Scarlet Plume, Second Edition (42 page)

“A runner from Whitebone’s band has been here. He left this message for whoever might pass. This was six sleeps ago.” Scarlet Plume turned around, looking to all sides. “Perhaps he has done this for us as it was done for you when you were traveling alone.”

Judith nodded. Whitebone had sent out yet another guard to make sure she arrived safely. She was touched by the thought. The old chief had meant nothing but good for her after all.

Scarlet Plume saw something else. He leaped up on the white rock, beside her horse. He stared north, head thrust out like a hound that had got hint of game up ahead.

Judith stared north too.

“There are two of them,” Scarlet Plume said.

“What? Where?”

“Do you see the cattail? Look the length of a good bow to the left of it.”

She stared. She thought it strange that he should have noticed something before the horses did.

“One is carrying the other because the other is hurt,” Scarlet Plume said. “It cannot be the enemy.”

“Can it be Mad Bear carrying Bone Gnawer?”

Scarlet Plume’s black eyes narrowed until they resembled a pair of obsidian arrowheads. His concentration became so deep he exuded a strong male smell. “They are children,” he said at last.

“What?”

“The one being carried is a baby and the one carrying him is a boy. The boy is very tired. He walks as does a white boy, with the toes out.”

Her skin began to prickle all over. She didn’t dare to guess who the children might be. She stared and stared. She knew she had good eyes compared to most people, but she still couldn’t make out anything in the tossing ocean of grass. She envied Scarlet Plume his powerful eyes.

“Come,” he cried, “we must hurry before they die. We must help them.” He bounded onto his horse and quirted it, sharp. “Hoppo! Hurry, Old Paint.”

The bay snorted in surprise, responded with an irregularly clodding clumsy gallop.

Judith’s gray gelding perked up. He neighed complaint at being left behind so suddenly, then gathered himself into a heavy gallop too.

They had gone about a mile when Judith saw them. Only the upper parts of them could be seen above the waving gray-green grass, and to her it looked more like a boy carrying a ragged bundle than a baby. The little boy was trudging along uncertainly, bent over, the bundle of rags hooked about his neck. A flash of sunlight struck the bundle a certain way. Then she saw that the bundle was a baby as Scarlet Plume had said. Its hands were pulled up around the boy’s neck.

Ted and Johnnie. Theodosia’s children. Her nephews. The Woods line through the women had not been wiped out after all. Ted and Johnnie had somehow survived the clubbing by the crazy squaw.

When she caught up with them, she hauled in her horse, hard, and slid to the ground. Her loose gold hair cascaded around her face so that for a moment she was blinded. Scarlet Plume already stood in the grass to one side, a sad, withdrawn look on his face.

Ted stopped and turned around. He stared at Judith open-mouthed. His towhead was black with crusted blood. All that was left of his clothes was the belt to his pantaloons. His naked body was tanned to a deep Indian brown. His little peter was so swollen, so pitifully sunburned and scabbed over, it protruded out of its foreskin. His legs from the knees down were terribly cut by ripgut grass and pocked over with sores. He was so dirty and his lips so swollen, she knew him more by his form than by his features.

What a wonderful boy Ted was to have carried his little baby brother all that way. Wonderful boy.

Little Johnnie hung draped unconscious on Ted’s back. His little arms and legs were fleshless, his belly so distended it shone.

Judith lifted baby Johnnie from Ted’s back and cradled his fragile body in her arms. She tried to say his name, Johnnie, but found her voice gone. Her breath came in flutters of compassion. Tears gathered behind her eyes. She couldn’t cry them. The tears swelled until they felt like balloons about to burst. At last a moan broke from her and the sound of it in her throat was like the raw billing of a mother lizard.

With the burden of Johnnie removed, Ted straightened up. He tried to focus his eyes on Judith. The pupils of his blue eyes were unnaturally large and blood-flecked.

“Mama, is that you?”

Judith opened her mouth to say something white, but found her tongue strangely stuck. She couldn’t talk white. Instead her tongue and lips shaped themselves to speak Sioux. Sioux had become her heart language.

“Mama?”

Judith at last found a few American words and broke through. She had to work at it. “Don’t you remember your Aunt Judith? I’m your auntie.”

“Mama?”

“Don’t you remember your Aunt Judith?”

“Mama, give me some bread. Please, Mama.”

