Tie My Bones to Her Back (22 page)

Twice as they approached the right-of-ways of railroads they spotted parties of men on horseback moving swiftly in the distance. Pawnees, Tom said. Looking for trouble. Both times they hid the wagon in a creek bottom and watched from a grassy crest of the prairie, lying on their bellies, rifles locked and loaded, until the dust of the horses faded from sight.

“I thought the Pawnees were friendly to whites,” Jenny said. “You hear all sorts of stories back East about Major Frank North and his valiant Pawnee scouts keeping the railways safe for commerce.”

Tom frowned. “We’d be safe enough if either Major North or his brother Lute were leading them, but I could see no spider soldier traveling with those savages. If they caught us, they’d kill me first off, no matter what you said. To them I’m a Cheyenne, not a human being. Then they’d kill you for your horses and your guns and your hair. Trust me. I know them all too well. They love a blond scalp.”

And if I were traveling alone, Jenny thought, how well would I fare with a war party of
your
people? Sometimes at night, under the vast, cold prairie sky, she found herself wondering and worrying about the reception she and Otto would receive from the Cheyennes, when and if they got there. Tom made it sound like a family reunion—why sure, they’d be welcomed with open arms. But perhaps he was lying again.

One night, as she lay wrapped in her blankets near the fire, staring up into space and musing on this possibility, Tom asked her what she was pondering.

“Oh, just the stars,” she lied quickly. “So many of them, and so beautiful—like sapphires and rubies up there.” She rolled over onto an elbow and looked up at him. “If you could have one to wear around your neck, Tom, which would you pick?”

He laughed. “The Cut-Arms have a story about that,” he said. “Two girls of the People were sleeping out on the prairie and one of them asked the same question. The other girl looked carefully and found a very bright star—That one there,’ she said. ‘I’d take it for my very own.’ Next day they were hunting for food along a creekbank and they spotted a porcupine high in a cottonwood. The girl who’d chosen the brightest star said she’d climb up there and throw the animal down so her friend could kill it. So up she climbed—and climbed, and climbed some more. But the porcupine just kept going higher. It seemed to her that the tree was getting way too tall, that it was growing taller even as she climbed it. The girl on the ground called her friend to come down. But the Bright Star Girl was stubborn and kept on climbing, until she was among the clouds. When she came to the top of the tree, she couldn’t find the porcupine. She reached a foot off the branch she was on, reached it out through the clouds, and found herself touching solid ground. She had climbed all the way up into the Sky Land. Then a handsome man came over the Sky Prairie and smiled at her, and his teeth were like starlight, and he took her to his tepee. ‘But I must go back to my friend and to my people,’ she said. ‘Why must you go?’ the Sky Man asked. ‘Just last night you said you wanted me for your very own.’ Of course, she thought, he is the Bright Star.”

Tom laughed with delight, and Jenny with him.

“So she stayed in the Sky Land,” Tom continued, “and became the wife of Bright Star. Soon she was with child. One day she was out digging roots on the prairie and pulled out a big turnip, of a kind that her husband had warned her not to dig. When she looked into the hole it had left, she saw the earth far below. She widened the hole, and then she could see better—her Cut-Arm People, her ponies, her friends, and her family. And she got very homesick. So she wove a rope of braided grass and began to climb back down to earth. But she was too heavy, what with the baby in her belly, and when she was halfway down, the grass rope broke. She fell faster and faster—so fast that the air started to feel hot, like when you ride your pony hard through a sandstorm. Bright Star Girl got so hot that her hair caught on fire. Then her skin, then her meat, and then finally her bones—all were burning. She fell through the air like a blazing stick. Like this . . .”

He reached into the campfire bare-handed and shied a flaming brand at the wolves that circled them just outside the firelight. Their eyes winked out and they ran off. But a sudden growl from the nearby wagon made Jenny jump.

“Don’t worry,” Tom said. “It’s only Black Hat. He likes to watch the wolves.” He shrugged and shook his head.

“Sometimes he talks to them at night, but he doesn’t really know their language yet . . . Anyway, when Bright Star Girl hit the ground, still burning, she broke into many pieces, and she was killed. Finished. But the baby in her belly survived—he was made of stone, just like his father, just like I am or any Cut-Arm—like the stars themselves. The People called him Falling Star, and he was a great hero in those days.”

