by Andy Conway
Red Shirt looked between them, expecting Katherine to interpret for him. She looked him in the eye, unafraid.
“She was only asking the same, Chief Red Shirt.”
He nodded, smiled and bowed his head to the girl, and Katherine saw what Two Face Lil clearly saw: that he was handsome and had noble features and that every woman fell in love with him. Even old Grandmother England had fallen in love with him.
Two Face Lil giggled and whipped her horse, shouting, “Yah!” and thundered away along the row of tipis.
“Let me help you,” said Red Shirt.
“It is not your place to raise a tipi,” she said.
“A chief must be all of his tribe,” he said.
There was a cackle of chatter from the winyanpi when they saw him hook her buffalo hide to the tent lift pole and raise it. Some of them rushed to help.
“Do not help me if you cannot help her!” he shouted, anger flashing in his eyes.
They quailed and retreated to their tipis.
Katherine had never seen him angry like that. She took the rope and walked around it five times, as quickly as she could, while her chief waited, whipping the rope around the tipi’s head. Like a maypole, she thought. One of those things she knew. One of those things that had come through to her from her old life. Perhaps she had danced around a maypole here, in this town.
“Something happened during the procession today,” Red Shirt said, placing the tent lift pole in position.
She merely nodded and wrapped the buffalo hide around one side of the skeleton, while he did the other. They fell silent, concentrating on making it right, wrapping it close, meeting on the other side.
She felt a surge of satisfaction once it was done, standing back to admire it.
Red Shirt reached for the lacing pins and handed half to her. They took each in turn, lacing the flaps together above and below the door hole.
“The winyanpi say it was a vision,” he said eventually.
She was almost surprised. They had said so little for so long. She stepped inside the tipi to busy herself pushing the poles out where the covering was bagged.
He stayed outside and she could hear him throwing the rope out and wrapping it four times around the crown, pulling the poles even tighter.
“Watch out!” he called, and threw the rope back inside through the smoke hole.
She stepped outside to meet his face again. “I’m not a medicine man. My visions are not important.”
He took the bundle of ash wood stakes and began pushing them through the tent loops, pulling them taut and twisting each one before pushing it into the ground.
She took her stone hammer and gave every peg a few whacks as he held them in place for her.
Twenty feet away some of the braves had paused to watch, chattering warily among themselves. She knew the whole camp was buzzing with news of her vision, and even though she wasn’t a medicine man, they were scared.
“I know that Sitting Bull would listen to your dreams. That your visions were important to him.”
She hammered another stake in as they circled the tipi. Each stake pierces the earth, she thought. This earth that I came from. Is some god hammering me back into this earth too?
“But the Hunkpapa also did not trust me,” she said. “Just like your Wagluhe.”
“You know that I trust you,” he said. “And always have. And if the chief trusts you, the tribe will follow.”
She smiled bitterly and shook her head, her fingertip stroking the scar across her cheek.
Sitting Bull had welcomed her to the Hunkpapa band, and they had accepted her as one of their own. She had lived with them for three years, fighting alongside them at the Little Bighorn, but in the end the women had turned on her. Chasing her out in the night, to kill her in the snow.
Perhaps she had died out there, and all of this was a dream.
She snatched up the anchor stakes and stepped back inside the tipi’s dark shadow.
Red Shirt followed, and she heard the murmur of gossip outside. Sudden anger filled her soul and she hammered each stake into the ground with venom, forming an X just off the centre of the space.
“The Hunkpapa are a... war-like people,” Red Shirt joked. “We Oglala are peacemakers.”
“You forget I knew Crazy Horse,” she said, pulling the anchor rope down and twisting it tight around the X she had made.
“You have the same craziness,” he said.
She looked up, stung, and met his clear, bright expression, and knew he’d not meant it to hurt, but in the true meaning of witko. Not what the whites meant when they said ‘crazy’ but what the Lakota meant when they said the word: a kind of swooning. To be possessed by visions, taken up by the spirits, head all whirling.
That was what she’d felt as they rode through the city. The thunder beings had danced in her head. She still felt dizzy.
She stepped out of the tipi and took one of the smoke flap poles, holding it like a lance, hooking it into the pocket of the flap up there and gently angling it forward till the flap was erect, like a flag.
Red Shirt did the same with the smoke flap on the other side.
“What I saw was of this place,” she said. “And of me. It was nothing to do with your people. It was mine alone.”
Red Shirt nodded and put his hand on her shoulder. “Bright Star Falling, I hear what they say about you: that you are winkte — a two-souled person. Like your old friend, Little Star.”
She clutched the tight leather bundle at her breast. “Only men can be winkte.”
“If a man with womanly qualities can be so, then why not a woman with manly qualities? Perhaps you are that other kind of winkte. You are as brave as any man. I see that. And you have great power inside you. Even our greatest medicine men are wary of your power.”
“I have no powers,” she said, sadly. And yet, she felt it inside herself. When Two Face Lil came to gloat, she felt that she could flick a finger and shoot an arrow between her eyes. Without a bow, without an arrow. She had had that power once. She knew it.
