Brothers of the Buffalo

by Joseph Bruchac

  “What happened next?” Josh said.

  Wash took a breath and shook his head. “Not that much,” he said. “Master Philip looked over to where Daddy, straight and neat in his butler’s uniform, was standing next to Mama while we two children looked out from behind her skirts. ‘Washington,’ Master Philip said, his voice slow and careful, ‘I thank you for your years of service, you...and your good wife.’ Then, thankful or not, Master Vance did not hand a gold piece to my daddy. Nor did my daddy smile or say anything back. He just held harder on to Mama’s hand and stood there like that, until Master Philip looked at the time on that watch of his that always hung by a gold chain from his vest. Oh—my Lord!”

  Wash looked down at his hand as if he was holding that watch. The realization that had just come to him took the air out of him as if he had been hit in the gut.

  “What is it? Josh said. “You all right, Wash?”

  “They said it was Yankees killed the Vances on the road and stole their gold,” Wash said slowly, his memories putting things together in a way they never had been before. And it all made such sense.

  The Vances had been gone for no more than a few hours before Mister Tom had ordered them all to assemble in front of the Big House. “Now all you,” the skinny overseer had said, “you all listen up here. You all stay right here and protek this here plantation on account of I’m a-going off to get help. I’ll soon be a-coming back with a big Southern army to drive off and kill all those damn Yankees, and I will take real close notice of what you all done whilst I was gone. Now don’t you be thinkin’ about runnin’ away to join them damn Yankees, neither. What they will do to you is a lot worse’n anything we ever done here, where we is kind and cares for your wants. Nossir. Them damn Yankees, they will starve you and they will hitch you to their wagons and make you pull them like you was oxen. That’s if they don’t shoot you or sell you off to Cuba or do wust things to you. They is all cowards, them damn Yankees, and they will run when us strong Southern white men come back at them. You all mark my words.”

  He might have said more, but then they’d all heard distant sounds like thunder. Yankee guns. Mister Tom had spurred his horse hard and galloped off in the opposite direction of those sounds of battle. Galloped off in the same direction the Vances had taken on their wagon, the sack over his back clanking from the silver candlesticks and tableware he’d taken from the dining room of the Big House. But Wash realized now that that had been only the start of the unfaithful overseer’s stealing.

  Just as he realized why his eyes had been drawn to the watch chain—that had once belonged to Master Vance—and the deadly eyes of that man on the train, the full beard disguising the mean, thin face of Mister Tom Key.

  Sweet Medicine was given four lifetimes

  to remain with the People.

  He changed with the seasons.

  Each spring and summer he grew young

  and strong.

  Each autumn and winter, he became feeble.

  His hair turned white and he almost died.

  Others were born, grew old, and passed

  and still Sweet Medicine lived on.

  For four long lifetimes, he lived with the People.

  But then the day came when Sweet Medicine knew

  his time among the People was done.

  He called them all together.

  Hear me, he said.

  Then he told them again the great story

  of how the Spirit People had taught him, and

  what the People must do

  to stay strong and survive.

  Then he grew very sad.

  He took up his pipe and pointed it west,

  north, east, and south, pointed up to the sky

  and down to the earth so all the sacred beings

  might listen and help his People understand.

  Hear my voice, he said. Hear my voice,

  new people you have never seen

  one day soon will come among you.

  They will be pale people with hair on their faces,

  their dress will be strange, everywhere they go

  they will look for certain stones.

  They will offer you gifts.

  At first you will refuse them,

  for those gifts will be bad for

  the People to take.

  But the time will come when you accept them.

  These new people will kill all the buffalo,

  all the animals that help us to survive.

  They will never be tired or satisfied.

  They will go everywhere, over all of our land.

  THE WASHITA

  Camp Supply,

  Indian Territory

  August 1, 1872

  Dear Mother,

  I hope all is well. It is very hot here. It is hotter than any hot day in Virginia. It is so hot that it is hard to think, but it has been a little while since I have written to you, so despite the oppressive heat, I have taken pen in hand.

