Black Hills (53 page)

“Oh, I saw it many times after that,” you continued in that soft, husky yet sibilant whisper, turning your almost blind and formerly blue eyes first in our direction, then in the general direction of May Custer Elmer, and then toward nothing at all but the furniture. “Miss Oakley… Little Sure Shot, you people called her in the program… became a very good friend of mine. Did you know that, Mr. Slow Horse?”

“No, Mrs. Custer, I didn’t.”

“What?”

Paha Sapa repeated his answer.

“Well, it is true, Mr. Slow Horse. Of course, Mr. Cody had been one of my husband’s scouts long ago. Everyone in the Army knew Mr. Cody long before he opened his Wild West Circus. That November when his show premiered at the… where was it, May?”

“Madison Square Garden, Auntie.”

“Oh, yes, of course… I believe I just said that. That November when Mr. Cody’s show premiered at the Madison Square Garden, quite everyone was there…. General Sheridan, whom I never cared for that much, to be bluntly honest, and General Sherman, and Henry Ward Beecher… I believe that was before his scandal… was it before his scandal and the adultery trial, May?”

“Yes, Auntie, I believe so.”

“Well, he was there… a strange, heavy, long-haired, and unattractive man dressed in a black cape-suit that made him look like a bag of suet. Beecher had one drooping eyelid that made him look like an idiot or stroke victim. It was hard to believe that he was the greatest speaker and evangelist and—evidently—ladies’ man of that era, but so it was. August Belmont was there for the premiere of Mr. Cody’s show as well as Pierre Lorillard. And I. I had complimentary tickets, of course. You and Charles weren’t there, were you, May dear?”

“No, Auntie.”

Paha Sapa was looking at the niece and I think both of us were wondering if May Custer Elmer had even been born by 1886. Probably. There was an arroyo of wrinkles under the lady’s heavy makeup. You, Libbie, were still talking—like an old toy which, once wound up, took a long time to wind down.

“Well, it was that same autumn that our old cook and fellow traveler from the frontier days, Eliza, came to town….”

I confess that I started a bit at this. Eliza, our Negro cook—my Negro cook during the war even before I’d married Libbie, Eliza, whom my cavalry unit had liberated from slavery in Virginia and who had then followed me (and then Libbie and me) to Texas and Michigan and Kansas and points west—Eliza in New York at Madison Square Garden watching Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show and its finale where Cody pretends to be me being murdered by Indians pretending to murder me? Eliza? Only ten years after my real death?

“… She had married a Negro doctor and left us while Au… while the Armstro… while the Colonel was still alive…. Or was it a Negro
attorney,
May, my dear?”

“A Negro attorney, I believe, Auntie.”

“Yes, yes… At any rate, I loved showing Eliza around New York that autumn and I gave her a ticket to the Madison Square Garden show…. I felt she should see it, you understand…”

For the first time in several minutes, your gaze, Libbie, returned to Paha Sapa.

“… because Eliza and I had lived through so many of the scenes depicted… not the attack on the Deadwood Stage, of course, or the Grand Review, but so many of the other scenes… and I felt sure that nothing could better call back for dear, faithful Eliza, could call back so vividly as it were, our shared experiences on the frontier as this most faithful and realistic reprsentation of a western life that has ceased to be, what with advancing civilization and all.”

You paused for breath, my darling, and I paused to review Paha Sapa’s memories of his brief time with Cody’s show. It was, essentially, the same show that you had seen in 1886, Libbie, and which so many thousands had seen in the years after that and at the Chicago World’s Fair. Cody rarely tampered with a winning formula, whether in his scouting or in his Wild West Show or in his lying about history.