“Whatever visions you have,” Red Shirt said, “I want to hear them.”
She nodded and lowered her face.
He mounted his horse and looked on the tipi, nodding with pride. “It is a good home.”
She watched him go, chasing the sun fading from the grey sky ahead of him, and remembered Sitting Bull. He too had turned away from her in the end.
Or was it she that had turned from him?
She picked up the buffalo hide door flap and pinned it into place and stepped inside, rolling it shut behind her so that no visitors might call.
She would build a fire, raise the lining on the inside and dress the tipi to set her bed. She kneeled in the centre of her space and placed her palm to the cold earth.
This was the place from which she had fallen.
Today, or tomorrow or the day after, she would find out who Katherine Bright was, and understand the dark power that seethed inside her.
She was so close now. It would happen.
Whatever Red Shirt said, it would scare him as much as it scared his people.
But not as much as it scared her.
5
THE SMELL OF SUCCOTASH and frybread invaded her lodge and made her belly groan with desire. She stepped out, her blanket wrapped around her, and joined those crowding to the commissariat tent, where pots bubbled over warm flames and steaks sizzled on hotplates.
She took her plate of food and ate alone. None of the winyanpi gave her evil looks. Ella even smiled and welcomed her.
She had always felt closer to Ella, perhaps because she had married a white man, Bronco Bill Irving, and he too acted as interpreter to Buffalo Bill. Ella had always had a kind smile for Katherine, unlike the other winyanpi.
They had all seen Red Shirt help her. They had seen their chief’s anger at their discourtesy and it had humbled them. But she could see their fear of her.
After dinner, Buffalo Bill called a camp meetin
g and they gathered in the arena to hear him speak.
Katherine and Bronco Bill interpreted for the Indians that knew no English, which was almost all of them, calling out Buffalo Bill’s words in Lakota, signing with hands, as was the custom.
“My fellow performers and artistes,” he cried out, waving his Stetson, all het up like a young buck in the mating season. “We come to another great city in this tour of Europe. We come to tell our story of the Wild West to a whole new city, a whole new people.”
This was what he lived for, Katherine thought. To tell stories; not with words, but with people and horses and guns. It was a living, breathing, hollering novel.
“We have told this story to the great city of London. So many times. And to Queen Victoria herself. And we shall tell the story again, in other fine cities across Europe, and to more kings and queens and crown princes. But do not assume that this is an opportunity for pause and rest. Each day we perform for the great people of this city as if we perform for the Queen herself. Each performance is the first time these people have seen our story. So let us tell it with the same excitement and gusto as the very first time we told it!”
Katherine saw the fatigue fall from the shoulders of the camp — the whites as well as the Indians. They were all smiling now and filled with purpose, and no one was thinking about a crazy white winyan with visions in her head.
“Every one of you is a crucial and essential part of this story we tell. You cowboys and rough riders, my sharp shooters. Annie Oakley, the queen of the shotgun...”
Annie Oakley rose and accepted her applause with a meek nod, applauding them all back.
“Lillian Smith, the undisputed queen of the rifle!”
Two Face Lil stepped out and gave a flourish with a stupid grin, like she was performing for the paying crowd. A flutter of malicious gossip passed through the white performers, and Katherine was certain she heard the word Wimbledon echoing amongst them.
“To Chief Red Shirt, and the good Sioux men and women, without whom I firmly believe it is impossible to tell the story of America!”
This was how it went every time Colonel Cody made a speech. He buttered them all up so much that if he’d announced they were being served up as corn, every man and woman would have put themselves on frybread and asked who the lucky diner was.
As she interpreted, Katherine became aware of a man she had not seen before. He was standing by Nate Salsbury, the top-hatted impresario who ran the show. The man ignored Buffalo Bill and stared only at her. She didn’t turn to him, only aware of him as a blur to her right, but she could feel the force of his gaze.
Only when Bill finished and there was great applause, did she steal a glance and see the man, still staring unashamedly.
Something familiar about him.
Was this the person who might know her, call her by her name?
She made for him, but Annie Oakley sidled up, linking arms with her, and she lost her chance to confront him. The strange new man was lost in the crowd.
“Dearest Bright Star Falling, my girl. How are you feeling?”
“I’m fine,” she said. “Thank you.”
“Aw, now don’t you go being all polite, my girl. I know you took a bad turn today. Half the damn camp’s jabbering on about it.”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Hell, I know that. I don’t wanna know your business. I just wanna know you’re all right.”
She felt Annie’s love flood her heart and soared on eagle’s wings.
“And don’t you pay no heed to that little bitch, Lillian,” said Annie. “If it helps you any, she’s just as rude and slappable to me, and if it wasn’t for Colonel Cody, I would have shot her stupid nose off her impudent face already.”
Katherine laughed and saw Two Face Lil glaring daggers across the camp at them. She was standing next to Buffalo Bill and the mysterious staring white man.
“Just look at her!” laughed Annie. “See how she looks at every woman like she spat on her boots, and then in an instant she’ll turn to any man and smile like an angel.”
“She is Winyan Nupa,” said Katherine.
