Текст книги "LITTLE BIG MAN"

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

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Текущая страница: 34 (всего у книги 35 страниц)

I decided to drop the subject, but as I might have figured, Old Lodge Skins now got right interested in it. He says: “I want to go see this unusual man, or whatever is left of him, my son. Will you lead me to the ridge?”

I’d sooner have made my bed in a campfire. But Old Lodge Skins pointed out that the warriors was all miles upstream, and the women and children had got finished with most of their mutilating and stripping the bodies on the evening before, so it would be quiet there, and I could put on a buffalo hat like Younger Bear’s and leather shirt and leggings, painting my face. Not to mention I would be with him.

Well, them wives of his helped me into the new getup, cutting down an extra pair of the chief’s leggings, and a couple little kids was also there, his I reckon and only six-seven years old and him at least ninety by now, and I needed a breechclout, so one of them women handed me a company guidon of the Seventh Cavalry, which was a swallowtailed version of the Star and Stripes. I am happy to report for the sake of fellow patriots that I never employed it for this purpose. I don’t curse in front of ladies and don’t degrade the national colors, not even in an emergency: I used my old bandanna.

But those wives had got into the spirit of the thing now, giggling away as they disguised me as a proper savage, dropping necklaces and such over my head, and finally they come with a beaded belt to which they had just tied a number of fresh scalps.

I says, “No, no!” And they pushed it at me, with magpie noises, and my hand struck against one skull-cover, and it was real black and woolly of texture, and I caught it and held it up, asking: “Where did you get this?”

Traded it, they says, for a blond one which Younger Bear had give them, to a Hunkpapa Sioux who fought upstream in the valley against the first bluecoat attack.

I don’t know if you can appreciate what it feels like to hold the scalp of a friend.

“It came,” says the fattest wife, “from a Black White Man whom the Hunkpapa recognized as a person who once lived with his tribe and married a Lakota woman. ‘What are you doing here?’ asked the Hunkpapa in surprise. ‘I don’t know,’ the Black White Man said. His horse had thrown him and he was lying on the ground with a broken leg, his rifle some distance away. ‘Well, you were shooting at us, so I think I should kill you,’ said the Hunkpapa. ‘I think you should,’ said the Black White Man, so the Hunkpapa did.”

Even so, I reckon it was better than working your life long as a yardman back in Missouri.

Taking Old Lodge Skin’s arm, I left the tepee and walked through the Cheyenne camp towards the ford, which was not far, for the Minneconjou village was just next door. As the chief said, all the warriors was up at the current battle and nobody was around but women, children, and aged men sitting in the sunlight and chewing their toothless gums. Some of the women was working as usual, but others was loudly mourning their dead husbands, sons, and brothers, for the Indians had lost some men themselves, only they didn’t count them: maybe forty or fifty. They had erected a funeral tepee in the Cheyenne camp, with the bodies inside on scaffolds, and killed a number of horses, arranging the carcasses outside like spokes of a wheel.

The youngsters was playing in the sunshine. I seen a boy that had a little toy horse made from dried clay, and it wore a curious saddle blanket, a folded U.S. greenback. There was also other Seventh Cavalry souvenirs in evidence: one woman wore a blue jacket with a corporal’s chevrons, some other kids was skimming a campaign hat through the air, and lying on the ground at one point was a pair of Army underdrawers, which had the name of the late owner stenciled across the waist. Further on, a shirt stiff as parchment from dried gore, torn canvas cartridge belts, discarded boots. Near to the ford the volume of this stuff increased, and small boys was watering pony herds there, among them a few big bays and sorrels with the conspicuous brand “7USC.”

Nobody paid mind to us, not even among the Minneconjou women who was washing clothes in the Little Bighorn, and me and Old Lodge Skins entered the river, fast-flowing and waist-deep, and waded across. I have mentioned my outfit, but not his: the chief had donned his full war bonnet of eagle feathers, which was a little moth-eaten if you examined it close but for all that a magnificent piece of headgear, each plume tipped with a puff of white down and little round mirrors at the temples, and trailing a long tail of more feathers which brushed the earth back of his heels. His face was painted crimson, and yellow lightning flashed across the cheeks. In one hand he carried a large bow, a special one, unstrung and with an iron lancehead affixed to one end. In his other hand he had that old medicine bundle I remembered from the Washita and further back: its skin wrappings was rotting away to dust in one corner and a bird-foot good-luck charm was protruding. I kept an eye on it but did not poke it back, for you wasn’t supposed to touch another’s medicine nor even know what it consisted of.

