Текст книги "LITTLE BIG MAN"

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

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Now it was C Troop, there below, all gone except a handful what scrambled up to us and fell behind the horse-corpse barricade, some hit in the back while so doing and belching blood onto the present occupants who pulled them in to add to the growing mortuary. Tom Custer was not of that number, so had got his, I expect. And young Reed was near me, one minute a-working his expensive sporting rifle and the next stone dead with his mouth open and tongue turning black, and I never saw Boston at all: he had probably dropped on our ride up from the river.

So as man, the General had lost two brothers, a nephew, and very likely his sister’s husband; as commanding officer, the better part of five troops; as cavalryman, his mount. In smaller things, his hat was gone and one revolver; the other he was firing, down on one knee now. His pants was tore, and most of the buttons off his double-breasted shirt, where he had ripped it further open to relieve the heat.

Mark Kellogg, the journalist, lay on his face in the gravel, presumably gone under though there was not a tear on his back anywhere, and from his coat pocket protruded the rolled foolscap of his last dispatch, never sent. Sergeant Hughes, what carried Custer’s personal guidon, was terribly hurt from a gut-wound that curled him up on the ground like a caterpillar around the point of a sharp stick, yet somehow he kept the banner from touching dirt. It hung limp except when feebly stirred by the passing of arrows.

I haven’t mentioned my own wounds, though I had received a couple. I had been struck in the left shoulder by a ball from a muzzle-loader, I reckon, for it had enormous power behind it, lifting me right off the prone position, reversing my head with my boots, so my spine whomped onto the ground and I couldn’t breathe for a minute. But I returned to place directly and got the Indian who done it, for he seen me go over and confidently exposed himself while reloading and nobody else was left to fire at him for thirty yards on either side of me. I give him one in the breastbone and let it go at that, having to conserve ammunition; down he went, and his pals pulled him back into the grass to die or recover, I would never know.

They done the same with all their casualties, whereas ours lay around us, and the dead horses, and owing to the heat the latter was ready to ripen soon, the laid-open flesh already growing dark, and there was even more flies on that hill than Indians, for commotion don’t touch that miserable little beast. I had a few at my bleeding shoulder, feeling their tiny feet where I still could sense no pain. I had also been scored across the cheek by an arrow, at an angle so that the blood trickled into the corner of my mouth, from which salty taste I discovered it in the first place.

But that hangover, now, that was altogether gone, along with the depreciating effect of no sleep for two days: nothing like a massacre to clear your head. I don’t believe my sight was ever keener, before nor since. Too bad there was nothing to use it on but savage enemies and sage, since I figured my seeing would soon end along with everything else. There couldn’t have been over thirty-forty of us left. I don’t know how long we had fought so far; sometimes it seemed like a whole lifetime and at others as brief as a sneeze since that gallop down Medicine Tail Coulee and then up onto the ridge.

I was conscious of somebody falling nearby and turned and seen it was Lieutenant Cooke, his magnificent whiskers a-swimming in gore; had been crawling along the line and got up too high for a second, his last. Then Custer come along, erect no more but his belly scraping the gravel. There was blood on him, too, splattered from someone else, I believe, for he was not yet wounded.

“Cooke,” he says, and nudged the adjutant’s lifeless form. “Cooke, take an order for Benteen.” And then spitting the dust and stones out of his mouth, he says, “Cooke, write this down: ‘Come quickly, and the day is ours.’… Have you got that, Cooke?”

“He’s dead, General,” I says.

“Get the name of the man who said that, Cooke,” Custer snapped, his eyes red-veined and not looking either at me or the adjutant but towards the head of my fallen pony.

I don’t know, I guess I felt sorry for him then, so I took up the role of Cooke and he never detected the difference.

I says: “Yes sir, I’ll take care of it.” And Custer mumbled some and rolled over on his back, his hands behind his neck, and looked into the sky and smiled as if at secret knowledge. Another of them great arrow-masses vaulted overhead, catching sunlight on the ground edges of their iron points, and coming down like sleet through his field of vision.

He never wavered-and as it happened, these was doing less damage now, for there wasn’t many targets left to hit-but says in an easy tone of voice, like a genial scholar:

“Taking him as we find him, at peace or at war”-them arrows come swooshing down to stick upright all over dead men and horses-“at home or abroad,” Custer goes amiably on, “waiving all prejudices, and laying aside all partiality, we will discover in the Indian a subject for thoughtful study and investigation.”

