The Powder River (19 page)

“I’m Sheriff Galway. Ramsel is dead here.” He jerked his head to indicate behind him. “The Injun’s dead yonder. The bad ’uns are fled away. You’d be a corpse, too, if you weren’t a soldier. They be not afraid of the sheriff, but they are afraid of the colonel. This mick will make them afraid of the sheriff in future. Maybe none will testify agin ’em, but a sheriff with his dander up can make life prickly.”

“What did they get me with?”

“A rascally lad name of Lawrence Byrne cracked your noggin with the handle of his Arkansas toothpick. He’s a handy one with that knife, is Lawrence. Too handy. He can hurl it to do ye with the blade or the handle. Double-jointed evil, that lad. Your head’s going to hurt mightily for a day or so, and you’ll have a lump you could use for a hat rack.”

Smith sat up. The world made a quarter turn, slowed down, and stopped. “I’d best take the Indian back,” Smith said. This time he said it in three syllables,
In-dee-un
. “The colonel will give the body to his people if they want it.”

“You want to get started now?” asked the sheriff. “You want to eat first? Sleep?”

“Ramsel got any family?” asked Smith.

“I’m his family,” said the sheriff. That was why the grief. “Townfolk think he’s my son, but he’s a foundling. I’ll say any words need saying.”

Smith nodded his head, and nodded it again, thinking and keeping control. He was obliged to keep up the pretense that Sings Wolf was none of his kin. Seemed like being around white people was a lot of pretending.

“Well,” he said, “let’s get the one cut down and the other one in the ground.”

The sheriff stood up and brushed off his hands. “Kind of you to help,” he said.

Smith got to his feet. The world stood still this time, but lightning flashed in Smith’s skull. He wiped his forehead again with the wet rag. A knot had risen smartly, for sure.

“Where’s the boot graveyard?” asked Smith.

Sheriff Galway reached down into the grave as far as he could without falling in and set Ramsel down gently. The lad was just a lump in canvas now. The Injun was wrapped in canvas, too, and tied onto the extra cavalry horse.

Galway slipped a copy of Mother Goose out of his coat pocket and tossed it onto the lump in a gesture meant to look casual to the sergeant. Ramsel never would have learned to read even a little bit without that book. He loved to say its jingle-jangle poems out loud in his singsong way, grinning all the while.

When they started pitching dirt in, Sheriff Galway couldn’t remember which end was Ramsel’s head. He was glad, for he didn’t think he could stand to shovel earth onto the lad’s face.

When the hole was filled, the sheriff held his hat at his belt, looked down at the mound of dirt, and began to chant musically. The sergeant stood at attention. He wouldn’t know what the sheriff was saying, but it didn’t matter. The words were Gaelic, their meaning a wail of grief and a prayer for safe journey to the other land. Sheriff Galway’s grandfather had taught the chant to him, and he was sorry that no one would remember enough Gaelic to speak it over his grave when the time came, to ease his way.

When he finished, the sheriff saw that the sergeant was crying. Tears just streaming down his face.

Funny, a hard man like that, in tears for a man-boy he didn’t even know. Well, it must be the conk on the head. Or the music of the Gaelic. Gaelic is a beautiful language, the language of grief, thought the sheriff for the thousandth time, for the Lord God has sent the Irish so much grief over seven centuries. Such a language will make a grown man weep, now, won’t it?

Chapter 9

Elaine absolutely hated them. She wanted to throw the cursed things across the lawn. Or the scruffy patch of dirt that the Wockerleys pretended was a lawn. Which she was probably going to fall down on any moment and break her other leg so she couldn’t clump about at all.

She banged the crutches out in front of her, leaned forward, swung, and planted her good left leg. She teetered forward and then sideways and nearly fell. The left leg was weak, she was weak, and she had poor balance. Too long in bed. But she was determined to get stronger and get mobile and get out of Dodge City and on with her life. Her life, by God, with Adam. It was fierce in her, a surge, a need not to be struck and stagnating in this house of strangers, this town of gamblers and whores.

