Little Big Man (39 page)

Younger Bear had the peculiar ability always to remind me of my proper race. I should have been armed against him, but I never was. When no issue was made of it, I’d generally be pro-Indian; and also if Old Lodge Skins or Sunshine was registering the complaint,
maybe because they were sort of my kin. But the Bear always drew my blood on this subject.

“Maybe,” says I, “they are trailing the big war party that has just come in from raids on peaceful ranches along the Smoky Hill River. Or they could be looking for that white woman and child held by the Kiowa.”

He set his jaw real stubborn. “I don’t know about those things. I am not a Kiowa but a Human Being. I have not been raiding along the Smoky Hill River. Yet I suppose if a soldier sees me he will shoot at me all the same.”

He was right enough in that, and I for one didn’t know how to explain it. However, I resented his unstated suggestion that it was
my
fault. And there I guess you have the issue between me and Younger Bear. If to a soldier one Indian was the same as another, no matter if they belonged to altogether different tribes, so to the Bear I was responsible for what all other white men did, even though I was at present living in this village and dressed as a savage.

I went back to my own tepee. Now I haven’t mentioned yet that while Sunshine’s father was dead and she didn’t have brothers, she did have three sisters, and they lived with us. One of them was also a widow and had two little kids. I was the only grown man in the establishment and had to hunt for the whole bunch. In return, them women done all the other work, and I reckon I could also have laid with them had I a mind to, though I never did with anybody but Sunshine, on account of until she got pregnant she alone exhausted me, and so far as since then was concerned, I might be a bit of a prude, but keeping a harem was never to my taste.

As I lay on my buffalo robe and looked at the swell or Sunshine’s pregnant belly, all I could think of was how Olga might at this very moment be carrying the seed of that savage in her. She was forever soiled. I could leave my lodge at any time, go back to civilization, take a bath, and be white again. Not her. The
Cheyenne
was inside her. Indians sure made me sick. I could hardly breathe for the smell inside my own home, where them sloppy women I supported stirred up the muck we was going to eat for supper. We didn’t have no fresh meat, on account of instead of hunting that afternoon I had set and ate dog prepared by my natural wife in the tepee of her unnatural husband.

While I was in this poisonous mood, little Frog toddled over and handed me the tiny wooden horse I had carved for him. He was
now about the age of Gus when captured. I handed the toy back to him. He just looked real solemn at me and then at it, and put it down very careful on my bed and goes away. That was the first indication I got of the atmosphere inside the lodge, but then I noticed the women was all unusually quiet and the children of my widowed sister-in-law, a boy and a girl, who I might joke with or tell stories to before the meal was served, were keeping to their own area.

Sunshine served me up a bowl of roots mashed up with some berries. These ingredients had been gathered the previous summer and saved in a dried version. It was like taking a mouthful of mud.

“Where’s that cow haunch I brought in yesterday?” I asks in bad temper.

She looks scared but corrects me. “That was three days ago.”

“If I say it was yesterday, that’s when it was, unless you’re looking for a beating, woman.”

She quickly begs my pardon, saying: “You are right, yesterday. I am a stupid person and—”

“Oh, shut up,” I says. “There are too many mouths to feed around here. That’s why I can’t ever keep us in meat. Why don’t your sisters get married?” The women all put their heads down. I coughed to free my windpipe from a swallow of that sludge.

“If you think I am going to lay with you,” I addressed them generally, “you are crazy.”

One of them come over to Sunshine and whispered in her ear, and then my woman says: “My sister will go out to trade her beaded dress for meat, if you will wait.”

I happened to know of the one that made this offer, that the shirt was the sole item among her possessions for which she could have got any more than a dried bone. And it wasn’t much itself, being stained and patched and there was places where the beads had fell off. We wasn’t a rich family, I can tell you that, having only one man in the place, and that man me, who never did no raiding of the settlements, and we didn’t have association with the traders, who I wouldn’t have wanted to see me anyhow, and I didn’t own any horses apart from the pony give me by Old Lodge Skins.

