Come Sundown (52 page)
Authors: Mike Blakely
O
n the tenth day after the battle, a small, battered party of Arapahos dropped into the valley and shambled into camp. They ignored the wailing of the mourners and went straight to the biggest lodge in campâthat of Kills Something. I was summoned as a translator. There were four men and two women. One man had a bullet hole through his arm, and one woman had been shot through the thigh. The tale they told chilled my heart.
n the tenth day after the battle, a small, battered party of Arapahos dropped into the valley and shambled into camp. They ignored the wailing of the mourners and went straight to the biggest lodge in campâthat of Kills Something. I was summoned as a translator. There were four men and two women. One man had a bullet hole through his arm, and one woman had been shot through the thigh. The tale they told chilled my heart.
Up in Colorado, all Arapahos and Cheyennes who wanted to be considered friendly had been ordered to camp at the reservation on Sand Creek, so that the army would know that they desired peace. There, they would be protected. That was the promise of the soldier-chiefs.
Instead, the friendly Indians had been attacked. The slaughter had come at dawn. Soldiers charged the lodges and massacred men, women, and children, even mutilating bodies. It was said that Black Kettle, a Cheyenne chief, had raised an American flag, and waved a white banner of truce. White Antelope had run afoot to meet the soldiers, unarmed, begging them not to attack. He had been ridden down by the soldiers and shot, still wearing his peace medal given to him by President Lincoln in Washington, D.C. A bitter fight had lasted all day as a few survivors dug in to the creek bank and held off the soldiers. They had slipped away after dark, many of them wounded, all of them freezing and hungry.
The leader of the cowardly massacre had been the same man who had been ordering Indians to Sand Creek in the first place. Colonel John M. Chivington. The name made me shudder as I remembered how Chivington had tried to order Westerly and her sister, and William Bent's wife, Yellow Woman, to the camp at Sand Creek. What if he had come back for them? What if John Prowers and William Bent had been unable to keep their wives, and mine, from being sent to Sand Creek? My panic began to mount, and I wondered suddenly if Westerly was dead or alive; well or wounded and dying. A sickly dread fell upon me like an avalanche.
“Listen, my brothers,” I asked the Arapahos after they had told their tale to the Comanche leaders. “Do you know Chief Lone Bear of the Cheyennes?”
“Yes,” said the leader of the party, his visage locked in a stare of fatigue.
“Lone Bear has two daughters. One of them is my wife, Nomeme-ehne. Do you know her?”
The visiting Arapahos looked at one another, and then one spoke:
“I saw the daughters years ago. Beautiful girls.”
“Yes. One daughter, Amache, is married to a white manâa good white man named John Prowers who lives at the town near the stockade of Owl Man. My wife lives there, also. I want to know that she is safe. My heart is heavy to think of this bad thing that has happened to you, but understand that I am worried about my wife. Was she at Sand Creek? Once before, the big bluecoat, Chivington, tried to send her there but Owl Man would not let it be.”
The Arapahos stared at each other for a while, then the leader spoke. “This is a bad thing to talk about. I do not know what is true and what is not. There was much confusion, and no one knows all of those who were killed, for the people were scattered after the attack.”
“Tell me what you know,” I begged.
He sighed and looked at the floor of the lodge. “I know that the wife of Lone Bear was in the camp at Sand Creek. I know that a daughter came to visit her before the attack. But I do not know which daughter. I did not see her. I only heard about it. Also ⦔
“What?”
“I heard that Lone Bear's wife was killed. I do not know about the daughter. She may have left the camp before the attack. She may have escaped. I do not know. I should stop talking about it, because there is no truth in what I say, only guessing.”
“Where have the survivors gone?”
“They are scattered, but we heard that the biggest camp is on the Smoky Hill River.”
Overwhelmed with worry now, I got up and burst out of the lodge into the cold afternoon. For ten days I had been considering what I should do now that I had gone Indian and turned against the U.S. Army. I feared returning to Boggsville to collect my wife. I feared I would be arrested and tried for treason should I show my face in a white man's settlement. I had planned to have a secret letter delivered to Westerly, telling her where to meet me, so that we could stay among the Indians. Now, I did not even know if Westerly was still in Boggsville. I did not know if she was alive or dead.
