Little Big Man (66 page)

Around then, Custer come back. He had gone to the extremity of our position, still trying to signal Benteen with the guidon, I expect, and while there an Indian ball had splintered off the flagstaff halfway along, so he was now holding it by the stub. But as to his person, he was yet untouched by enemy fire, however ravaged by smoke and dust and heat and madness.

I looks up at him, and blue eyes glittering within that mask of dirt, still staring southeast into the white fog, he says aloud though to himself: “Benteen won’t come. He hates me.”

I had stopped worrying about him standing erect: it didn’t matter much now whether he was hit, and then too it did provide some inspiration even for me, for I tell you it was absolute death from two foot off the ground on up, now. A fly couldn’t have got through unsinged, so we didn’t draw no more of that insect, though them that was there, feasting on our broken flesh, by the same token couldn’t get away when engorged.

Custer wasn’t singing, like Old Lodge Skins at the Washita, addressing his gods and walking in the magic way of the Cheyenne. No, the General stayed intact because he was Custer, better than anyone else, basically invulnerable even in defeat, and always right. You got to admire that type of conviction, even when you resent it. And I did both.

I says: “Hates you so much he would let two hundred others die to do you in?”

“Spite,” says Custer slowly, “spite and envy. I’ve had to face them my life long.”

He was speaking quiet, and there wasn’t enough noise left of our firing now to obscure a word. “I would have liked to be his friend, but envy intervened. For each of my achievements I have paid bitterly in lost affection. People love only the weak, teamster. Now make a joke of that.”

He was quite clear, you see, more so than at any time since we had come upon the ridge. He recognized me again, in my false role to be sure, but at least he wasn’t talking to himself no more. He smiled through the dirt, and despite what he just said, not sardonic in any wise but as if in serene resignation. Then he fired several rounds from his pistol at what seemed, from his stance and firm aim, to be particular targets, still holding that battle guidon, now tattered, on its broken staff in his left hand.

He was hit then, just once, a tear in his shirt directly over the heart. He turned some to favor the force, dropped the banner, clutched at the wound as if rather in courtesy than anguish. Onto his back he fell, arms outflung as though crucified, but his closed mouth still showing the traces of a smile. He might have went to sleep at a picnic. I couldn’t see he was bleeding at all, but he must have been, somewhere. I had finally accepted that fact that he was great—and he sure was, don’t let anybody ever tell you different, and if you don’t agree, then maybe something is queer about your definition of greatness—but it stands to reason he had blood.

There was about a dozen of us left when Custer went under, and we might have lasted a half hour longer. I can’t say whether the rest of them troopers—the officers was now all gone—knowed that the General had died. They was right occupied with their own business, single particles of life scattered throughout the dead and dying, and over-all ideas of unit and leader and even race was hard to grasp by
now, for fighting to the end is apt to make you awful single-minded. If Benteen had showed up at this time, we likely would have fired on him.

But he never, of course, and the bugle that commenced to sound on the slope towards the river was blown by a Sioux Indian who took it off a dead trumpeter, and he didn’t know any of the calls, naturally, and just blowed sour blasts. They was many of them yelling, too, and singing in their falsetto, and now no longer conserving their ammunition, for there wasn’t no need, so you had a lot of firing for the hell of it, with the smoke thick as pudding.

Still they did not charge. Finally I had only two or three cartridges left in my pistol, and I expect the rest had likewise or less, and we stopped firing altogether. I tried to look around once more to see who I was going to die with, but that stiffness from my shoulder had permeated my whole body now, and I was fair rigid, so lay my head upon my pony’s belly, from which all warmth was long gone, my hand holding the Colt’s alongside, and waited.

Waited, waited … Soon the whole field, a square mile of it, fell silent, so quiet I could hear the buzzing of a fly on my face-wound, and then I twitched my cheek, where the blood had dried like a strip of patent leather, and I could hear
that
crack. It would not have been hard to imagine everybody had gone home.

Ten minutes, fifteen—no chronometer could have measured that time, might have been thirty seconds or two hours, and then I heard a scraping on the far side of the pony and raised my eyes just as the head of an Indian, with one big eagle feather and a crimson parting of his black hair, reared slowly up across the animal’s spine. He had a wide brown face and wore no paint.

