The Powder River
Authors: Win Blevins
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Win Blevins
This book is for Martha Stearn, as they all are
storyteller: I’m going to tell a story.
audience: Right!
storyteller: It’s a lie.
audience: Right!
storyteller: But not everything in it is false.
audience: Right!
—ritual opening to Sudanese stories
storyteller: Under the earth I go.
On the oak leaf I stand.
I ride on the filly
That never was foaled,
And I carry the dead in my hand.
—ritual opening to Celtic stories
storyteller: Once upon a time …
—ritual opening to American stories
PROLOGUE
Elaine held her breath, as instructed, tucked her chin a little, and tried to look radiant. This is silly, she thought. I feel radiant already, so why make it artifice?
The photographer opened the shutter. Dr. and Mrs. Maclean, standing still for too long a moment, rigid, chests sucked up and breath sucked in, recorded their union for posterity. Really, thought Elaine, for Mother and my darned younger sister. Dora had already been married long enough to become a widow. They heard the shutter click shut.
Elaine looked up—far up—at her new husband, who was nearly a foot taller than she, and she was a tall woman. We’re probably recording it for our posterity, too, she thought. What she intended to do as soon as she and Adam were alone tended to create posterity, so they said. It would be her first time, but surely not his first time, and she intended to make it memorable. For both of them.
It was foolish and it was reckless, this getting married today. They’d been planning to go away to Kansas City to be married sometime later in the month. But this photographer showed up, an artiste-looking fellow with a goatee, saying he wanted to record Indian life before it went away, and Adam and Elaine decided impulsively to take advantage.
Not that Adam liked having Indians photographed. He said the white people were intent on preserving Indians like plant specimens, oh-so-affectingly dried and dead.
Adam called the Reverend Asa McClintock and his wife in next to the newlyweds. They were the presiding minister and witness, respectively, and were dear friends, and must be part of the wedding pictures.
The artiste made small adjustments in the way they were standing, called for the big breath, asked them to hold it, and again made a record of the nuptials. The photographs were certainly an extravagance. They would take most of the little bit of savings Elaine and Adam had. But Mother and Dora, disappointed to discover via telegram that Elaine was married, would be mollified by the pictures.
Besides, Adam looked so gorgeous. Breathtaking, really. Nearly six-and-a-half feet tall, in the handsome Prince Albert coat in formal black he’d worn when he was graduated from medical school, his dark skin gleaming, and his long, black hair with reddish highlights falling dramatically to his shoulder blades. Just looking at her savage made her a little weak-kneed.
The photographer called for Adam’s family to step in for a picture. His grandmother Calling Eagle stood next to him, and his mother Lisette next to Elaine. Elaine put a hand through Lisette’s arm. She thought the three of them made a terrific-looking group of women. Even on short notice and in rotten circumstances, they managed some finery for this occasion. Elaine had her borrowed wedding dress. Lisette had found ermine tails to wrap her braids in, and both the. Indian women wore dresses ornamented with elk teeth and moccasins covered with quillwork. Lisette was silky and slender, a sexy woman for fifty, and Calling Eagle looked tall and queenly, her braids hanging to her waist. Barbaric splendor.
Elaine’s brown hair was even longer, to her bottom. Today she’d let it hang straight, parted in the middle, as teenage girls wore theirs. She was showing off a quarter century of brushing, a hundred strokes a day. She wore a borrowed wedding dress, Lucille McClintock’s full-length affair of silk damask the color of jonquils, tucked a little at the waist. She knew very well she looked smashing. Young and virginal, too. Well, she was virginal.
Elaine looked up at Adam, his head there in the ether, and got all weak-kneed again. Elaine! she reprimanded herself with amusement. Cummings women are sensible women, dedicated women, serious women, champions of worthy causes. We do not melt when we gaze upon attractive males of the species.
We thought we didn’t until today, she answered herself. He is a prize. How many Cheyenne men have been graduated from medical school? Probably my Adam alone.
