The Powder River (20 page)

He was aware of this power today, and he knew he would be aware of it again, perhaps every day. Whatever it wanted from him, he would give. For there lay the good way.

Elaine clopped along, poking the crutch tips out, rocking forward, planting her left foot firmly, leaning forward, and jamming the crutch tips out again. It was an awkward motion, and she felt ugly doing it.

She got to the corner at the end of the Wockerleys’ street and started across the main street, Front Street, full of brittle ridges and deep ruts.

She didn’t care if people looked. At least she felt reasonably confident of not falling now—she was stronger and more skilled. Yes, stronger and more skilled, even hunched over her crutches, hopping about like a one-legged toad, making a racket on the boardwalk. Yes, I’m ugly, damn you, and proud of it.

She was dressed properly for the first time since she broke her leg, and felt better for it. She’d deliberately picked an old dress, but it was an improvement to be out of her nightdress.

She heard a scraping, tinny rattle but couldn’t think what it was.

She nearly bumped into a pair of legs sticking most of the way across the boardwalk. The man didn’t make way for her. She looked at him, propped against the front wall of the Lady Gay Dance Hall there, thinking he might be asleep or passed out. But he wasn’t—he was staring at her, eyes big as a horse’s. A sign pinned onto his coat, penciled as though by a child, labeled the man a “VICTIM OF THE REBELLION.” The tinny scraping sounded again—he was shaking coins in a tin cup.

Then she saw that his right arm was missing—missing entirely, from the shoulder. By his left hand rested a cup.

“Life’s a bitch if you’re short a limb, pardoning my language, missy.”

He still didn’t move his legs. More than thirteen years since the war, Elaine thought, and this man was still begging. She eyed him. He looked old, and dissolute, but her serious guess was that he was only in his early thirties. She felt a clot of contempt for him in her throat.

“People ain’t considerate of a man’s handicap, missy.” He smiled with indifferent malice. “Or a woman’s either.” Another man looked on from a bench, smirking.

She didn’t want to speak to him, and certainly not to ask for anything. She had two choices: She could go outside his feet. That would take her perilously close to the edge of the boardwalk, but she could lean against a post there, or grab it if necessary. Or she could plunge straight across the man’s legs. The main risk there was that he would move suddenly, or that she would bang his legs.

She considered. Then she jammed one crutch down right next to his crotch, closer even than she intended. His left hand jerked toward his testicles and stopped. She hopped on across.

As she hurried away, she heard him cussing her vilely.

She spotted the striped barber pole. Fran had told her the barber opened at ten o’clock, and she intended to avoid embarrassment by being the first customer, perhaps the lone customer. She was in fact about five minutes early.

But she wasn’t first. Pushing clumsily through the door, she saw a man stretched back in a barber chair, fully lathered. He appeared to be asleep. The barber stropped his razor.

Elaine got straight to it. “I want my hair cut.” The barber stopped in mid-strop and gawked at her.

She poled across, took hold of the arm of the other barber chair, laid her crutches on the footrest, and laboriously lifted and legged her body into the chair.

“I don’ yet cut ladies’ hair, madam,” the barber ventured. He spoke in some soft Spanish accent and dressed like a bit of a dandy, with a lovingly cared-for mustache and pretty eyes.

The lathered-up man cracked his lids and looked sideways at Elaine. He was a young fellow, but she wasn’t sure she’d be able to recognize him again, covered as he was from cheeks to Adam’s apple with foam. If she had to guess, she would have said his eyes were amused. Which was better than she feared in this bastion of maleness.

“I’ll give you five dollars,” she said. It was ten times the usual price.

The barber hesitated. “Don’ know how to do it,” he averred. But this was cupidity.

“I’ll tell you,” she said in a tone of finality.

The barber started his shave. Elaine noticed, across the room, that the coat on the hat rack had a tinned-steel star pinned to it. Oh, my, the sheriff, or the marshal, or some such. Still, she supposed it wasn’t against the law for a woman to come into a barbershop. The crime was cutting hair you’d let grow for twenty-seven years.

It was not just a whim—it was a need, a compulsion, a … She didn’t know what. She’d been mostly in bed for four weeks. She hadn’t wanted to take care of it, to brush it, to pin it up. She didn’t like the way it got into everything, into her food, onto her books, got pinned under her elbows, got caught in the bedspring. She resented its tangles, its snarls, and the unkempt, disreputable appearance it gave her. She’d come to hate it.

