Scarlet Plume, Second Edition (46 page)

“Well, captain, beggin’ your pardon, you may make a lot of noise, but you’re even worse off. They left out the gizzard itself when they made you.”

The captain glared. “I can have you shot for that. But you know, I’m instead going to give you an even worse punishment. Until further notice you’re in charge of the burial detail.”

Vince reported for his new duties the next day. It was a beautiful June morning out, yet already outside the surgeon’s tent bodies lay corded up like firewood ready for a steamboat. His detail dug burial trenches all day long.

Toward evening he saw one of the corded bodies move its feet. He got help and took the body out. An hour later, the body came to and walked away, determined to join the battle again.

For many nights Vince’s dreams were of rivers and big running springs, of never having enough to drink. He dreamed of swimming in tubs of blood where he was forced to fight off voracious bladders and slimy livers.

Then came the battle of Corinth in October. They got orders to move in. Frying pans tied to their guns clinked merrily as they tramped along.

Two days later, bivouacked in town near the depot, they were aroused at dawn by shellfire. The Rebs were on the march.

All too soon the Union line on the right collapsed and suddenly dense crowds of men in butternut brown, bounding and yelling, were pouring into Corinth. They came in like flooding brown waters. Without waiting for orders, Colonel Hubbard changed his front, moving by the right flank by file right, and took up a position at right angles to his former position. The enemy flank was presented to his new line. Colonel Hubbard ordered his men to fire. The fire was devastating. At the same time he called for a man to deliver a message to General Stanley. Vince volunteered, glad to get out of the holocaust. He was given a horse that had once been attached to a battery unit. The horse had galloped only a dozen rods, when in all the sudden gunfire, it reversed and headed straight into the hellish inferno beside the depot. The horse was used to running toward a battle, not away from it. The firing from both sides became deadly. Vince ducked behind the horse’s head. The horse advanced as if bucking a hailstorm driven by a furious wind. Then he and the horse were suddenly in the lead. The Federals let go with a great roar when they saw Vince and his horse advancing alone. He had become the soul of their stand. They fixed bayonets and advanced on a run behind him. The butternut Confederates tried to hold. They too let go with a great roar, a massive rising cry that sounded like a cross between the Indian death song and the roar of a black bear. But shoot as they might, the Rebs could not drop either Vince or his horse. Vince saw the butternuts falter. To his surprise he was all of a sudden standing up in his saddle and roaring with the best of them, shouting with the fearless passion of sure triumph. He was enjoying it. It was nothing to be a brave man after all, a hero. You just suddenly were. It was easy. If you didn’t get hit you were alive. And if you did get hit you were dead. That was all there was to it. The butternuts faded. The boys in blue closed the gap.

It was when he had finally turned his horse about that he got hit. A stray union bullet caught him at the hairline. He was out like a doused candle. And he didn’t know where he was or who he was until he woke up on board a boat headed for St. Paul.

When he had fully recovered in a St. Paul hospital, he was told to join General Sibley on the Sioux Indian front. Sibley had sent a hurry-up call to Governor Ramsey for more troops and all available men were ordered upriver to Fort Ridgely. That was how he happened to be in General Sibley’s tent. . . .

Vince placed his hand on Judith’s shoulder familiarly.

She shrugged it off. “Don’t.”

“What’s the matter, pet?”

“It’s too late.” The tip of her tongue sought for the four black hairs on the edge of her upper lip. To her surprise the four hairs were gone. They had not reappeared since she had pulled them out beside the pond in Lost Timber.

“Now, pet—”

“Don’t.”

They locked eyes, blue eyes and gray eyes.

She was the first to break off, and look to one side.

She held her belly in both her hands. She knew that in another eight months there would be a half-breed child with blood as pink as the prairie rose.

“When I am not in love I am nothing.”

3

The blue army moved down the Old Fort Road on the New Ulm side of the river. It swung past lonely kames and brown granite outcroppings. Dry axles screeched. Wheels raised little plumes of black dust. Each wagonload of prisoners was flanked by a detail of bristling mounted men. The long succession of wagons resembled a monster caterpillar being harried along by a small swarm of big black ants.

