Return of Little Big Man (52 page)

“Do you want your hat back?”

“I gave it to you,” I says.

“Yes,” says he, “but I think you need it.” And he takes it off and hands it to me.

I mention this because it’s a twist on what white people call Indian giving, and maybe demonstrates the redskin angle on the subject of personal possessions.

Well, so much for my imaginary love affair. I can shrug it off here, though it took me a while to get over it at that time.

That winter in North Platte the separate house Cody had built on his property and named Scout’s Rest was all finished and ready to move into, with fifteen rooms and big porches ten foot wide, and he had a special room upstairs fitted out for drinking, with a sideboard full of bottles and glassware arranged like in a bar, and a big bed for the use of any guest who was so drunk he passed out. His wife Lulu continued to live in the old Welcome Wigwam house, and as usual I never saw her all winter long.

I was back at my vacation job of personal bartender to Buffalo Bill and the many visitors he invited and also the passing cowboys, drummers, drifters, and all who dropped in without being asked but was whiskeyed and fed just like they was, some of them staying around for weeks, on account of Cody was always in the market for company and missed the show crowds. I myself for once welcomed having a lot of people around, for it was cheerier than if I had only the company of my disappointments. Also I missed old Pard real bad and often would go out to where he was buried and say hi to his bones, which I was relieved to see had not been dug up by any animal, for the grave could not be distinguished by now from the surrounding ground and the grass had grown evenly across all.

There was less money than I believed there’d be in the savings I kept at the local bank, not that they stole any, but I guess I hadn’t sent back as much as I thought and also not a lot of interest was earned on an account like that.

Cody seemed to have the golden touch, with his successful show, and I ought to say his ranch was a real one and profitable as run by his brother-in-law Al Goodman and several dozen working cowboys, and I decided if I was going to be lonely at least it wouldn’t be so bad if I was prosperous as well, so I asked Buffalo Bill to do me a favor and let me invest the modest amount at my disposal in the next project he come up with.

When he acted none too keen about that proposal, I got sore and, with some whiskey under my belt, accused him of being selfish. If I had been working for any other employer, my arse would have been kicked out the door at that point, but if there was anything Bill Cody was not, it was selfish or stingy or intolerant of the ranting of a drunk, so he says all right, but what I should know about the business ideas of Doc Powell was that they didn’t always make as much money as it seemed they might at the outset.

He was referring to an old pal of his who lived now in Wisconsin but showed up from time to time over the course of many years, in fact since Bill had met him when Powell worked for the Army as a physician at Fort McPherson long before. Unlikely as it seemed, Frank Powell was a genuine doctor and sometimes practiced as such, but he was also a character after Cody’s heart, a heavy drinker and a big talker, a sharpshooter who sometimes did an Annie Oakley act, an honorary Indian with the name of White Beaver, and a specialist in schemes designed to enrich himself and his fellow investors, among them the merchandising of such patent medicines as White Beaver’s Cough Cream, the Great Lung Healer, which was guaranteed to cure any complaint of the chest, from the congestion of a cold up to and including consumption.

Doc Powell’s latest project sounded sensible enough, at least when I was drunk, and also remember that Bill Cody was his partner: it was to colonize a couple million acres of undeveloped land down in Mexico that was free for the taking. Now, sneer if you will, but at the time it sure seemed like just the kind of thing that might appeal to a lot of foreigners in Europe who would want to get off to a fresh start in the New World, and this spot would be the newest part, starting from scratch. White Beaver was going overseas with us to sign up colonists.

That’s right, Cody was taking the Wild West across the ocean again in the spring, this time to Paris, France, and another celebration, which had a French name pronounced
Eck-spoh-ziss-ee-awn Oon-ee-vair-sell,
spell it as you will, and we’ll get to that directly. But first I want to dispose of the matter of money, though I can’t do it as thoroughly as my own savings was disposed of in this scheme: in a word, though this is jumping ahead some, Doc Powell couldn’t find nobody in Europe or anyplace else who wanted to colonize that acreage of Mexican desert. I had nobody to blame but myself, and Cody lost a lot more than I did. But he had a whole lot else.

