Scarlet Plume, Second Edition (14 page)

Whitebone took up the weathered jawbone of the dinosaur. Great age and much drying had caused the emblem to become as light as a wasp nest. Even the two ancient teeth were light, like white puffballs. Slowly Whitebone led the way. The emblem seemed to give off a soft phosphorescent glow in the purpling dark. Four venerable headmen walked with Whitebone.

Women, children, old people, dogs followed the leaders. Camp soldiers walked guard along either side. Judith carried the papoose. Smoky Day had helped her shoulder it onto her back. Smoky Day rode on a travois, sitting on her packed goods. Theodosia led Bullhead’s pack horse. Two Two led Mavis’ horse. The dogs with their loads snuffled along silently. They more than the merry children seemed to realize that danger lurked in the rear.

All eyes followed the softly gleaming white-bone emblem.

A baby cried; was given breast; fell silent.

Stars came out as thick as grass seed. An occasional falling star speared across the black sky.

Soon the trail turned straight west, past the south point of Skywater. Sometimes the prairie grass was head deep. It was still sweet with the day’s rain.

A brave went ahead and shot a fire arrow into the air. The fire arrow would help the stragglers in the deep grass keep to the true path.

“A pillar of fire by night,” Theodosia said.

Judith started. She hadn’t been aware that her sister was walking beside her in the dark.

“And a cloud by day.”

The papoose on Judith’s back seemed to have suddenly doubled in weight. Judith guessed it had finally fallen asleep. Yet the heavy walking was good for the deep ache in her seat and thighs. She shuddered, remembering the terrible thing Mad Bear had done to her, remembering how his necklace of shrunken fingers had tickled her as his body pounded into hers.

“Judith?”

“Mm?”

“Do not hate God for this.”

“Mm.”

“Even if we do die in a far place somewhere unremembered.”

A sudden sob escaped Judith.

“God shall be our refuge and our strength.”

Judith inwardly pinched her brain to keep from remembering and seeing terrible things.

“They may ravish our bodies, but never our souls.”

Judith pinched her brain even more, to the point where she saw dazzling blood stars.

“Judith, please, do not hate God for this.”

“Mm.”

“Your husband, Vincent, was a doubter, wasn’t he?”

Another sob broke from Judith. Judith thought, “Yes, Vince also have I wronged. It was my doing that sent him off to the wars.”

“God has something in mind. There must be a divine purpose behind all this. There has to be.”

Judith thought, “My poor poor family. Gone.”

Theodosia sighed. “Well, I did not choose to be killed by the Indians either. But if the Lord wills it, it is all right. And that should be your thought too. Because remember, someday we shall see Claude and Angela in glory.”

Two Two spoke suddenly beside them in the dark rustling grass. There was in his voice the sound as if he too had been weeping private tears for Angela. “Bullhead does not like it that the white sisters speak overmuch in the white tongue. He thinks all whites are bad talkers.”

Both women fell silent. They trudged on. They followed the sounds of creaking leathers ahead. Far in the lead, the pale-white jawbone wavered from side to side.

The trail led over rough ground. Sometimes the going was over gravel hummocks, sometimes across wartlike clumps of buffalo grass.

Judith bent forward from the hips, the better to carry the papoose. She followed in the steps of the pack horse led by Tinkling. The tops of her high black shoes began to cut her across the calf of her legs. A small corn on her left toe began to sting.

Judith thought, “Where did I make the wrong turn, that fatal mistake, which led to this walking horror? When I left the farm near Davenport? Because I was too prideful to marry a farm boy? Rear a raft of country kids?”

Judith thought, “Yes, even Theodosia. Her path too led in a straight line toward destruction. She married Claude, then was assigned by the church to help him build a mission station at Skywater. Why couldn’t the Lord have spared her, after all the savage souls she had saved for Him?”

Judith cried to herself.

Yes. Marrying Vincent Raveling had been her first mistake. She had known it from the beginning. He was exactly as her father had once described him. “A lily-fingered city clerk who’ll always have his nose in a book. No good.”

Marrying Vince had meant so much to her at the time. Vince had just been assigned to St. Paul as head clerk for Western Shipping. St. Paul was a new and fast-growing city. They would grow up with it. They would hobnob with the best people right from the start.

