Sacajawea (170 page)

“Please, do not give the child whiskey to drink. Pour it over the wound,” commanded Sacajawea.

Dirty did not answer. Her breathing was rasping as air hissed through her clenched teeth. “I can see my daughter has come where she was forbidden,” rasped Dirty.

“The child came for help. I could not refuse. See how the foot is swollen so it fills the moccasin? Take this knife and cut the moccasin off.”

Dirty put the whiskey to one side and began severing whang leather. The moccasin dropped off.

Sacajawea went out to find the yucca spears she remembered growing near the wall of Bridger’s Fort. Yucca spears to stab the swollen flesh. She was remembering what Kicking Horse would have done. Everything was dark near the wall and quiet. She ran holding out her hands to feel the tall daggers. She found the huge plant and whacked the long spears off one by one, trying to see where they fell in the darkness. The clouds moved across the face of the moon, and she saw clearly. Finally holding a bundle of sharp leaves, she ran back to her tepee.

Inside, she stood frozen. Dirty had put the girl’s swollen leg over a piece of firewood. “I’m going to cut the poison out.”

There was barely an exhalation from the girl.

Dirty then slid her arm back of the girl’s shoulders, lifting her. Whiskey went down her throat. The girl’s eyes flickered open.

Sacajawea’s face was beside the woman, disapproval strong on it. Dirty’s face mirrored fear and concern.

“No!” shouted Sacajawea.

Gulp, gulp, gulp—the fire swirled through the girl. It came too fast, and she coughed the sour, wet stuff all over her face. She felt it was all coming up; then the whiskey seemed to numb the sickness.

“She will take more!” scolded Dirty.

“No!” cried Sacajawea. “It is bad! It takes the poison through the blood faster.” She pulled the bottle from Dirty’s hands; half was gone.

Then Dirty’s rump was turned toward Sacajawea, the butcher knife in her hand.

Dirty spoke. “See there—the fang there? It has to be butchered out. Look at all that black blood.”

She had cut a sizable piece of flesh from the girl’s ankle. The flesh was dark and blood-covered. Sacajawea could see no fang in that mess. She wondered why she had not seen it before if it had really been there.

“Stop that!” shouted Sacajawea. “If you want your daughter to live! Pour some of the whiskey over the wound! Warm that blanket and tear it into thin strips. That hole in her leg has to be covered. Move faster, you butchering fool.”

“I think she’ll die, anyway,” sobbed Dirty. “No one can live with a leg that has such a big hole in it.”

Then Toussaint put his head through the tepee flap. He looked ready for a rampage. “Disgusting!” he said in a flat voice. “She’s a goner. No use working over her more. This is her reward for sneaking around with a dirty Arapaho. I just found out where’s she’s been. I ought to cut her nose off!”

It was not fear that answered. Sacajawea was not afraid. It was all the sores coming to one head. “She’ll pull through it if you keep your cheap whiskey out of her mouth and take your woman home with you. I’ll see to her this night myself.”

There was a moment of will against scared will. Toussaint’s words broke it. “A rattler’s bite means death. She let the Arapaho put his hands on her, and that’s same as a rattler’s bite to a true Shosoni.” He turned and marched out of the tepee, but halted at the flap and turned toward the inside, his face as black as anthracite. “Go to it! But her death will be on your hands!” He went on out.

These words of warning struck Sacajawea deep and added to her anxiety for the girl.

“She’s hardly breathing! You have killed my daughter!” Dirty wailed the death keen.

“Stop that! Her mind has only wandered away for a while. She may be all right.”

“No, no, she’s gone. She was a quiet child. Afraid of her father. She was going to run away with a rotten Arapaho. What would the rest of the tribe say to that? Arapahos are enemies, not some band to go to live with. Maybe you were helping her, you stinking skunk.” Dirty held the half-empty whiskey bottle to her own lips. Sacajawea pulled it away and told Dirty to find more firewood. Dirty wiped her hands on the shredded wool blanket and ran from the tepee.

Sacajawea washed the dark blood from the wound, noting that the leg above the knee was turning dark. Suddenly sharp lancets punctured the girl’s flesh. Wielding the yucca spears like a handful of daggers, Sacajawea stabbed again and again at the swollen leg, stabbing and striking with all her strength. Black blood ran in oily ooze from many holes at once. The smell of whiskey was in the enclosed air of the tepee, and it burned in the girl’s open wounds. Sacajawea poured most of it in the unnecessary hole Dirty had cut. Sacajawea wrapped hot wool strips around the leg.

