Grisha pulled her away from the window. “It is not safe for you there,’’ he said.
“My husband is still missing,” she said.
“You will not bring Rowland to safety any sooner by standing where a stray bullet might hit you.”
Grisha was exaggerating. The downtown areas south and east of the Fifties were still untouched. The rioters had attacked the great houses farther uptown first.
“He must be waiting it out somewhere,” she murmured.
“Yes. He would do that, he would find a place to wait it out. Now come away.”
She let him lead her to her room. Grisha had come there, to Ely Parker’s brownstone on East 21st Street, the night the rioting had started, appearing suddenly with no warning. Apparently Parker was used to such unannounced visits, and the two men had retired to Parker’s study. Katia had found out the next morning that Lemuel had never returned to the house and that the rioting and looting had spread to Fifth Avenue.
Grisha opened the door to her room. “I hope he is safe,” she whispered, surprising herself with her concern for Lemuel.
“He knows how to look out for himself.” Grisha paused. “I spoke to Donehogawa about taking you to Washington.”
“And my husband?” she asked.
“Of course. He can give some of his speeches there.”
Not long ago, she would have welcomed being with Grisha again, going to Washington, staying in his house. She would not have been fearing for Lemuel Rowland, or thinking about him at all.
“I don’t want to go back to Washington,” she said.
“It will be better for you there, Katia. I will buy you some new dresses—there will be parties, people to see, people who will want to see you.”
“I do not want to go there.”
“And where would you go instead of to Washington?”
She did not know how to tell him. To St. Louis, perhaps, then on to St. Joseph, or to one of the other places where those of her people who had learned Wasichu ways sometimes came, to trade with the whites and to prove that they were no threat as long as the treaty was kept. Katia thought of how Lemuel spoke of those places, the towns and settlements bordering the Lakota lands. There, she would not be a Lakota woman who had lived too long among the Wasichu, an outsider among both her own people and the whites. There would be others like herself, people who were learning to move between those two worlds.
“Where would you go?” Grisha asked again.
She swayed and put a hand against the wall to steady herself. The hallway was suddenly lighter, the gaslights too bright. Sparks of light danced in front of her eyes.
“Good night, Grisha.” She went into her room quickly and closed the door behind her, then crossed the room to the window and flung it open.
Cold air stung her face. She looked toward the west, but could not see any signs of the rioters. The bells had stopped ringing; the city was silent. The left side of her head throbbed with pain. She sank to the window seat and looked down.
Lakota warriors were in the street below, riding past on horseback, as if in a triumphal procession. Crazy Horse was among them, wearing his war paint of lightning bolts and white hailstones with his long hair streaming behind him. Walking Blanket Woman, with her dead brother’s coup stick clutched in her right hand, rode with the warriors, just behind Sitting Bull, who wore his bonnet of eagle feathers. There were bare-chested warriors in war paint and others in Wasichu clothing, and in the midst of the procession a tepee, painted with red and white stripes and stars on a blue background, had been pitched on top of a flat wagon. Four horses pulled the wagon; a man sat in front of the tepee. He turned his face toward her and she recognized Touch-the-Clouds.
She looked up and the familiar skyline of New York was gone. The city had vanished.
The dizziness caught her then. Katia managed to close the window before stumbling to her bed.
She lay there in the dark for a long time, unable even to get up to take off her clothing and prepare herself for sleep. The eerie silence persisted; she could not even hear the sounds of the house, the footsteps on the stairs, the murmur of voices in other rooms.
At last she heard a tap on the door, and then it opened. “Mrs. Rowland.” That was Bridget, one of the two maids. “Och, you poor thing—are you ill?”
“No,” Katia said, “I’m all right,” and opened her eyes. The gray light outside the windowpanes told her that it was morning.
“You’re sure?” Bridget helped her sit up and plumped up the pillows behind her. “You gave me a fright, Mrs. Rowland, lying there like that in your dress. I feared it might be the typhus.”
“What is happening outside now?” Katia asked. “Have you heard anything?”
