La Vengeance des mères

by Jim Fergus

  I do not know exactly how much time passed … five, six hours, perhaps longer. Our captors had returned to the battlefield, and for most of that time I could still hear the distant gunfire. Periodically, wounded warriors came in, or those needing fresh horses. At some point one of the women gave me a tin cup of water, which I was able to drink between my bound hands, then a small strip of dried buffalo meat. By midafternoon the shooting had become increasingly sporadic, and then finally ceased altogether but for an isolated shot now and again. The various bands of Crow and Shoshone warriors, some of them sporting fresh scalps on their belts, began to return to the encampment with victory ululations met by joyous trilling from the women … and occasional keening as the bodies of their dead were brought in.

  He was riding with one of these bands, as I dreaded he would be … I spotted him when they were still a little distance away, leading his party down the hillside into the encampment … a man, if one can call him such, whom it would be impossible to mistake for another. Greasy black hair falling in curls to his shoulders, Army Stetson worn sideways with the top cut out and eagle feathers protruding from it, black knee-high cavalry boots, the seam split halfway down, navy blue cavalry jacket and pale blue breeches with yellow stripes, all filthy, stained, surely never washed … I could almost smell his stench from here, could feel the bile rising in my throat, the cold fear washing over me. I knew that this time there would be no escape …

  Please, come for me, Hawk, wherever you are, I beg you … find me, save me … please … I know you’ll come … please, hurry.

  After he rode into the encampment, it took Jules Seminole very little time to locate me … “Ah, ma belle, my beauty! When they told Jules that a blond white woman had been taken captive, I knew … I knew that you had come back to me to beg my forgiveness, I knew you could not stay away for another moment, that your love was too strong to keep us apart any longer.” Now he fell to his knees beside me, swept his hat off. “Yes, my darling, Jules forgives you, I forgive you for everything … you see, I know why you stole my bride, for you could not bear to share Jules with her, you had to have me to yourself, so you took her away. It is perfectly normal. Oui, mon amour, but now, at last, your dream has come true, it will just be you and Jules from now on, a lifetime of love together…” He smiled his revolting rotten-toothed grin, cruel, mocking. “Yes, a lifetime of taking pleasure in each other, pleasure and pain such as you have never before known, my darling, that Jules can promise you. Ah, oui, ma petite, beginning this very day, surely the luckiest day of your life, you will drink the sweet nectar of Jules’s love juice … every day for the rest of your life … and you will taste the divinity candy of his darkest, his most forbidden recesses…”

  I vomited. I had only the bit of water I had drunk earlier and a small bite of the buffalo jerky in my stomach, but it came up without warning, in a wave of disgust and terror. “You’ll have to kill me,” I managed to say. “I’ll bite it off. I’ll rip your throat out with my teeth.”

  He slapped me so hard that he knocked me from my seated position to the ground. I lay on my side with my face in the dirt, breathing hard, trying not to cry, making no effort to sit up again.

  “Mais non, that you will not do.” Seminole spoke no longer in the wheedling, unctuous tones with which he had been addressing me. Now his voice seemed to come from another person—hard, vicious. “Au contraire, you will do exactly what I tell you to do, exactly as I wish for you to do it. For you see, in addition to Jules’s many other talents, I have pliers and excellent dentistry skills. I rather like to be in the mouths of toothless women … a sensation like no other. However, such a procedure as pulling your teeth will collapse your face and ruin your looks, which would be a terrible shame for a woman so lovely as you. As to killing you, oui, bien sûr, that, too, can be easily arranged. But not yet. For that would be a punishment far too easy for you. Do you realize that Jules’s precious jewels were swollen for a week after our last meeting? You stole his horse, his wife, his gun, you did grave damage to his manhood, not to mention insulting his dignity. You have a great debt to pay Jules before you will be allowed to die. And by then, you will be begging for death.”

  Seminole grabbed a handful of my hair and pulled me back to a seated position on the ground. He had thick arms and a swarthy simian build, and I was struck again by his strength, as I remembered from our first encounter.

  “I’m begging for it now,” I said.

