She beseeched him with dazzling blue eyes. “I cannot live without you. There was once a time when I walked ahead of my man. This I now regret. I wish to be your wife the Yankton way.”
“It is not a good thing.”
Again she held up her arms, imploring him to join her on the hide bed. “We could live at the edge of the white settlement somewhere. When it was needed I could walk into the town. When it was needed you could walk out upon the prairie. We could be free each in our own way.”
“Woman, would you laugh and sing all day with people who are takers while I smoked and danced all day with people who are givers, and then expect us to be happy lovers at night?”
She let her arms fall. “But my husband, you have stolen my heart. What am I to do? I shall kill myself if I cannot live with you.”
“The white man makes his poor work for him. The poor must give him much gold to live in the houses he owns. That is not the way of the red man. When the red man returns from a raid with many horses, he gives them away and keeps only the poorest for himself. The more he gives away, the greater he becomes.”
“Well, has not my white sister, the Good Book Woman, often said to the red man, ‘God loveth the cheerful giver’?”
He flashed her a smug, slitted look. “It can be said that the Good Book Woman and her husband learned much from the Dakota gods. It was because of this that a white swan was given to Sunned Hair.”
Judith gave him a look of love with all her soul. “Come, my scarlet lover, let us lie yet once again in the arms of rapture.”
He gave her a further penetrating look. “My heart does not run with white blood. Nor does your heart run with red blood. The two can never beat as one.”
Her eyes flashed a high blue. “Yet when the red man thinks of death, does he not see a white ghost? And when the white man thinks of death, does he not see a dark-skinned spirit? Is this not a like strangeness?”
He looked down at her with grave indulgence. “This Yankton brave has taken the morning bath. Has Sunned Hair?”
“Let us have children together. In their veins will run a blood as pink as the prairie rose.”
A look of contempt wrinkled his high nose. “Half-breeds! Ha! Are they not always children who are cut off from both the white man and the red man? Do they not run about in both camps with dropped heads like beaten dogs, neither wolf nor man? Half-breeds! Are they not always hungry? So that if they wish to eat they must devour their own babies?”
“Then let us start a new nation in this place. We will make Lost Timber our village and live here until the whites begin to surround us, and then if we must we will look for yet another Lost Timber somewhere farther west.”
“It is not a good thing.”
“I want your babies. Come and lie beside me.”
“It is a bad thing.”
“But, my husband—”
He broke in roughly. “The horses wait. Take the bath!”
“Husband.”
He plumped down before the fire. He stirred up the embers and added some fuel. He got out his red gossip pipe and had himself a stoic’s smoke.
Finally, sighing, she got up and went down to the pool and took the morning bath.
Naked, cleansed pink, she re-entered their vine lodge. Her hair hung loose about her face in light-gold showers. She made herself appear more modest than usual to draw his eye.
He sat smoking his gossip pipe and did not look up.
She saw that while she had been gone he had quickly packed up their possessions in two big parfleches. Her heart sank. She had lost. He really meant it. They were going. He would never touch her again.
He held up his pipe as if to some invisible person. “Here, ghost, take a smoke and give us a good day. Let the road be straight, the waters smooth, and the sky clear.” Then he clapped out his pipe in the palm of his brown hand, threw the curd of tobacco in the embers, and stood up.
Still naked, she held out her arms to him in a last appeal. “Let us k-isss. Was it not always sha before?”
He stared past her.
She embraced him. She rubbed her belly against him. Her naked skin made a sucking sound on his buckskin shirt. She caressed his hard bronze cheek with her pink cheek, lightly, brushingly.
He stood neither stiff nor melting. “The horses wait. Put on your clothes.”
“My husband, let us sit yet for a little time by our fire while you tell me about the old times when the Yanktons were a great people. I wish to know.”
“If one tells stories of the old days, snakes will appear in one’s bed at night.”
“Do you not love your wakan wife?”
He stared straight ahead. “Sometimes when a Yankton speaks of the whites as wakan he also thinks to himself that they are the no-good ones.”
