Little Big Man

by Thomas Berger

  Now I had left Bloody Knife under the sagebush when, walking back to camp a-studying this matter, who should I spot but a figure out of the distant past, sitting on the bank just beyond where the Powder emptied into the Yellowstone.

  His skin was darker yet than a Ree’s and he wore a flop hat with an eagle feather in it. By God if he had changed much in twenty year.

  I says to him: “Well, Lavender, this is some surprise.”

  For that is who it was, and he looked at me right polite and says I had the advantage on him.

  “Jack Crabb,” says I. “The Reverend Pendrake, in ______, Missouri.”

  He studies me careful and says: “Go on.” Then he takes off his hat so he can see better, stands up, peers into my face, kind of groans, then laughs, and I grabs him and gives him a bear hug. I don’t know why, it was more like finding a long-lost relative than when I had actually done so on several occasions.

  After we got through with exchanging the pleasures of re-meeting, I says: “Tell me what you’re doing here. Has the Reverend become a chaplain?”

  “No, not him,” says Lavender, who must now have been around forty-five years of age and had a few gray hairs when I looked him over close, but the mahogany skin of his face was still unlined. He was dressed in buckskin jacket and pants with fringe, and if I wasn’t wrong, his belt showed beadwork in the Sioux fashion. “No,” he says again, and then: “My oh my, I ain’t thought on that Reverend for many a year. He died, Jack, not long after you run off. Et himself to death, is what happened. He packed away one of them gigantic dinners that Lucy made for him one noontime, then took a nap directly after, and some of that meal backed up and clogged his windpipe and he suffocated afore anyone knowed the difference, damn if he did not.”

  At that minute Lavender got a bite on his fishline, for he had set down again and lifted his pole, with me alongside, and he pulled it out and there was a real nice fish on the hook, which he unfastened and tossed flopping on the bank.

  “Well,” Lavender goes on, “the way I looked at it at the time, that man died happy, in the condition he liked best in all the world: stuffed with victual. I believe Lucy had cooked roast pork with applesauce that day.”

  I suffered something between indigestion and heart flutter as I asked: “And Mrs. Pendrake? I reckon she got married again?”

  Lavender was threading another earthworm on his hook. “The Lady,” he says, “no, the Lady closed up the shutters on that house and I recall never even attended the funeral. And the church got it a new preacher who was supposed to live in that house, but she never moved out and none of them white folks had nerve to ask her to do it, so the new one, he had to reside somewhere else, and as far as I know she is there yet.”

  I was thinking my own thoughts: even for a minute the impulse run through my head to pack up whatever I was doing here and head back down to Missouri instanter, but I was old enough by now to accept the better sense. I was thirty-six and had been through too much. Believe me, the real romantic person is him who ain’t done anything but imagine. If you have actually participated in disasters, like me, you get conservative.

  But while I was staring into the Yellowstone at the current making a sort of watery arrowhead around Lavender’s fishline, he says: “I stayed on there for a year or so, but now it was a house of women, so I commenced to think again—” He slapped his hand upon the ground. “Sure,” he says, “it was you yourself what had lived with the Indians. I recall it now, Jack. How you and me talked of it. Well sir, what I done—for I was freed and could come and go as I liked—I went on West one day, like I had thought of doing for quite a spell. Thisheer kin of mine had gone out with Captain Lewis and Captain Clark.…”

  He went on about that slave York again, not having as good a memory as me. Suffice it to say he had had various employments and adventures before he found the type of Indian who met his needs, but he finally did, and who was they but the Sioux of Sitting Bull!

  This news brung me out of my thoughts. “You didn’t!” I says, and immediately regretted my choice of words, for you see Lavender wasn’t a darky no more. I mean, he was of course still a Negro person by race, but he wasn’t in any wise a servant nor had the mentality of such, and therefore was not any more used to having his veracity questioned.

  He just looked at me with an evident pride which I immediately recognized as being Indian, and I said quick: “By God,” I says, “by God, old Sitting Bull! It just surprises me, that’s all. That’s who they’re going out after now, ain’t it?”

