by Judith Pella
All the Cheyenne had wanted to do was return the woman because they felt sorry for her! True, she should not have been in the camp in the first place; but then, neither should the white men be building their roads across Indian land….
Suddenly Deborah closed her eyes and tried to shake the muddled dilemma from her distraught mind. It was a vicious circle—very, very vicious!
She wanted only to be with Broken Wing, to be assured that love and tenderness did still dwell in the world. But his countenance had begun to harden like stone; his sensitive, gentle eyes were darkening with grief and anger. She knew he must be thinking of revenge; it was the Cheyenne way. Wrongs must be avenged; and in the case of such a wrongful, depraved murder, Broken Wing’s honor as a man, and the measure of his devotion to his friends, depended upon his eagerness to seek vengeance.
But first the sad and dark death customs must be observed. Within an hour of the delivery of the Arapahoe’s message, a throng had gathered around Walking Wolf’s lodge. All the relatives were weeping. Buffalo Calf’s sisters had carried out all of her husband’s property and were throwing it at the feet of various of the spectators who were not relatives. In this manner, all of the dead warrior’s belongings were given away, culminating in the most grievous moment of all when the lodge itself was dismantled and the hides distributed. Walking Wolf’s wife was left with nothing but the clothes she wore and a blanket to cover herself.
Since Yellow Shirt was not married, he had no lodge of his own to tear down; but his parents and other relatives were no less prostrate with their sudden bereavement. Making it even worse was the fact that there were no bodies to honor with proper ceremony, and thus, to allow the bereaved the comfort of a final goodbye.
Several hours after the mourning rites had been performed, Deborah saw Buffalo Calf. She had hacked off her long braids, her face and arms were gashed with deep, bleeding cuts. Instinctively, Deborah started to help her, but Gray Antelope laid a restraining hand on Deborah’s arm.
“No, Wind Rider,” said the older woman. “Let her grieve in peace. Her wounds show the greatness of her sorrow.”
“Where will she go?” asked Deborah in a strangled voice.
“Wherever she will. It is her choice. When she is ready, she may go live in the lodge of her father. The lodge of her husband is no more.”
The Cheyenne way …
Sometimes it was so hard to accept. When the poor woman needed her friends most, she was cut off from them. She had only the painful wounds on her body, now crusting over with dried blood, to give her comfort. Deborah recalled when her brother had died and how many tears she had shed each time she chanced to gaze upon some special reminder of him, that daguerreotype of him in his dashing gray uniform, or his favorite horse in the stable, or the fine saddle he had given her one birthday. Maybe there was something to this strange Cheyenne custom after all. Those awful memories had, in the end, driven her from Virginia into the arms of Leonard Stoner.
Yet, recalling her own grief and her desire to escape painful memories did not make her any less helpless and frustrated at not being able to reach out to her widowed friend. But what could she say even if she did speak to Walking Wolf’s wife? What words of comfort did she have to offer? She thought of her father’s ineffective speech about God’s will. There had to be more to it than that, but Deborah could not guess what it might be.
So, Deborah did not protest when Gray Antelope nudged her back to her lodge. Maybe bleeding wounds were the only appropriate comfort.
36
That night Deborah could not get the heart-wrenching sight of Walking Wolf’s widow out of her mind. As she lay next to Broken Wing, she turned to him, and suddenly her body began to tremble with the cold perspiration of panic. In that moment, she understood the depth of Buffalo Calf’s love for her husband. She understood a grief so deep, even beyond what she had felt for her brother and father, that mere cuts in the flesh did not begin to match the open wound left in the heart.
“Broken Wing,” she said in a tremulous voice, “I love you!”
He nodded silently as tears filled his eyes. She desperately wanted him to hold her, to assure her that his love would not ever be withdrawn from her. But she began to comprehend that he, too, needed her love and reassurance. For where her grief, at least that panic at her empathetic sorrow, had not been based on reality, Broken Wing’s was very real. He had lost his friends, and she knew he blamed himself in part for their loss. Thus, Deborah ventured upon the truest expression of love by placing her own heartache beneath her husband’s, and reaching out unselfishly to him. But when she wrapped her arms around him, his body was stiff and tense in her embrace.
She hadn’t thought about it before, but all at once she wondered if his response to the tragedy was directed at her personally. She shuddered with renewed panic at this revelation, but she had to admit that her own people had wantonly killed his friends. And even if logic tried to tell her Broken Wing could never turn on her in this way, that irrational part of her which had been hurt so many times before was afraid.
“Broken Wing, I am sorry about what happened. I am ashamed.”
“You did not do it.”
“But my people—”
He broke in, his voice uncharacteristically harsh with its intensity. “You are Cheyenne!”
Was it that simple? How she wished she could convince her belabored mind of that.
“You haven’t spoken to me all day; you haven’t even looked at me. I was afraid …” She could not verbalize the awful words that would have completed her sentence.
“It is not because of you,” he answered in a gentler voice. “It is because now I fear I must fight the white man again. I tried to believe in peace like Black Kettle, but it seems to be impossible.”
