by Win Blevins
Curly heard that gruff tone and looked into the face of his genial uncle and swallowed hard. Spotted Tail was grizzly-bear furious. The soldiers had hurt the bear just enough to enrage it.
His story was appalling. White Beard had come up with the troops and said he wanted to parley. In the talk he had demanded that Little Thunder give up everyone who had helped kill Grattan and his men.
“This cannot be done,” Little Thunder had explained. “The Mniconjou who killed the cow has gone back to his village in the north.
“Of the Sicangu,” Little Thunder had gone on, “who could say who the fighters were? The soldiers came right into camp, shot Bear-Scattering, and the fighting was hand-to-hand. Every decent man defended his lodge.” Sometimes you really did have to explain to the wasicu like children.
“I have always wanted peace, still want peace. I offered to pay for the cow. But when soldiers came straight into camp and started killing people …” Little Thunder shrugged.
White Beard answered with roars and accusations.
Before long Little Thunder, Spotted Tail, and the other Sicangu in the parley realized the soldier chief only wanted to fight, so they left. Halfway back to the people, they saw that they’d been tricked. White Beard had used the parleying time to get his men into position for a trap.
The first charge came even before the peace talkers could get back to their lodges. Spotted Tail had to fight empty-handed.
The wounded man managed a grin. “I took a sword away from a horseback and started knocking heads,” he croaked.
Sweetwater Woman chimed in, “He knocked thirteen soldiers off their horses. I saw.”
A look passed between the man and the woman. Sweetwater Woman was lovely, and the two were very much attracted to each other, a love match.
It had been the second love match among Spotted Tail’s wives. Everyone knew the story. The young Spotted Tail had courted Spoon, the eldest sister, and she had wanted him. But Spoon’s parents had promised her to an older man. Finally the two suitors had argued and then set to fighting with knives. Spotted Tail killed his rival and claimed his woman.
Parents decided on husbands for their daughters, and that was good. But once in a while, when a young warrior was filled with passion, when he was willing to throw his life away for a woman … Then the people smiled at each other and envied the young couple.
And now Spotted Tail, a mature man more than thirty winters old, an admired leader in war, had his heart made young a second time by Spoon’s sister. It made the camp’s other wives titter.
“Yes, woman,” he said in half-reproof, “I lent you my horse, but you stayed and made the trilling.”
Curly saw what mixed feelings were in that comment, what pride and grief.
Spotted Tail’s sits-beside-him wife, his daughter, and his mother were being marched away, no one knew where.
Even talking to Curly was a pretense. Spotted Tail and Sweetwater Woman’s hearts were with the prisoners. They knew what happened to captives. The Lakota’s enemies had taken captives for centuries. They kept the women for breeding and tortured the men with exquisite deliberation until they died. The Pani even made human sacrifices of the girls.
Last night, Spotted Tail said, the men had tried to hold off the soldiers while the women escaped up the creek with the lodges, but many women had been killed or captured. Little Thunder and Spotted Tail had been wounded, and many more.
There were maybe eighty captives, And probably a hundred people dead, many of them women and children.
Curly saw his uncle’s eyes wander to the half-light of a corner of the lodge, and then into the twilight of the desperate stand by the bluff last night, and then into the darkness of the death of nearly a hundred Lakota men, women, and children. Families ruptured, the hoop of the people battered, the band maimed in a way that would last seven generations, a hundred winters.
Men were gone toward the river, following the prisoners, seeing what could be done. They would be back soon. Then the warriors would talk, and decide.
From the hooded look in Spotted Tail’s eyes, Curly guessed what they would do would be to kill wasicu, a barrel of white blood for every drop of Lakota blood shed.
But he didn’t know. Whatever it was, Curly would fight by his uncle’s side. The terror of the lightning and wakinyan and cold rain was still in his flesh. But the birth of the man-child warmed him, and a lust for wasicu blood set him afire.
