Scarlet Plume, Second Edition (40 page)

“Even as a puppy’s nose is cold and its tongue is warm.”

“No, no. Come now. If you will think hard on it, your nose will turn cold and your lips warm, even as mine, and then you will see the falling star. Come now. Kiss. Kiss.”

“Let me cry warm tears on your brow while you k-isss warm touchings on my lips. Will it not be the same thing?”

“No, no. Come. Close your eyes and think of wonderful things. Let the warmth that is in your eyes go to your lips. This way.”

They murmured together.

She said, “Let it be this way.” She shivered. “Let the lips play with each other as though they were fingertips, full of tender touching, thy lips as well as my lips.”

She kissed him. His breath was sweet. She kissed him. She delighted in the full firm molding of his fleshen bronze lips. With the edges of her lips she could feel, clearly, the edges of his lips where they shaped off into the cheek at the corners. She could not get enough of them. She also came to love the touch of his muscled cheeks and his broad jutting chin. They were hairless but the skin on them was taut and manly. She ran her fingertips around the curve of his jaw and up under his ear and around over his temple and then over his cheekbones. The cheekbones also fascinated her. It was as if he had a hard crab apple under each cheek. She wanted to bite them.

He smiled huskily in her ear. “If a woman we know by the name of Sunned Hair k-issses too much she will find that a warrior we know by the name of The Plume will have a warm nose in an unexpected place.”

“Come,” she said, “this way. Let us play at biting with the edges of our lips upon the other’s mouth. This way.”

“It is a strange place to bite another.”

“Can you think of a better place?”

“In the neck perhaps? If we are to bite as our brother the puma?”

“My scarlet lover.”

“Not all birds can sing.”

“What does my lover mean by that?”

“Every child knows that certain birds do not sing. Thus perhaps the red man’s lips were not made to touch the white man’s k-isss.”

“Let us try it.” She covered his mouth with her mouth, delicate pink upon elastic bronze. She kissed him tenderly sensual.

“M-mmm.”

“Is it not a good thing?”

“M-mmm.”

“When a Dakota speaks of a thing as being very good, what does he say?”

“A Dakota says a thing is scarlet when it is excellent. It is sha, he says.”

“Yes. Sha. Is this not sha?”

He held his head to one side as though to consider it as a grave chief might consider an offer of peace from the enemy. A faint smile lurked along the roots of his nose.

“Scarlet Plume is like a stubborn boy who will not eat meat even when it is sha.”

This he took seriously. A flick of sadness, even annoyance, twitched the bronze skin under each eye.

“Tell me,” she said, recalling something. “Why did you give me a wild swan with a broken neck? At Skywater before the massacre? Why did you not speak to me instead? I wish to know.”

“It was forbidden me to speak to the whites.”

“By whom? Whitebone?”

“By the soldiers’ lodge. Their rule, once made, cannot be broken until a new soldiers’ lodge is chosen.”

“Suppose my sister, the Good Book Woman, had not known what it meant to give one a white swan with a broken neck?”

He shrugged ever so delicately. “Then it was meant to be.”

“Tell me how it is among the Yankton young. What is the young man told to do by the old men when it comes time for him to woo the maiden?” With the tip of her forefinger Judith traced the edges of his thick lower lip. “Is he told to overcome her as the prairie cock does the hen?”

He smiled at her, close up, in a warm, musing manner. “He is told to approach the maiden as one would approach a very shy creature of the earth, gently, slowly, one step and one finger at a time, as one approaches a young antelope trembling in a cactus patch. Are not all shy hearts the same?”

“There,” she cried, “there. Kiss me now. Now. Just the way your lips were just then. Your heart was just then in your lips.”

“M-mmm.”

“Is it not sha? Very sha?”

“M-mmm.”

She sighed. “At last I’ve had my honeymoon.”

“Nnnh?”

Her eye caught movement on his body. She looked down. His testes were slowly stirring, first one, then the other, inside his scrotum. Their movement reminded her of moles working under a turf of grass, of a pair of little pigs caught in a sack and snouting quietly around trying to get out.

