Meatloaf in Manhattan (6 page)

There's some music coming from the building. Through one of the long windows in the hallway I can see a couple dancing, a nurse playing the piano, an old man on the accordion. The couple turn round slowly, a man and a woman, both in stockinged feet. Some others join them. In ones and twos, circling around to the strains of the music. Hypnotised. Caught in the moment.

My mother is tapping me on the arm.

‘Mine,' she says, offering the handbag for my inspection. ‘My things.'

I take it from her. I release the clasp and the bag yawns open.

‘My things,' repeats my mother, nodding her head, urging me to delve into the bag. I look inside. It is full to the brim with silver paper wrappers from chocolate bars, squeezed into tiny balls. I pick one out and roll it around the palm of my hand.

‘Lovely,' I say, ‘like jewels.'

She smiles, her face relaxes and I can see a trace of the mother I once held so dear. Then the twist of her mouth turns to a scowl. She stares intently into my face. So close I can feel the breath murmuring from her lips.

‘Thief,' she screams. ‘Thief … this strange man steals. He's taken everything from me. He takes all my things.'

She grabs the ball of silver paper from my hand and puts it in her mouth. She takes a handful of balls from the bag, knocking it to the floor, the rest of the balls spilling across the paving stones like mercury. I lean down to retrieve the bag. When I look up again she has stuffed all the silver paper into her mouth, chomping and chewing. Behind her a lilac tree hangs blossom like bunches of purple grapes. I feel numbed and detached, almost separate from the scene. An image from the flood comes to me. Not the tumult and swollen bodies bobbing in the water, nor the thunderous sounds of the wind and waves. It was the morning after, when things had quietened down, a flock of birds, cormorants I think they were, flying in a perfect arrow overhead. They cut through the sky as if to signal the contrariness of it all; the shape of normalcy as a reminder that all would return to how it was, how it would be. I followed the line of their flight, shielding my eyes with my hand from the brightness of the sun. They squawked at me and I watched them as they settled in the upper branches of a huge ghost gum up on the hill.

It was a glorious blue-skied morning after the storm. I was standing on the railway platform after another sleepless night in the makeshift tent, where the cries and coughs of my companions had rasped through the long hours of darkness. There was a little rivulet of mucky water dribbling along the tracks. When I looked down I could see a baby's cardigan caught up in the railway sleeper. I picked it up. It was bedraggled and stretched, but I could make out the carefully crocheted stitching. One tiny heart button hung from a thread as if torn from an infant chest. At that moment I had felt as if something had been lost from my life. Now, standing here in the shade of a lilac tree the feeling returns. In my numbness nothing seems strange to me. Nothing is unusual. Not even my own mother, blood and lipstick running down her chin. I try to hold her hand but she pulls away.

‘Poisoner,' she screams, blood and silver paper falling from her mouth. ‘I am being poisoned by this poisoner,' she shouts at the top of her voice.

Someone hears our drama. A door opens and shuts and the nurse appears, running across the lawn.

‘Mrs Daly,' she says gently, sitting down beside my mother. ‘Open your mouth.'

My mother grips her jaws closed, the blood forming a two-tier line of lipstick. She swallows hard, choking and spluttering, suffocating on blood and silver foil. The nurse slaps her hard on the back. An explosion of fiery, shining balls vomit from her mouth.

‘It's probably best you go Mr Daly,' says the nurse, wiping my mother's mouth with a handkerchief. ‘She doesn't know you, she doesn't really know anyone anymore.'

‘My things,' sobs my mother, the small silver balls all around her feet.

I look into the empty bag. Crumpled into the bottom is a photo. It is faded and scratched, the surface almost erased. A fossil etched into the leather of the bag. The vague imprint and outline of a small boy and a dog in a garden. There may have been a smile. There may have been sunshine. A forgotten memory. I collect the shiny balls from the ground. I pick up every one, even the bloody ones, my fingers sticky with my mother's blood and saliva. I fill up the bag as the two women watch me in silence. I close the clasp of the handbag, snapping it shut, passing it to my mother. Like a child with a teddy bear she clamps it close to her cheek and smiles.

‘My things,' she says.

‘Your things,' I say.