I took time to discourage about fifty savages from advancing for a minute or two; I was fast running out of shells, for as our number dwindled I fired more frequently in compensation. And while I was so doing, Custer lay a-chattering away to himself.

As I reloaded, I heard him say: “It is to be regretted that the character of the Indian as described in Cooper’s interesting novels is not the true one. Stripped of the beautiful romance with which we have been so long willing to envelop him, transferred from the inviting pages of the novelist to the localities where we are compelled to meet him, the Indian forfeits his claim to the appellation of the noblered man.”

A rift opened up above him, and he smiled at the blue sky there revealed, lecturing at it with a dirty finger.

“We see him as he is, and, so far as all knowledge goes, as he ever has been, a savagein every sense of the word.”

Well, he had an altogether appropriate subject, you could not deny him that, and his discourse was being embellished by the gunfire and howling of five thousand individuals of the very race; and I thought I could hear the devilish screeching of the women from the quarter nearest the river, and knowed what they was up to: clubbing the last sparks of life from our boys who lay wounded there, and mutilating all.

But that parting of the smoke took my attention then, for it lengthened gradually towards the southeast on some random current, and after a time you could see a good three mile across the stretch of ridges and bluffs by which we had come to this place, and the sun was on that far high point where Custer had took his second sight of the village, where I seen in Reed’s young face the beginning of the death in which he now lay.

And a tiny flicker showed there! No Indian lance-pennon was large enough to be visible at the distance, no war bonnet would flutter so, a flapping blanket would be darker, bigger; besides, all the Indians in creation was investing our hill. It had to be a cavalry guidon, I reckoned, had to be, though I surely could not verify the color at that range.

“General!” I says, yelling through Custer’s monologue. “Look there, look there!”

Now you recall his crazy lone gallop towards the ford, from which Mitch Bouyer rescued him, and afterwards he turned normal again and done as good a job of leading as a man could under the circumstances. Well, he had seemed even farther gone at present, what with that raving, but I kept a-shouting at him anyway, and finally he moved his dull eyes towards the east, and then instantly they ignited.

“That’s Benteen!” he snapped, and scrambled to his feet, erect again amid the hail of missiles and impervious to them. “Come on, boys,” he shouted to the sprawling quick and dead along the ridge, “give a volley to direct him!”

Then caught up his own guidon from the lifeless clutch of Hughes, who had now expired, and waved it in great semicircles, and on the signal of one remaining lieutenant with an arm all bloodied, we sounded in unison whatever pieces still functioned, twenty carbines maybe and some pistols, enough to make a goodly report.

Then a bugler was called around for, but none was left. So Custer had us salvo again, and he was about to order a third when the officer informs him we wouldn’t have enough shells left for another. Now I seen some of the Indians towards the outside of the throng against us, off a half mile or more, mount their ponies and head towards the peak where Benteen was supposed to be, and reckoned they had seen him too.

The distant flicker continued for a spell, getting no closer, and then the smoke from the volleys drifted across our view and cut it off forever. The last hope, and not a real one at that, maybe, for I expect he could never have got through with his hundred and Reno’s similar number, and they too would have been slaughtered. Well, you can read how he made a try and was discouraged by that movement of Indians in his direction, and him and Reno retired to the hill where they was soon besieged by the host who had finished us off.

But I’ll say this, and it might be biased on account of my own situation: Benteen never tried hard to relieve us. At this time only a few hundred Indians started against him, whereas we retained thousands. He had the pack train with its reserve ammunition; we possessed too few cartridges to sound a third volley. He hadn’t done no fighting yet at all; our carbines was jammed,

Reno might have been a coward, but not Benteen, who wasn’t afraid of nothing: not Indians, and not Custer, and besides, he was an honorable man, so well liked by the troops that I had got tired of hearing how wonderful he was. Which might have been my personal predilection against popularity, being generally alone in the white world as I had always been, but Custer was about to die now, while Benteen survived, and you have to admit that makes a difference.

