The Vengeance of Mothers Read online

“I have something for you.”

  I glanced at the saddlebags that she carried slung over her shoulder, which were indeed old—the leather cracked and faded, with faint stenciled lettering I was unable to make out on the flap of the pouch. “Give me a hint.”

  “In private,” she repeated. “I read the journals your father published. I met him some years ago on the res. I met you, too, but you probably don’t remember. We were just kids.”

  “Very well, follow me.”

  As I escorted the woman through the office, one by one the heads of my editors popped up out of their cubicles, as if there was finally something more interesting to look at than their screens.

  Having spent so much time with my father in both tribal and natural history museums around the country, I had become rather a student of native American artifacts and attire. It struck me that the woman’s beaded buckskin shirt and skirt, sewn together with rawhide stitching, seemed almost eerily authentic. She wore leather leggings and moccasins and moved with a fluid, athletic gait, her step so light and soundless on the office carpet that she seemed almost to float upon it. She was a tall, lanky girl, quite lovely, dark-skinned, but with light brown hair and arrestingly blue eyes—somewhat unusual for a native American. She had strong features and an aquiline nose with slightly flared nostrils, which, along with the way she held her head high, gave her a certain proud, even defiant demeanor. She wore braids, with colored beads and small bones that looked like they had belonged to birds tied into them. Most astonishing, around her waist she wore what I couldn’t help but identify as an old-time scalp belt, adorned with what looked to be real human scalps, examples of which I had also seen in various museum collections. Attached to it, as well, was a period scalping knife with an elaborately carved bone handle in a finely beaded sheath. I hesitate to say this, but in the vernacular of May Dodd’s day, the young woman had a certain savage look about her.

  I closed my office door behind us. Indicating her belt, I asked: “Is that what I think it is?”

  She nodded. “Don’t worry, I’m not going to add your scalp to it.”

  “Good to know. Please, sit down.” I gestured to the chair in front of my desk and took my seat on the other side. “Just out of curiosity, how did you get past security downstairs? They’re very strict about not allowing any kind of weapon into the building.”

  She deftly swung the saddlebags from her shoulder to the desktop, where they landed with a heavy slapping sound. “I am a shape-shifter,” she answered. “I take the form of other beings—birds, animals, other humans. To them I appeared as any other employee on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. I walked right by with a group of professional women returning from their lunch hour. No one stopped me, no one saw my knife, for to their eyes it did not exist.”

  I looked at her very carefully now to see if she would reveal the smallest smile at this little charade. But she remained perfectly deadpan. “I see,” I said, finally. “And how do you manage this shape-shifting business?”

  “Ah, but that is an ancient trade secret we do not share, least of all with a white man.”

  “Fair enough. What is it you wanted to give me?”

  “I said I had something for you,” she said, “but not to give, only to lend. I had intended it for your father. I am sorry I did not have occasion to see him again before he went to Seano, the Happy Place, but at the same time I am glad to know he has moved on there.”

  “And how did you learn about his death?” I asked.

  “You must know that your father was well liked by many people on the reservation. Word travels fast there.”

  “You say we’ve met before. But you’re right, I’m afraid I don’t remember you.”

  “We were just kids. We didn’t know each other well. But one day you invited me to go the movies at the res community center.”

  I laughed then, suddenly remembering. “How could I forget? I had just turned thirteen years old, and you were the first girl I ever asked out on a date. I was walking from Dad’s trailer where we parked on the res to pick you up at your house, and a group of Cheyenne boys waylaid me and beat the crap out of me. You’re Molly Standing Bear … all grown-up.”

  She smiled and nodded. “That’s right. When you asked me to the movies, you overstepped the boundaries for non–tribal members.”

  “That was made quite clear to me,” I said. “But after they beat me up, I went to your house anyway, and your mother told me you weren’t home. I never saw you again after that. It was a long time before I got up the courage to ask another girl out.”

