American Meteor (18 page)

He was someone used to looking at the world through a lens—it was his eye—and he relied on his instrument to
sound the depths of his subject matter, whether it was a formation of rocks or a solitary Indian. Unable to photograph the Ute as often as he’d like that winter, Jackson tried to “see” them without his camera. Two of the old men could speak English and did so with an eloquence that made me think of the King James Bible or Lincoln’s speeches. They’d been civilized by Quakers who had come all the way from Pennsylvania to turn them from heathens into gents. They could read and write and had sent polite letters to Johnson and Grant, asking that the government respect its treaties and allow the Ute to keep their buffalo herds safe from the hunters paid to slaughter them. Otherwise, there’d be nothing left but roots, bark, and vermin between them and starvation. Naturally, the government ignored them.

Jackson would spend hours palavering with the pair of natives, learning to “read the Indian,” just as he read the light, while I sat in a corner of the lodge, wrapped in stinking buffalo hides, sulking, speculating, and experimenting with my spit. I wanted to see if I could launch a gob high enough so that it would freeze in midair. I was in no mood to understand the black and unfathomable hearts of savages.

But something happened in February to change me; some would say for the better, though most would say to the detriment of my immortal soul. I took up with an Indian girl. I hesitate to say I fell in love with her, although if I’m honest, that is what I did—at least as I understand the term.

She had one of those comical Indian names like Sparks Blown up a Chimney. Hers was Fire Briskly Burning. I can’t recall what it was in Ute. Aptly named, she’d start up in my hands like a brush fire. We spoke not a word of each
other’s languages. That was fine with me. I left the conversing to Jackson. He had a wife, in Omaha. He could enlarge his mind on the shore of Utah Lake all he wanted. I was lonely and happy enough just to be in Fire’s arms. I didn’t need to visit her country every time my blood was up, and during those dismal months underneath her buffalo robes, we congressed only half a dozen times or so. Mainly, I was after her warmth. No, I didn’t use her like a hot brick you take to bed on a winter’s night, although people who sleep in pairs know what a furnace a human being is. No, not just for that, anyway. I wanted to be close to another person—a woman, by preference. It didn’t matter whether she spoke Ute or Creole, Egyptian or Chinese. Maybe the isolation of that outpost on the ragged edge of nothingness made me crazy. Only once before had I felt as empty: when I watched my mother go into the ground. If love is more than a desperate remedy for loneliness, I don’t know what it is. What Fire Briskly Burning thought of love—what she thought of me—I never found out.

We had come to Utah Lake to see the misery of Indians, and we saw it. So did people back east when Jackson sent prints there, made from the few negatives he managed to take back to Omaha. But they did no good. Oh, a deputation of Quakers descended on Grant, and a horde of missionaries descended on the Indians. But Sherman, Sheridan, and Custer were hell-bent on converting the entire race of Indians into dead redskins. The Indians believed they inhabited an endless ribbon of time. Ten thousand years on the Great Plains had done nothing to disabuse them. It took us whites just twenty-five years to show them they were wrong.

By March, I began to feel in my belly how starvation
felt. I’d lie under the buffalo robes, stiff with cold—Fire Briskly Burning’s furnace all but put out. I dreamed of the food I’d served the grandees on the hundredth meridian: roasted lamb and antelope, Chinese duck, oysters, buffalo tongue, braised bear in port wine sauce, washed down with champagne. After dinner, Durant had ordered a twenty-mile stretch of prairie grass set fire to entertain his guests. I wished to Christ I could feel its heat now; wished I’d some of the grass to feed the mules, one of which we’d slaughtered and dressed in the snow. I would eye the two remaining animals with avidity, but Jackson said we’d need them to climb out of the valley and over the Wasatch in the spring. He was thinking only of his goddamn camera and plates!

“If we’re still here,” I said gloomily from the depths of my beard, waterproofed with the bear grease used by the Indians to pomade their hair.

