The Vengeance of Mothers Read online

  “You know nothing about Army policy, madam.”

  “You would be surprised, Captain, how much I have learned. I only mention your daughter because I thought you might like to know that she is a lovely, happy, beautiful child. But she, too, is at risk.”

  And with that Bourke, furrowing his dark brow in the same expression, once again took rapid leave of me.

  23 June 1876

  Although, of course, I could not mention to Captain Bourke that I knew Gertie, I had hoped she would learn I was here and come to see me. And so this morning she has. We embraced when she arrived at my tent, and I broke down, so relieved was I to see a friendly face, a luxury I will soon be denied.

  “Easy now, honey,” she said, holding me tight. “It’s alright, you goin’ to be OK.”

  “No, it isn’t alright, Gertie, and I am never going to be OK.”

  “I know, I know … and there ain’t nothin’ more I can do for you either, honey. You know that, too, don’t you?”

  “There is nothing anyone can do for me.”

  “Cap’n Bourke sent me,” she said. “He thinks you’re a tough cookie … a ‘hard woman,’ he said. I guess he ain’t seen you fall apart like this.”

  “Nor will he ever,” I said, my tears subsiding. “Why did he send you?”

  “Knowin’ I was close to May, he thinks maybe you’ll open up to me, give me some information about the others. He don’t want the same thing happenin’ to them as happened to her and her friends, not to mention his child. He’s a good man, the cap’n … really he is … but like everyone else he’s caught up in the system … he’s a soldier, after all, and like all soldiers he takes his orders from his superiors. Course, he don’t know I already know all about the others. He don’t know about Meggie and Susie, neither, except for some wild tales circulatin’ among the enlisted men about a pair a’ painted, red-haired banshees seen ridin’ with the renegades at the Rosebud—killin’, scalpin’, and cuttin’ the nuts off soldiers, they say they were. I gotta tell ya, those damn Irish scamps got these young recruits spooked real bad.”

  “It’s just what the girls said they were going to do, Gertie.”

  “Look, I know you ain’t goin’ to tell the cap’n a damn thing about the others, and a’ course neither am I. Him askin’ me to come here just offered a good excuse to see you. He’s also signed me on to take ya down to Medicine Bow station, ’cause he trusts me. He’s sendin’ a dozen soldiers to escort you, ten on horseback and two with you an’ me in the wagon, with strict orders not to let you out of their sight for a minute. Hell, honey, you won’t even get to take a pee in private.”

  “I can’t go back to prison, Gertie … I just can’t. I’ve known freedom now … maybe for the first time in my life. I’ve fallen in love with a good man, and that’s also a first time. I’m going to have Hawk’s baby, or so says the medicine woman. You know what happens, don’t you, to women who give birth in Sing Sing? They take their babies away as soon as they’re born, put them in the care of a wet nurse, and send them to an adoption agency. I can’t go back there, Gertie. I’d rather die. Do you understand what I’m saying? I’m not asking you to try to help me escape, because I know you can’t do that, and I know there is no escape. But I do have a favor to ask of you.”

  Gertie looked at me questioningly for a long time. Finally, as if she had sorted out in her mind some version of what I was going to ask her, she nodded, and said: “I’m not gonna want to do your favor, am I, Molly?”

  “No.”

  “Then don’t even bother askin’ me, honey … because that I cannot do.”

  “Let me at least ask you this then, Gertie. If Captain Bourke doesn’t confiscate my ledger book before we leave here tomorrow, they will when we get to Medicine Bow. The government and the Army is not going to let any written evidence of their chicanery survive. I’d like to make one last entry. Will you come back in an hour, and take it yourself?”

  “What do you want me to do with it, honey?”

  “I don’t know, Gertie … put it to some good use if ever you can. I’ll leave that up to you. All my other books are in the care of Hawk’s grandmother. Who knows what will happen to them, either? They’ll most likely be consumed in flames by the end of these Indian wars, as were May’s.”

  “Sure, honey, I’ll take it, and I’ll keep it safe. You’re right, they won’t let you leave with it. When the time is right, I’ll see that it gets into the hands of someone who, like you say, can maybe put it to good use, who can tell your story of what happened out here. I’ll be back for it in an hour.”

