And her? Those close to Crazy Horse had whispered that Black Buffalo Woman lived with her two children in a small lodge behind No Water’s now. Close to her husband, but not with him. She could not be happy.
Years ago No Water had chased them down, pursuing the eloping lovers so he could take his wife back from the Shirt Wearer who had wooed away the wife of a fellow Bad Face Oglala. In committing that indiscretion, Crazy Horse had made himself an enemy to one of Red Cloud’s closest allies. Most Lakota men would have taken a different path than had No Water: after considering the fact that their wife had run off with another man, they would have decided they were better off without the sort of woman who did not want to be with them.
But not the quick-to-anger No Water. As soon as he had returned from his hunt and found both his wife and her former suitor missing, he knew. And had come after Crazy Horse in a blind fury.
For a moment now as he stared at her sitting in the shade, unaware of him, Crazy Horse’s fingertips touched the long, jagged scar that puckered the left cheek so that it seemed he perpetually wore a scowl. Yes, he or some of his friends could have chased No Water down after the cuckolded husband had shot Crazy Horse in the face, but it was against tribal law to kill one of the group. This stealing of a wife, his making a man crazy enough to kill him—why, it irritated an already raw wound opened by the rivalry between the Bad Faces and the Hunkpatila band. As his terrible wound healed, Crazy Horse had asked his people not to take up the club, or knife, or gun against No Water and his allies. It was the only way to save the Oglala from splintering.
So No Water kept Black Buffalo Woman, and Crazy Horse got to keep his broken heart.
Looking at her from afar, he sighed. “But I found Black Shawl.”
The wings of his spirit guardian were restless within. We both know you’ve never been able to love her the way you’ve always hungered after Black Buffalo Woman.
“It was … different with her.”
Yes, it always is when a man finds the one woman to make him happy.
“I am happy with my wife.”
No, you are content with her … and sometimes I wonder if you are even content with Black Shawl.
“She has been sick,” he argued against the spirit. “Weak. Her fever too. And that medicine water the healer gave her to drink makes her sleep so much that she is rarely in the mood to couple—”
So more and more every day now you think about the trader’s daughter. And right now you are thinking about the love for Black Buffalo Woman that once filled your heart and your loins with longing.
“I knew I would see her again one day. I knew it had to happen.”
So what will you do?
“I should speak to her,” Crazy Horse said quietly. “Tell her I am sorry. I never got a chance to explain that to her.”
You are … sorry?
“Yes. For the trouble I brought her. I look at her, knowing she and her children do not live with him. I … I should have left her be.”
Why did you ever think you could find happiness with another man’s woman?
Drawing in a long, deep breath, Crazy Horse finally replied, “I was younger, stronger perhaps, and believed there was nothing to stop me. That was a time when I believed that there was nothing I did could go wrong.”
Yes—those were days you felt me strong inside you.
“Aiyeee. Together I knew my days were full of strength and life.”
What if you go to her now and she shows you those eyes the way she did before, hunka? What if Black Buffalo Woman shows you those hungry eyes the way the trader’s daughter has turned hers on you?
“I can be strong now,” he replied, trying to make it sound firmer than he felt inside. “This is good, to see my Northern People preparing for the sun-gazing dance in the old way. I can draw strength from this dance, strength to do what I need to do. But first … she needs to hear that I am sorry for the way things turned out for both of us.”
He waited for an answer from the winged guardian within his breast, but none came. Scratching up his courage, Crazy Horse got to his feet and started down the slope at an angle, heading not for those making the last preparations as the sacred tree that had been chosen by a virtuous woman was carried into the circle—but starting for the bank of the creek where Black Buffalo Woman sat, her hands busy rolling a piece of deerhide back and forth within them.