Some men came back from Laramie, and their news buzzed around the circle of lodges. They’d run off with fifty soldier horses, which made everyone smile, but the rest of the news was bad. The prisoners hadn’t gone upriver to Fort Laramie but down the river, no one knew where until the men who followed them came back.
And there was even worse news. Everyone would hear it in the council lodge tonight.
“Circle of lodges,” murmured Spotted Tail, who was well enough to sit outside a little. “Council lodge.” Even the words were mockery. Most of the lodges were brush huts. The council lodge was a brush roof without sides.
Light Curly Hair sat with the men in the council lodge. He was seventeen winters old, and he had counted coup. It was not a coup he boasted about, but he had been first to touch the Two Circle woman. The eyes of the men in the lodge told him where he should be, at the place of lowest rank of men. The women sat huddled in their blankets at the back. There was no question of his speaking in council, a mere youth.
White Wing sat behind the center fire next to Little Thunder, to give witness for the men who had gone to Laramie, and Reeshaw sat next to him to confirm certain matters. Reeshaw was a trader’s son and understood the wasicu language. Spotted Tail was next to Little Thunder. He had long been a war leader. He was a shirt wearer. Now he was becoming like a chief.
White Wing spoke in the formal way that meant, “This is a serious matter and I tell exactly what happened.” First, he said, the prisoners had not been taken to Fort Laramie. The soldiers had marched them downstream. Some said they were going to Fort Kearny, which was farther from Lakota territory. Young men were following. They would send word back.
The people were silent except for the e-i-i-i of lament in the back, from the women. Everyone had admitted to himself, mostly silently, that these loved ones would never be seen again. They hoped the wasicu were not such devils as to torture women and children.
Second, the Wasp (their new name for Harney because he stung them) was bragging about the fight and treating it as a great victory.
The Lakota looked at each other in wonder and disgust. What kind of man attacked a peaceful village and slaughtered dozens of women and children and called it a victory? What kind of man thought it honorable? To have a skirmish, yes, to show valor in the face of danger, certainly—but to kill nearly a hundred, capture nearly another hundred, take the people’s food, and burn the lodges they lived in? Why?
Some of them wondered for the first time what kinds of beings they had to struggle against in these wasicu. They didn’t seem human. Warriors looked at each other in puzzlement. All a man knew was that he could never figure how wasicu would act.
Reeshaw had something to add. Marching toward the Platte, he said, the walking soldiers made up a song about the battle. He chanted it in English so the people could hear the rhythm of marching feet:
“We did not make a blunder;
we rubbed out Little Thunder
and sent him to the other side of Jordan.”
When Reeshaw translated the words, the people thought the soldiers were like adolescent boys given weapons before they were responsible for where they pointed them.
Third, because of the trouble, Harney had ordered the agent not to give out any rations this autumn.
A murmur went through the lodge, mixed with the a-i-i-i of anxiety. It was already the Moon When Leaves Turn Brown, also called the Moon of Ten Colds, September. Buffalo were scarce again, and the people were counting on the rations promised by the wasicu under the paper signed four summers e
arlier. Now the soldiers had captured most of their pemmican, or burned it, or scattered it over the prairie. Unless the band was lucky, like last autumn, and came upon a big herd, this would be a hungry winter.
Finally, Harney had talked to the Lakota in a way no other soldier chief had ever dared to talk. He ordered the Lakota to surrender the men who had robbed the mail coach a year ago. He ordered them to bring back the fifty horses. He said he’d attack other villages in the spring if they didn’t. He spoke sharply, like a man snapping at a dog to get out of his way, not as one spoke to human beings.
There was some talk about what to do, but the main point was clear:
Ordered. Lakota. No one had ever dared to do that.
Little Thunder made White Wing repeat several times the part about giving up the men who robbed the mail coach. It was perfectly clear:
“The Wasp regards those men as murderers.
“He intends to hang them by the neck.
“Until they are turned over, there will be no more rations. The Wasp will destroy villages at will—not just make war against fighting men, but against women and children and lodges and even food.”
