The Removes

by Tatjana Soli

  What if Autie stepped on one of those traps and was wounded or even killed? Rather than sacrificing him she would gladly have a hundred Rebels, a thousand, crawl on their bloodied hands and knees. She knew this was an unforgivable Christian failing, this selfishness, this pride. She chose virtue and charity when it suited, ignoring its call when its practice became too difficult.

  Bereft of other options, she prayed once more, as she did each morning, noon, and night for an end to this savage war.

  APPOMATTOX STATION, APRIL 1865

  The military inculcated in its officers the need to quantify every battle in terms of loss and spoils, so after each victory Custer dispatched men to count. The tally of the Shenandoah campaign: 2,556 prisoners taken, 71 guns, 29 battle flags, 52 caissons, 105 army wagons, 2,557 horses, 1,000 horse equipments, 7,152 beef cattle. As important as what was gained to the victor was what was destroyed for the loser: 420,742 bushels of wheat, 780 barns, 700,000 rounds of ammunition.

  The numbers in a ledger, of course, did not begin to quantify the impression on the senses: fields of grain burning in broad daylight with no one allowed to douse them. Black plumes of oily smoke that rose straight up then feathered across the blue sky. Slaves suddenly free but without provision of the next meal. Men under fifty conscripted to the Union war effort, or taken prisoner if they refused, or shot if they were too much trouble. Houses plundered, left aflame.

  Women for the most part were spared. They expressed little gratitude over the fact. Their eyes scorched Custer’s back as he rode by. Once he stopped to offer a tin of biscuits, and the lady spat on him. He did not stop again. He understood the temptation to blame him due to the color of his uniform. Female arms and stomachs hollowed from the want his army inflicted. Skin stretched over the filigree of pedigreed bones. Being gentlemen, the officers spared the women every indignity but starvation. At night some in desperation came to offer themselves for a handful of flour or a cup of sugar. In the morning, like bruised fruit, the most fragile souls had swung themselves from tree limbs, starched petticoats floating in the breeze.

  At the end of the War, 359,528 Union dead and 258,000 Confederate dead. Three thousand horses dead during the battle at Gettysburg alone. Unreal numbers. In the balance of things it seemed easier to die than live. During war the border between the two became porous. The people called the Shenandoah campaign “The Burning,” as if it were a plague brought from above, but Custer understood it was only a smallish hell made by man.

  Even then, the Confederates in their death throes did not give up. He was ordered to Appomattox, his soldiers exhausted, enduring terrible cannon fire, he leading a charge. Nothing was as beautiful in all of creation—men and horses steeled of intent, moving as one to engage death and hopefully wrest glory from it. The memory brought tears to his eyes still. Years later he retrieved a little of that feeling when buffalo hunting and attending horse races. When a horse went all out and began pulling ahead, years of breeding and training paying off, it came close to the meaning of life. At least to a cavalryman.

  He captured 24 cannon, 5 battle flags, 200 wagons, and 1,000 prisoners. As the prisoners filed past on their way north, Custer had the band strike up “Dixie.” The steps of the prisoners quickened and by the fifth repetition a discreet cheer rose up. Despite the tremors and ghosts, he did not believe in disrespecting the brave. Defeat yes, disrespect no.

  Sheridan told Custer to prepare to attack again, when it finally came—a lone rider coming forward with a white towel on a stick. It was over. Even as they stood battle ready, waiting, a cheer rose up and spread from both sides. Custer only knew he could at last rest. He sat on the ground still holding his horse’s reins in his hand and fell asleep.

  When Lee rode in to sign the surrender, Custer had tears in his eyes. The War had been the most formative experience of his young life. Two years before as a mere boy he had written to a friend that he would be perfectly content to be in battle every day. Now at the ripe age of twenty-five he realized the foolishness of his words. The world had come close to extinguishing itself, and the sooner the War ended, the better.

