Long Winter Gone: Son of the Plains - Volume 1 (45 page)

“She is hurt?”

“No one saw her hurt,” another squaw answered.

“Will the soldiers shoot us, Yellow Hair?”

“We only protected our chiefs,” another explained.

He said. “The soldiers will not kill you.”

“It is true,” one old woman exhorted the others. “These soldiers will not shoot women down in cold blood like buffalo caught in a narrow valley.”

“They came to hang our chiefs!” an old one shrieked.

“No.” Custer pointed to the guardhouse across the parade. “They were taking your men to the little house.”

He saw Monaseetah hurrying to him across the sun-baked compound. The women parted for her respectfully, as Yellow Hair’s woman.

“You are safe?” he asked, clutching her shoulders.

“I am not harmed.” A hand went to her belly. “Bullets close.” She pulled aside a flap of her blanket, the red one she had worn since that freezing morning beside the Washita.

In a fold of the crimson wool he saw a shabby beam of sunlight pour through the bullet hole. Anger scraped across his bowels. Now, more than ever, he had to get her out of Hays. Far from here.

An old woman shoved her way through the crowd, showing him three bullet holes in her blanket. With a gnarled finger she made a pistol, imitating the whistling bullets zinging around her during the fracus. “Ping! Ping!”

“Yes,” he replied. “No more shooting now. No more—ever.”

Monaseetah pressed against him. There were no easy answers to any of this. Yet, as a man hopes for spring in the cold heart of winter, he realized this tragedy held the
solution he had been seeking. Now he could send her south.

“There are no Indians coming to rescue you,” he explained. “Yellow Hair made you his prisoner. Only Yellow Hair can free you.”

He gestured to Monaseetah. “Even she will tell you how Yellow Hair rode alone into the camp of the great Medicine Arrow. Yet no warrior touched a hair on my head.”

Monaseetah nodded in agreement. Her gesture set the women wailing and keening. Tears slid down the deep crevices of their old faces. There was no escape.

“Yellow Hair is mightier than all our warriors!” one old woman shrieked.

“Mightier than our chiefs!” another wailed, ripping at her hair in mourning.

One by one they wandered off to begin their self-mutilation for the dead and wounded. Slashing arms and legs, blood oozing into the sticky, red mud at their feet. They hacked at their hair and chopped off fingertips. Above it all hung a keening wail like a winter wind through dead and dying trees.

“Where is the body of Big Head?” Custer asked her.

“He is with Dull Knife,” Monaseetah said. “Come.”

She pulled aside the flaps of the weather-grayed canvas wall tent for him. As his eyes adjusted to the light, he saw women huddled on the floor, quietly sobbing. Blinking in the dust, Custer made out two chiefs laid upon blankets. Around each body was a cluster of old squaws.

Custer knelt beside Big Head—this tall, gray-headed warrior he had determined to hold at all costs beside the Sweetwater. A winter day, so long ago. Bringing Big Head here, far from his people’s land … and for what?

He cursed himself for the foolishness of others.

If a man is to die, shouldn’t he fall as he’s lived? As a warrior, protecting his homeland and the weak ones?

This was the irony of Big Head’s death.
Falling with no glory. A victim of folly and stupidity.

Custer bent, touched Big Head’s brow where the women had painted his face with bear grease pigments. That touch was the closest thing to a Cheyenne prayer he could offer.

With a sigh, he turned to Dull Knife.

The old chief opened his thick-lidded, glazed eyes. Feebly, he waved, moving the old women back.

“I am not dead yet,” he whispered with a fluid rasp.

Custer recognized that unmistakable rattle in the old man’s chest, those flecks of pink foam dotting the Indian’s tongue. Death itself etched the old man’s weathered face.

“We only wanted to—” Dull Knife hacked up bits of lung and blood, spitting them into a smelly rag an old woman held beside his wet lips. “Yellow Hair … we wanted to be guarded by your pony soldiers.”

“Dull Knife must not work so hard,” Custer replied.

The old Indian’s strength faded with every breath. The war chief smiled weakly. “The walk-a-heap soldiers did not know the signs to talk with us. These who have killed us this day will never know the sadness I feel for them.”

