by Tatjana Soli
When night descended again, it seemed impossible but the storm increased in ferocity. It was unnatural, demonic. Libbie’s resolve was abandoning her. It seemed more likely than not that as the shed grew colder despite the bodies inside they might perish. She hardly had the energy of despair.
Eliza, overwhelmed, collapsed from exhaustion in the corner. Hoarding the remaining food and alcohol, there was nothing for any of them to do but each nurse his or her own misery. Libbie kept vigil over Autie, feeling personally responsible for abating neither his fever nor the storm.
Periodically she went to the single window and with her hand melted a small view out the frozen pane. Solid white shifting walls. For moments the view would open and then just as suddenly slam shut. Drifts capriciously formed and were swept away. This seemed the normal state of things to Libbie’s mind; sunshine and grass were just hearsay. The devouring wind had cleared the front door but had packed snow to the roofline on the other three sides.
In the middle of the night came the sound of many hooves, and Libbie was giddy that at last the regiment had come to their rescue. Melting her view out the window, she saw a group of mules using the front wall as shelter. They jostled for warmth. Driven mad by the cold, they bit and kicked at one another before finally moving off into the storm again, disappearing behind white walls as if they were the last forlorn creatures on earth.
Libbie had entered the most terrible kind of dream, the kind that was real and was your life and you could not awake from. She longed to rouse Autie and take strength in his assurances, but he was too far lost in his delirium. Adding to her distress, his medicine bottle was almost empty.
The barking, whining sound of a dog woke her. Confused, she rushed to the window to see a trembling canine form, but by the time she managed to pry open the door it had disappeared back into the snowy murk. Eliza had collapsed and slept, and she let the girl rest.
The whole world consisted only of snow and cold and fear. Libbie grew so disoriented, time lost all meaning. Either minutes or hours had passed when she awoke again, this time to the terrified squealing of a band of boars pushing against the rickety door so that it threatened to collapse inward. She screamed to Eliza, and they set their backs against the brittle boards, pummeled by each outraged thrust. Starving boars could easily attack and devour men.
Much later—it might have been morning or evening again—Libbie woke to the repeated neighing of a distressed horse. It went on for an hour, making sleep impossible, so that she hung on, waiting for the next sound, disturbed both to hear the animal again and then to not. When the horse seemed finally to stop for all time, Libbie was overcome with the most terrific remorse, imagining the sad beast had at last succumbed to the elements. She grabbed the sash of her coat and opened the door to see a cavalry bay looking at her with wild, crazed eyes. In his state, he could have trampled her, but Libbie could not bear passivity any longer, doing nothing for an ailing fellow creature. She must take charge or go mad.
The space between them had magically cleared for a moment like the eye of a hurricane so that Libbie, trudging out in Autie’s boots, could walk the twenty feet to the horse and slip the sash around his neck, the beast now steady as a docile house pet. She led him through the door. The minute she closed it behind them, the storm slammed down and obliterated the opening she had just walked through, packing it tightly shut. A moment sooner or later, the two might have perished.
The horse stood in the middle of the room like some phantasmagoria, as content as if the cabin were merely another barn stall, which it greatly resembled. The air turned feral and moist as the ice melted off the animal’s coat, puddling on the ground where he sipped it. In her corner Eliza woke briefly, her eyes going wide, sure that either Libbie or she herself had gone lunatic. Sharing quarters with both the general and a horse, her world turned topsy-turvy. Her answer was to close her eyes and hope reality was a dream. The soldiers, either asleep or preoccupied with their pain, took no particular notice of the new guest. Libbie’s heart jumped when Autie woke up once. He looked at the horse dreamily and seeming well satisfied went back to sleep.
Although the snow stopped the next morning, they discovered themselves to be buried within the cabin and seemingly forgotten to the outside world.
Hours later, digging could be heard, and there came a knock on the door.
They were delivered by a posse made up of town citizens and soldiers. Even in the town the streets had been so impassable that horses foundered and sank almost out of sight. The men had worked as a team to drag a cutter over the drifts for their recovery. Tom stood at the door with a big basket of food. For just the briefest moment Libbie saw what he had imagined—his closest family perished—and she shivered at how near it had come to that.
A true cavalryman, the sight of a horse standing in the room aroused no surprise.
“You’ve outdone us in pranks for a long while, I’m afraid,” was all he said.
He picked her up in his arms and hugged till the breath left her body and she begged to be put back down.
For his part the horse stepped daintily between the men and trotted outside as if they were his strange dream.
Supplies! They feasted, ravenous. A stove had been brought which Eliza quickly put to use with kindling. Autie woke, weak but on the mend. Although he had looked straight at the animal, now he did not remember the horse and thought they were pulling his leg until Tom pointed out the frozen pile of horse apples in the corner.
Libbie wandered away to an area roped off with blankets, and there burst out in hysterical sobs. When Autie found her he was astonished that she had decided to wait until danger was well past before showing fright. She reasoned that she had endured and now deserved her tears.
“Come on, Old Lady, don’t make too much of it.”
Libbie didn’t care what the men thought. Although she would do anything to prevent such danger in the future, she also knew she was equal to the circumstances if it came to that. It was a good thing to know about oneself.
