Scarlet Plume, Second Edition (38 page)

She followed him to the door.

He sat down on a stone beside the pool. He set his feet evenly and neatly in front of him. Then, leaning forward, elbows on knees, he let his eyes rest on the glimmering water.

She went halfway down the path. “Husband?”

He sat as one turned to stone.

She saw it was useless to talk to him. Brother-in-law Claude had often said that in certain braves, unaccountably, a lava-like melancholy seemed to erupt in them overnight. Claude spoke of the black melancholies as coming from the devil himself. “The Indian has them so deep, so profound,” he said, “there is no touching him. You might as well try to talk a lowering sky out of an impending thunderstorm than think of talking an Indian out of his dumps.” Claude said he had learned to let them alone. Either the black funk would take its course or the brave would take care of it in his own way, deliberately expose himself in battle and get himself killed.

Blue eyes milky with sympathy, wonder, Judith went back to her sewing.

She stitched carefully. Occasional sighs broke from her. Her mind kept edging around to what might be troubling Scarlet Plume. She hated to see him in torment.

Scarlet Plume sat stonily alone by the pool all day long.

She thought she could appreciate his mood of black bile a little. She had at first felt terrible herself while living with his people the Yanktons.

When Scarlet Plume didn’t come in at dark, she went out to talk to him.

“I have meat on a stick by the fire for a brave man. It sizzles merrily. There is also some soup which has been sprinkled with wild onion and sorrel.”

Scarlet Plume’s breath came slow and shallow. His eyes were fixed inexorably on the pool. The pool was now hardly more than a black shimmer.

“The meat waits.”

Scarlet Plume’s breath came slow and shallow.

“It will be as my husband wishes. I await him.” She returned to her fire.

Scarlet Plume sat in bondage. A dark being from the underworld possessed him.

The next morning he was still sitting beside the pool. From his frozen attitude it was apparent he hadn’t moved all night.

It was gloomy out. Clouds as heavy as pregnant sows slopped across the sky from northwest to southeast. Occasionally a little rain mizzled down.

“My husband, it is not a good thing to sit in a cold rain.”

There wasn’t the slightest hint he had heard her.

She got her wolfskin and draped it over his shoulders.

He ignored it.

She took up her sewing again. Tunic finished, she began to work on a new pair of leggings. Occasionally she threw a look at him. She worried.

The sun came out at noon. Glaring yellow light struck him directly over the back of the head. It gave his long, loose black hair the shine of a burnished crow.

After an hour of warm sun he stirred. It took him several minutes to get to his feet.

He got a hot coal from the hearth in their bower and started a small fire in front of his little round purification hut. He heated some white stones, carried a leather bag of water into the little leather hut, sprinkled a few handfuls of silver sage on the ground both inside and outside. He prayed. He stripped himself, and placing the heated stones handy, crawled inside. Soon plumes of steam leaked through the cracks of the leather hut. At last, purified, broiled to almost a roast red, he came leaping out and dove into the pool.

He washed his clout, wrung it out, and put it back on.

He went downstream a dozen yards, took his knife and cut himself a slender tough branch of bur oak. He came back and sat down on his stone again. He began to adze the branch down. Despite the hot purification bath, his cheekbones were still an ashen gray.

He was making a bow. Judith began to feel better about him. At least he was moving about. He would no doubt come around in his own good time.

She knew enough not to go near him. The dark spirit of the woman was alien to the hunt. The hunt was one of man’s oldest skills and had to be revered accordingly.

He cut the bow a certain length, measuring from his right hip across to his extended left fingertips. With his knife he beveled the bow with a sure touch. He cut grooves down the back of the bow. Carrying a coal from his sweathouse fire, he made a stick fire near his workbench and boiled antelope hoofs and tendons until he had a sticky glue. He spread the glue over the back of the bow in several thin layers and pasted on two sinews with the wide ends together in the middle. He spread on more glue and powdered it with white clay. He repeated the treatment several times. He wrapped a piece of buckskin the width of a hand around the middle of the bow. The bowstring he made from the antelope’s rear-leg tendons. Done, he set the bow aside to dry.

