La Vengeance des mères

by Jim Fergus

  Due to my liberation of their friend, Martha, I have been profusely forgiven by Meggie and Susie for riding off that morning with the chaplain. The twins have even offered to restore me to my position as “leader” of our group, which I have declined. I told them that Lady Hall was far more reliable and competent than I in fulfilling such a role. Indeed, it is true that I am impulsive … stubborn … rash … reckless, all the words the Kellys have used to describe me. And indeed, my coming upon Martha was entirely an act of happenstance for which I can take no personal credit. Things could have turned out quite differently.

  Meggie and Susie believe the party of white men are either prospectors, land speculators, cattlemen, or some combination thereof, and that with most of the tribes now subdued and moved onto the Indian agencies, they must have hired Seminole and his scouts to guide them through the countryside, to protect them from whatever hostile bands remain—most of them, like ours, in hiding or on the run.

  After only these few days riding with us, Martha has by no means been miraculously “cured” of the terrible ordeal she has clearly suffered. The girl is so wounded and terrified that we all wonder if she will ever fully recover. As we ride, she still slips regularly into her dazed, nearly unconscious state, as if only there can she find some peace, some escape. And since she’s been with us, she has experienced terrible nightmares, weeping, crying out in her sleep, and waking in a state of great agitation. We take turns sitting up with her, holding her, trying to offer her some sense of security, but she remains so far inconsolable and she does not speak to us.

  The Kellys are still trying to sort out how Martha came to be in Seminole’s captivity in the first place, and what became of her infant. Given the girl’s extremely fragile condition, they dare not broach the subject with her, nor has she revealed a single clue. According to Gertie, after the Mackenzie attack Captain Bourke escorted Martha, who was considered to be the sole surviving white woman of the Brides for Indians program, and her infant—the son of the Cheyenne warrior Tangle Hair—back to Fort Laramie. Because the government wished to keep the brides program secret, especially from the press, Bourke quietly arranged safe passage for Martha and the boy back to Chicago. We all try to avoid the darkest, though most plausible explanation, that somehow Seminole captured them on their way there … in which case the child’s fate can only be imagined … none of us can bear to consider the possibility.

  In the morning, at least several of us go down to the creek with Martha and there she makes her paste of mud and bear fat, a greasy leather sack of which she carries in her leggings. This she slathers all over her face as if donning her mask for the day. In the evenings, the Kelly girls patiently wipe the greasepaint off again. Our Cheyenne women now call Martha Ma’etomoná’e, which the Kellys translate as Red Painted Woman. They tell us that her former Cheyenne name translated to Falls Down Woman, due to the fact that she was rather a clumsy girl with a habit of tripping. They say we will all be given Cheyenne names … and yesterday they told me with a twin smirk between them that I have one already.

  “Oh, and what would that be?” I asked.

  “Well, see, they know about your encounter with Seminole,” Meggie said. “And now they call you Mé’koomat a’xevà. It’s not a name that sounds real pretty in Cheyenne.”

  “How does it sound in English?”

  The twins looked at each other again, and it was clear that they could barely contain their delight. “It ain’t so pretty in English, either, Molly,” said Susie.

  “Go on?”

  “Roughly translated … Woman Who Kicks Men in Testicles.” The girls now dissolved in uncontrollable laughter, all the others joining them.

  “We just hope you’re not lookin’ to find a husband among the Cheyenne,” said Meggie when she was able to speak again. “Because with a name like that, ’tis not likely to be an easy task for you.” And then Meggie and Susie danced a little Irish jig of mirth, laughing like crazy women.

  “Lookin’ on the bright side, lass,” sputtered Susie, “at least ya can be assured that you won’t be pestered by a lot of fellas asking you to step out with ’em!”

  I could not help but join them in their laughter, of which there has not been enough of late.

