Scarlet Plume, Second Edition (35 page)

She stepped outside. The sun shone glinting just above the steep bluff across the stream. Tilted glades of grass gleamed light-green between the trees. There was a chill in the air as if there might have been frost during the night. Leaves were shivering off some of the ash trees, sifting down the slopes like lavish throws of gold coins. A single wild plum stood like a decanter of dark wine in a far ravine. The buckskin leaves of the scrub oaks hung motionless.

She tripped down a green, mossy path. Silver-tinted black moss grew on the underside of a thick-armed grape vine immediately beside the path. She found Scarlet Plume’s watering place, a dam of rocks and twigs thrown across the stream much like a beaver might build it. She could make out individual pebbles on the gravelly bottom of the stream, red and gold and black and green.

She glanced around to make sure she was alone, then shed her tattered tunic. Golden naked, she stepped into the pool. The water had an edge to it as if it had been run through a filter of ice. She shivered. She moved into the water until it touched the backs of her knees. She cupped water over her elbows. “Ieee, it’s cold.” She waded in until water lapped up under her seat. Then, taking a daring breath, she dropped in. She came up spluttering, flailing her arms. She cried out in pleased shock. She splashed herself some more, took another plunge.

She scrubbed herself with sand. She let her hair down and undid the braids. She lashed her hair back and forth in the water, a flowing gold in a green liquid. She scrubbed her hair, again and again, remembering the lice. She wrung her hair out and spread it over her shoulders to dry.

She next scrubbed her doeskin tunic, inside and out, especially the seams. She put spreader sticks in it to keep it from shrinking too much, then laid it out on the grass in the sun.

Naked she skipped to their bower and draped herself in the wolfskin. She found a sunny place on a fallen tree outside the doorway and settled down to warm herself.

She waited for him to come. “My scarlet lover was sad.”

The sun shone on her. There was a wide golden silence. Water twinkled. More ash leaves drifted to earth. Her drying hair fluffed out on her shoulders with little springing leaps.

She waited.

A whimpering sound came to her from downstream. A fawn was hurt. The whimpering was pitiful. It seemed to come from behind some gooseberry bushes.

“Poor thing,” she whispered. “Now I suppose some puma will get it.” Out of the shadow on the far side of the stream came a doe. Head up, wary, it advanced a few steps; stopped; listened; advanced some more.

The whimpering became more pronounced. It now definitely came from behind the gooseberry bushes.

The doe slowly advanced to within a few feet of the gooseberries. It listened, ears alert; and stared, soft, dark eyes gleaming.

Then Judith saw Scarlet Plume. What she’d thought a shadow was really brown skin. He was squatted on his heels, new spear in hand and set to throw. He sat very still, unmoving. The whimpering sound came from him. He made the sound by sucking on a leaf folded between his lips.

Before she could cry out in warning, his arm flowed and the spear sprang. The spear caught the deer in the breast, transfixing it. Scarlet Plume followed his spear, leaping, as silent as a puma. Stooping, knife glinting, he cut the doe’s throat.

Judith caught a hand to her throat. “That wasn’t fair!” she gasped.

Scarlet Plume watched the fallen doe a moment, then turned and flashed Judith a victory smile. He had been aware of her all along.

Judith sat numb.

He kneeled beside the fallen doe and cupped up a handful of its blood and drank it.

Judith stiffened. Her scarlet lover drank blood? For a fleeting second, enormous, she realized what she had let herself in for. She and this man-savage were ice ages apart.

When the deer had bled sufficiently, he came bearing it toward her. The smile on his lips had changed to a look of quiet purpose.

He laid the doe on the ground. He cut slits down the backs of the rear legs and pried out the Achilles tendons. He passed a stout ash stick under the tendons and strung the body up on a tree limb. Starting at the head he skinned the doe skillfully. The pink carcass emerged as if with the motions of birthing. Scarlet Plume spread the skin out on the grass, raw side up. He next butchered the carcass, deftly, not wasting a motion. Everything usable was placed in neat rows on the skin. When he broke out the shinbone from the shank, Judith for the first time realized where the Yanktons got their lovely armor-like bone vests. Each shinbone was hollow and, like a bead, could be strung on a cord.