  I am not complaining. Unlike some here, I am very happy to be a soldier. I now have a fine horse, the finest in all of the company, I believe. I have also met one Indian who is something like a friend to me. He is one of our scouts and his name is Baptist John. As you might expect, he is a Christian.

  I have been thinking lately of what life was like during the days when we were owned by the Vances. Even though they were slave owners, they did not treat us that badly as I recall. But I would never again wish to be a slave. That is why Daddy did as he did and gave his life to fight for our freedom.

  I have met a young woman here who seems to be a very admirable person. She reminds me of you and of my sister. She is very lovely but also seems to be a strong person. Just like you and Pegatha. She is the niece of our sergeant and is working at Camp Supply, as do a number of respectable women, doing housework for the families of our white officers.

  Still no action here. My friend Charley says it is boring, but my friend Josh says that it is good luck.

  I am rather going on in this missive. I have not asked how you all are doing. Has the money I sent home reached you? I know you received one payment but two more should have come to you by now.

  I trust that Pegatha continues her studies. Hello, sister! Have the crops been good? I know that this letter will reach you at harvest time. Is Mr. Mack still assisting? Tell him that, as the head of our little household, I extend my sincere thanks for his help.

  I send my love and warm wishes and await your next letter.

  Your loving and obedient son,

  Washington Vance

  Hot as Hades, Wash thought.

  He lowered his chin and pulled down the brim of his hat as yet another gust of wind whipped up dust from the plain, throwing it back into the faces of the twenty men in the column.

  “Does it ever cool off round here?” Wash asked as Josh brought his horse up between him and Charley. The three of them surveyed the hazy landscape ahead of them, where dust devils chased each other back and forth. Two days of riding and all they had seen was dust and more dust. Having crossed the Canadian River some ten miles back, they were now far south of Camp Supply, which was located at the northwest edge of the big reservation that had been set up for the three thousand Cheyennes and Arapahos. Five million acres between the Cimarron and Arkansas River was supposed to be theirs. Now, though, the Indians were not allowed make free use of it, having been ordered to stay close to the Darlington Agency, southeast of Camp Supply. Keeping the Indians from leaving the confines of the agency was one of the reasons for their patrol through this dry, deserted land.

  “You all jes’ wait till January,” Josh replied, a rueful chuckle in his voice. “There will be plenty of cold then. Near cold as the North Pole. Snow will do a fine job then of replacing this here dust so as you can freeze and choke at the same time.”

  “Hah,” Charley snorted. “Hard to believe it has ever been cold here. Hotter’n any August back home in Virginny. I feel like a strip of bacon in Lucifer’s frying pa
n.”

  “Here come the lieutenant,” Josh said. “Look sharp.”

  Wash looked back down the column. Sure enough, it was their commander, Lieutenant Richard Pratt. His sharp eyes, staring like those of a hunting hawk out of his scarred, rugged face, seemed to take in everything around them as he approached.

  The three men saluted, but Lieutenant Pratt paid their gesture no mind as he reined in his horse and leaned in their direction.

  “Drought,” the lieutenant said. “It does make this land seem at times like the Valley of Dry Bones, does it not, men?”

  More like Jeremiah, Chapter Fourteen, Verse Four, Wash thought. But all he said out loud was “Yes, sir, it does!” as the wind kicked up in the little dip in the ground ahead of them—as if to illustrate those lines from the Good Book that Wash had pretty much memorized from cover to cover.

  Lieutenant Pratt nodded, his face so close that his hooked nose was almost touching Wash’s cheek. Unlike most of the white officers, Wash had noticed, Pratt always spoke to his colored soldiers as if they were men and not monkeys. And when he spoke to them, he called them “men,” a word some white troopers never used when addressing anyone with dark skin—even a fellow solider.

