But before I could deal further with this matter, Amanda come in the door. My back was to her, but I could feel as much as see her shadow.
Sitting Bull said, “Yellow Hair has not learned much Lakota. Therefore it’s difficult to tell her what to do. Two Robes and Seen by the Nation have taught her some things, of course, but if she wants to be useful she should speak our language.”
Notice he did not ask me to interpret between her and him. It was up to me to offer, but I could hardly get out of it, and anyway I’d have to identify myself to her sooner or later, dreading the moment though I did.
So I asked Sitting Bull what he wanted to say to her now, and he asked me if I wanted more food, and when I replied I did not, he said, “Henana.”
So without turning my head, I says to Amanda, who was still behind me, “He don’t want no more.”
So she comes and squats to pick up the platter, and this time she looks at me, being low enough to see under the brim of my hat, but she still didn’t say a word.
“Good day, Amanda,” I says.
“Good day, Jack,” says she, and rises without visible effort and leaves.
Sitting Bull didn’t comment, either, but I felt I should explain. “We know each other, she and I.” And then since he still said nothing and for all I knowed might of assumed we belonged to some white tribe of which all the members was acquainted with one another, like his Hunkpapas was, I expanded on it in a simplified way, saying we had met in New York, which after all he had himself visited with the Wild West in ’85.
“If you’d like to take her with you, you may,” he said. Though old and fairly portly due to meals of the kind he just ate, he too rose to his feet in quite an effortless style.
Whereas I, who was still slender as a boy, felt my years and lack of recent practice at sitting on the ground to feed. My knees was not as flexible as they once had been, and I had walked around thirty miles overnight and was stiff. I wasn’t sure of how to respond to his offer when I finally got to the standing position.
So I says, “I’ll talk to her later, if you don’t mind.”
“That would please me,” said the Bull. “I did not invite her to come here, but I can’t very well throw her out. She seems to be an agreeable person, but having her around makes me uncomfortable, and the other Hunkpapas don’t like the idea, particularly at this time of the Ghost Dance.”
Now I got to explain why this famous chief and wise man of the fearsome warrior nation of the Sioux found himself not able to expel an unwanted guest: it was them laws of hospitality. An Indian of the old days was at a disadvantage if his bitterest enemy got inside his lodge: he might slaughter him anywhere else, but he was forced inside his own home to treat him as a guest, feeding him and putting him up as long as he wanted to stay. One of the worst sins to a Plains Indian was lack of generosity.
You take that bunch in Italy called the Borgias, who I heard about when the Wild West was over there, for they had a lot of power around the time some of them old palaces and churches we visited was built, supposedly they was famous for inviting folks in for a meal and then dropping poison in the food and drink. No Indians I ever knowed would do such a thing, which should be pointed out along with their failure to contribute much to the history of architecture.
“You must take a look at the picture the other white woman painted of me.” No doubt he referred to Amanda’s predecessor. “It is in the other cabin, where the women can look at it.”
“What was her name?”
“I can’t remember,” says he, “because it’s hard to pronounce. But you will see it written on the picture when you look at it.”
“Yellow Hair’s white name is Amanda Teasdale.” I don’t know where the impulse come to mention that: it wouldn’t mean much to him.
“I would be happy if she went away,” said he. “If you want to, you might suggest that to her.”
“All right,” I said, and knowing what he meant, I added, “I’ll let her think it is my idea. I’ll do that right now so I don’t forget.” I stepped outside.
I welcomed the excuse to go talk to Amanda, now that I seen I wouldn’t get anywhere in urging Sitting Bull to get out of there before Cody showed up, which by the way ought to of been pretty soon, judging from the position of the sun. That meal, at which I couldn’t remember eating anything, had obviously taken quite a while nevertheless.