“One isolated incident,” said Deborah. “It might be that the officers at the fort are already on their way out here to apologize and make restitution.”
“Do you think a horse or a load of food will heal this wound?”
“No,” Deborah said honestly. “And if I could, I’d find the soldiers who did it and kill them myself. It is right that you go after them. Yet, I am afraid for you. I don’t want to lose you as Buffalo Calf lost her husband.”
“It is a warrior’s duty to fight. A Cheyenne man learns little else. We hunt, we fight our enemies, we count coup; it is what makes us what we are. And Wind Rider, my love, it is for this very reason that I will eventually have to fight the white man soldiers. I have been feeling this for a long time, even before you came.
“When I met you, I fought against it more. I want peace with the whites, yet I fear they will only accept peace on their terms. I love Black Kettle and I honor him, but I think in the end he will give in to the white man’s way. Do you know what that means, Wind Rider? They will not be satisfied until all our hunting grounds have the fences of their farms around them, until the buffalo have no more grass, until …” He closed his eyes, and even in the darkness of the lodge, Deborah could see the lines of torment etched across his brow. “Until they have fenced my people into their reservations.” He spat that final word out with revulsion.
Deborah shuddered. He had never before spoken of these things in such a dismal, hopeless way. She understood now that he feared to give rein to these virulent emotions. His entire body trembled with rage. He had once loved a white man, and now he loved a white woman; his very soul was being torn apart by the conflicting hatred that had been unleashed that afternoon. He had once told her that he judged men individually, that he could love some men, whether they be white or Indian, and some he could not. It had been simple. But Deborah could see a change in him. His Indian enemies, the Pawnee or the Crow, might steal horses and occasionally women and children, they might kill Cheyenne warriors in battle, but they were not trying to destroy the very core of who they were as human beings, as Tsistsistas. He could still love Abraham Johnston, and he could love his wife, Wind Rider, but perhaps that was largely because he saw th
em as more Cheyenne than white. Intellectually, he knew there were good whites, men like Wynkoop, and John Smith, and William Bent, who had defended the Cheyenne and worked to gain fair treatment for them from the United States government. But Broken Wing was also coming to realize that when the final battle came, he might not have the luxury of segregating the good from the bad.
Deborah understood his dilemma; she had suffered from similar confusion. He feared being caught in the middle as much as she did. She continued to hope no battle lines would ever be drawn, but she knew, especially now as she studied her husband, that it was a futile hope.
“Broken Wing,” she said, trying somehow to instill hope in him where she had none, “it may be that the government agents will still listen to reason when they realize how determined the Plains Indians are. You are different than the tribes they encountered in the East—you are stronger, more formidable. Many whites are terrified of the Plains tribes, and that alone may stop them. Perhaps all the tribes could unite—not just little alliances here and there like you have with the Sioux and the Arapahoe, or with the Comanche and Kiowa, but all together, even the Pawnee, the Crow, the Ute. As it is, the whites pit one warring tribe against another, use renegades as scouts and traitors—why, all they have to do is sit back and let you do their destructive work for them. But together! Imagine what fear a united tribal front would place in the hearts of the bluecoats.”
“What you say is impossible. No Cheyenne would trust a Pawnee any more than a white man.”
“Are you saying, then, that your cause is lost? That there is no hope?”
“I used to believe there was a way to peace. I used to pray to the Wise One Above to place the white man’s hand in ours as brothers.” He stopped abruptly, shook his head and fell silent.
They both lay still and quiet. In a near corner of the lodge, little Carolyn stirred in her bed, but she did not cry, for she was a good Cheyenne baby. Gray Antelope had early shown Deborah how to teach her baby not to cry by taking her out of the lodge and away from the camp when she did so. A crying baby could endanger the entire camp by indicating to an enemy where they were located. Deborah slipped from her own bed and went to her daughter.
Carolyn was now over a year old, and in the daytime she toddled about on shaky legs. She was a good child, full of energy, but already showing signs of a decided stubborn streak. Deborah could not tell if it came from her or Leonard.
When Deborah bent over the child’s bed, which consisted of a small hide spread on the floor with a wool government blanket for a cover, Carolyn looked up at her with wide, brown eyes.
“Mama, play?” she said in a sleepy voice that belied her desire for activity.
“It’s still night,” Deborah replied patiently. They both spoke Cheyenne. “It is time to sleep.”
“You and Papa no sleep,” Carolyn said petulantly.
Deborah could hardly be angry at her daughter’s impertinence, not when she so naturally referred to Broken Wing as “Papa.” She had never tried to teach Carolyn this; it had come about almost on its own, though it had been Broken Wing himself who had first used the term.
When Carolyn began to talk, it was Cheyenne she learned, and though her vocabulary was small, it still contained no English. It was nahkoa she learned first, the Cheyenne word for mother. When she indicated her keen mind by picking up the word so readily, Broken Wing immediately followed up with its counterpart.
“Singing Wolf,” he had said to Carolyn, using as they habitually did, the Cheyenne name he had given her that day of the Pawnee raid, “I am Nehuo.” He thumped his chest and repeated the word. Deborah noted joyfully that he had used the term for father without hesitation. But why shouldn’t he? In every way, he treated Carolyn like a daughter. Sometimes when he held her and the contrast of her pale white skin against his dark brown was most pronounced, Deborah marveled that neither seemed to notice.
