The Powder River (8 page)

Chapter 10

Elaine held on to Adam’s arm, pinching it, and she didn’t care if it hurt. “You better have something to say,” she snapped in English, “and quick.” He kept pulling her away from the circle, where the people were dancing. Calling Eagle had been given a new name, Sings Wolf, and everyone seemed disgustingly elated.

Elaine had tried to sit through the rest of the ceremony—Adam had practically held her down—but she saw and heard almost nothing. Calling Eagle dressed herself—himself!—as a man, starting with the breechcloth. He took a new name, Sings Wolf. He held up weapons and promised to use them against the whites. That brought a rousing chorus of
hous!
from the men and trills from the women. The whole time Elaine fought against dizziness that came high, lurching waves.

She tried to swing Adam around and make him talk to her. He gave her a look of—what?—some maddening combination of chagrin and amusement—and pulled ahead. “Down by the creek,” he said in English. “We’ll talk.”

English—good. They usually spoke in Cheyenne, but now she meant to make herself damned plain.

When they got to the creek, she couldn’t sit down and couldn’t think of a thing to say. Humiliated—she had been savagely humiliated. Deceived, deliberately deceived. Duped, gulled, taken in, cozened, misled, cheated, taken for a ride, flimflammed, made a fool of—
goddammit!

She knew she would get furious all over again later. Furious about degeneracy, and being sucked into living with degenerates. But now she was apocalyptically angry about her husband goddamn
deceiving her!

“I’m sorry,” Adam said.

“Sorry about what?” she demanded, glaring.

“Sorry you had to find out this way,” he answered mildly. He corrected himself, “Sorry you had to find out at all.”

“Why?” she exulted. Her husband was hanging himself.

“Because it doesn’t make any difference,” he said stubbornly. “When he was a woman, he was still a fine person.”

“When he, she, or it was a woman,” she enunciated mockingly.

Adam nodded. “When he was,” he said, making a point of sounding matter-of-fact. “Now he isn’t.”

“Degeneracy doesn’t make any difference,” Elaine said sarcastically. “Pederasty doesn’t make any difference.”

“He’s not a pederast,” Adam answered sharply. “He doesn’t have sex with children. Never did.”

“Oh, you want me to say
so-do-my
.” She punched out the syllables one at a time. “That makes it all right, then.”

Now Adam did sound annoyed. “I don’t know what will make it all right with you. It’s all right with him, it’s all right with me, and it’s all right with the people.”

“Fine. Just fine. Wonderful.”

He clasped her wrist gently, but she jerked her arm away and glared at him.

“It’s our way,” he said pathetically.

“Maybe you better tell me about the rest of
your
way, and his, hers, or its way.”

Adam turned on her now. “Ours, is it, and not yours? Sorry you’re here? Want to get out?” Now he roared. “Why don’t you go, bitch?”

She slapped him. Openhanded, with a full arm swing behind it.

It felt good. Clean. She was done with him and this marriage and these … losers.

She burst into tears.

He let her be. Let her cry by herself. Didn’t reach out, didn’t hold her.

After a few moments she staggered forward and leaned against him. She sobbed hard now, out of control, chest heaving up and collapsing like surf crashing on the sand. He put both arms around her shoulders and stood still and let her sob.

She lay with her head on his lap, her sobbing eased to soft, relentless weeping. She was tired and worn down and frustrated, Smith knew, and living among strangers. He stroked her hair gently and waited.

He remembered when he first went to St. Louis, fourteen, years old, he and his brother Thomas in tow behind their father. Mac Maclean had been born and raised in that frontier town with pretension to Frenchified elegance, and he meant for his sons to get an education there—and at the Westover Academy, a prestigious school.

Smith and Thomas had never slept in a bed, never worn a shoe, never eaten in a restaurant. The first few days the white people drove them crazy. Looked at them baldly, like trying to crawl through their eyeballs into their brains. Touched their beaded pouches and tried to buy them. Asked them prying questions: Who are you? Who are your parents? Are you an Indian?

It was hard enough getting used to the most ordinary things. Wagons would nearly run you down in the street. Everything was crowded, and people jostled and shoved. You had to eat with knives and forks, and you had pants with a fly that buttoned. The boys’ uncle Hugh, a storekeeper of philosophic bent, was much amused.

Smith told his father that he damn sure wouldn’t stay in any town like this, damn sure not. But Mac and Hugh Maclean sweet-talked the boys into staying among the white folks and learning to get along in civilization. Necessary, said their father. Essential, echoed their uncle.

