The Removes

by Tatjana Soli

  Libbie danced with a few officers who grabbed her arm before she was through the doorway. She was much the sensation in her shocking native attire—a fringed deerhide dress sewn with patterns made of elk teeth and beads. It was heavy and clinging and felt like a sensuous second skin. She wore her hair down in two long braids with feathers woven at the side with suede straps. On her feet she wore a pair of beaded moccasins.

  After drinking a small glass of punch to bolster herself she made her way to Autie. When she reached him, she gave him a big kiss, then immediately pulled back with a confused look.

  “Libbie!” he said.

  It was Tom, dressed in his brother’s uniform.

  “Why didn’t you stop me? You knew who I was! Even if I didn’t recognize you.”

  She blushed and walked away, never admitting that of course she would never mistake one brother for the other and had not this time.

  Later, having drunk too much, Tom insisted on taking Libbie aside. Drink was the bane of the army and so it had become for him. She hated to see him in such a state and began to lecture him yet again on taking a vow of abstinence as Autie had.

  “Yes, I’ll abstain as he does,” he said.

  Libbie looked away.

  “That was uncalled for. Forgive me. You suffer enough without my adding to it.”

  “Let’s go dance.”

  “I’ve received a letter from a certain lady in Monroe.”

  “Oh.”

  Other than her husband, Tom was the closest person to Libbie’s heart. They shared the status of being in thrall to Autie. Loyal to the death, still they kept their own council, feeling that he was too judgmental.

  They moved away for privacy although Autie was in his study, giving the guided tour to his taxidermied menagerie and quite oblivious to them. The room was so overwhelmed with his trophies it had the eerie feel of an Egyptian crypt, as if he intended to take his prizes with him to the afterworld.

  “Did you hear?” Libbie asked.

  “She gave birth to a son.”

  Libbie’s eyes smarted. The announcement cut even though she knew it was coming.

  “She married. A shopkeeper who agreed to the paternity.”

  “For the best.” She patted his arm. “But just imagine—you are a father!”

  Later, Libbie sat in the kitchen and poured herself a thimble of whiskey. Normally she never touched alcohol, but tonight the pain was too intense. Everyone was always curious about their childlessness. When they first married she took for granted that soon there would be pregnancies, her life filled with babies and children. Autie came from a large family and expected to have his own. After a year passed, she worried the failure was hers. To his credit Autie declared what a nuisance babies would have been in camp. She did not believe him for a moment, but she loved him all the more for the consoling fiction.

  Months after the departure of her Monroe friend, Autie had gone to the infirmary and received treatments of silver nitrate. He admitted receiving such treatments before while at West Point.

  When he departed that spring to bring in the remaining Cheyenne tribes, three captives accompanied him: the senior squaw, Mawisa, sister of Chief Black Kettle, who was enticed with the promise that her cooperation would be rewarded with freedom; a friend of Mawisa; and, of course, Monahsetah. In the end they would be gone almost six months.

  Libbie went home to Monroe and began her own treatments. The only mention of it between them was when she wrote in a letter, A night with Venus, a lifetime with Mercury.

  * * *

  AUTIE BROUGHT IN the remaining tribes and solidified his new reputation. A photograph taken during this time captured his transformation. He had donned the dressed buckskin clothes of a scout. On his head was a fur cap, and he had grown out a beard—incarnated once more into the heroic. With the Washita victory, he had completed the changeover from Civil War cavalier to plains hero. Now, though, Libbie judged him with new, harsh eyes. He reminded her of an actor preening in a new costume, and she understood the scorn of his detractors.

  Seemingly oblivious of their long separation, he bragged in his letters of how the nomadic life suited him. In retaliation she bought an expensive new dress that would cost him a month’s pay and stayed out later than her habit at a great many parties. As further punishment she added another month to her stay, but he was gone by so much longer her chastisement went unnoticed.

