by Robert Power
Dearest Sister, Yesterday Colonel Custer shot a deer, so I had a very fine dinner with him and his officers. While we were eating, our Arikara Indian scouts reported the sighting of our quarry. Early intelligence suggests both Sioux and Cheyenne are gathered and that we will be somewhat outnumbered. Yet, I have all confidence in Colonel Custer and his men and pray we will round them up and bring them back to the reservations from whence they have fled. But it cannot be denied there is danger ahead. It aches my heart to think my daughters, bereaved of a mother, could lose a father also. But I remain optimistic and of good faith. Sister dear, please kiss my daughters and accept my eternal gratitude for your guardianship. Your loving brother, Marcus Henry Kellogg.
The sun is now high in the sky. Hot and dry. Little-Path lies still in the grass as the battle rages all around. He listens for the movement of those close by him. Rain-in-the-Face, Iron Hawk, Chasing Eagle, Feather Earring. They will show him the way, he the young brave, fresh to this world of battle and tears. Looking up, the spiky grass tickling his cheek, he can see the soldiers in the trenches digging crazily, deeper, with spoons and plates and hands. Digging trenches, digging their own graves. Many are drenched in sweat and blood from the manic retreat. Some have arrowheads, embedded in muscles, bristling like the quills of a porcupine. On the wind he can feel the fear of the soldiers-blue, some just weeks arrived from distant lands of green fields where there is no thunderclap and deluge of arrows, no fearsome painted men with red skins and desperation, pride and volcanic anger. Wide-eyed, the soldiers-blue on the ridge, thoughts lost in kith and kin, never to be seen again, never to hold.
Little-Path sees the feather in the hair of Sounds-the-Ground-as-He-Walks, who now is up on one knee. The look in the eyes of the older brave is that of a resolve saddened by the silence on the plains, where buffaloes, once more numbered than stars in the sky, are all slain; embittered by the slavery and herding, the fencing in of a proud people. This one last angry, wild stand against the invader. Arrows, lances, tomahawks, stone-headed clubs, brave squaws waving flame-red blankets to frighten the horses. Little-Path sees history in those dark eyes, and the future. Last night, after the first day of the Battle of the Greasy Grass, Sounds-the-Ground-as-He-Walks told them all of his daring deed. How he had rushed upon Custer, before he fell, and tapped him with the coup stick. Just once on the shoulder. The blue-eyed chief turned, knowing full well what the touch would mean, how it would all end. Sounds-the-Ground-as-He-Walks shrieked with pride and glee, as he ducked below the blazing bullets, weaving back to his fellows, adulation assured. He was awarded the eagle feather, no smudge of red paint smeared to show an injury in the deed of derring-do. Little-Path sees the feather in his mentor’s hair and wishes for the chance to earn one for himself.
‘Lie still, Little-Path,’ says Rain-in-the-Face, whispering through the blades of grass, the dusty clay and ants that separate them. ‘Hollow-Moon will whistle when it’s time to attack.’
In the near distance, corralled into a ravine, the remaining bluecoats fight to the death. Those are the brave ones. Others take their own lives, driven mad by the brutality of battle, terrified by tales of torture indescribable awaiting those who live. Little-Path spots one white man who stands out from the others. He wears a greatcoat and top hat, sitting on a rock above a ravine, partly hidden by a bush.
‘Your chance,’ says Hollow-Moon, who appears at Little-Path’s shoulder, pointing to the man. ‘Earn an eagle feather, little brave,’ he whispers; blood, war-paint, dust and sweat cracking into a smile of encouragement.
With the noise and the cries, the whimpers, the screams and the snorting and neighing of the horses, the cutting of flesh, the whizz and crackle of bullets, the grunts and screams, the howls and sighs and all the peculiar madness of battle, Little-Path crawls on hands and knees up to the ridge behind the man in the great-coat. Marcus Kellogg is frantically writing in a small bound book. Little-Path creeps forward, drifting over the ground, soundless, effortless. He gets so close he can see the beads of sweat running down the back of the white man’s neck. Little-Path, almost in slow motion, extends his arm, and, with his fingertip, touches the man on the hand that holds the pen. The man turns around, not in fear, not in shock, more in resigned expectation. Little-Path sees he has no gun. Their eyes meet. The man says something that means nothing to the brave.
