Black Hills: A Novel Read online

  Paha Sapa is too tired and disturbed to care. He gets to his feet slowly and begins trudging back to the village. The coyote is answered by several other coyotes. They are only coyotes.

  The next year, when Paha Sapa confesses about his small-vision-backward-touching to Limps-a-Lot, he refuses to tell the details of the few times he has experienced small-vision-forward-touching because he has seen forward to people dying. He will not mention his touch-the-earth-to-fly times because he begins not to believe in them himself.

  When he gets home, Three Buffalo Woman does beat him (but with no real intention to hurt) for getting his second-best deer-hide shirt bloody.

  5

  George Armstrong Custer

  Libbie, my darling Libbie, my dearest Libbie, Libbie my love, my life, my everything, my Libbie—

  I need you, my darling girl.

  I have been lying here in the dark thinking of the time five weeks ago on May 17—was it only five weeks ago?—when I led the regiment out of Fort Abraham Lincoln on this mission. You will recall, my dearest, that the day started cold and foggy before sunrise. I had the men eat hardtack and bacon, just as they would for the next month on the trail. Then General Terry and I marched the men through the rising mists to the fort—you always tell me that you wonder why our frontier forts have no stockades, my love—and then around the parade ground in columns of four so as to reassure the anxious wives and families and troopers we were leaving behind.

  But you were not left behind then, my darling girl, my love. The other officers had to bid farewell to their families outside the fort, but you rode along with us that day, along with my sister, Maggie, and my niece Emma. Do you remember as we passed Suds Row, the married enlisted men’s quarters, all the women holding their babies and toddlers and even older children up and out toward us as they wailed? It made me think of a Triumph where the Roman general has returned in glory, only a bizarrely reversed one in this case, before any battles, where the wives of perfectly healthy troopers decide they are widows and treat their babes like orphans.

  We had more than seven hundred troopers in our line that day, thirty-one officers (most of them riding in the mass with you and me and Maggie and Emma), forty-five scouts and guides, and those three extra companies of infantry with that artillery detachment of four guns that followed those first days as an escort. (Yes, perhaps I should not have turned down the two batteries of Gatling guns Terry wanted me to take—but I’m sure you remember, my dearest, how those damned guns had slowed us down so on previous patrols, frequently pulling horses and men down with them when they tumbled into ravines or creek beds. A good cavalry unit has to travel light. No, if I were to do it again, I would still leave the Gatling guns behind.)

  What a sight the regiment and its escort must have been that morning. The column stretched for more than two miles. I know that the regimental band was playing “The Girl I Left Behind Me” and “Garry Owen”—all through the War I loved that latter song, but I confess that I have been growing weary of it in these later years, my dear—but you and I couldn’t really hear the music because of the clatter of our horses’ hooves, the rumble of the hundred and fifty wagons, and the constant bellowing of the herd of cattle we’d brought with us.

  It did not matter.

  None of that departure matters except what happened thirteen miles down the trail, when it was time for you to turn back to the fort. Do you remember? I know you do, my love. The memory of it is what woke me from my cold slumbers here.

  The group of us, including Maggie and Emma and my striker, Private Burkham, and the paymaster’s old wagon with its small escort, rode back about half a mile behind the column for us to say our good-byes. You surprised me by dismounting and suggesting that we—just you and I—take a walk among the willows that rose along the river there. These were the only high trees and shrubs for many miles; all the rest, back to Fort Lincoln and forward to where we were headed, was flat, open prairie.

  We’d walked less than fifty yards from Burkham and the wagon and the other women when you suddenly seized me and kissed me hard. You removed my hat and ran your hand over my short-cropped hair, smiling as you did so. You did not seem to miss what you always called my “lovely curly locks.” Then you took the flat of your hand and began rubbing me below my belt buckle.

  “Libbie…” I said, glancing back over my shoulder and over the thick willows to where I could still see the heads of Maggie and Emma, since they had remained mounted.

  “Hush,” you said.

