“Get out there as far as you can ahead of us,” Custer had told Lt Varnum, “when you locate the main encampment, secure a vantage point and send a pair of scouts back to me. Stay put and I’ll bring up the main body.”
Lt Varnum had ambitions of his own recalling an earlier conversation with the general in which the future of the lieutenant had been intimated.
“You find that encampment and lead me to it, Lieutenant Varnum, and I will make you a general!” promised the future President.
Custer was at the head of his mounted column of six hundred plus cavalrymen-soldiers in subdued grey and blue flannel shirts. The heavy wool regulation shirts were rolled into a bundle and secured onto the rear of the saddle, or placed into the saddle bags. They would be worn later in the afternoon, when the heat of the day subsided and the cool of the night set in.
The swallow tailed guidons were snapping in the breeze above the soldiers’ sweat ringed straw hats. The guidon in the lead element had the distinctive triangle cut out of the fly, giving it the swallow tailed bird image. It was divided into two colors consisting of horizontal red and white stripes. In the upper left corner of the guidon was a blue overlay containing two concentric circles of stars, each representing an individual state in the Union.
Many of the straw hats were pinned up on the right side to facilitate aim with the Springfield carbines that were slung across their saddles in leather scabbards. All of the officers carried .45 caliber Colt revolvers at their side, as did many of the enlisted–purchased individually in not a few instances. The flower of US Army strength–the 7th Cavalry followed this trail relentlessly.
One of the officers, an Irishman, carried an eccentric walking cane with a silver handle in the shape of a wolf’s head. He sat mounted atop his sorrel gelding while the flying column had stopped to water their horses. The captain of company I was an Irishman with a short temper, he grasped his walking cane and the reigns of his horse fiercely with his left hand as he rubbed his temples with his right. The foul tempered captain suffered bouts of insanity as his advanced syphilis entered the tertiary stage. His most capable sergeant approached him as the horses watered.
“Captain Keogh, Sir!” the sergeant addressed the tousle headed Irishman, “My men implore me to beseech you to ask the general for a longer break.”
“Ride or die!” snarled the big Irishman, his green eyes narrowing into slits.
“But Sir!” expostulated the sergeant, who was slapped viciously across the mouth, drawing blood.
“You and many others carry the bruises of my cane on your backs! Make me look bad in front of the general and I’ll see that you carry many more! Now, get out of here!” shouted the big captain in his Irish brogue.
“One of these days,” threatened the sergeant, with hatred beaming from his eyes, “I will kill you. Go to the general, go ahead, go to him like a cry baby and report me. There is no one privy to this conversation but you and I, and I mean to kill you!”
The volatile captain stood up in his stirrups and swung the cane, hitting the sergeant across the side of the face.
“Is that all you’ve got? You fucking Mick!” challenged the sergeant, who grabbed the cane with his left hand, stopping another blow in mid stroke as the order was shouted to mount up and resume march.
“You’re too big for your britches, Sergeant. Make your threats, I will see that you are horsewhipped and reduced in rank to private!” screamed the captain, the veins standing out on his neck and his face turning purple with rage.
“We’re not in Europe, Captain.” replied the sergeant, wiping the blood from his split lips with the back of his forearm, “I don’t care what type of a family you’re from. You’re dead meat, mother fucker!”
As the day wore on, the sun climbed high into the Montana sky, and the dust covered column began to stretch out–stragglers falling behind. But the former general pressed them hard, continuing the march up the Indian trail which Major Reno had described in great detail.
Bloody Knife–Custer’s best scout tried in vain to dissuade Lieutenant Colonel Custer from the object of his passion–the great Indian village which they knew awaited. The pair rode 50 yards ahead of the main body. “Can’t win this one. Not enough soldier.”
Custer continued to look far ahead, looking from left to right as he responded with a cliché. “The Sioux won’t fight. They’ll run at the first sign of us.” Custer made the statement in such a way as to belie the unease he felt.