  “Buffalo wallow down there,” Pratt said, pointing. “Can you imagine what it was like to see them rolling there?” He shook his head. “No, imagination is the only place we are like to see such a sight. No buffalo here now. The hide hunters have killed so many that those great beasts are scarce as hens’ teeth. Years past, this land was black with herds so big it might take a day for them all to pass at full gallop.” He waved his hand in a wide circle. “When there were buffalo, our Indians did not have to come in for supplies. They lived off the meat and used the hides to purchase trade goods.”

  Lieutenant Pratt wiped sweat off his long nose with the back of his gauntlet and sighed. “When this dry weather began back in ’53,” he observed, “it could not have come at a worse time for the tribes. Water holes and streams drying up or being claimed by white homesteaders. Cattle are now eating up the forage that the buffalo herds depend upon. A perfect recipe for conflict.”

  “Yes, sir,” Wash agreed, thinking to himself as he did so that not only was their lieutenant a man who did not mind talking to his colored troops, he was also a man who surely liked to hear himself talk.

  Pratt nodded. “Indeed,” he said. “And so, now that their buffalo herds have grown thin or gone entirely, the only nourishment our Indians may obtain is what the agencies dole out to them. It does not make them happy, most especially when those promised rations are scant or late, which of late they always are. Our aborigines are also far from pleased about the white desperadoes who regularly steal our Indians’ horses and drive them up to Kansas. To add to the poor Indian’s displeasure, the buffalo hunters from Dodge City have again begun poaching on his lands, despite our best efforts to exclude them. It may not be long before the hunters wipe out what few buffalo are left, despite the fact that no white men are supposed to venture south of the Arkansas River. Then, to add the icing to the cake, the whiskey traders come in with their helpful wares.” Pratt shook his head sadly.

  “One of the main tasks we cavalrymen from Camp Supply have is to protect the reservation from the bad influences of white men. Worst are the whiskey dealers. Bringing in big wagons loaded with clanking bottles and thumping barrels of cheap whiskey—mixed with gunpowder and turpentine. There is an endless supply of that rotgut whiskey, and our Indians provide an endless demand. They will even trade their ponies and mules and buffalo robes for that whiskey when they do not have enough food to eat. Add to that the sad fact that the whiskey dealers are constantly selling our Indians guns and pistols and ammunition, surplus left over from the Civil War. When our poor savages are intoxicated, they fall into senseless arguments and stab and shoot one another.”

  Interesting, Wash thought. So instead of fighting Indians, we men of the 10th are now supposed to save them.

  Wash looked up at the long-nosed lieutenant, who seemed lost in thought. Yet and still, Wash had to admit to himself, superior though his tone of voice might be, the lieutenant’s unprejudiced attitude applied as much to the colored troopers as it did to the Indians. Being able to see a man as a man and not just judge him by the color of his skin made Pratt far different from most other white men.

  Pratt stirred from his reverie with a long sigh. “Alas,” he said. “Too little food, too many horse thieves, too few buffalo, and too much whiskey make a witches’ brew.”

  “Double, double toil and trouble,” Wash said out loud before he could stop himself.

  Pratt leaned back and looked hard at Wash.

  “What was that, trooper?”

  “Nothing, sir.”

  “No, that was from the Scottish play, was it not?’

  Caught, Wash thought, but at least it is by a white man who may not resent me for being uppity enough to educate myself a little. So he nodded. “Yes, sir.”

  “You know the Bard’s plays?”

  “I know a bit of Shakespeare, sir.”

  “Ah. At some point in the not too distant future,” Lieutenant Pratt said, “we must talk.”

  “Yes, sir,” Wash answered. And at some point in the not too distant future I must learn to keep my mouth shut.

  Pratt pulled back on his reins to wheel his horse as he raised his right arm.

  “Move out,” he shouted.

  More clopping along through the wind and the dust with it. Wash pulled his bandanna over his mouth and returned to humming his great-grandfather’s song beneath his breath.