“A gentleman’s downstairs, Mr. Roosevelt, with his wife and some of his family. Come here in the middle of the night, and told us some of what was going on. Mob of people burned down his new house on the West Side, and some others round it, up on Fifty-seventh Street. Better if they had burned out the filthy tenements downtown.” Bridget slipped off Katia’s shoes and then covered her with a blanket. “There’s a lot of people like Mr. Roosevelt staying in other houses on this street, but the rioting’s almost over. That’s what I heard when the gentlemen were talking this morning. Had to bring in more soldiers to stop it—some of the police were rioting, too. They say at least three hundred people are dead.”
“Bridget.” Grisha was standing at the door, in the same black suit he had been wearing last night, looking as though he had not slept. “Go downstairs and see what you can do to aid Mrs. Roosevelt and her daughters. I will look after Mrs. Rowland.”
Bridget hurried from the room, but left the door open. “Rowland is back,” Grisha said.
Katia stiffened and clasped her hands together. “Is he—”
“He is downstairs, fortunately with only a few bruises, from which he will quickly recover. He says a woman got him away from one crowd before it began to riot. He managed to get her to her flat safely, and then had to hide there when the rioting reached her street. A man was hanged there, Rowland said, a man in evening clothes. The mob pulled him out of a passing carriage.”
Katia sighed, unable to speak.
“Rowland was wise to stay hidden. Communists, socialists, discontented veterans of the war to preserve the Union, the wretched poor—no one knows who started it, not that it matters now. They probably all had a hand in it.” He came toward her and stood over the bed. “It is almost over. Martial law has been declared here. When it is quiet enough, when I can get the permissions, we will go to Washington, you and Rowland and I.”
“I told you before that I didn’t want to go there.”
“You will be safer in Washington,” Grisha said.
She heard footsteps outside, in the hallway. Lemuel appeared at her door. Katia restrained herself from getting out of bed and running to him, from showing how much she felt for him in front of Grisha.
“What is this talk about Washington?” Lemuel asked.
Grisha turned around. “I was suggesting to Katia that it would be to her benefit, and to yours, to come to Washington with me.”
“I don’t want to go,” Katia said softly.
“You will be safer there,” Grisha said.
“You’re mistaken, Rubalev,” Lemuel said. “I’ve been through enough during the past three days to convince me that this won’t be the last such riot. The same thing could happen in Washington.”
“The government will not let it happen there. They will take this as a warning. They will take steps.”
“They’ll have to keep more troops in New York now,” Lemuel said. “They’ll have to conscript more men to have enough soldiers to keep the peace here, and in the south, and in Boston and any other Eastern harbors where British ships aren’t more than a few miles offshore. I don’t know how the government in Washington will be able to do that very easily, given that widespread bitterness about conscription is one of the things that kindled this up
rising.”
Lemuel came to the bed. “Where do you want to go, Katia? Or is it that you prefer to stay here?”
She shook her head. “I can’t stay here. Donehogawa has been kind, but I have stayed here long enough. I want to go west again. I can’t live among my people any more, I know that—too much has changed in me. But I want to live near them.”
“You are making a mistake, Katia,” Grisha said.
Lemuel turned toward Grisha. “A mistake? I think not. My wife would be safer out there than here. There is peace out West, and given the troubles Washington faces now, that peace is likely to endure for some time.”
Grisha’s eyes narrowed. “This sounds like something that you would say in one of your lectures.”
“My lectures weren’t lies, Rubalev. I didn’t give my talks simply to feed the discontent of people, or to win their sympathy for our Lakota brethren. When I began, I had my doubts that people would listen, that what I dreamed of could ever come about. But now I know that it can. The longer there is peace on the Plains, the greater the chance that war will never come.”
“That will not stop the Lakota from preparing for war.”
“Of course they must prepare for it,” Lemuel said, “if only to keep their former enemies from attacking them. A stalemate can serve the Lakota as well as any war.”
Grisha was silent. Katia thought of her vision, of the procession she had seen only a few hours ago. Lemuel was wrong; war would come. That was what the vision meant; she was certain of that now, and she would not have had such a vision here, among the Wasichu, unless it meant that the Wasichu would be defeated. The Lakota were warriors; sooner or later, they would fight.
