One Thousand White Women (22 page)

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Authors: Jim Fergus

BOOK: One Thousand White Women
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“The scuttlebutt is that if Custer comes back at the end of the summer with his saddlebags full a gold,” she continued, “the rush is goin’ to be on—in a big way. It’s already started strictly on account of the rumors. All them prospectors and settlers and shopkeepers and whores and everyone else who follows the gold rush is goin’ to need—is goin’ to demand—military protection against the Injuns. Because the Injuns still think that country belongs to them—see? And why shouldn’t they? It was give to’em fair and square. That’s the heart of their big medicine country, and they ain’t goin’ to take real kindly to all them white folks running through it, shootin’ it up and scarin’ off the game. Now according to what the Cap’n is hearin’, Grant’s people is fixin’ to pull the plug on this whole brides program—for a couple a reasons. For one thing, when the shit storm begins, they don’t want a bunch more white women in the way of killin’ off the rest of the Injuns. And they sure as hell don’t want to get themselves in no situation where the Injuns can use you gals as hostages—then the newspapers would find out about this whole damn mess. How do you suppose that would look for President Ulysses S. Grant? So until further notice you all is the first, an mos’ likely the last installment of payment to the Injuns. Now all this is unofficial right now, you understand? The Cap’n is privy on accounta bein’ Crook’s aide-de-camp, which a course puts him in a tight spot. Now if word gets out among the Injuns that the Great Father in Washington is—number one—backin’ out of the brides deal, and—number two—plannin’ to take the Black Hills back, well just all kinds a shit’s goin’ to fall from the skies. The Cap’n don’t want you in the middle a that. He wants you to come back to Robinson with me. Right now. After we get a little catnap, we can leave later today.”
“All of us?” I asked. “Leave now?”
“Honey, if all you gals was to try to leave at once,” Gertie said, “it’d take the damn Injuns about five minutes to track you down and bring you back. And they wouldn’t take kindly to it. See, they think you was given to them. And to an Injun a deal’s a deal. No, this’d just be you and me, honey. We’d just sneak off and the two of us’d have a pretty good chance a makin’ it. Especially after last night. I know this country, and anyhow, Little Wolf might just let you go. It wouldn’t hardly look good, see, for the head man to go chasin’ off after his wife like a damn jilted lover, if you get my meanin’.”
“But Gertie, you know perfectly well that I can’t leave my friends here,” I said. “Especially after what has just happened.”
“That’s what I told the Cap’n you was goin’ to say,” Gertie said. “But he said to tell you that the government’s goin’ to figure out a way to get the others out, too. It’s just a matter of time, and in the meantime at least you’d be safe.”
“The government being so reliable,” I scoffed. “John Bourke must take me for a fool to believe that. Or a coward to leave my friends here.”
“Neither, honey,” Gertie said. “You know that, but he figured it was worth a try. You think last night was bad, things is goin’ to get a lot worse out here’fore they get better. They’ll get over the whiskey, but once the Injuns get things figured out, which after they start to see all the settlers moving into the Black Hills, will be real quick, this ain’t goin’ to be no place for a lady. You ain’t goin’ to be safe here.”
I laughed. “We’re hardly safe now,” I said. “Tell Captain Bourke to come out here with a detachment of troops and provide us all safe escort home,” I said. “Like a gentleman.”
“Like I say, he can’t do that, honey,” Gertie said. “He’s an Army man. He’d be facin’ a court-martial for sure if his superiors even got wind of the fact that he’d sent me out here to warn you.”
“So what is our position, then—officially speaking?” I asked. “Are we nothing more than sacrificial lambs? An interesting, but unsuccessful political experiment? Missionaries stranded in the line of duty? Or perhaps, easiest to explain, white women gone astray, taking up with savages of our own volition?”
“Yup, that’s about it, honey,” Gertie said. “Take your pick. Like I say, they goin’ to try to figure a way to bring you home, but until Custer gets back with a full report on the gold, and until they figure some way to do that, everyone is just settin’ tight. Which, you know, honey, has always been the thing the government does best.”
“Shame on them!” I said. “Have they no sense of shame?”
