The Powder River (23 page)

She’d gotten a little news from the sheriff. The Cheyennes had been captured and taken to Fort Robinson—they’d probably be returned to Indian territory immediately. God, she felt for them. She supposed Adam would go with them. Or they would all fight, Adam included, and all would end up dead.

She came to a wall and turned. She hated that infernal clumping noise she made.

Bat should have been thinking of it the other way: it must seem to people that if there was a rivalry, he’d bested his rival. Not that Bat Masterson did think of it that way. He wasn’t that interested in her, except as a curiosity. Possibly a one-legged sexual curiosity, morbid thought.

But instead of reveling in his victory, he kept talking about how Adam had kidnapped the Batz girl and murdered her father right here in Ford County, and he wasn’t paid to let people commit mayhem and walk away. He sent telegrams to other sheriffs, and went on and on about putting together another posse, and seemed to be slowed in the chase only by the unnershurriff’s reminders that the voters of Ford County wouldn’t favor spending a lot of money to chase one single, scruffy Indian. Beally, Bat was being immature about it.

She hurt badly now. Another length of wall and she could collapse onto her chair and get the damn thing off.

So maybe she could distract Bat. A little flirtation certainly wouldn’t hurt, especially now that she was a divorced woman. She wouldn’t let that little morbid thought affect her.

It was damned queer. First Smith felt as though he couldn’t speak English. As he rode the last miles toward the Lost Chokecherry camp, he felt peaceful, somehow. Now he was free of the torments. Now he had said good-bye to Elaine. Now he had an answer. But the queer part was, he’d never had a question.

The answer was, See Baven and ask for help in making the sacrifice.

The answer was, Give your flesh and your blood to the sun.

He knew, somehow, deep inside himself, not to question why that was the answer. He knew he must simply do it.

Chapter 2

Bat Masterson knocked apart some packing-crate material in a hurry to build a fire in the potbellied stove.

Really, they were very lucky. The weather had been pretty this Christmas morning. Elaine and Bat Masterson, both far from their families, had planned a ride to celebrate the festive day, and a picnic to cap it off, though she made him promise no gifts, from either of them. When they were ready to leave, it looked a little gray, but nothing to fret about. A couple of slow miles out, the wind had come up and the snow began to come down with a gritty determination.

They took shelter in this empty house. According to Bat Masterson, the man of the house came alone in late summer and built it for his family, not just a cabin but a real post-and-beam house. Two months ago he went back to Kansas City on the train to get them and hadn’t been seen since. Domestic strife, maybe. “I’m not going to give up Kansas City for horizons filled with cow manure, Henry.”

The house had no furniture except for packing crates to sit on, but it was new, and did have windows to keep the wind and snow out, and the stove. She had gotten badly chilled in the last few minutes outside, so the fire would help a lot. And they would eat their picnic inside, that’s all.

She was overtired again, and her stump hurt like hell. But she had to learn to ride—she refused to be a shut-in.

“Here,” said Bat, “warm up with this,” and held out a flask.

“No, thanks,” she said.

“Medicinal,” he insisted, shaking it at her. “You need it.”

She shrugged, took the flash, tilted it, and swigged. Acchh! She didn’t know how men could stand the taste of whiskey. But the burn felt kind of good in her throat.

She pegged painfully over to the window and gazed into the snowstorm. It had become a full-scale plains blizzard. She wondered if they could get the wagon back to town, or if the drifts would stop them. If so, she would make Bat Masterson ride the draft horse and they would force their way through the two miles of drifts. Elaine wasn’t going to stay out overnight and let Mrs. Yancey, at the boardinghouse, make her out to be a slut.

Ironic. She’d enticed Bat Masterson into promising her a Christmas-day picnic partly to control him. A courting sheriff couldn’t be chasing after an ex-husband. Now Smith’s trail was covered with snow, anyway, and she was very much in Bat Masterson’s control.

The fire was crackling now. Bat spread out the blankets from the surrey next to the stove, and she laid out the picnic lunch she’d gotten from the hotel.

She had to get off her peg—it was killing her. She used a crate to lower herself to the floor, and then leaned back against it.

Bat Masterson ate avidly, as she’d expected, in an almost predatory way. Though he seemed to think he maintained decorum, he attacked the food like a trencherman, ripping meat off a drumstick with his teeth, scooping up potato salad, gobbling buttered rolls whole. And all the while gulping it down with a kind of grim concentration, without a word.

Underneath your gentle manner, thought Elaine, you are no gentleman, Bat Masterson. She would have to be careful of him.

“Sheriff,” she said in a carefully modulated voice, “would you turn your back? My peg is hurting and I must remove it.”

