Scarlet Plume, Second Edition

by Frederick Manfred

  Quickly he put on he did not know what she was about and managed to slide out from under her reaching lips and stand up with a slab of venison in hand.

  She yearned for him.

  He said, gently, “My helper is talking to me again. He warns me that a man who has been with a woman lately is prone to wounds. Arrows and bullets are drawn toward such a man. Mad Bear’s band is about.”

  A weakness swept over her. She staggered against him and clutched him about the hips.

  “We must be careful that we do not break some law that will cover the sun with blackness.”

  “Am I not an agreeable lover in your eyes?”

  “You are going toward the day. I am going toward the dark. Your people and my people were born too far apart.”

  “Then I am now dirt in your eyes?”

  “It is our times. Your time is one time and mine is another.”

  “I wish to teach my scarlet friend how to kiss.”

  “Kiss? What is kiss?”

  “Let us touch lips. When done in the proper manner it gives much pleasure.”

  Gravely he unclasped her arms.

  She sank to the ground.

  A cold draft woke her.

  It was night. She was lying on her matting of willow switches. Embers in the hearth fell into each other with soft, expiring sounds. There was a good wind out and it wrestled through the trees and sometimes it touched into the bower and brought out a dull orange blush in the graying ashes. She could smell Scarlet Plume’s buckskin odor behind her somewhere. She guessed he was sleeping.

  She felt forlorn.

  Everyone else had their proper place in the world, as if they truly belonged where they did—yes, even those in death like Theodosia and Angela. But she herself was a misfit. Unwanted. God had not really planned on having her around. No wonder the Yanktons had finally set her apart and made of her a goddess. She was better off dead.

  She begrudged her belly its delight with the red man.

  “I must be out of my mind thinking I can be in love with a Stone Age man. Ma always did say I was over-notional as a child.”

  For the thousandth time she picked at an old sore in her heart. She had never enjoyed bedding with Vince. It had always been a chore for her. Though truth to tell it had never been much of a delight for Vince either.

  The difference between Vince and Scarlet Plume was the difference between a dust rag and a scarf, the one made of old cheesecloth and the other of scarlet silk.

  Yet, plainly, by decree, her duty lay in St. Paul. Vince was still her husband under God, and she had better have a cozy home prepared for him when he returned from the wars. And perhaps have more babies with him to make up for the loss of Angela. She had made her bed, now she had better lie in it.

  She recalled one night in particular. . . .

  She and Vince were in bed together, breathing quietly, preparing themselves for sleep. She was about to drop off, when Vince’s hand came itching over under the covers.

  Her lips curled in disgust. She hated it when he came at her this way. It was so mouselike. Like some scared errand boy with a harelip. Vince sometimes not only bored her, he sometimes revolted her. She let her tongue play along the edge of her lips, until the tip of her tongue found the four black hairs on the upper lip.

  Vince’s hand went itching down her leg. Near her ankle it found the hem of her nightgown, then, still itching, it began to work up her leg, taking the nightgown with it, baring her thigh.

  “Don’t,” she said, flatly.

  “My precious pet. Mmm.”

  “Stop it.” With a quick motion she pushed her nightgown down.

  Presently the itching hand began to pull the nightgown up again.

  “I said don’t.”

  Vince lay still for a few seconds, very still, then brusquely, roughly, he grabbed hold of her nightgown and stripped her to her chin in one swift sweep of the hand under the covers.

  “Stop it, I said!” She tried to push her nightgown down again.

  Before she could stop him, Vince managed to get a lock on her and rolled her over on her belly. “This way, sweet,” he said, urgent. “My precious pet.”

  “No!”

  But Vince had her down. There was nothing she could do about it. He laughed a lover’s soft laugh in her ear. “You know what Lucretius says.”

  “I don’t care what he or any of those dirty old Latins say. Including even Caesar Augustus. I don’t want to and that’s final.”

  “Come, my precious pet.”

  “And I certainly don’t want to that way. Never. Disgusting!” With a sudden lashing of her long legs she tried to break free.