Jackson treated me to his most scornful look, and for once I returned it. In 1873, when Hayden invited him along as photographer on a survey of the Central Rockies, Jackson didn’t ask me to accompany him. After Utah Lake, he considered me “pusillanimous.” Seventy-three was the year the bison herds on the Central and Southern Plains had been all but killed off and, with them, the resistance of their rightful inhabitants, who’d been pushed by treaty and bayonet onto squalid reservations in Indian Territory. Seventy-three was also the year of the great panic, brought about by overspeculation, mostly in railroads, and the damn Germans’ decision to stop minting talers, coins whose silver was mined in the American West. As a result, the Jay Cooke bank failed; Wall Street closed; work on the Northern Pacific transcontinental railroad halted; the country went onto the gold standard.
The panic would finish Durant, who was like the rat that fell into a barrel of feed, gorged itself, and was exploded by its own appetite. Underneath the pile of prodigious events, I felt like a midget with a Barnum elephant on his back. And I felt as trapped by the snow as a grub in an Armour tin of spoiled meat.

“You should have stayed in Omaha and taken pretty pictures of the stiffs,” said Jackson. Fed up with roughing it, I’d do just that, though it would be in Lincoln, not in Omaha, where I’d eventually set up shop. He dismissed me with a shrug and began to gnaw on a mule bone, his supply of apricots long since exhausted.

I remembered George Osler’s saying, “They pay five dollars the ton for buffalo bones. They grind them up for fertilizer.” I wondered what the going rate was for famished human bones.

We hadn’t planned to spend the entire winter in the perishing cold. A fur trapper Jackson met in Denver told him of a Mormon settlement built around hot springs near the source of the Jordan River, to the north of us. But the snow lay too deep for the weakened mules, and Jackson refused to abandon his equipment and trudge there on foot. We tried, once, to reach the Jordan by traveling along the lake, but the poor mules slipped and slewed and slid onto their bellies like walruses.

I survived the long winter, but Fire Briskly Burning did not. Malnutrition and pneumonia took her, despite the bear grease in her hair. There is small nourishment in scanty fish and rodents. Her people took the body, its fire extinguished forever, and dealt with it according to their notion of the afterlife. I’ve asked myself many times what
I’d have done if she had lived. I’ve never given myself a satisfactory answer. Jackson and I waited long enough for the mules to forage on the new shoots of grass, and then we walked out of the Wasatch and headed toward Omaha. We were silent while the wind in the pass told a complicated story of sadness and loss.

My spit never did freeze in midair, except in my imagination. I can’t say I learned to read Indians, either. But I insist that I came to know one of them sufficiently to rid my mind of the prejudice that they were no better than dogs. Stranger yet, a Lakota chief would show me the future in my dreams. It would fill me like seawater does a sponge—or vinegar, for I’d choke on its bitterness.

Omaha, Nebraska, May 25 (Decoration Day) 1874

After my blue funk in the Utah Valley, I busied myself in the Jackson Brothers’ studio, but William never again took me into his confidence or into the wilds with him to make pictures. My initiation into the mysteries of his art ceased, and I was left alone to hand-color the stereo views he sent back from the Rockies and the Yellowstone. I was only a little disappointed, for by now I’d realized I lacked his gift and would never have it, no matter how he might have led me—by insinuation or discipline—toward the sublime. The world was radiant for him, while I saw only glimmers in the general darkness, as you would on a sultry August night riven by an electrical storm: thrilling, terrible, and brief. For all my wanderings, I’m ordinary. I came to terms long ago with my littleness. A man is what he is—he can’t rise so much as an inch above his shortcomings—Horatio Alger be damned! I don’t hear you try to contradict me. I had my ages—childish,
heroic, gilded, shameful—and I was content to let time stall around me, like a river shunted into a backwater. My atoms gloried in the change, as fish would to find themselves relieved of ceaseless effort. I languished, placidly, contentedly, thoughtlessly. At least I seldom gave my life a thought—me, who’d spent so much time examining it under the loupe of a fretful, helpless self-regard. I was worn-out from thinking, although what simmered below my mind’s awareness of itself was as unknowable as the life of fish—be they in the canals of Mars or the muddy water of the Missouri. I mean to say that my mind kept its secrets hidden from me.

I’ve not much more to tell about my three years of idleness in Omaha, where I waited—my house scrubbed clean of remembrance, so to speak—to take up the thread of my life once more; and I will pass over them without further notice, except for a Decoration Day by the Missouri River. That was in 1874—the year my history caught up with Custer’s in the Black Hills.