  26 April 1876

  A word now about some other members of our party, to whom, with all that has happened these past days, I have given rather short shrift so far in these pages. The long days in the saddle have given us ample opportunity to visit with one another, either as a group or individually. At the same time, this immense country in the face of which we feel so tiny and inconsequential seems to encourage a certain intimacy among us that our close confinement, first on the train and then in Crazy Horse’s village, did not permit, freeing some of the girls to unburden themselves frankly and without artifice. In this way, while the landscape can sometimes seem terrifying, it is also liberating.

  And so I have had occasion to learn more about several of the women in our group. The Norwegian, Astrid Norstegard, has been heretofore perhaps the most taciturn among us, as well as the most stoic—quiet, never complaining, and revealing little about herself. I wonder if perhaps this is a characteristic of her people. At the same time, she is not what one might call an especially cheerful girl; it might even be said that she has a rather dour disposition.

  This morning I found myself riding beside Astrid. The prairie wind had come up, as it frequently does, and black rain clouds were massing on the horizon. “You know,” she said, “if I squint my eyes in a certain way, and feel the rhythm of the horse rocking beneath me, and the wind in my face, I can almost imagine myself on a fishing boat in the North Sea. Even those distant buttes and rock formations jutting from the earth bring to my mind the islands and peninsulas where my family has lived and worked as fishermen for generations.”

  “But you are such a long way from home,” I said. “How did you come to be here, Astrid? You’ve never told us.”

  “I married a man named Nils Norstegard,” she answered. “A very fine man, who dreamed of immigrating to America. We had heard much about the Great Lakes, particularly Lake Superior, for we had relatives who had gone to the city of Duluth and made their way as fishers on the North Shore. Life in Norway was very hard, and we were very poor, but we were young and full of the spirit of adventure. And so we left …

  “It was a long and difficult passage but once we arrived and were settled we were happy doing what we knew how to do, what our families had always done. We built a simple hut on the lake, and Nils built a fine fishing boat, and I made and mended his nets. Lake Superior is rich in trout, whitefish, sturgeon, lake herring, and other fishes.

  “One day, less than six months after our arrival, Nils’s boat was found drifting a half mile offshore … he was not in it … perhaps he fell overboard … However, he was a fine, experienced boatman and I believe that he was the victim of someone else who forced him overboard … His body was never recovered … I will never know what happened to him…” Astrid paused here, raising her head to gaze across the plains, composing herself with her usual stoicism, though the rawness of her loss was written clearly on her face.

  “We had not yet had children,” she continued, “which I suppose was a good thing. I found work in the fish house, and between that and mending nets for other fishermen, I earned just enough money to get by. I had many suitors—older men who had lost their wives and needed a woman in the house, and other single younger men who had come alone to the North Shore from the old country. But I was not yet ready to remarry, and I was afraid to marry another fisherman, for too many men in my family over the generations have died at sea … and now my own husband.

  “I had suspicions about who may have been responsible for Nils’s death—one man in particular who had made improper advances toward me while he was still alive, and who was the first to approach me with a romantic proposition after he disappeared, before even the suitable period of mourning was over. I was afraid of this man. I did not
wish to stay there for he was always watching me, always coming by my hut, looking at me, making insinuating remarks. Nor did I wish to clean fish for the rest of my life. But I had nowhere else to go, and no means to get there. Then I saw the advertisement in the newspaper, asking for young, single women to go west … and I answered it … and here I am…”

  “At least if you remarry here,” I suggested, “one thing you will not have to worry about is losing your husband at sea.”

  She smiled. “Yes, Molly, I did consider that. I thought if I marry a Cheyenne man, he will probably not die by drowning. But look,” she said, indicating the plains with a sweep of her hand, “this country is not so unlike the sea, and as we have already learned, other dangers lurk. One could certainly lose a husband out there.”

  27 April 1876

  Let me say that greenhorns though we be, I believe our group is proving to be quite adaptable. Our actress/dancer/songstress Lulu LaRue has been particularly effective in ministering to poor Martha, holding her gently in her arms and singing sweet French lullabies to make her sleep again. Others of us are learning the words to some of these ditties, and we frequently join in a kind of chorus.

