Little Big Man Page 15

  “For as you know they are a wily lot. Eventually, I suppose, we will be forced to kill them all off—I can see no other possibility in the face of their savage obduracy against setting aside the life of the brute.

  “So much for those unhappy memories. The important thing is the life that opens before you,” and so on, the upshot of which was he sent me east to Fort Leavenworth, the departmental headquarters, with a column that was going there the next day. Leavenworth was on the Missouri River, right near Westport, what was later named Kansas City, and Independence, where my Pa bought his wagon and team of ox. This was civilization, or what passed for it in them days, in the extreme.

  I got a choking, sensation when I heard the news. There was already so many white men around Laramie you could hardly breathe, and I didn’t sleep well in them rectangular barracks, on account of having been trained by the Cheyenne to favor the circular dwelling. I think I have mentioned their feeling about circles, the circle of the earth and so on. They was set against the ninety-degree angle, which brought continuity to a dead stop. Old Lodge Skins used to say: “There’s no power in a square.”

  Now I was going back to a whole world of sharp corners, while somewhere out on the prairie the Human Beings had collected again, and having keened for their dead, was eating roast hump and dreaming and telling stories by the buffalo-chip fire and stealing ponies from the Pawnee and getting theirs stole in return, and Nothing was there in her fringed dress of white antelope.

  They knew about where I was, although they might not have been told, the way they knew about everything that concerned their people and nothing else. They wouldn’t have heard of or understood the slavery troubles, John Brown and all that was going on in white Kansas at the time.

  But I never regretted leaving Laramie as such, which had grown into as ugly a place as you could find—that’s what I thought then before I seen many other white places. A lot of Indians pitched their tents thereabout, among them I’m sorry to say certain Human Beings, but they didn’t resemble the ones I had known, and the individual tribes was not so important as that they all belonged to a degraded type known as the Hang About the Forts. The free-roving bands didn’t think much of them. A good many of these gentry literally just sat around their stockade in their blankets, looking stupidly at what went on, for they was permitted to come and go at will, and if a soldier wanted the space they occupied he would roust them out of it, like shooing a dog. Some did a little trading in second-rate skins, and some prostituted their women, and all of them subsisted on Government handouts give to them for being “friendlies.” These last of course was usually less than half of what they was authorized by law, for the Indian agents withheld the rest and sold it to white emigrants or the Army seized it for their own use on account of the quartermaster’s stores was generally insufficient owing to crooked purveyors back East or thieving supply officers.

  It was also against the law to sell liquor to the Indians, but the Hang Around the Forts was oftener drunk than not, for the troopers would sneak them whiskey in exchange for a roll with their wives and daughters, a sorry lot but presumably better than nothing—few white women was to be had thereabouts. Also the traders did quite a good business in firewater, fairly open, and I never heard they was arrested for it, probably because when drunk the fort Indians was even more harmless than when in possession of their faculties.

  I mention this subject because while I was at Laramie I run into someone I knowed from the old days. I had wandered among the Indian camp out of nostalgia for my old life, but I was about to be driven back to the fort by dirty old squaws trying to sell me mangy buffalo robes and their whoremaster husbands, grinning and sniveling, when I saw a canvas tent pitched there out of which from time to time an Indian buck would stagger and then maybe fall flat before he reached his destination or puke all over the ground.

  A number of braves was inside when I poked in, each singing a different song or orating hoarsely to nobody in particular. The smell was indescribable. At the back of the tent was an open barrel with a rusty dipper hanging on it, and alongside stood a white man dressed in filthy buckskins. He looked as if he had never washed his face from the day he was born; you could have peeled the dirt off it like a rind. He also never owned a razor.

  “How’re ya, partner,” says he, showing his mossy teeth. One of the Indians lurched over then, and taking off his moccasins, handed them to this sowish fellow, who after examination of the articles shakes his head. So the Indian pulls off his shirt, which was a gray wool trade item, black with grease, and hands that over.

