Return of Little Big Man (48 page)

Now you recall how I left that Indian school, in a fairly disgraceful style, and though Wolf Coming Out had told me he explained to the Major that I had not been at fault, he didn’t know no English, and the Major no Cheyenne, and that would of been a complicated thing to convey in sign language, so despite Amanda’s nice manner I remained uneasy. I also considered it quite possible she didn’t remember me, for I didn’t know why a person on her high level would of done so. I had gotten to having a high idea of myself, the way I went over with not only Prince Bertie but also with his old Ma the Queen, but all it took was one sight of Amanda to lower myself in my own eyes.

Not wanting to remind her of the school, I asked, “How’s your folks? They still live in Dodge?”

“My parents are no longer alive.”

I expressed my regrets, and Cody and Burke done so as well, but Amanda was finished with that topic. She stood up from the camp chair in one graceful motion without apparent effort, and in that fitted satin dress she was as stately as any of them titled females I seen in Great Britain and a good deal handsomer than all.

“I’ll take you at your word, Colonel,” says she. “Lead me to the Indian camp, Jack.”

Now Cody returned to the surprise he begun with. “Then you really do know our friend here?”

I have just been saying how small my opinion of myself was when in Amanda’s presence, but when Cody agreed with it I was irked, and raising my nose says, “Miss Teasdale and me was colleagues at an Indian school.” And then of course could of bit my tongue.

But she never batted an eye at the reference, just inclined her head at Cody, ignoring Burke to whom she had not been introduced, and swept out of the tent with a
swish
of attire as majestic as any I heard at Windsor Castle.

I caught up with her outside. “Amanda, we’ll meet the Sioux directly, but I just want to explain how I happened to leave the school the way I did.”

She walked as fast as she had when younger, on them longer legs than mine, but with a more conscious sense of herself, and a number of the cowboys from the troupe was hanging about and didn’t fail to gawk at her, though they would of been scared to say anything aloud, for she was obviously a lady of high class. But I knowed I’d get kidded next time they caught me alone.

Amanda glanced at me now and said, “I believe it was self-explanatory.”

You might think that remark relieved me, but it was so indifferently spoke it made me question whether she had any idea what I was talking about. So I persisted. “I was just worried about what you might of thought, with all that commotion.” She made no response to this, so I tried a more general approach. “The Major is a mighty fair man, I’m sure of that.”

“The school closed some years ago,” Amanda says. “The missionary fund ran out of money and Government policy changed, for the better in my opinion. Religious bodies were really at a disadvantage in dealing with the problem, as demonstrated by the Major’s experience, for by no means could he be personally blamed for every difficulty.”

She might of got more beautiful over the years and finer dressed, but she had acquired a way of speaking like somebody who sat in an office and talked only to others of their own kind.

We had went past the tents of the white performers and was approaching the Indian camp, and that’s what Amanda’s attention was fixed on right now.

She stopped for a moment and shook her head. “Must it be so shabby?”

“If you ever seen a real village in the old days, you’d call this luxurious,” I says. “There ain’t no scalps hanging from a lodgepole, and everybody’s got plenty to eat, good beef, not dog, and they’re getting paid for just being Indians, not doing anything that could be called work, not to mention that white people buy tickets to watch them.”

A lot of this was hypocritical, for having lived with the Cheyenne I didn’t have no horror of scalps, and in the days when there was plenty of buffalo and we could get to them, the periods of hunger wouldn’t be long, and as for dog, it was good eating and done only on special occasions. Finally, Indians never needed money till the white man took over. But I was giving the arguments Amanda could understand, having been educated.

However, she did not. Like most people with a cause she heard only herself giving her own side.

“They’re treated as animals!” says she, tossing her hatted gold head in indignation.

“Come on, then,” I told her. “Let’s talk to some of them and hear what they got to say.”

I led her to the tepee where Two Eagles lived, on account of he had a real nice wife named White Bear Woman who was a good cook if you liked Indian grub, and I did and ofttimes had a meal with them, for I also enjoyed the company. I’m not saying only Indians appreciated their vittles—you should of seen the Prince of Wales tying on the feedbag!—but they applied themselves to food with the wholehearted focus of them who even in the midst of plenty allowed for the possibility of future want.

