Scarlet Plume, Second Edition (29 page)

She waited. She breathed shallow breaths. Her own heart shook her. Soon trembles shook her thighs. She had to let her mouth hang open to keep her teeth from chattering. She almost wished she were back in the safety of her wakan white tepee.

Darkness became heavy. The gray shape stood out even more clearly.

It became very hot out, close. Sweat trickled down her face. Mosquitoes trailed across her cheeks with a thousand tickling legs.

A tremor beginning in the calves of her legs moved up until it made her neck crack. Her breasts shook.

“O Lord, if it be thy will, let this pass from me.”

Almost as if in answer, a blast of lemon light exploded above her. She bowed under it. She sank involuntarily to her knees. A split second later, thunder came out of the ground. She steadied herself with a hand to the earth. The sudden stroke of lightning and thunder completely took her breath away. Chest caught, squeezed tight, she sucked and sucked for air.

At last, willing it, working the muscles of her belly, she managed to make a pinched wheezing sound, then take a tiny breath. It took a while before she could resume her shallow, rapid breathing.

Rain dropped from the skies like a bucket overturned on a hot-air register. It hit her like a blow with the flat of a hand. It pushed her down. The mosquitoes vanished.

She cowered under the storm. She tucked the parfleche under her. She sat on her heels, crouched. Huge drops fell on her back like little fat pancakes.

The rain was cold. Water poured in around her neck and down inside her tunic. She could feel her nipples harden. Goose pimples swept over her like wild measles. Water trickled into her ears. Every now and then she had to hold her head to one side, first this way, then that way, to let the water run out. She shivered. She waited. She worried that the gray shape might jump her. Blood boomed in her temples.

“Enemies and much adversity ring me about.”

Rain came down in varying sheets, drenching, with weight.

“A woman sitting upon a scarlet beast.”

Another dazzling blast exploded above her. The ground under her shook like a rickety table. She fell on her side, hugging doubled knees to her chest.

“Though my sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow.”

Abruptly there was a sound of great rushing high above her. Rain began to hit around her like water being spilled out of a whirling pail.

“Baby Angela a year old and in my arms again. Please, yes.”

The wind swooped down and began to move along the ground like a vast broom. It snapped the leather fringes on her sleeves. Rain hit her like the stickles of a scrubbing brush. It was cold, cold.

“Just some little child’s body I could hug and hug and hug.”

Warm tears mingled with cold rain on her cheeks.

“Something to love up.”

The rain stopped. Presently the wind let up too. Thunder and lightning moved slowly into the northeast.

Wonderingly, she opened her eyes in the new silence. Stars were sparkling merrily above her.

She sprang to her feet, ready to fight off the gray shape.

The gray shape was gone.

“Mercy me.”

Then in the starlight she saw that her doeskin tunic could once again be seen in the dark. Rain had washed it clean, back to a light gray. She herself was now a gray shape in the dark night.

Lightning far in the east gradually gave way to a buttermilk dawn. A meadowlark peeped single sleepy notes in a beard of willows downstream.

Judith was exhausted. It was time to think of sleeping through the day again.

She stood on a steep bank on the east side of the river. Ahead, another big bend meandered off to the west. A hogback directly south kept her from seeing where the river doubled back. The tops of the hills to either side were sandy, with short tufting grass.

A breeze from the southeast came fresh and sweet over the hogback. The smell of water was in it.

She heard it. A low, steady droning sound as of pouring, rising and falling, and rising again. She held her head to one side the better to hear. Yes. There it was, all right, a sound as of a little stream falling on a leather drum.

Looking around, she wondered where the little waterfall could be. The river below her ran silently between steep banks, so it couldn’t be that. Nor was there any sign of a small stream trickling down the hogback.

She listened intently. The sound was unmistakably that of falling water. It came on the wind. It was some distance away. Perhaps a couple of miles to the southeast.

Waterfall. Of course. It was the falls on the Big Sioux River. Sioux Falls.

A half-dozen miles at the most, and there lay safety. A warm fire in a cookstove, a kind white face, a white smile. Home. Civilization. Thank God.

She climbed a mound halfway up the hogback for a better look around.

