Certain as the sun baked the back of his neck, Tom would see that the last two bullets weren’t used on the Indians. He’d learned enough from Indian warfare to know that. Two bullets. One for Autie, one for himself.
Lord, am I crying? Shit! I’ve never cried. Not even at Saylor’s Creek when half my face was blown off in that charge for the flag. I had to do it, goddammit! That artillery position was chewing Autie’s cavalry to pieces. Crying?
He sighed and fought for control. He didn’t want to cry in front of the men. Not now. Jesus, is it noisy here! Just listening to the sound of these few men on the hill. To the south Keogh was down to—
Hell, Myles has four men left.
Cooke was firing off into a pocket of some snipers to the west and still doing some damage. Christ, Billy had only two others still with him now.
Down the west slope in front of Tom sat perhaps a dozen more of his men nestled behind the bodies of comrades or horse carcasses. Up here he felt so alone … so goddamned alone. Then he looked down at Autie’s unruly straw mustache and sunburned freckled cheeks. And suddenly he didn’t feel so alone anymore.
Up here right near the top of Autie’s goddamned hill.
He tried to spit. Nothing but cotton balls in his mouth now.
Shit! Can I make it to the top? Can I?
Custer wanted Tom to drag him to the top. He had always done what Autie wanted him to do. From their earliest days as kids in Ohio right up to courting the proper girl—that Agnes Bates from Monroe last summer at Lincoln. He had always done just what Autie wanted, and he always would.
Autie … oh, Autie! You were always the fair-haired boy in town, the hero—even as kids. The one we were told to be like. And I was always the younger brother—trying to live at the edge of your bright light. It wasn’t fair, Autie!
I was every bit as good as you. But the only way anyone would ever pay attention to me was for me to chew tobacco in school, get in trouble in town—stealing, drinking whiskey with the older boys, raising hell. But you—no, you never raised hell. I had to, just to get someone to pay attention to me.
That’s why I did those reckless, stupid things for you in the war, Autie. You understand now, don’t you? Two goddamned Medals of Honor for heroism. That’s why I charged alone while the other men around me were cut down or turned back. Simply because I wanted everyone else to know I was every bit as good as you. But look at us! We’re both waiting to die on some dirty little hillside on some dirty little nameless goddamned river in Montana Territory.
And no one is going to know I saved you as long as I could … down to the last war cry on this hill … and then put an army bullet in your brain.
CHAPTER 27
NO one would ever know.
How could they? He had never calked about it with any Sioux or Cheyenne friends. And the only white men who had laid eyes on him were dead now.
He was Crazy Horse. No one would ever know what he kept buried inside.
What it was had left a searing impression that had burned inside the pit of him up to this very day as he sat atop his war pony, staring up the north side of this grass hill where the last ragtag squad of pony soldiers had themselves dug in, soldiers who fired a shot now and then from behind other dead wasichu soldiers and horse carcasses.
Only he would ever know what happened twenty-one summers ago.
Following an early-morning attack on a Brule Sioux village camped north of the Shell River, what the white man called his Platte, instead of taking scalps, General Harney’s troopers had brutally slashed the pubic hair from the dead squaws littered among the smoking ruins of the village. Around those defiled bodies terrified children wailed as the soldiers completed their bloody task.
A fourteen-year-old Oglalla boy named Curly had been visiting cousins in the village Harney attacked. That frosty morning Curly was forced to witness this methodical butchery by Harney’s crack infantry as they slashed and tore and laughed about the mutilated genitals.
Years later after the death of his only daughter to the white man’s cholera, this young warrior changed his name. In a dream quest he was told he would ride a wild horse, leading his people to avenge the many wrongs of the pale-skinned earthmen.
Curly was no more. Crazy Horse was born.
Down below the soldier hill now, all along that grassy slope, crawled Miniconjou and Sans Arc warriors, along with a mixture of Left Hand’s Arapahos and whoever else wanted to lob a few shots at the hold-outs.
