A Good Man

by Guy Vanderhaeghe

  A wary intelligence glimmered in Sitting Bull’s eyes. “And what is the reason for this disappointment?”

  “Major Walsh believed he could make the Grandmother’s counsellors understand that they were treating your people harshly. Even when it was clear they would not listen to the truth, Walsh would not relent. He would not leave them alone. Then they told him they would never let him talk to the President for you, nor would they allow him to ask the Grandmother to give you a reservation. These things would never be permitted. They told Walsh he must do only what he was told and nothing more.” Case paused, trying to discern if what he was relating was being taken in by Bull, but the deeply lined face remained impassive. “So you see,” he said, “those above Walsh tell him everything he did was wrong. But he will not agree with them. He says he did only what was right.”

  Bull nodded and gravely said, “So the strong-hearted horse gallops as he chooses. I am pleased to hear that. It is not just that any man should be harnessed to the wagon.”

  “And because he will not quietly pull the wagon where they want it to go, soon they will drive him out of the Grandmother’s police. It is only a matter of time before they do that.”

  Sitting Bull sat quietly for some moments. Whatever his thoughts were it was evident they disturbed him. The little boy shifted nearer to his side and scowled at Case, as if issuing a warning to stop troubling his father.

  At last Bull said, “Because he was my friend they do not trust him.”

  “Yes. The Grandmother’s counsellors have long memories. There is nothing they dislike more than proud, stubborn people who will not bow their heads to them and agree with everything they say. Those who don’t, pay the price. So will Walsh.”

  “Perhaps you believe Long Lance had to sacrifice too much for the sake of friendship.”

  Case thought of Joe, his crushed leg. How he struggled to mount a horse now, of the agonized hitch to his gait. He thought of Ada waking in a slippery nightmare-sweat, how she cried out, terrified just as he was terrified when he dreamed of Pudge. Ada said it was Dunne’s face in the blue moonlight, the joyful look that filled it even as the life drained out of him, the strange ecstasy written there that haunted her, troubled her more than any reproachful, condemning gaze ever could. Case knew the steep price that Joe and Ada had paid to save him, was reminded of it every day when he saw Joe crossing the yard in the morning, leaning on a stick because his leg stiffened in the night, or when he walked into the parlour and discovered his wife sitting with a dazed, murky expression on her face, reliving that snowy night almost four years ago when she and Joe had come to deliver him from his captor.

  Case said, “It is not for me to say whether Walsh sacrificed too much for you. There was a time I thought that when two people were on different sides of a dangerous river, they should not try to cross it. I advised him to consider his actions very carefully, not to put himself at risk. It was wrong of me to ask him to go against his nature. But now the Grandmother’s counsellors have sent him to a little room in a little town. That is no place for a man like Walsh. He is very angry with the men that put him there.”

  “I would not like to be those men. I have seen Long Lance angry. Sometimes he was angry with me.” Sitting Bull smiled at Case with gentle irony. “That is sometimes how it is with strong-willed men. They knock heads.” He tapped out the ashes of his pipe on the floorboards. “I remember how in the first hungry spring in the Grandmother’s country, Black Moon, Four Horns, and I went to Long Lance at the post in Willow Bunch. All the children had empty bellies. I said the Grandmother was rich and we were poor. I asked him, ‘What Grandmother does not reach into her pot and give her children food when her pot is full of meat?’ I spoke to him impolitely because I thought of the children crying for food in our tipis.” Bull rested his hand on his boy’s shoulder and fell silent for a moment. “I believe that day Long Lance was sick with the sweating sickness,” he said.

  “St. Anthony’s fire,” Case offered.