The river had risen during the night from the heavy rain. Water was slowly flooding across a slough on the inner side of the fan-shaped bend. Looking ahead, she could make out where the river turned south again as it curved through a wide, deep valley. She could almost see where the river headed back northeast toward where she believed the falls were. By cutting across the country she could save miles and much time.

Carefully she examined the gullies, the riverbanks, the willows, the deep grasses to all sides for sign of skulking animal or enemy. Nothing moved. No wolves or coyotes, no Yanktons or renegade Sioux. She was alone.

She decided to risk going across open country in daylight. It shouldn’t take her too long to go a half-dozen miles. And then she’d be safe.

Parfleche tucked under her arm, she hurried up the rest of the hogback. Near the sandy top the grass became prickly. Twice she had to step around prickly-pear cactus.

She hurried.

Gophers whistled at her. They sat at a safe distance, erect beside their holes. The gophers reminded her of asparagus grown fat and tall overnight, of a lazy husband stirring sleepily on a Sunday morning.

She was winded when she reached the top of the hogback. She stopped to catch her breath. She listened, head bent sideways. The sound of braiding water to the southeast now came to her very clearly. Again she examined the prairies to all sides. Still nothing.

She began to run, bowed slightly at the hips, covering the ground with loping, swinging strides.

“Dear God, please let Rollo, the mail carrier, be there when I arrive. Amen.”

The sun coming out of the cloud bank on the eastern horizon was an eye being gouged out of a skull. Presently it bathed her in a light tinctured with blood.

Judith had to set herself to keep from plunging down a steep bluff. Her hand came up and lightly she held her throat.

Below her, green grass sloped down to a huge bed of exposed red rock, and there, down through the middle of it all, tumbled a full-size river. Water rumpled across zigzag cataracts, then dropped off a stiff fault in the red rock, then in a series of whirlpools chased itself down a tortuous channel. The wild, twisting waters reminded her of a pack of dogs milling about and snapping at their own and each other’s tails. Farther on, the river flattened out and flowed serenely across broad shallows of pink sand.

It was a noble waterfall. Even in her extremity, Judith noted the wonderful primitive colors: grass as fresh as lettuce, rocks as red as just-butchered buffalo flesh, water the color of newly brewed green tea. And the year’s first frost had turned the leaves of the ash to gold and the grapevines to wine. It was stunning to find such a lovely spot on the lonely prairies. Miles and miles of monotonously rolling flat land, and then suddenly this, a little green paradise beside a waterfall.

A faint mist hovered over the maeling waters at the foot of the falls. The little dancing mist took curious shapes in the light wind. Watching it, she understood why the Yanktons believed a guardian spirit, the Spirit of the Buffalo Woman, lived behind the braiding waters.

She looked upstream. And there they were. A dozen log cabins and sod dugouts surrounding a little cluster of stores, all built on a bench overlooking the cataracts and the falls. Sioux Falls. At last.

She angled down the face of the green bluff toward the village. She hurried, full of expectation, face radiant, heart beating with joy. She was home at last. Soon someone would spot her coming and then they would all come out on their doorsteps to greet her with happy, excited voices, glad for her that she had been saved. There would be white faces and the sweet sound of white tongues.

“Easily might I have been lost, but I was not, for Thou wast beside me. Amen.”

She hurried toward the first cabin. Sumac burned scarlet all around the base of it. A gnarled scrub oak flung an oblong shadow on the grass in the yard. The garden beside the house was dug up and littered with dried-up potato stems. She passed through the neat white picket gate, went up a pink gravel path to the log stoop.

She was about to knock when, looking at the doorknob, she saw a heavy bronze lock hanging in the door hasp. The lock was snapped shut. There was no one home.

“Probably out visiting. I’ll try the neighbors next door.”

She hastened to the next brown cabin. This time she didn’t have to go through the white gate to find the front door locked. She could see the closed lock from the street.

She took a few hesitant steps farther down the rutted pink street, and stopped. She stared down the line of dwellings, not wanting to believe, not being able to believe, what she then saw. All the cabins and dugouts, even the stores, were locked tight. Most of the windows were boarded up. The city fathers, everybody, had flown the nest. Deserted. That explained why there were no children or dogs out playing.

