Seize the Sky: Son of the Plains-Volume 2 (2 page)

Many of the hairy tanned heads had been smashed to jelly. The congealing ooze was already attracting both crawling and flying insects. Some heads had been severed from the bodies. Among the sage and yellow dust lay other body parts: hands, feet, penises, legs, and arms. Practically every man’s torso bristled like a porcupine with a score or more arrows, most fired into the dead bodies by eager young boys or infuriated, wrinkled old men who could not remember ever celebrating such a resounding victory. Truly, this was a day for joy and singing the old songs.

Farther down the slope two older youths played a game of shinny-ball with a soldier’s head, batting the bloody trophy back and forth with discarded rifles that could be found beside every dead soldier. The bearded head rolled into the sticky entrails that had tumbled from another soldier’s belly wound. Suddenly the two youths had a new game to play. They yanked and pulled, tore and ripped the warm, snakelike intestines from the man’s belly.

The little boy turned away, his mind already numb to the shrieking crimson spectacle all round him. Even here at his feet he could not escape the gore. Here lay three of the white-bellies, looking like helpless fish flopped on the creek bank. All three had been stripped by the women. Yet while two had been desecrated and horribly mutilated, their genitals hacked off and tossed aside, their thighs gashed, a hand gone or foot cleaved away, heads scalped and pummeled
to a sticky jelly—the hairy-face in the middle remained untouched.

Why had his aunt protected this one from desecration? Why had she stood guard while his mother hauled him up the hillside to view this body? Why would they want this one, solitary soldier out of all the others to hear better in Seyan—his people’s Life After Crossing Over?

This soldier’s face bore a look of peace.

The boy felt something very different boiling inside his own belly. In summer all he ever wore was the little breechclout and his buffalo-hide moccasins. The sun’s scorching fingers raked his naked back. Trickles of sweat coursed down his heaving chest. It seemed the sun’s rays grew hotter, the stench more suffocating. He imagined the white-belly corpses inching in on him here where he sat near the crest of the hill.

“
Aiyeeee!”

He jerked up, his nose inches from the frightening glare of an ancient, shriveled woman. The skin on her face sagged, as did the wrinkled pair of old dugs he saw as he peered down the loose neckline of her ill-fitting skin dress. The boy swallowed sickly.

Her wild eyes darted like accusing black marbles from him, to the white soldier, to Monaseetah, and back to the soldier’s body again.

“You have not touched this one yet!” Her teeth showed black gaps from which burst a hideous odor.

“No.” Monaseetah placed a hand on the dead soldier’s chest, over his heart just above the bloody wound. “He is a … my relative.”

“Aieee!”
Her head fell back as she cackled, and the boy feared it would fall off the old harpy’s shoulders. “A
relative
, sister?”

“You are Sioux—yes?” Monaseetah did not remove her hand from the soldier’s heart.

“Miniconjou.”

“I am Tsistsistas. I know this soldier from long ago. Several winters now. In my land to the south. This one, he was foolish to come north. But, he is my relative.”

Slowly the old one bent forward, studying the young mother’s face with a rheumy eye. “You see to him, Cheyenne sister.” The old hag peered at him closely a long moment before he pulled away, hiding behind his mother. “I want his boots, Tsistsistas. Only his boots!”

She cackled once more as Monaseetah scooped up the knee-high dusty black boots she had set aside for herself. The scuffed cavalry boots belonging to two other soldiers were nowhere near as tall as these. Running her hands over the soft, pliant black leather, the wrinkled one smiled now that the precious treasure belonged to her.

“These, little sister, will make fine bullet pouches … perhaps a quiver for some man’s arrows. Maybe a hiding place for a man’s love charms or war medicine. So very soft—”

“Take them and go, old one!” Monaseetah snapped. “Just go!”

Her fiery words caught the boy by surprise. He rarely heard his mother bark at others. She almost never shouted at him or his older brother—only when they had really deserved it.

“He is your relative, you say?” She squinted the cloudy eye again, stooping close to the young Cheyenne mother, glaring with suspicion and disbelief at Monaseetah.

“He is.”