The men who had sheltered with them ended up losing fingers, toes, and even ears to frostbite. In camp an unlucky few had whole feet and legs amputated, but all lived. It was a miracle that no soldiers had frozen to death, although many had suffered a variety of calamities from the storm. The soldier guarding the horses had tried his best to shelter Autie and Libbie’s puppies by holding them against himself and sharing his blankets, but despite his efforts the entire litter had frozen to death, one by one. The only ray of light came on receiving the news that a laundress stranded in a tent on the far side of camp had safely given birth to one hardy little soul.
My Rosebud,
The worst thing I can imagine in this life would be feeling that the love of the one person whose love was desirable was surely but slowly departing from them. From my unique position in society I have the opportunity to examine the marriages of many and can tell you that ours is one most rare. I have yet to find husband and wife here who enjoy life as we do. Regardless of the rumors you have heard of that other woman, you alone matter to me. I realize that I alone am responsible for that spark of distrust … in your mind but which others have fanned into a flame …
My love for you is as unquenchable as my life and if my belief in a future state is true, my love will survive my life and accompany me to that future. You may doubt my love but that does not disprove its existence. I love you purely and simply, no woman has nor ever can share my love with you.
Your faithful boy,
Autie
THE ELEVENTH REMOVE
The return—Life at the fort—Tintypes
After the story and tintype were taken, General Custer went back in his tent, handing off Neha and Anne to his next in command for transport. Anne would not be given the opportunity to speak with him again. Later she learned that her rescue had made him a national hero.
When the soldiers reached the fort—a haphazard collection of log cabins and huts surrounded by a stockade fence—
Anne and Neha were turned over to the commander’s custody. Colonel Montrose was a mustachioed senior officer running down his last years of service, and the prospect of announcing the rescue of two long-captive women would be a fitting highlight to his career. He was less enthused once he learned that Custer had already “scooped” the story, having two newspapermen escorted overnight to base camp, bypassing the fort entirely. He became reconciled to the loss because the two women—one full white, one half-breed—did not fit his idea of Christian virtue. Or so Anne came to believe during the period of her confinement.
The two huddled together in the stone guardhouse in their filthy blankets against the chill and refused the baths offered by the fort’s army wives. The returning captain had advised that by their rebelliousness the women might as easily be considered hostiles as liberated captives. Under no circumstances should they be allowed any freedom as they might well use it to escape, giving the lie to the story that the buffalo-skinner massacre had been a battle to free the women.
During interrogation, the two captives were sullen, refusing to sit in chairs but instead insisting on unladylike squatting on their haunches, as if chairs, questions, food, shelter, and rescue were all part of an elaborate deceit against them.
Montrose had read of such cases of delusion in those suffering from long captivity, and he prayed for these lost souls while trying not to show his justifiable vexation.
“I must go find my children,” Anne insisted. “I told General Custer.”
“Then it is being undertaken, I’m sure. Custer, Custer … You are now under my hospitality.”
“Yes, sir.”
He was embarrassed by his outburst of peeve. He’d long ago given up the idea of outstripping Custer, but the man still got under his skin. He forced himself to focus on the captives. In Christian humility, he tried to imagine the same happening to his wife, his daughter. Unbearable. He tried for a conciliatory tone.
“Soldiers will be riding out against the camp shortly.”
“No soldiers!”
“Certainly soldiers. Your children will be liberated and returned to you. The perpetrators punished.”
“My family is killed,” Anne said, meaning her Indian one.
The buffalo skinners had been friends, as close to her in their way as Running Bear’s family. The pain in one limb of the tribe hurt the entire body.
“Your immediate family were massacred, yes, but we have contacted an uncle who has been searching tirelessly for you. Your return will be his crowning jewel.”
“Let me go with the soldiers to get my children.”
He sniffed.
“Certainly not. Much too dangerous an undertaking for a woman. It is a tragedy what you have already been made to endure.”
His comments were ridiculous considering her hardship these last years, although once upon a time before her captivity she would have wholeheartedly agreed with him.
Neha looked and acted too much like an Indian to garner his sympathy, but Colonel Montrose looked slyly at the curve of Anne’s nose, which was delicate, the line of her chin, the straightness of her back, the deep indentation of her waist, and thought what an abomination that a paragon of womanhood be ruined in such fashion, virtue stripped from her as she was made to bear half-breed brats. What a dismal future awaited such a woman with no possible prospects of domestic happiness. Let the children survive with their own as best they might.
Anne and Neha listened to the jangling sounds of weaponry being loaded on wagons. The soldiers, tripled in number, planned to ride out against the main camp at dawn. Anne imagined her Solace and Thomas’s terror at the sound of cannon, their fear of soldiers, who they had been told were devils. There had not been time enough to make them understand otherwise. Who would look after them now? Even if one of the chief’s wives took charge of their care, wouldn’t they surely be mistaken for Indian children and thus doomed to an Indian fate? Anne was the only one who could act as a bridge for them to cross from one world to the other, the divide as deep and treacherous as a forbidding canyon. Instead, she was locked behind a fence like an animal.