Next, searching the floor of the pool, he found a stone the shape and size of a chicken’s heart. He built a flint-maker, a tool with a long wooden handle and tipped with a piece of deer antler. The handle fitted exactly under his right arm, from the tip of his middle finger to the point of his elbow. He set the butt of the handle against his chest to form a steady fulcrum, then, pressing the antler point against the edge of the heart-shaped stone held in his left hand, pressed firmly. Presently the stone fractured and a half-moon flake flew off. Flake after flake jumped off around the entire rim of the stone. He worked both sides.

By evening he had a half-dozen arrowheads ready, all of them beautifully executed, all of them needle-sharp.

He selected a half-dozen second-growth chokecherry shoots and cut them a certain length.

It became dark out and he came inside to work by the light of the hearth. His face was still ashen. His eyes sputtered more than glittered. He still would not eat.

Judith remembered having seen such a face before. Pa had looked like that after his two-day headaches.

Scarlet Plume worked until he had six gleaming arrows, perfectly tipped and deftly feathered. All the arrows were properly grooved so that blood could flow from the wound they would make. He set the arrows a certain distance from the fire to let them dry gradually. There was a magical sense of rightness in all he did.

Weapon-making done, he sat quietly a moment.

He rubbed a hand along his jaw. The hand paused. It had found something. With a fingertip he explored his teeth. He winced when he touched a back molar, a wisdom tooth. He selected a splinter from a mound of twigs to one side of the fire. Gingerly he picked at the wisdom tooth. After some careful poking around, he pried out a tiny ball of decayed food.

The removal of the little speck of food let air into the cavity of the tooth. He sat very still for a while. Then, of a sudden, he took the splinter and held it in the fire. The moment it blazed up, he quickly jammed its burning end into the cavity of the tooth. There was a sizzling sound. He held it in the cavity until the splinter turned cold. Not a ripple of pain showed on his face.

Judith sat like a scared rabbit.

He sat immobile some more. Gradually his wide, haunted eyes filled with lava-like torment again. The dark being from the underworld still possessed him.

Judith decided to help him. She would ask him the most horrendous thing she could think of. She would shock him out of it.

“Brave one,” she said, “we have now lived together as man and wife for some time. Yet you have not told me your secret name. Do you have secrets from your wife? I wish to know.”

He quivered as if struck with a whip.

“What is your secret name? I wish to know.”

He shuddered.

“Well, then, at least tell your wife the name of your helper. Who is he?”

“He is wakan. I cannot speak of it.”

“Speak to your wife. I would know what your trouble is.”

He shuddered some more.

“Husband, there is also another thing I would know. What is the secret name of Wakantanka?”

The effect of the question on him was like a blow on a tense string. He vibrated violently all over. And only gradually did the vibrations die away.

She felt miserable, even ashamed, asking such questions. Yet she felt she had to help him with her white-man kind of medicine. “What is his name? I wish to know. When I reach the home of my white friends I want to tell them about the god of the Yanktons, that he is a very great god.”

He spoke. His voice was so cracked, so hollow, it was more the voice of a ghost than that of a man. “Woman, one touches Wakantanka himself when one mentions his true name. If I mention his true name he will surely strike me dead. That is why he is also spoken of as He Who Has A Secret Name.”

“I have heard it said by my sister, the Good Book Woman, that Wakantanka is sometimes known by the name of The Great Master Of All Breath.”

Terrible awe showed in his eyes. He jerked away from her as if truly expecting her to be struck dead. She had hit on the correct name.

“And now that I know his secret name, can you not tell me your secret name?”

“No!” he cried hoarsely, eyes wild and rolling. “No! No!”

She herself began to shake all over. Yet the devil in her pushed her on. “Tell me, what is your secret name?”

“No!”

“Speak to your wife. I would know what your trouble is.”

A massive breath made his chest shudder. He swallowed and swallowed.

“Speak to your wife. I would know what your trouble is.”

