by Win Blevins
No one in the family spoke about the killings. Maybe they would when she was accepted, truly accepted.
It is touching to see the easy closeness of mother and son. They do not talk much, but they sit close together often, touch each other frequently, and especially seem to have a rich communication of looks. The juggler says his mother talks just enough: she has the gift of knowing when to add word to something and when to let it be.
I will be fascinated to see how he conducts himself with his real mother, Annemarie Maclean. She is still in Montana Territory, running the family trading post, and he has not seen her in thirteen years, but she is literate, and they correspond. She is also a mixed blood, French-Canadian and Assininboin, Cheyenne by adoption.
Back to our feast. We are splurging, using up most of our food in one grand gesture. The splurge is wonderful for us, all of us. Of course, we are skinny, even emaciated. Many of us have been ill. The principal good feasting does, though, is not for our bodies but our spirits. Buffalo! The good times back again!
I, of course, cannot bear to eat only buffalo—not after you have educated me to the loveliness of your vegetarian way. My bread and beans and canned peaches are grace notes to a primitive menu. I am very fond of canned peaches, but wish desperately that we could get fresh fruits and vegetables.
Another stick of bannack was cooked. She set it aside on a cloth, and started more.
She picked up one hot twist of bannack and hurried toward Adam, shifting it from hand to hand. How strange—her body felt queer, legs wavy and stomach roily. The twist of bannack burned her fingers. She instructed herself to keep her foolish mind on the here and now.
“It’s hot!” she said to Adam urgently. She sat down by him and put her arm through his as he ate. The twist didn’t seem too hot for him at all. She supposed that being without the staff of life his first twenty years made him appreciate it that much more. How odd, to be without bread.
She put her head on his shoulder. She would suggest that they take their blankets away from the others tonight and make love for the second time in their married life. On the rough ground. She knew he wanted that, and it was past time. The Brahmin must become a trollop.
She squeezed his arm. “Go tell people the beans are ready,” she whispered. He nodded and jumped up, mouth full of hot bread.
Watching him go, she wondered if she would act like a Brahmin if the soldiers did in fact fight—faint dead away at the first sound of fire. Or worse, she might vomit or her bowels explode. She was grateful that her husband was firm about her staying well back with the other women. She was afraid, not so much of getting hurt as humiliating herself with her daintiness.
She looked at Adam, spreading the word at a fire twenty steps off. He seemed light, cheerful, and big enough to endure anything. She felt a pang for him. She thought of him once more, sitting down stumped, not knowing what he wanted to do, juggling his ivory balls for half an hour, and coming up with marriage. A fascinating and lovable man, Adam Smith Maclean.
Adam and I are making the feast even more special with a gesture that is privately important to us: we are giving away what food we brought—beans, flour, and a few cans of vegetables. We’ve invited all the people to share in our few luxuries, and any food is a luxury. I proposed the idea, and my dear husband understood immediately and touched his lips to my forehead in a grave way that gave me a pang.
She got up, sighed loudly, twisted the last stick of bannack, and put it on the fire.
When we have given away our last food, we will have no advantage over the other Cheyennes. We will be not only among the people but of them.
This is not so much of a hardship as you might think. The men bring in game every day, and the people always have something to eat—more, in fact, than they had at the agency, where they were forced to depend on the government for rations. If it is still not quite enough, our spirits will be uplifted to be hungry with the people.
Through this gesture we hope to gain something intangible but immense: until now the people have treated us—Adam too—as someone special, someone apart. The reason for this deference was only in part respect for our positions as doctor and teacher. It was more an acknowledgment that we could ride away freely from the people’s dilemma, and no one else could. Anywhere we wanted to ride, we would be left alone by the whites. If we went to the Powder River country, we could stay. We could ride into one of the forts sending soldiers against the Cheyennes and be welcomed. We could even go home to Brahmin Boston, a mere fairy tale to the Cheyennes, and live and thrive. No disease threatens our bowels. Starvation does not stare us in the face. Soldier bayonets do not fence our freedom. Surely our people think that before the time might come to die, the doctor and teacher would choose to disappear.