I turned and ran to my lodge. By the time I got my herbs and medicines and other things together, the criers were spreading
the distressing news about Sand Creek through the camp. I grabbed a bridle and some rope and went to catch horses.
the distressing news about Sand Creek through the camp. I grabbed a bridle and some rope and went to catch horses.
“Plenty Man!”
I turned and saw young Quanah running toward me. “I have no time to talk, nephew.”
“I heard about Sand Creek. I know you worry about your wife. I want to ride with you, uncle.”
I simply nodded. “Hurry. I will not wait for you, and I will ride hard.”
He smiled briefly and turned to sprint away.
By the time I caught two of my ponies with good bottom and a lot of wind, Quanah was also astride a horse and loping to catch up to me. We took the trail the Arapahos had ridden in on, and we went fast. I decided to go straight to the Sand Creek refugees. Boggsville was closer, but I reasoned that if Westerly was there she was safe. If, however, she had been at Sand Creek during the massacre, she might need my help right away. An agonizing thought nagged me. If she was slowly dying of some mortal wound, I might have just a few days to see her alive. I hated thinking of these things, but my mind would not stop considering every possibility. At the very best, assuming my wife was safe, she was nonetheless mourning the loss of her mother, who the Arapahos said had been killed in the massacre.
The ride was punishing. Not the riding itself, for a Comanche embraces physical hardship, especially astride a good mount. It was the not knowing; the constant hoping, fretting helplessness of it all. Quanah did not speak to me much on the trail, for he knew I was worried. He communicated with me only to discuss the trail and our progress. Thus we rode northwest without stopping or eating much for four days. We crossed the Arkansas thirty miles downstream of Boggsville and Bent's Stockade and angled due north, toward the headwaters of the Smoky Hill River, where we had heard most of the survivors of Sand Creek had fled. We scarcely saw a tree after leaving the Arkansas Valley. Here, the plains rolled away, hill after hill. The days were brisk; the nights bone-achingly cold.
Another day and a half of riding brought our fagged ponies
to a bloodstained trail that led us to a wretched refugee camp of wailing mourners who shrieked their anguish as they slashed their own flesh with knives. A line of burial scaffolds stood on a hill overlooking the camp. My dread sank into my empty stomach like a hot coal. I spoke to the first woman I came to who was not mourning.
to a bloodstained trail that led us to a wretched refugee camp of wailing mourners who shrieked their anguish as they slashed their own flesh with knives. A line of burial scaffolds stood on a hill overlooking the camp. My dread sank into my empty stomach like a hot coal. I spoke to the first woman I came to who was not mourning.
“I am looking for my wife.”
She stared at me and Quanah for a few seconds. Then she began to laugh and I saw the sanity go right out of her eyes. Just as suddenly, she cut her own laughter off in her throat, and attacked Quanah's horse, pummeling the animal across the head before Quanah could rein away. Then the woman ran off, screaming through the camp.
“A crazy woman,” Quanah said, obviously nervous about our greeting.
I nodded. “I hope not everyone in this camp has gone crazy.”
“Look. Someone comes.”
I followed Quanah's eyes and saw a middle-aged man limping toward me, using a stick as a crutch. His leg was badly swollen from a wound. “What do you want?” he said, a suspicious glare in his eyes.
“I am looking for my wife.”
“Where have you come from?”
“Comanche land. I am Plenty Man. This is Quanah.”
He looked south. “Did you see any soldiers?”
“No.”
“Buffalo?”
“No. There is nothing out there. The plains are dead.”
“Everything is dead,” he replied. “Everything. Even the sky. The sun is not even warm anymore.”
“I am looking for my wife. She may have been at Sand Creek. She is the daughter of Chief Lone Bear. Her name is Appears-with-the-West-Wind.”
His mind seemed to roll back into the horror of that day on Sand Creek, and he looked afraid. “The wife of Lone Bear was at the camp on Sand Creek. She was killed.”
“I have heard that. But her daughter?”
“A daughter was there, but I never heard her name.”
“What happened to her?” I demanded.
“She came to this camp with the others.” He spoke so quietly, I could barely hear.
“So, she is here?”
“She was here until ⦠Until yesterday.”
“Yesterday? Where has she gone?” My mind felt like a corkscrew, all twisted and cold.
“She has gone ⦔ He shifted on his good leg, and winced at the pain of the wounded one. “She has gone ⦔
“Where? Tell me!”
