Ride the Free Wind

by Rosanne Bittner

  Dooley came inside the tipi to add wood to the fire.

  “He’s coming yonder,” he told Abbie, averting her eyes.

  “Thank God!” she whispered, pulling her new baby daughter closer. Little Rock still slept. After helping Dooley bury the men they had killed, Zeke had been gone all night. He had insisted on burying them far away from the tipi, loading them on a travois and dragging them over the crest of a distant ridge. He buried them deep, with no mounds, so that eventually there would not even be a sign of the graves. He wanted no reminders of the night before and would not tell Abbie where the men were buried.

  It was nearly sunrise when he returned. Abbie knew he had been tortured all night over her attack—feeling guilt because she had suffered and blaming himself for everything bad that happened to her just because he was a half-breed.

  “Don’t be too upset with him,” Dooley was telling her. “He’s hurting.”

  “I’ve been through this before, Dooley,” she answered softly. “And I’m not one to be angry with a man for being gone all night … not a man like Zeke. He had to be alone.”

  Dooley nodded. “You’re a good woman, Abigail, good for him.”

  She smiled. “It isn’t hard to be good to him.”

  Dooley returned her smile. When they heard Zeke’s horse come closer outside, Dooley stood up and left, exchanging a glance with Zeke before taking his horse for him.

  “She’s been waiting for you,” he told Zeke. “Why don’t you go in there and take a good look at that new baby girl. She’s a damned purty little thing just like her ma.”

  Zeke looked back at him with red, tired eyes. “She all right?”

  “If she wasn’t, I’d have come looking for you. Figured you’d stay close enough to hear me holler if she needed you.”

  A faint smile passed over Zeke’s lips. “I was close enough.” He put a hand on Dooley’s shoulder. “Thanks for your help, Dooley.”

  Dooley just shrugged. “You’ve been good to me, letting me stay here and all. I’m going to my soddy to get some rest. And you’d best do the same. You look terrible.” He winked at Zeke and led his horse away.

  Zeke swallowed his doubts and hesitation and ducked inside the tipi. He stopped when he met her eyes. She looked beautiful, lying there with a new baby in her arms, their son asleep nearby. Everything was so peaceful it was hard to believe the terror of the night before.

  “I’m sorry I got you into all this, Abbie girl, living in the middle of nowhere, having your babies with no doctor. You deserve better.”

  She looked at him steadily. “If you think I deserve the best, then I’m getting what I deserve. I have you, and my babies. My son and my daughter are healthy, and I’m living in this beautiful land with my beautiful husband. I’m happy, Zeke. There’s nothing more I want.”

  He looked around the tipi with a frown; then he turned around, sighing deeply. “Oh, Abbie, Abbie,” he said with a note of resignation. “I just don’t know any more.”

  “Well, I do know! If we were living in a fancy house, those men would still have done what they did. They were after a woman and looking to steal horses. It wouldn’t have mattered who I was. And women all have their babies the same way, whether it’s in a fancy house or a tipi, with a doctor or by letting nature take its course. They nurse them and love them just like I do. Living where we do and the way we do—that doesn’t make any difference at all!”

  He shook his head, finally turning to face her. He came over and knelt beside her, touching his daughter’s soft, red cheek with his big, rough hand. “Abbie, you have so many years ahead of you,” he told her, his eyes watching the baby. “I hope you don’t spend them regretting the day you married a half-breed who’s given you nothing but a tipi and a hard life.”

  “Zeke Monroe!” she said chidingly. She reached up and touched his cheek, and he took her hand. “I sold my soul to you that first night you stepped into the light of my pa’s campfire and offered to be our scout. Remember when I gave you that cup of coffee?”

  “I remember,” he answered, meeting her eyes.

  She smiled and her eyes teared. “You touched me for just a moment, and I thought I’d up and die right there, I got such a tingle in my body!”

  He smiled a little, almost bashfully, and she squeezed his hand. “I still get that tingle when my strong and handsome half-breed husband touches me,” she continued. “My sister said once that if I married you, all I’d ever get was a tipi and ten kids, and I told her that was just fine with me, if you were the one I was getting pregnant by. I meant that, Zeke. That’s why I made that vow to God to love you and be true to you for the rest of my life.”

