Red Cloud wished to return to Washington and the Great White Father reluctantly agreed to see him. Plenty Cuts expected to go as the Chief’s interpreter, but Red Cloud invited the half-breed Rivière to accompany him. Plenty Cuts said he hadn’t wanted to go, that he’d had his fill of the white man and white man’s villages, and She Goes Before told everyone her husband spoke the truth.
A week after Red Cloud departed, Plenty Cuts went hunting alone, as was his custom now White Bull was gone. He rode east and south onto the high grasslands where the buffalo had been so plentiful some herds had taken three days to pass.
Twenty miles from the Sod Agency, the grass had recovered and his pony dropped his head to snatch at it. Plenty Cuts rode thoughtlessly. Insects lifted ahead of him and small animals ran through the understory, invisible beneath waving bluestem that touched his pony’s withers.
Pollen and seed heads coated the pony’s flanks and Plenty Cuts’s legs and moccasins. An ocean of grass stretched for miles to the western snowcapped mountains. He didn’t see any buffalo.
That night he camped on Horse Creek. He caught two trout, gutted them, and wrapped them in wet grass before he bathed. He sat naked before his fire until he dried. He tossed some kinnikinnick, Indian tobacco, into the fire.
Patience descended upon him. His hobbled pony spattered droppings. He ate his fish. The creek chuckled. Sap popped in his fire. The stars rolled overhead as they always had.
The next day, when he came to the water tower beside the Union Pacific track, at first he thought he’d found a snowbank. So late in the season? So far from the mountains? Was the white man hauling snow to the railroad so passangers could eat ice cream crossing the plains?
One wagon was departing and another was unloading bones as Plenty Cuts approached the snowbank: an eight-foot-high mound of buffalo bones, a hundred feet long glistening in the noonday sun.
A bearded man whose authority was belied by his filthy clothing stood in the shade of the water tower while a sweating teamster shoveled and hurled bones onto the pile. “Get me another load by Tuesday, Henry,” he encouraged, “and you’ll have two more dollars.”
He glanced at Plenty Cuts and addressed him in a confidential tone. “There’s fortunes to be made for any man who ain’t afraid of hard work.”
Plenty Cuts frowned.
“God’s truth, pilgrim. Buff bones are bringing six dollars a ton in Omaha. They grind ’em up. Oh, they say buff bones is the best fertilizer what is. They say they’ll turn a New Hampshire farm green again, though”—he shook his head—“I misdoubt that, seein’ as I was born and reared in the Granite State.”
For the first time he seemed to truly see his visitor. “Jesus,” he said. “You’re Lakota.” He squinted. “No, you ain’t. You’re a nigger. Can’t be both, which is it.”
Plenty Cuts dismounted and led his horse to the watering trough under the tall wooden tower.
The teamster wrestled a skull from his wagon and dropped it with a crash. “Two bucks ain’t enough, Posey. Hell, it took me two days to find these.”
“I’ll be movin’ west Wednesday, soon as these are picked up. Archer stationmaster will tell you where to bring ’em.”
To Plenty Cuts he added, “This country here was prime pickin’. Gentleman hunters shootin’ from the train was a bonanza for the workin’ man, but my gatherers got to go farther now.” He sighed philosophically. “I expect my price will go up once the easy pickin’s are gone. Which did you say you were?”
“Didn’t.”
“Well, you sure look like a nigger, but you’re dressed like a redskin.” He gestured at Plenty Cuts’s breechclout and high moccasins. “Maybe you’re a breed?” The man hitched himself onto the bone pile and offered snuff. Plenty Cuts shook his head.
The sweaty teamster brought his wagon around and the buyer gave him his pay.
“Scrip!”
“Ain’t got no silver, Henry. Course, if you’d rather have my IOU . . .”
The teamster snorted and stuffed the bills into his shirt pocket. “See you in Archer, Posey, ” and he drove off.
Posey turned to Plenty Cuts. “Well, whatever you are, you can gather bones and I reckon in that outfit you can get ’em where honest white men fear to tread. I hear the Powder River country is a treasure trove. A real treasure trove.”