That morning, I treated myself to steak and eggs at the hotel where Durant used to put up before the panic finished him; got shaved and had my long hair cut by the hotel barber; and then I walked out to the riverbank, intending to do some fishing. As a rule, I didn’t care for fishing. Maybe I’d had my fill of God’s fifth day of creation, having been shanghaied by circumstances into oystering as a boy. But I had given myself enthusiastically to the luxuries of the flesh at rest and knew there was nothing so restful as sitting on a flat stone, warmed by the sun, and diddling with a bamboo pole. I didn’t much care what I caught with my godforsaken worm or even if I caught anything at all. I was glad to let my eye glaze over with the dancing river light and let my
mind sink into its own tranquil ooze, sleepy with the murmur and drone of a hot May afternoon.

I must have fallen asleep and would have remained so had it not been for the ferocity of a chain pickerel that pulled the pole out of my hands and dragged it out onto the water. In a moment, it had bitten through the line and disappeared among the reeds and grass. I cursed the fish, for form’s sake, though I didn’t begrudge it the worm or the bamboo pole, either, even if it had cost me four bits. No, the pickerel had put an end to the last pretense of ambition for that holiday afternoon, and my thoughts turned toward a nocturnal visit to Madam Ida’s. But as I was searching my mind for the girl I’d choose to light my firecracker, I surprised myself by flushing Chen out of one of memory’s dark rooms. During the recent do-nothing years, I’d hardly thought of him at all—embarrassed, perhaps, by my indolence. Now, sitting on my flat stone, I recalled how, years before on this same riverbank, Chen had chided me for a rage that had blown up in me as sudden as a squall. I don’t remember now what had incensed me. Some highhandedness of the rich and powerful, I suppose. I had the soul of a muckraker in those days. Chen took my arm (a womanish gesture that made me flinch) and said, “You’re too earnest, Stephen. Earnest men are sometimes good, like Lincoln; sometimes fanatical, like Booth. It’s better to be calm; safer to take a tranquil view of things.”

Chen wasn’t perfect. I’ve idealized him in this recitation, but he had his faults, same as anybody—yellow, red, black, or white. While he was encouraging me to be philosophical about life, a man stepped out onto a pier just below us and dumped a litter of newborn pups into the river.

“What do you think of that?” I asked Chen, my anger flaring like a ribbon of magnesium once again. It may be common practice to drown unwanted cats and dogs at birth, but it’s a cruel one, Jay.

“I have seen infant girls put into the river to drown,” Chen said stoically.

I didn’t like his attitude—and don’t tell me human life is cheap in China, damn it! It’s the same here. So maybe I tend to be self-righteous and too full of zeal. A man can’t help what he is or doing what he must. Anyway, when I read in the paper how Custer was getting ready to march into the Black Hills, my days of idleness were at an end.

Fort Abraham Lincoln, Dakota Territory, July 1, 1874

When I first laid eye on General Custer, he was trimming his yellow mustache with the finicky attention of a French duke or an actor. I stood in the doorway, regarding his face in the ornate mirror he held in one hand while he snipped decisively with a silver scissors held in the other. He was considered handsome by many, but in my opinion a foppish vanity and fatuous self-satisfaction, darkened by cruelty and ambition, had made an otherwise ordinary face grotesque. Absorbed in his pruning, he didn’t notice me at first, although he liked to boast that nothing escaped him. I began to worry that he’d suddenly look up and, provoked by being taken by surprise, wither me with his disdain. I’d read enough newspaper accounts of the famous Custer temper to fear his annoyance. Nervous as a weather vane, I was deliberating whether I ought to sneak out of the room, when he discovered me in the little gilded mirror. He caught my eye, and I caught his: We were bound, momentarily, by a
single look of mutual fascination—mine tempered by fear, his black with suspicion. I coughed, and the spell broke. He laid the mirror down on his dressing table and turned to me.

“Who in the hell are you?”

“General Custer . . .” I began to stammer.

“
I
am General Custer, and I’ve never doubted the fact.”

He didn’t need to complete his asservation. His unspoken words hung in the cloying air of the room, whose walls shone with afternoon sun, as if with the reflected glory of the general’s golden hair, dressed with cinnamon-scented oil: “. . . of my special destiny and greatness, you pint-sized worm.”