Scarlet Plume, Second Edition (30 page)

“A body rests all over when she lies down in a feather bed.”

Even before she could straighten out her under leg, she was sound asleep.

A squeaking sound woke her.

She roused enough to realize where she was: in a featherbed in a deserted cabin in Sioux Falls. Squeaking? Hadn’t everybody left town? She looked around. There was nobody that she could see.

She went back to dreaming again, picking up almost exactly where she had left off.

A gray shape with a kindly wolf smile touched her on the brow. He had a warm paw. The touch woke her, though she really knew she was still asleep.

Gray Shape said in Sioux, “The white woman feels sad. I want to shake hands with her. That’s all I have to say.”

She smiled in joy.

“The white woman must flee or her neck will be broken. Come, I will lead the white woman back to her people in safety.”

She smiled ecstatically.

Gray Wolf took her white hand in his penny-skin paw and led her to a river. He helped her across the stepping-stones to the other side. Scarlet waters flowed in silence at their feet. A waterfall poured with a roar just out of sight behind an arch of rocks. The arch of rocks was covered with wolfberries.

Gray Plume, still leading her by the hand, took her to a house. He opened the oaken door. She entered ahead of him. Together they looked at the deep bed in the far corner, then they looked at each other. They stepped toward the bed hand in hand. They lay down beside each other. He fondled her breasts with one hand and with the other—

She sat up out of sleep. This time she was sure the door had creaked.

Heart tribbling in her throat, she threw a look at the door. It was barred. No one could have gotten in that way. She looked at the windows. They too were still nailed down tight.

With a sigh she lay down again. Perhaps it was only the tin in the stovepipe cracking after the fire had gone out. She stretched her limbs inside the clean white sheets. She let her eyes rest on the brown raftered ceiling.

The light in the cabin was different. She turned on her pillow and looked. A shadow slanted across the south window. It meant the sun was setting beyond the bluffs to the west. Evening shadows were rising out of the earth. A whole day of sunshine had gone by.

“What a sleep that was.”

She had slept so long and so deep she only now began to realize how tired she had really been. Yes, and had been since Skywater.

That horror at Slaughter Slough had almost slipped from memory, so long ago it seemed now. And looking back at it, it actually did seem more nightmare than true fact. But the worst was she had taken to dreaming in Sioux, not American.

She scrambled out of bed and moved from window to window, cautiously looking for sign.

The street was still empty. The pink paths were still silent. No dogs barked. No wolves lurked in the wild hemp.

She felt a call to nature. She picked up the creamy wolfskin from the bed and draped it over her shoulders. It did not quite come far enough around to cover her. But it would have to do. She unbarred the door and stepped out. The sinking sun hit her full on with its big red eye. She ducked her head, almost shyly.

The trail to the privy went around behind the cabin. She entered and closed the door after her. The only light came from a quarter moon cut in the door. In the dimness she could just make out where the seats were, a big one and a little one. She couldn’t help but feel thankful for the luxury of a privy. It was the first time since Skywater she had decently gone to a toilet. The former owners had been considerate enough to nail up a swatch of wrapping paper on the wall within easy reach of the sitter. Even the thought that a spider might have woven a web across the big seat was a comfort of a kind.

Stepping outside, she became aware of the river once more. The Big Sioux, sliding golden green across the red cataracts in a thousand little separate brooks and then over the falls in one huge splash, was a wonder.

The sparkling water looked so inviting in the falling sunlight, she just had to have a quick dip. She skipped down a pink path. Close up, the roar of the waterfall hurt the ear. Humps of water-honed red rock fit the arch of her bare foot exactly. They reminded her of well-licked blocks of pink salt in Pa’s cattleyard. She watched the flooding green tea tumble over and around and down the haphazard cataracts. She watched the sliding flood drop over the fault in the rock and splash in the maeling pool below.

She climbed to a shallow pool higher in the cataracts. The bottom of the pool was as smooth as the socket of a just-butchered buffalo’s hipbone. She threw her wolfskin aside and knelt in the river and cupped herself a drink. The water was warm. She sat down in the pool. The water rose over her hips to her navel. She splashed herself, cupping water with both hands over the slopes of her pear breasts. She took down her golden hair and unbraided it and rinsed it from side to side in the gently rivuleting water. She turned over on her belly and doused her face. She lolled in the water from side to side with only the back of her head and her buttocks showing.

She sat up. She combed her hair with trailing fingers. She looked directly into the red eye of the setting sun and sang a song:

She gathered a handful of reddish sand lying in a curl of the stream and scrubbed herself. She wrung the water out of her hair.

When the sun set she snatched up her wolfskin and scampered naked up the path toward the brown cabin. She felt marvelously refreshed.

It was dark inside the cabin. She gathered more wood and lighted a fire in the hearth.

She decided not to put on her Indian garments again. Instead she searched through a closet to see if the woman of the house hadn’t left some clothes behind. To her delight she found a shimmering purple petticoat and a green dress. On the floor beneath them stood a pair of black button shoes. She held the petticoat and the dress up to the light, then held them against her body. A perfect fit. She slipped them on, then sat down on the three-legged stool and slipped on the high black shoes.

She paraded up and down the cabin. The clothes weren’t new. But they were civilized. What a joy to be wearing decent white things again. With all her soul she wished she were back, right then, in St. Paul and wearing her own clothes. How moldy they must smell by now in the closet behind the fireplace. With a yearning hotness, she wished she were standing, right then, in the little corner of their bedroom where she always dressed.