  Do you want to know what I think of him? Tom should have been the General and I the Lieutenant.

  —GEORGE ARMSTRONG CUSTER

  April 17, 1871

  Dear Jimmi,

  It has come to our attention, seeing as you are soon to be joined in holy matrimony to our beloved sister Maggie that you will need to be initiated into Custer family lore. Since Maggie has little to zero interest in this subject, Armstrong and I have taken it upon ourselves to explain certain stories to you. Of course Armstrong, as usual, has taken the General’s prerogative, that is he decided on an action then promptly turned it over to a plebe to carry out. In this case you are lucky, though, because I, too, can spin a yarn, and probably a more interesting one than You-Know-Who. Let’s see if I can’t pen something for posterity. As there’s a card game starting now, this will be continued.

  —Tom

  TOM CUSTER

  BRAVERY

  In our childhood I won’t deny that the Custer boys were called many things but coward wasn’t one of them. Then or later. We loved pranks and never tired of playing them on each other, on our dad, who gave as good as he got, and sometimes on outright strangers. After Armstrong left for West Point, I hit a low point, thinking I would spend the rest of my life up to my elbows in dirt, staring at the same dull horizon till the end of my days. As time passed the idea became more and more intolerable, and I twice tried to enlist, underage, before my father finally gave his consent. He understood we had adventure running in our blood.

  After the War of the Rebellion, I was stationed away from Armstrong and Libbie at a fort being built deep in Indian Territory. As we drilled the soldiers, others were busy felling trees and erecting our shelter, always under guard due to the proximity of the warring tribes. We had just put up the guard tower when we were alerted to an ambush not two hundred yards from our location across the river. From our elevated vantage we could observe the action but were out of range, a fact that the war party had clearly predicted. We watched helplessly as the guard, frightened at the sight of real live warriors, not only failed to get off a single shot, but abandoned the wagon and mules—the object of the raid—and fled to a nearby hillock. A single courageous soldier could have held the dozen warriors off indefinitely but that is not what happened.

  At the fort, the lieutenant made ready a troop to ford the stream even as the Indians were sawing through the traces and harnesses to carry the animals off. Our single cannon was fired, which soared harmlessly over the natives’ heads and into the woods behind. This gave the Indians pause, but unmolested, they continued on. We watched as the party rode off with their booty and only then did our guard rise to give false chase, firing off a few rounds at their fast-disappearing backsides before returning to camp. There were certain truths that were self-evident in the family, and one of the most important was that Custers always pursue.

  The Indian cannot be himself and be civilized; he fades away and dies. Cultivation such as the white man would give him deprives him of his identity … If I were an Indian, I often think, I would greatly prefer to cast my lot among those of my people adhered to the free open plains rather than submit to the confined limits of a reservation, there to be the recipient of the blessed benefits of civilization, with its vices thrown in …

  —GEORGE ARMSTRONG CUSTER

  INDIAN TERRITORY, SPRING 1869

  After Washita, Custer was happy to be removed from civilization for a time, even if it meant a prolonged absence from Libbie. Sheridan left him with orders to bring in the remaining tribes either by diplomacy or force. After his last drub
bing in the papers, Custer vowed it would be the former.

  They rode for weeks before coming on Indian camps that quickly sued for peace and then scattered like the virga, the rain that evaporated on its way from cloud to earth. Villages that had been full of people until minutes before were abandoned as if by magic, only lodges, blankets, pots, and weapons left behind when the soldiers arrived. By routine the men counted the spoils, put them in a pile, and set them ablaze.

  He ordered half of the men back to Fort Sill in order to be more mobile and conserve food. The remainder, including more than fifty Indian scouts, formed a strange hybrid thing crossing the plains. Golden Buffalo again came to him for his nightly lessons and sometimes stayed to eat supper with the two Indian women. Custer practiced his rudimentary conversation on them, and they would indulge him for a while before tiring of his slowness and talking among themselves for hours while he looked on.

