Tie My Bones to Her Back (21 page)

“Ah, Miss Dousmann, what a pity,” he said. “A brave man maimed, as so many were in the war. For this, too, is a war, you know. Yet there are persons in this great nation of ours, mainly in the cities of the East, who are demanding that the Congress pass laws to prohibit the hunting of the buffalo. These foolish gentlemen, knowing nothing of the West or of the hostile, uncivilized savages who infest it, call the buffalo hunter a vandal and a profiteer. A criminal, if you will! On the contrary, Miss Dousmann, I believe that instead of prohibiting such hunts, the Congress ought to vote all buffalo hunters a hearty and unanimous thanks. In fact, it ought to appropriate sufficient funds to strike and present to each hunter—yourself included—a medal of bronze showing a dead buffalo on one side and a discouraged redskin on the other.”

Officers within hearing said, “Hear, hear!”

He raised his voice and his wineglass in response, warming to his audience. “By God, Miss Dousmann, the buffalo hunters have done more in the past few years to settle the blamed Indian question than the whole damned Regular Army has in the past thirty years! Why, they’re destroying the very
commissary
of the Indian nations. And as Napoleon so wisely put it, an army fights on its stomach. We should be sending the buffalo hunters
free rifles and free ammunition
, not mealymouthed complaints from a gang of limp-wristed Eastern fops who never skinned so much as a jackrabbit!” He emptied his glass, as did the whole table. Colonel Dodge signaled a steward to bring more wine.

“Believe me, Miss Dousmann,” the general continued in a quieter, more reasonable tone, “if we want lasting peace on these prairies—if we want to see great towering cities and hives of industry humming on the plains, which of course we do—we must allow the hide man to kill, skin, and sell until the last buffalo is slain. Only then can these grasslands—the greatest, richest, finest pasturage in the world—be covered with speckled cattle and what the Eastern fops so cynically call ‘the festive cowboy.’ For civilization truly follows the hunter, as surely as rain follows the plow.”

The officers and their ladies rose spontaneously as one and cheered. Huzzahs and loud hand clapping, tears, spilled wine, heaving bosoms. Jenny remained silent. She wanted to object, so many thoughts raced through her brain—the aridity of the Great West, painfully obvious to anyone who had traveled it, would alone prevent the growth of great cities or any sort of civilization worthy of the name. And the incessant wind—what white woman could consider living permanently in a world where dust crept into everything? And the cold, the numbing, nerve-killing cold, always waiting to leach the very life from man, woman, or child? Only Indians could live happily in this world of the Great West, and a few like-minded whites who might as well themselves be Indians. But they had to keep moving to do it—they had to follow the herds.

She realized, just then, that she was becoming one of them.

T
HE FOLLOWING MORNING
, before he returned to his headquarters in Chicago, General Sheridan stopped at the infirmary to visit Otto. “How are you doing, son?” he asked after he’d seated himself beside Otto’s cot.

“About as well as can be expected, General.” Though he was awed by the presence of the great man, Otto had never had more than grudging respect for him. “Little Phil” Sheridan was a bulldog of a fighter, but his willingness to kill his own troops in the furtherance of his career was legendary in the Union Army. In that respect he was the equal of Grant and Sherman, now President of the United States and overall commander of the U.S. Army, respectively.

“That’s good, that’s good,” Sheridan said. “No complaints, no whining. What I’d expect of a Black Hat soldier. Tell me, was you at the Wilderness?”

“Yes, sir, I was.”

“A grim fight, that,” the general said, shaking his massive head. The dark hair shot with gray was cut so short it looked as if it were painted on. “My cavalry didn’t see much action there, thanks to the terrain and the timidity of George Meade. But we more than made up for it later in the campaign—at Yellow Tavern.”

“That’s where you killed Jeb Stuart.”

“Yes, it was, that damned Rebel poseur, with his yellow sash and his ostrich-plume hat and his goddamn cape lined with red satin. It was one of George Custer’s men put a pistol ball through Stuart’s miserable guts. John Huff was his name, an elderly private of the 5th Michigan Cavalry. A satisfying day, that one was.”

