The Dying Grass, page 37
Yessir.
How’s Perry holding up?
Very stoic, sir.
Good. Where’s James Reuben?
Well, sir, he and Jim are trolling the timber over there, just in case there’s more unburied—
That goes beyond duty, especially for red men! I’ll remember them in my prayers to-night.
And I also, sir.
Before we complete this despatch I need to see Doctor Alexander.
I’ll bring him straightaway, general.
Good evening, doctor. You’ve had some unpleasant work.
Did my best, sir . . .
You surely did, and it won’t go unrecalled. Now, I need to ask you something.
Yessir.
Were the bodies mutilated?
General, at this stage there’s no proof either way. The coyotes—
Were any of them scalped?
Again, no proof, because when the head begins to—
All right. In your best judgment, did Joseph outrage these bodies or not?
In a court of law, applying the rule of innocent until proven guilty, I’d need to acquit Joseph. As for my own personal feelings—
So no proof.
No, general.
Next matter: Did you find anything pertaining to the missing woman, Mrs. Manuel?
I’m sorry, sir—
Thank you, Doctor Alexander. Get some rest now. If our scouts discover any more bodies you’ll be informed in the morning. You’re a very steady officer, and I’m grateful to have you in my command.
Thank you, sir.
Ready, Wilkinson? After burying our dead, we went into camp, having failed to establish the whereabouts of Mrs. Manuel. Shall I mention that there is no proof of mutilations?
General, I’d hold off. There was that one soldier found with his—
Fine. We anticipate bringing Chief Joseph to submission within the next several days. Morale is high. Closing salutation. Take that and the other despatches to Norton’s and find a message rider to carry it on from there. Rest now.
Good night, general.
Good night, and GOD bless you.
11
Umatilla Jim and Tsams Lúpin are sitting in a thicket, with their sodden blankets pulled tight around themselves and their slouch hats down over their eyes. Lifting his head from his chest, Tsams Lúpin
(he who was once called by another name)
says in his own language
(which Tsépmin could have spoken to him had he chosen):
My brother, I shall now save you from the dark fire, and teach you from the Book of Light. Will you pray with me to JESUS?
to which Jim
(who has kept his true name,
which no Boston knows except for Tsépmin)
replies in the same tongue: I shall not trouble my heart with Him. Perhaps He has helped you, but only for awhile, brother. When the Bostons have finished devouring the other People, they will finish eating you.
No, my brother,
pointing with his long smooth finger,
you speak wrongly! Now take JESUS into your heart. He is your only protection,
the rain running down his cheeks like tears
as the thunder says: Timm!
and Umatilla Jim says: Tell me, brother. Was it you who told Moss Beard to get Bluecoats to drive in your People? So I have heard from White Bird’s young men.
Áhaha! So they are your friends! Now I am beginning to see into your heart.
Speak straight, brother.
I told Cut Arm that if he wished to move our former relations the Dreamer People onto painted land that cannot feed their horses, he had better get Bluecoats, because otherwise they will not go. That is all I told him.
So your heart pities them.
Of course, for when they die they will suffer forever in the dark fire—as will you. But regarding to this war they have acted wickedly. I am praying as we ride: JESUS, may they soon be cast down, in order to lead them to repentance. Now for the last time, will you pray with me?
Dear brother, I have not the same heart as you. But I am not against you; to me it is all the same.
12
Wood, luxuriously oilskinned, again shakes the rubber blanket, pulls off his cap in hopes of cooling his sweaty curls, his flesh cold and wet, his face roasting with sunburn, his mouth dry as old leather, and the cavalry trousers sticking to his knees, writing by feel in the dripping dark:
Dearest Nanny,
You wouldn’t believe the sights and smells of
Pollock’s bunch still brightly singing nigger songs,
To-day the scarf you made me was a comfort, because
I have come to believe in the existence of absolute evil. To-day I When I saw the remains of Lieutenant Theller, who led his squad in a hopeless stand against the red savages, I
Had I been capable of predicting his fate, I would have
(LORD help me)
done nothing
because, not comprehending the cause (and there might have been none), but registering no less certainly than he did the Idaho sun on the parade ground and presently, after several unreceived essays in ingratiation, returning Theller’s dislike for him, he cut the man’s acquaintance as thoroughly as possible, not that the Army respects such aspirations, particularly out on the frontier; indeed, he once at the Vancouver barracks overheard the general explaining to a terrified young shavetail, for what reason he never knew, that it is not only necessary but pleasing to learn to rule and be ruled by men one detests—but not by Theller, Wood insisted to himself, desiring and accordingly justifying the utter expungement from this earth of his brother officer, whom PROVIDENCE accordingly doomed him to encounter in Lewiston, the steamboat to Walla-Walla, the first stage to Alaska, being delayed due to a leak in the boiler; so on that bright hot afternoon last summer (two months after Custer’s fall,
while Doc, Blackie and Blurick rode in Captain Travis’s thirty-two-wagon caravan toward Farewell Bend),
Wood, remembering a certain establishment in San Francisco where he had once spent a twenty-dollar goldpiece and change on a certain lady who
actually it was not her at all, but the transaction, which
made him feel ashamed, fulfilled and hilarious—
joy blossoming up around the piano-player’s ironwood hands, the bartender pacing softly in his black and white vest behind the L-shaped granite counter where a flock of gorgeously feathered soiled doves sat crossing and uncrossing their thighs, smiling at the miners who had just steamed in from Sacramento or perhaps the Klamath country and so remained both rich and desperate (but not for long); while multitudes of worthy old sports in clean shirts laughed in company at discreet tables between the wooden pillars of this establishment, temporary couples swirling wine glasses at one another, and the waiter twisted himself into a letter C as he loaded up his left arm with a mountain of dishes, convincingly pretending not to see what the diners might be up to:
Would you care to come upstairs with me, lieutenant?