With a bony finger the old one brushed a lock of the boy’s light hair out of his eye before she took that same finger and dipped some of the drying blood from the massive oozing wound at the soldier’s left side. With that blood she smeared something on the man’s left cheek. Again she dipped and painted, dipped and painted, until she had enough of a symbol brushed dark against the sun-burnished skin and reddish blond whisker stubble.

“I put this here to tell all Sioux they must leave this body alone.” The old woman’s face softened. Perhaps she remembered years without number gone by, remembered little ones at her breasts, remembered a man she had loved long before there were too many years to count any longer. “My people will not bother him, seeing this sign on his body, little sister. Do not worry your heart.”

Monaseetah sat stunned, not at all sure what she should say. “Thank you … for your great kindness.” She dropped her gaze, ashamed of her tears.

“Little niece, it is always better to grieve. Later you can heal from that mourning for those who have gone before us to the Other Side. It is always better to forget after some time has passed … and you go on into the days granted you by the Father of us all.”

“But I do not want to forget. I will never forget.”

Monaseetah’s words turned the old woman around after a few hobbling steps. She looked at the tall, dusty cavalry boots clutched securely beneath her withered arms like a rare treasure.

“I will always remember this day, little one. Remember for all the time that is left me. I too can never forget. Sometimes it might be better to carry the hurt inside … and remember what happened here beneath this sun.”

The wrinkled one turned away and was gone.

More frightened now, the boy clung to the back of his mother’s buckskin dress. Monaseetah pulled free a butcher knife and set to work with its sharp blade.

He could not see what she was cutting until he stepped around her shoulder. His wide, wondering eyes watched as she finished hacking off one of the pale man’s fingertips. Monaseetah let the soldier’s right hand fall before she dropped the fingertip into a small pouch hung round her neck.

Why would she take part of this soldier’s body to keep when everywhere else on the hillside all the others hacked at the white bodies with pure, unfettered blood-lust?

He studied the soldier’s head and saw that it would truly make for a very poor scalp. The short reddish blond bristles were thinning, the hairline receding. No wonder no one had torn this skimpy head of hair from the white man’s skull.

“Here, my son.” Monaseetah gave him an elk-horn ladle she had pulled from her wide belt. “Bring me water from the river. Take it. Go now.”

She nudged him down the hill toward the river that lay
like a silver ribbon beneath the wide white sky. At least it would be cool beside the water, he thought.

Dodging the huge bloating horses and gleaming soldier corpses, he went to the river and scooped water into the ladle. Mounted warriors screeched past him as they rode to the south. Shaking, the boy spilled half of the cool water on his lonely, frightening climb back up the long hillside. He slid to a halt beside his mother and choked back the sudden foul taste of bile washing his throat.

It surprised him. For the first time this afternoon he wanted to vomit. He gulped and swallowed, fighting down the urge to rid himself of that breakfast eaten so long ago.

As his mother began to wash the white man’s head and face, the boy turned away.

She used a strip of dirty, stiffened white cloth—one of the dead soldier’s stockings. If only these white men wore moccasins instead of the clumsy black boots that made their feet hot and sticky. With moccasins the white men would not need to wear these silly stockings. He smiled and began to feel better for it.

This was his seventh summer. He was too old to act like a child, the boy decided.

Finally he turned back to watch his mother scrub the last of the black grainy smudges from the edges of the bullet hole in the soldier’s left temple. Little blood had oozed from the wound.

Perhaps this pale man had already been dying from that messy bullet wound in his side. The boy had seen enough deer and elk, antelope and buffalo, brought down with bullets. And he knew no man could live long after suffering a wound in the chest as terrible as this. This soldier had been dying, and he was shot in the head to assure his death. Someone had wanted to make certain that this soldier was not taken alive. Someone had saved this pale-skinned soldier from the possibility of torture by sending a bullet through his brain.

Strange. As the boy looked about the hillside, he could see that the warriors had taken no prisoners. As far as his young eyes could see along the ridges of shimmering heat
and yellow dust and black smoke and red death—none of these pony soldiers had lived for longer than it took the sun to move from one lodgepole to the next.

