by John Jakes
The trader said there were plenty of other things he could sell, but he preferred to carry just a few that had proved popular year after year. All the merchandise was for women, but it would be paid for by men, using the most common form of Indian wealth, horses.
Charles absorbed this along with Wooden Foot’s explanation of his success.
“They’s fort traders who sell the exact same goods I do, only the Cheyennes won’t go near ’em. And vice versey. I been haulin’ goods into the villages near twenty years.”
“Don’t the Indian agents regulate trading?”
Wooden Foot spat out some plug tobacco, thus expressing his opinion of the Interior Department’s Indian Bureau employees. “They sure would like to, because they’re mostly greedy no-goods who want the trade all to themselves. I keep an eye peeled for ’em. If they don’t find me they can’t stop me. The Cheyennes won’t turn me in, for the same reason I still got my hair. I’m a friend.”
“Who might turn into something else if you were crossed?” Charles pointed to the notched feather.
“Well, yes, they’s that, too.”
A cigar curled smoke up past the brim of Charles’s brand-new flat-crowned wool hat. He sat comfortably on Satan, having sewn strips of scraped buffalo hide to the inner thighs of his jeans pants. The piebald was again in good fettle, though Charles took care to rein him lightly and guide him with knee and hand pressure whenever possible. Satan was responsive; he was smart. Charles hadn’t picked wrong.
In the saddle scabbard he carried a shiny new lever-action Spencer that fired seven rounds from a tube magazine in the stock. His gypsy robe hid a foot-long bowie knife and a keen hatchet with Pawnee decorations, feathers, and beaded wrappings on the shaft. He was better equipped than the U.S. Cavalry, which had to put up with war surplus arms, no matter what.
The autumnal landscape, the chilly temperature, and the lowering night cast a melancholy spell over him. Wooden Foot attempted to counter it with lively conversation.
“How’s that little actress? Pinin’ away?”
“I doubt it.”
“Plan to see her again?”
“Maybe in the spring.”
“Charlie, you got a funny look. I seen it on men before. Did you lose some other woman?”
“Yes. Back in Virginia. I don’t like to talk about it.”
“Then we don’t. Still, it’s nice you got the actress, for comfort.”
“She’s only an acquaintance. Besides, one woman can’t replace another. Can we drop it?”
“Sure. You’ll soon forget about it anyway. They’s lots of other things to command your attention where we’re goin’.” His tone said he meant perils, not amusements.
Charles wished he could forget Gus Barclay for even a little while, but he couldn’t. And in the privacy of his heart he wished that his conscience would let him think in a more personal way about Willa Parker. She did capture his fancy with her striking combination of youth and worldliness, idealism and cheerful tolerance. He supposed it wouldn’t hurt to accept her offer of a ticket to a performance when he got back.
If he got back.
Wooden Foot seemed confident. Still, there was a vast country lying ahead of them. And no denying that some of the tribes were angry about the presence of the Army and the steady westward waves of migration.
Fenimore Cooper switched his tail and frisked back and forth ahead of the riders, bolting now to the left, now to the right but always loping back with joyous barks. Charles wondered if the dog was happy about not being hitched to a travois just yet.
Boy saw a blue jay bickering in a shrub and clapped his hands in delight. Charles puffed his cigar and patted Satan. Growing smaller and smaller in the immense wooded landscape, the Jackson Trading Company passed out of sight and into darkness.
12
A THUNDERSTORM ROARED OVER the city of Richmond. Rain poured from the eaves of the City Almshouse and splashed the gravestones of Shockoe Cemetery immediately to the south. The noise of the storm kept patients awake in the charity wards this bleak September night.
One patient lay on his side, knees drawn up to his chest, arms clasped tightly around them. His cot was on the end of the row, so he was able to face the bare wall and hide with his thoughts.
In the dark high-ceilinged room men turned and groaned and rustled their bedding. A matron’s lamp floated through like a firefly. A young man with a completely white beard sat up suddenly. “Union Cavalry. Sheridan’s cavalry on the left flank!”