“And what’s that? Please tell me it’s Sioux for Punch Her Mouth.”
“Two Face.”
“Oh, I like that!”
Katherine laughed with Annie Oakley but a shadow fell across her heart as she remembered the myth of the goddess Winyan Nupa: she was married to Tate – Tah-tay – the wind god, but then banished to wander the earth with one half of her face disfigured, the other shining like the sun.
Something about it made her fearful. It was just a story, but it seemed closer to her than it should, as if she had once walked among those gods and taken part in their squabbles.
“That’s her all right,” cried Annie. “Little Two Face. Weenyan Nooper. I’m a-have to remember that one. Notice how she flirts with every man in a five-mile radius, and equally has to undermine every woman in the same vicinity.”
Katherine laughed. Annie squeezed her arm.
“I’m going to turn in now, but you come call on me and Frank in our caravan any time you like. If you need company.”
Katherine smiled and shook her head, wanting to slip away to her lodge and sleep, still light-headed, as if her brain had been cooked in a fry pan.
She watched Annie walk back over to her husband, Frank, who waved across at her and smiled kindly, and Katherine felt human again.
Buffalo Bill called her over. The staring man at his side. As she walked across to them, Lil Two Face scowled like she’d swallowed a toad, and waddled off with her squashy nose in the air.
“Bright Star Falling, my dear, allow me to introduce you to a gentleman from the press. Someone I would like you to assist in creating a picture of our Wild West venture.”
The gentleman at his side, now she had a good look at him, was a dark haired man in a tight brown check suit. He raised his brown derby hat with one hand and held out the other to her. It was something she’d forgotten that white men did. No one had raised their hat to her since she’d donned her Indian clothes again. When she’d dressed like a white woman in New York, they’d done it all the time.
“He’s a reporter for an august local publication and his name is Mister Peter Wethers.”
She shook the man’s hand and met his dark eyes. He smiled with genuine warmth and interest and, she knew, did not see her as a squaw. Or, if he did, did not hate them or feel them inferior in any way.
The pang of recognition again. Who did he remind her of? Would he say her name and reveal the person she had been in this city that felt like home?
“I’m delighted to meet you,” he said. “Miss...”
“My English name is Katherine,” she said.
He nodded, as if that made sense, but there was no recognition there.
He didn’t know her. She felt the weariness of the day drag her down. But if she recognized him, where could she have seen him before? Riding through the city today, or perhaps he’d watched the show in London? Perhaps he looked like someone she’d seen across the ocean. But she could think of no one it might be.
“Bright Star Falling is one of my interpreters,” said Buffalo Bill. “She speaks perfect Lakotan and is utterly indispensable to me in providing a crucial avenue of communication with my Indians, who, as you know, are vitally important to me, Mr Wethers.”
“It’s obvious you hold them in high esteem,” said Peter Wethers.
“Make no mistake of it, this is the key message I wish to emerge from your work with me. There is a local newspaper, a rival to your publication, Mr Wethers, that intends to stir up hatred against my Indians.”
Peter Wethers seemed surprised. “Oh? I didn’t know that, Colonel Cody.”
Buffalo Bill nodded sadly, taking out a roll of newsprint and slapping it. “Savages that killed the hero, General Custer... polluting our fair town... are our wives and daughters safe in their beds while this menace parades our streets?”
“Blimey,
” said Peter Wethers. “I mean, that’s rather nasty.”
“My vanguard tells me there are rival politicians to the city fathers who wish to stir up the local populace against us. But I feel sure that every person who comes to see the Wild West shall see the truth for themselves.”
Katherine looked from one to the other, wondering why she had been invited to witness it.
“No worry,” said Buffalo Bill. “I have it under control, should any nastiness arise.”
His gaze wandered to a man standing several yards off. A man in a grey suit and derby hat. Katherine shuddered.
Calder.
The Pinkerton agent assigned to the show. All the Indians feared him, and it seemed his sole purpose was not to protect the colonel, but to keep the Indians in check. While the white performers were free to come and go as they pleased, the Show Indians were gently reminded that they were subjects of the United States, granted merely temporary leave of their reservations. Agent Baynard Calder was the hunting dog that would track down any Indian who strayed.
Calder seemed to sense her stare. His eyes met hers.
A spider crawled up her spine.
Calder spat on the ground.
She forced her attention back to Buffalo Bill and the reporter, unable to hear their words until she felt Calder’s malevolent gaze fade.
“Mr Wethers, I want you to interview Chief Red Shirt and as many of my Show Indians as you can. I do firmly declare that the Wild West would mean nothing without their participation. Nothing at all.”
“You’ll be wanting me to interpret,” said Katherine.
“Mr Wethers is going to interview many people in the show, Bright Star Falling, but I particularly want you to help him talk to the Indians.”
She returned her gaze to Peter Wethers, trying to ignore that strange feeling of recognition in her belly. “I would be happy to,” she said.
Buffalo Bill laughed and slapped his thigh. “And you know what I say? I say she too would make possibly the most interesting interview subject of them all!”
“Oh no, Mr Cody,” she said and looked at the grass.