“Have I become your enemy?”
“You are a woman from the other side and I have done my people great wrong in lying beside you skin to skin. You stole my heart and I could not stop myself. Also, I have gone against the vision. There is nothing but blackness ahead for my people. There is also nothing but blackness ahead for me. It is now fated. I hasten to that place where the blackness dwells. I have said.”
“My husband.”
He continued to stare ahead with an iron gravity.
She was afraid he would fall into one of his Indian melancholies again. She cried. She too saw nothing ahead but blackness. Both were doomed.
He saw her tears. Yet he took her by the shoulders, and gently, with infinite consideration, turned her about. He picked up her tunic and gestured for her to put it on. “First we go to visit Skywater to see if any of the whites are yet alive. If we find them we will return them to the white cities also.” He coughed delicately. “Perhaps Sunned Hair may wish to weep at the grave of her daughter.”
Cold closed over Judith’s heart.
He picked up their parfleches, threw them over his shoulder, and carried them outside.
She dressed. When she stepped outside she found him already mounted on the red horse, Old Paint.
He sat easily, parfleches neatly balanced in front of him across the horse’s neck. Besides the natural blaze over his nose, Old Paint also had a series of white circles painted across his belly and over his rump. The horse’s black mane and tail had been decked out with small blue feathers.
Scarlet Plume held Buckskin Belly by his rope. The gray horse stood alongside their sitting stone. Buckskin Belly too had been painted with wakan circles, though with red paint, not white, in vivid contrast to his gray hair. Yellow feathers fluttered in his tail and mane.
Sighing, forlorn, Judith lifted her tunic to her hips and climbed aboard the gray. She sat as a man would, legs astride. The stiff hair on the horse’s spine tickled her. She thought it a bitter thing that she should be holding a horse between her bare legs instead of the man she loved, and that that horse should be carrying her back to white captivity.
Scarlet Plume turned his horse about and led the way. He did not once glance back at their love lodge in the wild vines. It was done.
They rode up the bed of the ravine. There were green glades under the barren trees, all the way to the top of the hills. The morning sun shone brilliantly through the brown arms of the oaks. Light seemed to concentrate in dancing halos above the springs. Tree leaves rustled underfoot. The horses plodded along sedately. She guessed the horses had once belonged to some outpost pioneer, now killed.
Near the head of the ravine she spotted what at first she took to be a single wind-tortured wild mulberry. But coming closer, she saw that it was two mulberries, the one white and the other red, twined through each other in mortal embrace. It reminded her of two huge bull snakes wrestling. They lay sprawled over and around a granite boulder.
When they reached the plateau above, she looked back a final time at their love lodge in the ravine. She cried. Slowly her eyes swelled red with grief.
Scarlet Plume rode in front, heading into the northeast. His eyes kept working the grass
in front of the horse for sign, then the filmy horizon ahead.
Judith was struck by how much Scarlet Plume’s flowing hair resembled his horse’s trailing tail, black; how his cheeks were exactly the color of his horse’s coat, red-bronze. The man and the horse were one.
Her gray hurried to keep up. Her gray was so fat and wide across the middle that sitting astraddle made her thighbones ache in her hips. The stiff hair on the horse’s spine continued to tickle the bare insides of her legs.
They rode into a wind. It lifted the black manes and tails of the horses. It lifted Scarlet Plume’s loose black hair and her loose sunned hair. They rode on, silent.
A whimsy chased through Judith’s mind. Both horses had black manes and black tails. It meant that, though one was a bay and the other a gray, far back they were related. She wished her hair were black. Then she could claim that, though their skins were different, she and Scarlet Plume at least had the same hair and probably far back were also related.
Scarlet Plume pushed the horses. Sometimes he lightly whipped his horse with an ash switch. He rode urgently. He was in a hurry to get it over with. He was a wolf on a horse.
The sun mounted behind them. The day opened. The sky became a coneflower with drooping blue rays and a bronzy head. The green wind from the north brushed their cheeks. The air was so thin it opened the nose and made the brain giddy.