The muzzle was damned near his nose when I fired, and his brains was blasted out before his eyes knowed it. Then shots sounded everywhere among us, scuffles and cries, and we was overrun.

Almost simultaneous, I got a thump on the skull and had the thousandth of a moment to sense that something landed on my back, light of weight yet all-enveloping. I figured it was Death, and thought:
you sneaky bastard, I might have knowed you would get me from behind
.

CHAPTER
29
Victory

I SMELLED SOMETHING SPICY
, followed by a host of other scents, then commenced to hear drums, first only the big one in the back of my head, the beats of which at length smoothed out into one continuous dull roar, and then the regular smiting of them a distance off. And the voices, frenzied and ranging from a deep-throated howling to the highest quavering falsetto screech, almost at the pitch of a whistle.

I opened my eyes real careful, naturally expecting to find myself down in Hell, and first thing I seen was the flames, all right, and the next was the Devil himself, looking exactly like I had always figured he would or maybe worse: two horns sticking up from his forehead and his face was crimson-colored, and he had two big white fangs and the nastiest eyes you could imagine: they was outlined in white.

He was crouching alongside me and peering at me, and as I expected he might bite or something, and I too sore and weak to move, I was a-fixing at least to spit into his face, for I believe demons must operate on the same principles as people: show them you are helpless, and you’ll get no mercy.

But before I had gathered enough spittle onto my tongue, the Devil says something to me in the Cheyenne language.

“Are you awake?” he says.

Well, that was fair: I had been killed by Indians, so had gone to the redskin Hell. I says: “Yes I am,” and let it go at that, for I would have liked to sass him, but as you know there ain’t no real curse words in the Cheyenne tongue, except to call a man a woman.

“All right,” he says. “Then you know that you and I are even at last, and the next time we fight, I can kill you without becoming an evil person.”

Then he leaps up with a whoop and runs out of the tepee—for
that is where we was—and other than that buffalo hat, G-string, and moccasins, he was naked though painted from head to toe. For he wasn’t a devil but rather an Indian, Indeed, he was Younger Bear.

The flames was the little fire in the center of the lodge, of course, and the door flap was pulled back so I could see the glow of a bigger blaze outside, with the shadows of many moving bodies, the silhouettes of legs.

“He goes to dance,” says a familiar voice nearby, “but you had better stay here awhile.”

Old Lodge Skins sat there upon the buffalo robe, taking the fire-shine onto his walnut visage.

“Do you want to eat?” he says.

I struggled up to the sitting position, feeling like a sack of loose meal, then tested with my fingers the stricken portions of my being. My left shoulder was all tied up with leather, moss, and stuff having a sweetish odor; and there was something that felt like raw mud upon my cheek-wound. My head was O.K.: that is, it ached awful, but the skull didn’t have a break you could feel.

Finally, I says: “Grandfather, I did not expect to see you.”

“Nor I you, my son,” answers Old Lodge Skins. “Do you want to smoke?”

I says: “Then I guess I am not dead.”

He reaches over and pokes me with a finger hard as horn. “No,” he says, “if you were a spirit, my hand would go right through your arm as if it were smoke.” The fact that I was talking to him, see, wouldn’t make no difference neither way: he spoke a lot to the deceased, not only of humans but animals as well.

I asked him when it was as to time.

“The Human Beings and the Lakota rubbed out all those soldiers on the ridge,” says Old Lodge Skins, “by the time the sun was here.” He showed me on the horizon of his hand: looked like around five-thirty or six o’clock. “This,” he says, “is the night following that, and everybody is dancing to celebrate the victory. Tomorrow we are going to kill the rest of the bluecoats on the hill downriver. It was a great day.”

He sighs and goes on: “I am too old to fight any more, and as you know I cannot see through my eyes, but a boy led me up to Greasy Grass Ridge, which overlooks the place where the soldiers were. I could hear the battle and smell it and see a great deal in my mind,
which is better than the eyes under those conditions, because I was told the smoke was very thick anyway.

