Rachel beat at her as the old woman scrabbled away on her back, pushing with her arms and legs tike an overturned turtle doing the backstroke. The stick bounced off the woman’s head and shoulders, splitting her forehead. Blood rained into her eyes. Might as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb, Rachel thought bitterly. As she struck she waited for a lance to bury itself in her back, or a hatchet to split her skull. She wondered with detachment what it would be like to have one’s skull split by a hatchet. Would she feel anything? At least it would be quick.
A crowd of neighbors had gathered, laughing and shouting as though betting on a dogfight. Among them a stony-faced, towheaded boy stood with his friends. Give it to her. Rachel. John Parker’s fists were clenched, and he was torn between wanting to help his cousin and wanting to disown her. He felt a flush coloring his face and he turned away, beckoning angrily to his friends.
“Mea-dro, come. Who wants to watch two women fight?” The five small boys stalked through the crowd like bantam cocks. Their miniature bows and arrow quivers hung rakishly across their backs, and ropes and lunch sacks swung from their breechclout belts. John didn’t look back, nor to the right or left. He glared ahead to hide his pain and guilt, and refused to admit that he had ever known Terrible Snows’ white slave.
There was a low laugh behind Rachel, and Terrible Snows wrenched the club from her hands, spraining her wrist. She spun on him and went for his bulging toad’s eyes, her thin fingers spread and curved like talons. Her eyes were wild, and she was hissing. Flecks of foam gathered in the corners of her bruised mouth. Terrible Snows dropped the stick and grabbed her wrists in a relentless grip. He held her while she writhed, pain shooting up her arms, then he shoved her backwards. She tripped over a broken saddle and fell sprawling. When A Little Less saw that she wasn’t going to be clubbed to death, she set up a steady howl, and Rachel screamed back, propped on her elbows in the dirt.
“You filthy savages. You lousy, stupid, stinking savages. May you rot in hell!”
A Little Less was built like a nail keg on legs, and she now lay flailing on her back, unable to get up. Terrible Snows pulled his mother to her feet and kicked Rachel hard in the side to help her up. When A Little Less picked up a stick to resume her beating, he took it from her and pushed her into the lodge. She could be heard still grumbling and threatening as she slammed her kettle and stir stick and knives around, holding a dirty rag to her bleeding head. The show was over, and the neighbors went back to their evening meals.
Terrible Snows pulled off his damp, smelly moccasins and threw them in Rachel’s face. But mending moccasins was recreation compared to tanning hides for hours each day or chasing barefoot through the brambles after the ponies. She gathered up the shoes and went to find her sewing materials in the chaos of the tent. She skirted the perimeter of it to avoid A Little Less, staying well out of arm’s reach.
It looked like she was going to survive another day. She hadn’t been killed or even punished. Yet. And Terrible Snows had laughed, ugly sound though it had been. She held her wrist as she reached up involuntarily to touch the raw, painful spot on her nose where it had been burned again. It throbbed constantly from the torture of A Little Less and her outcast daughter, Toyahbi, Mountain. That would stop. Rachel had had enough. She would be a slave. She would eat scraps, the offal from the family’s skimpy meals. She would suffer the horror of Terrible Snows’ stinking breath and jutting belly at night, his thick, ugly, blotchy penis battering into her, tearing the dry, tender flesh. But there would be no more beatings or cuttings or burnings.
Rachel had always been thin. Now she was gaunt. There were purple bruises around her sunken eyes, from the beatings, but also from exhaustion and malnutrition. She looked like a scarecrow dressed in the scraps and patches she gleaned from the family’s rags and leftover pieces of buckskin. They were sewn crazy-quilt fashion and flapped around her thin legs. The children chased her and threw clods of dirt and dung at her. There were always bruises and sores and open cuts on her arms and legs, and her hands were filthy and calloused. Rachel had just turned sixteen years old, and she looked a hundred. And her belly was swelling with her second child.
