“I have good friends among the Cheyenne,” Otto said. “But yes, they’re bloody-minded.”
General Sheridan frowned and rose from his chair. “I must be moving on,” he said. “Duty calls, alas. I told your sister last night at dinner that the government ought to strike a medal for you buffalo hunters. I doubt it shall ever come to pass, but I would like to reward you personally with this.”
He bent down to place an ugly, double-barreled revolver on the cot beside Otto.
“This was Jeb Stuart’s pistol,” he said. “It’s a nine-shot, .42-caliber LeMat—ten shots if you load the 20-gauge underbarrel—and no doubt it’s killed many of your comrades in years past. Perhaps you’ll never be able to use it on redskins, and more’s the pity, but you can leave it to your heirs. There are still thousands of red devils left for us to kill.”
The general leaned over and patted Otto on the shoulder, then turned on his heel. He had purchased dozens of these revolvers after the war and passed them out regularly to men like Otto—brave soldiers of the Union who had fallen on hard times. It was a heartfelt gesture.
Tom Shields stood quietly in a corner of the infirmary, having come in to visit Otto, as he did every morning. He had heard Sheridan’s words and recognized the man. The spider war chief passed within ten feet of him as he left. It took every bit of willpower Tom Shields possessed not to draw his knife and kill this enemy of his people.
JENNY CAME TO the infirmary every day, bearing trays from the mess hall to feed Otto. At first he hardly acknowledged her presence, taking the food off her fork or spoon and chewing embarrassedly, refusing even to meet her eye. She prattled on about the affairs of the day—more gunfights in Dodge City, an elegant new restaurant opened on Front Street, wagonloads of hides arriving in droves from the new hunting grounds down in Texas—but he rarely so much as grunted in reply.
“Why don’t you talk to me?” she burst out one evening. “I know you must blame me for. . . this”—she gestured at the wire cage that still protected the stump of his arm. “But can’t you see that I’m sorry? It really wasn’t my fault.”
Finally his eyes looked at her. And darted away again. He shook his head and blushed.
“No, no, Jennchen,” he whispered. “I don’t blame you. I don’t blame anyone. It’s just . . .” Tears leaked from the corners of his eyes and he took a deep breath. “It could have happened a thousand times in a thousand ways, at any time during the war. It could have happened—maybe it should have happened—before Mutti and Vati died, when I was alone on the buffalo ground. Yes, I should have been dead long ago, and I’d always figured that one day before very long I would be dead. An artillery burst, a skirmisher’s bullet, a badly placed shot on a charging buffalo, who knows—a knife fight in a drovers’ saloon in some cow town along the railroad? But then I’d just be . . . finished. Punkt. Like that. I never even imagined a situation where I’d be alive but incapable of making a living.”
“Who says you can’t make a living? You can still walk, you have at least one arm, you’re educated and intelligent. Think of the wise, wonderful things you could tell your students about the Great West if you taught school.”
“Bitter things, Jennchen. Ugly things. How to kill buffalo, how to kill Indians, how to kill soldiers in a war. No, I could never teach, nor will I ever work in a store of any kind. I am a hunter who can hunt no longer. I would rather be dead than live on as an object of pity.”
“Otto, Otto,” Jenny moaned. “What can I do?”
“Look in that drawer beside the bed.”
Jenny opened it and saw the LeMat revolver.
“If you love me, sister, take it and shoot me,” Otto said. “It’s loaded—I asked the orderly to check before he put it there.”
His eyes burned into hers.
She took up the pistol, heavy in her hand. Her heart felt heavier.
But she shook her head. “You know I can’t,” she said finally. “Anything but that.”
He laughed bitterly. “Ach ja, I knew you couldn’t. Nor will the orderly, much less Dr. Wallace. Maybe Tom will oblige me.”
“No,” Jenny said. “I’ll forbid it.”
Otto sighed. “Then I must live with myself,” he said. “But I won’t be a burden to you. You’re young yet, Jennchen, a whole happy life ahead of you—you should marry, have children, but who would marry a woman saddled with a crippled brother? Dr. Wallace was telling me about the new Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Homes being built by the Grand Army of the Republic. For crippled veterans of the war, he says. The nearest one is in Kansas City. He says that as a decorated veteran of the 2nd Wisconsin, I would qualify for admission, even though my injuries occurred after the end of hostilities. His say-so would guarantee it.”