  “My parents did not allow me to see you.” Now Molly Standing Bear touched the saddlebags lightly with long slender fingers, as if in a kind of blessing. “I must go now. Everything you need to know is contained here.”

  “Need to know about what?” I asked. “I should tell you that the magazine does not accept unsolicited manuscripts. Which doesn’t prevent people from sending them to us … though usually they arrive as e-mail attachments, not inside antique saddlebags.”

  “This is not for the magazine,” she said. “This is just for you. Your father was one of the few white men we trusted. I’m hoping that you, as his son, can also be trusted.”

  “Trusted with what?”

  “Take good care of these,” she said, again lightly placing her hand on the saddlebags. “I’ll be back for them. If you lose them, I will take your scalp.”

  “You’re kidding about that, right?” I asked.

  She touched the handle of the knife at her waist and looked in my eyes without answering, which seemed like a kind of answer to me.

  “Yeah, OK, one last question then.”

  “I remember your father, too, asked a lot questions,” she said. “We forgave him for that because we respected him, even though in our culture it is considered impolite.”

  “It’s our job,” I said. “I’m just curious to know: what’s up with your outfit? I mean, this is downtown Chicago. You are clearly an intelligent, well-educated woman, but you’re dressed like you just walked out of a museum display case featuring nineteenth-century Plains Indian attire.”

  “That’s just the look I was going for,” she said.

  “I’m surprised the police haven’t stopped you.”

  “Is it illegal here to be a native American?”

  “No, but the Chicago police force doesn’t see many traditionally dressed Cheyenne women on the streets. Not to mention the fact that you’re wearing what appears to be an authentic scalp belt and knife. I would think they might just stop you out of curiosity.”

  “I told you, I blend in. I become whatever, whomever I need to be in the eyes of the beholder. They do not see me for who I really am.”

  “And who are you, really?”

  She stood to leave, smiled, and held her open hands out to her sides. “I am who you see me as.”

  In that moment, I saw Molly Standing Bear as a young girl again on the reservation, and myself as a thirteen-year-old boy with a mad crush on her. “You know,” I said, feeling a flush of gooseflesh, “you know, Molly, I really liked you when we were kids. I remember you had kind of an edge, an attitude. The res boys were all intimidated by you, because you were smarter than they were, and you didn’t put up with their bullshit.”

  “They’re still intimidated by me, I’m still smarter, and I still don’t put up with their bullshit.” She said this not in any boasting kind of way, but simply as a statement of fact.

  I laughed. “Yeah, I can see that. Any chance we could have that movie date while you’re in town? Or maybe even dinner, now that we’re grown-ups?”

  “None.”

  I laughed again. “OK, then. I’ll walk you back out to the lobby.”

  “I know the way.”

  “Sorry, company policy. All visitors must be escorted from the premises … especially those who are armed.”

  But she was already at the door, and without turning she slipped out of my office, silent and graceful as a spirit be
ing.

  I stood from my desk and followed her. But when I opened the door and stepped into the hallway, she was gone. The only person walking ahead of me toward the lobby was a woman in a tailored gray business suit and heels, carrying a briefcase. “Madam, excuse me,” I called after her. “Did you just pass a young Indian woman in the hall?”

  Without breaking her brisk stride, the woman looked over her shoulder and smiled politely. “No sir, I’m afraid not, I haven’t seen a soul.”

  I stood there for a few moments in the hallway regarding the departing figure of the woman, the hairs on the back of my neck rising with a tingling sensation.

  “Did the native American girl just come out through here?” I asked Chloe when I reached the front desk.

  “No, I thought she was still with you,” she answered. “But some other lady came out who I don’t remember coming in. She must have slipped by when I went to the ladies’ room. You want me to call security, Chief? That Indian girl really creeps me out. Like, what was that weird hairy thing she was wearing around her waist?”

  “You don’t want to know, Chloe.”

