Return of Little Big Man (66 page)

But for old Rain in the Face I might of made my escape now, and maybe regretted doing so once I had thought about it, and then returned and looked for her but never found her again my life long.

As it was, hearing the commotion, Rain looked over at them who was making it and back at me and says, “Yellow Hair was a friend of Sitting Bull’s. He knew a number of American women. He got on better with them than with white men, because the women usually wanted to help him. I think she doesn’t like it that they brought his house here, but I’m not sure, because she doesn’t speak Lakota very well.”

Up to then I was still intent on getting away, for occupied as she was, sassing the derbied fellow, she hadn’t seen me. But I was touched by the last thing said by Rain.

“She’s a friend of mine, too,” I says, “and I should have done a better job of teaching her the language. I’m going to go over there now, and if that man is insulting her, I’ll kill him.”

So that is what I done, went up to Amanda and the heavy individual in the derby, and when I got there, far from abusing her, he was whining about her abuse of
him,
which was driving away business, and if she kept it up he’d have no choice but to call the Columbian Guard, which was the Fair’s police force, to come arrest her as an anarchist.

Now that was a serious charge, for some years earlier a bunch of foreigners calling themselves by that name had set off a bomb in Haymarket Square, in Chicago, killing a number of people: even I had heard of that.

So my idea changed about dealing with the present situation. I would only make it worse by lighting into the fat man. As I seen it, what I should do was get Amanda away from there as soon as possible. I didn’t think she was likely to traffic in bombs, but this fellow could sure cause trouble with such an accusation.

So I marches up to them, and to Amanda I says, “Oh,
here
you are, sweetheart. Me and the kids been waiting at the Ferris wheel for an hour!” To the big fellow chewing on the stogie, I says, “My wife has a way of wandering off.”

Amanda was took altogether by surprise, so much so I was actually able to lead her by the arm off that lot, past old Rain in the Face who looked surprised too but also amused, for Indian men never thought whites knowed how to handle women, and get all the way to opposite the Ostrich Farm, before she reacted.

And then it was not the blowup I expected. I guess she had expended her anger on the derbied fellow. With me it was sullen reproach.

“Do you really think that was necessary?”

“It was the best I could come up with,” I says. “I didn’t want you to get arrested for being an anarchist.”

“I’m not an anarchist,” Amanda said wearily. “That was empty bluster.”

Neither one of us had said hello, fancy meeting you here, or the like, and it was too late for that now. Nearby, them weird-looking ostrich birds, if birds they was, strutted around on stilt-legs within a fenced enclosure. Beyond it was an eating place.

“I hear the big ones can be saddled and rode like a horse,” I says. “But the so-called scrambled ostrich eggs they serve yonder is actually chickens’.”

Amanda was suddenly smiling at me, but in a way that was also sort of sad. “Jack,” she says, “Jack, what are you doing here?”

“I’m still with the Wild West,” says I. “We’re on a lot down below the Midway, at Sixty-second Street, near the Fair but not in it, because the management thinks the way you used to and maybe still do, that showing Indians killing Custer and all does not demonstrate an uplifting sentiment, not to mention a hope for their future as farmers and churchgoers and the rest of it, and I expect they’re right so far as that goes.” At that point I stopped and said, “Excuse me, Amanda, I’m running off at the mouth. There’s nothing in the world I’d rather do than see you again, but I was going to run away and hide just now, out of shame for never answering your last letter, but reason I didn’t was because I couldn’t. I sure tried—but dammit, forgive my language,
I can’t write very good.”
Right at that point of embarrassment for me, somebody came to tend to them ostriches, and the birds made a noisy commotion: they can run fast as ponies, you know.

Amanda was not distracted by this. She was still smiling sadly at me. “Yes,” she says, “you are at fault, Jack, and you don’t even understand why. It’s not that you didn’t answer my letter. It’s your reason for not doing so: vanity.”

By golly, it hit me hard to get put in my place by a woman more than a dozen years my junior, than who I naturally assumed I knowed more of the basic principles of life. But what hit me harder was that she was right.