  “But that’s just it, Abbie. I’m afraid some day you’ll sit back and wonder why in hell you did all this, wonder what life might have been like if you had gone back to Tennessee and married a nice, quiet white boy who farmed and—”

  “Zeke!” she interrupted him with a frown. “What would I want with a boring life like that. And how dare you say I’d be so fickle as to think such things!” He looked at her, surprised at her anger, for her eyes began to blaze with determination and scorn for his remark. “I knew before I ever met you the kind of man I wanted. He was going to be all man, strong and sure, willing to die for me. It wouldn’t matter what his station was in life, only that he was a real man who could be brave and never turn tail on a fight, but who’d be gentle with his woman. And I figured I’d set my sights too high, till I saw you that first time. It was like … like getting struck by lightning. I felt like God was all but pounding me over the head to tell me I’d best not ever let you out of my sight, and I didn’t.” Her eyes softened again. “We have to take one day at a time, Zeke. That’s all we can do. We don’t know what lies ahead. We only know there’s you and me … and Little Rock and now our new daughter. We’re together and safe. And I wouldn’t take all the fancy houses and rich men in the world in exchange for life without my Zeke. You and I, Zeke. That’s how it has to be. We can’t let anything that happens destroy what we have—that special love we have.”

  He closed his eyes and held her hands tightly. “There’s so much trouble ahead, Abbie, for this land, for the People—”

  “There’s nothing we can do about that, Zeke. All we can do is hang on to our love and never let anything that happens separate us. And God knows what stories we’ll have to tell our grandchildren some day, Zeke Monroe, about how this land got settled and how you and I had a part in it. We’ve got to help the People through these bad times, and we can’t do it if we have problems between us.” She searched his troubled eyes pleadingly. “Don’t let your anger get in the way of our love, Zeke. Don’t let those awful men out there put doubts in your head about you and me.”

  He let go of her hand and stroked her hair back from her face. “Abbie, people will insult you because of me. They’ll—”

  “Let them!” she flashed. “Cheyenne Zeke is my man, and I’m damned proud of him. You’re my legal husband, and I’ve got nothing to be ashamed about. What I’m ashamed of is you, Zeke Monroe! The way you’re talking right now. Doubting my love for you when I just gave birth to your second child.” Her words broke and tears of anger welled in her eyes.

  He flinched, looking like a little boy who had been severely scolded, and she wanted to smile in spite of her tears; for although he still had blood on his leggings, the blood of the men he had so ferociously attacked, she had the power to reduce him to a scolded child.

  She pulled her baby girl close to her breast. “You’d best get cleaned up,” she told him quietly.

  He sighed and rose obediently, not sure what to say to her. He went to the tipi entrance and stopped.

  “Abbie, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—”

  “I know you didn’t, Zeke. It’s just that I made a choice, and I don’t want to have to worry about your doubting my love.”

  “I’ve never doubted that. I just … I love you so much. If I ever see you hurt bad because of me …” He left qu
ietly without finishing.

  The summer of 1849 brought two things that were much more devastating for the Cheyenne than all the bluecoats the East could have sent against them; they were worse than being attacked by every Pawnee tribe and all the Ute and Crow combined.

  Gold was discovered in California. Not only did the gold bring a new surge of emigrants, who raped the land, killed the game, and shot the Indians without reason; but the emigrants themselves brought something much worse than their guns and destruction. They brought more disease.

  At first the summer seemed peaceful enough. Little Rock was two years old that year, and Zeke and Abbie’s daughter, named Moheya, meaning Blue Sky, was six months old when the news began to trickle in.

  Cholera. It raged through the Pawnee and did more destruction than all the years of fighting with the Cheyenne. Before it was over, eleven hundred Pawnee had been wiped out, and it was rumored the Sioux had also suffered severely from the dreaded “big cramps.”

  Most were certain the disease had begun with polluted water, made that way by the thousands of westward travelers who left dead animals lying where they dropped in their tracks, and who bathed in the rivers and left behind a trail of garbage and human waste.

