Climb the Wind: A Journey Into Another Past

by Pamela Sargent

  “Magic gunpowder and black and white powder can settle,” one of the Chinese explained to him. “Maybe settle in tube so can no more make big noise. Cannot move rocket-arrows fast or get them all stirred up and then—boom! Blow us all to hell!”

  There was, Lemuel told himself, no purpose in urging the two brothers along at a faster pace. It would be days, perhaps longer, before anyone arrived at Fort Fetterman to negotiate with Touch-the-Clouds and the other chiefs.

  The four of them sat around the fire for a while after securing the horses and eating a supper of dried buffalo meat, hardtack, and coffee. The coffee, brewed by Virgil, had been taken, along with the hardtack, from the captured supplies at Fort Fetterman. The Chen brothers turned in first, crawling under their makeshift shelters of tree limbs and canvas. Virgil offered to take the first watch. The fire would keep animals away, but there was a chance, however slight, that any wanderers who might be hunting or traveling along the Platte would try to steal their horses.

  Lemuel slept, dreaming that he was back in Tonawanda, trying to explain who he was to the people he had known as a child. One of the men kept saying that he could not be who he was, that he had seen him with enemies of the Senecas, that he no longer belonged among his people. The man had the voice of Ely Parker. “The men among whom you live are not your only comrades,” the voice of Donehogawa murmured to him. “Others call out to you. Soldiers call out to you.” Lemuel woke up then and was suddenly afraid.

  He lay under his blanket, waiting until the fog lifted from his mind, then crawled out from under his shelter. Virgil, standing guard near the tethered horses, quickly turned toward him.

  “I have to go back,” Lemuel said softly.

  “What?” the black man whispered.

  He could not tell Virgil that a dream had come to him and that he knew it to be a warning. “I have to ride back to Fort Fetterman, tonight.”

  Virgil nodded, almost as if he understood somehow. “Told you before I got a bad feeling,” the Negro said, “and I ain’t feeling no better now.”

  “Wait here,” Lemuel said as he began to saddle a horse. “I’ll ride back to you as soon as I can.”

  Lemuel kept his mount moving at a trot. The sky was clear, with a nearly full moon to help light his way along the trail. Occasionally he slowed, to let his horse rest or to move more slowly over stony patches of ground, but something inside him was urging him on, telling him not to stop, to ride at a faster pace, that he might already be too late.

  Too late for what? he asked himself. He had been thinking about Rubalev throughout his ride, and suddenly regretted that he had not ridden after him immediately, that he had not followed him back to Fort Fetterman. He thought of how Rubalev had chanted his kill songs after the battle in the Black Hills.

  The breezes that had whispered through the night had died by morning. It was midmorning by the time Lemuel rounded a bend and saw the damaged wooden wall of Fort Fetterman up ahead. Warriors outside the wall were still digging graves for the dead; bodies stripped of their boots and uniforms lay nearby, already bloating. At least they had not been scalped. That must have taken every bit of authority Touch-the-Clouds possessed, to keep the men from taking those prizes; or perhaps it was simply that many of the dead had short or thin hair and that their scalps were therefore not worth taking.

  Lemuel was closer before he recognized one of the bodies, a man whose brown beard had flecks of gray. Colonel Green lay among the dead. He was stripped of his jacket and shirt, but still wore his blue uniform trousers with the yellow stripe; he had been left that measure of dignity. There were no signs of wounds, of torture. Green had, it seemed, been shot in the back of the head; the bullet had come out through his left jaw. Lemuel did not look closely at the bodies lying near the colonel, certain that he would see the two lieutenants with them.

  Rubalev rode toward him from the fort with two Lakota men. Lemuel felt his hand moving toward his Colt, then let it fall to his side again. He should have gone after Rubalev as soon as he saw him. He could have shot him at some point along the trail and left the body there.

  “What are you doing here?” Rubalev called out in English.

  “You killed them,’’ Lemuel said.

  “Of course we killed them,” Rubalev replied.