“No,” I says now. “I am not hungry.” I was some ashamed, but ashamed to show it. I knowed why none of them had got married, too. Because they was living in the tepee of a white man, and the Cheyenne
braves would not come and hang about such a door and play their medicine flutes in courtship. Especially since, as the years had gone on, there was an ever greater surplus of females in the tribe, owing to so many men having been killed. I had put a curse on them girls, I reckon. But whose idea had it been to take Sunshine for a wife? Not mine.

“I am sorry you are angry with me,” says Sunshine now. She had put in a full day’s labor, including the chopping of firewood and then drug a great load of it on a buffalo robe for a quarter mile to our lodge. She was all ready to have that kid any time now. When the moment came, she would throw down her hatchet, retire behind a tree, and have it in the snow, and then chop the rest of her quota and bring back both child and cottonwood logs.

“Sit down here and eat,” I says. “I’m not angry with you.”

Which she did, shoveling in that mush with a big horn spoon, and the rest of them likewise, with a sound like an army tramping through a swamp. If I hadn’t been a fool at business back in Denver, by now I could have been setting in my own big house, dining off porcelain and silver and sent me to England for a baldheaded butler wearing a swallowtail coat. If my Pa hadn’t been crazy, God knows what I would have been. I guess everybody toys with ideas like them.

When Sunshine was finished and had picked off her dress the bits of grub what slipped off the spoon, and also some from the earthern floor, for she was still bothered—they all was, even though my mood had sweetened—when she done that and took her bowl and mine to go clean them, she hesitated and says in a low tone:

“When will you kill him?”

“Who?” I asks, getting irritated all over again, for I knew very well what she meant, and remembered my earlier aim though I didn’t wish to, which accounted for my annoyance. “You just better,” I says, “keep out of what doesn’t concern you.”

Sunshine squats and smooths out that buffalo robe next to mine. “I’ll make a nice bed for her,” she says, “and give her my best red blanket. And the white boy can sleep next to our nephew Spotted Pony, if he likes it there.”

I says evenly: “The white woman with Younger Bear is not my wife and the boy is not my son. My family was killed upon the Arkansas River.” I reached for a bow that was hanging from a lodgepole
behind me, which I used to hunt when saving powder and lead. And I says: “If I hear any more talk about the matter from you, old woman, I’ll give you a beating that you won’t forget.”

Sunshine had took on considerable flesh with her pregnancy—though even so she was slimmer than Olga—and showed a real moon-face as she now grinned. And directly the rest of the women and the kids cheered up, though I had spoke softly and they was eating loud, and they commenced to chatter and laugh like they did normally, for it was ordinarily a happy lodge.

See, they had all thought I would rub out Younger Bear and take Olga and Gus back and that accounted for my earlier meanness: that I was working myself up for the killing, and I don’t wonder they figured I might not have stopped with the Bear but murdered them all as well, for Cheyenne women knowed where high passion could lead a man.

Well, they could set their minds to rest, for Little Big Man was not a-going to make any trouble for anybody. On the other hand, I was more or less obliged to honor my invite to entertain Younger Bear and his family on the morrow. After that, I was done with the matter. I had no intention of getting in thick with Mr. & Mrs. Bear and going on exchanging dinners one after the other. I didn’t expect Olga, the way she changed, ever to find out the true state of affairs—for I’d be wearing that buffalo hat and black facial paint, and she never would be looking for me—but one of the Indians no doubt would smell it, for they was keen about such matters. Not Younger Bear, in his stupidity and conceit, but Little Horse, probably, or one of my own women. Or maybe Gus, and that would kill me.

So I figured to run off right after dinner on the following day and go back to the railroad. I had now got what I rejoined the Cheyenne to find, such as it was.

That was the state of mind in which after a while I pulled a number of animal skins and dirty blankets over me and tried to sleep. The women and children had also retired, but the fire was banked with enough logs to keep it burning all the night, otherwise we would have froze even within our multiple wrappings, for frigid air entered between the door-lacings and from beneath the lodge skin. Occasionally I could hear my pony stamp against the cold outside. I had picketed him near the entrance rather than meadowed with the rest of the herd. Being he was my sole animal at this time, I
couldn’t afford to have no Pawnee run him off; though I had not heard of any in the area.