So we fought on and no help came and one by one the remaining guns fell silent, but the Indians still didn’t make no overrunning charge, just surged ever closer so that we was as if upon a diminishing island in a river at flood. Finally I fired my last carbine shell, broke the stock against the ground and poured gravel into the breech; it wasn’t permanently ruined but at least no savage could turn it against me without some prior work. Then I drawed my Colt’s and thought to get the knife out of my left boot-top, but discovered that arm was altogether lifeless owing to the wounded shoulder: no pain, just gone to board. Well, by time it come to blades I didn’t reckon to be still among the quick, anyhow, so let the idea drop.

Around then, Custer come back. He had gone to the extremity of our position, still trying to signal Benteen with the guidon, I expect, and while there an Indian ball had splintered off the flagstaff halfway along, so he was now holding it by the stub. But as to his person, he was yet untouched by enemy fire, however ravaged by smoke and dust and heat and madness.

I looks up at him, and blue eyes glittering within that mask of dirt, still staring southeast into the white fog, he says aloud though to himself: “Benteen won’t come. He hates me.”

I had stopped worrying about him standing erect: it didn’t matter much now whether he was hit, and then too it did provide some inspiration even for me, for I tell you it was absolute death from two foot off the ground on up, now. A fly couldn’t have got through unsinged, so we didn’t draw no more of that insect, though them that was there, feasting on our broken flesh, by the same token couldn’t get away when engorged.

Custer wasn’t singing, like Old Lodge Skins at the Washita, addressing his gods and walking in the magic way of the Cheyenne. No, the General stayed intact because he was Custer, better than anyone else, basically invulnerable even in defeat, and always right. You got to admire that type of conviction, even when you resent it. And I did both.

I says: “Hates you so much he would let two hundred others die to do you in?”

“Spite,” says Custer slowly, “spite and envy. I’ve had to face them my life long.”

He was speaking quiet, and there wasn’t enough noise left of our firing now to obscure a word. “I would have liked to be his friend, but envy intervened. For each of my achievements I have paid bitterly in lost affection. People love only the weak, teamster. Now make a joke of that.”

He was quite clear, you see, more so than at any time since we had come upon the ridge. He recognized me again, in my false role to be sure, but at least he wasn’t talking to himself no more. He smiled through the dirt, and despite what he just said, not sardonic in any wise but as if in serene resignation. Then he fired several rounds from his pistol at what seemed, from his stance and firm aim, to be particular targets, still holding that battle guidon, now tattered, on its broken staff in his left hand.

He was hit then, just once, a tear in his shirt directly over the heart. He turned some to favor the force, dropped the banner, clutched at the wound as if rather in courtesy than anguish. Onto his back he fell, arms outflung as though crucified, but his closed mouth still showing the traces of a smile. He might have went to sleep at a picnic. I couldn’t see he was bleeding at all, but he must have been, somewhere. I had finally accepted that fact that he was great-and he sure was, don’t let anybody ever tell you different, and if you don’t agree, then maybe something is queer about your definition of greatness-but it stands to reason he had blood.

There was about a dozen of us left when Custer went under, and we might have lasted a half hour longer. I can’t say whether the rest of them troopers-the officers was now all gone-knowed that the General had died. They was right occupied with their own business, single particles of life scattered throughout the dead and dying, and over-all ideas of unit and leader and even race was hard to grasp by now, for fighting to the end is apt to make you awful single-minded. If Benteen had showed up at this time, we likely would have fired on him.

But he never, of course, and the bugle that commenced to sound on the slope towards the river was blown by a Sioux Indian who took it off a dead trumpeter, and he didn’t know any of the calls, naturally, and just blowed sour blasts. They was many of them yelling, too, and singing in their falsetto, and now no longer conserving their ammunition, for there wasn’t no need, so you had a lot of firing for the hell of it, with the smoke thick as pudding.

Still they did not charge. Finally I had only two or three cartridges left in my pistol, and I expect the rest had likewise or less, and we stopped firing altogether. I tried to look around once more to see who I was going to die with, but that stiffness from my shoulder had permeated my whole body now, and I was fair rigid, so lay my head upon my pony’s belly, from which all warmth was long gone, my hand holding the Colt’s alongside, and waited.

Waited, waited … Soon the whole field, a square mile of it, fell silent, so quiet I could hear the buzzing of a fly on my face-wound, and then I twitched my cheek, where the blood had dried like a strip of patent leather, and I could hear thatcrack. It would not have been hard to imagine everybody had gone home.