Judith rode Buckskin Belly. She held Johnnie in front of her. Ted rode Old Paint. To either side of them trailed the other rescued whites, most of them on foot, some in wagons.

Wavering V’s of ducks and geese were southing. Far-flung arrows of white swans cut across the highest heavens.

Occasionally the remains of families were found sprawled in the burned grass. The skeletons lay as if just fallen after a hard run. Remaining morsels of flesh on the bones had the stink of ripe steak slightly burned.

The column hit a cloud of late-autumn flies. The horses went crazy and the whole line broke up into sections and snapped upon itself for a time. The column next crossed on a corduroy road, the logs undulating underfoot in spongy black muck as if they were the backs of live hogs.

A couple of times Judith managed to ride close behind the army wagon in which Scarlet Plume rode. He sat near the endgate, shackled to an Indian named His Face Resembles An Antheap. Antheap’s smallpox-pitted cheeks were as rough as a rasp. Each wagon contained a driver and five pairs of prisoners. All the prisoners wore red-and-black horse blankets.

Scarlet Plume’s iron control of his face reminded Judith of a Christ riding impassively to his fate, enduring chains and humiliation because a higher god expected it of him. It made Judith grimace to think that she could compare her red friend to Christ. She had never taken too kindly to Christian reflections. But she had come to appreciate one thing: why it was that Theodosia could have felt such devotion to her Christ. Scarlet Plume’s road to Mankato was similar to Christ’s road to Calvary. And Scarlet Plume’s manly composure made Judith wonder too if Christ had been such a pallid mama’s boy after all.

There was one big difference between Theodosia’s loving and her loving. Theodosia Woods loved her ideal across the distance of several thousand years at the same time that she cohabited on occasion with a man named Claude Codman, while she, Judith Woods, both loved her great man and cohabited with him, now—with this twist, that Scarlet Plume belonged many times removed to a past before the time of Christ.

Scarlet Plume’s stoic self-control cracked once. It happened when Judith brought him a tin of river water as they rode along. For a brief moment he looked at her, black eyes radiant with love. It set her to blushing, making her look down, and she thought, “Please, do not look at me so, my husband.” Trembles chased through her limbs, so that she was afraid she would fall off her horse. It was as if, safely on his way to a white man’s scaffold, Scarlet Plume had for one moment at last felt free to let her see how he really felt about her.

Manic moods ravished her. One moment she was in despair when she thought of Scarlet Plume being hanged like a common criminal; the next moment she was in heaven when she remembered the burning thrill of his lovemaking. He was going to die; he had to be saved somehow.

The procession stopped to water the horses. The red friendlies went among the whites and put on begging dances in behalf of the chained wretches. It was cold, the ground was frozen, and the little red children wore jackrabbit skins inside their moccasins. The little red ones continued to skirl happily in and out of the entourage.

The whites paid little attention. The soldiers were looking forward to drinking New Ulm beer. New Ulm beer was reputed to be sweet because it had been made out of spring water running off old green rock.

When the soldiers did remark on the red captives, it was always in scorn. “I hear the Gen’ral gave orders we ain’t supposed to shoot ’um down with a shotgun no more.”

“No?”

“Says it tears ’um up so bad.”

“Hum. That it does.”

“Well, the Gen’ral is welcome to his job. I know I wouldn’t want to swap saliva with that mangy crowd over a peace pipe.”

“What are we going to do with ’um now that we’ve won and are going to hang the bucks? It seems horrible to think of leaving their wives and kids behind to certain starvation.”

“Me, I’m for killin’ the whole lot of them. Bucks, squaws, kits. They’re like rattlesnakes. The less you have around, the safer it makes the country.”

“What about the pretty little red rattler girls, eh? I see our boys don’t mind splitting a little red oak nights now and then. ’Specially with the little red virgins so willing to wriggle out of their camp and meet you halfway in a holler somewhere.”

“Welll.”

“Heard some of the white women talking yestiddy. That Alva Axtell in pa’ticular. She said she would crush out even the little baby brains, if she had her way. Wouldn’t let one of them go. Lord, the way that Alva Axtell talked. As bad as any female savage I’ve ever heard.”

“It’s an awful fix, all right. I pity those who have to decide the matter.”