White Wing said it softly, firmly, without variation. The Wasp had been absolutely clear.
Everyone knew who had robbed the mail coach. Spotted Tail, their main war leader. Red Leaf and Long Chin, the brothers of Bear-Scattering, the chief killed by Grattan. Two boys, who didn’t count.
Little Thunder guided the talk away from these mail-coach raiders for a while.
“Why doesn’t the Wasp demand any longer that the ones who killed Grattan and his men be turned in?”
In the Grattan fight twenty-nine soldiers came into the Sicangu camp, and all died. But the mail coach? That was done in anger afterward, in revenge for the killing of Chief Bear-Scattering. Yes, three wasicu died, and their wonderful paper money got thrown to the winds. (The people were still tickled about this.) But why did the Wasp demand blood payment for this and not for Grattan?
“I don’t know,” said White Wing.
Reeshaw had something to say. “I talked to the other interpreters. They said when he got to Laramie, after he hit the village, the Wasp heard the truth about Lieutenant Grattan from the soldier chief at Laramie. Grattan was spoiling for a fight, the soldier chief said—he’d boasted he wanted to take on ‘the entire Sioux nation.’ And besides, he was drunk, the soldier chief said.”
Murmurs filled the brush arbor. Yes, Grattan had been looking for a fight, and deserved what he got. Whether he was drunk they didn’t know, but his interpreter had been drunk and hadn’t told the officer the truth about what Bear-Scattering was saying.
“Something else,” Reeshaw added. “Some of the newspapers back in the white-man towns are calling the Wasp a squaw killer. They say his attack on Little Thunder’s village was cowardly.”
Heads nodded.
White Wing spoke up again. “But the Wasp demands that the ones who attacked the mail coach be given up. Or he will attack other villages, any villages anywhere.”
Eyes grew large. No one said anything because there was nothing to say. The wasicu wouldn’t admit they were wrong. Instead they’d do some more killing and give any flimsy excuse. What kind of people were they?
So everyone waited to see what answer Little Thunder would send to the Wasp. Give up Red Leaf and Long Chin? They were living with the Oglala now—what could Little Thunder do about that? Give up Spotted Tail? Outrageous.
But if Little Thunder refused, more women and children would die.
You didn’t ask if a wasp gone wild was right or wrong. You couldn’t placate it. You killed it if you could. Or got away from it.
Little Thunder didn’t look at his friend Spotted Tail. “Everyone think about the Wasp’s words,” he said, “and we’ll talk more later.”
SPOTTED TAIL’S DECISION
Spotted Tail disappeared.
The morning after the council, still slow-moving from his wounds, he went alone to the far side of the little lake in the sand hills, across from the camp, and built a sweat lodge and spent the day there.
He didn’t come back that night.
Sweetwater Woman acted rattled. Spotted Tail must have talked to her. “One goes onto the mountain,” she said quietly to Curly, telling him in the oblique way that was polite that Spotted Tail would cry for a vision. She didn’t need to say he’d probably be gone several days. Her voice sounded pebbled, and one hand trembled.
Curly would never have asked—it would have been an intolerable breach—but Sweetwater Woman suddenly added the words herself. “Spotted Tail will see whether he should turn himself over to the soldiers to be hanged.”
Curly flinched as if she had slapped him. His tongue thickened so that he couldn’t respond. Her language was shocking. She had specified the decision with indelicate directness, and she had said that terrible word for the way of death. An ugly picture tried to rise in his mind, but he forbade it.
Then Curly realized she wasn’t slapping him but herself.
The awful picture rose again, his uncle hanging by the neck, fouling himself, his face swelling up grotesquely. Or was it his mother?
He levered his mind into the present. He thought of Spotted Tail alone in the place where Curly had been last year in this Moon When Leaves Turn Brown, in that queer space between this world and whatever else there was, and sitting still and facing, alone, the question: Live? Or throw away your life?
Curly saw his uncle in imagination, the man’s big arms and his huge chest and his amused eyes and his hearty laugh, and could not make the picture fit, this man so … vital, sitting and thinking of choosing to die.
