by Bill Albert
Buffalo Bill got quiet for a minute or two and so did the rest of them.
“That don’t solve this one, Nate, does it?”
“But you can’t let a white boy stay with Indians,” said the doctor. “Surely not! What if someone was to find out?”
“Who’s going to find out?” asked the Major.
“Now hold on Doc,” said Bill, pushing himself onto his feet.
He came over and sat down next to me on the sofa, rested his hand on my knee.
“From what you told me. Doc, old Sunset Buffalo Dreamer saved this boy’s life. Ain’t that true?”
“Well, I suppose, yes, must have, his throat like it is, but that doesn’t mean . . .”
“Lot to be said for Indians raising kids, whole lot. Teach them respect for their elders, to hunt, to ride, to be a man. Indian kids don’t sass. The boy would do a whole lot worse off in one of them city places for orphans. What’s he going to learn there? Stealing most likely. Lying for sure. Cities ain’t no fit place for kids.”
“Will!” pleaded Nate Salsbury. “We ain’t running a nursery school, we’re trying to run a show. Moreover, you got more important things to think about right now. What about General Miles? Did you forget you’ve volunteered just about the whole damn show to go to Cuba! What about that? Don’t you think that’s enough trouble for us if Miles actually accepts? Let the Doc take the boy into the city and be finished with it. He’s not your responsibility.”
“Nate, I don’t want to ride back and forth on that Cuba thing again. You know I got no choice but to stand by America now when she really needs me! Standing tall by Old Glory!” he bellowed with patriotic passion.
“Yes, sir!” added the Major. “Got to think about Bill’s reputation here, Nate. What would people say if Buffalo Bill Cody didn’t volunteer? I mean, for most people Buffalo Bill Cody is America! No time more than now. Look how those Cubans pulled ‘em in in New York.”
“Sure, sure,” said Nate. “A hundred thousand dollars it’s going to cost too. Can we afford that?”
“Can’t not afford it!” snapped the Major.
“Suppose you want to ‘afford’ the boy here as well?” complained Nate.
The doctor bent and whispered something to Buffalo Bill.
“Yeah,” he said. “Right.”
He squeezed my knee again. All the touching was starting to make me edgy.
“Boy . . . Say I can’t keep calling you boy!” said Buffalo Bill. “What rightfully is your name?”
Newborn Buffalo Calf, I wrote.
“Please, son, we’re trying to help you,” said the doctor. “The Colonel’s time is too valuable for all this foolishness. Just you write your name down proper and stop wasting time.”
Newborn Buffalo Calf, I wrote and gave him a defiant stare.
Buffalo Bill laughed.
“If you weren’t so tender,” said the doctor angrily, his long hands working at his sides like big traps, “I’d take the strop to you!”
I started from the sofa, but Buffalo Bill held me down by the arm.
“Nobody’s taking a strop to nobody! Boy wants to be called Newborn Buffalo Calf, we’ll call him Newborn Buffalo Calf. No harm in that, is there. Doc? No, course there ain’t. Boy’s had a tough time, just like the Major said and he’s got a tougher time coming.”
I looked at him. He shifted his eyes away and came over unsure for the first time.
“Your throat, son . . . Buffalo Calf that is. The Doc, well the Doc didn’t think he should be the one to tell you. More for your folks to know first and then . . . But since there ain’t none, except of course the Chief, he thought as how I should explain it to you.”
I knew what he was going to say, but until it was actually said I had pushed the idea away because then it didn’t have to be true.
“What it is, is that the Doc reckons that your voice box is all busted up and well, he says how that after a time the pain will go but the voice, well that most likely won’t be coming back.”
And it never has. When the show reached Boston, Buffalo Bill sent me to see a famous surgeon at a hospital there. The famous surgeon took one look at me, shook his famous head and said I should be happy that I was alive. Sunset Buffalo Dreamer told me the same thing, but at least he tried to give me a little more to work with.
“A man must live his life, not another’s,” he told me. “A boy becomes a man only when he finds that truth.”
