La Vengeance des mères

by Jim Fergus

  “Aw hell,” she answers, “don’t you gals know?… both the Cheyenne and the Lakota consider me to be a he’emnane’e—half-man, half-woman. See, everyone knows I was married to a Cheyenne fella and had babies by him. And they also know I ran a mule train for years as a boy named Jimmy. They believe the he’emnane’e have big medicine, that we got all the qualities, wisdom, and power of both sexes … which … what the hell, might even be true. That’s why they pass me the pipe, which gives me the right to speak my mind in council. And because I can speak as a man, I got some real influence. Course, even though I don’t have all the necessary body parts to qualify me as a real he’emnane’e, I never tried to set ’em straight on that notion, because it’s real useful to be treated as both man and woman if you get what I mean. On the one hand, they gotta behave toward me with a certain kinda manners they reserve for women, on the other I have the full voice of a man. Comes in mighty handy sometimes.”

  “Aye, such as right now, Gertie/Jimmy the muleskinner,” says I. And we laugh.

  LEDGER BOOK II

  Captured

  The first Lakota to board the train approached me, took me by the arm, and pulled me from my seat. He drew a knife from the scabbard at his waist, raised it, placing the flat of the blade beneath my chin. He looked at me with no apparent malice … even, is it possible? a certain tenderness …

  (from the journals of Molly McGill)

  18 March 1876

  What an extraordinary luxury to have this paper and pencils with which to write. When all has been taken from you, when you have nothing left but the clothes on your back, it is remarkable how much such a gift means. It is like giving a drink of water to a woman dying of thirst. As it was in prison, one of the worst things about this incarceration is the boredom of it. We have virtually the entire day to do nothing. And so I have distributed paper and pencil to anyone among us who has asked. Some draw, some write letters that they hope Gertie might be able to post for them, some simply doodle (which I find a waste of valuable paper). We all thank the Kelly sisters for this gift. About them I will write more later …

  I was keeping my own diary on the train trip west. Of course, all that came to an abrupt halt upon our abduction, and my diary is forever lost. And so I will tell first of this terrible event …

  It had been thus far a mostly uneventful trip across the plains. We had more or less exchanged our personal histories, or, at least, as much as we each wished to reveal of them. With few exceptions, most of the women felt they were escaping a fate worse than that to which they were headed, and some needed to tell their stories by way of reassurance. This seemed particularly true now that we were drawing closer to our destination, and the reality of the bargain they had struck began to reveal itself in this vast plains landscape wilder and more desolate than any of us had ever before seen or imagined.

  It was early morning and I was looking out the window of the train, seated next to a woman named Carolyn Metcalf, a pleasant, quiet, demure lady, who had thus far on the trip kept very much to herself. By appearance and demeanor, she seemed rather an unlikely candidate for the brides program. By way of making conversation, I asked her idly where she came from.

  “I am from Garden City, Kansas,” she answered. “My husband … no, I should say my former husband, is the pastor in our Baptist church.”

  “I’m sorry, I did not mean to pry,” I said.

  “That’s quite alright,” she said. “You are not prying. And in case you’re wondering what I am doing here, I signed up for the program in order to gain release from the state insane asylum. However, I can assure you that I am of no danger to you.”

  I laughed. “Yes, well, I signed up to get out of prison. But I’m no danger to you, either.”

  “You see, I had begun to question certain tenets of our religion,” she continued, as if having finally told someone of her incarceration, and not having been censured for it, she was now free to fully unburden herself. “This, I naively believed, was a right of all American citizens, even women. Early one morning before I had even risen from my bed, the church bishop, escorted by two members of the Bible class at which I had voiced some of my reservations, and in the company of our local sheriff, appeared at our house. I barely had time to cover myself in a dressing gown. Their visit, of course, had been arranged by my husband. Now in the presence of these gentlemen, the good pastor explained to me that there is a law in the State of Kansas that a husband has the right to commit his wife to the insane asylum without any proof, that he had filed the necessary forms, and all was quite legal. It appears that the diagnosis of insanity was based simply on the fact that I had questioned our faith.

