Canaan

by Donald McCaig

  Dear Pauline, “divorce” is an ugly word, but in a case like yours . . .

  Perhaps I say too much.

  Last fall, Temperance advocates persuaded the city to make a law that “spiritous liquors cannot be sold on the Sabbath.” These sincere people have confused morality with the wine our Savior took—without ill effect—on the night he was betrayed. The law was widely disregarded until, following Temperance complaints, one memorable Sabbath the city police pounced on five hundred establishments, small and great. They dared to arrest Mr. Charles Delmonico.

  Mr. Delmonico’s outraged employees elected me to deliver our message of support. I believe our unqualified devotion helped Mr. Delmonico through some difficult days.

  Nothing came of it. Mr. Delmonico was released on one hundred dollars’ bond and every Manhattan establishment resumed serving wine and liquor as before. But my employer was more shaken by the experience than he publicly allowed and last Thursday he summoned me into his office.

  Mr. Delmonico asked if I knew Richmond, Virginia.

  I confessed I did not, but I did have friends there.

  Mr. Delmonico was gratified I had connections in a city he has always associated with Southern grace and charm. He is considering opening a restaurant in Richmond.

  Consequently, two weeks hence I will travel to Richmond to determine whether Delmonico’s could succeed there.

  I will be in your city at least a fortnight and would like it so much, dear Pauline, if I might call on you.

  I will always be your friend,

  Randolph Howland

  CHAPTER 58

  ORDERS TO GENERAL GEORGE CUSTER,

  JUNE 22, 1876

  The Brigadier General commanding directs that as soon as your regiment can be made ready for the march, you proceed up the Rosebud in pursuit of the indians whose trail was discovered by Major Reno a few days ago. It is, of course, impossible to give you any definite instructions in regard to this movement, and were it not impossible to do so, the Department commander places too much confidence in your zeal, energy and ability to wish to impose upon you precise orders which might hamper your action when nearly in contact with the enemy. He will, however, indicate to you his own views of what your action should be, and he desires that you should conform to them unless you shall see sufficient reason for departing from them. He thinks that you should proceed up the Rosebud until you ascertain definitely the direction in which the trail above spoken of leads. Should it be found, as it appears to be almost certain that it will be found, to turn toward the Little Big Horn he thinks that you should still proceed southward, perhaps as far as the headwaters of the Tongue, and then turn toward the Little Big Horn, feeling constantly however, to your left so as to preclude the possibility of the escape of the indians to the south or southeast by passing around your left flank.

  (Signed) Gen. Alfred Terry, Commanding

  CHAPTER 59

  KILL SONGS

  WAVING A TELEGRAM, MARK KELLOGG PUSHED INTO THE sutler’s tent. “At last! The man of the hour is coming! Our purgatory is ended.”

  “Hurrah for Yellow Hair,” Bill Shillaber wiped beer foam from his upper lip. “Bloody Knife told me last night.”

  “How the dickens . . . ?”

  Shillaber shrugged. “Indians know things. Bloody Knife’s already sent his wife and young’uns back to the Agency.”

  The unusual bustle outside the tent confirmed Kellogg’s news. After months of inaction, this army was stirring into life.

  “Well . . .” Kellogg eyed Shillaber’s beer. “I say thank God. Thank God for the man of the hour!”

  The man of the hour’s chief of scouts pointed to a stool and yelled for the sutler, who was somewhere in the back of his double tent opening whiskey cases. If Custer was returning to the regiment, maybe he’d bring a paymaster. The men hadn’t been paid in months. When the red-faced, huffing sutler put his hands on the bar, Shillaber ordered beers for the reporter and Top.

  Outside, a sergeant was berating a hapless trooper. Shillaber grinned at the imaginative ritualized profanity. “Army never changes, does it, Top?”

  Top cracked his knuckles. A circle of condensation leached onto the counter from his untouched beer glass.

  The three men were alone in the tent outside Fort Abraham Lincoln, Bismarck, Dakota Territory, which, three years after the Yellowstone survey, was still the Northern Pacific end of track.

  “Top?” Kellogg knitted his brow. He cleared his throat. “When I lost my dear wife, I think I . . . I died a little too . . . I was a . . . a different . . .” He coughed apologetically. “A better man before Martha passed away.”