  Lavender looks sad. He says: “I married a Sioux woman of the Hunkpapa band and lived several year in a tepee made of skin.” He shook his head and that feather quivered in the band. “They are real good people, and you take old Bull, I reckon for an Indian he is what you could call a genius. When he wants to see what is happening anywhere in the world, all he has to do is close his eyes and dream and he’s got it clear.”

  “Yes,” I says, “that’s right.”

  The sun reflected off the lobes of Lavender’s widespread dark nose. “You recall the Reverend Pendrake, Jack,” he says. “How he was always spouting principles. They was good and even holy ones, I guess, and it was on account of them that he bought me from my old master and give me freedom. So I might be ungrateful when I say the longer I listened to him, the more I thought: he is a fool.”

  “So did I,” I says, “even as a young boy.”

  “But why, Jack, why did we think that?” Lavender was real quizzical, and took off his hat and dropped it to the ground, showing his head of frizzy curls. “For I was black,” he says, “but you knowed how to read and write.”

  I says: “Speaking for myself, I thought he was talking about how things should be rather than as they was.”

  “That’s right! That’s it!” shouts Lavender. “Whereas an Indian has it the other way around.… Well then,” he goes on, “why did both you and me turn about in time and leave the Indians, too? Tell me that.”

  I says: “Because we wasn’t born barbarians.”

  “You said it.”

  “And it don’t work if you are aware of anything else,” I goes on.

  “It’s perfect if you been born in a tent and carried on your Ma’s back and lived with hocus-pocus since the day you was born and never invented the wheel.”

  “If you come from civilization,” says Lavender, “to live among the savages, it is fine for a while and then you get so powerful curious as to what is going on back home, you can’t stand it. You got to see, so you come back, and it might be good or it might be awful, but it is happening.”

  He pulled in his line and picked up his fish, and we went back towards where his tent stood at the edge of the bivouac.

  “We got that straightened out,” I says. “But what I wonder now is why you have come back to this country?”

  Lavender looked sort of embarrassed at that. He says: “I ain’t here to fight the Sioux. I signed on as interpreter. When they see this army, why, maybe they’ll return to the agencies.”

  “You think they will?”

  “No,” he says. “And if they shoot at me, I reckon I’ll shoot back.”

  The next day I finally seen Custer. I was still there unofficially and could have strung along that way for quite a time in a camp of that size, where as I have said there was lots of civilians as wagon drivers and such, and I considered so doing, for I was an enemy in this midst and it seemed less like treason if I didn’t sign on for nothing. But then I thought that if I was around long enough, people would become aware I wasn’t attached to any of the various services and begin to ask questions. I was afraid my sympathies might show up in any prolonged conversation with a white man, for you couldn’t walk nowhere among that bunch without hearing how they was going to whip old Bull and his cutthroats, only good redskin was a dead one, etc. On that subject, the troopers would even forget their dislike of Custer and talk of what a fighter he was.

  Then I still never knowed what I intended to do. The
Indian camp had not yet been located, Major Reno and his command being out on a reconnaissance mission along the Tongue River at the moment to determine just that. I guess I had some vague plan when the village was found to slip off and get there before the troops and warn the hostiles, though it was too likely I would get killed long before contacting any Cheyenne who might recognize me.

  The best move at present seemed to be getting hired as scout, and that required an interview with Custer. General Terry might be in official command, but I got the impression that he did the talking while Custer acted.

  I went to the headquarters tent of Son of the Morning Star and bluffed my way past the orderly—a different man from the Washita striker—and walked inside to a little camp table, and there sat the General behind it, a-scribbling as usual. I don’t know that anyone has ever pointed out what a writer Custer was: letters to his wife most every day, and he also done a whole series of articles for the Galaxy magazine while in the field. I believe he was writing such now.