Joy stirred. Her foot and leg throbbed with each beat of her heart. She tried to move the terrible hurting, but her leg did not stir. It was still night. The center fire glowed weakly. Somebody sat beside the pallet. “Mother?” said the girl through thick lips. “Mother, stop the pain.”

“Be still.” The voice was Sacajawea’s. “Your mother has gone.”

She brought the girl bits of mescal button. “Try to swallow without water. Water comes back.”

The drug took some of the edge off her pain and seemed to settle her stomach. Again consciousness slipped away.

When she awoke again, Sacajawea removed the binding on the leg and gave Joy more dry mescal bits. Joy felt the prickles of circulation creep down her leg, and the throbbing seemed less severe. She rewrapped the leg.

From outside in the early morning came the thin sound of high keening—the death wail.

“Who has died?” asked the girl feebly.

“No one has died,” said Sacajawea abruptly. “That is a coyote’s call, nothing more.”

The girl lapsed into another period of blackness. The next day, Sacajawea carefully unwrapped the bandages and soaked them in yucca suds; then she wrung them and replaced them on the swollen leg. She propped Joy up and forced some thin broth between her lips. Immediately the broth spurted to the dirt floor.

“Rest,” said Sacajawea’s compassionate voice. “You have plenty of time to try later.” Her cool fingers, with a grateful pressure, were on Joy’s forehead. “The one you call High Horse was here early, before dawn today, to see about you,” whispered Sacajawea. “He calls me grandmother and seems well mannered. His father is at the agency trying to make plans for a council. He is waiting for Chief Washakie to return. He says one day the Shoshonis and Arapahos will not be enemies. I like him.”

How did he know I was here? Joy wondered. Who told him? Did the boy Squirrel Chaser follow me? Her mind was too far away to concern itself. She lay back, and her consciousness again departed.

Long afterward, Sacajawea heard Joy groan, and she saw her eyelids open. The girl was as thin as a lodgepole. Sacajawea placed a cool cloth on her forehead and bent over her.

“How do you feel?”

“My head,” she answered thickly. “My head.”

“You’ve been far away, but I hoped you’d come back.” There was a catch in Sacajawea’s voice.

“You did not believe the others when they said I would die?”

“They had never seen one bitten so by the rattler live. I thought you could fight such an enemy.”

Sacajawea lit her pipe, her hands trembling as with palsy. She steadied the bowl and held a lighted stick to it. She studied the dirt floor through the slowly rising smoke. Her voice seemed weary with its burden of dead days remembered. “A storm is coming on. The sun is covered, and the wind comes very strong and cold. I need more wood for the fire.”

The girl moved across the pallet. “High Horse says nothing bad about my family. He is not bad, as my father thinks. I can put my foot on the floor. The pain is gone.”

“You must not be too quick,” Sacajawea objected. “The flesh must fill in your ankle before it is strong enough to stand on.”

Sacajawea left to gather an armload of cottonwood chunks Shoogan had piled beside a stump outside the circle of tepees. She met Dancing Leaf, also gathering wood against the oncoming storm.

“How is the girl?”

“She will be all right,” answered Sacajawea. “The swelling is about gone. She may limp—that is all.”

“I saw her mother going to visit. Her eyes were red and puffed, and she mumbled the Death Song. It is not good for Dirty to carry on so when her daughter is getting better.”

Sacajawea’s face turned white. “Hmmm,” she said high up in her nose and hurried back.

When she raised the flap of the tepee, she stooped in a puff of pleasant warmth and placed the armload of wood chunks beside the fire. Then she noticed Dirty in the shadows against the wall, her hair straggling to her shoulders about her aquiline face, which had been handsome, surely, before her niggardly way of life had squeezed the flesh down to the bone.

Dirty moved forward and threw the robe from Joy. Sacajawea gave a cry that stopped halfway up her throat. The girl seemed a stranger. Her hair was caked with sweat, her eyes were empty, her face was ashen, and her mouth was still open for the words she was sayingwhen death took her. Blood clotted on her ankle and on the pallet; she had the smell of sour whiskey.

“What happened?” said Sacajawea accusingly. “She was well enough when I went for the wood.”

