Return of Little Big Man (42 page)

“There is a charming story that has been told by others,” Libbie said, “of how my husband and I first met, as children, in my hometown of Monroe, Michigan. Armstrong had come from Ohio to visit his sister. I was swinging on our front gate, and as he walked by, I cried, ‘Hello, you Custer boy!’” She made the first real smile since we arrived, aside from the polite kind, and it was like the sun come out. She must of had them dimples already as a little girl. She would of been just the right age to of said the same to me, had I been lucky enough to live on a street full of white porches in Michigan. I could just imagine her melodic voice calling me “you Crabb boy.”

Annie too was real taken by this. “And you both fell in love right then,” says she, leaning her head at a sentimental angle.

Mrs. Custer was sitting close enough to reach over and lay her hand on the back of Annie’s. “Would not that have been delightful, my dear,” she says. “But alas! this incident did not happen. It is fictional.”

Annie’s face fell at that news, and damn if I didn’t feel disappointed too. Libbie had a way of taking others into her way of seeing things. So when she goes on and tells how she really met “Armstrong,” who now and then, in an especially tender memory, she called “Autie,” I got so caught up in the narration that even though I knowed how their courtship come out in the end, I was in real suspense during the account of the many months Custer begged for her hand, first from a reluctant Libbie, who was the belle of Monroe, sought after by everybody wearing pants, including some so bold they tried to steal a kiss but was rebuffed, and then after he had conquered her heart, from her Pa, a judge who was one of the pillars of society in the region.

In fact I still think it was remarkable of Custer to give so much attention to being a suitor when he was at this same time fighting in the Civil War, nowhere near Michigan, and not just serving his time, either. He was just out of West Point, where he graduated last in his class, having done little during his years there but pull pranks and gather demerits, but once he started to lead cavalry charges he become the Yankee J.E.B. Stuart and whipped the Rebs in almost every encounter, the result being he found himself the youngest brigadier general in the Union Army at the age of twenty-three. Finally even old Judge Bacon had to give in and accept him as a son-in-law.

Now, from the side on which I had been acquainted with the man, the aspect presented by his widow was new. I had heard of his brilliant record in the War, but what was mentioned most often by the fellows I had knowed in the Seventh Cavalry en route to the Little Bighorn before they was all rubbed out, was how much higher the casualties was in Custer’s command than in any other, so that was another record set by the Boy General. My point in bringing it up here is to say I never thought about it while listening to Mrs. Libbie tell me about her hero, who she at first saw as just another young man she had to keep from being too fresh, also a person of no social standing, from a Democrat and Methodist family, while she was from a quality line and a product of the Young Ladies Seminary and Collegiate Institute.

For a little while anyway I got so involved in this account I was rooting for Custer, a young fellow trying to rise in the world. I felt some similarities to him, even at my current age.

“But at the source of my father’s objections,” Libbie went on, “was a chance event that occurred early in the War. He was returning home one evening when he saw, staggering along the street nearby, a thoroughly inebriated young man in an Army officer’s uniform.” She pursed her sensitive lips and looked ruefully into her lap, then raised her head with another smile. “Unfortunately my father recognized that young officer as the Custer boy, whom at that time I had not yet met!”

Now to show you how caught up in this I was, I took Custer’s side: he was on leave from a war, for heaven’s sake. Who was he to be criticized by some old teetotaling civilian? But I never said anything, and just as well, for Libbie goes on to say though it was true that young Autie was at fault on this occasion, only good come of it.

“It was the very evening that Armstrong’s sister Lydia, whom he stayed with in Monroe, saw the same distressing sight, and thereupon exacted from him a promise never to be drunk again. Standing up erect as the soldier he was, Autie pledged, ‘Such a promise is not enough! I hereupon swear never again to let any form of alcohol pass my lips.’ And,” said Libbie, staring at each of us in turn, “he kept that vow to the end of his life.” She turned and looked at his bust. “There are many things the world does not know about my late husband. Would you think he would weep at a performance of
East Lynne?
Let me assure you he did.”

