We keep running as best we can through the wigwams and out onto the frozen grasses. I’m looking about for my horse but she must have got the hell out of there and I didn’t blame her. Got to make the higher ground behind the batteries. That the only place will seem like home. I got Winona by the hand now and we two soldiers running. Truth to tell she not much smaller than me. If there’s bullets coming after us it’s only a hive of strays. Ain’t no Indians firing now. Not a one. And as we reach the line of Gatling guns we pass Caught-His-Horse-First lying dead. The murderer of Mrs Neale and Hephzibah and here now the incredible price. What grace in this or God I could not say. Not much.
Seems like it were all the devil that day. Kill them all. Leave nothing alive. Everything was killed. Nothing left to tell the tale. Four hundred and seventy. And when the men were done killing they started to cut. They cut out the cunts of the women and stretched them on their hats. They took the little ball sacks of the boys to be dried into baccy pouches. They severed heads and hacked off limbs so they was not going to no heavenly hunting ground. The troopers came back up the hill lathered in blood and gore. Spattered with tendrils of veins. Happy as demons in the commission of demon’s work. Exultant and shouting to each other. Drenched in a slaughterhouse of glory. Never heard such strange laughter. Big hill-high sky-wide laughter. Clapping of backs. Words so black they were blacker than dried blood. Remorse not a whit. Delight and life perfected. Slaughter most desirable. Vigour and life. Strength and heart’s desire. Culmination of soldiering. Day of righteous reckoning.
And yet in the days going back across the plains there was just deep exhaustion and queer silence. The mules drawing the guns with earnest intent. The mule-skinners herding them on. Troopers who had gathered back their mounts wearily submitting. A gopher-hole tripping up a horse enough to send a trooper falling like a greenhorn. Can’t even eat their grub on the middle stop. Can’t even remember their private prayers. Killing hurts the heart and soils the soul. And Captain Sowell looking as angry as old Zeus and as sick as a poisoned dog. He don’t talk to no one and no one talking to him.
The other silent creature be Winona. I keeping her stuck close to me. I don’t trust anyone. What we walked through was the strike-out of her kindred. Scrubbed off with a metal brush like the dirt and dried blood on a soldier’s jacket. Metal brush of strange and implacable hatred. Even the major. Same would be if soldiers fell on my family in Sligo and cut out our parts. When that old ancient Cromwell come to Ireland he said he would leave nothing alive. Said the Irish were vermin and devils. Clean out the country for good people to step into. Make a paradise. Now we make this American paradise I guess. Guess it be strange so many Irish boys doing this work. Ain’t that the way of the world. No such item as a virtuous people. Winona the only soul not thrown on the bonefire. She seen the worst now and seen it before. It makes her silent, so silent the silence of winter is like a clattering. No words in her now. I got to keep her close. Got to get back to John Cole and keep her close. I ask her plain what she wants me to do. I ask her three times and get no answer. Try a fourth time. Tennessee, Tennessee, she says.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
OUT ON THE PLAINS falls a deep sea of snow covering the battle site two days to the north. Covering the Sioux dead till the spring. The few dead troopers were took back before the snows and the burial details been busy in the boneyard. The buglers blown their frosty tunes. Cold clamps the upland and the bottomland with clamps as sure as iron. Tamps down the surge of trees and stills the creeks. Manhandles the bears into their dens I guess. Now from the further country of Montana Territory come the white wolf maybe and the white fox maybe and some say even the white bear. The trail going south-east’s wiped out and all the scratch and scrape of man with it. It ain’t peace because storms stomp madly over it and the upper sky is a smithy for lights and bangs but it ain’t our violent war.
The fort’s full of rumours. I got to wait till my papers is rescinded by the major until I can go. So Winona is lodged by the major in his cold quarters now emptied of all he loves. I guess he feels he must protect her all in all. She takes off that drummer boy’s garb and climbs back in her travelling dress. Major says she can take anything of his wife that fits and he ain’t got no use for nothing now. He says that without showing sorrow which makes me more sorrowful than a bulldog’s face. The whole business wretched and strange. Then getting even stranger when the colonel returns from California. So happens Captain Silas Sowell is his son-in-law so that’s a voice he listens to. Captain Sowell still furious with the reddened fixed face of fury. Harry Sarjohn furious too in that his good faith with the Indians is all shot to perdition. Guess they’re a joint tornado. I get all this from Poulson my friend. Rumour, rumour tearing round the fort. I long to catch that stage down to the new town. It stops just outside the gates and that’s a busy six horses and a rackety coach. Army keeping the road clear so that’s good. Got to have some way to run supplies up from the railroad depot. Going to be a long locked-in winter looks like. Me and Winona can’t be caught here. Then outside of all expectation the major is arrested. Captain Sowell saying he went berserk out there and is guilty of gross misconduct. Vengeful sorrow working havoc on the Sioux. The Sioux was just readying up for a new treaty just as the flag being flown was saying. Caught-His-Horse-First due in Washington with the other chiefs of the plains. Now all this was put into outrageous jeopardy. Yes, that’s so. It were a murderous act, that’s the truth. Weren’t nothing to do with nothing except the major’s grief and that’s most likely.
The queer kick in the rumour also tucks Starling Carlton into the story. Brave captain found dead and Harry Sarjohn says he saw a trooper do it. With a sabre. He don’t kennt that trooper but he can point out his face maybe. Now, I never seen him near us. But he’s sneaky alright. He got the sabre right, God damn it. You’d think he’d be pleased I was trying to protect a Indian since that’s what his other caterwauling was about. So there’s going to be a muster on the parade ground. Well that’s a lot of faces. But I ain’t in the heart’s position to risk such a thing. I got to fold in Winona, I got to. So I goes to the camp barber, a decent man I knew from aforetime, by the name of George Washington Bailey. He a black man, the best barber ever stropped a blade. I ask him to close shave me like he often done and get every mortal whisker off. I’m wearing my hair what’s called Southern long, that is, as long as another man’s sense of right can bear. Then I cross the drear and wind-haggard ground to rouse Winona. Stage leaving four o’clock. Got two hours. I don’t even go get my travelling gear and I got to leave my saddle and my horse. Winona too. Going to be army horses now I guess. Farewell. We don’t lack for the dollars to get us home that’s one thing. I skip in back of the major’s place. Now he quartered elsewhere in the lock-up. So I guess there’s luck in everything even havoc. I keep thinking crazy thoughts like they must of dug one big hole for Starling. I’d a never in my life wish to see that bugger dead and now it’s me that killed him. Might be a small thing set inside that day of killing.