Sweetwater Woman suddenly said she was going to be with her two sister wives and their mother for the night.
Curly decided to sleep in the lodge alone, preferring solitude to family, another reason his people were calling him “Our Strange Man.” When Sweetwater Woman left, Hawk flapped her wings within his breast.
Spotted Tail was entirely different from him, fixed somehow like a tree with roots in Mother Earth and her ways of copulating and birthing and excreting and bleeding, a man who planted his big, flat feet on the earth and looked around and said inside his head, This is mine.
Alone in the lodge this night, Curly told himself that Spotted Tail was made to live in the world and he, Curly, was not.
Sweetwater Woman and her two sisters didn’t come back for three days. Nor did his uncle.
The whole time Curly brooded, and Hawk pranced on her perch, restless.
On the fourth day Spotted Tail came back. He strode in calling out to his friends, hollering for his children to come and play. He threw the two small ones into the air and spent a while helping one of his daughters paint a piece of buffalo hide she wanted to stuff for a doll. When his boys came back, he played war with them, both boys on one side and Spotted Tail on the other. The weapons were sticks for flinging gobs of mud.
That night Curly heard the sounds of love from the robe of Sweetwater Woman and later both of the other robes.
His uncle seemed clear, light, at ease. Apparently he had made his decision.
Curly felt dazzled. And he wondered what it was.
The next morning Flat Club came back to camp drunk. Everyone wondered where he had gotten the whiskey, but there were places. Flat Club liked to get drunk. It made him amiable and amorous. He was well known for chasing his two wives around when he drank too much. Most people were embarrassed by his behavior. Even eye contact between a man and woman was brazen, and public touching entirely improper. But when Flat Club was drunk, he acted like a lustful bull among the cows, all in good humor, and only toward his own wives.
Spotted Tail always enjoyed this vulgar behavior. Since Flat Club was married to two of his own half sisters, he treated Club like a brother-in-law. Which is to say Spotted Tail teased him.
This time Spotted Tail solicited Curly’s help. Flat Club was carrying on comically in front of their lodge, one of t
he few buffalo-hide tipis left in the village. “Come on,” he said over and over to one wife and then the other, “let’s walk under the blanket together.” And he would stumble toward one of them, hands outstretched lecherously. The women kept to their tasks and avoided him easily enough—he kept falling down—but they were acutely embarrassed.
One of them told Flat Club that his ce, penis, wouldn’t work any better than his legs.
“Show her!” yelled Spotted Tail, laughing. “Show her your legs work!”
He whispered to Curly, and the youth scurried off.
Flat Club ran around the tipi at high speed, with unbelievable balance for his state of inebriation.
“Let’s dance!” yelled Spotted Tail, and started in. Spotted Tail chose a ridiculous sage grouse strut, an imitation of the bird’s mating dance. Flat Club thought this was hilarious and joined in fervently. The two puffed out their chests like the silly-looking birds, waggled their tails, and looked sideways sneakily to see if the females were watching.
Now a crowd was gathering to see Spotted Tail’s fun. Even Flat Club’s wives were starting to enjoy the show.
Curly slipped back into the lodge with a big bundle of something wrapped in a blanket.
“Ho, Flat Club!” yelled Spotted Tail, looking around to make sure his audience was appreciative. “Remember what we did that time with the crazy old woman?”
Flat Club slapped his belly over and over until he fell down. He rolled onto his back and waggled his feet in the air.
Many people remembered. This old woman, who’d gotten very prickly with age, had badgered the teenage Flat Club and Spotted Tail until they vowed vengeance. The youths ran up the slanting side of her lodge until they could grab the lodge poles, hang on, and sit in the crotch of the poles. Then they rocked the poles back and forth until the hides began to tear along the seams, poles broke, and finally the whole lodge toppled. All the while the old woman yelled like a wounded she-bear, but none of the adults interfered—they thought she had it coming.