  But for all his soft white clerk’s hands, Vince was still the stronger, and he held her down. The soft, wallowing featherbed under them didn’t help any either. All her squirmings to avoid his thrusting only served to help him. He got both knees between her legs and held them forcibly apart.

  “Vince,” she hissed, “you crazy jackass you!”

  “Wives conceive more readily in the manner of wild beasts.”

  “But I don’t want any more children. One is enough. You agreed to that too.”

  “After the custom of the four-footed breeds. Because so postured, with the breasts beneath and the buttocks upreared, the seed can take its proper place.”

  “Angela will hear us.”

  “Judy, darling. Oh, darling. You’re wonderful.”

  She bucked him off. She was furious. A couple of times before, he had talked her into this manner of lovemaking, but she hated it. It made her sick to her stomach. She would not let herself be mounted like some mare of the field. The other way, face to face, was the human, dignified way.

  In addition to being a lecherous devil, Vince was also old-fashioned. He wanted her to lie placid, and on her belly. It was her business, he said, to lie still and be calm about the whole thing. Here he quoted Lucretius again. “The woman hinders her own conception if, with haunches heaving and all her bosom yielding like the billows of the sea, she treats the Venus of the man too joyously. Aye, she throws the plowshare’s even course from the furrow and diverts the spurt of seed away from its proper place. Courtesans are wont to move for their own ends to keep from pregnancy, all the while they render the Venus of the man the more pleasure. This our wives have not need of.”

  “You know you hate having children of your own,” Judith hissed, face pressed into her pillow. “You hate Angela. Why do you want more?”

  “I didn’t say I wanted more,” Vince whispered.

  “Well, then why this way?”

  “It’s that I want the pleasure of pretending to want more.”

  “Get off.”

  But Vince was not to be denied this night. He seized her just above the hips so that her rearing motion served his end all the better. His breath came hoarse in her ear.

  Finally, tiring of the struggle, she let him have his way.

  “Oh, Judy, Judy,” he gasped, thick with fulfillment. “Judith!”

  After a bit, Angela called in the dark from her bed, “Mama, why is Papa puffing so?”

  “Oh!” Judith was shocked to learn that Angela had heard them.

  Vince, still lying on her back, let go a final groan of pleasure. “My precious pet.”

  “Why is Papa puffing so?” Angela asked again.

  Judith burned. Baring her teeth in the dark, she said, “Oh, it’s nothing. Just that your Papa has a bad heart. Go to sleep now, child. . . .”

  It was morning when Judith awoke again. The sun was shining through the wide doorway. Scarlet Plume had a spanking fire going. A wonderful smell of meat soup and broiling venison drifted through the bower.

  A black spider with a red belly hung from a piece of bark just above her. It seemed to be bouncing in the air, up and down, and up again. She couldn’t make out the thread it hung from. It was a good fat spider and she wondered if it was poisonous. Pioneers often talked about seeing deadly black widow spiders in the woods.

/>   Her head itched. On both sides and especially over the temples.

  Cautiously she drew a catching fingernail through her long, loose hair, hard across the scalp. She examined the fingernail. Yes, there was one. Infinitely tiny legs wriggling. Lord, they were back. She killed it between her thumbnails. It made a light crack of a sound.

  Scarlet Plume spoke directly above her head. He was kneeling behind her. “Sometimes when one is very weak the little creatures awaken out of one’s skin like little drops of sweat.”

  She felt humiliated that she had been caught unclean. “It is because your people are lousy.”

  “The old and dying ones sometimes have them.”

  “And not the young and the healthy?”

  He said, surprised, “But the Yankton grooms his neighbor’s hair after the daily morning bath. How can this be?”

  She twitched under her wolfskin cover.

  Gently, with warm, firm hands, he lifted her by the shoulders onto his thighs so that sunlight fell on her gold hair, then began to search her scalp.

  She liked lying on his taut, vibrant copper thigh.

  He searched diligently.

  After some moments, she asked, “Well, are there more?”

  “There are none. He was the last. Even as the Yankton.”

  Once more, suddenly, irresistibly, she found herself desiring him. She felt a contraction in her womb and a swelling in her breasts. She wanted to go to that place that far. He-han.