In a rough crescent looping round that southern flank over the back of the ridge were stationed the angry, swarming-hornet Hunkpapa soldiers led by Gall and Iron Dog. They were bolstered by the strength of Cheyenne Crazy Dog warriors led by Bob-Tail-Horse and war chief Two Moons, who had by this time had a horse shot out from under him.
On this far slope of soldier hill sat the impatient Oglalla warriors, itching for permission to charge on over the troopers. They would act as cavalry themselves, riding light and fast up that long north slope. Led by their spiritual master. Led by Crazy Horse.
With the latest Henry and Winchester rifles, both lever-action repeating weapons, in addition to those army carbines captured in the valley fight and on Calhoun’s hill, the warriors encircling the last-stand hill had the soldiers outgunned in those final minutes. For speed of firing the repeaters worked admirably. For long-range sniping the Springfield carbines were the best.
Earlier in the afternoon Crazy Horse had lost a handful of warriors in his first charge at the soldiers. As the troopers had been chased out of the coulee to the top of the spine, The Horse had led his Oglallas across the river and along the minty bottomlands. Like blackbirds swarming after a hawk, they followed him around the brow of the hill and up its north slope—just in time to meet Smith’s E Company. Right then and there the surprised soldiers clattered to a halt and hunkered down for a stand. Crazy Horse had them bottled up but good. No longer any place to go, no place to run.
The Oglallas had swept on up through the soldier ranks, touching here, striking out there with lance and hawk and rifle … until the great yellow cloud of dust blinded everyone, and the screams and shouts and wild grunts grew deafening to the ears. Then, as suddenly as Crazy Horse had come, he was gone. His Oglallas with him, battering Keogh’s I Company against Galls Hunkpapa infantry.
Crazy Horse had stopped the frantic retreat of Custer’s soldiers. With nowhere to run, no place to hide, the troopers milled about, confused and bewildered.
And frightened. For as the yellow-and-red dust lifted from the brow of the hill, the young soldiers with Tom Custer looked down to see the mighty Oglalla army waiting for them at the bottom of the north slope, taunting them, playing with the wasichu troopers the way a badger will play with a little brown field mouse before he gobbles it up alive.
For too long the Sioux and Cheyenne had waited to have such a victory as this. They wanted to savor it, knowing what that wait did to those few left atop the hill.
They swarmed round those hundred twenty troopers at first, noisy like enraged bees stirred from a hive someone has knocked with a stick. They swarmed on the north and west and south, hot for combat, their blood boiling for a chance at some close-in fighting. As the minutes dragged by, Crazy Horse and his Oglallas calmly watched pandemonium and insanity spread through the soldiers like winter’s first frost slicking icy scum across a pond.
Officers darted here and there, trying to wrench some semblance of order from their frightened men. Army horses with empty saddles reared and bucked and tumbled, tearing away from their handlers, spooked by the waving blankets and the shrill cries and the bullets and arrows slapping their flanks like stinging wasps. And everywhere the white men began to fall—some screaming in pain at their wounds, others falling without any sound at all.
For some of those iron-gutted veterans, it became desperately clear that Custer had made a crucial mistake in judgment. When he had forged down that trail beside Ash Creek against the advice of his scouts, the general plainly inten
ded to have his victory over the Sioux here and now—or he would die seeking his destiny along these flowered hillsides bordering the Greasy Grass.
No man could ever claim Custer had a fear of being wounded or a fear of death. Neither had ever been a part of George Armstrong Custer’s life, and no such fear would attend his death.
The last twenty or so who remained huddled near Custer could watch how the general slowly, bravely slipped away without a yelp or cry of pain through that long afternoon. As they had admired him in life, so they would admire the way he died.
Those twenty rolled up their sleeves and burrowed down behind barricades of dead horses, some animals gut-shot and still trumpeting in pain, sounding so human as they thrashed their way into death, the stench from their ruptured bowels pungent on the hot, steamy air. Those last twenty worked quietly, fiercely at their weapons, prying the shells out if they could, and if that took too long, throwing aside a carbine and reaching for another. With but twenty men left on that hill, there were a lot of weapons to choose from.
