Текст книги "LITTLE BIG MAN"

Автор книги: Томас Бергер (Бри(е)джер)

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CHAPTER 25 Custer Again

IT TOOK THE BETTER PART of two weeks to reach Fort Abraham Lincoln, up the spring-swollen, bank-crumbling Big Muddy; and when we got there, the troops had been gone for about the same length of time on their direct overland march to the Yellowstone, led by General Terry, with Custer as second in command.

Lincoln wasn’t much of a place, occupying a sweep of treeless flat bottomland overlooked by bluffs from which the hostiles had been spying on the camp; you could see them little piles of stones behind which they’d conceal their heads.

No sooner had the boat tied up at the dock than two women come on board, and one of them was the prettiest female I ever seen in my life with one exception. And well-dressed and gracious, and oh my, what a remarkable sight up there in that barren land with the constant wind blowing across the flats.

It was Mrs. Custer. I recognized her though never having laid eyes on her before, with her winsome round face and beautiful sad eyes and wearing a dinky little velvet bonnet sort of like a derby, and she put her tiny feet on the rough gangplank the deckhands threw down, and walked over it like a bird. Them fellows just stood gawking; it was me who put a hand out at the other end, and she rested hers lightly upon the wrist of it as she stepped to the deck and looked squarely at me and never said thanks, but rather smiled it with small nose and a soft line of pearly teeth. I’ll admit something: I would have killed every Indian on the plains if she had asked me to, or at least if she had been watching. Then she passed me by, for I wasn’t nobody, and was short as her and, as a matter of fact, fair seedy after the time on that boat, where the washing facilities wasn’t of the most improved.

Well sir, what did I do but follow along behind her like a personal servant or an idiot to which somebody done a kind thing, and there was that other woman, too, who was General Custer’s sister and the wife of Lieutenant James Calhoun, though I couldn’t have described her a second later.

Captain Marsh showed them into his cabin, and presumably getting after something on the heel of my boot, I lingered outside the door.

“Captain,” says this whippoorwill voice, “I beg of you to let us come along.”

“Forgive me, ma’am,” Marsh says, “I cannot.”

The same exchange, more or less, was repeated several times, but the captain stayed firm, and I moved away so as to hear no more of her distress. I was full of wonder at this wife of that glorious soldier, with his six hundred troops and his supply boat and Gatling guns. Bad worried she was, you could hear. Now women generally shiver at the thought of Indians, but not, you would think, one who was married to the victor of the Washita. Custer had whipped the Southern Cheyenne, and found gold in the Black Hills. He even survived the enmity of the President of the United States! He was hated by individuals, but was the public’s great favorite, and Mr. James Gordon Bennett of the New York Heraldhad sent along a correspondent to be “in at the kill”-of the Indians, that is. Custer’s wife was as pretty as a woman could get. So what ailed her?

I went onto shore. An old sergeant was there who had been left behind from the campaign on account of his retirement was coming up, watery-eyed old devil whose purple nose told me he had been doing much of his soldiering across the river in the saloons of Bismarck.

I says: “Why would the General’s Mrs. want to come along, a fine lady like that?”

“Had a nightmare,” says he, then honked into a bandanna and put it away. “Seen a big buck Sioux, bare to the G-string, holding up a bleeding scalp of long yellow locks. Might of been that was the reason why the General had a short haircut afore they left.”

I says: “No, he never! …”

“All right then,” says the sarge, “you just come upriver and you know better.”

“Settle down,” I says. “I ain’t calling you a liar, I’m only confounded. I sure never thought Custer would slice off them golden locks. Now what will the Indians call him if not Long Hair?”

“Son of the Morning Star,” says the old soldier. “That’s what the Crow scouts named him.”

“Was you at the Washita?”

“No,” the sergeant says, “I had to stay behind in camp with a case of the screaming shits.” He was clearly one of them fellows who find some way of missing all hazards.

At that moment Mrs. Custer and the other lady come off the boat, escorted by Captain Marsh, and got into a carriage on the dock and was drove off to the fort by an orderly. Marsh stood looking after it, and then he turns and says to me: “Poor thing, but I can’t take along any women, especially now with this trouble between Custer and Grant. You know, Custer got court-martialed some years ago down in Kansas for running off a campaign to see his wife.”