What a color-prejudiced nation ours is!
Elaine Cummings Maclean, though, is determined not to be separate, apart, superior, white. I have married a Cheyenne, and it means something to me I do not know how to tell even you. I want to take it into myself fully and truly, whatever it means. Perhaps it means a last taste of the old, free life. Perhaps it means an opportunity to inspire an elevation of the people into a new way of living. Or perhaps it means fleeing soldiers, fighting, hunger, destruction, and death. I want my fate, and the fate of my husband and of my marriage, to be part of the fate of the Cheyenne people.
That is my decision. Yes, it frightens me.
She closed the ledger book. She couldn’t send this letter—it sounded mad. She did not permit herself the thought that her life was now mad.
Chapter 5
“Little Wolf says we don’t shoot first,” Smith told Elaine. Calling Eagle nodded to herself. Little Wolf was a wise man, Calling Eagle thought. In the end it likely wouldn’t help, but he was a wise man.
“Maybe the soldiers won’t shoot,” Elaine put in. The scouts were reporting a plain full of U.S. cavalry, but Smith, Elaine, and Calling Eagle were well back, at the top of the gully where most of the women were.
“Morning Star thinks they won’t,” said Smith without hope. “Since they didn’t catch us sooner, he thinks they’re not too interested in us. Little Wolf thinks they will.”
“What do you think?” asked Elaine. He shrugged his shoulders. He was painting his forehead bright crimson.
My grandson Vekifs is wise, too, Calling Eagle reflected. Vekifs was her pet name for him, an affectionate form of veho, meaning roughly “Dear Little White Man Who Has Become a Cheyenne.” As applied to Smith, little was ironic. He is wise, she thought, to decline to try to predict the choice of another man, especially a veho. He simply readies himself with his paint. His wife, though, the sign of his foolishness, clings to beliefs about things. She believes the white man is what she calls civilized, so she believes his soldiers will behave in a civilized way. Maybe the blood will make her stop believing. Maybe not.
Smith finished reddening his forehead and started applying three horizontal stripes of verdigris to his nose. Calling Eagle observed wryly the odd expression on his wife’s face. Even your husband the doctor is not so civilized, Calling Eagle thought. She wondered what Elaine would say if she knew that the paint medicine was taught to Smith by Owen Mackenzie, the murderer of Smith’s father and brother.
The woman had it wrong anyway. She looked at paint and feathers, the great protectors, and saw barbarism. Then she looked at powder and ball, the great destroyers, and saw civilization. Just backward.
Smith finished his face and turned and gave Elaine a mock growl and a big grin. So he could see he was making his young and innocent wife nervous.
Smith’s comrades-at-arms were getting ready, too. How strange their medicine objects must seem to the white woman—a little pebble, a dried-up lizard, the skin of a bird, the paw of a badger, the dried heart of an eagle, a piece of fox dung, the feather of a raven. How strange the states of trance, the medicine words crooned over and over. The woman knew the Cheyenne words, but not the Cheyenne soul.
Calling Eagle w
ished the warriors did not need the white man’s weapons. This morning two young men came in with three guns, a few cartridges, and a little powder and some percussion caps. The old-man chiefs had sent them to a renegade trader hidden in the oaks. But for what little they got, they had to give an ancient medicine headdress, two fine-quilled otter skins, their wives’ saddle trappings, and lots of beadwork. So much to give for so little, the power of the Tsistsistas-Suhtaio way for the power of the white-man way.
Calling Eagle thought such trades spelled the end of the spirit life of the Tsistsistas and Suhtaio, the life Sweet Medicine taught them. Yet she, too, could see no way to survive without the white-man guns. She and the other medicine people of the tribe could offer no power to compete with the guns. That, she thought, was what was wrong. That was the great regret of her life.
Smith stood up to go to the rocks and do battle. “Go to Lisette,” he said gently to his wife. “She’s just beyond the spring.”
