Our sorrow spiralling to heaven. Our courage spiralling to heaven. Our disgrace entangled in it like sorrow and courage was so much briars.
The Sioux men are hunkered down behind whatever will protect them but once we reach the limits of their village they rise up without hesitation and with bare breast charge against our approach. Each of us has one charge in his musket that must be preserved for a sure hit if there be ever such a thing in this kind of raggle-taggle battle. I see Caleb Booth in the corner of my eye fall in the Indian fusillade. Then they are pulling knives from their waists and hollering and there is a sort of mad joyous desperation in it that kindles a crazy fire in the heart. We are not lovers rushing to embrace but there is a sense of terrifying union none the less, as if courage yearns to join with courage. I cannot say otherwise. No fighter on earth as brave as a Sioux brave. They have their squaws and kindred sheltered and now at the last desperate moment they must risk all to defend them. But the shells have done terrible damage in the camp. Now I can see plain the broken bodies and the blood and the horrible butcher shop of carnage that those bursting metal flowers have manufactured. Young girls are strewn about like the victims of a terminous dance. It is as if we have stopped the human clock of the village, that’s what I were thinking. The hands have stuck and the hours will be no more. The braves come on like perfect demons, but I will allow magnificent, keenly storming. There’s so much blood in our hearts they might be bombs also. Now we be wrestling and falling and rising, we are thirty soldiers against six or seven, all that our bombs and bullets have missed. These are fierce men with the bitterness of useless treaties in their bellies. Even in the flash and spark of battle I can see how famished they are, the bronze bodies long-muscled and scrawned. We kill these men by sheer weight of numbers. Now only the sheltering squaws and such remain. The sergeant, wheezing like a wind-broke horse, halts the ruckus of death and bids two men go down to the ravine and round up the women. What’s in his head to do that we do not know for the women rush up from where they have laid in their forms of grass and with shrieks as sharp as blades charge against the startled soldiers, and they are engulfed in a frenzy of stabbing. Others of us rush over and kill those women. Now we have four, five of us dead, and all of them. Fearfully the lip of the ravine is broached. We look down into its sheer stony depths and there in a nest are a butcher’s dozen of youngsters, their faces gazing up, as if they are praying to see their people returning for them. But this cannot be.
Now the sergeant is blowing smoke because the Crow scouts say that Caught-His-Horse-First ain’t among the dead. What we done is we have killed his family, two wives included. Also his only son seemingly. The sergeant looks pleased at this but John Cole whispers to me he ain’t so sure. Sergeant ain’t always so bright about things, he says, but just to me. The sergeant is of a mind to throw the children into the ravine but Lige Magan and John Cole suggest it’s just better to round them up. Bring them back to the fort where they can be tended. The little school will have them, they say. I know without any degree of doubt that they are thinking of the major and Mrs Neale. All that has passed has been without the major’s say-so and the coming of Mrs Neale has placed a caution in every man’s soul. I am only saying how it were. The sergeant can kill as many braves as he likes but there will be already a reckoning for the squaws. Sergeant can say Goddamn as often as he likes but it’s true. Goddamn Easterners know nothing, he says. Goddamn. No one speaks, we’re just waiting for orders. Starling Carlton don’t say a word, he’s kneeling on the ravine edge with his eyes closed. The sergeant’s narrowed face looks sullen and angry but he tells us to round up the children. We’re so tired we can’t understand how we will return to the fort. The blood is intact in our bodies but we feel like we are bleeding into the earth. There’s a few dead troopers to bury, couple of fellers from Missouri. A young feller from Massachusetts who was assistant muleteer to Boethius Dilward. And Caleb Booth. Sergeant rallies hisself and puts all vexation aside and doesn’t fail to say a few uplifting words. That’s why we still obeyed the sergeant. Just when you think he was going to hell by the highroad he shown he ain’t the worst.
CHAPTER NINE
BUT DEATH WERE COMING too for the sergeant. He laid up in the infirmary where John Cole thawed out in his time and you could go in and see him. At first he wouldn’t say much but little by little he seemed to want to say more. The hospital steward which was all we had for a doctor that time did his damnedest but there wasn’t much to be done asides from mopping up. All the tubes in his stomach were rotting and sometimes he had shit coming out of his mouth, like it had lost its sense of direction on the plains of the sergeant’s body. He was still the sergeant, you couldn’t just say anything to him, you had to tread carefully for fear of a savaging. Grizzled old bastard like him don’t go providing death-bed transformations. But at the end what he said to me was, he didn’t know what life was for. He just said that. He said it seemed very short looking back even though it had seemed long enough when he was getting through it. He said he had a brother in Detroit village but it was probably no earthly use writing to him because he couldn’t read. Actually this exchange of words took place one evening late in the fall when the last of the year’s heat was trying to hang on with failing fingers in the wind. The steward had just closed the window but nevertheless the breath of outside lingered on in the wooden room. The cold spaces of the yards between the buildings. The sergeant was now more bones than man. He looked like an old saint carved in a church but he still talked like the foul soul he was. I don’t mean that unkindly. He was a queer sort of a man alright. Mostly cruel and thoughtless but there was the seam of something else unnamed. I was just alone with him looking at his shrunken face in the half-light. The thin eyes glittering yet. His disease had blacked up his face. He spoke about Caught-His-Horse-First and how he hoped we’d get him eventually. I said we sure would keep a weather eye out. I was thinking maybe now our accounts were balanced but I didn’t say that. Then the sergeant seemed to go wandering in his mind a little back to the Detroit of his youth when his brother was beginning to come good in business and then he killed a man. Missed the noose by a mere shadow of words because there wasn’t witnesses. Fell into melancholy, was what the sergeant said. He seemed a different man talking about his brother. Said his mother was a hard old woman and his father were killed in 1813 fighting Injuns along the frontier of those times, Kentucky. Said his only regret was he married a woman that didn’t like him and that he never divorced the harridan and tried for a second Mrs Wellington. The sergeant! Well all this surprised me, let me tell you. But a dying man can just say what he likes. It don’t have to be true.
Then he dies. At least we don’t have to listen to his singing no more, says Lige Magan.
Also at this time Mrs Neale had took in the captured Indian bairns into her school. Turns out Caught-His-Horse-First’s daughter was called Winona which in the Sioux language means First-born Girl according to Mr Graham the interpreter. She might have been six or seven then but who could tell because their record keeping was about as good as my own crowd in Ireland.
Well I weren’t the only soul thinking maybe the books was balanced between the chief and the blessed army. The sergeant weren’t too long in his humble grave before Mr Graham received some sort of communication and we was told that Caught-His-Horse-First was wishing to give us a visit. The colonel and the major went into confab about it and it was decided to entertain this visit as maybe it might lead to better times between us and the tribes. Everything was awful stirred up and the colonel feared an out-and-out war on the plains, that’s what he said. And the major maybe had his mind back in the time when the chief had saved us on our hungry march and although he was putting the massacre into the mix he was also mindful of the work of the late sergeant in slaughtering the chief ’s wives and son. The major in his heart always strove for justice I do believe and as he had a properly low opinion of man in the main he could allow a great margin of leeway when it was indicated. Troopers theyselves often when about the world were given to sprees and drinking, and there was oftentimes violent upflares even in camp that resulted in more than bruises and uproar. But just as the drear Black Hills were said to be speckled with gold, he believed that man was likewise. Also he had the mighty civilising medicine of Mrs Neale, a woman who might have been a preacher had she not been cloven. The mixture of beauty and religion in her could make troopers faint with what can only be reckoned love. Maybe lust too.