Return of Little Big Man

by Thomas Berger

  You might say they didn’t care much about white history for it seemed to have no reference to their own lives, but what they was taught about geography, by a big hefty female named Bertha Wadleigh, bothered them boys, especially when she hung a long roll on a couple of nails above the blackboard and pulled down from it a flexible map printed on oilcloth, which was a wonder to them insofar as it was taken as a bright-colored decoration. But when she said it was a picture of the part of the earth on which we lived, in this case North America, them Cheyenne believed she was lying, though for a reason they couldn’t comprehend, because walking the same earth as them, she hadn’t nothing to gain from pretending it was actually a piece of cloth hanging on a wall.

  They was getting so riled up about the matter that I thought they might get into trouble, so I just told them Miss Wadleigh was a crazy person who was given this silly job to keep her busy in a harmless way, which is what Indians kindly do to their own nutcases. So once again I weren’t no help in what this school was trying to accomplish, and I tell you my conscience was not at peace, especially when it come to the religious classes, which was given by the Major himself. Them boys could readily accept Mary’s giving birth though a virgin and Jesus’ rising from the dead, and anything else in the realm of the miraculous, like walking on water, turning water into wine, and so on, but they never could make any sense of the central of all Christian beliefs, that God, who ran everything in the world, would let bad people crucify His son, and trying to tell them it was to save everybody from their sins only made it more incredible. Why didn’t God just do away with sin?

  Well, I have got sidetracked from completing the account of that incident concerning the wanted man Elmo Cullen and its consequence. How’d them boys happen to be out there by the creek to give us a helping hand? For in doing so, they was breaking the school rules for Saturdays, like Amanda had noted, which afternoons they had off from classes but was expected to stay on the school grounds and play sports, which meant mostly baseball, for that was the only kind of equipment the school possessed at the moment, and not enough even so. The one bat was soon broke, after which they used axe handles and the like, but the one ball was finally beat to a state that it could not be stuck together any more, and the substitutes made of wood or tight-wrapped rawhide never were satisfactory. Anyhow, only eighteen players could be in the game at any one time, which meant the rest of the male students had nothing to do but watch, which didn’t long maintain the interest of the Cheyenne, who took the opportunity to slip away into the country and play make-believe war, until Cullen showed up and they had somebody to rub out in reality.

  Try as I did to explain their ways to Amanda, I can’t say she ever found the episode acceptable, even though the Major did, who had been a soldier both in the Civil and the Indian wars, seeing lots of violent deaths and, even as a Christian, having no objection to the death of an enemy in a good cause.

  Now I haven’t said much about the other students at the school, some of which done a lot better than my boys at picking up what was taught, and most learned passable English, especially the girls. I don’t want you to think the place was an absolute flop by any means. There was at least one boy from my time, an Osage if memory serves, who went on to become a doctor amongst his people, and a couple others become preachers in their tribes, and some of the girls went on to teach at reservation schools and be nurses at hospitals for Indians. I never heard of any who got positions in the white world. I guess that practical experience at cookery and, for the boys, plowing, shoeing horses, bailing hay, and so on might have paid off when they tried to make a go of it back home as farmers.

  As I said before, it was normal for an Indian from a warlike tribe to boast of such violence as he wreaked on enemies, and such was not looked upon as a blowhard like he might of been with whites, maybe because I never knowed a redskin who told untruths in so doing, whereas with American braggarts the first thing that occurs to you on hearing them is they’re probably lying, else they wouldn’t have to praise themselves. So young Wolf Coming Out, he sure let the other students hear about his feat, notwithstanding that he didn’t speak a word of anything but Cheyenne, and I don’t know if I ever mentioned one of the singular facts about Indians was every little tribe had its own peculiar tongue, which frequently was incomprehensible to the tribe right next door, and so the sign language was invented. But words never meant much to young people of any race I was ever acquainted with. I gathered that the others learned as much about the killing of the white desperado as they could have been told, making the other boys real jealous and impressing the girls, which was the desired result.