Now I know what you’re thinking at this point: you’re tired of hearing how once again Mrs. Agnes Hickok never got reimbursed for Wild Bill’s roll which I lost while in hot pursuit of his murderer Jack McCall. It’s beginning to sound like I made all this up! Well, I was ahead of you, way back then. I myself got sick of being a welcher. Before giving a cent to White Beaver, I divvied up my savings into two equal portions. In five years with the Wild West, I had saved almost two hundred fifty dollars. I know that don’t sound impressive these days, but in that age you could buy a meal for ten cents, so such a sum was not to be despised. What I done was round out Mrs. Aggie’s share to an even one twenty-five and send it off in cash to the Cincinnati address I had gotten from her daughter Emma the Champion Equestrienne of the World. I hope it reached her. I never knew. I included a note in which, after apologizing for poor grammar and worse spelling, I said I had been a pard of Wild Bill’s many years before and owed him a poker debt, which I was long last able to return. I never said it was a dying request, for I was ashamed to have taken so long to fulfill it, and for the same reason did not sign my name.

So I had finally accomplished both the obligations I had took upon myself on leaving Deadwood a dozen years before with regard to the two widows, Mrs. Custer and Mrs. Hickok, though as usually happens in life the realization was somewhat different than the intention. I don’t know what I had in mind in connection with Libbie Custer before meeting her, beyond being her sincere friend, but I had not exactly hit it off with the lady. As for Agnes Hickok, I had wanted to provide her with a considerably larger bequest, regardless of how much was in the roll Wild Bill had entrusted to me, but it was the best I could do.

Now, getting back to B.B.W.W, off we went to Europe again on the same
Persian Monarch
we come back on the year before, with two hundred persons, almost half of which was Indians, some fifty buffalo amidst an animal cargo of three hundred, the Deadwood stagecoach and the other equipment, and while the crossing weren’t as rough as the first time, I never got used to traveling on water. I had first went West as a young boy in a so-called prairie schooner, but I tell you, going over the bumpiest ground, you could stop at any time. Stop on the ocean, you’re still there.

You got to bear with me when it comes to French names and places. “Paris” was simple enough to figure out even though they said it with an
ee
at the end, and the harbor where we landed, the “Harve” (though Americans would of said “Harb”) made sense, but where we set up the encampment on reaching Paris was in a park with a funny name on the order of “Annoying,” though I gather it didn’t mean that in French, and the iron tower what had lately been put up, so high you could see it from everyplace in town, had the right name in the English version, the “Eye-full,” but even the Frenchmen who liked it called it something that sounded like “Awful.” And by the way, a lot of them hated it even though it was the tallest manmade structure in the world, which was true of them people on almost every subject. Whereas in England everybody seemed to agree on basic matters, at least in public, the French made a specialty of disagreeing with one another on almost anything.

Eventually I found out that some of this was not what it seemed, but due to the language, which is more excited-sounding than ours and makes a lot of next to nothing, like “Good morning, sir” is just a mumble compared to
Bone-JOO, mess-YEAR,
which can be like a song. And a good many of their words though sounding like some in English, have different meanings, for example to us “assassin” would be John Wilkes Booth who killed Mr. Lincoln, but in Paris it meant only the driver of a cab whose trotting horse almost run you down when you tried to cross the road.

They had a lot of funny ways, which shouldn’t of been surprising, because after all they was French, and though they was nice and hospitable when we got to Paris, I had the feeling they was suspicious about what it was exactly that a performance of ours consisted of and whether they should like it and why, for I found there was nobody like a Frenchman for taking nothing for what it appeared to be and reserving judgment till he decided if he was being made a fool of or not. So at the opening performance, with their President, Mr. Carnot, and a lot of other big shots on hand, for that Exposition commemorated their Revolution of a hundred years earlier, there was an audience numbering twenty thousand people, and they wasn’t unfriendly, but neither did they show anything near the excited expectation that always greeted us at home and maybe even more so amongst the British, who was supposed to be restrained, as opposed to the hotblooded folks across the English Channel, which by the way ain’t called that by the French, who was always thinking about food, but rather the “Munch.”

