Beecher seemed pleased by his question and let it hang for a breath before resuming, “When men have a great stone to move, they first dig away the earth around it, working moderately and taking care to reserve their strength. When the earth is removed, they apply their lever, and now all take hold. At the word, ‘Heave!’ ”—at Beecher’s bellow, Pauline flinched—“each man strains with nerve and sinew—he throws his whole strength into that moment’s effort, and the stone is forced from its bed.”
Seductively as a lover, Beecher asserted that the passionate Christian could shift every stone, however heavy; that he could alter the very firmament.
Beecher’s cadences buzzed at Pauline like a persistent wasp. How could this jolly optimism explain her self-slain father? Dr. Beecher’s assurances gleamed like a conqueror’s boot.
After the service, Pauline made for a door where Dr. Beecher wasn’t greeting his congregation, which disappointed Cousin Molly, who’d rather hoped to shake Beecher’s hand.
On their drive uptown, Eben told them Beecher was a famous abolitionist. Beecher’s sister had written Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
“Mr. Barnwell,” Cousin Molly groaned, “we are rustics, not ignoramuses.”
“Beecher believes a man can raise himself by his own will,” Eben said stubbornly. “We aren’t fixed by accident of birth. Beecher’s sermons have been published.”
Pauline said, “Can’t we talk about something else?”
Molly patted her hand.
“I . . . I’m sorry, dear Molly. Everything is so new to me!”
Farther up Fifth Avenue, chockablock residences gave way to trees and meadows. Harlem Lane fronted horse establishments: stables, white-painted inns, and clubhouses. Trotters—hundreds of trotters—walked, trotted, or cantered along the broad dirt lane.
“Why, that’s Robert Bonner driving Dexter!”
“What a handsome animal!”
They were overtaken by the lightest, most delicate sulkies, and color returned to Pauline’s cheeks.
One driver’s nod was a challenge. Another nod: challenge accepted. Lashing their trotters to utmost effort, the contenders wove through slower rigs at breakneck speed.
“How do they avoid collisions?” Pauline asked.
“ ‘Live men’ don’t fear collisions. Dear Pauline, this makes my blood race. How I wish I possessed the nerve . . .”
Pauline began thinking Eben’s carriage—which had previously seemed so up-to-date—was rather dowdy.
Eben said, “After I place Mahone’s new bond issue, I shall buy a trotter. I already have subscribers for ten thousand.”
Behind matched blacks, a driver silently lifted his stovepipe. Hastily Eben Barnwell reciprocated, “Leonard Jerome! Good day to you, sir!”
The other replied with an flick of his whip.
“Jerome,” Eben confided happily, “is Commodore Vanderbilt’s partner. In Jerome’s stable—I have it on good authority—every stall is walnut-paneled and carpeted. Carpeting in a horse stall—can you imagine?”
Appetites whetted, they returned downtown to the northernmost of Mr. Delmonico’s establishments, a converted mansion one block west of Union Square. “I usually eat at the Broad Street Delmonico’s,” Eben confessed.
“If you frequent a different restaurant,” Cousin Molly wondered, “why are we dining here?”
“Oh, Miss Semple, you ladies are too fine to dine with us speculators. The uptown Del’s is higher-toned.”
They were escorted to a table in what had been the mansion’s formal sitting room. The faux-marble floor was stenciled in a diamond pattern, the globes of gas chandeliers glowed, and though it was early afternoon, the drapes were drawn.
At another table, a balding, schoolmastery man rose and bowed.
Eben returned this bow. “Amos Hayward is with the Treasury. He fancies I did him a service once. Isn’t this a grand establishment? When I was a boy I didn’t dream such places existed.”
“When you were a boy . . . ?” Pauline prompted.
Eben summoned their waiter. “Randolph, the young lady will have the crème de volaille—that’s a cream soup, Pauline—and the truites de Long Island—that’s a Frenchy way of spelling ‘trout’—and the terrapin. We’re lucky to find terrapin on the menu.”
Cousin Molly said she would be content with soup and bread.
“I am so glad you came,” Eben enthused. “I am grateful you have forgiven me. If I am thoughtless, Pauline, it is from exuberance, not malice. Life is so awfully fast, I can hardly keep up!”