  “I told them they would live. I said there was no reason to kill them now.”

  “No reason?” Rubalev’s eyes widened. “It was the order of Touch-the-Clouds. He saw that we could not let them go.”

  “I’m sure it was his order,” Lemuel said softly. “I am equally certain that you’re the one who advised him to do it.”

  “He did not want to let them go. He had promised to kill everyone who did not surrender right away.” Rubalev leaned forward in his saddle. He held his reins with his left hand; his right arm rested near his holster. The two men with him were carrying their rifles. They wanted Lemuel to know that they were ready to gun him down as easily as they had their captives. “But then he wondered what would be of more use to him, keeping his promise or showing mercy. In the end, he did both. The Blue Coats here died, as he had promised they would, but their deaths were quick. One bullet in the back of the head— that was all it took for each. It was quick, Rowland. We did not waste bullets.”

  “Were you the executioner?” Lemuel asked.

  “Touch-the-Clouds knew what was needed. It does not matter which hand held the gun.” Rubalev’s mouth twisted. “The men who will treat with us must know that when Touch-the-Clouds offers surrender or death, he means to keep that promise exactly. And there is this as well. He is to send you back among the Wasichu, is he not?”

  Lemuel was silent. Touch-the-Clouds might have mentioned those plans to Rubalev; perhaps it had been Rubalev’s idea in the first place.

  “You can go back now, find out what you can, go to your old comrade Jeremiah Clarke. He will not know that you were with the Lakota in the Black Hills who fought Custer. He will not find out that you came here to Fort Fetterman. That makes you more useful to us than if he knew those things.”

  “I gave that man my word.” Lemuel looked at Green’s shattered dead face. “I told him that I would do everything I could to free him and his men.”

  “And so you did.” Rubalev showed his teeth. “Do you not want the Lakota to keep their lands? Or have you changed your mind?”

  “I haven’t changed my mind.”

  “You know what the enemies of the Lakota want, and what they will do to get it. Think of that whenever your anger rises at the methods we have to use against them.” Rubalev rested his hands on the horn of his saddle.

  Lemuel’s right hand hung at his side. He found himself gazing at the other man’s hands, knowing that he could now draw on Rubalev and have a good chance of hitting him in the chest with one or two bullets before Rubalev could shoot back. The thought came to him in an instant and fled from him just as quickly. The two warriors with Rubalev would surely kill him in return. Rubalev already knew that he had nothing to fear from Lemuel.

  “Leave us,” Rubalev said. “Go back to where I met you. Let us do what we must do to have our treaty, and then you will see that we did only what was needed, what we had to do.”

  He had known what he was doing when he joined himself to the Lakota cause. They had done no worse to Green and his men than soldiers had done to their people in the past. Lemuel pulled lightly at his reins, turning his horse, and then rode away.

  FOURTEEN

  Jane groomed the dappled horse as Virgil Warrick spoke of his plans. The black man and Lemuel Rowland had been in this camp for almost a month now, until word had reached them about the new treaty, and now Virgil was talking of leaving again.

  “Got a place north of here,” Virgil said. “Ain’t much more than a shack, but it suits me. Enough game, and plenty of fish. I can get enough pelts to trade at a post for anything else I need.”

  She had imagined that Virgil lived among another band of Lakota or Cheyenne, perhaps even had an In
dian wife. Now it seemed that he was living more like a trapper or a mountain man.

  “Got enough to get you through the winter?” she asked.

  “I can get what I need, and I don’t need much.”

  “You live out there all by your lonesome?”

  “Mostly.”

  Jane finished brushing the dappled horse and moved on to a gray pony. It was one way she could make herself useful, taking care of some of the horses Touch-the-Clouds had left in this camp. The chief had a lot of horses, more than any other man here. She wondered if she could make herself useful enough for him to keep her here, to let her stay alive. Better to remain with his wife Graceful Swan, who was more civilized than most of these savages, than to be Rubalev’s prisoner again. Winter was coming; there was frost on the ground in the mornings now, and an iciness in the air. It was easier for a body to die in the winter, especially if she was the prisoner of a man who did not especially care whether she stayed alive or not.

