Touchstone Season Two Box Set

by Andy Conway

  His Indian wife shooed him away and fed me dogwood tea, acrid tasting. I retched, but held it inside and plunged into sleep once more.

  When I awoke, I felt I had emerged from underwater. My ear had been blocked ever since I’d set foot in New York. I felt light and hungry. It was silent out there, the crowd having long gone, but there was the distant hubbub of the city, of carriages passing, sidewalk steps and chatter.

  Bronco Bill’s wife was called Ella Irving, and though she had an English name, she dressed entirely as an Oglala. Their three children came to stare at me before she tucked them into blankets and sang a lullaby. I listened and searched my heart again for any sign of love for children, but found none.

  Ella and Bronco Bill whispered outside the tipi about what to do with me, and I heard her say at one point, “She has a good heart.”

  I don’t know why she said that about me. Anyone can tell my heart is bad to the core.

  They were arguing. I pushed myself from the comforting warmth of the blankets and buffalo hides. I could not stay here. I had to find Sitting Bull.

  I crawled out of the tipi to find the sun had fallen, and they stopped their whispers, Ella reaching out to comfort me.

  “I have to speak to Sitting Bull,” I said.

  “He doesn’t want to speak to you,” said Bill.

  “Have you told him about me?”

  Bronco Bill nodded.

  “But I know him. I was with him at Little Bighorn. I have an important message for him. I’ve travelled so far to see him.”

  Bronco Bill looked at the dirt and made patterns with his moccasined toe. “He says you died. He says you can’t be you.”

  I did not make any decision to storm off and go to Sitting Bull, but no sooner had Bronco Bill said those words than I found myself hiking up my skirts and stomping through the camp looking for Sitting Bull’s tipi.

  There were more than thirty tipis dotted around the village, in no order that I could see. It seemed a random scattering.

  There. Painted on the side of a tipi. A boy counting coup in his first ever battle. A chief standing on a hill, arms aloft, the wavy symbol of a river, and many blue crosses.

  His exploits in battle.

  Standing guard outside the tipi were three white men, barrel chested, dressed in tight suits with derby hats, their faces red, their hands like shovels. These were not the Akicita — the tribal police of the Lakota camp — you would expect to see guarding a chief. And in the few steps it took me to size them up and come within smelling distance of the whisky on them, I saw the truth. Sitting Bull was here as a guest, a performer, almost a prisoner. He was no longer entitled to his own police force – a police force which superseded his authority as chief – he was no longer entitled to his entourage of Men who are Talked About , his mother, his sons and daughters and all his wives. He was here alone. As alone as the sad buffalo and elk that were paraded around the arena for city folk to gawp at.

  The men sat up from their stools as I marched forward, alarm in their eyes. One was whittling a stick with a penknife and he instinctively brandished it for protection. The largest of them held out a hand.

  “Excuse me, ma’am—”

  “I must speak with Sitting Bull!”

  “I’m afraid you can’t do that, ma’am,” said the big one.

  “No interviews allowed,” laughed the knife man.

  “I have an urgent message for him!”

  “I’m afraid that’s not allowed, ma’am.”

  He truly was a prisoner.

  And it hit me, that Buffalo Bill must have wrangled with the government to get Sitting Bull to be part of the show. Senators, police chiefs and generals must have debated it; and these were the conditions: he could be paraded like an animal in a circus, but no one could speak to him.

  I was not a friend with a message, I was a potential threat to the peace of the nation. A few misplaced words and this man could start a war all over again.

  “This is ridiculous!” I spat. “I’m speaking to him.”

  I ducked to enter his tipi, but their hands like shovels scooped me up and I flew like a clod of dirt, to be dumped on the sidewalk, sitting next to a pile of horse dung.

  The sidewalks of New York

  THE PAIN I FELT WAS as much in my belly as my butt, as undignified as that was. I brushed my skirt down and thought of finding a room for the night, somewhere to get a meal, then my heart fell into my boots.