Randolph brought champagne. “Mr. Hayward’s compliments, sir.”
The balding man was bowing again.
“Give the gentleman our thanks and regrets we cannot join him at his table. The ladies are in mourning.” Eben returned to his guests. “When Hayward comes to New York to audit the Bank of New York’s accounts, we dine together. Hayward’s an undersecretary. He drops the names of powerful acquaintances and hints at information too confidential to be shared.”
Cousin Molly eyed the champagne. “Sir. It is Sunday and, as you have reminded me—we are in mourning.
“If you don’t care for champagne, Miss Semple, simply invert your glass.”
Which Molly did while, markedly, Pauline did not.
Diced onions, carrots, and celery floated in the thick soup. Cousin Molly was hungrier than she’d imagined.
“I’ve never had champagne,” Pauline confessed.
“You’ll acquire a taste for it,” Eben was confident. “At the Broad Street Del’s when a speculator makes a coup, he buys champagne for everybody. How I’d like to be that man!”
Pauline wondered how many of their fellow diners were as rich as young Eben Barnwell. She checked herself: what was she thinking!
Guilelessly, with a hint of envy, Eben told them how Gould and Fisk had bested Commodore Vanderbilt.
“That man with the matched blacks? The carpeted stable?”
“Yes, Jerome is Vanderbilt’s man. When Vanderbilt tried to gain control of the Erie, Gould and Fisk printed Erie stock faster than the Commodore could buy it.”
“But that’s dishonest!” Pauline was uneasy. Who was Eben Barnwell, really?
“Dear child”—Eben drank champagne—“it is only money.”
Molly helped herself to Pauline’s untouched trout. “Most men work for their bread.”
Eben said, “Yes. But in our great country any man can rise. No American is confined by his antecedents. Our waiter, Randolph, came from good family, but he and his mother fell on hard times.” That worthy attended Eben’s raised finger. “Randolph, how long have you been employed at Del’s?”
“I started five years ago, in the kitchen.”
“Now you’re a headwaiter. May I ask, what was your largest gratuity?”
“At his New Year’s affair, Mr. Fisk gave me fifty dollars.”
“Thank you, Randolph. Would I could be so generous.”
The waiter smiled. “Would that you could, sir.”
“Fifty dollars for a single night’s service,” Pauline whispered. “How can that be? Jack Mitchell works daybreak to dusk for a dollar.”
“Our nation is made for getting and spending.”
“And for the Christianity of happy flowers,” Pauline said. “Cousin, please take my trout. My appetite has deserted me.”
When the terrapin arrived, it smelled overpowering, and the first rich spoonful stuck in Pauline’s throat.
Money. Money. Money.
With tears in her eyes, Pauline wondered how she’d gotten so far from home.
CHAPTER 24
IN THE HAYFIELD
In the day, our canvas lodge glowed with sunlight; at night, its thin walls seemed solid as logs. We lay between bearskins on a mattress of deer grass, and sometimes I’d hear a Real Dog howl on the bluff across the river and I’d curl deeper against Plenty Cuts and did not dream.
Plenty Cuts and Shillaber bought wagonloads of flour and potatoes from the Gallatin Valley t
o Fort C. F. Smith. The Blackfeet had been attacking travelers, but we passed through their country for fifteen days without seeing them.
Plenty Cuts and Shillaber took jobs cutting hay for the Seizers.
Although High Backbone of the Miniconjou, Two Moons and Roman Nose of the Cheyenne, and the Arapaho Sorrel Horse all led war parties against the Montana Road, Washitu newspapers named it “Red Cloud’s War.” Though wagon trains were afraid to use the road, the Seizers’ forts guarded it and Seizers came and went as they pleased.
We were offered a cabin outside the stockade, but the cabin was dark and smelled bad, so I bought a Cheyenne widow’s lodge and household goods for five silver dollars and a half pound of plug tobacco. The widow moved in with Grasshopper, her sister’s daughter.
Three miles downriver, they were mowing hay and most of the haymakers and Seizers slept there in a willow corral, but every night my husband came home to be with me. He told me, in the Lakota tongue, how happy he was. Crow, Arapaho, and Northern Cheyenne lodges sheltered under Fort Smith’s cannons. They were blanket indians and I was the warrior White Bull’s sister, but I walked with downcast eyes.