No, ma’am. I’d love to, but I’ve gotten engaged.
What a sweet boy! Is that her daguerreotype?
Yes, ma’am.
And she’s promised to marry you?
Well, she—
Then here’s a kiss to remember me by—
he thought to recapitulate the triumph in a certain tent overlooking the Snake,
Smooth whiskey and good company, lieutenant! Guaranteed,
because voyaging to Alaska would be daring, so he longed to do something a trifle evil (if not so much as to become unworthy of Nanny); and therefore, having outgrown the kettles and buckets hanging from the ceiling-hooks at the sutler’s store, he sought out that tent (which he must have marked out last time), found it, ducked his head when the smiling, red-faced man in gumboots raised the canvas flap, and passed in to the secret world:
two drunken woodhawks, their timber well sold to Captain Wolf and already ten percent pissed away, and
a boy flourishing cards in his slender fingers, as delicately as a musician, and
Theller, purple-faced, lolling like a worn out cavalryman asleep in the saddle, his hand down the bosom of a plump Blackfoot squaw in a muslin dress painted with red and yellow horses
(now what seems strangest of all is not what he was doing or even that I spied him with her, but that she hadn’t yet learned to stop decorating herself with horses, as if she were still some sort of virgin in regard to higher civilization; usually they seek to imitate our white women, in order to
)
Nanny, if you could only imagine the round of the soldier’s life! If I could only tell you
and he opened his eyes, saw me and cursed.
Sometimes I do slip into reveries about that squaw! She wasn’t beautiful, but something about her dress,
the lovely horses cantering across her breasts and belly as if she were their world
and her knees apart and her bare feet in the pale stirrups of a tan saddle as we go riding through the golden grass:
She leads and I follow. At the bank of an unknown river, she sits me down. Then I commence to kiss each horse on her dress
but here’s Theller with his arm across them and his hand rooting under them, calling me the worst oath I ever knew,
the squaw hanging her head, although not for shame—
unaffected in all her ways: neither powdered cheeks nor pencilled eyebrows for her!
And I myself would have treated her kindly, and someday she and I would have journeyed to her Country of Horses.
There is a Country of Horses, Nanny, and someday, once the Army’s made it safe, I will take you there, and I will show you
Theller black, yellow and stinking, veiled in flies:
I can’t get his smell off my hands!
And what if she doesn’t care to go there?
O, to lie down now with that Blackfoot squaw, and work my hand up her dress,
kissing her red and yellow horses,
yellow like Theller’s flesh.
13
Peculiar to say, he feels that by getting acquainted with these dead men he now knows Nanny better than before.
14
Rising at two a.m. in case Mr. Joe should strike, they form a line and lie on their rifles, awaiting daylight.
Well, this sure is swell.
Quit it.
All pickets in position, Captain Pollock.
You check them every half hour.
Yessir.
Almost the Fourth of July. I suppose we’ll still be in the field,
wriggling their greasy stinking toes in their boots as the grass prickles their sweaty necks.
Anyhow, it’s better than patrolling the sinks back at Lapwai
as more rain drifts and drifts,
the coyotes singing, perhaps already rooting up the dead,
and it almost seems as if they can hear blood dripping underground.
SALMON CROSSING
JUNE 28–JULY 1
1
Hey, you scout. Where have I seen you before?
Lewiston, colonel.
What’s your name?
Jim.
O yes. Umatilla Jim.
That’s right, colonel.
Now I remember. Didn’t you track Palouses one time for Colonel Wright?
I sure did, sir. And I got me some.
And then you deserted.
Colonel Píli,* it wasn’t like that.
Well, what the fuck was it like then? Answer me right now, and if I’m not satisfied I’ll have you punished.
Fresh sign over thataway—
Well, I should say!
I did my job, colonel, and after them Palouses got whipped I asked my wages and the colonel didn’t pay me. Told me to clear the hell out or he’d hang me like the others—
Which others?
