Custerphobes or Custerphiles, as one otherwise forgettable editorial writer had put it some years earlier. And it was true that there seemed to be no middle ground—no one who thought I was something between those opposite and mutually exclusive poles of arrogant fool or martyred hero.
Were you forgetting important things these days in your age and illness, my darling? Had senility begun to set in behind those rheumy eyes and that wrinkled, absent expression? Is it possible that you were, even as I sat opposite you, forgetting that you had led the Custerphile contingent now for fifty-seven long, bitter years? Ever vigilant in defense against any conceivable blot on my name or record of honor, you also led the offense at times, such as in 1926 and again in 1929, when you strongly objected to C. H. Asbury, then chief agent at the Crow Agency in control of the Little Big Horn battlefield that bears my name, when Asbury considered putting up even the smallest plaque honoring the name and memory of that drunkard and coward Major Marcus Reno—who, my darling, you were certain had left me and my three companies alone on that hill to die.
All those years and decades of never faltering as you led the Custerphiles in my name, never allowing the Custerphobes a foothold or fingerhold, using your grief and widowhood and dignity as your weapons, and during that time how many faux “unknown survivors” of my so-called Last Stand had you heard from or been forced to meet with? Dozens? Scores? Hundreds?
You, my love, had gone to the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago, only seventeen years after your husband had been turned into worm meat, and there had been introduced to Chief Rains-in-the-Face, who, it was bragged by the Indians even there in Buffalo Bill’s troupe, was the man who had killed me. You, my Sunshine, were all too well aware that the reason for that fat old smallpox-scarred Indian’s ascendancy in the Sioux and Cheyenne hierarchy there in Buffalo Bill’s Show—they had given Rains-in-the-Face Sitting Bull’s old cabin to live in at the Fair, the cabin transplanted right there on the Midway Plaisance, where poor Paha Sapa first met his wife, for God’s sake—was precisely the smiling, smirking Rains-in-the-Face’s claim of having personally killed me in the high grass of the Little Big Horn. And when Cody introduced the smiling, pock-faced old Indian fool, you had nodded curtly, feeling the pain slashing your insides as if someone were in your belly swinging a straight razor.
No wonder you were worn out but rigidly on guard and scowling this day, this day that only Paha Sapa and I knew was our reunion, yours and mine, my darling, when Mrs. May Custer Elmer began explaining how Paha Sapa had been there on the battlefield the very day and hour and moment that I—your husband—had died.
There was a real silence when May quit talking. Paha Sapa did not break that lengthening and audibly thickening silence, nor did you, my once and former and now lost lovely girl. The heavy clock on the bureau clunked away the passing seconds. Somewhere on the East River to the south, in the direction of the Brooklyn Bridge, a large ship’s horn bleated woefully.
Finally, after a full ninety seconds of our remaining six minutes had been fed to silence, you spoke even more softly than before, but with an inescapable edge in your tone that could have shaved me as cleanly as the straight razor even then slashing at your insides.
“You were there when my husband died, Mr. William Slow Horse?”
“Yes, ma’am. I was.”
“How old are you now, Mr. Slow Horse?”
“Sixty-eight this coming August, Mrs. Custer.”
“And how old were you then… that day… Mr. Slow Horse?”
“Eleven summers that August, ma’am. Not quite eleven that day in June.”
“What do your people call the month of June, Mr. Slow Horse?”
“Different things, ma’am. My band called June the Moon of the June Berries.”
You smiled then, Libbie, and the new, wrong teeth looked more aggressive than ever. An old predator’s overbite, not a rabbit’s.
“That name is a bit tautological, isn’t it, Mr. William Slow Horse?”
Paha Sapa did not smile or blink or look away from the cold, once-blue stare aimed at him.
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Custer. I don’t know that word… tautological.”
“No, of course you don’t, Mr. Slow Horse.”
