Little Big Man Read online

  Troy looks cross-eyed for a minute at the wooden grip that extends over and parallel to his nose, then Hump withdraws the weapon, letting his victim go over backwards spewing blood. Shadow That Comes in Sight, wearing a numb look, catches up the jug from Troy as the latter goes down. Hump claws at Shadow, who smashes him in the face with the stone vessel, so hard it breaks and they are both dripping with spirits. Hump’s right nostril is severed from his nose except for a little skin string, and there seems to be a general net of gore containing his entire face, but he joins Shadow, now that their point of difference is soaking into the ground, in a fresh assault on the nearest jug.

  From this juncture on, the altercation becomes general and the noise very barbaric: yells, howls, squeals, and screams, the snicker of steel on bone, the mushy murmur of flesh being laid open, the blast of gunfire, and the wind of arrows as they left and the whonk of their arrival.

  The women and us kids stayed back by the wagons, and though I could not make out my Pa in the middle of the pack, I could hear his yawp above all that din: “Brethren, where have I failed?” Then he gargled on a throatful of fluid and blew out his spark. Next time I saw him, on the morning after, the arrows staked him to the ground like a hide stretched out to dry. Yet he still wore his scalp, for this was whiskey and not war, and not being in their right minds, the Indians didn’t take trophies. They fought among their own likewise as with the whites, and Pile of Bones blew out the back of White Contrary’s head with a cap-and-ball pistol and his brains run out like water from a punctured canteen; he swayed for a long time before he dropped, retaining the jug that had cost him life itself, and Pile of Bones had to hack it from the hands of a corpse.

  Walsh, who being Irish had hit the spirits in the wagon before he went to serve the Cheyenne, pulled a knife from his boot, but it got turned in the rush upon him and pierced his own belly; he was dying with terrible sounds. Otherwise, our fellows went down without resistance. Farthest out, I could recognize Jacob Worthing by his boot-bottoms, with the new soles put on at Laramie. John Clairmont, an Illinoisan, lay with his head pointed towards the wagons; I knew him by his baldness. And from the center of the tumult already over, sprouted a little thicket of arrows from among the matted grass. These turned out later to be fixed in my Pa, although at the time I didn’t know that but saw the feathered ends as a type of prairie bush.

  For a while after the whites were disposed of, the Cheyenne that were left kept sucking at the jugs and paid no mind to the women and children. Which explains how Worthing’s wife and kid were able to get away: she picked up her boy and started running, with the wagons as cover between them and the Indians, towards the Laramie Mountains, snow-capped so far away though near-seeming the way eminences are on the prairie. You could see the Mrs. and child for onto a mile, intermittently between their sinking into swells and then coming into sight again on the upward slope; finally they disappeared over a bluff and I have never heard of them from that day to this. The rest of us just stood there dumbstruck, not even crying.

  But little Troy at this point up and made a desperate move. He run out to his daddy’s body, took a butcher knife off a scabbard in its belt, and stuck the side of a tall Cheyenne who was singing a drunken dirge in between pulls of a jug. An Indian admires that kind of ginger in a kid, and if this particular specimen had not been liquored up he might have give him a present and a strong name, but he was in the demon’s grip, and raised the lance on which he had been leaning and drove the boy off the ground on its point, which come out the back of his blue shirt directly, accompanied by a great blossom of scarlet. The Cheyenne kicked him free, and he struck the prairie with the sound of a wet rag being slapped onto a bar-top.

  The boy would run from a lad his own age but took on a six-foot savage. As to yours truly, I believe at that time the other children looked on me as a bully though I was underweight and no bigger than a sparrow, for I was the youngest in my family and knocked about a good deal by my brothers and sisters, for which treatment I would pay back them to whom I was not kin. But seeing white men get punishment of this fashion from Indians, I have to admit I let the water drain into my pants.