“I gave her whiskey to stop the ache in her head and cut the leg to let the last of the poison out.”

“But the swelling of her leg was hardly to be noticed. She had asked to put the foot down!”

“Porivo, you think you know all! You think you have some mysterious power, some great medicine, but see—you could not make my daughter well!”

Dirty flung the empty whiskey bottle on the floor and staggered to the tepee flap. “She was going to live with an Arapaho. She would have disgraced me.” Her keening was loud outside the tepee.

Sacajawea wept quietly. Her anger was as strong as her sorrow. She peered at Joy for a while, still letting the tears roll over her cheeks. Finally she said to herself, I am old and have learned so many things that I do not know much anymore. Maybe I was wiser before my ears were troubled with so many forked words.

She washed the girl and rubbed her body with bear’s oil and sage. Then she unbraided her hair and combed it. When it was shiny, she braided it very carefully. She painted a thin red line down the center part and put red paint inside Joy’s ears. “Your black road of trouble has ended,” she said out loud to the girl. “You will go to a place where the grass is green forever and the sky is always blue and no one is afraid and no one is old.” She dressed the girl in a soft white tunic with a yoke of small blue beads. The tunic was too large, and she cinched the middle with a leather belt, decorated with porcupine quills.

When she had finished, she walked to the far side of the village to the tepee of Toussaint. Outside, she called, “I have prepared the body of my granddaughter for her long journey.”

Contrary Woman poked her head out, followed by two boys, who recognized Sacajawea immediately. “Dirty is with you?”

“No, I have not seen her since morning,” said Sacajawea.

“She said she was going out to see her dead child.

But we had not heard that she had actually died until this moment.”

“Nor I,” said Sacajawea.

Contrary Woman helped Sacajawea wrap the body in a buffalo robe and tie it with thongs until it was only a large bundle.

“She was not really a bad child. She was shy and had few friends. She seemed lonely, sad at times. Is it really bad, loving one of the enemy?” said Contrary Woman.

“I do not think so,” said Sacajawea. “They have the same feelings as we.”

The two women sat with tears shining on their cheeks in the firelight and sang a low song over and over so that this daughter would have courage on her journey to the Spirit World.

After a while, Toussaint came to the tepee and suggested that Sacajawea give away her most prized possessions in honor of the granddaughter who had died there. “I will take the silver medal,” he said. “Joy was my daughter, and I ought to have some payment for her death.”

Sacajawea looked at him, stunned. “I have nothing but sorrow now,” she answered. “When this day goes to the Spirit Land, I will look to see what I wish to give you.”

Toussaint placed the bundle on a drag behind his pony and started for the hills. Behind the drag were Contrary Woman and her boys, Squirrel Chaser and Race Horse, and the toddler, Yelling Falls. Sacajawea followed. As they walked, they wept.

In the fading sunlight on the hilltop was a new scaffold that Dirty had had Toussaint build a week before.

Toussaint unhitched the pony and leaned the drag against the scaffold. He climbed up and pulled the bundle to the top and tied it down with thongs. That night the coyotes heard the weeping and moaning and raised their high, sharp song of sorrow. When they stopped, the night was large with the howling wind, and Dirty sat among them, and nothing mattered.

The next day they sat where they were and felt bad, and the young women squabbled between themselves.

The old times were better, thought Sacajawea, wandering alone and mourning and praying. Then it was like dying with the dear one and coming back all new again and stronger to live. Now when someone dies we do not go anywhere, and we quarrel; we have forgotten how to learn.

After a while, they went back to the village.

Late that afternoon, White Curly Bear called out to Sacajawea, “I can wait no longer, but must tell you about Washakie.”

Inside the tepee, she seated herself in front of Sacajawea, saying, “This morning my man came into camp holding seven scalps. The men came out and greeted him. Shoogan held his horse as he dismounted. Women and children came and formed a circle around their chief, and circled him from left to right. ‘Let him,’ said Washakie, ‘who can do a greater feat than this claim the chieftainship.’ And he held the scalps high above his head. ‘Let him who would take my place count as many scalps.’ Then he told that he had been out on the warpath single-handed to test his skill, that he had come across a band of Sioux, and that each scalp was his own trophy.” White Curly Bear had a mock-serious crinkling about her eyes. “I am glad to find you back among the living.”