Long Winter Gone: Son of the Plains - Volume 1

by Terry C. Johnston

  Nothing like rain to make a man feel lonely. More than the cold of a winter storm. A long, endless rain isolated him.

  Custer hurt for her return.

  He glanced at his pocket watch again, setting it on his field desk.

  He had given Monaseetah full run of the Big Creek camp. His regiment made her welcome, watched her protectively.

  Once a day she would leap atop her pony, galloping west to visit Cheyenne friends in the Fort Hays stockade. Among her people, she told stories of the soldiers’ winter march to Fort Cobb, or their come-spring chase of Medicine Arrow’s Sweetwater villages. Each time she returned to him, Custer found Monaseetah more animated and cheerful, ready to jabber with him, relating the condition of every soul in the stockade.

  Everyone except the three chiefs Custer had captured on the Sweetwater.

  “They are haughty, Yellow Hair,” she had grumped one night. “They won’t speak to me.”

  Even with a lot of coaxing, for the longest time Monaseetah would not tell him why the chiefs would not speak to her. Her face eventually reddened with shame, her eyes refusing to touch his, she explained. “Cheyenne warriors do not talk to women dishonored by white men.”

  “Dishonored?”

  “Yes,” she had whispered. “I am disgraced, they say—because I am Yellow Hair’s whore.”

  Custer remembered how that had angered him. Still did,remembering that cold rock in his gut when he watched her lips speak those words.

  He sipped his coffee, now cold, then stepped to the flaps where he flung the coffee into the muddy company street.

  The Nineteenth Kansas would pull out tomorrow. Some to march east to Fort Riley, while others would push south to Fort Zarah and Fort Lamed. Fewer still would ride west to Fort Wallace and Fort Dodge. They were citizen soldiers, mustered out from that army post closest to their homes and fields and families.

  He’d been in camp less than a month and already Custer yearned for the thrill of the campaign trail. It was in the march itself that he felt full of purpose. Now he waited out the spring thunderstorms, fighting mosquitoes and boredom—worrying about the decision he’d long since made.

  Custer turned and sat on a crude wooden bench that slid under the long plank table in his tent. Beside his rope prairie bed stuffed with a grass-filled tick squatted a low stool and a tripod where his tin washbasin sat. On a cord from the ceiling over the basin hung a small shaving glass. Still he had put off shaving the beard that had grown full and red during the winter.

  From the ashwood water bucket he raised a dipper and walked to the tent flaps, sipping at the cool water, gazing west toward Fort Hays in the shimmering distance. These days he tried to keep her close. Her tent beside his, where she stayed with her infant son.

  He hurt. Wondering when she’d be coming back.

  Is it this way with a parent and child? he brooded.

  He glanced at the calendar poking out beneath the dispatches and maps on his table. A week from Thursday Libbie would arrive with their Negro maid, Eliza, by train from Monroe.

  Since last September too much had passed between them: not only time, but distance too.….

  Custer watched the rain batter the puddle in front of his door, mesmerized into a half-dream, recalling the winter he thought would never end, wanting her musky flesh beside him all the more.

  How am I to tell him?

  Her reflection danced upon the surface of Big Creek, rippling like a prairie storm, staring back at her without an answer.

  Monaseetah knelt on the grassy bank, enjoying this shady sanctuary from the muggy heat. She remembered how, as a young girl, she had escaped to river or creek in the heat of the day to find there a private place to think on important things.

  I must find a way to tell him.

  How could she, when he had grown so angry that time she confessed her love for him? Then she had promised herself she would never utter that word again in his hearing. Love.

  As desperately as she clung to life itself she loved this man. She had left her people, her way of life—left everything she was for him.

  And now I’m afraid.

  Scared of what he might say, of what he might do if she told him. Scared of losing him forever.

  Somewhere nearby a pony snorted. Her body tensed as she peered from the brush, seeing no one coming. Her body relaxed, taut vigilance gone, like raindrops from greased rawhide.

