She did not answer.
“If you do not I will take you back to Drunken Bride. You can tell them you escaped. You could sell his farm, use the money for passage back to New Orleans.”
“What ’bout you?”
I hesitated. “I need to stay here,” I finally answered.
“Why?”
“You can go back and be white, Chloe. In fact you won’t be able to be anything but white. You’re his widow now, but I will always be a nigger. We could never be together out there.”
She was silent. Outside the sun began to set, and its light made the tipi walls glow pink.
“I have missed you,” I finally said.
She did not answer. The light changed to golden and then the sun dipped away.
“I should build the fire up.” I crawled away from her, and added tinder, and blew on the coals and lay on another buffalo chip. When I turned back she had taken off her dress, the same dress she had been wearing all this time, smeared with Joseph Wilson’s blood. She let it drop to the ground. “Throw it out,” she said, and I picked it up and pushed open the door flap and tossed it outside. I turned back to her. She lay down into the buffalo robes. “Ain’t you gonna love up on me?”
It had been eight years since I had been with Chloe, eight years since Master Wilson had shot me and I had gone bobbing down into the Mississippi River. Chloe was older now. I was older. I was no longer a field slave and she no longer a fancy. I pulled off my shirt and kicked off my moccasins and my leggings. I crawled under the buffalo robe with her. She tugged on the little noose hanging from the necklace at my throat. “You wear this all the time?”
“Yes.”
She lifted the button and rolled it between her fingers.
“It’s yours,” I said. “I found it when I was in the army, in Wilson’s room at Sweetmore.”
She shook her head. “You have my button?”
“Yes.”
“You have it all this time?”
“Yes.”
She let the button drop to my throat with a cool little thump. She wrapped her arms around me and traced her fingers across the scars on my back, and when I felt that touch, Chloe’s touch against my skin, I wept.
You tell me that I captured Mrs. Joseph Wilson in October of 1870. I suppose that I must agree with you on the date, if not the identity of the woman who climbed onto my horse with me. At that time I had no use for calendars, or clocks, or to mark years with numbers. I knew the year by what happened inside it. I knew the month by the weather and the moon. Just as I know now that it is Saturday morning, April 3, 1875, and that tonight, I will be buried somewhere beneath the prairie grasses.
Jack stirs in the next room. I see him moving papers about at his desk, pinning a wanted poster to the wall, idly eating a biscuit. By the jailhouse clock I see that I have five hours before my hanging. I reach up and touch Chloe’s button. Her life with me was not one of terrible servitude as you claim it to be. I want you to know this. Chloe wanted a home, and I gave it to her. I would have taken her anywhere else had she asked me to. She did not ask. She stayed. I see the clock hand move. I must keep writing. I must keep telling you what I know. If you do not hear it from me, you will never hear it.
FEATHER HORSE and Crawls Along noticed the bloody dress tossed outside our lodge that night. They picked it up and threw it on the midden and arrived the next morning at our tipi with a buckskin dress that had once fit Crawls Along. They shooed me outside and clothed Chloe. They gave her moccasins. They combed out the tangles in her hair. They chattered to her in a language she could not understand, and then they pulled back and admired her, made her turn in a circle, and brought her outside to show me her transformation.
Chloe had always been beautiful, no matter what her clothes; the simple dress of a slave in a showroom, the slightly better dress of a house slave, the plain farmwife’s dress I had captured her in, and now, this buckskin dress fringed at the bottom and tasseled across the breast. It was good leather, elk hide, cured and worked to suppleness by Crawls Along, and the dress draped across Chloe’s shoulders like something liquid. She smiled shyly at me, and then Feather Horse and Crawls Along shooed me away once more as they began to teach her how to break camp, for after that raid into Drunken Bride, we had best be on the move once more.
She was given a name. Nakuhakeetuh. It means Come in Sight. She was named for the way that she suddenly appeared to the other warriors on the back of my horse after the raid. They had not seen her walk to me. She had come in sight to them, just as she had to me, wondrously, mysteriously, and miraculously.