  She turned on his copper thigh and reached up and with naked arms embraced him. The faintest of luring smiles gleamed within her half-dropped eyelash.

  He sat immobile. Presently large, warm tears fell on her exposed breast. He was crying copious tears upon her in the ancient Sioux manner.

  She didn’t know what to do. A grown man crying tears on her when her own thoughts were already too dark for tears?

  Above her the black spider with the red dot in its belly retreated upward, taking in its own thread as it went. When its hairy black legs touched bark, it turned over and in two quick rowing motions vanished.

  The thought flashed through her mind that she should grab Scarlet Plume’s knife and cut her own throat. Because she was caught no matter what she did. She couldn’t, really, live with his people, nor he with hers. Scarlet Plume had been born to the wrong people at the wrong time. “I’ll never again have a single happy moment. Ever.”

  At the same time memory of that wonderful burning moment when Scarlet Plume’s thrusting had brought her to fulfillment also flamed in her mind. Why was devil’s work so enticing and God’s work so forbidding? Why couldn’t it be the other way around? Perhaps Scarlet Plume was right when he said the whites were upside down in their thinking. Truly. Maybe the white man had the wrong names for his gods.

  Her eye fell on an odd growth at the end of one of the hackberry branches in the wall of the bower. She had noted such tufted growths before. Her mother called them witchbrooms or hexenbesen. The abnormal growths always reminded her of a woman with a mustache. It was out of place. Like her own four black hairs were on her upper lip. Everyone else might seem proper to the world but not a woman with a mustache. Misfit.

  Vince had been wrong for her too. Pa had put his finger on it, exactly, when he said, “Child, marry him, if that’s your mind. But don’t come whimperin’ back to me a year from now when you find he ain’t much of a man. I saw him driving a team of horses to town the other day. Give them horses a week and they’ll be his boss.”

  At the same time Vince had represented the finer things of life. Things she thought she couldn’t do without. Music. Theater. Books. High talk.

  “When I am not in love I am nothing.”

  She stared wide-eyed at the little jumping fire. Reveries moved in her eye like clouds across a valley.

  She had suffered cruelly at the hands of the Indians. Yet the sheen of an idyll lay upon the harrowing times she had had with them. Shimmering images floated across her vision. She saw again with moving, even terrible nostalgia, the night when Whitebone momentarily went berserk in grief over his lost wife, the evening when Scarlet Plume impregnated a wooden effigy with his will power and made it dance on a little mound of sand, the night when Scarlet Plume with risen phallus danced up the buffalo, the day of the gory buffalo jump and the shouting of the little children when the hunting party brought home the game, the day when Smoky Day died, followed by the giveaway dance, the haunting ceremony of the Virgin’s Feast, and then the day she swam alone in the pink pool in the Dells. Already she felt more lonesome for those days with the Yanktons in Siouxland than for all her days with the whites in St. Paul.

  The Yankton custom of giving she would never forget. Did one family have good luck in the hunt, then it was immediately shared with the neighbors. They lived together as sharing members of one big family and against the world. Yankton life was devoted to the sheer joy of living, not to getting.

  The Yanktons had no property, no gold stored in temples. Yet their sense of wealth was profound. They shared freely what they found to hand.

  They had no records. Yet their sense of history was profound. They not only loved their own children, if such there were, but all children.

  They had no clocks. Yet their sense of time was profound. They lived spontaneous from moment to moment, a wandering across a flowering prairie.

  Scarlet Plume’s tears continued to fall on her naked breast.

  She considered his strange crying. It was not the usual kind of weeping. It was not personal. It was more as if a tribe, a history, were using him to weep.

  She thought, “How stupid of the white man. When he came upon this Eden prairie, why did he take by force what he could have had by love?”

  In the midst of her thoughts, there was suddenly a strange wild strangled cry outside. It came from the bluff across the stream. It was as if a woman were struggling with all her might to keep from being choked to death.

  Scarlet Plume’s thigh stiffened under Judith. He grunted, short, then lifted her to one side. With the fluid motion of a puma he moved to the entrance. Head up, eyes glittering, he listened, so intently that his ears seemed to quiver. He reached for his spear and a new war shield he’d just made.