The thick chestnut hair that had always been her pride was an owl’s nest. It was greasy and snarled beyond the power of a comb to correct, even if she had had one. She’d gotten out of the habit of bathing, but the bottom had come when she found herself popping a louse into her mouth the way A Little Less did. She cultivated her personal disorder, making herself as ugly as possible. She still hoped, after two months of abuse, that Terrible Snows would find her too repulsive to rape. But it seemed impossible to do.
At least she might discourage some of his friends. Terrible Snows was a very generous man when it came to his slave. She didn’t wear out from that kind of use, and he found many men eager to try her. At night she lay with her head to one side, her body rigid and her eyes squeezed tightly shut. She tried to breathe as shallowly as possible until Terrible Snows had finished. And she thought of Luther, her husband. Luther with his bony body and the pale spot at the back of his head where the hair was thinning out.
She had done her duty by him. She had borne him a male child, and she was carrying another. And he had abandoned her. As the weeks passed and no one tried to ransom her, she became more and more bitter, dividing the blame for her misery between those who tormented her and those who let them do it. She’d show them all. She’d survive until someone happened onto the band, a trader maybe, or a trapper.
They were out here somewhere, those men. She’d seen them milling around Independence when her family had passed through. There’d been hundreds of them, all outfitting for the wilderness. More people than she’d ever seen in one place. They left in long wagon trains, or in groups or in pairs. Now and then a man with a strange, feral look in his eyes would head out alone, leading a string of pack mules loaded high. The plains had swallowed them up, and the vast emptiness silenced them. At first they had seemed to grow as they rode out onto the prairie, their images distorted by the shimmering waves of heat that pulsed from the ground. Then they had vanished, like drops of water on a hot griddle. But they were out here somewhere. She could see their presence in the ribbons and beads and the new cotton jacket of Old Owl. They were out here. And she would wait for them to find her.
Terrible Snows and his family were plagued with bad luck. His horses were always the ones who died mysteriously of black lung, or were stolen by the Osage. His lodge was the one that had caught fire two years ago and burned to the ground, leaving them struggling to replace what little they had. They lived with cast-offs and gifts from others. Terrible Snows was always borrowing horses so he could hunt, and they were inferior animals. He never brought home as much meat as other men. He could never gather enough ponies to buy a wife, and his sister’s infidelity to her husband was a constant reproach to him. He cursed his luck, swore some evil medicine man had put a spell on him. But inwardly he knew he was being blamed for his misfortune. He was treated like everyone else, but he knew there was shame around him, a barely perceptible shame, like meat just before it goes bad.
Terrible Snows and his mother and sister and white slave lived at the edge of the village, away from the more prosperous warriors clustered around the lodges of Old Owl, the civil leader, and Santa Ana, the war leader of the band. Terrible Snows swaggered and he boasted and he took his rage out on Rachel. It was the only life she knew with the People. That and the cruelty of the children, who could spot a weak member of the herd and run it to ground like wolves after a sick elk. Even John pretended he didn’t know her. So much for loyalty of her own kind.
Later that night, after her fight with A Little Less, Rachel slipped silently through camp on her way to check the ponies. She ran furtively to avoid being tormented by anyone. She knew she would always be an outsider here, cold while others sat at their fires. Lonely while others talked and laughed in the evening shadows. Abused while others cared for each other. It never occurred to her
to ask anyone for sanctuary. They were all alike. No one would help her here. She passed through the center of the village and headed for the pasture on the other side, her path lit by the fires shining through the lodge walls. The pasture would be dark, but there would be some light from the moon, and she would be away from Terrible Snows. Maybe he would be asleep when she returned.
She stubbed her bare toe on a rock and hopped a few steps, massaging it. At least it was warm now. What would it be like when winter came? Best not to think of that. Best to believe she would be long gone and safe in her husband’s house. As she passed Old Owl’s smoking lodge she heard the men inside, and she cursed them silently before moving off into the darkness.
Like a flock of geese settling in for the night, the cackling of laughter and talk drifted from the softly glowing lodge. Of the eight old men sitting around the fire inside. Old Owl was the runt of the litter. He looked like someone who had fallen on hard times. His shoulder-length gray hair was ragged, thin, and disheveled. A few stray bristles sprouted from his weasel’s chin like stubble missed by the plow. He was small, even for a Comanche. The parentheses of his bandy legs, embracing an invisible horse, gave him a rolling gait.
