The Vengeance of Mothers Read online

  “Me, too, am already married,” says Maria. “My boy and me … he says his name is Hó’hónáhk’e … went under the robes the night of the dance. He was very sweet with me. He did not hold a loaded gun to my head the way Chucho el Roto liked to do when he had me. He used to say that when the day arrived I no longer pleased him, he would pull the trigger. That excited him.”

  “Jaysus Christ, lassie…” says I. “If that is all you know of the act, then we’d say you’ve made yourself a fine match with young Hó’hónáhk’e, which, by the way, means Rock … It’s good that you didn’t waste any time. We did the same with our lads … for different reasons maybe … We figured the sooner we lived up to our end of the bargain and had our savage babies, the sooner we’d be able to get our lovely little arses back to Chicago. See, we were plannin’ to leave the little buggers with the Cheyenne. Susie and me never had much in the way of maternal instincts … maybe because we never had a mother to show us how. And then, of course, soon as they popped out … oh hell, even before really, we fell in love with ’em, and life took on a whole other meaning to us. We figure that a woman lives three different lives in this way … or at least that’s how it’s been for us … there’s one life before you become a mother, a second after you do, and a third when you lose a child.”

  “’Tis the God’s truth, Meggie … and you and me are in the third life. We ain’t ever going back to Chicago now, for we have the final business of mothers to attend to right here. Aye, someday people’ll be readin’ in the history books about the fightin’ Kelly twins, scourge of the Great Plains.”

  28 May 1876

  Now me and Susie are real surprised when Molly comes to see us in our lodge today. It is the first time she has done so, and we don’t even know how she found us. She scratches at the opening real polite and when our old widow woman, Mó’éh’e, opens the flap and invites her in, she steps to the left and sits down by the entrance, just like the Cheyenne expect visitors to do, which impresses us no end.

  “You be learning the ways of the People, Molly,” says Susie.

  “I’ve been trying to take your advice and observe their rules of etiquette,” she says. Although these are sometimes difficult to determine.”

  Elk Woman fills our trade pan with water and boils up some coffee Gertie left with us. We make a little awkward chitchat with Molly, wonderin’ why she came, and realizing that except for a few short conversations between us while riding on the trail, all this time since we first met the greenhorns back in Crazy Horse’s village, the three of us have never really been alone together in a social kind of way. It ain’t completely comfortable, either.

  As if reading our minds, Molly says: “I imagine you girls are wondering why I came to see you.”

  “Aye, lass, that we be wonderin’,” says Susie.

  “It just occurred to me that we’ve never really talked, just the three of us. That is to say, there have always been others around, we’ve never had a single private conversation.”

  “There ain’t a whole lot of privacy in an Indian village,” says I, “as you may have noticed by now. So why have ya come to see us, then, Molly?”

  She laughs. “Well … to have a private conversation.”

  “And what about, lass?”

  “Gertie described a rather dark future for us all, didn’t she? And since then I got to thinking … I’ve been thinking that we don’t really know each other, beyond some vague details of our respective lives. We’ve been at odds a good deal, you girls and I, and I know you haven’t always approved of my behavior … I’m not even sure you like me. And that’s alright, too, I don’t blame you for it, truly I don’t. But I do like you both, and I admire you … and I think in many ways we are a lot alike … or at least we have much in common … we share a similar wound. What you said yesterday, Meggie, about the three stages of your lives … before you’re a mother, after you’re a mother, and after you lose a child … that made an impression on me, for I know exactly what you mean. That’s how it’s been for me. It appears that more bad things are going to happen to us soon, things that are completely out of our control. Maybe even we’re all going to die, or at least some of us are. You girls seem to have resigned yourselves to that fate, and for a long time, I thought I had, too. But I don’t want to die anymore, not yet. And if I do … if any of us do … I don’t want it to happen without us leaving something behind with each other … some memory of kindness between us, some vestige of friendship … Do you understand what I’m trying to say?”