“So after the performance, which I had not been able to attend—again—due to other obligations, Eliza took a card I had given her back to Mr. Cody’s tent—the two had not previously met, since Eliza had left our service before Mr. Cody began scouting for the cavalry—and she reported to me later… ”

And here, my Sunshine, you slipped into a cackling
, Amos ’n’ Andy–
exaggerated imitation of Eliza’s old Virginia slave patois. (Paha Sapa owned a tiny radio that his son, Robert, had built for him and had also heard fragments of
Amos ’n’ Andy
a hundred times in bars and other workers’ homes, its broadcast blasted off the ionosphere by the powerful WMAQ as part of the NBC Blue Network that reached even to the Black Hills on good listening nights. When the Ruby Taylor character had almost died of pneumonia two years ago, in the spring of ’31, half the men on Mount Rushmore could talk of little else.) And you, my darling Libbie, also must have been listening to it religiously, since your voice now was more the Harlem screech of Kingfish’s wife, Sapphire, than of our old, slow-southern-speaking cook Eliza.

“… ‘Well, Miss Libbie, when Mr. Cody come up, I see at honce his back and hips was built pracisely like the Ginnel… Eliza always called my husband “the Ginnel,” Mr. Slow Horse, even after the war when all the officers who remained in the army were reduced in rank and Autie… my husband… retained only the rank of colonel… ‘Well, Miss Libbie,’ she says, ‘when I come on to Maz Cody’s tent, I jest said to him: “Mr. Buffalo Bill, sir, when you done come up to the stand and wheeled around like dat, I said to myself
, Well, if he ain’t the ’spress and spittin’ of Ginnel Custer in battle, I never seed any one that was.” ’”

After this relatively loud recitation of the
Amos ’n’ Andy
version of Eliza’s Negro-ese, you cackled laughter, my darling, until you began to cough, and May Custer Elmer also laughed hard, making her broad red cheeks broader and redder, and even Paha Sapa smiled very slightly, I think (unless there was a slight vibration of a passing elevated train shaking the reflecting glass of the china cabinet). Your coughing continued until everyone else’s reaction was finished, and then Margaret—Mrs. Flood—brought in a tray with a steaming teapot, once fine but now spiderweb-fissured china cups and saucers for all of us, a matching little pitcher
and sugar bowl, tiny spoons, and—on a separate dish—tiny wedges of what might possibly have been cucumber sandwiches. Since you were still coughing into a white handkerchief that seemed to have appeared from nowhere (although I had learned when I was alive and married to you that the only thing more mysterious than a woman’s heart is the contents of her sleeve), Mrs. May Custer Elmer did the honor of pouring the tea. By the time she had concluded with the pouring, you had concluded with your hacking and coughing.

I knew that Paha Sapa was starving but was afraid to take a tiny sandwich wedge, not being totally sure of how such things should be eaten in the presence of the ladies. If I remember correctly, you and I, Libbie my dearest, were once, in the earliest days of our marriage, confronted with precisely such miniature-sandwich fare at one of ancient General Winfield Scott’s last official soirees as head of Lincoln’s army before his great age and even greater weight carried him off into History’s oblivion, and that afternoon I had simply popped two or three of the tasteless little cucumber-and-bread-and-butter triangles into my mouth and washed them down with a giant swig of the general’s seriously substandard wine.

You had frowned at me, but your eyes were merry in those youthful days and then, when none of the crowd was watching, you winked at me. There was no winking or conspiratorial twinkle in your eye this day, the first of April 1933, and you addressed both the cup of tea that niece May had poured and one of the tiny sandwich triangles with deadly, frowning seriousness. It’s been my observation that interest in food is one of the—if not the—last things to go with the truly elderly.

It was while you were eating and chewing with such unladylike total concentration, my dearest, that I realized yet another reason that I was having trouble identifying the Libbie-you that I so wildly loved with this old-woman-Libbie in the high-backed chair opposite me: your teeth were different.

You had always had lovely teeth, but very small—each one looking like a miniature of one of those white Chiclet pieces of candy-covered gum that Paha Sapa used to discover young Robert chewing somewhere around 1906—and your perfect but tiny-toothed smile was part of your charm.

Now you obviously had full dentures. The dentist or denture maker had made no effort to match your original, lovely little teeth and these new, larger, much more aggressive substitutes changed your entire face, giving it an almost rodentlike thrust-forward and far too much exposure of the imitation teeth when you spoke or chewed.

I apologize for these unkind remarks, my darling Libbie. I make them because I know now you will never hear them.