The old sergeant give a wheezing laugh and rubbed his stubbly chin: with the commander gone, I reckon he didn’t bother to shave regular. He says: “He generally does what he wants. In the Grand Review at the end of the War, he galloped past Grant without salutin’. Claimed his horse bolted, but I seen him give it the spur.”

Marsh, having himself some reputation for dash, didn’t want to hear about this. He says: “Well now, take if Custer gets hurt, why, it would be all the worse to have her there.”

“He has a charmed life,” I says bitterly.

Well, Marsh went about the business of taking on more stores, and the old sarge invited me to cross over to Bismarck with him and we’d tie one on at a good hog ranch he knowed, which is what they sometimes called a whiskey joint, and he’d even let me buy if I insisted, for he had already went through his pay. On the last subject, he told me the men on the campaign wasn’t to be paid until they got into the field, so that they couldn’t spree in Bismarck. Custer didn’t want to march out with a regiment who was all hung over. So the Seventh Cavalry was carrying two months’ wages in its pockets through the wilds of Montana, around $25,000 in paper bills.

I had to turn down the invite, for the Far Westwas soon moving north again, up to the big bend of the Missouri and on into the Yellowstone River, with no significant layovers except the regular stops to cut wood to fire its boilers and a dropping off of supplies to an infantry column waiting at Glendive Creek. It was into the first week in June when we finally reached the mouth of the Powder, and that’s where we found the Seventh Cavalry in bivouac.

All right, I had got there. Now what? There was quite an assemblage of Army thereabout. Besides the Seventh there was infantry and Gatling guns, and a supply train of 150 wagons; a herd of cattle, most of which however by now had been butchered and ate on the march in; a mule train; and a couple hundred civilian teamsters, mule skinners, and herders. Not to mention some forty specimens of an Indian for who the proper name is I think Arikara though they was mainly called Ree at that time. These Ree had come along as scouts, being hereditary enemies of the Sioux, though I believe that in time past they had been friendly with the Cheyenne when the Human Beings lived along the Missouri, for that’s where the Ree still resided.

Right miserable-looking bunch, they was small and soot-colored, and I think a Ree would rather have cut his own throat than ever wash a particle of his person. Still, they was Indians, albeit enemies to them with which I was raised, and the mood I was in, I’d have took to anybody at the moment who was not white of countenance. I was thinking of Old Lodge Skins, see, and if he was still alive, and the Lakota tribes, the Minneconjou and the Hunkpapa and all, out there someplace to the west of us. Rumor now had it they was probably encamped along the Rosebud. I’ll tell you about that creek: it got its name from the wild rosebushes along its bank. I reckoned its waters would run with blood any day now, like at the Washita.

The Far Westhad started to unload its stores, and I spotted a Ree what had come up to where that sutler was setting up his barrels of whiskey. This Indian was a dumpy fellow, dressed in filthy buckskins, and I would have took him for a degenerate imbecile the way he was a-studying them barrels.

But some trooper says to me: “Looky there at Bloody Knife, will you. He’d cut his Ma’s throat for a shot of red-eye. You would never know he is Hard A-” He broke off, on account of he didn’t know who I might be, being as I wore civilian clothes: among the herders and teamsters was Boston Custer, the General’s youngest brother, and his nephew Armstrong Reed. The trooper had been going to say “Hard Ass,” but changed it. “You wouldn’t guess, from looking at him, that he was the General’s favorite scout, would you?” He snorted. “Goddam old drunk.”

But Bloody Knife wasn’t drunk at that minute, nor for some time thereafter, for not even scout Indians was allowed openly to drink whiskey in front of white men. So he hung around hopelessly awhile and tried to talk to people in sign language, and at last, not able to stand and study them barrels without a chance to break into one, he trudged off as though from the burial of a loved one, so grief-stricken was his dark face.

I caught him up and, never speaking Ree, says in the signs: “You want a drink?”

He says: “All right.” So I got a canteenful of that red-eye dispensed by the sutler, and me and Bloody Knife went on out one of the many ravines that cut up the country at the mouth of the Powder and set behind a sagebush, after the Indian had emptied his bladder so as to have a full capacity for drinking the whiskey. This pissing also served to run out a rattlesnake who had been sunning himself in the area: rattlers was abundant in that region.

