Return of Little Big Man

by Thomas Berger

  At last not only was I doing something with my life I could be proud of, but also I had that closer connection with Amanda that I had yearned for, and it might not seem much, us just being at first teachers in the same place, but it turned out to be the right way to start towards something more, and I mean not only personally but by way of profession, for though giving music lessons to poor children was a mighty fine occupation, as was my own, I kept after Amanda on the subject of that book she had wanted to write about Indians, whether just about Sioux women or an account of Sitting Bull’s death, or what seemed best to me, combining the two, and I admit at the back of my mind was including a good bit of my own story with it, though how that might be done I never had no idea, being as you know barely literate, not to mention I hadn’t ever so far told her more than bits and pieces with respect to my childhood with the Cheyenne.

  My time at Hull House was of a morning, for I hadn’t asked nor was offered any pay, so stayed on with the Wild West, continuing to draw the wage, which come in handy now, as seeing Amanda all the time I took more care of my appearance, getting shaved daily by a barber, which cost me twenty-five cents but he also kept my hair and mustache trimmed, the former having taken on more gray at the sideburns and receding some at the temples, which concerned me a little but the barber assured me I looked the more distinguished for it, and then combed my hair down with pimp oil, adding to the stink of the bay rum he had earlier doused my face with, but if that’s what it took to look like a gent, I would endure it, along with acquiring a striped blazer, a pair of white flannel pants, and a summertime straw skimmer to replace the winter derby.

  I dressed more sober for Hull House, and of course around the Wild West you couldn’t look like a cake-eater from the East, so the fashionable outfit was for my off-time, the fairly rare occasions when I got any, given my two employments. And when I did find a few free hours, it had to coincide with Amanda’s for it to be of value to me.

  I’ll go into that subject further in a minute, but first I don’t want to forget that matter that led to my reconnection with Amanda. I had promptly reported back to Annie Oakley that Rain in the Face denied killing either Custer brother.

  “Do you believe him?” she asked. “Or was he just saying that?”

  “I don’t know,” I says. “I don’t think he’d admit it if he did, but maybe he really didn’t. He feels sorry for Mrs. Custer, anyhow.” It wasn’t exactly sorrow, but that seemed the best thing to call it for the purpose at hand. “He asked me if I could get him a picture of her.”

  I don’t know exactly what Annie thought of the request, for she just looked quizzical. “Well, I don’t personally own one, Jack,” she says, “and maybe when we get back east I could ask her about it, but I don’t know as I really want to.”

  I never saw Rain in the Face again nor went near Sitting Bull’s cabin, but then I didn’t see much more of Annie or Cody himself except during the show. I spent all my other time either frequenting Amanda or waiting to do so. What I wanted especially was to get her over to the Fair, and don’t mean just the Midway but also the White City with its display of the wonders of the end of the nineteenth century, and not all of them was machines and industrial and farm products: there was that enormous Palace of Fine Arts full of paintings, and concerts of fine music by the brass band of none other than John Philip Sousa, but she never had a good word to say about it, so on the first occasion we “walked out,” as they put it at that time when you was courting a girl, which I doubted Amanda had any idea I was doing, we had tea at the Palmer House, the fanciest hotel in Chicago and one they could hold up against any I seen anyplace in the world, for in fact it was constructed as a collection of the best features from other countries, from its French front to its Italian staircases and mirrors, Egyptian chandeliers, the interiors reproducing those of the German Kaiser’s palace, and the English rooms for smoking cigars and playing billiards.

  Now the way I decided to handle the matter of acting so as not to embarrass her was to copy what Amanda done as to putting cream and sugar in the tea, and so on, and generally I got by using this means, along with being helped by dumb luck at such times as when the waiter wanted to take the order for us both from only me, which later in life I learned was the polite style, with the lady telling the man what she wanted and him telling the help, but independent as Amanda was, she ignored that system and told the waiter what she required, so I did likewise, because it was the same.

  Another time I was favored by fortune is when I dropped my spoon but only started to bend down to fetch it off the floor when I realized I better wipe it off before using it again, but not dirty the expensive linen napkin they give you there, so was reaching for the bandanna I carried up my sleeve when a passing waiter, not our own, beat me to the spoon, and did not hand it back but supplied a fresh one. That’s the kind of service they had at the Palmer House. Imagine how much silverware they run through in the course of a day.

  Along with the tea they brung an assortment of little cakes and miniature sandwiches with I guess some of the same fillings they used in England, which I couldn’t identify when over there, either, most of it being air so far as substance went, but it was real grand in that hotel, and had I been able for long to take my eyes off Amanda I would of studied more of the fancy furnishings, which was a real marvel in a city also known for its stockyards. I mentioned dropping that utensil, well, the thick carpet looked so clean I probably wouldn’t even of had to wipe that spoon off except for the principle of the thing.

  At first, facing her like that across a table of white linen, gleaming silver, and china cups so thin as almost to be transparent, I wished I had fortified myself with whiskey before coming to drink tea, for the foregoing, including the crystal vase of fresh flowers, was as a setting of which Amanda was the jewel. She was wearing frosty blue today, a couple shades paler in hue than her eyes. In the summertime then women wore more than nowadays in the dead of winter: it was really a production, along with the wealth of hair carried on their heads, plus a hat.