The way his eyes glinted, she really must be careful of him. Bight now. He turned away. She lifted her skirt, unlaced the rawhide strap, slipped the peg off—what a relief!—and set it on the crate.

She had to admit she thrived on his attention these days. She saw no one else in Dodge except Dr. Richtarsch. And a lady could enjoy the warmth of the flame without getting burned.

“Thank you, Sheriff,” she said formally. And Bat Masterson turned back and looked at her with his hunter’s eyes.

She must be careful. Outside the snow swirled down thickly and the wind howled and they really might not be able to get to town tonight.

The first words out of Lisette’s mouth were, “Do you want to eat?” Smith smiled to himself. They had rigged a lean-to with some brush and covered it with his paulie, which Lisette called by its proper name, tarpaulin. He sat behind the fire pit in the position of the man of the lodge, poor as the lodge was, and she handed him elk stew.

His other women kept shy eyes on him to see whether he needed anything. When he had eaten, Hindy brought him his pipe, with a little real tobacco, Navy plug. He had no idea where she’d gotten such a luxury, but simply accepted it with a smile.

As his smoke filled the little lean-to, he contemplated his family situation. He felt good about Hindy. She was getting rounder, more a woman and less a pubescent girl, and she had steadily gotten more and more comfortable with the Human Beings. He wasn’t surprised. She had been deprived of family, really, for a couple of years, and had never had the experience of community. Now, abruptly, she had both, and she embraced them thirstily. Before long, though he had just acquired his first daughter, he would have to marry her off. To a Cheyenne, of course. He smiled at that idea.

Rain was beautiful. Though still thin, she no longer looked haggard. She now had a certain maternal radiance to enhance her ethereal innocence. At the moment she was feeding Big Soldier, a lusty-looking little boy—he’d gotten past his low birth weight just fine.

Smith eyed Rain in a new way. Maybe his mother was right. Maybe he should take Rain as a wife. He’d rejected the idea once, but that was before he divorced Elaine. Not that Rain, or Lisette, would care that Smith already had one wife. He did care for Rain. He didn’t love her, not in what the white man thought of as a romantic way. He didn’t lust after her either, but he knew he could feel desire for her in other circumstances. Anyway, there would be no need for sex between them for some time, even forever. Not with a marriage that was essentially a gesture of being his family’s keeper. Maybe it was a good idea. He had in his lodge a mother and a daughter, but no wife and no son. Yet here were wife and son, waiting for him, beckoning to him. Maybe life was telling him something.

He tapped the ashes from his pipe into the fire. Whatever he decided about that, first he needed to get his spirit righted. He stood and walked through the camp, a damn poor camp, he noticed again, to the wickiup of Raven.

They sat and smoked—Smith made a gift of the real tobacco. They spoke politely of matters other than Smith’s reason for coming. At last, pipes finished, Smith began. “Grandfather, will you help me make the sacrifice of the piercing? I want to thank Maheo for bringing me back to my people. And for bringing the people back almost to home, the Powder River country.”

Raven sat silent. He understood. He understood that Smith asked him because he and Sings Wolf had been friends, and Raven would know Sings Wolf’s respect for Smith. He may have understood that Smith wanted to commit himself to being Cheyenne. He did understand that Smith wanted to bring back to the people a sacred gesture that had been missing for several years, one generally made during the medicine-lodge ceremony and possibly at other times. And Raven thought this reminder would be good for the people.

Smith watched Raven ponder. It was strange to Smith how clearly and simply he felt the need to make this sacrifice. It was the answer to the question he had not asked. It was his statement to his people, and to the white world: I am a man of the Tsistsistas-Suhtaio. Somehow it was his way of laying down his old life and beginning a new one.

Ironic, then, or maybe suitable, that the winter solstice would be in the next day or two, and Christmas a few days later.

What disturbed Smith was how confused and fearful he felt as he came to Raven. He might have described himself as a man suspended between the worlds of white and red man, a physician not accepted by his people, an employee condemned by the Indian Bureau, a man without a home, a man recently divorced. He would have said he had no future: he could not truly become an Indian who went back to the blanket, for that would be a pretense. He could not go to, say, Kansas City and become an affluent physician, a pointless existence. But all these difficulties were not the entire point. In himself he felt more than could be explained by circumstances, a mysterious and pervasive uneasiness of spirit. He was bewildered. He was in pain.

Raven nodded and said, “We will go tomorrow. Four days. Say nothing of it to the people.”

Raven didn’t need to tell Smith not to talk. Later, Smith thought, everyone will see the scars, and rejoice.

Four days. A sacred number. And a number longer than many guides would have chosen. Maybe Raven wanted Smith to prove something to him. Maybe Raven wanted Smith to prove something to himself. Yes, thought Smith. Yes, I will.