If only this small miracle could be repeated on a larger scale. But Deborah realized that at least part of the problems between the whites and Indians stemmed from the belief on the part of the whites that the Indians were inferior, and thus they were justified in taking the best land and herding the savages into reservations like animals. She wanted to take comfort in the hope that her marriage to Broken Wing might somehow be a step toward a larger union between the two races, yet she could not help a nagging fear that instead of her love bringing together the divergent factions, it would be buried by them.
Quietly, Deborah soothed Carolyn back to sleep. She gently pulled the blanket up about the child’s shoulders and bent over to kiss the soft fluff of pale hair on her head. Then she returned to her own bed.
37
Broken Wing was still awake, still tense. Deborah sensed that in the time that had lapsed since she left to tend Carolyn, he had come to some difficult decision.
“Broken Wing,” she said somewhat fearfully, “do you wish to talk more?”
He was silent for so long that she began to think he was afraid even to tell her what was on his mind. At last he did speak, but it almost seemed as if he were avoiding the topic most heavy on their hearts.
“Wind Rider, what does your name mean?”
“You know, you gave it to me yourself.”
“I mean your white man’s name.”
“I don’t know. I think I had a great-grandmother or someone named Deborah. It’s from the Bible.”
“I have heard of this book. It is the book of the white man’s God?”
“Yes,” said Deborah.
“Then your name must have strong medicine.”
“I don’t know. I guess the whites don’t give as much significance to names as do the Cheyenne. If a name is pretty, they use it, or sometimes they name a child after a loved one, as in my case and also Singing Wolf’s.”
“It is the same with us, but when a Cheyenne comes of age, when a girl marries, or a boy goes on his first hunt, we may change our names to signify some special meaning. Would you like to hear how I came by my name?”
“Very much.”
“When I was a child I had my grandfather’s name, Buffalo Robe. I was eleven when I returned to my tribe. My brother, Stands-in-the-River, who was my father’s nephew, took me to him and taught me the ways of a warrior. I killed my first buffalo when I was fourteen. I counted my first coup in battle when I was fifteen and was accepted as a warrior in my tribe. But I knew that my time with the white man had changed me, made me a little different from my Cheyenne brothers. I was fully accepted by them, but within myself I knew I needed something more to remake my bonds with the tribe. For this reason, I decided to make the sacrifice of self-torture so that the Wise One Above might speak to me.
“With Crooked Eye as my elder, I went to a lonely place and there we found a sturdy pole that we planted in the ground. Then, as you saw warriors do in the Sun Dance ceremony, Crooked Eye pushed pins through the skin of my chest and a rope was attached to these and to the top of the pole.”
Deborah recalled this part of the Sun Dance indeed, for it was not a sight easily forgotten. She had thought the warriors hanging from the pole by their impaled skin were trying to prove their manhood, but Broken Wing had explained they were instead seeking the favor of the Great Spirit, not only for themselves, but often for the tribe in general. Deborah had also seen the scars on Broken Wing’s chest, but when she had asked him about them he had always been vague in his response.
Broken Wing continued. “I hung from the pole all that day with the hot sun burning down on me. I had no food and no drink and sometimes I think I was not always conscious. The purpose is to break the skin from the pins, but that does not often happen. At sunset, Crooked Eye came and cut the skin away from the pins and told me to sleep on the lonely hilltop. This I did, and in the night, I had a dream. It was this:
“I was standing in a clearing in a beautiful green wood. I knew it was a place filled with good spirits and I was glad to be there. Then a large white bird swooped down into the cleari
ng. When it landed on the ground before me, I saw it was an eagle, but of the purest white, with not a single colored feather on its magnificent body. It was truly a great bird, but when it spread out its wings, a span that was longer than a tall man, I saw that one of its wings was injured, and the bird’s proud face was weary with pain and fatigue.
“‘You are hurt,’ I said.
“‘I am,’ the bird replied, and I knew when he spoke I had come upon a medicine bird, perhaps a messenger from Heammawihio himself.
“‘Can I help you?’ I asked.
“‘That is why I have come, for only you have the medicine that can heal my wound.’
“‘What medicine is that?’
“‘It is the medicine of love in your heart.’
“I gladly helped the eagle, and somehow—I am not certain how it came about—I fixed the mighty wing, and the white eagle flew away.
“When I awoke, I knew the Spirit had spoken to me. The eagle had stood for the white man. I might some way be used to bring healing and brotherhood between the people of my blood and the people of my heart. Since then I have always carried a white feather from an eagle in my medicine bundle. And I have sought to be faithful to the magic white eagle. It was at that time that I took the name Broken Wing as a reminder of the hope given me by the white eagle.”
When he paused, Deborah wanted to ask what had happened, why he seemed now to have changed, but she couldn’t form the words. But she knew she wouldn’t have to ask, for the look on Broken Wing’s face told her he had more to say, and it was not going to be a pleasant speech.