“In any case,” Lemuel continued, “Katia is able to decide for herself where she wants to live.”
Grisha opened his mouth, about to speak. She shot him a glance. “Yes,” she said, “I am, and I will not go to Washington.”
“And where do you wish to go?” She heard the suppressed anger in Grisha’s voice. He could not care about her so much; he did not need her any more to further his ends, whatever they might be now. Perhaps he was simply angry that she no longer needed him.
“I want to go West,” she said, “with my husband. I will leave it to him to decide where we will go.”
SEVENTEEN
White Eagle sat outside his tepee with a drum, softly tapping out signals in the talking wire code. His camp was in Dakota Territory a day’s ride to the west of Fort Abraham Lincoln. White Eagle still thought of the circle of pitched tepees as a camp, although the Lakota there were living in ways that his grandfather would have found strange.
Three of the men in the camp, among them Denis Laforte, were Wasichu Sapa, black men, who had taken Lakota, Cheyenne, or Arikara wives. There was also, at the edge of the camp circle, a tepee that stood near a pole from which a talking wire had been strung. Through the talking wire, using one of the signalling devices inside the tepee, White Eagle could send signals to Bismarck, the town across the Missouri River from Fort Lincoln, to the Wasichu medicine man who worked there with his assistants, and from Bismarck to places that were far away. A few of the young men were inside the tepee practicing their telegraphy.
Telegraphy—that was what the Wasichu called the tapping that sent words and messages through the talking wires. White Eagle had quickly learned how to do the tapping in the white man’s language, but for the past months he had been devising a Lakota code for the sounds. Morse code was what Talking Wire Man Edison, the Wasichu medicine man in Bismarck, called the telegraph signals. Spirits inside the wires flew with those signals to far places, where other men could listen to them and know what the spirits were trying to tell them.
If war came, the Lakota would need to know how to use this telegraphy, this Wasichu medicine that could send their signals over great distances. So Touch-the-Clouds believed, which was why White Eagle had learned how to tap out the messages and had taught the skill to others and was now practicing the signals in a Lakota-based code. The Eastern Orphan Rowland had told Touch-the-Clouds about how useful the talking wires and the messages carried over them had been during the great war between the Blue Coats and the Gray Coats. Four Star Grant, the chief who had later become the Great Father in Washington, had been able to send commands to chiefs and warriors who were far away from him, and find out where men at a distance were moving and what battles they had recently fought.
Touch-the-Clouds had smiled while speaking of the talking wires. Cut the wires, and an enemy could be cut off from knowing about the movements of both his own men and his foes—although the Orphan claimed that there were some men who had mastered the signals so well that they could place cut wires against their tongues and capture the signals being carried by the wire spirits. Cutting the wires to keep an enemy in the dark about distant events was one good tactic, but Touch-the-Clouds had seen that knowing the medicine of the talking wires could also be useful in warfare in many ways.
War, White Eagle thought. War would come, sooner or later, whatever some of those who lived among and traded with the Lakota and their allies preferred to believe. Even the older men, those who had counted coup in battles long ago, had seen that they had to be ready for war, even if the peace they had now lasted for several more years. The Wasichu would grow greedy once again, and they had broken treaties before. Touch-the-Clouds had seen that the Lakota would have to find new ways to fight.
Denis Laforte came out of the tepee where the telegraph was kept, followed by two children. One was White Eagle’s daughter, Dancing Girl, his only child and now nearly twelve summers old. The other was Yellow Bird, the son of Young Spring Grass and Long Hair Custer; the boy was close to Dancing Girl’s age.
“The children are learning fast,” Laforte said in the Wasichu tongue as he walked toward White Eagle. “They can send and receive messages nearly as well as the men now.”
“Better,” Dancing Girl said, using the Wasichu word. “The wire sings to me.” She wore a long deerskin tunic and denim leggings; her black hair hung down to her waist. Her face was already much like her mother’s, with the same large brown eyes and slightly crooked smile.
