I’ve not much more to tell about my three years of idleness in Omaha, where I waited — my house scrubbed clean of remembrance, so to speak — to take up the thread of my life once more; and I will pass over them without further notice, except for a Decoration Day by the Missouri River. That was in 1874—the year my history caught up with Custer’s in the Black Hills.
That morning, I treated myself to steak and eggs at the hotel where Durant used to put up before the panic finished him; got shaved and had my long hair cut by the hotel barber; and then I walked out to the riverbank, intending to do some fishing. As a rule, I didn’t care for fishing. Maybe I’d had my fill of God’s fifth day of creation, having been shanghaied by circumstances into oystering as a boy. But I had given myself enthusiastically to the luxuries of the flesh at rest and knew there was nothing so restful as sitting on a flat stone, warmed by the sun, and diddling with a bamboo pole. I didn’t much care what I caught with my godforsaken worm or even if I caught anything at all. I was glad to let my eye glaze over with the dancing river light and let my mind sink into its own tranquil ooze, sleepy with the murmur and drone of a hot May afternoon.
I must have fallen asleep and would have remained so had it not been for the ferocity of a chain pickerel that pulled the pole out of my hands and dragged it out onto the water. In a moment, it had bitten through the line and disappeared among the reeds and grass. I cursed the fish, for form’s sake, though I didn’t begrudge it the worm or the bamboo pole, either, even if it had cost me four bits. No, the pickerel had put an end to the last pretense of ambition for that holiday afternoon, and my thoughts turned toward a nocturnal visit to Madam Ida’s. But as I was searching my mind for the girl I’d choose to light my firecracker, I surprised myself by flushing Chen out of one of memory’s dark rooms. During the recent do-nothing years, I’d hardly thought of him at all — embarrassed, perhaps, by my indolence. Now, sitting on my flat stone, I recalled how, years before on this same riverbank, Chen had chided me for a rage that had blown up in me as sudden as a squall. I don’t remember now what had incensed me. Some highhandedness of the rich and powerful, I suppose. I had the soul of a muckraker in those days. Chen took my arm (a womanish gesture that made me flinch) and said, “You’re too earnest, Stephen. Earnest men are sometimes good, like Lincoln; sometimes fanatical, like Booth. It’s better to be calm; safer to take a tranquil view of things.”
Chen wasn’t perfect. I’ve idealized him in this recitation, but he had his faults, same as anybody — yellow, red, black, or white. While he was encouraging me to be philosophical about life, a man stepped out onto a pier just below us and dumped a litter of newborn pups into the river.
“What do you think of that?” I asked Chen, my anger flaring like a ribbon of magnesium once again. It may be common practice to drown unwanted cats and dogs at birth, but it’s a cruel one, Jay.
“I have seen infant girls put into the river to drown,” Chen said stoically.
I didn’t like his attitude — and don’t tell me human life is cheap in China, damn it! It’s the same here. So maybe I tend to be self-righteous and too full of zeal. A man can’t help what he is or doing what he must. Anyway, when I read in the paper how Custer was getting ready to march into the Black Hills, my days of idleness were at an end.
Fort Abraham Lincoln, Dakota Territory, July 1, 1874
When I first laid eye on General Custer, he was trimming his yellow mustache with the finicky attention of a French duke or an actor. I stood in the doorway, regarding his face in the ornate mirror he held in one hand while he snipped decisively with a silver scissors held in the other. He was considered handsome by many, but in my opinion a foppish vanity and fatuous self-satisfaction, darkened by cruelty and ambition, had made an otherwise ordinary face grotesque. Absorbed in his pruning, he didn’t notice me at first, although he liked to boast that nothing escaped him. I began to worry that he’d suddenly look up and, provoked by being taken by surprise, wither me with his disdain. I’d read enough newspaper accounts of the famous Custer temper to fear his annoyance. Nervous as a weather vane, I was deliberating whether I ought to sneak out of the room, when he discovered me in the little gilded mirror. He caught my eye, and I caught his: We were bound, momentarily, by a single look of mutual fascination — mine tempered by fear, his black with suspicion. I coughed, and the spell broke. He laid the mirror down on his dressing table and turned to me.
“Who in the hell are you?”
“General Custer. ” I began to stammer.
“I am General Custer, and I’ve never doubted the fact.”
He didn’t need to complete his asservation. His unspoken words hung in the cloying air of the room, whose walls shone with afternoon sun, as if with the reflected glory of the general’s golden hair, dressed with cinnamon-scented oiclass="underline" “. of my special destiny and greatness, you pint-sized worm.”
I am on the short side — you can see that plainly enough— but I resented being thought of as a worm.
“I’m Stephen Moran,” I said, this time without hesitation. “I’d appreciate the honor of accompanying you as expedition photographer. There’s nothing I’d rather do, sir.”
Of all the people I’ve known, Custer was the least bothered by modesty. He gave himself license to do or say anything that would enlarge his reputation, which he nourished with the care and single-mindedness of a horticulturist intent on producing a gaudier flower. Luckily for me, the general was not camera shy. During the war, he’d gotten himself photographed more often than anybody else in the United States, not excepting Lincoln and Grant. He stared at me awhile, ruminating over my proposition. To be always within range of a camera must have appealed to him.
“Have you ever taken pictures in the wilderness?” he asked. “Or are you one of those parlor snakes who take pictures of ladies and gentlemen posed grandly with a pot of ferns?”
I recounted my experiences at Bear River, in the Wasatch, and on the shore of Utah Lake. I omitted my pusillanimity. They appeared to satisfy him, although he continued to assess my meager frame skeptically. It was then I shrugged the saddlebag from off my shoulder so that he could see my medal. I had decided to wear it in order to trump any objections the general might raise concerning my fitness.
“Come closer,” he said. “Where’d you get that? You didn’t steal it, did you?”
“No, sir. I got it for heroism at Five Forks.”
“Moran. ” he said, shutting his eyes as if to find my history recorded in a dark corner of his mind. “Are you the bugle boy who rode to Springfield on the Lincoln Special?”
“I am, sir.”
He opened his eyes and their light fell on me like a royal pardon.
I’d have congratulated myself on my cunning had I not already discovered in my twenty-five years how easily a megalomaniac could be manipulated.