He wiped his forehead with a surprisingly clean gingham handerchief. “Hot, ain’t it? I swear these bones draw heat.”
PLENTY CUTS LED his pony over the iron rails and the ties. He wondered how many forests it took to carry a railroad from the Atlantic to the Pacific.
Night was falling when he made camp in the sandy bottom where Lodgepole Creek ran, fifteen feet wide here, clear and cold from the distant mountain snows. It was grassland; no trees anywhere. Though there was driftwood on the stream banks, he didn’t make a fire. He had food in his parfleche but wasn’t hungry.
Plenty Cuts was not a reflective man. His instincts had never betrayed him. Often, more thought and slower reactions would have left him dead.
Tonight, his mind was as big as the universe, as big as the whiteness of sun-bleached bones.
Sitting cross-legged in the sand, in the twilight, he started composing a letter to his friend. “Jesse, I guess it’s all over out here.” He paused to reconsider. “Friend Jesse, I surely hope things are well with you and your good wife.” He tried in vain to remember her name.
A strange memory intruded: what he’d said about women in Texas, that day they were discharged, how there were plenty of them, “plenty of fish in the sea.”
“Jesus,” he said aloud. His pony lifted its head at his voice but resumed grazing.
“I ain’t doin’ so good. Me and She Goes Before and Tazoo came in to the indian Agency. We get treated like we was idiot children. Feed us, pat us on the head, but don’t make trouble.”
Scratch that! Whatever he’d been, whatever he’d done, he’d never been a whiner.
“Nelson Story would have favored this land, Jesse. Good grass, good water, and no buffalo to eat the grass and the redskins locked up in the agencies. Oh, there’s loose ones in the north around the Powder River and Yellowstone, but both sides of the Union Pacific is white man’s country now.
“I believe Ol’ Massa done caught up with me. Seems I can’t get away from Massa no matter how far I run.
“Jesse, do you ever wish you were back in the army? When I think back on it, the army was the best I ever done. How about you?
“Or are you still a race man? Are you still hope-sick?”
That coinage pleased even as it shamed him. What if one’s direst predictions came true? What kind of man could take pleasure in them?
Man like him, maybe.
Man like him.
He blinked and rubbed his eyes. The moon was up and the shallow creek shone like a silver ribbon.
“Friend Jesse, I thought I might see you again in Washington City, but Red Cloud took somebody else. I guess I told Red Cloud one truth too many.”
“I guess I don’t like the truth any better than he does.
“So here’s the truth: I do not wish to lie with my wife anymore. I do not wish to do anything. I wish only to eat and sleep.”
God Damned moonlight in his eyes. So bright it made him weep.
He stood and rubbed his arm across his face and, putting a finger to each nostril, blew snot onto the sand.
The hell with this damned letter. Who would he get to write it for him anyway?
TWO DAYS LATER, Plenty Cuts returned to the Agency empty-handed. He did not tell She Goes Before about the buffalo bones piled like a snowbank, though he dreamed about them.
Red Cloud came back from Washington, without significant concessions. Despite this, he sent a message to Sitting Bull and the other chiefs who hadn’t come in to the Agency. Red Cloud said, “I shall not go to war anymore with whites. Make no trouble for our Great White Father. His heart is good. Be friends to him and he will provide for you.”
&n
bsp; It wasn’t known what Sitting Bull thought of this message, since he did not reply.
We had come in because there was no game on the plains and here, at least, Tazoo could eat.
In the warm months some familes roamed the country as the Lakota had always done. In winter, they’d come in for the Agency rations. When I suggested we might too, Plenty Cuts told me, “It don’t make no difference what we do.”
When I asked him why, he said, “Might as well get used to the Agency. Here’s where we’re gonna be until we die. We’re all blanket indians now.”
I said it didn’t matter that Red Cloud hadn’t chosen him. The young men didn’t respect Red Cloud anymore.
My husband listened as an adult listens to a child prattling.
My husband did not hunt. He rose long after the sun rose. He forgot to wash and sometimes he smelled bad. He did not lie with me. He would watch the young men playing the wheel and arrow game, trying to toss an arrow through a beaded wheel. In the evenings he went to the lodges where the gamblers played the bone game, singing and striking the ground with their sticks while the gambler considered his guess. My husband never gambled; he watched. I feared he might take his own life.
