The High Missouri (34 page)

“The first Frenchman stole us and made us slaves,” said Cree, speaking in a measured way for Dylan’s sake. “He was a man of perhaps fifty winters. He used us as slaves,” she added with some resentment. “Then he gave us to another Frenchman to
sell
,” she added, stressing the word. “We were homesick. Monsieur Dylan took pity on us and helped us get away, and brought us back here.” She stopped. It would be one of her virtues to answer no more than she was asked.

Shaking Plume spoke softly and respectfully to a young man, who grunted assent and left the lodge. Hearing Red Sky’s name, Dylan supposed the chief had asked for her to be brought here.

Shaking Plume asked Cree something more sharply—Dylan heard the word
slave
.

“Monsieur Dylan said he would help us return to our village and our families,” Cree said. “He told us we were not slaves but free, and offered to help us get home.”

Shaking Plume spoke fast again, his words like thrown stones.

Dylan couldn’t follow the rapid Blackfoot. Suddenly he knew, and his heart spun and sank, and he felt himself sucked into mysterious and fatal depths. He was sure Shaking Plume was asking Cree whether he had frigged them.

Lascivious pictures came raging into his mind, accompanied by the clangor of a death knell. His testicles squirmed.

“I think Monsieur Dylan brought us back,” Cree Medicine answered with her eyes cast down humbly, “because he wanted to make friends with the Piegans, and because his heart was warm toward Red Sky and me.”

She flicked her eyes fleetingly up at Dylan, and immediately back to the ground. He thought she was saying she’d done what she could. He knew that even so slight a gesture as a look in the eyes might be thought brazen by these counselors. It was a courageous act. He thought that perhaps this woman truly cared for him.

Red Sky came in behind the young man, her eyes properly on the ground. She knelt to the right of Cree.

Dylan forced his body to be still. His fate rested in the hands of a teenager, who spurned him. Humiliation puckered his spirit.

Shaking Plume’s rapid Blackfoot shot at Red Sky, seeming to Dylan the same words asked of Cree Medicine.

“Four of us were digging prairie turnips near Willow Creek,” she said, speaking slowly. “Père Noël, a big Frenchman, came with Minnetarees on horseback and pointed guns at us. We dared not scream, but I attacked him with my turnip digger. He threw me to the ground and laughed at me. The others gave in peacefully. They had big American horses and made us ride double day and night until we got to the Milk River.

“The big one, Noël, laughed a lot in a cruel way. He acted fond of me and ordered me around and said he would keep me for himself.”

Shaking Plume coughed a little, sounding impatient. Dylan wondered whether these counselors cared nothing about the fact that their young women had been raped.

“At the Mandan villages he sold Cree Medicine and me to Chabono—like horses he sold us. That one took us to Red River to sell us again. He thought it was good to get as far as possible from the guns of the Piegan men.”

Shaking Plume interrupted her. Dylan had the impression Red Sky would have kept going with the story at great length. He had no idea whether she would paint him as a rescuer or another tyrant. In his fear he missed Shaking Plume’s words entirely.

He noticed that Red Sky hesitated. For a moment Dylan thought she was going to look up, but she didn’t. She said tremulously but with emphasis, “I planned our escape, and Monsieur Dylan helped. I think he helped because he…” Was she groping for words? Did she not know what she wanted to say?

At last she took the plunge. She even had the boldness to look Shaking Plume in the eye. “Monsieur Dylan hated to see an old man own us and use us as he pleased. He wanted us to be able to live as human beings.”

The counselors sat mute in the face of this claim. For Dylan the silence sang.

Then he thought, Maybe they’re not silent in acceptance or admiration. Maybe they’re aghast at her rudeness in meeting the chief’s gaze.

The tadpoles kept slithering up and down his spine.

When Shaking Plume spoke, there was reproof in his voice, and he addressed himself to the sister who was properly demure. Dylan grasped the word
husband
.

Cree answered softly and with her eyes cast down, as a woman should. But she enunciated the words with great clarity. “I have set up my lodge. I have built a fire, and laid out the robes. I welcome my husband Monsieur Dylan to my lodge.”

Only Shaking Plume’s commanding eye kept the pugnacious Three Horns from bursting out.

Finally, Shaking Plume said simply, “What about your… Ermine Head?”