Elaine looked at Calling Eagle expectantly. The old woman shook her head. “I’m going with Vekifs,” she said, nodding at Smith. “I go with the men.”
Calling Eagle smiled at the puzzlement on Elaine’s face. She did not realize that Calling Eagle was different. No white people realized. When they were told, they were outraged.
Well, that would come later. Calling Eagle followed Smith toward the rocks.
Little Wolf walked in a measured way toward the soldiers, with Morning Star and other chiefs at his side. Every man’s hands were empty, except that Morning Star carried the pipe, showing peaceful intentions. An Arapaho scout came out to meet the Cheyennes. The chiefs did not like having a man of their friends the Blue Cloud people come out to them to talk for the enemy, but they said nothing.
The Arapaho was sent out with the words Little Wolf expected. Come back voluntarily and the whites will treat you well. Try to go on and they will drive you back.
Patiently, the Cheyennes said the old words again. We don’t want to fight. We won’t shoot unless the whites attack us. But we won’t go back—we’re going home to the Powder River country.
So the Arapaho went back to Captain Rendlebrock, and the chiefs went back to the Cheyenne soldiers on the hills. Little Wolf stayed out in front by himself, feeling ambiguous, easing toward the soldiers, hoping to talk a little more, or to show something, or do something—just foolishly hoping.
Watching the soldiers and waiting, he remembered what he’d said to his warriors a few minutes ago. Don’t shoot first. If the soldiers have to kill someone, let me be the first one.
And he might be the first one. He wished he was at a point in his years when he might surrender life gracefully, but standing out here, waiting uneasily, he knew very well that he wasn’t. He loved being in the swim of things too much, loved being the Sweet Medicine chief, he whom the people called their brave man, their dedicated man. He loved taking hold and making even the most terrible decisions of these terrible days. He also loved to fight—how gloriously alive he’d felt that day two years ago on the Powder when he’d been shot seven times. He also loved watching his children becoming full people. Approaching sixty winters, he also felt so much love for one of his wives, Feather on Head.
He had sung many times with the other warriors the great battle words, “It is a good day to die.” But he liked his life very much right now, and wanted to keep it. Perhaps that was unworthy of him. Perhaps that was what life had yet to teach him, to ease the fierceness of his grip on it. Teach it to me slowly, he thought—I am in no hurry.
He could imagine feeling less attached to life under only one circumstance: if the Human Beings could not go home to Powder River, if they all must die here in this wretched country, if there was no hope for the Tsistsistas and Suhtaio. In that case he would like to throw his life on the ground in front of the whites in contempt.
With every moment that passed, and the soldiers did not send anyone out to talk to him, Little Wolf became more resigned to his certainty that the whites would shed blood here. That was their nature. He had given up trying to understand it.
He tried to laugh about the whites’ dumb ways. It had gotten around camp that the teacher, the wife of Smith, had asked why the soldiers brought Blue Cloud scouts. She did not see that the soldiers like to get Indians so corrupted that they would trade the lives of their friends for a few dollars. But Calling Eagle had answered, so the tale went, that without Indian scouts the cavalry couldn’t find dung in a buffalo herd.
Little Wolf liked that. It was good to laugh at white stupidities. But he couldn’t find much laughter in his heart.
He was not surprised when the music came across the still, sunny afternoon. The trumpet rang out, “Fire!”
Smoke rose from the barrels into the sky, and then the battle call of the trumpet came across the bright plain. Smith nodded to himself—they’re attacking. But it was all distant and abstracted, like a painting of a war instead of a battle itself.
Little Wolf started walking back calmly, without hurrying. Smith watched with breath held, amazed at the chief’s courage. Or maybe he had accepted his own death, and that gave him dignity. Or maybe he had made medicine to become invulnerable and was sure he could not be struck.
Smith was well protected in some rocks, walled off from enemy fire. Calling Eagle crouched beside him, her eyes intent on Little Wolf. Smith forced his mind through the odd unreality of it all, forced himself to feel the vulnerability of Little Wolf’s flesh moving slowly through the invisible fire, as yet untouched.