Every day back then was a miracle. My heart opened. It opened wider than I ever knew possible. No matter where we went, Chloe was with me. Nakuhakeetuh shared my bed, rode one of my horses when we moved, dipped water down by a stream and brought it to our lodge, learned the ways of cooking and camp. I cannot tell you the pride I felt in her, for she adapted. She did not cleave to her former life, or any fantasy of another life, in another place. If she looked to the east, it was not to civilization, but to the sunrise.
It was not easy for her. I know this. I, too, had had to learn the ways of the people, learn the language, and learn the culture. How she must have loved me to do this. To stay. To patiently, day after day untangle Feather Horse’s and Crawls Along’s words to her. I translated some, but I could not be there as the women did their work each day. I could not tell her the proper angle to hold a hide-scraping tool, how many hot rocks it took to drop into a leather pouch in order to warm a stew, or how to put up and take down the tipi single-handedly. I was grateful for Feather Horse’s and Crawls Along’s gentleness, for they did not box Chloe’s ears or otherwise hurt her in order to make their points. The band did not treat her, ever, as a captive. She was treated as my woman, the woman of Feather Horse’s vision. “White,” the people said of her.
“No,” I told them. “She is not white.”
“You have gone blind,” Beetle once said to me. “Nakuhakeetuh is white.”
In our lodge we spoke our common language, until one night Nakuhakeetuh said to me, “Tuhkuh.” Eat. She handed me a stick with which to spear the chunks of meat in the stew. “Tuhkuh,” she said again.
I did not move.
She prodded the sharpened stick toward me and said in English, “What wrong with you?” And in Comanche, “Tuhkuh.”
“You are speaking the language,” I said in English.
She stopped motioning with the stick. She stood by the kettle and looked at me, and then at our lodge. She looked back at me and smiled. “Tuhkuh,” she said again.
Every day more and more of the language slipped into her, until one night we were making love and she whispered my name in a heat of passion. Kweepoonaduh Tuhmoo. Kweepoonaduh Tuhmoo.
It makes me cry now to remember it.
Her life was not easy. I know this. Chloe worked hard. She scraped hides. She cooked. She sewed. She kept the fire. She cut the tahseewo meat into thin strips and draped them to dry over the scaffolding that she had built. Every time we moved the village she took the tipi down and put it back up again so that it opened to the east. She arranged the interior just as it was supposed to be.
I will not lie to you, for I have no reason. If Chloe were still alive, I would not be writing this. Instead I would tell you everything you long to hear. I would confess to you that, yes, she was my captive, and yes, she was my slave, and yes, I abused her terribly. I would do my best to make her white again, in the hope that being white would lead her to an easier life. But I haven’t any reason to humor you. For the first time in Chloe’s life she was no one’s slave.
Chloe told Feather Horse and Crawls Along that she was not white. She told them that she had belonged to Master Wilson, and that at the time of her capture, she was posing as his wife. I do not know if Feather Horse and Crawls Along are still alive, but if they are, they are living on agency land. Perhaps you can find them and ask. They will tell you that what I say is true. Nakuhakeetuh
told them the same story I am telling you now.
“Why would you do this thing?” Feather Horse had asked.
Chloe told me that she could not explain. She had answered it was a trick.
“A trick on who?” Crawls Along said.
Chloe could not answer this either.
“You were only doing what you thought might make your life more bearable,” I told her.
In Comanche, Nakuhakeetuh said, “Joseph was not fooled. He knew I hated him. Every day he knew this. He owned me worse then than he had ever owned me before. I think he liked it that way.”
“Puh sooah-tsoomyee,” I said. He is dead.
His scalp dried nicely, by the way. His hair flowed pretty on my shield. I thought you might like to know that a part of him became useful after his death.
The first time I told Chloe that I must go out on a raid, she did not cling to me. She did not cry or beg me to stay. She had observed the other women sending their men off on raids, smiling, holding up their children for one last kiss before the warriors spun their horses and rode off toward the settlements in the east.