  This morning, as we were packing the horses for departure, one of the Cheyenne women, whose name we are told translates to Singing Woman, came over to our campsite, leading a young girl by the hand.

  The woman conferred with Meggie and Susie for a moment, in Cheyenne, of course, and as she did so the child walked over to where I was saddling Spring. She was barefoot and wore a simple hide shift, a pretty little thing with a slight, willowy build, tawny skin, dark hair, and a round, open face, and she stood looking up at me with solemn brown eyes. Then she reached her hand out toward me in a kind of tentative, supplicating gesture. I knelt down beside her and cupped her cheek in my palm. “What is it, dear?” I asked.

  “Her name is Hóhkééhe, Molly,” Susie said. “That means Mouse. She’s an orphan. Her parents were killed in the Mackenzie massacre.”

  “What does she want?”

  “She has never seen a blond woman before. Singing Woman says she’s been fascinated by you ever since we’ve been travelin’. She just wants to touch your hair.”

  “Aye, Mol,” said Meggie, with a laugh, “she doesn’t believe it’s real. “She thinks it’s made of straw.”

  I laughed. My hair has grown long these past months, and I often wear it loose, as I did today, rather than in braids. I took now a handful where it fell over my shoulder and held it out to the child. “Well, of course you can touch it,” I said. I knew she didn’t understand my words, but she would the gesture and my tone. She smiled shyly, and touched my hair very lightly with just the tips of her fingers, as if afraid it would burn her. Then, emboldened, she took the tress in her hand, rubbing it lightly between her thumb and fingers. As I watched her, I could feel the tears coming, for I realized that I had not touched nor had I been touched by a child since my daughter’s death … and this little brown Mouse looked to be roughly the same age as was my Clara. In that moment, I had the haunted sensation of looking again into the eyes of my own daughter. I raised the girl’s other hand to my lips and kissed it.

  When finally she let go of my hair, I took the tress in hand, twisted it several times to tighten it, pulled my knife from the sheath at my waist, and cut off a length about six inches long. I stood then, and sliced a sliver of rawhide off the end of the strap that secured my bedroll to the saddle, and with this I tied the tress in a little bundle. Kneeling back down, I handed it to the girl. She smiled proudly and raised it to her nose to smell. Then she scampered back to Singing Woman.

  “It’s a fine thing for you to give her a lock,” Susie said. “It will be much prized as a trophy when she shows it to the other wee ones. You’ve made yourself a friend for life, Molly.”

  “Please tell her that she must also give me a lock of hers,” I said.

  As we rode out this morning, Meggie and Susie explained that Singing Woman had come to see us on another mission, as well. The Cheyenne women have heard us singing softly these last few nights, and the music pleases them. They wish for us to teach them our songs, and they sent her as their emissary, for, as her name suggests, she is said to have a lovely voice. We all thought this an excellent idea, as given the constant chores involved in traveling—making and breaking camp each day, hunting, gathering, cooking, putting up our rough shelters for the night, and taking them down in the morning—we have had little time to visit each other’s evening bivouacs, and therefore very little personal interaction.

  And so today, after the first morning break to water the horses, we rode for a time with the Cheyenne women. We sang our songs, and tried to learn a bit of each other’s language. Because they have had contact for at least two generations with French trappers and traders from Canada, a number of whom have married into the tribe over the years, many of them speak a kind of limited French patois, that is to say, a linguistically impure regional version of the language. This proves to be quite helpful in teaching them Lulu’s songs, and we had a fine time, the universal language of music seeming to bring us closer together.

  As requested, just as we were setting out, my new little friend, Mouse, brought me a lock of her hair. She, or perhaps one of the women, had tied my tress to one of her black braids, and I now tied hers into mine. Speaking Cheyenne, with a kind of pleading look on her face, she touched the horse’s neck, then herself, then my leg in the stirrup, and I realized that she was asking if she could ride with me. And so I helped her up; she swung aboard light as a spirit being and straddled Spring’s withers, and we rode out, her tiny, slender brown body warmed in the sun, leaning against me as she sang along in a high, sweet voice. I, in turn, held her lightly with one arm, both the orphan child and the bereaved mother taking solace in this simple maternal contact. How I have missed it … how it breaks my heart …

  The Cheyenne women, in turn, are trying to teach us the rudiments of sign language, by which means the various plains tribes “talk” to each other, and which the Kellys tell us is how their group was first able to interact with the natives. It is a wonderfully effective form of communication, and a native practitioner is able to converse as quickly in hand gestures and facial expressions as in spoken language.