Crow warriors came to say the Lakota were holding the Sun Dance and preparing to attack the forts. The Seizer chief gave them small gifts but did not believe their warning.
Little Brown Snake, a Crow warrior, told me that White Bull had quarreled with Young Man Afraid of His Horses. My brother was chief of his own village now. My brother had fought bravely at the Hundred in the Hand and became a Wicasa—a Shirt Wearer.
“A Seizer slashed him with his long knife, but White Bull dragged him off his horse. White Bull boasts about his scar and how the Seizer begged for his life.”
When the blanket indians learned I was White Bull’s sister I was invited into their lodges, where I drank sassafras tea while the women told me giving birth would hurt.
Long ago my husband had been a Washitu slave. His masters had
whipped him. The children saw his scars when he was bathing and gave Plenty Cuts his Lakota name.
Plenty Cuts had won honors in the Washitu’s Southern war. After that fighting was finished he wanted to be a Seizer, but they wouldn’t accept him because his skin is black.
He returned to life—he told me—in my arms.
In Virginia City Reverend Evans married us and Wong gave me away, but I told Plenty Cuts I would not be truly married until he gave horses to White Bull, as is our custom.
He said, “If you like we can be married by the Baptists too. Then the Blackfeet. We can get married by every preacher and medicine man in the territory.”
I swatted his big grinning face.
Although neither Washitu nor indians treated my husband as a complete person, the Crow children loved him. They showed him how to shoot their tiny bows and giggled when they were the better marksmen. They taught him how to ride indian fashion with a saddle pad and a nose bridle. Sometimes they treated him like a beloved uncle, sometimes like a favorite dog.
RATCLIFF’S STOLID MULES FORGED THROUGH RYEGRASS TICKLING their chins. Grasshoppers, dislodged from their perches, became meals for cliff swallows that swirled above the mower. It clattered and clunked and the reel squealed as it dragged grass into the sickle bar, whose teeth chittered like the grasshoppers but louder.
For eons, buffalo had migrated through here, but none came near Fort C. F. Smith in the hot August of 1867.
That morning, three mowing machines swathed the pasture between the bluffs and the Bighorn River. The pitman arm of Ratcliff’s mower clacked and the sickle bar chattered and Ratcliff half turned to keep the ungainly machine tracking. When something thupped past Ratcliff’s ear, he thought it was an especially bold swallow. The haymaker on his right lashed his mules into a run as indians appeared before the wall of unmown grass.
Swallows spun up. The fleeing mowers bounced and chittered until their overworked pitman arms snapped. Inside the willow corral, soldiers grabbed their rifles and fired.
Lakota scouts lay motionless along the rimrock on the dry bluffs behind the corral.
After the haymakers whipped their teams into the corral, soldiers rolled a wagon across the opening. The indians pulled up their blown horses just beyond easy pistol shot. Several slumped wounded. One—a chief, by his eagle feathers—stood on his horse’s rump to flip his loincloth at the soldiers.
The swallows who were rearing their second hatch on the cliff face chirruped and dove at indian scouts sprawled on the rimrock. Hundreds of Cheyenne and Lakota in war regalia waited silently behind the scouts.
No male had ever exposed his privates to Lieutenant Sternberg. “Mount up!” he cried.
His sergeant yelled, “They’re decoys, sir. Same damn trick they pulled on Fetterman.”
“We shall chastise them,” Sternberg shouted. “Mount up!”
But hesitation proved the sergeant correct, for, by a miracle, the wounded indians sat upright and the winded horses regained strength and more indian horsemen came out of the tall grass: a dozen, two dozen, fifty, a hundred, two hundred.
“Oh, Christ,” the sergeant breathed. “We’re for it now.”
In their cliffside burrows the swallows spotted a Harlan’s hawk: just a dot next to the sun. Men in the corral lay among horse and mule droppings facing outward like the spokes of a wheel.
Ratcliff set his rifle stock to his cheek and dug his elbows into the dirt. Sweat dripped off his forehead. His rifle barrel shimmered. The indian ponies’ hooves floated on a mirage of superheated air.