  I saw to it that the medicine knife was returned to its perch on the doorjamb outside my room, never to be taken away again short of another life-or-death situation.

  Now, Cheyenne maidens was renowned for their chastity and their courting could be as long and involved with rules as that of Miss Millicent Chutney by Mr. John Longworth Whitfellow, in Boston. But the boys was not obliged to take a similar care with the honor of females from other tribes (like the lads of the three major religions when going interfaith), so the schoolgirls, none of which was Cheyenne, was fair game, as they was to the boys of all the other tribes, which accounted for the solid walls between the two halves of the dormitory building and the separate entrances. The sexes was also kept apart at meals and in recreation, for it was the Major’s theory that nothing was more likely to impede the progress of civilization amongst young barbarians than access of male and female to one another before proper marriage by a Christian preacher and not the heathen connection made without benefit of clergy in which these young folk had been conceived by their parents.

  I have said that another of the small male staff was a German what taught arithmetic, name of Klaus Kappelhaus. He was also in charge of the ground-floor dormitory and, even though near as I could understand he had emigrated to avoid military service in the Old Country, he maintained an even stricter discipline over his boys than the Major asked, among other things making them polish their shoes in unison each night before going to bed and on arising in the morning recite by heart long sections of the Declaration of Independence, the preamble to the Constitution, General George Washington’s farewell address to his troops, etc., all of which Klaus had himself memorized before becoming a citizen. The accuracy of his memory had to be taken on faith by most folks, for his accent was so thick he could be saying almost anything. His version of the Declaration began something like, “Van in duh coze of hoomahn ayffents....”

  I generally kept out of Klaus’s way, for like everybody I have ever knowed who was hard to comprehend by reason of accent, speech impediment, or mouth wound, he loved to talk a lot. But this one evening after the boys was supposed to have gone to bed—though in my case, not being a German, I wasn’t strict about the exact schedule, so long as all lamps and candles was out, for safety from fire—I come down to have a smoke out front of the building, again for safety’s sake, for when sitting alone at the end of day with a pipe in my mouth I had acquired a tendency to nod, and a few times the lighted pipe had fell into my lap with a spray of sparks. After all, I was approaching the then substantial age of forty, which looking back was only a little more than a third of my life, but how was I to know that at the time?

  So there I was, puffing away and watching the lightning bugs flash over the little patch of lawn that had finally took hold but had to be hand-watered frequently by the students, which seemed foolish to them because it wasn’t an edible crop and a near drought was always in progress thereabouts.

  “Check,” says somebody in a harsh whisper behind me, and before turning I recognized it as my name as pronounced by Klaus Kappelhaus, which was useful because aside from the glowing bugs there wasn’t much light from the overcast sky and none from the dormitory behind him. (His version of my whole name was Check Grobb.)

  “Just going in, Klaus,” says I, tapping out against an uplifted boot heel what remained of the tobacco embe
rs.

  “Check,” says Klaus, “iss any of your boyss shneeking into duh girlss’ side?” I am purposely making this easier to understand here than it was in reality. Believe me when I say each speech of his was a struggle for me.

  “I don’t expect so, Klaus,” I tells him. “For not only do I keep my door open but I’m a real light sleeper.” And I adds, “Plus any such would have to go all the way downstairs past Charlevoix’s floor and then through yours, then get into the girls’ side without being detected by Bertha Wadleigh.” Who was the ground-floor guardian next door, and a hefty person who made even Klaus uncomfortable to be near, for she was husky enough to whip him in a fair fight.

  “Check,” says Klaus, “duh girl got shits.”

  I wondered why I had to hear that. “It ain’t like Mrs. Stevenson to cook bad food. It’s probably something they ate on their own, green apples maybe.”

  “Check,” says Klaus, “she lets duh shits down from duh vindow.”

  For a minute I still didn’t get it. Then: “You mean the girl drops tied-up sheets from a window?”

