Scarlet Plume, Second Edition (41 page)

It flashed through her mind that there would be many such lost places. With no regular mail route, or neighbors to leave the gossip with, cut off for a time while they dug in, many and many a first settler had no doubt vanished forever from all knowledge of men during the terrible uprising. Kith and kin back east would wonder about them in vain. They had just simply disappeared. A couple hundred years from now, some plow might turn up a rusted bit of iron. The stranger behind the plow would stop the horses and stoop to pick up the bit of iron. He would wonder over it, fumble it around in his hand, make a guess as to what it might have been, part of a flatiron or a hinge, shake his head, toss it up and down a few times, then let it drop in the furrow again, pass on, and on the next round cover it forever.

Judith abruptly turned her horse about and headed for Slaughter Slough. Now that she had come that far she had to know.

Scarlet Plume rode behind her.

She came upon a flattened place in the gray-green slough. In the middle of it lay a skeleton. She reined in her horse. The spot was about where her brother-in-law Claude had been murdered. Yes. It was he, all right. There lay his shot-shredded skull. Judith could still see her sister Theodosia stroking his bald nose, lightly, tenderly, after the killing, still see her kissing his closed eyes, each in turn, and his cold, fallen lips.

Looking closer, Judith saw that hundreds of little sticks had been thrust into the turf next to the skull. Indians who had known Claude had visited his grave and each had shown his respect by leaving behind a little marker.

She slid to the ground. She brushed horse hair from between her legs. She knelt a moment beside the skeleton. She thought, “Dear Claude, I was not always sympathetic to everything you stood for. But you were a noble man. Forgive me.”

She looked up at where Scarlet Plume still sat dark on his red horse. “Can we not at least bury his bones?”

“Mad Bear’s people took the white man’s digging stick with them.”

“Can we not find a fresh badger hole somewhere in which to place the remains?”

Scarlet Plume slid off his horse. “I have a knife. Perhaps a little hole can be dug under the thick grass.”

The horses, released, slowly grazed off by themselves. They cropped hungrily, tearing off grass by the mouthful.

Scarlet Plume cut squares in the turf and pried them up. He placed the webbed squares neatly to one side. Then he dug into the sour black humus until he had a hole the size of a laundry basket. He stepped back.

Gray-eyed, Judith picked up the bones in pairs and placed them in the hole. She set the skull carefully at the head. The bones were chalk dry. Certain of the softer joints seemed to have been gnawed down by wolves. A tear ran down one side of her nose. Another tear let go of her eyelash and dropped dead center through the grinning mouth of the skull. She stood up and brushed off her knees and hands. She stood back, a hand to her bosom.

Scarlet Plume threw the dirt back in, then carefully replaced the squares of turf and stomped them down firm and tight.

Evening stole up around them. It seemed to come in on the green wind. The fringes along the hem of Judith’s tunic fluttered lightly against her legs.

Scarlet Plume stood very still. He seemed to be waiting for her to find something else.

The knowledge of what it was he wanted her to see next came to her just as her eyes spotted it: a scaffold burial. A woven willow platform supported by four slender posts. On a slight rise in the land.

On the platform lay a slim body wrapped in leather. From the top of one of the posts hung the shreds of what was left of a green silk dress. It was the soft whispering of the green silk in the wind which really told her what it was. Angela.

Judith took several steps toward the scaffold, then stopped short. With a great effort of will she held herself tight together. Her gold brows almost touched over the bridge of her nose. Her blue eyes took on the glint of gun metal. “Who did this thing?”

“Bullhead took her scalp.”

Judith almost toppled over. “Yes, yes. I know that. I did not mean that. I meant, who buried her in this manner? Who gave you that right?”

“There was no digging stick.” Scarlet Plume spoke with some reluctance. “With a knife one could not dig deep enough to hide the flesh from the wolves.”

“So that’s what you meant when you told the Good Book Woman that you buried the child in the proper manner.”

“Does Sunned Hair scorn the Dakota manner?”

Judith blanched so white she could feel it draw at her face. “I wish to know.”