  About a dozen Cheyenne were still conscious when the whiskey was all gone, though some lay flat as the dead and wounded and put a glazed stare upon the sky. Others sat upon their skinny haunches, looking glassily into the crotch, and some whined like injured hounds. Old Lodge Skins was squatting there with his seamed face turned towards Caroline. After all that turmoil, in which, having his own jug, he had not participated except perhaps to set it off, he was yet trying to figure out what her game was, and on my sister’s part she was studying him, I think right through the worst of the carnage. Since a year or so back, she had been a peculiar type of person, somewhat forward with the male sex but on the order of another man rather than a harlot.

  Hump busted the last jug with his hatchet and run each fragment over his tongue. His nose was dripping fresh blood from where that nostril had since come altogether off and got lost, and his chin ran red, subsequently dyeing his bone breastplate, but he was basically a friendly-looking Indian even now. He had the widest mouth I ever saw on a human being, and his nose, broad to begin with, was smashed more so. For a Cheyenne his eyes were large. He put them in our direction, going over us one by one.

  It is true that save Mrs. Worthing and her boy, nobody tried to get away; and except for young Troy, none did any fighting back. You didn’t see no rifle-shooting pioneer women with our train. Even Caroline did not know another weapon than her bullwhip. Which she had been holding all this while in her left hand by the stock, the long tail trailing on the prairie behind her. She had no lack of targets to crack it at, but just stood peering at the old chief.

  One of our couples was originally out of Germany, called by everybody Dutch Rudy and Dutch Katy, simply the two of them without offspring. Round, pink-faced individuals, two hundred pounds apiece and losing not a gram in those weeks upon the trail, on account of they had brought their wagon filled with potatoes. I could now see Dutch Rudy’s belly rising like a hillock from the plain, some yards out. Dutch Katy was leaning against their wagon, two along from ours, wearing her blue sunbonnet, and where her hair showed it was pale and fine as cornsilk. Like all women of them days she was more or less shapeless in her dress, except there was a lot more of her. She was a great hunk of flesh, and on her is where Hump’s eyes came to stay after their travel.

  Across he staggered, and Katy knowed it was for her and started to appeal in Dutch, but as after a bit it was clear he didn’t mean to kill her, or not anyway until he had his pleasure, she went down on the ground slowly as if melted by the sun, and Hump ripped at the gingham and stuffs beneath until he laid her thick flanks bare, pressing his swarthiness between them, him all dirt, blood, and sweat and coughing like a mule. Dutch Katy, like all her countrymen, had always been a maniac for keeping clean. She used to wash at every stop, going in the river while wearing a loose dress for modesty, and had had some close escapes from the quicksand of which the Platte was full. I remember once they had to throw a line over her and draw her out by ox.

  This event touched off a general movement by the Cheyenne towards our women, and since there was more of the former than the latter, again the strife began which had so lately ended over the whiskey, and again Indian felled Indian, but enough was left to mount the widows of Troy and Clairmont, and the Jackson sisters—and if you think there was outcry on the part of the victims, you are wrong; while those who were not raped stood watching those who were as if waiting their own turn, their children clustered around them.

  Now Caroline at last woke up when Spotted Wolf come towards my mother. She shouted at Old Lodge Skins, who simply grinned in answer. My fifteen-year-old brother Bill, and Tom who was twelve, they broke and run under the wagon, among the buckets hanging there.

  That left me, with my wet pants, and my sisters Sue Ann, thirteen, and Margaret, eleven, and we was hugging Ma.

  Carolin
e tried once again to get the chief’s intervention, but it’s likely that he never knew what she wanted and it’s sure he could have done nothing if he had, and the shadow of Spotted Wolf, an enormous Indian, was already across us and we could smell his stink. My Ma was praying in a low moan. I looked up and saw the Cheyenne’s face, which was not wearing what you generally think of as a cruel or indecent expression but rather one kind of dreamy and genial, like he had every O.K. for his lust.

  At that moment the black lash of Caroline’s whip snaked around his throat, drawing up the bear-claw necklace there, and he went over backwards, cracking his head on a rock and didn’t get up.