  My bag. I had left it in the tipi with Ella Irving and Bronco Bill. It had my Running Away Money. Hunger growled in my belly twice as loud at the thought.

  The gates to Madison Square Garden were locked. I had nothing.

  A long night of hunger and cold stretched before me. I had suffered worse, much worse, on the plains. A night on the New York streets with nothing to eat would be nothing compared to fleeing the longknives for months through the snow on that trek to Canada. But I felt lonelier here.

  How strange, that I should feel so lost and alone in a city of thousands and thousands of people. They brushed by me on the sidewalks. They drove by, crammed into carriages and wooden buses, axles squealing, teams of gaunt horses pulling them, their solid flesh cracked by leather reins. The noise of them all, the smell of them, and the stink of oil from the street lamps. You could not breathe air that wasn’t being breathed by another here, and yet I was the loneliest I’d ever felt.

  I drifted away from the gates and through Madison Square Park, silent statues standing sentinel under electric lamps, and found myself joining the fringes of the crowd that stared at the Cumberland building opposite. A beam of light projected pictures onto its great blank wall and they stared agog, like the throng who’d stared at Buffalo Bill and his Wild West show, but this time at pictures. Advertisements for soap and corsets, mustard and vegetable pills, theatre shows and beer.

  The crowd cooed with delight at each new advert that flashed up onto the giant wall, as if they were watching the greatest picture show on earth.

  But I looked up and saw something different.

  A great iron ship as high as a mountain, cutting its way through waves of concrete.

  I turned from them and walked north, pausing at a restaurant where an overwhelming fragrance of cabbage and carrots, peas and bacon wafted out into the cold air and almost made me faint with longing.

  The street signs informed me I was on Fifth Avenue, but the further I walked, the quieter it became, and something inside me expected the opposite. The tallest buildings were the churches, and in my mind I saw giant palaces of glass.

  A cabman rested on an ash barrel by the side of the road, reading a newspaper, his horse standing silent, head bowed, trussed up and defeated.

  I called to it in my mind. It nickered and snorted but shook its mane, like my thoughts had been a flea, biting at its flesh.

  The cabman’s newspaper caught my eye. The familiar face of Buffalo Bill. The portrait that was plastered all over the city. But also the head of a dour-looking old woman with pearls about her neck and a crown sitting atop her white hair. Queen Victoria, I knew her even though no one had ever said her name to me.

  Last chance to catch the Wild West before it sets off to England.

  The cabman raised his eyes. “You want a lift, ma’am?”

  I pointed to his paper. He followed my finger with his eyes.

  “The show is going to England?”

  “Buffalo Bill?” he asked, surprised. “Yes, ma’am. England and the whole of Europe.”

  He licked his fingertip and opened the paper to an inside spread, holding it open for me.

  Giant blocks of fine print broken by headlines like Buffalo Bill’s Wild West to Tour Europe. Command Performance Before Queen Victoria, by Royal Command, for Golden Jubilee Celebrations. Tour of Great Britain and Europe for Whole Year.

  I peered close, my heart beating, eyes aching to read the small print under the faint light from the oil lamp.

  The tour would commence in...

 
“England,” I whispered, remembering George W. Hancock’s words on the steamboat, telling me where I was from.

  I snatched the paper from him and scanned the list of dates for Great Britain. The show would stay for four whole months in London before moving on to the second city.

  There it was, in black and white.

  Birmingham.

  For a month.

  The cabman shouted after me. I had dropped his newspaper at his feet. I didn’t hear his insult. I was running, my heart pounding in my ears. Running back to Madison Square Garden.

  Running to Buffalo Bill.

  The lonely death of Red Flea

  PEOPLE MILLED AROUND the entrance turnstiles, still guarded by policemen, flapping their arms against the cold.

  I noticed performers and staff coming in and out. All I had to do was wait for Bronco Bill or Ella Irving to come out and ask them to get me back inside.

  “Bright Star Falling!”

  A voice I knew.