Well, it had not worked out. Vince hated social doings. He preferred his pipe and Lucretius to parties. Also, the wives of General Sibley and Governor Ramsey, jealous of her blond-gold, statuesque beauty, had snubbed Judith at every turn, considering her an upstart from the country. Judith soon found herself making friends instead with a merry widow named Mavis Harder.

Judith stumbled through a tangle of wolfberry bushes. Tinkling had apparently chosen the wrong path. Some dogs laden with parfleches broke out in a snarling wrangle. Tinkling talked to them like they might be persons, and the dogs soon quieted.

But even then all might have been well, Judith thought, if she had only remained content with her lot in St. Paul.

Actually it had been a fairly good life. Both she and Mavis had joined a women’s club where gossip was frowned upon and improving one’s mind was encouraged. She and Mavis participated in the new feminist movement then sweeping America. They went to the theater together. They read the new books together. They became fast friends.

The tip of Judith’s tongue strayed over the edge of her upper lip and pushed at the stubs of the four pesky black hairs. Ah, so they’d grown back again. She’d plucked out the four black hairs but two weeks before.

She’d never discussed the four black hairs with Vince. She’d always made it a point to keep them plucked so he wouldn’t remark on them when they kissed.

In her mind the four hairs were associated with an odd demand Vince often made of her when they made love. Making love had never really meant much to her, it was perfunctory with her, so when Vince asked her to submit the Lucretius way, well, that she didn’t appreciate at all. Not at all. As a self-respecting woman she just couldn’t let herself submit to such indignity. Especially not just as she was all fired up with the feminist dream of freedom from male domination.

She had to admit, though, that submitting to Vince’s odd demand wasn’t nearly as awful as being ravished by a filthy Mad Bear. That horrible tickling of Mad Bear’s necklace of dead brown fingers on her chin . . . Oh, God.

She could feel, even hear, Vince’s letter crackling where it was hidden in the bosom of her dress. “My precious pet,” he had written. Yes, precious pet. Yes, yes. “And precious dear man wherever you may be tonight, fighting Johnny Reb in the deep, dark South.”

“Forgive, forgive,” she murmured aloud in the dark. “It’s my fault Angela is dead. I should never have come out here.”

“Judith?” Theodosia called.

Judith thought, “Well, we’re all going to die anyway, so in the end it really doesn’t matter.”

“Judith?”

Judith thought, “It’s all still like a dream to me. Like it never happened, actually.”

“Sister?”

Judith held her tongue.

“Do not hate God for it. Please, my sister. He has a purpose.”

Angela had come to Judith after a long and difficult labor, giving her much pain. But from then on Angela had been her precious love. Dear sweet darling girl with her flowing silver-blond hair and her kittenish blue eyes and her golden legs.

Theodosia threshed through the tall grass beside Judith. “You are saved, aren’t you?”

A short, wild laugh broke from Judith.

“Remember. We are all God’s children. All of us. Red as well as white.”

“The black man too?”

“Sister.”

Judith bumped into the rear of Tinkling’s pack horse. Tinkling and the horse had suddenly stopped dead still. The horse flourished its tail in Judith’s face in irritation, and stomped the ground hard, once.

The rest of the caravan—squaws, children, dogs, horses—had stopped too. Whitebone and his white emblem had vanished from sight. All stood immobile, absolutely unmoving. It became difficult to make out anybody in the prairie dark. Something was wrong.

They waited.

There were shots. One, two, three, four.

They waited.

Finally the sound of running came. Behind them. It was a runner. He went straight for Whitebone ahead.

There was another interval of waiting, and then the softly glowing white emblem rose out of the deep grass again.

“We are safe,” Tinkling whispered from where she stood holding her horse’s nostrils.

Word came back that Scarlet Plume and Traveling Hail had spotted enemy skulking in their rear. At least so it seemed at first. There was a grayness about the skulkers which made Scarlet Plume think they were white scouts from the great enemy army coming down from Fort Snelling. Scarlet Plume and his brother and the two other guards lay down in the grass, waiting, watching. Soon they noticed that the skulkers, quiet as they might be, took no pains to hide themselves. This was surprising. Then the four rear guards saw what it was and they smiled to themselves. Antelope. Curious antelope. Antelope were known to approach things they did not understand. Four shots followed and four antelope lay dead.