  “Not quite yet,” says Susie, “but go on, lass.”

  Molly laughs again. “Yes, I’m not sure I know what I’m trying to say, either. Maybe it’s simply that I’d like for us to be friends. For instance, I’d like to know something about your babies, other than that they are dead, and how they died. I don’t even know their names.”

  “As you have never spoken the name of your daughter.”

  “Clara. My daughter’s name was Clara.”

  “That’s a grand name, Molly,” says I. “Yet you know more about our girls, than me and Susie know about yours. Because you have never even told us how Clara died.”

  “I haven’t told anyone about that … until Hawk just recently. Along the lines of what you said yesterday, when a child dies … and I hardly need tell you girls this … when one’s child dies young, their death becomes the defining moment, not only of their short life, but also of our own. Everything before then, everything they were, everything we were, everything they and we would have become together is canceled, erased like chalk from a blackboard … because they are no longer, as we are no longer.”

  “Aye, that is so, Molly,” says Susie. “It’s just like you said: ‘my daughter’s name was Clara’ … for she is no longer, as you are no longer her mother. Our girls were just wee babies, you see, only a few weeks old when they died … three weeks and two days, to be exact. They had no past to speak of … maybe they had memories of the warmth of our wombs at the end, we hope so. The only memories we have of them are of carryin’ them in our bellies, of their birth, of them as tiny, cheerful infants, and, of course, of their cold death, one by one. Mine were named Bird and Egg, Vé’ése and Vòvotse, those are Cheyenne baby names, and if they had lived they would have been given other names as they were growing up. But like you say, Molly, that is never going to happen … all of that is gone, all of that has been erased. All that remains of them now is the constant knot of pain in our guts, where once they were.”

  “Mine were named Curly and Baldy,” says I, “Péhpe’e and Oo’estséáhe, because one had hair already and one didn’t … it’s how I could tell ’em apart. Those babies will never learn to walk or talk, to run or play…”

  “My daughter was beaten to death by her father,” says Molly in a real small voice, and we see in the dim light of the tipi that tears are running down her cheeks. “She was six years old … she … she wanted a bicycle … that’s all … he killed her because she wanted a bicycle.”

  “Jaysus Christ,” says Susie, shaking her head. “Aye, we understand now, lassie. And you killed the bastard, that’s why ya went to prison, ain’t it?”

  Molly just nods because she can’t talk now for her weeping. And me and Susie are cryin’, too … for our dead children, and hers, and for our former selves who died with them, who, like Molly says, are no longer.

  Molly stays the night with us in our tipi, and we send old Mo’éh á’e to Hawk’s lodge to tell him where she is so he won’t worry. We fix up a sleeping place for her and we talk late into the night. She tells us how she feels about Hawk, that she’s in love with the lad, the first time she’s ever really been in love in her life, she says. She tells us that after they have had a bit of a “honeymoon,” Hawk intends to speak to Bear and Good Feathers about taking the orphan girl, Mouse, in to live with ’em. She tells us how guilty it makes her to have these feelings—both for Hawk and for the child—because her life is going on without her daughter, after all �
�� and she feels like she’s abandonin’ her. Me and Susie try to reassure her by saying just what she was tryin’ to tell us—that the person she was as Clara’s mother died with her little girl, but maybe now she has a chance at a fourth stage of life, as the wife of a man who loves her and as another child’s mother. And, a’ course, Molly, being Molly, turns that right around on us and says if we really believed that, then why don’t we try to make another chance for ourselves.

  To this Susie answers: “Ya see, Molly, you already got your vengeance by killin’ the man who killed your daughter. Meggie and me can’t rest until we get ours.”

  “I’m sorry to tell you this, girls,” says she, “but there is no rest with vengeance. It doesn’t make you feel any better, it doesn’t relieve the pain. There is only the slight satisfaction of retribution that at least the man responsible is also dead.”