“You must go,” Chloe said to me. “Make me proud.”
It was early spring. We rode a long ways, all the way into the Hill Country, where the white settlements were, and we took many horses, and no captives, and killed, I remember, three men and one woman, and burned houses. I took no scalps on this raid. One of our party, Beetle’s brother named Poehoevee, Sweet Sage, was killed, blasted in the face by a woman with a shotgun. Beetle stabbed her and scalped her, and we loaded Poehoevee’s body onto the rump of one of the horses and began our ride home.
The village was gone when we returned. Signs had been left to tell us where they had moved and we found them easily enough, but the moving of the village during my absence had frightened Chloe. Feather Horse and Crawls Along explained to her that we would know how to find them. Still, she worried, and when we rode in Chloe forgot to make the welcoming yips the women made to announce returning warriors. She ran to me, and I slid off my horse and we were in each other’s arms.
But the welcoming yips of the women turned to wailing as Poehoevee’s body was discovered. His first wife ran to him slumped across the rump of the horse and she threw herself onto him, and then his second and third wives joined her, and then his sister, his aunts, his mother.
That night these women traveled to a lonely rise and wailed and gashed their arms and breasts. There is no other sound like a Comanche woman in grief. It is a sound that insists on being heard, like the call of a wolf. In our lodge with the fire guttering at its center, Chloe pulled away from me. “What that?” she asked in English.
I told her.
“They cuttin’ theyselves?”
“Yes.”
“Cain’t you make ’em stop?”
“No.” I reached for her again. I kissed her neck and moved my lips down to her breasts. The wailing of Poehoevee’s women filled the air.
“How many nights they gonna do this?” Chloe asked.
I stopped kissing her. “I don’t know,” I answered. “I don’t know what makes them stop. Forget this. We’re together. I am home, safe.”
She pushed her hands against my chest. “Naw,” she said, and she rolled over, facing away from me, and pulled the buffalo robe around her.
I pressed my body into her back. I pressed my erection into the fleshy cheeks of her buttocks.
“Don’t make me,” she whispered in Comanche. “Please, Kweepoonaduh Tuhmoo. Don’t make me.”
I loosened my hold on her. I moved my body, my erection away from her skin. “I would never do that,” I said. “I would never make you.”
She rolled over and wrapped her arms around me. “I wish they would stop.”
“Here.” I pulled the robe over her head and pressed my hands against her ears. “Don’t listen.”
We moved the village a few days later. I was among a party of scouts that saw soldiers riding through the plains. We stayed out of sight and passed a spyglass around to look at them. The man who was leading the way had stubs for fingers on one of his hands, and he impatiently snapped them in the air as the soldiers rode forward, looking for Indians.
I had heard of this man. Bad Hand, we called him. You will know him as Colonel Randal MacKenzie.
The troops he led were Negroes. Thin Knife asked me if I wished to join them, and I said no.
“You say Nakuhakeetuh is not white. You could take your wife and go and be with your people,” he said.
“I am with my people now,” I answered.
“It would perhaps be an easier life for you.”
“Why do you say this? It would not be easier. Nakuhakeetuh is white in the minds of the whites. She would be taken away from me.”
Thin Knife raised the spyglass and looked again at the soldiers. “Do you know any of them?” He passed the glass to me.
I looked. I did not recognize anyone. I returned the spyglass to him. “I hope not,” I answered.
“Will you fight them if you have to?”
“Of course.”
He looked at me and raised the spyglass again, and then we began backing our way out of our hiding place. The soldiers did not find us. We did what we were best at. We melted into the plains. We vanished. I have never found out if Henry or Sup or any of my other friends at Sweetmore, or even my own father, were among the soldiers in search of us. I did not want to know then, and I do not want to know now.