  “Eggzackly! He climbs opp.”

  “You seen him in the act?”

  It was too dark to clearly see his expression, but I reckon he was shocked by the question. “No, I have not zeen dem fickling, and I don’t vantto!”

  Klaus didn’t always get an American turn of speech and had therefore believed “act” meant more than my reference to climbing. I straightened him out on the matter and then asked if the sheets was lowered tonight.

  “In duh beck.” He meant the back of the building, where he had just come from as I came out the front.

  So we went through the ground-floor hallway and out the rear door. The night wasn’t any lighter back there, but with that trick of looking not directly at the object of your interest but rather just to the side of it, I could just make out a long twisted kind of rope made of knotted—they wasn’t sheets, which in fact the students were not given and, at least with my boys, wouldn’t of used even when the use was explained—blankets is what was tied end to end and hung from a window from the top floor boys’ quarters, dangling a couple feet from the ground. And over on the girls’ part, another such come down from a window on the second floor.

  I had to get the young fellow, whoever he was, out of there before an alarm was raised that reached the Major, who was dead set against any kind of sexual activity for anybody and in the case of his students for all I knew would prescribe the firing squad. At the least he’d expel the offenders, who must then go home in shame, having disgraced their tribes in front of the whites. That’s sure how the Cheyenne would see it.

  “I’ll shinny up,” I told Klaus. “God knows how long he’ll stay up there otherwise.” Before the climb, I squeezed a promise out of Klaus, which wasn’t easy on account of how he was about discipline, to let me handle the punishment of the miscreant my own way and not inform the Major or anybody else on the staff. I admit I made use of my boys’ rep for savagery, Klaus after all having fled the Old Country to avoid the warlike.

  So I goes up the blanket-rope, which was the easiest part of this mission, and I clumb over the windowsill. By now my eyes was adjusted to the night and I could see some, dark as it was, but him I was looking for would of been easy to spot in any event, for he was grunting like a rutting animal. I won’t keep you in suspense any longer than I was, for I right away suspected it would be Wolf Coming Out, him having got his man and thus the admiration of them Indian girls, to which he was like a matinee idol would be for white maidens, and no male person can resist taking advantage of such an opportunity.

  Now I go over to where he is covering the girl, who I can hardly discern, and in as low a voice as could be I announce myself and call him off.

  But Wolf don’t stop what he’s about nor even change his rhythm, but just says, breathing quick, I should take as his gift any of the other girls in the room, for they all belong to the bravest warrior in the school, namely himself.

  So I see strong measures are required, and I haul off and give him such a kick in his naked arse on that low cot that he goes sprawling across the girl, and then with a choke hold I drag him off and onto his feet, where he tries to wrestle, at which Cheyenne boys is pretty good, but they never understood the principle of fist-fighting, so it was easy enough to give him a right uppercut onto the glass jaw all Indians have (as opposed to their granite skulls), and he hits the floor dead to the world.

  I pulled the makeshift rope up and inside, run it around his chest under the armpits, and tied it tight. Then I took off my belt and put it around his body to hold the wrists at hip-level, so his arms wouldn’t raise when he was lowered on the rope.

  Then, using the leverage of the windowsill, I let him slowly down until he hung close to the ground, where Klaus could let him loose.

  While I was occupied with this effort, my pants, too loose at the waist to stay up without a belt or galluses, began to move south, and when I straightened up and was preparing to slide down the rope now Wolf was clear, my trousers plunged to my ankles, right at the moment a delegation of female staff members entered the room, each carrying a lighted oil lamp and headed by the burly figure of Bertha Wadleigh. What happened was Dorothea Hupple, the staff monitor for this floor, had been woke up, behind a closed door, by the noise of Wolf’s rutting and, scared, had already went down to fetch the others before I arrived.

