Dances With Wolves (8 page)

one

Wind In His Hair and the men returned to find their village in mourning.

The party that had been out so long against the Utes had come home at last.

And the news was not good.

They’d stolen only six horses, not enough to cover their own losses. They were empty-handed after all that time on the trail.

With them were four badly injured men, of which only one would survive. But the real tragedy was counted in the six men who had been killed, six very fine warriors. And worse yet, there were only four blanket-shrouded corpses on the travois.

They had not been able to recover two of the dead, and sadly, the names of these men would never be spoken again.

One of them was Stands With A Fist’s husband.

two

Because she was in the once-a-month lodge, word had to be passed from outside by two of her husband’s friends.

She seemed to take the news impassively at first, sitting still as a statue on the floor of the lodge, her hands entwined on her lap, her head bowed slightly. She sat like that most of the afternoon, letting grief eat its way slowly through her heart while the other women went about their business.

They watched her, however, partly because they all knew how close Stands With A Fist and her husband had been. But she was a white woman, and that more than anything else, was cause for watching. None of them knew how a white mind would work in this kind of crisis. So they watched with a mixture of caring and curiosity.

It was well they did.

Stands With A Fist was so deeply devastated that she didn’t make a peep all afternoon. She didn’t shed a single tear. She just sat. All the while her mind was running dangerously fast. She thought of her loss, of her husband, and finally of herself.

She played back the events of her life with him, all of it appearing in fractured but vivid detail. Over and over, one particular time came back to her . . . the one and only time she had cried.

It was on a night not long after the death of their second child. She had held out, trying everything she knew to keep from caving in to the misery. She was still holding out when the tears came. She tried to stop them by burying her face in the sleeping robe. They had already had the talk about another wife, and he had already said the words, “You are plenty.” But it was not enough to stem the grief of the second baby’s passing, grief she knew he shared, and she had buried her wet face in the robe. But she could not stop, and the tears led to sobbing.

When it was over she lifted her head and found him sitting quietly at the edge of the fire, poking at it aimlessly, his unfocused eyes looking through the flames.

When their eyes met she said, “I am nothing.”

He made no reply at first. But he looked straight into her soul with an expression so peaceful that she could not resist its calming effect. Then she had seen the faintest of smiles steal across his mouth as he said the words again.

“You are plenty.”

She remembered it so well: his deliberate rise from the fire, his little motion that said, “Move over,” his easy slide under the robe, his arms gathering her in so softly.

And she remembered the unconsciousness of the love they made, so free of movement and words and energy. It was like being borne aloft to float endlessly in some unseen, heavenly stream. It was their longest night. When they would reach the edge of sleep they would somehow begin again. And again. And again. Two people of one flesh.

Even the coming of the sun did not stop them. For the first and only times in their lives, neither left the lodge that morning.

When sleep finally did find them, it was simultaneous, and Stands With A Fist remembered drifting off with the feeling that the burden of being two people was suddenly so light that it ceased to matter. She remembered feeling no longer Indian or white. She felt herself as a single being, one person, undivided.

Stands With A Fist blinked herself back to the present of the once-a-month lodge.

She was no longer a wife, a Comanche, or even a woman. She was nothing now. What was she waiting for?

A hide scraper was lying on the hard-packed floor only a few feet away. She saw her hand around it. She saw it plunge deep into her breast, all the way to the hilt.

Stands With A Fist waited for the moment when everyone’s attention was elsewhere. She rocked back and forth a few times, then lurched forward, covering the few feet across the floor on all fours.

Her hand went to it cleanly, and in a flash, the blade was in front of her face. She lifted it higher, screamed, and drove down with both hands, as if clasping some dear object to her heart.

In the middle of the split second it took the scraper to complete its flight, the first woman arrived. Though she missed the hands that held the knife there was enough of a collision to deflect its downward flight. The blade traveled sideways leaving a tiny track on the bodice of Stands With A Fist’s dress as it passed over the left breast, ripped through the doeskin sleeve, and plowed into the fleshy part of her arm just above the elbow.