When their father headed back upriver and the boys settled in with Uncle Hugh, things got worse instead of better. Men insulted them on the street. Women and girls wouldn’t talk to them. Clerks who couldn’t even read assumed they were stupid and tried to cheat them on their change.

Worst of all, to Smith, he never knew how people would take him. When he spoke, they acted like he was being forward. When he was silent, they called him sullen. Polite was understood as aloof. Friendly was overfamiliar. Smith acted respectful to people, so he had little eye contact with men, none with women. His respect they misunderstood for deviousness.

He had a rotten time with it. Two people got him through—Uncle Hugh with his sly humor and cunning insights into people, and Mr. Highsmith, the science teacher at the school, with his mad, all-absorbing love of plants. Smith’s uncle taught him to get along in society, and his teacher took him on marvelous field outings to collect specimens.

Society was the hard part. Smith managed it, and after a while it was as easy as speaking English with his father but Cheyenne with his mother. Still, Smith hated it for a long time. He thought the white people were stinkingly offensive. As Elaine thought now about the Cheyenne people.

She had stopped crying, but didn’t want to raise her head.

“Want me to tell you about Calling Eagle?” he asked softly. He apologized in his head to Sings Wolf for using the name of the person who had not yet transformed himself into a warrior.

She nodded. “I may run,” she murmured.

“What?”

“I feel like jumping up and running off.”

Smith wiped her face with his bandanna. “Calling Eagle was a
hemaneh
,” he began. “It means ‘wants to be a woman.’ My people believe that some men are directed by the powers to live as women. They are told when they are boys, or young teenagers, to follow the female way. So we call them
she
, they walk like women, they talk like women, they dress like women, they dance as women, we treat them entirely as women. They take husbands, as women do. They cook, they sew, they do women’s crafts like beadwork and quillwork.

“Still, we keep the awareness that they aren’t women—they’re something special,
hemaneh
.

“They have their own signs of not having been born women, too. Their dress isn’t exactly feminine. They wear little things that men wear. Any Indian would know a
hemaneh
’s dress immediately. But white people don’t.”

He pulled at her fingers, stretching them the way she liked. “People weren’t trying to fool you about Calling Eagle. What she was was there for you to see, in the open. When you were ready to. But we didn’t tell you, because we know white people have a violent reaction to that. Even our white friends do. Even my father did.

“I didn’t tell you either. I was part of the … It must look like a conspiracy. I was afraid to. I should have.”

He caressed her earlobe between thumb and forefinger.

“These people are special to us. They alone can dedicate the medicine-lodge ceremony. They build the bonfires for the scalp dances. They create love songs, set up marriages, and help reconcile troubled couples. They do very beautiful work in beads, quills, and other women’s crafts—even more beautiful, often, than the women.

“Our men ask them to go on hunts and pony raids. Strangely, because of their male power. Their unused male potency.” He hesitated and went on softly, “You see, they aren’t like queers”—he lay the word in gently—“in the white world. They don’t do the same things. They only have sex one way, like women.” He let it sit for a moment, thinking what words would be explicit enough. “They go through life with their virility unexpressed.”

He wondered if she would still be repulsed. He asked himself whether she would want to stay with the tribe, and with him. He knew only that he wanted her to.

“I may run,” she said.

“That’s why the people were so glad at his … transformation. Only a vision could have told Calling Eagle to withhold the male expression. Only a vision could have told Sings Wolf to release it. Now he has a lifetime’s worth to release. Declare. Explode. He will be very powerful in battle.”

He raised her hand to his lips and kissed it lightly.

He waited.

He grew a little tense and waited some more.

At last he spoke. “What are you thinking?”

“I’m afraid, Adam. I’m afraid.”

He lifted her to her feet and held her. And you may yet run, he thought. After a while, uncertain, he kissed her. She responded a little, then more than a little.

They went to their bedrolls and carried them into the night, both rolls on Smith’s big shoulders, Elaine’s arm around his waist. It was awkward, and they staggered like drunks and chuckled at themselves.

Out there in the dark they made love for only the third time in their two weeks of married life. For the first time Smith felt urgency in Elaine.

Urgency, he thought later, looking at the stars while she slept on his shoulder. Good. Something sharp about it, clawing, anxious. Violent, too. Passion. Yes, passion. Good. Unless it was a way of saying good-bye.

Lying there under the stars, in the peace that comes after love, his beloved wife sleeping snuggled close to him, Dr. Adam Smith Maclean felt unreasonably, hopelessly, infinitely forlorn.

