The Powder River (13 page)

Chapter 3

Smith heard a scraping noise, something on cloth. Heavy cloth—canvas! In Hindy’s dog tent.

And then a stifled squeak.

His stomach turned nauseatingly. He knew what it was. Rape. The son of a bitch was raping Hindy. That bastard Nelly Burns.

Smith flopped, hard. He was wrapped in a tarpaulin and bound and gagged and there wasn’t a goddamn thing he could do. Except flop around in the dark and kick and make noise and wake somebody up and …

Now he knew why that bastard put Hindy in a tent—and Smith had thought stupidly that Burns was acting decent to her.

Smith lurched as hard as he could toward the tent—maybe he could knock the goddamn thing down—and found himself looking into Calling Eagle’s eyes.

What remarkable eyes. Calling Eagle heard the sounds, too, and knew what they meant. Her eyes were deep and still and aware, accepting the pain of the world.

Calling Eagle! He meant Sings Wolf. Not his grandmother, his grandfather. But Sings Wolf was unsexed now, wrapped in the heavy tarpaulin from foot to mouth, almost nothing but eyes and hair showing. Smith congratulated himself yesterday for not once failing to call her by her new name, Sings Wolf. Then it occurred to him that he was nonetheless thinking of Sings Wolf as
her
.

But Smith wasn’t a damn bit interested in being accepting about this pain or any other. That son of a bitch was violating Hindy!

He gyrated around and kicked and banged his back against the ground—he got into a frenzy of kicking and banging—and it made no difference at all. Until he heard the tent flap move.

What he saw was the half-breed Nelly Burns looking at him down the barrel of a Navy .36. And holding his pants up with one hand. And smiling viciously.

“Lucky you didn’t stir anybody,
Doctor
. I’d blow your nose out through the back side of your skull.”

Smith lay still. Nelly Burns was a mad dog, and there was no sense getting bit.

Smith could hear Hindy mewling softly now.

Burns pulled his pants up and stuck his revolver into the waist. “I’m looking forward to seeing you die, though, you and Grandpa there. We’ll even do it legal, soon as Lieutenant Garber comes up. Don’t it make you feel better to die legal?”

The three scouts had made camp here expecting the main column to come up. But for some reason it hadn’t, only several more scouts. They’d gone back to find out why, leaving the three captors here with their prisoners.

“I’m looking forward to seeing you beg,
Doctor
, and shit your breechcloth,
Doctor
, and seeing the coyotes sniff your guts.” Burns cackled, shaking his head at Smith. His left eye opened oddly, giving him a know-it-all look.

Smith supposed it was just as well he was gagged. No sense getting shot for cussing Burns, or spitting on him.

The scout went and sat against a tree, the only tree for miles around on this plain. It was Burns’s watch. Soft sobbing came from the dog tent. Yes. Smith was better off gagged. No words, but when the time came, he would kill Nelly Burns.

Smith had picked up some facts from the scouts, and they all pleased him. This Garber was in command because Colonel Lewis was dead. The soldiers had attacked the people in some hills this side of the Smoky Hill River, and the Cheyennes had driven them off. Colonel Lewis, sure enough, had made good on his promise to annihilate the Cheyennes or die trying.

Smith was beginning to believe in a kind of mad destiny. It seemed to be the Cheyennes’ fate to win battles in spite of overwhelming odds. It looked like their destiny to get back home to Powder River country. Unbelievable, but he was coming to believe it.

Not that Smith would necessarily live to get home. This damn Burns was likely enough to kill him. Smith had known men like Burns all his life, border scum, men who felt loyalty to no community, no tribe, no nation, no nothing. Men who were worse than animals because they liked to torture and maim and kill. Men like Owen Mackenzie, who killed Smith’s father Mac and brother Thomas, men like Nelly Burns.

Of course, Burns liked to mock Smith with the fact that they were both half-breeds. Burns was half-Pawnee—he said his father had been a trader to the Pawnees. So Smith let himself indulge in the age-old Cheyenne hatred for Pawnees.

The other scouts weren’t bad men, the ones headed back to the main column or the two in the other dog tent. None of them was army. The army used old-hand frontiersmen to figure out where it was going on the plains and in the deserts and mountains. None of them had much civilization. But only Burns was a mad dog.