‘We can’t take the clouds,’ he says, over and again, looking up to the sky.
Then Marcus Henry Kellogg turns and looks at the slip of a boy standing before him. ‘I’ll die today,’ he says, ‘but yours will be the greater death.’
Little-Path throws back his head and howls. Down below Hollow-Moon whistles. His braves, brandishing tomahawks, arrows and stone clubs, spring up from the grasses and charge the ravine for the final assault, to avenge the silencing of the buffalo, to claim back something of their own, to make their last stand.
Marcus Kellogg will write no more, nor speak. ‘Clouds’ is the last word he pens as the arrow whispers through the air, its sharp and glittering point slicing into his neck. He gasps, he sighs; he stares straight into the young eyes of Little-Path. Something about this singular death, this killing, this man in a greatcoat on a ridge above the fray, this end, hits hard at Little-Path. He is shocked at the intensity of his feelings. So sure until now of his place, his purpose.
As the arrow takes the breath from the man in the greatcoat, when he slumps in his death-throes, Little-Path sits down on the ledge, numbed by something he has yet to understand. Then, when the braves have done and finished below, stripped the corpses bare of clothes and rings and hair and teeth, one comes up to the ridge and with a bloodied knife hacks at Marcus Kellogg’s head, wrenching scalp and skin. Little-Path knows he wants his feather, but what else he wants, what else he knows, what he might become, that was once so simply set, is lost to him in that moment.
Later that night the deeds of battle are recounted: the daring raids, the reckless attacks. Little-Path is remembered and honoured in the counting coup.
‘I saw Little-Path,’ says Reindeer-Stalking, ‘high on the ridge before the greatcoat was killed. Our young brave crept upon him and touched him on the hand. So close was he, so daring a deed.’
All the braves whoop and clap, the fire dances to their cheers and Little-Path is handed the prized feather from the golden eagle.
The sound of a train’s whistle brings Little-Path back from his daydreaming. He folds the letter Eileen Kellogg had dictated to her pastor and places it in the bag. He looks up, and there in front of him, as if a ghost from the Battle of Greasy Grass, stands an older man. A Sioux or a Cheyenne. Difficult to tell from the bloated face, the matted hair and straggly beard. The clothes he wears, tied somehow together by strands of string, are rags gathered from the roadside and railway sidings.
‘My name is Thunder Bear,’ says the invisible mouth from within the beard. ‘Everything is gone,’ he says swigging from the bottle of whisky. He sinks to his knees, his morning melancholia gently giving way to daytime madness. He scrabbles around on the ground, whipping up the dust with his gnarled fingers. ‘Where are the braves? Nowhere for us to go to grow. The white man has won, taken everything from us. And given us this,’ says Thunder Bear, holding up the bottle to the light, staring intently at the amber liquid. ‘So braves fall off their horses, fathers rape their children. No one can trap a buffalo, there are no buffalo.’
Little-Path listens to the old chief, saddened beyond sadness. He says nothing, unsure if the older man is even aware of his presence. Up above, the clock shows the hour and he knows it is time to go.
After a short walk, Little-Path stands outside the simple wood-framed house on a street behind the telegraph office. Slung over his shoulder is the bag he has carried with him ever since the last night of the battle. The woman he has come to meet is looking at him from the parlour window. Eileen Kellogg is tall and thin, with white hair tied away from her face in a bun. She wears a shapeless dress of grey calico that reache
s to the floor. Little-Path sees her and she sees him. Her face is expressionless. As she moves away from the window the curtain flutters. The front door opens. He walks up the pathway, knocks on the doorframe, hesitates, and then enters. He can see her sitting by the fire, a bible in her lap. There are no flames in the hearth.
‘Sit down,’ she says without turning to look at him. He sits on a wooden stall, the only other seat in the room. ‘So, you have come to tell me how you slaughtered my brother. How you scalped him and cut off his ear.’ She looks up, studying this old man with the deeply lined face, with a feather in his ponytailed hair. ‘He was so battered they only identified him by his boots.’ Little-Path says nothing. ‘They told me you got your womenfolk to smash in their faces with clubs, no matter if they were dead or alive.’