“Ted.”

“Johnnie couldn’t walk much, Mama. I had to carry him all the way mostly.”

“You are a very brave brother.”

“Is Johnnie dead yet, Mama?”

“Johnnie’s fine, Ted. Just fine.” Her tongue continued to work strangely stiff. “You’re a good boy to take care of him so. A true brother.”

“Give me some bread, Mama. With some bumblebee honey on.”

“Ted.”

“Is the fort close by, Mama?”

“Yes, dear boy. We are almost there.”

“I’m so hungry, Mama.”

Scarlet Plume stood beside her. He spoke Sioux. “I see willows ahead. They grow beside The River Where A Piece Of Wood Is Painted Red. It is a pleasant river. The waters in it are lazy.”

Ted jumped at the sound of the heavy Indian voice. He began to shake all over. He tried to focus his eyes on Scarlet Plume. “It’s the Indians again, Mama! Is he going to kill us?”

Johnnie stirred too.

Judith hugged Johnnie close and warm. “It’s all right, boys. Don’t be afraid. This is Scarlet Plume, a friendly. So you don’t need to worry. He’s bringing us back to the white cities. He wants to help us.”

“I’m afraid, Mama.”

“Shh, now. It’s all right.” She looked up at Scarlet Plume. “Just how far is it to the willows?”

“A few running steps for the horses.”

Judith decided she would walk and carry Johnnie, while Ted could ride her horse. But Ted screamed when his swollen pudendum touched the horse’s hairy spine. Scarlet Plume had to help him down again.

“Ted.”

Scarlet Plume then took Ted in his arms and began carrying him toward the river. The horses followed them, neighing wonderingly, not wanting to be left behind.

Scarlet Plume found a dry, sandy beach under red willows. He filled a skin with water and helped Judith wash the children. He dug out an Indian salve from his legging sash, the same herb he had once used to dress Judith’s wounds. He rubbed the limbs and bodies of the children gently, working in the salve. His firm ministrations soothed them.

“Mama, give me some bread.”

“Soon now, darling. But first we’ve got to doctor you a little.”

“Am I dying, Mama?”

“Course not.”

“I can’t see very good though.”

“Shh, now.”

“I feel just like Jesus did when he was dying on the cross. Slowly he couldn’t see no more.”

“Shh.”

“Mama, will there be water to drink in heaven?”

It didn’t take Judith long to decide they would never be able to wash the black clots of old blood out of the children’s hair. Scarlet Plume suggested that he hack all the hair off with his sharp knife. When it was done the children’s bald heads resembled the rough surface of washed walnuts.

Scarlet Plume next built a fire and quickly made soup from jerky and wild greens.

The drifting aroma of the soup at last reached Johnnie where he lay inert. He stirred. His lips moved. “I want mum-mum.”

“Poor darling.”

A smile as warm as an indulgent grandmother’s wreathed Scarlet Plume’s face. “He lives.”

Judith echoed him. “Yes, he lives. Thank God.”

It was dark by the time they had the children fed and washed. The children slept like bags of grain. They lay on a bed of willow twigs, the wolfskin covering them. In the light of the little twinkling fire the children’s faces once again took on a pink color.

Scarlet Plume spoke over his red gossip pipe. “We will rest here one day.” He looked up at the stars. “After that we must hurry or we will miss the white soldiers’ encampment. They must stay ahead of the snow.”

“It will snow?”

“The time for it has come.”

They sat in silence awhile, a man and a woman and two children resting around a fire of an evening. Judith wished with all her soul that they truly might be a family together.

Scarlet Plume clapped out his pipe. He stood up and stretched. Then he vanished into the willows. He would stand guard for the night.

Judith gave the children a last look, then, utterly exhausted herself, curled up on the sand beside them.

Her last waking thoughts were of Scarlet Plume. She loved his tender way with children, even enemy white children. She adored his husbandly manner in the lodge, his warm, grave silences as well as his warm, grave laughter. She admired his considerate mien when around old women, as he was around Smoky Day. His stance in life was that of a brave man as well as that of an exceedingly wise one. Smiling, snuggling under a deerhide, she indulged in passionate feminine fantasies.

The next day a late fall blackbird sang in the red willows.