So there was something I shared with the man, after all: tears come to my eyes during that same show, when I seen it in Tombstone, and I would of been embarrassed had not some of them miners, along with a number of gamblers and other good-for-nothings sobbed so loud at times you couldn’t hear the actors speak.

“My husband,” said Libbie, “had one fault, and on our honeymoon in this very city he visited a phrenologist who, after a thorough examination of Armstrong’s head, identified that weakness.”

I admit this statement took me by surprise, for I was slipping under her spell by now. “Is that right, ma’am?”

“Overdoing,” she says. “The consequence of having an heroic supply of energy, and bravery, generosity, honesty, and goodness, the very traits in which his critics were and are so woefully deficient.” Her sweet face become stern during this speech, only to smile again now. “I should add merriment to his list of virtues. At West Point, Armstrong was habitually last in his class because he applied his gifts to mischief-making and not to his studies. In his final year the subject at which he did worst was cavalry tactics! From which he went into the War and became, in his earliest twenties, the outstanding cavalry commander on either side of the conflict. There can be no question as to that truth. At Yellow Tavern, his Michigan Brigade met head-to-head with the renowned Jeb Stuart’s Invincibles, and at the end of the day General Stuart was dead and Armstrong had prevailed.”

This was the time when Custer couldn’t be beaten and the origin of the famous “Custer’s Luck.” Now, I had fell into the mood in which I was momentarily eager to help Libbie in her cause. “I heard tell,” I says, “the General had his horse shot out from under him more than once.”

“Four times,” said she. “Once his boot was shot off, and he came back to Monroe to recuperate with a leg wound so slight that we were soon at a dance.” Her eyes sparkled. “A costumed dance, I might add. I went as a gypsy, with a kerchiefed head and carrying a tambourine.” She leaned towards Annie and said, “You’ll never guess Armstrong’s costume.”

Now if that had been directed to me, I might of said, without any ironical purpose of my own, “An Indian chief.”

But what Libbie mentioned was a name I didn’t recognize, and Annie didn’t neither, for I asked her about it later. I’m going to speak it here the way it sounded,
Looey Says.
Not till some years afterwards, when the Wild West performed in Paris, did I find out what she said—which I remembered due to its oddity—was what the French called their King Louis the Sixteenth. Fellow who told me that was some rich Frenchman who was crazy about cowboys and Indians, like so many of them was, and he never got tired of watching
Coostair
get rubbed out in the show. When I told him of the aforementioned, he says I must of heard the wrong number for the king. It had to be
Looey Cat Horse
or
Looey Cans,
that is, the Fourteenth or the Fifteenth, as nobody would want to be the Sixteenth, for during the Revolution they cut his head off. I was so ignorant at the time that I thought this Frenchie had gotten it wrong: George Washington whipped the King of England in the Revolution, but certainly never chopped off his head.

Though neither of us knowed what she meant, Annie and me joined Mrs. Custer in a genteel little chuckle, and Libbie proceeded to give an example of Armstrong’s wit at West Point which in fact I do still think was right clever. It was in a course in the Spanish language, and he asked the instructor how to say, in Spanish, “The class is over,” and the teacher told him, so Custer got up and left the room, followed by all the rest of the cadets.

“Once we were married,
I
was often the target of his teases, and Brother Tom would join him, having been his confederate since boyhood in guying their father, and they were still doing it when he was an old gentleman.”

At the Greasy Grass the Indians—some whites said Rain-in-the-Face personally—mutilated Tom Custer’s corpse so bad I couldn’t of told who he was had not his initials been tattooed on his arm: that’s how I last seen him. Along with Tom, most of the other younger male members of the Custer clan was rubbed out: the young brother Boston, and the nephew Autie Reed, son of the sister Lydia to who the future general give the no-drinking pledge, and sister Margaret’s husband, Lieutenant Calhoun. You couldn’t disregard such a loss, even if you wasn’t related to any of them. But the same thing happened to most of the Cheyenne families I ever knowed. No kind of grief is yours alone, no matter who you are, but it’s only human to think otherwise much of the time.