Ten minutes, fifteen-no chronometer could have measured that time, might have been thirty seconds or two hours, and then I heard a scraping on the far side of the pony and raised my eyes just as the head of an Indian, with one big eagle feather and a crimson parting of his black hair, reared slowly up across the animal’s spine. He had a wide brown face and wore no paint.

The muzzle was damned near his nose when I fired, and his brains was blasted out before his eyes knowed it. Then shots sounded everywhere among us, scuffles and cries, and we was overrun.

Almost simultaneous, I got a thump on the skull and had the thousandth of a moment to sense that something landed on my back, light of weight yet all-enveloping. I figured it was Death, and thought: you sneaky bastard, I might have knowed you would get me from behind.

CHAPTER 29 Victory

I SMELLED SOMETHING SPICY, followed by a host of other scents, then commenced to hear drums, first only the big one in the back of my head, the beats of which at length smoothed out into one continuous dull roar, and then the regular smiting of them a distance off. And the voices, frenzied and ranging from a deep-throated howling to the highest quavering falsetto screech, almost at the pitch of a whistle.

I opened my eyes real careful, naturally expecting to find myself down in Hell, and first thing I seen was the flames, all right, and the next was the Devil himself, looking exactly like I had always figured he would or maybe worse: two horns sticking up from his forehead and his face was crimson-colored, and he had two big white fangs and the nastiest eyes you could imagine: they was outlined in white.

He was crouching alongside me and peering at me, and as I expected he might bite or something, and I too sore and weak to move, I was a-fixing at least to spit into his face, for I believe demons must operate on the same principles as people: show them you are helpless, and you’ll get no mercy.

But before I had gathered enough spittle onto my tongue, the Devil says something to me in the Cheyenne language.

“Are you awake?” he says.

Well, that was fair: I had been killed by Indians, so had gone to the redskin Hell. I says: “Yes I am,” and let it go at that, for I would have liked to sass him, but as you know there ain’t no real curse words in the Cheyenne tongue, except to call a man a woman.

“All right,” he says. “Then you know that you and I are even at last, and the next time we fight, I can kill you without becoming an evil person.”

Then he leaps up with a whoop and runs out of the tepee-for that is where we was-and other than that buffalo hat, G-string, and moccasins, he was naked though painted from head to toe. For he wasn’t a devil but rather an Indian, Indeed, he was Younger Bear.

The flames was the little fire in the center of the lodge, of course, and the door flap was pulled back so I could see the glow of a bigger blaze outside, with the shadows of many moving bodies, the silhouettes of legs.

“He goes to dance,” says a familiar voice nearby, “but you had better stay here awhile.”

Old Lodge Skins sat there upon the buffalo robe, taking the fire-shine onto his walnut visage.

“Do you want to eat?” he says.

I struggled up to the sitting position, feeling like a sack of loose meal, then tested with my fingers the stricken portions of my being. My left shoulder was all tied up with leather, moss, and stuff having a sweetish odor; and there was something that felt like raw mud upon my cheek-wound. My head was O.K.: that is, it ached awful, but the skull didn’t have a break you could feel.

Finally, I says: “Grandfather, I did not expect to see you.”

“Nor I you, my son,” answers Old Lodge Skins. “Do you want to smoke?”

I says: “Then I guess I am not dead.”

He reaches over and pokes me with a finger hard as horn. “No,” he says, “if you were a spirit, my hand would go right through your arm as if it were smoke.” The fact that I was talking to him, see, wouldn’t make no difference neither way: he spoke a lot to the deceased, not only of humans but animals as well.

I asked him when it was as to time.

“The Human Beings and the Lakota rubbed out all those soldiers on the ridge,” says Old Lodge Skins, “by the time the sun was here.” He showed me on the horizon of his hand: looked like around five-thirty or six o’clock. “This,” he says, “is the night following that, and everybody is dancing to celebrate the victory. Tomorrow we are going to kill the rest of the bluecoats on the hill downriver. It was a great day.”

He sighs and goes on: “I am too old to fight any more, and as you know I cannot see through my eyes, but a boy led me up to Greasy Grass Ridge, which overlooks the place where the soldiers were. I could hear the battle and smell it and see a great deal in my mind, which is better than the eyes under those conditions, because I was told the smoke was very thick anyway.

