Black Hills (52 page)

There was amidst all the dark, ancient furniture, however, a proud new console radio, a gift from friends, I learned later through something Paha Sapa read. It looked anachronistic there amidst all the furniture, photographs, and paraphernalia from the previous century. The dial was dark.

I remember Paha Sapa reading years ago that for the 50th anniversary commemoration of my regiment’s short-lived battle at the Little Big Horn, you’d owned no radio and thus had been invited to a nearby hotel on June 25, 1926, to listen to the radio broadcast ceremony and reenactment. Had it been the Doral across the street? I forget. The hotel had kindly offered you a deluxe room for the night but, according to published reports, you sat quite upright in your wicker chair, staring at the radio during the entire broadcast, and left—hobbling on your cane—immediately upon that broadcast’s conclusion. Your only recorded comment to the actors’ (one playing me) shouts and simulated hoofbeats broadcast from Montana—“Yes, that is how it would have been.”

How could you possibly know, my darling? How could you possibly know what it could have been like? For all your daring trips into hostile Indian territory with me and visits to this fort or that, how could you possibly have any idea what those final minutes were like with fifteen hundred or more bloodthirsty Sioux and Cheyenne closing in on our thinning ranks? How could you possibly have any idea?

There were two more women Paha Sapa had to meet before being led into your presence in the back parlor (where the single window did indeed, just as the 1927 reporter had told us, still retain a thin view of the East River). The first, the lady who had called down the stairway to Paha Sapa, was Mrs. May Custer Elmer, our interlocutor over the past year in setting up this brief meeting. I’ve mentioned that the newspaper in our hometown of Monroe, Michigan, during the time of the unveiling of one statue of me or the other, once referred to Mrs. Elmer as my (“the General’s”) “favorite niece,” but she was a grand-niece, and I had no memory of her. She was a smiling, pink-cheeked, slightly flustered middle-aged lady and did welcome Paha Sapa decently, without offering to shake the Indian’s hand.

With Mrs. Elmer (who was busy telling Paha Sapa that her husband was quite the amateur astronomer) in that first room of the warren of small rooms running back to the parlor, was a Mrs. Margaret Flood, the equally middle-aged maid, who squinted at Paha Sapa (and thus at me) with suspicion as open (but much quieter) as that of Miss Marguerite Merington down in the foyer. Mrs. May Custer Elmer
interrupted her description of her husband’s passion for astronomy to explain that Patrick, that is, Mr. Flood, the handyman, was off running an errand today, as if that had some relevance to Paha Sapa’s meeting with the dead general’s widow.

And then we were in the little parlor, lit mostly by the afternoon light from the west reflected back from taller buildings and windows outside the east-facing window, and there you sat waiting, Libbie, my darling.

Except, of course, it was not you.

Being saved from the scourges of aging myself, I am not sure if any human being can keep the countenance and “selfness” of his youth and middle years so deep into old age. Perhaps men can be more successful in such indolent ambition since a few salient features—a beak of a nose such as mine, perhaps, or a mighty mustache—can stand in for the missing person the way a caricaturist’s bold, cruel lines stand in for reality. But for women, alas, the ravages and betrayals of time are much more cruel.

You were seven days away from your 91st birthday on that first day of April 1933, when Paha Sapa visited you, my dearest.

Only you—the Libbie that I had known and loved and made love to and dreamt of even in my death sleep
—that
you was not there.

You were dressed in crepey widow’s black (with some sort of cream-colored cloth at your throat, attached by a brooch from another century, my century), which seemed absurd to me fifty-seven years after the unlucky day that made you a widow.

Your hands, your lovely, soft, slender-fingered, smooth-skinned, loving Libbie hands, were now liver-spotted, tendoned, arthritis-swollen and contorted claws. The nails were yellow with age, like an old man’s toenails.