  “We’ll take that,” says I. “That’s better than nothin’, ain’t it?”

  “But you won’t even be killing the men who were directly responsible for your daughters’ deaths.”

  “Aye, that satisfaction we won’t have, it’s true, but at least we’ll be strikin’ a blow against the Army that sent the men who were responsible. And who knows, maybe we’ll get lucky and find ourselves engaged in battle against some of the soldiers who attacked us that morning. A girl can dream, Molly.”

  “You ladies are incorrigible,” says she.

  “That we are, lass, that we are.”

  “And by the way,” says Susie, “we do like you, even if we don’t always show it. You know, the thing is, Meggie and me got an image as a pair of tough street lassies to protect. And even if it ain’t entirely true, we been guardin’ that image our whole lives as a way to defend ourselves, keep folks at arm’s length. The fact that you came on as tough as us, maybe even tougher … aye, it’s true that kinda rubbed us the wrong way sometimes.”

  Molly laughs at this. “What you see as my toughness, girls, is largely an act, too … just as you say, to defend myself. My real self is more like what you have witnessed tonight—a weak, weepy, grieving mother, filled with remorse and guilt.”

  “But you’re filled with love, too, Mol,” says Susie. “That much is plain to see.”

  It’s a good thing that Molly came to visit, because by the time she leaves us this morning, we feel like we’re all the very best of friends.

  LEDGER BOOK X

  Of Love and War

  We have little left to hide from one another, and no pretenses. How unladylike, how unthinkable it would previously have been to admit aloud to the taking of physical pleasure, how shocked women of polite society would be were they to overhear us. Yet to us it is a perfectly natural conversation among friends, without shame or embarrassment. Life in the wilds offers certain freedoms not readily available to the so-called civilized.

  (from the journals of Molly McGill)

  27 May 1876

  On the morning after what it is now understood was my wedding night … although not exactly as every girl might have imagined it to be … I woke up in Hawk’s lodge, still in his arms. I had that hollow feeling in my stomach upon remembering all that I had spoken to him, as if the unburdening of it emptied me, drained my heart, my blood, my very soul from my body. Perhaps I had held on to this story for so long, not wishing or able to share it with anyone else, as a way of holding on to my daughter. Because once I let go, I knew she would be gone from me for good, and I would never be able to change the ending for her … a vain hope, of course, but one I have held close.

  I was not sure if Hawk was awake now or still sleeping, for his breath came even, but he began to move against me, our bodies warm together under the buffalo robes. I felt him strengthening against my belly, and the first tentative twinge of my own desire, a feeling barely remembered. I pressed my breasts against his chest, my lips to his neck, inhaling his man scent, and I felt our hearts beating together in unison as if we had known each other for a very long time. There was new life sprouting here between us, like the unlikely spring grass in the ruins of the massacred village, offering at once a sense of comfort and renewal, as well as the pain and heartbreak the Cheyenne say lives on forever in the earth … and in us.

  Hawk whispered something to me in his own language, in a voice so soft and gentle. He touched me in the same way, and I opened myself to him. And then we were covered and absorbed by each other in that private world that there are no words to describe.

  29 May 1876

  Gertie left us this morning. I came from Hawk’s lodge to say good-bye to her at the communal tipis I had shared with the others. Only Lady Hall, Maria, and I have already moved into the lodges of our respective mates, the others still being courted by their boys … it is hard to think of them as men, and even more so, as warriors. Yet for the sake of protection, the twins are encouraging all of our girls to get settled in our husbands’ lodges … such a strange notion that still seems …

  Gertie had just finished saddling her big gray mule and was strapping on her Army saddlebags. All there was to say on the matter had been said, and a nervous silence fell over us as we watched her work. Finally, she put her foot into the stirrup and swung into the saddle.

