La Vengeance des mères

by Jim Fergus

  I left her in her room, and went back to the kitchen table. “If you need to hit somebody,” I said to him, “you hit me. But if ever you lay a hand on our daughter again, I will leave you, I will take her with me, and you will never see either of us again.”

  That is where the story should end. That night, after he passes out, I should pack our bags, and before he wakes in the morning, Clara and I will have left to go back upstate to my mother’s house. But it does not end there, and no matter how many times I relive it in my mind, I cannot change the ending of this story, there is no going back …

  Early the next morning, a Saturday, two women colleagues from the Children’s Aid Society came to our house. They needed my help in situating another group of orphans who had been found living in an abandoned, rat-infested building in Five Points. Both my husband and Clara were still asleep, and I left them there together and went with the women. I left my daughter alone in the house with her drunken, insane father, in order to look after the children of strangers …

  I had not expected to be gone the entire day, but I was and I didn’t get home until nearly dark. I found my husband passed out on the kitchen floor, two empty bottles of cheap gin beside him. I called out for Clara. She did not answer. The dusky evening light and oppressive silence of the house filled me with dread. I felt the terror rising in my breast. I ran into her room. She was lying facedown on her bed, naked, the sheets around her soaked in blood, her tiny body bruised, her face battered, swollen, nearly unrecognizable. Her father had beaten her to death. I hugged her to my breast, weeping in a state of utter hysteria, thinking that this was all a terrible mistake, this could not have happened, this is only a nightmare from which I will awaken, and when I release her and look at her again my daughter will be alive, and so happy that I am home. Please, please, let it be so … let it be so … but it was not.

  I went into the kitchen then, oddly calm and deliberate now, and I tied my husband’s hands and legs firmly with twine; still he did not wake up. I took a large kitchen knife from the drawer, knelt beside him, and pressed the blade against his throat. His eyes popped open, and I let him have a good look at me. Then I cut his throat, and watched the light fade from his terrified eyes.

  I walked the several blocks to the nearest police station, still carrying the knife, my dress covered in the blood of my daughter, and now that of my husband. I told them what I had done. They handcuffed me and had me lead them back to the house. I was arrested and accused of murdering both my daughter and my husband. The city assigned a lawyer to my case; I pleaded guilty to the latter crime, and innocent to the former. The trial was covered by all the newspapers, with lurid headlines. Some women colleagues from the aid society testified on my behalf, but I refused to take the stand, refused to say a word in my own defense. My mother came down from upstate for the trial. Of course, she knew I had not killed my daughter, and she begged me to testify. The jury convicted me for the murder of my husband, but were split on the charge of the murder of my daughter. The judge took pity upon me, and instead of condemning me to death, sentenced me to life imprisonment in Sing Sing. I wept when he delivered the sentence, not because I was relieved, but because I had prayed to be hanged and put out of my misery. Now I knew that I would have every day, all day for the rest of my life to mourn my daughter, to torture myself for my own culpability in her death.

  In a grotesque irony, my husband’s and daughter’s bodies are buried side by side in paupers’ graves somewhere in the city, the precise location of which I was never told. It was not expected that I would ever be released from Sing Sing to have occasion to visit their graves. I cannot bear to think of my little girl resting for eternity alongside the man who killed her, and when I learned about this brides program, the first thought I had was that if I was accepted in it, and if I survived, perhaps one day I could go back there, I could find Clara’s grave, have her disinterred and take her back to bury in the country. It was only this slender hope that gave me any reason at all to live. I did not protect my daughter from her father when she needed me. For that I can never forgive myself, nor do I deserve forgiveness. But one day, perhaps, I will take my little girl home, away from that monster once and for all, as I should have done so long ago.

  My daughter’s murder, the strain of the trial, and my conviction and imprisonment were all too much for my mother. Five months later, I received a letter at Sing Sing from an old farm neighbor, with an obituary enclosed from our small-town newspaper. It said that she had died of a broken heart.