At last, after swallowing and swallowing, he managed to find tongue. “You are the white goddess. When you command I must speak. Therefore I do. The day before this day I saw a burning in the swamp. It was a ghost and it was dancing on top of the grass. It was on the other side of the bier of Mad Bear’s departed warrior. I saw that it was the dead man’s spirit. He followed me and told me he was unhappy. He said I had done a great wrong to the Dakota people. He told me it was not permitted a Yankton to make connection with a white goddess. He said that it was a terrible wrong. It was for this that Whitebone lost his old mother, Smoky Day. The swamp ghost said it was against the vision that was given me. He told me to take you to the white cities quickly.”

Another shudder shook Scarlet Plume. “When one sees a swamp ghost it is always a sign that death lies waiting near for someone. I saw him very plainly. He had two great glowing eyes.”

Judith fell silent. What could she tell this man?

Scarlet Plume again made a move to fight off the black miseries.

He made himself a drum by staking out a piece of rawhide over the hole in the earth on the other side of the hearth where he boiled the meat. He made himself a drumstick with a piece of ash and a wrapping of leather.

Then he began to beat the earth drum slowly,
tok-t-tok-t-tok
.

Presently he warmed to the task and began to sing. The singing was a barbaric
rhu
ing deep in his throat. The sound of it was as if a lizard were trying to sing a psalm. The words were more than sad, they were guttural. The melody always fell away at the end. The melody had come down a long, long road, out of the savage deeps of time.

The drumming came to her through the earth under the hearth and entered her belly. It entered the seat of all things.

He drummed and sang on into the night, without interruption, beating with first one hand then the other, holding his free hand, palm open, alongside his mouth for resonance.

She lay down on her hide bed. She covered her ears with a parfleche to mute the sound of the drumming. It exhausted her to listen to it.

It was well past midnight before he stopped.

The pause that followed was full of ringing echoes.

He said, “The Yanktons will soon be dead. All of them. Our homeland will soon be plowed and burned away. All of it. We and our land, we are too naked. The great wagon-guns of the white man’s war and the hard plows of the white man’s peace have put holes in us.” His face was so ashen it resembled bleached placenta. “My dreams have deserted me, even those that come only in the night. I have no dreams. When I look forward I look into blackness. When I look backward I look into blackness. I am dead ahead and I am dead behind. I have no more to say.”

There was a further slight quiver in his eyelids. Then he lay down and composed himself for sleep.

An hour later there was an awesome scream outside their shelter. Both Judith and Scarlet Plume sat up out of sleep like seeds suddenly popped out of milkweed pods.

“What was that?” Judith whispered. Her scalp puckered up on her skull.

Scarlet Plume reached over and placed a hand on her mouth. The hand was warm with a brother’s touch.

A single red ember, no larger than the eye of a squirrel, showed in the hearth. There was just enough light inside the lodge for Judith to make out the silhouette of Scarlet Plume’s face. His blacks were gone.

The voice in the night erupted horribly outside the door again. It was as if a hundred crucified Christs were letting go at once.

“It is the puma,” Scarlet Plume whispered. “The terrible cat.”

“A true puma? Not Mad Bear and his band?”

“It is the true puma.”

Judith quick slipped out of her bed and crawled in with Scarlet Plume. She hugged him. Her belly humped up.

The scream of the great cat ripped the night air again. This time it was so close they could hear spit crackling in its throat. In her mind’s eye Judith saw an enormous wild beast, lips wide and snarling, teeth as sharp as icicles, throat a
rhu
ing red—all of it an unreasoning ravening hunger.

“Ahh.” Scarlet Plume let go a slow breath. “It can now be seen that what I saw two days ago was not the true swamp ghost.”

“Swamp ghost?”

He took her head in both of his hands and slowly turned it about. “See? There it is.”

Two circling balls of fire glowed in the doorway.

She shrank in his arms.

“I saw instead the eyes of this puma and not the eyes of the swamp ghost.”

She hugged him about the waist.

He spoke to the two eyes, clear and resonant. “Big cat, you stand on the threshold of a Yankton lodge. Welcome. Enter. Eat with us. There is much meat in the parfleche. Big cat, you see the hearth of a true Yankton. Step forward. Sleep with us. The ground is dry on this side of the fire.”