Return of Little Big Man (21 page)

Wolf shows me his weapon, the bright blood on which he is reluctant to clean off. “You were right,” he says, “this knife has powerful medicine. To celebrate this great victory I present you with the scalp of your enemy.” And he hands me that slimy object, a shock of hair so dirty I had rather hold it by the gory base.

It was a real generous gesture, for which I thanked him, saying I would add it to my medicine bundle, a private and usually secret collection of talismans an Indian keeps as a defense against bad spirits, this to explain ahead of time why he wouldn’t be seeing it again, whereas what I purposed to do, and in fact did a little later, was sneak it back onto the corpse’s skull while still moist enough to stick, so as to avoid embarrassing questions before the body got safely buried.

Meanwhile I had to fold the thing, skin side in, and put it in my pocket, for Amanda was returning now, her face paler than ever. Throwing up had relieved her of some of her earliest feelings, and what she says sternly now, including the other two boys, was “What were you doing off school grounds without permission? And what are you doing
out of uniform?”

“Let it go, Amanda,” I told her. “The boy just saved your virtue and my life.”

She turned her rage on me. “You don’t know that. I could have dealt with him. Women go through that sort of thing with men all their lives. He didn’t frighten me.”

“No, I sure saw he did not,” I agreed. “That was great, stabbing his leg like that. I’m mighty grateful to you for spoiling his aim. It was you who saved my life first.” I did think her a marvel, a young girl from a good family, handling herself so well in a violent situation.

But she wasn’t pacified. “He did not have to be killed!”

Meanwhile Wolf had found the pistols dropped by the dead man, as well as the bowie discarded by Amanda.

“Just a minute,” I told her, and to Wolf I said in Cheyenne, “You earned those weapons by combat, but you are not among the Human Beings right now. You are a boy and a student at a white man’s school, and you may not possess those weapons. The same rule applies to the rifle on the horse. But I will arrange for them to be kept until you are ready to leave the school and go home and then be given to you.”

He frowned, but next his brown brow cleared, and he said with evident pleasure in his black eyes, “Then I will go home soon?”

“I don’t know how soon, but you’ll be going home sometime. Where else would you go when you finished school?”

“We thought we would be killed,” he says blandly. Which goes to demonstrate a red man’s process of mind: white people would take all the trouble to run a school and deal for months trying to get students like himself to learn something, only to put them to death at the end. But you must understand they seen whites kill thousands of buffalo for the hides alone, leaving all the fine meat to rot on the ground, and then send the skins away, not even using them so far as could be noticed. And build a noisy, dirty railroad, the cars of which could only run in a straight line, so if the smallest object lay on the track the train couldn’t go around it. And wear continuous pants, crotch joined to the legs, so if a white man wanted to make water, he had to tear open the front seam, and to drop his dung he had to let down the entire garment. For an Indian there was endless examples of how whites didn’t make sense, not the least of which was they let their women run them.

The dead man’s horse had not been scared away by the commotion and the loss of its master but had just moved a few feet away, where it was standing calmly. I took the Winchester from the boot, and while I was there I opened and looked through the saddlebag on the right side, and the first thing I found was a folded poster showing torn nail holes. I opened it up and seen someone named Elmo Cullen was wanted for murder and armed robbery. A bank in Grand Island, Nebraska, offered $500 for his capture dead or alive. Cullen was described as about 5 foot, 10 inches, weight 165, age 31, “dark complected, heavy long dirty brown mustache, hair dark brown, probably clean shaven, bowlegged.”

I took the poster over to the body on the ground, which could have been that of a bounty hunter looking for Cullen. Kind of hard to tell about the bowlegs in his present state, but the rest of the description seemed to fit.

I handed the poster to Amanda, who was still complaining, and said, “Looks like the school’s got some money coming.”