Arrows buzzed into the corral.
“Lieutenant Sternberg,” young Private Abbott called. “You must take cover!”
“Who spoke? I’ll have that man bucked and gagged!”
Private Abbott, who hadn’t been in the army long enough to learn discretion, was spared by the bullet which took Lieutenant Sternberg in the forehead.
Some indians screamed like foxes. Some roared like a mother grizzly. They blew their eagle-bone whistles. Their vests were beaded with porcupine quills dyed red or black or green or blue. His buffalo-hide shield bore each warrior’s medicine sign. The eagle feathers in their headbands had been got by lying all day in a blind beside an eagle’s nest to snatch feathers from a full-grown bird as it landed. Red-tipped feathers honored battle wounds.
Ratcliff fired, ejected the empty, inserted, fired again, ejected, inserted, fired, ejected, inserted, fired . . .
Warriors charged the willow corral like they meant to ride over it, and Ratcliff aimed at the mass of them and touched off a round, another, and indians and horses were a flesh wall looming over him, their arrows slicing through the flimsy willow barricade.
The indians expected the firing to stop for reloading, but two weeks before, the soldiers had been issued breechloaders and never stopped shooting.
The Lakota broke and withdrew. Ben Shillaber dragged a wounded sergeant into a lean-to. A mule had arrows buried in its rib cage and back. Its white eyes rolled and bloody froth dripped from its muzzle. It brayed frantically.
Hunkered over, Ben Shillaber toured the corral, patting one man on the back, joking with another. Arrows flew from the alders beside the creek, and rifles spat back. They never had a clear target and shot at what might be an elbow, might be a quilled vest, might be a moccasin.
They heaped brass cartridges in their hats.
Indians slipped out of the alders across the mowed field, concealing themselves in the shallowest dips and declines, sliding toward the corral like a snake after a sparrow’s eggs.
A soldier cried, “There! Over there!”
“God Damned! Where’d he come from!”
“Shillaber made a good indian out of him!”
“He’s just playing possum. Won’t somebody shoot that damn mule?”
“Why don’t the Colonel send help?”
“Don’t worry about the Colonel, boys,” Ben Shillaber laughed. “He’ll come soon’s he’s finished his supper.”
“What’s that s
mell? Oh! God help us!”
Wisps of smoke, then flame licked above the grass, with darker flames roiling the grass heart, then black smoke rolling toward the white men and their stored hay shocks—a ten-foot wall of flame. It was so hot men laid their faces against the cool earth and prayed.
“Forget the damn fire!” Shillaber called. “Watch for indians.” As the flames writhed closer he cried the Confederate yell and Union men who had feared and hated that cry yelled it too; even Ratcliff emptied his lungs.
The fire wall loomed over the corral and horses jerked at their picket pins and whinnied and bucked with fear.
With the sound a man makes flailing a carpet—a tremendous whup—the fire extinguished itself and falling ashes blanketed the corral. Ratcliff sneezed.
The clicking like rosary beads was men counting cartridges.
“The fort will see the smoke. If they can’t hear the shots, they’ll see the smoke.”
“The water barrel’s empty. Christ, I’m thirsty.”
Even the oldest swallows couldn’t recall such an insect feast. Beaks agape, they swooped, gorging as they dove. The Harlan’s hawk taloned a swallow and bore it to the scorched earth, where, as the swallow uttered terrified chirps, the hawk plunged its beak and extracted a string of succulent gut glistening white against the burned grass.
Flights of arrows arced into the corrals, wounded more horses, and killed another soldier. When a warrior jumped up at the corral gate, Ben Shillaber shot him. The haymakers cheered the man’s death agonies.
At dusk, Ben Shillaber offered straws to each man. Someone must bring help from the fort. Private Abbott drew and flinched.
“Ride like hell, you’ll make it,” Shillaber said. “The indians won’t be expecting you.”
But when Shillaber saddled Lieutenant Sternberg’s gelding, Private Abbott missed the stirrup.
“Hold up,” Ratcliff said. “Ben, there’s no use gettin’ a white boy killed when you got a nigger.” Ratcliff snatched the reins from Abbott and swung into the saddle.
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