  Anyway, on setting down there in that place where I didn’t belong, with a lady I didn’t deserve to know except maybe as her servant, I got a feeling of panic: any minute, the hotel detectives would show up and give me the bum’s rush for disgracing the Palmer House by just walking onto its premises.

  But one of Amanda’s abilities, once you got to know her personally, and vice versa, was to actually show an interest in what you told her. I admit this surprised me, though I did remember its beginnings back in the short time we was together after Sitting Bull’s murder, at which time I guess I didn’t believe it.

  Now I expect you been thinking throughout this story of mine, wasn’t there one single person of all them I run across who wanted to hear about the remarkable historical events I had participated in or at least witnessed? True, oftentimes for one reason or another I never tried to get into that subject, and I have showed you some examples, particularly with regard to the Little Bighorn, but also with my failure to keep Wild Bill Hickok alive when his bodyguard, and then that matter of the Earp-Clanton shootout at Tombstone, when I never wanted to testify for either side. But the way I found many people to be who was fond of their own reminiscences was not to encourage those of another person, considering it not information but only competition, and in my case, from a nobody.

  Well, wonder of wonders, Amanda turned out different when I finally got to know her after all them years of slight acquaintance, and it started that day at the Palmer House. In trying to talk her into writing the book, I got into my boyhood with the Cheyenne, and for the first time she asked me how that come about, and I begun to tell her, much as I have related it here on this machine, for she was real interested, to the degree of asking for details when I left them out, and as I guess you know by now I ain’t tongue-tied once I get going and know somebody’s listening, even if it’s only on faith, as right here.

  I sure didn’t get it all told on that one occasion, but continued at
her request during many similar hours we spent together over that summer and into the autumn, and at some point Amanda decided to write her book based on my experiences, not a biographical account but a summing up of the history of the West during my lifetime as I witnessed it, and she had her own point of view on the subject, which was more condemnatory of the whites than I would of been, for while I certainly agreed that much of it was fairly rotten, I couldn’t help being impressed by what happened since Chris Columbus had the guts to cross the Atlantic in that eggshell boat and find a whole new world for the Europeans to corrupt, if you want to put it that way, but also to build some remarkable things and establish principles that if ever carried out in full really might offer a better life for many, in fact had already done so.

  But you tell as much to anybody who is so bothered by the bad stuff they don’t want to consider the good, why, you might not get far, for that is their nature, and such was Amanda, who thought most of the people in charge of everything done a bad job with the exception of the women what operated Hull House.

  Which is to say she never approved of much done by men including even George Washington and Tom Jefferson, what kept black slaves, the last-named supposedly even being intimate with the females thereof. I didn’t know how much of this was true, reluctant as I was and am to think ill of the Founding Fathers, and I never heard any of it even from Lavender, my friend who died at the Greasy Grass, and he should of knowed, being colored. But she believed it and never even was that complimentary about Abe Lincoln, who had been Lavender’s hero, Amanda claiming that his freeing of the slaves had been more politics than moral commitment.

  But I don’t want to sound as if I’m knocking or making fun of her. It was just I thought it a pity she didn’t get more enjoyment and take a little time off from the cares of the world to have some fun, ride the Ferris wheel with its panoramic view of Chicago without thinking of all the people out there too poor to buy a ticket: the ride took only twenty minutes, going around twice.

  The other thing bothered me was in a different area, but one I considered fundamental, given the character of my attachment to her. Though treating me fine and being partial in memory to Sitting Bull, Amanda as I said generally took a dim view of the male sex. Now combining this and what I had noticed around Hull House, that the unmarried ladies there was so self-sufficient amongst themselves, with the Misses Addams and Starr being such close companions for many years, it begun to occur to me that I hadn’t ever heard Amanda speak of any male person in her life but her father, who she condemned.

  If I was barking up the wrong tree, my admiration for her would not be diminished, but the nature of it would definitely be altered. After all, I admired Old Lodge Skins and Sitting Bull and Bat Masterson for that matter, and Bill Cody in my own way, along with friends of the opposite sex like Allie Earp and Annie Oakley. If between me and Amanda there was only the barriers of upbringing and culture and class, the situation was not totally impossible, for we was Americans. But if we was separated by basic inclination, then any hope I had of future intimacy was useless.

  Which even so didn’t affect the telling her my life’s story so she would write that book. The tape machine hadn’t yet been invented at the time, and only Tom Edison had the equipment to record a human voice (an example of which was on display in the Fair’s Electricity Building), so Amanda presumably depended on her memory, assisted by the jottings she begun to make after a while, in a little leatherbound notebook with a cunningly attached pencil on a silk ribbon.

  She listened patiently to everything I said, but perked up and took notes when I got to subjects which took her special interest, which wasn’t weapons and hunting or horses or food, or even them stories us children was told from Cheyenne tradition by Old Lodge Skins, including my favorite about the great hero Little Man. I don’t mean Amanda nodded off when I deal with such topics, but she seldom wrote anything down, and in fact the same was true even of the real dramatic events like the big battles, culminating in the biggest of all at the Greasy Grass, except she did ask more than I first mentioned about the women mutilating the soldiers’ bodies, but I still never went into it as thoroughly as I could of, as I haven’t here, for it turns my stomach even at this late date. All I can say is Indians expected the same to be done to them when they lost, which is sure savage but I guess fair in its own fashion.

