Scarlet Plume, Second Edition (11 page)

The mud-lizard
rhu
ing counterpoint in the howling abruptly changed. It became a merciless triumphant shrilling.

The lean savage stood up and held the bleeding fetus for all to see. The lean savage grinned wickedly. The cross-legged purple fetus shuddered at the sudden touch of air upon its glutinous skin. The fetus resembled a curled-up giant crayfish. An odd rhythmic convulsion shook it. It shat a tiny ball of glistening black dung.

The grinning red devil spotted the single plum tree halfway up the rise. He ran toward it, carrying the fetus by the nape of its neck. He broke off one of the plum tree’s prickly branches near the trunk. Taking hold of the fetus by its neck and its crossed feet, he impaled its soft body on the stub of the branch. The soft body jerked, jerked, jerked.

Both Judith and Theodosia saw it from where they lay hidden.

“Animals! Monsters in human shape.” Judith shuddered violently. “Worse than wolves even.”

“It cannot be true,” Theodosia said.

“Hellish outrages.” Numbness moved into Judith’s brain.

Tallak groaned. “Ya, I should have kept one bullet for Mrs. Christians.”

“It cannot be true.”

Worse was yet to come. Two other renegades, wearing stolen stovepipe hats, with clouts dropped and phalluses erect, pushed aside the arm with the loaf of brown bread and mounted Mrs. Christians’ riven body and raped her in turn.

Mrs. Christians hardly noticed them. She lay staring at her baby impaled on the plum tree. Popped eyes a ghastly purple, she slowly stretched her free hand toward her crucified issue. With her other hand she still hugged to her side the loaf of brown bread. The bread was saturated with blood.

Judith whispered, “It’s enough to make one’s eyes want to vomit.”

Her movement stirred the tops of the rushes above. Immediately shots rang out. Balls narrowly grazed her.

Theodosia rose a little on her knees. She stared at the scene, hazel eyes now black with horror. “May God in his infinite mercy forgive them.”

Pounce ran over and squatted beside Mrs. Christians. With one chopping swing of his war club he crushed her skull. White brains instantly pudged out behind, oozing through her hair. Pounce turned in his squatting position. With two quick slashes of his knife he scalped her private parts. He rose and held his new trophy up for all to see. He danced the victory coup. “The white man may count coup in his manner when he debauches the wives and daughters of the red man. Well, now it is the red man’s turn to count coup in his manner. Houw!”

“Our prize pupil in Christ,” Theodosia murmured.

“Theodosia,” Judith whispered. “Shhh.”

“Our covenant red child.”

“Sister, now.”

“Such terrible filthy doings.”

“Theodosia.”

“Vilest of reptiles.”

Whitebone and his soldiers’ lodge decided to hold a council of war on the far side of the meadow. They smoked the pipe. So far they had not joined the massacre. Quietly they gestured among themselves, every now and then looking over at the screaming shooting melee. After more talking and looking, they rode in an orderly manner to a knoll near the plum tree. One by one they slid off their ponies and sat in a row on the ground. They watched. Whitebone smoked his gossip pipe meditatively.

The cloudbank in the southwest moved up. It thickened all along the horizon. Soon a black roll formed under it. Lightning spangled down, then thunder boomed dully with long, slow detonation.

A brush of wind came up. It came from the direction of the burning Utterback sod house. On it rode thousands of fine bits of white fluff down.

Maggie Utterback cursed where she lay. She beat the ground. “All them years of picking goslings. Lost, all of it. A handful at a setting. It took years to fill one quilt. Let alone our featherbed.”

“They look to me like they’re crazy with whiskey,” Tallak said. “Somebody must’ve sold them a barrel of squirrel whiskey last night.”

Judith remembered the time she had asked Charlie Silvers what was meant by squirrel whiskey. Silvers sold it. Smiling, Silvers told her squirrel whiskey was made of cheap alcohol, very raw, colored artificially and tinctured with turpentine and the ground-up leaves of fresh tobacco. “It really makes them redskins jump around,” Silvers said. “Makes them think they can run up and down a tree like a red squirrel.”

There was a rush of squaws and red children over the rise. The squaws raided the wagon, carrying off the canned goods, boxes of clothing, blankets. Ledgers and records exploded into flying bits of paper. The Indian boys latched onto the waiting grays. The grays snorted at their Indian smell, and jerked away, but the Indian boys unhooked them anyway and led them joyfully to their camp. Pounce secured the keg of gunpowder and ordered his braves to lug it to his village. Other braves came along and toppled the wagon over on its side. The wagon made a perfect barricade.