But Libbie was thinking of the golden days now, and it was with a girlish giggle that she went on. “All of twenty-two, I was known to those two rogues as the Old Lady. It seems Autie could, by the universal rules of war, have commandeered a certain farmhouse in the Shenandoah Valley as his headquarters, but it was ever his practice politely to request and not simply take by force—after all, so many of his favorite West Pointers were now wearing gray—and on this occasion the old Dutchman whose house it was replied, ‘Gentlemens, I haff no objections if you come in, but duh old lady, she kicks aginst it.’”

Well, she had many other stories about her all too short life with the General and I’m told went on to put them into a number of books that covered almost every day of the dozen years they was together, never allowing for no flaw in the perfect husband and peerless military leader, and either convinced most other people or anyway shamed most possible critics of him into silence so as not to rile her, who had suffered so much with no fault of her own, and loyalty in wives and widows was considered one of the prime virtues in a woman of that time. I never heard tell of her ever seeing another man socially in all the rest of her life except in a group. She was as much one of a kind as the late G. A. Custer had himself been, and I’m glad I met her, not only because of my crush, which I kept in that place in the heart designed to preserve such feelings forever, but also to give balance to my sense of the General. Though I doubt I ever could of learned enough to make me actually like him, I could at least see how she viewed the man and even feel for an instant anyway a personal regret that he had never survived that last campaign to go on a pre-planned Redpath Lyceum tour in the fall of ’76 and lecture on how he had punished the Sioux and Cheyenne during the previous summer.

Unfortunately, this nice occasion as Mrs. Custer’s guest ended on a sour note that probably nobody could be blamed for.

Mrs. Libbie was reminded again, when telling of some fancy dinner her and Armstrong was invited to by rich people, that her husband because of that long-ago vow couldn’t taste any of the champagne and other luxurious wines, but never having made such a promise herself, she could and did personally enjoy them. Now, thus far the reflection was a happy one, but suddenly she saddened. “I have reason to believe,” she said, “that the tragedy would never have occurred had his subordinates in Montana taken, and kept, a pledge against drinking.”

It was true that when it come to Seventh Cavalry officers and boozing, some smelled like walking stills, but I doubt it had anything to do with their defeat.

However, at this point I was so sympathetic to Libbie, I foolishly chimed in, “Some of the Indians claimed a lot of the soldiers at the Little Bighorn seemed drunk.” I think I have pointed out that redskins was inclined to say what would make white listeners feel better, and ain’t it interesting that people whether red or white think being drunk is a good excuse for any kind of calamity? Whiskey or the absence thereof would not of changed the outcome at the Greasy Grass.

But I had stuck my foot in it to mention Indians in Mrs. Custer’s presence. High color darkened her delicate cheeks, and into her eyes come a glint of hatred I wouldn’t of thought possible in a lady of such tender sensibilities.

“Please never mention savages in my presence,” said she, “or I must ask you to leave. I apologize: you are my guest, but I cannot abide such a reference.”

Now you might believe there wasn’t no depths I wouldn’t sink to in fawning over the object of my besottment, but you would be wrong in this case. I didn’t beg her pardon. Custer attacked that big camp on the Little Bighorn expecting to kill as many warriors as he could. That it happened the other way instead was altogether fair. He got what he had coming, not in terms of revenge but according to the fortunes of war. But I too had had loved ones killed by the enemy, and when this happened as an adult I sure hated the killer—George Armstrong Custer. So I never thought less of her for her feeling.

Well, I had accomplished one of my aims, to finally meet the lady who I had thought about so long, and I was not disappointed by her. Libbie Custer was the sort of woman who a lot of men would of thought was well worth losing their life early for, if God demanded such a swap, and I might of been one of them. It turned out she went on to last almost as long as me, give or take a few decades, living till the 1930s. I never saw her again except at a distance, in a box seat at performances of the Wild West, to which, wearing a jaunty, feathered hat, she was a frequent visitor, but her and Annie become pals, passing many an hour together in embroidering and female palaver, and Annie was the better for it in her efforts to improve herself in genteel ways.

Speaking of Annie, when we left Mrs. Custer’s place that day what she says was not about this occasion but rather how I ought maybe get myself another dog on account of missing old Pard so much.