  “Well, here we are, then,” she said, nodding down at us. “Don’t know when I’ll see you gals again … depends on what Little Wolf decides to do. But no matter what is to come, I want to tell ya all something before I leave. I want to tell ya how much I admire you … all a’ you. I admire the hell outta you. I know it ain’t been easy what you been through already, but you done yourselves proud. An’ I never heard a bit of whinin’ from you, either. You’re damn fine women, every damned one a’ you, and it has been my honor to know you.”

  Now Gertie looked around at the village lying so peaceful in the valley, smoke curling from the tops of tipis, children playing in front of their lodges, women, two or three together, fleshing hides, tanning, butchering, cooking, quilting, chatting easily among themselves, giggling softly from time to time. And then she looked up and took in the landscape beyond—the birds singing in the trees of the river bottom, the morning sunlight sparkling off the flowing water, the greening foothills, behind those the snowcapped peaks of the Bighorns, and on the other side of the river, the hills and bluffs running off to the plains. “It ain’t such a bad life with these folks, is it?” she said. “Takes some gettin’ used to, no doubt a’ that … as you’ve all well learned. But once you’re accustomed to their ways, and get in the habit of livin’ wild, it ain’t a bad life at-tall … that is, if others’d just leave ya alone. I loved it myself, loved all of it, I miss the hell out of it. But like I told ya, it ain’t a life that can last, and it’s comin’ to an end here real soon. I hate to see you caught up in all this, but I can’t do much more for you now. Whatever happens, you gals take good care a’ yourselves, take good care a’ each other. Stay as strong as you’ve been this long … stay even stronger … you’ll need be.”

  “But Gertie, when the Army comes,” I asked, “you’ll be with them, won’t you? Might we not see you then?”

  “No, honey, course we don’t travel with the troops when they go into battle. We stay back in a base camp some distance away. Some a’ the teamsters may go along on mules as civilian fighters. But not me, I’ll be with the supply wagons … Anyhow, that’ll be way too late to be stoppin’ in for a visit.”

  Gertie reined her mule around. “Adios, gals,” she said, touching the brim of her grimy, misshapen, sweat-stained hat. I thought I detected tears welling up in the corners of her eyes. But maybe it was only because I was looking through the veil of those clouding my own. “And say good-bye to those damned Irish rascals for me, too,” she added. “May we all meet again under happier circumstances … and I don’t mean on the hangin’ road to Seano, neither. You all stay away from that place. I have it on good authority that it ain’t all it’s cracked up to be.”

  Now Gertie took her hat off and lightly slapped her mule’s hindquarters with it. “
Git on down the trail, old Badger,” she said, and as the beast broke into a trot, I could then see plainly the streaks of tears on her cheeks, sparkling like the flowing river in the sun. I know Gertie was thinking that she would never see us alive again, because that’s what we were all thinking.

  2 June 1876

  Ours is to be a short honeymoon, indeed, for yesterday morning, the camp crier came through the village, announcing that we were to begin taking down our lodges and packing up for travel. Hawk left to attend a powwow and smoke with Little Wolf and the chiefs of the other bands, including that of a contingent of well over a hundred Lakota warriors and their families, who rode in yesterday afternoon and set up a camp near ours.

  Hawk’s grandmother arrived at our lodge shortly thereafter to show me how to dismantle the tipi, and to help me at it, as this is something we have little experience with. Her name is Náhkohenaa’é’e, which Hawk translates as Bear Doctor Woman. Cheyenne names seem to spring from either physical attributes, accomplishments, talents, events in which the individual has participated, and very frequently from the animal and bird kingdom, or from some combination of more than one of the above. When I questioned Hawk further about his grandmother’s name, he told me this story:

  When she was a young woman her name was Méstaa’ehéhe … Owl Girl, because she was said to be able to see in the dark. One morning she was walking from her family’s camp to another nearby village to visit a sick relative, when she was overtaken by a sudden thunderstorm with lightning and pounding hail. She took refuge in a cave that was often used by the People for such purpose.