They were waiting.
“That’s it,” he said. “That’s all there is.”
The squaw was still frowning. She took Catherine aside and began whispering to her. Catherine nodded. The squaw nodded. “Big business deal goin on there,” Will said. The squaw came to him then and took the meat and turnips from his hands. Catherine pulled back the flap of the tent and Will went inside. The fire was still burning, but just barely. He took a log from a stacked pile, dropped it on the dying embers, fanned the fire to brighter flame with his hat.
“Come on over here,” he said.
She came to the fire.
“Let me see that sore again,” he said.
She knelt by the fire. He cupped her chin in his hand and studied her lip.
“Yeah, I reckon,” he said dubiously. He let go of her chin, went to the buffalo robe, dropped down on it, and began taking off his boots. She was still standing by the fire, the army banket around her. He wondered how many soldiers she’d had to fuck for that blanket. “Who’s the squaw?” he asked. “Your business manager?”
Her hands came from under the blanket. The blanket hung from her shoulders, open over her naked breasts. Her hands moved in the firelight, shadows danced. He couldn’t understand a fuckin word she was saying.
“You know how to write?” he asked.
She nodded.
“I’ll fetch you what to write with,” he said. “Tomorrow.”
The cottonwood was huge. It had probably been here on the riverbank for a century or more. They sat beneath it side by side, shaded from the hot July sun. The river was dry; it had not rained since the beginning of the month. Will had borrowed a carving board from the kitchen, and this was propped on her knees. Her left hand kept a dozen sheets of foolscap in place on top of it. In her right hand she held a mechanical pencil he’d borrowed from Schwarzenbacher.
“You just write down the answers, okay?” he said.
She nodded.
“Okay, what’s your full name?”
She wrote Catherine Parrish.
Under that she wrote Kewedinok.
And under that, Wumin of the Wind.
“Woman of the Wind?” he asked.
She nodded.
“Is that what this... Kewe... Ke... however you say it? Is that Woman of the Wind?”
She nodded again.
“Well...” he said, and looked again at what she’d written. “Where were you born, Catherine?”
Boston, she wrote.
“How’d you get out here?”
I came west with my father and brother.
“When?”
1837.
“How old were you?”
14.
“That makes you... you’re twenty-one, is that it?”
In Octowber, she wrote.
“So... uh... you had an Indian husband, huh? How’d that happen? I mean, where’d you meet a... an Indian to marry? You know what I’m saying?”
After, she wrote.
“After what?” he asked.
Trapers.
“Trappers?” he said. “I don’t follow. Was your father and brother trappers?”
She shook her head.
Alown, she wrote. Leff me alown. Trapers came.
They had gone off hunting, expecting to find game in the woods nearby. But instead the afternoon shadows lengthened, and she was still alone in the wagon, becoming frightened. She heard the sound of horses’ hoofs, thought at first it was her father and brother returning. Voices. Men riding out of the woods. Six of them. The one riding the lead horse had a patch over his right eye. Black leather patch. Took them only a minute to realize she was alone in the wilderness. The one with the patch dragged her from the wagon. She pleaded with him to stop, begged him, but he just kept hugging her and kissing her, talking to her in French, saying over and again, “Je t’adore.” She would remember those words always though she understood no French. He forced her open, she screamed in pain. The others laughed. They took her then in turn, the other five, and then the one with the patch again. She lay on the ground bleeding. She could hear them talking to each other in French. Their voices sounded worried. The one with the patch came to her, and squeezed her chin hard in his hand and said something to her. She knew it was a warning. She nodded. Yes. Please. Yes. Go. Leave. Please. He took a knife from his belt. He forced her mouth open.
An cut out my tung.
Her hand did not waver when she wrote this. Her eyes were dry. She sat stiffly beneath the cottonwood tree, and the pencil scratched into the stillness. In the river, a fish splashed.
The warriors who found her wandering later in the woods, half-crazed and starved, were a party of eight Ojibwa braves, far from home in search of horses and scalps. They’d apparently got both, though not of the “lesser enemy” variety they were seeking; these were no Dakota horses they trailed, six of them with leather saddles. She recognized them at once as having belonged to the trappers who’d raped her. Dangling from the warriors’ belts were fresh bloody scalps. She almost fainted at sight of them, though she herself was still bleeding — from her mouth where the tongue had been taken from it, and from below where the trappers had brutally torn her. The leader of the war party threw her over his saddle and carried her north with him to his village, where she became the second wife in his tipi. She was happy there until he was later killed in battle. Then his brother took for his own not only Catherine but the other wife as well.
“Is that the squaw you’re living with now?” Will asked.
She nodded.
“Who put those scars on your back? Who beat you, Catherine?”
Brother, she wrote.
“Your brother? I thought—”
She shook her head.
Husbin brother.
“Your brother-in-law, you mean? The one who...”
She nodded.
“And you left in the spring, is that it? You and the squaw both. The son of a bitch let you go?”
Killed. Big batil, she wrote. Dakotah.
“And so you came here.”
She nodded.
On the paper she wrote: It is a bern, you need not wurry.
“I wish I could do like you,” Gideon said. “Get myself drunk, push it out of my head that way.”
“It don’t help none,” Will said.
They were sitting high above the fort, the river at their backs, the Indian village below. This was the first of August. They had been at the fort for three days and three nights, but had not yet talked together about what had been waiting here when they arrived. There was a surprising chill on the early morning air now, and Will sat hunched inside his coat, his arms folded across his chest, his back against the rock ledge behind him.
“Just don’t seem like us no more,” Gideon said.
“I know.”
“Without her, I mean. It don’t seem like the family, Will.”
“Won’t never be the family no more, Gid,” he said. “Not the same family anyway.”
“I wish we could get them to move on,” Gideon said. “I have the feelin it ain’t good for them here. Too many damn Indians here. Remind them all the time of what happened. Don’t you think, Will?”
“I don’t know,” Will said.
“We could make it to Fort Hall before winter, couldn’t we?”
“I reckon. Be hard to get them goin, though. Pa’s already wrote to the government about buy-in a quarter section on the river. He’s plannin to squat there till he hears. Be a cabin goin up before you know it, Gid.”