His self-control broke. In the expression around his eyes and at the roots of his nose there was the suggestion that he had willingly let it break. Reverently he stepped across the grass until he stood under the scaffold. He knelt. He lifted his face to the skies and of a sudden filled the evening air with an awful, eerie Dakota lamentation. Echoing howls returned from the groves along the lake.

Judith stood behind him. His behavior stunned her. Real tears were streaming down his coppery cheeks. Real grief corrugated his face. He meant it. Yet there was also in it the beat of an old ritual.

Her hand came to her throat. A cold fury seized her. She resented his wailing. It was her grief, not his. Only that morning he had told her that his heart did not run with white blood. What did he mean now by falling to his knees at Angela’s bier before she herself did? He had stolen her grief.

Yet it was not in her to order him off.

She let him cry until her shadow reached him from where she stood. Then she said, quietly, speech clipped, “Is it not also the Dakota custom to remove the bones from the scaffold when the wind and sun have done with them?”

Scarlet Plume cried yet a short time, then abruptly cut it off. He let his face resolve again into an expression of stoic hauteur. He got to his feet. “Is it your wish?”

“It is.”

“Where does Sunned Hair wish to place the bones?”

She turned to gaze across endless stretches of prairie. She thought it a bitter thing that the evening breeze should have on it a penetrating smell not unlike boar semen. She turned to look back at the lake behind them. At last she said, “Let us bury her under the ashes of the Good Book Woman’s cabin. It is my wish. Will you gather up the bones?”

Gravely, with the courtesy of a mannered prince, he took down the scaffold post by post. He caught the skeleton wrapped in its leather shroud before it fell to the ground. He placed the shreds of what was left of Angela’s green dress inside the bundle. He held Angela’s remains deferentially in his arms.

Judith stepped closer. Her manner was crisp. Her wide blue eyes took in every detail. “Is it all there?”

“Even to the ghost.”

Judith steeled herself not to start. Ghost?

“But now that we have wept, her manes will be free to go to the white man’s heaven.”

Manes? Yes. In a white man’s brain the word also had another meaning. She remembered seeing Angela’s silver mane smoking in Bullhead’s hair, burned, after a lightning bolt had struck near him.

The two geldings continued to graze by themselves, reins trailing in the grass, occasionally stomping a hoof at a fly.

Scarlet Plume led the way to Theodosia’s cabin. His decorum was that of a solemn medicine man leading a procession of ghosts. It was almost dusk. With his hands Scarlet Plume scooped aside the ashes of the cabin. He dug a pit. Gently he placed the tangle of bones and skull in the hole. He stepped aside for Judith to say the last words, to cry the last tears.

Belly taut, Judith gestured for him to fill the grave.

Scarlet Plume hesitated a second. His eyes swung from left to right. He spotted the flowerless, stunted hollyhock. He seemed to nod in his black eyes. He stepped over and pulled the hollyhock up by the roots. Carefully he placed it in the fold of the leather shroud. He began to refill the hole.

Beyond him, through an opening in the trees, Judith saw six wild swans swimming irregularly on the blue surface of the lake. The old father swan up front was trumpeting hoarsely. Suddenly his wings slapped hard on the surface of the water, and he rose, water trailing from his long legs like clear syrup, and was off. After a moment the other five white swans broke free of the surface too. They lifted steadily, up, up, then veered off in a wide turn to the south. With their legs trailing after them, they resembled frogs suddenly flying. Faintly there came down to Judith the call of the father swan:
whooo-whooo-whooo
. It reminded her of an Indian lover’s flageolet.

Scarlet Plume finished. He covered the grave with the ashes. He patted the ashes down with a spray of oak leaves to hide all trace that a grave had been made on the spot.

Judith turned, walked a few steps toward the grazing horses, pitched forward. She lost consciousness before she hit the ground.

A twirling sound awoke her. There was also the lovely liquid sound of lapping waves.

She opened her eyes. Above her, not a foot away, hung her gray wolfskin. It took her a moment to understand that she was lying on the prairie with the wolfskin serving as a shelter, that the lake Skywater lay below and behind her.

But the twirling? She turned her head.