  She must think of the words to use. For what she had to say was not something so simple that it could be said, then forgotten. Such matters of the heart resisted her understanding as easily as pond water slipped from a crane’s back.

  Another moon come and gone.

  She could not deny it. Eighteen summers now—no longer easy to fool herself. Instead of thinking on what should bring great joy, Monaseetah ached with dread.

  She dropped her head against the cool, fragrant grass, listening to the water lap against the bank. Its merry chatter eased some of the pain in her uncertainty.

  Until something deep within the dark part of her gripped her—knowing he would send her away. With the news she had to tell him, Yellow Hair would send her away.

  Monaseetah realized she was crying, finding out at last what it meant to be a woman in love.

  “Look at me,” he begged, gripping her shoulders. “Tell me you understand.”

  Monaseetah sensed the plea in Custer’s voice. A sound not heard often from Yellow Hair. And every time, it pulled the anger from her heart, making her soft in his hands, like the mud of the riverbank. She gazed into his eyes.

  “That’s better,” he said. “Tell me you understand why you must live at the fort.”

  Instead, she dropped her eyes and shook free of his grasp. Monaseetah sat upon the prairie bed, staring at the side of the tent. Custer stroked her hair while she pouted.

  “I don’t know what to say to you, Monaseetah. Can’t seem to make you understand that nothing’s changed.”

  She turned back to him, her eyes flicking like wounded birds before she sunk her head in his lap.

  “This wife of mine comes tomorrow. To spend the summer with me. Seven moons is a very long time for me to be apart from her. She will expect me to be very happy to see her.”

  “Aren’t you, Yellow Hair?” Monaseetah asked boldly. “And happy to throw me away?”

  “No,” he whispered. “I will never throw you away. No matter what the years bring.”

  She believed him. As sure as the sun rose each day, Monaseetah knew he would never throw her away. Time and again he grew angry with her, telling her to go, sending her away. Yet each time he called her back, sent for her, or came to her himself. So certain of it now, she realized he must love her. Even though he was mortally afraid of telling her.

  Her knowing made this tearing apart no easier.

  “Come times when you make me feel like a used-up, worn-out moccasin you throw aside.”

  He cradled her head against him. “She comes only to visit me. Come winter, there is no place for her to stay.”

  She looked up into his eyes. Not sure if it was the truth she read there. Not really wanting to know if what he told her was a lie.

  “When will you free my people from your prison at the fort? Send them back to their homes?”

  His face registered surprise at her question. “When the villages return to the reservation. Do you wish to go home with them, Monaseetah?”

  More than thinking, she concentrated on his fingertips stroking the side of her face.

  “I wish to stay with you, Yellow Hair. Wherever you tell me to stay. To be near you.”

  He pulled her against him tightly. “I thank your Everywhere Spirit for letting you to stay with me for the time we have left.”

  One of the hounds poked its muzzle through the tent flaps, then leapt onto the bed as a second dog loped in. Their wet noses dove for Monaseetah’s face. Custer’s pets had formed a special attachment for this Cheyenne girl.

  Both of them laughed, wrestling wit
h the hounds, feeling once more the freedom to savor what time they had left. After a few minutes of play, the bitch nipped her male companion and darted from the tent. With his tongue lolling, the male joyously leapt from the bed and followed.

  Alone again in the early twilight of a spring evening, Monaseetah cupped her tiny hand along Custer’s smooth cheek, still not sure if she liked his bare face. Then she pulled him down to her parting lips.

  Resisting a moment, Custer whispered, eyes darting to the cradleboard by the stove, “What about the child?”

  “He sleeps, Yellow Hair,” Monaseetah answered, pulling him down on top of her as the little life within her belly tumbled.

  “The child sleeps.”

  Nuzzling a warm place for his cheek on the pillow, Custer feigned sleep as she slipped from the covers and padded barefoot to the trunk where her dress lay.

  He had to admit, the view from this direction was mighty appealing. His half-sleepy eyes slid from the nape of her neck, across the little wings of her shoulder blades, on down to the slimness of her waist as it molded into the roundness of her heart-shaped buttocks. He’d nearly forgotten how good she looked.

