Little Big Man (38 page)

“I am sorry for that,” I says, and sincerely enough, for the enmity between me and Younger Bear had always gone in only the one direction, though he sometimes annoyed me.

But Little Horse, typical of a
heemaneh
I suppose, passed it off fairly negligent. “Oh,” says he, “he got over it. We joined the band
of Red-Winged Woodpecker, and Younger Bear sold his Thunder Bow and Contrary power to someone else, which freed him to get married.”

At that moment the subject of these remarks come in out of the Washita, shivering off the water before it could freeze on him, and since Little Horse broke off our talk to dry Younger Bear with a red blanket and help him into his clothes, I got the idea who had participated in that wedding.

So when the Bear was all dressed and looked at me, I couldn’t forbear from needling him a little, for though nobody among the Cheyenne ever condemns a
heemaneh
, it is O.K. to rib the fellow he lives with.

So I says: “I have just been talking to your lovely wife.”

“All right,” he says, smiling without malignance, I thought, and squeezing a quart of water out of each of his braids. “Now come and meet the other one.”

He exchanged the wet blanket for a dry one from Little Horse, swathed himself in it, and led the way among the lodges, through the crowds of dogs, and pointing to one sharp-faced animal that had a good deal of coyote in him, I expect, he told Little Horse to cook it for the guest, so the Horse popped it in the head with a club from his beaded belt and carried its limp yellow body by the hind legs along with that wet blanket, and we come to a shabby tepee and went through its entranceway.

A goodly fire was blazing in the center and over it hung the usual black pot being stirred by the usual stout woman, except her face was white beneath the dirt and her hair blonde for all the sooted grease. It was Olga.

Younger Bear turns to me and shows what I took to be an evil sneer at the time, but now I realize it was mainly pure pride, for he had no idea that his female wife and me was related other than by race alone.

“We will smoke,” he says, “and then we will eat.”

Olga looks awful as to her person, wearing a dirty buckskin dress and leggings and old moccasins gone almost to rags. The Bear might have took his regular bath irrespective of the temperature, but I believe Olga abstained according to the same schedule. I said before I seen her blonde hair, but actually it was greenish, and the tail of an uncurried horse was less tangled.

Now, I had left all my weapons back at my own lodge, so as to
display my peaceful intentions to any hostile braves I might encounter, and Younger Bear was a great husky fellow more than six foot tall and we was right in the middle of an encampment no doubt full of his friends. I didn’t think of these matters. All I seen was my dear, sweet wife degraded into a slave for this damnable savage, and my fingers curled into murderous claws and I would have been upon the Bear and tore out his throat in the next second … had not Olga looked up right then and sounded off in a voice that for sheer raucousness took the cake from Caroline, or Nothing that time I heard her bawling out her man, or any other female white or red who ever tormented my eardrums.

“Maybe you can tell me what we’re going to eat, you good-for-nothing loafer, you!” she howls. “I can’t remember the last time you brought in any game. Why, Little Horse here is more of a man than you.” The latter had stayed outside to prepare that dog, and now he come in with the bleeding hunks of its flesh, his dress arms pulled back so as not to soil them, and he tries to calm her down, but Olga continues to Younger Bear: “I think you should change clothes with Little Horse, except that you are too stupid and awkward to be a
heemaneh!
And who is this foolish beggar you have brought here to steal what little food we have, none of which you provided? Tell him to do his buffalo dance elsewhere.”

Younger Bear scowls and says: “Unless you want a beating, woman, you will shut your mouth.”

“You know who’ll get the beating,” snarls Olga. “I’ll break a club against your lazy spine.” She brushes back her hair, leaving a long smear across her forehead, and spits contemptuously in the fire. Then she takes them hunks of dog from Little Horse and hurls them into the pot with a splash of blood and boiling water, some of which hits the Horse and he shrieks in horror that his dress is stained, and Olga says: “I’m sorry, dear,” and takes him outside to look at the spots in the daylight.