I suppose it was to her credit that though commonly mercenary for that cause she did not immediately change her tune now. She even added to it something about blood money. But I’ll say this for Amanda, by time me and the boys had slung the body over the horse and hauled it into town to the sheriff, she agreed with my simplified story of the episode as being pure defense of her virtue on my part, against an armed criminal from whose boot I was able to pull his bowie, but not without almost being shot through the heart by him, of which I could show the rip in my coat.

I left the Cheyenne boys out of it, for nothing but trouble would of come from them attacking even a criminal white man to save two other whites. At least I never wanted to chance it. So far as the sheriff knowed, them students, dressed the way they was for a school pageant, had just helped us bring in the body, which
was
Cullen, for in one of his pockets the sheriff found a tattered letter from his old Ma, back in Missouri, asking for money, along with an indecent photo of some woman taken in a red-light house, I expect, with “oil my luve to Elmo” scrawled between her naked spread thighs and signed
Saginaw Sal.

Cullen’s horse turned out to be stole from the man he had killed outside the bank he had robbed in Nebraska and had to be returned to the widow. None of the cash he had took from the bank turned up on his person. I believe that sheriff thought it possible I might of helped myself to it. He allowed as how he might have fifty dollars coming from the reward for the costs of identification, telegraphing Grand Island, et cetera, so we let him keep that, and the rest when it come was presented to the Major for the school, by me but in the name of Wolf Coming Out, who never made a claim for any part of the money, on account of he still didn’t understand or care what an important place money occupied in civilization, for him and the other boys had not acquired much of the latter from their classes.

You take history, which was taught by a woman with little squinty eyes and a mumbly voice, who was named Miss Gilhooley, which I gave up trying to get the boys to pronounce when they couldn’t get closer than
Grr-who.
I ain’t going to go through the details of how what she taught in class was transmitted by me to them, but though not literal in the word-for-word, I was careful with the facts, and learned some history myself while so doing. But what would come back when them young Indians was quizzed might be hard to recognize.

All of this was by mouth, for of course they couldn’t write. Stands Like a Bear’s version of the Revolutionary War: “George Washington stole a horse and rode around telling the Americans that they would all get new red coats if they agreed not to drink any more tea. So they all got drunk on whiskey and started fighting.” Walks Last said the Civil War was caused by a big argument between Abraham Lincoln, who was a Black White Man, and President Grant, over a woman.

You might say they didn’t care much about white history for it seemed to have no reference to their own lives, but what they was taught about geography, by a big hefty female named Bertha Wadleigh, bothered them boys, especially when she hung a long roll on a couple of nails above the blackboard and pulled down from it a flexible map printed on oilcloth, which was a wonder to them insofar as it was taken as a bright-colored decoration. But when she said it was a picture of the part of the earth on which we lived, in this case North America, them Cheyenne believed she was lying, though for a reason they couldn’t comprehend, because walking the same earth as them, she hadn’t nothing to gain from pretending it was actually a piece of cloth hanging on a wall.

They was getting so riled up about the matter that I thought they might get into trouble, so I just told them Miss Wadleigh was a crazy person who was given this silly job to keep her busy in a harmless way, which is what Indians kindly do to their own nutcases. So once again I weren’t no help in what this school was trying to accomplish, and I tell you my conscience was not at peace, especially when it come to the religious classes, which was given by the Major himself. Them boys could readily accept Mary’s giving birth though a virgin and Jesus’ rising from the dead, and anything else in the realm of the miraculous, like walking on water, turning water into wine, and so on, but they never could make any sense of the central of all Christian beliefs, that God, who ran everything in the world, would let bad people crucify His son, and trying to tell them it was to save everybody from their sins only made it more incredible. Why didn’t God just do away with sin?