She wondered where the people were. She didn’t know Dodge City, actually, but she didn’t want to. No one came to see her but the fatuous Dr. Richtarsch, the stiff Dr. Wockerley, and the pallid Fran Wockerley. Fran and the doctor were so absorbed in their marital dance, he dominatingly proper, she cringingly lonely, that they had no room for anyone else. At least, though, Elaine could give the poor creature some company.

Elaine did see the town’s habits, and she didn’t like them. It woke up not at dawn but at midday. Many of the town’s businesses didn’t open for business until the afternoon. Even Dr. Wockerley had office hours in the afternoon only. And the morals! Wasn’t the town’s mayor, Dog Kelley, living openly in sin with one of its ladies of the night, a creature called the Great Easton? Wasn’t the sheriff himself a notorious gambler? Mocking the laws so flagrantly symbolized something for Elaine, something smart-aleck and crude, something she hated.

She clopped on ahead, making her tight little square on the small plot of earth outside the porch where she slept. This was the third day since Dr. Richtarsch brought her these crutches, and her sixth episode of clumping around in the little yard, all six painful. She had wishes: she wished she could do her practicing in the house, where she would not be seen. But she had never so much as seen its interior, and she was sure Fran was not the one keeping her outside. She wished she felt free to ask Fran to help her into one of her dresses. She was wearing only one of Fran’s wraps over her nightdress, which she’d lived in for weeks, and she didn’t feel presentable enough for outdoors. The truth was, though, that she’d fallen several times, twice catching herself against the house but once crashing all the way to the ground and making her stump hurt like the dickens. It made no sense to get one of her dresses dirty or torn.

She had dreams of getting showy on her crutches, of doing pivots that would amaze adults and delight small children, of striking a figure that would be the envy of all, supported under each arm or not. And then topping the pivot with a curvet. She wished she were as tall as Adam so she could command everyone’s eyes and stun them with the graceful way she comported herself with her handicap. She imagined her full-length skirts swirling and her hair, let out all the way to her waist, waving elegantly in the breeze as she moved.

For now she took one step forward awkwardly, and painfully.

A little head jerked back around the corner of the far house. After a moment two heads poked out, a boy and a girl. They peeked at Elaine from behind the house next door, on the side away from the main street. When they saw her looking back, they giggled. The boy stepped out and gawked openly. Another head, of a younger boy, stuck out from behind the corner.

Elaine bent one arm at the elbow and waved. “Hello, children,” she called, trying to sound nice. She wished she felt nice. She waved again.

The older boy sauntered out, hands held behind his bottom, shoulders held back, in a strut. He was a cherubic-looking child, blond and blue-eyed. The other two stood out from the corner, “Don’t, Jake?” said the girl, but she tittered like she hoped he would. The cherub stopped.

“Jake, is that your name? Jake?” tried Elaine.

The cherub waggled his torso and grinned, all shy tomfoolery, but he said nothing. Elaine thought he had a sneaky look on his angelic face.

“You children could visit me sometime,” Elaine said. “I live on this porch.” The porch which she wanted to move away from as soon as possible. “We could play games together. I’d like that.” She adjusted the crutch under her right shoulder. She leaned more heavily on that one, where her leg was truncated, and it got uncomfortable.

The cherub clawed the air aggressively and growled. Elaine didn’t understand—was he trying to scare her?

He began weaving toward her in exaggerated play movements, like he was sneaking up on something. “Are you a panther?” she asked. “Am I a deer?” She felt tremulous, but tried not to show it.

Suddenly the boy let out a huge, lionlike roar and charged Elaine.

She flinched.

Near her, the boy clawed at the crutch on her right side. His hand didn’t come close.

But Elaine jerked back, tried to pull the crutch out of his way.

She teetered. She lost her balance. She tottered backward, tried to catch herself with a crutch, and failed.