I went to Shivering Aspen, the wintke, for advice and told him everything.
He said I must pretend to be cheerful even when I was not and must not complain, no matter what Plenty Cuts said or did.
The wintke said that I must not feed my husband’s demon.
The wintke prepared a lotion I was to rub between my breasts and on my upper thighs. He told me to bathe, anoint myself, and surprise my sleeping husband with caresses on a night when the moon was full and the canvas walls of our tipi glowed with light.
In the Moon of Ripening Plums, I anointed myself and caressed my husband awake and we lay together and everything was as it had been between us.
In the morning, he told me he had been sick but now he was well. He went to the sweat lodge and fasted. He prayed for success in the hunt. His voice was strained, like a singer’s who has not been singing much lately.
He took his rifle, his best pony, and a packhorse into the mountains where the blackhorns had always been numerous.
He was gone ten days and when he returned he had one small parfleche on his packhorse. “The railroad’s through the mountains too,” he told me. “The blackhorns are bones.”
He emptied his parfleche onto the dirt. His bullets had shattered five prairie dogs into bone shards, blood, and fur.
I said brightly, “I will clean them and make a stew. Fresh meat will taste good.”
My husband turned over one of the small broken animals with his foot. “I ain’t nothin’ but a nigger pretendin’ he’s a redskin. I ain’t nothin’ in the world.”
CHAPTER 48
A CADAVER
WHEN THE LEGISLATURE WAS IN SESSION, JESSE BURNS WAS “the Right Honorable Delegate from the Marshall Ward,” a tireless advocate for free public education. On the House Internal Improvements Committee (the Railroad Committee) he voted as General Mahone’s agent, Colonel Elliot, told him to. Jesse’s five dollars a day when the legislature was in session and four dollars janitor’s pay when not was more cash money than he’d ever had in his life—more money than he’d thought existed. After Sudie complained that her coffeepot was “plumb wore out,” Jesse walked into a hardware store on his way home that evening and paid cash for a fine blue enamel pot.
He and Sudie rented three ground-floor rooms on First Street: the parlor, hall, and butler’s pantry of an ancient, neglected family home. Two other negro families were on their floor, but they used the back door and the old walls were so thick, Jesse and Sudie never heard them. It was as if they had a house of their own. The butler’s pantry became Sudie’s tiny kitchen, Jimson slept in the hall, and the front parlor, with its grand windows and elaborate cornices above faded, faintly voluptuous French wallpaper, was their and baby Sojourner’s bedroom. Sudie thought it was the “grandest room I’ve ever been in,” and Jesse thought it was grand too.
During the War, the Richmond Customs House had housed the Confederate Treasury and President Davis had had an office on the second floor. Although Jesse kept his clothes in a basement locker he shared with two other janitors, sometimes just walking into that important structure on a brisk spring morning made him proud.
Times were hard. The tobacco warehouses only hired white men and many Virginia negroes had returned to the plantations they’d worked before the War.
Throughout the South, white Republicans were appointed postmasters and clerks and mail carriers. Even the crew of the Customs steam launch were party loyalists. After Jesse’s trip to Washington, the Customs Inspector suspected Jesse might have some influence and Jesse did nothing to disabuse him of that idea. The Inspector apologized for the poor patronage he could give Jesse: one job on Mahone’s track gang.
Jimson sneered at it. “That’s nigger work. Ain’t seein’ no white men layin’ track.”
“Yes,” Jesse explained as if to a child. “You may have noticed that we are not white men. We are colored men striving for equality. We have made progress. We can vote and there are negroes in the United States Congress. But until the day of Jubilo, Jimson, we have to earn our bread by the sweat of our brow. Many grown men would be grateful for a job laying track.”
Honestly puzzled, Jimson shook his head. “Damn, Jesse! I helped you get elected. You can’t do no better for me than that?”
“Your mother hates to hear you curse.”
