to keep from caving in to the misery. She was still holding out when the tears came. She tried to stop them by burying her face in the sleeping robe. They had already had the talk about another wife, and he had already said the words, “You are plenty.” But it was not enough to stem the grief of the second baby’s passing, grief she knew he shared, and she had buried her wet face in the robe. But she could not stop, and the tears led to sobbing.
When it was over she lifted her head and found him sitting quietly at the edge of the fire, poking at it aimlessly, his unfocused eyes looking through the flames.
When their eyes met she said, “I am nothing.”
He made no reply at first. But he looked straight into her soul with an expression so peaceful that she could not resist its calming effect. Then she had seen the faintest of smiles steal across his mouth as he said the words again.
“You are plenty.”
She remembered it so well: his deliberate rise from the fire, his little motion that said, “Move over,” his easy slide under the robe, his arms gathering her in so softly.
And she remembered the unconsciousness of the love they made, so free of movement and words and energy. It was like being borne aloft to float endlessly in some unseen, heavenly stream. It was their longest night. When they would reach the edge of sleep they would somehow begin again. And again. And again. Two people of one flesh.
Even the coming of the sun did not stop them. For the first and only times in their lives, neither left the lodge that morning.
When sleep finally did find them, it was simultaneous, and Stands With A Fist remembered drifting off with the feeling that the burden of being two people was suddenly so light that it ceased to matter. She remembered feeling no longer Indian or white. She felt herself as a single being, one person, undivided.
Stands With A Fist blinked herself back to the present of the once-a-month lodge.
She was no longer a wife, a Comanche, or even a woman. She was nothing now. What was she waiting for?
A hide scraper was lying on the hard-packed floor only a few feet away. She saw her hand around it. She saw it plunge deep into her breast, all the way to the hilt.
Stands With A Fist waited for the moment when everyone’s attention was elsewhere. She rocked back and forth a few times, then lurched forward, covering the few feet across the floor on all fours.
Her hand went to it cleanly, and in a flash, the blade was in front of her face. She lifted it higher, screamed, and drove down with both hands, as if clasping some dear object to her heart.
In the middle of the split second it took the scraper to complete its flight, the first woman arrived. Though she missed the hands that held the knife there was enough of a collision to deflect its downward flight. The blade traveled sideways leaving a tiny track on the bodice of Stands With A Fist’s dress as it passed over the left breast, ripped through the doeskin sleeve, and plowed into the fleshy part of her arm just above the elbow.
She fought like a demon, and the women had a tough time prying the scraper out of her hand. Once it was free, all the fight went out of the little white woman. She collapsed into the sisterly arms of her friends, and like the flood that comes when a stubborn valve is tripped, she began to sob convulsively.
They half carried, half dragged the tiny ball of shaking and tears to bed. While one friend cradled her like a baby, two others stopped the bleeding and patched up her arm.
She cried for so long that the women had to take turns holding her. At last her breathing started to grow less intense and the sobs faded to a steady whimpering. Then, without opening her tear-swollen eyes, she spoke, repeating the same words over and over, chanting them softly to no one but herself.
“I am nothing. I am nothing. I am nothing.”
In the early evening they filled a hollowed-out horn with a thin broth and fed it to her. She began with hesitant sips, but the more she drank, the more she needed. She drained the last of it with a long gulp and lay back on the bedding, her eyes wide as they stared past her friends to the ceiling.
“I am nothing,” she said again. But now the tone of her pronouncement was measured with serenity, and the other women knew she had passed through the most dangerous stage of her grief.
With kind words of encouragement, murmured sweetly, they stroked her tangled hair and tucked the edges of a blanket around her small shoulders.
At about the same time exhaustion carried Stands With A Fist into a deep, dreamless sleep, Lieutenant Dunbar woke to the sound of hooves, stamping in the doorway of his sod hut.
Not knowing the sound, and hazy from his long sleep, the lieutenant lay quiet, blinking himself back awake while his hand fumbled along the floor for the Navy revolver. Before he could find it, he recognized the sound. It was Cisco, come back again.
Still on guard, Dunbar slipped noiselessly off the bunk, and creeping past his horse in a crouch, he went outside.
It was dark but early yet. The evening star was alone in the sky. The lieutenant listened and watched. No one was about.
Cisco had followed him into the yard, and when Lieutenant Dunbar absently laid a hand on his neck, he found the hair stiff with dried sweat. He grinned then and said out loud:
“I guess you gave them a hard time, didn’t you? Let’s get you a drink.”
Leading Cisco down to the stream, he was amazed at how strong he felt. His paralysis at the sight of the afternoon raid, though he recalled it vividly, seemed something far away. Not dim, but far away, like history. It was a baptism, he concluded, a baptism that had catapulted him from imagination to reality. The warrior who had ridden up and barked at him had been real. The men who took Cisco had been real. He knew them now.
As Cisco fiddled with the water, splashing it with his lips, Lieutenant Dunbar let his mind run further along this vein of thought and struck pay dirt.
Waiting, he thought, That’s what I’ve been doing.
He shook his head, laughing inwardly to himself. I’ve been waiting. He chucked a stone into the water. Waiting for what? For someone to find me? For Indians to take my horse? To see a buffalo?
He couldn’t believe himself. He’d never walked on eggs, and yet that was what he’d been doing these last weeks. Walking on eggs, waiting for something to happen.
I better put a stop to this right now, he said to himself.
Before he could think any further, his eyes caught something. Color was reflecting off the water on the other side of the stream.
Lieutenant Dunbar glanced up the slope behind him.
An enormous harvest moon was beginning to rise.
On pure impulse, he swung onto Cisco’s back and rode to the top of the bluff.
It was a magnificent sight, this great moon, bright as an egg yolk, filling the night sky as if it were a whole new world come to call just on him.
He hopped off Cisco, made himself a smoke, and watched spellbound as the moon climbed quickly overhead, its gradations of topography clear as a map.
As it rose, the prairie grew brighter and brighter. He had known only darkness on previous nights, and this flood of illumination was something like an ocean suddenly drained of its water.
He had to go into it.
They rode at a walk for half an hour, and Dunbar enjoyed every minute of it. When he finally turned back, he was charged with confidence.
Now he was glad for all that had happened. He wasn’t going to mope anymore about soldiers who refused to arrive. He was not going to change his sleeping habits. He was not going to patrol in scared little circles, and he was not going to pass any more nights with one ear and one eye open.
He wasn’t going to wait any longer. He was going to force the issue.
Tomorrow morning he was going to ride out and find the Indians.
And what if they ate him up?
Well, if they ate him up, the devil could have the leftovers.
