Scarlet Plume, Second Edition (18 page)

A slow drumbeat boomed on the far side of the camp, steady, insistent, jarring.

Presently Judith’s eye fell on a dusky young woman sitting just across from her in the gate or the horns of the camp. Her name was Squirts Milk and she seemed to be nursing two little ones, twins, at her ample bosom at the same time. This in itself was unusual enough, until Judith noticed that one of the nurslings was abnormally hairy. Judith couldn’t help but stare and stare, until of a sudden the hairy nursling gave a kick. The hairy one wasn’t a baby at all. It was a puppy. The puppy’s little eyes were closed in bliss as it suckled at Squirts Milk’s soft tan pap.

Smoky Day smiled. “The puppy’s mother was eaten yesterday. There was so little meat that some of the camp dogs had to be eaten.”

It had always given Judith pause to see that Indians considered dog meat a delicacy. “Surely now, when this puppy comes of age, he will not be eaten?”

“It is fated. When the pa-pa is scarce there is no other way.”

“Pa-pa?”

“Pa-pa is the meat of the buffalo.”

Smoky Day’s remarks were like strange stones sending ripple after ripple through Judith’s mind. Wasn’t it remarkable that to the Dakota “ma-ma” meant milk from the mother and “pa-pa” meant meat brought home by the father—almost the same as to the Anglo-Saxon?

Judith looked at Bullhead’s tepee five doors down. Things were still quiet there. Judith longed to stroll over and ask her sister how she was doing. But she didn’t dare. There just was no telling how Bullhead would take it.

But Mavis was up and about six doors down. Mavis seemed paler, though she did not limp as much. She had boiled some antelope meat for her handsome savage husband Traveling Hail. He seemed content enough as he chewed heartily away.

The Yankton women passed to and fro, busy with the morning chores. Clouts and leggings, thoroughly scrubbed in the sandy stream, were hung out to dry. Old men sat talking, and smoking their gossip pipes. Braves were busy repairing bows. An arrow-maker sat just outside the horns of the camp, flaking out a new supply of arrowheads. Older boys sat at the feet of grandfathers, listening to tales of great exploits, their faces strained with yearning for the day when they might be hailed as brave warriors, the only path to distinction for the Dakota. A pair of young wives took turns biting on lead bullets with their strong teeth, the better to make enemy wounds big and ragged. A fat squaw brought food to a damsel sitting alone in darkness in a menstruating hut beyond the camp circle. On the other side of the dead cottonwood, Two Two and a dozen young lads stood guard on the grazing horses. Across the stream some maidens chatted merrily as they gathered fruit in a clump of plum trees. Apart from the grieving white women, Whitebone’s band was generally a happy and contented one.

“Darling Angela.”

With a fine groan of pleasure, a hand to each knee, Whitebone got to his feet and toed over to the front of his tepee. He picked up the lodgepole, to which the white jawbone of Unkteri was fastened. Everyone in camp watched to see in which direction they would remove that day. With proper ceremony, Whitebone pointed his emblem west, then placed it on a forked branch. All squaws instantly got busy, taking in the spears and guns standing by the lodge entrance, loosening the lodge stakes for swift striking, calling in the children, tying up the dogs and puppies.

Judith watched Smoky Day and Tinkling bustling in and out. It irked her to see so many bowed-over women in camp. Her resentment came out on her like an emanation from her blood. “What a self-constituted lord of creation the Dakota woman has let her man become,” Judith muttered to herself. Aloud she said, “What a strange thing I see in the Yankton camp. The women do all the work while the men sit on their behinds doing nothing but eat and smoke and gossip.”

Whitebone stiffened on his pink rock and his old head retracted like an angry snapping turtle’s. He was suddenly so mad, Judith could smell him from where she sat.

Scarlet Plume was offended too. And it was he who spoke in defense of the Dakota customs, not Whitebone. “Listen carefully to what will now be said. This is what the Dakotas hold. Wakantanka means for each to do his own work. The men must hunt the meat, fight the enemy, steal the horses, and teach the boys.” Scarlet Plume gave Judith a direct look. “The women must cook the meat, make the clothes, build the tepees, have the babies and feed them. Who else can have the babies and feed them?” Scarlet Plume’s voice softened some. “All this is just. And it can be seen that it is just when it is noted that the horses and the weapons and the honor feathers belong to the men, and the tepees and the parfleches and the food belong to the women.” Scarlet Plume paused a moment. “Also, Whitebone is a great chief who must carry the burden of much thought for his people.”