  “Far too soon, ma petite putain,” he said, “my little whore, first you have your debt to pay.”

  “You know the warrior Hawk, do you not?” I asked.

  Now his tone changed again, becoming oddly whiny and defensive. “Of course, Jules’s mother is Cheyenne,” he said. “She is the sister of the Sweet Medicine Chief Little Wolf. Jules grew up with Hawk.” A shadow crossed Seminole’s face. “My uncle Little Wolf banished Jules from the tribe. That is why Jules rides now with the Crow. When we were boys everyone liked Hawk. He was a fast runner and won all the races, he was always the best at games, the best rider of horses, the best shooter of the bow, and of the rifle and pistol. And even then, it was said that he was a shape-shifter and could become a hawk, that he could fly like a hawk. Everyone admired him. Jules was not well liked, for his father was a Frenchman from Canada, a trapper, who was not well liked by the People, for he brought alcohol among them. Jules wanted to be friends with Hawk, but Hawk did not like Jules. Jules was not gifted at games, or running, or at all the other things that Hawk could do so well … Jules had no special talents, no one admired him. Hawk ignored Jules, he mocked him. Jules does not like to be made fun of. Now tell me why do you ask Jules about this man Hawk?”

  “Because I want you to know that he is my husband,” I said, “and I am going to have his son. If you violate me, if you force me to do any of the vile things of which you speak, if you harm me in any way, you know what Hawk will do to you, don’t you? You know what he is capable of. He will hunt you down, and you will suffer terribly before he kills you. I am certain that he is already on his way here. He rescued me the last time, and he will rescue me again.”

  Seminole laughed, as if suddenly terribly relieved. “Ah, mon amour, you see you have come back to Jules at just the right moment. I had no idea you were married to Hawk. I am so sorry to give you this sad news, but as his wife, you deserve to know the truth: Hawk was killed today in battle, one of the Army long-gun soldiers shot him from his horse. Jules witnessed this himself. So you see, now you are free to remarry, to realize your dream of spending the rest of your life with Jules. Together we shall raise Hawk’s son as our own. Don’t you see, my beauty? This will bring us even closer together.”

  “You’re lying, I do not believe you.”

  “Mais ma belle, why do you think he hasn’t come already to save you?” Seminole asked. He looked up in the air. “Look, not a single hawk in sight this afternoon. See, only the vultures circling, waiting to feast on the remains of the dead. Your Hawk, my darling, has been shot from the sky, falling to earth just as he fell from his horse. I only hope his people have recovered his body before the scavengers reach it. It would be such a shame if he had go to Seano with no eyes, and his entrails pecked out.”

  That was all it took to cause me to fall completely apart. I began sobbing violently. Although I did not want to admit it, either to Seminole or to myself, I believed what he said. Hawk would have found me by now, he would have come for me if he could … I know he would have …

  “Well now, mon amour,” said Seminole, “no sense in crying over it. Jules is going to remove the rope from your ankle, but I will leave your hands tied, for I do not think that you are as yet entirely trustworthy … although, believe me, you will soon be as docile as my former wife, Vóese’e, Happy Woman, as Jules so lovingly named her.

  “We are going to retrieve your little pony from the corral, while everyone here is packing up the camp. You and Jules will ride side by side, like a real couple, to the supply base of mon
cher Général Georges Crook, where my warriors will receive their pay for scouting and battle services rendered, and where Jules will receive his next orders. There we will spend the night … and you must now begin to imagine all the intimate acts you will perform upon Jules as a loving wife on her wedding night. Ah, oui … we shall be alone together at last, my darling … And tomorrow we will return to our village to the west, where we will commence our true life together. You will be the most obedient of wives to Jules. For if you are not … and I do hope you understand this … the life of your unborn child will be in the gravest danger.”

  I pulled myself together then. It was one thing to wish death for myself, quite another to sacrifice the child that grows inside me. That thought was all I had left from which to draw strength. I remembered Pretty Nose’s proud, defiant courage and I tried to summon some of it for myself.