I wish this story were different. I wish I could write about many years in which Chloe and I were together without the pursuit of soldiers, many years together in which our story was only our story, and not a part of the larger fabric of history. But our time together without the outside world pressing into us was brief, and there are things I must write about that defined our life together, things I participated in, and things I had nothing to do with.
I had been with the tribe for three years, and Chloe not quite a year when we heard of a raid made against a wagon train at a place you call Salt Creek. White men were killed, so you labeled it a massacre. Three men were arrested at the agency. I knew them all. Satanta, Satank, and Big Tree. They were good men.
You held a trial that summer. The month before, Satank had been killed trying to escape, but Big Tree and Satanta were sentenced to hang, and this made us angry. We vowed to get our revenge on the whites, for not only were you killing two of our leaders, but also you were planning to slice our country in half with your railroads. Besides that, there were just too damn many of you, and you kept on coming.
We were sick of you that summer, sick of your arrogance, sick of your farms and sheep and cattle. Even the agency Indians were mad enough to leave that place and come back to the plains, back to the old ways. It made my heart glad to see our numbers swell, our herds multiply, and our villages stretch for more miles along a river.
But it was hard on Chloe. She had not been with the tribe long enough to feel secure with us, and just when she had begun to know the people in our band, other bands arrived to join us. Besides this, the men left often that summer. We went on many raids. We killed many white people. I frequently left Chloe to ride to the settlements with Thin Knife. When I was gone she stayed with Feather Horse and Crawls Along and the children. She did not feel safe alone in our tipi. She was still considered white, and there was much hatred of whites that summer. She feared, as did I, that someone from another band might hurt her.
But it was not long before this chapter was over and another begun. We heard that the governor, fearing that we would kill many more whites if the execution was carried through, had reduced Satanta’s and Big Tree’s sentences. Instead of hanging, they were sent to a prison. This subdued the agency Indians, and most of them drifted back there. Our numbers shrank again, and we were back to smaller raiding parties, and fewer scalps.
Chloe had seen, though, what she had stepped into. She had seen the scalps on my shield. She had seen the dances and heard the drumming. She was living and
traveling with warriors. If she knew that she had stepped into the losing side, she did not express this to me. She welcomed me home every time. She accepted what little gifts I brought to her from the white world. A woman’s hairbrush, a hand mirror, a reel of ribbon not unlike the strip of ribbon I had given her at Sweetmore. This last she sewed into a shirt for me, so that the ribbons billowed when I rode my horse across the plains.
We were all over that land. Our hearts knew it in a way your hearts never will. The older warriors could sit down with the younger ones and tell them how to reach a place they had never been. They could draw a map in the dirt and show the young braves rivers and rocks and valleys and canyons. Show them where to find the hidden water holes. Tell them how long the ride between waters. The land to us was more than land, more than something we skimmed across on our way to other land. The land, the sky, the rivers, the buffalo, these were our companions.
I close my eyes sometimes. I sit still and do not write. I think of how it was to step outside my tipi and see the moonlight sparkle in a rippling river. I think of the walls of Palo Duro Canyon rising up above our village. I think of the collective breath cloud of a herd of buffalo along the prairie’s horizon. And then she comes to me. She comes in sight, my Chloe, my Nakuhakeetuh, sitting across from me in our lodge while the fire makes its talk and its light. She is sewing and, with her teeth, she pulls a thin piece of sinew from a strand to use as thread. She looks up at me. I have been reading a book taken on a raid. She looks down to thread her needle, and smiles. “I am to have a child,” she says.
A month ago, here in Drunken Bride, a soldier came to visit me in my cell. He showed me a picture of a white girl about eight years old. “She was with a band that turned themselves in,” the soldier said. “She doesn’t recall where she was captured. She doesn’t recall her name, or even her language. We are trying to find her people.”
I reached through the bars and took the photograph from him. I recognized the child.
“We caught her with her brother,” I said. “The boy was traded to the Apaches. I do not know what became of him. Their mother is dead.”
The Life and Times of Persimmon Wilson Page 28