“General Custer’s making quite a name for himself out here in the West,” Otto said.

“Yes—as a butcher.” The general laughed. “If you’re to believe the Eastern papers, that is. He did too good a job for me down on the Washita. But you’re an Indian fighter, your sister tells me. You understand that this is total war. The only way we can hope to put an end to all this rape of our women, this burning of homes, this hit-and-run warfare at which the redman excels, is to burn him out of the West, root and branch. Or starve him into submission. You buffalo boys are doing just that, destroying his means of livelihood. Why, take the Cheyenne, just one tribe—though, granted, the cruelest of the lot. No better than Mosby’s or Quantrill’s banditti—sneaking in when we’re not looking, pretending to be what they ain’t, coming up to a farmhouse door and begging for food; then when a softhearted farm wife fixes ’em a hot meal, what do they do? They throw it in her face and rape her before ripping off her scalp. They kill all her children and livestock, and burn the place down. But you know that, I’m sure.”

“I have good friends among the Cheyenne,” Otto said. “But yes, they’re bloody-minded.”

General Sheridan frowned and rose from his chair. “I must be moving on,” he said. “Duty calls, alas. I told your sister last night at dinner that the government ought to strike a medal for you buffalo hunters. I doubt it shall ever come to pass, but I would like to reward you personally with this.”

He bent down to place an ugly, double-barreled revolver on the cot beside Otto.

“This was Jeb Stuart’s pistol,” he said. “It’s a nine-shot, .42-caliber LeMat—ten shots if you load the 20-gauge underbarrel—and no doubt it’s killed many of your comrades in years past. Perhaps you’ll never be able to use it on redskins, and more’s the pity, but you can leave it to your heirs. There are still thousands of red devils left for us to kill.”

The general leaned over and patted Otto on the shoulder, then turned on his heel. He had purchased dozens of these revolvers after the war and passed them out regularly to men like Otto—brave soldiers of the Union who had fallen on hard times. It was a heartfelt gesture.

Tom Shields stood quietly in a corner of the infirmary, having come in to visit Otto, as he did every morning. He had heard Sheridan’s words and recognized the man. The spider war chief passed within ten feet of him as he left. It took every bit of willpower Tom Shields possessed not to draw his knife and kill this enemy of his people.

J
ENNY CAME TO
the infirmary every day, bearing trays from the mess hall to feed Otto. At first he hardly acknowledged her presence, taking the food off her fork or spoon and chewing embarrassedly, refusing even to meet her eye. She prattled on about the affairs of the day—more gunfights in Dodge City, an elegant new restaurant opened on Front Street, wagonloads of hides arriving in droves from the new hunting grounds down in Texas—but he rarely so much as grunted in reply.

“Why don’t you talk to me?” she burst out one evening. “I know you must blame me for. . . this”—she gestured at the wire cage that still protected the stump of his arm. “But can’t you see that I’m sorry? It really wasn’t my fault.”

Finally his eyes looked at her. And darted away again. He shook his head and blushed.

“No, no, Jennchen,” he whispered. “I don’t blame you. I don’t blame anyone. It’s just . . .” Tears leaked from the corners of his eyes and he took a deep breath. “It could have happened a thousand times in a thousand ways, at any time during the war. It could have happened—maybe it should have happened—before Mutti and Vati died, when I was alone on the buffalo ground. Yes, I should have been dead long ago, and I’d always figured that one day before very long I
would
be dead. An artillery burst, a skirmisher’s bullet, a badly placed shot on a charging buffalo, who knows—a knife fight in a drovers’ saloon in some cow town along the railroad? But then I’d just be . . . finished.
Punkt.
Like that. I never even imagined a situation where I’d be alive but incapable of making a living.”

“Who says you can’t make a living? You can still walk, you have at least one arm, you’re educated and intelligent. Think of the wise, wonderful things you could tell your students about the Great West if you taught school.”