Involuntarily, she stuck out her right leg.

Her stump hit. The pain was excruciating. Her bottom and back slammed in the ground.

Elaine let out a scream—it sounded awful even to Elaine, throttled, unnatural, monstrous.

It took her a minute or two to clear her mind. The children were gone. She supposed she’d scared them off. She shook her head. She trembled all over. She didn’t know whether she was laughing or crying.

The children had run off. Frightened, she supposed. But of her? Or themselves?

Smith went about it all in a deliberate way, a way that honored his grandfather, that showed him respect, and especially that gave room for remembering his grandfather.

He built a scaffold in a cottonwood tree along the south fork of the Platte River, which the Cheyennes called Geese River. He cut the poles patiently from dead cottonwood trees. He rushed no motion and did everything as well as he could.

While he cut, he remembered his times with Sings Wolf when Sings Wolf was a
hemaneh
, a half-man, half-woman. He remembered when she taught him to play the hoop-and-stick game. He remembered when she played the hand game with him, a game of betting on being able to guess which hand the bone is in. One day she stopped letting him win and took his pocket knife to teach him that you can lose at gambling, and only let him earn it back the next day by splitting a lot of wood, after a night of agony and hatred.

He remembered when she held him, after the deaths of his father and brother. Though he was grown, she grabbed him and pulled him to her breast, wordless, with only a hint of rocking, and kept him there for a long time, until the tears came.

He remembered how she went, with his mothers, and avenged the murders: the three women caught the killer through a sexual wile, knocked him groggy, cut off his penis and testicles, and then skinned him slowly, while he was alive. When he finally died, they cut off his head.

With all these memories Smith honored his grandfather.

He remembered how Sings Wolf, then Calling Eagle, received a great dream of death, and in that dream saw herself as a fallen warrior. He remembered how Calling Eagle accepted the call to manhood with dignity, despite her personal inclination and a lifetime of custom. He recalled how she announced her vision in a beautiful ritual, how she transformed herself into a man, how she seemed as fitting and attractive a man as she had been a woman. He remembered how, shortly thereafter, the man-warrior Sings Wolf led a war charge that turned away the soldiers and saved the Human Beings. In these memories he honored his grandfather.

He remembered how his grandfather, sometimes his grandmother, had been the wisest human being he had ever known. He remembered her warmth when he came to her with the problems of growing up. He remembered the depth of her understanding when he spoke to her of the pain of being a white man and a red man at once, how she spoke of herself as among the people but not quite one of them. He remembered what she said—that a human being has one fundamental choice in life, to live joyfully according to his particular nature, or to fight his nature and have no life at all. He remembered her sympathy when he began to want to go to civilization and learn science and maybe—hope beyond hope!—become a scientist himself, even a doctor, and remembered pondering her words about fulfilling his nature then. In these memories he honored his grandfather.

After a couple of hours, he had the scaffold ready. Then he walked along the river and cut some willows. It was surprising to him how fresh the world seemed in the face of death, how sharp the sounds, how keen the colors, how savory the smells, how warm and gentling the wind.

He hoisted Sings Wolf to his shoulder, then heaved him onto the scaffold. It was an awkward effort, and he flushed with its humiliation. He climbed onto the scaffold, wrapped Sings Wolf in his blue blanket coat, and laid his knife, tomahawk, spear, and bow and arrows around him. Then he patiently built a little basketwork of willows over his grandfather, to keep the birds off for a while.

At last it was done as well as it could be done, with no effort spared. His mother would likely want to come back here, in a month or a year, after the flesh was gone, and pay her respects to the bleached bones.

Still, words were needed now, and gestures, and a spirit of awareness of the Powers.

Smith lit his pipe. He offered it, starting in the west and proceeding sunwise to the south, to the Maheyuno, the four sacred persons who dwell at the four corners of the universe. He offered it to Maheo, the All-Father, also called more formally Maxemaheo, and to mother earth. And then he spoke.

