The Powder River (25 page)

Elaine shook violently.

Suddenly she felt weary beyond weary. She wanted to sleep and knew there was no hope of getting back to town tonight. Well, to hell with her reputation. She and Bat Masterson would need each other to stay warm.

She turned to him and searched his face. How was he responding to being refused? Would he resort to force? She could only wonder.

“Sheriff,” she said, “would you build the fire up? Then lie next to me and hold me?
Just
hold me?”

Miraculously, he did. She snuggled against him and wept quietly.

After dawn Smith awoke. Raven sat beside him, patient, watchful, waiting. Smith kept his head still and looked around. The mundane earth surrounded him, the simple hills and rocks he had seen here four days ago. That seemed reassuring. He wasn’t dreaming. He was glad to see the world again, and sorry to leave the world of his dreams.

He took the canteen from Raven, a stolen army canteen, he noticed, and drank long and deep. Water, he thought with satisfaction. He had dreamed and dreamed of flowing water.

It was time to go back to the tribe now. He had made his sacrifice. He had seen his dreams. He did feel in a way new, aware of something emergent in himself, like a pupa becoming a new creature. He smiled strangely. He was pregnant, and about to give birth to himself. The idea made him laugh a little. It also made him feel quivery, sometimes exhilarated, sometimes downright afraid.

Chapter 3

Elaine fought slumping in the hard chair in Vernon May’s office. She was tired—she forbade herself to use the word
exhausted
. She had traveled two days on the train to get to Omaha from Dodge City. At least she was through with that stockyard town and the attentions, all too persistent and all too pleasant, of Sheriff Bat Masterson. Dear Sheriff Masterson. He had never stopped trying, in his amiable way. She did not resent it, but she did not want carnal knowledge of him. To her carnal knowledge meant Adam. Maybe that would change someday.

For now she was alone, and it was darned hard. She had to go to bed and get up alone. Eat alone. Manage her valise and change trains and get to a boardinghouse alone, and get to this office today. All the while her damned stump hurt mercilessly, a stern forecast of what the half century of the rest of her life was going to be like.

A few days here, only three, she hoped, and she could go home. Home sounded wonderful right now.

A woman about her age sat across from Elaine, pale and drawn and clutching her arms as though she was freezing. Elaine could hear the muffled voices of a child and a man in the next room, presumably this woman’s child and Mr. Vernon May. She wondered what sort of ghoul Vernon May must be, to choose a life of working with mangled limbs. Not as strange as being an undertaker, but ghoulish, still.

Then the little boy came out in Vernon May’s arms, laughing and whomping Mr. May on the head with his new wooden arm. Amazing. The child’s mother went to take the boy into her arms, and the kid posed the arm for her—he was proud of it, at least for the moment. So maybe Vernon May was a pied piper. How had he persuaded a child of about seven, facing a tragedy, to look at it so cheerfully? A wonderful, man surely.

When the boy and his mother left the waiting room, Elaine stood with difficulty, shook the man’s hand, and introduced herself. “Elaine Cummings.” She had decided to use her maiden name, like the proud suffragist she was. She went on, “You must be a miracle worker.”

Mr. May looked at her with compassionate eyes. “No miracles, I’m afraid. We
can
make many of you more comfortable.” He held out his hand for her to go through into the examining room before him. He had a cute bald spot reddened by the plains sun. Stumping forward in some pain, Elaine wondered how anyone could spend his life facing people who’d lost their arms or legs and stay as cheerful as Mr. May. Working with cripples, substituting wooden arms and legs for the limbs God gave them—Ugh!

He put her onto a table and began to unstrap her peg. She knew only a little about him from Dr. Richtarsch. During the Rebellion Richtarsch had amputated limbs with compound fractures routinely, as was the custom at that time, since infection otherwise killed the patients. He had an orderly with a knack for making the soldiers’ wooden pegs a lot more comfortable—Vernon May. Mr. May made wax impressions of the stumps, with all their quirky irregularities, and then carved, filed, and sanded a block of wood to sit atop the peg and fit the stump most elegantly, said Dr. Richtarsch. “Quite a skill that chap has.” After the war, Richtarsch and other army surgeons encouraged him to set up a private practice and told other physicians about him. In the end Mr. May relocated to Omaha, which amused Elaine, because he spoke the sharp accent of the street kids of New York City.

He inspected her peg and told her that he would make the wax impression now, and she could keep using the buffalo-hide padding if she wanted. For the moment she should just relax.

But Elaine couldn’t relax. Every touch on her stump seemed irritating as the shock she’d felt in the electric machine at school. So she finally asked for something to read while he worked, anything, as a distraction. Mr. May handed her the
Omaha Herald
. And there—she jumped when she saw it.