Chapter 11

The Human Beings obeyed Crier and scurried into the hills as fast as they could. The infantry was behind them, pushing at them, the cowboys dashed in and out on their horses, raising a lot of dust and noise, and the cavalry was trying to cut the tribe off ahead. Quick, into the little breaks of the hills.

Not that it would necessarily make any difference. The people were flabbergasted at how many soldiers there were. If the whites wanted to stay and fight this time, no Human Being would leave these clumpy little hills, ever.

Some of them hoped that the new medicine of Sings Wolf would save them. They thought of his ancient song:

Ho! Listen! Come to us! Feast!

O wolves!

They knew, though, that the soldiers wanted to get even for General Custer, and probably would.

The young men found a commanding place. Back a little way was a spring. While the men dug holes for rifle pits, the women dug holes to protect themselves and the children. There was nowhere else to get away from the fire.

Little Finger Nail, the painter and singer, showed his young cousin what to do if Nail was shot. “Hold the rifle high,” said Little Finger Nail, “and let the bullet drop on their heads.” Nail sounded cheerful. “If we die here,” he declared several times, “the people will remember us forever.”

A double handful of women came into the men’s rifle pits this time. If the men fell, the women would pick up their guns and shoot until they died, too.

The warriors painted themselves. They sang songs over small objects of power revealed to them in visions and dreams. They put on their war gear, whose protection was spiritual as much as physical. They sang their death songs, declaring that they knew they would die today, preparing their spirits for it, accepting death.

Sings Wolf walked among them, ready. Ready to die. He had never gone into battle before. He wore the breechcloth he had seen on the scaffold, plain moccasins, and nothing else. His face was painted the way it was in his dream. It was white from the eyes up, black from the eyes down. The eyes were circled in red, the mouth in ocher. His hair was woven into a single, long braid. Old Black Hand had given him a necklace of grizzly claws, strong medicine, and he wore it around his neck.

He carried in one hand the cudgel of his husband in his former life, Strikes Foot, the brass-headed sheep’s horn. In the other he held a lance borrowed from a boy. Strange, slight armament, he was declaring, but enough for Sings Wolf, a man of spiritual strength.

He walked among the warriors, letting them see that he was ready, letting them feel his power. He felt it himself, welling up in his body, seventy years’ worth of masculine vitality. His arms felt fluid, his legs more, supple and strong than they had since he was young. In his heart and his mind he was fierce.

Sings Wolf strode with formal dignity among his people. He did not know what he might do today, and he did not wonder. Maybe he would strike a coup. Maybe he would take a scalp, his first. Maybe he would lead the young men in a war charge. Maybe he would live—maybe he would die. But he walked with body and spirit elevated by the powers. Live or die, he stood transfigured.

Elaine could not bear it. She crouched next to Adam in the pit while he fired his lever-action Winchester. When he told her to, she reached up without looking and cooled the barrel with her wet rag. And she thought she would go berserk. Turn into a woman tetched, or
witko
, as the Cheyennes’ cousins the Lakotas said.

It was the noise. First the soldiers attacked, infantry and dismounted cavalry running closer and closer while the Cheyennes held their fire. Then, when Little Wolf called for return fire, this mind-numbing, sense-blasting din.

Elaine would have done anything to put an end to the madness. Anything. She thought her mind was fragmented, a rock smashed by sledgehammers of sound.

She felt shorn of her other sensations. She still saw, touched, and smelled, more or less, but it was all a screaming chaos. She felt an urge to hold on to the earth so she wouldn’t fall off.

Adam yelled to her something about a charge off the hills behind them, to keep some mounted soldiers away from their rear. Elaine could barely sort out his words. It seemed so stupid that while the tornado sucked her understanding out, Adam would try to say something about the idiot pranks of the men fighting, on either side.

Wasn’t it enough that these people, these good-hearted but crazy-minded Human Beings, were throwing their lives away because a queer decided to stop wearing dresses? In front of Adam she called Sings Wolf not
him
but
it
.

Suddenly the shooting around her stopped. An uncanny quiet held the air, a space between realities.

Then the world lurched back into its awful joint. Cheyenne war-horses roared almost right over her—a mad war charge. Sings Wolf rode at the fore. He, she, or it held a frail boy’s lance held absurdly high, his, her, its body armored by his, her, its fantasies. He, she, or it was bellowing out its new song about wolves.