“Ah,” Smoky Day cried from her travois. “Now we shall have fresh meat at our next stopping.”

The caravan moved on.

An hour later there was another alarm in the night, this time up front.

Whitebone’s emblem was being jiggled about with agitation. There was also a sudden wild cry, followed by much lamenting.

Everybody hurried forward to see what it was. The entourage piled up, became a mob of redskins and horses and dogs.

They had come upon a small creek of running water. Beside it grew a single sweet cottonwood, a young tree about the height of a telegraph pole. The moon revealed a gruesome sight. An old Yankton woman hung from a limb of the young tree. A young Yankton wife lay on the ground beneath her, wailing her heart out. The old woman had been hanging from the limb for some time. The withered, gaunt face of the dead woman had a strangely eloquent expression in the moonlight. The arms hung straight down like sticks attached to a bundle, while the shadowed eye sockets seemed to glance from side to side.

Everybody stood staring at the scene. All remarked on the fact that the old woman had not fallen apart in decay but had dried up into a mummy instead. She had been too tough, too leathery, to succumb to maggots.

Smoky Day told Judith and Theodosia about it. On their last remove, Snow On Her, aged mother of Alighting Goose, had been left behind to die. Snow On Her knew she was a burden to the band. Abandonment was the same thing as ordinary dying. Nothing could be done about it. She had become infirm, knew death was near, and had asked to be left behind to be eaten by the wolves. The wish was respected. It was a reasonable wish. It was right. When the band was at last out of sight, Snow On Her had instead taken thongs and hung herself. It was less painful than being gnawed to death by wolves.

Walking Voice, the village crier, came along and spoke in a low voice. “Attend, Yanktons. The moon has now risen and the enemy can see us moving in the grass. We will remove yet a short distance. We will follow the stream south to where it turns near certain ripe plums. There we will pitch our tepees. After the tepees are up, let the smudge fires against the mosquito be but small fires. I have said.”

The band took up its burdens and followed the winding stream south. The stream ran swollen from the day’s heavy rain. The wailing of Alighting Goose was gradually left behind.

Whitebone stopped a mile farther on. He looked around in the gold, dusty moonlight. He liked what he saw. The low, flat place behind a cutbank in the turn of the stream was a good camping ground. The grass was rich. There was much running water. He stuck the pole of his white emblem into the ground in an upright position. Instantly the squaws tumbled out the lodgepoles and unfolded the leather tepee coverings.

By the time Judith had unhooked the papoose from her back and had set its cradleboard up on end, Tinkling and old Smoky Day had the tepee half up. All around them, in a neat exact circle, other tepees were swiftly going up too, each according to its allotted place as determined by the rank of the man of the house.

Two Two watered and hobbled the horses, then with skins got in a supply of water. Tinkling and Smoky Day finished lashing down the tepee covering, then brought in the parfleche traveling bags. Whitebone hooked his emblem on a loose lodgepole and tied it upright to his tepee. The ancient jawbone shone above them in the moonlight like a soft white flag. Smoky Day set up a tripod just inside the tepee on which to hang Whitebone’s shield and spear. Tinkling built a small smudge fire with willow twigs. And home was ready.

The papoose Born By The Way began to cry just as Judith carried it through the flap door. Something had frightened it.

Tinkling cast a number of buffalo robes on the grass around the fire. Smoky Day showed Judith where to sit, on the left as one entered, or the women’s side. Baby in arms, Judith settled on her robe, knees to one side.

Judith was dead tired. She looked down at the crying baby. It would no doubt grow up to be another violator of women, white women. Gladly would she have thrown it to the wolves outdoors if she dared. But she was now a captive and if she wished to survive she had no choice but to keep it quiet, even to comfort it. So she rocked the baby, and hummed to it, all the while that she hated it. Her own humming made her belly leap.

Whitebone leaned in. He stopped behind Judith. His old face wrinkled up momentarily in a great cry. Tears fell on her gold hair. Then, abruptly composing himself, he proceeded to his place across from the door on the other side of the little pinking fire.