  “I ain’t always alone,” Virgil went on. “There’s a camp of Blackfeet up the river—I picked up some of their lingo. But being by myself suits me a lot of the time.”

  The pinto tethered next to the gray nickered and tossed its head as Jane walked toward it. Virgil steadied the horse, holding its head gently, as Jane began to brush its hide. The hides of the horses were getting hairier; another sign of winter.

  Jane did not ask him if he was ever sorry that he had left civilization. She knew how foolish a question that was, given how civilization treated black men. The Indians might be savages, but they treated Virgil pretty much the same as they treated anyone else.

  At the edge of the camp, some of the men who had ridden here with Sitting Bull mounted their horses, ready to ride to Sitting Bull’s Hunkpapa camp. She noticed that Frank Grouard was with them, dressed in leather leggings and a long buckskin coat. She had taken him for one of the savages before Graceful Swan had revealed that he had been captured in a raid some years earlier. If the swarthy black-haired half-breed Grouard was indeed a captive, he surely seemed at ease in his captivity. Sitting Bull called him Sitting With Upraised Hands and considered him almost a brother, and she had often seen him roaming the encampment with Rubalev. But Graceful Swan seemed to go out of her way to avoid Grouard, and Jane had followed her example. Any man who was too friendly with that yellow-haired devil was someone she would rather keep at a distance.

  She watched as Grouard rode off with the other braves. Virgil caught her eye. “They’ll be riding to meet Touch-the-Clouds and maybe sing a few more war songs together,’’ he said, “and then they’ll be off to their own camps.”

  “Yeah.” She was grateful to know that Grouard would not be here. She wondered if he ever longed for escape.

  “Calamity,” Virgil said then, “ever think about going back?” Apparently his thoughts were running along the same trail as her own.

  “Going back to what?” she asked. “Anyways, if I even tried to escape, the redskins’d kill me for sure.”

  “After some time goes by, it won’t matter to them if you go back. Won’t matter much what you say to anybody then. You might even get famous, bein’ the last one left alive and all.”

  The last one left alive. That was why she could not go back, to people who would stare at her and whisper about her and know that a skinny no-good saddle tramp and mule skinner and wagon driver was all that was left of the lost companies of the Seventh. They would never forgive her for saving her skin by living with the redskins who had murdered her comrades instead of fighting on, for staying alive when all those brave men were dead, when glorious George Armstrong Iron Butt Long Hair Son of the Morning Star Custer was dead. That she was a woman would matter as little to most of them as it always had to her. They would think even less of her for that, for going off with the men and then not fighting with them. They would believe that the Indians had used her the same way some of the enlisted men had used her after giving her a few coins and some whiskey in return.

  That was another reason for remaining with the Lakota. Whiskey had got the better of her too many times. Being sober all the time had made her ashamed of some of the things she had done. Better to stay in Indian territory, where whiskey was scarce and she wouldn’t be tempted.

  “I ain’t going back,’’ Jane said. “I can’t go back. Ain’t got nobody back there anyways.” Her daughter, growing up as another family’s child, did not count, and she had lost Bill Hickok’s love long ago.

  Lemuel Rowland was outside her tepee, calling to her. Katia left her fire and went to open the flap.

  “White Eagle is here,” he said. “He tells me that your husband will arrive here in two days. He’ll want the camp to be ready to move by then.”

  She could not put off what she had to do any longer. “Are you coming with us?” she asked.

  “Touch-the-Clouds wants to send me east again. He wants me to be his eyes and ears among the Wasichu.”

  She had suspected as much. “Then he will expect me to go with you,” she said quickly.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “He told me some time ago that he would send me away. He doesn’t want me as his wife any more. It is the same as what he did before, when he let me go with Grisha to St. Louis. He would have told you himself, but you might as well hear it from me. He told me that I was to go away with you when the time came.”