She’d really thought she wouldn’t get giddy over a good-looking man. At the advanced age of twenty-seven, she’d half accepted the idea of spinsterhood. She’d permitted Dr. Adam Smith Maclean, known to the world informally as Smith, to call on her out of her need for a friend, and as a public statement of racial policy. She hadn’t expected to fall in love with him. And the truth was that, though she’d been intrigued by him from the first, and then enchanted, until today she hadn’t felt this, well, this “first fine careless rapture!” she quoted to herself.
So go away, Miss Sensible, Miss Serious, it’s the giddy girl’s day to play. Time enough tomorrow to do something about the rotten conditions the Cheyennes are living in. Time enough then to worry about being a schoolmistress with practically no students. Married to a doctor with practically no patients.
She held her breath and tucked her chin as the photographer instructed.
Adam leaned down, and whispered in her ear. “I love you,” he said, eyes gleaming.
She wanted to wrap herself around him shamelessly. “Houghmagandie,” she breathed back in his ear, putting a Scots burr on it to tease him. It was his playful word for the deed that created posterity. According to him, it was his father’s playful word for it, and a genuine Scottish expression—his father had been a pure Scot. Nothing so tickled Elaine as hearing a giant Cheyenne speak English with a Scots burr.
“I think that ought to do it, folks,” called the goateed artiste.
Elaine looked at Mr. Goatee and gazed at Adam up there in the ether and took in her breath firmly and said, “No, one more.”
She turned to face Adam and put his hands around her waist. She’d made up her mind that she would do this, even if it was a little … outrageous. She put her arms around his neck. If a girl can’t be outrageous on her wedding day, when can she? “Now, Adam,” she said with mock sternness, “you can’t move when we’re doing this. Certainly not your hands, but not even your head or even your lips.”
His eyes were laughing.
She looked at the photographer. He nodded. She closed her eyes, lifted her face into the sky (ridiculous!), and kissed her brand-new husband full on the lips.
“Hold your breath,” called the photographer.
BOOK ONE
Chapter 1
Scratch-scratch-scratch!
Elaine flinched, and turned over toward Adam. His face was perfectly relaxed in sleep, and sweet—he hadn’t heard a thing. She shook his arm. He didn’t move.
Scratch-scratch-scratch!
Dammit. She resented the way he was sleeping anyway. She lay here awake and edgy, flat on her back, to tell God’s truth feeling lonely as hell on her wedding night, and in her marriage bed, with the strange smell of sex in her nostrils. With her husband grandly asleep right next to her, oblivious. She had a sore crotch, nipples that her nightdress irritated, jumpy nerves, and you name it, and he slept like a lord through the whole thing.
She shook Adam again. Dr. Adam Smith Maclean was dead to the world.
She could guess how he would report their first amorous experience—playfully and happily as a kid with a new pony. He had toyed and teased and cavorted and just plain—hell, why not say it?—rutted. He played the joyful giant all the way. (Well, he was a damn barbarian, wasn’t he?) Not that he hadn’t been gentle and considerate and tender—he had, as much as he could. He’d been a little amused at her shynesses, too—he hadn’t tried to hide the fact that he knew his way around this territory very well indeed. But in spite of his tenderness, and her own eagerness to please, well, it hurt, and smelled peculiar, and worse, made her feel self-conscious and a little shaky and in need of a lot of reassuring. But now she lay here out of sorts and lonely, and at the same time mad and jittery and making up her mind that she was going to be damned good at this business of lovemaking, and he slept the sleep of the satisfied.
Scratch-scratch-scratch!
Dammit, even Indians weren’t polite enough to wait all night. A scratch on the door instead of a knock—that made them Indians, and surely the doctor’s charges, not hers. The agency Indians had been wretched all summer with dysentery and malaria, and often they did ask Adam for white-man medicine to help out. So tonight would be just the first of thousands of nights that her married life would get interrupted by the sick. That was OK—she wanted to be used, to give the days of her life to something. So did Adam. That was part of what she loved about this crazy Indian.