Her stare is hard and bitter. It accuses. It demands.
‘I was only a boy,’ says Little-Path, ‘There were many deaths and many more in the days and years to come. I killed no one that day. I killed no one in my life. But I was there. I saw your brother when he was alive and then I saw him when he was dead.’
‘You said, in the letter I received, that you have something for me, something of my brother’s.’
Little-Path opens the bag he had found in the bush above the ravine, the bag he has kept safe down all these decades. He takes out the small book that Marcus Kellogg had been writing in as he sat on the rock above the gulch, watching the savagery and carnage below.
‘How did you find me?’ she says taking the book from Little-Path.
‘I searched. I think the clouds guided me to when the time was right.’
‘The clouds?’
‘Your brother. Although I spoke no English back then I captured the sounds he spoke that day. He said, “We can’t take the clouds.” Over and again he said those words and I held them in my mind until I could understand their meaning.’
The woman shrugs her shoulders, ignoring the heathenness of Little-Path’s words. She turns the book over in her palm as if caressing the hand of her brother. The book is leather-bound with a metal clasp. She opens it up and looks at the neat lines of writing, the sheets of simply drawn maps, the rough sketches of cavalrymen and campfires. The writing on the final page is slanted, hurried, jumping across dividing lines. She looks up at the messenger, the boy from the battle.
‘Read this last page to me,’ she says, bracing herself for whatever the words will reveal. ‘Reading was something I have never learnt to do.’
Little-Path takes the book from her. Momentarily their fingers touch. Eileen’s hand recoils as if from a flame. Then he reads the lines he’s read a thousand times before, ever since he learnt the language of the bluecoats on the reservation, when all was lost and all had to be found again.
‘Our situation is hopeless. There will be no victory here. Hell is unleashed all around and we are being slaughtered. The clouds pass by overhead, they race on the wind, as if nothing is amiss. They will be here in the morning when we are gone. Is this God’s judgment on our race? His ruling on our own barbarianism, now dealt to us in the valley and ravine below? For claiming that which is not ours to take? I grieve for my daughters who will soon be orphans. Forgive my sins, my shortcomings. Grow strong. But the clouds …’
They sit in silence, the elderly lady in a long grey frock and the Sioux Indian with an eagle feather in his hair. Dusk settles into the room and the light fades. On the mantelpiece above the hearth Little-Path notices a wooden cross and a small photograph in a silver frame. In the half-light he sees the sepia image of two young women. They stand under the clock of the Bismarck train station with suitcases at their feet. They are clearly about to embark on a journey. Little-Path stands up to go. Eileen Kellogg grips the bible tightly, feeling for the words she cannot read, but has heard a thousand times from the preacher.
‘Thank you. Thank you,’ she says, in little more than a whisper. ‘For this act of kindness.’
‘I am sorry for your loss,’ says Little-Path. ‘I will go now.’
‘Yes,’ she says, ‘before the weather sets in.’
Little-Path nods and smiles and leaves the house. Outside in the garden he looks up to the sky. There’s a distant rumble of thunder, a dampness in the air and a sense of rain.
Eileen sits in the chair by the fireplace, watching Little-Path as he closes the gate behind him and walks off down the road towards the station and the eastbound night train. Presently she lights the logs. The flames brighten the room and warm her body. She unclips the clasp and opens the book. Running the tip of her fingers along the curve and slope of the written word, she thinks of her darling brother, alone on the ravine, hell raging below, clouds racing above.
THE GENERAL AND THE BILLIARD CUE
The General doesn’t like what he sees in the mirror. His shirt is grubby and his collar is frayed. The four golden stars on his epaulettes are faded and dull. Most of all he dislikes the uncertainty in his eyes. He leans closer to the glass in the hope it might help him to see more, to understand better. He tightens his tie, sadly aware of his thickening neck. Outside the night is drawing in and fresh falls of snow swirl in the wind, swept in from the peaks of the Altai Mountains. Too much has changed, but the snow will continue to fall, of that he can be certain.