“Almost the whole Lakota nation is here, and they are splendid warriors, the second best in the whole world. But naturally the Human Beings are foremost.”

He was getting excited, commencing to sweat on his bare old belly, with that ancient scar, and his blind eyes was shining.

“The Hunkpapas have a wise man named Sitting Bull. Some days ago they held a sun dance on the Rosebud, and he cut his flesh a hundred times and saw a vision of many soldiers falling into camp upside down. Then we moved to the headwaters to hunt buffalo, and some soldiers shot at us, so we whipped them.”

This apparently referred to the column led by General Crook, coming up from the south, and showed why Terry and Custer never made a junction with him.

“So then,” Old Lodge Skins went on, and he now fetched out of the mess behind him a hatchet and was gesturing with it, “we moved here to the Greasy Grass, and some people believed those first soldiers were the ones that Sitting Bull dreamed of, but others said: ‘No, because they did not fall into camp. More will come.’ I did not join this argument, because while the Bull is wise, he is also easily spoiled by a lot of attention, and Gall was getting jealous of him. Which is not good.”

I could agree with that, after my recent weeks with the Seventh Cavalry, and was kind of relieved to hear of it happening also among Indians. I did this in the forefront of my mind, though, for still deeper than all else, and it stayed so for many days, months, years, was them last moments with Custer on the ridge. You are not the same afterward when you should have died and didn’t.

Well, Old Lodge Skins talked on and on, through the night while the drums kept on outside and the victory dance continued, the great fires illuminating the entire valley while Reno and Benteen’s little command cowered up there on the bluffs. I fell off to sleep from time to time, having good reason for it if ever a man had, and I don’t guess the chief thought it bad manners, for he was not necessarily addressing me anyhow.

After the Washita, his band and him come north, across Kansas, Nebraska, and into the Dakota Territory: some eight hundred mile, most of it on foot for you recall how Custer shot them ponies and
the rest of that camp run off, so Old Lodge Skins and his surviving people could not obtain much help. If they got anywhere near ranchers and cowboys on that hike, not to mention soldiers, they was fired on automatically, so to speak; and whenever they sighted buffalo, why, there was white hunters with the long-shooting rifles that could kill either animals or Indians at a half mile. The Human Beings did not overeat on that long walk.

I asked about Sunshine and Morning Star, and the chief says they had not been with him and since he hadn’t heard they was killed, he figured they must have joined the Cheyenne what stayed in the south with the Kiowa and Comanche. I never got a further report on them two, nor did I ever look for them in later days. If Morning Star is still living somewhere down in Oklahoma, he is half white and eighty-five years of age, and his Ma some twenty added onto that, and I have always hoped they owned a patch of land with some oil on it and never had to sell blankets to tourists to support themselves.

Then, without my asking, Old Lodge Skins said: “That yellow-haired woman of Younger Bear’s died on the long walk north, and their boy, also with yellow hair, was captured from us by soldiers in a fight on Medicine Bird Creek. My son Little Horse was rubbed out at the same place, and many others too, and there was hardly anybody left when we reached this country.

“But once here, we met some more Northern Human Beings, and all the old troubles due to the mistakes of youth were now forgotten, so they welcomed us, and our friendship with the Lakota became very close because the great Oglala named Crazy Horse married a woman of the Human Beings. So we hunted and ate well, for there are still buffalo here, and more people joined us, warriors like Gall and Crow King, and the war chief of the Human Beings, Lame White Man, also Two Moon, and Sitting Bull made medicine, and last week we beat the soldiers on the Rosebud, and today we rubbed out even more on the Greasy Grass, and tomorrow we will kill the rest on the hill.”

I expect you could say Olga had been another who died as a result of what Custer done at the Washita, but he was beyond my holding anything further against him, and anyway she had not been my woman for quite a time. Poor Swede girl: she had a strange life.

As to Gus, in afteryears I looked for him throughout the central plains, but there wasn’t no white men nor Indians who ever heard of Medicine Bird Creek, which must have been its Cheyenne name. So I could not get a line on him. But I should still today like to find my boy, and would pay a twenty-five-dollar gold piece to the person who can give me information on him.