“You want to be the chief of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, well if Crook and Terry are in on this, it will diminish my achievement. Terry has confidence in me and that’s why he let me go it alone.” resumed Custer, who continued scanning the countryside straight ahead, and to either side of him as he spoke.
“Hmmmph!” grunted Bloody Knife, who didn’t catch a word Custer had said.
The sound of the horse’s feet and the din of the march added to the difficulty of understanding what the Yellow Hair had said. Besides, Bloody Knife knew, The Yellow Hair often spoke simply to hear himself speak. In this manner he would always have an agreeable audience.
The column became engulfed in a cloud of alkaline dust from the Indian trail. Some of the soldiers blew their noses into handkerchiefs, but not many. Most blew their noses with their fingers, and nearly all wore brightly colored bandanas over their faces to staunch the respiration of dust. The riders in the center and further back had it the worst. Their eyes were caked with dust and the granules acted like abrasive sandpaper when they open and closed the eyelids. At times some rode with their eyes closed, trusting their mounts to follow those in front of them.
So it was that the Boy General had issued the orders to halt, refraining from a bugle call.
“Let’s unass right here and get the tent set up!”
Bloody Knife knew well the General’s love of camping and his peculiar fondness for an overlarge tent which he had carried everywhere he went. Orders were passed to the rear with instructions for troop commanders to come forward to the command tent in an hour’s time. It was a Sibley tent, a large conical canvas affair standing about twelve feet tall and shaped like a tepee. About eighteen feet in diameter at the base, it could shelter a dozen men and was supported by a center telescopic pole. It was staked to the ground and didn’t require the use of guidelines; the tent was beige in color.
“General Custer, Sir!” the expostulation was in heavy Irish brogue.
“What do you need, Miles?” asked the Yellow Hair, perturbed at being interrupted in setting up his tent. “I said we’d hold a briefing in an hour.”
“It’s one of my sergeants, Sir. He threatened me! He threatened to kill me!”
Custer had been kneeling down, hammering the tent stakes into the ground prior to erecting the telescopic tent pole, but now he stood up, clearly annoyed. He faced the hulking Irishman with the boyish good looks and jet black hair. A foreigner, Custer felt, who had no business being an officer in the Army.
“You son of a bitch!” yelled Custer, “If you cane one of my men again, I’ll personally ram that wolf’s head handle up your ass! Send that sergeant here that threatened to kill you!” demanded the general, his voice softened as an idea came to him.
The sergeant and the captain stood before Custer, who was aware of ubiquitous stares amid the soldiers who made ready the camp. The Boy General was aware of how hard he had pushed his men, and that everyone needed a respite.
“Take your shirts off, the both of you!” ordered General Custer, who was sitting on a folding field chair, fanning himself with his hat.
The sergeant quickly stripped off his shirt while the captain looked stupidly at the sitting general.
“Now, fight!” shouted Custer, “Fight like the sons of bitches you are!”
General Custer allowed his men to watch the brawl between the sergeant and the captain, knowing that their spirits would be bolstered by the break in routine. He had exceeded the projected rate of march by setting his column into motio
n at a furious pace, locating the trail, and sticking to it tenaciously. It was fortunate to have the pack train with provisions for both men and horses. Heavily armed details escorted the exhausted mounts to the Rosebud to rehydrate while the rest of the command watched the sergeant and the captain fight. Individual companies could be discerned by their unique guidons; the swallow tailed pennants were divided horizontally into two solid colors. The top half was red, with a white number “7” sewn into it. The bottom half of the guidon was white in color, with the letter of its company sewn onto it in red coloring.
The sergeant was getting the better of the big Irishman as the fight drew on. Except for the lookouts posted on the surrounding hills, and the details seeing to the exhausted horses, most of the command was circled around the officer and NCO as they fought.
“I’ll cane you to death!” shouted the captain, drawing a boot knife and advancing on the pugnacious sergeant.