The boy sat quietly and watched his mother at work. With care she washed the white man’s entire face, scrubbing the dirty sock dipped in river water over the bristling stubble of red gold sprouting on the burnished cheeks and strong chin. The lips were cracked, peeling and bloody from days in the sun and from drinking alkali water.

The boy’s eyes wandered down the pony soldier’s frame until they froze on the wound in the man’s left side, just the length of two of his little hands below the white man’s heart. An ugly, gaping hole; he imagined the exit wound had to be even bigger. Surely the warrior who had shot this pony soldier had been no more than one arrow flight away when he fired his gun—no more than fifteen of his own short little-boy strides. A shot fired far enough away not to bring instant death—but close enough to insure that death would be soon in coming.

He wondered: In his last moments had this soldier gazed down this slope, seeing all the lodges and wickiups where slept the young unmarried warriors along the bank? Hadn’t the soldier seen the great village stretched for miles along the Greasy Grass? Or had he seen and refused to believe his own pale blue eyes now staring in death at the summer sky of the same robin’s-egg hue? Had he plunged on down toward the villages and his own death?

How could his mother treat this soldier as she would a member of her family? They had no relatives. Monaseetah and her two sons were alone in this world. It had been twelve winters since Monaseetah’s mother was killed by pony soldiers far to the south along the Little Dried River. Eight winters now since Monaseetah’s father had suffered the same fate at the hand of other soldiers in another dawn attack. His thoughts and fears tumbled: Why had his mother told the old Miniconjou woman this white-bellied soldier was a relative?

The stench of dried blood and putrefying gore clung strong on the breeze. He rubbed his nose and fidgeted,
wanting to be gone. His mother’s hand quieted his nervousness.

“I am finished at last, my son.” She pulled him round to her gently. “I want you to listen to my words with all your heart. Listen to me with your soul, son of my body.”

The boy nodded, wanting only to be gone from this terrible hillside.

Monaseetah tossed aside the dirty stocking she had used to bathe the dead soldier. When he studied her eyes for some answer to his confusion, the boy discovered tears glistening in her dark eyes, streaming down her coppery cheeks. He thought,
She is the prettiest woman I have ever seen
.

With a tiny dirty finger he touched her cheek, wiping away a single tear. Without a word Monaseetah took his tiny hand, directing him to touch the white soldier’s hair.

“The red gold of a winter’s sunrise,” his mother whispered as she touched the soldier’s hair.

Monaseetah guided his hand to stroke her own dark, silky hair falling unfettered in the hot breezes across her quaking shoulders.

“Black, my son. Sleek as the raven’s shiny wing when it snags the sun’s rays in high flight.”

She took the boy’s hand and brought it up to touch his own head. She held some of his own long hair before his eyes.

“Your hair is not like your mother’s.”

“I do not understand,” he said, quivering.

Again Monaseetah took his hand to touch first the soldier’s thinning, close-cropped hair. Then her own long, loose hair. Finally his own. Looking at it perhaps for the first time in his young life, the boy found himself growing scared, with a cold creeping right down to his toes.

“You were named Yellow Bird because of the color of your hair, my son.”

He watched her choke back a sob that made his mother shudder. She swiped at her wet cheeks before he worked up courage to ask.

“You are my mother, aren’t you?”

“Yes.” She smiled through the haze. “I am your mother.”

Anxiously Yellow Bird wrung his hands through his hair, not understanding, afraid to accept what his mother had told him. He did not like the feeling at all. He had been scared before, he remembered. Like last summer when his pony had been spooked by a rattler, bolting into the hills as he clung to its mane in desperation. Yet right now he was more frightened than he had ever been.

Yellow Bird bolted to his feet. As quickly his mother snagged his wrist and yanked him down beside her. He fell to his knees, sprawling over the naked pony soldier.

He cried out as his face brushed the pony soldier’s cold, bristling cheek.

Fiercely he clamped his eyes to shut off the flow of hot tears. In a flood he figured out what she wanted him to tell her. But Yellow Bird knew his mother wanted him to say the words himself.

Desperately he hungered for escape. The hillside filled his nostrils with the stench of blood and bowels released in death, gore scattered across the gray-backed sage and yellow dirt and dry red-brown grasses in savage, sudden, welcome death. At once Yellow Bird could not breathe.