  When Allison translated for Case, Bull nodded. “Yes, the Fire Sickness. One time when he visited my camp I saw how it came on him and how his body burned. It gnawed his bones. He had fever one moment and shook with cold the next. I think that day at Willow Bunch he suffered from it and it put him in a fierce mood. He answered me rudely. He said I gave him nothing but trouble. My young men stole horses from the Americans and then he had to spend weeks in the saddle looking for them. He said if I was not careful of the way I spoke to him, he would put me in irons and lock me up in jail. I did not like to be threatened that way. Before I knew it, I drew my pistol and waved it in his face. But he caught my wrist, pushed me out the door, and threw me down in the dust outside. My mouth was full of dirt and that was a bad, bitter taste to me. I had eaten too much of the white man’s dirt. I started to get up, ready to kill him, but he kicked me down again. Then Four Horns and Black Moon took hold of my arms so I could not shoot Long Lance. I struggled with them against the wall of his cabin and we broke a window. I lost my heart fighting my friends and I sank to the ground. Long Lance stood over me, trembling with the Fire Sickness, shouting at me.

  “I got to my feet and went away without speaking a word to him. Back at my camp, all the young men cried out that Long Lance should be punished for what he had done to me. My blood was still very strong and wild so we got our weapons and ponies and went back to show Long Lance that he must not deal with us in such a way. He and twelve of his men were standing before their post. Long Lance had laid corral rails on the ground. He shouted to me that if we crossed over those rails, he would shoot us down like dogs. That was a foolish thing to say because there were many more of us than twelve, and if he fired on us I would not be able to stop the young men from killing all the Old Woman’s pony soldiers. I could see how afraid Long Lance’s men were. They were ready to run.

  “I told the young men to let me go alone. I had a good horse. I e at a hard gallop right at the poles, but at the last moment I jerked my pony up, stopped just before the place Long Lance said I must not go beyond.” He shook his head as if trying to dislodge that memory. “I stopped because I knew he would not have hesitated to shoot me. He would have thought it weak not to do as he had sworn to do. But at the last moment, I saw what would come of riding past the poles he had put on the ground. We could have killed them all that day, but once that was done, my people would be caught between wolves. The Americans on one side, the British on the other. And who would suffer the most? The women, the children, the old people. They would be torn to pieces by the wolves. That is why I stopped my horse.” A look of sorrow settled on Bull’s face. “Sometimes, I think that is when my people began to lose faith in me. They thought I did not kill Long Lance because I had lost my courage. Is that why Rain in the Face, Gall, even my own daughter decided to leave me? Did they think I was too weak, and because I was weak there was no hope for us?”

  Bull’s expression pleaded with Case for an answer to his questions. Even the child beside him seemed to be intently awaiting his reply.

  “No,” said Case, “it is because they could not bear to starve and suffer any longer. But it is also true that it is hard to see the difference between wisdom and weakness. To stop before you reached those poles, that was a strong thing to do. You checked yourself for the sake of your people.”

  “In the old days I would not have done it,” said Bull, sounding a little doubtful, a little regretful.

  “Perhaps you do not remember something you said to me that night we first met. You told me not to try to turn Walsh away from you, but instead to turn myself – seek the way I should go. That is what you did when you faced Walsh across the poles. You turned yourself away from a foolish thing and took a better path.”

  Before Bull could reply there was a rap at the door. Allison opened it. A sergeant poked his head inside. “Captain says all visitors off the boat directly. We set off soon.”

  “All right,” said Case, rising from the bunk. “I will write to Walsh
and tell him everything that has passed between us here. Is there anything you wish to say to him?”

  Bull clipped the goggles back on and lifted himself up off the floor. His son stood too, as if he were the tiny shadow of his father. Bull stretched out two hands and clasped Case’s hand between them. “If you see Long Lance shake his hand like this. Tell him this is the way I wish to say goodbye to him. His hand between both of mine.”

  “Yes,” said Case, “if Walsh and I ever meet again, I will shake his hand exactly as you have shown me.”

  Bull said, “I will come with you a little ways.” He and his son followed Case and Allison up on deck. All four stood at the railing, feeling the breeze, a pleasant relief from the oppressive heat of the cabin. Case looked down, watching the river insistently tugging at the sides of the vessel. Bull said, “The Long Knives are taking me down the river. No one has told me where it is I am going.”