  Top’s dress cavalry uniform bore no insignia. His pants were pressed into knife creases, his boots were polished to a mirror finish, and his jacket was buttoned at the throat. “I’m not the man you are,” he replied.

  Kellogg looked away and drained half his beer. He set his lips like he was going to whistle. He belched. “’Scuse,” he said. “Shillaber, will I go with the expedition?”

  “Don’t fret, son. Yellow Hair needs a reporter who thinks he’s, what did you call him: ‘The Man of the Hour’?” Shillaber drained his beer. Top didn’t look up when Shillaber appropriated his glass. “For Christ’s sake, Top,” Shillaber said.

  When Top raised his red-rimmed eyes, Shillaber winced. “Okay, Top,” he said. “Have it your way.”

  The expedition—the Seventh Cavalry, two companies of the Second Cavalry, and the Sixth, Seventh, Seventeenth and Twentieth infantry—was supposed to march against the Lakota in April, but its commander had made an error in judgment; maybe several errors. George and Mrs. Custer had enjoyed their lengthy leave in Manhattan, where they’d been feted by prominent men who were no cleverer or more perspicacious than George Custer. They had made fortunes; why shouldn’t he? General Custer lent his name to a noxious financial scheme, and after it failed, George Armstrong Custer was forced to sign a note for eighty-five hundred dollars, which was a large lien against his army pay. Consequently, he was overjoyed when the Redpath Agency asked him to deliver a lecture series. Five nights a week for four or five months at two hundred dollars a night.

  But Secretary of War Belknap said Custer’d already had five months’ leave and refused to extend it.

  So Custer headed to Dakota Territory to ready his expedition. When a blizzard blocked the track, the Northern Pacific laid on a special train for him: three engines, two snowplows, and forty men to buck the drifts.

  Not three weeks after Belknap refused Custer’s perfectly reasonable (and, to Custer’s mind, necessary) request, the Secretary of War was arrested for taking bribes.

  Whoopee. George Custer wrote the congressional committee offering to testify against Belknap.

  Okay, they said. Come now.

  I didn’t mean right now, Custer said. I’m going to lead a campaign against the Sioux. Maybe later.

  Now, they said.

  So George Armstrong Custer returned to Washington.

  The national hero—the Democratic national hero—testified before a Democratic committee and probably Custer expected it would be all right to repeat old rumors, make baseless allegations, and implicate President Grant’s brother in Belknap’s misdeeds.

  Sheridan and Sherman were quick to disown their favorite. President Grant removed Custer from command and refused to see him or hear his increasingly abject apologies.

  So Custer talked to a sympathetic New York reporter. The headline was: “Grant’s Revenge.”

  Naturally, Grant was livid.

  Custer begged General Terry to intercede for him and that kindly officer, the only Union Civil War general who hadn’t attended West Point, begged Grant to let Custer come on the expedition, if not in overall command, then in command of his own regiment.

  Grudgingly, Grant agreed. Sherman warned his subordinate: no more reporters.

  The whirlwind himself descended on Fort Abraham Lincoln. Officers yelled orders to grunting privates loading t
ons of stores into a hundred fifty wagons. Although the army had been waiting for months, much hadn’t been done that now couldn’t be. They hadn’t time for rifle practice, nor to reshoe the horses, and they couldn’t spare time to teach the troopers how to pack the mules. Some officers didn’t think they’d need the mules anyway.

  Their Commander electrified his officers, his troopers, even his indian scouts. The Commander’s youngest brother, Boston, had come west for his health and begged to join the expedition. Seventeen-year-old Autie Reed, the Commander’s sister’s son, wanted to go too. Why should the boys miss the fun? Although his wife couldn’t accompany them, General Custer promised she could come out on the supply steamer after he’d captured Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse.

  General Crook would attack the Lakota from the south, General Gibbon from the north, and the Crows, the Lakota’s traditional enemies, blocked their escape to the west. Together, they were the anvil. Custer, coming from the east, was the hammer.

  A scant one hundred years after the United States of America declared its independence from Great Britain, the last of its free indigenous peoples were to be rounded up so their lands could be crossed by railroads and parceled out among God-fearing whites.