An older squaw, Sunflower, Pounce’s squaw, poked quietly through the rubbish left by the other squaws. She found something. She stooped over and picked it up. A thick book. The lettering on it shone gold.

“Isn’t that our Bible?” Judith whispered.

“Yes.” Theodosia sighed. “Ah, who knows, perhaps Sunflower will at last be the one true believer we have been looking for.”

“What fools we were to leave the reverend’s cabin,” Tallak said. “This is a perfect trap. They don’t have a better slaughter pen in St. Paul. A regular slaughter slough.”

Angela touched Judith’s arm. “Mama, what is that Indian doing to Uncle Claude?”

Judith looked. “God in heaven.”

“Surely there cannot yet be more for my husband to endure?” Theodosia cried.

“Don’t look.”

But Theodosia looked. The brave who had killed Reverend Codman with a double-barreled shotgun had removed the reverend’s heart and was sitting on the ground solemnly eating it slice by slice.

“Animal’s Voice,” Theodosia said. “One of Pounce’s band. He would never come into our mission church. He once shot at our bell while we were holding service. He was always a stubborn blanket Indian. A pagan.”

A cannibal. Also a communicant eating a piece of holy bread at a Lord’s Supper. Flesh of my flesh. Blood of my blood.

It became very quiet out. The heavy cloud could be heard moving up. There was also the soft sound of lightly threshing rushes. The sweet smell of vegetable decay hung in the hot and sticky air. Dust sifting off the standing reeds made it hard to breathe.

The children whimpered for water. The hummocks were too prickly to sit on and the soft ground between slowly gave way under their bodies. Soon everyone had wet knees and seats.

A grasshopper flicked out. A skink glinted at the edge of a patch of muck. A single red ant kept climbing up and down a slender cattail. An occasional mosquito settled on the back of a hand.

One of Angela’s feet fell asleep. She rubbed it. The drowsy look of a lazy kitten came into her blue eyes.

A frog leaped up from near where Angela rubbed her leg. It hit a few rushes, stirring their seeded tops. Immediately shots rang out from the rise.

Mad Bear and Pounce and their men sat down to wait the settlers out. They lolled on the short grass halfway up the rise, guns across their knees.

Presently a few squaws came over the rise carrying food: boiled buffalo meat, flat bread, some of the white man’s canned goods. Many of the braves raided the stout plum tree of its yellow fruit. Some of the yellow plums were spotted with blood from the impaled fetus. The fetus was at last dead. The braves spat the plum pits into the grass.

Pounce mocked the whites from where he sat. “My arm is lame from killing so many stinking hairy-faces. Houw.”

Mad Bear’s body twitched, hungering for something to do.

“Perhaps we should set fire to the slough,” Pounce said. “That will drive them out.”

“I want the Good Book Woman for my wife,” Mad Bear said.

Someone moved in the rushes.

A half-dozen braves instantly lifted their guns and fired. The barrage slapped into the slough.

Mad Bear called down, “If the whites will send up the Good Book Woman we will let the rest of you escape.”

Pounce laughed. “Mad Bear, the Good Book Woman is mine. I must have her to help me enter the white man’s heaven.”

Laughs of derision broke from the long line of waiting braves.

The black roll under the heavy cloud rushed toward the slough. There was a blast of lightning. Thunder.

“Hurry,” Pounce cried, looking up at the threatening sky, “hurry, Good Book Woman, come out of the grass or it will rain on your black dress.”

Ted asked, “Is Papa truly dead now, Mama?”

“Oh, my child.”

“Is he in heaven by now, Mama?”

“Yes, my child.”

“Then it won’t do any good to make him a birthday cake now, will it? With maple-sugar frosting?”

“Oh, my child.”

Again someone made the mistake of stirring in the rushes. Two volleys of flying balls whacked into the muck.

“I’m hit,” Mavis said calmly from where she lay hidden.

“Bad?” Tallak called.

“Just tore my dress.”

“You sure?”

“Well, there is a little blood.”

The cloud bank came on, a high arching cave.

Tallak said, “When it starts to rain pretty soon, I want you all to scatter out some. Everybody. They won’t see the grass moving so easy in the rain.”