She searched some more in the closet. She found a comb, a little scissors, a round box of aromatic pink powder, and a mirror. She set the mirror up on a shelf and examined her face. Her complexion was perfect. Yet she couldn’t refrain from powdering her nose a little and around under her ears. The perfume in the powder made her think of a Paris she had often imagined but never seen. She combed her hair until it spat tiny sparks. She found a folder of hairpins and put up her hair in a pyramid of golden circles one above the other. She examined her hands. The palms were calloused, crisscrossed with small cuts, wrinkled. A rose thorn festered in the tip of her ring finger. But the worst were the fingernails. With the little scissors she trimmed the nails carefully, neatly, and with the point of the scissors cleaned out the blue funeral rings under the nails.

Well-groomed at last, feeling quite dressed up again, she set about making supper.

She found herself a gay blue apron and tied it on over the green dress. She made herself some unleavened bread with what was left of the flour. She found a jar of wild plums on the top shelf of the cabinet.

She recalled the potato patch in the garden outside. “There’s bound to be a couple of spuds left in the ground. Digging with a fork you sometimes overlook a few.”

It was as dark as Egypt out. Stooped over at the hips, she scratched through the crumbly humus. Halfway down the third row she found a root still tight in the ground. She probed along it and found four lovely fat tubers. One of them was almost as large as a piglet. Happily she gathered them up in her apron and hurried back into the cabin. She peeled the potatoes and dropped them in boiling water. She set the water for tea. In place of steak she cut herself several thick slabs of smoked bacon. She set the table for one, with her chair facing the fireplace. She hummed to herself. It was so good to be at home in a wooden house again.

She ate in a leisurely manner, pretending she was among fashionable people. She spooned her plum dessert in style.

As she sipped her tea, pinkie lifted, she spotted a newspaper in a magazine rack on the wall. Avid for news, she got it. It was an old copy of the St. Paul
Press
, a triweekly, dated September, 1861, at least a year old. As she read, it came to her that she had seen that issue before, beside her own fireplace in St. Paul. Rollo, the mail carrier, must have brought it down long ago on one of his trips to Sioux Falls. The newspaper was worn and much fingered, indicating it had been passed from hand to hand. There was an odor of old straw in its creases. She even read the editorials, which before she had ignored. Finally, finished reading, she put it back where she had found it.

Nostalgia set in. She wept when she thought of her dead Angela. Never, never would the two of them sit down to a good meal again. She wept when she thought of her soldier husband, Vince.

It was night and time to get on. She cleared off the table, washed the dishes, put things away just as she would have done in her own home.

She made the bed, tightening the sheets and fluffing out the pillow and straightening the quilt. She respread the wolfskin cover.

She sat down on the edge of the bed a moment to catch her breath. What a change the furnishings of a white home were compared to those of a tepee. She leaned down to take a last sniff of the pillow. The smell of soap in it was as precious as the aroma of any perfume she’d ever known. The woman of the house was a good housekeeper.

She let her hand trail across the creamy gray wolfskin cover. She settled back against the headboard.

She jerked awake. Her heart beat in her chest like a pounding fist. Red inchworms galloped across the line of her vision.

She had been dreaming of husband Vince. She had just dodged out of his reaching arms, running to her corner in their bedroom, with Vince following close on her heels. He was angry with her, demanding his rights as a husband. “It is your duty to submit,” he said. “It is God’s will that you be the good wife.” He reached for her throat with both hands, intending to shake some sense into her. Surprisingly she found his hands warm. She had hoped they would be cold and clammy so she could hate his touch.

She shuddered when she thought of the dream again. The after-effect of it was like too much smoke in the nose. And the worst of it was that Vince’s American tongue had sounded strange to her Sioux ears.

Warmth touched her hand. Looking at where her hand lay on the pillow, she saw why she had dreamed of a warm touch. The sun was just up, and from where it came in through the east window, it had caught her precisely across the throat and the hand.

Her glance went back to the window. What? The sun coming up? It had only gone down a bit ago.

“Stars alive, I’ve slept around the clock.”

It was hard to believe. But there the sun was, rising in the east.

“I better skedaddle. I don’t like the idea of traveling in the daytime but I can’t stay here forever either. I’ll just have to be doubly cautious, is all.”

She jumped to her feet. She took off the other woman’s clothes, putting them neatly away in the clothes closet, and slipped into her gray buckskins again. Indian clothes were best for roughing it. She rebraided her hair and pinned it up in a rope around her head.

She snapped off two fringes from her sleeve for the two days idled away in Sioux Falls, and stored them carefully in her parfleche.

“First thing a body knows, old Whitebone and his wild bulls will stumble onto this village. Or maybe even that fiend Mad Bear will find it, coming down Rollo’s buggy trail.”

She ate a cold potato left over from the night before. She sliced up what was left of the smoked bacon, and after eating several raw strips, put the rest away in her parfleche. She also helped herself to a supply of matches from the tin box over the stove.

She sat down at the table and with a stub of a pencil wrote a note on a piece of brown wrapping paper.

She placed the note on the table and weighted it down with a stone. She had a last look around, then resolutely set her face and left.

The spring lock did work again when she snapped it shut, and that was good.

2

Judith stuck close to the Big Sioux River. Somewhere along the line she was bound to come across Rollo the mail carrier’s tracks.

Noble hills, like great loaves of brown bread, lay one behind the other on her left. She was careful to make her way along the bottoms, staying to the underbrush as much as possible. When the river ran naked of trees, she walked along the water’s very edge, staying well below the crumbling black bank.

She learned to take a quick jerking look around to all sides, furtive, like that of any savage in the wilds.