Ghost Dance (30 page)

She paused for a moment, and drew up her feet and put her head on her knees, looking at Chance.

"I didn't know that," she said.

"It's true," said Chance. He added, "You should be able to walk all right by now, too, but I wouldn't walk too far at first."

"That's a good idea," said Lucia, and she swung her feet off the bed and stood a bit too unsteadily beside it.

She walked a step or two from Chance, and turned to look over her shoulder. "I'm actually pretty good," she said.

"In a day or two," said Chance.

She took two or three more steps, and then turned to make it back to the bed.

She started to walk back toward Chance, tottering but brave, and then suddenly squeaked and had it not been for the fact that Chance swiftly, alertly, sprang to his feet, she might have fallen. Fortunately he managed to catch her.

"Oh," she said.

Chance held her softly beside the bed, and stood her on her feet, lifting her by the arms, and then with his hands touched her hair and as she looked at him, he gently, very gently, kissed her forehead.

"I guess," said Lucia, "I'm not as ready to walk as I thought."

"I guess not," said Chance.

Lucia was looking up at him and very slowly she lifted her lips to his and touched them. The sound of the kiss was very delicate.

"When you brought me inside two nights ago," said Lucia, "you said something to me."

"Merry Christmas," said Chance.

"Not that," said Lucia.

"Oh?" said Chance.

"I said something to you, too," she said.

"Did you?" asked Chance.

"Yes," said Lucia, kissing him again on the lips, a delicate thing, like the touch of a bird.

"You probably didn't know what you were saying," said Chance.

"I did," said Lucia.

"What did you say?" asked Chance.

"My feet are cold," said Lucia.

"Oh," said Chance.

"I don't have any money, you know," said Lucia, looking up at him.

"I know," said Chance.

Lucia pushed back from him a bit, careful not to let him go. "That's not a very proper thing for a doctor to say," she said.

"Sorry," said Chance.

"So I don't know what to do about your fee," she said.

"I'd forget it," said Chance.

"Not me," said Lucia.

"There's no fee," said Chance.

"If I were a hussy," said Lucia, "I'd know how to pay you."

Chance smiled.

"I'm a hussy," said Lucia.

Chance's laugh was cut short when she seized him by the back of the head and pulled his face down to hers, kissing him so fiercely that he felt the imprint of her teeth on his lip. She then pulled back, and laughed. "There," she said, "you see!"

"Oh," she cried as he drew her into his arms, and then she was frightened, feeling herself by his arms bound against his hardness, unable to move, and his mouth covered hers and through her teeth as she struggled she felt his remorseless tongue thrust through touch hers, turning it back and her body, she felt as if it were flying as he lifted her from the floor and placed her on the bed, half across it, and his tongue never left hers and she felt on her ankle, gently controlling her, his warm hand moving thighward and she swam not caring in pleasure wanting only his closeness and the immersion like joy and fainting and wine and not being able to move and not wanting to and then, he threw back his head and shook it crying aloud and she too cried out with joy loving him and reached for him loving him, loving him.

Chance, recalling the matter later, remembered that she had said at one point that she would like California.

Chance never quite understood how things had been decided but he knew that they had been, and that he was glad, and that he, as a male, and a rational one, would probably never by himself have been responsible for a decision so foolish, and so incontrovertibly glorious, as the one to which he discovered, to his amazement, he had been party.

His life was one of danger, he himself was hunted. He had nothing to offer a woman, neither security nor prospects. He had no home, no practice, no future. He had little to give her but himself and his love, and to his astonishment, he had learned that this was all she wanted.

Chance did not bother comprehending love, but was thankful to move within it, as one might move in the air he breathed, in the sunlight that showed him the world.