  All this I whispered to Hawk beneath the buffalo robes of his sleeping place. I knew he was awake now, though I had no idea how much he had heard or how much he had understood. What could he possibly know about life in the city, about slums, homeless children, aid societies, the American trial system, Sing Sing … about drunken fathers who beat their daughters to death? Such a thing is simply unheard of in their world. Indeed, as we have learned since we’ve been among them, Cheyenne parents never punish their children physically, never whip or spank them, rather they teach them correct behavior by advice and counsel, and by example. So I could only imagine what Hawk must have been thinking as I recounted this terrible story, which he had no possible means of understanding. Still, I believed that I owed it to him, and as painful as it was for me to tell, I felt some small sense of relief for having finally unburdened myself of a heavy silence I had carried all this time.

  We lay together without speaking. Finally, Hawk sat up, removed his deer hide shirt, breechclout, and leggings. He raised me gently to a sitting position and lifted my dress up over my head. Then we lay down together and he took me in his arms. I smelled again the faintly wild scent of his skin. He held me, warm against him, enveloped in the buffalo robes and in the sanctuary of his smooth, muscled body. I buried my face in the crook of his neck, and I began to weep. I wept for the release of my story, for the pain and terror of my little girl at the end of her life, the memory of which will live inside me for the rest of mine. And I wept for the silent tenderness this man showed me. Whatever he had understood, or not, he knew there were no further words to be spoken between us, nothing left to do in this night but to hold me in his arms.

  LEDGER BOOK IX

  Under the Buffalo Robes

  When one’s child dies young, their death becomes the defining moment, not only of their short life, but also of our own. Everything before then, everything they were, everything we were, everything they and we would have become together is canceled, erased like chalk from a blackboard … because they are no longer, as we are no longer.

  (from the journals of Margaret Kelly)

  25 May 1876

  Me and Susie have a fine time dancin’. We get to laughin’ our cacks off with the greenhorns during the cancan … that’s the most damn fun we’ve had in a long time … and the people are all havin’ fun with us, too. We keep dancin’ afterward, until finally we take a breather and sit down with Martha, Gertie, and Phemie. Most a’ the lasses are takin’ their turns in the dance circle, too, sometimes alone, sometimes with each other, and sometimes with the partners Dog Woman has set ’em up with. Lulu, Hannah, and Maria have all spent time in the shadows a little away from the circle, wrapped in the blankets with their boys, though we ain’t had any reports about how these powwows are goin’ just yet, for they are all back in the dance now.

  Lady Hall is steppin’ up a storm with Bridge Girl, havin’ the time of her life it appears. And we’ll be goddamned if the chaplain hasn’t taken to the circle with Astrid. We don’t believe that Dog Woman has approved this pairing yet, but the two of ’em make a grand couple, and they move right pretty together.

  “That wee Hannah lass,” says Susie, watching the performance, “is tiny as a mouse’s diddy, but she can dance, can’t she?”

  “Aye, sister,” says I. “’Deed, she can. And a’ course, ain’t Lulu bleedin’ deadly on the floor? And you can see that Maria’s got savage blood in her step, too, can’t ya? Why, she could damn n
ear pass for Cheyenne.”

  “Aye, funny ain’t it, how they asked for white women in the trade,” says Susie, “and our government sent ’em Phemie in our group, and a Mexican Indian, as dark-skinned as them, in this one?”

  “That’s somethin’ I’ve always admired about these folks,” says Gertie. “They don’t judge people by the color of their skin. Remember, Phemie, how the first name they gave you when you come here was Black White Woman? But that was just a way to call you, to identify you, they didn’t judge you by it or think any less a’ you.”

  “Yes, since we arrived here,” Phemie answers with a deep chuckle, “I have always been treated as an equal … and that is not an experience we negro folk often have.”

  “Martha,” says Gertie, “if you should get a hankerin’ to take a turn in the dance circle yourself, you got four babysitters right here, dyin’ to look after your little boy.”

  “Oh, no, thank you, I couldn’t,” Martha answers. “I can never leave little Tangle Hair again, except when I go outdoors to do my toilet, and then Mo’ke a’e watches him for me.”