The matron rushed to his bedside. Her voice soothed him to silence. Then her lamp floated away again.
The Almshouse had been a Confederate hospital at the height of the war. Toward the end, it became temporary headquarters for the Virginia Military Institute, which had been forced out of the Shenandoah by the ferocity of Phil Sheridan’s horse. Since the surrender, several wings had reopened on a temporary basis to care for mentally disturbed veterans, the human debris cast up by the tide of war and left to lie on the shore of peace, abandoned, forgotten. At present the Almshouse sheltered about fifty such men. Hundreds more, perhaps thousands, huddled in the South’s ravaged cities and wandered its ruined roads, without help.
The patient on the end cot tossed and writhed. A familiar awl of pain pierced his forehead and turned, boring deeper and deeper. He’d suffered with the pain, and a broken, almost deformed body, ever since he took a near-fatal fall into …
Into …
God, they’d destroyed his mind, too. It took him minutes just to finish the thought.
Into the James River.
Yes. The James. He and fellow conspirators had planned to rid the Confederacy of the inept Jefferson Davis. They’d been discovered by an Army officer named …
Named …
No matter how he tried, it wouldn’t come back, though he knew he had reason to hate the man. In the struggle that ensued after the discovery of the plot, the man had pushed him through a window above the river.
He vividly remembered the shocks of the fall. He had never experienced such pain. Outcrops of rock slammed his head, buttocks, legs as he went bouncing downward, finally striking the water.
He had a recurring nightmare about what had happened next. Sinking beneath the water, clawing against the current to reach the surface, and failing. In the dream, he drowned. Reality was different. Somehow, by effort or by chance, he no longer remembered which, he’d dragged himself to a bank downstream, vomited water, and lost consciousness.
Since that night he had been a different man. Pain was a constant companion. Strange lights frequently filled his head. Lying on the cot in the midst of the storm, he saw them again, yellow and green pinpoint flashes that blossomed to starry bursts of scarlet, fiery orange, blinding white. As if all of that wasn’t a sufficient portion of suffering, his memory constantly betrayed him.
Somehow he had reached Richmond and survived the great conflagration that leveled so much of the city the night the Confederate government fell. He lived by prowling the night streets, committing robberies. His most recent had yielded but two dollars and the handsome though old-fashioned beaver hat sitting on a shelf above his cot. He’d gone without food for long periods—two, even three days sometimes. Then there was a blank, after which he awakened in the Almshouse. They said he’d collapsed in the street.
Why could he remember some things at certain times, and not at others? Then again, a whole new set of recollections would be clear while the first ones were beyond his mind’s grasp for hours, or days. It was all part of the damage done to him by …
By…
It wouldn’t come.
The rain fell harder, a sound like drumming; His hand crawled around under the cot like a blind white spider, seeking something he did remember. He felt it, pulled it up, hugged it tightly to his filthy coarse patient’s gown. A torn magazine, given him during one of his lucid periods. Harper’s New Monthly for July of this year.
He was able to recall paragraphs from the secti
on called “Editor’s Easy Chair.” The copy described the Grand Review of Grant’s and Sherman’s armies in Washington, lasting two days in …
In …
May, that was it.
In the dark, he squeezed his hand into a fist. I should have marched. People kept me from it. They kept me from playing the role I was born to play.
He could picture it. He was riding a fine stallion, bowing from the waist to acknowledge the cheers of the mob, saluting President Lincoln with his saber, then riding on, his great steed moving in a high-stepping walk while the mob, sweating, awestruck, chanted as one:
“Bon-a-parte. Bon-a-parte.”
He was the American Bonaparte.
No, he should have been. They kept him from it, those men named …
Named …
No use.
But he’d remember them someday. Someday. And when he did, God help them, and all their tribe.
He listened to the drums within the rain most of the night. About four he fell asleep. He awoke at six, clutching the torn Harper’s. Although free of pain, he was still wretchedly unhappy. He couldn’t think of the reason.
He couldn’t even remember his own name.