Many rains that fall had given the plains the look of spring. Swollen streams gurgled on all sides. Scarlet Plume steered a route along the higher contours to avoid the soppy swales. Waving grass shaded off imperceptibly into lapping ponds.
A whitewing blackbird lived cheerfully in the midst of a flock of late redwings. One meadow was completely taken over by yellowhead blackbirds. The yellowheads sang short autumn songs, then lifted up and flew south.
As she jogged along, Judith thought to herself, “Well, I’ve at last had my honeymoon. And in Indian summer too.” She held the leather reins lightly in her hand. Her gray horse followed the bay ahead as if tied to its tail. “A honeymoon in Indian summer. A warm spell between the first frost and winter freeze-up.”
Late in the day they came upon a stream two jumps wide. It ran northeast. A swatch of willows bristled along a turn. They watered their horses. They got down and had themselves a drink. Then, after a leisurely groaning stretch, they rode on. They crested a light rise. Before them spread the tree-fringed shores of Skywater.
Judith steeled herself against what they might find.
The first pile of ashes marked the Utterback homestead. Bits of fine white down from an Utterback featherbed still lay scattered through the deep grass, reminding Judith of the first traces of winter snow. The burned-off Utterback stubble field had come back some with the glittering green of fall grass.
Next came the ashes of Crydenwise’s sod shanty. The skeleton of the wolf that Crydenwise had skinned alive still hung on its crude cross. The Sioux had not touched it for reasons of their own.
Over the next rise lay traces of Theodosia’s cabin.
Scarlet Plume halted. He looked sternly around. His black eyes glittered in memory.
Judith forced herself to look down. She saw gray ashes faintly tinged with yellow. They were sodden and compressed from many heavy rains. A piece of curled-up paper hung caught in the silent lilacs. A ripped book lay open in the grass, its hieroglyphic ecstasy leached away by the weather. The ripped book reminded her of a gutted chicken. A single hollyhock, stunted by the fire, also frost-touched, nodded stiffly at the edge of where the cabin had once stood. The climbing sweet peas and the wooden fence on which they had grown were completely gone. The vegetable-and-flower garden could just barely be made out. It was overgrown with new, rough grass. The little paths leading away in various directions were filled with thick crabgrass. Even the black scars of the fire on the ground had already vanished under a new, virulent green. Another summer’s growing and the gray ashes of the cabin would also be obliterated with healing rings of grass. In two years there would be no mark or record whatever that this had once been a white man’s outpost in virgin wilderness.
It flashed through her mind that there would be many such lost places. With no regular mail route, or neighbors to leave the gossip with, cut off for a time while they dug in, many and many a first settler had no doubt vanished forever from all knowledge of men during the terrible uprising. Kith and kin back east would wonder about them in vain. They had just simply disappeared. A couple hundred years from now, some plow might turn up a rusted bit of iron. The stranger behind the plow would stop the horses and stoop to pick up the bit of iron. He would wonder over it, fumble it around in his hand, make a guess as to what it might have been, part of a flatiron or a hinge, shake his head, toss it up and down a few times, then let it drop in the furrow again, pass on, and on the next round cover it forever.
Judith abruptly turned her horse about and headed for Slaughter Slough. Now that she had come that far she had to know.
Scarlet Plume rode behind her.
She came upon a flattened place in the gray-green slough. In the middle of it lay a skeleton. She reined in her horse. The spot was about where her brother-in-law Claude had been murdered. Yes. It was he, all right. There lay his shot-shredded skull. Judith could still see her sister Theodosia stroking his bald nose, lightly, tenderly, after the killing, still see her kissing his closed eyes, each in turn, and his cold, fallen lips.
Looking closer, Judith saw that hundreds of little sticks had been thrust into the turf next to the skull. Indians who had known Claude had visited his grave and each had shown his respect by leaving behind a little marker.
She slid to the ground. She brushed horse hair from between her legs. She knelt a moment beside the skeleton. She thought, “Dear Claude, I was not always sympathetic to everything you stood for. But you were a noble man. Forgive me.”
