A Good Man (56 page)

A brief spell of warming, followed by a cold snap, glazes the snow that had fallen on the Nez Perce as they had fled Colonel Miles weeks before, lending it a bone china lustre. It crackles and shatters under the hooves of the Sioux ponies as they gallop the last mile to Pinto Horse Butte. The wolves, the Sioux scouts, are braiding their ponies among the tipis, crying the good news that Bull brings from Fort Walsh, announcing that the holy man has scolded and humiliated One Star Terry and claimed the Old Woman’s country for his own. He returns unharmed and brings his good friend Long Lance to celebrate with them.

People spill excitedly from the lodges, the women carrying little ones in their arms and on their backs. Children rush to the outskirts of the village and scale the highest icy drifts to be the first to welcome home the riders. The village’s warriors, bundled up in Hudson’s Bay blankets and buffalo robes, keep a more sedate, more dignified pace, although their poise is ruffled when they plunge through the crust of the snow and have to flounder and flail their way out of the banks.

Everyone gathers in the evening light, the sun tiny and orange on the horizon, the moon already up and showing the blue scars on its face. The horsemen are spotted riding hard in a jagged, zigzag gallop. The people hear them shouting encouragement to their ponies, which are throwing up rooster tails of white flakes as high as their haunches, a joyous wave of bounding ponies and flying snow, buoyed by the honour songs the village begins to sing.

Gall, broad and solid as an ancient cottonwood, waits to meet his old friend Sitting Bull. Gall would not go to Fort Walsh to talk with the Americans. His heart is too bitter. Ten years ago soldiers had tried to arrest him; when he fought back they thrust their bayonets into his body many times and left him for dead on the ground. At the Little Bighorn, two of his wives and three of his children had perished at the hands of the Long Knives. But now he lifts his voice in thanks for the news that Bull is bringing, that Wakan Tanka has given them this country, a land where there are still herds of buffalo to shake the earth, a place where the Long Knives are forbidden to disturb the winter sleep of the Sioux with the noise of bugles, the crack of Spencer carbines.

The riders end their wild dash in a spray of snow and milling ponies. Wives and children, brothers and sisters, cousins, and grey-headed parents crowd in to greet the horsemen. Sitting Bull looks weary. He salutes Gall but does not halt his pony, simply heads it towards his lodge.

Walsh is hemmed in tight on all sides; many hands are held up to him to shake. Everyone has an invitation for him. Sleep in my lodge. Eat in my lodge. A troop of children scampers along beside the Major’s horse as he wends his way through the camp. They pat his boots, tug at the skirts of his buffalo coat, begging to be noticed. At last, he pulls a funny face, the one his daughter Cora loves, and they scream with laughter, feign fear and run away.

Preparations for feasting are under way. Fires bloom in the swiftly falling night. Women butcher game, set cook kettles on the boil, put sticks strung with meat over fires. Drums throb and singers break into song. Walsh and Léveillé have agreed to dine with Gall tonight. He ushers them into his lodge where they are served the choicest delicacies: marrow soup, buffalo tongue, antelope steaks, hump, grilled venison. They wash down the rich meat with black tea thick and sweet with sugar. Each time a new dish is offered Walsh protests he cannot swallow another bite, but Gall forces more on him, and the Major tucks in with feigned gusto. Only when the last pipe is smoked, the last gobbet of meat eaten, the last cup of tea drunk, does Gall heed Walsh’s protestations of weariness, and lets him go to claim the bed the old blind Santee chieftain Inkapaduta offered him for the night. The Major says goodbye to all his host’s kin and to Léveillé, who will sleep in Gall’s lodge.

Outside, Walsh pauses. All around him, the tipis glow like overturned funnels, their skins bright as lampshades, the fires inside sending up thin fingers of smoke to stroke the black belly of the sky. Each warrior’s best buffalo runner is tethered outside his entrance, snuffling and pawing the ground. People pass from lodge to lodge, paying visits, their shadows flitting here and there. A dog trots up to Walsh, sniffs the grease and fat on his fingers, licks them, gives a cough of pleasure.

He thinks that if he had been born fifty years ago, it would have been a good thing to be born a Sioux. Jimmy Walsh wouldn’t have been a square peg in a round hole here, by no means. A bellyful of fresh-killed meat, a skirmish now and then to keep the blood from going mouldy, a life on the back of a horse. Go off to some spot in the wilderness and dream up your own religion. Each man his own parson. Each man his own boss. That’s what he was meant to be – Jimmy Each Man for Himself. And instead, son of a bitch, here stands old Jimmy Everyman.

Sitting Bull does not feast, does not sing, pays no visits but one. He limps a half mile through the snow to the burial scaffold of his dead son. The skeletal frame leans its shoulders against a wall of stars, holds up to the sky the tiny bundle he so carefully wrapped in his best blankets and robes against the cold teeth of winter, the lightest of burdens resting in the arms of thin poplar poles.

Bull stares up at it, feeling in his own skull the power of the hoof that left its mark on his little boy’s head as if it were soft as dust, or snow, or mud, hears the child’s breath growing slower and fainter in his ears.

He mourns the flesh that will never live under his hand again. Above all, he grieves that his son will never taste the sweetness of the gift his father has brought back to the people, a place here in the Old Woman’s country where they can live in the way Wakan Tanka asks of them.

At Fort Walsh he had pushed down his grief with two palms, left it to struggle like a dog when a raccoon mounts its head to drown it in a stream. But now he takes his hands away and his sorrow lifts its head, gulps for breath, and howls in the night.

TWENTY-FIVE

CHILLED TO THE BONE
, tired and wrung out, Case approaches Ada’s house. Feeling like an old man, he stiffly mounts the steps, knees creaking, hips grinding rawly in their sockets. Rattling around for three days in the back of a Murphy wagon has taken a toll on him.

