Long Winter Gone: Son of the Plains - Volume 1 (42 page)

Monaseetah realized she was crying, finding out at last what it meant to be a woman in love.

“Look at me,” he begged, gripping her shoulders. “Tell me you understand.”

Monaseetah sensed the plea in Custer’s voice. A sound not heard often from Yellow Hair. And every time, it pulled the anger from her heart, making her soft in his hands, like the mud of the riverbank. She gazed into his eyes.

“That’s better,” he said. “Tell me you understand why you must live at the fort.”

Instead, she dropped her eyes and shook free of his grasp. Monaseetah sat upon the prairie bed, staring at the side of the tent. Custer stroked her hair while she pouted.

“I don’t know what to say to you, Monaseetah. Can’t seem to make you understand that nothing’s changed.”

She turned back to him, her eyes flicking like wounded birds before she sunk her head in his lap.

“This wife of mine comes tomorrow. To spend the summer with me. Seven moons is a very long time for me to be apart from her. She will expect me to be very happy to see her.”

“Aren’t you, Yellow Hair?” Monaseetah asked boldly. “And happy to throw me away?”

“No,” he whispered. “I will never throw you away. No matter what the years bring.”

She believed him. As sure as the sun rose each day, Monaseetah knew he would never throw her away. Time and again he grew angry with her, telling her to go, sending her away. Yet each time he called her back, sent for her, or came to her himself. So certain of it now, she realized he must love her. Even though he was mortally afraid of telling her.

Her knowing made this tearing apart no easier.

“Come times when you make me feel like a used-up, worn-out moccasin you throw aside.”

He cradled her head against him. “She comes only to visit me. Come winter, there is no place for her to stay.”

She looked up into his eyes. Not sure if it was the truth she read there. Not really wanting to know if what he told her was a lie.

“When will you free my people from your prison at the fort? Send them back to their homes?”

His face registered surprise at her question. “When the villages return to the reservation. Do you wish to go home with them, Monaseetah?”

More than thinking, she concentrated on his fingertips stroking the side of her face.

“I wish to stay with you, Yellow Hair. Wherever you tell me to stay. To be near you.”

He pulled her against him tightly. “I thank your Everywhere Spirit for letting you to stay with me for the time we have left.”

One of the hounds poked its muzzle through the tent flaps, then leapt onto the bed as a second dog loped in. Their wet noses dove for Monaseetah’s face. Custer’s pets had formed a special attachment for this Cheyenne girl.

Both of them laughed, wrestling with the hounds, feeling once more the freedom to savor what time they had left. After a few minutes of play, the bitch nipped her male companion and darted from the tent. With his tongue lolling, the male joyously leapt from the bed and followed.

Alone again in the early twilight of a spring evening, Monaseetah cupped her tiny hand along Custer’s smooth cheek, still not sure if she liked his bare face. Then she pulled him down to her parting lips.

Resisting a moment, Custer whispered, eyes darting to the cradleboard by the stove, “What about the child?”

“He sleeps, Yellow Hair,” Monaseetah answered, pulling him down on top of her as the little life within her belly tumbled.

“The child sleeps.”

Nuzzling a warm place for his cheek on the pillow, Custer feigned sleep as she slipped from the covers and padded barefoot to the trunk where her dress lay.

He had to admit, the view from this direction was mighty appealing. His half-sleepy eyes slid from the nape of her neck, across the little wings of her shoulder blades, on down to the slimness of her waist as it molded into the
roundness of her heart-shaped buttocks. He’d nearly forgotten how good she looked.

And, until last night, how good she felt beside him in bed. With nothing else touching him but her heated flesh.

“Good morning, my little sunbeam!”

Whirling at the sound of his voice, Libbie swept up the flowing crinoline dress she had worn on the train from Monroe, clutching it before her to hide her nakedness.

“Why, Autie!” she squealed. “Why ever did you want to scare me like that?”

“Scare you?”

“Watching me with no clothes—not a single stitch at all. While your eyes get their fill!”

“Come now,” he replied, smiling. “I haven’t near seen my fill!”

She let him have it with those amber eyes of hers, eyes that could claim only to be half-mad with him for studying her body in wide-eyed admiration.

“Gracious lady, will you accept my apology?”

He slipped from the blankets, standing before Libbie without shame.