You might have thought Younger Bear was shamed in front of me, but he didn’t show it. He shrugs and lights his pipe. “Usually,” he says, “this woman is gentle as a dove. I think she acts this way just to show off for the guest, for I am a good provider. Did I not bring in that dog just now? I am also a wonderful lover, for I stored up my force for several years as a Contrary, when it was not permitted to have a woman, and now …”

Well, he went on boasting for a time, and lying, and I’ll tell you
his degeneration was awe-inspiring. How many times have I said that the Cheyenne spurned both these indulgences, and here this Indian had taken them up like a saloon bum.

Not that I thought of that at the time—no, I was still paralytic from seeing Olga. She wasn’t a victim, that much was clear, but her whole personality had changed. You remember how amiable she was when married to me, even to the point of meekness. She never in those years learned much of the English language, yet here she was already fluent in abusive Cheyenne. Maybe her Swedish throat took more naturally to another harsh tongue, but what about that fear of Indians she had had since the massacre of her family by the Santee Sioux?

My God, but it was strange, and in the pondering of it I forgot for a time about Little Gus, when suddenly in he runs, dressed like a savage and with his fair hair in braids. He must have been about the age of five now and he was a robust lad, his sturdy little body half-naked despite the cold. He had a bow and took it to Younger Bear.

“Father,” says he, “the string is broken. Please make me a new one, because I need it for our war.”

The Bear smiled real fond at Gus, though he chided him: “It is not the way of the Human Beings to interrupt the smoking of a guest.” But he pulled the lacing from his own quiver hanging from a lodgepole and stretched a new bowstring of it.

At last I found my tongue and asked Gus, the child of my own loins, “Who are you fighting? The Pawnee?”

My voice must have sounded strained, but he didn’t take enough notice of me that it mattered. He was still breathing hard from his running, and as a kid will be, was absolutely occupied with that momentary need of his. So he grabs the bow from Younger Bear, which had now been repaired, and answers while en route to the outside.

“No, not Pawnee,” he says in his high, fierce voice in that guttural language. “White men!”

“I wish you would come back here and show the proper respect for the guest,” said Younger Bear, but rather weakly, I thought, and before he had got it all out, my Gus had rejoined his playmates. You could hear them whooping. He figured himself for a pure-bred Indian.

I didn’t know what Olga thought, and having seen her in action I didn’t want to find out. It was the goddamnedest thing I ever seen
or heard of. The Kiowa, down in their camp, had a white woman who was used as the lowliest slave. I didn’t have much protection in that village, so hadn’t stayed longer than to determine that she wasn’t my wife, but had seen the poor thing and her baby of eighteen months and she was a miserable sight.

But the only distress hereabout was in Younger Bear’s countenance when Olga lighted into him. Now that we was alone he starts to boast of how he paid ten ponies for her to the Southern Cheyenne brave what captured her upon the Arkansas. The usual price for an Indian girl, paid to her father, was only three or four animals.

You might think I was sitting there gritting my teeth. I wasn’t. I felt as if in a dream, and says right calm: “That boy has pale skin.”

“And hair like the morning sun,” says Younger Bear. “His name is Medicine Standing Up, only we usually call him Potbelly. I think he will become the most powerful war chief of the Human Beings. You know the great Crazy Horse of the Oglala has light skin and fair hair, and he cannot be hit with a bullet.”

“You made this child?” I took a drag on the stone pipe and handed it back to him. I expected him to say he had, in the mood he was in then, but he looked into the fire for a time through half-closed lids and then replied: “No, his father was the same medicine bird that came to me at Sand Creek and said: ‘Stop being a Contrary! Run away! Do not care what people think. You have a greater destiny than fighting these bluecoats today. You must marry a woman with pale hair and rear my son!’ So that is what I did.”

Well, Olga and Little Horse come in again and cooked that dog and served him up, and my ex-wife bawled Younger Bear out from time to time and give me no more notice than she had before, and I reckon if Little Horse had told her anything about me, it was some fantastic story that would never remind her of Jack Crabb.

Somehow I ate enough to be polite and when done even extended the return invite that manners called for.