It made him think how she had taken his ready manhood within those same two hands and kneaded it into readiness before she climbed atop him. They had coupled and coupled again in their few days and brief hours together before No Water found them, burst into their lodge, and—as Little Big Man grabbed for his old friend’s arm, hoping to forestall bloodshed, seeking to protect Crazy Horse from the infuriated husband—shot Crazy Horse in the face, the bullet from the borrowed pistol entering just below the left nostril.1
And in the seasons that followed, many were the nights that he awoke with a cold fear gnawing in his belly, his skin damp and clammy, crying out in his sleep, “L-let me go! Let go of my arm!”
The only way he had ever managed to put himself back to sleep was to think of Black Buffalo Woman, to remember how she had showered him with a passion he had never since discovered in any other woman.
He knew it would be good to make his apology. If not for her, at least for him. It was the best he could do now to make up for all the years that had been lost to others when they should have been with each other all along. Maybe that was why he wanted to trust Three Stars. Life was simply too short to go on carrying around the same old hate. The same way this sun-gazing dance, performed in the old way, would be good for his people. And even the way that hunt Three Stars promised when the first autumn winds began to dry the prairie grass would be good for his people too. This … this apology to her was part of making things good. If life would never be as it had been, then at least he could do his best to make life as good as it would ever be again.
Slowing his steps as he approached the trees where she sat, Crazy Horse looked at the children. The boy, older, clearly No Water’s child. But the girl, younger—no more than six summers—she favored her mother, but … much more fair of skin. He stared, wondering about the child as she played with her miniature dolls and horses, trying to sort through the years it had been since he and Black Buffalo Woman ran away together, remembering how some had whispered that this daughter was born just long enough after the time Crazy Horse had eloped with No Water’s wife.…
Then he turned to stare at Black Buffalo Woman. At almost the same moment she turned to gaze over her shoulder at him, as if she knew he was standing there, watching her. Instantly her eyes widened. Then her face grew dark and she looked away. Not back at her work on the hide in her hands, nor at the nearby creek rushing by her feet, but staring off somewhere else. She tugged at the blanket that lay on the ground beside her legs and dragged it onto her shoulders, over her head.
No gesture could be more emphatic than that. His heart, once strong and committed to say the words that needing saying, now broke in small, cold pieces.
She was telling him to go away. Not to look at her. Because she refused to look at him. The blanket said it all.
For a moment more he stood there, glancing one last time at Black Buffalo Woman’s daughter. Her light-colored hair and pale skin. Remembering They Are Afraid of Her, the daughter who had died while he was away raiding the Psatoka. These two could have been sisters.
But now the one had long ago gone back to the winds on that scaffold far to the north in a country that no longer belonged to his people. Because only the rocks and the sky live forever.
Slowly Crazy Horse turned away, his heart smaller, cold too, realizing the final words to an unfinished chapter of his life had just been written. Trying to remind himself that whenever a man turned his back on something old … it was best that he turn his face toward something new.
* * *
“Do you see the smoke?” he asked Samantha, pointing at the
distance.
Squinting, she wagged her head.
“Look low, along the faintest part of the sky—where it meets the earth,” he instructed.
“Yes,” she answered cheerily. “I think I can see the smudge of it now. Where is that smoke coming from?”
“Near as I can figure from the few times I been through this country, that can only be one of two things.”
“Two?”
“One might be a Injin camp. The reservation Sioux,” he explained, patting the small boy on the back where the babe hung suspended against Donegan’s chest.
“And the other?”
“Why, Camp Robinson itself, Samantha!” His voice rose with genuine joy.
“You mean we’re almost there?”
“Damn me if we ain’t, by the blessed souls of Mary and Joseph!”
She reached out to squeeze his wrist, her whole sunburned face smiling beneath the broad brim of the man’s slouch hat he had bought her before embarking on this trip. They had tucked away her one good straw fedora among those new dresses, shawls, and other woman’s things in the leather valises the packmare had strapped to her sides, suspended from the army packsaddle for this journey north into the land of the Montana gold diggings at Last Chance Gulch.
“Just a few more miles?” she asked with a guarded hope.