There was some Indian women coming and going at the other nearby buildings or lounging about if they was men, and young kids running around at play, all of them closely related to Sitting Bull as it would turn out, wives, daughters, sons, sons-in-law, and grandchildren, though some of the youngsters was of his own offspring. It was just like all the Indian camps I ever knowed, except the lodges was square, made of wood, and not portable, and the Sioux no longer was allowed to do the two activities all Indian life had previously been arranged to further, namely, hunting and war—unless of course they joined Buffalo Bill’s Wild West and did them in make-believe.
I found Amanda around the corner, tending a cookfire. Now I could see her in full daylight, her face was smudged with soot on one cheek, I guess when she cleared a lock of wispy hair from her eyes with a dirty hand as she bent over the embers. The hem of her skirt showed dried and hardened mud, being too long for this life, dragging on the ground, and I reckon the whole dress was filthier than it looked, for twice while I approached she wiped her fingers on the skirt, but luckily it was so dark nothing black showed though anything lighter did, such as the yellowish mud and then in back was something looked like one of the babies had spit up where she last set down.
She was poking at the glowing coals with a stick, separating them so they’d burn out quicker. I guess Sitting Bull’s women taught her that. A white person would be likely to drench the fire with water, plenty of which flowed in the nearby Grand, but if you done that the charcoal wouldn’t be of any use till it dried out and you might need it sooner, and you would also squander the water which had to be fetched by bucket. The stick kept catching fire at its end, at which she would pull it away and extinguish the flame by screwing it vigorously into the ground.
I tell you, I couldn’t spare the time for anything but the most important question, at least to me. “Amanda,” I says, “where’s that husband of yours?”
She straightened up, swiping at her cheek again with her left hand, leaving behind more smudge. “Husband?” says she, them deep blue eyes looking real puzzled. “I don’t have one.”
“You never got married back in New York?”
She made a face like a little girl’s, corners of the mouth turned up, eyes rolling, an expression of hers I never seen before and a specially unusual one to see in her present situation. “Jack,” she says, “I did not get married in New York.”
“I went to that Friends of the Red Man office,” I says, “and there was a sign on the door saying it was closed, and the janitor told me—”
“Oh,” says she, “now I know what you’re referring to. When my associate Agatha Wetling was married, the wedding took place in Boston. I was maid of honor. We had to close the office for a few days. Aside from a secretary, there were only the two of us on the executive staff.” She sniffed. “All too many people were on our governing board, though, most of them men. It wasn’t long afterward that the organization was dissolved.” She lowered her head, scratched the still smoldering stick on the earth, and murmured, but then raised it and managed to look proud though disheveled. “So I finally decided to do what I probably should have done in the first place instead of trying to deal with the Indian problem at a distance: go to the heart of the matter.”
I immediately returned to my old sympathy for Amanda, while actually thinking she was misguided. “Well,” I says, “you come to the right fellow. There ain’t nobody alive who’s more one hundred percent Indian than Sitting Bull, but he’s involved in something now that probably nobody can help him with. Not even his old friends like Buffalo Bill, who by the way is heading h
ere right at this moment.”
“Oh, not that awful charlatan,” Amanda said in cold disdain. But then she give me an appealing look. “Jack, can’t you do something to get rid of Cody? You know him.”
I was torn in several ways. Amanda could get to me usually, plus I didn’t approve of Cody’s mission as specified by General Miles, but I couldn’t believe he would ever try to arrest Sitting Bull and just maybe he could talk him into returning to the show after all. Beyond all this of course was the unlikelihood of Cody’s listening to me unless I was agreeing with him, and whatever he did would be preferable to having them Indian soldiers show up, anxious to prove they could do a good job of controlling their own kind.
“Amanda, I’m saying this for your own good, believe me. I know you mean well, as always, but forgive me for asking this, it ain’t no criticism. I was wondering what you hoped to accomplish coming here and working like an Indian wife.”