Whitebone finally found voice. “My other wife that was, she was a good woman. Yet it must be also said that she was one of those who could put out the lodge fire with the wind of her angry words.” Whitebone shook his head in memory. “Sometimes at the end of her moon she could be as crabby as a crazed she-wolf. I had much regard for her, yet her black madnesses often darkened my spirit.” Whitebone glared at Judith as his voice took on the crackling hardness of a man who meant to have his own way. “Let not my new wife be as one of those wolf women often seen in the white village. I have said.”

“Aiii,” Smoky Day cackled.

Judith flushed under the paint over her cheeks.

Then something caught Scarlet Plume’s eye down the line of tepees.

Judith, relieved to have the attention shifted from her, looked too.

A glinting thing had suddenly poked through the leather wall of Bullhead’s lodge, just under Bullhead’s emblem, the painted brown head of a buffalo bull. It was the point of a knife. The knife jiggled a moment, then, desecration of desecrations, it whipped up, slitting directly across the middle of the emblem. Two pale hands took hold of each side of the long rent, pulled them apart, and out stepped Theodosia.

“Sis!” Judith cried.

“Ah,” Theodosia said, “there you are. I worried all night what might be happening to you.” Theodosia spoke in a tight voice. Her sunbonnet was gone and her face was a sight. It was shock white, even the large freckles, and her eyes were like the eyes of a swamp specter seen from a distance. Tottering a little, Theodosia started toward Judith.

Bullhead emerged roaring from his tepee door. He stood a moment beholding the gaping rent cut through his emblem, then, brandishing his war club, he came after Theodosia.

“Theodosia, what happened?” In her excitement, Judith threw the little papoose to one side.

The papoose landed in the cooking fire, almost upsetting the boiling kettle. The papoose’s little brown face closed down like a scared puppy’s, then opened in a tremendous bawl.

Smoky Day and Scarlet Plume leaped to save it.

But Theodosia, already moving in a half-staggering run, got there first. She plucked the papoose and cradle from the fire before the flames could take hold. She brushed off a few live coals and gray ash. “There,” she crooned, “there, there.”

Trembles broke out all over Judith. She could feel whiteness blanching over her breasts inside her tunic. The devil had been in her to let her do such a terrible thing.

Theodosia cradled the baby, and murmured to it, and slowly the baby quieted.

Still bellowing, still waggling his war club, Bullhead stomped out his rage on the grass behind Theodosia. He didn’t quite dare to hit Theodosia as long as she held the chief’s son in her arms.

Theodosia gave the little baby a kiss on its nose, and handed it back to Judith. As Theodosia did so, she had her first good look at Judith. She started. “Judith, why, what have they done to you?”

“Me?” Judith cried. Judith’s heart leaped up. Even now, concern for others was still uppermost in Theodosia’s mind. Greater love could no woman have. “What about you, Theodosia?”

“Sister, rescue is on the way. Remember, under God all things are possible.”

Judith couldn’t say further. She saw in a swift glance that Theodosia had been through hell. Theodosia’s clothes had been torn off her during the night. Somehow she had managed to patch them together with thorns for pins. There was a large blue lump on her forearm and a deep red mark across her throat.

Bullhead raised his club for a swing at Theodosia.

Scarlet Plume moved, stepping between Theodosia and Bullhead. Scarlet Plume’s eyes were dancing wild. He caught Bullhead’s club and stayed the blow. Holding the end of the club, he pushed Bullhead back.

Theodosia hardly noticed the two men. Her gaze wandered off, abstracted. She began to babble a little. “The heathen rage. Yet when one of them shames himself with his rudeness to you, you must make it appear that you deserve it.” Theodosia had to set her feet apart to keep her balance. “I know that my noble Claude lives. He resides on that farther shore where he has joined the multitudes of them who have gone on before. While I remain behind in this vale of horror.” Theodosia staggered, almost falling to the ground. “Oh, how I long to be translated to that upper world so that I may join him.”

“Sis!”

“Life is made up of shadow and shine. Oh, I pray God that He in his infinite mercy may grant me removal of all memory of this time so that it may pass from me forever. I cannot bear it.” Theodosia leaned down to look Judith in the face. “Sister, can you tell me of a place of refuge where this poor soul may go to hide? The Bible speaks of such places in Israel, cities where tormented souls could go and be safe from those who would oppress them.”