  Shillaber warned Custer that the indians wouldn’t run; this time they’d fight. Um-hmm, he said.

  A rare meteorological phenomenon attended the Seventh’s departure that chilly May morning, and afterward some believed it had been an omen. The image of the horsemen, gun limbers, and supply wagons appeared, mirrored on the clouds high above the earthbound column.

  It would be years before the Washitu learned about Sitting Bull’s dream and could compare the two portents.

  ALTHOUGH THE COLUMN followed General Stanley’s route, it was delayed by an unseasonable blizzard and didn’t reach the Yellowstone River until June seventh, where the Far West was waiting to take General Terry upriver for a confab with General Gibbon.

  Gibbon told Terry his Crow scouts had located a tremendous Lakota village—as many as fifteen hundred lodges—on upper Rosebud Creek.

  AT THEIR CAMPFIRE that night, Shillaber passed Kellogg his flask and yawned. “Custer’s famous luck! He’s lucky Grant didn’t ask for his resignation.”

  Top sat in the shadows, his face a mask.

  Kellogg said, “Grant hates him because Custer’s a Democrat.”

  Shillaber snorted. “Son, here’s a rule for you: serving officers don’t call the President’s brother a thief.”

  Kellogg’s mind was on a higher plane. “Wouldn’t Custer make a fine candidate? For President, I mean.”

  “’Spect he’s considered it.” Shillaber yawned.

  “You think we’ll surprise ’em? The indians, I mean.”

  Shillaber scratched his nose. “Hell, yes! Oh, hell, yes! This expedition’s been in every newspaper for months, but, son, you know: indians can’t read.” He shook his head. “If Custer doesn’t pull this off, he’s washed up. You got to think how he’s thinkin’, son. The Centennial Exposition is going great guns, the Democrats are choosing their presidential candidate, and the Boy General is on the Yellowstone with a crack regiment looking for Sitting Bull. What do you think he’ll do, Top? Use that nigger juju. What do you prognosticate?”

  Top stared through the dancing flames. “Somebody’s gonna get killed.”

  “You got that right,” the chief of scouts agreed.

  At the Tongue River, I fell in with Laughing Bear, a Cheyenne I’d known at Fort Smith, and Laughing Bear’s silly wife Grasshopper. That night in Laughing Bear’s lodge Tazoo tended Grasshopper’s baby as if it were her own.

  We crossed more lodge trails and Laughing Bear said many Cheyenne and Sioux had quit the Agency, that all the young warriors had left.

  Some Hunkpapas caught up with us and when we said we were going to Sitting Bull’s village they joked that they would ride along to “protect us from the Crows.”

  With so many Lakota and Cheyenne on the move, there was no danger from Crows.

  The young Hunkpapa boasted of the coups they would count and the brave deeds they would do and sometimes one would look at another, just a glance, and, yelling as young men will, they’d race their ponies pell-mell despite the prairie dog holes and the gullies that opened suddenly under their pounding hooves.

  On Rosebud Creek we turned south, climbing toward the divide. At a bend where the creek was shallow and wide, we entered a broad meadow whose grass had been grazed to the roots by thousands of ponies. One old man was sitting beneath the Sun Dance. I knew him, although I hadn’t seen him in many years. When I lived with the Santee in Minnesota, Inkpaduta had led the uprising for which my father, Red Leaf, had been hung.

  Inkpaduta was rail-thin and only his smile was young. “It is good to see my Santee sister.”

  “I am—”

  “You are She Goes Before. Yes. Your father Red Leaf killed trader Myrick and stuffed grass in his mouth. What a fine joke!”

  After all these years Red Leaf’s lie had become the truth because he had died for it.

  The Sun Dance pole stood in a circle of buffalo skulls whose hollow eye sockets faced the sunrise. A tangle of leather lines dropped from the crown. Hardened and darkened by dried blood, the leather tips rattled when the wind shook them.

  “I hope the Seizers come.” Inkpaduta’s eyes glittered. “I have been waiting a long time.”

  This dusty meadow beside a shallow creek was sacred to the Lakota. The bravest warriors had cut this tall pine and borne it here while young women who had never lain with a man sang its passage.