  He did look different with his long hair cropped off like a normal person’s, a little weaker maybe, but then that might have been only the superstition of Bloody Knife. However, I saw something else before he lifted his eyes to me. It was day outside, but he was using a candle as additional illumination, and as he was bent over his papers, the top of his hatless skull lay directly in my sight and there, on either side of a sparse yellow forelock, long spearpoints of pink skin run back almost to meet at the crown. Custer was getting bald.

  I felt a touch of human feeling for him on the sudden, which soon left while he made me stand there for quite a time without acknowledgment.

  At last he scratches in a full stop on his writing, and he waits for it to dry, lays aside his pen, then stares coldly at me.

  “State your business,” he says in that raspy voice I had not forgotten.

  “General,” I says, a-trying to keep down the distaste that had again replaced that short-lived other feeling, “I was wondering whether you could use another guide or interpreter. There is Cheyenne out there with the Sioux, and I lived among—”

  “No,” he says, and picking up his pen again, called: “Orderly, show this man out.”

  That trooper entered the tent and stood aside for me to exit, but I got sore and wouldn’t move and when he took ahold of my arm to assist my departure, I pushed him off and says: “Boy, you touch me again and I’ll lay you open with my pigsticker.”

  Custer looked up at that and broke out in a dry laugh with more air in it than sound.

  “You’re peppery, aren’t you?” he says. “I like that. All right, orderly, you can retire.” Which the trooper does, glowering at me. Then Custer settles back in his camp chair with a superior smile and says: “Now then, what makes you think you might be useful to me?”

  I was still riled, but I managed to mention some of my experiences with the Cheyenne while of course omitting everything about the Washita.

  “Oh, Cheyenne,” he broke in before I had got much out, “but not Sioux? Well, my good fellow, you are eight years late. As you may have heard, I trounced the Cheyenne in 1868 down in Indian Territory. You apparently do not keep up with things.”

  I tell you, it was his grin that burned me more than the substance of his comments, but I knowed that if I really let my temper go, I’d kill him.

  So I says, level as I could: “There’s still enough Cheyenne north of the Platte to give you a run for your money, especially if they have joined with the Lakota.”

  “Oh,” says he, “a few stragglers, perhaps, have made their way north to join these malcontents, but I can whip the whole lot with one troop of the Seventh—unless the Indian agents have managed to equip them with the latest Winchester repeating arms, in which case I shall need two troops. In my opinion, a better campaign might be waged against the latter gentry, the scoundrels who, on the one hand, speculate in the Indian annuities and, on the other, excuse and prevaricate about the depredations of the savages under their protection.”

  On this subject he become genuinely exercised, frowning beneath them heavy pale brows and nose getting real pointy. “I find it quite sinister,” he says, “that these men can connive—for that is what it amounts to—in the atrocities against their own countrymen. For example, the official at the Red Cloud Agency has been so lax with his barbarous charges that they lately, with murderous threats, frustrated his attempt to raise the American flag above his office!”

  Then he caught himself, as if realizing it was not proper form for a brevet major-general of the U.S. Army to address a common frontiersman with high emotion.

  “Well,” he says, “I suppose this is all Greek to you. I’m sorry that I cannot give you employment as guide, but you can give extremely valuable service as herder or teamster or whatever you now do. Not everybody can ride at the head of the column: the feet are no less useful than the eyes.”

  Now you won’t believe this, but it happened. I lost control at Custer’s dismissing me so, and before I knowed what I was doing, I says very distinct:

  “You bastard, I should have knifed you when I had the chance.”

  I was plumb full of horror once that expression was out—not because I feared for my well-being; no sir, I realized on the instant that now I would never get away to warn the Indians. I stood there for a time, the words still echoing in my head, and Custer says:

  “But thank you for coming forward. I like your ginger. We need have no doubt of the outcome when even the civilians wish to serve in the van.”

  He returned to his writing, and I left the tent. Custer had not heard my comment, spoke directly to his face! As regards the outside world, he was like a stuffed bird under one of them glass bells. His own opinion sufficed to the degree that he had no equipment for detecting exterior reactions. That’s the only way I can explain it.