THE STORY OF LITTLE-PATH AND MARCUS KELLOGG

Little-Path stands on the railway platform. He is sixty five years old. It's been over fifty years since the day of the battle and he knows he has only a few months to live. His smooth black hair, streaked with the occasional grey, is tied tight in a ponytail. In his headband he wears the feather he won for bravery in the counting coup at Greasy Grass. Despite his illness he stands tall and strong. His eyes are bright and clear, belying the darkness of the sights and scenes they have witnessed.

He wears his raccoon-pelt coat to keep out the cold wind from the Great Plains, the one he fashioned and sewed on the reservation in Montana. He cups and blows his hands and watches the train disappear around the curve of the track, then walks slowly through the busy hallway of the North Pacific railway depot. He's used to the looks he gets from strangers. Hostile. Suspicious. Fearful. Some stop and stare. Mothers hurry children along, worried he might be hiding a tomahawk and bloody intent. But Little-Path pays them no heed. If they knew the life he's led they might show some sympathy, a modicum of kindness. But how could they really know?

Outside, the clock on the station tower tells him he is an hour early for his meeting. So he sits on an empty bench to gather his thoughts. He reads again the brief note from Eileen Kellogg that has brought him to this town of Bismarck, North Dakota.

Some half a century earlier it is dawn in the week of Little-Path's thirteenth birthday. He is woken by commotion. Looking outside he sees the chaos unfolding. Braves running in all directions, gathering horses and weapons. All the tribes mingling, Brule with Hunkpapa, Sans Arc with Oglala. Runs-the-Enemy sees his young friend and brings his stallion to a sudden halt, dust whipping around the animal's hooves. ‘Quick, Little-Path,' he shouts, his horse bucking and twisting beneath him, ‘There are soldiers, very close, at the edge of the camp, we must make ready to fight. They've already slaughtered the two wives and children of Chief Gall, and murdered our women who were gathering turnips by the creek.' Runs-the-Enemy's face is smeared with warpaint. Fast Horn, an Oglala, gallops by, blood pouring from his stomach. ‘I'm shot through,' he shrieks, ‘soldiers, near the high divide of the Rosebud Valley.'

Runs-the-Enemy's eyes are wild for revenge as he turns his horse and speeds to the gathering place where the Muskrat Creek and Medicine Tail Coulee empty into the Little Bighorn River.

Earlier that same morning, an hour before sunrise, Marcus Henry Kellogg sits outside his tent. He is a handsome man of forty years, clean-shaven save for bushy sideburns. His deep-set eyes are both intense and sad, reflecting the grief of a wife ten-years dead and two daughters left to be raised by their aunt. He should be back in Bismarck, setting the type for the fourth edition of
The Bugle
. But the editor's wife was taken ill and Kellogg volunteered to stand in for Editor Lounsberry to accompany the Seventh Cavalry on its pursuit of the Plains Indians. He pulls the rug around his shoulders, draws on his pipe, enjoying the sweet taste of the tobacco as he composes his thoughts. The scratch of his pen on paper, lit by the first light of this his last day on earth, is the only sound to be heard. He imagines the voice of the postmaster reading the letter to his sister Eileen who, through force of circumstance and no fault of her own, had no schooling for herself.

Dearest Sister, Yesterday Colonel Custer shot a deer, so I had a very fine dinner with him and his officers. While we were eating, our Arikara Indian scouts reported the sighting of our quarry. Early intelligence suggests both Sioux and Cheyenne are gathered and that we will be somewhat outnumbered. Yet, I have all confidence in Colonel Custer and his men and pray we will round them up and bring them back to the reservations from whence they have fled. But it cannot be denied there is danger ahead. It aches my heart to think my daughters, bereaved of a mother, could lose a father also. But I remain optimistic and of good faith. Sister dear, please kiss my daughters and accept my eternal gratitude for your guardianship. Your loving brother, Marcus Henry Kellogg
.

The sun is now high in the sky. Hot and dry. Little-Path lies still in the grass as the battle rages all around. He listens for the movement of those close by him. Rain-in-the-Face, Iron Hawk, Chasing Eagle, Feather Earring. They will show him the way, he the young brave, fresh to this world of battle and tears. Looking up, the spiky grass tickling his cheek, he can see the soldiers in the trenches digging crazily, deeper, with spoons and plates and hands. Digging trenches, digging their own graves. Many are drenched in sweat and blood from the manic retreat. Some have arrowheads, embedded in muscles, bristling like the quills of a porcupine. On the wind he can feel the fear of the soldiers-blue, some just weeks arrived from distant lands of green fields where there is no thunderclap and deluge of arrows, no fearsome painted men with red skins and desperation, pride and volcanic anger. Wide-eyed, the soldiers-blue on the ridge, thoughts lost in kith and kin, never to be seen again, never to hold.