“What will happen to my children?” Anne whispered.
“They will be hunted with the rest of the tribe,” Neha said. “They will suffer like Indians. You must forget them.”
The two women made keening cries—mourning, loss, and prayer all mixed together—until the soldiers, unnerved at how they sounded like wolves, bade them be quiet with the point of a gun. Anne pressed her hand over the icon that had represented all she so pined for, but now instead it recalled the beauty of its lack. The return to civilization had not provided succor.
After the soldiers departed on their campaign, the fort calmed. Anne was informed that her uncle was on his way to claim her. In the meantime, it was suggested she reacquaint herself with civilization by way of a comb and a looking glass. At first she had refused to talk or to eat, but eventually could not overcome the protests of her stomach. Each piece of delicious bread, each morsel of meat, seemed a betrayal of her children, who might at that very moment be suffering unknown privations.
She watched the white children of the soldiers be coddled and dandled much as she herself had been as a young child. They were given no experience of life outside the confines of their windows, unlike the upbringing of an Indian child reared in self-sufficiency from the earliest years. Her dear Elizabeth, unmindful of the meaning of a snake’s rattle.
Simple woman that she might be, Anne knew more than the commander—there was no justice in the worth accorded the two sets of children, one Indian, one white. It angered her, the varying treatment they received. They had no differing worth in God’s eye, only in man’s jaundiced one.
Also disturbing, a group of visitors had arrived, and Anne found she had been sold as a sort of public spectacle: the white savage. Nearby settlers came to gawk, and a man who took tintypes set up his equipment. They were allowed to observe Anne and Neha from an elevated platform on the other side of the fence, and comment on them as if they were exotic specimens in a menagerie garden.
One woman, who wore a pink silk dress, her blond hair rolled in oiled curls, said to a companion, “She looks hard-used, doesn’t she?”
Anne looked down at her deerskin shift, which she had so proudly stitched together herself, and at her dirty, callused hands, widened from hard labor. Her hair was ratted and unkempt. The experience of self-consciousness was strange after so many years. She hated the pink-dress woman for making her feel shamed at what she considered a hard-won victory. Doubtful the pink-dress woman would have survived the things she had, but that victory now meant nothing. Defiant, Anne stood with arms folded across her chest and cast a burning glare at the woman, who finally realized the captive did indeed understand English. She blushed and hurried away with her friend.
The man with the tintypes came into the stockade and asked respectfully if he could take their image.
“For the history books, you know.”
Neha refused to sit for him, but Anne agreed. The softness of his voice made her amenable; he did not bark orders at her as the soldiers did. He tried to get Anne into poses he imagined were those typical of an Indian, but at this she refused. There was, after all, an avarice in his eye that she had not noticed. She sat in the chair and looked straight at the lens, her commanding gaze frozen as he exposed the negative. All she could think was that it would be a good thing to have a likeness in case her children ever wanted to know of her.
Years later when she saw the image for the first time on an exhibition wall, she hardly recognized the wild self she had become.
THE TWELFTH REMOVE
Repatriation—A bath—Tea
After several more days had passed, Anne’s rebellion in the stockade was becoming more pose than reflection of her true state of mind. Much time had passed in her former captivity, but she still understood the rules of white society—the sooner she acquiesced to outward appearances, the sooner she might gain her liberty.
Each meal with its piece of milled bread flooded her with memories of home, memories she had not allowed herself to indulge because of their mournfulness. When after two weeks the troops returned empty-handed—the Cheyenne camp had disappeared, Solace and Thomas along with them—it was clear that she would have to journey alone to find them or risk losing them forever. A plan solidified in her mind when she overheard gossip of General Custer’s wife paying a visit to the commander’s wife that day. She would beg her to help get her children back.
She requested an audience with Colonel Montrose and apologized at her folly in refusing his wife’s offer of refreshment. That afternoon, a contingent of women invited her into the colonel’s quarters. Notably, Neha was not included in the invitation, nor would she have obliged. Anne knew it was on her shoulders to purchase freedom for them both.
Before she was allowed to sit in the parlor, or enjoy a cup of coffee, or eat a single bite of food, a black servant girl took her to the back of the house. In a shed she found a zinc tub of hot water and a bar of homemade soap. The servant seemed frightened of her and kept her distance. Anne guessed that outlandish stories of barbaric ways were being circulated through the fort at her expense.
She declined the offer of help and turned modestly away to undress. As she stepped into the tub, lost in memories of her mother washing her hair, the servant girl gathered her discarded clothes, including the pocket that held her prized icon, and hurried out of the room.
Anne yelled after her. When the girl did not return, she jumped out of the tub and ran naked outside chasing her. In the courtyard, the girl plopped the pile of clothing into a brick fire. She shrank back as Anne screamed at the loss of her clothes and burned her hand trying to retrieve the icon from the obliterating flames.
The colonel’s wife, russet curls and dumpling face, stood in the doorway, horrified. The other women crowded in behind her to gape, including a striking brunette in a military-style riding habit whom Anne guessed to be the famous Mrs. General Custer. She was the only one who seemed genuinely stricken by the captive’s distress.