She looked up at where Scarlet Plume still sat dark on his red horse. “Can we not at least bury his bones?”
“Mad Bear’s people took the white man’s digging stick with them.”
“Can we not find a fresh badger hole somewhere in which to place the remains?”
Scarlet Plume slid off his horse. “I have a knife. Perhaps a little hole can be dug under the thick grass.”
The horses, released, slowly grazed off by themselves. They cropped hungrily, tearing off grass by the mouthful.
Scarlet Plume cut squares in the turf and pried them up. He placed the webbed squares neatly to one side. Then he dug into the sour black humus until he had a hole the size of a laundry basket. He stepped back.
Gray-eyed, Judith picked up the bones in pairs and placed them in the hole. She set the skull carefully at the head. The bones were chalk dry. Certain of the softer joints seemed to have been gnawed down by wolves. A tear ran down one side of her nose. Another tear let go of her eyelash and dropped dead center through the grinning mouth of the skull. She stood up and brushed off her knees and hands. She stood back, a hand to her bosom.
Scarlet Plume threw the dirt back in, then carefully replaced the squares of turf and stomped them down firm and tight.
Evening stole up around them. It seemed to come in on the green wind. The fringes along the hem of Judith’s tunic fluttered lightly against her legs.
Scarlet Plume stood very still. He seemed to be waiting for her to find something else.
The knowledge of what it was he wanted her to see next came to her just as her eyes spotted it: a scaffold burial. A woven willow platform supported by four slender posts. On a slight rise in the land.
On the platform lay a slim body wrapped in leather. From the top of one of the posts hung the shreds of what was left of a green silk dress. It was the soft whispering of the green silk in the wind which really told her what it was. Angela.
Judith took several steps toward the scaffold, then stopped short. With a great effort of will she held herself tight together. Her gold brows almost touched over the bridge of her nose. Her blue eyes took on the
glint of gun metal. “Who did this thing?”
“Bullhead took her scalp.”
Judith almost toppled over. “Yes, yes. I know that. I did not mean that. I meant, who buried her in this manner? Who gave you that right?”
“There was no digging stick.” Scarlet Plume spoke with some reluctance. “With a knife one could not dig deep enough to hide the flesh from the wolves.”
“So that’s what you meant when you told the Good Book Woman that you buried the child in the proper manner.”
“Does Sunned Hair scorn the Dakota manner?”
Judith blanched so white she could feel it draw at her face. “I wish to know.”
His self-control broke. In the expression around his eyes and at the roots of his nose there was the suggestion that he had willingly let it break. Reverently he stepped across the grass until he stood under the scaffold. He knelt. He lifted his face to the skies and of a sudden filled the evening air with an awful, eerie Dakota lamentation. Echoing howls returned from the groves along the lake.
Judith stood behind him. His behavior stunned her. Real tears were streaming down his coppery cheeks. Real grief corrugated his face. He meant it. Yet there was also in it the beat of an old ritual.
Her hand came to her throat. A cold fury seized her. She resented his wailing. It was her grief, not his. Only that morning he had told her that his heart did not run with white blood. What did he mean now by falling to his knees at Angela’s bier before she herself did? He had stolen her grief.
Yet it was not in her to order him off.
She let him cry until her shadow reached him from where she stood. Then she said, quietly, speech clipped, “Is it not also the Dakota custom to remove the bones from the scaffold when the wind and sun have done with them?”
Scarlet Plume cried yet a short time, then abruptly cut it off. He let his face resolve again into an expression of stoic hauteur. He got to his feet. “Is it your wish?”
“It is.”
“Where does Sunned Hair wish to place the bones?”
She turned to gaze across endless stretches of prairie. She thought it a bitter thing that the evening breeze should have on it a penetrating smell not unlike boar semen. She turned to look back at the lake behind them. At last she said, “Let us bury her under the ashes of the Good Book Woman’s cabin. It is my wish. Will you gather up the bones?”
Scarlet Plume, Second Edition Page 34