Thank heavens she didn’t seem offended by the question. “I suddenly realized,” she said, “that I have previously been morally fraudulent. I had been looking at these people from an enormous distance. That was true even at the Major’s school.” She sneered. “And to work for the cause as far away as New York was grotesque.”
A great need to defend her, in this case from herself, come over me. “Well,” I says, “that’s where I think anybody’d have to go to raise the most money, wouldn’t they? It’s true there ain’t many Indians to be seen there, aside from Cody’s show, but out here in the West, with plenty of Indians around, the whites generally hate them and ain’t going to look kindly on you.”
This found a mark with her. “They’re horrible. Poor Catherine Weldon! The newspaper called her Sitting Bull’s white squaw, living in sin with an old savage. And she was given worse names at Fort Yates—by the white wives, of course.”
“There you are,” I says. “I bet you was doing a swell job back East, right near Wall Street too.” I had no real idea of what I was talking about, but I did so want to buck her up.
She sneered again, though as before it was not at me but at herself, nor was such an expression an unattractive one with a face like Amanda’s. “I did such a good job that the money we laboriously collected managed to disappear without a trace, though neither Agatha nor I took any of it beyond administrative expenses.”
“I doubt you’re the only person to run into crooks on the money side of an enterprise,” I pointed out. “Next time you’ll know what to look for.”
“There won’t be a next time,” Amanda said. “I’ve learned my lesson.”
First it was Sitting Bull who exasperated me. Now it was her. Why is it people you like are always the most stubborn? It was time for me to get stern. “Now, Amanda,” I says, “how long are you going to hang around here working like a flunky? You ain’t an Indian woman and you’ll never be one. What you’re doing is just make-believe, for the reason you can go back to the white world any time you get tired of this.” She had throwed her head back and looked away. “And I expect you will do that soon enough, for Indian wives perform all the hard labor of the camp while the men don’t do much of anything, and to the white way of thinking that’s wrong.”
Now she looked at me and said, “Ha!”
“All right,” I says, “so amongst whites except for rich people the women do a lot of chores too, but the husbands go out to work. All I’m saying is it’s different with Indians, but so is most everything else, except for the fact that they seem to like what they do, which includes, or used to in the recent past, being merciless towards their enemies, torturing, killing, scalping, and mutilating. If you think you can become a squaw as your latest project, then you really ought to think about what it took to cut the guts out of a wounded cavalryman laying on the field at the Little Bighorn.” Even talking turkey as I was, I couldn’t bring myself to tell her sometimes it wasn’t guts but the private parts of such a poor devil, after which they stuffed them in his mouth. “Yet there ain’t no mother more tender to her offspring than an Indian, so they’re not always different in everything. But it takes a long time to see Indians as a whole, as well as a real strong stomach.”
I could never get one up on Amanda. She smiled at me now and, though her face was dirty, spoke with her old assurance. “That was an eloquent lecture, Jack, but as it happens, I already agreed with its points before you made it. I have no intention of impersonating a Lakota woman. I’m just trying to understand what it means to be one, admittedly in white terms. And I think I’ll learn more here, though no doubt never enough, than in some Indian-betterment organization, or at some university under the direction of white men.”
That was reasonable enough, I figured. But then what?
“Write about it,” says she.
I was always impressed by anybody who could just read and write in the common way, being fairly shaky at both all my life, but to write about something meant more than a postcard or list of camp supplies. “For a newspaper?”
“Well, maybe,” said she. “Or a book.”
“Excuse my ignorance, Amanda,” I says, “but that would likely take you a few days, would it not?”
“At least.” She seemed amused by my question.
“Yeah, well, I doubt you’re going to have that long, here anyway. They’re aiming to put Sitting Bull out of business in one way or another, and none will be pretty. Please get out right away. I know what I’m talking about!”
One thing this accomplished, if nothing else: she took more personal notice of me than ever before. “Jack,” she says quite warmly, “you’ve always tried your best to help, and it hasn’t gone unnoticed by me. You have a good heart.”