A lone eagle feather dangled from the thin rope of his scalplock like a tattered flag that had been left out in too many storms. His crafty, myopic eyes peered owlishly over a monolith of a nose. Fortunately, his daughter, Something Good, hadn’t inherited his looks, although she did have the same intelligent glint in her eyes.
Old Owl’s breechclout was torn and dirty, and the stiff, rumpled white cotton jacket was far too big for him. It seemed as though he had shrunk in the wash rather than his clothes. The jacket was already grimy, although it was so new that creases still sectioned it off where it had lain folded among the trade goods.
He had bought it from the traders who had left only a week before. Old Owl thought how fortunate it was that Nabisoa, He Sticks Himself, had ridden ahead to warn the band so they could pack the new white captives off on a fast hunting trip. The boy was eager to go on any expedition, and probably would have hidden from the traders anyway, but the woman would have been troublesome. She wasn’t the only one. Old Owl had had to talk long and hard to convince Terrible Snows to miss the traders. Old Owl always avoided trouble when possible, and he didn’t want white people coming after the boy. The woman would be sure to tell the traders he was here, and his family would come looking for him.
The nightly meeting in the lodge looked like a convention of grandfathers, which, in fact, it was. And Old Owl seemed the most grandfatherly of all. A kindly man. A deacon perhaps, or a tailor, or a senior bookkeeper. He was a chief and a diplomat and a killer, but a kind man nonetheless. He had never killed anyone unnecessarily, at least not as he reckoned necessity. And he rarely killed at all anymore. Not humans, anyway. He was fifty-four years old and not in shape for it. His arthritis was too painful for the long forced marches and nights on the cold, wet ground. About all he was good for these days was giving advice. And he was very good at that.
As he sat in the place of honor, opposite the door, he saw in the gloom outside a pale, impish face under a thatch of hair like curly golden pine shavings. He frowned and waved his hand slightly at the boy. He wasn’t in the mood to have a horse backed into the lodge this night. It would break the silence and he would have to start the opening ceremony all over again. John, or Weelah, Bear Cub, as he was called, had done that once before, and like all boys, he didn’t realize that once is enough for any joke.
But Cub vanished into the night and Old Owl watched his cronies file silently into the smoking lodge. They sat without a word and remained silent while Old Owl held up his scarred, greenish-gray soapstone pipe and chanted his prayer to the sun. He laid a pinch of real tobacco, uncut with sumac leaves, on the ground as an offering. He stroked the smooth, soapy-slick bowl, feeling the curve of it in his hand. It wasn’t his sacred pipe, the one he used for important councils, but he was very fond of it nevertheless.
His medicine pipe, his special one, had traveled a long road from the red pipestone quarry on the dividing ridge between the Saint Peter’s River and the Missouri, nine hundred miles to the north. Once it had been a place of peace where the Father Who Lived Behind The Sun called all the Indian nations together. They had dug for the red stone without fear. Then the white men came, and desecrated the quarry, carrying away the sacred stone to make into bowls and foolish things. They told the Dahcotah Sioux to guard the place and forbid others to use it so they could sell the pipes. Now the People must make war to get the pipes to smoke for peace. And all because of the white men.
Old Owl took a long drag on the green pipe. His cheeks sucked in and the hot smoke burned the back of his throat, making him pleasantly light and dizzy. As he exhaled, he felt the day’s small tensions and annoyances floating up with the smoke. He blew the first puff toward the top of the tent for the Father. The next he directed downward, into the ground for his Mother, the earth. Throughout the invocation there was absolute silence, except for the faint wheezing of So Nabehkakuh, Many Battles, which his friends stolidly ignored.
Forty-five years ago an arrow had passed through Many Battles’ neck and pierced his windpipe. Sanaco had only been a herder then, but he had pulled the arrow from Many Battles’ throat as he lay writhing and suffocating in the grass, trying to yank it out himself. Putting a steadying hand on the older man’s shoulder, Sanaco had pushed away the ragged flesh from the edge of the wound. Poking his index finger into the bubbling hole, he hooked it under the punctured pinkish-gray tube that whistled with escaping air.