White Bear Woman had a fire going in front of the lodge and a pot of something already cooked and placed at the side of the hot coals to keep warm while she made fried dough in a skillet.

She was a plump woman with a round brown face, and she smiled at me when I greeted her and said the most frequently repeated phrase in any Indian language I ever heard of: “Do you want to eat?”

I says to Amanda, “She’s inviting us to supper.”

Amanda was staring real sorrowful. To me she says, “Can you find some polite way to refuse? Please don’t hurt her feelings.”

I told White Bear Woman that Yellow Hair thanked her but was at that time of the month and didn’t have no appetite.

Just as I expected, this Indian female says, “But that’s the best time to eat, to replace the strength that is lost! She is too skinny to begin with.”

The Indians never had that theory about feeding a cold and starving a fever: there wasn’t any disorder they didn’t treat with grub if they had any.

“I don’t want her to think I am spurning her food,” Amanda says, now smiling nervously down at White Bear Woman, who wasn’t looking up but rather testing the hotness of the skillet with a fingertip she quick withdrawed and sucked the heat from in her lips.

“You can be sure that would never occur to her,” I says, “for she thinks she’s eating better than you do.”

Now White Bear Woman’s several kids had begun to collect for the meal, but though they had been with the Wild West for a time, the littlest having in fact been born during the first season when Sitting Bull was with us, they had been brung up to be polite and not pester white visitors unless of course the latter wanted to buy the pictures of themselves and their offspring which the Indians sold.

Which didn’t mean they wasn’t staring at Amanda.

Now let me give her credit for not acting like many white women who visited the Sioux encampment: she never exclaimed about how cunning the little girl looked in the fringed dress and beaded headband or spoke to them in “Indian”—
me give heap wampum,
and so on—or worst of all, talked like they wasn’t there, for by now all the Sioux could understand some English words, especially when applied to themselves.

On the other hand, Amanda was stuck with the idea she brung with her that these people was being misused, so the presence of them kids made her feel worse.

“I see that we’ve come at an inopportune time,” she says.

“It wouldn’t be if we sat down and fed with them.”

Amanda frowned. “Let me explain. It’s not that I think I’m too good to eat with them, nor is it I have a distaste for their diet. I’ll take your word they have food they enjoy eating and in sufficient quantity. But if I joined them, I would be certifying that I believe their being here is right.”

“You put more meaning in a pot of stew than it warrants,” I says. “Indians deal a lot with the spirit when the situation calls for it, but I never knowed them to be anything but direct when it comes to food. They eat whatever is available, for you got to eat to live, and you got to live to die. That last might sound idiotic on the face of it, until you realize that for them life is a circle.”

“That may well be,” Amanda says, “but you are speaking of the past. The Indian’s situation was changed altogether by the coming of the white man. Whether or not that was deplorable, it took place and we must deal with it as a fact. Putting the red man on display as a performer is not the solution to his plight. Instead, it maintains him as a hopeless anachronism, by celebrating the savagery he must put behind him else he has no future whatsoever.”

You couldn’t doubt her sincerity. After all, Amanda had been at this work of saving the red man for years, a cause that had little interest for most whites and none at all for many. It’s just that if you knowed Indians at all and how personal they was, by which I mean they was actually human, talking of them only as a problem, even when you was watching them get ready to do the most essential thing anybody living can do, namely eat, seemed to miss the beginning point.

Right now we had to move upwind of the skilletful of hot lard, in which the raw dough was sizzling away under a cloud of steam and spitting grease drops at us.

White Bear Woman looks up from her squat and says, “You ought to get a healthier woman to sleep with. You could cut yourself on Yellow Hair’s sharp bones.”

“You have too keen a tongue. Two Eagles should give you a good beating.”

I got to explain that me and her was kidding one another, and I had mentioned her husband, to which she said he’d get hurt bad if he tried it. Sioux women wasn’t easily mistreated.

Amanda didn’t get any of this, of course, and might not of understood even if she had spoke Lakota. I reckon it was a coincidence that she now asked about the head of the family.