And Lucia, too, was unutterably other than she had been; and so too was her world, even to the shine on the walnut chest in the Carter soddy, the gleam on the brass kettle on the shelf near the stove, the tiny drops of grease on the kindling bucket, the grains of dust in the floor of the soddy, the weaving of the blanket, the careful stitching in the quilt on the bed; all things were different and beautiful to her and objects which she had hitherto thought prosaic, like a glass jar, a metal spoon, a piece of string, a kitchen match, the wood of a slat on a kitchen chair, now seemed to gather into themselves and radiate a startling, incredible perfection.

Chance replaced the blankets about Lucia.

"I've got to go now," said Chance.

Lucia nodded.

Chance looked on the luster of her eyes, the new softness of her face. He held her wrist, noting the deep rhythm of the blood moving through her body. When she spoke her voice for an hour or so would be a bit lower than normal.

Chance smiled and kissed her.

He rose and slung the Indian blanket that was his only wrap over his left shoulder.

He would write to her from California. She would join him there.

Then suddenly as he stood there, looking down upon her, seeing her as beautiful and as his love, he felt as though the room suddenly darkened and as if his heart stopped beating for that instant.

It seemed then as though the walls of his hope trembled, and the towers of the future which had seemed so shining, so bright with promise, crumbled.

Suddenly it seemed as though the air was gone, as if the sun had vanished, leaving the pelt of night behind, the darkness of which was marked by not a star.

"Edward?" she asked.

"It's nothing," he said.

It would be wisest, of course, not to write, but to try to forget, best for her probably, maybe best for him.

"Edward?" she asked.

"It's nothing," he said, "nothing."

What sort of life would it be for her? What sort of life could it be for her?

"You love me?" she asked.

"Yes," he said.

"You frightened me," she said, "–how you looked."

"I'm sorry," he said. "I'm sorry."

He turned and went to the door of the soddy, fumbled with the latch, pushed it up.

At the door he turned to look on her once again, and as he looked, tears formed in his eyes, because he knew that he should not send for her, that if he loved her he could not do so.

"Good-bye, Lucia," said Chance.

"Edward!" she cried.

But he was gone, and in a bound he had mounted his horse and the soddy was behind him.

"We'll take good care of her for you," Mrs. Carter had called after him.

He thought he heard Lucia's voice cry his name again, perhaps from outside the soddy, but the sound was indistinct in the wind and covered by the hoofbeats of his horse.

In a few seconds Chance, crying, reined his horse sharply to the left, turning it to follow the travois tracks and the pressed grass that marked the trail of the Sioux.

In an hour he had rejoined the band.

 

 

 

 

Chapter Seventeen

 

The winter morning was crisp, the air as brittle and clear as thin ice. It was the 29th of December, 1890, at the banks of Wounded Knee Creek.

The lodges of the Minneconjou, also on the whole sheltering the Hunkpapa of Old Bear, irregularly dotted the still prairie, like some silent, natural formation, not the habitats of men. The barkless tepee poles showed like bones through the weathered hide of the old skins that clung to them.

The camp was quiet.

Not even a cooking fire rippled the still December air above the lodges. None of the dogs crept through the camp to smell for food. They lay curled in the ashes of last night's fires, their eyes open, not willing to move.

Outside the perimeter of the camp, soldiers walked in pairs, calling the signals of their post. The sentries walked in short, shuffling steps to keep their feet warm. They carried their weapons at right shoulder arms, their free hands unmilitarily buried in the refuge of their blue greatcoats, except when officers checked the watch. The breath of the sentries hung about their rifles like gunsmoke, eventually drifting upward and behind them.

 

* * *

 

Yesterday afternoon the soldiers had appeared.

The Sioux had been on their second day of the march when the shout, "Long Knives!" hurtled like a volley of shots the length of the long, ragged line.

Chance had not counted on soldiers surprising the Sioux on the prairie, coming to escort them to Pine Ridge.

Chance supposed there were about five hundred of them.

On the left and the right they had appeared, dust moving into the sky about twelve hundred yards away, on both sides.

Old Bear had ridden the line of the Sioux, crying out, "Do not fire! Do not fight!"

About two hundred yards away, the two converging forces of cavalry reined in, their sabers out of the sheath, their colors flying.