Amazing, she knew, when she thought how she’d treasured it, and Adam had loved it. She’d brushed it out a little this morning, to make it straight for the cutting, and felt a moment of sadness about it.

She’d given thought to how it should be cut, and that was a problem. No women’s hairstyles permitted anything but full-length hair, none at all. The only women she’d ever seen cut their hair were Cheyennes, who hacked it straight at shoulder length when they wanted to express grief. Elaine was feeling plenty of grief, at the loss of her leg, at the absence of her husband—a temporary absence, by the Lord!—so hacked off straight at shoulder length it would be.

The barber finished the shave and covered his customer’s face with hot towels again. Elaine wondered if the lawman wanted to hang around to see the crazy lady get shorn. Well, take a gander, Mac.

The barber came toward Elaine with scissors snicking, smiling obsequiously.

She flipped her hair behind the headrest and shook her head to get it to hang right. “Just straight across, nothing fancy,” she said, “at the shoulders.”

The scissors snicked. She saw the lawman looking out from under his towels at her and wondered idly what he was thinking. She pictured the long hanks of brown hair floating to the floor behind her.

No, she wouldn’t look when she was finished. She wouldn’t ask the barber for the fallen hair. He’d sell it for good money, thinking he was tricky. Which was fine. To hell with the hair. God damn the hair.

Weary and discouraged, Smith rode into the canyon of White Tail Creek and into the Cheyenne camp just at dark. He had worn himself out catching up with the Human Beings, just as they had worn themselves out getting here. He’d read the tracks all day long and had figured out most of it.

From the two forks of the Geese River, which the whites called the Platte, it was the old story. The Human Beings were being chased hard by soldiers, two separate, large groups of soldiers from behind. The Indians were desperately short of horses. The men took turns—riding awhile, then sending the horse back to a partner so he could ride, meanwhile running in the all-day-long warrior’s lope. So the double-used ponies covered the ground three times.

Smith found the result of that tactic along the way—horse carcasses. He was glad he had his own horse and the three cavalry mounts to help out. But he knew that with the army constantly putting in new troops and horseflesh, such a flight was doomed.

He needed to sit in his own lodge behind his own fire, with his wife at his side, eat and listen to his children playing, smoke a pipe, and talk about something simple and domestic with his wife, perhaps what goods they would trade for at the post. Except that he had no wife, no lodge, no children, no tobacco, and nothing to trade. The post was still there. He thought of his mother Annemarie at the trading post on the Yellowstone. It was a post he had never seen, for his mothers had moved it from the Yellowstone after he left home. Yet it was in the heart of Cheyenne country, and it would be home. Certainly home if the Human Beings were there. Certainly home if his family was there. And the sights, the sounds, the smells of the first two decades of his life, his memories, his sense of the earth under his feet in the right way.

As he looked about the camp, he saw that not only the horses were worn out. The people were like old cloth, tattered at the edges and rubbed thin in the middle. They wouldn’t last long at this pace.

Lisette did have a small fire among some rocks. When he dismounted, she held him for a long moment, for she knew what it meant when he came alone, leading three riderless horses. “He is riding the Milky Way Trail to Sehan,” Smith told his mother formally. He felt tears well in his eyes again and roll down his cheeks. “A mob lynched him in Ogallala,” he murmured softly in her ear. “Hanged him. Killed a deputy getting him.” Smith felt his slender mother was comforting him, not he comforting her. Yet she was the one who called Sings Wolf father. “I couldn’t….” His voice clotted, and he stopped trying to speak.

His mother led him to the fire. Hindy stopped eating and started cutting Smith some meat, doubtless horse meat. Rain nursed Big Soldier. He did have a family, of sorts. He smiled at them wearily and, before he sat, touched Rain gently on the cheek and tousled Hindy’s hair, like she was a boy. He took the meat gladly and sat by the fire, legs crossed. He was grateful for his family, his women. He wished he had Elaine among them.

Smith felt his mother’s hand, gentle, insistent. He wondered how long he’d napped here by the fire. An hour, perhaps. He looked into Lisettes eyes. “Two men have come in from Little Chief,” she said. Her eyes were troubled.