  And then you went to your knees, but not—I remember clearly—until you had swished out the skirt of your dress (you wore my favorite that day, the blue one with the corn silk little flowers on it) and your petticoats so they would not be stained by the damp grass.

  And then you unbuttoned my fly.

  “Libbie…”

  But I could say no more, my darling, for you had taken me into your soft hands and then into your mouth, and I forgot Burkham and the waiting wagons, forgot my sister and my niece, forgot even the seven hundred men and hundred and fifty wagons and hundreds of cattle with the regiment now leaving me behind.

  I forgot everything except the stroking of your hands, the warmth of your mouth, the movement of your lips and tongue upon me.

  I arched my head back once, but I did not close my eyes. The blue sky—it had turned into a hot May day after the early morning fog and mist—disturbed me somehow, as if the color were a portent. So I looked back down at you and what you were doing with me and to me.

  I always look, my dearest love. You know that. You know everything about me. Any other woman doing such a thing—I have never known any other woman to do such a thing—would, I would think, look bizarre, absurd, perhaps obscene, but when you take me in your mouth like that with your head bobbing back and forth, your hands still moving on me, your lips and tongue rapacious, and your lovely eyes glancing up at me from time to time from under those beautiful lashes, there could be nothing bizarre, absurd, or obscene in the gift you are giving me, in the sort of love you are showing me. You are beautiful. It makes me excited this very second, here in the darkness, to think of you, your cheeks pink with the sun after that long day of riding and also pink with excitement, the top of your lovely head, the sunlight catching individual hairs on either side of the part, moving faster and faster.

  When we were finished—it had only taken a minute, I know, but it was a minute of pure joy and pleasure before weeks of solitude and care and hardship for me—you removed the handkerchief you had brought, dipped it in the stream, cleaned me up, tucked me in, and set the buttons of my tough blue cavalry trousers to rights.

  Then we went back and said our formal farewells in front of Burkham and the others. We both had tears in our eyes, but neither of us could keep from smiling, could we, my darling?

  When the wagon and you and the other women were mere dots receding across the prairie, Burkham startled me by saying, “It’s hard, ain’t it, General?”

  Again I wanted to smile, although I forced myself not to. Remembering that Burkham might be one of those interviewed by the press—several correspondents came with us, you remember, and more waited in Bismark and elsewhere for every word of our punitive expedition—I put on my saddest, sternest face and said to him, “Private, a good soldier—and I have always been a good soldier, Burkham—has to serve two mistresses. While he’s loyal to one, the other must suffer.”

  Burkham grunted, evidently not moved by my eloquence. He swung up onto his gelding and said, “Shall we get back to the other mistress, General, before the tail-end of it gets out of sight?”

  Libbie, my darling girl. I know you do not mind my talking of such things with you, since I have written you so many letters filled with such intimate thoughts, and whispered them to you while we lay together naked. You have always been more open and generous with your passion than any other woman in the world.

  Do you remember the time when I could no longer bear to be apart from you (and I had
heard that cholera had broken out at Fort Leavenworth, where you were waiting), so I wrote you from my Republican River camp telling you to come at once to Fort Wallace, where my men would bring you to my camp on the Republican, but Pawnee Killer and the hostiles were swarming everywhere there in Kansas, and I realized, too late, that they would almost surely attack the rich wagon train you would be traveling in, so I ordered the men who would be picking you up to shoot you rather than let the Indians capture you—later, you told me that this was terribly sweet and that you took it as a sure sign of my undying love—but when the wagon train (which indeed had been attacked by five hundred or so Sioux and Cheyenne, right where Comstock, the guide whom the Indians call Medicine Bill, had predicted they would attack, but the hostiles were driven off) returned from Fort Wallace, there was no sign of you and I went half mad with worry and passion? I love you so much, my dear, sweet, darling little girl.