“And after all I’ve gone through.”

She sat down on a red rock just off the street. Her pulse beat strangely, so trippingly swift she thought she was going to have heart failure.

Gradually she began to understand what had happened. Of course. Rollo, the mail carrier, would have brought the news to Sioux Falls that the Sioux were on the warpath. And, from the looks of things, with not a single house or store or barn burned down, the whites had all escaped alive. Thank God for their sake at least.

She wondered if one of the storekeepers might not have left a back door open. Methodically she made the rounds. She climbed over a pile of lumber, skirted a mound of stacked empty boxes, stepped across splashes of broken glass, pushed through a patch of head-high ragweed. Everything was locked tight.

She peered through the windows of one of the stores. The shelves and counters were bare. Everything that could be moved had been taken along. That explained why there were no wagons or runabouts around.

Dejected, she trudged back to the first cabin. She stood looking at it.

Need for sleep finally made up her mind. She would get in anyway. There was no point lying on the cold ground as long as there were empty beds around.

She picked up a stone the size of a clam and chinked it against the bronze lock a few times, hoping the spring would let go. But the lock was rusty, and stubborn.

She went around to the window on the south side, then to the window on the east side, to see if she could pry them up. Peering through the dusty glass she saw they were nailed to the sill. She flipped the stone in her hand a few times, weighing the idea of knocking out a windowpane with it. Glass was precious out on the frontier, a real luxury.

She stepped around to the front door again. She studied the door hinges. They were iron, also rusty, and very heavy. The pins in the hinges had heads at either end and couldn’t be punched out.

She found herself a heavier stone and chunked it, hard, on the bronze lock. Teeth set, she hit the lock a good dozen times, each time harder than the last. Finally she gave it one last big whack, on its flat side.

That did it. The lock clicked, let go, sprang open.

She gasped in relief, and rushed inside as if it were her own home she had at last managed to enter. She closed the door behind her, barring it.

The morning sun streamed through the east window, casting a square shaft of saffron light across a large single room. The light fell on an oak cupboard, revealing shelves full of glistening glasses. On the pantry shelves gleamed blue dishes and a handful of silverware. A black, well-polished cookstove stood near the chimney. A fallen mound of yellowish ashes lay between the andirons in the fireplace. A multicolored hook rug covered most of the puncheon floor.

In a far corner stood a four-poster with a creamy gray wolfskin for a bedspread. She went over and sat on the bed. She almost sank to her waist in a feather tick. She reached under the quilt and found actual sheets, clean and white. There was also a pillow with a white case. She nuzzled her face down in the clean white linens. The smell of lye soap was in them. She stroked the creamy wolfskin.

“Poor woman, whoever she was. After having brought these lovely things all the way out here somehow, prized precious possessions, then she had to run and leave them.”

Searching through a wooden bin she found a few measures of flour. In a tin box she discovered a few leaves of black tea. And in a stone crock she found a slab of smoked bacon. Food. White food at last.

She found a tin bucket and got some water. She gathered up an armful of wood and soon had a fire going in the black stove. She put on a kettle of water for tea. She fried herself a mess of bacon, then a round dozen flapjacks. She ate, at first ravenously, then more sedately, chewing all thoroughly to make it go the further. The smoked bacon strips made up for the lack of molasses.

Fatigue moved in her like a fog, engulfing her mind until sight blurred. She undressed, hanging her gray doeskin tunic and her leggings over a three-legged stool. Naked, she rose on her toes, stretching to her full height, arms out. She held her breasts in the palms of her hands and fondled them. They seemed less full than usual, she thought. She’d been starving them the last while. Well, when she got back to St. Paul she would take care of that. She’d eat nothing but ham dinners for a while. She cast a glance at the sunken mound of her belly, then at the golden brush over her privates. Sighing, allowing herself one last luxurious stretch, she crept into bed. The sheets felt delicious to her skin. The sheets were like sweet ices on a warm tongue. She curled over on her right side. She could feel the creamy wolfskin bedspread slowly embracing her. The sound of the steadily pouring waterfall outdoors made her drowsy.