My favorite (if unknown to me) grand-niece May cleared her throat. She was our facilitator here and she obviously believed that her aunt’s mistaken belief that she had seen Paha Sapa perform in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show (or Circus, as it had been called in New York City in 1888) was the perfect segue to the heart of our proposed discussion.

I was happy to hear this, since we had promised May that our visit would take up no more than fifteen minutes of your sacred time and energy, Libbie, and—according to the loudly hammering clock on the north wall—we had used up a little more than half that time already with our senseless chitchat.

“Auntie Libbie, perhaps you remember me mentioning that Mr. William Slow Horse wrote to us that not only was he in the re-creation of the… ah… Battle at the Little Big Horn in Buffalo Bill’s show, but he was actually there. At the Little Big Horn, I mean. He was… he saw… I mean, he was there on the field with Uncle Armstrong twenty-five June that year when… ”

I saw the transformation in you then, Libbie. From leaning forward to eat and sip your tea, you set down the saucer with a clank and sat far back in your high chair, your curved spine as rigid and vertical as you could make it, the expression on your face becoming guarded, protective, and neutral.

Paha Sapa had read to me an old article about your presence at an unveiling of some ridiculous equestrian statue of me in Monroe back in June of 1910: you had hobnobbed with his Immenseness, President Howard Taft, with Michigan’s Governor Warner, and with countless others that weekend, but—you said to some reporter much later—what had almost finished you off (not your words, my darling) was the evening meeting at the Armory with hundreds of veterans of the Seventh Cavalry. Some unkind wit there, I think it was a humorous officer in the infantry (the same one who had made you laugh when he said that his infantry following our cavalry during the War had been fascinating, since there were no fence rails left for a fire, no pigs or chickens left for a meal, no full smokehouses left untouched, or anything else that might inhibit their hungry advance in our wake), had commented drily that reports of the massacre of me and my men must have wildly exaggerated if there were so many regimental “survivors” there that weekend. You had ignored that, but what you could not ignore was this mandatory personal meeting with hundreds of aging, toothless, white-haired, white-mustached, wrinkled old veterans in their red neckties—I had worn
one, of course, and some of the men had picked up the habit then and apparently all of the grizzled old veterans thought it a good idea—all of them insisting that they knew and remembered you well and that they had been “dear friends” with the General.

Other than a few staff officers, you admitted that you remembered not a single one of these men (much less the wives and children and in-laws and grandchildren they had dragged to the unveiling of the equestrian monument there in Monroe and whom they insisted on introducing to you as if they also had been dear friends and followers and intimates with you).

But it was more than this, I am certain, that made your spine rigid and your face expressionless this first day of April 1933.

Even through the severely restricted lens of Paha Sapa’s reading in recent years, I understood all too well that when it came to the topic of my death—my death and the deaths of 258 other officers and troopers of the Seventh Cavalry, including my two brothers, my very young nephew, and my brother-in-law—everyone who had taken the energy to form an opinion on me fell into either the category that considered me a megalomaniacal fool who managed to get my men, my relatives, and myself killed through sheer, arrogant stupidity, or in the opposing category wherein I, Lieutenant Colonel (still called “General” by those who loved me) George Armstrong Custer, had died following orders and in a valiant attack on the largest concentration of hostile Indian warriors in the entire history of our nation’s warfare against the Indians.

Custerphobes or Custerphiles, as one otherwise forgettable editorial writer had put it some years earlier. And it was true that there seemed to be no middle ground—no one who thought I was something between those opposite and mutually exclusive poles of arrogant fool or martyred hero.

Were you forgetting important things these days in your age and illness, my darling? Had senility begun to set in behind those rheumy eyes and that wrinkled, absent expression? Is it possible that you were, even as I sat opposite you, forgetting that you had led the Custerphile contingent now for fifty-seven long, bitter years? Ever vigilant in defense against any conceivable blot on my name or record of honor, you also led the offense at times, such as in 1926 and again in 1929, when you strongly objected to C. H. Asbury, then chief agent at the Crow Agency in control of the Little Big Horn battlefield that bears my name, when Asbury considered putting up even the smallest plaque honoring the name and memory of that drunkard and coward Major Marcus Reno—who, my darling, you were certain had left me and my three companies alone on that hill to die.