Return of Little Big Man (57 page)

The Bull chewed with great gusto, smacking his old seamed lips. Since this would of been real late for his first breakfast, it must of been the second, and I reckon he was pleased by my arrival if only for the excuse to eat again while feeding a guest.

He chewed for a time and then said, “That is the first white woman I ever knew who could cook a good meal.”

As I say I hadn’t even noticed let alone tasted what I guess I too was eating.

He went on. “The other one wasn’t any good at cooking, but she could paint nice pictures. I’ll show you one of them afterwards.”

I was grateful for a peg to hang my attention on. “There was another white woman?”

“She went away,” he said. “She did not approve of the Ghost Dance, and like a white woman, had to tell me as much though it was not her place to do so, even after Seen by the Nation and Four Robes explained it was not proper.”

Them last two named was his Indian wives of many years, and they was sisters. Annie Oakley never liked to hear they was bought by him for one horse each, though Frank always got a big laugh out of that fact. Annie never had trouble understanding that it was quite a high price at the time, but what she couldn’t believe was that a man could care for a wife obtained in this manner, let alone two. But she wasn’t an Indian.

“I didn’t run her out,” the Bull says, I guess in case I would think him a mean man. “She got mad and left.”

I remembered why I come here. My personal feelings had to be put aside. “Bear Coat thinks you are causing trouble with the Ghost Dance, and so do the agent and the soldiers at the fort. They all agree you should be arrested. Good as this food is, I think we should get out of here as soon as possible.”

Sitting Bull nodded and chewed some more. “Don’t worry about it. Everything has been decided.”

I had been afraid he would come to some such conclusion, based on my early experiences with Old Lodge Skins: you couldn’t talk an Indian out of what he seen in a dream or heard from an animal. In the present case it turned out to be a meadowlark,
sdosdona,
for that breed is, as everyone knows, fluent in Lakota (and he took time out here, even on this solemn subject, to kid me about my supposed faulty command of that language). Birds had always been his friends, since one saved his life once as a boy when he was attacked by a grizzly bear, by telling him to play possum.

“If
Sdosdona
saved my life by speaking truly, he can prepare me for my death,” said he. “He did not say when I would be killed, but he told me who would do it.”

It didn’t matter if I believed it or not, and I tell you I did and I didn’t, for I had been raised Indian but had since went to many of the major cities of the world and met queens and popes and went up in the Eiffel Tower and rid on railroads and steamboats and stood next to someone talking on the telephone, while here he was, setting on the floor of a crude log cabin eating with his hands, damn superstitious dumb redskin—tears come to my eyes as I’m telling this, as they might of at the time, for I feared he knowed what he was talking about, for at bottom we each live in our own situation.

“You believe the soldiers will finally kill you?” It might be the way he wanted to go, in one last fight.

He shook his heavy head, braids swinging, and he snorted. “The soldiers have never concerned me my entire life. They are only another enemy, one much stronger than the Crow and Pawnee, but still just enemies. Those who will kill me, the meadowlark said, are my own kind.”

This I could not believe. “He could not mean the Lakota.”

“Yes,” said Sitting Bull, “and he spoke the truth.”

It didn’t matter if I believed him or not, for
he
sure did, which of course could and maybe should of been the end of the matter for me. I liked him but I doubt he had any special attachment to me, and I never owed him nothing the way I would of had he been Cheyenne: he weren’t family.

But I have always admired a man of whatever color for standing up for his own point of view while the rest are falling all around him. You will recall that principle applied to my feeling for George Armstrong Custer, who I otherwise never cared for. The attitude he had of regarding as pathetic everyone who could not be Custer stood him in good stead at the end. So with Sitting Bull: if a bird told him how he would die, he regarded that as one more proof he was spiritually superior to his enemies, white or red, in which case being killed could be seen as the greatest success.

But I wasn’t going to stand by and let another of my friends get slaughtered after having had a premonition of approaching death. If I let myself think about it, I still could not evade some blame for failing to stop Wild Bill Hickok’s murder.

But before I could deal further with this matter, Amanda come in the door. My back was to her, but I could feel as much as see her shadow.