Judith couldn’t resist making a biting remark. “Not all white women think like Alva Axtell. I say the worst Indians I ever met were the white people living on the border.”

One of the soldiers gave Judith’s Indian dress a look. “Lady, have you ever seen the Sioux go into battle? Like they did a couple of weeks ago at Wood Lake? No?” The soldier shivered at the recollection. “They go in like bees swarming out of a hive. God. They won’t show fair fight any way you fix it, the mean varmints. I say they’ll never behave themselves until we give ’um a clean out-and-out licking. The only way to treat the Indian is to sculp about half of ’um, then the balance will sorter take to you and behave themselves.”

“Yes,” Judith said. “When the white man fights for his life he can take comfort in the sure hope of victory. But when the red man fights for his life he knows for a fact that he’s going to die no matter how hard he battles.”

The soldier gave her Indian garb another look, then his bearded face closed over.

The procession moved on.

The line of bluffs eventually curved away from the river. Between the bluffs and the bottoms lay a wide shelf of land and on it stood what was left of New Ulm. Brick stores and a few wooden homes had somehow survived a fiery Indian holocaust. Cellars gaped on all sides, gray with tumbles of ashes.

At the first sight of the fire-blackened settlement below them, the friendlies recoiled and hung back, falling behind the line of marchers. The mounted soldiers and the line of wagons bearing the prisoners, however, rolled inevitably onward, going down the bluff. The flag of the Union fluttered high above the lead wagon.

Judith was riding with the friendlies at the time and it scared her to see how they shied away from going through New Ulm. From the friendlies she heard talk of how certain Sioux hostiles, now gone west, had made particularly ferocious attacks on the German settlers, killing and scalping many. The Sioux referred to the Germans as “Those Who Speak The Bad Language” or the “Bad Talkers.” Looking down onto the wide shelf of land, Judith saw that the New Ulm survivors had emerged from their huts and their holes and had lined up on a high bank overlooking the road. Someone had alerted them that the army was coming through with red prisoners.

Judith knew it meant trouble. She handed Johnnie over to Ted and trotted up to where Scarlet Plume rode in the last wagon.

It was nearly noon. A cold north wind whistled through a cottonwood grove in the river bottoms. An occasional snowflake drifted down from what otherwise appeared to be a clear blue sky.

The head of the line descended below the bank on which the New Ulm Bad Talkers stood. The New Ulm grownups stood up front, with the children pushed back on higher ground. The men came armed with guns and clubs and pitchforks, the women with glistening butcher knives and aprons full of stones. They wore a crazy-quilt mixture of clothes: brown, gray, black, red. Some had even dug out their wedding clothes from storage. It was all they had left.

General Sibley spotted impending trouble too. He urged the infantry to hurry up and form a wall of protection between the captive Sioux and the Bad Talkers.

But the General saw it too late.

Four of the bolder red children were still racing in and out of the line of march, incongruously crying, “Sibilee! Sibilee!” It happened that two New Ulm boys, more adventurous than the rest, and wanting to get a close-up of the passing entourage, had hidden themselves in a clump of honeysuckles immediately alongside the trail. The four red children, chasing each other with play bows and arrows, flushed them.

The four red children stopped dead in their tracks, staring, their black eyes suddenly gleaming like obsidian arrows. The two white boys also stared, their blue eyes suddenly shining like the eyes of surprised fawns.

There was a long moment of silence. Even the shrieking axles seemed muted. Everybody gaped.

One of the red boys, named Already Bold, said quietly in Sioux to the white boys, “It is a good thing to see the enemy. Let us play war. Do you have the toy guns?” Smiling, Already Bold held up his play bow and quiver of arrows.

The face of the shorter of the two white boys opened and he began to screech.

The cry struck the mother chord in every female breast within earshot. Judith herself felt her bowels constrict within her and for a second was inflamed with a violent hate for the red children.

The Bad Talkers let go with a barking roar. Dough bellies bouncing, the wives came down the slope like a bumping avalanche. Butcher knives flashed. Stones flew. Beer bellies humping, the German men came right behind them, yelling like a mob of Beowulfs. Blue guns glinted. Pitchforks shone.