  It’s funny the holes Martha has in her memory, the things she remembers and those she doesn’t. She seems to believe now that May and the others have somehow gone home rather than having been killed, as if she’s forgotten the attack altogether, even though she surely remembered it when we were back in the place where it happened. It’s like every time she goes into one of her trances, everything that happened before gets erased in her mind. Thankfully, this has not happened since she was reunited with her baby. Gertie tells us Martha didn’t even remember Molly when she came by to say hello, even though Molly is the one who rescued her, and has even been to visit her once with Lady Hall at Tangle Hair’s lodge here. Yet Martha does remember Phemie and Gertie, me and Susie and all her dead friends.

  “By the way,” says Susie, “where is Molly? We haven’t seen her since she was sitting here with you lasses.”

  Gertie and Phemie laugh together. “We think she’s under the buffalo robes with Hawk,” says Gertie.

  “Go on!” says me and Susie together. “Get out!”

  The two of ’em look at each other, smilin’ like Cheshire cats. “It’s true, girls,” says Phemie.

  “But Hawk didn’t even come to the dance?” says I.

  “Like hell he didn’t,” says Gertie, “he just didn’t dance, is all. Brung three of his handsomest horses with him as a gift to Dog Woman. It’s damned amazin’ how fast she decided that Molly and Hawk were made for each other. It appears they went straight back to Hawk’s lodge. Why, I ’spect they’re at it right now.”

  “An’ just after me and Susie got finished tellin’ her she wasn’t goin’ to get Hawk. Shows what little we know, right, sister?”

  “Aye, Meggie,” says Susie, “’Tis the God’s truth … we Kelly girls never have been real canny in matters of the heart.”

  “Nor real lucky,” says I. “Well, good for Molly. She set her cap for Hawk right from the start, and it appears she got him, after all.”

  So me and Susie take another turn in the dance circle. We think it does us good … aye, the music and the motion kinda our way a’ forgettin’ our own memories for a brief moment … well, maybe that’s not exactly what I mean to say … for ours are memories that don’t ever get forgotten. Let’s say instead that we lay those frozen corpses down gently at the edge of the circle as we enter, for there must be lightness in the act of dance and they weigh us down so that so we couldn’t possibly step light. Aye, and it is such a relief to do so that me and Susie can hardly stop all night … we prance and kick and leap and laugh, dancin’ wild with the lasses, with the Cheyenne lads, with the chaplain, too, havin’ the time of his life, whirlin’ dervishes we all are, lost in the fire, becoming flames ourselves under the full moon.

  26 May 1876

  We continue our war drills with Phemie, and we’re gettin’ to be passable shots with the bow and arrow … we can release three arrows in a row from our horses’ backs at a dead run, drawin’ them from the quivers on our back, all in two shakes of a lamb’s tail. The Springfield carbine rifles are a wee bit heavy for us, so we been given Colt .45s and Army-issue holsters to wear on our hips, and we’ve learned how to draw the guns, slip onto the sides of our horses, hangin’ on to the mane with one hand, one leg hooked over the horse’s haunch, and shootin’ under their necks, just the way Phemie does … well, almost as good as she does.

  Me and Susie are ridin’ wild paint prairie ponies that have been trained for war by a lad named Votonéve’haméhe, which in our tongue means somethin’ like Winged Horses Man, a young bucko famous among the People for his gift at breaking and training broncos … to the point that he is said to even be able to teach a horse to fly. Aye, course we don’t know about that part … but we do know his services are much in demand and that we’re real lucky to have these mounts, the only reason bein’ because he so respects Phemie and wants all her warrior women to be astride the best possible horseflesh. Ours are lively, quick-steppin’ little ponies, a perfect fit for a pair a’ lively, quick-steppin’ little lassies like me and Susie. Due to their training they ain’t a bit gun-shy, nor do they spook when we make sudden movements—steady creatures, even when we get clumsy as still happens from time to time. We’ve named ’em Noméohtse, Going with the Wind, and Áme’háohtséhno’ha, Flying Horse … you know, just in case there really is something to that flyin’ business and we might need to take to the air, we figure we’d better give ’em names that would allow for that special talent.

