“He is your relative, you say?” She squinted the cloudy eye again, stooping close to the young Cheyenne mother, glaring with suspicion and disbelief at Monaseetah.
“He is.”
With a bony finger the old one brushed a lock of the boy’s light hair out of his eye before she took that same finger and dipped some of the drying blood from the massive oozing wound at the soldier’s left side. With that blood she smeared something on the man’s left cheek. Again she dipped and painted, dipped and painted, until she had enough of a symbol brushed dark against the sun-burnished skin and reddish blond whisker stubble.
“I put this here to tell all Sioux they must leave this body alone.” The old woman’s face softened. Perhaps she remembered years without number gone by, remembered little ones at her breasts, remembered a man she had loved long before there were too many years to count any longer. “My people will not bother him, seeing this sign on his body, little sister. Do not worry your heart.”
Monaseetah sat stunned, not at all sure what she should say. “Thank you … for your great kindness.” She dropped her gaze, ashamed of her tears.
“Little niece, it is always better to grieve. Later you can heal from that mourning for those who have gone before us to the Other Side. It is always better to forget after some time has passed … and you go on into the days granted you by the Father of us all.”
“But I do not want to forget. I will never forget.”
Monaseetah’s words turned the old woman around after a few hobbling steps. She looked at the tall, dusty cavalry boots clutched securely beneath her withered arms like a rare treasure.
“I will always remember this day, little one. Remember for all the time that is left me. I too can never forget. Sometimes it might be better to carry the hurt inside … and remember what happened here beneath this sun.”
The wrinkled one turned away and was gone.
More frightened now, the boy clung to the back of his mother’s buckskin dress. Monaseetah pulled free a butcher knife and set to work with its sharp blade.
He could not see what she was cutting until he stepped around her shoulder. His wide, wondering eyes watched as she finished hacking off one of the pale man’s fingertips. Monaseetah let the soldier’s right hand fall before she dropped the fingertip into a small pouch hung round her neck.
Why would she take part of this soldier’s body to keep when everywhere else on the hillside all the others hacked at the white bodies with pure, unfettered blood-lust?
He studied the soldier’s head and saw that it would truly make for a very poor scalp. The short reddish blond bristles were thinning, the hairline receding. No wonder no one had torn this skimpy head of hair from the white man’s skull.
“Here, my son.” Monaseetah gave him an elk-horn ladle she had pulled from her wide belt. “Bring me water from the river. Take it. Go now.”
She nudged him down the hill toward the river that lay like a silver ribbon beneath the wide white sky. At least it would be cool beside the water, he thought.
Dodging the huge bloating horses and gleaming soldier corpses, he went to the river and scooped water into the ladle. Mounted warriors screeched past him as they rode to the south. Shaking, the boy spilled half of the cool water on his lonely, frightening climb back up the long hillside. He slid to a halt beside his mother and choked back the sudden foul taste of bile washing his throat.
It surprised him. For the first time this afternoon he wanted to vomit. He gulped and swallowed, fighting down the urge to rid himself of that breakfast eaten so long ago.
As his mother began to wash the white man’s head and face, the boy turned away.
She used a strip of dirty, stiffened white cloth—one of the dead soldier’s stockings. If only these white men wore moccasins instead of the clumsy black boots that made their feet hot and sticky. With moccasins the white men would not need to wear these silly stockings. He smiled and began to feel better for it.
This was his seventh summer. He was too old to act like a child, the boy decided.
Finally he turned back to watch his mother scrub the last of the black grainy smudges from the edges of the bullet hole in the soldier’s left temple. Little blood had oozed from the wound.
Perhaps this pale man had already been dying from that messy bullet wound in his side. The boy had seen enough deer and elk, antelope and buffalo, brought down with bullets. And he knew no man could live long after suffering a wound in the chest as terrible as this. This soldier had been dying, and he was shot in the head to assure his death. Someone had wanted to make certain that this soldier was not taken alive. Someone had saved this pale-skinned soldier from the possibility of torture by sending a bullet through his brain.
Strange. As the boy looked about the hillside, he could see that the warriors had taken no prisoners. As far as his young eyes could see along the ridges of shimmering heat and yellow dust and black smoke and red death—none of these pony soldiers had lived for longer than it took the sun to move from one lodgepole to the next.
The boy sat quietly and watched his mother at work. With care she washed the white man’s entire face, scrubbing the dirty sock dipped in river water over the bristling stubble of red gold sprouting on the burnished cheeks and strong chin. The lips were cracked, peeling and bloody from days in the sun and from drinking alkali water.
The boy’s eyes wandered down the pony soldier’s frame until they froze on the wound in the man’s left side, just the length of two of his little hands below the white man’s heart. An ugly, gaping hole; he imagined the exit wound had to be even bigger. Surely the warrior who had shot this pony soldier had been no more than one arrow flight away when he fired his gun—no more than fifteen of his own short little-boy strides. A shot fired far enough away not to bring instant death—but close enough to insure that death would be soon in coming.
He wondered: In his last moments had this soldier gazed down this slope, seeing all the lodges and wickiups where slept the young unmarried warriors along the bank? Hadn’t the soldier seen the great village stretched for miles along the Greasy Grass? Or had he seen and refused to believe his own pale blue eyes now staring in death at the summer sky of the same robin’s-egg hue? Had he plunged on down toward the villages and his own death?
How could his mother treat this soldier as she would a member of her family? They had no relatives. Monaseetah and her two sons were alone in this world. It had been twelve winters since Monaseetah’s mother was killed by pony soldiers far to the south along the Little Dried River. Eight winters now since Monaseetah’s father had suffered the same fate at the hand of other soldiers in another dawn attack. His thoughts and fears tumbled: Why had his mother told the old Miniconjou woman this white-bellied soldier was a relative?
The stench of dried blood and putrefying gore clung strong on the breeze. He rubbed his nose and fidgeted, wanting to be gone. His mother’s hand quieted his nervousness.
“I am finished at last, my son.” She pulled him round to her gently. “I want you to listen to my words with all your heart. Listen to me with your soul, son of my body.”
The boy nodded, wanting only to be gone from this terrible hillside.
Monaseetah tossed aside the dirty stocking she had used to bathe the dead soldier. When he studied her eyes for some answer to his confusion, the boy discovered tears glistening in her dark eyes, streaming down her coppery cheeks. He thought, She is the prettiest woman I have ever seen.
With a tiny dirty finger he touched her cheek, wiping away a single tear. Without a word Monaseetah took his tiny hand, directing him to touch the white soldier’s hair.
“The red gold of a winter’s sunrise,” his mother whispered as she touched the soldier’s hair.