Anger chased surprise across the boy’s face. He snapped, “Well . . . Well, then . . . the hell with her!” and stormed out the door. When Jimson came home, three days later, he was wearing the clothes he’d worn when he left and Jesse didn’t ask where he’d been. Jesse thought Jimson needed a lengthy, reasoned talking-to, but he deferred to the boy’s mother, who begged, “Don’t bother him none, Jesse. He eighteen years old. He a man now! Don’t make my son less than who he is!”
JIMSON WAS SULLEN and silent. Jesse was offended and silent.
Thanksgiving Sunday, Richmond’s churches tolled worshippers to church. Although Jimson rarely attended, somehow Jesse had assumed Jimson would accompany them that day. Sudie was dressing Sojourner in a new blue frock when Jesse heard the front door creak and he caught Jimson going out. “Don’t you think it’s time you start making something of yourself?”
“Like you done?” Jimson raised a young man’s contemptuous eyebrow. “Yeah, you so damn smart. You can read and write good as any white man, so you a janitor cleanin’ up white men’s messes. When you was elected I thought you was gonna be somethin’.”
In the weeks to come, Jesse would consider and reconsider what he might have said. Should he have humbled himself, or appealed to the boy’s better nature?
But that morning the Right Honorable Member from the Marshall Ward was too angry to consider.
His stepson’s fists were clenched. Jimson’s mouth was twisted in a derisive sneer. Jimson Burns: who’d never fought a war, never been cut by a bullwhip, never lost his wife and child, never had friends murdered, never seen every hope broken and lying in shards at his feet—what kind of reply did he deserve? Jesse slapped his stepson so hard his hand stung.
The blow knocked Jimson slack-jawed against the door frame. He straightened slowly, touching his cheek.
“Jesus, son,” Jesse said. “I . . .”
Jimson smiled bitterly. “God Damn! I been smacked by a broom-pusher!”
Though Jesse called after him, Jimson Burns ran into the clamoring of bells. Jesse never forgot the sound of those bells.
Monday morning after Jesse went to work, Jimson came home for his clothes.
When Jesse told his wife, “He’ll be back soon as he gets hungry,” Sudie was furious.
Jesse heard Jimson was sleeping in a dilapidated tobacco warehouse in Shockhoe Bottom. He was running with the Knockabouts, gambling and drinking and maybe doing things Jesse was better off not knowing. Jesse guessed J
imson came home sometimes and Sudie slipped him money. He and Sudie never spoke about that. They never spoke about Jimson at all. Every evening after he hung up his hat, Jesse asked about baby Sojourner.
One week before Christmas, his workday finished, an elated Jesse Burns stepped from the Customs House’s clean, dry vestibule onto slushy Bank Street where the lamplighter was sparking the gaslights. There was a vacancy on the Customs steam launch, and the Inspector had asked Jesse to find a negro to fill it.
Jimson would be grateful.
Jesse paused outside Goldschmidt’s Fine Tailors. In its window, a bolt of heavy blue serge was draped over a settee. An ebony walking stick leaned against the arm.
Jesse stuffed his hands in his pockets and shivered. Wasn’t outdoors but twice a day anyway, just long enough to walk to work or home. Twenty minutes each way. Jesse didn’t need a coat for twenty minutes—nobody could get cold in twenty minutes!
Tonight, he’d ask Sudie what she wanted for Christmas. He had eight dollars put aside.
The gaslights ended where Marshall Ward started. For three years, Jesse had tried to get gaslights to his district. By arguing a threat to white citizens’ health, he had gotten sewers, but Marshall Ward’s drinking water still came from water wagons or the dubious municipal well.
Lamps glowed behind house windows. The sky was overcast, the moon a splinter, low in the eastern sky.
When he saw the crowd in front of his house, Jesse broke into a run. Neighbors were gaping on his front stoop, and his front door yawned open in a terrible invitation.
Dry-mouthed, heart pounding, he shoved through, crying, “Sudie, where’s my Sudie?”
His wife sat in a hall chair, hands folded limply in her lap. Kneeling at her side, Reverend Fields Cook’s head was bowed in prayer. One hand rested on Sudie’s shoulder.
“Sudie . . .”
When his wife looked up, she said plainly, “Jesse, it’s my boy. They kilt him.”
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