  27 May 1876

  Me and Susie ain’t seen the greenhorns since the night a’ the dance, an’ so today we decide to go for a visit. We want to see what progress they’re makin’ gettin’ settled in with their Cheyenne families. After what Gertie told us, we expect we’ll all be on the move again soon … to where, as usual, we do not know. But with our new responsibilities to the Strong-heart Society, we ain’t goin’ to be in any position to be lookin’ out after ’em when the shite monsoon strikes. Also, we gotta admit, we want to catch up a little on their romantic lives … for reasons … what’s the grand word I’m lookin’ for, Susie … aye, for vicarious reasons. Those days may be long gone for us, but we still like to hear the stories … they remind us of our own group, our more innocent days, an’ sometimes we need somethin’ a little hopeful to think about … like love and romance.

  They tell us they’re still being courted by their lads, who come around every evening, wrapped in their blankets, opening them wide and taking them in for a little conversation.

  “He chats me up for a while,” says Hannah, “and then I tell him about meself, about me brothers and sisters, me mum and me dad … Course we can’t understand a word the other is saying, but somehow we’re comin’ to know each other anyhow.”

  “Mais oui,” says Lulu, “and my little prince, too, is the perfect gentleman. I have never known a boy so sweet, so gentle, so different from any of the men I have ever been with before.”

  “My man,” says Carolyn, “and I use the term loosely … showed me on his fingers how many years he has. “He hardly looks it, but he assures me that he is eighteen. I have never had a younger beau before, but I must say, it is rather exciting. I danced like a wild woman the other night … I completely lost control of myself … It was quite liberating. I must confess to you girls … now that I’m getting used to the idea, I wish for that boy to take me…” She laughs, blushes, and puts her hand over her mouth. “Good Lord, do you know that I have never before spoken … or even dared to have such a thought?”

  “That we can well imagine, Carolyn,” says Susie, “from what you’ve told us about your husband. Not exactly a wildcat between the sheets, we expect.”

  “‘Wildcat’ would not be a term that leaps to mind when describing the pastor,” says she. “However, my young man has been the picture of propriety. I fear that perhaps I am too old for him … perhaps I do not excite his passions.”

  �
�Don’t you worry about that, missy,” says I. “For once the courtship period ends, and you lassies move into the lads’ lodges, and they get over their natural shyness, you’ll find that these boyos are bleedin’ savages under the buffalo robes … and we mean that in the best possible way. Still, you may need to take matters into your own hands to get him started … if you understand our meaning.”

  “Oh, dear, yes, I … I believe I do,” says Carolyn, blushing again.

  “Our boys needed a little encouragement, too, ain’t that right, sister?”

  “Right as rain, Meggie,” says Susie. “But once we gave ’em a taste of our charms, there was no holdin’ ’em back … three, four, five times a night they were at us.”

  “Oh, dear,” says Carolyn again, with a small, nervous laugh.

  “And you, Molly,” says I, “why, we heard that you and Hawk kind of skipped the courtship period altogether and went right into the state of unholy matrimony. Ain’t that so?”

  “My personal relationship with Hawk is my private business,” says she, “and none of yours.”

  “Talk around camp is that you’ve already moved into his lodge,” says Susie.

  “Yes, that much is common knowledge,” says Molly. “It is what goes on inside the lodge that is not your business.”

  “That’s alright,” says I, “because me and Susie got real good imaginations. You do understand that in the eyes of these folks, now that you’ve moved in, that means you two are married?”

  “Understood, thank you.”

  “All we can tell the rest of you lasses is this,” says Susie. “Don’t be wastin’ any more time before goin’ under the robes with your boys. After what Gertie told us, we’ll be on the move again soon. While we’re still here, you all need to make honest men of ’em, get settled in their tipis. They may seem young to you, but these lads have been trained for war since the day they were born. They will all prove to be competent warriors, and the greatest responsibility they have is to protect their families from harm. You’ll be safer with them than you will alone or together.”