  And, until last night, how good she felt beside him in bed. With nothing else touching him but her heated flesh.

  “Good morning, my little sunbeam!”

  Whirling at the sound of his voice, Libbie swept up the flowing crinoline dress she had worn on the train from Monroe, clutching it before her to hide her nakedness.

  “Why, Autie!” she squealed. “Why ever did you want to scare me like that?”

  “Scare you?”

  “Watching me with no clothes—not a single stitch at all. While your eyes get their fill!”

  “Come now,” he replied, smiling. “I haven’t near seen my fill!”

  She let him have it with those amber eyes of hers, eyes that could claim only to be half-mad with him for studying her body in wide-eyed admiration.

  “Gracious lady, will you accept my apology?”

  He slipped from the blankets, standing before Libbie without shame.

  Her eyes widened before she thought to hold a hand over them. “You’re terrible, Autie! Horrible to me!”

  “Come, now—you’ve seen all of me before!”

  “Not on purpose, I haven’t!”

  He reared back, amused at the sight of her hiding her face behind one hand while the other struggled to hold the dress over her own nakedness, nonetheless exposing her small, fine breasts.

  “Here, Libbie. Let me help you get dressed.”

  “You’ll do nothing of the kind!”

  “You white women are such silly prudes.”

  “White women? What would you know about—” she began, then pulled her hand from her eyes, fuming suddenly. “Autie Custer, if the Good Lord intended people to be naked, he’d not invented clothing for us to wear!”

  “The Lord didn’t invent clothes, Rosebud! Man covers his own shame.”

  “And you certainly should be ashamed of yourself, Bo!” she said. “Treating a proper lady so shabbily.”

  “Lady! For God’s sake, you’re my wife!”

  “You ought to treat your wife better than a common harlot.”

  He stopped laughing. “You didn’t mind me treating you like a harlot last night.”

  She turned from his probing eyes, then realized in her turning he saw all the more of her. Her lips pressed into a thin, pouting line of anger, realizing he had gone and said it. What she had hoped they would never talk of again.

  “Such a long time … for us both, husband.”

  “Too long, Libbie.”

  “Will you put your trousers on, please?”

  “Can’t you talk to a naked cavalry officer?”

  “Not until he has his britches buttoned. While you do it, you can turn around so I can put my things on.”

  “All right.” He sighed.

  Custer plopped on the bed, pulling the gray pants over his feet. “Libbie, there’s been so much time since we … I only thought we owed it to ourselves to try again.”

  “I was afraid you were going to say that this morning.” She wrenched up the deep blue dress, shook it angrily, and stepped among its ample folds. “I don’t want last night to become a habit with us.”

  “A habit?” He gulped. “A man and his wife can’t enjoy each other?”

  “Such activity should be preserved for the creation of God’s greatest gift, a child.”

  “There you go with that Presbyterian drivel again!”

  “A child, Autie. A child!”

  “Stop right now before you get yourself worked up again. I’ve heard it all many times before. Isn’t that why we both just stopped trying?”

  “If not to create a child, what’s the purpose of our intimacies?”

  “Purpose? My God, Libbie—in case you haven’t noticed lately, I’m a man and you’re still every inch a woman! You made no complaints last night.”

  “That was last night.” She stared solemnly at the tent wall. “I’d grown so lonely for you. Missing you.”

  “Do you remember the last time we made love?” he asked, stepping toward her.

  She shook her head.

  “Me neither. You can bet it was a long time before I left Monroe. But last night—that was as good as we’ve ever been together.”

  “I was so lonely for you, Autie.” She whimpered like a wounded animal.

  He clutched her shoulders. “We can grow close once more. Sharing our bodies again as we—”

  “We don’t need that!”

  Custer’s hands slipped from her shoulders. “No, I suppose we don’t.” He was weary of it already. He turned away, defeated. “I had hoped—”

  “I quit hoping long ago, Autie.” She swept one of his hands up in hers. “Quit hoping for a child that would draw us even closer together. Please.” she begged. “The kindest, most loving thing you can do for me is to forget being intimate with me. You must understand how cruel it is—the guilt I suffer this morning—for what I did last night.”