A meteor blazed across the night sky.

“Look out,” Tom said, laughing. “Here he comes again!”

T
HEY FINALLY FOUND
Tom’s family band, the Suhtaio, camped on the Red Fork of Powder River, up near the headwaters in a rough, broken country that the spiders called Hole-in-the-Wall. It had been a favorite resort of outlaws for more than twenty years. From the east, where the Bozeman Trail ran, there was only one way into Hole-in-the-Wall, through a narrow, easily guarded gap in a scarp of sandstone called the Red Wall. On the sundown side, many trails led west through the high Big Horn country and across a great basin of prairie to the Absarokas and the Wind River Mountains, and to the gold mines of Virginia City. Over the years, the Cheyenne had been forced to kill a few of these spider outlaws, when the men tried to rob their camps or rape Sa-sis-e-tas women.

When Tom located the Suhtaio lodges, he did not reveal himself. He returned quickly to the wagon and told Jenny to wait. Then he stripped off his clothes, bathed in a nearby brook, dressed himself in fringed buckskin leggings, a red breechclout, and a doeskin shirt decorated with porcupine quills. He blackened his face and hands with ashes from the fire, took the scalps—a dozen of them—from his war bag, tied them to a pole in groups of four, and rode off on Wind Blows toward the Cheyenne camp. Black was the color of victory. Jenny hid the wagon in a brush-grown gully—Otto was sleeping—and followed on one of the mules to see what happened. She brought the Henry and a bandolier of bullets, just in case of trouble.

Tom galloped up to the semicircle of lodges, then rode Wind Blows back and forth outside the east-facing entranceway, shaking the scalp pole above his head and singing out in a strange, harsh voice how each scalp had been taken. Everyone in the village came running, the men with guns in hand or arrows nocked on their bows. Jenny began to raise her rifle. But when the Cheyennes recognized Tom, great cries of joy went up.

Two men took the scalp pole from him, while the rest of the people returned hastily to their lodges and began lugging bundles of firewood to the center of the village. A huge cone of firewood rose, underlaid with dried grass to ensure quick ignition. This tepee of wood Jenny later learned was called the
hka-o
, or “skunk.” Drummers and singers, their faces painted red and black, gathered near it. Older men and women stripped to the waist and painted their upper bodies black and stood in a line on one side of the fire cone. The girls and unmarried young women had dressed themselves in long deerskin dresses, their finest outfits, and lined up in a row facing a similar row of young men, their sweethearts. Jenny recognized Crazy for Horses, Cut Ear, and Walks like Badger among them. The two older men who had taken the scalp pole now returned with it and lit the fire.

Tom spotted Jenny standing at the edge of an alder thicket near the stream and walked out to her. He took her by the hand and led her toward the fire. The Indians did not stare, they were too polite for that. They merely glanced at her, some of the girls with unconcealed jealousy. “Don’t be nervous,” Tom said. “This first dance is the Dance of the Sweethearts. Some of these girls wanted me to pick them for the dance. But I want you to be my sweetheart from now on. Will you?”

“And what would that entail—being your sweetheart?”

“Living in my lodge,” he said. “Eating with me, sleeping with me, at least for as long as we’re here with my people. Or at least for as long as you can still stand me.” He laughed with some embarrassment. “At any rate, it will keep the other girls away from me, and from you as well. They can be quite wicked. I’m certain my mother will welcome you.”

It was as close as he would ever come to a proposal of marriage.

“All right,” she said, amused and strangely titillated by the exchange. “But what about right now? What will become of Otto? We can’t just leave him out there in the wagon.”

“I’ll send one of my Elk Soldier friends to take care of him,” Tom said.

Jenny said, “Good. Now what do I do for this dance?”

“Just follow my steps.”

After speaking briefly with Walks like Badger, who walked reluctantly toward the hidden wagon, Tom put his arm through Jenny’s as they reached the line of girls. Each of them had been selected by her sweetheart or, if she had none, by her brother, and now they danced forward, arm in arm, toward the fire. The drums beat a fast rhythm, the voices of the Sa-sis-e-tas rose above the crackle and roar of the flames. The stuttering, hard-heeled dance steps were simple once Jenny got into the swing of them, and Tom was a good dancer, easy to follow. His arm was strong and sure. She glanced at him, at the sweat cutting clean stripes of tan on his ash-darkened face, eyes burning green as he chanted the alien words in staccato cadences.