  I heard the ding of the elevator in the hallway outside the office, and I came out just as the doors were beginning to slide shut. The woman in the gray suit stood in the back of the elevator. Her hair was pinned up neatly and she wore makeup; she looked like a professional—an attorney, a doctor, perhaps a university professor—but there was no doubt in my mind: it was Molly Standing Bear. She smiled wryly as the doors closed on her.

  I hurried past the front desk toward my office. “Chief,” Chloe called after me, “you sure you don’t want me to call security?”

  I stopped and turned to her. “Hey, Chloe, haven’t I asked you to stop calling me Chief?”

  “But you know I always called your dad that,” she said. “I think he liked it. Kind of a retro thing.”

  “I’m not my dad, Chloe, and I’m not into retro. So please, just call me JW like you used to, like everyone else does. And while you’re at it, shut up about security.”

  “Grumpy, grumpy, grumpy,” she muttered, shaking her head. “OK, JW, I got it. So what happened to Pocahontas, anyway? Where’d she go?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “I told you she was weird.”

  Back in my father’s chair, I dragged the saddlebags toward me across the desk. On close inspection I was just able to make out the faded stenciling on the flap of the pouch. It read Miller 7th U.S. Cavalry. I remembered the one fact that every Plains Indian buff knows: the Seventh Cavalry was under the command of General George Armstrong Custer at the Battle of the Little Bighorn. I was almost afraid to open the saddlebags. But of course, I did.

  From the first pouch, I slid six antique ledger books with faded cloth covers. Stocked in trading posts throughout the West during the late 1800s and early 1900s, these were one of the few sources of paper readily available to native American tribes, whose pictorial artists highly valued them for use as drawing pads. On a trip to New York with my father, I had seen one of the most famous ledger art books on display at the Museum of Natural History. The drawings in it had been executed by a young Cheyenne artist named Little Fingernail, who when traveling or in battle wore the ledger strapped to his back, as did May Dodd. With an eerie similarity to her journals, there is a bullet hole passing through both covers and all pages of that book. Fired by a soldier as Little Fingernail fled an Army attack, the bullet killed the young artist, just as it had May. Both of them shot in the back.

  In the second pouch, I found seven more such ledgers, all numbered. Flipping through the pages of the first book, I saw that it contained neither old accounting records—which, of course was the original purpose of these ledgers—nor native American drawings. Instead, the lined and columned pages were filled with a woman’s handwriting in different colored pencils, the only medium available to the Indian artists of the day. On the inside of the cover was written:

  This book belongs to Margaret & Susan Kelly. Private property. Keep out!

  I picked up one of the ledgers from the second pouch, opened it at random, and saw that it was written in a different hand, though also that of a woman. Assuming that Molly Standing Bear had arranged them in some order, I put this one back, picked up the first again, and began to read. I stayed in my office all the rest of that workday and all the night. I took no calls, responded to no text messages or e-mails, and did not stop reading until I turned the last page of the final ledger book.

  The following journals have been rearranged in alternate but roughly chronological order. As they were written by two different authors, covering some of the same events, there is some inevitable overlapping of dates. Except for very minimal and occasional corrections of spelling and punctuation, they are largely unedited. In some cases, quotation marks, italics, paragraph breaks, and obviously missing words have been added, simply for the sake of clarity and continuity. Although it is always difficult for those of us trained in this business not to “clean things up” as my father used to say of the editing process, I have kept in check as much as possible my more anal-retentive editorial impulses, thus leaving intact the voice and style, as well as the literary shortcomings of the respective narrators. Because, of course, this is their story, not mine.

  LEDGER BOOK I

  In the Camp of Crazy Horse

  We curse the U.S. government, we curse the Army, we curse the savagery of mankind, white and Indian alike. We curse God in his heaven. Do not underestimate the power of a mother’s vengeance.