A drop of blood lay dried on the edge of Scarlet Plume’s nether lip. Judith shivered. She feared him. She huddled under her wolfskin.

He was hanging up the jerky to dry, when she at last found tongue. “I see that a Yankton warrior considers it manly to deceive a poor mother uneasy for the safety of her young.”

A patient, gentle look appeared in his black eyes. “While you were taking the morning bath, I prayed to the morning star for a good hunt. This I said: ‘We have need. Sunned Hair needs the food and the doeskin. Forgive us for taking this doe. Yet she is needed. She is not a mother at this time. We promise not to kill more than is needed.’”

“Nevertheless you awakened a mother’s love in her and preyed on it.”

He looked down at the deer head on the green grass where it lay with its dulled-over eyes. “She understands. The Yanktons were once animals before they were people. Her family and my family have been neighbors for many grandfathers. She and I are of one blood. Therefore the Yanktons are cousins to the deer and must apologize to her and thank her for the food and the doeskin. We do not ask her to carry burdens for us as the white man asks of his animals. We only need the blood of one at a time.”

“Do not your dogs carry sticks many weary miles across the prairies?”

“The dog is a pet friend of the woman. Sometimes when the puppy has no mother the woman gives him to suck. It is not for a man to say.”

“Well, has not the red man made a slave of the spirit dog, the horse, when he rides on his back?”

“It is a sad truth that horses were made to carry burdens. This we learned from the white man.” Finished with dismembering the carcass, Scarlet Plume began to scrape the inside of the doeskin.

“Suppose this poor mother needed the blood of a Yankton? Your blood?”

He lifted a shoulder eloquently. “If it were fated to be, it would be for us to understand. A good thing.”

“Does the Yankton consider the deer more of a brother than he does the white man?”

Scarlet Plume opened his eyes wide. “In the beginning the red man welcomed the white man into his tepee. He considered him his kodah. He cried tears over him when he first met him. This was a great thing. But soon it could be seen that the white man wanted to cut up his mother into black strips and mutilate her. Our wise men saw that even as the red man gives when he has plenty, the white man takes when he has plenty. Does not the white man know that whatever one steals from his brother in this world he will have to carry it in the next world? Can he carry the world?” Scarlet Plume shook his head gravely. “The white man’s thoughts are upside down.”

Judith fell silent.

Scarlet Plume looked up from his scraping. “If the red man tried to make the white man live like him, the white man would want to fight him. Well, that is why the red man fights. If the red man were to let the white man feel, ‘We are better than you,’ the white man would be very bitter. Well, that is why the red man is also very bitter.”

Judith grudged him his ancient pride.

A shadow, swift, like a quick basso profundo passage in a fugue, touched his face, darkened his eyes. He spoke quietly. “Yet the power of the whites will prevail. We will be annihilated. This is a terrible thing for a Yankton to think about. Not even Whitebone will survive. It is a fated thing. Just as this mother deer is feeding us, so too the Yankton will be killed up and fed to the white man.”

Judith’s eyes began to glow from within.

“We are all dead men. Yet we will fight as long as we can.”

Judith found herself back on his side of the fence. It was shocking to think that the Yanktons she had known might be destroyed.

“What part of the deer does Sunned Hair wish to eat?”

“What?”

“Does not the white woman know that like parts nourish like parts? There are no special like parts for me as I am a man and this deer was a mother at one time. What special part of the deer does Sunned Hair wish?”

It was with an effort that Judith spoke. “I do not wish for any special part today.”

When he finished working the doeskin, he said, “Even the grasses are related to us. They do not hesitate to feed on our fleshes after we die. Someday soon I too shall lie down and fold my arms for a last time and feed the grasses. We are all one. We have a common mother. But the white man considers himself apart from this mother. Can it be that the white man has become overproud because Wakantanka fleshed him”—Scarlet Plume glanced at her white skin—“in wakan white? It is something to think about. The white man has been made part God when he does not deserve it perhaps.”