He raised his long frame off the ground and shook himself. His thought was, What now?

Little Chief and those who camped with him had been left behind on the march to the south. Now these two men had run away from Little Chief’s people while they were being escorted to the Cheyenne and Arapaho Agency by the army.

The people shook their heads. Even as they risked their lives, and lost lives, to escape to their home country, their relatives were being forced south. Is’siwun, the sacred buffalo hat, and Mahuts, the four sacred arrows, were in the south. It seemed that the Cheyennes were fated to live far from Nowah’wus, the sacred mountain, their power perhaps broken. Unless the will of fewer than three hundred fleeing Cheyennes was stronger than fate.

Smith stood with Lisette in the crowd to hear whatever the runaways from Little Chief had to say.

Little Wolf asked, with an unexplained tone of significance in his voice, whether the country around Red Cloud Agency was full of soldiers. The runaways nodded. Soldiers everywhere, they said.

Morning Star stood to speak. “We are almost in our own country, my friends,” he said. Smith supposed the handsome chief had been terribly stricken by the death of one of his wives, Short Woman, about a week ago. Now he seemed a weak, old man. “The soldiers up there with our friends the Sioux have always been good men.”

Little Wolf leaped in, “They are up there to catch us and kill us.”

“We have a right to be with Red Cloud,” said Morning Star as though to a child. The Human Beings had been with Red Cloud when they agreed to go look at the agency in the south.

“With the whites you have a right to nothing that you do not already hold in the palm,” asserted Little Wolf plainly.

Now Morning Star lost his temper. He turned on the Sweet Medicine chief and ordered him to shut up. He said they would never make it to the Powder River country. Winter was coming. The people were exhausted—some babies had died, just today, from banging around in the hide sacks hanging from their mothers’ saddles as the Human Beings ran from the soldiers. Little Wolf was a fool not to see that the Human Beings were forced to go in to Red Cloud, a fool.

This was fighting talk, and right away men of the Dog Soldiers began to step in close behind Morning Star, men of the Elk Society behind their leader, Little Wolf. Faces mottled with anger, and hands tightened on weapons. Smith and Lisette didn’t move.

Little Wolf got up slowly and made his declaration. “We cannot divide now. We cannot.” He paused. He repeated his motto: “An Indian never caught is an Indian never killed. Together we can get away.”

But Dog Soldiers and others still stood behind Morning Star looking angry. Little Wolf waited, but their faces didn’t soften. He understood. They were tired, tired unto death. They thought going to Red Cloud, even if a slender chance, was the only chance they had.

So the Sweet Medicine chief relented. He said he would move his camp a little apart. Those who wanted to go on to the north, to the Powder River country, could camp with him tonight.

In the morning, Morning Star and his followers were gone. The division of the Tsistsistas-Suhtaio was about even. The men of the Elk Society and their families and some others elected to try for the northern land. The Dog Soldiers and their families and many of the young men went toward the Red Cloud Agency. Little Wolf supposed the young men anticipated that there would be more young women to choose from among the Sioux.

Smith’s women moved their few belongings to Little Wolf’s camp, and Smith staked his horses there in a little grass. Powder River, he thought. Home.

No one had energy for more than lying about in blankets and occasionally putting a small log on the fire. They ate from the soup Rain had made of the horse meat, without vegetables and without salt. Smith couldn’t get enough of the hot liquid.

He looked around at his family. What family he had left. His father dead, one mother several hundred miles away, his brother dead before the age of twenty, one sister moved to the settlement at Helena, the other, the palsied one, dead in her youth, his grandfather lying on a scaffold back near Ogallala. Here with him, those who would be of his lodge, if he had a lodge, his mother, his cousin’s widow, the infant Big Soldier, and an adopted white girl. Quite the motley crew, Smith, he told himself.

“What will happen to us?” asked Hindy.

He liked her. She hadn’t been cared for, she’d been abused, she’d seen more of the brutal side of life than a teenage kid should have to see. She didn’t know what to do with herself. Didn’t see a way to make a life, present or future. She was afraid. But it seemed to Smith that she might endure it all. She wore her pain right out in front, on her face. Lisette said she’d even started doing some wisecracking. She might come through.