  You will remember that they had sent Lieutenant Lyman Kidder out from Fort Sedgwick to find my column, and he and his ten men had dropped out of sight right in the territory between us and Fort Wallace where I had feared for your life. I called for a forced march to Fort Wallace—primarily out of concern for you, my dearest—and we found what was left of Kidder and his men, stripped and hacked and scattered all over a little hollow. Comstock explained to us what the tracks told—of how Kidder and his small party had tried to run, how Pawnee Killer and his band had caught them from the rear, run them down, shot them with arrows, then murdered and mutilated them. It was a July day, and the bodies and men’s parts had been lying in that sun for days, and I took the lesson then—and shall never forget it—that when faced by any serious force of Indians, the thing to do is to stand and fight, using your far superior firepower to keep the savages out of arrow range. Kidder had galloped in panic for more than ten miles, and although our cavalry horses are faster than Indian ponies, the Indians are ingenious at swapping their tired mounts for fresh ones, and some of the Indian ponies simply never tire.

  Never run from Indians was the lesson I learned that July day nine years ago, standing there in the Kansas heat and stench watching the burial party inter the awful remains of Lieutenant Kidder and his men. And all that time I was sick with worry about you, my dearest—so worried that my belly constantly hurt and cramped with anxiety.

  Kansas was burning. Pawnee Killer and the other hostile Sioux and Cheyenne had slaughtered more than two hundred whites, including many women and children, in the area I was supposed to patrol on my first western expedition, and the cavalry had shot and killed only two of the redmen—and those had been killed by Kidder’s party before they died.

  So I called off the campaign and drove a hundred men and horses one hundred and fifty miles in fifty-five hours. Stragglers fell behind and were killed by Pawnee Killer’s braves, but I would not go back to recover our dead or to chase the hostiles. You were all that I could think of. On July 18, I reached Fort Hayes and left ninety-four of the men there, taking only my brother Tom, two officers, and two troopers on a sixty-mile ride to Fort Harker, which we covered in less than twelve hours. There I left Tom and the four men behind and took the three a.m. train to Fort Riley, where—I prayed to God—I would find you waiting for me in relative safety.

  Do you remember our reunion, my darling?

  You were in your quarters, pacing, wearing the green dress I had praised at Fort Hayes the previous month. You wrote me later that the vision of me when I threw open the door and entered the room was brighter than even the brilliant Kansas sun—There before me, blithe and buoyant, stood my husband!—you later told me that you wrote to your stepmother, but what you did not tell the dear second Mrs. Judge Bacon was that besides being visibly blithe and buoyant, I was also visibly aching for you, my sex as rigid and far more straight and much more in need of use right then than the securely sheathed saber banging at my leg.

  Do you remember, my darling, me—still dusty from the trail and railway—slamming the door and lifting you up and carrying you to the bed there in your quarters, smothering you with kisses and fumbling in your clothes while you fumbled at my buttons, then you unlacing your stays and lowering the top of your dress while I tore off your petticoats and pantaloons? Do you remember my spurs gouging the footboard of that bed that had been so carefully brought out all the way to Fort Riley while you rolled me onto my back, mounted me as I might leap onto Vic, seized me in your eager hand, and guided me into you?

  You may remember that we were finished in seconds—our cries probably distracting the sentries on the ramparts—but, as has been our wont since our honeymoon, in minutes we started up again, tearing off the rest of our clothes even while we petted and kissed and stroked and suckled at each other.

  I know I slept then, after the second bout of our lovemaking, slept for the first time in five hard-ridden days and more than five hundred miles, but you woke me two hours later. You’d had the orderlies and men carry in bucket after bucket of hot steaming water, them trying to tiptoe in their high boots past the bed where I snored naked under the light sheet (my clothes in disarray all over the floor, you not giving a fig what they might have thought), and when I woke, the curtains were closed and you were standing naked next to the bed, beckoning me to the bath.

  Oh, the luxury of that claw-foot tub in that palace of a senior officer’s visiting wife’s billet in Fort Riley!