I saw where we had rode down Medicine Tail Coulee less than a day before. The ground was tore up with hoofs, and there was the marks of iron-shoed cavalry horses going right down into the water, but we hadn’t got that far, so they must have been made by captured animals the Indians took across to their camp.

We walked a mile or more, up the diagonal ravine that Custer had took for his retreat, then onto the slope, proceeding ever higher towards that final ridge, and it was a good way before I seen the first body, though there might have been some that fell into the many gulches thereabout or been thrown there after being stripped and mutilated.

But soon they commenced to show up, at a distance pure white in the brilliant sun, like a field of boulders, one there, then two or three, others in groups of a dozen, lying where they fell and almost all by troops. Wasn’t no sign of disorganized panic; they had been whipped but not routed. And when you thought of the proportion of recruits, the exhaustion of two days without rest, and the overwhelming strength against them, they had done real well.

Now Old Lodge Skins says suddenly as we toiled up the rise: “This fight has given me a better opinion of white men. I did not understand before that they knew how to die properly.”

“Can you see them, Grandfather?”

“Almost,” he says. “Their bodies shine so.”

But as we come closer, the marble-white was not clear, but streaked and sometimes drowned in red which the heat turned brown, and the smell was starting up too, attended by millions of flies, and the birds rose in great circles at our approach and coyotes scampered off to a safe range. There was also maybe a hundred dead horses spread across that square mile.

I gritted my teeth and held my breath and trudged on, with the ground as it were sucking like quicksand at my moccasins though it was dry as ash. Yet I continued, for Old Lodge Skins had some high purpose in coming here. He was hardly a ghoul. And I guess I realized that it was only through him that I could ever come to accept the fact of that awful ridge and make it a part of normality.

“Yes,” he says, breathing deep through his ancient leathery nostrils, “they must be happy on the Other Side to have died as warriors rather than tenders-of-cattle or corn-growers or crazy diggers-of-yellow-dust or those-who-lay-down-iron-for-the-fire-wagon. I tell you, my son, I had thought for a long time that all white men were turning into women.”

He stopped for a minute so’s I could rest. True, that night’s sleep had done wonders for me, and also the dressing on my shoulder; but it was remarkable I could walk at all, let alone climb uphill. Old Lodge Skins himself showed no physical strain, though out there in the sunlight you could appreciate his advanced age: them ravines in his face was so deep that a fly would think twice about treading the bluffs above them. Indeed, his visage was a sort of miniature of the ground on which we stood. And his withered skin, wherever it could be seen for the paint, made the hide wrappings of his medicine bundle look almost new.

He turned now and seemed to take a view across the entire panorama, holding the bundle to his chest and pointing with the lancehead-end of the bow, from which two eagle feathers dangled.

“There came Gall with his many Hunkpapa,” he says, “and there Crow King. Down there, Lame White Man and the Human Beings, Minneconjou, and other Lakota peoples broke through the soldiers’ lines, while the great Crazy Horse and Two Moon went downriver, traveled through the encircling coulee, and swept up from the bluecoats’ rear.

“It was the greatest battle of all time, and there will never be another.” His thick voice broke slightly and two tears rolled down the troughs alongside his heavy, crimson, yellow-traced nose and vanished into the vertical traces of his upper lip, his mouth being like a river system with tributaries above and below.

And despite all I had been through, I felt sorry for him and says, “Surely there will be more,” though I did not consider what good they would do him since he was already too old to have been in this one.

“No,” said he. “This is the end.”

After a bit I gathered my strength and we climbed on, passing the remains of C Troop just below the knoll, and it ain’t my purpose to dwell upon the particulars of the carnage, for I think I have said enough about how the Indian women would come out after a battle and deal with the wounded. Well, they was served up with such a banquet following the Battle of the Little Bighorn as to surfeit the worst glutton. There was so many corpses to deface that they actually got tired of mutilating after a time; and so, many bodies stayed untouched, some not even stripped for the clothing.

