The Powder River (24 page)

She was waiting, she said, for the dreams about her leg to cease. Almost every night she dreamed that she was walking, walking normally, on two legs, and her right foot was suddenly missing below the knee—or clear up to the hip!—and she came suddenly crashing down. She always woke up with a horrible start, in her bed.

He reached out again and laid his hand gently on her stump. It felt like a healing touch, a blessing with a hint of miracle, and she accepted it gratefully. She laid her head on his shoulder. She told him softly that she also had dreams—she’d never have thought she’d tell anybody this—where worms crawled into the end of her leg and up little blood vessels toward her heart.

He kissed her forehead gently. She didn’t stop him, and she knew that was a mistake, but she liked the kiss some, and she very much liked everything else.

She put a hand up to touch his mouth and ease it away a little, but he took her hand in his and held it to his chest. He lifted her chin. He kissed her on the lips. She waited, paid attention, explored to discover whether she wanted to kiss him back.

He touched her right nipple through her dress. The sensation was incredibly intense. He circled it lightly, teasingly, and she gasped. She circled his neck with one arm and began to kiss him back.

He unbuttoned her bodice and touched delicately the skin where her breasts began to rise. She lay back in his arm and kissed him. Elaine realized that she was weeping with gratitude.

Adam Smith Maclean, born to Robert Burns Maclean, a Scots fur trader, and named for a great Scots political philosopher—Adam Smith Maclean, son of Annemarie Charbonneau Maclean, a Cheyenne woman sired by the French-Canadian fur man Toussaint Charbonneau and out of an Assiniboin woman; son also of Lisette Genet Maclean, of Sioux and French-Canadian blood—Adam Smith Maclean, an Indian trader, a Cheyenne warrior, a college graduate, a doctor of medicine—Adam Smith Maclean danced naked before the sun.

He danced for the sun. He danced into the sun. He danced to become the sun.

His eyes swam in its light. They were red, unfocused, drooped, blinded by the weak, amber light of the pale sun from its winter-solstice low. They were exhausted, glazed, seeing nothing.

Smith’s body was attached to the dead cottonwood by strips of rawhide. The strips were tied to the skewers that penetrated his chest, and to the tree. The blood on his chest, belly, and legs was dried and scaly. Occasionally fresh blood seeped downward from his wounds, forming on the old blood a red goo.

He was exhausted and was mired in his exhaustion. He was wake-dreaming of pistons, the huge pistons of the engine of a steamship that he had once toured in Boston Harbor. His legs felt as those pistons had looked, astonishingly massive and heavy, geared to rotate up with patience-straining slowness, to change direction invisibly at the apex, and by the tiniest degrees to descend. His legs were approaching immobility. There in front of the tree, in front of Maheo, Smith would soon lift his legs and set them down more and more slowly, until he changed only at the rate flesh rots, and the wind turns rocks to dust.

Time moved by just as slowly—even more slowly—and he had given up hope of this day’s ever reaching noon, much less sundown.

And then he saw: he was covered with blood, deluged in it, not only his chest but his hair, his face and neck, his belly and groin and legs. He was inundated with his own blood. And standing in it. His feet squished feebly in what felt like muck, but it was blood, his vital force mixed with the dirt. Every moment it was deeper, every moment it sucked his legs deeper, and soon he would be swallowed, to his waist, to his neck, to his nostrils, until he drowned in his own blood.

On this third day of his sacrifice, exhausted, starved, desperate with thirst and fatigue, Smith danced through the strangest and most exotic lands of consciousness. Sometimes he had vivid dreams while fully awake: Once he nearly got trampled by horses in Boston. He lay in the road and the horses pounded toward him, pulling their carriage, but they never arrived—they started toward him again, and again, rampaging endlessly toward him, trying timelessly to stomp him into the dust, and never arriving.

Another time he went on a long trip with his mother Annemarie up into the Yellowstone country. They were looking for something, he wasn’t sure what, though sometimes he wondered if it was his father’s body. The landscape turned crazy on them—not merely hot springs that killed the nearby trees and wrapped them with winding sheets of minerals, and queer geysers, but a mountain where everything was dead—grasses, trees, elk, even the birds had turned to stone. It was a place of sorrow, worse than death, because truly lifeless.