His eyes began to creep laboriously across the camp, and his head turned so slowly that it seemed his neck must be in great pain. He twisted his whole body around to the right, his feet locked into place by the pain of his wounded leg. His eyes grew so sad and his face looked as if he would weep, but no tears came, and no sound escaped his mouth. His gaze crawled, as if he had to drag it like a dead thing. And I watched, a prisoner of my own terrors, as I saw where he would look, finally, when he willed his tortured eyes to show me where Westerly had gone. Now, before I even knew it, he was looking at the hill over the camp.
“She went there,” he said. “The one farthest away.”
The scaffolds stood like skeletal stalkers of life lurking over the camp, and I heard the winds of black death moaning among their poles. I screamed and kicked my pony, leaving Quanah and the wounded Arapaho man behind.
“I will join her soon!” he shouted at me as I ran my mount toward the burial scaffold.
Which daughter? Which one? Amache? Westerly? No, no, please, not Westerly. Please, oh, please ⦠I felt the horrible guilt of wishing my sister-in-law dead.
I made the pony ride right up to the scaffold, though he didn't like the looks of it. I stood on his back and grabbed one of the four upright poles, almost totally mad with fear. I shimmied up the pole as I began to moan unintelligibly and uncontrollably. The scaffold was not made for someone to climb, and it swayed under my weight. I heard screams back at the camp, for what I was doing was ghoulishly unthinkable.
The body atop the platform was wrapped in a bloodstained blanket, tied up tightly with ropes and strips of rawhide, and
lashed to the platform with more of the same. A great, bad buzzing sound filled my skull as I drew my knife to cut the ropes that ran across the shoulders and head of the corpse. Quanah had followed but stayed beyond the burial grounds. He scolded me from afar, but I could not even hear his words. I unfolded the top of the blanket as tears began to fill my eyes. I had to look. I had to see. I had to know.
lashed to the platform with more of the same. A great, bad buzzing sound filled my skull as I drew my knife to cut the ropes that ran across the shoulders and head of the corpse. Quanah had followed but stayed beyond the burial grounds. He scolded me from afar, but I could not even hear his words. I unfolded the top of the blanket as tears began to fill my eyes. I had to look. I had to see. I had to know.
I pulled the blanket back and saw the lifeless face of my beautiful wife, and I screamed in an inhuman voice that still wakes me sometimes in nightmares. I felt my fist clenching my knife so hard that it hurt, and some instinct I possessed for survival made me throw the weapon away for fear that I would plunge it into my own guts. I drew a breath that rushed into me like wind tearing a ragged battle flag, and forced the same air out, all black and boiling, in a scream of heartbroken anguish. Pieces of my soul came out in that scream, never to be reclaimed.
I felt myself falling. I hit the ground hard, and lay there stunned in every way a man can take a beating. Nothing was good inside me. My brain would not think, my heart would not beat, my blood flowed backward in my veins. My chest rose and fell in great sobs as I slipped into some sort of state of semiconsciousness that I embraced like a furlough from Hades.
A comforting sensation enveloped me. It was neither cold nor hot. I felt no pain. It wasn't dark, though neither was it bright. It was all very pleasant, though I still remembered the crippling pains of the real worldâthe world that I considered real. Then I heard the deep voice of a man laughing in such an easy, joyous way, that I did not at first recognize the voice until he spoke: “Plenty Man,” he said in a chuckle. “Plenty, Plenty, Plenty ⦠Man, Man, Man ⦔
It was Burnt Belly, speaking in a singsong voice I had never heard him use.
“You take too much care upon yourself. If only you knew. Your time there is but a blink. You are a shooting starâjust a fleeting moment of brightness in a single night of all the nights of all the seasons of all of creation. You are the shadow of a soaring eagle that passes across the face of a sleeping man. You should go and find a tree that knows ten times the summers you have passed, and listen to that tree. Only then
will you begin to know. You are one drop of rain, one breath from a newborn child. Yours is one small cloud that drifts across the moon. That is all. Nothing very bad ever lasts very long. You will see. I went ahead of you to tell you this. Westerly, too. We have not left you so very far behind. You will know in time, grandson.”
will you begin to know. You are one drop of rain, one breath from a newborn child. Yours is one small cloud that drifts across the moon. That is all. Nothing very bad ever lasts very long. You will see. I went ahead of you to tell you this. Westerly, too. We have not left you so very far behind. You will know in time, grandson.”
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