Chance had strained his eyes to make out the small triangular flag in the distance.

Running Horse had read it easily. "Seven," he said. And he had added to Chance. "That is bad."

Chance nodded. He, like everyone else, had heard of the Custer Massacre, but it had only been a thing in newspapers when he had been fourteen or fifteen years old; then he had read about it in a book or two. It had always been distant, remote, something that had happened to someone else on the other side of the world, meaning nothing much to him, nothing that wasn't abstract.

But somehow Chance felt that that event, that had been to him only a few lines of newsprint, a paragraph or two in a book, had not yet finished.

Not all of the Seventh Cavalry of course had been wiped out with Custer, only the detachments which he had personally led. There would be large numbers of career men left who would remember Custer, and their comrades, from fourteen years before. Chance could well suppose that these men might instill as a matter of course newer recruits with their own anger, their own vehemence. The Seventh might, for all Chance knew, suppose itself to have a score to settle; they might suppose, for all he knew, that there was a blot on that small, defiant triangular flag whipping in the wind some two hundred yards away, a blot to be rubbed out, a blot that had waited fourteen years for its cleansing.

Chance watched while Old Bear and Big Foot rode slowly out to meet the commander of the cavalry forces.

When the chiefs returned they told the braves to put away their weapons. The white man had come to go with them to Pine Ridge. There was to be no fighting. This pleased most of the warriors, who had little inclination to fight with an enemy four times as strong, particularly with one's starving women and children at one's back. Some of the men, the younger ones, like Drum, urged fighting, but they received for their show of bravery only the passive stares of the older men.

Chance melted in with the Indians, pulling the blanket more about his shoulders. He had wanted to go only as far as Wounded Knee and pull out before any soldiers arrived.

Old Bear rode through the ranks to Chance. He paused before him, his eyes sad. "There are men with the Long Knives who want to know if a white man is with us," he said. "They want to find such a man."

"What did you tell them?" asked Chance.

"I told them," said Old Bear, "that we are going to Pine Ridge and that white men are the business of white men."

"What did they say to that?" asked Chance.

"They want to look for you," said Old Bear. "But I told them it would not be good. There are young men too ready to fight."

"Thanks," said Chance.

Old Bear looked at him, the trace of a smile cracking the leather of his face. "I did not lie, Medicine Gun," he said.

Chance nodded, looking to where Drum and his braves were shifting on their horses, an angry knot of young warriors, glaring and shaking their rifles at the soldiers.

Drum rode a way into the prairie toward the soldiers, and then rode back. He did this twice, holding his rifle over his head, taunting them in Sioux. Then he returned to his young men. Chance guessed that Drum and his braves would not accompany the march to Pine Ridge, not if they could help it.

"Tonight," said Old Bear to Chance, "it will be hard to leave camp because the guard will be heavy. Tomorrow night, near Pine Ridge, maybe the Long Knives will not watch so close."

"All right," said Chance. "I'll wait, and move out when I can."

He hoped there would be an opportunity.

Chance looked out toward the encircling cavalry.

Suddenly among them he spotted the brown coat of a civilian. Something about the shape of the man and his carriage in the saddle told Chance it was Grawson. The man was putting something back in his saddlebags, possibly a pair of binoculars.

"He has seen you," said Running Horse.

After a while, the long lines of Sioux began to move again, and Chance, wrapped in his blanket against the cold, rubbing and blowing on his hands to keep the fingers flexible, rode with them.

"Where do we camp tonight?" asked Chance.

"Wounded Knee," said Running Horse.

 

* * *

 

In the camp of the soldiers, corporals went from bundle to bundle, shaking them awake.

This morning, even before reveille, they would be awake and ready for action.

The soldiers stirred, grumbling out of their damp blankets, cursing between chattering teeth, pulling the stiff cold leather of their boots over their wool stockings. When the last buckles were fixed and the last greatcoat was buttoned, the troops massed for formation.