  “And Gertie, one last thing, I want you to promise me that after I give this to you, you won’t read it until you return from taking me to Medicine Bow.”

  Gertie looked hard at me again, then finally nodded reluctantly and said: “Awright, honey, I promise.”

  My darling Clara,

  I don’t know what, if anything, lies beyond this life … having gone before me you surely know more about it than I. What I do know, my little girl, is that the dead do not read the journals and letters those of us still living address to them. And so I write to myself, but with you in my heart, as I have throughout this ordeal. I seek your forgiveness, which you cannot give, and knowing that as well, only I can forgive myself, which I cannot do, either. The grand tragedy of life is that we can never go back to fix our terrible mistakes. Everyone should be allowed to do so, just once. Instead, all we can do is to relive them, over and over and over again, to torture ourselves endlessly with questions to which there are no answers. Why did I leave you there with him? What was I thinking? Why didn’t I take you to the neighbors? I’ll tell you why … because you were sleeping so peacefully, and I didn’t want to disturb you. Yes, instead of disturbing your sleep, I left you there to be beaten to death.

  I enjoyed a brief moment of peace, a respite of solace and escape here with Hawk. I was loved and held close. I saw a future lying ahead with him and your unborn brother. I thought that perhaps in this way, I might be able to earn your forgiveness and my own. But that hope, too, has now died. I write not in a spirit of self-pity, but one of resignation, of acceptance. I am ready. I am coming for you, at last, my dear, darling Clara.

  Your loving mother.

  And that is all I have left to say in these pages. My adventure comes to an end, and I rest my pen once and for all.

  LEDGER BOOK XIII

  The Return of Martha

  War is funny that way … aye, it’s kinda like the first time ya let a boy inside your knickers … it’s usually a big disappointment, a letdown, maybe it even leaves you feelin’ a little sick to your stomach. But then another part a’ you wants to try it again, and when ya do, knowin’ more or less what to expect, it’s that much easier, and even easier the time after that, until pretty soon, damned if you don’t get to likin’ it. And that’s how it is with makin’ war … not so different really than makin’ love.

  (from the journals of Margaret Kelly)

  21 June 1876

  With all the travelin’ these past months, I’m gettin’ pretty competent at writin’ in my ledger book off the back of a horse. Aye, we’re on the move again—west and north, our ranks swellin’ with the addition of the “reservation” Indians who have joined us, more joinin’ up all the time. These are mainly Lakota, with some Cheyenne and Arapaho, who had already surrendered and were livin’ at the agencies. As word spread of Sitting Bull’s Sun Dance vision in which the white soldiers were fallin’ into his camp headfirst like grasshoppers, followed by our victory on the Rosebud, the boyos been sneakin’ off the res by the hundreds to hook up with us, even though it ain’t permitted. Life there is bleedin’ boring, nothin’ for ’em to do all day long. They want to hunt and fight again, because that’s what a lad lives for in this country, it’s everything he’s ever been brought up to do. Take that away, and they got nothin’ left.

  No tellin’ how many we are now, no way to count … a couple thousand maybe, all the bands co
min’ together, movin’ in roughly the same direction, separated a little and leavin’ at different times, but all with the same destination in mind—the Little Bighorn country. We should reach there this evening. We hear the buffalo herds are thick up that way, the summer grass already tall for the horses. Aye, when it comes right down to it, that’s all these folks really need to survive, buffalo and grass. That ain’t really askin’ so much, is it?

  Now that we’ve left the Rosebud, we’re all feelin’ that we’ve also left Molly and Pretty Nose behind once and for all. Somehow we been holdin’ on to small hopes that maybe they’re still alive, maybe they’ll manage to get away and make their way back to us. But now it looks like they are truly lost forever, and we’ll never know exactly what became of ’em. That’s how it is in this big country, stretchin’ out in all directions, so indifferent to the puny lives of human beings … sometimes it just swallows people up, and leaves not a trace of ’em behind.