I’m sitting in a hotel room in Barnaul, Western Siberia, wrapped in every layer of clothing I can find. In the square outside my fifth floor window the statue of Lenin looks out over a brand new world. If he could bear to peek around the corner Lenin would see the garish yellow archways leading, not on to the glorious road to socialism, but to McDonald’s and an internet cafe. My job is to work with the Ministry of Health to prevent the spread of AIDS in a country where the economy is in ruins and the narcomafia holds sway in Dumas from Moscow to Vladivostok. Young kids, lost in the new post-communist world, are jacking up heroin to soften the blows of the mythical globalisation dream. Not many care or know about the dangers of sharing needles. There’s a lot to think about, but for the moment I have two immediate concerns of my own. One, the vain hope of some hot water to shave with; and, two, my luggage, lost and probably ravaged at Domodedovo airport in Moscow.
There’s an urgent knock on my door. It’s Ivan, my interpreter.
‘Dr Browne, it’s time to meet the General. The car’s waiting.’
‘Fine, spasebar, Ivan. I’ll be down in one minute.’
Outside it is bitterly cold. The snow is stacked up on the roadside and the car has snow chains on the tyres. I sit upfront with Misha the driver.
‘Dobra vercha, Misha.’
The heating is on full blast, as is the pop music of the radio. On the dashboard is Misha’s mascot, the plastic spider, curiously complementing the web of cracks in the windscreen. We skid and meander along the icy streets of Barnaul, the first town to be built by Peter the Great in Western Siberia. We pass the old foundry, where the gold and silver that so excited the Tsar was smelted. Nowadays, Barnaul is the capital of Altai Krai and its centre has moved away from Pushkin Square and the fine old houses built by the businessmen sent by Peter to exploit its mineral wealth.
As we leave the city the road becomes even more treacherous. On either side the ubiquitous birch trees are firmly planted in a thick crystal-clean white blanket.
The music blares, the heat becomes stifling and the windscreen wipers battle to keep the swirling blizzard at bay. When we arrive at the sanatorium it is already dark. The driving snow in the floodlights of the car park looks like a plague of locusts as we are hurried from the car to the building.
Inside, the bright lights and colourful décor contrast starkly with the cold and dark winter’s night. In the corridor, as I struggle out of my hefty boots, I look into the reception room. The walls are thick with tomato-red flock wallpaper. Heavy velvet curtains cover the windows from ceiling to floor and in the middle of the room a dining table groans with food and drink. There are bottles of vodka, beer and wine, and platefuls of red and black caviar, potato and herring salads
and meats and cheeses of all variety. We are greeted by our fellow guests. There is Oleg, a handsome young man in his early thirties, a narcologist of the new breed who is eager to learn from the West and break free of the old Soviet style of medicalising all health problems. Next to him stands Dr Roshikiev, well into his middle age, and as chief narcologist for the oblast, frightened of these new ideas that threaten his hegemony over the treatment of drug users. The third guest is the grey-haired Enid Schneider, a World Health Bank consultant of the type who wears a cashmere scarf and is more interested in the shopping, sites and inflated consultancy rates than improving public health. She gives me a jaded nod of acknowledgement. I do my best to return a polite ‘hello, good to see you again’. Soon she’ll be complaining about the bathroom in the hotel, the long haul back to Moscow and her preference for the temples and weather of Myanmar.
‘We are waiting for the General,’ says Oleg in his fast-improving English, ‘but we can sit at the table and have a drink.’
We follow him and Dr Roshikiev into the dining room and take our places at the table. I make sure I have a fresh glass and bottle of mineral water close at hand for the inevitable toasts, then listen as the younger and older man conclude some urgent business in Russian. I nibble on a piece of rye bread, aware the main spread should not be disturbed until the General arrives. This is to be a crucial meeting. To make AIDS prevention viable it is critical to win over the law enforcement agencies. In dealing with injecting drug users the balance needs to be shifted from the criminal to the public health agenda.
Dr Roshikiev turns to speak to Ivan. Amongst the few words of Russian I recognise, I notice the word ‘methadone’.
Ivan nods at the older man as he deciphers his question. Ivan looks like a Cossack, with thick jet-back hair, dark eyes, dark skin and a full bristly moustache.