Her soul went out to him. She remembered the thrilling moment of his urgent thrusting. With her hands she slowly stroked her pear breasts upward. She thought, “All of my life I have tried to stamp out my passional nature, yet here I now sit, in this wilderness, perfectly willing to live in sin with this wild man.”

Scarlet Plume staked out the doeskin to dry.

Judith took a deep breath and went over to where he sat on his heels. Wetting a finger, she gently rubbed the drop of dried blood off his nether lip. She bent down to kiss him.

Quickly he put on he did not know what she was about and managed to slide out from under her reaching lips and stand up with a slab of venison in hand.

She yearned for him.

He said, gently, “My helper is talking to me again. He warns me that a man who has been with a woman lately is prone to wounds. Arrows and bullets are drawn toward such a man. Mad Bear’s band is about.”

A weakness swept over her. She staggered against him and clutched him about the hips.

“We must be careful that we do not break some law that will cover the sun with blackness.”

“Am I not an agreeable lover in your eyes?”

“You are going toward the day. I am going toward the dark. Your people and my people were born too far apart.”

“Then I am now dirt in your eyes?”

“It is our times. Your time is one time and mine is another.”

“I wish to teach my scarlet friend how to kiss.”

“Kiss? What is kiss?”

“Let us touch lips. When done in the proper manner it gives much pleasure.”

Gravely he unclasped her arms.

She sank to the ground.

A cold draft woke her.

It was night. She was lying on her matting of willow switches. Embers in the hearth fell into each other with soft, expiring sounds. There was a good wind out and it wrestled through the trees and sometimes it touched into the bower and brought out a dull orange blush in the graying ashes. She could smell Scarlet Plume’s buckskin odor behind her somewhere. She guessed he was sleeping.

She felt forlorn.

Everyone else had their proper place in the world, as if they truly belonged where they did—yes, even those in death like Theodosia and Angela. But she herself was a misfit. Unwanted. God had not really planned on having her around. No wonder the Yanktons had finally set her apart and made of her a goddess. She was better off dead.

She begrudged her belly its delight with the red man.

“I must be out of my mind thinking I can be in love with a Stone Age man. Ma always did say I was over-notional as a child.”

For the thousandth time she picked at an old sore in her heart. She had never enjoyed bedding with Vince. It had always been a chore for her. Though truth to tell it had never been much of a delight for Vince either.

The difference between Vince and Scarlet Plume was the difference between a dust rag and a scarf, the one made of old cheesecloth and the other of scarlet silk.

Yet, plainly, by decree, her duty lay in St. Paul. Vince was still her husband under God, and she had better have a cozy home prepared for him when he returned from the wars. And perhaps have more babies with him to make up for the loss of Angela. She had made her bed, now she had better lie in it.

She recalled one night in particular. . . .

She and Vince were in bed together, breathing quietly, preparing themselves for sleep. She was about to drop off, when Vince’s hand came itching over under the covers.

Her lips curled in disgust. She hated it when he came at her this way. It was so mouselike. Like some scared errand boy with a harelip. Vince sometimes not only bored her, he sometimes revolted her. She let her tongue play along the edge of her lips, until the tip of her tongue found the four black hairs on the upper lip.

Vince’s hand went itching down her leg. Near her ankle it found the hem of her nightgown, then, still itching, it began to work up her leg, taking the nightgown with it, baring her thigh.

“Don’t,” she said, flatly.

“My precious pet. Mmm.”

“Stop it.” With a quick motion she pushed her nightgown down.

Presently the itching hand began to pull the nightgown up again.

“I said don’t.”

Vince lay still for a few seconds, very still, then brusquely, roughly, he grabbed hold of her nightgown and stripped her to her chin in one swift sweep of the hand under the covers.

“Stop it, I said!” She tried to push her nightgown down again.

Before she could stop him, Vince managed to get a lock on her and rolled her over on her belly. “This way, sweet,” he said, urgent. “My precious pet.”

“No!”

But Vince had her down. There was nothing she could do about it. He laughed a lover’s soft laugh in her ear. “You know what Lucretius says.”

“I don’t care what he or any of those dirty old Latins say. Including even Caesar Augustus. I don’t want to and that’s final.”