You made no move to offer your hand to Paha Sapa and this relieved both of us. Even though Paha Sapa’s
looking-into-vision
skills seemed to have waned in recent years, neither he nor I wanted to take the risk of any physical contact between him and you. At one time, years ago, when I first became aware of where and what I had become after my death at the Little Big Horn, I had fantasies of Paha Sapa going east and deliberately touching you so that my ghost-self might leave the aging Indian and dwell in and with you for the rest of our lives (yours and mine, I mean, my darling). How wonderful and intimate our silent conversations might have been over those last years. How that might have assuaged your loneliness and my own. But then I realized that I was not a ghost, nor a soul waiting to travel to Heaven (as I had preferred to think upon discovering my place in Paha Sapa’s mind), and the fantasy died with that revelation.

Your face was very, very pale and the blush or whatever the makeup on your cheeks was called only made the truth of the paleness—like rouge on a corpse—more painfully obvious. All of the newspaper and magazine accounts of you over the years had stressed how much more youthful than your chronological age you looked, and based on the few photographs Paha Sapa had seen—you at age 48, age 65, age 68—that had once been true. The smile and eyes and curls on the forehead (from dyed hair?) had indeed looked similar, if not the same. But now age had erased those vestiges of my Libbie’s continuity and beauty the way an angry schoolboy might draw a wet eraser over a chalk-filled blackboard.

Your old-woman’s throat was a mass of cords and cables—the Brooklyn Bridge again!—that your high, black, lacy collar did not succeed in concealing. The bone structure of your cheeks and jawline were lost to folds and dewlaps, jowls and wrinkles. I remember us—you and I—once remarking that the men on your father’s side of the family, the Judge especially, resisted wrinkles far into old age. But it looked now as if you had finally taken after your mother. The few laugh lines that we—you and I—had joked about, almost celebrated, in those last months of our lives together, now possessed all parts of your face. Time had worked like a fat spider weaving its webs everywhere.

I remember, however ungallantly, that you had weighed 118 pounds that June before I left Fort Abraham Lincoln forever. Whatever you weighed now in our last real encounter, your body appeared to have collapsed inward on itself as if your bones had long since liquified, save for the bent spine so common to very old ladies and the obvious boniness of your sticklike forearms.

I would love to tell you, my darling Libbie who cannot hear me, that your eyes were still your own—blue, bright, intelligent, mischievous, alluring—but they had also undergone what Shakespeare called a “sea change,” and not for the better. They had somehow darkened and seemed lost in the shadows of your deep-sunk orbital bones—the way you and I had commented on Abraham Lincoln’s eye sockets near the end—and the eyes themselves seemed rheumy and unfocused.

I shall describe—and remember—no more. But these observations were made in the shadows of an April afternoon in the most indirect and already-fading light. The large, heavy, dark furniture in the room seemed to be soaking up the light. (I admit that I looked for the small signing table from Appomatox Courthouse that Phil Sheridan had given us, but it was not in this parlor and I hadn’t noticed it on the way in.)

I was introduced by my “favorite cousin” May as “Mr. William Slow Horse, the gentleman with whom I have been corresponding and of whom I’ve recently spoken.”

Mrs. Elmer
waved Paha Sapa to a seat and when she herself had plopped into a chair, Paha Sapa sat us down across from you, Libbie. In the crowded room, his knees were only about four feet from yours (if one could discern where knees or any other anatomical components were in that wrinkled mass of black crepe, silk, muslin, and whatever else went into that mourning pyre of a dress).

And I confess again that in all my images of meeting you again through Paha Sapa’s visit, I had never—not once—imagined another person in the room with us. Even after Mrs. Flood—“Margaret” to Mrs. Elmer—had excused herself to go about some domestic chore (or perhaps just to sit smoking in the kitchen or back stairway), the room seemed far too crowded with the three living persons and my own hovering, nonliving presence there.

I also realized at that second that I was the second ghost of General George Armstrong Custer (even though I was no ghost) to enter this room. The first ghost had been carried everywhere by Mrs. Elizabeth Custer for almost fifty-seven years and was certainly in the room with us.

When you spoke, my darling, your voice was simultaneously phlegm husky and as wispy as the spiderweb wrinkles concealing your features. Paha Sapa and Mrs. Elmer both bent forward to hear you.

“Did you have a pleasant trip to New York, Mr. Slow Horse?”

“Yes, Mrs. Custer. It was fine.”

“All the way from… where? Nebraska? Wyoming?”