  The white fellow puts up his first finger, with the top two joints folded down, and says: “Half, you brown-arsed son of a bitch. Half, you shit-eater.” And half-fills the rusty dipper, and the Indian takes it and pours it down his throat.

  “Have one on me,” the white man invites yours truly.

  I just look at him, and he says: “I don’t mean of this horse piss. I got a bottle of the real stuff here.” He fetches the same from a sack on the ground, while stuffing into it the shirt and moccasins he has just obtained.

  “For that in the barrel I use a pint of whiskey per gallon, add gunpowder, tobacco, sulfur, tabasco, and black pepper, then water it up to level. These skunks don’t know the difference. But I swear that this here is the good. Drink up.” He pushes the bottle at me.

  “No, thanks,” I says.

  “Well, stay anyway. I don’t get much chance for conversation during the day, dealing with these.” He upends the bottle and lets it gurgle, and one of the Indians sees it and staggers towards him, but he kicks him in the groin and the Indian, who from his braids is a Cheyenne, falls to the ground and passes out. The others don’t pay no attention to this incident.

  “Of course,” the fellow says, lowering the bottle, “I generally goes over to the fort of an evening and take dinner with the commanding officer, a personal friend of mine, but during the day I get pretty lonely. It ain’t easy for me to deal with this trash, considering they murdered my whole family in front of my eyes and _____ all the women in it. I reckon when Kansas becomes a state one of these years, I’ll go up to Congress for Senator.” He took another swallow. “Sure you don’t want to take a pull of this? It’s still got the hair on it.”

  But I turned my back on him and, stepping across that recumbent Human Being, left the tent. I didn’t drink whiskey as yet, and I never could stand to hear the lies of my brother Bill. I was just grateful he didn’t recognize me.

  At Leavenworth, quite a big fort, I was quartered with an Army chaplain who had a little house for himself and family. This was a skinny horse-toothed fellow with a wife who resembled him strongly and several fair-haired children who didn’t look like either of them. I stayed there for several weeks, during which time whenever the wife and kids was out of the house and I was there with the chaplain, he’d ask me into his office and start talking oily about my spiritual well-being, in the course of which to make his point he’d lay a spidery hand on my knee. I think he was a heemaneh though he never went farther. I wasn’t sorry to leave when the time come, for in addition to that, his wife claimed I still stunk and made me bathe a lot.

  At last I was called in to see the head officer there, a general with whiskers, and he said: “Well now, Jack, we’ve got a fine home for you. You’ll be schooled and get proper clothes and have a splendid father to look after you. You have a lot to catch up with, but you’re a bright boy. And if in later years you wish to pursue a military career, to follow the guidon with our brave boys, I’ll be glad to let you use my name.”

  With that he stuck his head into a pile of papers, and his orderly led me outside to where that Army chaplain I had stayed with was talking to an enormous fat man sitting in a buggy.

  I just want to say here that was the first and last time I saw the general. Nobody at Leavenworth ever asked me a word about the Indians I have lived among for five years. But neither had it occurred to the Cheyenne to ask me about the ways of the white
man, not even when they was being destroyed by them. You got to knock a man down and put your knife at his throat before he’ll hear you, like I did to that trooper. The truth seems hateful to most everybody.

  So I was brought outside to that buggy, and the chaplain says: “Here’s our little savage now.”

  The other man had a square-cut beard of black, and he wore a black frock coat, but his belly was too great to fasten it across. His fat was hard and not soft, if you know what I mean. The old-time strong men used to be like that, with enormous potbellies that was fat but felt like muscle if you hit them there. I had seen pictures of such, and I thought maybe that’s what this fellow was.

  So I immediately got the idea we’d be traveling around to the opera houses, giving shows, lifting sixteen midgets with one hand, breaking iron chains and all, for the chaplain says: “Jack, this is the good man who has graciously consented to adopt you. You must honor him as you would your own Papa, for that’s what he has become by law.”

  The fat man glanced at me over his beard, shifted his powerful shoulders, and said in a voice as deep as if it echoed from a canyon bottom: “Can you drive a wagon, boy?”

  I admired him and wanted to please, so said: “Yes, indeed, right good.”