“Oh, let’s see about that, Mick!” retorted the sergeant, scooping up a handful of sand and throwing it full into his knife wielding opponent’s face.
“My eyes! My eyes! I’m blind! I’m blind!” screamed Captain Keogh, “I’ll spill your guts for that!” Keogh wielded the short bladed boot knife with his right hand, swiping viciously with it as he frantically tried to clear the sand from his eyes with his left.
The stench of hundreds of unwashed bodies surrounded the two combatants; the stench of bodies of men who drank stale beer carried by the supply wagons and from whiskey bottles made of brown, translucent glass, of men who shouted and goaded them on, and of men whose fists slammed into open palms as they sang choruses of obscene songs while the two men fought.
“Now! That’s what I call entertainment!” guffawed the Boy General, slapping his knee hard as he leaned forward on his field chair, laughing.
With the passage of the day, came the chilling of the starry night, whose icy stars were not the only lights to be seen, myriad fireflies competed in the luminescent pageantry, owing to the fact that the General had forbade the ignition of campfires until morning. Lights could also be seen, many miles away by the sentries picketed atop high ground, sentries who stood vigil against the solemn, taciturn men who built the distant fires that glittered eerily in the distance.
The camp fires of the Indian village were so numerous that a glow seemed to expand from the village, its luminescence reaching like a hand thousands of feet into the dark chill of the Montanan atmosphere. The 7th had drawn nigh unto the enemy they knew, because the wind outraged their ears with the resonance of hundreds of pagan war drums. The resonance faded as the wind ebbed, and grew as the wind renewed. As darkness settled, the drumming became more distinct, and the shrill notes of war flutes could be heard above the timbre of the rolling drums.
Chapter Seven ~ The Dream, The Vision, The Nightmare
General Custer slept fitfully in the Sibley tent, a deep, exhausted sleep; resplendent in the imageries of scarlet nightmares. Often a variation of the same dream; it always began near the end, but never resolved. The dreams included characters from his past, which were out of the timeline in the dream, or the dream would take place out of context with the geography, but one element remained constant-the Indian. Always hunting or fleeing from Indians, this time through an endless ocean of prairie grass. Custer shifted in his sleep on the cot inside the tent, his sleep deepening, the nightmare growing in luxuriant detail and realism…
As he kneeled he rested the butt of his Spencer repeating rifle into the spongy, damp grass of the meadow and he leaned into the rifle for support, taking the strain off of his haunches. Underneath his buckskin jacket he wore a blue cavalry shirt, outside of which adorned a unique double shoulder holster from which depended two English Webley bulldog revolvers. A gun belt bearing a Colt .45 revolver cinched tightly around the buckskin jacket. There was apprehension in the blue eyes that searched the green open expanse that surrounded and flanked the Indian trail. The sky was blue, but there was no sun. Adrenaline dilated pupils bored into the endless beyond.
Rising, he began to slink cautiously along, having been for hours on the hunt. Trying to find the quarry was like trying to find a needle in a haystack in this green verdure of tall grass; aware the path hugged the margins of the Arkansas River, he stuck to it, like a revolver in a holster. He tried not to make noise as he padded carefully along, but he knew that a sound, no matter how small, would not escape the ears of the Indian.
He was alert, every sense on edge, he was listening with such intensity as he crept along that he could hear his ears ringing. The grasses were so dense, so suffocating that eyesight was relegated to a secondary level of importance. It was a sixth sense that made him freeze in place, crouching, rifle at the ready. He didn’t breathe, he didn’t move, he wondered what had made the noise, that was so faint, so subtle, he wondered if perhaps he had imagined it. There was not to be heard the chirp of birds, nor the high pitched whir of cicadas, the silence was deafening.
The dream oddly changed it’s time and location, as dreams often do. He found himself in the dining room of the brother of his grandfather, who was reading aloud from the Bible to his wife; both were seated at the table.
“…and it says here, in the book of Matthew…” Custer’s great uncle continued to read to his wife, not noticing his great nephew’s appearance.