I stared down at the toes of my boots. “I guess you got me there, Amanda. I was ashamed of how ignorant I am, so I never sent that information you needed and you couldn’t write your book. Now I see it that way, I don’t know how I can face you.”

“Jack,” Amanda said, “look at me.” I did so, for there was nothing I had rather do. “Your help would have been important, but it would not have been indispensable. And your failure to answer those questions is not why I gave up.”

“Oh.” Funny, that took me down another peg. Far from being glad I was off the hook, I guess it was on account of my vanity again that deep down I was disappointed not to have had more effect on her, even if damaging. I was learning more about my character at this moment than I had in all the years before, a pity it wasn’t more admirable. “Amanda, them ostriches is bothering me,” I says at that point. “Can’t we go someplace where we can talk in peace? Up in the Captive Balloon maybe, or on the Ferris wheel? No, they’re too crowded, I guess. I tell you, I can’t think straight, I’m so surprised to see you.” I swallowed hard, and come out with it. “My God, but you are beautiful.”

She must of been getting close to what was considered middle age in them days, say forty, but she hadn’t failed to improve in every particular through the fifteen years since we first met, her skin and features without a sign of wear, her hair and eyes no less than perfection, her form all willowy grace.

As to the comment I had just blurted out, I think I more or less expected she would be offended, but I couldn’t help saying it regardless of the consequences.

In fact what Amanda done was look at me in a way I never seen her do before, call it a mix of earnestness and wonderment and maybe, unless I was just wishing it into being, the slightest hint of affection. “Why, Jack,” she said, “that’s the first personal word you’ve ever said to me.”

To show you how clumsy I was at this, I couldn’t come up with no better response than to gawk and say, “It is? Huh.” And then, “Maybe a ride in one of them gondolas over on the lagoon? I’ve rode the real thing, you know, in the town of Venice in Italy, where the streets is paved with water. Imagine our Sioux seeing something like that. You can’t say B.B.W.W. ain’t broadened their knowledge of the world.” Finally my embarrassment had passed to the degree that I could get back to what I really wanted to say. “Mind telling me,” I asked, “how
you
happen to be here?”

After my complaint about them ostriches, we had started to stroll away from them. At the main street running through the Midway, Amanda turned west. “Let’s get away from this wretched place,” she said, “and walk in the park.”

Washington Park was across from the entrance to the Midway, so we went over there and walked amongst the trees on a summer day that was fair but not as hot as some can get in Chicago. Looking at Amanda in the pattern of sunlight that come through the trees I was reminded of some paintings a French person showed me in Paris one time of ladies outdoors. The closer you got to the picture, though, the vaguer it was, coming together only when you backed up. That was not the case with Amanda, who was always in my focus.

“What am I doing here?” she said now. “I couldn’t believe it when I read that the cabin had been brought to the Midway Plaisance. I felt like blowing it up.”

“Well,” I says, “that’s likely why that fat fellow thought you was an anarchist. He didn’t know it was a figure of speech.”

She suddenly put an arm through mine and squeezed it against her. “Dear Jack,” she said.

It would of been easy for me to be overwhelmed, but I remembered my place and was proud just to have the other strollers-by see such a fine woman grasping me of her own will.

“I know how you feel,” I says, “after what happened on the Grand River. I keep thinking I should of done something to help Sitting Bull, but who could know his own people would do him in—well,
he
knew, he predicted it himself, but—”

Amanda squeezed my arm again. “You couldn’t have affected the outcome, Jack. You did what you could when the time came: you saved my life.”

I have related the facts of that day, with me and her cowering in the frozen mud under the lead flying above. I didn’t think of it as saving her life so much as saving my own while she just happened to be there at the same time. It seemed natural to huddle together. I didn’t make this point now, however, enjoying her commendation as I did.

She went on. “I have thought of that morning many times since. In fact, it became an obsession. I couldn’t write my book. Sitting Bull’s murder kept intervening. But when I decided to confine the subject to that event alone, putting the women’s issues aside until I had at least exorcised those awful images, I couldn’t manage that, either. I’m afraid I failed at still another of my pathetic attempts to accomplish something worthwhile.”