“Maheo,” he said, “and all the other Powers, Maheyuno, Maiyun,” and he named some of the Maiyun—“sun, thunder, moon, morning star, the whirlwind, badger, and you other Powers, my grandfather Sings Wolf has taken the Milky Way trail to the good place, Sehan.”

Tears swept his face now, with no holding back.

“I commend his spirit to you.”

“I regret that his children and grandchildren and all his other relatives do not stand here beside him. They revere and honor him, as I his grandson honor and revere him. I regret that his horse does not lie here beneath his scaffold, so that he might ride swiftly along the trail. But the Human Beings are in desperate need of horses, Powers. My grandfather would rather walk himself than make the small children and their mothers walk.

“Powers, of few Human Beings, almost no other Human Being, could I say this: He was a good man, and a good woman. As a boy he heard you Powers calling, and took the call to his heart, and set aside the ways of men and of the warpath, and became as a woman, dressing as a woman, speaking in a woman’s way, being a woman in the lodge, comporting himself as a woman in every way.

“He made a splendid woman, Powers. He was the sits-beside-him wife to my grandfather Strikes Foot, and for many years they filled the lodge with their love for each other and for their children. Their hearts were big, Powers, and they took many children born to others into their lodge, and called them son and daughter, and reared them with loving kindness. This they did with my mother, Annemarie.”

As a mother Sings Wolf cooked well, kept a handsome lodge, made attractive clothes, and worked hard at all a woman’s duties. “Yet as
hemaneh
she did more. She made the fires for the scalp dances. She created love songs. She brought man and woman together in marriage. She helped them conquer the troubled waters of living together. She brought power to our men on hunts and pony raids. She came to excel at making beautiful patterns in quillwork and beadwork, and to supersede other women in these crafts that belong to women.

“Most of all, Powers, she dedicated the medicine-lodge ceremony. And she kept untouched her male power, the power she was born with and that you asked her to save, unused.”

Smith rested a moment, feeling wrung out by his own tears.

“Therefore, great Powers, she was able to hear your call when it came again, beyond her seventieth winter. You sent a wolf to ask her to take off her dress, set aside her pot and her awl, take up these weapons laid beside Sings Wolf today, and seek the way of the warpath. The Human Beings, you said, needed the maleness of Sings Wolf.

“Against a lifetime of custom, Powers, and I believe against personal preference, Sings Wolf obeyed. And very soon the soldiers came, and on that magnificent day, Sings Wolf led a war charge of Tsistsistas-Suhtaio warriors, of men inspired by his male potency. Strong in their hearts, Powers, they turned the soldiers back and saved the people.

“I believe that this deed was the culmination, the true fulfillment, of the life of my grandfather. Powers, he waited, he listened, and he served. The Tightness in his daily way brought him to his fulfillment. And after that, I believe, he was willing to die. Willing to help the Human Beings in their need, too, but willing to die.

“So here, now, you see his body. Here and now, I ask you, accept his spirit. Oh, I implore you, sacred Powers, accept my grandfather’s spirit. Make his every step blessed.”

Smith spent the rest of the day sitting beneath his grandfather’s scaffold, smoking, not thinking but letting his mind drift in a kind of meditative way.

A little after sundown he grew chill and went to where he had picketed his horse for his coat.

He knew something now he hadn’t known before. He didn’t exactly know the words, but he knew. It was his calling to live among the Cheyennes, as a Cheyenne. Not to be like the agent, the missionary, and the other whites sent to the reservation to help the people, who lived among them, but remained different from them—and let that difference be their central teaching. Smith’s calling was to be not only among the people but of them.

He chuckled. Maybe then the missionary would try to save Smith, too.

He didn’t yet know all of it. He didn’t know whether he should keep offering the Cheyennes his medicine, the white-man medicine. He thought maybe the first step was to ask not what he could teach them, but what he could learn from them. And he didn’t know whether he must give up his white-man wife and take a wife, or more than one wife, from the people.