Black Hills (55 page)

But this time they didn’t. It was that simple, Libbie, my love.

I
f I had been able to talk to you that final day on April first, I might have explained to you that the sadness I felt was not for me, but for leading my young brother Tom (perhaps the bravest of all of us, he with his two Medals of Honor) and my non-soldier brother Boston (whom I hired as a scout at the last minute, on a whim, thinking that he would be sorry to have missed the Last Great Indian Fight), not to mention my nephew Autie, who had just turned eighteen and who came along precisely so as not to miss that promised Last Big Battle, all to that place on that day.

If I could, Libbie, if ghosts or Heaven were real, I would shake them by the hand and look them in the eye and apologize to all of them—especially to those men who’d followed me and trusted me for so long, like Lonesome Charley Reynolds and Myles Keogh and Bill Cooke—not for their deaths, for we all owe God a death (as Hamlet reminded us), but for the foolishness of my own assumptions and minor miscalculations that hot, humid June Sunday in 1876.

But I would also have reminded
you
of something, my darling. I would have reminded you of how much fun we had (and planned to continue to have, me earning money, at last, as a lecturer once that Final Great Indian Battle was over, and also writing my books, and perhaps some future in Democratic politics). But without worrying about our future, just remind you of how much fun we had.

I was a warrior and loved being a warrior. And you enjoyed the status and excitement of being a warrior’s wife, my love… or at least of being an
officer
warrior’s wife.

The Rebs had been the bravest enemy I would ever fight, and the hostile Indians served as a foe in the years after the War. But even then, even that last winter and spring, you and I knew that the days of an active warrior on the frontier were closing fast.

Finally, the last thing I would have told you that Saturday afternoon in your parlor of stale air was that you should have remarried. I had no doubt about that. You should have remarried as soon as you could after the Little Big Horn, Libbie, my love.

It was two years after our New York visit and totally by chance that Paha Sapa came across a newspaper quote by your “literary executor,” the same accusatory and strangely syllable-stressed Miss Marguerite Merington whom we’d met briefly down in the foyer, and Miss Merington quoted you as saying around the time we met you—“One does get so lonely. But I always felt I should be committing adultery if I were to wake up one morning and see any head but Autie’s on my pillow.”

Well, my darling, to that I must say to you—horse apples.

The Creator designed you, more than He did most women, I believe, to be loved, to love in return, and to be a lover.

You should have found a good man as soon after June 25, 1876, as would not have seemed scandalous—an attorney would have served (as it did for our cook Eliza) or, better yet, a judge, since you always secretly wanted to marry your father the Judge—and you should have married a good man and put our life on the Plains behind you forever. No lobbying for equestrian saddles. No endless correspondence with yellow-mustached and mawkish old soldiers who write to say “I loved General Custer” but who are
really
saying “I would love you, Mrs. Custer, if you would let me.” No writing romantic fantasies about a not-quite-true past with silly titles like
Boots and Saddles
or
Following the Guidon.

You should have lived for yourself, Libbie Bacon, not for your dead husband. You should have celebrated life, not my death, and you should have become a lover again and awakened every day you could with another man’s head on your pillow and your head on his. Perhaps you could still have had a child—you were 34 when I died. Stranger things have happened. You would have lived in fullness and celebrated life then, my darling.

Instead, you “lived” to serve a ghost. And there are no ghosts, my dear.

Someday I shall explain that to Paha Sapa, who thinks otherwise. I shall try to make him understand what I discovered some years ago—that I am no ghost, nor a soul waiting to go to Heaven, but only a node in his unique empathic consciousness, a sort of simulation of a self-aware memory.

It is all Paha Sapa and a twist of his odd gift of vision and always has been. There is no ghost, no “me” here, my love. There never has been.

And while I am neither ghost nor liberated soul, I have learned something about death in these years in the cradle of darkness, Libbie. I tremble to tell you that I do
not think that there is anything beyond this life, my dearest, which is all the more reason I wish you had decided to live with another man and build a new life rather than choose to bury your future with me fifty-seven years ago.

But I am still glad that Paha Sapa—the loneliest man you have ever met or ever could meet, my love, a man who has lost his name, his relatives, his honor, his wife, his son, his gods, his future, his hopes, and every sacred thing ever entrusted to him—I am still glad that Paha Sapa brought me to New York on that first day of April 1933.

W
e were delayed a day and a night due to a freak spring snowstorm near Grand Isle, Nebraska, and two days after we finally got back to Mount Rushmore, the
Rapid City Journal
carried this, dated April 5 and reprinted from the New York Times—

G
ood-bye, Libbie. Farewell, my darling girl. We shall not meet again.

But, as Paha Sapa has taught me without knowing he has taught me
—