She fought like a demon, and the women had a tough time prying the scraper out of her hand. Once it was free, all the fight went out of the little white woman. She collapsed into the sisterly arms of her friends, and like the flood that comes when a stubborn valve is tripped, she began to sob convulsively.

They half carried, half dragged the tiny ball of shaking and tears to bed. While one friend cradled her like a baby, two others stopped the bleeding and patched up her arm.

She cried for so long that the women had to take turns holding her. At last her breathing started to grow less intense and the sobs faded to a steady whimpering. Then, without opening her tear-swollen eyes, she spoke, repeating the same words over and over, chanting them softly to no one but herself.

“I am nothing. I am nothing. I am nothing.”

In the early evening they filled a hollowed-out horn with a thin broth and fed it to her. She began with hesitant sips, but the more she drank, the more she needed. She drained the last of it with a long gulp and lay back on the bedding, her eyes wide as they stared past her friends to the ceiling.

“I am nothing,” she said again. But now the tone of her pronouncement was measured with serenity, and the other women knew she had passed through the most dangerous stage of her grief.

With kind words of encouragement, murmured sweetly, they stroked her tangled hair and tucked the edges of a blanket around her small shoulders.

three

At about the same time exhaustion carried Stands With A Fist into a deep, dreamless sleep, Lieutenant Dunbar woke to the sound of hooves, stamping in the doorway of his sod hut.

Not knowing the sound, and hazy from his long sleep, the lieutenant lay quiet, blinking himself back awake while his hand fumbled along the floor for the Navy revolver. Before he could find it, he recognized the sound. It was Cisco, come back again.

Still on guard, Dunbar slipped noiselessly off the bunk, and creeping past his horse in a crouch, he went outside.

It was dark but early yet. The evening star was alone in the sky. The lieutenant listened and watched. No one was about.

Cisco had followed him into the yard, and when Lieutenant Dunbar absently laid a hand on his neck, he found the hair stiff with dried sweat. He grinned then and said out loud:

“I guess you gave them a hard time, didn’t you? Let’s get you a drink.”

Leading Cisco down to the stream, he was amazed at how strong he felt. His paralysis at the sight of the afternoon raid, though he recalled it vividly, seemed something far away. Not dim, but far away, like history. It was a baptism, he concluded, a baptism that had catapulted him from imagination to reality. The warrior who had ridden up and barked at him had been real. The men who took Cisco had been real. He knew them now.

As Cisco fiddled with the water, splashing it with his lips, Lieutenant Dunbar let his mind run further along this vein of thought and struck pay dirt.

Waiting, he thought, That’s what I’ve been doing.

He shook his head, laughing inwardly to himself. I’ve been waiting. He chucked a stone into the water. Waiting for what? For someone to find me? For Indians to take my horse? To see a buffalo?

He couldn’t believe himself. He’d never walked on eggs, and yet that was what he’d been doing these last weeks. Walking on eggs, waiting for something to happen.

I better put a stop to this right now, he said to himself.

Before he could think any further, his eyes caught something. Color was reflecting off the water on the other side of the stream.

Lieutenant Dunbar glanced up the slope behind him.

An enormous harvest moon was beginning to rise.

On pure impulse, he swung onto Cisco’s back and rode to the top of the bluff.

It was a magnificent sight, this great moon, bright as an egg yolk, filling the night sky as if it were a whole new world come to call just on him.

He hopped off Cisco, made himself a smoke, and watched spellbound as the moon climbed quickly overhead, its gradations of topography clear as a map.

As it rose, the prairie grew brighter and brighter. He had known only darkness on previous nights, and this flood of illumination was something like an ocean suddenly drained of its water.

He had to go into it.

They rode at a walk for half an hour, and Dunbar enjoyed every minute of it. When he finally turned back, he was charged with confidence.