“That’s the thing they does second best, honey,” Gertie said with a wry smile, “is not to have no sense a shame.”
We had reached our lodge, Little Wolf’s lodge … my home. “You must be exhausted, Gertie,” I said, “and hungry. Why don’t you stay here, have a bite to eat, and sleep for a while.”
“Don’t mind if I do, honey,” she said. “I got to picket my mule, though, first. I left him tied up on the edge of camp.”
“I’ll have Horse Boy tend to him,” I said. “That’s his job, and he’s very good at it.”
“Whooo-eee!”
Gertie said, “Ain’t you just the lady a the house! Why you got servants to do all the work for ya!”
All were still in their beds inside the lodge, except for old Crooked Nose, who, I believe, never sleeps. She took me by the arm, her fingers like an eagle’s claw, and smiled her toothless grin, which was meant, I believe, as an expression of genuine happiness for my safe return. Gertie introduced herself and they whispered briefly in Cheyenne. It did not surprise me that Little Wolf had still not returned to the lodge—the great man was probably passed out somewhere with his drinking cronies of the night.
I went to Horse Boy’s bed and knelt beside him. The morning light was still dim inside the tipi but I could see that the child’s eyes were open, catching the faint light from the embers of the fire and shining like gunmetal. I stroked his forehead and he smiled slightly. I held my hands open on either side of my ears and wriggled them, the rudimentary sign language for mule. The boy giggled at my antics, and, I think, thought that I was trying to amuse him. Gertie came over and knelt beside me. “Tell the boy where you tied your mule, Gertie,” I said. “He’ll fetch it and take care of it for you.”
She spoke to the lad, who immediately scrambled to his feet, wide-awake and eager as always to perform his duties. I was finally beginning to understand a few words of the language but was still shy about speaking it. “God, I envy you Gertie. I have a terrible time with the Cheyenne language.”
“Like I said, I learnt it when I was just a girl. Always easier to pick up at a young age. But you’ll get the hang of it. Just remember that everything’s done backwards from the way we say things. Let’s say you want to say somethin’ like, ‘I’m heading down to the river to take a swim,’ which in Cheyenne is said—‘Swim, river, go there, me.’ See? It’s all backwards.”
Without a sound, Quiet One had gotten up herself to stoke the fire with sticks and to put a small pot of meat to heating. Then she left the tipi to fill the paunch water vessel. The savages observe a curious custom of emptying out water that has stood all night—“dead” water they call it—and filling the vessel from the creek each morning with “living” water.
Soon she was back, and she poured some of the water into a small tin trade pan into which she also sprinkled a handful of coffee grounds. She put the pan on the fire to boil. Coffee is a precious commodity among the savages, and she was clearly serving it in honor of the company—without even knowing, or asking, who the company was; generosity is a universal trait of these people. And so in spite of the trials of the night, life went on …
The camp was exceptionally well provisioned at the present time. Besides the whiskey that Seminole had brought with him, the southerners had furnished us with the three most prized commodities among the savages—white man tobacco, sugar, and coffee. All these they had brought as gifts from the trading post—although most had probably been squandered last night on the whiskey.
Now I laid a bed of buffalo robes for Gertie next to mine and brought her a bowl of meat and a tin cup of coffee with a generous lump of sugar in it.
“Hell, this ain’t so bad now is it, honey?” she said, making herself comfortable against the backrest I had fixed for her. “I always did enjoy sleepin’ in a Injun lodge. Cozy, ain’t it? Makes ya feel safe.”
“I was beginning to feel so until last night,” I said. “I have lived in a lunatic asylum, Gertie, but never have I seen lunacy like that.”
“It’s just the whiskey, honey,” she said. “Plain and simple. It’s poison to’em. Turns’em plumb crazy.”
“How long did you live among them, Gertie?”
“Oh, I don’t know, let’s see … ‘bout eight years I guess altogether,” she said. “I was stole off a wagon train when I was a girl, and I stayed with’em until after Sand Creek. Someday I’ll tell you the whole story … when I ain’t so plumb tuckered out. But Hell, I liked livin’ with these folks just fine. Hated to leave’em. Yes, ma‘am, a person can get mighty accustomed to this life, you understand what I’m sayin’? Besides last night, how are you takin’ to it, honey?”