“Almost the whole Lakota nation is here, and they are splendid warriors, the second best in the whole world. But naturally the Human Beings are foremost.”

He was getting excited, commencing to sweat on his bare old belly, with that ancient scar, and his blind eyes was shining.

“The Hunkpapas have a wise man named Sitting Bull. Some days ago they held a sun dance on the Rosebud, and he cut his flesh a hundred times and saw a vision of many soldiers falling into camp upside down. Then we moved to the headwaters to hunt buffalo, and some soldiers shot at us, so we whipped them.”

This apparently referred to the column led by General Crook, coming up from the south, and showed why Terry and Custer never made a junction with him.

“So then,” Old Lodge Skins went on, and he now fetched out of the mess behind him a hatchet and was gesturing with it, “we moved here to the Greasy Grass, and some people believed those first soldiers were the ones that Sitting Bull dreamed of, but others said: ‘No, because they did not fall into camp. More will come.’ I did not join this argument, because while the Bull is wise, he is also easily spoiled by a lot of attention, and Gall was getting jealous of him. Which is not good.”

I could agree with that, after my recent weeks with the Seventh Cavalry, and was kind of relieved to hear of it happening also among Indians. I did this in the forefront of my mind, though, for still deeper than all else, and it stayed so for many days, months, years, was them last moments with Custer on the ridge. You are not the same afterward when you should have died and didn’t.

Well, Old Lodge Skins talked on and on, through the night while the drums kept on outside and the victory dance continued, the great fires illuminating the entire valley while Reno and Benteen’s little command cowered up there on the bluffs. I fell off to sleep from time to time, having good reason for it if ever a man had, and I don’t guess the chief thought it bad manners, for he was not necessarily addressing me anyhow.

After the Washita, his band and him come north, across Kansas, Nebraska, and into the Dakota Territory: some eight hundred mile, most of it on foot for you recall how Custer shot them ponies and the rest of that camp run off, so Old Lodge Skins and his surviving people could not obtain much help. If they got anywhere near ranchers and cowboys on that hike, not to mention soldiers, they was fired on automatically, so to speak; and whenever they sighted buffalo, why, there was white hunters with the long-shooting rifles that could kill either animals or Indians at a half mile. The Human Beings did not overeat on that long walk.

I asked about Sunshine and Morning Star, and the chief says they had not been with him and since he hadn’t heard they was killed, he figured they must have joined the Cheyenne what stayed in the south with the Kiowa and Comanche. I never got a further report on them two, nor did I ever look for them in later days. If Morning Star is still living somewhere down in Oklahoma, he is half white and eighty-five years of age, and his Ma some twenty added onto that, and I have always hoped they owned a patch of land with some oil on it and never had to sell blankets to tourists to support themselves.

Then, without my asking, Old Lodge Skins said: “That yellow-haired woman of Younger Bear’s died on the long walk north, and their boy, also with yellow hair, was captured from us by soldiers in a fight on Medicine Bird Creek. My son Little Horse was rubbed out at the same place, and many others too, and there was hardly anybody left when we reached this country.

“But once here, we met some more Northern Human Beings, and all the old troubles due to the mistakes of youth were now forgotten, so they welcomed us, and our friendship with the Lakota became very close because the great Oglala named Crazy Horse married a woman of the Human Beings. So we hunted and ate well, for there are still buffalo here, and more people joined us, warriors like Gall and Crow King, and the war chief of the Human Beings, Lame White Man, also Two Moon, and Sitting Bull made medicine, and last week we beat the soldiers on the Rosebud, and today we rubbed out even more on the Greasy Grass, and tomorrow we will kill the rest on the hill.”

I expect you could say Olga had been another who died as a result of what Custer done at the Washita, but he was beyond my holding anything further against him, and anyway she had not been my woman for quite a time. Poor Swede girl: she had a strange life.

As to Gus, in afteryears I looked for him throughout the central plains, but there wasn’t no white men nor Indians who ever heard of Medicine Bird Creek, which must have been its Cheyenne name. So I could not get a line on him. But I should still today like to find my boy, and would pay a twenty-five-dollar gold piece to the person who can give me information on him.

And Little Horse gone too, never again to wear them beaded dresses and show his graceful ways.