Custer stood before them, obediently at the table. He woke up, and then slid back into deep, uneasy slumber, into the part of the dream he favored.
But suddenly he was inexplicably somewhere else, he knew not where. It was earlier in the day and he was walking toward a single story clapboard house at the side of a roadway. The unpainted house stood alone, it was a solidly built frame house with a wide front porch. He had the impression it was a wayfarer’s inn for outlanders, vagabonds, and ne'er do wells. Something about the place raised his level of awareness.
“Hello!” he shouted as he mounted the steps.
No response came from within the house; it came from under the building. He stepped back down and walked around to the side.
Kneeling down and peering underneath he could see that it was a pier and beam structure, he could see that a square shaped pit had been excavated about four feet deep, and there were four Caucasian women attired in dark Puritan dresses which had gone out of style 200 years before. Their hair was brown, and pulled back tightly. They did not wear hair covers. The dresses were dark brown and full length with white bib collars and soiled white aprons. The women were busy doing something with their hands at a darkly stained table made of heavy rough cut oak boards. They were speaking amongst one another. For the first time in one of his nightmares Custer felt fear.
“Hello?” said the General, his mouth was without saliva as he swallowed, his Adam’s apple rising and falling. The women ignored him, although he knew they were aware of his presence. Suddenly from behind he felt a pressure on his back pushing him into the pit with the women.
“Confound it! What the devil! I’ve got to wake up! Wake up!”
He felt his stomach rise as though he were falling from a great height, and when he stopped falling, he was prostrate on the earthen floor of a tepee adorned with horrific symbols. He looked up into the fierce face of what appeared to be a Sioux Medicine man. The Sorcerer uttered a dialect he’d never heard before and then he looked into his eyes; dark eyes of obsidian that seemed to reach into his soul. He struggled against the power that was overwhelming his will to resist when suddenly he was awoken from the dream by a violent shaking of his shoulder.
“General, it’s Reveille! Awaken!”
Chapter Eight ~ Bath Time!
The bedroom in General Custer’s two story home at Fort Abraham Lincoln was illuminated by half a dozen whale oil lamps which cast a warm glow across the lavishly furnished room.
“Make ready my bath!” came a command delivered by a female voice.
Elizabeth Custer told her maid servant, a strikingly beautiful Indian girl of about 20 years to prepare her
bath as she began undressing. Elizabeth knew she would not be fully undressed before the raven haired beauty had filled the tub with scented, steaming water.
Libbie Custer, as those intimate with the Custer family knew her, was in her early thirties, and still the most beautiful of all the officers’ wives stationed on the post of Fort Abraham Lincoln. As she stood in front of the mirror she unpinned her auburn colored hair, listening to the girl pouring another bucket of hot water into the Victorian styled bath tub. Although she always slept in a night gown when her husband was home, this was not so when she was alone. And the avoidance of nudity in her husband’s presence was, to her, a proper reprisals for the affliction he had cursed her with. Yet she enjoyed the nudity she displayed occasionally in front of other officer’s wives, more often in front of her sister in law, and especially in front of her Indian servant, who she could sense was made uncomfortable by it.
The black Victorian touring hat lay carelessly tossed on the bed, as Libbie let her hair fall down to her shoulders. She began unbuttoning the white and black pin striped high necked walking blouse, which was secured by five buttons, and pulling it off, she flung it haphazardly to the floor.
Too fast, she thought to herself, what’s the hurry? It’s going to take that little imp another 30 minutes to get my bath ready!
She had always enjoyed displaying herself in front of other women, especially in dormitories of the women’s schools her father had sent her to. Off came the thin black velvet belt, followed by the pinstriped walking skirt and Edwardian hoop underskirt. Leaving the silken white underbus corset on for the moment. Libbie often did not wear drawers or tap pants underneath her dresses. She admired her beauty in the full length mirror-a gift from Alexis-the nephew of the Tsar of Russia.
Metal Storm: Weird Custer A Novel Page 4