There was a sudden yell on the other side of the slough. Shots followed. There was the sound of hard running.

Judith turned on her heels in the soft oozing muck. Cautiously she peered out.

Mad Bear’s men had flushed Crydenwise. Crydenwise was running for his life across a low slope. An Indian named Bone Gnawer, a fine runner, was chasing him, war club raised and ready to smash in his brains. The two made a complete circle of the slough. The seated redskins cheered them on. The two ran directly in front of the hidden whites. Bone Gnawer was so close upon Crydenwise that he stepped in Crydenwise’s tracks before the bent grass could rise again.

One of Mad Bear’s men slithered his bow through the grass at the running Crydenwise. It was perfectly done. Before Crydenwise could leap to avoid the bow, it got tangled up between his legs and tripped him. Crydenwise went down. Bone Gnawer overran him a couple of steps, stopped short, turned. Crydenwise rolled over on his back and began kicking his legs furiously at Bone Gnawer. Crydenwise held up his hands to ward off the coming blow. Crydenwise showed his teeth and a low gargle like that of a cornered mink crackled in his throat. Crydenwise’s dark whiskery face was drawn taut in a final snarl. Bone Gnawer feinted with his war club; then, before Crydenwise could recover, let it fall true. There was a sound as of a squash being broken open. Next came the flash of a knife, the quick twist of a wrist, and Bone Gnawer came to his feet with a triumphant cry of coup, holding up a bleeding scalp. There was a roar of triumph from the watching braves. A series of tremolo whoops rose from the squaws.

Whitebone and his soldiers’ lodge sat observing it all, silent, smoking the pipe.

“There goes our church!” Tallak called out.

Everybody looked. Over the rise lifted a pouring column of black smoke and snapping flames.

“Now there finally is nothing to show for all those years,” Theodosia said.

“Them oak beams I cut by hand,” Tallak said.

There was no wind. The black smoke rose straight up. It slowly turned yellow as it towered higher and higher. Gradually it blended off into the overcast.

Redwings and meadowlarks flew by overhead and hid in the slough. One redwing hid but a step away from Judith.

The dark roll under the heavy cloud rushed toward them. It churned rumbling across the prairie. Lightning worked through it like a dozen burning sparklers. The front edge touched down on the south arm of Skywater.

Squaws came running with buffalo hides to shelter certain of the armed men. Rain would soften the taut bowstring and wet the powder. The rest of the braves scurried for shelter in Pounce’s village.

“We better keep our powder dry too,” Tallak advised in a low voice.

“I’ve already got mine under,” Maggie Utterback said.

“And remember, when the rain starts, everybody scatter out.”

“Can we drink the rain, Mama?” Angela whispered.

“Of course, darling.”

“I’m hungry too, Mama.”

“I know, my kitten, I know. We all are.”

Judith slowly shook her head. This was not really happening. It could not be true.

Soon the roar of the storm was upon them. Huge drops fell with plashing thwacks. A wrestling wall of wind rolled over them. Then came buckets of water. The tall grass bent under it. The stiffer cattails kept bending down, then springing back.

The whites scattered out. Judith and Angela moved apart one way, Theodosia and her sons moved another way. Each group became invisible to the other.

A slowly traveling roar came to their ears. Presently hailstones began to pelt into the slough around them. Pieces of ice the size of robin eggs hit them over the head and shoulders and arms. Tallak’s children cried out. So did Johnnie Codman.

Angela smiled under the irregular plunking. She quickly caught up a few hailstones and put them in her mouth. “Look, Mama. Mmm, they’re good.”

Ted scrambled through the rushes and gathered up a handful of hailstones too.

As suddenly as it had come the storm was over. There were no afterdrops.

Sioux children rushed about on the rise, eagerly gathering up hailstones in parfleches. They chattered about the clear cool drink they could now have.

The smell of the swift storm was rinse sweet. It didn’t seem possible after such a beautiful rain that people could be skulking for their lives in a green slough. Where was the lovely morning when everybody was still at peace and the gardens and little fields were fat with produce?

The warriors again came out in force on the rise. They checked the powder in their guns. Some fired off their guns to make sure, blasting random shots into the slaughter slough.

“I’m hit!” a voice called out.

“Joe, is that you, you cowardly devil?” Maggie Utterback cried. “So that’s where you hid out.”