By now some of them had both hands filled with the heavy Colt revolvers, like Billy Cooke, standing and plugging away methodically at the hundreds of warriors who snaked up through the tall grass to fire silent arrows into the air, watching their arc whistle down into the dead horses, the dead troopers, and hearing every now and then a muffled scream when a live soldier felt the iron sting.
And still that double handful kept the warriors at bay. It had been close to an hour and a half since the general had been slung over his McClellan, in his brother’s grip while they rode like hell up the ridge. For these last twenty that hour and a half seemed like hell gone on forever. Eternity is something hard for a man to swallow when he’s choking on his own bile.
Overhead the sun seemed to fall, not into the west, but easing right down on the hill itself. Hotter, drier—and the air got meaner with it. Filled with the buzz that is summer on the high plains. Blowflies and mosquitoes, beetles and ants, scurrying through the little desperate ring of soldiers. All matter of creature called to the sugar-sour blood spilled across the thirsty soil.
And everywhere the mean, scorching air roared with sound if a man stopped for a moment to listen.
All about them rang those thousand and one distinct sounds that added to the nightmare. The shrieking of the women, urging their warriors on. Those shrill cries of the warriors themselves. That high-pitched, constant keening of the eagle wing-bone whistles. The drum, drum, drumming of thousands of hooves racing back and forth along the slope. That mournful creak of dry saddle leather as a horse thrashed, working against its bloody cinch. The whimper of a soldier dying, forgotten by his bunkies and fellow troopers because they had their own problems at the moment … maybe because those bunkies were all dead anyway and beyond worry now.
Above it all rose that wild cry of the wind rushing down from the Wolf Mountains: stalking, hunting like a feral predator. Knowing there would soon be bones bleaching and burning beneath a hot sun—before the day was out. Bones for that feral wind to whistle and sing over for all time to come.
Most of the warriors could wait these last long moments. There was medicine made up on soldier hill. Already they had watched some of the troopers throw themselves away. Silently the warriors glanced at one another and nodded, spitting on their fingers, then blowing on their palms. The troopers had killed themselves and each other, so many lying in the grass and flopping around like white-bellied trout tossed on the stream bank to die beneath a hot sun.
“The Great Powers made these soldiers kill themselves,” the Sioux explained to one another.
“Yes,” replied the Cheyenne. “The Everywhere Spirit made these soldiers go mad because they attacked a village of women and children.”
And even a few of those Cheyenne massing on that hillside remembered the legend of long ago begun far to the south in the Territories when old chief Medicine Arrow had told the soldier-chief Yellow Hair that he would be cursed with death should he ever break his word to the Cheyenne by bringing his soldiers to attack a Cheyenne camp of women and children. Perhaps only a handful could remember that curse and the dumping of ashes on Yellow Hair’s boots to seal his fate.
“If only that soldier-chief Yellow Hair were here now,” some whispered mystically, “he would finally see how it is for all these last brave soldiers to die around him, exactly as the old chiefs curse predicted in that winter long ago.”
Having watched Tom Custer dragging the general up the slope, stopping to pant in the smothering heat, Mitch Bouyer decided he had had enough.
He wasn’t about to wait for death to come slinking of its own pace. He wanted to die now.
Down inside he knew this hillside had his name on it anyway, so why wait?
Attack death as you would attack any enemy itself, Mitch Bouyer, he thought to himself. Grapple with it and go down singing your death song. The Sioux taught you that much in all your years growing up in their camps. Your Hunkpapa mother had done enough to pass that much on to you anyway.
“General,” Mitch whispered as he knelt over Custer, their blood mingling in the yellow dust at Custer’s side.
Tom glared flatly at the dark half-breed.
“I’m leaving now. General.” Bouyer sighed, ignoring Tom’s shadow over him.
“He can’t hear you now.” Tom’s voice came out tasteless and bland, even though his eyes flashed their contempt.
“S’pose it doesn’t matter much now, anyway, does it?” Mitch replied without looking up.