OK, drastic measures. She put a foot against his back and started pushing, hard. Suddenly he sat up on the edge of the bed. She slipped out and got a robe to put over her nightdress. “Someone’s here,” she whispered. She saw that he was grinning at her in the dark—he was alert. He must have been trained at medical school to wake up like that, all of a sudden. He slipped on his nightshirt—he thought wearing clothes in bed a strange custom. He lit the bitch light, and she followed him through their bedroom door and through the other room to the front door. Adam moved his huge frame not sleepily but confidently, and Elaine thought that was another part of what she loved in him, his air of competence. She had to admit she loved his size, too. It felt marvelous to be enveloped by so much of him.
It was Adam’s grandmother, Calling Eagle. Behind her was his mother, Lisette. The queenly Calling Eagle spoke softly in the Cheyenne langauge, too low and fast for Elaine’s Cheyenne. Adam hesitated, asked something softly, got a vigorous nod and one strong word in reply, and the visitors stepped back into the dark.
Her husband turned to her. In the flickering light he looked thrown off balance. She reached to put her arms around him, but he grasped her hands with his.
He leaned against the door jamb. “They’re going home,” he murmured, emphasizing the last word a little. She had the most extraordinary sensation at that moment, a sharp smell of something burning, acrid and almost painful. Later she would tell Adam that she had smelled the future in that instant.
When he looked down at her, his eyes were full of pleading. “Now. But the agent has said he’ll use the soldiers to drive them back.”
She repeated it to herself, word by word. She felt the bizarre sensation she felt when she was told her father had died, the roots of her hair burning and freezing in patches. She knew she could stand it if she didn’t reach to her hair with her hands and kept her feet wide apart and stable.
So she told herself slowly what the words meant: The northern Cheyenne tribe couldn’t stand it anymore at this agency. They were heading for Powder River, more than fifteen hundred miles and Lord knows how many soldiers away. Tonight. On her wedding night. And, unbelievably, she was their teacher, her husband their doctor.
“Right now,” Adam said forlornly.
“We’ll never make it,” she rasped softly.
All right, it was futile. All right, it was dumb. Smith started arguing with his new wife anyway.
“Goddammit,” Smith barked, “do you think being Dr. and Mrs. Maclean will keep us from getting killed?”
She had her back to him, hands on the bureau, shoulders pushed up. God, he wanted to provoke her, to make her listen to reason.
She turned to him, touched his arm, and put her head against the outside of his shoulder.
He almost permitted himself a smile. Listen to reason, indeed. She’d never listened to reason—other people’s reasons. Instead she’d gone to the Hampton Institute to teach Indian boys. Then traveled west to visit the Cheyenne and Arapaho Agency, then talked the church into sponsoring a day school there, then talked them past her unmarried state and inexperience so she could run it. She was wonderfully stubborn.
He was born a Cheyenne. She’d chosen to be here, and he loved her for it.
But he argued anyway. Feeling dumb, he held her stiffly and repeated the arguments he’d already used. The Cheyennes would be fugitives, at war with the United States. This was Indian territory, a hell of a distance from Powder River, way up in Wyoming and Montana Territories. Soldiers would fight them all the way, out of Fort Dodge and Fort Hays and Fort Laramie and Fort Robinson—hell, he didn’t know all the forts they might come from. People would get killed, white people and red. And by God, Adam and Elaine Maclean would not be immune.
And then the simple, practical considerations. His job was to doctor, hers to teach—they’d be walking away not only from their paychecks but their duty.
Some of it he didn’t tell her. He couldn’t imagine her trekking across the country for weeks and months on a horse, her belongings on a pony drag, her privy the bushes, her bed—her marital bed—crowded into a tipi with Smith’s family, her meals puny and full of dust, her life bitter as alkali and cold wind. He didn’t say, either, that she was too precious to him, that he could not risk her life at the hazards of war.
God, but he loved her.