Taking that empty hand in his glove, he squeezed hard and reassuringly. “Tonight, I pray you’ll sleep on a fresh-stuffed tick, Sam. And eat with your long and beautiful legs under a proper table, for sure. There’s bound to be some women about—not near as many as call Laramie home … but I’m sure we’ll scare up a place to stay the night, maybe two, before we move on.”
She cleared her throat in that way he knew so well, a mannerism that told him to brace himself for something unexpected.
“Why must we hurry on after so short a stay at Camp Robinson?”
Seamus heard that sound in her voice, sensing the way it immediately plucked at his heart like little else ever could. He damn well knew she wasn’t the trail-riding sort, even after their long ride up from the Staked Plain of the Texas panhandle. Samantha was a hardy woman, not given to complaints and such, but even a strong-boned female would find it difficult to stay in the saddle with the likes of Seamus Donegan. He had to remember that she was what she was, and the babe too.
He sighed as he looked down at their hands, fingers intertwined, then gazed into her eyes, and his began to moisten. “No reason we can’t find us a place to lay by for a few days, Sam. As long a lay-over you want to have for you and Colin here. If there’s no shake roof I can put over your head, I’m sure there’s a post quartermaster who will let me use one of his wall tents for a spell.”
“I think a wall tent would serve us quite nicely, Seamus,” she said wearily, her whole face lighting up. “Every tent I saw on the grounds of Fort Laramie was far better than the small spaces most army couples are given.”
“Tight quarters indeed,” he replied and released her hand as Colin stirred and came awake with a cough. “The real trick will be getting my hands on a couple of new ticks what ain’t been called for by them sojurs.”
“We’ll make do with our old ones,” she said with a firm jut to her chin. “Ticks or no ticks, we’ll be fine.”
“You don’t mind sleeping on blanket bedrolls, right on the ground?” he warned.
“I won’t complain. I promise,” and she held up her hand as if swearing to it.
“You’re a angel, I say,” he told her in a voice filled with admiration. “Don’t know what I ever done to deserve a angel like you.”
Giving him that rakish half-lidded gaze of a seductress, Samantha said, “Why, little Colin needed a father, didn’t you know?”
Theirs had been the trip coming north by east from Fort Laramie. A week now in the journey, when the distance could have been traveled by a hard-riding man in a little more than two long and grueling days clamped atop the saddle. But instead they had traveled no more than a few miles each day, not making an ordeal of it. Lazy about getting up and stirring life back into the fire, he eventually slipped off each morning while Sam slept in, carrying the coffee pot down to a narrow stream. She only had to stir when Colin awoke, in need of his breakfast. My, but that boy took to the teat! A Donegan, that one was—surely his father’s son.
In his small, grease-coated iron skillet Seamus would fry up some bacon, maybe a slab of salted pork or beef, then reheat some of the biscuits he had baked the night before in the small Dutch oven they carried along with their camp supplies. Flour and bacon and beans, pretty much the standard trail diet of a soldier. Because they were in no hurry, it was always late in the morning by the time the cooking gear was cleaned, bedding rolled up, and all of it packed away. Then the stock had to be unhobbled and brought into camp, saddled, and loaded before he finally stomped out the fire, mounted up, and moved them out. Without fail, it was never very long before little Colin began to fuss about one need or another. Either his little diapers began to smell with that horrendous telltale odor or the lad’s belly had gone empty and he needed filling under some sheltering cottonwood, in a spot where Seamus could keep an eye out in all directions.
And they always stopped in a shady stand of trees a couple of hours later as the sun reached mid-sky, when Seamus might refill their canteens if he had managed to make their midday halt near a stream. Chances were Colin was already hungry again, so he’d get the two of them comfortable on a small scrap of army canvas he unfurled on a patch of green grass, close to the wide trunk of a tree. After the boy had his tummy filled most days, he was ready to nap right there against his mother’s warm breast. Ah, the joy it brought the Irishman’s heart to look down upon them two, mother and son, as they lay sleeping in the shade, a summer breeze nuzzling Sam’s loose curls as he watched her chest rise and rise, rise and fall. And all things felt so right in the world.