If Burns didn’t kill Smith and Sings Wolf, Lieutenant Garber might well have them executed. Smith pondered the old preacher’s body back there. Since they hadn’t had a shovel, they hadn’t buried him, just covered him with rocks. If Hindy told the soldiers where her father was, Smith and Sings Wolf were dead. Hell, she didn’t have to tell them—the wagon sat there like a tombstone, marking the spot.

Maybe Garber would judge them guilty on the face of it anyway: Smith and Sings Wolf had stolen the draft animals and kidnapped Hindy. If she claimed she’d gone along willingly, they’d think her horrible experiences had warped her mind.

And maybe they had. Her father, the Reverend Ratz, had made a good start at it—maybe this rape had finished the job. Smith couldn’t hear Hindy now. He would have felt better if he could hear her crying, for silence was worse than her sobs. Maybe Hindy was ruined.

Elaine wrote in a slanted, efficient hand, not an ornate one like her sister Dora’s. Yet Elaine’s handwriting was attractive if the reader saw beauty in polished simplicity.

She was writing to her sister rather than her mother. She knew that Dora would inform Mother right away, and Elaine wanted Mother to know. But Elaine couldn’t name all the terms of life in this place to her mother. Now
that
, she realized, is an attitude Mother would not approve of. Nevertheless …

She dated her letter the first day of October, 1878, and pitched in. She picked up where her last letter left off—how the fight at Turkey Springs turned out OK, like violence among children, much declamation, little damage. She felt guilty for this misrepresentation, but it was literally true, and she couldn’t bring herself to tell Dora how she felt about it.

She voiced eloquently her admiration for the toughness of Rain, who bore a child alone and in desperate circumstances, and now was her sister. She mentioned lightly the superstition that so dominated the girl’s mind that she could believe a soldier who watched her bear the child was a spirit.

She told how the Cheyennes were accepting Adam’s medical help more. Though they still wouldn’t tolerate the little death, they saw that he helped, and they were a practical people. Besides, Adam’s grandfather (she wrote grandmorther and crossed it out) put it well—Indian medicine for Indian illnesses, white-man medicine for white-man diseases. They would let Adam help with white-man hurts, like bullets.

She wrote of miracles—Little Wolf’s walking through the hail of bullets untouched, and Bridge’s stopping the arterial bleeding of Sitting Man. She surmised that the God who reigned over the earth, called by various names as he was, had room in his heart for poor red men, though white men did not.

She wrote that sleeping on the ground without a shelter, riding fifty miles in a day, and going hungry were hardships she had adjusted to easily. She said nothing about the hardship of living in perpetual fear, or about how her circumstances chafed at her fledgling marriage.

She puzzled at length over what to say, if anything, about Calling Eagle’s transformation into Sings Wolf. At length she wrote,

One of our women had a dream, and in that dream saw herself dead, dressed as a man, outfitted for war, and being buried with the honor due a warrior. She took it as a sign and revolutionized her life! She traded her feminine name for a man’s name and gave up her clothes and adornment and all her feminine ways to live as a warrior would. Her first day as a man she led a war charge that turned back the soldiers, and we won against an overwhelming number of bluecoats.

Her conversion is truly a blessing because we are so short of men able to fight, and it is taken by our people as a great sign that in desperate circumstances the Powers will provide in a truly miraculous way.

There is more to the story, which I shall tell you in person. It illustrates wonderfully with what awe our people regard dreams.

But she didn’t know whether she could bring herself to talk even to her sister about the facts of Sings Wolf’s anatomy.

She said nothing about the apparent disloyalty of fighting United States soldiers. Her family had opposed the authorities in the Revolution, when they were British, and opposed the authorities again when they tolerated slavery. Mother and Dora would understand that one fought for the right.

Finally Elaine got to the night of the crossing of the Arkansas.

My horse stumbled and fell, and in the dark water stepped on me. I fear that the result is that I have broken my right leg, but am getting excellent care. Adam brought me here to Dodge City, where I am doubly watched over. The surgeon from Fort Dodge attends to me medically while the local doctor gives me room and board. If his wife did not sit with me and talk for long hours—poor creature! no one else seems to talk to her!—I would be parched for company.