Christ, it was awful.
Elaine lifted her head off her husband’s shoulder. If he thought Elaine Cummings would be intimidated, he had another think coming. We Cummings women, flinty New Englanders, ardent abolitionists and suffragists, do not quail at rough going.
She stepped away from Adam, looked up into his eyes, and told him in an unmistakable tone, “They’re our people.” She took a deep breath. Her husband was a good man, but in some ways not grown up. “You can’t walk away. I won’t walk away.”
She let the words hang. She decided not to add what else she knew—that he secretly yearned to go on this adventure, and yearned for her to go with him. More important, he wanted to go home, to the Powder River country, and make his life there.
Home
. She turned to the bureau and started putting the rest of their few clothes into a canvas bag. He would see they had to go.
Smith saw the set of his wife’s shoulders and slowly nodded. He turned and took down his Winchester from over their bed. He had lived this life—had been on the run, had taken scalps, had held a dying man in his arms—and she hadn’t. He hoped she would stand up to it well, and not hate it too much. Inside, he had to admit, he could feel stirring a part of himself, a wild part he only half welcomed. It sang out, Let’s fight like hell.
Elaine looked over her shoulder at him and took the canvas bag out to where the horses were waiting.
Dr. Maclean admired her. She was stronger than he was, wiser, and more devoted.
Half an hour later, past midnight in what was not yet Oklahoma, Smith made a last-minute check of his cabin for medical supplies. He’d packed his pocket surgical kit, cod liver oil, alcohol, chloroform, one tonic, one astringent, one emetic, laudanum, and some extract of smart weed for the dysentery—he didn’t have any more quinine, and would just have to hope no one came down with malarial fever. These were all medicines he’d brought with him from the East. He’d be damned if he’d take agency stores and give the army an excuse to arrest him for theft. He didn’t see anything else he could take, or needed, since his people mostly rejected his kind of medicine anyway.
He took a last look around the cabin. Elaine was outside, mounted, with Calling Eagle and Lisette, ready to go. Smith put in his copies of
Gray’s Anatomy
and Hartshorn, and grabbed for
Apple-Blossoms
, the book of poems Elaine had published when she was at the Harvard Annex, the Harvard for women. It brought memories flooding into him, memories of Boston, and of meeting Elaine, and hearing her read her poems and discovering how much cultured people admired her.
My God, look what he’d almost left behind. His ivory balls. His old friend Peddler had taught him to juggle, and he’d found these three billiard balls in a pawnshop. They were perfect for his big hands. He used them for a kind of mesmeric relaxation. In fact, it was after a session with his ivory balls that he knew—simply knew, without question—that he must ask Elaine Cummings to marry him.
Smith took a last look around the room. Their bureau, the drawers hanging out, empty. The bitch light, its wick barely flickering—he blew it out. The chamber pot. The iron bedstead, their one luxury, its shuck mattress now stripped of sheets and blankets. He thought of the loving they had done on that bed just hours ago, and felt his loins stir.
He stepped outside, stuffed the last few belongings into his saddlebags. They had to leave the wagon, which wouldn’t stand the rough country ahead. They had to leave the tent, which would have given them privacy but was Indian Bureau property. He looked at Elaine. She was perched on her sidesaddle. Though she was a good rider, the sidesaddle seemed …
Hell, what had he gotten her into? From Boston, the center of civilization, her family, and her way of life, to … what?
His life. He looked around at his mother and grandmother. The Cheyennes had spent Smith’s whole life getting swamped by the white man. This red-white fighting had even killed his father. And his brother. Now he was throwing his wife into it. Christ, he was scared, and the fear tasted vile in his mouth.
He swung into his saddle and looked sideways at Elaine. She hung there on the side of her horse in her long skirt that hid the horns her legs used to do the work of riding. To Smith she looked like an old-fashioned daguerreotype of an ideal New England lady. He felt a skin-prickly rush of want for her.
Calling Eagle clucked, and they moved out.