  This entry I make as we sit around our evening fire. Encouraged by Lulu’s efforts, our Mexican girl, Maria, has also begun to sing some of the folk songs she learned as a child growing up in a tiny village in the mountains of Sonora. Although none of the rest of us speak Spanish, we can imagine from the tempo and inflection of her voice that some of these are romantic love songs, and others about the hard, frequently tragic life in that rugged land.

  She tells us tales of Apache raiders who kidnap Mexican women and babies from the villages, and other dark legends of the Sierra Madre. She tells us that when she was only twelve years old, she was sold by her impoverished family to an infamous Mexico City bandito named Chucho el Roto. She says these songs were the only possession of her lost childhood that she was able to take with her, and that they helped sustain her through the many lonely days and nights to come, running finally into weeks, months, and years of what was essentially captivity.

  Then even Astrid, so usually quiet and watchful, shares the music of her own land with us, haunting songs of the North Sea, in which one can hear the wind moaning, feel the waves cresting over the bows of the fishing boats, and in the distance see the craggy bays of her home country.

  Finally, timid little Hannah Alford, spellbound by the songs of the others, gets up the courage to offer a few Liverpudlian tunes of her own, which, in her lively voice with its distinct accent, are as gay as can be. She says these are mostly drinking tunes her father brought home from the pub after having a pint or two with his friends at the end of their day’s work in the rail yard.

  In this way, while all try to assimilate into this strange new world, they bring with them at the same time something of their past, of their former home, something f
amiliar to remember, to hang on to in the face of these endless plains, covered by this vast, star-filled night sky, which if we lie on our backs and look up, gives us a sense of vertigo, as if we are tumbling headlong into it.

  Only Carolyn Metcalf does not join us in song, for she says that the only music her husband, the pastor, permitted the family were church hymns, and after what he and the deacon have done to her, and knowing that the organist now lives in her home, she is a little soured on singing.

  28 April 1876

  We have all made one observation regarding Martha: she is terribly attached to her donkey. I suspect that the creature was her only friend through the ordeal of her captivity, and given the alacrity with which he ran away with us without a moment’s hesitation, as if fleeing for his own life, we believe that Seminole probably mistreated him as well. Never have a donkey’s little legs moved so rapidly! Although she does not speak to us, Martha made it clear that she wants the beast picketed by the entrance to her tent, and when she wakes in the night she sometimes goes outside to caress and hug it around the neck.

  My parents kept donkeys as working animals on our farm, and I’ve always enjoyed them. Despite their well-earned reputation for stubbornness and unpredictability, and the fact that they can be quick to kick when the opportunity presents itself, and to bite, I find them to be quite intelligent creatures, more so even than horses. And I have to admit that Martha’s donkey is a comely little fellow … as donkeys go … with a grayish-tan coat, dark brown mane, white muzzle and belly, and a series of pale spots on his hindquarters. He has a jaunty, one might even say slightly cocky disposition, and he steps out quite smartly when we travel. He does not tolerate any encroachment upon his person from the horses, at whom he nips when they come too close. Sometimes he simply raises his upper lip, baring his huge teeth in a kind of warning, an expression that makes us laugh and earns the full respect of the horses. We all take it as a good sign that Martha is so attached to the little fellow, for it seems to suggest that perhaps she will eventually be able to make a similar connection to people. She continues to slip in and out of her trance state. We try to engage her in conversation, ask her questions, and sometimes we just chatter on together, hoping that somehow she is absorbing our words, or at the very least, our kindly intentions.