Heyoom Tookaitat for one, and then—
That’s a GODd——d Nez Perce name.
That’s right, colonel. One of the boat packers. He liked to drink sometimes. You were there.
I was where?
Well, I saw you standing by that big cottonwood tree on the south side of the Clearwater. The colonel hanged Heyoom Tookaitat for losing a bag of flour. Said he’d stolen it, but Heyoom Tookaitat said it fell in the river. When the wagon drove off and left him kicking in the air, most of the white folks clapped—
I don’t have time to shoot the shit with you, Jim. Go do whatever you’re supposed to be doing.
All right, colonel.
Jim, aren’t you married to Mr. Joe’s sister or something like that?
My wife’s the niece of his cousin.
So you’re fighting your own squaw’s relatives.
Well, colonel, I ride where I ride—
What’s her name?
Annie, colonel. She stays home.
And she’s Nez Perce, right?
Sure.
Then you’re a Dreamer. Because she must be a Dreamer.
My heart is good, colonel. I been to church—
Skedaddle,
recollecting pretty fucking well now how that hanging had gone and how immediately afterward Jim, who had actually been drummed out for running off his mouth at the colonel, rode away into the high yellow hills north of Lewiston across the Clearwater, where Theller and I used to gallop our horses up in the green grass:
I ought to tell the general, but he’s already against me.
2
Captain Paige, what news?
General, we marched along the ridgecrest as you ordered, and when we could see down into the Salmon country we discovered a large force of hostiles.
Good:
Hear, O Israel: you are to pass over the Jordan this day, to go in to dispossess nations greater and mightier than yourselves, cities great and fortified up to Heaven.
Thief treaty!
Did they leave anything behind?
Nothing of value, sir. The reds have removed their plunder, loose stock and squaws across the river to a well fortified place on the divide.
Thank you, captain. Lieutenant Fletcher, take his report. Captain Winters, detail four more scouts and sweep our back trail up to the Nez Perce village at White Bird Cañon, then ride straight back here as quickly as you can. If Joseph has divided his forces, there may be fresh sign over there.
Yessir.
Yep, that there’s a regular lodgepole trail. Must be hundreds of wild Nez Perces on the other side. Maybe all of ’em.
Not for much longer.
You got balls right now. I’m curious to see if they’ll drop off come fighting time.
And should Joseph threaten Lewiston—
What is it, Wood?
General, Captain Hunter’s men have scouted upstream. They found and buried the remains of three settlers murdered by Joseph. Apparently the bodies were pretty much all burned up except their feet in the boots.
Names?
Captain Hunter deduces they were Mason, Osborne and some Frenchman who wasn’t known in the country but—
Write up a report. Well, Captain Trimble, how was your ride in?
Tell you the truth, some of the shavetails are still pretty shaken up, general.
They’ll have to get over it.
Yessir. They never saw Gettysburg—
I first met you there, right before it got bad. Do you remember?
Of course, general. You’d already lost your arm—
So I had. Perry, your detail did mark Theller’s grave? The widow plans to move his remains.
Yessir.
Now with the blowing of the trumpet hearts are about to meet.
General, I can see those horsemen but I can’t tell who they are. Here’s my field-glass—
I don’t need it, Whipple. They’re Joseph’s Indians. You of anyone ought to recognize them. You lived with them all winter.
Now, general, I—
One can tell them at great distances by the ease and grace of the arms. See how smoothly their whips go up and down? The way we use our reins is jerky and angular in comparison.
Yessir. They’re making a real threatening demonstration—
Sir, I count eighty-seven blanket-waving warriors.
In that case we have to . . .
. . . Impractical for a pontoon train . . .
But the general promised us . . .
(the sun smoking their separate wearinesses out through their eyeballs).
Deploy a hundred sharpshooters on the ridge, doublequick.
Yessir.
Do they hope to turn my flank at Rocky Cañon?
But, general, they’re savages!
Where’s that James Reuben? I’d like to know what they’re shouting at us.
General, sir, he’s out on picket. But Ad Chapman—
All right, fetch Mr. Chapman here.
Howdy do, general.
Chapman, I’m putting you to the test. What are the hostiles crying out?
Well, general, they’re taunting our good Indians—you know, Reuben and his bunch. They’re calling on them to come over and fight.
What else?
That’s all, sir.
Can you recognize any voices? What about Joseph’s?
O, now I hear him for sure, general. He’s yelling out real bloodcurdling things, calling on SATAN—
As I expected.
Yessir.
How much were you paid to interpret at Lapwai?
Well, I used to get a dollar a day and more, hard cash money—
Are you aware of the circular from the Indian Office, dated the thirty-first?
Of when, sir?
Of last month, of course.
No, sir.
Indian interpreters must now be paid at the rate of eighty-one and a half cents per day.