  The next morning, before the sun was a hot sliver on the horizon, the dancers inserted its thongs under the flesh of their arms or legs and danced as the sun rose higher in the sky; pulling against the lines until they ripped the thongs through their flesh.

  Older or weaker men inserted a single thong under thin skin which would tear easily.

  Sitting Bull had asked Inkpaduta to insert two thongs under the thick muscles of his back.

  “It is too much,” Inkpaduta told him. “You will faint before you pull them out.”

  “The sun is rising,” Sitting Bull had said. He bent so Inkpaduta could slit his back and push thongs underneath the muscles.

  Inkpaduta closed his eyes now, remembering. “He danced all morning. The sun wasn’t so hot at first but became hot later. Every-one was sweating and chanting with the dancers. Unseen, our medicine animals circled the pole. The sun was nearly gone when Sitting Bull pulled a thong out. Hearing the awful sound it made, we groaned with him. He reeled and would have fallen, but the second thong held him upright. He shouted a great shout and lunged and we saw the tent raised on the muscles of his bloody back and the white wooden thong as it emerged. He fainted then and we carried him to his lodge, where his wives washed his wounds.”

  Inkpaduta’s face reminded me of vultures descending onto a carcass: that same rapt concentration.

  Why had I come here? What had I hoped to find? Did I wish that one day my beloved Tazoo would see her husband agonize below the Sun Dance pole? Would I wish to see Plenty Cuts hanging from these lines?

  “That night, Sitting Bull dreamed for the Lakota,” Inkpaduta continued.

  Dizzy and ill, I sat on a buffalo skull. The sun scorched this dusty meadow. The grumbling drums, the chanting, the shuffle of dancers’ feet, the shrill eagle-bone whistles. That liquid thuck as a thong ripped free. “What was it . . . ?” I licked my lips. “What was Sitting Bull’s dream?”

  “Seizers, hundreds of blue-coated Seizers, falling out of the sky into our village.”

  I was too weary to go on. Inkpaduta and the Hunkpapa left, but Laughing Bear and his family stayed with me. That evening, when Grasshopper brought food, she reminded me I had bought her aunt’s lodge at Fort C. F. Smith many winters ago.

  “Your husband, Plenty Cuts?” she asked.

  “Plenty Cuts is dead,” I told her.

  That night I slept under a buffalo robe with Tazoo snori
ng and blowing wet bubbles against my cheek. The stars arced from here to there. They were beautiful as icicles are beautiful.

  The next morning on the divide, we rode past the ancient lookout everyone called the “Crows Nest” and descended into the broad valley of the Greasy Grass.

  ALTHOUGH HE WOKE before reveille, Top kept his eyes shut, clinging to his dream. In his dream, he’d been running away. It was the first time he’d run from Master, a boy of fourteen running down the road in the early morning, heading he had no notion where. Away; he was running away. To some promised land. Or where a promised land would arise. He ran so fast no man could catch him, a fleet negro boy running down a country road through the dewy Virginia morning; taking his life in his hands.

  When he crested the rise, he saw the patrollers but didn’t believe in them. He ran straight at the mounted white men as if they weren’t there, and they were astonished and he passed between them and down the road with nothing in front of him but air and freedom and the rattle of galloping hooves behind. In his dream the patrollers never caught him.

  “Damn hincty nigger,” Top grunted as he rolled out of his blankets.

  Campfires were kicked into life. That thud, thud, thud was a trooper crushing beans with the butt of his revolver. A trooper cried, “Christ, Goldin, look where you’re pissing. That’s my damn haversack!”

  Dark shapes interrupted the firelight when the horse guards came in. A single star hung in the western sky. The half moon had set hours ago. They’d be in the saddle by sunrise.

  Top had folded his pants and coat beneath his ground cloth. When he pulled them on, his pants were clammy but pressed. His boots had been his pillow. He rubbed them with his coat sleeve before he put his feet in them. He stood and stretched.

  Some officers wore buckskins and civilian blue shirts, some soldiers preferred brown shirts to the issue gray pullover. Slouch hats were popular. Top smacked his forage cap against his pant leg before setting it at a proper military angle.