“But my guess is that it means ‘redundant’—or, as my mentor, Mr. Doane Robinson, used to joke, ‘repetitiously redundant’—which I guess our word for June is. The Lakota word for June is wipazunkawaštewi, and it means more or less ‘the moon in which the cherries of that moon become ripe,’ and the dates for the lunar month, a moon, aren’t exactly the same as those for the modern calendar month of June.”
You squinted at him through this recital, my darling, perhaps the longest speech I’d ever heard Paha Sapa give, and everything in your squint, the set of your mouth and chin, and your posture showed that you were not listening, refused to hear, and did not care.
Finally you said flatly, “You claim to have seen my husband there on the battlefield, Mr. Slow Horse?”
“Yes.”
“Did you kill him?”
Paha Sapa blinked at that. “No, Mrs. Custer. I didn’t hurt him in any way. I didn’t have a weapon with me. I just touched him.”
“Touched him? Why would you do that if you weren’t attacking him, Mr. Slow Horse?”
“I was ten summers old and was counting coup. Do you know the term, Mrs. Custer?”
“Yes, I believe I do, Mr. Slow Horse. It’s what Indian warriors do to show their courage, isn’t it? Just touching an enemy?”
“Yes, ma’am. I wasn’t a warrior, but I was trying to show my courage.”
“Did you have with you a… what do you call it? A coup stick? I saw those when I traveled with my husband to Indian villages in Kansas, Nebraska, and elsewhere.”
“No, I only had my bare hand.”
You took a breath, Libbie, and while still sitting stiffly, leaned forward slightly, as if you were on a rusty hinge.
“Did my husband say something to you, Mr. William Slow Horse? Are you going to tell me that my husband said something to you?”
Paha Sapa and I had discussed what to say next many times. When he first suggested coming to see you, for me, several years ago, I had certain fantasies of having Paha Sapa share various secret things with you that only you and I would know, so you would understand that he was truly speaking for me. Some of the secrets seem absurd now—“Mrs. Custer, he said to remember how we went into the willows alone on the day the regiment left from Fort Abe Lincoln and what we did there… ”—and unless Paha Sapa explained that my ghost was inside him, it would make no sense anyway.
We actually discussed telling you that my ghost—what Paha Sapa thought of as my ghost—was inside him. Then I could tell you, my dearest, everything that I longed to tell you. After all, we had both lived through that strange era of spirit rappings and seances before and during the War, and more than once you had wondered aloud if there was anything to these mediums and these visits from the dead.
Now Paha Sapa could have proved that there was.
Only we decided against that. It was all too… vulgar. We had finally decided (I had finally decided) that Paha Sapa would explain to you only that I, your husband, had, with my dying breath, whispered to him, a mere boy, “Tell my Libbie that I love her and always will love her.” And we fully expected you to say, “Oh, and did you speak and understand English when you were ten years old, Mr. Slow Horse?” and he would reply, “No, Mrs. Custer, but I remembered the simple sound of the words and understood them years later when I did learn English.”
To that end, we’d shortened the message a bit to “Tell Libbie I love her.” Six simple syllables. It might seem possible, especially to a woman of ninety who had loved me all these intervening years, that I might have said that and that an Indian boy might have remembered six such syllables and finally carried them to her like six roses.
Then I heard Paha Sapa reply to you in that little room… “No, Mrs. Custer, your husband did not speak to me.
I believe he was dead when I touched him.”
You stared at him a long, long moment then—another minute of our short time together gone forever—and said coldly, “Then why did you come to see me, Mr. William Slow Horse? To tell me what my husband looked like in those last seconds? To tell me that he did not suffer… or that he did? Or perhaps to apologize?”
“No, Mrs. Custer. I was just curious to meet you. And I appreciate you giving me this time.”
Paha Sapa stood up. I felt myself fluttering in gales of inexplicable emotions—I did not even know what they were—but you still sat there and looked calmly up at this aging Indian visitor, my love, your gaze still cold but no longer suspicious or hostile. Perhaps a little puzzled.
