“I cannot leave you,” she protested.
“For a short time, you must. I will see you … be with you again.”
She stared at the ground, feeling the babe kick in her belly. “I understand. I must have our child among my people.”
Custer gathered her against him once more, caressing the side of her cheek with his callused fingers. “The little one cannot be born here among the white men. I fear for the child’s safety. A life of suffering, forever roaming, looking for peace, searching for his own spirit. Lost on the winds, as my spirit roams.”
He embraced her, listening to the familiar sounds of the parade—teamsters adjusting harness and brake, soldiers checking cinches and bits, stirrups and belts. Creaky leather, the way his own guts churned.
“Promise me the white man will never know of our child, Monaseetah!”
She nodded, tears streaming.
“If any of my people learn that Yellow Hair has a child,” he continued, “there will never be peace in that child’s life. Like a curse I had passed onto the blood of my body. Promise me.”
“I do, on all that my heart feels for you.”
“See he grows straight and true.”
“As his father.”
“A warrior of power and honor, Monaseetah. With mighty medicine no man can dim or shame.”
She had waited long enough and could wait no longer to ask the question. “When will I see you again?”
Behind her the old women called out, shouted for her to board quickly.
Custer glanced up nervously. Myers’s company clambered into their black McClellans, settling their rumps for a sweaty ride into the land of summer.
“I promise I will come when I can.”
“Tell me! Give me some dream to hold, though I cannot hold you!” She caressed the back of his freckled hand.
The squaws yelled for her to join them before the wagons rolled.
Custer jerked his head in sudden desperation. He wanted to say he would come soon—yet he could not lie to her.
“I don’t know, Monaseetah. If I am not there before our child is born, then I may come while the child still suckles at your breast. If not then, when the child walks. With the help of the Cheyenne, he will become a mighty warrior.”
Monaseetah’s full lips trembled. She grew afraid to speak again. The tears flowed as if some river long dammed had burst. She reached for his hand, bringing it to her lips, holding it there. Knowing no hands had caressed her as these hands had … as no man would ever touch her again.
“Monaseetah—” he licked his dry lips, “you are the woman I have waited for—like waiting for the breath of spring after too long a winter on the land. You are the spring for my heart. I will come for you.”
She pulled away as the wagons creaked into motion, the shouts for her growing insistent, hands reaching for her. Imploring her to hurry.
Yells and curses reached the sky as horses and mules were jabbed and kicked and prodded into motion. Saddle gear jangle and brassy braying, shouts and curses and whinnying. No one could overhear his final words to her.
Custer shouted it here at the last. “I will come to you, Monaseetah. To be with you for all time. When I come, I will never leave you again.”
She scrambled frantically to pull herself aboard the wagon, yanked up with the help of three old squaws who waved to the soldiers as Monaseetah leaned out the back of the wagon. From between her swollen breasts she took that red bandanna he had given her a long time ago, when she had been crying over something of little consequence. Yet, instead of drying her eyes with it now, she waved the bright bandanna to him as the wagons circled the parade, then pointed west and south toward Indian Territory.
Custer stood frozen in the center of the emptying parade, dust settling on his shiny boots, smudging his fresh blue tunic with its gold braid shimmering in the new-orange light of summer morn. He held his hand high and still, as if in prayer to what spirits there might be to watch over the future. What gods might guard that future and bring things to pass.
From her place in the wagon she gazed at that solitary figure standing tall as a mighty, wind-battered oak in the middle of that empty parade, his hand outstretched as if in prayer to her Everywhere Spirit.
“Yes, Yellow Hair,” she murmured, knowing he heard her with only his heart now, “I know of your promise— to come for me one day in the Moon of Fat Horses.”
She laid a hand across her swollen belly, the other held aloft waving that bright red bandanna for him to see as the wagons lurched past the last dull-gray cluster of Fort Hays buildings.
“Your son will know of your coming,” she promised. “In that Moon of Fat Horses when Yellow Hair comes, the son of Yellow Hair will finally know his father.”
Her black-cherry eyes glazed and she could no longer see him for the dust, for her tears.
FROM THE AUTHOR
I was born on the first day of 1947 in a small town on the plains of Kansas. That great rolling homeland of the nomadic buffalo has remained in my marrow across the years of my wandering.
From Nebraska to Kansas and on to Oklahoma, I’ve spent a full third of my life on those Great Plains. Another third growing up in the desert Southwest an arrow’s shot from the wild Apache domain of Cochise and Victorio. The most recent third of my life has passed among the majestic splendor of the Rocky Mountains—from Colorado and on to Washington state. In less than a year, I am back in Montana, here in the valley of the great Yellowstone River, in the veritable heart of the historic West. The plains and prairies at my feet, the great Rockies as my backrest.
The Great Plains and all its history run in my blood. I suppose they always will. More than merely growing up there, my roots go deep in the land that over the last hundred-odd years soaked up about as much blood and sweat as it did rain.
My maternal grandfather came from working-class stock in St. Joseph, Missouri, where he first became a carriage-riding sawbones doctor who as a young man moved to Oklahoma Territory, finding it necessary to pack two small thirty-six-caliber pistols for his own protection while practicing his medical arts from his horse-drawn buggy. In later years he would be proud to say he never stepped foot in a motorized vehicle.
It wasn’t long before Dr. David Yates met and fell in love with the schoolmarm teaching there in Osage country, Pearl Hinkle. My grandmother had bounced into The Strip, formerly called “Indian Territory” or “The Nations,” in her parents’ wagon in June of 1889 during the great land rush that settled what is now the state of Oklahoma. With immense pride I tell you I go back five generations homesteading on the plains of Kansas—Hinkles, simple folk with rigid backbones and a belief in the Almighty, folk who witnessed the coming of the Kansas Pacific Railroad along with the terrifying raids of Cheyenne and Kiowa as the Plains tribes found themselves shoved south and west by the slow-moving tide of white migration.
My father’s father wandered over to the territory from the vicinity of Batesville, Arkansas, when he first learned of the riches to be found in what would one day become south-central Oklahoma. It was an era of the “boomers”—when oil money ran local governments and bought law-enforcement officers both. Yet in that violent and lawless epoch, Oklahoma history notes a few brave men who stood the test of that time. I’m very proud to have coursing in my veins the blood of a grandfather who had the itchy feet of a homesteader turned justice of the peace in that of times rowdy, violent, and unsettled frontier.
Still, it was more than what Scotch-Irish heritage ran in their veins that both my parents passed on to me— more so the character of those sturdy, austere folk who settled the Great Plains. From my father I believe I inherited the virtue of hard work and perseverance. And from my mother, besides her abiding love and reverence for the land, I have inherited a stamina to endure all the travesties that life can throw at simple folk. Those traits she has given me, along with a belief in the Almighty—the selfsame belief that helped those hardy settlers endure through hailstorms and locust plagues, drought and barrel-bottom crop prices.
Brought up in the fifties during the era of Saturday matinees and some twenty hours of prime-time westerns