She slid her white limb up and down on his red limb. She pushed her knee high enough to touch the round wrinkly corms of his manhood. Above the corms, already tottering, stood a newly risen jack-in-the-pulpit. The three of them had a life all their own. She thrilled to the touch of the warm swollen flesh. She swooned to think of the delight of the fleshes they would soon have together again.

“Honey—moon?”

She explained what the white man meant by the word. With a soft, coy hand she took hold of his risen stalk of proud flesh. She delighted in the firm cylindrical supple feel of it. It reminded her of a suspension bridge. It arched across chasms of time. It was a root risen out of flesh and become stalk, and tipped with a glistening anther.

“Honey—moon,” he repeated, musing inwardly. “When the moon is sweet.”

“Yes. When the moon is very sweet. Also, honey does not spoil. Honey never turns sour.”

He gave her a lidded look. “Yet it is known that the moon turns dark each month.”

She skipped over this. “Honey never turns sour.” She did not want to think of his severe Dakota taboos, of the lonely wretched darkness she’d experienced in the separation hut. With a fingertip she touched the silken pink eye of his standing anther.

He mused. “The Dakota have a ceremony in which the newly married maiden is requested to think of sexual things. This is done so that the tribe may increase in number. It is held in The Moon When The Strawberries Turn Red.”

“In what manner are the maidens to think?”

He smiled a sly smile. “They must think of the squirrel who hides an acorn in the earth against the hungry winter. The squirrel does not know that when he hides the acorn for himself he is also planting for Wakantanka so that an oak may grow.”

She placed the flat of her hand on his broad bronze chest and stroked it back and forth. “And what does the warrior say in Dakota when he speaks of love to the maiden?”

“He says, ‘I have a fast hold on your heart. You have a fast hold on my heart. Let us run away on my swift pony and set up a tepee with our cousins in another band.’”

“Ah!” she cried. “That is what we call the honeymoon.”

Scarlet Plume went on. “‘You are my pretty woman, and a brave man likes to see a pretty woman who is modest and meant for him alone.’”

“This is what he says to her?”

“He also says, ‘Do you have the boiling stones ready? I am coming with the game.’”

She nipped his ear. She loved the smell of him after the morning bath. He reminded her of spring grass after a rain. “Tell me, how does the white man smell to the red man?”

He thought a moment. “That he does not bathe overmuch.”

“You do not like his smell when he sweats?”

He spoke frankly. “The smell of the white man when he sweats is like the odor of old deerhide after it has lain in a damp place for a long time.”

“But when he bathes? As I have done with thee?”

“Then it is sha. Sha.”

“Very sha?”

“Sha.”

She kissed him. “Tell me, what does my scarlet lover think of the k-isss now?”

“It has become sha. It is difficult to learn. Nevertheless after a time it becomes sha. As scarlet as the flying redbird.”

She kissed him. “Has not the time come for the squirrel to plant yet another acorn?”

They loved together.

“It is sha,” he whispered at last. “Very sha.”

Night came. They slept skin to skin under the wolfskin robe, their feet exposed to the fire. When the fire died out both instinctively drew their feet back in under the robe. The toes of themselves tucked the robe under, warmly.

PART FOUR

Camp Release

Scarlet Plume spoke firmly from the doorway. The sun had just dawned. “Hoppo! Up! I have caught us two tame horses. Are you ready to remove?”

Judith sat up. Lazy gold hair slid across her shoulders. “Horses? Where did you find them?”

Scarlet Plume looked broader and more formidable than usual. He had on a newly made buckskin shirt and a pair of fringed leggings. “I arose while it was still dark and made a cast about our camp. I found the horses at the springs above us. They were white-man horses and in need of a fresh drink. When I called them by their white names, they let me catch them.”

Judith hugged herself in the chill air. Her nipples rode like little pig snouts on her crossed forearms. She hoped her nakedness would divert him. “What names were these?”

“A blaze lay on the red horse’s nose. Him I called Old Paint. Gray and very fat was the other horse. Him I called Buckskin Belly.”