At that time I didn’t understand. I was just a frightened kid, sitting in Buffalo Bill’s tent, trying to hold the crying from my throat. I could feel the tears on my face and then a great bubble of a sob roared up from somewhere tearing at my throat. A moan escaped, then a splutter. I fought like crazy to stop the crying, but I couldn’t get enough air.
“Jesus and Mary! The boy’s choking!” shouted the Major. “Get some water!”
The doctor took hold of my head and told me to relax, which isn’t easy when someone’s trying to squeeze your ears together. Buffalo Bill put his arm around me and Major Burke managed to spill a glass of water over my pants.
“Courage, Newborn Buffalo Calf,” Buffalo Bill said, in a first-time quiet voice. “Sioux braves don’t cry. Your father. Sunset Buffalo Dreamer, when he was at the Sun Dance, he didn’t cry. No sir. Had those sharp wooden stakes pushed right through his chest muscles and then had to stay all day hanging at the end of ropes from the top of the Dance Lodge. Hanging and turning, until those stakes tore clean through and he could bust loose. He didn’t cry out the whole time. Not a sound, not a single tear. You think on that and have courage like him. You wanna be an Indian, then you gotta act like an Indian!”
Act like an Indian? Act like a Liebermann? Was that my choice?
What did crazy Indians and their stupid, dumb-ass games have to do with me? I didn’t want anyone sticking me with stakes or hanging me up. I took the pen and began to write “Meyer Liebermann,” but got only as far as “Me” when a man came rushing in to announce that a telegram had arrived from General Miles in Washington. Buffalo Bill leapt from the sofa and the others crowded around him. I was forgotten, and by the time anyone remembered that I was a problem that needed solving I’d managed to pull myself back from Meyer Liebermann to Newborn Buffalo Calf. I was caught in the flow yet again, but trying like the devil to swim my way to safety.
7
You might say I was one of the first to benefit from the war against Spain, although since that telegram headed me on the road West, a road which looks to coming to an actual dead end here in Boise, “benefit” is maybe not the word that best fits. I can only tell you that back then it looked pretty good.
In his telegram General Miles accepted Buffalo Bill’s offer to raise a cowboy cavalry to fight in Cuba and appointed the Colonel to his staff. Buffalo Bill’s face glowed as he read the telegram out loud. He pulled back his shoulders, regained his bark and began issuing commands like the war was going to start in five minutes. In the excitement of ordering horses to be rounded up, telegrams to be sent, transport to be arranged, Buffalo Bill crisply dispatched my case, as if it was part of the overall battle plan. I would stay with the show until the season finished.
“It’ll keep the Chief and the others happy and come October we’ll have another think on it. But,” he said, turning his warrior’s gaze full on me, “you’ve got no free ride here, boy! There’s a war on! You’re going to work! Everybody’s got to pull their weight! The only deadwood with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West is that damn stagecoach!”
The Major laughed loudly along with Buffalo Bill. The doctor smiled. Nate Salsbury looked like he’d heard that joke a few times before.
I was joyfully delirious at the thought of working with Buffalo Bill. He would teach me to shoot and ride, like he had with Johnnie Baker, the Cowboy Kid. He would show me all the tricks, pass on the special secrets known only to scouts of the pla
ins. I was going to be an official member of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show and Congress of Rough Riders of the World. I would dress myself in fringed buckskin, put on a white Stetson and shiny boots and ride into the arena on a high-prancing horse. Buffalo Bill and Buffalo Calf. It was perfect, because you don’t need to talk in order to shoot or ride. Unfortunately, you also don’t need to talk in order to serve coffee and clear away dishes.
In the mess tent there were ten long tables, each seating twenty or more people at their blue-painted benches. All of them had a coffee boy, except Table Number Seven—the Indians’ table. That is, it didn’t have a coffee boy until I got the job. Me, Meyer Liebermann, a common servant! And for Indians! After all I had been through. When would I have time to learn to ride and shoot?
“Ride and shoot?” said Ed Taylor. “What’s all this about ride and shoot? The Colonel didn’t say nothing about that to me. Coffee boy is what he said. Clear as day it were. You rest up a couple a three days and then you start in to work.”
Ed was Buffalo Bill’s tent guard, a huge slab-solid bear, with the disposition to go along with his looks. Ed was to see that I got properly settled.