  Now Wolf had been saved, but I was the one in trouble, all the more so because I never had no drawers on, owing to the fact that with the weather too hot for longjohns I hadn’t found the time yet to go into the drygoods shop in town and buy summer garments. I should of worn a Cheyenne-style breechcloth! So you can imagine what it looked like I had been up to, in that dormitory full of Indian girls, who had probably been awake all the time but only now begun to giggle and chatter.

  Seeing me, Dorothea Hupple let out a scream and almost dropped her lamp, but big Bertha advanced on me like a mad bull, being about that size.

  “Now, wait a minute,” I says, having pulled up my pants, “I can—”

  But didn’t get no further before Bertha shifted her lamp to the left hand and slugged me in the jaw with her ham-sized right. I went down.

  Standing over me, she glowers down in the lamplight. “Beastly little man! The Major will put you in prison for this.”

  I roll-dodged the kick she sent my way with a big slippered foot, and quick got up before she could launch another, clutching the waist of my pants, which was threatening to fall again. She and them others was wearing what respectable women put on for bed in them days, which was no less modest or voluminous than the daytime garb, and they had dressing gowns on top of that, but aside from Bertha they all acted like I had caught them naked.

  “Hold on,” I says to Bertha and included the rest. “This looks like what it isn’t.” But then I reflected that having gone to so much trouble to save Wolf, I could hardly implicate him now. “You just ask these girls if I touched any of them” was the best I could come up with, and it didn’t do much for my case, for Bertha allowed as how she had got there just in time to stop me from forcible rape.

  That girl Wolf had been topping, who I got a look at finally, had pulled the skirt of her nightgown down and was pretending, alone in the room, to be fast asleep. I believe she was a Kiowa. Wolf wouldn’t have knowed a word of her language, but never had to.

  Bertha says, “Dorothea, go run for the Major and tell him to bring his gun.”

  “You want me shot?” I asks.

  “You vile little runt,” Bertha says, thrusting her big square jaw my way, but I never thought about returning the punch, not wanting to break my hand. “You think this doesn’t matter, because they’re just Indian girls?”

  I could of told her I once had a Cheyenne wife, and a baby what was half Indian blood, but when they’re that riled people don’t want to hear reasons why they shouldn’t be, so I never bothered. But I sure wasn’t going to wait around for more abuse, ev
en if I was pretty certain the Major wouldn’t shoot me.

  I straddled the windowsill and then went down that blanket-rope while holding my pants up with one hand and braking my descent with the other and my knees. I probably arrived at the ground before them ladies started downstairs.

  Klaus was still there, along with a groggy Wolf Comes Out. I quickly explained to the former what had happened, and reclaimed my belt. I was in too much of a hurry to wait while Klaus reacted in his Dutch version of English, but got from Wolf a promise not to say anything about the evening’s events if asked, which he probably wouldn’t be.

  “I’m sorry I had to hit you,” I told him. “I have to go now.”

  Being an Indian, what he said in return was only “I hear you.” He knew if I wanted to say more, I would of done so. Since I didn’t, it wasn’t his place to bring it up.

  I then departed that school in the dead of night, ending my term there under a cloud of disgrace. I tell you this: I wouldn’t have went away in that fashion, as if admitting my shame, but for one consideration. I would of stayed and defended myself, and without betraying Wolf Comes Out too, for I can be right inventive when the need arises, but I knew that one person would never believe a word of mine, and I don’t mean Bertha Wadleigh. I just couldn’t bear to face the disdain of Amanda Teasdale.

  8. Buffalo Bill to the Rescue

  NOW I HAVE MADE a little fun of Klaus Kappelhaus’s accent, but he was nice enough on my hasty escape from school to lend me such money as was in his pockets that night, which added to the small change in my own, was sufficient next morning to buy me a train ticket (I spent most of the night hiking to town) back to Dodge City, of which I had previously thought I seen my last, but at this time it was the only place where I had any connections, and I was out of a job and owned only the clothes I was wearing, though having reclaimed my belt at least my pants stayed up.