He knocks softly at the front door rather than entering the house as he would have in days past when he felt he owned that right. There’s a faint stirring inside, the sound of footsteps. The door opens and there is Ada, eyes widening in surprise. “Oh,” she says, “I presumed it was Joe.” She takes two steps backwards, as if in faltering retreat. “You’re shivering. Come in. There’s hot coffee on the stove.” Then, without another word, she makes for the parlour, leaving him to divest himself of his garments. Case clicks his heels together, contritely knocking the snow from his boots, pulls off his coat, and hangs it on a hook in the vestibule.

He goes to the kitchen and pours himself some coffee. The welcome was as he had supposed it would be, guarded and distant. She appears to require a moment alone to gather herself to deliver her sentence. But when he enters the parlour, Ada is on the sofa with a pile of student papers on her lap, brow furrowed to illustrate her concentration. Her pencil flies furiously over one of them. He eases himself carefully down in a chair as if it were made of glass.

“Well,” she says, glancing up at him, “Odysseus returns.” She makes a gesture to the papers. “And finds Penelope busy at her loom. I did not expect you so soon. How was Major Walsh? Sitting Bull?” There is a brittle brightness to her voice.

“Both tolerable,” he says, his voice hedged with circumspection.

“I am glad to hear it.”

“You are angry. You have every right.”

Ada thinks for a moment as if weighing the correctness of his observation. “It seems I am. Joe and I have been debating whether this time you had not taken permanent leave of us.”

“Ada, I promised you to return.”

“Yes, you did promise. After the fact, wouldn’t you say? But when a man takes flight with the frequency you do – twice in the space of six weeks – one begins to wonder if he will not finally make good his escape.”

He fidgets with the cup, staring down at it, lifts his eyes to the mantel clock, watches the second hand complete a circuit. Finally, he says, “I gambled everything when I left that document with you. I need to know the outcome.”

When he turns back to Ada, he sees two red spots printed on her cheekbones as if someone had brutally pressed their thumbs against them. “And what exactly did you imagine were the stakes in that wager?”

“Your regard, your affection.”

“How careful you are. What very moderate words you choose – regard, affection,” she whispers.

“And did you ever give me eason to presume you felt more? My every profession of love has been met with one response – you would not marry me. I don’t deny you were correct to have reservations. No doubt you sensed something amiss, a shadow about me.”

She considers that. “No. You give too much credit to woman’s intuition. I sensed nothing in the beginning. It was only recently … when you fell prey to melancholy that I wondered what was at the root of it.”

“And now you know,” he says, with a hopeless shrug of the shoulders.

“Lieutenant Wilson.”

“Yes. I may as well have killed him with my own hands.”

“That you feel guilt – that is understandable. But do not overstate the case. You seriously misjudged a situation. There were terrible consequences. But could you have foreseen exactly what would happen?”

His throat is dry. He takes a sip from his coffee to revive his voice. “For years,” he says, “I’ve wondered if deep inside me I did not want it to happen. I know I wished Pudge Wilson ill. I seized the moment and indulged my spite.”

“So a wish is as good as a deed?” He sits mute. “Am I nothing to you but a judge? Well, I won’t pass sentence. It’s not my business to convict or exonerate you.” With some heat, she adds, “You drop that confession – that so-called
statement of fact –
in my lap and go out the door. As if you wanted no part in what consequences it might have for us, wanted to blithely wash your hands of any part in deciding our future.”

“I did not want any hand in influencing your decision, which I would not have been able to restrain myself from attempting to do if I had stayed. I feared I would beg you not to leave me.”

“That sounds a very hollow excuse.”

“I was too much of a coward to sit and watch you read that confession. The prospect of it frightened me. Just as the look on your face frightens me now.”

Ada says softly, “You were not the only one, Wesley. I was most terribly frightened too.”

“Of what?”

“I feared you would be too ashamed to keep your promise to return, that you would not be able to face me. You are a prouder man than you think. And so I went to the school board –”

“And offered your resignation. Say no more. You wish to remove yourself from Fort Benton. That is perfectly understandable.”

“No. I requested a week’s leave of absence before Thanksgiving so we could be married in Helena. I had the idea that by making this gesture – giving you what you had always asked for – I could bring you back to me. I have a superstitious streak …” Ada falls silent for a moment, then shrugs. “And if this silly charm did not return you, I was willing to suffer the chagrinof a besotted woman who foolishly announces a wedding that will never come to pass. But that is neither here nor there,” she says resolutely, straightening her back. “You wanted a decision from me. There it is. For you to accept or not.”

“Are you in earnest?”

“Deadly earnest. And if you are in earnest,” she says, “you could signal it by putting a proper notice in the Benton paper.” She gives him a timid, wry smile. “Nothing frivolous, nothing along the lines of seeking a woman familiar with the works of George Eliot. Just an honest declaration. If you wish to do this, do it right.”

“Of course I will.” He rises, feeling unsteady on his feet. “I don’t know what to say.”

Suddenly there are tears in her eyes. “You might promise not to leave me again. That would be a beginning.”

He moves across the room, sits down beside her, takes her hand. It is cold. “Of course I will promise,” he murmurs. “I swear it. But what changed your mind? After all this time?”

“After Cow Island, I thought you would never do such a thing again. And then you did, without a word of warning. And I knew your history of turning your back on things, of your failure to remain constant. Despite your promise to return I could not convince myself you would.”

“I may have changed my work many times. I plead guilty to fleeing my father. But I would never desert you, Ada. How could you think that?”

She sounds as if she is speaking to herself and is surprised by what she is hearing. “A loneliness I had never felt descended on me when you were gone. A loneliness like grief. The strength of it surprised me. The truth is, I couldn’t think clearly. Everything was a muddle.”