She decided to brighten her pages with what she’d learned of Dodge City from Fran Wockerley, a shy but eager gossip. Elaine told how the vast herds of half-wild cattle were herded up from Texas—“aristocratic beeves, descended from the great ranchos chartered by the King of Spain!”—to be jammed into cars and shipped to the hungry East.

So large numbers of cow-boys (most of them truly
boys
) gasp into Dodge City all through the summer and fall. Thirsty for amenities after their months on the trail, they collect their meager wages and set out to indulge in what they fancy to be the luxuries of civilization (really the depravities which are its regrettable by-products). Straight to the pleasure palace the cow-boy heads, the spot for drinking, dancing, and gambling all in one—Dodge’s streets are dust, its saloons gilt! Before long the country fellow has lost his wages to a professional gambler, gotten too inebriated to care, danced with a pretty girl (and maybe stolen a kiss!)—Dora would understand this euphemism—

and had a fight with someone who insulted the “great state of Texas.” Having gotten what he came for—he has “seen the elephant!”—he heads for a home hundreds of miles away, broke, hung over, banged up, and happy.

It is all in the spirit of fun, of course, and one cannot feel begrudging. It makes me wonder, though, that the people of Dodge should be so certain of the superiority of their “civilization” compared to the style of living of the Indians who just fled past them in pitiable circumstances, poor, hungry, dirty enough, and plenty ignorant, but possessed of dignity and elevated by the strongest spirituality.

She set pen and paper down a moment and rested. She tired easily these days. But she had to get to what she’d been avoiding:

Now I am in traction—I’m painfully bored not being able to move about—but Dr. Richtarsch says my break is mending “nicely,” so I shall no doubt be running races soon. Adam is gone on with the people to the north country, and I will meet him there when I can travel. Meanwhile, think of all the time I shall have to write you letters! And to read your letters.
Please
write me in care of Dr. M. T. Wockerley, Dodge City. Dr. Richtarsch says I shall be here at least a month.

Though my bone is knitting, the cut in my leg is infected, Dr. Richtarsch fears, and today he expressed concern about it.

The good doctor had used the word
concern
, but Elaine knew he was deliberately understating its seriousness. She did the same.

I am confident that I shall throw the infection off quickly—you remember how my colds lasted only a day, and yours a week!

She rested again. She told herself that her anxiety was foolish—“feminine frippery!” she accused herself. She was more than half aware that the frippery was a premonition—a premonition that she would die of this little infection—die in miserable Kansas, die a failure at marriage, die far from her husband, far from her family, die without being held, without being cherished, without being loved. Die a sort of spinster. She had risen above such feminine foolishness since she was a little girl, though, and she wasn’t about to regress now.

Lying back, half-exhausted, she thought of Adam. Adam who was riding across the plains with Sings Wolf, trying to catch up with a hapless people. Adam who was running from her. Lord, she ached to tell him she loved him. She wondered when she would get to hold him and tell him.

“I love you,” she wrote in the letter to her sister, and signed her name.

She would take a nap. It was amazing how tired she seemed to be from this broken leg. And in the afternoons she was feverish. She would take a nap, and then Dr. Richtarsch would be here, and they would visit a little while.

The flask landed with a clink. It lay across the coals that remained of the fire. It sounds empty, Smith thought, so he’s as drunk as he will get. It was an expensive-looking flask of embossed silver. Smith wondered what body Burns had stolen it from.

Burns got up and staggered over to the fire. He was a small man—Smith could have broken him of the know-it-all eye over one knee. Smith cursed himself again for hurrying and getting ambushed.

Burns just stood there, like he’d forgotten why he came. Did he mean to pick up the flask he’d thrown? Or would he not think of it until morning, when he was hung over and needed the hair of the dog and didn’t have any?

Smith had worked and worked at his bonds, hands and feet, and thought he might be making some progress. He was afloat in the damn tarpaulin and couldn’t chafe at the ropes much. He’d rubbed his back hard on the ground, though, and it felt like he’d moved the hemp up in back. Maybe before dawn he could scooch it up over his shoulders. He wished to hell his shoulders were narrower.