I tried to explain that being a coffee boy was not what I had in mind. I wasn’t afraid of working, I wrote, but surely there was something more interesting I could do.
“Oh, I see,” growled Ed. “Of course, a clever little fellow like you don’t wanna be serving up no coffee to no Indians, do you? I guess we could always make you president of the show, that is if Colonel Cody wouldn’t mind moving over to make room. How would that suit you?”
I demanded to see Buffalo Bill again. I tried to make the writing as forceful as I could, inking up the letters full to bursting.
“You what?” he laughed, not at all good-naturedly. “You demand! You little pissant! Man’s got a show to run. Five hundred people to look after and a war coming at us full bore. Let me tell you something, you was damn lucky to get to see him at all, man as busy as he is. Demand! Might as well shit in your boots and pray for rain!”
I never did figure out what he meant by that. I also didn’t get to see Buffalo Bill.
Sunset Buffalo Dreamer was glad to have me back. Charlie told me it did a lot for the old man’s position. Not only a public apology from a white man but the return to him of his vision son.
That night the camp was packed up and moved and the next day we followed. I think it was to Bridgetown or Newark, but the show hit so many different places one after another and, except for my one trip to that Boston hospital, I never got any farther than the showgrounds, that everywhere looked pretty much the same. We were a tent city on the move, following the railroad tracks.
Indians in the Dimes call it the Iron Horse, and the sign for it is Fire Wagon, but Charlie had been educated.
“The railroad,” he said, as we rattled out of a siding onto the main line, “it brought the white man and it took the land. The railroad, it killed the buffalo. Now it carries us on its back like small children.”
When the last evening show was over the show tents were torn down and all the equipment; stagecoaches, show wagons, covered wagons, water tankers, buggies, electric light engines, field pieces, seats, and a whole heap of other stuff I couldn’t put a name to were loaded on the flatcars, horses and buffalos were herded up ramps into the slat-sided stock cars and all the other gear—canvas tents, canvas backdrops, saddles, harnesses, riggings, tent poles, costumes, rifles, and ammunition—was stowed in the dozens of baggage cars. Enormous laundry tubs, cannibal cooking pots, boxes of cups, plates, pots and pans, boxes of knives and forks and spoons, tables, benches, barber chairs, a forge, three anvils, a cooking range the size of a small wagon, all that and more, everything needed to feed, clean, and repair an army on the move, all of it had to be packed and stowed onto the cars. Sometimes the whole show traveled, other days the performers came separately. But no matter how we traveled or where we went our city would be rebuilt to the exact same design, laid out clean and neat. You could always find your way around. If you were in Omaha, Nebraska, or Oshkosh, Wisconsin, Ashtabula, Ohio, or Altoona, Pennsylvania you knew that the barber’s tent was always next door to the mess tent, the blacksmith’s was as near to the setting down point as they could get, the latrines were dug out back of the corrals, and the tipis set up due north of the main arena and always facing east to greet the rising sun. Behind the scenes the Wild West was anything but wild—more like a big clanking machine rolling its well-oiled way down the railroad tracks from town to town.
A few days later I officially became part of the machine when Ed turned me over to Mr. Martin, the Head Waiter, who turned me over to Mr. Walsh, the Assistant Head Waiter, who turned me over to Mike Furlong, the waiter in charge of Table Number Seven.
“Boy can’t talk,” Ed explained helpfully. “Hears real good though. Colonel himself took him on, but says you’re to treat him no different from the others. You mind Mr. Martin good, boy, and you’ll get along just fine.”
The message was passed with me down the line.
“Coffee boy?” Mike Furlong said with a thin gurgle of disbelief. “For the Indians?”
“That’s what the Colonel wants,” said Mr. Walsh. “That’s what the Colonel gets.”
“Yes sir, Mr. Walsh,” Mike Furlong said, his head bobbing up and down rapidly on a stalk-thin neck. “Won’t be no problems, Mr. Walsh, you bet. Take some of the load offa me it will. No problem at all.
“Will the Lord’s wonders never cease?” he exclaimed after Walsh had left. “You done this afore, child? No? Well, don’t worry on it none. Be easy to learn you all I know.”