“South Dakota, ma’am. The Black Hills.”

You were not leaning toward us, but I could see you straining to hear, Libbie. I could see no hearing trumpet in the room, but you were obviously having difficulties. I wondered how much of Paha Sapa’s conversation you could actually hear. But there seemed to be a glint of recognition in those unfocused eyes at the sound of “Black Hills.” I remembered Paha Sapa reading something you wrote in 1927: “There was a time after the battle of the Little Big Horn that I could not have said this, but as the years have passed I have become convinced that the Indians were deeply wronged.”

If I’d lived, my darling Sunshine, I would have convinced you of this long before 1927. I remember Paha Sapa reading—I believe it was in your
Boots and Saddles—
something to the effect that “General Custer was a friend to every reservation Indian,” meaning, obviously, that I would help those who submitted to the orders of the U.S. Government, carried out by such agencies as my Seventh Cavalry, and who stayed at the agencies, ceased hunting, waited patiently for our allocations of beef for them to arrive by rail, and who tried a little farming while waiting.

Nothing could be further from my feelings, then and later. I confess that I had and still have contempt for the reservation Indians, those who submitted under our threats and attacks and who became docile agency redskins. It was the warriors I admired—them and the women and children and old men who risked everything by going back out onto the Plains with them in a sad and doomed attempt to regain their old way of life… an attempt that was already all but impossible due to our extinction of their buffalo herds. All of us in the Seventh, from the officers down to the newest immigrant enlisted man, used to complain about the fact that the Agencies gave the Sioux and Cheyenne new repeating rifles with which to hunt the occasional game and the young men took these rifles, often superior to our own, and rode out onto the prairie to do battle with us.

We complained, but we in the Seventh Cavalry admired such behavior—we would not have wanted anything other than a fair fight—and during negotiations we soldiers tried to hide our contempt for the lesser, “tamed” Indians both on their reservations and lounging in their ill-kept tipis near the forts. They were little better than the tramps and panhandlers that Paha Sapa had passed on the streets of New York that morning.

You had been saying something.

“Have you had time to sightsee in New York yet, Mr. Slow Horse?”

Paha Sapa smiled slightly—I saw his reflection in the tall glass-covered piece of furniture holding china near you. I had not seen or felt Paha Sapa smile many times in the years I had been aware of him and of my place in him.

“I walked down to the Brooklyn Bridge this morning, Mrs. Custer.”

“Oh, Auntie,” interrupted May Custer Elmer, “you remember how, years ago, you used to take the taxi to the New York side of the bridge and walk partway over on the promenade and I would come from Brooklyn and meet you on the promenade deck?”

Paha Sapa had been sending his letters to Mrs. Elmer at 14 Park Street in Brooklyn.

You did not turn your face in May’s direction, Libbie. You did cock your head and smile slightly, as if you were listening to pleasant music from the radio. But the radio was not on.

Mrs. May Custer Elmer cleared her throat and tried again.

“Auntie, I think you remember that I told you that Mr. William Slow Horse was in Mr. Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West Show that you enjoyed so much. It’s why we decided that you should meet with Mr. Slow Horse. Do you remember, Auntie?”

Between the very loud voice and the slow exaggeration of almost every syllable, your grand-niece was speaking to you as if you were not only old and a little deaf but also a foreigner, Libbie. But you finally quit listening to the inaudible music and looked first at her and then at Paha Sapa.

“Oh… yes. I saw you perform in Mr. Cody’s show, Mr.… Slow Horse, is it? Yes. I saw you perform and noticed you in the finale where Mr. Cody impersonated my husband. I remember it well…. It was at the Madison Square Garden in November of eighteen eighty-six. You rode very well and your war cries were most chilling and convincing, both in the Deadwood Stage act and in the Little Big Horn finale. Yes, very convincing. Very good performance, Mr. Slow Horse.”

“Thank you,” said Paha Sapa.

I knew that Paha Sapa had never been to New York before and that he hadn’t joined Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show until spring of 1893, shortly before the Chicago World’s Fair. But whoever you were thinking of, Libbie—whichever Indian—this seemed to have broken the ice and I understand why Paha Sapa didn’t correct you.