  We had to leave by train that evening, taking you and your servant Eliza and the cookstove back to Fort Harker by rail so we could begin the long ride and wagon drive back to Fort Wallace, but that hour in the hot bath… Do you remember, my Libbie, my darling? Do you remember leaning back against me in the steam as I cupped your beautiful breasts and kissed your beautiful neck and your lovely ears and your luscious lips, kissing you again when you twisted around so that your lips could find me and so that you could turn and fall upon me, your hand going down in the hot water to find me again?

  Oh, my darling Libbie—I remember my tongue against your sweet cunnie and your sweet mouth on my sex. We made love eight times that afternoon and you came ten times, both of us knowing even in our hunger and joy that it would be long days of hard travel and no privacy before we could so much as kiss again. I remember when we were dressing in a hurry to pay our compliments to the commander before rushing Eliza and the trunks and stove to the station—Eliza had taken and washed and ironed all my filthy clothes while you and I were alone and naked; she was used enough to that—and I started buttoning my fly, and you, in your corset and nothing else, the hair of the V of your sex still wet from the bath, stayed my hand and then went to your knees one final time….

  You’ll remember, my sweet, that when I returned I was court-martialed for, among other things, abandoning my post. It was a year suspension without pay and reduction in rank. I would face a thousand courts-martial and suffer ten thousand suspensions for you, my dearest. But you know that. You’ve always known that.

  I need you, Libbie. I do not know where I am. It is dark here, dark and cold. I hear sounds and voices, but they are muffled and seem to come from very, very far away. I am having trouble remembering the last hours, days, minutes, our march, the Indians, any battles we had… I remember almost nothing but the absolute verity of you, my sweetheart.

  In truth, my love, I cannot recall where I have been or what has happened. My guess is that I have been wounded, perhaps seriously, although I cannot seem to gain consciousness sufficiently to know whether my body is intact, my limbs still attached. Sometimes I hear people speaking nearby, but I can never quite make out what they are saying. Perhaps I am in some hospital with German nurses. All I know is that I still retain my wits and my memories of you and our love here in this comatic darkness. I hope to God that it is mere sunstroke or concussion, which, as you know, has happened to me before, and that I will fully awaken soon.

  You do not want your Autie damaged, your beautiful boy’s slim body inordinately scarred or missing necessary parts. I have promised you… I promi
sed you when I left Fort Lincoln… I have always promised you, during the War, before every campaign out here on the plains… that I will return and that we will be together forever and forever and forever.

  Oh, Libbie… Libbie, my darling… my dearest girl, my sweet wife. My love. My life.

  6

  On the Six Grandfathers

  August 1936

  506 STEPS.

  Paha Sapa pauses at the base of the stairway and looks up at the 506 steps he has to climb. They are the same 506 steps he has climbed almost every weekday morning for the past five years. It is 6:45 on a summer morning—Friday, 21 August—and already the sun has turned the air in the valley as hot as it gets here in the Black Hills. The air is filled with the sound of grasshoppers and the butterscotch scent of heated ponderosa pine. Because it’s Friday, Paha Sapa knows, the crew coming down from the top this evening will play their “mountain goating” game—the 506 steps are separated into flights by some forty-five ramps and platforms, and the goal of the cheering workmen will be to “mountain goat” down by leaping from platform to platform without touching any of the fifty or so steps in between. No one has ever done this successfully, Paha Sapa knows, but no one has broken his neck or leg either, so the mountain goating will happen at the end of this long workday as well, the wild leaping accompanied by the shouts and cheers of the hardworking drillmen and hoist men and miners and powdermen released for their weekend.

  Paha Sapa looks up at the 506 steps and realizes that he is tired even before beginning the climb.

  Of course, he is seventy-one years old this month, but this is not the reason for his fatigue so early in the day. The cancer that Paha Sapa was diagnosed with just a month earlier—in Casper, Wyoming, so that no word would reach Borglum or the workers as it might if he’d gone to a doctor in nearby Rapid City—is already eating him from the inside out. He can feel it. It means that he has less time than he had hoped.