  Case drifted into a reverie. He was remembering those teas at the Literary Society presided over by old Sutherland, professor of Greek. Sutherland had liked nothing better than to talk about tragedy, to define it for them, to hold forth on the different varieties of it, Greek and Shakespearean. He could fill an afternoon piling up subtle distinctions. One day, Pudge Wilson had suddenly roused himself and said, “Courage in the face of certain defeat – that’s what tragedy is.” It was Case’s best memory of his old friend.

  He contemplated Bull, who had no idea where he was being taken. A man in the grip of the river and in the hands of the men steering him down it. Next spring, maybe the spring after, Case meant to drive his cattle north over the border, to good grazing. There he, his family, and Joe would settle in a land from which Walsh and Bull had been banished. He knew that, in some way, he would never be able to shake the feeling that that country would always be theirs, not his.

  Suddenly Crow Foot gave a cry, breaking into his thoughts. His finger was pointing to the sky. Case followed it and saw a red kite swooping, swinging like a demented pendulum across the blue expanse. He turned his eyes to a level stretch of bank a hundred yards off where Ada was running, skirts fluttering as she clung to the kite string; their son was stumbling after her, his hands held high as if he were straining to seize the bright red piece of darting paper. Joe, with his halting gait, was following them, shouting with glee, brandishing a stick above his head.

  When Case learned that Sitting Bull was to be displayed at Bismarck, he decided that his family should accompany him there. A change of scene, an outing to a town with so many civilized amenities would do them all good. This morning he had spied the kite in a shop window and bought it for his son, Edwin. All day the boy had been waiting impatiently to see it fly, his mother counselling patience. “We need a breeze. We need a breeze,” she had murmured to the boy.

  Now at the end of day the breeze had come; it was wrinkling the Missouri, herding the clouds before it. Case leaned his elbows on the gunwales and watched the trio chase the wind, chase the kite, chase whatever it was they were pursuing.

  Bull lifted up his little son above the gunwales so he could see everything better. The antics he was witnessing seemed to baffle the boy’s father. He turned to Case and asked, “What are those people doing? What is the purpose of that thing?”

  Case heard Crow Foot laugh. He saw the boy’s hands were raised high above his head, that he was reaching upward, just as his own son was doing.

  “The purpose of that thing?” said Case. “Joy. Nothing but pure joy.”

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  It is impossible for me to acknowledge all of the works consulted during the writing of this novel, but I would like to make mention of a few in particular: Robert M. Utley’s The Lance and the Shield: The Life and Times of Sit

  ting Bull (Ballantine Books, 1993); Ian Anderson’s Sitting Bull’s Boss: Above the Medicine Line with James Morrow Walsh (Heritage House, 2000); Captain John A. Macdonald’s Troublous Times in Canada: A History of the Fenian Raids of 66 and 1870 (W.S. Johnson and Co., 1910); J.A. Cole’s Prince of Spies: Henri Le Caron (Faber and Faber, 1984); Hereward Senior’s The Fenians and Canada (Macmillan of Canada, 1978) as well as his The Last Invasion of Canada: The Fenian Raids, 1866–1870 (Dundurn Press, 1991); editor Jerome A. Greene’s Battles and Skirmishes of the Great Sioux War, 1876–1877: The Military View (University of Oklahoma Press, 1993); Hugh A. Dempsey’s Firewater: The Impact of the Whisky Trade on the Blackfoot Nation (Fifth House, 2002); and Evan S. Connell’s Son of the Morning Star: Custer and the Little Bighorn (Harper Perennial, 1991).

  I would like to especially thank my editor, Ellen Seligman, and my agent, Dean Cooke, for the generous advice and encouragement they have provided me over many years. I also wish to thank the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation for the Fellowship which they granted me and which was of great assistance while I finished this book.