  “In this manner was I kidnapped from my house, forbidden even to say good-bye to my three children. I was sent to the asylum, where I have spent the past two years. When the doctors there asked my husband’s consent for me to participate in the brides program, he quite readily gave it. You see, the good pastor had taken up with the organist in our church, presumably a more devout soul than I, and he wished to marry her. Thus he arranged our divorce, as he had arranged all else, and was delighted to send me out west to marry an Indian, rid of me once and for all … The organist now raises my children … and here I am. On a train into the wilderness…”

  At this moment in Carolyn’s story, we came to a long curve in the tracks with low hills on either side, last year’s yellow grass poking out in places where the wind had blown clear the snow. Just as the engineer sounded the horn and slowed the train, I spotted a plume of smoke rising ahead of us.

  As a precaution, several of our escort of a dozen soldiers were dispatched to climb atop the train as lookouts. We heard their footsteps overhead as they passed from car to car. Now the engineer blew the horn again, at the same time sharply engaging the brakes, the wheels making a heavy metallic squeal. We were thrust forward in our seats and then abruptly backward as we came to a halt in front of a large bonfire burning on the tracks.

  In that very instant the shooting began, in concert with the terrifying unearthly cries of our attackers, like the ululations of a pack of coyotes under a full moon. A soldier fell heavily on the top of our car, rolled off, and tumbled past my window to the ground below. Some of the women began to scream.

  “Get down!” a soldier hollered at us. Carolyn and I dropped from our seats, crouching as low as we were able on the floor. Several women, already hysterical, were crawling down the aisle as if they might somehow escape. The soldiers began returning fire from the windows, others climbing over those women in the aisle to take up positions between the cars. But the bullets seemed to come from both sides of the train, and at all angles, shattering the windows and spraying us with shards of glass. In a matter of moments, six of our own women were shot, four of them immediately dead, the other two mortally wounded, the soldiers, too, falling one after the next, the cries of the dying and wounded, the screams of the terrified … blood spraying …

  And then suddenly it was over as quickly as it had begun. The soldiers fired no more, and the attackers, too, quit their assault, an eerie silence falling over the train, broken only by the moans of the wounded and the weeping and whimpering of those still alive, lying or crouched on the floor. I looked up from my prone position to see the first Indians entering our car, three of them, all brandishing rifles. “Stay down,” I whispered to Carolyn. I am not sure exactly why, but I stood, brushed the front of my dress and took my seat again—not because I am an especially courageous woman, rather simply one for whom there is little in life left to fear, least of all my own death. However, I did not wish to die cowering on the floor of a train.

  The first Lakota to board the train approached me, took me by the arm, and pulled me from my seat. He drew a knife from the scabbard at his waist, raised it, placing the flat of the blade beneath my chin. He looked at me with no apparent malice … even, is it possible? a certain tenderness … Nor when he spoke to me in his incomprehensible tongue was there anger in his tone, rather I t
hought I sensed a kind of reluctance. Although I knew he was about to slit my throat, I felt no fear, only a strange detachment, the heightened sense of observation one sometimes experiences in dreams, as if I were standing outside myself, watching, noting every detail with perfect objectivity. He smelled of gunpowder and sagebrush, winter prairie grass, horse sweat, and a deeper odor, a kind of animal man scent. He was fairer than the other two Lakota who followed him down the aisle, stepping as they did so over the dead and dying. His light brown hair was braided, his eyes hazel, his skin the chestnut color of burnished saddle leather, taut and unlined across a proud nose and broad cheekbones, the latter adorned with slashes of red paint. I felt some sadness in his gaze, even a kind of affinity, as if we had come instantly to some unspoken understanding. “Go ahead, kill me,” I said softly in encouragement, my voice, too, coming from a great dreamlike distance. “I am not afraid. I have nothing left to live for. Go ahead, I welcome the solace of death. Go ahead, please, release me.” But he did not slit my throat, he lowered his knife, and spoke sharply over his shoulder to the others. Only later, in the manner in which we assess a fading dream upon waking, did it occur to me that, of course, the man certainly couldn’t have understood me. Now he took me by the arm and led me down the aisle, and through the door at the back of the car, and there between the cars he lifted me from the platform and swung me to the ground with a gentle grace that suggested I had not yet awakened. Pointing with his rifle, and speaking to me again in Lakota, he indicated that I was to sit down. One by one the other surviving women, including my seatmate, Carolyn Metcalf, were similarly escorted from the train. We sat on the frozen ground waiting to see what was to become of us next. Some wept and blubbered, others seemed in a state of shock.