“If you had apologized, Mr. Slow Horse,” you said to him in that whisper of a voice, “I would have told you there was no need. I realized long ago that it wasn’t you Sioux and your Cheyenne friends who killed my husband… it was those cowards and Judases in his own command like Marcus Reno and Frederick Benteen who killed my darling husband and his brothers and our nephew and so many of his troopers.”
Paha Sapa did not know what to say to that. I did not know what to tell Paha Sapa to say to that. He bowed and turned to leave. Mrs. May Custer Elmer hustled to show him out through the cluttered rooms.
There was a whisper from the parlor behind us and Paha Sapa turned back. You were still seated—seeming more shrunken somehow, my dearest, perhaps because you had slumped from that defiant posture and now looked only like a bent old woman—but you were beckoning Paha Sapa closer with a wiggle of one yellow-nailed finger.
He leaned over you, breathing in the scent of lilac toilet water and the deeper smell of a very old woman wrapped in her stifling layers.
You looked him in the eye then, looked us in the eye, and whispered… “Autie… ” or perhaps “Good-bye” or perhaps it was a pure nonsense syllable, something choked off or irrelevant to everything that had come before.
When Paha Sapa realized that you were not going to say anything else, he nodded as if he understood, bowed again, and followed May Custer Elmer out. The housekeeper, Mrs. Flood, had bustled in behind us, carrying what looked to be medicines on a tray into the parlor for you.
Back at the hotel for colored people, Paha Sapa slept well that night. His train was leaving from Grand Central Terminal at 7:45 the next morning. Although I never really slept, there were times when I faded into the nonconsciousness of the black background which I occupied when Paha Sapa did not summon me out to the light and sound, but I did not find escape there that night.
I found myself wishing that I could have told you many things, Libbie, my darling, my wife, my life.
I wish I could have explained to you that it wasn’t betrayal or cowardly officers that caused my death and that of my brothers Tom and Boston and my nephew Autie and the others there at the Little Big Horn. It was true that Major Reno was a drunk—and probably a coward—and that Benteen hated my guts (and always had) but proved his courage on the same field where Reno showed his cowardice, but none of that was relevant to my death. I know in my soldier’s heart that Reno and Benteen and the others couldn’t have come up to help me and my three surrounded companies; the four miles that separated us that day might as well have been the distance from the Earth to the moon. They had their own battle to fight, Libbie, my love, and no troopers could have reached us in time or to any effect other than dying with us.
There were just too many hostile Indians there, my dearest. Our best intelligence, the white agents at the Agencies, had assured us over and over that no more than eight hundred warriors in all, Cheyenne and Sioux, the Lakotas and Nakotas and Dakotas, all of them, had slipped away from the agencies to go hunt buffalo and fight. No more than eight hundred and probably far fewer than that, since such large bands rarely spent much time together—finding proper grazing for their horses was too difficult. And the sheer heaps of human excrement and other filth and garbage generated by camps of more than a few hundred Indians discouraged them from staying together long.
So we rode in expecting eight hundred and ran into… how many? You’ve heard all the figures, Libbie, my darling. They range from fifteen hundred warriors arrayed against us to more than six thousand, most coming from a village of ten to fifteen thousand men, women, and children, all of whom were willing to join in the fight—or at least in the scalping and mutilating. In the end, my darling, it turned out to be a matter of just too damned many Indians there waiting for us. It was unprecedented. It was unexpected. It was my undoing.
Even then, Libbie, we should have prevailed. Right up until the last minutes, I was sure we would prevail—even without Reno’s companies or Benteen’s or the supply train or the packs of ammunition.
The reason was simple: the cavalry in any solid numbers always had prevailed against Plains Indians. Our most trusted tactic was to charge any large band or village of hostiles. They might fight for a few minutes, or fight while running, but if there was a way for them simply to scatter and run in the face of a charge, they always had before. Always.
But this time they did not.
It is almost humorous when you think about it, my darling. It’s precisely what you once said to me about a skittish horse you were riding in Kansas—“Horses can be dangerous, but you can always trust them to act like horses. Once you know what they’re going to try to do to you, you can avoid it.”