Sitting Bull said, “Yellow Hair has not learned much Lakota. Therefore it’s difficult to tell her what to do. Two Robes and Seen by the Nation have taught her some things, of course, but if she wants to be useful she should speak our language.”

Notice he did not ask me to interpret between her and him. It was up to me to offer, but I could hardly get out of it, and anyway I’d have to identify myself to her sooner or later, dreading the moment though I did.

So I asked Sitting Bull what he wanted to say to her now, and he asked me if I wanted more food, and when I replied I did not, he said,
“Henana.”

So without turning my head, I says to Amanda, who was still behind me, “He don’t want no more.”

So she comes and squats to pick up the platter, and this time she looks at me, being low enough to see under the brim of my hat, but she still didn’t say a word.

“Good day, Amanda,” I says.

“Good day, Jack,” says she, and rises without visible effort and leaves.

Sitting Bull didn’t comment, either, but I felt I should explain. “We know each other, she and I.” And then since he still said nothing and for all I knowed might of assumed we belonged to some white tribe of which all the members was acquainted with one another, like his Hunkpapas was, I expanded on it in a simplified way, saying we had met in New York, which after all he had himself visited with the Wild West in ’85.

“If you’d like to take her with you, you may,” he said. Though old and fairly portly due to meals of the kind he just ate, he too rose to his feet in quite an effortless style.

Whereas I, who was still slender as a boy, felt my years and lack of recent practice at sitting on the ground to feed. My knees was not as flexible as they once had been, and I had walked around thirty miles overnight and was stiff. I wasn’t sure of how to respond to his offer when I finally got to the standing position.

So I says, “I’ll talk to her later, if you don’t mind.”

“That would please me,” said the Bull. “I did not invite her to come here, but I can’t very well throw her out. She seems to be an agreeable person, but having her around makes me uncomfortable, and the other Hunkpapas don’t like the idea, particularly at this time of the Ghost Dance.”

Now I got to explain why this famous chief and wise man of the fearsome warrior nation of the Sioux found himself not able to expel an unwanted guest: it was them laws of hospitality. An Indian of the old days was at a disadvantage if his bitterest enemy got inside his lodge: he might slaughter him anywhere else, but he was forced inside his own home to treat him as a guest, feeding him and putting him up as long as he wanted to stay. One of the worst sins to a Plains Indian was lack of generosity.

You take that bunch in Italy called the Borgias, who I heard about when the Wild West was over there, for they had a lot of power around the time some of them old palaces and churches we visited was built, supposedly they was famous for inviting folks in for a meal and then dropping poison in the food and drink. No Indians I ever knowed would do such a thing, which should be pointed out along with their failure to contribute much to the history of architecture.

“You must take a look at the picture the other white woman painted of me.” No doubt he referred to Amanda’s predecessor. “It is in the other cabin, where the women can look at it.”

“What was her name?”

“I can’t remember,” says he, “because it’s hard to pronounce. But you will see it written on the picture when you look at it.”

“Yellow Hair’s white name is Amanda Teasdale.” I don’t know where the impulse come to mention that: it wouldn’t mean much to him.

“I would be happy if she went away,” said he. “If you want to, you might suggest that to her.”

“All right,” I said, and knowing what he meant, I added, “I’ll let her think it is my idea. I’ll do that right now so I don’t forget.” I stepped outside.

I welcomed the excuse to go talk to Amanda, now that I seen I wouldn’t get anywhere in urging Sitting Bull to get out of there before Cody showed up, which by the way ought to of been pretty soon, judging from the position of the sun. That meal, at which I couldn’t remember eating anything, had obviously taken quite a while nevertheless.

There was some Indian women coming and going at the other nearby buildings or lounging about if they was men, and young kids running around at play, all of them closely related to Sitting Bull as it would turn out, wives, daughters, sons, sons-in-law, and grandchildren, though some of the youngsters was of his own offspring. It was just like all the Indian camps I ever knowed, except the lodges was square, made of wood, and not portable, and the Sioux no longer was allowed to do the two activities all Indian life had previously been arranged to further, namely, hunting and war—unless of course they joined Buffalo Bill’s Wild West and did them in make-believe.