Dylan’s testicles twisted. He would have given one to know anything at all about this Ermine Head.

“Monsieur Dylan is my husband,” said Cree Medicine.

Emotions tossed Dylan like choppy waves.

Could she divorce Ermine Head so easily? Dylan had heard that Piegan women owned the lodge, and to divorce the man, needed only to set his belongings outside. He’d also heard Piegan men had the right to beat their women as much as they pleased, and even to cut off the nose of a faithless wife. He wondered which was true.

His skin trembled. Was he safe now? No torture, no scalping? But did he now have a wife? Did he want one? Was he trapped?

Three Horns finally burst into a torrent of angry words. Shaking Plume burst back. Dylan couldn’t follow all the language, but he saw the naked emotions. Three Horns was furious at this humiliation of his son Ermine Head. Shaking Plume was upbraiding him harshly for his rude speech. Three Horns half rose and pointed at Cree and then jammed his finger emphatically at Red Sky. Finally the squat man jumped up and hurled himself out of the lodge.

Speaking calmly now, Shaking Plume told Dylan that he regretted the impoliteness of this man, and asked Dylan’s forbearance.

In his best Blackfoot, Dylan spoke his understanding.

Shaking Plume turned to Red Sky, with some wariness, Dylan thought. He said, “Do you have anything more to say, my willful daughter?”

Dylan felt despair. Was Red Sky now to be offered as a sacrifice to the wrath of Three Horns and Ermine Head?

“I was promised to my sister’s husband,” she began, and to speak at all was brazen. Dylan was afraid she was going to anger Shaking Plume with another long speech. “Before we were stolen, I refused to go to Ermine Head because he beat her without reason. I refuse to go to him now.”

She paused, and looked up first at Shaking Plume and then at Dylan. He saw that she was defying the male authority in this lodge, knowingly. The softness of her voice and the gentleness of her words could not undo the daring of her act: She was making a choice. “I wish to accept my sister’s husband, Monsieur Dylan.”

White Raven saw Shaking Plume look briefly at him. He kept his face impassive. He, White Raven, her father, did not know what to think of this remarkable gesture, this seizing of self-power by his daughter. So how was the leader to know? Perhaps Red Sky at Morning was a manly-hearted woman. The Piegans had a tradition of such women, and the people honored them, women who took upon themselves the air and authority of men. Even if jokes got told about their husbands, the people honored such women. Time would tell whether Red Sky at Morning was one of them, or merely displaying the bad manners of a teenager. Or maybe…

Shaking Plume passed it over, this extraordinary behavior. He was wise. Instead he spoke to the young Frenchman White Raven’s daughters had attached themselves to.

“Tomorrow morning you may open your parfleches for trade.”

The Frenchman did not show his relief in his face, which was good. Or his greed, or his triumph. He kept his face polite, as he should.

The silence was full of everyone’s consent. After a few moments the counselors began to leave.

White Raven walked behind his daughters and their new husband. They weren’t talking. He hoped that meant their minds were on the momentous events of the last hour.

He was concerned about Red Sky at Morning. Since she was a small child, she had been different, and he loved her difference. He loved Cree Medicine’s womanliness, her pleasure in the tasks and roles of a woman, which seemed to White Raven to spring from a wisdom, an ability to see and savor. He loved Red Sky at Morning for her difference, her impatience with convention, with the very parts of life Cree Medicine liked. He felt, without thought, that in some distinct way that couldn’t be spoken, this difference
was
Red Sky.

Maybe it was just immaturity and bad manners. Time would tell. But his mother had predicted that Red Sky at Morning would be a manly-hearted woman. White Raven hoped so. He smiled at himself. This was a kindlier explanation, he thought, than the alternative—that he didn’t know how to raise a daughter properly.

He turned his mind away from Red Sky’s future. It was useless to think about it. His daughter, like all people, was a living spirit. He wanted to watch her show the courage to live as that spirit directed her.

He sat on a rock and watched his daughters go to their lodge with their new husband. Amazing, he thought, the days of the earth. One day he had three daughters, one married—though in difficulties—and two at home. The next day he had one—two were simply gone, disappeared, evaporated. And on a day not long thereafter he had two daughters married to a foreigner. Life was itself the great Coyote, the trickster, the shape changer.