  Other bad news is we’ve learned that Hawk took a bullet, lost a lot of blood, and nearly died. They say it was his nana, Náhkohenaa’é’e, Bear Doctor Woman, who saved his life, that she made a special poultice to stop the bleeding and sat up in his lodge, singing to him for three days and nights without sleeping herself. They say he’s better now but still too weak to travel, so they left him behind on the Rosebud with the old woman, two of his male cousins and a nephew to hunt and look after him. We been holding on to one other slim hope, and that is if Molly and Pretty Nose were still alive, Hawk would find ’em and bring ’em back to us. But that hope, too, is gone now, for they say it’ll be a good long time before he’s up and about … even longer before he soars again … if you believe in such things … Either way, we figure the longer those lasses are missing, the less chance we have of ever seein’ ’em again, nor would we know where to begin looking. It breaks our hearts so bad we can hardly bear to look at each other without bustin’ out in tears.

  * * *

  And so we have arrived this evening, as planned, and I write this now from our lodge in a side valley of the Little Bighorn, the biggest damned Indian village we ever seen, and still growin’ as other bands and more reservation Indians continue to arrive. We first saw it from the high ground as we were ridin’ in, and it took our breath away, maybe three miles long and a half mile wide, how many thousands of Indians it’s impossible to guess … includin’ our number, we figure six, seven, eight thousand? The old widow, Elk Woman, who looks after me and Susie, says it’s the biggest encampment she’s seen in her seventy-six summers, spread out so far in the valley that once you’re down in it you can’t see from one end to the next, maybe the biggest assembly of tribes there’s ever been.

  Though it ain’t far away from the Rosebud, it’s different kind a’ country here—broader valleys and big, rollin’, mostly treeless grasslands, but for the cottonwoods and willows in the river bottoms, up high a shimmerin’ spread a’ hills and arid buttes running away to the horizon that never ends. It’s enough to make a lass dizzy …

  22 June 1876

  Aye, now we’ll tell of the finest thing that happened this morning … me and Susie are up early, it ain’t quite dawn yet, and despite its size the camp is real quiet, everyone still asleep in their lodges, the only sounds the first timid songs of the morning birds, the soft nickering of the horses in the corrals, and an occasional halfhearted bark of a dog. The sound carries so in the still, clear air of daybreak that we can hear the hoofbeats of a single runnin’ horse in the hills above the valley …

  We part the tent flap and can just make out the silhouette of a lone horseman against the pearly gray skyline … a lone horsewoman, I oughta say, ridin’ bareback, gallopin’ across the horizon, long braids flyin’ behind her like banners. She turns her mount and comes down the hillside toward the village still at a dead run, and that’s when we see it’s Pretty Nose herself comin’ toward us.

  Because we have decided that in an encampment as large as this one, we need to stick close together or risk losin’ each other, the rest of our warrior society is camped around us with their families. That includes Lady Hall and Bridge Girl; Maria and her husband, Rock; as well as our noncombatant lasses—Lulu and her boy, Squirrel; Carolyn and Light; Christian and Astrid. These last two me and Susie are convinced have given up waitin’ for a Mennonite preacher to magically appear on the plains and marry ’em in the eyes of God, and gone native like the others, which is to say livin’ as husband and wife. Now, one by one, our women begin to come out of their lodges and take up the trilling, wakin’ up the whole damned village, others comin’ out to see what the commotion is all about, and joining in … and then others … the sound spreading like a wave across the valley floor, for it is a universal signal among the tribes that one of our own, in this case whether it be Cheyenne, Lakota, or Arapaho, has come home safe to us. Aye, it is something to hear this trilling rising on the air with the promise of dawn, taken up by a thousand women and girls in the village, maybe two thousand even … it sends gooseflesh like an army of ants crawlin’ across our skin.