  Fodio-lay, Gunba

  Gaban-gari, Kanta.

  But even as he sang that song he couldn’t keep from thinking. Quieting his mind was a trick he had never learned. And this time his thoughts returned to the home he had left behind, to the place where he had learned to read from a father who defied the rules that forbade slaves to become literate. The place where he had, indeed, read and loved the plays of William Shakespeare, the Bard of Avon.

  In his mind he saw himself again in the little cabin his family had occupied behind the Vances’ Big House. The best thing about that one-room shack was that it had a shelf with no fewer than eight books on it. They hadn’t always been there. They came from the Big House, where his mama was cook and his daddy was butler. When the Vances ran off, the first thing Wash’s father had done was rescue his favorite books from that library. The collected works of Milton and the collected plays of Shakespeare, the Lives of the Saints, the Greek myths, Plato, Le Morte d’Arthur, Beowulf, and the Bible.

  “Wash.”

  Josh Hopkins had brought his black horse up next to Wash’s. Like Wash, he now had his neckerchief tied up over his mouth and nose. Not that it helped much.

  “Well,” Josh coughed, “ain’t hardly no need for us to eat tonight. I figures we both gonna gain about ten pounds with all this dust we eating.”

  Wash nodded. Opening his mouth would mean swallowing more of the dirt caked on his face.

  I imagine I now appear more red than a Cheyenne, he thought.

  Josh pointed down toward a small ribbon of water barely visible in the dust-filled wind.

  “Know what that is yonder?”

  Wash shook his head.

  “Been this way once before. Recognize that hill and the way the stream it bends here. That is the Washita. Where Custer whupped them Cheyennes to a fine fare-thee-well in November of ’68. I surely would have liked to have been there.”

  Josh started to chuckle, a chuckle that turned into a hacking cough. He spat out a dust-flecked glob of phlegm. “’Course,” he continued, leaning close so that Wash could hear him over the wind, “there is not a snowball’s chance in hell that I or any other colored man could have ever been riding among Custer’s 7th Cavalry—unless he was a cook or laborer of some sort in the following supply wagons.”

  Wash nodded. He had not been with the 10th more than a week before he began to hear Custer stories. How
the colonel had threatened to resign his commission when they attempted to put him in charge of colored troops. How his wife was even worse, threatening to shoot any negro soldier that came within fifty yards of her home. Colonel George Armstrong Custer—one of a good many white officers who believed they knew a colored man’s rightful place. If such men as Custer had their way, every negro soldier would have his gun and uniform and horse taken away.

  “Camp Supply,” Josh said. “It was built for old Massa George. It was from our very own Camp Supply that he set out to attack those Cheyennes here on the Washita.”

  “Custer!” Wash said, shaking his head. “Custer,” he said a second time, just as the wind died down a bit so that the colonel’s name went echoing out across the land. Just then Wash thought he heard something. Something other than the howling wind.

  “Did you hear that?” he asked.

  “Huh?” Josh said

  They scanned the land around them. Numerous small bushes that appeared to have been born dead, and below them, on the other side of the nearly dry streambed, a line of small stunted cottonwood trees, limbs lifted up like defeated enemies trying to surrender.

  “Did you hear a wildcat or some such creature growl?” Wash asked.

  Josh shook his head. “Don’t you let that imagination of yours carry you off. Ain’t nothin’ here but old Indian ghosts.”

  A shiver went down Wash’s spine. Then he nodded. The two men rode at a slow trot down the hill. The hooves of their horses cracked through the eggshell-dry surface of the thick gumbo mud, then splashed through into water that rose up to their fetlocks. There was a flash of silver as a long-bodied fish twisted out from under the hooves. A few more steps and they were up and out of the creek, beginning to pass through the little cottonwoods. Though the trees had seemed dead from a distance, close up it could be seen that they were alive enough to hold on to a few green leaves that shook as a hot breeze, like the exhaled breath of a giant creature, washed over them.