I give Bloody Knife time for a good swallow and then took back the canteen. I says, watching a couple drops run down his chin and neck and flush out some bugs what lived in his collar, “What is Long Hair going to do?”

The Ree just kept his black eyes upon that canteen. “He has cut his hair,” he says, making the slicing sign with his two dusky hands.

I signaled that I knowed that, but never saw what it had to do with the issue.

“It means,” he says, “that he is going to die.”

I give him the canteen again. I don’t have to tell you at this point what importance an Indian sets upon human hair. Scalps are taken for a more important purpose than just trophies: a man without a skull-cover is considered powerless even when he reaches the Other Side. And whenever Indians saw a white man balded by nature, they believed him a coward who had deliberately shaved his head. I realized Custer had made a bad mistake for his own interests.

“That was not a good thing to do,” says Bloody Knife, who was getting more depressed with every swallow. He looks up at the sun and signals to it: “I shall not see you rise many more times.”

I knew that if I let him continue on that note he would commence to sing his death song at any minute and then I’d never get anything else out of him, so I says right quick: “But that will not happen until all those barrels of whiskey are gone, so drink up.”

At which he was some cheered and filled his fly-trap again.

“Many Sioux and Cheyenne out there?”

He says: “Numerous as stars on a clear night.”

I pointed back towards the camp. “But look at all those soldiers. And more will come from the west and south.”

Bloody Knife shook his dirty head of tangled hair. It was graying some at the temples. “It does not matter,” he says. “We will all be rubbed out. Long Hair will never be the Great Father in the chief village of the white men, as he wishes. I like him a lot, but his medicine has turned bad.”

He goes on that Custer had come to him and the other Ree a night or so since, give them presents, and said he would whip the entire Sioux nation before the month was out, in return for which the American people would make him President.

Well, Grant was in trouble on account of them crooks in his Administration, and when you figured he had got to the White House by whipping the Rebs, a similar result might transpire for the man who sent the Indians under, for they was the only outstanding enemy of the U.S.A. at this particular time in the hundredth year of our Independence from the tyranny of the Old Country.

“I reckon he would like to get it all done by the Fourth of July,” is what I wanted to say, but that is a hell of a difficult speech to make by signs. The Cheyenne know July as “the Moon When Buffalo Are Mating,” but I didn’t know what the Ree called it. However, I made the buffalo-horns, and the motion for screwing-which is the same as used by every white schoolboy-and for moon, and for the fourth day thereof. Still, what would a Ree know of the historical meaning. So I says the day when the soldiers made a lot of noise, shooting cannon and the like.

A look of dim recognition come over his dark face. “And get drunk?” he asks.

“Oh, hell,” I says aloud in English. “What does it matter? Drink up, you poor son of a bitch.”

He shortly passed out, and I took the precaution of unloading his rifle, in case he woke up before the effects had worn off.

I had learned what I wanted to know. I reckoned, in view of Custer’s current needs, this upcoming battle would make the Washita look cheap. Bloody Knife’s pessimism did not impress me. I didn’t care how many hostiles had collected, I knowed they wasn’t organized, never had much modern armament, and was living with their wives and kids.

Well, what was I going to do about it? That old childish idea of assassinating Custer was obviously out. Such a stunt, pulled off now, would just make the Seventh fight harder. They all hated his guts-no sooner had I got off the Far Westthan I heard the troopers grousing about him: they was particularly burned up that he hadn’t let them be paid till they got into the field, which meant that even if they never found a hostile Indian, there’d be men in an outfit that size who would die of rattlesnake bite and the like, without having had a little celebration in town before they went on their last campaign. But once he had been shot by me, or stabbed in the back, he would turn into a hero. Anyway, General Terry was in actual command, so the campaign would not stop.

Now I had left Bloody Knife under the sagebush when, walking back to camp a-studying this matter, who should I spot but a figure out of the distant past, sitting on the bank just beyond where the Powder emptied into the Yellowstone.

His skin was darker yet than a Ree’s and he wore a flop hat with an eagle feather in it. By God if he had changed much in twenty year.

I says to him: “Well, Lavender, this is some surprise.”

For that is who it was, and he looked at me right polite and says I had the advantage on him.

“Jack Crabb,” says I. “The Reverend Pendrake, in ______, Missouri.”