But Tom Custer had got it real bad, resembling something on a butcher’s block. I would not have recognized him, except that his initials was tattooed upon one arm, along with an American flag and the goddess of liberty. His blond scalp had been ripped off down to the nape of the neck, his skull was crushed, his body opened from breastbone to groin, and his-I don’t want to say any more; just let his example stand for all those ravaged, though he was about the worst I seen. Remember Bottsy’s story that Rain in the Face swore to cut Tom’s heart out and eat it? By the looks of things he could have done that, though in later years he denied it.

So it was in the greatest dread that I gained the summit of the knoll, Old Lodge Skins more leading me than I him, for if they had done that to Tom, what horrors must have been the General’s lot?

We went up through the barricade of fallen horses, who was beginning to swell from the corruption, they having been dead for a day, the odor terrible, and there, strewn about like ears of corn, was the white bodies of the men who had died alongside me not twenty-four hours earlier. For a moment it was utter still, but I reckon that was an effect within my own head, for a light breeze blew up there and after a bit I heard a whispering flutter that traveled along the ground.

I seen what it was then: hundreds of dollars in greenback bills was scampering along the earth in the wind, now and again blowing over a naked corpse to give him some decency. It was that pay which Custer had held back from the men until they got a day out of Fort Lincoln. The Indians found it when stripping the bodies and flung it away as they did the other papers they come across, love-letters, orders, and the like, which added to the murmuring drift, giving the resemblance of an abandoned picnic ground to the area where none of the bodies had been violated and could have been sleeping but for the arrows erected from them.

One cheekful of Lieutenant Cooke’s mutton-chop whiskers had been scalped, along with his head. Kellogg, the newspaper fellow, was lying where I seen him fall, full-dressed, unmarred.

Old Lodge Skins said: “Take me to the formerly Long Hair.”

It ain’t easy to identify men who are both dead and naked. They tend to merge and blur, like the people in a Turkish bath, only rigid as well.

But finally I saw General Custer, arms still in the crucified extension in which he fell, resting across the bodies of two troopers, where I guess he had been flung when stripped. There was a neat hole in his left chest, and another on the same side of his temple, very little blood from the first, none at all from the second, which I expect had been received as the Indians rode about the field when everybody was down, shooting each so as to make certain of him.

He was not scalped nor mutilated. What got me was his expression. I swear it was still a faint smile, slightly derisive, utterly confident.

“There he is,” I told Old Lodge Skins, taking his hand in mine and pointing with both. And the chief went to Custer, stooped, and felt his head briefly. I would have opposed his doing anything nasty, but I knowed he wasn’t going to: he was simply looking at the late General in a blindman’s fashion.

Then he straightened up and says: “This was the man who brought the soldiers to the Washita?”

“Yes.”

“And at Sand Creek before that?”

“No, that was another.”

“Ah.” He nodded his old head in the big war bonnet, and its feathers flexed in unison, like when a flight of birds unanimously changes direction in the sky. It was a beautiful thing, which I mention on account of the contrast with everything else in this place. There was no living thing throughout the field but him and me and the flies. The other Indians had finished up the day before, had fetched away their own dead, and would never return.

“All right,” says Old Lodge Skins. He touched the lance-end of the bow lightly to Custer’s bare white shoulder, taking symbolic coup upon it, and he says something to the corpse which I can’t translate no better than:

“You are a bad man, and we have paid you back.”

So that was that, and we started down to camp, only I was still imbued with the glory and tragedy of it all. Custer had had to die to win me over, but he succeeded at long last: I could not deny it was real noble for him to be his own monument.

So I expresses to Old Lodge Skins a thought that occurred to many other white men after the outside world learned of Custer’s Last Stand-only I had it first because I was the first American to see him lying dead, as I was the last to see him live-a romantic thought it was, and appropriate in view of the General’s heroic idea of himself that he imposed even upon a skeptic like me.

I says: “He was not scalped, Grandfather. The Indians respected him as a great chief.”

Old Lodge Skins smiled at me as at a foolish child.

“No, my son,” says he. “I felt his head. They did not scalp him because he was getting bald.”

Back at the tepee I laid low, and you can read how the Indians continued to besiege the remainder of the Seventh on Reno Hill, that morning and afternoon of the 26th, but then some boys out herding horses come running through the tepees with news that more bluecoats had appeared, moving down the Greasy Grass from its mouth. So the warriors was called in and the women struck them countless tepees in no more than three-quarters of an hour, and we commenced to move south, everybody, thousands of Indians, tens of thousands of animals, in a column maybe four mile long, with the women and children on ponies which also pulled travois behind, and the warriors riding guard ahead and behind.