  Pretty Nose rides in and dismounts, her horse lathered and breathin’ hard. Me and Susie, bein’ the affectionate souls we are, can’t help but take her in our arms and give her a big hug, the others gatherin’ around. She doesn’t waste any time tellin’ us what we all want to know—what happened to ’em, how did she get away … and most of all, what happened to Molly? She tells us her horse got shot and went down, her leg trapped beneath, which is the part we knew from Phemie. Molly dismounted to help her. That’s when the Crow captured them, and after the battle was over, they were taken back to the Crow bivouac and separated. She says the warrior who claimed her dragged her into his stick hut … and though she doesn’t say as much, we can tell from the way she lowers her head and looks away that he did to her what all men will do when they take a lass captive … goddamn the filthy bastards … She says he tied her up so she couldn’t escape, came back later, untied her and made her take down the hut. She says the whole camp packed up and traveled south, and that she and her captor were ridin’ in the rear, while Molly was ridin’ up front … aye, just as we had all feared, with none other than Jules Seminole leadin’ the party. She says that because they were so far apart she and Molly only got a glimpse or two of each other as they rode.

  She says they traveled down to the big Army supply camp on Goose Creek, where Crook had retreated to lick his wounds after we kicked his arse on the battlefield. They pitched their own camp for the night a bit away from the Army. Her captor forced her back inside his hut … to do to her again we know, without her sayin’, what he’d done before … the bastard … Later that evening, after the sun set, three soldiers rode into the Crow camp, and sometime after that Pretty Nose heard Molly singin’ one of Lulu’s songs. When she managed to look out through the opening of the hut, she saw that Molly was being led away by the soldiers.

  It was nearly dark now, and her Crow captor had fallen asleep. He wore a knife on his belt, which he’d taken off and tossed aside. She reached out real slow, real careful, slid the belt toward her, slipped the knife from its sheath … and slit the wanker’s throat. Good for her … the fooking bastard.

  She says she waited a couple more hours with the dead man bleedin’ out beside her, until she figured all the others, except the boys guardin’ the horses, had gone to sleep. Then she crawled out of the hut on her belly and all the way like that to near where the horses were corralled. She waited there a good long time, watchin’, and gettin’ a sense of what the horse boys’ routine was. They took shifts sleeping, and every now and again, whichever one of ’em was on duty would walk around the perimeter of the corral to make sure all was well. She timed it so that when the boy did this, and she knew he was on the back side, she stood and moved real quiet toward the corral. There was a pile of halters with lead ropes near where the other boys were sleeping. She picked one up and ducked under the corral rope. Pretty Nose has always had good relations with horses, she has a cal
m, sure way about her that puts ’em at ease, and they didn’t spook or make a sound when she came among them.

  She picked out the biggest, strongest-lookin’ mount she could find and slipped the halter over his head. Using the knife she’d taken from the Crow she killed, she cut the corral rope, swung onto the horse’s back, pressed her heels to his flanks, gave her best Indian yell, and busted out at a gallop. She says she knew that with the rope down and the disturbance she caused, the other horses would spook and bolt, which would distract the horse boys and slow down any pursuers. And so it did. Still, she knew some would chase her, and she rode as hard as she could push that horse without killin’ him. There was enough moon and a sky full of bright stars to light her way. She says she got back to our old camp on the Rosebud about daybreak yesterday morning, and there she found Hawk, bad wounded, with his grandmother, cousins, and nephew lookin’ after him. She holed up all day until darkness fell. They fed her and she got some much-needed sleep before she rode out again after dark to follow our trail.

  And so here she is … and now, in addition to gettin’ Pretty Nose back, we know that Molly is still alive. Aye, that gives us a little somethin’ to hope for again. We don’t know what the Army will do with her … but at least we can be thankful she’s no longer with Jules Seminole.

  We feed Pretty Nose, and Mo’éh á’e makes up a sleeping place for her in our tipi. She is about the toughest lassie we know … but she is one knackered girl. We know that she will never speak further of what happened to her during her captivity. It is not the way of these people. We know that from our own experience, when it happened to me and Susie with May and the others. And Pretty Nose knows that we know without her havin’ to speak of it. You put it away someplace tight inside yourself, and do your best to keep it there. That’s how things work in this country … life goes on, no matter what happens, you make your way, best you can, through the trials and hardship, the pain and suffering … and maybe, if you’re real lucky, with a wee bit of happiness mixed in … until one day it doesn’t go on anymore.