Ted told of how he and his little baby brother managed to exist upon finding themselves alive after the massacre at Skywater. He too had dug up potatoes in Theodosia’s patch near the cabin, except that he and Johnnie ate theirs raw. They mostly drank from the lake. They found candy and tobacco on some of the dead bodies. Ted had quite a time keeping Johnnie from crawling back to his father Claude’s body. Johnnie kept crying, “Papa, Papa, don’t sleep so long.” At last Ted decided that everybody at Skywater was dead, that no one was coming for them, not even the mailman Rollo. So Ted started out with Johnnie, heading up the buggy trail toward Fort Ridgely. They walked days. Finally they lost the faint trail in the deep grass. Somehow Ted managed to keep them heading mostly north. They drank water from sloughs and dew from grass in the mornings. They ate grass and sorrel and wild onions and rose hips. Miraculously one day they found a friendly settler cow. She was fresh and apparently very anxious to be milked. They obliged her. They milked in a cupped hand and drank from it. “The milk was so good, Mama. It was better than when Johnnie let me share some of his titty.” Sometimes they got down on their hands and knees under the cow and suckled her tits. It was delicious. But then one night wolves spooked the cow and she disappeared. They trudged on. They thirsted. Their lips and tongues became cracked. Sometimes the mosquitoes sat so thick on their cheeks they could grab them by the handful and eat them.

Judith wept. She hugged the two children each in turn, her loose gold hair falling around them.

Scarlet Plume continued to rub their limbs with his Indian salve. He fed them soup. He caught perch in the stream, using a hook cut from a deer hoof.

The following morning Ted awoke with his sight returned to him.

“You’re not Mama,” he said, looking up at Judith from his bed. “Your hair is different. You’re Aunt Judith. I thought your voice sounded kinda funny.”

“Ted.”

“What happened to Mama?”

Judith decided to tell him the truth. “She went to heaven.”

“Did the Indians kill her like they did Papa?”

“I’m afraid so, Ted.”

The reflective look of a man already old came over his face. He mused to himself. “So Mama went to live with Jesus. It’s where she always wanted to go. She loved Him so much.”

Judith’s eyes closed over.

“Is Angela in heaven too?”

A cramp grabbed Judith in the belly. “I hope so, Ted. It is my fond hope.”

“What’s going to happen to us?”

“By tomorrow night we’ll all be safe in camp. With our own soldiers.”

“Will they be nice to Scarlet Plume?”

“They better.”

“I like Scarlet Plume. He’s a good Indian, ain’t he, Auntie?”

“He’s a wonderful great man.”

They traveled easy. Johnnie rode with Judith, Ted with Scarlet Plume.

Scarlet Plume taught Ted how to stave off thirst on a long run by chewing on a little stick, creating saliva. He also taught him to put small cuts of jerky in his cheek so that trickling juices would keep his tongue wet.

Brilliant yellow warblers, heading the other way, south, rose out of every wolfberry bush they passed.

The farther they rode, the more the children began to chatter happily. It was almost a joyous homecoming.

They came upon the River Of The Milky Water, the Minnesota, late in the day. Fringed with leafless elm and ash, the river wound slowly, very lazily, through a great wide valley. The valley was so lovely it made Judith wonder if it weren’t all a dream, a phantasma. For a few faint fleeting seconds it reminded her more of a painting she had once seen of the Rhine valley in Germany than truth in Minnesota.

They sat a moment, looking down. The heavy leaves of an oak rattled beside them on the bluff. Prevailing winds had strangely contorted the oak. It lay on the curve of the bluff like a loaf of brown bread baked on a boulder.

Scarlet Plume slid to the ground and once again went about gently touching things: a blade of buffalo grass, a gray stone, a gooseberry bush, an acorn. He cried over them all in the ancient way.

Judith understood.

What he did next, however, startled her, scared her. He dug a metal mirror out of his kit bag and set it up on a low limb of the bent oak. He combed his black hair neatly with a dried buffalo tongue, brushing it until it shone like a well-curried pony’s tail. He carefully fixed his scarlet plume in the loose, flowing hair at the back of his head. Last he painted his left cheekbone: a yellow dot inside a blue circle. The yellow dot was a sign to let the sun know that all men needed light to sustain life. The blue circle was the blue sky, a symbol of peace.

“Why is this done?” she asked.

He threw her a look that was almost one of contempt. Her ignorance of the ways of men, red or white, was considerable.

“The white general will think you have painted your face for war,” she warned.