rolled into the sticky entrails that had tumbled from another soldier’s belly wound. Suddenly the two youths had a new game to play. They yanked and pulled, tore and ripped the warm, snakelike intestines from the man’s belly.
The little boy turned away, his mind already numb to the shrieking crimson spectacle all round him. Even here at his feet he could not escape the gore. Here lay three of the white-bellies, looking like helpless fish flopped on the creek bank. All three had been stripped by the women. Yet while two had been desecrated and horribly mutilated, their genitals hacked off and tossed aside, their thighs gashed, a hand gone or foot cleaved away, heads scalped and pummeled to a sticky jelly—the hairy-face in the middle remained untouched.
Why had his aunt protected this one from desecration? Why had she stood guard while his mother hauled him up the hillside to view this body? Why would they want this one, solitary soldier out of all the others to hear better in Seyan—his people’s Life After Crossing Over?
This soldier’s face bore a look of peace.
The boy felt something very different boiling inside his own belly. In summer all he ever wore was the little breechclout and his buffalo-hide moccasins. The sun’s scorching fingers raked his naked back. Trickles of sweat coursed down his heaving chest. It seemed the sun’s rays grew hotter, the stench more suffocating. He imagined the white-belly corpses inching in on him here where he sat near the crest of the hill.
“
He jerked up, his nose inches from the frightening glare of an ancient, shriveled woman. The skin on her face sagged, as did the wrinkled pair of old dugs he saw as he peered down the loose neckline of her ill-fitting skin dress. The boy swallowed sickly.
Her wild eyes darted like accusing black marbles from him, to the white soldier, to Monaseetah, and back to the soldier’s body again.
“You have not touched this one yet!” Her teeth showed black gaps from which burst a hideous odor.
“No.” Monaseetah placed a hand on the dead soldier’s chest, over his heart just above the bloody wound. “He is a … my relative.”
“You are Sioux—yes?” Monaseetah did not remove her hand from the soldier’s heart.
“Miniconjou.”
“I am Tsistsistas. I know this soldier from long ago. Several winters now. In my land to the south. This one, he was foolish to come north. But, he is my relative.”
Slowly the old one bent forward, studying the young mother’s face with a rheumy eye. “You see to him, Cheyenne sister.” The old hag peered at him closely a long moment before he pulled away, hiding behind his mother. “I want his boots, Tsistsistas. Only his boots!”
She cackled once more as Monaseetah scooped up the knee-high dusty black boots she had set aside for herself. The scuffed cavalry boots belonging to two other soldiers were nowhere near as tall as these. Running her hands over the soft, pliant black leather, the wrinkled one smiled now that the precious treasure belonged to her.
“These, little sister, will make fine bullet pouches … perhaps a quiver for some man’s arrows. Maybe a hiding place for a man’s love charms or war medicine. So very soft—”
“Take them and go, old one!” Monaseetah snapped. “Just go!”
Her fiery words caught the boy by surprise. He rarely heard his mother bark at others. She almost never shouted at him or his older brother—only when they had really deserved it.
“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—