Scarlet Plume sat on his heels almost beside her. He was making a fire with a primitive fire drill. The female piece he had made out of soft, very dry willow, the male piece out of hard oak. He held the female piece down with his toes while he rotated the male stick between the flat palms of his hands, back and forth, the point set in a small notched hole. He rotated the drill rapidly at the same time that he pressed it down. The sharp friction made the twirling, squeaking sound she had heard.

Wood powder presently began to appear around the edges of the small hole. The wood powder turned brown, then began to smoke, then turned a deep black, then began to smoke in earnest. More wood powder piled up around the rotating point. Of a sudden a tiny spark glowed off to one side of the hole, in the notch. Slowly the spark spread through the powder around the hole. As soon as the spark was glowing well, Scarlet Plume let go of the drill and dropped a pinch of tinder on the spark. The tinder caught. He dropped on some coarser shavings. They caught too. He next dropped on a handful of dry grass. A billow of acrid smoke drifted around his bronze face. He leaned down and blew on it gently. A flame jumped up. Quickly he transferred the little flame to some tinder beside a stick tepee already prepared. In a few seconds the oak sticks were blazing merrily.

Judith had never seen fire making done before. It was a thing to see, an exquisite skill that men were about to discard in favor of the match. Once again, for a fleeting moment, Judith had a vivid glimpse down a long, long road leading all the way back to savage deeps of time. Thought of it helped her hold down the deep fog of grief that lay in her.

Scarlet Plume saw that she was awake. “Hoppo! The morning star is up. Already it hangs in the scarlet sky as bright as the blue egg of the redbreast.”

She sat up, and in so doing she bumped her head against one of the supports holding up the wolfskin. The wolfskin fell around her. It scared her and for a second she fought it as though it were alive.

Smiling a little, Scarlet Plume helped her.

She rubbed her eyes. “Have I slept long?”

“From sun to sun.”

She got to her feet and stretched. She smoothed out her wrinkled tunic with the flat of her hand.

She saw that he had gathered a few white boiling stones and had dug a boiling hole beside the fire. The thought of more boiled meat momentarily gagged her. But then she saw a neat pile of pinkish-brown potatoes on the other side of the fire. Her eyes opened. “Where were these found?”

“In the Good Book Woman’s garden.” He pointed to where he had gone rooting through a grass-choked patch of ground.

Her eyes lighted up a high blue. It had been months since she had had a good boiled potato. “Mmmm.”

“They will be ready when you return from the morning bath.”

Later, just before they left, after she had mounted her gray gelding, Scarlet Plume did something that endeared him more than ever to her. He touched a tree, a wolfberry bush, a sunflower, a cricket sitting on a nodding spear of grass. He also reached out a hand as though to touch the morning sun. The easy dignity of the true fatalist lay over his wide face.

They jogged northeast, loose hair flowing, gold and black. There was no wind except that created by their own going. Mosquitoes rose in clouds as they passed by placid water in low green sloughs. Thousands upon thousands of ducks and geese flew by overhead, going south. All morning long the skies were filled with their vague, haunting cries. Sometimes they dipped through dry coulees. When an occasional odd hump in the land came along, Scarlet Plume ascended it for a long searching look around.

The sun had climbed to near noon, when Scarlet Plume abruptly stopped and got down off his horse. He squatted in front of a large white boulder, staring intently at something on it.

Judith urged her horse up close to have a look too. “What is it?”

“Sign.”

“Where?”

His brown finger traced out faint red markings on the white surface of the stone. Rain seemed to have washed much of it away.

“What does it say?”

He pointed to two irregular circles, several twiglike human figures, a rough sketch of a cannon, a wide diagonal stripe. “Here are two lakes. One of them is known as Talking Water, the other Wood Lake. Here are white soldiers fighting with red warriors. Here is the River Of The Milky Water.” He next pointed to a series of dots. “This tells that almost a moon ago”—he pointed straight north—“there was a battle in that direction. Red warriors were defeated by a great camp of white soldiers. There are many red prisoners. Many white captives have also been returned by the red men.” He stood up. He nodded to himself. “It is to this place that we must go.”

Judith didn’t understand the hieroglyphic markings and she didn’t understand the reasoning. She sat drooping on her horse. “Whatever you say. I suppose there’s no turning you back now.”