Tom was not sure if the question deserved answer.
“I tried to tell you, Custer.” Bouyer bit his lip against pain. “But you were ready to throw away all these good men for the sake of taking your soul on a long, long journey. Some said to Washington City to hold power over all the whites. I say you were prepared to go all the way to hell if you had to. But now—you’ll never make it out of this valley.”
Tom grabbed the calfskin vest Bouyer wore.
Mitch turned and snarled. “Leave me be. I’m dead a’ready. And I ain’t gonna take nothing from the time your brother’s got left anyway.”
Young Custer let the half-breed go. “Hurry. He wants me to drag him to the top.”
Bouyer looked back to the sallow face, eyelids half-closed as death hovered near.
“I’m moving on now, Custer. Down toward the river. Sioux look thickest down there. I’ll take two, maybe three of ’em with me as I go down. Got no idea how long this belly of mine will let me stay up on my wobbly pins. But I figure if I get started downhill with a bum gut spilling into my hands like it is, ain’t much but a lot of lead gonna finally bring me down.”
Mitch struggled to his feet and bent to shade Custer’s face. He wobbled, then sighed as he struggled to keep his balance. “Guess it’s time. I’ll be seeing you in hell, General Custer.”
Tom watched the half-breed careen about, pulling two pistols from his sash.
As Mitch darted past stunned troopers and around the dark barricades of bloated horses, his calfskin vest flapping wild in the breeze, he began yelling at the top of his lungs. Yet it was more than a yell—more like a chant, a high, wild song.
Telling the devil he was coming in, like it or not. And the old boy damned well better open those bloody gates of hell for him.
Amazing both troopers and Sioux alike—Bouyer made it better than four hundred dusty yards down the hill, firing those pistols at every Indian who popped up from the sage and grass to halt his wild charge. He was angry, damned angry—and wasn’t about to go down easy. Old Jim Bridger, mountain man and later guide for the army in the early days of the far west, had taught Bouyer well.
Mitch died with some grit.
He went down the way he had lived, both hands packed for bear, singing his own medicine song to the Devil himself.
Ordering the gates of hell itself opened to welcome him home.
Custer came to as moccasined feet padded off.
He had his lucid moments, when his m
ind ran as clear as a mountain stream.
This time he was lulled by the constant drone of noise filling the air with a golden hum.
As his eyes sought to focus, he initially saw nearby a young bugler, not a day over eighteen really, his ear blown away, the pulpy wound already crusted under the hot, juice-drying sun. Flies were at work on the flesh, crawling and buzzing in and out of the boy’s open eyes as they stared off across that Montana landscape. A few flies worked in and out of the bugler’s gaping mouth.
Nearby, somewhere to his left, out along the ridge, a trooper cried out and died noisy. Yelling about the arrows falling from the yellow sky. Yelling something wild and crazy and demented about death falling out of the sun.
All round Custer closed a narrowing fog. Not in much pain any longer. His chest had grown lighter for the first time in—ah, hell. He didn’t know how long he’d been here anymore. Strange, but his mind seemed suddenly clear again, like a piece of crystal he had seen once at a museum back east in New York City—a piece of crystal displayed on a swatch of sapphire blue velvet. His mind just that clear—as he allowed his soul to slip on down, sensing those emotions these last few soldiers huddled tightly about him must surely be feeling.
A good man—that Bouyer, Custer thought.
Some men, he brooded darkly, wallow through the muck of suffering if their wounds are painful like this chest of mine. Doesn’t make the whole thing of dying any easier … having to hurt through it all. And when the pain gets to be a little more than you can bear … a man begins to wonder just when it will all end and the pain will go away. Can’t death just come and take me now? Can’t I just have it done?
Down at the last when you’re holding on by the last thread comes the peace … the welcoming. Death will come welcome and none too soon for most men left on this hillside.
Off somewhere in the corner of his mind, Custer heard Yates and Tom and Keogh nearby. Heard them bellowing “Garry Owen” together. Off-key as always. It was their medicine song, their fraternal death song.
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