  The next day Sheridan sent Libbie the signing table as a gift, including a note to her stating that her Armstrong was as responsible for the victory as anyone. Could one accept praise for victory without also accepting blame for carnage? He was in some ways still a child. Proud fool, he carried away the trophy table, flattered as a silly schoolboy by Sheridan’s praise.

  The lowly Custer clan had done its country proud in the War. Brother Tom was awarded two Medals of Honor, and Custer became the youngest brigadier general in the army. He determined to put out of his mind those burning houses, lace curtains of ash, fine clothes trampled, smoldering furniture. The endless, endless dead. He felt the Southerners’ hatred, palpable like a sharp rock in his boot. It was deserved. As simple as this—in war one side won, the other lost. He was a soldier who followed orders. During the War he had turned from boy to man. When lucky he saved the day. So far he had been lucky more often than he had not.

  THE FOURTH REMOVE

  Work camp—Neha—Rattlesnake bite—With child—In mourning

  Two summers later Anne took Elizabeth with her while she worked as buffalo skinner. The work crew consisted of four men who were unfit for battle due either to age or infirmity; three older women unfit for anything else; Neha, the newest woman of her chief, Snake Man; and Anne, with her charge. As the youngest, Neha and Anne were given the most grueling work. Work camp was for those too unlucky to get out of the labor of butchering. They had the camaraderie of being the lowest level of the tribe.

  They dried meat like laundry on long suspended poles. They scraped the skins clean and aired them on bushes. Anne’s job was the laborious one of tanning the hides. This involved stretching them along the ground and tacking them down with small wooden pins. Day after day, she would kneel over the skin and rub it very hard with a sharp stone, till it was pliable and white. Her hand cramped, her arms ached, her back was tender, and yet she had no reprieve the long day. Her belly hung heavy with her first child, which would be birthed in the fall.

  It pleased her that it was only women and old men in camp, that the senior wives of her master disdained such labor. No one objected to stopping early and sitting by the fire to eat and tell stories as long as the work got done.

  Away from the drama of the chief and the cruelties of his wives, Anne had the rare luxury to sleep deeply. The cool nights and nearby river lulled her to a peaceful state. For the moment, she was content. Human happiness was like a flower insistent on burrowing its way out despite the most inhospitable conditions.

  * * *

  DURING THE LAST YEARS, Elizabeth and Anne had been traded from chief to chief three more times, the first time for a gun, the second for a sack of grain, and the third to Snake Man for Anne’s sewing ability, which had gained her a small measure of status. Bearing witness to the killing of other captives due to ill health or escape attempts, Anne understood her only refuge was in appearing to submit to captivity and in being useful to the tribe’s survival. The native way of life brooked no tolerance for delicate sensibilities or melancholia. A captive without use was one quickly dispatched.

  During raids on settlers one of the great prizes was clothing, but these garments needed to be sliced and refitted. Always a proficient seamstress for her mother, Anne was now much in demand for her ability.

  At first the bloody, arrow-pierced nature of the clothing repulsed her and led to sleepless nights, but with time she adopted a more sanguine attitude toward the clothes’ resurrection. She viewed their new afterlife much as she did her own, of adapting to a second life that bore no resemblance to her former one.

  Members of Snake Man’s family came to her with sewing demands, including the embroidery of war garments, tobacco pouches, and gun cases, but other members of the tribe also sought her out and paid by barter, mostly food of which she felt the constant shortage, so that after a time Elizabeth and she a
te well enough.

  A new element in her life was the unexpected gift of companionship that Snake Man’s acquisition of the half-breed Neha provided. The two women had formed an alliance against the cruelties of his older women. Anne had grown used to solitariness, learning not to get too close to anyone in the tribe—members came and went so frequently that attachment proved difficult. Yet she found she enjoyed the girl’s company and grew to depend on it.

  When Neha first arrived at the teepee, Anne was quite awed by her appearance. She somehow had stolen only the best from both races. She stood tall and lean, with dusky skin and gold-flecked eyes. All the chiefs had their eyes on her, and Snake Man impoverished himself of his horse herd to buy her out from under them.