White Eagle frowned at his daughter, who passed too many of her days among the wire warriors instead of doing women’s tasks or playing with the other girls, then smiled. When Brown Bear Woman had died, only four years after the birth of their daughter, White Eagle’s grief was so large and crushing that he had thought that he might never take another wife. His mother, White Buffalo Woman, had taken in Dancing Girl, and he had not needed a wife in the camp of Glorious Spirit and Victorious Spirit. Since the signing of the treaty at Fort Fetterman almost four years ago, he had spent as much time in the Wasichu towns bordering Lakota territory, in Bismarck and Deadwood and Red Cloud, as among his own people. He had felt how unlike his father, how unlike most of his people, he had become after arriving at this camp a year ago to teach younger men some of the Wasichu ways and to learn the language of the talking wires from Edison, the Wasichu in Bismarck.
Dancing Girl sat down next to him. “Send me a message,” she said.
White Eagle tapped out a few signals.
“The message is in English,” Yellow Bird said.
Dancing Girl made a face at him. “Anyone can hear that it’s in English. Let Father send the rest of the message.”
White Eagle beat out a stream of signals.
“The Great Father Blaine in Washington has agreed to treaties with the Little Fathers of Texas and California,” his daughter said. “Is that true?”
“It is,” Laforte replied. “Talking Wire Man Edison read it in a Bismarck talking paper yesterday. Your father received the message this morning.”
“Speak in Lakota,” White Eagle said. He was beginning to worry that Dancing Girl spoke more easily in the Wasichu tongue than her own, while Yellow Bird rarely used his mother’s Cheyenne tongue. They might have to know the white man’s speech, but he did not want them to lose their own. Words sha
ped the world. He had found that out after learning the Wasichu tongue. The world he had known as a child, the world of wakan beings and visions and pte, Uncle Buffalo, became a place of things to be parceled out, looked at, examined, and taken apart. The Wasichu tongue could blind a man to the spirits that lived in all things and make him see the hills and plains and mountains as soulless places.
“Send me another message,” Dancing Girl said.
White Eagle tapped on the drum.
“A day’s ride west of our camp, a young Wasichu man who wears small glass shields in front of his eyes has come to camp on the Little Missouri River,” Dancing Girl said in Lakota, and then in English, “Father, that’s silly. Why would a man wear shields over his eyes?”
“It is another message from Talking Wire Man Edison,’’ Laforte said. “This Wasichu man is so shortsighted that he must wear lenses in metal frames—they are called spectacles—in order to see anything at a distance.” He spoke the words in English, and White Eagle did not object, because there were no words for “spectacles” or “lenses” in Lakota.
Dancing Girl leaned against her father. “When I am older,” she said in Lakota, “I will go to war.”
“You cannot,” Yellow Bird said. “You are a girl.”
“Walking Blanket Woman went to war. She fought in the Black Hills. She was at Fort Fetterman, counting coup with the men.”
“Walking Blanket Woman had no brothers and no husband,” White Eagle said. “It was proper for her to fight in their place and take vengeance against the Wasichu for their deaths.”
“I have no brothers and no husband,’’ Dancing Girl said. “Buffalo Calf Road Woman talks of going to war.” She shot a look at Yellow Bird. “And your mother went to war in the Black Hills against—”
“That is enough,” a woman’s voice said behind them. “You should not speak of what happened in the Black Hills, not in a place near so many Wasichu, and I hope you will never have to go to war.”
White Eagle looked up and saw his wife, Young Spring Grass, standing by the opening of their tepee. There was another thing his grandfather would not have understood, how he could take a woman as a wife who had been used by Long Hair Custer, who had given the Blue Coat chief a son and then been discarded by him, whom no man among the Tsistsistas, her own Cheyenne people, would have had as a wife. But White Eagle had wanted a wife who knew something of Wasichu ways, who would not shake her head at him and make signs against evil spirits with her hands when he spoke of rocket-arrows, talking wires, exploding balls, and other Wasichu medicine.
Climb the Wind: A Journey Into Another Past Page 32