He studies me careful and says: “Go on.” Then he takes off his hat so he can see better, stands up, peers into my face, kind of groans, then laughs, and I grabs him and gives him a bear hug. I don’t know why, it was more like finding a long-lost relative than when I had actually done so on several occasions.

After we got through with exchanging the pleasures of re-meeting, I says: “Tell me what you’re doing here. Has the Reverend become a chaplain?”

“No, not him,” says Lavender, who must now have been around forty-five years of age and had a few gray hairs when I looked him over close, but the mahogany skin of his face was still unlined. He was dressed in buckskin jacket and pants with fringe, and if I wasn’t wrong, his belt showed beadwork in the Sioux fashion. “No,” he says again, and then: “My oh my, I ain’t thought on that Reverend for many a year. He died, Jack, not long after you run off. Et himself to death, is what happened. He packed away one of them gigantic dinners that Lucy made for him one noontime, then took a nap directly after, and some of that meal backed up and clogged his windpipe and he suffocated afore anyone knowed the difference, damn if he did not.”

At that minute Lavender got a bite on his fishline, for he had set down again and lifted his pole, with me alongside, and he pulled it out and there was a real nice fish on the hook, which he unfastened and tossed flopping on the bank.

“Well,” Lavender goes on, “the way I looked at it at the time, that man died happy, in the condition he liked best in all the world: stuffed with victual. I believe Lucy had cooked roast pork with applesauce that day.”

I suffered something between indigestion and heart flutter as I asked: “And Mrs. Pendrake? I reckon she got married again?”

Lavender was threading another earthworm on his hook. “The Lady,” he says, “no, the Lady closed up the shutters on that house and I recall never even attended the funeral. And the church got it a new preacher who was supposed to live in that house, but she never moved out and none of them white folks had nerve to ask her to do it, so the new one, he had to reside somewhere else, and as far as I know she is there yet.”

I was thinking my own thoughts: even for a minute the impulse run through my head to pack up whatever I was doing here and head back down to Missouri instanter, but I was old enough by now to accept the better sense. I was thirty-six and had been through too much. Believe me, the real romantic person is him who ain’t done anything but imagine. If you have actually participated in disasters, like me, you get conservative.

But while I was staring into the Yellowstone at the current making a sort of watery arrowhead around Lavender’s fishline, he says: “I stayed on there for a year or so, but now it was a house of women, so I commenced to think again-” He slapped his hand upon the ground. “Sure,” he says, “it was you yourself what had lived with the Indians. I recall it now, Jack. How you and me talked of it. Well sir, what I done-for I was freed and could come and go as I liked-I went on West one day, like I had thought of doing for quite a spell. Thisheer kin of mine had gone out with Captain Lewis and Captain Clark.…”

He went on about that slave York again, not having as good a memory as me. Suffice it to say he had had various employments and adventures before he found the type of Indian who met his needs, but he finally did, and who was they but the Sioux of Sitting Bull!

This news brung me out of my thoughts. “You didn’t!” I says, and immediately regretted my choice of words, for you see Lavender wasn’t a darky no more. I mean, he was of course still a Negro person by race, but he wasn’t in any wise a servant nor had the mentality of such, and therefore was not any more used to having his veracity questioned.

He just looked at me with an evident pride which I immediately recognized as being Indian, and I said quick: “By God,” I says, “by God, old Sitting Bull! It just surprises me, that’s all. That’s who they’re going out after now, ain’t it?”

Lavender looks sad. He says: “I married a Sioux woman of the Hunkpapa band and lived several year in a tepee made of skin.” He shook his head and that feather quivered in the band. “They are real good people, and you take old Bull, I reckon for an Indian he is what you could call a genius. When he wants to see what is happening anywhere in the world, all he has to do is close his eyes and dream and he’s got it clear.”

“Yes,” I says, “that’s right.”

The sun reflected off the lobes of Lavender’s widespread dark nose. “You recall the Reverend Pendrake, Jack,” he says. “How he was always spouting principles. They was good and even holy ones, I guess, and it was on account of them that he bought me from my old master and give me freedom. So I might be ungrateful when I say the longer I listened to him, the more I thought: he is a fool.”

“So did I,” I says, “even as a young boy.”