  Neha was the daughter of a powerful chieftain. Despite her mixed blood she had been the favorite of her father, who insisted on an exceptionally large payment of ten horses to give her in marriage. This did not endear her to Snake Man’s wives, who considered her prideful. The outcast white woman became her only consolation.

  Younger than Anne, Neha was unhappy at the age and sullenness of her new husband. The two women commiserated on the randy, vain ways of Snake Man, who had more wives than means. The new woman’s presence had the effect of curtailing his visits to Anne, for which she was grateful.

  * * *

  AS A REGULAR PART of their year, the tribe went in search of buffalo to add to their stores for the winter. On one such journey they came upon railroad tracks that cut through their favored hunting valley, a pristine landscape that was one of the main routes of the herd.

  The warriors stopped their horses and glared down at the metal-and-wood track as if it were an animate power, an adversary of supernatural strength. Anne felt her heart pound in excitement at this scarce, longed-for evidence of her civilization in such remote wilderness. Civilization came on rails, each track shortening the distance between herself and home. Did it not seem possible after all that she might be discovered? Discovered instead of rescued, because after so much time it was not credible that they searched for her still.

  The Indians went to work destroying the track, a Sisyphean task even if they were successful in derailing a single cargo. Anne tried not to think of the danger to the passengers, but rather that the damage would necessitate repairmen who might be able to deliver her from her captivity.

  After crossing the mangled tracks, the tribe was not jubilant over such destruction but remained morose with foreboding. Noting Anne’s quickened step, one of the women weighed her down with more to carry as punishment. Behind their ill temper, Anne sensed despair.

  Anne meekly shouldered her added burden, sensing the volatility of the tribe’s collective mood. She continued to hope, despite the bitter thought that she knew of no rescue attempts nor ransom offers having been made on her behalf. Most likely she was counted dead to the greater world.

  * * *

  SHE WAS SIXTEEN YEARS OLD the winter she was first with child but had mercifully miscarried due to malnourishment. The chief’s women had been filled with spite toward her, hitting her about the head for the slightest mistake, denying her food, making her sleep outside the teepee’s shelter, but after the loss of the child their rancor stopped.

  Anne could not account the reason but was grateful. She supposed it was much like introducing a dog to an established household: a new pecking order must be hammered out. She was a servant of the family, certainly not on the level of a wife. Perhaps their anger had diminished due to her clothes-making ability, which rendered the chief’s women among the most fashionable in the camp.

  The following spring she again became pregnant, and she beat her stomach with rocks and ate dirt, and again she lost the child. She made long and complicated prayers to God begging forgiveness for her damning actions.

  The winter of her seventeenth year she was again pregnant, and this time she prayed that with the food she earned from her own labor she might be strong enough to deliver. She could explain her change of attitude in no other way than that she longed to have something of her own, something for which she would have reason to survive. She considered it God’s gift and not to be questioned. It was a time of relative peace within the tribe, and she used it to rebuild her strength and plot an escape.

  Once she had accepted the fact of the growing baby inside her, she assumed that it would diminish her hunger for freedom, but the pregnancy had the opposite effect. She could not imagine bearing a child within captivity, even if that captivity was by its own people. Far from a child giving her a sense of belonging, its imminent arrival made her even more restive.

  Anne wanted the boons of civilization for this next generation while also fearing for the child’s safety within the camp. Would there be jealousy among the wives? Would its white blood make it an outcast? If the infant were hardy enough to survive till childhood, would its rude upbringing make it unable to later return to its white origins, just as an animal, once tasting the elixir of freedom, cannot again be domesticated?

  * * *

  THE MEAT-DRYING PROCESS was under way when the women decided to take a break from the noontime sun. They went to lie in the shade to sleep, Neha joining them, but Anne told Elizabeth to follow her to the river, where she would bathe away the blood and animal fat that coated her arms.