  One of the horse boys cut Spring out of the corral and returned my tack. The camp packed up and we rode out. I tried without success to spot Pretty Nose in the procession as we left. But after we had been riding for a half hour or so, I heard her soft, sad voice beginning to sing one of the songs Lulu had taught us, “Vive la Rose,” “Long Live the Rose,” about a girl abandoned by her lover. Pretty Nose was letting me know where in the procession she was, and that she was alright. I turned in the saddle and finally got a glimpse of her; we smiled at each other, and I took up her song, so that she would know, I, too, was alright … even if neither of us really was.

  “Ah, mon amour!” said Seminole when our song came to an end. “I had no idea you sang so beautifully, and in French! Quel plaisir! You will sing songs of love to Jules every day! How that excites him! But, please, you need not worry about Jules ever leaving you, ma chérie, or you ever leaving him, for that will never happen, we are inseparable. Such a perfect, loving couple we shall make, united forever, morning and night in our unquenchable passion!”

  As we rode, Seminole kept up a running discourse of filth and madness, alternately and without warning, becoming at times strangely civil, even banal, speaking both English and French, or a mixture of the two, turning in the saddle to address me as if we were intimates taking a pleasure ride. Other times he didn’t appear to be speaking to me at all, but involved in some bizarre interior dialogue, in different voices, alternately whiny, argumentative, absurdly tender, all punctuated by crazed laughter. He obviously found his own company highly entertaining; I began to have an ever clearer and more chilling sense of how truly insane he was. I knew beyond a doubt that he had the power and the depravity to break me, as he had broken Martha in both mind and spirit, and that the only defense I had was to find in him some point of weakness, some opening … In the meantime, all I could do was to make the smallest, most tightly closed package of myself in order to try to preserve my own sanity. Keep your head high and your eyes straight ahead … do not look at them, do not show fear, Pretty Walker had said to me.

  “Tell Jules, my darling, why you carry the ledger book upon your back,” he asked. “Are you an artiste? Do you have other secret talents Jules has not yet discovered?”

  “I keep a journal,” I said.

  “You are a writer?” he asked.

  “No, I just keep a journal.”

  “And have you written about Jules?”

  “Yes, as a matter of fact, I have, in one of the earlier ledgers.”

  “Ah, you write about Jules? How wonderful, I am so happy, so proud!” he said. “You must love him very much.” A shadow crossed his face. “But Jules does not know how to read. If only I had known that one day someone would write a book about me, I would have insisted upon learning.”

  “It is not a book, and it is not about you. It is a journal, and you just appear in a few entries.”

  “You must read them to Jules!”

  “I do not have them with me … obviously,” I said. “All my old journals are in a parfleche that Hawk’s grandmother now keeps for me … However, if you let me go, I could certainly ride back to fetch them, and bring them to read to you.”

  At this Seminole laughed like a madman. “Ah, mon amour, Jules is so happy to see that you have a sense of humor. That was one thing missing in my marriage to Vóese’e … the girl you know as Martha … I must say, the poor thing was not very much fun, she did not know how to laugh, or to make me laugh. But I can see that you and Jules will laugh much together.”

  “That I would very much doubt.”

  “Tell me, my precious, is Jules as dashing a hero in your book as he is in real life?”

  “I told you, it’s not a book, it’s not about you. And, no, you are neither dashing nor a hero in the few entries in which you are mentioned.”

  “But in your book, you must surely speak of Jules’s irresistible animal attraction, non?”

  “I may have used the term ‘animal’ to describe him … although that would seem rather generous.”

  At this insult, Seminole’s cheerful mood just as quickly evaporated. He glared at me and I expected that he was going to hit me again. “Ah, oui, that does not make Jules laugh, that hurts Jules’s feelings. Jules never forgets insults. Be assured, Jules will pay you back for that.”

  Seminole’s strange combination of evil and infantilism, his changeable moods and voices, kept me constantly on guard. He had a compulsion to wound and terrify, while at the same time a bizarre need to be accepted, admired, even loved by his victims.

  “You’re right, I am writing a book about Jules,” I said in an attempt to placate him, “an entire book about him. He has many different sides to him, Jules does. Yes, he possesses a certain undeniable animal attraction. However, I also point out that he could use a bath every now and then.”