He looked after them fondly. The young man had behaved himself well, White Raven thought. He had been brave to venture to the people at all. He had chosen good circumstances to come, bringing Cree Medicine and Red Sky. He had evidently pleased them with his conduct on the way here. White Raven assumed that included pleasing them in the blankets, if Red Sky was not too sovereign to permit herself to be topped. White Raven smiled to himself. This was the sort of humor the people indulged in about manly-hearted women. If his daughters saw the matter truly, the young fellow cared for them, and honored them in his ways.

White Raven supposed this Monsieur Dylan would not be their husband for a lifetime, as White Raven had been Calf Robe’s husband, and that saddened him. These Frenchmen came and went as they pleased, or so he heard, and left children like droppings. It was incomprehensible, except that the Frenchmen were foreigners and unenlightened, and you could expect no more from them than from teenage boys blinded by the lusts of the body. Still, a few Frenchmen bound themselves to their women truly. Perhaps Monsieur Dylan would be one of these.

White Raven held no real hope of that. He thought his daughters’ fate sad. True, it was no worse than their situation with that great oaf Ermine Head. And their marriage would bring them the Frenchman goods—pots, knives, awls, blankets, and the like—all the things women wanted, and would bring these things more cheaply and conveniently to all the people. It was good enough. And if their father raised no objection, as he deliberately had not, none of the leaders would interfere.

White Raven sniffed the air with pleasure. It was an autumn sunset, and the air was cooling and filled with wood smoke and the smells of cooking. This was a combination White Raven was fond of. He would eat now.

Then, he thought, he better have a talk with his daughters’ new husband, and begin to make him aware of the dangers of having Ermine Head and Three Horns as enemies.

The three of them, man and two wives, walked through the cool air of the late autumn afternoon toward their lodge. Dylan wondered what was in the mind of White Raven, his new father-in-law, walking behind them. No one spoke.

Feelings thrilled through Dylan: passion for his new wives. For Cree especially, and lustful memories. Renewed desire for Red Sky too, who had made her choice. Also greed: now he could trade freely. Triumph: he was alive. Resentment: he was trapped by two wives. Confusion: he had a motherless child in Montreal, and childless wives among the Piegans.

He was all mixed up. And that was without admitting to himself one feeling, a cold, snaky fear. When he looked at his wives, he wondered if he had finally given up all hope and become a barbarian.

The three walked together to the lodge, and Dylan went with his wives into his home.
Wives, home
—difficult words for him.

Cree immediately began getting dinner ready, her eyes down, her face worried.

She had reason to worry. After only a moment’s hesitation Red Sky looked Dylan in the eye and spoke boldly. “You are a good man,” she said. “I am glad of your protection. Without it I would have to marry Ermine Head, or another.”

She spoke smoothly, easily, as though her directness to her husband were not brazen. “You remember I am to consult with Owl Claw. The course of my life may change at that time. I ask you, humbly, until that time,” she said, “please to let me be alone in the robes.”

So. With effort, he controlled his feelings. “As you wish,” he said.

Cree’s hand was over her mouth, her eyes round. He didn’t know whether her astonishment was at Red Sky’s request or his response.

Desperate, he slipped outside. He looked at the sunset reddening the western sky and suddenly remembered—now for the first time—an old sailor’s saying he’d heard. He was amazed he’d never thought of it in respect to Red Sky at Morning, his sort-of wife, until now.

Red Sky at morning,

Sailors take warning.

Red Sky at night,

Sailor’s delight.

He laughed. Laughed sardonically, miserably. She was truly named, Red Sky at Morning, and no delight at night. He cackled.

He remembered that his father had disparaged business partnerships mockingly as the worst of all worlds, calling them “like marriage without sex.” Now Dylan was snared in just such a partnership.

Cree sat on the blankets at the back of the lodge, her knees forward and legs tucked back, sewing her husband a pair of moccasins. Monsieur Dylan was outside, perhaps walking, perhaps living in his head, as he did too much. For herself, she would not live in hers. She would not wonder whether her sister would become a manly-hearted woman, even a woman warrior, even… She cut off her thoughts. She would not wonder whether bad-heartedness would arise between Monsieur Dylan and Red Sky, or what that bad-heartedness might lead to. These matters rode the winds, which blew from every direction and to every direction, and only the foolish tried to predict them.