As promised, Annie and Frank was back with the show. They had straightened out whatever difficulty they had with Cody, and Lillian was gone now, so there was Little Sure Shot, waiting for her entrance into the arena in Paris, and me and Frank was in attendance, ready with her guns, ammunition, a supply of them glass balls, and other equipment for the act, and I tell you she had stayed as pretty as she was when she first joined B.B.W.W. but had become even more accomplished as a performer, having acquired an ability to take hold of a crowd by simply walking in in her demure way, wearing that fringed outfit and star-marked hat, them neat little shoes and leggings, curtseying like a well-brought-up schoolgirl of the kind Libbie Bacon must of been not too many years before she married Autie Custer. Long before Frank handed her the gun and I throwed the first glass ball into the air, Annie would have an audience eating out of her hand.

But on this occasion, with the French still reserving judgment on the Wild West, Annie took it as a personal challenge to take them on, all twenty thousand. She had noticed that for the opening ceremonies, the audience applauded only when certain persons posted here and there throughout the arena give them the okay to do so by starting up the cheering. Later on we found out that every show in France, from circuses to highbrow plays, hired fellows of this type, who was called “clackers,” and once some Frenchman told me, with typical Paris humor tending towards the cynical, that after an act or two you could tell from the level of noise exactly how much the clackers had been paid on each occasion.

Anyway, Annie took this as an affront to her professional pride.

“Go on, Frank,” she says, “you and Jack tell them to keep quiet.”

Knowing Frank didn’t want to rile her before a performance, I took it upon myself to point out there was a number of such people: the show’d be over before we went through a crowd that size.

There was sparks in her eyes. Annie wasn’t really a shy schoolgirl. “Well, Jack,” she says, “if you ever bothered to look, you could see the main ones are right close. You go over to them and you tell them to hush. Now is that too much to ask of you two?”

If you have had experience in entertainment, you know performers are real highstrung just before going on, so I quick followed Frank, who being married to her had already started off, and being a clear-thinking man, had already figured out a practical answer to the problem, neither of us speaking French: he got one of the English-talking officials assigned to us to deal with the matter, and it was taken care of.

Which meant Annie come into the center of the arena to absolute dead silence. There wasn’t even any applause from the President’s box, where I heard later they thought Miss Oakley wanted complete quiet for some safety measure when shooting her firearms.

Well, them show guns, even with their light loads, made enough noise to startle city folks when they first went off at every performance, and the Frenchies wasn’t any exception. Fact was, they turned out to be just as excitable as supposed, only took a while to show it, but pretty soon their yells and cheers was even drowning out Annie’s guns, and before her act was over, the whole bunch was on their feet screaming and throwing hats and parasols and scarves into the arena and at one another, and in general going nuts for her. It sounded like another revolution had started, a century after the first.

If Annie was the toast of the town in New York and London, she was even more in Paris: the French toast, I called her, for them people always went any dish one better, like dipping it in egg, being crazy on the subject of food: you couldn’t get a piece
of cheese
in Paris, you had to name the kind, out of several hundred. You couldn’t buy
butter
unless you specified the fat content, for again there was a big choice. Incidentally, you couldn’t get “French toast” over there, where they call it, in their lingo of course, “lost bread.” And who else in all the world would eat liver raw?

You ought to know the answer to that one: Indians, of course, though it would probably be that of a hairy four-footed animal rather than a goose, but sharing that trait weren’t the only connection between the red man and the French, who from the first had a spot soft in their hearts for Indians and generally got along better with them in the New World than the British. The French and Indian War was even before my time, but I know that them two was allies in it against the Redcoats, like the Americans was a little later with the French against the same enemy, so though the French was peculiar, we had old ties with them on our side of the water, including even many tribal names, among them Sioux, Assiniboine, Nez Perce, Iroquois, and others, for they was first visited by Frenchmen in the market for furs and also priests, who had enough sense to tell an Indian he didn’t have to quit his heathen beliefs to become a Catholic: God would let him be both, at least until he learned better.