I found Amanda around the corner, tending a cookfire. Now I could see her in full daylight, her face was smudged with soot on one cheek, I guess when she cleared a lock of wispy hair from her eyes with a dirty hand as she bent over the embers. The hem of her skirt showed dried and hardened mud, being too long for this life, dragging on the ground, and I reckon the whole dress was filthier than it looked, for twice while I approached she wiped her fingers on the skirt, but luckily it was so dark nothing black showed though anything lighter did, such as the yellowish mud and then in back was something looked like one of the babies had spit up where she last set down.

She was poking at the glowing coals with a stick, separating them so they’d burn out quicker. I guess Sitting Bull’s women taught her that. A white person would be likely to drench the fire with water, plenty of which flowed in the nearby Grand, but if you done that the charcoal wouldn’t be of any use till it dried out and you might need it sooner, and you would also squander the water which had to be fetched by bucket. The stick kept catching fire at its end, at which she would pull it away and extinguish the flame by screwing it vigorously into the ground.

I tell you, I couldn’t spare the time for anything but the most important question, at least to me. “Amanda,” I says, “where’s that husband of yours?”

She straightened up, swiping at her cheek again with her left hand, leaving behind more smudge. “Husband?” says she, them deep blue eyes looking real puzzled. “I don’t have one.”

“You never got married back in New York?”

She made a face like a little girl’s, corners of the mouth turned up, eyes rolling, an expression of hers I never seen before and a specially unusual one to see in her present situation. “Jack,” she says, “I did not get married in New York.”

“I went to that Friends of the Red Man office,” I says, “and there was a sign on the door saying it was closed, and the janitor told me—”

“Oh,” says she,
“now
I know what you’re referring to. When my associate Agatha Wetling was married, the wedding took place in Boston. I was maid of honor. We had to close the office for a few days. Aside from a secretary, there were only the two of us on the executive staff.” She sniffed. “All too many people were on our governing board, though, most of them men. It wasn’t long afterward that the organization was dissolved.” She lowered her head, scratched the still smoldering stick on the earth, and murmured, but then raised it and managed to look proud though disheveled. “So I finally decided to do what I probably should have done in the first place instead of trying to deal with the Indian problem at a distance: go to the heart of the matter.”

I immediately returned to my old sympathy for Amanda, while actually thinking she was misguided. “Well,” I says, “you come to the right fellow. There ain’t nobody alive who’s more one hundred percent Indian than Sitting Bull, but he’s involved in something now that probably nobody can help him with. Not even his old friends like Buffalo Bill, who by the way is heading here right at this moment.”

“Oh, not that awful charlatan,” Amanda said in cold disdain. But then she give me an appealing look. “Jack, can’t
you
do something to get rid of Cody? You know him.”

I was torn in several ways. Amanda could get to me usually, plus I didn’t approve of Cody’s mission as specified by General Miles, but I couldn’t believe he would ever try to arrest Sitting Bull and just maybe he could talk him into returning to the show after all. Beyond all this of course was the unlikelihood of Cody’s listening to me unless I was agreeing with him, and whatever he did would be preferable to having them Indian soldiers show up, anxious to prove they could do a good job of controlling their own kind.

“Amanda, I’m saying this for your own good, believe me. I know you mean well, as always, but forgive me for asking this, it ain’t no criticism. I was wondering what you hoped to accomplish coming here and working like an Indian wife.”

Thank heavens she didn’t seem offended by the question. “I suddenly realized,” she said, “that I have previously been morally fraudulent. I had been looking at these people from an enormous distance. That was true even at the Major’s school.” She sneered. “And to work for the cause as far away as New York was grotesque.”

A great need to defend her, in this case from herself, come over me. “Well,” I says, “that’s where I think anybody’d have to go to raise the most money, wouldn’t they? It’s true there ain’t many Indians to be seen there, aside from Cody’s show, but out here in the West, with plenty of Indians around, the whites generally hate them and ain’t going to look kindly on you.”