she wanted to die and have it done with—just how much worse could hell be than where she was right now?
Pulling her closer and closer to death was Gritta’s belief that her children had gone on to a better place. Too long since she last saw the boys.
“Now I lay me down to sleep.”
Remembering how she always got down on her knees beside the bed the boys shared, kneeling between them. Each night Hattie knelt at her small bed nearby.
“I pray the Lord my soul to keep.”
She hadn’t seen her daughter in almost as long as she had missed the boys. Couldn’t remember—Hattie’s face. For so many years there it had been like looking back on her own childhood, so much did Hattie look like her mother.
“If I should die before I wake.”
But she would never see them again. Not living. Not in death. They had gone on to heaven, and she was going to hell for all that she had done with Usher.
“I pray the Lord my soul to take.”
How fervently she prayed that last line, repeating it over and over as she grew more and more faint, without the strength to hide the smooth, peeled twig beneath one of the table’s leg supports. It was there she had kept it over all these seasons and miles and operations she performed on herself.
Cursing her womb that had given birth to three children who now lived with God. Cursing her womb, desiring to scar it irrevocably so that no chance would the devil’s own seed stand of finding sustenance there and growing.
How long had it been? She dug at the thought the way her fingers dug at the hard, flaky soil.
She sensed again that fleeting remembrance of being bedside with the children, saying the prayer before diving between the cold sheets and blankets and the thick comforter.
Then Gritta was struck with the fact so cold and smooth, it was like the limestone walls of the springhouse where they kept the milk and butter cool. She could not say where she was, how long it had been, nor how old she had become. Nothing to relate to space and time.
The warmth between her legs was turning slightly colder now.
None of the rest mattered anymore, for the children were all gone and with God now. Only her regrets that she would not live for eternity with them in the glory of the Lord’s love. And J—…Jonah himself must surely be dead. Not come home from the war for so long. Not come after her. He was surely dead. Killed by the Yankee soldiers Sterling Price wanted to drive out of Missouri. How much longer would they be fighting?
She knew these men who rode with Usher fought and then marched back north to spend the winter. It must be a long, long war for the fighting to go on and on and on this way.
When the war ended, would she no longer be Usher’s slave? How that made her battered soul rejoice, sending tiny shards of light against all the darkness of her gloom. Not that she saw anything to change in the way things had worked out for her: getting took off that farm of theirs in Missouri was probably the best thing after all —what with Jonah killed by the Yankees and her unable to do a lot of the work it took a man to do. Better that she was took by Usher now that Jonah was dead.
Only regret she had was those children of hers dying so young.
As sure as she was about anything, she would be going to hell eventually—if this wasn’t it already.
This heat. This singing, buzzing, hot air. This endlessness. This despair and lack of any hope. Where she was, it must surely be hell.
“I pray the Lord my soul to take.”
Tall One had never dreamed he would see so many warriors together, all riding north by west, nearing the earth-lodge settlement where the buffalo hunters gathered. A wildly independent tribe, never before had the Comanche banded together in numbers anywhere near these. And with them rode the fiercest of the Kiowa and Cheyenne.
First they would strike the buffalo hunters there at the earth lodges, then spread out like the fanning tail feathers of an eagle as war parties leveled one after another of the white settlements they found trespassing on buffalo ground. How glorious would be this ride behind the war chiefs for him and Antelope!
It was to be the last summer of the white man in the land of the Comanche.
They were timing their arrival at the white man’s earth-lodge settlement, wanting to get there when this first moon of the summer had grown full and fat. Beneath the silver light of that moon they would charge in and club the hide hunters while the white men slept in their beds.
As decided by the war chiefs, the many wandering bands came together a few days ago at the mouth of Elk Creek on the North Fork of the Red River. It was there, within the boundaries of the Kiowa-Comanche Reservation itself, that the shaman Isatai had commanded a sundance lodge be erected. By the hundreds The People had come until there were more than any could ever remember celebrating this ancient ritual. Even avowed peace chiefs Horseback and Elk Chewing came south to the great sun—praying with their bands.
And after that celebration of dancing to the sun for renewal of their People, the chiefs of those warrior bands held their council of war. Kiowa under Satanta and Lone Wolf. Shahiyena under Medicine Water, Iron Shirt, and Gray Beard. Each of them came carrying the war pipes sent them by the gray-eyed Kwahadi war chief.
Still, there were holdouts. Like the Shahiyena Little Robe, who upon hearing the talk of war immediately fled with his people back to the agency. Fearing most what everyone knew was coming, the Shahiyena Stone Eagle sat arguing with himself about what path he should set his feet upon.
For the rest, the path lay clear and straight.
They had come to believe in the prophet called Isatai, come to believe that this shaman might truly be more than a mere magician. Perhaps through this powerful medicine man the Comanche finally could drive the white man from their ancient hunting ground, for all time to come.
So it had seemed most fitting, before they undertook the bloody work of war, that the Comanche chose to immerse themselves in more of the frenetic symbolism of the sun dance, excusing themselves from most of the “formalities” practiced by the Kiowa and Shahiyena. That symbolism of the sun dance had for many generations been unequivocally tied to the buffalo. And now more than ever the threat posed by the white buffalo hunters had become most real.
If the buffalo disappeared—the Comanche would be next.
At Elk Creek the bands had gathered the poles and branches for the great sun-dance arbor. At the center they raised a tall, forked ridgepole, and ringing the outer circle stood the twelve shorter poles, each one connected to the center with long streamers decorated with scalps of their enemies and scraps of fluttering calico and trade cloth. A newly killed buffalo calf, its body cavity emptied, then stuffed with willow branches, was raised to the top of the huge center pole. There it would gaze down upon the dancers, granting them its buffalo magic.
Masked clowns smeared with mud cavorted and swirled among the gathered villages, throwing mud balls at the unsuspecting and lending a carnival atmosphere to this important undertaking. These were the Comanche “Mud Men,” the
Four days of searing sun and short, chilly nights filled with the endless drumming and prayer singing by the old men. For Tall One and Antelope it proved to be a frighteningly beautiful celebration to watch. While dancers among the northern tribes hung themselves from the rawhide tethers or dragged buffalo skulls from skewers driven beneath the muscles of their backs, the Comanche did not believe it necessary to torture themselves to be heard by the Spirit Above. Still, the dancers allowed themselves no food nor water for the duration of the celebration of the sun. While these warriors danced, men and women came forward and hung small offerings of food and tobacco and scalps from the center pole. Young boys hoping one day to become full-fledged warriors tied their gifts to their tiny arrows and shot them into the sun-dance tree, far above the dancers.
And when the celebration to the sun was over, the voices of the hundreds were raised exultantly to the heavens. Never before had there been such a gathering on the southern plains: Kiowa, Shahiyena, Kiowa-Apache, and Comanche. The hot summer breeze toyed with Tall One’s single feather lashed to one of his braids. His heart filled standing there, witnessing that grand union of fighting men.