“Who says I even want to get married?” Jenny asked. “I’m your sister, and if I choose to care for you for the rest of our lives, you cannot properly deny me that right. It is my Pflicht—my family duty—and I want to discharge it as honorably as you performed yours in the war. No, sending you to a home would be to my dishonor.”
The argument went on for days, until one evening Tom Shields interceded.
“Let’s go north to my people,” he said. “There are many widows among the Sa-sis-e-tas, lonely women who’d be only too happy to provide a wounded warrior with a warm lodge and plenty of meat. My mother will care for you even if no one else does. And . . .”
“I thought you said your mother was dead,” Jenny interrupted.
“I lied,” Tom said. “My father lives, too.”
“Why did you lie about them?”
“I wanted your sympathy,” Tom said. “My mother said it would work.”
“Well,” Jenny said, “she was right. Where are your people right now?”
“Somewhere in what you call the Big Horn Mountains,” Tom said. “Don’t worry, I’ll find them.”
“Well, do it,” Jenny said. She looked at Otto.
He had sunk back into silence and apathy.
PART
III
16
ON THE FIRST day of spring 1874, Jenny and Tom left Fort Dodge and headed north toward the Big Horn Mountains. Otto, still too weak to ride, they carried with them in a light Studebaker wagon Jenny had bought secondhand from the Army, along with two big Missouri mules and a played-out cavalry horse, a fifteen-year-old buckskin called Trooper. She paid for all this with money her brother had saved from the sale of buffalo hides, drawn on a letter of credit from a bank in Leavenworth, Kansas. Otto rarely spoke. He lay red-eyed and haggard, propped up in the back of the wagon under heavy blankets, staring at the horizon or watching the wolves that trailed them whenever Tom or Jenny killed fresh meat. He never complained, not even when the wagon jounced for days over rough, frozen ground. He watched the wolves intently.
They crossed the Saline and Solomon Rivers with little difficulty, for the water was still low, locked up in the icy Rockies, which loomed far and ghostly blue to their west, awaiting the heat of the summer sun before it came crashing down through the rivers of the plains. But the upper Republican was already rising when they got there, nearly in spate. They unloaded the wagon to lighten it. Tom cinched winter-dried cottonwood logs to the frame which served as floats and they breasted the roaring brown river in a surge of spray. The mules swam strongly. They emerged on the far bank with only an inch of water in the wagonbed. Otto, whom they had wrapped in a tarpaulin, said nothing. Then Tom and Jenny rode back to ferry across on horseback all the goods they’d unloaded earlier—guns, ammunition, blankets, cookware, kegs, crates, and provisions. The transfer took many trips.
Twice as they approached the right-of-ways of railroads they spotted parties of men on horseback moving swiftly in the distance. Pawnees, Tom said. Looking for trouble. Both times they hid the wagon in a creek bottom and watched from a grassy crest of the prairie, lying on their bellies, rifles locked and loaded, until the dust of the horses faded from sight.
“I thought the Pawnees were friendly to
whites,” Jenny said. “You hear all sorts of stories back East about Major Frank North and his valiant Pawnee scouts keeping the railways safe for commerce.”
Tom frowned. “We’d be safe enough if either Major North or his brother Lute were leading them, but I could see no spider soldier traveling with those savages. If they caught us, they’d kill me first off, no matter what you said. To them I’m a Cheyenne, not a human being. Then they’d kill you for your horses and your guns and your hair. Trust me. I know them all too well. They love a blond scalp.”
And if I were traveling alone, Jenny thought, how well would I fare with a war party of your people? Sometimes at night, under the vast, cold prairie sky, she found herself wondering and worrying about the reception she and Otto would receive from the Cheyennes, when and if they got there. Tom made it sound like a family reunion—why sure, they’d be welcomed with open arms. But perhaps he was lying again.
One night, as she lay wrapped in her blankets near the fire, staring up into space and musing on this possibility, Tom asked her what she was pondering.