Now he was glad for all that had happened. He wasn’t going to mope anymore about soldiers who refused to arrive. He was not going to change his sleeping habits. He was not going to patrol in scared little circles, and he was not going to pass any more nights with one ear and one eye open.

He wasn’t going to wait any longer. He was going to force the issue.

Tomorrow morning he was going to ride out and find the Indians.

And what if they ate him up?

Well, if they ate him up, the devil could have the leftovers.

But there would be no more waiting.

four

When she opened her eyes at dawn, the first thing she saw was another pair of eyes. Then she realized there were several sets of eyes staring down at her. It all came rushing back, and Stands With A Fist felt a sudden wave of embarrassment at all this attention. She’d made the attempt in such an undignified, un-Comanche-like way.

She wanted to hide her face.

They asked her how she felt and if she wanted to eat, and Stands With A Fist said yes, she felt better, and yes, it would be good to eat.

While she ate she watched the women go about their little bits of business, and this, along with the sleep and the food, had a restorative effect. Life was moving ahead, and seeing this made her feel more like a person again.

But when she felt around for her heart, she could tell by the stabbing that it was broken. It would have to be healed if she was to continue in this life, and that could be best accomplished with a reasoned and thorough mourning.

She must mourn for her husband.

To do that properly she must leave the lodge.

It was still early when she made ready to go. They braided her tangled hair and sent two youngsters off on errands: one to fetch her best dress, the other to cut one of her husband’s ponies from the herd.

No one discouraged her when Stands With A Fist ran a belt through the scabbard of her finest knife and fastened it at her waist. They had prevented something irrational the day before, but she was calmer now, and if Stands With A Fist still wanted to take her life, then so be it. Many women had done so in years past.

They trailed behind her as she walked out of the lodge, so beautiful and strange and sad. One of them gave her a leg up onto the pony. Then the pony and the woman walked away, heading out of the basin that held the camp and onto the open prairie.

No one cried after her, no one wept, and no one waved good-bye. They only watched her go. But each of her friends was hoping she would not be too hard on herself and that she would come back.

All of them were fond of Stands With A Fist.

five

Lieutenant Dunbar was hurrying through his preparations. He’d already slept past sunrise and he’d wanted to be up at dawn. So he hurried through his coffee, puffing away on his first cigarette while his mind tried to order everything as efficiently as possible.

He jumped on the dirty work first, starting with the flag on the supply house. It was newer than the one flying from his own quarters, so he climbed the crumbling sod wall and pulled it down.

He split a corral pole, shoved it into the side of his boot, and, after careful measurement, lopped a few inches off the top. Then he attached the flag. It didn’t look bad.

He worked for more than an hour on Cisco, trimming up the fetlocks around each hoof, combing out his mane and tail, and greasing the heavy black hair of both with bacon fat.

Most of the time was spent on his coat. Lieutenant Dunbar rubbed it out and brushed it down a half-dozen times until, at last, he stepped back and saw that there was no point in doing more. The buckskin was shining like something on the glossy page of a picture book.

He tied his horse up short, to keep him from lying down in the dust, and hustled back to the sod hut. There, he pulled out his dress uniform and went over every inch with a fine brush, snatching off stray hairs and flicking away the smallest balls of lint. He polished all the buttons. If he’d had paint, he might have touched up the epaulets and yellow stripes running down the outside of each trouser leg. He made do with the brush and a little spittle. When he was done the uniform looked more than passable.

He spit-shined his new knee-length riding boots and set them next to the uniform he’d laid out on the bed.

When it was finally time to work on himself, he picked up a rough towel and his shaving kit and hotfooted it down to the stream. He jumped in, soaped himself down, rinsed, and jumped back out, the whole operation taking less than five minutes. Taking care not to nick himself, the lieutenant shaved twice. When he could run a hand over his jaw and neck without hitting a whisker, he scampered back up the bluff and got dressed.