Little-Path sees the feather in the hair of Sounds-the-Ground-as-He-Walks, who now is up on one knee. The look in the eyes of the older brave is that of a resolve saddened by the silence on the plains, where buffaloes, once more numbered than stars in the sky, are all slain; embittered by the slavery and herding, the fencing in of a proud people. This one last angry, wild stand against the invader. Arrows, lances, tomahawks, stone-headed clubs, brave squaws waving flame-red blankets to frighten the horses. Little-Path sees history in those dark eyes, and the future. Last night, after the first day of the Battle of the Greasy Grass, Sounds-the-Ground-as-He-Walks told them all of his daring deed. How he had rushed upon Custer, before he fell, and tapped him with the coup stick. Just once on the shoulder. The blue-eyed chief turned, knowing full well what the touch would mean, how it would all end. Sounds-the-Ground-as-He-Walks shrieked with pride and glee, as he ducked below the blazing bullets, weaving back to his fellows, adulation assured. He was awarded the eagle feather, no smudge of red paint smeared to show an injury in the deed of derring-do. Little-Path sees the feather in his mentor's hair and wishes for the chance to earn one for himself.

‘Lie still, Little-Path,' says Rain-in-the-Face, whispering through the blades of grass, the dusty clay and ants that separate them. ‘Hollow-Moon will whistle when it's time to attack.'

In the near distance, corralled into a ravine, the remaining bluecoats fight to the death. Those are the brave ones. Others take their own lives, driven mad by the brutality of battle, terrified by tales of torture indescribable awaiting those who live. Little-Path spots one white man who stands out from the others. He wears a greatcoat and top hat, sitting on a rock above a ravine, partly hidden by a bush.

‘Your chance,' says Hollow-Moon, who appears at Little-Path's shoulder, pointing to the man. ‘Earn an eagle feather, little brave,' he whispers; blood, war-paint, dust and sweat cracking into a smile of encouragement.

With the noise and the cries, the whimpers, the screams and the snorting and neighing of the horses, the cutting of flesh, the whizz and crackle of bullets, the grunts and screams, the howls and sighs and all the peculiar madness of battle, Little-Path crawls on hands and knees up to the ridge behind the man in the great-coat. Marcus Kellogg is frantically writing in a small bound book. Little-Path creeps forward, drifting over the ground, soundless, effortless. He gets so close he can see the beads of sweat running down the back of the white man's neck. Little-Path, almost in slow motion, extends his arm, and, with his fingertip, touches the man on the hand that holds the pen. The man turns around, not in fear, not in shock, more in resigned expectation. Little-Path sees he has no gun. Their eyes meet. The man says something that means nothing to the brave.

‘We can't take the clouds,' he says, over and again, looking up to the sky.

Then Marcus Henry Kellogg turns and looks at the slip of a boy standing before him. ‘I'll die today,' he says, ‘but yours will be the greater death.'

Little-Path throws back his head and howls. Down below Hollow-Moon whistles. His braves, brandishing tomahawks, arrows and stone clubs, spring up from the grasses and charge the ravine for the final assault, to avenge the silencing of the buffalo, to claim back something of their own, to make their last stand.

Marcus Kellogg will write no more, nor speak. ‘Clouds' is the last word he pens as the arrow whispers through the air, its sharp and glittering point slicing into his neck. He gasps, he sighs; he stares straight into the young eyes of Little-Path. Something about this singular death, this killing, this man in a greatcoat on a ridge above the fray, this end, hits hard at Little-Path. He is shocked at the intensity of his feelings. So sure until now of his place, his purpose.

As the arrow takes the breath from the man in the greatcoat, when he slumps in his death-throes, Little-Path sits down on the ledge, numbed by something he has yet to understand. Then, when the braves have done and finished below, stripped the corpses bare of clothes and rings and hair and teeth, one comes up to the ridge and with a bloodied knife hacks at Marcus Kellogg's head, wrenching scalp and skin. Little-Path knows he wants his feather, but what else he wants, what else he knows, what he might become, that was once so simply set, is lost to him in that moment.