  I turned to see Surrounded, clad in a pinstripe suit but with beads around his shirt neck and a feather poking out of his derby hat. He grinned proudly.

  “They said you were dead, but look at you. You have turned into a wasichu.”

  How strange it was that he seemed to think I had always been an Indian, and not a white woman in Indian clothes.

  “I need to get inside. I need to talk to Buffalo Bill. Can you help me?”

  He beamed. “Of course! Anything for Bright Star Falling.”

  He marched up to the turnstile and chatted with the man on the gate and after a minute or two he waved me in.

  I was back inside and heading straight for Sitting Bull’s tipi but Surrounded pulled me back.

  “You must come and smoke a pipe with me. We have so much to talk about!”

  I did not want to waste any time with him, but he had got me inside and I owed him this favour. I followed him into his tipi and he lit a fire and, with great ceremony, filled a pipe, all the time talking of what had happened since we last met.

  “We thought you were dead, but of course, there was no body where they said you had fallen. We went out to see in the morning. The women told us of your disappearance, and little by little we got out of them that they had chased you out of the camp, intending to kill you, but your bad magic had spirited you away.”

  I remembered his betrayal. The women whispering their lies about my cowardice, and he, the only one who knew the truth, saying nothing. Letting that bitch scold him for talking to me.

  “Where is Red Flea?” I asked.

  He puffed on the pipe for a while, looking into the distance and I thought he was not going to answer, but he eventually said, “She’s dead.”

  He paused for an age before continuing.

  “After that night, when they tried to kill you, all of those women became spooked by your disappearance. As the camp moved on through the snow, trying to reach Canada, those six women started to believe you really were White Buffalo Calf Woman and that you would return one night and take their souls. Day by day, I watched Red Flea slowly lose her mind. She would look over her shoulder every other moment, thinking to see you coming for her. She would jump and yell at the slightest noise. Her hair fell out in clumps, which left a trail for the blueshirts to follow. One morning I woke to find she had hung herself from a tree, only a hundred yards from the Canadian border.”

  He stared into the flames, as if he saw her swinging there from the end of her rope. He might have been sad that she died, or he might have been thinking about what to eat for breakfast in the morning. I didn’t know.

  I was glad she was dead.

  “What of the other women?” I asked.

  “They were hanging with her. All six of them must have agreed it and gone out in the night together.”

  Like they went out in the night together to kill me.

  I lowered my face to hide my smile.

  Maybe Red Flea was right all along. Maybe I really am evil.

  “It was kind of funny, in a way,” said Surrounded. “In trying to kill you, they hoped to lift the curse on us, so we might find Canada. But another month of wandering in the snow, going slowly crazy, and they must have decided that they were the curse. We crossed the border that same day.”

  “I need you to help me,” I said, passing the pipe back to him. “I need to persuade Buffalo Bill to take me on so I can get to England.”

  Surrounded sucked on the pipe and clouded his face in thick, sweet smoke so that he appeared like a man with no head.

  “I can do this,” his voice came through the fog.

  “Thank you.”

  The smoke cleared so just his eyes roamed me. “You shall be my wife,” he said. “You can come to England with me.”

  “I’m not going to be your wife.”

  “This is how it must be,” he shrugged.

  I glanced at the knife he’d used to pare his tobacco and thought for a moment that I might slit his throat. “You owe me for what I gave you,” I said.

  “I paid you with two horses, and the rifles, remember,” he chuckled.

  “I gave you your life as a warrior. To ride free into battle with magic on your side. You rode into the Battle Where the Sister Saved Her Brother, and to the Battle of the Greasy Grass where Long Hair was defeated. What price do you put on those two days that will warm your bones till the day you die? What shall you tell your grandchildren on your deathbed but what you did on those two days that I gave to you? Are two ponies and two rifles all that was worth?”

  He was looking into the flames again, perhaps seeing the glory of those days he was a warrior. He shrugged. “I am not a warrior no more.”

  “But you may ride with braves again,” I said. “Be a Show Indian. It is better than dying on a reservation.”