“Oh, just the stars,” she lied quickly. “So many of them, and so beautiful—like sapphires and rubies up there.” She rolled over onto an elbow and looked up at him. “If you could have one to wear around your neck, Tom, which would you pick?”
He laughed. “The Cut-Arms have a story about that,” he said. “Two girls of the People were sleeping out on the prairie and one of them asked the same question. The other girl looked carefully and found a very bright star—That one there,’ she said. ‘I’d take it for my very own.’ Next day they were hunting for food along a creekbank and they spotted a porcupine high in a cottonwood. The girl who’d chosen the brightest star said she’d climb up there and throw the animal down so her friend could kill it. So up she climbed—and climbed, and climbed some more. But the porcupine just kept going higher. It seemed to her that the tree was getting way too tall, that it was growing taller even as she climbed it. The girl on the ground called her friend to come down. But the Bright Star Girl was stubborn and kept on climbing, until she was among the clouds. When she came to the top of the tree, she couldn’t find the porcupine. She reached a foot off the branch she was on, reached it out through the clouds, and found herself touching solid ground. She had climbed all the way up into the Sky Land. Then a handsome man came over the Sky Prairie and smiled at her, and his teeth were like starlight, and he took her to his tepee. ‘But I must go back to my friend and to my people,’ she said. ‘Why must you go?’ the Sky Man asked. ‘Just last night you said you wanted me for your very own.’ Of course, she thought, he is the Bright Star.”
Tom laughed with delight, and Jenny with him.
“So she stayed in the Sky Land,” Tom continued, “and became the wife of Bright Star. Soon she was with child. One day she was out digging roots on the prairie and pulled out a big turnip, of a kind that her husband had warned her not to dig. When she looked into the hole it had left, she saw the earth far below. She widened the hole, and then she could see better—her Cut-Arm People, her ponies, her friends, and her family. And she got very homesick. So she wove a rope of braided grass and began to climb back down to earth. But she was too heavy, what with the baby in her belly, and when she was halfway down, the grass rope broke. She fell faster and faster—so fast that the air started to feel hot, like when you ride your pony hard through a sandstorm. Bright Star Girl got so hot that her hair caught on fire. Then her skin, then her meat, and then finally her bones—all were burning. She fell through the air like a blazing stick. Like this . . .”
He reached into the campfire bare-handed and shied a flaming brand at the wolves that circled them just outside the firelight. Their eyes winked out and they ran off. But a sudden growl from the nearby wagon made Jenny jump.
“Don’t worry,” Tom said. “It’s only Black Hat. He likes to watch the wolves.” He shrugged and shook his head.
“Sometimes he talks to them at night, but he doesn’t really know their language yet . . . Anyway, when Bright Star Girl hit the ground, still burning, she broke into many pieces, and she was killed. Finished. But the baby in her belly survived—he was made of stone, just like his father, just like I am or any Cut-Arm—like the stars themselves. The People called him Falling Star, and he was a great hero in those days.”
A meteor blazed across the night sky.
“Look out,” Tom said, laughing. “Here he comes again!”
THEY FINALLY FOUND Tom’s family band, the Suhtaio, camped on the Red Fork of Powder River, up near the headwaters in a rough, broken country that the spiders called Hole-in-the-Wall. It had been a favorite resort of outlaws for more than twenty years. From the east, where the Bozeman Trail ran, there was only one way into Hole-in-the-Wall, through a narrow, easily guarded gap in a scarp of sandstone called the Red Wall. On the sundown side, many trails led west through the high Big Horn country and across a great basin of prairie to the Absarokas and the Wind River Mountains, and to the gold mines of Virginia City. Over the years, the Cheyenne had been forced to kill a few of these spider outlaws, when the men tried to rob their camps or rape Sa-sis-e-tas women.
When Tom located the Suhtaio lodges, he did not reveal himself. He returned quickly to the wagon and told Jenny to wait. Then he stripped off his clothes, bathed in a nearby brook, dressed himself in fringed buckskin leggings, a red breechclout, and a doeskin shirt decorated with porcupine quills. He blackened his face and hands with ashes from the fire, took the scalps—a dozen of them—from his war bag, tied them to a pole in groups of four, and rode off on Wind Blows toward the Cheyenne camp. Black was the color of victory. Jenny hid the wagon in a brush-grown gully—Otto was sleeping—and followed on one of the mules to see what happened. She brought the Henry and a bandolier of bullets, just in case of trouble.