Smith sat stripped to his breechcloth before the fire in his brush lodge, smoking and staring into the flames. He touched the big scabs on his chest, which itched. He didn’t care if his women thought him strange, half-naked in the middle of winter. He was bothered. He had been fretting all day about what his sacrifice meant, whether his dreams had been a vision, what he had brought back from his days in the wilderness of spirit, what he had learned that might inform the inner circle that represented his life, the outer circle of the life of his family, and the outermost circle, the life of his people. So far he could see nothing.

He chuckled bitterly to himself. His people’s life was utterly blighted—half of them here hiding from the soldiers, poor, hungry, and half-naked, the other half captured and imprisoned at Fort Robinson until they could be herded back, like livestock, to a country they hated.

His own life, if anything, seemed to him more blighted. He had no wife, no proper family, no true people, no culture he belonged to, no country. He was a man of many parts, too many, too various, and ill-fitted. He was equally spattered with the blood of the battlefield and of the hospital ward—his fingers had peeled off the scalp and had tied off the bleeding vein. His ears and feet loved the music of the song of the scalp dance, and of the Frenchie’s fiddle, and of waltzes he had heard in Boston drawing rooms. He liked his Prince Albert coat, and liked as well his reddish black hair worn long to his shoulders with the deerskin pouch braided into it. He was a mess.

He was cursing himself, too. He had pondered something truly stupid—trying to kill his white-man self, becoming a true blanket Indian. It was stupid because he couldn’t change the way his very mind worked. Every flow of water, every rolling pebble brought gravity to consciousness. Every sunrise and sunset reminded him of Copernicus. A compass suggested magnetism. A watch was to him not a mystic revelator but a tool ingeniously constructed of springs and weight and counterbalances—and he loved the ingenuity that so constructed it.

Stupid. Father, he said inside himself, I apologize.

Mother, he thought, picturing Annemarie in the trading post at the mouth of the Little Powder River, I will see you in the spring. Right now he took no joy in this prospect.

God, if he could only stop his mind from churning. What did his women think? Why had he failed at the sacrifice? Had he actually failed at his sacrifice—or was he looking for the wrong result, looking to get instead of give? Why did he feel so confused?

He stood up abruptly. He had an idea. He would stop his damned mind from rolling over and over restlessly. He went outside.

It was dark. Most people probably were eating now. He wouldn’t be seen.

He walked down to the small lake. It wasn’t quite frozen—the ice was thin and patchy. He walked a quarter of the way around the lake and clambered out onto a big rock that extended a dozen feet into the lake. Quickly he threw off his breechcloth and leggings and leaped into the lake.

He reeled. He yearned for something hard to hold on to, lest he fall off the circling earth. He thought he was bellowing, but then realized nothing was coming from his mouth but the hiss of his own breath.

He got the use of some of his limbs back and scrambled out.

God
damn
, he was cold. He chafed his chest and arms with his big hands. He’d never done the plunge except after a sweat bath. Until now. What a difference.

He started walking back toward his hut. He would warm up in his blankets, then eat a little, and then juggle. The thought of the ceaseless motion of the round balls pleased him.

It worked, he thought. I intimidated my mind into switching off for a while.

CHEYENNE OUTBREAK AT FORT ROBINSON

Elaine’s fingers clawed at the edge of the paper unconsciously as she read.

The Cheyennes had broken out of a barracks they’d been imprisoned in at Camp Robinson, Nebraska, in a hopeless situation, and many were dead. Trying to give their families a chance to get away, twenty-one men were killed in the first ten minutes of the outbreak. Nine women and children also died in the first minutes.

The newspaper ripped down the middle on one page. Elaine hadn’t known she was gripping it so hard. She held the torn edges together and skimmed the article for a list of the dead, and Adam’s name. Nothing.

More than a hundred escapees—why not more than two hundred? Had half of them died? She forced herself to push away the thought of the ones she cared for individually, didn’t permit herself to wonder whether the dead were Lisette, Rain and Big Soldier, Sings Wolf, and Adam.

They fled, the
Herald
said, without winter clothing, blankets, or food, and almost unarmed, through an unusually bitter Nebraska winter. It was assumed they would try to get to the Sioux reservation at Pine Ridge, South Dakota, and ask Red Cloud for shelter. They were judged by people who knew the country to have no chance at all of defying the elements and escaping the army long enough to reach Red Cloud.

Elaine let a wave of dizziness pass.