“I guess it was Younger Bear who conked my head up on the ridge today,” I says.

“Yes,” says Old Lodge Skins. “Then threw a blanket over you and carried you across the river to my tepee. That was not easy to do, for our people went crazy with joy when the last soldier fell, and in the confusion, Indian was killing Indian, and many hands clutched at Younger Bear’s burden so as to rip you apart, but he owed the debt, and also I have no other sons left now but you.”

Finally I fell into a sleep of some hours, the first real rest in a couple of days of hardship and bloodshed. It might sound odd, but I felt safe and right in that tepee with the blind old man a-droning on, though outside, the savage exultation was ever mounting, and I reckon there was more than one Indian who had a sore throat next day and stiffer limbs from dancing than he had got in battle.

But they was most of them up again bright and early to invest that hill where Reno and Benteen was holding on. There wasn’t nothing I could do about that at present though I didn’t like to think of the fact that Lavender, Charley Reynolds, Bottsy, and my other friends was with Reno, unless they had been killed in the valley. But I was confined to Old Lodge Skins’s tepee by my own desire, one white man somewhere in the middle of that enormous assemblage of lodges me and Custer seen from the bluffs the day before.

I woke up remarkably improved as to physique, though, my shoulder right tender but a lot of the stiffness had gone already and I could almost feel that moss or whatever it was drawing the rest of it out. I had thought the ball-joint had been busted, but if it was, it somehow healed too in the succeeding days and give me fewer twinges throughout the years since than that old wound in my other shoulder where I got shot in Dodge City.

My facial crease also was knitting up under the mud plastered there, and I didn’t know I had it unless I laughed-which I wasn’t doing much of at present.

Old Lodge Skins was still sitting there when I awakened and investigated my hurts. It was another warm, bright day outside, the sun half penetrating the tepee cover, the fire gone to white ash.

“Who was the doctor?” I asks him.

“Younger Bear,” says he. “Do you want to eat now?”

One of them fat wives of his come in then from her cooking fire outside, bringing me a bowl of boiled buffalo. Everything was going on as normal, for Reno’s hill was across from the upper end of the camp, whereas the Cheyenne circle was furthest downstream and out of earshot of the firing-the village was that big.

I took the bowl from her who handed it to me without expression, and ate some, and then I said: “Grandfather, do you want to hear what I was doing with the soldiers?” For he never would have asked.

“I am sure you had a very good reason,” says he. “Let us smoke first.”

So we exchanged the pipe, and then I says: “Do you know who led the bluecoats? General Custer.”

He tried two or three times but was unable to pronounce the name, nor of course did it mean aught to him.

“Long Hair,” I says. “Only now it is cut short.”

“Now it is probably cut off,”says he, laughing at his typical Indian humor.

“The Washita,” I says. “He led the bluecoats there.”

“Oh, yes.” Old Lodge Skins nodded pleasantly. “I remember that fight. It was bad, but we rubbed out many soldiers in the tall grass.”

Well, I was stubborn as him, and persisted: “Did no one ever talk about who led the soldiers there?”

“A white man,” says the old chief. “They were all white, except for some Osage scouts, so it must have been a white man whom they followed, for nobody would follow an Osage.” Then he got to telling experiences of his own in fighting the Osages as a young man, and it was ever so long before I could get back to the subject.

“This man used to wear his hair down to his shoulders,” I says.

Old Lodge Skins asks: “Like a Human Being?”

“No, he didn’t braid it.”

“Then like a white woman,” says the chief. “Was he a heemaneh?”

I was sure getting the worst of it. Now it may seem funny, but I felt I owed something to Custer. After all I survived him, and by God he was not 100 per cent to my taste, but he had impressed me, dying the way he did. He had worked out a style and he stuck to it. He might have been a son of a bitch, but he was his own man, never whining nor sniveling nor sucking up to another, be it even the President of the United States.

But I guess I could never get that across to an Indian, for independence was the rule rather than the exception amongst them and thus not the occasion for any special merit. Nor could any one of them, no matter how exalted-not Crazy Horse not Sitting Bull nor Gall-order two hundred others to perish along with him. That was the difference. Whatever Custer believed, he did not die alone. So while as a Caucasian you could call him a man of principle, from the Indian point of view you might say he had no principles at all. Especially since soldiers, unlike savages, did not fight for fun.