Sometimes he heard music, cosmic music from no instruments that ever existed, ethereal, unimaginably beautiful, and utterly indescribable.

Sometimes he fell ceaselessly through freezing clouds, his hands and feet turned blue, his breath turned to rime all over his body, and he felt himself suffocating.

Occasionally, as now, he felt light-footed, and charged with a buoyant and infinite energy. Dancing, he could feel time pass magically, minutes singing by in a simple lifting and descent of one foot. The foot would rise as gently as fog lifts, stay in the air as long as a leaf takes to unfurl in spring, and fall to earth as lightly as midsummer sunbeams alight.

Sometimes not merely his foot but his entire body rose delicately into the air, and his feet trod softly through space, like milkweed floating. When these moments came, he would take deep rest, and refresh himself for his eternal dance into the sun, his dance that would end when he melded into his life-giving father.

They were beautiful to Smith, these infinitely nuanced movements that allowed time to sing by. By this miraculous power given by his sun father, he might dance from the sun’s midpoint to its setting in half a dozen steps.

Not that he had the strength to last a single step of this dancing—his strength, though he was tall and well muscled, his strength had failed. Now he continued through the energy brought him by the all-giving sun, and during the night by the sun’s daughter, the moon.

The Tsistsistas-Suhtaio said that all life and strength came from the sun. Smith was a scientist—he was many things, too many, but scientist was one of them—so he knew in more secular terms that all life and power on earth came from the sun. Now he knew it in a new way, resoundingly personal, infinitely precious, and for the first time the knowledge was truly his.

He had given up his own power. His legs and arms and body had wearied and fallen. Without food, without water, with only an occasional brief rest, he was dancing, dancing the sun and moon around the sky. He had surrendered to the sun, and it had entered his flesh and his bones and energized them endlessly in this gentle, lovely, lilting dance. Sometimes, his eyes closed, he felt that he rose directly into a shaft of the sun’s light and danced there weightless, suspended, a mote of dust in the air. Sometimes he felt that he traveled immense distances on one of the beams, off the earth and past the clouds and beyond the atmosphere, toward the sun father itself. Always something would bring him back to the world, perhaps the gentle reminder of his guide Raven to open his eyes and gaze into the sun. And for that reminder and his return to earth, Smith was grateful.

With pristine inner eyes, Smith saw the earth as bountiful, as nourishing, as his beloved mother. Perhaps earth was not the only world to live in—Sehan, the trail of the Milky Way that lay beyond death, was said to be a good place—but he loved the earth, loved its grasses and its trees, its various beasts, its vast seas, its overarching skies, and particularly its flowing streams, fecund with life, ceaseless in motion, brilliant with reflections of the sky and the sun. Most of all he loved its people. For the first time he saw their trials, their struggles, their enmities, their pain and confusion for the mere thrashings of the spirit they were, unnecessary, futile, to be shed like a cocoon so a human being could take to the air and then look back on his struggling self with pity and affection.

Now Smith loved everyone, his father especially, both his mothers, his sister who had become a town wife, his brother and sister who walked the Milky Way trail, his grandfather Sings Wolf, recently lost, his deceased uncle-friend Jim Sykes, called the Man Who Doesn’t Stir Air When He Walks, his other uncle-friend, the Jew known as Peddler, his favorite teachers at college, his comrades there. He loved also those he had hated, Nelly Burns, Twist, and the man who killed his father and his brother, Owen Mackenzie. He loved even the one who had hurt him most, Elaine Cummings Maclean. He pronounced in his mind his infinite benediction on them all and wished they could hear it. It is well, he said to them, it is well.

When my eyes ceased to see, he thought, I began to see.

The time came at the end of the fourth day. It was the day Smith thought was Christmas Day, the fourth day of the new winter, the winter the whites would call 1879. He danced all day, as he had the three days before—a cosmic dance not on the earth, or toward the majestic sun, that king of kings, that lord of hosts, but in and out of manifold and unimaginable worlds of the spirit. Long ago his body had surrendered. But his spirit, energized by the sun, danced the body onward, and the spirit mounted on wings.