The Cheyennes had broken out of the barracks where they’d been held because the commanding officer, Captain Wessells, known as “the Little Flying Dutchman,” had deprived all of them, men, women, and children, of food for four days, and of water for another.

“Bastard,” snapped Elaine, and Vernon May shot her the oddest look over the wax he was molding.

Wessells said his intention was to make the Cheyennes agree to go back to Indian territory, as ordered by the Interior Department.

These Indians, though, had run away from their reservation there in September and astounded the civilized world by fighting their way against overwhelming odds all the way to the country where they wanted their reservation, near their Sioux relatives.

Despite this proof, Wessells evidently underestimated their resolve. They chose to die rather than to leave their home country.

Here was a speech by Morning Star. Why the hell was there no mention of Little Wolf? Was Adam among the escapees or not? Among the dead or the living?

“We bowed to the will of the Great Father,” Morning Star said, “and we went far into the south where he told us to go. There we found that a Cheyenne cannot live. We belong here. Many times you promised us an agency, but you only took us far to the south country, saying, ‘Go and see. You can come back.’ Then when we were dying there, and sick for our home, you said that was a mistake, that we must stay because everything was changed. You are now the many and we are the few, but we know that it is better to die fighting on the way to our old home than to perish of the sicknesses.”

Elaine was surprised that the newspaper printed this speech. Hadn’t Morning Star and Little Wolf told the whites the same thing all last summer in Indian territory? Hadn’t they demonstrated it beyond doubt by striking out for home? Old news.

Where in the hell was Adam?

One straw to grasp: Dr. Moseley, caring for the wounded in the post hospital, said, “The will to live runs strong in these people.”

Elaine finally realized the
Herald
Mr. May gave her was a week old. She would have the livery service take her to the office of the
Herald
, wherever it was, and read everything. God, when would Mr. May finish with this damn mold?

Smith juggled. Then he slept a few hours, ate a little more, and juggled again in the dark. He could sense the dawn coming.

He loved the feel of the ivory balls in his hands, smooth, hard, unforgivingly round, in their way sensual. And he loved the eternal motion of his hands. He wondered if he could juggle forever and never drop a ball. He wanted to go on forever.

And as Smith juggled toward his forever, an awareness came to him, stealthily yet fully, like a person who did not enter a room but is just suddenly there, standing palpable by a window.

He became aware that he heard new inner music. That was odd, because he had never known that he heard inner music. Yet it was clear. He heard an inner music that was, well … He couldn’t say. Whatever it was, it was him. He was different.

He wondered idly where this new inner music would lead him, whether he should dare to follow it. And at that he laughed at himself out loud. He couldn’t choose to follow it or not to follow it anywhere. It was within him. He might be able to turn it off—turn it off with that damned dialogue in his head!—but then he would simply be not listening. There was no other music to hear.

It was so important, and yet natural and commonplace, that he kept his mind on his juggling, his eyes a little glazed. Perhaps some other awareness would come to him, full-blown as from the head of Zeus.

It didn’t. But he got an idea to do something. The predawn light gave him the urge.

He went outside, looked around the valley lit lilac by the coming sun, drew the cold of a winter dawn into his lungs. And then he began to sing. It was a song he’d first heard sitting beside his father twenty years ago, a song sung then by an old man, a way of saying thank you, Maheo, for a long and fruitful life. He had wondered at the song then, not understanding. He had heard it on dozens of dawns in his life—it was a common song. For the first time he wanted to sing out its blessing.

He, our father,

He has shown his mercy unto me.

I walk the straight road.

He sang it slowly, lingeringly, with feeling. And for the first time since his wedding day, he felt light-hearted.

George Miller, the editor of the Omaha
Herald
, a rakish-looking young fellow, was gracious to Elaine. He not only showed her what had appeared in his newspaper about the Cheyenne outbreak at Fort Robinson, he handed her a file folder of telegraph sheets and clippings from other papers. “The death dance of the Cheyennes,” he said with glinting eyes and ironic smile, “is big news.”

She read for nearly an hour, in tears the entire time. The Cheyennes had broken out at night. Aside from the thirty dead, thirty-five had been recaptured that first night, mostly women and children. (Almost no names—how maddening!) A leader named Wild Hog had been held apart, and so was “in captivity,” like an animal in a zoological garden. Tangle Hair, the Dog Soldier leader, was wounded and recaptured. The army was tracking a large group, three dozen or more said to be led by Little Finger Nail, westward along the bluffs of the White River, where they were hard to ferret out. The whereabouts of Morning Star and his family were unknown. (Why was Nail mentioned and not Little Wolf? Why never a mention of Adam? Wasn’t a half-breed doctor newsworthy?)