  Elizabeth had spent the morning picking wildflowers and braiding them into a crown to put atop her gold-white hair. That hair and her blue eyes made her an object of much adulation among the Indians, who allowed her to be lazy compared with Indian children her age, who were expected to work to the maximum of their abilities. Elizabeth sat on the boulders by the stream, the red, gold, and blue blossoms in her headband giving her the appearance of a wood fairy.

  The girl had changed much in her two years of captivity. Although she no longer cried, she also hardly talked. Her mother was a topic she refused to bring up. Anne did not know if the child had figured out her lie, or if she had blissfully forgotten. What she did do was make Anne her keeper, never letting her out of her sight. When the chief came to pay his attentions she turned the girl’s sleeping face away and endured his rutting without protest to not waken the child. They ate and slept together, the girl curled in her arms so that Anne was made a mother before ever giving birth. The child’s love gave her the courage to accept her approaching maternity.

  When Anne explained that she soon would be joined by a baby, Elizabeth grew more cheerful, and often she would lay her small hand on the minor protrusion of Anne’s belly and talk to the child as if it were her personal confidant.

  “Baby will be my brother. He will grow up strong and protect me. He will take us away from the Injuns.”

  Anne did not know how to broach the fine point that the baby would indeed be one of the Injuns she wished him to take them away from. She had avoided such thoughts herself as it was easier to continue on that way. One foot down and then another. However cowardly, such thinking had allowed them to survive thus far.

  The sun was hot; light sparked on the moving water of the river like a flint against stone. How good it would be to join the women under the trees and nap. Anne rubbed her swelled belly and felt round and ripe as a fruit, her baby a sweet wild plum. At moments like these she felt not exactly happiness—she refused the description in such captivity—but animal well-being. She had survived. Just to be alive and filled with life felt akin to victory. These were her drowsy thoughts as she closed her eyes in the shade by the other women. She told Elizabeth not to wander too far off.

  Sometime later she felt a rough jabbing at her side and instinctively rolled away to protect her stomach, the juicy burgeoning pit. Her first unhappy thought was that the wives had reverted to their rough ways before she realized that something else was wrong. The women’s faces were grim as they shoved her back toward the river, where she found the prone form of her Elizabeth. Neha stood over her.

  The child had continued picking flowers and had crawled into some undergrowth after a particularly lovely bunch
of red clover when she’d heard a strange rattling sound. An Indian child would have been taught that the sound warned of danger, the area likely infested with venomous rattlers, but Elizabeth simply sat back mesmerized by the toylike, seemingly harmless baby rattlesnake only as long as her hand. Did she reach for it, or it her? Impossible to tell except that there were fang marks right on her chest, far too close to the heart for an adult, much less a child. The women had pulled the girl away from the nest of serpents, knowing that the presence of one indicated others, but had otherwise given up on her.

  “How did it bite you?” Anne asked.

  “It was so tiny,” Elizabeth replied, already dazed.

  Now Anne held the small body, Elizabeth moaning as her chest swelled and turned an angry reddish purple that carried like blush to her neck and then face. Her frightened blue eyes were quickly buried within pillows of flesh. Each breath came more ragged than the one before, her lungs compressed within her bloated chest. In desperation Anne yelled to Neha to help her carry the girl down to the river. She sat Elizabeth neck deep in the shallows, thinking perhaps the cold water would draw off the poison. Elizabeth started a forlorn wailing, which caused the women to frown and then turn their backs on the whole futile enterprise.

  “I feel hurting,” Elizabeth whispered. “Hold my hand.”

  “I am.”

  “I can’t feel you.”

  Anne squeezed harder and held the other hand also.

  “Listen to me. This is important. Remember your mother?”

  Elizabeth looked across the water with great finality.

  “She died,” the child said.

  Anne bit her lip.

  “She is happy in heaven. She waits for you. You will go straight from my arms to hers. Do not be frightened.”

  “I’ll try. I can’t be sure.”

  An hour later, the child was gone.