That wasn’t difficult, for Mike Furlong was the worst waiter there ever was, no “probably” about it. What’s more, he knew it and it didn’t worry him.
“Why do you think they stuck me down here at ol’ Number Seven?” he cackled, a finger digging away at his left nostril. “Don’t get me wrong, I ain’t saying nothin against them Injuns, God’s own creatures that they are. Although they ain’t got much in the line of table manners. Eats with their hands mostly. Saves on the forks but ain’t nice to watch, specially for us gentlefolks.”
Mike Furlong winked at me and then giggled. Scrawny, completely bald and given to sudden and terrible bouts of religion, I reckon he wasn’t, as they say in Cripple Creek, playing with a full deck.
“Coffee boy. Sure, why not? Indians drink the stuff down like there’s no tomorrow. Gallons maybe. Like I said, easy as fallin down.”
That was something he did know about. While being a waiter didn’t come easy to Mike Furlong, falling down did. He never seemed to notice what his skinny legs were doing. He’d be picking at his nose or his ears and talking away as he did, mostly about Jesus or the Day of Judgment, and someone would call him, he’d turn and then over he’d go. Carrying trays wasn’t much better. The Indians got real expert at catching plates on the fly.
The peculiar thing was that not only were the Indians not fussed by his erratic behavior, the crashing plates—which is what they called him—and the sudden sermons, they actually liked him. More, they revered him like he was something special, which I guess you could say he was. When the caterers, Keen and Langan, had tried to fire him, the Indians sent a delegation along to Buffalo Bill to complain and Mike was kept on.
“Crashing Plates, he is touched by the hand of the Great Spirit,” Sunset Buffalo Dreamer told me. “Those with brains that whirl are sacred, good medicine for the Lakota.”
“Are you saved, child? Do you know our Lord? No? Neither do most of these heathens!” Mike shouted, gesturing at the forty or so Indians stuck well into their dinners. “But God’s Grace will find them just the same as it will find you, you wait and see if it don’t! One day the . . . Down there, child, more coffee, down at the end there! Hang onto your feathers now, Short Bull!”
You wouldn’t think that filling cups with coffee would wear
you down so, but it nearly killed me. The gray enamel pot held four quarts and must have weighed at least ten pounds. I know that doesn’t seem much, but lifting it over and over again made it feel like fifty pounds, more when you add the noise in the mess tent: a roar of hundreds of voices, the clank of hundreds of forks and knives against hundreds of plates, the clanging of hundreds of cups, the slurp of hundreds of mouths and grind of hundreds of sets of teeth working their way through each meal. And that was generally for two sittings. After a time the pot became so heavy I had to bend from the knees to lift the damn thing level with the table. Forty Indians drinking two or three cups of coffee meant filling the pot at least five or six times, especially since I wasn’t strong enough to carry one completely brimful. By the end of the first meal I was staggering, my arms and back aching like sin.
They’d raise up their tin cups and I’d have to shuffle along, lift and pour. No one, not even Sunset Buffalo Dreamer, ever said thank you. Back home in New York my mother always said thank you to the girl who served us. But then the Indians hadn’t had my mother’s advantages in life.
When they’d all finally filed out of the tent there were the dishes to clear away and carry off to the dishwashers, Joe and Jesse Jackson, the only Negroes with the show. They bossed us around pretty bad. That’s how low down the line we coffee boys were. After they finished washing them we had to stack the plates, cups, and cutlery in their boxes and when that was done there was the table to set for the next meal, or the coffee urns to clean or packing up for a move or picking up in the mess tent or one of a dozen other chores. It seemed that just about the time we got finished cleaning up they got us turned around ready for the next meal. Work was all there was. It filled out the spaces and dribbled into every crack.
I sent notes to Buffalo Bill begging him to see me, pleading with him to give me some other job to do, but I never had a reply. Like Ed Taylor said, he was probably too busy getting ready to fight the Spaniard and didn’t have time for my piddling problems. Hadn’t he let me stay on with the Show? Wasn’t that enough for any kid to hope for? Maybe he didn’t even get the notes. There were a lot of people standing between Buffalo Bill and the rest of the world.