Well, I have got sidetracked from completing the account of that incident concerning the wanted man Elmo Cullen and its consequence. How’d them boys happen to be out there by the creek to give us a helping hand? For in doing so, they was breaking the school rules for Saturdays, like Amanda had noted, which afternoons they had off from classes but was expected to stay on the school grounds and play sports, which meant mostly baseball, for that was the only kind of equipment the school possessed at the moment, and not enough even so. The one bat was soon broke, after which they used axe handles and the like, but the one ball was finally beat to a state that it could not be stuck together any more, and the substitutes made of wood or tight-wrapped rawhide never were satisfactory. Anyhow, only eighteen players could be in the game at any one time, which meant the rest of the male students had nothing to do but watch, which didn’t long maintain the interest of the Cheyenne, who took the opportunity to slip away into the country and play make-believe war, until Cullen showed up and they had somebody to rub out in reality.

Try as I did to explain their ways to Amanda, I can’t say she ever found the episode acceptable, even though the Major did, who had been a soldier both in the Civil and the Indian wars, seeing lots of violent deaths and, even as a Christian, having no objection to the death of an enemy in a good cause.

Now I haven’t said much about the other students at the school, some of which done a lot better than my boys at picking up what was taught, and most learned passable English, especially the girls. I don’t want you to think the place was an absolute flop by any means. There was at least one boy from my time, an Osage if memory serves, who went on to become a doctor amongst his people, and a couple others become preachers in their tribes, and some of the girls went on to teach at reservation schools and be nurses at hospitals for Indians. I never heard of any who got positions in the white world. I guess that practical experience at cookery and, for the boys, plowing, shoeing horses, bailing hay, and so on might have paid off when they tried to make a go of it back home as farmers.

As I said before, it was normal for an Indian from a warlike tribe to boast of such violence as he wreaked on enemies, and such was not looked upon as a blowhard like he might of been with whites, maybe because I never knowed a redskin who told untruths in so doing, whereas with American braggarts the first thing that occurs to you on hearing them is they’re probably lying, else they wouldn’t have to praise themselves. So young Wolf Coming Out, he sure let the other students hear about his feat, notwithstanding that he didn’t speak a word of anything but Cheyenne, and I don’t know if I ever mentioned one of the singular facts about Indians was every little tribe had its own peculiar tongue, which frequently was incomprehensible to the tribe right next door, and so the sign language was invented. But words never meant much to young people of any race I was ever acquainted with. I gathered that the others learned as much about the killing of the white desperado as they could have been told, making the other boys real jealous and impressing the girls, which was the desired result.

I saw to it that the medicine knife was returned to its perch on the doorjamb outside my room, never to be taken away again short of another life-or-death situation.

Now, Cheyenne maidens was renowned for their chastity and their courting could be as long and involved with rules as that of Miss Millicent Chutney by Mr. John Longworth Whitfellow, in Boston. But the boys was not obliged to take a similar care with the honor of females from other tribes (like the lads of the three major religions when going interfaith), so the schoolgirls, none of which was Cheyenne, was fair game, as they was to the boys of all the other tribes, which accounted for the solid walls between the two halves of the dormitory building and the separate entrances. The sexes was also kept apart at meals and in recreation, for it was the Major’s theory that nothing was more likely to impede the progress of civilization amongst young barbarians than access of male and female to one another before proper marriage by a Christian preacher and not the heathen connection made without benefit of clergy in which these young folk had been conceived by their parents.

I have said that another of the small male staff was a German what taught arithmetic, name of Klaus Kappelhaus. He was also in charge of the ground-floor dormitory and, even though near as I could understand he had emigrated to avoid military service in the Old Country, he maintained an even stricter discipline over his boys than the Major asked, among other things making them polish their shoes in unison each night before going to bed and on arising in the morning recite by heart long sections of the Declaration of Independence, the preamble to the Constitution, General George Washington’s farewell address to his troops, etc., all of which Klaus had himself memorized before becoming a citizen. The accuracy of his memory had to be taken on faith by most folks, for his accent was so thick he could be saying almost anything. His version of the Declaration began something like, “Van in duh coze of hoomahn ayffents....”