scaffold, I began to regain my strength. It was a clear, warm day, and in the sunshine, I had the strange sensation of being reborn … It all came back to me in that moment … The soldiers had removed my leg shackles so that I could urinate, and they sent Gertie to guard me, though I could hardly run away from them. As there were no bushes or trees behind which I might have some privacy, we walked a fair distance away. I asked Gertie to turn around and face the soldiers while I went about my business.

  “You know, Molly, I seen plenty a’ gals pee,” Gertie said, “seen you do it, honey, lotsa times. But sure, I’ll turn around if that’s what you want, and you do what you need to do.” I think she knew what it was that I needed to do, for she honored my request and after she turned I kept walking. Because of the wind blowing, she couldn’t hear my footsteps, and I had reached the edge of the cliff before she turned around again.

  “That really what you want, honey?” Gertie called against the wind, and I saw that the soldier in charge of my escort was walking briskly toward us.

  “You tell him to go back, Gertie, or I’ll jump right now. I mean it.”

  “You let me handle this, Sergeant,” she called, holding up her hand. “I got it covered. She’s just takin’ a little air. I’ll have her back at the wagon in no time. You get on back to your men now. If ya scare her, she’s gonna jump. An’ Cap’n Bourke ain’t gonna be real happy if ya lose the prisoner that way.”

  “I know what yer thinkin’, Molly,” Gertie said. “But you don’t have to do this. As long as yer alive, there’s always a chance we can get ya outta this mess some other way.”

  “No there isn’t, Gertie,” I said. “There is no other way, you know that as well as I do. I’m not going back to Sing Sing, I’m not going to have my baby there and have it taken away from me right after birth, given to a wet nurse and strangers to raise, while I rot in silence for the rest of my life, wondering what became of her, or him. I already lost one child; if I have to lose another, it is coming with me.”

  That was when I saw Christian Goodman and the others ride in toward the soldiers, and shortly thereafter Ann Hall walked out toward us. She conferred for a moment with Gertie, then called to me, asking my permission to come closer. I told her she could approach within five paces, but I stopped her well before that, and told her that if she came any closer and tried to touch me, I would take her over the edge with me.

  Like Gertie, Ann tried to convince me not to jump, but I had been waiting for this opportunity since we departed for Medicine Bow station, and I knew that another like it would not come. Now I stood on the edge of the cliff, preparing myself. This was my recurring dream, being in this exact place. In my dream it always takes me a while to get my courage up to fall, but each time when I finally let go of the earth, I find that I can fly like a bird. I knew that my dream had brought me to this place, and that in this moment I was dreaming again. I heard a hawk scream overhead and I looked up to see it soaring high above. Ah, yes, Hawk has come to me, as he always does, as I knew he would, to teach me to fly. I raised my arms and let my body fall toward the abyss. “Good-bye, Ann,” I said.

  Yes, all that I remembered so clearly now as I walked in the sunshine, born again and regaining my strength, moving back and forth between my dream world and this one. Martha led me toward Meggie and Susie’s burial scaffold on a hillside. In the valley below, the entire encampment of Cheyenne, Lakota, and Arapaho stretched out at least a mile long and a half mile wide, a constant hum of noise rising as all were at work breaking down tipis, loading pack horses and travois, our own wounded upon some of them. High in the air, dozens of vultures circled, telling of the plenitude of carrion to feast upon in the hills around.

  Martha and I stood for a long while looking up at the scaffold, silently buried in our own thoughts, our own memories of those cheeky girls who had played such a large role in both our times here. The hides covering their bodies billowed gently in the prairie wind as if Meggie and Susie moved beneath them and might at any moment cast them aside, sit up, and announce the joke they had played on us. That would be just like those girls. But it did not happen. How courageous they were, both in life and death. Clearly, their characters had been hardened and honed growing up on the streets of Chicago, two little orphan girls who had only each other to depend upon, protecting themselves by assuming an armor of bold swagger and self-confidence that they carried into adulthood. Yet no armor, as I know personally, withstands the loss of one’s child; it falls away, leaving us naked, defenseless, and only our own death will release us finally from the agony. Although we had had our differences, I was grateful to have made peace with Meggie and Susie, to have become friends with them. Our shared experience as grieving mothers of murdered children became the foundation of a mutual respect and bond to one another. Now I could only hope that the twins, in their brave gesture, had finally found the peace they sought.

  “We cannot tarry here long, Molly,” Martha finally said. “The scouts have reported that the Army troops are advancing, and we must flee before their arrival. Believe me, you do not need to see the battlefield.”

  “But I must, Martha. I don’t know why, but I must. You show me where it is and I will be quick about it and meet you back at the tipi.”

  * * *

  Martha was right, I shouldn’t have gone to the battlefield at all, for the horror of the scene, and my own actions there, will stay with me forever. I still don’t know exactly what drove my need to witness it, but after she left me, I followed a long trail of scattered corpses up and down the hills. The Indians had removed their own dead, and those I came upon were white men, and a few Black men. They had all been stripped naked, some had been scalped, others had cut their own hair short, as if anticipating their fate, and thus avoiding a scalping. Some, though not all, had been mutilated, limbs and organs severed, eyes gouged out. The buzzards, emboldened, were descending and I surprised some that had already alighted upon their chosen meals. They looked up at me, raising their wings in a threatening gesture, issuing a low, guttural hissing sound to express their irritation at being interrupted. I was not afraid of the unholy creatures, and as I approached I waved my arms and hollered at them and they lifted off with heavy, whooshing wingbeats.

  The trail of the dead led me finally to the top of a hill, where at least several dozen dead soldiers lay together, most within a circle of dead horses roughly thirty feet in diameter, placed symmetrically enough to suggest that they had been killed by the desperate soldiers to serve as breastworks. A gang of vultures had descended upon both men and horses, and they, too, flushed at my screams. From one of the dead horses, I pulled the saddlebags free … taking perhaps a perverse trophy of my own. The soldier’s name was stenciled upon it: MILLER. No first name, no rank, and of course, I had no way of knowing which of the bodies, being feasted upon by the buzzards, belonged to this poor boy.

  Of these corpses, was it not sufficient punishment to have died this way, without being horribly mutilated as well? Skulls crushed wit
h stone clubs; arms, legs, and heads hacked off with knives; eyes gouged out; genitals cut off. I came across one boy whose severed penis had been stuffed in his mouth, all this the work of the women and old men of the tribe, who immediately after the battle entered the killing field with their clubs and knives to finish off the wounded soldiers and perform their gruesome surgeries. Here is the detritus of the glory of war. What is it about human nature that drives us to commit such atrocities? Is it not enough that we kill each other, must we also defile our enemies’ bodies? God help us …

  Shaken to my core by this scene of carnage, I walked to a hilltop upwind of the stench and opened the saddlebags that contained soldier Miller’s worldly possessions. There was a pouch of tobacco, and a box of wooden matches, several pairs of socks and undergarments, a pocketknife, a lock of brown hair tied with a red ribbon, and a faded photograph of a young woman, presumably his sweetheart back home, to whom the hair must have belonged. In the other saddlebag, there was a rabbit’s foot that boys carry for good luck … it had clearly failed him. There was also a leather-bound diary inside. I opened the cover and saw that there was an inscription inside written in a woman’s hand.

  My dearest son Josh,

  I began to weep when the Army conscription agent drove his wagon into our farmyard yesterday, and told us that you had been called up, and were being sent to fight in the Indian wars. I fought back my tears for I did not wish you to see me weak. I knew that I would have ample time to cry in private after you left us.