Tom galloped up to the semicircle of lodges, then rode Wind Blows back and forth outside the east-facing entranceway, shaking the scalp pole above his head and singing out in a strange, harsh voice how each scalp had been taken. Everyone in the village came running, the men with guns in hand or arrows nocked on their bows. Jenny began to raise her rifle. But when the Cheyennes recognized Tom, great cries of joy went up.
Two men took the scalp pole from him, while the rest of the people returned hastily to their lodges and began lugging bundles of firewood to the center of the village. A huge cone of firewood rose, underlaid with dried grass to ensure quick ignition. This tepee of wood Jenny later learned was called the hka-o, or “skunk.” Drummers and singers, their faces painted red and black, gathered near it. Older men and women stripped to the waist and painted their upper bodies black and stood in a line on one side of the fire cone. The girls and unmarried young women had dressed themselves in long deerskin dresses, their finest outfits, and lined up in a row facing a similar row of young men, their sweethearts. Jenny recognized Crazy for Horses, Cut Ear, and Walks like Badger among them. The two older men who had taken the scalp pole now returned with it and lit the fire.
Tom spotted Jenny standing at the edge of an alder thicket near the stream and walked out to her. He took her by the hand and led her toward the fire. The Indians did not stare, they were too polite for that. They merely glanced at her, some of the girls with unconcealed jealousy. “Don’t be nervous,” Tom said. “This first dance is the Dance of the Sweethearts. Some of these girls wanted me to pick them for the dance. But I want you to be my sweetheart from now on. Will you?”
“And what would that entail—being your sweetheart?”
“Living in my lodge,” he said. “Eating with me, sleeping with me, at least for as long as we’re here with my people. Or at least for as long as you can still stand me.” He laughed with some embarrassment. “At any rate, it will keep the other girls away from me, and from you as well. They can be quite wicked. I’m certain my mother will welcome you.”
It was as close as he would ever come to a proposal of marriage.
“All right,” she said, amused and stran
gely titillated by the exchange. “But what about right now? What will become of Otto? We can’t just leave him out there in the wagon.”
“I’ll send one of my Elk Soldier friends to take care of him,” Tom said.
Jenny said, “Good. Now what do I do for this dance?”
“Just follow my steps.”
After speaking briefly with Walks like Badger, who walked reluctantly toward the hidden wagon, Tom put his arm through Jenny’s as they reached the line of girls. Each of them had been selected by her sweetheart or, if she had none, by her brother, and now they danced forward, arm in arm, toward the fire. The drums beat a fast rhythm, the voices of the Sa-sis-e-tas rose above the crackle and roar of the flames. The stuttering, hard-heeled dance steps were simple once Jenny got into the swing of them, and Tom was a good dancer, easy to follow. His arm was strong and sure. She glanced at him, at the sweat cutting clean stripes of tan on his ash-darkened face, eyes burning green as he chanted the alien words in staccato cadences.
The scalp pole stood behind the fire, its trophies glinting in the random dance of the flames. For an instant it seemed to her that the dead hair of Tom’s enemies was alive again and dancing with them. With her free hand Jenny reached up and pulled off her hat, skimming it backward without looking. She untied her braids and shook them out, so that her long blond hair swung wildly. As she warmed to the beat of the dance, she felt her body loosen deliciously, tasted the clean sweat on her upper lip. The rhythms worked into her bones. She heard herself chanting now along with Tom, with her fellow dancers, and though the words were strange, they somehow felt familiar on her tongue. It felt good, dancing this way, wild and free, and suddenly an image formed in her brain—something half remembered, perhaps from a tale her father had read her from one of his many books on the ancient Germans, or perhaps a deep reverberation of folk memory—of painted, half-naked people, white-skinned men and women both, dancing to drums in a fire-lit forest, their long blond hair swinging in ritualistic rhythm to an ancient song of death and new love.
Tie My Bones to Her Back Page 16