III
Red Horse’s jaw tensed as he stepped up to the quartermaster’s table on the front porch of the commissary. A stiff wind rustled the papers on the table, and the quartermaster slapped them flat with a plump, hairy paw. The planks of the porch creaked under Red Horse’s moccasins.
Behind him, the line of Lakota women stretched around the building, and he heard Quiet Clouds’ hoarse cough. She was a kind and gentlewoman, but a cough had come upon her during the long, hard winter, as with so many others in the scraps of the tribe that remained after the massacre.
Only a few hundred Lakota lived here at the White River Agency camp, most of them women and children, and most of those ravaged by sickness, or starvation, or still recovering from wounds taken in the fighting at Wounded Knee Creek and elsewhere. They huddled now in the muddy spattering of tents next to the Bluecoat headquarters of the White River Sioux Agency. Most of their dwellings were not even proper lodges anymore, but canvas Bluecoat tents, their lodges having been destroyed or confiscated.
Quiet Clouds’ cough turned Red Horse’s heart into a gray coal.
The Bluecoat sergeant called Smith stood behind the quartermaster, rifle in his hands. Three other Bluecoats stood guard along the line of Lakota stretching behind Red Horse. Smith’s pale eyes bored into Red Horse’s. Red Horse looked down at his own arms, grown so thin from hunger, felt the tightness in his sunken belly and the way the woolen coat—a “gift” from the white man’s government—hung loose on him. He had once taken the scalp of a Bluecoat with hair the same color of dry prairie grass. For several years, as a gift of honor to his wife, he had kept the scalp in his lodge, and with it the spirit of the warrior he had defeated on the battlefield. It was among the many prizes that had been stripped from him, one by one, until nothing was left but the white men’s version of his name.
He imagined burying a warclub in Smith’s face, but would he even have the strength now for a killing blow?
Almost forty winters now behind him, and he could not have foreseen this fate. He had been a warrior since his sixteenth year. Now, the buffalo were gone. All but a few scraps of Lakota land had been stolen. All the horses that the Lakota had possessed, great majestic herds, now all slaughtered or stolen by the Bluecoats, the white men, and the iron-road companies.
Chief Red Cloud had submitted to life on a reservation, too old to fight anymore. Crazy Horse was dead. Spotted Tail was dead. And now, the last of the great Lakota leaders, Sitting Bull, in the last Moon When the Wind Shakes Off the Leaves, had been killed by Indians working for the white man, and Chief Spotted Elk’s entire band had been butchered at Wounded Knee Creek in the Moon When the Elk Shed Their Antlers. Of all the leaders, there was no one left.
All lay in the hands of the Father now. Soon the grass would be knee high, the time when the Father had foretold. The time when white men would be swept from the land, and the Earth would be renewed. Talk of the Son of the Great Spirit’s coming had diminished since the slaughter near Wounded Knee Creek, but Red Horse had not forgotten the Father’s words, or the dances in the Moon of the Brown Leaves where he had seen—
“Are you going to stand there all fucking day?” the quartermaster said.
Red Horse’s awareness returned from the land of ghost dreams. “Medicine,” he said.
The quartermaster twisted the bushy hair on his face. “Look, Red Mule. Born-with-a-Tooth got her ration of medicine. I can’t give you no more.”
Red Horse had refused to go to the white man’s schools. He had refused to take on their ways. He had refused to become a farmer in this land where crops did not grow. His poor skill with English meant that he sometimes did not understand the words of the Bluecoats, but there was no mistaking the contempt in the quartermaster’s tone. He restrained the anger from his voice. He had had enough beatings, for now. “Her name is Born-with-a-Smile.”
The quartermaster’s eyes narrowed. “What did you say?”
“I say her name is Born-with-a-Smile. I am Red Horse. She is my wife.” His English name tasted bitter in his mouth. He was not the English sound, “red horse.” No matter how the white man tried to rip away even his name, he would always be Sunka Wakan Luta. And his wife would always be Kici Iha Tunpi, at least for a while longer, until she joined their ancestors.
The quartermaster leaned forward. “And I’m telling you, Red Mule, she got her medicine. She ain’t getting no more.”
The sting of a red-hot arrow shot through Red Horse’s breast. He glanced at the guards.
The quartermaster waved his hand. “Next.”
Red Horse stood stiff as the trunk of pine tree.
The quartermaster met his gaze, unflinching. “I said fucking next!”
Red Horse clamped his teeth together and stomped off the porch, careful to avoid the tense guards. Two children coughed as he passed. Mud covered their bare legs.
He stopped there and held up his useless, helpless hands—the hands that had once carried a rifle, a warclub, a bow. These were not the hands of the Sunka Wakan Luta. They were the hands of “Red Horse,” the White Man’s dog.
A two-horse wagon rattled up the trail that ran between the shabby tent-village and the hastily made army post.
Red Horse squared himself. Maybe there was still hope. “Doc Zimmerman!”