  “I see it all now,” he said, changing the subject. “I made a terrible mistake to take Red Flea as my wife. I was destined to be with you. The spirits have brought you back to me. It is destiny. The Everywhere Spirit wishes it. You shall share my bed tonight. You shall be my wife.”

  I shook my head.

  “If you want to go to England,” he said.

  “I gave you courage for battle, but you turned coward over a woman. I gave you the power to face Long Hair and you weren’t brave enough to face Red Flea. You only had to speak out for me, but you stayed silent and let them kill me. That’s why I’m dead to you.”

  I jumped to my feet and walked out, unable to spend a moment more looking at his stupid face I wanted to stab. And just as quickly my anger died, like a fire doused with water.

  I was free of him, but alone in a fake camp in New York in winter and with nowhere to go but back onto the streets.

  I wandered through the camp, treading softly on the frozen grass, wrapping my coat around me tighter, wishing I had a good blanket, wishing I was back in front of a fire, even Surrounded’s fire.

  The three white guards were still standing outside Sitting Bull’s tipi and I knew that any attempt to get past them would see me back in the gutter.

  I stood shivering, wondering what to do. Perhaps go back to Bronco Bill and his wife Ella and ask them to intercede on my behalf.

  Or go to Buffalo Bill himself.

  Looking about me, I tried to see which might be his lodging. The cowboy part of the camp was further on, where the sound of the band serenading a midnight lullaby drifted down on the cold wind.

  As I had decided to go find him, the flap of Sitting Bull’s tipi opened and two men climbed out. The guards straightened to attention a little more. Buffalo Bill in his buckskin jacket, a man behind him in a suit and top hat; the man who had barked out the narrative of the Wild West through a megaphone and had introduced himself as impressario, Nate Salsbury. They strode away from Sitting Bull’s tipi, anger in their step.

  I followed quickly in their wake, straining to hear.

  “...the whole European tour in doubt...” cried Buffalo Bill. “She’s the queen of England and the British empire.
Hell, isn’t she the Empress of India? What will she say when I turn up with no great Indian chief?”

  “Just get another chief,” said Nate.

  “Am I to dress any old ragged Show Indian in a war bonnet and con the Queen of England that she is seeing Sitting Bull?”

  “It’s an idea.”

  “Mr Cody, sir?” I called.

  They turned, surprised. Nate stepped between us, protecting his star, as if I might pull out a gun and shoot him right there.

  “Madam, how did you get in here? I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to vacate the premises.”

  Buffalo Bill laughed. “I’m not supposed to sign autographs at this time, young lady, but I can make an exception this once.”

  “I can help you,” I said. “With Sitting Bull.”

  Nate Salsbury took my arm to march me away. “I doubt a young lady such as yourself can know anything about the complexities of persuading Sitting Bull to change his mind and take a tour of Europe.”

  I shrugged him off. “I know more than you think.”

  Nate looked at Buffalo Bill. The two men shared a smile.

  “She’s spunky,” Cody laughed.

  “I know Sitting Bull,” I said. “I know him well.”

  Buffalo Bill guffawed and slapped his thigh. “Why, this is the best entertainment I’ve heard in years!”

  “I lived with the Hunkpapa for three years. I speak Lakota fluently. I know Sitting Bull very well, I assure you. And if your band of thugs hadn’t thrown me out tonight I would have talked to him already.”

  Footsteps padding through the camp towards me. I turned to find it was not the security, coming to throw me out again. It was Bronco Bill.

  Buffalo Bill smiled slyly and stroked his waxed moustache. “Why, Bronco, just the man. Perhaps you can settle a wager for us.”

  I turned to Bronco and spat out a stream of Lakotan. Tell this puffed up idiot I know Sitting Bull and get him to let me talk to him.

  Bronco blushed and looked at his paymaster, whose mouth had fallen open a little. “It’s true Mr Cody. She speaks Lakotan. She knows Sitting Bull.”