Judith smiled. “How does my husband know they are white-man horses?”

“They would not let me mount in the Yankton way, on the right side. Also, they were cut the white-man way.”

“But my husband, I have turned my mind around and do not wish to return to St. Paul.”

“It is time to go. The horses wait. Already I carry food in my legging sash.”

“But I do not wish to go back to the white cities.”

He looked quietly down at her. He crossed his arms slowly over his great chest. “I have already painted the horses in a sacred way. Now the arrows of the enemy cannot touch them.”

“I wish instead to go back to your people, the Yanktons. Do they not live in the center of the world? My heart turns black when I think of living again in the white cities.”

“Your white husband awaits you. He wishes to be father again. He needs a new baby to take the place of his lost daughter.”

Judith fought off weeping. She held up her slender arms to Scarlet Plume. “My husband, do not ask me to return to the whites. My husband, I like raw liver so much I want to live with your people. I want to go where you go. Your people are my people and your gods my God. When I die I want to be buried beside you in a little lost valley somewhere. Let The Great Master Of All Breath punish me, and more, if I let anything but death part us.”

Iron control settled over his face. “Woman, I cannot go against the vision. The vision is wakan. Also, Whitebone will surely kill us if you are not now returned to the whites. Come, the horses wait.”

She let her arms fall in her lap. She shivered in the chilly air. “Then you must come and live with me among the whites. I cannot live without you. You have made a woman of me. This I can never forget.”

“The round toes of the red man will fit poorly in the white man’s square dance.”

She beseeched him with dazzling blue eyes. “I cannot live without you. There was once a time when I walked ahead of my man. This I now regret. I wish to be your wife the Yankton way.”

“It is not a good thing.”

Again she held up her arms, imploring him to join her on the hide bed. “We could live at the edge of the white settlement somewhere. When it was needed I could walk into the town. When it was needed you could walk out upon the prairie. We could be free each in our own way.”

“Woman, would you laugh and sing all day with people who are takers while I smoked and danced all day with people who are givers, and then expect us to be happy lovers at night?”

She let her arms fall. “But my husband, you have stolen my heart. What am I to do? I shall kill myself if I cannot live with you.”

“The white man makes his poor work for him. The poor must give him much gold to live in the houses he owns. That is not the way of the red man. When the red man returns from a raid with many horses, he gives them away and keeps only the poorest for himself. The more he gives away, the greater he becomes.”

“Well, has not my white sister, the Good Book Woman, often said to the red man, ‘God loveth the cheerful giver’?”

He flashed her a smug, slitted look. “It can be said that the Good Book Woman and her husband learned much from the Dakota gods. It was because of this that a white swan was given to Sunned Hair.”

Judith gave him a look of love with all her soul. “Come, my scarlet lover, let us lie yet once again in the arms of rapture.”

He gave her a further penetrating look. “My heart does not run with white blood. Nor does your heart run with red blood. The two can never beat as one.”

Her eyes flashed a high blue. “Yet when the red man thinks of death, does he not see a white ghost? And when the white man thinks of death, does he not see a dark-skinned spirit? Is this not a like strangeness?”

He looked down at her with grave indulgence. “This Yankton brave has taken the morning bath. Has Sunned Hair?”

“Let us have children together. In their veins will run a blood as pink as the prairie rose.”

A look of contempt wrinkled his high nose. “Half-breeds! Ha! Are they not always children who are cut off from both the white man and the red man? Do they not run about in both camps with dropped heads like beaten dogs, neither wolf nor man? Half-breeds! Are they not always hungry? So that if they wish to eat they must devour their own babies?”

“Then let us start a new nation in this place. We will make Lost Timber our village and live here until the whites begin to surround us, and then if we must we will look for yet another Lost Timber somewhere farther west.”

“It is not a good thing.”

“I want your babies. Come and lie beside me.”

“It is a bad thing.”

“But, my husband—”

He broke in roughly. “The horses wait. Take the bath!”

“Husband.”