  Judith grabbed up her wolfskin and cowered under it.

  Again the eerie caterwauling wail floated down to them.

  “Ho-uh-kah.” He spoke to himself, with a low, guttural sound. “It is intended to be the voice of the terrible cat, the puma. Yet the puma does not prowl while the sun shines.”

  Judith shivered with fear.

  Calmly he set his spear and shield to one side. “It is not the true puma. It is the enemy. Only an outcast Dakota would be so foolish as to make the call of the puma while the sun shines.” He turned to Judith. “Woman, we must be swift. They will soon be upon us and find you.”

  He rolled up the matting on the floor directly in front of the fire, spread out the fresh deerhide to one side, then with clawing hands began to dig a hole in the ground, heaping it onto the deerhide. He dug faster than she had ever seen a dog dig. Dirt flew. The hole deepened rapidly. Yet for all the furious digging not a particle of the flying earth fell anywhere but on the deerhide.

  Huddled in shock, she asked, “Wh-what are you doing?”

  A few more handfuls and he was done. He jerked the wolfskin from her, then took hold of her roughly and lifted her naked into the hole. He pressed her down firmly. “Fold thyself,” he commanded, urgent. “Make yourself small, woman. I will cover you with branches and this wolfskin, and then sit on thee as though this was my accustomed place before the fire.”

  She protested, struggling. “But what about all that dirt? Won’t they see that?”

  “It shall be wrapped up in the deerhide as though it were a huge parfleche of pemmican.”

  “But—”

  “Down, woman, if you would save your life.” His eyes glittered blackly down at her. “Scarlet Plume commands. I have sworn to my helper to deliver you safely to you
r people in the white cities.” He grabbed her by the neck and the knees and folded her together, so tight her spine cracked. Her chin became caught between her knees and she couldn’t move. Dirt crumbled off the sides of the hole and got into her eyes. Loose dirt also filled in around her nates and in between the slopes of her thighs. Scarlet Plume swiftly crisscrossed some branches over her, covered them with her wolfskin. She was abruptly plunged into black choking darkness. With a thump he settled himself directly above her. He sat heavy on her, crushing her down. Then, after he had tied up the deerhide of dirt, he waited, very still.

  “But I shall choke to death,” she whimpered under him. “I cannot breathe in here.”

  “Does Sunned Hair wish to have Mad Bear count a bull’s coup on her again, the white man’s way?”

  Swallowing back a groan, she suffered it. The loose earth was warm and pressed in on her.

  She could feel him stir above her. Presently she smelled tobacco smoke. She understood. Should anyone stumble in on him they would find him having a quiet smoke by himself.

  Scarlet Plume did not have long to wait. There was a cough outside. Then another. Footfalls sounded almost in her ear, a pair of them. She could sense the two strangers standing inside the door, examining Scarlet Plume. She heard them sit down across the fire.

  A heavy voice finally said, “Does Scarlet Plume have a second belly that we do not see? There is overmuch warm food.”

  She recognized the voice instantly. Mad Bear. As Scarlet Plume had guessed. A prickling charge as of electricity bumped through her.

  Scarlet Plume said gravely, “The stranger is always welcome at my fire. Take the food and divide it between you. You have come a long way and are very hungry. It shall make me happy to see you eat it. I have much meat.”

  Mad Bear grunted.

  The other stranger spoke. “Do we not smell a woman about?”

  Judith also instantly recognized that voice. Bone Gnawer. The fiendish renegade who had raped Angela. Another prickling, of sudden raging hate, bumped through her. She longed to get her claws on him. Scratch out his eyeballs. Rip off his testicles. She swallowed, swallowed, sure she would strangle to death with her nose so tight between her knees. She knew the click of her swallowing might be heard but she didn’t care. She longed to kill that monster Bone Gnawer. Darling Angela lying on her back, golden legs and slim child arms outflung and tied to stakes driven into the ground, silver-blond hair outspread upon the green grass, crude surgery performed on her to accommodate grown men and her body then brutally violated by God only knew how many bullish savages . . . O Lord, how long?