Still in my paint and buffalo hat, I stayed with the family contingent of course, riding one of Old Lodge Skins’s ponies, him alongside on another, and also his wives. A few Indians had looked at me while we was moving out, but nobody said beans. I reckon they was tired of fighting by now and didn’t want no more trouble unless forced into it. I learned a new thing: that Indians can’t keep their attention very long even on winning. I mean, I knowed they was like that in warring tribe against tribe, but I hadn’t ever seen them whip white men before.

It was early evening when the Cheyenne group passed through the valley across from Reno’s position, for we was last in line, and I looked over at them bluffs but could not see a soul, for the distance was some miles. Also the Indians had earlier fired the grass to screen our movements, and smoke still drifted aloft.

The soldiers coming from the north was of course Generals Terry and Gibbon, on their way to that junction with Custer, a day late as he had been a day early, and now they would find him two days dead and the Indians vanished.

You can read about that, and also about Reno and Benteen’s defense of their hill and the finding of the bodies of Lavender, Charley Reynolds, Lieutenant McIntosh the halfbreed Iroquois, and Bloody Knife the Ree, among others down in the valley. I come through that bottomland with the Indian assemblage, but fortunately didn’t have to see any of my dead friends. I reckon they lay in the timber.

And of course you can read of the Little Bighorn battle itself in a couple hundred different versions, for it is being argued up to this time. First come the newspaper stories, and next there was a military investigation to determine whether Reno had been a coward, which heard a lot of witnesses and declared him not guilty-though some of the very officers who testified in his favor continued to blacken his name out of court. Even as a remnant, the Seventh Cavalry lived up to its glorious traditions, linking arms in public while privately slandering one another.

And then come the accounts of officers and men who served in the other part of the field, and that of the Crow scout Curly. Other fellows went about the reservations, interviewing Indians who had fought on the hostile side. This naturally resulted in a mess: no two savages could agree on what had happened in even their own particular area, seeing things different as they invariably did, not to mention the roles played by manners and fear. Some Indians thought they would be punished if they made it sound too bad; some, out of courtesy, told the investigator what they thought he wanted to hear. One would claim all Custer’s men committed suicide; another, that the troops had crossed the ford, penetrated the village, and was driven out, with the General getting killed and falling in the middle of the river.

Last of all the scholars went to work, some setting up residence on the battlefield, which become a national monument, and going over the ground with tape measures and surveyors’ instruments. Did Custer disobey his orders? Could Benteen have reached him in time to save the day? What was the exact route of travel taken by the five troops after leaving the Lone Tepee? For every question there are ten answers, pro and con on every detail.

But I alone was there and lived it and have told the God’s honest truth so far as recollection serves. To this day I bear scars on cheek and shoulder from wounds I received on that ridge above the Little Bighorn River, Montana Territory, June 25, 1876, in the engagement with Sioux and Cheyenne Indians in which General George A. Custer and five troops of the Seventh U.S. Cavalry perished to the last man but one.

Why have I kept silent till now? Well, hostile Indians was never popular in this country, but for some years after the Little Bighorn their following dropped away to where it was outnumbered by admirers of the rattlesnake. “That’s right,” you can hear me say to a fun-loving bunch in some saloon, “I was saved by my friends among the Cheyenne.”

Then I outlived that era, and along about 1920 I got to dropping a few hints to my then acquaintances but went no farther when I seen the look come into their eyes. What with being related to my Pa and Caroline, I am right sensitive to reflections on my sanity.

Oh, since I been in this old-folks’ home and watched them Western shows on the television, I might have made a remark or two, for it gets on my nerves to see Indians being played by Italians, Russians, and the like, with five o’clock shadows and lumpy arms. Redskins don’t hardly ever have to shave, and even the huskiest of them have smooth limbs rather than knotty muscles. As to feature, they don’t look nothing like gangsters. If the show people are fresh out of real Indians, they should hire Orientals-Chinese, Japs, and such-to play them parts; for there is a mighty resemblance between them two, being ancient cousins. Look at them without bias and you’ll see what I mean.

I guess my reasons for mainly keeping quiet boil down to this: Who would ever have believed me? But I am now too old to care. So if youdon’t, you can go to hell.