But now the sun was setting for the fourth time of his sacrifice, setting not in a flaming eruption of glory, but in a quiet glow of amber light on scudding clouds, a wan light, like the sun on wet river rocks. Straight to the south and on east, heavy, dark clouds blocked the sky, and Smith thought that the cattle towns of western Kansas must be getting a snowstorm. It was truly winter.

He directed his mind back to the matter at hand. A couple of minutes ago, Raven had said, “It is time to break loose from the pole.”

That meant he must do what he had dreaded for all four days—lean back against the rawhide thongs that attached his chest to the sacred cottonwood. He must hurl himself backward. He must rip the skewers from his breast.

He feared that fear might keep him from using his full strength to tear the skewers out. He feared fainting from the pain. He feared even more that he might faint before the skewers tore through, and then he would have to throw his weight against the crazy, stretching strength of his skin over and over, the flesh pulling away from the muscle beneath but not breaking. He had seen that happen at the sun dance.

Therefore, coward that he was, Smith walked forward slowly toward the bare cottonwood, and then ran backward a few steps, testing. Yes, his legs would carry him backward at a run a little. He tested a few backward steps again and decided that he could summon more strength—that father sun would grant him more strength—than he thought he had.

He stepped backward until the rawhide strips were nearly taut. He reached down and aligned three stones leading to that spot so he could anticipate the moment of tautness accurately.

He walked forward all the way to the cottonwood. Then, at first slowly, he began trotting backward. Then faster. Then desperately fast. For an instant the thought shot through him that his strength was failing. Then he saw the first of the stones. He took two decisive steps backward, the most vigorous he could manage, threw his arms backward, hurled his entire body into the air. From mid-air he knew nothing more but pain.

Smith woke up to find Raven cutting the ripped flesh from his chest. Smith knew Raven would bury it at the base of the naked tree. He let himself drift into unconsciousness again.

He woke once more when he felt water pouring into his mouth. Smith drank the sweet liquid, the milk of the breast of his mother the earth. Raven bathed Smith’s face a little in it, and laid his head down, and covered him with a blanket.

“Take just this for now,” Raven said. He spooned a little broth of some kind into Smith’s mouth. “Sleep,” he said. “Sleep.” The word seemed indescribably seductive.

He slept. He dreamed. He dreamed of the substance he loved most on the earth, water, flowing water.

Elaine watched Bat Masterson’s lips as he sucked her nipple and played with it lightly with his tongue. His was a well-formed head, and she liked the sight of it. And he was making a sensual tide flood through her body.

She lay on the blankets from the carriage, the top half of her dress pushed down to her stomach and the bottom half, she feared, pulled up to her belly. Why not? she said to herself wildly. Why not? She had never felt so mad before.

He kissed her belly, kissed it over and over again. Then he slowly, teasingly pulled out the bow knot that kept her bloomers up—it felt incredibly sensual—and gently pulled them down. If she felt a little like an animal being field-dressed, she had not known how delectable it could be to be maneuvered and subjected to a man’s will, a mere thing of his pleasure. He touched her between her legs and sent an electric rage through her.

He knelt between her legs-—now she was lost. He lowered his trousers, and came onto her, and kissed her, and she kissed him back, and crazily a voice that belonged to her said into his dark mustache, “No.”

She stiffened.

“No,” she said again. It just came out. “Please no.” She knew she’d thought of her juggler.

Bat Masterson wriggled on her, and she yearned for him to be in her. It wasn’t fair.

“No!” she said, louder. Thank you, juggler.

He wriggled, and it was almost too late.

She rocked to one side. He held on and locked his eyes fiercely on hers. She rocked again and got a little breathing room. “Sheriff, I’ve decided to say no. Please.”

Something murky moved through his predatory eyes. For a moment she was afraid, sharply afraid. Then he rose onto his knees and stood, half-naked and tumescent, over her.

In a few moments she made herself decent. She rolled onto her one fit knee and looked at the window. She held out her hand to Bat Masterson and said softly, “Would you help me to the window, please?” He supported her in a gentlemanly way.

This Christmas evening was terrible—at least she supposed it was evening. She could see nothing but the snow slanting horizontal in the wind, no earth, no sky, no light. The snow was an indeterminate gray white, and she couldn’t even tell if the sun was still up. The surrey, parked just a few steps away, was invisible. Snow was drifted high against the front steps.