“But why, Jack, why did we think that?” Lavender was real quizzical, and took off his hat and dropped it to the ground, showing his head of frizzy curls. “For I was black,” he says, “but you knowed how to read and write.”

I says: “Speaking for myself, I thought he was talking about how things should berather than as they was.”

“That’s right! That’s it!” shouts Lavender. “Whereas an Indian has it the other way around.… Well then,” he goes on, “why did both you and me turn about in time and leave the Indians, too? Tell me that.”

I says: “Because we wasn’t born barbarians.”

“You said it.”

“And it don’t work if you are aware of anything else,” I goes on.

“It’s perfect if you been born in a tent and carried on your Ma’s back and lived with hocus-pocus since the day you was born and never invented the wheel.”

“If you come from civilization,” says Lavender, “to live among the savages, it is fine for a while and then you get so powerful curious as to what is going on back home, you can’t stand it. You got to see, so you come back, and it might be good or it might be awful, but it is happening.”

He pulled in his line and picked up his fish, and we went back towards where his tent stood at the edge of the bivouac.

“We got that straightened out,” I says. “But what I wonder now is why you have come back to this country?”

Lavender looked sort of embarrassed at that. He says: “I ain’t here to fight the Sioux. I signed on as interpreter. When they see this army, why, maybe they’ll return to the agencies.”

“You think they will?”

“No,” he says. “And if they shoot at me, I reckon I’ll shoot back.”

The next day I finally seen Custer. I was still there unofficially and could have strung along that way for quite a time in a camp of that size, where as I have said there was lots of civilians as wagon drivers and such, and I considered so doing, for I was an enemy in this midst and it seemed less like treason if I didn’t sign on for nothing. But then I thought that if I was around long enough, people would become aware I wasn’t attached to any of the various services and begin to ask questions. I was afraid my sympathies might show up in any prolonged conversation with a white man, for you couldn’t walk nowhere among that bunch without hearing how they was going to whip old Bull and his cutthroats, only good redskin was a dead one, etc. On that subject, the troopers would even forget their dislike of Custer and talk of what a fighter he was.

Then I still never knowed what I intended to do. The Indian camp had not yet been located, Major Reno and his command being out on a reconnaissance mission along the Tongue River at the moment to determine just that. I guess I had some vague plan when the village was found to slip off and get there before the troops and warn the hostiles, though it was too likely I would get killed long before contacting any Cheyenne who might recognize me.

The best move at present seemed to be getting hired as scout, and that required an interview with Custer. General Terry might be in official command, but I got the impression that he did the talking while Custer acted.

I went to the headquarters tent of Son of the Morning Star and bluffed my way past the orderly-a different man from the Washita striker-and walked inside to a little camp table, and there sat the General behind it, a-scribbling as usual. I don’t know that anyone has ever pointed out what a writer Custer was: letters to his wife most every day, and he also done a whole series of articles for the Galaxymagazine while in the field. I believe he was writing such now.

He did look different with his long hair cropped off like a normal person’s, a little weaker maybe, but then that might have been only the superstition of Bloody Knife. However, I saw something else before he lifted his eyes to me. It was day outside, but he was using a candle as additional illumination, and as he was bent over his papers, the top of his hatless skull lay directly in my sight and there, on either side of a sparse yellow forelock, long spearpoints of pink skin run back almost to meet at the crown. Custer was getting bald.

I felt a touch of human feeling for him on the sudden, which soon left while he made me stand there for quite a time without acknowledgment.

At last he scratches in a full stop on his writing, and he waits for it to dry, lays aside his pen, then stares coldly at me.

“State your business,” he says in that raspy voice I had not forgotten.

“General,” I says, a-trying to keep down the distaste that had again replaced that short-lived other feeling, “I was wondering whether you could use another guide or interpreter. There is Cheyenne out there with the Sioux, and I lived among-”

“No,” he says, and picking up his pen again, called: “Orderly, show this man out.”

That trooper entered the tent and stood aside for me to exit, but I got sore and wouldn’t move and when he took ahold of my arm to assist my departure, I pushed him off and says: “Boy, you touch me again and I’ll lay you open with my pigsticker.”

Custer looked up at that and broke out in a dry laugh with more air in it than sound.