He plumped down before the fire. He stirred up the embers and added some fuel. He got out his red gossip pipe and had himself a stoic’s smoke.

Finally, sighing, she got up and went down to the pool and took the morning bath.

Naked, cleansed pink, she re-entered their vine lodge. Her hair hung loose about her face in light-gold showers. She made herself appear more modest than usual to draw his eye.

He sat smoking his gossip pipe and did not look up.

She saw that while she had been gone he had quickly packed up their possessions in two big parfleches. Her heart sank. She had lost. He really meant it. They were going. He would never touch her again.

He held up his pipe as if to some invisible person. “Here, ghost, take a smoke and give us a good day. Let the road be straight, the waters smooth, and the sky clear.” Then he clapped out his pipe in the palm of his brown hand, threw the curd of tobacco in the embers, and stood up.

Still naked, she held out her arms to him in a last appeal. “Let us k-isss. Was it not always sha before?”

He stared past her.

She embraced him. She rubbed her belly against him. Her naked skin made a sucking sound on his buckskin shirt. She caressed his hard bronze cheek with her pink cheek, lightly, brushingly.

He stood neither stiff nor melting. “The horses wait. Put on your clothes.”

“My husband, let us sit yet for a little time by our fire while you tell me about the old times when the Yanktons were a great people. I wish to know.”

“If one tells stories of the old days, snakes will appear in one’s bed at night.”

“Do you not love your wakan wife?”

He stared straight ahead. “Sometimes when a Yankton speaks of the whites as wakan he also thinks to himself that they are the no-good ones.”

“Have I become your enemy?”

“You are a woman from the other side and I have done my people great wrong in lying beside you skin to skin. You stole my heart and I could not stop myself. Also, I have gone against the vision. There is nothing but blackness ahead for my people. There is also nothing but blackness ahead for me. It is now fated. I hasten to that place where the blackness dwells. I have said.”

“My husband.”

He continued to stare ahead with an iron gravity.

She was afraid he would fall into one of his Indian melancholies again. She cried. She too saw nothing ahead but blackness. Both were doomed.

He saw her tears. Yet he took her by the shoulders, and gently, with infinite consideration, turned her about. He picked up her tunic and gestured for her to put it on. “First we go to visit Skywater to see if any of the whites are yet alive. If we find them we will return them to the white cities also.” He coughed delicately. “Perhaps Sunned Hair may wish to weep at the grave of her daughter.”

Cold closed over Judith’s heart.

He picked up their parfleches, threw them over his shoulder, and carried them outside.

She dressed. When she stepped outside she found him already mounted on the red horse, Old Paint.

He sat easily, parfleches neatly balanced in front of him across the horse’s neck. Besides the natural blaze over his nose, Old Paint also had a series of white circles painted across his belly and over his rump. The horse’s black mane and tail had been decked out with small blue feathers.

Scarlet Plume held Buckskin Belly by his rope. The gray horse stood alongside their sitting stone. Buckskin Belly too had been painted with wakan circles, though with red paint, not white, in vivid contrast to his gray hair. Yellow feathers fluttered in his tail and mane.

Sighing, forlorn, Judith lifted her tunic to her hips and climbed aboard the gray. She sat as a man would, legs astride. The stiff hair on the horse’s spine tickled her. She thought it a bitter thing that she should be holding a horse between her bare legs instead of the man she loved, and that that horse should be carrying her back to white captivity.

Scarlet Plume turned his horse about and led the way. He did not once glance back at their love lodge in the wild vines. It was done.

They rode up the bed of the ravine. There were green glades under the barren trees, all the way to the top of the hills. The morning sun shone brilliantly through the brown arms of the oaks. Light seemed to concentrate in dancing halos above the springs. Tree leaves rustled underfoot. The horses plodded along sedately. She guessed the horses had once belonged to some outpost pioneer, now killed.

Near the head of the ravine she spotted what at first she took to be a single wind-tortured wild mulberry. But coming closer, she saw that it was two mulberries, the one white and the other red, twined through each other in mortal embrace. It reminded her of two huge bull snakes wrestling. They lay sprawled over and around a granite boulder.