  At this Seminole laughed again. “Ah, that is much, much better, my love! Jules knew it, a whole book about him! If only I could read. You will read it to Jules, won’t you, ma princesse? Do you know what Jules will promise, my darling … because he is so deeply in love with you? I promise I will take a bath once every month … I swear, once every month without fail…” And he laughed, and laughed.

  The afternoon winds had come up, blowing ominously to suit my own sense of doom. But at least it helped to make conversation more difficult, and to drown out Seminole’s words as we rode.

  We traveled south and west for perhaps three hours, until the sun was just setting and we reached the edge of the Army base camp in the valley of Goose Creek. We kept to the hills on the perimeter without entering the encampment itself, but close enough to have a sense of the vastness of it—huge corrals of mules and horses, endless rows of supply wagons, canvas soldiers’ tents, cooking, dining, and medical tents all set up in military formation. Cavalry and infantry companies were still arriving from the battlefield, bringing with them the dead and wounded, attended to by doctors and orderlies. Fires burned near several mess tents as cooks prepared supper. After all this time in the wilds, it was strange to witness this relatively orderly outpost of civilization, and I cannot say that I did not experience a certain twinge of nostalgia … even longing. Then again, it occurred to me that but for one bite of dried beef, which I promptly vomited, I had not eaten since this morning, and perhaps it was simply the familiar smell of white-man food cooking that inspired these thoughts.

  Seminole halted us in the hills a good distance away from the Army encampment below, and his band pitched its evening bivouac. He was going off to collect pay from the quartermaster for his warriors and scouts, and clearly did not wish for me to be seen by any of the Army personnel. He turned me over to the same two sullen women who had taken charge of me before. They reminded me of prison guards I had known, handling me roughly and contemptuously as they tethered me again to my stake, clearly enjoying their power over the powerless. Before Seminole left, I asked him if he could at least free my hands so that I could continue working on my “book” about him while he was away. He was so pleased by this notion that he agreed, untying my hands and speaking sternly to the women, presumably telling them
not to let me out of their sight. I took the journal from my back and assumed the squatting position, learned eventually by all prisoners in solitary confinement, so that one’s butt does not rest on the cold stone floor of the cell.

  My keepers sit cross-legged by a small fire in front of the makeshift stick shelter they have constructed, cooking meat impaled on sticks that they hold over the flames. From the smell, I identify it as either elk or deer, for buffalo has a particular odor of its own. They do not offer me any, nor, despite my hunger, do I ask.

  Undated entry

  After Seminole had been gone for well over an hour, three soldiers rode into the far end of our camp. My first impulse was to cry out to them for help, but then suddenly in a tumult of confusion I realized that to be rescued by the soldiers would only result in captivity of another kind. Presumably, because I’m a white woman and clearly a captive, they would take me in, but then they would surely want to know who I was and where I had come from. What plausible lie could I possibly tell? And when they found out the truth, which they undoubtedly would, what would they do with me, send me back to prison? It had never occurred to me until this moment that there might be a worse fate than being Jules Seminole’s “wife” … for at least here, I had a chance of escape, while there is no escape from Sing Sing.

  The soldiers rode slowly through the camp, stopping as they went to speak with the Crow. They appeared to be asking questions, as if searching for someone in particular, for those they consulted pointed in our general direction. When finally they reached the hut beside which I was tied, the highest-ranking of them, a captain it appeared from his uniform, addressed my women keepers in native tongue. They answered, gesturing toward the Army camp. I realized that they must be looking for Seminole. The soldiers regarded me with obvious curiosity. I kept my eyes downcast, in my squatting position, trying to be as inconspicuous as possible. My attire gave no suggestion that I was not myself a native, my face covered with dirt after the long day, my skin darkened in our time under the plains sun, my braided hair equally filthy, though still noticeably fair. The captain now looked at me, then asked the women another question … I assumed demanding why was I thus tied. They answered. He dismounted, handed his reins to one of the soldiers, walked over, and squatted in front of me. He spoke to me in what I recognized to be the Cheyenne language, and I realized that the women must have told him I was a captive from that tribe.