“Why . . .”

“I wish for such a place of refuge.”

Scarlet Plume’s voice crackled. “There is such a safe place for a guest among the Yanktons. Let the Good Book Woman go to the council lodge. There you will be received as one of the land.”

“But she is a woman,” Bullhead roared. “Have the Yanktons become women that they welcome a woman in their council lodge?”

Smoky Day, Tinkling, Squirts Milk, and all the people, even pale Mavis, stood by their tepee doors and watched with slowly darkening brows. Some even stood with their hands clapped over their mouths at what they heard, their eyes directed to one side in consternation. Yanktons were known never to interfere in man-and-wife squabbles.

Theodosia leaned nose to nose into Judith’s face. “Verily, we are like poor hens, being attacked again and again by mad cocks. But face must be saved, and first of all the face of others.”

“Theodosia, oh, my dear.”

“Do you know what my brute did to me last night? My brute—may God forgive his poor savage soul—who thinks himself my husband. Yes; he staked me to the ground in what was supposed to be my own house, and gagged me with a buckskin thong over my throat so that I could not cry out, while he perpetrated the most shameless, most horribly outrageous, acts upon my person. Why, he even poked a hot stick under me to make me come up to his go-down.” Theodosia shuddered at the memory of it. “The Lord only knows how I lived through it all. Again and again and again. Like some buck goat gone mad. When all my life I’ve considered my body a vessel of the Lord’s. Holy. Oh, God, oh, Claude, forgive, forgive, but the raw liver of the Indian way of life I cannot eat.”

Scarlet Plume’s eyes rolled like a furious wild stallion’s.

Judith handed the papoose to Smoky Day, and went to her sister and took her in her arms and comforted her.

Theodosia murmured on Judith’s neck, voice muffled. “May the name of my husband be held in everlasting remembrance for his effort to bring these miserable sinful natives knowledge of Christ. Because what my husband did was beyond the call of even Christian duty.”

“Yes, sister, yes, yes.”

“Claude meant nothing but good for them.”

“Of course he did. We all know that.”

“Come hither and I will show unto thee the judgment of the great whore with whom the inhabitants of the earth have been made drunk with the wine of her fornication. And I saw a woman sit upon a scarlet-colored beast.”

“Theodosia!”

“Yet though my sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow.”

Bullhead was beside himself. He was so mad spittle sprayed out of his nose. His black cheeks quivered in sheets. The little row of honor eagle feathers at the back of his head worked like the snapping tail of an angry turkey cock. He lowered his big head at Scarlet Plume and swung it from side to side. He pawed the ground like a mad buffalo bull. Yet he did not quite dare to charge Scarlet Plume.

Whitebone stepped between Bullhead and Scarlet Plume. He held up his old hand in peace. “What is this? Are my children squabbling over a white squaw? The Yanktons hate the white man with a hot heart, and yet this comes about?”

“Kill the whites!” Bullhead bellowed. “Let us kill my white woman! Let us kill your white woman! Let us kill Traveling Hail’s white woman. They are all good for nothing.”

Theodosia recovered her calm. She freed herself from Judith’s embrace, and turning on her heel, staggered straight for the council lodge.

Bullhead jumped around Scarlet Plume and bounded for his tepee. He danced in; danced out. He came carrying something else besides his club. In his right hand was something that looked like a silver quirt, which he swirled around and around. He leaped in front of Theodosia just as she reached the door of the council lodge. The dark-browed guards standing in front of the door jumped out of his way. Bullhead roared, “Kill all the whites! It is fun to kill the whites.” Then Bullhead lashed Theodosia in the face with the silverish thing. “You cannot enter the men’s lodge. It is where the sacred symbols of power are kept.”

The lashing did not hurt Theodosia, only stung her. Yet she stopped as if clubbed. She cried a name.

Judith heard the name. She ran up. Her eyes followed the swirling silverish thing as Bullhead lashed Theodosia once more in the face. Then Judith saw it as it momentarily came to rest. She too cried a name. “Angela!”

Mavis stood before Traveling Hail’s tepee as one shaped into a graven image.

Scarlet Plume rushed up. He also saw what it was. Angela’s silver hair. Her scalp. And at last Scarlet Plume’s control snapped. He picked up a log and waggled it in Bullhead’s face. “What you have done is a terrible thing! The gods will punish us for what you have done!”