  He was frowning. Maybe she was wrong about how he felt about her; maybe he did not want to have anything to do with her. The back of her neck burned; she looked away from him.

  “I won’t ask anything of you,” she said. “You do not have to live with me as your wife. Touch-the-Clouds doesn’t care how we live together as long as we are useful to him.”

  “Katia,” he said, “I have only the highest regard for you.”

  She was about to say that she could not care for him, that she felt no more for him than a bit of gratitude for the kindness he had shown, but held back.

  “When my husband is here,” she murmured, “I will tell him in front of White Cow Sees that I am leaving him. He will tell me that I am free to go. And then we will leave, before the winter.” Perhaps he would want to send Grisha east, too, to a place near her, where she might see him occasionally. Katia suppressed that thought.

  “Katia—”

  “It might be best if you speak to Touch-the-Clouds alone when he returns,” she said, “and then he can tell you what he expects from us.” She could bear this humiliation no longer. Katia turned around and crept inside her tent and lowered the flap behind her.

  “We are to go to St. Joseph first, and then to Kansas City,” Graceful Swan was saying. “I don’t know where we will go after that.”

  Jane listened, trying to take it all in. Too much had happened all at once, what with Graceful Swan deciding to leave her husband and go off with Lem Rowland. Not that Jane truly believed things had happened quite that way. Maybe a lot of redskin men didn’t think it was manly to make a woman stay if she wanted to go, but Touch-the-Clouds was not the sort of man who would let his wife walk out on him just because she wanted to, especially if she was leaving with another man.

  “Well, I hope you’ll be content,” Jane said. Graceful Swan almost seemed sorry about going. The woman was used to white ways; she could not be that unhappy at leaving the hard life of a savage’s woman behind, even if Touch-the-Clouds was forcing her to go.

  “I was going to say—” The Indian woman gazed at the cooking pot made from a buffalo paunch that hung over the fire. The light from the burning wood and dried buffalo chips flickered across her face. “I will ask the chief if you may come with us.”

  Jane stared at the flat stones around the fire, then stretched her hands toward the warmth. “I can’t go,” she said at last. “He won’t let me go.”

  “I can try to convince him that you won’t say anything to anybody that would endanger our people. He knows that I want safety for us as much as he does. Rowland—Lemuel might convince him. Tou
ch-the-Clouds might listen to him.”

  “That don’t matter.” Jane drew up her knees and rested her chin on them. “I hate the chief for what he did—ain’t never going to forget that. But I wouldn’t say nothing now anyway about what happened to the Seventh. It ain’t so much that I care that much what respectable folks would think. They never thought much of me anyway. It’s what the soldiers would think, and the wagon drivers, and the people like me. They’ll think I was a coward, that I did wrong just to save my skin. They’ll think I should have died with the rest of them.”

  “They won’t know anything about it if you don’t tell them,” Graceful Swan said. “After some time goes by, it won’t matter what you say. Eventually the whites will find out what happened in the Black Hills, but it will be over, it will become something that isn’t worth a battle any more, or a war, something that’s past.”

  “Won’t never be past for me,” Jane said.

  “What will you do?” the other woman asked.

  “Now you know God damn well what I’ll do, pardon my language,” Jane replied. “The chief’ll keep me around for whatever work I can do, or he’ll turn me over to that Rubalev again.” Either way, she probably would not get through the winter, which would end any worry over what tales she might tell if she ever got away.

  She got up and left the tepee. The sky was still light, but the people in the camp were getting ready for the night. She went to the horses that were tethered behind Graceful Swan’s tepee.

  Virgil Warrick was with the horses. She watched as he finished brushing a chestnut mare. “You got a mighty grim look on your face,’’ he said.

  “Graceful Swan’s leaving the chief and going off with Lem Rowland,” Jane said.

  “I know,” Virgil said. “Lemuel Rowland asked me if I wanted to come along, said I might be helpful. Told him it didn’t sound like things were getting any easier away from here for darkies.”