Little Wolf walked, measured step after measured step, through the barrage. Cheyenne bullets flew over his head, and soldier bullets plunked all around him. The soldiers were off their horses, every fourth man holding the mounts of his companions, in their way.
Smith heard the Cheyenne women make their high trilling for the chief’s bravery from the first little hill to the west. So they had come out from the gullies to watch the fighting, and to hell with the danger. Smith was damn glad—those were Cheyenne women. Loudest of the trillers were Pretty Walker, Little Wolf’s daughter, and one of his wives, Feather on the Head, and Singing Cloud, the woman Finger Nail hoped for. Smith hoped they’d sneaked off and left Elaine in the gully—surely they did.
Smith rose up on his knees and yelled exultantly ah-ho! His voice sounded shrill to himself, so he bellowed again, lower, like the thunder. He grinned sheepishly at Calling Eagle. Getting onto his knees reminded him that he wore pants instead of a breechcloth. Pants below and bare torso and painted face above—half-white and half-Indian. He chuckled at himself.
Little Wolf simply continued to walk. Some bullets kicked up the dust around him, though Smith thought most of them flew into the Cheyenne positions on the hill. This walk was a gesture of greatness—it would be memorialized in the songs and stories of people and wreathed in double glory if Little Wolf came out unharmed. To Smith he seemed to walk even now in an aura of light.
The chief reached the base of the hill and stepped in among its creases. The trillers raised their sound to the skies.
Calling Eagle shook Smith’s shoulder, grinning broadly. He knew what she was saying—See, medicine can whip weapons—the spiritual defeats the merely physical.
Smith didn’t know. His education was in the physical, but he had grown up witnessing the power of medicine.
Now the soldiers came forward, within easier range for their Springfields. They knew the Indians didn’t have many guns, or they wouldn’t have dared. So this was the time for Smith to add his lever-action Winchester to the melee. He held steady on a horse, pulled the trigger, and saw the creature leap about crazily.
After several shots the fighting felt good. He had spent his youth with a rifle in his hands, and the old sense of competence came back. He was still a dead shot, and the lever-action made him fast. The soldiers were too far away for him to hold on men, but Smith made several horses come.
Curiously, it felt fine. It was not hard to shoot at white men. It was as satisfying
as shooting at any enemies.
Then Smith saw the thin line of horses bolt out onto the plain and ride hard at the whites—a war charge!
“Hoka hey!” yelled Smith. The warriors were using mostly spears, axes, and bow and arrows to save ammunition. When they neared the soldiers, Smith held his fire. The cavalry line fell back, confused and disorderly. The young men yelled and shot and dashed forward and back and forward and back again.
The soldiers ran, and the ones at the rear were digging rifle pits. Behind Smith, Calling Eagle made a little trill.
Smith stood up and faced the retreating soldiers. He still felt a little self-conscious about his damned pants. He shook his rifle in the air and at the top of his lungs roared, “Hoka hey! You bastards!” He threw an arm around his grandmother and hugged her. He thought, Look at those bastards run.
Chapter 6
Elaine hurried down the hill through the broken rocks and little gravel slides, slipping and half falling. If only her knees would keep steady. She was rushing to join Adam, who was said to be at the foot of the hill checking a man named She Bear. She Bear, they said, was the only man killed in the battle—the other wounds weren’t even serious.
Oh, yes, damned lucky, she thought sarcastically. Only one man dead.
She longed to touch Adam, simply to feel his solid arm in her hand, his big back inside her arm.
It had been awful, just awful. From her place in the gully she could hear the guns going off but couldn’t see anything. But her imagination had done its nasty work. The whole time it had spewed up images of mayhem and death, and cast them about prodigally. She had simply sat there rigid and refused to pay attention to them, had sat there almost in a trance, knowing nothing, intelligence and understanding and life itself suspended until it was over.