Book Two
A Winter Count
IT IS TO BE regretted that the character of the Indian as described in Cooper’s interesting novels is not the true one. … Stripped of the beautiful romance with which we have been so long willing to envelop him, transferred from the inviting pages of the novelist to the localities where we are compelled to meet with him, in his native village, on the war path, and when raiding upon our frontier settlements and lines of travel, the Indian forfeits his claim to the appellation of the noble red man. We see him as he is, and … as he ever has been, a savage, in every sense of the word.
GENERAL G. A. CUSTER,
My Life on the Plains, 1872-74
I was born upon the prairie, where the wind blew free and there was nothing to break the light of the sun. I want to die there and not within walls.
CHIEF TEN BEARS of the Comanche,
Medicine Lodge Creek, 1867
13
SILVER FANS OF WATER rose as they crossed the stream in the dazzling morning. The richly silted valley glistened after rain. Indians working fields of squash and beans and ripening pumpkins waved their man-made hoes and shouted greetings. Upstream, blurs now, stood the solid post-and-beam lodges, covered with grassy sod; the traders had passed the Indian dwellings on their way to this ford.
“Kansa,” Wooden Foot said, indicating the workers in the fields. “They’re called Kaw, too.” He led his companions from the shallows into rippling foot-high bluestem. “They get along with ’most everybody. Guess that was typical of all the tribes a long time ago. Even the Cheyennes, when they lived in Minnesota or wherever. It ain’t true no more. You’ll soon see the reasons.”
Passing almost due west, they did:
Emigrant wagons, westbound, with white tops billowing and snapping in the autumn wind.
A coach of the Butterfield Overland Despatch line bound down the Smoky Hill route with clatter and a cloud of dust.
A railroad work camp, double-story office cars lined up on a spur that ended in the middle of a field of thistles, clover, wilted goldenrod.
“This yere’s tribal land, Charlie. The Indians been ’customed to roam anywhere they pleased, like them Arabs way on the other side of the world. Long as anyone can remember, they lived off the land’s bounty. Chiefly the game and buffla. The Kansa, f’rinstance, they changed their way. Settled down. But not the Cheyennes. They live the old way. So you can’t steal their land or shove ’em on a farm and expect ’em to kiss your foot. That’s why some of ’em’s killin’ people. Didn’t you do the same when the Union boys marched all over your land?”
“Yes, sir,” Charles said, understanding.
In Topeka, Wooden Foot bought a load of tin pots. “The women like these better’n rawhide bags or sewn-up buffla stomachs. They can boil water ’thout all the fuss of droppin’ in hot rocks.”
The new goods required Fen to pick up some of the burden. The collie pulled a travois that held their tipi poles and cover. He went hours at a time, with only his lolling tongue showing his strain.
From a detachment of cavalry they learned that the big peace conclave, the one Willa had mentioned, had started, down on the Little Arkansas. The captain leading the detachment said, “You boys might have a peaceful winter for once.”
“Damn fool,” Wooden Foot said after the troopers rode on. Red-faced, he showed a surprising amount of sweat in the winy autumn air. “That captain’s one more who don’t grasp how the tribes work. He thinks that if a peace chief like old Black Kettle, whom we’re goin’ to see, makes his mark on a treaty, everybody else just puts their feet up and stores their weapons. Mighty few sojers understand that no one Indian speaks for all Indians. Never did. Never will.”
“I guess you think pretty highly of the Southern Cheyennes.”
“I do, Charlie. They’s the finest horsemen in the world. Finest cavalry, if you want to sharpen a point on it. Also, I been out here long enough to see ’em as different people, not just a bunch of copper-color look-alikes. If some Dog Society man rapes a fanner’s wife, like as not the cavalry’ll shoot some peaceable old chief, ’cause they can’t tell the difference. I was lucky. Pa taught me to see each one separate. They’s good ones and they’s bad ones, quite like the general run of humans. I loved one enough to take her to wife some years back. She died birthin’ a little girl. Baby died a week after.”
He coughed suddenly; bent his head forward, jaw clenched, as he grasped a handful of his shirt. Charles reined Satan, leaning left to grip Wooden Foot’s arm. “What is it? What’s hurting you?”