I had trusted the Sioux and Cheyenne there at the Little Big Horn to act as they had at the Washita—as Indian warriors had everywhere else the Seventh Cavalry and other regiments had encountered them. Taken by surprise by a cavalry charge, they should have fought a few minutes but then scattered as they always had before.
But this time they didn’t. It was that simple, Libbie, my love.
If I had been able to talk to you that final day on April first, I might have explained to you that the sadness I felt was not for me, but for leading my young brother Tom (perhaps the bravest of all of us, he with his two Medals of Honor) and my non-soldier brother Boston (whom I hired as a scout at the last minute, on a whim, thinking that he would be sorry to have missed the Last Great Indian Fight), not to mention my nephew Autie, who had just turned eighteen and who came along precisely so as not to miss that promised Last Big Battle, all to that place on that day.
If I could, Libbie, if ghosts or Heaven were real, I would shake them by the hand and look them in the eye and apologize to all of them—especially to those men who’d followed me and trusted me for so long, like Lonesome Charley Reynolds and Myles Keogh and Bill Cooke—not for their deaths, for we all owe God a death (as Hamlet reminded us), but for the foolishness of my own assumptions and minor miscalculations that hot, humid June Sunday in 1876.
But I would also have reminded you of something, my darling. I would have reminded you of how much fun we had (and planned to continue to have, me earning money, at last, as a lecturer once that Final Great Indian Battle was over, and also writing my books, and perhaps some future in Democratic politics). But without worrying about our future, just remind you of how much fun we had.
I was a warrior and loved being a warrior. And you enjoyed the status and excitement of being a warrior’s wife, my love… or at least of being an officer warrior’s wife.
The Rebs had been the bravest enemy I would ever fight, and the hostile Indians served as a foe in the years after the War. But even then, even that last winter and spring, you and I knew that the days of an active warrior on the frontier were closing fast.
Finally, the last thing I would have told you that Saturday afternoon in your parlor of stale air was that you should have remarried. I had no doubt about that. You should have remarried as soon as you could after the Little Big Horn, Libbie, my love.
It was two years after our New York visit and totally by chance that Paha Sapa came across a newspaper quote by your “literary executor,” the same accusatory and strangely syllable-stressed Miss Marguerite Merington whom we’d met bri
efly down in the foyer, and Miss Merington quoted you as saying around the time we met you—“One does get so lonely. But I always felt I should be committing adultery if I were to wake up one morning and see any head but Autie’s on my pillow.”
Well, my darling, to that I must say to you—horse apples.
The Creator designed you, more than He did most women, I believe, to be loved, to love in return, and to be a lover.
You should have found a good man as soon after June 25, 1876, as would not have seemed scandalous—an attorney would have served (as it did for our cook Eliza) or, better yet, a judge, since you always secretly wanted to marry your father the Judge—and you should have married a good man and put our life on the Plains behind you forever. No lobbying for equestrian saddles. No endless correspondence with yellow-mustached and mawkish old soldiers who write to say “I loved General Custer” but who are really saying “I would love you, Mrs. Custer, if you would let me.” No writing romantic fantasies about a not-quite-true past with silly titles like Boots and Saddles or Following the Guidon.
You should have lived for yourself, Libbie Bacon, not for your dead husband. You should have celebrated life, not my death, and you should have become a lover again and awakened every day you could with another man’s head on your pillow and your head on his. Perhaps you could still have had a child—you were 34 when I died. Stranger things have happened. You would have lived in fullness and celebrated life then, my darling.
Instead, you “lived” to serve a ghost. And there are no ghosts, my dear.
Someday I shall explain that to Paha Sapa, who thinks otherwise. I shall try to make him understand what I discovered some years ago—that I am no ghost, nor a soul waiting to go to Heaven, but only a node in his unique empathic consciousness, a sort of simulation of a self-aware memory.
It is all Paha Sapa and a twist of his odd gift of vision and always has been. There is no ghost, no “me” here, my love. There never has been.