  So here she was, showing her usual partiality to subjects pertaining to females, which, given as she was one and preparing to write a book from that point of view, was not unbalanced. But it did add to that feeling of mine that like some of the others at Hull House, she could make her way through life without the help of a man, to put it politely. And when she did show an interest in a male matter, it could be called that only with a twist: I refer to the heemanehs, born as men but finding while growing up they preferred to do girls’ things instead of training to be warriors, was allowed to do so, wear dresses and do women’s work and even get married though usually as only one of several wives one man would have, the others being females.

  Amanda was more fascinated with this subject than I wanted her to be, for it wasn’t all that important in Cheyenne life. Heemanehs wasn’t that common, and in fact I only ever knowed one, Little Horse, and he seemed so natural you got used to him in no time and nobody beat him up or even insulted him as I knowed happened to white Percies as far back as during that short time I went to school when adopted by the Pendrakes. Amanda being so taken with this minor theme, while regarding as ho-hum all I had to tell her about war, increased my feeling as to her personal constitution, if I can call it that, and once again it looked like I was heading into a melancholy phase concerning her, as I had often in the past, except that this time it was likely to be permanent.

  I won’t keep you in suspense, but I will give you another surprise, knowing what you do about me by now, which of course she did not, for as it happened I neglected, for reasons of delicacy, modesty, or what have you, to include in my story any mention of my Indian wives or, for that matter, Olga, the Swedish woman I had previously married but who got captured by the Cheyenne as I described way back. I have always had a habit never to tell a woman I liked about any other I was associated with in the past, and I still think I have acted right in so doing, for the only means by which not to provoke jealousy is to slander them you once thought enough of to take up with, and that I won’t do.

  Anyway, to get to the point, while my suspicions of Amanda was nearing a disappointing conclusion, for her own part she had gotten the idea, believe it or not, that I might be a heemaneh! Or the white version thereof, for she never seen me wearing a dress.

  Lucky we was walking in the park at the time and not at tea in the Palmer House when I found that out, else I might of dropped my china cup. I can’t even remember clearly what she said to give me the idea, but I got it correctly, as she proceeded to admit when I said she had gotten it wrong.

  “But never have you mentioned a woman,” she said, more annoyed than apologetic for her error.

  I also was irked a little, for I still figured she was the odd one and what bothered her was to find out I was not, maybe to the degree that I might still, after all these weeks, make an unwelcome advance. So I adds, with some heat, “Don’t worry, the last thing in the world I’ll do is get fresh with you.”

  Amanda stopped there on the path and says in what I can only call indignation, “Why not?”

  “You ain’t never mentioned a man!” says I. “You don’t care for the whole tribe, it’s plain to see.”

  She stared at me for a time, still standing there, and a young couple passed, holding hands, smiling about us. Then she asked, “Do you really want to hear about my private life?” Funny, that’s all she had to say to make me realize I was as wrong about her as she had been about me.

  “No,” I says, “nor tell you about mine,” and found it possible to grin, and neither one of us ever told the other more than a few hints of our previous connections, which policy I can reco
mmend.

  Well, we’re coming to a new phase of my existence at this point, and if I live long enough I hope to tell you about it, for it was as remarkable as anything else I ever done though real different from all. I guess you could say it begun with my finally now being able to talk Amanda into going to the Fair and sharing some of my pleasures such as the Ferris wheel and the Venetian gondolas, eat German sausage and drink French cider, see Hagenbeck’s tiger ride the velocipede, and it wasn’t just the Midway I cared for, but the exhibitions and sights of the White City, interested as I was, now more than ever, in self-improvement. Of course Amanda never needed that. She already knowed a lot about pictures and statues before visiting the Palace of Fine Arts and in fact didn’t think much of quite a few of them on display which I thought as fine as they could be, the paintings looking real only prettier, and telling a story you could understand right away, like a mother trying to cheer up a sulky little kid with an apple, but Amanda said them vague kind of pictures I told her about seeing in Paris was better than the glossy. Fond as I was of her, I believed she was a snob about cultural matters, for you take the concerts of John Philip Sousa, where the highest-browed kinds of orchestral music was played, but also real heartwarming tunes like “Old Folks at Home,” which could bring water to my eyes, but Amanda never cared for at all, and it was the last straw for her when Sousa’s bunch did “Tarara-Boom-De-Ay” on the same program with the works of some of them Germans.

  Neither did she think much of Frank Butler’s poetry which I showed her examples of that I was greatly partial to, and I didn’t fail to notice her disdainful sniff when I pointed out the amazing coincidence of both me and Custer shedding tears at performances of East Lynne.

  I suspected, from hints she dropped, that at least one of the men in her earlier life, probably at New York, might of been some kind of sissy connected with culture, but never knowed in detail, for we both kept to that agreement about our pasts.