  The rolling hills on either side of the tracks were sculpted by the wind, the virgin snow without imprint of man or animal, until several dozen more mounted Indians suddenly materialized, riding soundlessly toward us from all directions, the snow kicked up by their horses’ hooves swirling like clouds of vapor, covering their tracks behind them so that they seemed a kind of mirage. Now as they converged upon us they began uttering their strange yipping ululations of victory.

  In this way did they ride in, a different race of man than any we had ever before seen, dressed in moccasins and buckskin leggings and wrapped in trade blankets or buffalo hides against the chill winter air; they wore braids and ornately painted faces, and rode with such natural harmony that they and horse seemed one being together, a kind of centaur. All carried rifles and it became clear from their sheer number why our dozen poor soldiers—raw young recruits, some of them recent immigrants, who like most of us had never before been west of the Mississippi—were so quickly overwhelmed.

  We had each only been allowed by the authorities to bring with us one small carpetbag of possessions, and these the Indians now threw from the train, some of them bursting open upon impact. Those Lakota who had dismounted began emptying out their contents. If a bag contained shiny objects such as coins or jewelry, these they might pick up, as well as certain articles of clothing, winter coats or woolen sweaters. Otherwise they seemed to have only a cursory interest in our meager belongings. When one of them opened my bag and turned it upside down to empty, my diary fell to the ground with everything else. Instinctively, I made a lunge for it … it seemed important to me in that moment to recover this one object, this one small connection to my past life, the last record that remained of my little girl. But one of them kicked it out of my grasp. They clearly wished to leave us with nothing. And so they have.

  There were only two passenger cars on the train, one for us and one for the soldiers, followed by three cattle cars full of horses that had been shipped from the stockyards in Omaha to resupply the cavalry at Fort Laramie. The Indians on the train now opened the doors of the stock cars, slid the loading ramps to the ground, and began leading the horses off single file. Coming from the close, warm quarters of the train into the cold afternoon air, the horses nickered, snorted, and threw their heads, steam rising off their bodies and streaming like smoke from their nostrils.

  How cold we were sitting in the snow on the frozen ground, and we huddled together seeking warmth and physical contact. We did not speak. I think we all had the same sense of having entered some primal new world in which we owned no language.

  Now those Lakota who were still afoot made us stand and began leading us each to one of the mounted warriors, who offered us an arm and with the help of the man on the ground swung us onto the back of the horse behind the rider. This we submitted to as docilely as children, reminding me of the submissive frame of mind one assumes in prison, the utter helplessness of captivity, the futility of resistance. The man who held his arm out to me, and behind whom I was seated, was he who had led me off the train.

  When we all were thus seated, the riders wheeled their horses with the precision of a flock of rising birds, and broke into a gallop across the rolling plains, the warriors issuing again their ungodly warbling cries, half-man, half-beast. We put our arms around the waists of our abductors and hung on for dear life … a strange intimacy of necessity … I did not turn my head to look back at our train, the carnage around it, the tracks running ahead into the distance without us, our last link to the world we once knew.

  We traveled thus all night, beneath more stars than I had ever seen before, and a thin sliver of new moon, alternately walking, trotting, galloping. Another group of Lakota drove the herd of horses, but these we soon left behind. I drifted off to sleep several times to the rolling cadence of the horse’s gait, waking abruptly with my head resting against the man’s back, my arms still around him, feeling the warmth of his body and smelling again his scent of wildness, taking even I must confess some simple human comfort in it. The odd thought occurred to me that it had been a long time since I had held on to a man, and I wondered if it was equally strange for him to have a woman he did not know clutching him thus.