  * * *

  THE MARCH WAS a demanding one. Low promontories that seemed only hours away with their promise of revealing camps required a full day of hard riding, and they would end up arriving in the dark to set up unsatisfactory bivouac. Field glasses revealed hints of habitation in the distance that turned out to be mirages, drying away upon approach. Tricks played on the eye and on the brain.

  Traversing the salt plains took a week or more.

  The land that appeared so flat and mute and hostile opened up to Monahsetah and Mawisa as they read signs invisible to the soldiers.

  The terrain revealed itself to be as sweetly knowable as a woman’s body, and Custer liked riding it all day, sleeping in his tent under the stars at night, nose filled with the girl’s scent of leather and grass and smoke. He was in no particular hurry to find the fleeing Cheyenne, who were rumored to be joining the Arapaho, heading to the Llano Estacado, where they figured to permanently elude the army.

  The particular band they tracked was rumored to be holding two white women settlers captive, but after the Blinn defeat he was not ready for the violence that would surely come from another rescue effort. War, battle, and other violence were much like appetite, one had to build the hunger for them, and at the moment he was sated. For the first time since he’d come to the forbidding plains, he felt he understood the landscape. Subdued and conquered like the girl beneath him, he in turn had been conquered. Every morning was permeated by the taste of grass and smoke. Each night became a silken black river of hair over honey-dark skin. He did not write letters home to Libbie.

  The nomadic lifestyle suited him, and he thought he understood what no politician in Washington could ever figure—even mansions of gold had no leverage to a people who craved space and movement, who considered all land in common and found a barrier of any sort to be a kind of death. What they wanted was a floating world.

  Monahsetah’s spirits lifted, being on the open land, even though her prison traveled with her. Being tethered to one spot on the earth was the ultimate agony.

  She taught Custer to use bow and arrow like an Indian. Done right, it was almost as effective as a gun. His competitive nature made him want to be as good with it as the warriors he fought against.

  * * *

  YEARS BEFORE, the Kiowa had tried to play Sheridan false. The chiefs had ridden along with the command, thick with promises that the village was on its way to Fort Cobb, but every few hours another chief begged off to go hurry the village along. Trackers discovered that the village was fast disappearing the other way. Lone Wolf and Satanta had promptly been made prisoner, but even then the village dragged its feet returning.

  During long days of negotiation, Custer had occasion to get to know his forced guests through the interpreter, Satanta’s son, a warrior of twenty. He served as liaison between the village and fort, carrying messages back and forth. In the course of things it came out that the young warrior was renowned for his shooting skills, instantly igniting Custer’s competitive streak.

  During the interminable, dull hours of diplomacy, he soon had the boy engaged in contests of target practice. The smart thing would have been to let him win, but Custer could not. It was not in him. To soothe the chief’s ego, the distance to the targets was varied and finally they even switched rifles, with no change in outcome. To Satanta these results were aberrations. He gazed into the campfire, his eyes glowing golden, as he explained that the result was as impossible as the buffalo disappearing, as impossible as the Kiowa not ultimately emerging triumphant.

  Indian fighting, too, was fast disappearing, a way of life soon to be gone. The cavalryman was as dependent on the Indian as the Indian was dependent on the buffalo. Progress was as inexorable for him as it was for the tribe. He pitied them all.

  * * *

  MONAHSETAH’S MOODS SWUNG from carefree to dark, and one day during practice Custer turned to find her aiming the arrow straight at his heart.

  —Do it, he said.

  She said nothing, her face a mask of cold deliberation.

  —I wondered when you would try. But if you kill me, imagine who will come after, he said, and spread his legs apart, squaring his hips, providing as big a target as possible.

  Based on tracks left by Indian hunting parties, they pressed on westward. One morning the command was excited by the presence of smoke ahead and its promise of a main camp. The scout calculated that it could be reached by the afternoon of that day. After six hours of hard riding the smoke appeared just as distant as it had earlier, the only change being that the surrounding land had grown more rocky and forbidding.