When they reached the plateau above, she looked back a final time at their love lodge in the ravine. She cried. Slowly her eyes swelled red with grief.

Scarlet Plume rode in front, heading into the northeast. His eyes kept working the grass in front of the horse for sign, then the filmy horizon ahead.

Judith was struck by how much Scarlet Plume’s flowing hair resembled his horse’s trailing tail, black; how his cheeks were exactly the color of his horse’s coat, red-bronze. The man and the horse were one.

Her gray hurried to keep up. Her gray was so fat and wide across the middle that sitting astraddle made her thighbones ache in her hips. The stiff hair on the horse’s spine continued to tickle the bare insides of her legs.

They rode into a wind. It lifted the black manes and tails of the horses. It lifted Scarlet Plume’s loose black hair and her loose sunned hair. They rode on, silent.

A whimsy chased through Judith’s mind. Both horses had black manes and black tails. It meant that, though one was a bay and the other a gray, far back they were related. She wished her hair were black. Then she could claim that, though their skins were different, she and Scarlet Plume at least had the same hair and probably far back were also related.

Scarlet Plume pushed the horses. Sometimes he lightly whipped his horse with an ash switch. He rode urgently. He was in a hurry to get it over with. He was a wolf on a horse.

The sun mounted behind them. The day opened. The sky became a coneflower with drooping blue rays and a bronzy head. The green wind from the north brushed their cheeks. The air was so thin it opened the nose and made the brain giddy.

Many rains that fall had given the plains the look of spring. Swollen streams gurgled on all sides. Scarlet Plume steered a route along the higher contours to avoid the soppy swales. Waving grass shaded off imperceptibly into lapping ponds.

A whitewing blackbird lived cheerfully in the midst of a flock of late redwings. One meadow was completely taken over by yellowhead blackbirds. The yellowheads sang short autumn songs, then lifted up and flew south.

As she jogged along, Judith thought to herself, “Well, I’ve at last had my honeymoon. And in Indian summer too.” She held the leather reins lightly in her hand. Her gray horse followed the bay ahead as if tied to its tail. “A honeymoon in Indian summer. A warm spell between the first frost and winter freeze-up.”

Late in the day they came upon a stream two jumps wide. It ran northeast. A swatch of willows bristled along a turn. They watered their horses. They got down and had themselves a drink. Then, after a leisurely groaning stretch, they rode on. They crested a light rise. Before them spread the tree-fringed shores of Skywater.

Judith steeled herself against what they might find.

The first pile of ashes marked the Utterback homestead. Bits of fine white down from an Utterback featherbed still lay scattered through the deep grass, reminding Judith of the first traces of winter snow. The burned-off Utterback stubble field had come back some with the glittering green of fall grass.

Next came the ashes of Crydenwise’s sod shanty. The skeleton of the wolf that Crydenwise had skinned alive still hung on its crude cross. The Sioux had not touched it for reasons of their own.

Over the next rise lay traces of Theodosia’s cabin.

Scarlet Plume halted. He looked sternly around. His black eyes glittered in memory.

Judith forced herself to look down. She saw gray ashes faintly tinged with yellow. They were sodden and compressed from many heavy rains. A piece of curled-up paper hung caught in the silent lilacs. A ripped book lay open in the grass, its hieroglyphic ecstasy leached away by the weather. The ripped book reminded her of a gutted chicken. A single hollyhock, stunted by the fire, also frost-touched, nodded stiffly at the edge of where the cabin had once stood. The climbing sweet peas and the wooden fence on which they had grown were completely gone. The vegetable-and-flower garden could just barely be made out. It was overgrown with new, rough grass. The little paths leading away in various directions were filled with thick crabgrass. Even the black scars of the fire on the ground had already vanished under a new, virulent green. Another summer’s growing and the gray ashes of the cabin would also be obliterated with healing rings of grass. In two years there would be no mark or record whatever that this had once been a white man’s outpost in virgin wilderness.