Dull Knife hacked up more bits of lung into the red rag. “I feel more pity for the young soldiers who killed us than for my old friend Big Head. We were children together. We stole our first ponies together. Now these walk-a-heaps, mere children, have killed two old Dog Soldiers by accident.”

“I promise you will be guarded by pony soldiers now.”

“Yellow Hair promises this?” His glazed eyes narrowed.

“Yes. I promise.”

“Your word is worthless, Yellow Hair. You have cursed yourself. Medicine Arrow … all of us were there in his lodge when you cursed yourself.”

“There is no curse!”

Dull Knife tried to focus on those winter-blue eyes. Recalling a winter none of them had believed would ever end.….

“Remember, Yellow Hair—attack a village of women and children, then you and all your children will die.”

“We did not attack you today!” Custer argued.

“I do not speak of this day,” Dull Knife answered, his eyelids drooping. “Come a time, soldier folly will bring your end. Just as my time comes before the sun leaves the sky.”

“No, Dull Knife!” Custer shouted at the body sagging in his arms. “You cannot die. I will see you returned to the homeland of your people!”

The black-cherry eyes peered into an unseen distance. Down the long, last trail.

“I will never see my home again, Yellow Hair. Already I am on the road to the other side. I will not see my people again. Only the ones who have gone before. There I will be with Big Head, where he already rides a strong pony. Once more we will raid for sleek horses. And drink clear, sweet water so cold it makes my mouth hurt. Not this warm, bitter water your soldiers give us to drink in this stinking hole of death.”

Custer heard the rattle, saw it shake the Indian’s huge frame.

“This hole, Yellow Hair—where we Cheyenne cannot travel beneath the sky, across the breast of the Mother of Us All as Cheyenne were meant to journey. You make us live
on reservations, and soon that place begins to stink with our being there too long, like this prison. Yellow Hair, I would rather die a free man than live in a stinking hole like you white men.

“Everywhere I look in that land where I go, my people are happy. They do not have to look upon the face of the white man, who breaks all promises. I no longer live with a sad heart.”

With the quickness of a swallow’s wings, Dull Knife’s eyelids fluttered and closed. Pink froth oozed from his lips.

An old woman bent her head to his chest. She brought her eyes to Custer, wrinkling them behind the smoky incense of burning sweetgrass braids the women offered in prayer. She raised her face and voice to the heavens. High and eerie, her melancholy song rose from the tent.

Grappling with his own rage, Custer scooped the dead chief into his arms. Clutching the limp frame to his breast as he rocked back and forth. Spitting his words while salty tears scorched his eyes.

“They were going home! With God’s next breath, these men were going home! Why …?”

Something inside Custer told him more than just an old Indian had died. Something more precious than any one man’s life.

“By all that’s holy—these Cheyenne will go home now!”

As he stared into Dull Knife’s face, peaceful now in death, Custer came to believe that a flickering hope had been extinguished. A hope he had long hidden.

Nine days later, on 11 June, fifty-four Cheyenne prisoners were herded together arid told they would leave for their homeland in the south at dawn the next day.

Speaking through an interpreter, Colonel Nelson A. Miles was disappointed to find less than celebration from the Cheyenne with his announcement—until he realized this journey to freedom had come a few days late.

Too late for Big Head and Dull Knife, too late for the others who would return south whole of body but weak in spirit. South to the reservations, where the bands of Medicine Arrow and Little Robe awaited them. Fifty-three had marched north from the Washita. Three more were captured on the Sweetwater.

Two bodies, bound in blankets and rawhide strips, lay putrefying in the steamy shade beneath the west wall of the stockade. Two old chiefs heading home for burial in the old way, in the homeland of ages past.

Romero had appealed to Custer, who sent him on to Miles with his blessings. The Fort Hays commandant had immediately agreed that the intepreter could take himself a Cheyenne wife who had fallen in love with him. To Miles’s way of thinking, the squaw would have a better life with Romero than she could ever have on that parched reservation of the Cheyenne.

That evening before the rest of the prisoners would start south, Romero waited, as anxious as a virgin on her wedding night, at the stockade gate for his bride. As a purple band of twilight streaked the warm land, she was freed. Romero tramped west and north with his woman, Fort Hays disappearing behind them. Neither one ever looked back.