  Anyhow, that’s why no roster of the men present at the Battle of the Little Bighorn ever contained my name. Custer thought I was a herder; and the herders and teamsters themselves figured I was an interpreter or guide, especially as I hung about a good deal with Lavender.

  It was while we was at this camp upon the Powder that the Seventh Cavalry stripped off its excess baggage. All sabers, for example, was crated up and left there, so them pictures of the Last Stand in which Custer waves his sword while the Indians swirl around him is lies. And that famous regimental band which had so tormented me upon the Washita, they had come this far from Fort Lincoln, but for once they would not accompany the attack. Their gray horses was needed for a number of troopers who had made the march on foot.

  A day or so later the rest of us moved forty mile up the Yellowstone to the mouth of the Tongue River. I got myself an Indian pony with a pad saddle and a rawhide halter from Bloody Knife, who had a few extra animals. As I recall the transaction, it cost me two or three canteenfuls of the sutler’s whiskey, not the worst deal, but then that pony had seen better days and wasn’t worth a whole lot more. He was a buckskin, right skinny and had a couple saddle sores, which I treated with an old Cheyenne remedy of boiled tobacco, bitter grass, animal fat, and salt.

  My last memory of the Powder River encampment is of the band, on a nearby bluff, playing for our march out. Naturally, their selection was “Garry Owen,” and it brung to my mind certain images of eight year before. I did not of course know that as the blare receded into the distance, it represented the fading out of Custer’s famous luck as well.

  I was riding at the rear, with the pack mules that had now replaced the wagons as supply train, and on ahead stretched the mighty blue column.

  CHAPTER 26 Trailing the Hostiles

  AT THE MOUTH OF THE TONGUE we found an abandoned Sioux village of the winter before, and the troopers poked about in it for trash, broken lodgepoles and the like, that they could use for campfires. Lavender found an old beat-up pair of discarded moccasins that he said he had known the owner thereof, recognizing the beading. I don’t know if he did or not, for he was getting gloomier as we proceeded w
estward and it may have affected his judgment.

  A little later he located a burial scaffold raised on poles painted black and red, the body still upon it in its funeral wrappings along with the other truck the Indians include with the deceased so he won’t be naked and helpless on the Other Side: bow, moccasins, and suchlike; and as I come up, Lavender was a-standing there, one side of his hatbrim blown up against the crown by the persistent wind, for it was upon a barren bluff, and a-staring at the platform with his mouth gone slack.

  Then up come some of the cavalrymen and tore down the scaffold for fuel and they took the moccasins and bow as souvenirs and left the body rest upon the bare ground. While this was going on, Lavender just stood to the side, and then he says to me: “I’m a-going fishing.” That’s what I mean by his getting queer.

  But the next moment Custer himself appeared upon his prancing mare with three white feet, what was called “Vic,” and he looks down upon the corpse and says to Lavender: “Uncover it.” Which my friend then did, upwrapping the skins, and inside was a dead Sioux brave all right, who had been dead for a while, no doubt about that, but you could still see a big wound in his shoulder.

  Custer says: “Dispose of it.” Lavender lifted it into his arms and carried it like you would a small living person, a child or a girl, except it was stiff and being withered never weighed much. Down to the bank of the Yellowstone he went and pitched it into the water.

  I figured the kind of person Custer was, he would not recognize me though we had the conversation recently, but I was wrong. He says: “Hello, teamster,” and I touched my hat to him, instinctively respectful. I wouldn’t have done it if I had thought about it, but the point is that when you were around Custer for a while, even if you hated his guts, you had to acknowledge that authority came natural to him.

  Next a soldier reported to the General that they had found the remains of a white man in the ashes of an old fire down in the campsite, so he spurred off on Vic, and as I was afoot, by the time I got there they had uncovered a skull and most of a skeleton, though the bones was all jumbled together, belonging apparently to a late member of the U.S. Cavalry, which could be told from the device upon a couple uniform buttons also in the same fire, and thereabout was some big stones and charred wood clubs with which he had been obviously beat to death. I saw the Ree scouts telling this to Custer in the signs.