  “You go with the kids to climb in the wagon, Ma,” said Caroline, coolly withdrawing her whip into a big loop. “None of these individuals will trouble you further.” Caroline was completely self-possessed as she said this; she was as arrogant as my Pa.

  Old Lodge Skins was pointing at the unconscious body of Spotted Wolf and laughing his guts out. That irked Caroline, but also pleased her, and she flicked her whip sort of flirty at the chief. He flopped onto his back with his arms crucified and laughed his old mouth, dark as a cave full of bats, into the sun. His foot was still bare and his busted gun lay near him like the skeleton of an open umbrella.

  Ma did what Caroline said, gathered us kids together, including the two cowards down among the ox dung, and we went into the wagon, where we found room for all of us though there really wasn’t any, what with the furniture, boxes, and bags that represented our worldly goods. Tom’s shoe was in my face, rather nasty considering what he had walked in, and I was wrapped around a barrel now full of crockery but which had once held salt-fish and never lost the aroma, but we was lucky to be alive, so you didn’t hear no complaints.

  All afternoon we stayed there; it was like being closed up in a bag lying in the sun, because the junk in the wagon bed cut off the air without insulating any. Outside the noise died away within an hour, and when after midafternoon Bill took nerve to raise the side canvas and peep from under, he reported no one standing within the range of his eye.

  We then all shivered at the squeak of somebody climbing into the box out front, but Caroline soon poked her head in through the puckered opening and said: “All quiet, folks. You stay where you are and don’t worry none. I’ll be sitting right here all night.”

  Ma whispered: “Can you do anything for your poor Pa, Caroline? What become of him?”

  “He is stone-dead,” said Caroline, plenty disgusted, “and all the rest along with him, and I got enough to do right here without keeping the buzzards off them.”

  “You know,” said Ma, addressing us all, “if he had had time to learn the Hebrew lingo he would have been all right.”

  “Yes, Ma’m,” answered Caroline and withdrew.

  I managed after a while to drop off and wrapped around that barrel I stayed asleep till dawn, at which time Sue Ann poked me awake with a spade handle maneuvered through the baggage. They were all the rest of them up and out, and I crawled forth sore of body but empty of mind until I touched the earth and heard the sound of shovels. The surviving women—and that I believe was all of them, for they had been smart enough not to resist, and when finished the drunken Indians had been too weak for further mayhem and collapsed—were digging graves with the help of the older children.

  Already before dark on the afternoon before, what with the hot sun, the coyotes and carrion birds had got quick wind of the matter and paid the field a visit. The results was fairly evil. Now with people moving, the birds wheeled high and the coyotes sat out on the prairie just beyond gun range.

  The Cheyenne were all gone, and their dead with them. When I asked Caroline, who claimed to have been awake all night and would know, she said: “Don’t you worry none about that, but go and help the folks with Pa.”

  It was then I saw my Pa for the last time, as hitherto described. Ma and the rest of the family unpinned his body from the ground, and we lowered him into the shallow grave dug by Caroline and filled it in, which took quite a few shovelfuls, as I recall, to cover the end of his nose. Nearby, Dutch Katy was performing the same service for Dutch Rudy. She was wearing a fresh dress and her fair hair was dark with wet: it was plain she had already been down to the river for her bath. I won’t say I never saw a dirty German, but the clean ones go to an excess.

  Now we was just finished putting our menfolk under the sod, when someone looked up and shrieked like a crow, and there was the Cheyenne coming down the rise. There was now but three of them, Old Lodge Skins and two braves, the latter each leading four riderless ponies. They showed no preparation for violence, but this second appearance was too much for most, and for the first time our people began to yell and cry. Back under the wagon went Tom and Bill. Caroline was the exception. I remember while grabbing onto her bony hips in my own fright, looking up at her face I observed a rather keen look about the nostrils like a horse’s when he smells water.

  The other two, with their herd, stayed back some thirty yards while Old Lodge Skins rode forward on his brown-and-white pinto, which had painted rings around the eyes. He put up his hand and orated for about fifteen minutes in a queer falsetto. His plug hat was a little more crushed than yesterday but otherwise he appeared in perfect shape.