“I reckon he’s inside the tepee or playing cards someplace and will show up when the food’s all ready to swallow,” I says. “The cooking is not his business.”

Amanda looked around at the rest of the camp. There was females in front of the other lodges, doing the same as White Bear Woman, and kids as well, and where the meal was ready, the whole family including the menfolk was sitting on blankets, eating.

“It’s real homey when you get onto it,” I told Amanda. “This is pretty close to a real village. It’s more comfortable than it might look. If the weather was wet, they’d all move indoors and make the fire there. The smoke goes up and out the top, where the lodgepoles cross.”

“It is all very quaint,” Amanda said, “but is this how people should live in the United States of America at the end of the nineteenth century?”

“They’re Indians, for heaven sakes. They always lived like this and don’t see nothing wrong with it.”

“But they can’t continue to do so,” says she, her chin firm and her eyes fixed, “except in a show like this. It’s all make-believe. Their old way of life is dead and gone.”

She was right, no doubt about it, when it come to the long run, but I had learned by that time in my own existence to take what advantages was offered by the short run while waiting for the long to come about, else you might end up without nothing, and if anybody was skilled at making the most of what lay at hand, it was an Indian, just as it was whites who specialized in the future. I seen myself as a mix of the two, though better accommodated to the redskin way of making the best of what was available, for there was no getting away from the fact that it was less complicated.

“Amanda,” I says, “if we hang around much longer we’re gonna have to eat.”

“There was no point in my coming here,” said she. “Colonel Cody simply wanted to evade a discussion of the issue. That these people might stoically accept their lot or even think it’s better than some is beside the point.”

I expressed my regrets to White Bear Woman, who had just flipped the fried dough over on the other side, with less spattering this time, for it had soaked up most of the grease, which is what made it so tasty. The smells of that and the stew, as well as the roast meat being cooked over the fire in front of a neighboring tepee, had set my mouth to watering.

“Speaking of eating,” I told Amanda, “I want to do it someplace. We don’t have a performance tonight. Would you want to eat supper with me?”

Now this might not seem so earthshaking an event, until you understand I had never before in my whole life asked a woman out in the city sense of that term, I mean, I had ate many a meal, under various conditions, with various females, including of course my white and Indian wives, but never asked any on a “date,” as such, and I was a man of forty-seven years!

I reckon I was fortunate she never took me up on it, for though I had hung around with the likes of the Prince of Wales, I had never doubted my position was as an entertainer and it didn’t matter if my manners was bad, but I sure wouldn’t of wanted to give Amanda any more reason than she already had to look down on me by not knowing how to feed in a fine New York eatery.

Now till this moment Amanda had been so distant that I still doubted she remembered me, or anyway I preferred that doubt to thinking it didn’t mean much to her whether she did or not, but all of a sudden now she saw me as a person.

She even produced one of her rare smiles. “I’m sorry, Jack. I’ve been preoccupied. Yes, let’s eat together, but not at one of those over-priced restaurants.” I had an impulse to tell her price was no object, in case she thought I couldn’t afford it, but was checked by the suspicion that her real reason might of had to do with my manners or appearance. She went on, “And they are much too noisy for conversation. Why don’t you come home with me to my flat? I’ll make a meal, if you don’t mind something simple.”

“Why, Amanda,” I says, trying to be easygoing about it, “that’s real neighborly of you.” But I was in a state of great feeling. I won’t say excitement as such in case you might believe I mean indecent, which wasn’t it at all. If I never before asked a lady out to eat, neither had one ever invited me to her house: that the first such turned out to be Amanda was the kind of thing I never could of imagined.

By the standards of a later day it took a long time to go anywhere at that time, but relative to that era, moving around New York was swift. We steamed across to Manhattan on the ferry and then took the elevated railroad uptown. I didn’t marvel that a girl from Kansas knowed her way around the city, for Amanda always had a natural authority when it come to civilized matters, but she told me it had took her a while to get on to the best way of handling herself in New York, where it was more than a simple thing of avoiding the areas and persons who seemed un-respectable as in Dodge, for there was too many of both here and ninety-nine percent of the people you encountered was strangers and didn’t care what nobody thought of them.