  (from the journals of Margaret Kelly)

  9 March 1876

  My name is Meggie Kelly and I take up this pencil with my twin sister, Susie. We got nothing left, less than nothing. The village of our People has been destroyed, all our possessions burned, our friends butchered by the soldiers, our baby daughters gone, frozen to death on a godforsaken march across these rocky mountains. Empty of feeling, half-dead ourselves, all that remains of us intact are hearts turned to stone. We curse the U.S. government, we curse the Army, we curse the savagery of mankind, white and Indian alike. We curse God in his heaven. Do not underestimate the power of a mother’s vengeance.

  We have reached the winter camp of Crazy Horse on the Powder River. We been here six days now. The Lakota family who took us in has given us a stack of ledger books and a rawhide pouch full of colored drawing pencils. These belonged to one of their tribal artists who was killed in battle. Because me and Susie don’t speak Lakota, only Cheyenne and sign talk, they wished us to make drawings of the attack on our village so they could see for themselves how it went. These are a real visual people, and we got no other way to communicate with them. We did the best we could, but me and Susie are not real good drawers.

  The thing is we can write a little better, at least I can, though we ain’t fancy educated girls, like our old friend May Dodd. Aye, we may have all been from Chicago, but me and Susie grew up on the streets, orphans who lived by our wits … and our bodies in times of need … because we was a handsome pair of lassies back then and the fellas was always sniffin’ around after us. When we was split up and sent to different foster homes, one of my families gave me a little more teaching than did Susie’s, who just made her a servant like in many foster homes, didn’t care if she knew how to read or write, long as she could do their housework and laundry. So when she has somethin’ to say here, she is just going to tell me and I will write it down best I can, and together we are going to keep up this journal in honor of our friend May. For Brother Anthony tells us that she, too, is dead, along with all the others, except Martha. But just now we have no tears left to shed … we expect that will come later.

  The night before the Army attack, a number of us white women slept in Brother Anthony’s tipi. Earlier that evening we had watched our Cheyenne husbands dancing proudly over their trophies of war—a bag of twelve severed baby hands taken in a raid that day against their enemy, the Shoshone. They had ridden with a band of other rash young men out
to prove themselves for the first time in battle. None of the experienced warriors such as Little Wolf, Hawk, or Tangle Hair had participated, but it is the tradition of the tribe that all must attend the victory dance. As they pranced, these boys chanted the tale of their triumph, they sang that in taking these babies’ hands they had captured the power of the Shoshone nation … aye, the grand power of a baby’s hand …

  After the horror of what we saw the lads had done, we white women fled from the celebration, and we could not bear to go back to our own lodges, could not bear to look upon our husbands ever again. We slept that night in Brother Anthony’s lodge, and we tried to make sense of something that made no sense at all. What were those boys thinking? How could they have done such a thing? And maybe, after all, what happened in the morning was God’s just punishment … though still we curse him for putting us and our children on earth and then abandoning us.

  Even though we were flyin’ white flags of surrender, the soldiers attacked the village at dawn. We woke to bugles blowing, galloping horse hooves pounding frozen earth, the sharp metal-on-metal sound of swords unsheathed, gunfire, and the battle whoops of the invaders. Course, those of us with babies had but one thought—to run, to save our children. Me and Susie gathered our twin girls in their baby boards and strapped them to our breasts. Brother Anthony went immediately through the tent flap and with no fear for his own safety raised his arms to the heavens and begged the soldiers to stop this madness. But the killing had already begun, and the soldiers did not heed Anthony’s pleas.

  As our own men took up their arms, the women, children, and elders ran from the tipis, confused and terrified … they were knocked down and trampled by the soldiers’ horses, shot by rifle and pistol, slashed by swords, there were screams and cries everywhere, chaos and death … everywhere chaos and death.

  We ran for our lives with the others. We saw some of our own fall to the soldiers and we tried to help ’em best we could. But finally we had to make the terrible choice to leave ’em where they fell, so we might save our own babies. The attack went on for several hours, as the men of the village fought bravely to defend us. But they were no match for the Army. We who managed to reach the hills sought any shelter we could. It was so cold … so bloody cold …