  It was strange how in no time at all everybody went from fear to being excruciatingly bored, and the very women who yesterday had been helpless victims and just minutes earlier were howling in fright, now began to advance on him threatening with their fists and saying: “Git on out of here, you old skunk!” Which shows something about the way a female is put together; she will suffer any outrage so long as it is interesting, but bore her and she don’t know fear.

  But Caroline spoke up. “Settle down, now,” said she, swaggering out in front of the crowd. “Don’t you understand they come back for me? That’s what the horses is for, to pay for hauling me off. You noticed yesterday, didn’t you, that I wasn’t touched while all that nasty business was being done to you? They was saving me, was what they was doing.” My sister’s cheeks were a deal more ruddy than the sun could be held accountable for, and she was tossing around her copper hair like the flies was at her face.

  “Now, you’d better let them take me,” she went on, “unless you want to get kilt like the men.”

  “But Caroline,” Ma asked plaintively, “what in the world do they want you for?”

  “Probly torture me in various devilish ways,” Caroline answered very proudly. I thought it a strange thing to boast about, myself, but held my peace, because what I could see was that my sister reminded me of nobody so much as my Pa. That poor thing was determined to be extravagant.

  The Widow Walsh then said: “Ah, go on, then. I ain’t stopping them,” and turned away, the rest of the women with her. They had lost their men and been raped and were stranded in the wilderness, and there was no way back but that by which they had been months in coming, so they could hardly be much moved by what happened to one girl.

  Old Lodge Skins was impassively sitting his horse, watching us through droopy eyelids. On the wooden saddle hung his shield, round, made of hide, and adorned with ten black scalps. In place of the blown-up musket he now carried a lance from the shaft of which dangled a couple more hanks of hair. He wasn’t a bad-looking dog, or hadn’t been in his youth, anyway, whenever that was; his braids now were shot with gray and the muscles of his limbs were stringy. It is hard to tell an Indian’s age, but he must have been within smelling distance of seventy. He grew a big nose with a long, hooking sweep to it, and the ends of his mouth had slight upward twists, whereas his eyes was sad. He generally wore a sort of good-natured melancholy as to expression. You couldn’t say he looked dangerous in any wise; indeed, it was rather Caroline who seemed savage at this juncture.

  She had been a tomboy but was getting on in years, and the men never took to her back in Evansville except as a pal. She had got a crush on the local blacksmith, a widower of forty, and hung around the forge, but as far a
s he went was to let her hold a horse’s hoof while he shoed it. Then there was some farmer’s son: I think for a time they spread manure together, forked hay, and the like. Not even them drummers who came and went, of whom it was said they would screw a snake if somebody’d hold its head, paid her attention as a woman. White men had never done much good for her, you see, and now Pa and the others with the wagons had got themselves killed.

  I mention this to explain Caroline’s peculiar manner at that time. I think she was also humiliated at not having been raped.

  “Well, Caroline,” said Ma, standing there in her long, washed-out dress and sunbonnet; she looked like one of them little dolls you can make out of a hollyhock blossom with a bud for its head. My Ma was small, not far over five feet, and I reckon my lifelong shortness is due to hers. “Well, Caroline, I expect we will have to go back to Laramie. I’ll tell the soldiers and they’ll come to fetch you.”

  “I wouldn’t count on that,” replied Caroline. “Indins know all about how to hide their tracks.”

  “Well, then,” Ma said, “you must drop a button now and again, or a piece of your shirt, to lay a trail.”

  Caroline impatiently scraped the sweat from her forehead and wiped the hand on the butt of her jeans. She believed, I think, that Ma was trying to diminish her danger and self-concocted glory, and the direct result of that was the cooking of my goose.

  “Maybe they won’t hurt me permanently,” said Caroline. “Maybe they’ll hold me for ransom. I don’t expect to be murdered, or why would they want Jack to come along, too?”