As to the report of a soldiers’ trail by Younger Bear, I took that to be some more of his foolishness. We was down here now on the reservation assigned to the Cheyenne at the Medicine Lodge council, so why should they be after us? I mean Old Lodge Skins’s band. If they looked for anybody, it would be that war party that had come in to the villages downriver. But the whole business was unlikely in this weather. Nobody fought in the winter, least of all the U.S. Army, whose big horses could never negotiate that crusted snow.

I thought about a lot of stuff like that, for I couldn’t get to sleep. I might have determined to be done with the matter of Olga and Gus, but it was far from done with me. The veins in my temples was throbbing, and my groin was giving me trouble. I mean it felt as if I was pursing up there, like a dried apple. After a time it occurred to me that I was feeling lust in a different form from any I had hitherto knowed, especially while with the Indians. I have told you it was Sunshine who was ardent, rather than yours truly. Well, now I reached over for her, completely forgetting her present condition.

What I touched was the summit of her big belly, through the robes, and she was awake right smart, getting out her hand and rubbing mine.

She says: “Wunhai’s feelings are hurt by what you said.”

That was the sister what offered to sell her beaded dress for meat. Her name meant “Burns”; maybe she had singed her finger when a girl or something. She was right comely and the youngest of Shadow’s offspring, a couple years beneath Sunshine and favoring her as to the eyes and glossy hair but slim as a willow wand. When I thought of it she recalled for me my old girl friend Nothing before she got married and turned fat and ill-tempered; poor Nothing was another killed at Sand Creek.

Anyway, I had up to now regarded Wunhai as a sister-in-law, white fashion, never having adapted the Cheyenne view of such things. What Sunshine meant had hurt Wunhai’s feelings was that statement I had made earlier to the effect that I would not lay with any of them other women.

I patted Sunshine’s belly and withdrew my hand. As usual, my trouble lay in deciding whether I was finally white or Indian. If the
former, I had ought to go to sleep: Olga’s having went savage was her problem, not mine. On the other hand, I commenced to realize the responsibility I had for Sunshine’s sisters: it wasn’t enough to support them. On account of me they was old maids. I had ought to do something, for they was a good bunch of women. Maybe I was being hypocritical, I don’t know; you figure it out. Next I remember, I had rose and slipped through the fireglow halfway around the circle of the tepee and was kneeling by Wunhai’s robe. Her eyes gleamed through the shadow I threw across her.

“I’m sorry for what I said,” says I.

She says: “I hear you.” And opens up her covers on that side and I enters thereunder, against her slight brown body, which happened to be naked and burning hot after my chilly journey without my breechclout. There was a sweet girl. It turned out she had never knowed a man before, being a real fine example of the high morals of the Human Beings, but her instincts was sound. My oh my. I reckon she was about eighteen years of age and very lithe.

Well, I won’t hazard a guess on how long I was engaged in discharging my brother-in-lawly duty, but it was a spell, and finally come a point when little Wunhai had received sufficient apology to drop off to sleep in my arms. O.K., I climbed out and tucked her in, experiencing an odd sensation when a cold draft flushed through my loins. I reckon I shivered, and another sister-in-law of mine who slept nearby sat up and beckoned to me.

When I come to her she whispered: “Shall I put more wood upon the fire?”

“It’s all right,” says I, quaking away, for I had got up a sweat beneath Wunhai’s robes and it now felt as if it was turning to ice.

“Well,” she said, “you better get in here before you freeze.”

This girl’s name was Digging Bear, and she was a few years older than Sunshine, maybe about twenty-three or four, very wide across the horizontal centerline of her face, an effect that was made more so by her sometimes wearing the braids behind her ears. She had positive features but handsome and was firm as a mare. She wore her dress in bed but had it lifted by the time I joined her. She was the only sister shorter than me; still she was right powerful of muscle. Having admitted me to the field of battle, as it were, she made me struggle over the outcome, and for a long time thereafter, the calves of my legs bore bruises where she had dug in with her heels as if riding a pony upside down.