Then he would turn away so he could scan the horizon in all directions, looking for smoke, or spires of dust raised by hoof or wagon wheel. Sometimes he’d smoke his pipe as they slept; other times he’d re-wind his watch and just sit with it nestled in the palm of one hand, looking at them in wonder, his heart so filled with exquisite joy that now at last they were heading to Camp Robinson, on from there to the mining towns of the Black Hills District, then striking out across the wilderness together for the gold diggings of Montana Territory.
It really had been eleven years, he often mused on this ride from Fort Laramie. Back to when he and Colonel Sam Marr first started north from Laramie with that small detail of soldiers and a Bible-thumping Reverend White, the land he was itching to reach was part of Idaho Territory. Now its sprawling expanse had a name all its own: Montana. Likely stood for mountains. The name fit, although it was these high rolling plains, the up-jutting bluffs and buttes and spectacular ridgelines, that Seamus loved all the more than hulking granite mountains. Up there in Montana Territory he would at long last have the chance to carve out the rest of his future in among the other gold seekers who scratched at the earth or shook the sluice-boxes, searching for that glint of yellow.
He’d buy her a house, he would. Have it built for the three of them. And then he’d fill it with the finest of dresses, china, and wind-up clocks too. For Colin, why, there’d not be a toy he wouldn’t get for the lad … so his son didn’t have to grow up knowing the relentlessly hard life of hand-to-mouth he and the other Donegan children had suffered back in old Eire. A Patlander come to Amerikay as a youth to look up a pair of uncles who had disappeared with little trace … but Seamus found them both, eventually. No, neither the Donegan nor the O’Rourke side of his blood had ever been what a man might call financially comfortable, much less well-off.
But that was about to change, he vowed each time he gazed into the limitless distance for sign of army patrol, Indian war party, or fellow sojourner.
With their midday nap over, Seamus rolled everything up once again and they pushed on until late in the afternoon when he chose a l
ikely place to make their camp well before the sun was about to set. This gave him plenty of time to hobble the horses, putting them out to graze until he would eventually picket them in camp at nightfall. After bringing water up in the canvas bucket, he built a modest fire beneath the spreading branches of the cottonwood, so the smoke would disperse among the leaves and limbs. No sense announcing their presence.
Their canvas-sack bedrolls spread out by twilight, and little Colin asleep between them, Seamus and Samantha spent the next hours talking low of things to come, what they would see, where they were heading, and what they would do when they reached that fabled destination of Last Chance Gulch, Montana’s newest strike. And when the coffee was gone, and Sam had returned from the brush for the last time before bed, he’d see that the two of them were tucked in before he took up the gunbelt once more and slipped out of the firelight. Quietly moving through the darkness, stopping often to listen intently before he moved on a few more paces, each evening he would make a wide circle of their camp, smell deeply of the night air—perhaps to pick up the scent of distant fire, animal, or even man. Only when his hour-long circuit of camp was done did he slip back toward the dying fire, as quiet as the padded feet of a church mouse, his shadowy form lit only by the crimson flicker of a few last embers.
There he took off the gunbelt once more, and laid the pair of Colt’s pistols at his head, just as he kept another brace of his percussion pistols by Sam’s grass-filled pillow. Most every night he ended up drifting off to sleep on his back, staring up at the brilliance of the summer sky, feeling little by little the anxiety draining from the marrow of him. Looking forward to chancing upon an old friend, perhaps running onto battlefield comrades somewhere along the way. Surely, when they struck out to the northwest from the Black Hills, he would take her directly for the mouth of Tongue River after they struck the Yellowstone, and there introduce her to Colonel Nelson A. Miles. Perhaps a lay-over of a day or so at that cantonment for the Fifth Infantry would do them all a bit of good, what with the miles they would have put behind them by that time. Then they would push on in that final stage of their journey through Montana Territory.
Turn the Stars Upside Down: The Last Days and Tragic Death of Crazy Horse Page 9