He pinned the hole shut with a cactus spine while Many Battles, now as calm as though he were being checked for lice, studied the clouds over his head. Around them the retreating horses pounded by, showering them with clods of dirt and torn grass while war screams filled the air. Many Battles hadn’t forgotten that day, and he made sure that Sanaco had every advantage his prestige could give in the silent struggle for leadership.
For forty-five years Many Battles’ voice had been like a file rasping a metal arrowhead. He preferred to converse in handtalk, although the People didn’t use it as much as the other tribes. They didn’t have to. Next to Spanish their own tongue was the lingua franca of the southern plains. Now, made equal by time and trials, Sanaco and Many Battles sat side by side at the fire.
Old Owl watched each friend in turn as the pipe passed from hand to hand, always to the right. War and raiding and loving women were the best ways to spend one’s youth. Old Owl couldn’t conceive of doing things any other way. As long as one had the misfortune to grow old, though, this was the way to spend one’s time. Among friends. Without striving or boasting or having to prove one’s manhood constantly. It was enough to watch the cycles, the patterns of life. To see the young make the mistakes that their elders made, and to see them discover the joys. To know that spring would follow the worst winter and the sun would never fail to rise. To know that the buffalo would always come back to the People each year and that Mother Earth would send up fruits to feed her children.
The pipe passed to Kwasinabo, Snake. He must have had a bad day. His brow’s were puckered and his wide, thin mouth turned down at the ends like an old, sprung bow. That meant he was either angry or thinking. And Snake didn’t think much.
“How is your woman, White Horse?” Snake would never forgive Tosa Pookuh, White Horse, for stealing her from him thirty years ago. When he was in a bad mood he’d bring it up, even though the cuckolder had given the cuckoldee ten fine horses to soothe him. And he and his new woman had left the band for five years until the scandal died down. Snake was sixty-two years old. The three wives he had were more than enough for him, but the offense still rankled.
“Snake, Brother, I rue the day I let her talk me into marrying her. She gabbles like a flock of jays and fills my lodges with relatives. Her family eats more than a pack of starved wolves, and their snarling and howling and complaining follows me to bed at nig
ht.”
White Horse rarely smiled. He had an impassive face with a profile that would look good on coins. It took newcomers a while to realize they were the victims of a master flimflammer.
“Would you like her back?” He stared at Snake with an earnest, sincere face. “For twelve horses I’ll throw in her sisters, her mother, and three of her aunts. I’ll keep my daughter, Deerskin, though. She makes pemmican with plenty of meat and not so much fruit. Think what a comfort all those women will be in your old age. You’ll have the strongest pizzle in the band with all the exercise it’ll get.”
Snake was never sure if he was being made fun of or not. He suspected he was, and his voice had a jagged edge of belligerence. “No. She’s just right for you. She’s too lazy to tan hides right and they stink. Her shirts feel like bark and her moccasins fall apart after one wearing. I never wanted her anyway. She was always trouble.”
“There was trouble at Terrible Snows’ lodge today.” Sanaco was a plain, matter-of-fact man with a knack for turning aside an argument’s point before it could draw blood. Many Battles said he could be on friendly terms with Cannibal Owl. He would drop in on Sanaco some night to steal his soul, and Sanaco would distract him with a game of dice or a long, rambling discussion of horses. He’d stuff his guest so full of stew he wouldn’t be able to fly. Cannibal Owl would have to walk home, belching, souls and death forgotten in the warm glow of hospitality.
“The white-eyes woman knocked A Little Less down this evening. It sounded like half the dogs in the village were fighting.” There was a general chuckle. Everyone had wanted to knock A Little Less down at one time or another. Santa Ana spoke up.
“They deserve each other, those two. The white-eyes slave is like an animal. My nephew’s friend said she clawed him when he accepted Terrible Snows’ offer of her. It’s like bedding a bundle of thorny mesquite sticks, he says.” Santa Ana was hulking, with a bland affable face and a heap of corpses in his past.
Robson, Lucia St. Clair Page 16