I stopped walking and made so bold as to take her hand in mine, hers being gloved in a slippery material, silk I guess, and real thin so I could feel the warmth of her fingers. “Aw, Amanda, don’t you feel that way for one minute! You done a lot of good everywhere you been. Take Sitting Bull, he thought the world of you.” You’re not much of a person if you can’t stretch the truth for someone you care about.

“He thought I was a fool,” said she.

“Well, if that was the case, it wasn’t
you?
I told her. “He just never saw eye to eye with whites.”

“He respected Buffalo Bill, you told me, and he obviously had a high regard for you. Could it be he placed a lesser value on white women?” She took her hand back, but not in an unfriendly way, just slipped it from my grasp.

There was a bench yonder, so I steered towards it and we sat down. “Well now,” I says, “you might not be wrong in one way, but, you know, you was there at his camp for a while, Indian women don’t go to college, don’t get jobs outside their family and move someplace else, and so on. They stay home and do female chores, which seems normal to them. That’s what they like.”

“But how does anyone know? Have they been asked?”

“I never thought of that,” I says, truthfully. “I guess that’s the kind of thing you could of dealt with in your book. All I know is, they ain’t shy about complaining and have real sharp tongues, but about particular matters, like if their man don’t provide enough food, not concerning the basic arrangement you seem to be against.”

“I’m not necessarily against it,” Amanda said in her positive style. “I’d just like to understand it, but I came to the conclusion that I never would, and I simply gave up. There’s too great a gulf between us.”

I knowed she meant her and the Indians, not me and her, though the latter was probably as true as the former, so somewhat down in the mouth, I asked, “Then how did it happen you was over there just now at Sitting Bull’s cabin?”

She sniffed. “You’re right. I was being foolish, as usual. So far as I could tell from speaking to the Indians there,
they
saw nothing wrong.”

“They come to Chicago to make some money and eat popcorn,” I said, “have a good time on the merry-go-round and Ferris wheel, if they’re like our bunch. Old Rain in the Face, the limping one, he was one of Sitting Bull’s best friends.”

She looked at me, in the personal manner again. “But, Jack, do you think it’s right to have such an exhibit? The bulletholes can still be seen in the walls.”

“No, I don’t,” I says. “But here’s the funny thing: that’s the white side of me, though the people that brought it here was white. Whereas while an Indian wouldn’t ever think of putting the cabin on exhibit, if somebody else does, it’s all right with him, if he gets rewarded.”

She shook her golden head. “Is that not another example of how we have corrupted that people?”

It was not a question, but I answered it anyway. “I don’t know. It just seems natural in anything alive, white or red or whatnot.”

“But shouldn’t
we
aim higher?”

Now it
was
a question, it seemed to me, and as I was being included in the “we,” I was real flattered. But I says, “No doubt about it, if you settle for standing up for your own principles and ain’t ruined by the opposition of others.”

“Or the indifference,” Amanda says, “which is worse.”

Maybe that was true from her point of view, but I tell you if you have seen as many people killed as me, you’d have to say it was usually due to real malice and not because nobody cared.

I didn’t say this, though, for what I prized most in Amanda was her highmindedness combined with what you really had to call a practicality, for her life hadn’t been one of dreaming up ideals inside some library without ever going outside and trying them on for size with reality. It took a lot of guts for a girl like her to go to the Grand River and try to accommodate herself to Indian ways, and when violence come she hadn’t panicked. And way before that, you recall that incident back during the time of the Major’s Indian school, when the wanted criminal Elmo Cullen jumped us, she put a knife in his leg before young Wolf Coming Out cut his throat. Once she even worked as a piano player in a Dodge saloon and sporting house. She was a durable woman. Yet she never lost that class she had from the first, which I’m proud I recognized right away without having much for comparison beyond my foster mother Mrs. Pendrake way back when, but by now I had met not only Libbie Custer but Queen Victoria, as high up as you could go, and Amanda didn’t suffer alongside them.

I wish I could of told her as much, but didn’t know how to do so in a way that wouldn’t seem humorous, always a problem of mine, so instead I asked her how she come to be in Chicago.