  He sent back to Fort Sill for provisions even as they continued on farther and farther into the barren landscape. The graying buffalo grass gave out so that they had to strip mesquite to feed the horses. The men were reduced to one meal a day and soon meat ran out entirely.

  What infuriated him enormously was the short-changing they received from the Commissary Dept., and as soon as this campaign was over he was determined to roll heads, all the way up to President Grant if needed. They’d received no bread, only flour, the men reduced to baking something well-nigh inedible over a campfire. They’d even run out of candles, and he was forced to hoard his stubs in order to write each evening. This was no way to take care of soldiers. He suspected much of the previous summer’s mischief by the Indians had to do with the poor provisioning at the reservations, making the army’s job even harder.

  The smoke changed direction the second morning and fanned out before nightfall. When they at last reached its source, after almost ten hours of nonstop riding, it was discovered to be a prairie fire burning out of control, caused either by an old campfire or lightning. In the dark the orange embers snaked along the ground. When they reached a bush or tree, the possessed flames jumped and devoured the vegetation in a burst of fire before moving on. The soldiers’ feet stirred up ash as they walked so that they had to cover their faces with kerchiefs to breathe. In this way thousands of acres were consumed, unseen except by them as sole witnesses.

  Stopping for the night, one of the horses collapsed from starvation. No sooner had the body touched the ground than it was quickly dispatched into a meal. Soon campfires were lit from the existing conflagration, and ravenous men cooked roasts, steaks, and broils on spits of coaled wood. Next morning it may have been his imagination, but he thought the horses moved more briskly, trying to minimize the degree to which their ribs poked against the skin, worried that they might be turned into the main course that night. His horse, Dandy, seemed happy to feast on sand and air.

  He buried his hunger in Monahsetah’s flesh while the rest of the soldiers shared out their whole month’s ration of whiskey in mere days to dull their hunger pangs, all thus enjoying many an intoxicated night. None was more boisterous than Tom. As a matter of course, he had confiscated his brother’s allotment of spirits because in the particular of his sobriety vow he was utterly faithful. Tom’s behavior grew loud and disruptive, though, and Custer was forced to reprimand him. When that was not enough, he cuffed the cup out of his hand.

&
nbsp; —Set an example, for God’s sake.

  —You should talk! Monster!

  In his drunkenness Tom rose in anger, fists coming out before he realized his error, not only in defying an elder brother but his commander, too.

  The unacknowledged truth between the brothers was they were matched in abilities, yet he had the role of leadership. Tom must acquiesce.

  He ordered Tom under arrest for insubordination and drunkenness. The next day he had him paraded before the troops with a placard bearing the word “drunkard” on his back. Tom sulked, refusing to go to his tent for meals as was their custom.

  —Spend time with your damned Indians.

  A few days later, Tom returned to his old self, except now he kept a special distance from the bottle when it was offered. Whether alcohol unleashed truth or its opposite, neither brother was eager to explore.

  They rode another day, entering a wide valley with the promise of trees in the distance indicating water. As they approached, the trees wavered off. When at last they came upon streams, they found them alkaline and undrinkable, salt-crusted white along their banks. Both men and horses were near breaking point. Custer felt the men’s hatred for him, both for his treatment of Tom, the camp favorite, and for pushing them to this doomed end.

  Riding during the glare of noon, he squinted against the caliche burn from the ground when far in the distance he saw horses were being run, a large troop of soldiers following. Even before he saw them as more than blurs on the horizon, he understood the horses would be the slashed ones from Washita, that some of the soldiers would be dressed in Union uniforms, some Confederate. There would be many cavalry and some Indians, women and children, and following would be buffalo, and even dogs beyond count. When they came close enough to be visible in his field glasses, they of course disappeared. He was pursued both within and without.