Hearing that, my good heart fell. Who wants to be praised for his kindness by a woman he takes to? I wasn’t no preacher nor settlement worker. But she wouldn’t of been Amanda without adding a twist, which brung back my hopes after all.
“I wonder whether you would do me still another favor?”
“Anything at all, Amanda.”
“My greatest difficulty here has been due to my ignorance of the language. I had expected some of the Sioux to know more English than it turns out any of them do. Of course I have learned a little by pointing and asking what it’s called, but that’s a laborious process and useless for nonmaterial things such as thoughts and feelings.” Her smile though with a dirty face was as beautiful as I ever seen. She gestured towards me, putting out a slim hand. “Could you teach me to speak Lakota?”
“You ain’t going to leave?”
“Sitting Bull,” said she, “is the greatest living Indian leader. My study is not simply of what it is to be a Lakota woman but what it is to be a wife of Sitting Bull. I’m going to stay near him.”
Which meant she as usual wasn’t really taking me seriously. However, I had no choice but to say, sure, I would start the lessons soon as she wanted, and she said it would have to wait a little, for she had other chores to do. Now you might wonder, like me, how that had come about if she couldn’t communicate no better with the Indians, but I found it was her idea to hang around the women and imitate them, and if it turned out she was in their opinion pretty good at something, like cooking food to please the Bull, why, she was welcome to do it. As odd as Indians often was by our lights, they could also be totally practical.
I don’t want to be indelicate, but I admit when Amanda mentioned learning about being a wife to Sitting Bull, I hoped she wasn’t referring to sharing his bed as part of her research. Of course I couldn’t openly pursue that matter. I’d just have to watch where she slept that night, if in fact I was to know that night as a free or even a living person. I figured Sitting Bull would just politely turn Cody down, but violently resist any attempt by Indian police or white troops to take him away as a prisoner, and while, had I been acting on my own behalf, I would of left before this happened, having done what I could to warn him and thus discharged my moral obligation to a friend, Amanda’s presence made it necessary for me to remain and help him,
and maybe get myself arrested or even killed in the process.
But so as not to keep you in further suspense, let me go through what did and did not occur that evening and for the next couple weeks.
First, I waited all day for Buffalo Bill’s arrival, but he never come. What happened, as I learned afterwards, was that Agent McLaughlin and Colonel Drum had been able to stop him after all by that emergency appeal to President Harrison, who sent a return order telling Cody to lay off and go home.
Nor during that same period did anybody appear who was unfriendly to Sitting Bull, but a number of Hunkpapas did get the Ghost Dance proceedings set up in a nearby field, fallow now in winter and suitably flat for dancing, with an associated sweat lodge, an old-fashioned hide tepee where water was poured on hot stones, creating a steam that would make the naked bodies of the sitting participants perspire, purifying the spirit for the ceremonies. Afterwards they would put on special Ghost shirts of what to a white man would be real good quality deerskin, specially decorated, but finally just leather and not the bulletproof material an ordinary Sioux might well work himself up to believe. But I didn’t think Sitting Bull would go that far, and I’m not saying he did, though he went into the lodge and sweated with the others.
It wasn’t the kind of thing I could ask him about directly, but just being in the same camp I could pick up enough on the subject to get a general sense of the situation, and most of it come from Sitting Bull himself. He wasn’t sold on the Ghost Dance, but he wasn’t against it either. What he wanted to do was give it an opportunity. Probably it wouldn’t work, but maybe it would, and meanwhile it offered people something beyond the limited existence imposed on them by the victorious whites.
He had heard quite a bit about Christianity, from all sorts of missionaries, including even one who was female, and in fact sometimes wore as personal decoration that crucifix give him by a Catholic priest. But most of what it pertained to was quite distant from him and the Lakota way. What good was a Spirit up to who told you to turn the other cheek to an enemy with a raised hatchet?
Return of Little Big Man Page 45