  The disease seemed confined mostly to the Platte River area, so the northern Cheyenne began fleeing south, bringing the disease with them to the southern Cheyenne. The northerners didn’t know what else to do but run to their brothers in the south, thinking that if they fled fast enough, the disease would be left behind. But it followed them, and men and women fell from their horses or fell in their tracks as they walked, screaming in agony from the horrible cramps, dying terrible and, to them, dishonorable deaths.

  The numbers of the Cheyenne along the Arkansas were swelled by those fleeing from the north, and although after several weeks, the disease began to wane, it picked up again, becoming so bad that William Bent sent his own Cheyenne wife and half-breed sons east with other Cheyenne, away from the Santa Fe Trail, where the disease seemed to be most rampant. But before it was finished, the Cheyenne had lost nearly half their people.

  The ravages of the disease signaled the end of many things for the Indians, for in that same year, with the fur trading business ruined by the decimation of so many Cheyenne, William Bent’s business began to fold. Bent had flourished on Indian trade, but the demand for furs had dwindled, and that situation, combined with the loss of so many southern Cheyenne and the severe restrictions on the Indians’ ability to hunt and trap, meant the fur trade was over.

  A new era was coming, and the old fur trading posts were being turned into Army posts. No post was planned for Bent’s Fort, and William Bent could not bear to see his fort sit and fall into ruin. So, once his wife had been sent away, he stripped the fort of its valuables, rolled powder kegs into the fort’s main rooms, and set a torch to it. There was soon a great explosion and fire. The fort smoldered for days, and the mecca of the fur trade for the Cheyenne and the other Indians on the Arkansas River was no more. The end of Bent’s Fort brought even more confusion to the Cheyenne, who saw their old way of life fading before their eyes.

  By the fall of 1849, Gentle Woman had died of the horrible cholera, as well as little Magpie. Their loss cut deeply into Abbie’s heart, and her soul cried out in agony as she watched Tall Grass Woman dig her nails into her cheeks and slash at her arms with a knife to express her grief over little Magpie. The little girl had died such a terrible death that Abbie wondered if perhaps she should have let the girl drown in the river the day she had dived in to save her.

  Three days later brought Gentle Woman’s final release from the painful sickness. Swift Arrow slashed his chest with a knife and cut off the end of a little finger in his grief over his mother. When Zeke’s brothers committed similar self-mutilations, they were joined by Zeke, who again cut at his chest several times.

  Abbie knelt to the ground in her grief, holding her children close to her, as Deer Slayer and his sons placed many gifts and beautiful jewelry and new moccasins on the scaffold that held Gentle Woman. Finally Abbie could bear it no longer. Her heart was as heavy as when her own mother had died, for Gentle Woman had truly been a mother to her. With patience and love, she had taught Abbie so many things. Her name had been most fitting. And Abbie’s grief was made worse by the knowledge of how deeply this woman’s death would affect Zeke, who had been so close to his Cheyenne mother—Zeke, who had searched for Gentle Woman years after being torn from her arms by his white father and who had promised Gentle Woman he would always come back. Now Gentle Woman was gone. She was the one who would not be coming back.

  Abbie was filled with all the Cheyenne beliefs Gentle Woman had instilled in her soul, and she could not stop herself from digging into her own cheeks with her fingernails. She wanted to hurt. She wanted to feel pain. It was necessary.

  By 1850, Fitzpatrick was again talking treaty, but this time it was serious talk. There was a new superintendent in St. Louis, named Mitchell, and he agreed that a treaty was needed. Most tribes still ran wild and were confused as to their rights and territories. The government was awakening to the fact that the Plains tribes could not be forced into anything with military show, that infantry was useless against these experienced and very skilled warriors, and that cavalry mounts could not match Indian mounts. And most important, a treaty seemed a much less costly answer to the Indian problem than a war.

  A treaty council was planned for the summer of 1850, so the wheels began rolling in Washington, but very slowly. Because of the involvement of Congress in the Compromise of 1850, its members were slow in attending to the problems of the Indians, and money was not appropriated for enactment of the treaty until February of 1851.