I says: “I am married to the daughter of Shadow That Comes in Sight, who you know was a great warrior.” I had some pride, too, and it had begun to get me that this Indian was bragging about having my white wife in his tepee. Though I wasn’t angry at him, really, and if I hated him, it wasn’t in the fashion that I had imagined I would hate the man what held Olga. For he wasn’t detaining her: that much was clear. And though she seemed in a foul mood, it was the kind a female finds strangely satisfying. She had something
on him; had found out probably, I guess from Little Horse, that he had showed the white feather at Sand Creek and was never going to let him forget it.

I hadn’t seen this side of Olga when we was married, thank the good Lord, though I realized now that I might have, had she known about that business flop I suffered in Denver. But she hadn’t. She never knew about anything in them days but keeping house and tending to Gus. She hardly knowed any English, I believe that’s why. But by Jesus how she had took to Cheyenne life! After cooking that dog, she had went out and worked alongside and bantered with them other Indian women and beyond her skin and hair you’d never been able to distinguish amongst them.

I be damned! Excuse my cursing. It’s just that it was a wonder to me and I don’t know how to express the measure of it. I wasn’t sad and I wasn’t mad. I wasn’t even embarrassed, though I might have been if I hadn’t been wearing that buffalo hat and face paint. For it was Jack Crabb who had lost his wife, not Little Big Man; that was the way to look at it. You might think I should have been dying for the details of the final moments in which that little group of whites was overrun by the Indians down on the Arkansas and Olga and Gus was carried off; I should have wanted to discover from Younger Bear the name of the brave what had sold them to him, and go kill that Indian to protect my honor.

But none of that occurred to me at this time. No, seeing my wife and boy in Younger Bear’s tepee, both of whom was apparently prospering in their own style, I was impelled rather to make that announcement of my own marriage to Sunshine. I done more: I boasted that, because her father was dead and she didn’t have no brothers, I didn’t pay nobody a single horse for her.

Now like most braggarts, Younger Bear couldn’t stand to hear nobody else steal his thunder. He commenced to pout and chewed forever upon the same fragment of gristle. His eyes had got more Oriental as he grew older, and now they almost disappeared beneath the bulge of his low forehead and the underlying tear-sacs traced in paint that hadn’t been altogether washed off by his bath. I had had a feeling all along on this visit that he didn’t recognize me—that is, of course he knowed I was white though dressed like a Cheyenne, but did not connect me with his boyhood. The only other time I had seen him since the old days had been that once when he was a Contrary, lost in his backwards scheme.

Well sir, he don’t say a thing now until we finish off our chuck and wipe our hands upon our garments and go outside, and there is Olga and some other women fleshing a fresh hide that is staked down upon a spot from which they have swept the snow—her big bottom is pointed towards me, and I would never have recognized it, for back in the old days Olga was robust but never portly. And little Gus runs by, ducking an imaginary bullet fired from a stick-gun by a brown playmate who he must have euchred into impersonating a white enemy. Only a son of mine could have pulled off such a trick, and damn me, that incident touched me more than anything so far. That was the closest I come to calling him, saying: “I’m your Pa, boy. Don’t you recall your old Daddy?”

But of course I never, for it wasn’t the place nor the time, and how in hell would I ever explain the get-up I was wearing to a five-year-old. I’m telling the truth here, and the truth is always made up of little particulars which sound ridiculous when repeated. But I’m prepared to say that maybe I didn’t take back my wife and boy because I was wearing them buffalo horns, when everything was said and done.

Well, I took leave of Younger Bear and renewed the invite to come and eat at my lodge the next day and went so far in a bravado intended to cover up the emotion I felt on seeing Gus as to add: “And bring the whole family!”

The Bear suddenly come from his coma and says to me, very keenly: “You have decided to stay.” So he did recall me.

“I never thanked you,” he says, “for bringing extra food to me while I was being taken as a prisoner to the fort. I want to do that now.”

I was afraid he would next start in on that old business about owing me a life, so I fixed to leave, but he says: “Wait. I want to apologize for the rudeness of my wife. She is a good woman, but she just cannot stand to be in the presence of white men, because they killed her father and mother.…

“Listen,” he says, “on the way here we crossed a fresh trail made by white soldiers. I think they are looking for this village, though the chiefs touched the pen and we are at peace.”