  We arrived finally in the Lakota village just as the sun was cresting the horizon, flooding the rolling plains with the hard white light of winter. The people began coming out of their tipis to watch our passage, the women taking up a high-pitched trilling to welcome their warriors home. Small brown children ran out to lightly touch our feet and legs, squealing and giggling with delight, then running back to their tipis, sometimes turning and running back to touch us a second time. Their simple pleasure in this game made our entrance into this strange new world seem less threatening, for it is hard to be afraid of children. In direct contrast, their mothers watched us as we passed with varying expressions of suspicion, distrust, dislike, even hatred, one arm crossed holding their blankets over their opposite shoulder, as if closing themselves off from us. We would later talk about this among ourselves, all agreeing that we hoped it was not the women of the tribe who would decide our fate.

  We are now being held in a single large tipi, where we have at least been given blankets and buffalo hides to warm us at night. We have a fire pit in the center and a stack of sticks and dried buffalo droppings to burn outside the opening, replenished when necessary by the young Lakota boy who guards us. Some of the others have spoken of trying to escape, to which I ask the simple questions: “Escape to what? Where would we go? In what direction? We do not even know where we are.”

  Some days ago a young white man came to see us. He introduced himself as Brother Anthony, a Benedictine monk. We were so happy to see him, and thought for a brief moment that perhaps he had come to rescue us. However, he quickly disabused us of this hope, telling us that he had no such authority. Still, he was a kind, gentle man; he asked us to pray with him and offered us some small solace.

  The next day he sent the two Irish twin sisters, Meggie and Susie Kelly, to see us. Wild, strange creatures who call themselves “white Cheyenne,” which seems an accurate description, for they appear to exist in some state of limbo between savage and civilized, neither quite Indian nor altogether white … and at the same time … I
hardly know how to put this … somehow part human, part mythological beings, like twin elves from another land. They are small, pitifully thin girls, dressed in tattered animal hides over which they wear ragged trade blankets, their pale severe faces framed by a mass of tangled red hair, their demeanor that of certain hardened souls such as I knew in prison, girls full of equal measures of rage and a deep underlying heartbreak. The sisters put up a brave façade, a kind of bravado, and although they would not reveal the details of what has befallen them, it is clear that they have suffered greatly. They, too, have been very kind to us, giving us hope and sound advice, and even a rare laugh or two, their visit making our group feel less helpless and alone.

  As it was for me in prison, we are learning to appreciate whatever small “luxuries” we are offered—our hides and blankets for example, fire, a daily trip to the creek, where we break the ice, splash ice-cold water on ourselves, and fill a vessel fashioned from the stomach of a buffalo in which we carry water back to the tipi. The boy who guards us, Yellow Bird, he is called, or so the twins tell us, brings our food every day, sometimes cooked, sometimes raw. This includes dead rabbits and beavers, and various parts of deer, elk, and buffalo, as well as wild root vegetables, dried wild fruits, and strips of dried meat. We boil the roots and fruits in a tin trade pan given us, to soften them and make a kind of stew. As I grew up on a farm in upstate New York, I learned the ways of self-sufficiency—animal husbandry, gardening, putting up fruit and vegetables for the long winters. Like virtually all farm people there, my father was also a hunter, and as a result I know a bit about such matters and am able to butcher as well as cook the dead animals, which is a great relief to some of our more squeamish girls, who would probably starve to death were they required to perform such tasks themselves. At the same time, I must confess that I am unable to identify certain items that come our way. I believe that one day we were presented with the carcass of a small dog, but I made up a story for the others, telling them it was a plains animal that lived in underground burrows and was entirely unrelated to canines. As there is never much food, and we are always hungry, we eat what we are given on blind faith, and whether it tastes good or not. One day recently the Kellys even managed to bring us a small leather pouch full of coffee beans, which evidently the Indians obtain at the trading posts in trade for buffalo hides. We ground the beans with a rock on a flat stone and boiled the coffee in our pan over the fire. It seemed quite the greatest luxury we had ever known. As I learned in prison, it is astonishing how quickly human beings can learn to adapt to severe changes in circumstances, and to deprivation.