“I’ve hardly been here long enough to say,” I confessed. “And I’ve hardly had time to reflect upon it, so busy have we been working and learning, adapting to their ways and trying to teach them something of ours. Now that you mention it, it occurs to me that in the past weeks I have hardly stopped to ask myself if I was happy here … I had simply resigned myself to it … But after the events of the night I shall have to reconsider the question …”
“Naw, you don’t want to do that, honey,” said Gertie, with a dismissive wave of her hand. “Like I say last night was just whiskey talkin’. They’ll get over it. You’ll get over it. I knew damn well you wasn’t comin’ back with me. I told the Captain you wasn’t no welcher. This is a good band of people you got here. Some of them southerners is a bad influence, that’s true. They’ve spent too much time with the whites, but all in all, if these folks was left alone, things’d be just fine. If the whites’d leave’em alone, stop lyin’ to’em, stop givin’’em whiskey, things’d be just fine.”
“Stop giving them white brides,” I added.
“Yeah, we’re always messin’ around where it ain’t none of our business,” admitted Gertie. “An’ that’s exactly the good thing about the Injun life—you don’t have to stop and think about whether or not you’re ‘happy’—which in my opinion is a highly overrated human condition invented by white folks—like whiskey. You don’t have to think about it any more than a bear cub or a pronghorn antelope or a coyote or a damn bird has to think about it. You got a roof over your head? You warm? You got enough food to eat? You got plenty a good water? You got a good man? You got friends? You got somethin’ to do to keep you busy?”
I nodded affirmatively to each of these in turn.
“You got a Injun name yet, honey?” Gertie asked. “I forgot to ask ya that. Mine was
Ame’ha’e—
which means Flying Woman because one time I jumped off a runaway horse at a full gallop and landed right in a damned tree and the Injuns all thought I could fly. I always did like that name.”
“The name they’ve given me is
Mesoke
,” I said.
“Swallow,” Gertie said. “Yup, that’s a real purty name. Seems to me that you got everything a body really needs in life. Hell, honey, you tell me, what more does a person need?”
I thought the question over for a moment and then I said: “Safety … security … love, perhaps.”
“Aw, hell, honey,” Gertie scoffed, “if them first two things was so important to you, you wouldn’t be here. You still be livin’ in that asylum you mentioned. And love? Hell, that’s the easy part! You see that old girl squattin’ by the fire?” she asked pointing to Quiet One. “Now you think she spends her time worrying about whether or not she’s happy? You think maybe she ain’t got enough love in her life—what with her family, her husband, her children? I’ll tell you something. You know when you’ll find out if you been happy here? You’ll find out after you leave. When you really got some time on your hands to think things over.”
“I miss my babies, Gertie,” I said. “That’s the worst part of it. Do you know that I have two children? It was for them that I signed up for this program, to gain my freedom so that one day I might be with them again. I think of them every day, try to imagine how their lives are, what they look like now. It helps me to go on. I like to imagine how it would be for them if they came to live with me here, grew up among the savages.”
“Oh, they’d plumb love it, honey,” Gertie said. “Put the damn whiskey aside, and it’s a wonderful life for children. I thought I was goin’ to die when they first took me, but after a while I practically forgot all about my real folks. It was like livin’ a damn fairy tale. Like I say, where the fairy tale comes to end real fast is when you bump against the white man’s world again. That’s what happened to you last night. An’ that’s what happened to me at Sand Creek.”
“If I give you a letter to my babies, Gertie,” I asked, “will you post it for me at the fort when you return? They would not permit us to send any communication to our families before we left, but perhaps you could post one for me?”
“I’ll try, honey,” she said. “Sure I will.” And she laughed. ‘You’re a long way from mail delivery out here, ain’t you?”
“If you liked this life so much, why did you go back to the white world, Gertie?” I asked. “Was it because Blackbird was killed at Sand Creek?”
Gertie was silent for a long time, and I thought perhaps that she had drifted off to sleep. “That was part of the reason,” she finally said. “But it was also just because I couldn’t get away from the fact that I’m white myself. There’s no damn way around that, honey.”

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