Her eyes widened before she thought to hold a hand over them. “You’re terrible, Autie! Horrible to me!”

“Come, now—you’ve seen all of me before!”

“Not on purpose, I haven’t!”

He reared back, amused at the sight of her hiding her face behind one hand while the other struggled to hold the dress over her own nakedness, nonetheless exposing her small, fine breasts.

“Here, Libbie. Let me help you get dressed.”

“You’ll do nothing of the kind!”

“You white women are such silly prudes.”

“White women? What would you know about—” she began, then pulled her hand from her eyes, fuming suddenly. “Autie Custer, if the Good Lord intended people to be naked, he’d not invented clothing for us to wear!”

“The Lord didn’t invent clothes, Rosebud! Man covers his own shame.”

“And you certainly should be ashamed of yourself, Bo!” she said. “Treating a proper lady so shabbily.”

“Lady! For God’s sake, you’re my wife!”

“You ought to treat your wife better than a common harlot.”

He stopped laughing. “You didn’t mind me treating you like a harlot last night.”

She turned from his probing eyes, then realized in her turning he saw all the more of her. Her lips pressed into a thin, pouting line of anger, realizing he had gone and said it. What she had hoped they would never talk of again.

“Such a long time … for us both, husband.”

“Too long, Libbie.”

“Will you put your trousers on, please?”

“Can’t you talk to a naked cavalry officer?”

“Not until he has his britches buttoned. While you do it, you can turn around so I can put my things on.”

“All right.” He sighed.

Custer plopped on the bed, pulling the gray pants over his feet. “Libbie, there’s been so much time since we … I only thought we owed it to ourselves to try again.”

“I was afraid you were going to say that this morning.” She wrenched up the deep blue dress, shook it angrily, and stepped among its ample folds. “I don’t want last night to become a habit with us.”

“A habit?” He gulped. “A man and his wife can’t enjoy each other?”

“Such activity should be preserved for the creation of God’s greatest gift, a child.”

“There you go with that Presbyterian drivel again!”

“A child, Autie. A child!”

“Stop right now before you get yourself worked up again. I’ve heard it all many times before. Isn’t that why we both just stopped trying?”

“If not to create a child, what’s the purpose of our intimacies?”

“Purpose? My God, Libbie—in case you haven’t noticed lately, I’m a man and you’re still every inch a woman! You made no complaints last night.”

“That was last night.” She stared solemnly at the tent wall. “I’d grown so lonely for you. Missing you.”

“Do you remember the last time we made love?” he asked, stepping toward her.

She shook her head.

“Me neither. You can bet it was a long time before I left Monroe. But last night—that was as good as we’ve ever been together.”

“I was so lonely for you, Autie.” She whimpered like a wounded animal.

He clutched her shoulders. “We can grow close once more. Sharing our bodies again as we—”

“We don’t need that!”

Custer’s hands slipped from her shoulders. “No, I suppose we don’t.” He was weary of it already. He turned away, defeated. “I had hoped—”

“I quit hoping long ago, Autie.” She swept one of his hands up in hers. “Quit hoping for a child that would draw
us even closer together. Please.” she begged. “The kindest, most loving thing you can do for me is to forget being intimate with me. You must understand how cruel it is—the guilt I suffer this morning—for what I did last night.”

“For making love to me? With everything you are as a woman?”

“Yes,” she answered firmly. “I can’t have a child.
We
can’t have a child. And each time we make love, I’m reminded that I’m just a little less as a woman, a little less as a wife to you.” She gazed up at him as he brushed a strand of chestnut hair from her eyes.

“Autie, you can’t want to remind me of the horror and revulsion I feel for my own body’s failure to bear your children!”

Libbie collapsed against him, tears boiling up from some incomplete place down in her being. He stroked her long chestnut hair.

Soon she’ll pin it up around her face, he knew. But for now, it flows over her shoulders, rumpled from our night together. Hair long and flowing like—

He tried to shove the other out of his mind. Feeling like a sham dodger, holding Libbie, thinking of Monaseetah.

“All right,” he whispered, beaten. Such a hard thing to do, this drawing back from the woman he had fallen in love with when he was ten years old. Too painful for him to dredge up all those hopes and dreams any longer—those prayers that Libbie would be all things to him.

“It’s settled, Libbie.”