  “You’re a liar, boy,” he growled. “For where’d you learn to drive a wagon if you have been reared by the Indians? We shall have to beat the lying out of you.” He leaned down, grabbed my shirtfront, and lifted me into the buggy with only his left arm. It was like being levered up with the trunk of a tree.

  The chaplain squealed: “Oh, Jack, you must be respectful to the Reverend and show him that you learned at least some manners in your short time among us.”

  That was it: my new Pa was not a theatrical performer but another goddam preacher, as if I hadn’t had my quota of them, and his name was the Reverend Silas Pendrake. In addition to that black beard, he had thick black eyebrows, and his skin was white as dried pipe clay. He sure looked mean. I had retained my scalping knife in the waistband of them Army pants I still wore, underneath the shirt, and I considered putting it into his spine as we drove towards the Missouri River. But I was discouraged by the look of his enormous spread, which run about four foot from shoulder to shoulder and almost as thick through. I believed my blade would snap off against it, as if you’d stab a stone wall.

  That knife and Muldoon’s six-foot clothes comprised my total property. They took my pony when we got to Leavenworth and I never saw it again. I think the chaplain sold it to compensate for my keep, and his tow-haired kids got to playing with my Cheyenne bow and broke it.

  At the river Pendrake drove his buggy right onto the deck of a stern-wheel boat that was sitting there. His horse by the way was a big, patient gray animal; and you might figure how strong he was to pull his gigantic owner. That horse was a might leery of me, as I could tell from the curve of his nostrils: I reckon he could smell the Indian on me though I had washed at least four or five times all over in the months since leaving the tribes.

  After a while they got that boat going, and it was interesting but I didn’t like it much because I remembered Old Lodge Skins would mention that if a Human Being, anyway, went over much water he would die. Of course I had been raised on the Ohio at Evansville, but that was long ago, and the Missouri to look at won’t build your confidence. It is always undermining its banks before your eyes, and I reckon that if enough years go by it will have worked its way out to Nevada and be irrigating them deserts.

  I ain’t going to tell you where we was heading, except it was a fairly prominent town in western Missouri. The reason for my delicacy will be clearly apparent in the sequel, as they say. So we’ll just go on here from where we docked after a trip of some hours, and drove off the boat, and through the town to the better section of it, where Pendrake had himself a proper church and next door to it a two-story house of some substance, with a barn in back into which he run the buggy, and said to me the first words I can recall he uttered since leaving Leavenworth: “Do you know how to unhitch a wagon, boy?”

  I had learned my lesson. “No, I don’t, sir,” says I. “Not a-tall.”

  “Then you must figure out how to do so,” he rumbles, though not nearly as mean as he talked at Leavenworth, and I immediately got the idea that maybe his manner there was intended to offset the mincing ways of that chaplain, so I wouldn’t think all preachers was alike. I’ll tell you right now about Pendrake: he never seemed to know how to act natural except when eating; otherwise he appeared to be trying to live up to an obligation to someone or something else. I think if he’d of cut himself, he might bleed to death before working it out laboriously that the thing to do was put on a bandage.

  Well, it wasn’t hard to study out how to unhitch that horse, and aside from tossing his head some, but doing that slow and heavy, the animal didn’t give me no trouble, and I got him in the stall. After that was done, though, I was in a quandary, on account of I still didn’t have no faith that Pendrake wouldn’t take a marvelous price for a bad guess. If I stayed in the stable and he expected me up at the house, there might be hell to pay. On the other hand, if I went to the house, maybe he’d rather I stayed in the barn. I decided for movement, as usual, and headed for the house, but instead of going into the back door which he had used, walked around to the front, thinking I’d avoid him for a time that way and also get the lay of the building in case I’d have to run for it.

  I went up on the porch and through the front door, and into a hall where a hatrack stood fashioned of deer antlers, then stepped into a parlor which I expect wouldn’t look like much today but it was then a wondrous sight to me with the brass coal-oil lamps and tidies on the furniture to keep off hair-grease, for though Pendrake wasn’t exactly wealthy, he sure wasn’t seedy like my folks had been and wasn’t Army like that chaplain.