Custer watched sadly from the guardhouse along the western wall of the stockade as the pair rode straight for the sinking, red sun. Like beetles scurrying from the light, they disappeared into the hills of gold and brown, brittle-red
earth and creeks of lazy blue-green. A pair of riders reaching for that place where the great beckoning land touched the sky … out there far, far beyond.

Somewhere between earth and sky.

At last Custer realized the ache upon his own heart was for the coming loneliness. An ache in their parting. A cruel tearing of flesh from flesh as painful as any gaping, bleeding wound—an agony he had no way of healing.

F
OR
days he vowed he wouldn’t make a fool of himself at her leaving.

Yet here Custer stood like some moonstruck young warrior, watching for a last glimpse of Monaseetah among the prisoners milling anxiously about in the stockade.

Beneath that dawn-pale light of a thumbnail moon hung limp in the western sky, the Cheyenne had taken Colonel Miles at his word. They were ready to leave at sunrise.

Custer had killed time in the officers’ mess, drinking coffee, waiting on something he wanted to be gone and done with, something he had hoped would never come to pass.

Saturday. A working day, 12 June. The sun spread its first crimson tendrils across those dark, eastern hills through which the Smoky Hill had cut its way for ages long, long gone. That haze already lingering over the trees at the river’s banks testified to a hot and muggy day a’birthing. Summer had come to the southern plains at last, with as
much vengeance as the past winter had come: a long winter gone.

Custer moseyed outside to watch the comings and goings of Captain Myers and his K Troop, cavalry escort for Pepoon’s civilian scouts on this journey south to Camp Supply. There the Cheyenne would be turned out and the army would roll back to Fort Hays, their mission complete—the Cheyennes home at last.

By the time the Cheyenne reached Camp Supply, seven months would have passed since any of the women had enjoyed freedom. Any, except for Monaseetah. For much of her captivity at the hands of the Seventh Cavalry, she had come and gone as she pleased, belonging more to the Yellow Hair than she had ever belonged to her people.

With the rising of a cold, winter-pale sun, she had come into his life. Now, with the coming of a festering bone-yellow summer sun, he sent her away.

Custer swallowed against the painful knot in his throat. Not since that awful moment of drunkenness played out in front of the Bacon house in Monroe a decade ago had he suffered such anguish. Never this sort of fear.

That’s what it was, after all—fear. He had to admit he was scared … frightened he would never see her again. Knowing already he had to.

With the groan of axles, a train of sidewalled freighters wheeled free of the wagon yard, some already loaded with supplies and foodstuffs for the prisoners and escort. The remaining empty wagons would haul copper people: big and small, wide and thin, young and old; even the dead. Copper people transferred, from the Department of the Platte to the Indian Bureau, Fort Cobb, Indian Territory.

While Myers’s company stood rigidly by their horses and
off-duty soldiers looked on with passing interest, Fifth Infantry guards opened the stockade gates one last time. A faceless interpreter barked orders for the Cheyenne to march through the gate in single file, one prisoner at a time. Each prisoner was checked off on some clerk’s official list.

Custer shook his head. A pitiful farewell for a proud people taken prisoner in winter battle, freighted home while ink dried on a meaningless scrap of paper that would find rest in someone’s useless file in Washington City. Given a final Indian Department burial by someone to whom the Cheyenne had never been human beings—only prisoners, names, numbers … requisitions, blankets, tents … bullets and bayonets.

“At goddamn last, the sonsabitches are going home and out of our hair!” an infantryman blared down on the parade.

Funny to think about it now
, Custer brooded, watching the prisoners peeling through the stockade gate the way he would take layer after layer from a prairie onion.
The Cheyenne are taking more than they had when we pulled them out of the valley of the Washita. Then they had only what they wore on their backs, leaving behind a smoking ruin of Black Kettle’s village.

“Farewell, old Cardigan!”

Surprised, Custer glanced at the stockade. Some of the soldiers shouted farewell to Fat Bear, the last surviving Sweetwater prisoner. The old chief ambled through the gate, nodding here, smiling there.

“Happy hunting, Cardigan!”

The soldiers cheered Fat Bear using the name they had given him for the worsted mackinaw coat he had taken to wearing. A gift from the army.