“Bitter things, Jennchen. Ugly things. How to kill buffalo, how to kill Indians, how to kill soldiers in a war. No, I could never teach, nor will I ever work in a store of any kind. I am a hunter who can hunt no longer. I would rather be dead than live on as an object of pity.”

“Otto, Otto,” Jenny moaned. “What can I do?”

“Look in that drawer beside the bed.”

Jenny opened it and saw the LeMat revolver.

“If you love me, sister, take it and shoot me,” Otto said. “It’s loaded—I asked the orderly to check before he put it there.”

His eyes burned into hers.

She took up the pistol, heavy in her hand. Her heart felt heavier.

But she shook her head. “You know I can’t,” she said finally. “Anything but that.”

He laughed bitterly.
“Ach ja,
I knew you couldn’t. Nor will the orderly, much less Dr. Wallace. Maybe Tom will oblige me.”

“No,” Jenny said. “I’ll forbid it.”

Otto sighed. “Then I must live with myself,” he said. “But I won’t be a burden to you. You’re young yet, Jennchen, a whole happy life ahead of you—you should marry, have children, but who would marry a woman saddled with a crippled brother? Dr. Wallace was telling me about the new Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Homes being built by the Grand Army of the Republic. For crippled veterans of the war, he says. The nearest one is in Kansas City. He says that as a decorated veteran of the 2nd Wisconsin, I would qualify for admission, even though my injuries occurred after the end of hostilities. His say-so would guarantee it.”

“Who says I even want to get married?” Jenny asked. “I’m your sister, and if I choose to care for you for the rest of our lives, you cannot properly deny me that right. It is my
Pflicht
—my family duty—and I want to discharge it as honorably as you performed yours in the war. No, sending you to a home would be to my dishonor.”

The argument went on for days, until one evening Tom Shields interceded.

“Let’s go north to my people,” he said. “There are many widows among the Sa-sis-e-tas, lonely women who’d be only too happy to provide a wounded warrior with a warm lodge and plenty of meat. My mother will care for you even if no one else does. And . . .”

“I thought you said your mother was dead,” Jenny interrupted.

“I lied,” Tom said. “My father lives, too.”

“Why did you lie about them?”

“I wanted your sympathy,” Tom said. “My mother said it would work.”

“Well,” Jenny said, “she was right. Where are your people right now?”

“Somewhere in what you call the Big Horn Mountains,” Tom said. “Don’t worry, I’ll find them.”

“Well, do it,” Jenny said. She looked at Otto.

He had sunk back into silence and apathy.

16

O
N THE FIRST
day of spring 1874, Jenny and Tom left Fort Dodge and headed north toward the Big Horn Mountains. Otto, still too weak to ride, they carried with them in a light Studebaker wagon Jenny had bought secondhand from the Army, along with two big Missouri mules and a played-out cavalry horse, a fifteen-year-old buckskin called Trooper. She paid for all this with money her brother had saved from the sale of buffalo hides, drawn on a letter of credit from a bank in Leavenworth, Kansas. Otto rarely spoke. He lay red-eyed and haggard, propped up in the back of the wagon under heavy blankets, staring at the horizon or watching the wolves that trailed them whenever Tom or Jenny killed fresh meat. He never complained, not even when the wagon jounced for days over rough, frozen ground. He watched the wolves intently.

They crossed the Saline and Solomon Rivers with little difficulty, for the water was still low, locked up in the icy Rockies, which loomed far and ghostly blue to their west, awaiting the heat of the summer sun before it came crashing down through the rivers of the plains. But the upper Republican was already rising when they got there, nearly in spate. They unloaded the wagon to lighten it. Tom cinched winter-dried cottonwood logs to the frame which served as floats and they breasted the roaring brown river in a surge of spray. The mules swam strongly. They emerged on the far bank with only an inch of water in the wagonbed. Otto, whom they had wrapped in a tarpaulin, said nothing. Then Tom and Jenny rode back to ferry across on horseback all the goods they’d unloaded earlier—guns, ammunition, blankets, cookware, kegs, crates, and provisions. The transfer took many trips.