  Then that great voice said behind me: “You’re in the parlor?” He wasn’t exactly outraged by it, just dumfounded.

  “I didn’t break nothing,” says I.

  I hadn’t turned till then. When I did, expecting to see his hulk directly behind me, he was actually farther away than I thought. With that voice of his, he could be a hundred yards distant and still sound on your neck.

  But now, between him and me, was a woman with dark-blonde hair drawn across either side of her face and into a bun at the back. She had blue eyes and pale skin, though not the dead white of his, and wore a blue dress. I reckoned she was about twenty years of age while Pendrake was fifty, so believed her his daughter.

  She was smiling at me and had teeth smaller than average over a full underlip. She kept looking at me but talked to Pendrake.

  “I don’t think he’s ever seen a parlor before,” she said velvety soft. “Would you like to sit down, Jack? Right here,” pointing out a kind of bench covered in green plush. “That’s called a loveseat.”

  Pendrake sort of growled deep in his windpipe, not in rage but rather a sort of stupor.

  I said: “No thank you, ma’am.”

  And then she asked if I wanted a glass of milk and a piece of cake.

  There wasn’t nothing I wanted less than milk, for which if I’d ever had a taste I had long lost it, but thought I’d better play along with this girl if I was going to have a friend in that house, so followed on to the kitchen and by so doing got out of Pendrake’s way for a while at least, for he went to a room off the parlor where he wrote his sermons and sometimes spoke them aloud; you could hear him rumbling through the woodwork and the glassware would tinkle all through the place.

  In the kitchen I met another individual who was friendly right off. She didn’t have no other choice, being colored. Though freed, she wasn’t acting cocky about it, I can tell you, for it was within the law in Missouri of that day to keep slaves. I guess once you’ve been one, you always figure you can be made into one again. She got on my nerves slightly, however, with her everlasting good humor, which I suspect was partly fake, and I’d have had more in common with her great-grandpa who
carried a spear in Africa. This cook’s name was Lucy and she was married to a fellow who worked around the place outside, cutting grass and all, another freedman by the name of Lavender. They lived in a little cottage out beyond the stable, and I could sometimes hear them arguing out there in the middle of the night.

  That white woman which I took for Pendrake’s daughter was actually his wife. She was older by five or six years than I had first thought, just as he was some younger. Still, there was quite a range between them and I already wondered that first afternoon what she saw in him. And I might as well say now I never found out, either. I reckon it was one of them marriages arranged by the parents, for her Pa had been a judge and such a fellow wouldn’t want a saloonkeeper for a son-in-law.

  Mrs. P. now sat across the table while I drunk the milk, and impressed me by the interest she took in my early life, or seemed to. Here was the first soul who ever asked about my adventures, which surprised me in a refined white woman in the Missouri settlements, whereas that colored Lucy, though laughing incessantly and saying “Lordy,” couldn’t have cared less and I knew figured me for a mighty liar.

  I saw I had a good thing in my stories, so didn’t exhaust them all at once. I also tried to mind the eating manners showed me by that chaplain’s wife, where the first time I set down to table I picked the meat off the plate with my hands. I knowed better now and cut that cake Mrs. Pendrake give me bit by bit and daintily inserted it into my mouth on the point of a knife.

  When I was done, she said: “You don’t know how glad we are to have you with us, Jack. There aren’t any other young people in this house. Your coming has let the sun in.” I thought it was a pretty thing to say.

  Next thing she did was take me shopping for some new clothes. She got her bonnet and parasol, and her and me walked into the commercial part of town, for it was not far and the day was fine weather in early October as I recall. We come across a number of people that Mrs. Pendrake knowed and they gawked at me and sometimes talked with her as to my identity. The women generally made a clucking noise and sort of simpered, though I drew a belligerent look from certain of them who were old maids, schoolteachers, librarians, and such, for I hadn’t got a proper haircut in five years and probably had a nasty expression in spite of my efforts to look decent.