He felt her arms squeeze about him reassuringly. Lord, but he loved this frail, insecure woman so much at times. And others, he wanted her gone from his life. Her and the
constant reminder that she believed he was at fault. That he was the reason she was barren.

“I promise, Libbie.”

Custer gazed out through the narrow slit in the tent flaps, mesmerized by the line of gold and brown prairie melting in a haze against the cornflower blue sky. A land much bigger than any man. Surely bigger than any problem that might threaten to overwhelm him.

Looking at that shimmering horizon where the green and gold of the shortgrass rising from the brown flesh of the prairie to meet the caress of the morning sky just like a woman’s breasts rose to her lover, Custer knew he had fallen in love with another.

“I
s this the place the Injins is kep’, Ginnel?”

Custer smiled, bouncing on the seat of the freight wagon he had borrowed for this trip to Fort Hays from the Big Creek camp.
Dear Eliza.

Keeping much of her childlike and beguiling innocence down through their years together since that first autumn of ’64. A freed Virginia slave, she was only seventeen then. His cook ever since. Now housekeeper for Libbie. Custer couldn’t imagine doing without her.

“Yes, Eliza.
Wild
Indians.”

As Eliza glanced away, Custer winked at Libbie.

“’Cain’t wait, Ginnel. Able to tell all I know that Eliza see’d a real live blood-tastin’ Cheyenne warrior!”

“Not the warriors you have to keep an eye on,” he whispered mysteriously with another wink at Libbie. “It’s the women-folk who’re the sneakiest of all. Why, you don’t know when they might slip up behind you”—he slapped both reins into one hand—”and poke a knife right atween your ribs!”

With the empty hand he jabbed his imaginary knife at Eliza. Gasping in horror, she clutched a hand to her breast and tumbled back against the sideboard of Lieutenant Bell’s freight wagon he had borrowed for their trip to Fort Hays.

“Autie!” Libbie yelped, giggling. “You’re so cruel to Eliza! Scaring her witless!”

“You scared witless, Eliza?” he asked.

“Me, Ginnel?” She sat straight, flashing teeth yellowed like old ivory set within her ebony cheeks. “No, the Ginnel’s quite the kidder, Miz Libbie,” Eliza said. “Never know when he mean it, and when he don’t. Anythin’ at’all … he might’n be pullin’ my leg.”

“But I’ve never pulled hard enough to pull it off,” Custer added.

“Why, Ginnel—there you go at me again!” she exclaimed.

“Yes,” Libbie said with a sigh. “We just don’t know what to expect of him next, do we?”

Custer watched something strange cross Libbie’s face, before she gazed down the road once more. Whatever it was, it had made him cold. Here beneath a bright June sun. Clouds like tiny sailing ships adrift upon the expanse of a blue-domed sea. And her putting this cold knot in his gut.

“There it is,” he announced as they neared the outskirts of the buildings. “Now, Eliza, you best be careful around those squaws. I don’t want to lose my Black-Eyed Pea.”

“Black-Eyed Pea?” Libbie asked.

“The Ginnel called me that back in the war, Miz Libbie. When he was just a freckle-faced soldier boy.”

“Not a boy any longer, Eliza.” He flashed her his grin. “You just watch yourself, ’cause I may hand you over to
them Cheyenne squaws myself—let them find out just how good darkie meat can taste slow-broiled!”

Eliza yelped in mock pain as he pinched her cheek. “Oh, Ginnel! You are a one!”

“Thank you, Eliza,” he answered. “At least you’re happy you came to Kansas to see me.”

Libbie tired hard, but couldn’t suppress her giggle behind the gloved fingers she held to her lips. “From the impression I got my first night in camp, Mr. Custer”—and she winked at him wickedly—“I was led to believe you were really happy to see me!”

He felt like a schoolboy propped stiffly on a park bench beside a young schoolgirl named Elizabeth Bacon, who persisted in prodding him to admit that he really did like her best of all.

“You did show me, Autie,” she whispered. “Despite everything that’s troubling us, I still know you’re truly happy to have me with you again.”

Libbie slipped an arm through his. Custer steered the wagon past the post entrance, saluting the guards as he passed.

On the east side of the huge open compound that formed Fort Hays stood a large fenced stockade where several large wall tents squatted in the sun like ugly toads. From the open-air prison rose the sound of children’s laughter. Several brown youngsters, naked save for breechclouts, chased one another in play.