  During all this time, Fitzpatrick crossed the Plains, holding small meetings with tribes and trying desperately to keep them calm. Finally he convinced most of the southern Cheyenne and Arapaho to begin a journey north to Fort Laramie for a great meeting. The Indians saw a ray of hope. They would go and sit in on this council. Besides, it had been a long time since they had gone north and met with their Sioux brothers. It would be good for them all to be together again, to feast and dance. They could hold ceremonies that might bring them the strength and wisdom they would need to cope with the changes taking place in their lives.

  Zeke and Abbie prepared to accompany them northward, for Zeke wanted to see for himself just what kind of promises the government intended to make. And both he and Abbie looked forward to the trip, which would be good for them all.

  Abbie would again ride like an Indian woman, carrying her little girl papoose on her back. Little Rock would ride proudly in front of his father on his father’s finest Appaloosa, and Zeke would take some of his herd along to sell at Fort Laramie, for Bent’s Fort, at which he had done business, no longer existed. Yes, it would be good to make the trip. They packed a travois and made ready for the journey; meanwhile the pile of logs still lay where it had remained for nearly three years. The cabin still had not been built.

  * * *

  Susan Garvey and the doctor laughed and rolled on the bed together, lost in another sexual interlude. They did not share a love affair, merely naughty games for the thrills and pleasures they brought them. But this time their fun was interrupted by Senator Winston Garvey, who had paid a servant to tell him the truth about his wife and the doctor, about whom he had become suspicious. He had only to surprise them to get his final proof.

  The bedroom door burst open, and the doctor jumped up from the bed, wide-eyed with fright and staring at the enraged senator. Susan screamed and curled up, pulling the covers over herself.

  “Get the hell out of my house!” Garvey sneered at the doctor.

  The doctor was speechless. He quickly put on his pants and grabbed his black bag, not even giving Susan a backward glance as he rushed past the senator, his face beet red. Garvey slammed the bedroom door, and Susan began whimpering and shaking her head as he came closer to her.

  “Winston, I … I’ll l
et you do … whatever you want!” she whimpered. “I’m so sorry, Winston! Please, don’t hurt me! You can come to our bed whenever you wish! Don’t turn me out, Winston! Don’t tell anyone about this! Please, Winston!”

  He backhanded her across the face and she screamed. He ripped the covers away from her and began unbuttoning his pants.

  “You are going to lie here, my sweet, and you’re going to let me do whatever I wish. You owe me. You owe me plenty!”

  He grasped her hair and pulled it until she screamed again.

  “You slut!” he growled. “You filthy tramp! All this time telling me you couldn’t lie with me because pregnancy might kill you!” He hit her again. “Well, my sweet wife, I’ll have you all I want and whenever I want, and in a day or two you’ll get your ass to Santa Fe! Because after I’m through with you, I won’t want to look at you for a while. If I do, I just might kill you!”

  He hit her again, and she began crying uncontrollably. He smiled, laying his full, heavy weight over her naked body. “In two days you’ll be on your way west, my dear,” he told her. “I might hate your guts, but I still like your lovely little body, and you like the importance of my name, so we just might get along after all. You can pay for your keep like a whore by letting me bed you. And maybe you’ll get lucky on your way to Santa Fe and get raped by some Indian buck. I’ll bet you’d just love that!” he sneered.

  She covered her face and wept, as his lips moved down over her body. “By the way,” he told her as he groped between her legs. “Don’t think you can make arrangements with your doctor lover to go out there with you. I’ve already made plans for the doctor’s untimely death.”

  She cried harder, but he was not touched. He proceeded to take her forcibly, feeling a certain excitement at the sound of her weeping.

  The stagecoach clattered over the Santa Fe Trail, carrying the prim, proper, and beautiful senator’s wife and their little four-year-old son, Charles. Susan Garvey held her head high, for she noticed the way the men looked at her at the stage stops, as though she were a goddess. She would be a queen out here, admired by all. And no one would know about her affair with the doctor.