At that minute Lavender got a bite on his fishline, for he had set down again and lifted his pole, with me alongside, and he pulled it out and there was a real nice fish on the hook, which he unfastened and tossed flopping on the bank.
“Well,” Lavender goes on, “the way I looked at it at the time, that man died happy, in the condition he liked best in all the world: stuffed with victual. I believe Lucy had cooked roast pork with applesauce that day.”
I suffered something between indigestion and heart flutter as I asked: “And Mrs. Pendrake? I reckon she got married again?”
Lavender was threading another earthworm on his hook. “The Lady,” he says, “no, the Lady closed up the shutters on that house and I recall never even attended the funeral. And the church got it a new preacher who was supposed to live in that house, but she never moved out and none of them white folks had nerve to ask her to do it, so the new one, he had to reside somewhere else, and as far as I know she is there yet.”
I was thinking my own thoughts: even for a minute the impulse run through my head to pack up whatever I was doing here and head back down to Missouri instanter, but I was old enough by now to accept the better sense. I was thirty-six and had been through too much. Believe me, the real romantic person is him who ain’t done anything but imagine. If you have actually participated in disasters, like me, you get conservative.
But while I was staring into the Yellowstone at the current making a sort of watery arrowhead around Lavender’s fishline, he says: “I stayed on there for a year or so, but now it was a house of women, so I commenced to think again-” He slapped his hand upon the ground. “Sure,” he says, “it was you yourself what had lived with the Indians. I recall it now, Jack. How you and me talked of it. Well sir, what I done-for I was freed and could come and go as I liked-I went on West one day, like I had thought of doing for quite a spell. Thisheer kin of mine had gone out with Captain Lewis and Captain Clark.…”
He went on about that slave York again, not having as good a memory as me. Suffice it to say he had had various employments and adventures before he found the type of Indian who met his needs, but he finally did, and who was they but the Sioux of Sitting Bull!
This news brung me out of my thoughts. “You didn’t!” I says, and immediately regretted my choice of words, for you see Lavender wasn’t a darky no more. I mean, he was of course still a Negro person by race, but he wasn’t in any wise a servant nor had the mentality of such, and therefore was not any more used to having his veracity questioned.
He just looked at me with an evident pride which I immediately recognized as being Indian, and I said quick: “By God,” I says, “by God, old Sitting Bull! It just surprises me, that’s all. That’s who they’re going out after now, ain’t it?”
Lavender looks sad. He says: “I married a Sioux woman of the Hunkpapa band and lived several year in a tepee made of skin.” He shook his head and that feather quivered in the band. “They are real good people, and you take old Bull, I reckon for an Indian he is what you could call a genius. When he wants to see what is happening anywhere in the world, all he has to do is close his eyes and dream and he’s got it clear.”
“Yes,” I says, “that’s right.”
The sun reflected off the lobes of Lavender’s widespread dark nose. “You recall the Reverend Pendrake, Jack,” he says. “How he was always spouting principles. They was good and even holy ones, I guess, and it was on account of them that he bought me from my old master and give me freedom. So I might be ungrateful when I say the longer I listened to him, the more I thought: he is a fool.”
“So did I,” I says, “even as a young boy.”
“But why, Jack, why did we think that?” Lavender was real quizzical, and took off his hat and dropped it to the ground, showing his head of frizzy curls. “For I was black,” he says, “but you knowed how to read and write.”
I says: “Speaking for myself, I thought he was talking about how things should be rather than as they was.”
“That’s right! That’s it!” shouts Lavender. “Whereas an Indian has it the other way around.… Well then,” he goes on, “why did both you and me turn about in time and leave the Indians, too? Tell me that.”
I says: “Because we wasn’t born barbarians.”
“You said it.”
“And it don’t work if you are aware of anything else,” I goes on.
“It’s perfect if you been born in a tent and carried on your Ma’s back and lived with hocus-pocus since the day you was born and never invented the wheel.”
“If you come from civilization,” says Lavender, “to live among the savages, it is fine for a while and then you get so powerful curious as to what is going on back home, you can’t stand it. You got to see, so you come back, and it might be good or it might be awful, but it is happening.”
He pulled in his line and picked up his fish, and we went back towards where his tent stood at the edge of the bivouac.
“We got that straightened out,” I says. “But what I wonder now is why you have come back to this country?”
Lavender looked sort of embarrassed at that. He says: “I ain’t here to fight the Sioux. I signed on as interpreter. When they see this army, why, maybe they’ll return to the agencies.”
“You think they will?”
“No,” he says. “And if they shoot at me, I reckon I’ll shoot back.”
The next day I finally seen Custer. I was still there unofficially and could have strung along that way for quite a time in a camp of that size, where as I have said there was lots of civilians as wagon drivers and such, and I considered so doing, for I was an enemy in this midst and it seemed less like treason if I didn’t sign on for nothing. But then I thought that if I was around long enough, people would become aware I wasn’t attached to any of the various services and begin to ask questions. I was afraid my sympathies might show up in any prolonged conversation with a white man, for you couldn’t walk nowhere among that bunch without hearing how they was going to whip old Bull and his cutthroats, only good redskin was a dead one, etc. On that subject, the troopers would even forget their dislike of Custer and talk of what a fighter he was.
Then I still never knowed what I intended to do. The Indian camp had not yet been located, Major Reno and his command being out on a reconnaissance mission along the Tongue River at the moment to determine just that. I guess I had some vague plan when the village was found to slip off and get there before the troops and warn the hostiles, though it was too likely I would get killed long before contacting any Cheyenne who might recognize me.
The best move at present seemed to be getting hired as scout, and that required an interview with Custer. General Terry might be in official command, but I got the impression that he did the talking while Custer acted.
I went to the headquarters tent of Son of the Morning Star and bluffed my way past the orderly-a different man from the Washita striker-and walked inside to a little camp table, and there sat the General behind it, a-scribbling as usual. I don’t know that anyone has ever pointed out what a writer Custer was: letters to his wife most every day, and he also done a whole series of articles for the Galaxy magazine while in the field. I believe he was writing such now.
He did look different with his long hair cropped off like a normal person’s, a little weaker maybe, but then that might have been only the superstition of Bloody Knife. However, I saw something else before he lifted his eyes to me. It was day outside, but he was using a candle as additional illumination, and as he was bent over his papers, the top of his hatless skull lay directly in my sight and there, on either side of a sparse yellow forelock, long spearpoints of pink skin run back almost to meet at the crown. Custer was getting bald.