“Nothin’ ”—the old trader got his breath—“to speak of.”
He gulped, eyes watering. “My pa had a bum heart. He passed it along. Don’t let it worry you. Let’s travel.”
The low hills began to flatten; the willows and cottonwoods to thin out. They rode through shorter buffalo and grama grass, empty of habitation except for the mound towns of black-tailed prairie dogs. Autumn light flooded everything, creating a raw beauty from hills sliced open by wind to reveal striatums of white and yellow and orange chalk. Charles couldn’t exactly say he was happy, but each day he thought of Augusta Barclay a little less.
“All right, Charlie,” Wooden Foot said when they’d forded the Smoky Hill. “Time for you to start school.”
“You never know when you’ll need speed, Charlie. Boy an’ me, we practiced till we can put the tipi up in ten minutes and strike it in half that. With your help I figure we can cut it some more. Notice that the round door always faces east? That way you miss most of the big rain and wind storms outa the west, and you catch the mornin’ sun. Also, the tribes like to be reminded that way that it’s the Great Spirit who sends ’em light and nourishment. Well, let’s hop to, Charlie. Up she goes in eight minutes if you want your supper.”
Flickering fire shone on the coil of brass wire. Wooden Foot’s hair, long to start with, had grown enough to split into braids. He was winding wire round and round the braid hanging over his left shoulder.
Charles munched some pemmican, a chunk of powdered buffalo meat hardened up after the addition of fat and berries. “If you don’t want to bother with that, I can cut your hair with my knife.”
“Oh, no. You cut off a man’s hair, you take away his life in the hereafter. If a Cheyenne ever gets a haircut, his woman burns the cuttings so nobody does mischief with ’em.”
Boy jumped up, excited. “Road! Road!”
Charles looked past Boy’s pointing finger to the veil of stars unfurled across the heavens. “That’s the Milky Way, Boy.”
“It’s the Hangin’ Road, Charlie,” Wooden Foot said. “The trail the Cheyennes travel to the spirit world. The road to the place of the dead.”
The trader patted his nephew to calm him, then opened his parfleche, a hide bag decora
ted with quills and painted designs. From the bag he took a roll of clean, soft animal skin, which he spread by the fire. Next he opened small pots of red and black paint he moistened with spit. He surprised Charles by producing an artist’s small brush. With strokes of black he began painting at the upper left corner of the skin. A line of three stick-figure horses and riders. He finished with a smaller four-footed figure out in front.
“What in thunder’s that?” Charles asked.
“The start of our winter count. Kind of a picture history of a season in a man’s life. Chiefs and braves make ’em.” He grinned. “I figure the Jackson Trading Company’s important enough to have one this year.”
They saw a buffalo herd in seasonal migration southward. By a stream dried to a width of six inches, they waited hours for the herd to pass. It was six or seven miles long, front to back, and a good mile across. Wooden Foot pointed out the old bull leaders.
“One name the tribes got for the buffla is Uncle. Since he provides pretty near everything they eat or use, they figure he’s pretty near a relative.”
Under an ugly gray sky streaked silver by lightning, Charles held on to his hat and squinted through blowing dust at eight young Indians armed with lances and rifles. They were within hailing distance, so Charles clearly heard them yell, “Sons of bitches. Sons of bitches!”
One brave knelt on his pony’s back, thrust out his rear end, and thumbed it with his right hand. Wooden Foot sighed. “They’s sure learned all the best we got to teach.”
Boy crowded his horse close to his uncle’s. Charles rested the Spencer on his right leg, his mouth dry with worry. The lightning streaked east to west, and distant thunder pealed. Behind the braves milled a herd of at least fifty wild stallions, mares, and foals. The white men had stopped when they spied the Indians herding the ponies across some low hills.
“That’s money on the hoof, them horses,” Wooden Foot said. “Tribal wealth. They won’t risk losin’ it by comin’ after us. They seldom attack ’less they outnumber the other side or they’s trapped or provoked. ’Sides, they’s near enough to see we got these.”