The scalp pole stood behind the fire, its trophies glinting in the random dance of the flames. For an instant it seemed to her that the dead hair of Tom’s enemies was alive again and dancing with them. With her free hand Jenny reached up and pulled off her hat, skimming it backward without looking. She untied her braids and shook them out, so that her long blond hair swung wildly. As she warmed to the beat of the dance, she felt her body loosen deliciously, tasted the clean sweat on her upper lip. The rhythms worked into her bones. She heard herself chanting now along with Tom, with her fellow dancers, and though the words were strange, they somehow felt familiar on her tongue. It felt good, dancing this way, wild and free, and suddenly an image formed in her brain—something half remembered, perhaps from a tale her father had read her from one of his many books on the ancient Germans, or perhaps a deep reverberation of folk memory—of painted, half-naked people, white-skinned men and women both, dancing to drums in a fire-lit forest, their long blond hair swinging in ritualistic rhythm to an ancient song of death and new love.

After the dances, which lasted well into the dark of night, an older woman who had been talking to Tom in Sa-sis-e-tas came up to Jenny as she was rebraiding her hair. The woman had washed the black from her face and upper body and put on a deerskin blouse. Her own braids, nearly white, had streaks of yellow in them. Her eyes were as green as Tom’s, level and questioning; her cheekbones broad, her nose shorter than an Indian’s, though her skin was as dark as any Cheyenne’s.

“Grüss Gott”
she said in German. “
Ich bin der Two Shield’s seine Mutter, heiss
’
Ulrike Bauer. Die Indianer haben mich Starkherz genennt
—I am Tom’s mother, called Strongheart Woman by these people.”

Jenny stepped back and put out her hand.
“Sehr gefreut,”
she said formally, with a slight bow. “Very pleased, I’m sure. My name is Jenny Dousmann. And you are a captive, Tom says—Two Shields, that is?”

“Not for a long time already,” Strongheart Woman said. “These are my people now, and a much better
Volk
than those I was born among. But we will talk of that later. Now you must be hungry. You and your brother will sleep in my husband, Little Wolf’s, lodge tonight, until Two Shields prepares his own tepee for you. Little Wolf is off at war right now, but I am sure he would approve.”

I
N THE DAYS
that followed, Strongheart Woman taught Jenny much about the ways of the Cheyenne, from the rudiments of their strange, complicated language to the niceties of womanly behavior that Tom could never have explained. Yet it was Strongheart Woman who insisted quite firmly that Jenny not adopt Cheyenne dress.

“They think of you just now as a creature beyond sex,” Strongheart Woman said. “If you dress as a woman, they will consider you one, and some of the mystery will be gone. And since you are now with Two Shields, I would not be allowed to speak with you—among these people, a mother-in-law and daughter-in-law are wisely kept apart. But if they should get the idea that you are merely a captive, some of the wilder soldiers—the Kit Foxes or the Crazy Dogs—might take it in mind someday when Two Shields is away to put you ‘on the prairie,’ as they call it. It is just a fancier term for rape. They do not think of captive women as human beings.”

She paused and frowned, perhaps remembering.

“I hear the Old Man Chiefs talking, though,” Strongheart continued. “Perhaps you are E-hyoph-sta, they say, come back to test us, to see if we’re worthy of your assistance. Even before you came, Two Shields’s Elk Soldier friends had described your birth from the belly of the cow buffalo, after the storm. And Two Shields has told us of your hunting skills. Don’t misunderstand me, though. The Sa-sis-e-tas treat their own women well enough. We have much influence in the tribal councils. Some women of this tribe have themselves been great soldiers, women who have counted coup in battles with our enemies. I myself have done so. It’s how I won my name. But our most important role is the bearing of children, as it is with women everywhere. You mustn’t be burdened with that task just now. If by chance you should get with child and you don’t want the baby, tell me and I will take care of it. I know the right medicines. Don’t tell Two Shields or anyone else. Killing a Cheyenne child either before it is born or afterward is considered a mortal sin by the Old Man Chiefs—you and I would be cast out of the tribe, as would any woman who did so. But our women—all women, I suppose—have ways of getting around the wrongheaded rules of men, as I’m sure you know.”