  “For making love to me? With everything you are as a woman?”

  “Yes,” she answered firmly. “I can’t have a child. We can’t have a child. And each time we make love, I’m reminded that I’m just a little less as a woman, a little less as a wife to you.” She gazed up at him as he brushed a strand of chestnut hair from her eyes.

  “Autie, you can’t want to remind me of the horror and revulsion I feel for my own body’s failure to bear your children!”

  Libbie collapsed against him, tears boiling up from some incomplete place down in her being. He stroked her long chestnut hair.

  Soon she’ll pin it up around her face, he knew. But for now, it flows over her shoulders, rumpled from our night together. Hair long and flowing like—

  He tried to shove the other out of his mind. Feeling like a sham dodger, holding Libbie, thinking of Monaseetah.

  “All right,” he whispered, beaten. Such a hard thing to do, this drawing back from the woman he had fallen in love with when he was ten years old. Too painful for him to dredge up all those hopes and dreams any longer—those prayers that Libbie would be all things to him.

  “It’s settled, Libbie.”

  He felt her arms squeeze about him reassuringly. Lord, but he loved this frail, insecure woman so much at times. And others, he wanted her gone from his life. Her and the constant reminder that she believed he was at fault. That he was the reason she was barren.

  “I promise, Libbie.”

  Custer gazed out through the narrow slit in the tent flaps, mesmerized by the line of gold and brown prairie melting in a haze against the cornflower blue sky. A land much bigger than any man. Surely bigger than any problem that might threaten to overwhelm him.

  Looking at that shimmering horizon where the green and gold of the shortgrass rising from the brown flesh of the prairie to meet the caress of the morning sky just like a woman’s breasts rose to her lover, Custer knew he had fallen in love wi
th another.

  CHAPTER 28

  “Is this the place the Injins is kep’, Ginnel?”

  Custer smiled, bouncing on the seat of the freight wagon he had borrowed for this trip to Fort Hays from the Big Creek camp. Dear Eliza.

  Keeping much of her childlike and beguiling innocence down through their years together since that first autumn of ’64. A freed Virginia slave, she was only seventeen then. His cook ever since. Now housekeeper for Libbie. Custer couldn’t imagine doing without her.

  “Yes, Eliza. Wild Indians.”

  As Eliza glanced away, Custer winked at Libbie.

  “’Cain’t wait, Ginnel. Able to tell all I know that Eliza see’d a real live blood-tastin’ Cheyenne warrior!”

  “Not the warriors you have to keep an eye on,” he whispered mysteriously with another wink at Libbie. “It’s the women-folk who’re the sneakiest of all. Why, you don’t know when they might slip up behind you”—he slapped both reins into one hand—”and poke a knife right atween your ribs!”

  With the empty hand he jabbed his imaginary knife at Eliza. Gasping in horror, she clutched a hand to her breast and tumbled back against the sideboard of Lieutenant Bell’s freight wagon he had borrowed for their trip to Fort Hays.

  “Autie!” Libbie yelped, giggling. “You’re so cruel to Eliza! Scaring her witless!”

  “You scared witless, Eliza?” he asked.

  “Me, Ginnel?” She sat straight, flashing teeth yellowed like old ivory set within her ebony cheeks. “No, the Ginnel’s quite the kidder, Miz Libbie,” Eliza said. “Never know when he mean it, and when he don’t. Anythin’ at’all … he might’n be pullin’ my leg.”

  “But I’ve never pulled hard enough to pull it off,” Custer added.

  “Why, Ginnel—there you go at me again!” she exclaimed.

  “Yes,” Libbie said with a sigh. “We just don’t know what to expect of him next, do we?”

  Custer watched something strange cross Libbie’s face, before she gazed down the road once more. Whatever it was, it had made him cold. Here beneath a bright June sun. Clouds like tiny sailing ships adrift upon the expanse of a blue-domed sea. And her putting this cold knot in his gut.