“You’re peppery, aren’t you?” he says. “I like that. All right, orderly, you can retire.” Which the trooper does, glowering at me. Then Custer settles back in his camp chair with a superior smile and says: “Now then, what makes you think you might be useful to me?”

I was still riled, but I managed to mention some of my experiences with the Cheyenne while of course omitting everything about the Washita.

“Oh, Cheyenne,” he broke in before I had got much out, “but not Sioux? Well, my good fellow, you are eight years late. As you may have heard, I trounced the Cheyenne in 1868 down in Indian Territory. You apparently do not keep up with things.”

I tell you, it was his grin that burned me more than the substance of his comments, but I knowed that if I really let my temper go, I’d kill him.

So I says, level as I could: “There’s still enough Cheyenne north of the Platte to give you a run for your money, especially if they have joined with the Lakota.”

“Oh,” says he, “a few stragglers, perhaps, have made their way north to join these malcontents, but I can whip the whole lot with one troop of the Seventh-unless the Indian agents have managed to equip them with the latest Winchester repeating arms, in which case I shall need two troops. In my opinion, a better campaign might be waged against the latter gentry, the scoundrels who, on the one hand, speculate in the Indian annuities and, on the other, excuse and prevaricate about the depredations of the savages under their protection.”

On this subject he become genuinely exercised, frowning beneath them heavy pale brows and nose getting real pointy. “I find it quite sinister,” he says, “that these men can connive-for that is what it amounts to-in the atrocities against their own countrymen. For example, the official at the Red Cloud Agency has been so lax with his barbarous charges that they lately, with murderous threats, frustrated his attempt to raise the American flag above his office!”

Then he caught himself, as if realizing it was not proper form for a brevet major-general of the U.S. Army to address a common frontiersman with high emotion.

“Well,” he says, “I suppose this is all Greek to you. I’m sorry that I cannot give you employment as guide, but you can give extremely valuable service as herder or teamster or whatever you now do. Not everybody can ride at the head of the column: the feet are no less useful than the eyes.”

Now you won’t believe this, but it happened. I lost control at Custer’s dismissing me so, and before I knowed what I was doing, I says very distinct:

“You bastard, I should have knifed you when I had the chance.”

I was plumb full of horror once that expression was out-not because I feared for my well-being; no sir, I realized on the instant that now I would never get away to warn the Indians. I stood there for a time, the words still echoing in my head, and Custer says:

“But thank you for coming forward. I like your ginger. We need have no doubt of the outcome when even the civilians wish to serve in the van.”

He returned to his writing, and I left the tent. Custer had not heard my comment, spoke directly to his face! As regards the outside world, he was like a stuffed bird under one of them glass bells. His own opinion sufficed to the degree that he had no equipment for detecting exterior reactions. That’s the only way I can explain it.

Anyhow, that’s why no roster of the men present at the Battle of the Little Bighorn ever contained my name. Custer thought I was a herder; and the herders and teamsters themselves figured I was an interpreter or guide, especially as I hung about a good deal with Lavender.

It was while we was at this camp upon the Powder that the Seventh Cavalry stripped off its excess baggage. All sabers, for example, was crated up and left there, so them pictures of the Last Stand in which Custer waves his sword while the Indians swirl around him is lies. And that famous regimental band which had so tormented me upon the Washita, they had come this far from Fort Lincoln, but for once they would not accompany the attack. Their gray horses was needed for a number of troopers who had made the march on foot.

A day or so later the rest of us moved forty mile up the Yellowstone to the mouth of the Tongue River. I got myself an Indian pony with a pad saddle and a rawhide halter from Bloody Knife, who had a few extra animals. As I recall the transaction, it cost me two or three canteenfuls of the sutler’s whiskey, not the worst deal, but then that pony had seen better days and wasn’t worth a whole lot more. He was a buckskin, right skinny and had a couple saddle sores, which I treated with an old Cheyenne remedy of boiled tobacco, bitter grass, animal fat, and salt.

My last memory of the Powder River encampment is of the band, on a nearby bluff, playing for our march out. Naturally, their selection was “Garry Owen,” and it brung to my mind certain images of eight year before. I did not of course know that as the blare receded into the distance, it represented the fading out of Custer’s famous luck as well.

I was riding at the rear, with the pack mules that had now replaced the wagons as supply train, and on ahead stretched the mighty blue column.