In her mind Elaine heard raucous, cackling laughter. A sudden memory swept through her—the stupid laughter of neighbor boys in Massachusetts. She had caught them cutting the legs off frogs one by one and throwing the creatures into the water to see if they would sink. Then the boys smiled slyly at each other with their eyes, boasting of their daring.

In eerie inner stillness she watched the warriors gallop down the hill toward the lines of soldiers, lifting their screams and their clubs and lances to the sky, while the sky threw back at them simple, gray, solid, murdering bullets. In her mind’s eye she saw a bullet smack into a rib cage, sundering flesh, splintering rib, smashing lung to a pulp of blood, pink meat, and air bubbles. In her mind’s eye—this must be what they mean by a vision, she thought caustically—she saw a bloody stump of leg whirl end over end through the air, an arm suddenly show a black cavern where it met its ribs, a headless body teeter on a horse’s bare back, sway giddily, then catapult into space, end over slow-turning end, against the sky like a dark sun.

Adam’s yell hit her brusquely. He was standing up, waving his rifle in the air, hallooing. Down on the plain the warriors rode back from the charge, and the soldiers ran back toward their mounts and wagons. She saw, sickeningly, that Adam was exhilarated, infected by the madness. She registered remotely that the soldiers really were falling back. The warriors regrouped and charged again. The soldiers faced them raggedly and made smoke puff out of their rifles. Red men and white men fell into disarray and retreated.

Adam whooped. Elaine looked at him with a shudder. He was so stupid. They were so stupid, all these men. And Adam’s man-woman grandmother.

Adam sang a few words—her mind didn’t make words into sense anymore. He grinned at her absurdly. She buried her face in her hands and tremblers quaked up and down her nerves.

The soldiers didn’t come back. It was unbelievable, it was too good to be true, it was glorious. Smith watched the infantry and cavalry and even the cowboys move off to a distance and give up the fighting.

“They can’t stand the taste of steel,” he shouted out loud, surprising himself. “Not when it’s rammed down their throats!” He was exultant, his nerves jumpy with excitement. He looked at Elaine. She seemed sort of traumatized. He’d heard of soldiers in the Civil War getting like that in battle, going blank.

He touched her arm and she jerked it away. She’d be better in a few minutes. A little peace would calm her down. So would knowing that the people had driven the goddamned soldiers off. The people led by Sings Wolf. Smith wanted to sing hallelujah.

Why not? “Hallelujah!” he hollered. He gave forth a few notes of the “Hallelujah Chorus” tune. “Hal-lay-aylu-yah!”

That night the Human Beings slipped out of the hills and made their way to the north, once more to the north, toward the crossing of the Arkansas River.

They talked it over, and decided it was the only thing to do—go north, walk toward the next river and across the next railroad track, trudge around the next town, circle the next fort—head north until they catch you and kill you. Or until you get home, home to the Powder River country.

Yes, there might be sentries tonight, and you might not get away. But go. It may be futile. What else is there to do?

Many of them now began to believe that it was not futile. They felt a conviction that they would reach the Powder River country and be permitted to stay there. In the beginning some had felt that conviction, and many had thought this journey inevitable but futile. Of those who believed, some were foolish or naive. Others were simply prideful and bullheaded. But a few thought they had a hazy glimpse of the future. Those few were men and women of vision. Others believed in the vision because they believed in the seers.

Tonight, after the Human Beings had turned back the soldiers again, against absurd odds, more believed. More dared to hope.

They would still take whatever came. But more of them smiled when they thought about it.

Sings Wolf smiled. It was a visionary’s faraway smile, yet it was crossbred with irony and wariness. He had hoped at the beginning, barely hoped, and thought he was deluding himself. Now all was changed. He was transformed from a woman into a man. He was endowed with potency. He led a battle charge, and the powers expressed their will through him. Through him the people were more potent.

And the white soldiers seemed less potent. Twice they had come, seeming formidable in their strength, and twice they had gone away. No one knew why they went away—probably even they did not know. The war cries of the strong had turned futile, and the war cries of the weak had gotten strong.

Today Sings Wolf turned the soldiers away. Tonight he still could feel power rising in him. Maybe he wouldn’t get home—he was old, and the powers could abandon his old body at any moment—but he still felt hope that the people would get home. What was crazy was, his hope no longer seemed crazy.

The Human Beings went quietly through the night. They found no sentries and headed for the Arkansas contentedly enough. Yes, the soldiers would be waiting for them at the river crossing. But they would venture forth, and the venturing no longer felt hopeless.