He didn’t know whether he was worthy to pass the test. He didn’t know what he wanted from the sacrifice, what sort of man he wanted to become. He only knew that his old life caused him pain. That he must pass through it and into a new life.

He was scared.

“Tell me about your stump,” said Bat Masterson. They were sitting together up on the crate now, and her stump lay between them, a lump under her skirt.

Elaine looked at him, and she supposed he must find the expression on her face very odd. His word
stump
seemed so brutal, yet mentioning it was kind. Among other things, she knew that she did want to tell someone about it. Dr. Richtarsch answered her questions, which wasn’t the same at all.

So after one very deep breath, and then one more, Elaine began to talk to Bat Masterson about her stump. She told him how it didn’t feel like a stump—it felt like a leg. Her missing foot still got hot and cold. She could almost wiggle its toes. She told him how it constantly fooled her for balance. Simple heft was missing, and that could easily make her fall over when she got into or out of a chair without her crutches, or on or off her bed.

She told him how terribly it hurt when she walked on her peg. That’s why she didn’t walk on the peg in public yet, she just practiced in her room, and wore it when she rode.

She even surprised herself: she told him how it leaked fluids, thin stuff with traces of blood in it, and dirtied her bandages and sometimes her skirts. She went further: she told him how she worried about its smelling.

She recovered by saying, quakingly, that she intended to be the most graceful woman—person!—ever with one leg.

Bat Masterson reached out and took one of her hands in both his big paws. She let him take it. Then he switched and held each of her hands. Meanwhile he looked at her in the most extraordinary way, his gray-blue eyes now tender and full of understanding.

“I want to touch your stump,” he said.

She meant to say no, but her eyes flooded with tears, and the words caught in her throat.

He lifted her skirt a couple of inches and exposed the awful nub end of her leg. He looked at it for a long moment. She thought of the coarse, reddened, folded skin he was looking at, and shuddered. He glanced up at her gently. And he put his hand softly on the stump.

Elaine wept without a sound, tears flooding down her cheeks.

Raven chose a dead cottonwood half a days walk from camp. It stood by the creek, blighted, its trunk broken off halfway up, its limbs leafless and brittle, its bark gone except for patches that looked like scabs.

Four days, Raven had said. Four days Smith would go without food, water, and sleep. Four days he would dance facing the sun, tied to this tree, the flesh of his chest skewered. At the end of the fourth day he would lean back against the rawhide and jerk the wooden pegs out through his skin. Then his sacrifice would be complete, and Raven would bury Smith’s torn flesh at the base of the tree, and he could sleep there.

They said a man making the sacrifice of the piercing sometimes got a vision at the end of the ceremony while he slept. He wondered whether his unworthiness would deprive him of the vision. He wondered if his white-man blood would deprive him. He wondered if dancing during the shortest days of the year, the darkness nearly twice as long as the sunlight, would diminish the sacrifice.

He looked at the sun, low in the south. Though today or tomorrow must be the turning of the winter sun, when it got as low in the sky as it could and the earth moved into winter and toward spring, today was a day of what the whites called Indian summer, warm and mild. It was as though it kept its strength to watch his sacrifice.

Raven drew his knife and motioned for Smith to lie down. He stretched out on the ground and closed his eyes. He felt Raven’s shadow block out the winter sun as his guide knelt over him. Smith took a deep breath. “Cut deep,” Smith asked. He knew that many men made that request as a sign of courage, and that it was seldom granted. He felt the skin above his left nipple pinched up and he began to let the breath out.

Raven’s knife pierced his chest, and the world was pain. While he was in the eruption of pain, the piercing was repeated above his right nipple. Then the wooden skewers were inserted, left and right.

“All right,” said Raven. Smith knew that meant he must open his eyes and begin. He felt too shaken to stand, too weak to speak in protest.

Smith got to his knees and then his feet, shakily. He stared at the sun and let his eyes go out of focus. He knew he didn’t have a chance under the skies of lasting four days. Nevertheless he began to shuffle his feet in the eternal dance to the sun.

Now Bat Masterson sat close to her, one arm around her shoulders in support. Her stump was still exposed, and she couldn’t stop talking, rambling half coherently. The content didn’t feel important. To be leaning against him, to be held a little, to be telling him the truth, that was important.

She spoke of her family and her future. She would go back to the Hampton Institute, she said, where she could teach Indian children again. Probably she would even go on a fund-raising lecture tour and speak of her experiences among the Cheyennes and their need of education. On the tour, she claimed, she would use her peg leg to excellent advantage. And maybe she would write a book, an appeal for help for the Western Indians.

She realized she was being silly, talking on and on, but it felt good, and evidently Bat Masterson liked listening. If he thought her a sentimental fool, he was considerate enough not to say so.