The Yellowstone (10 page)

Chapter 14

Hoop-and-stick-game moon

Mac felt uneasy in the Cheyenne camp until Calling Eagle herself suggested a sweat-lodge ceremony.

Everything had gone all right. People were friendly. Every day Mac walked awhile around camp, regaining his strength. The third afternoon he and Blue helped move the horse herd, and that left Mac exhausted.

Reshaw was long gone, and well gone, as far as Mac was concerned. The breed took two horses and would probably ride them hard, alternately, until he got to Fort Platte. The Cheyennes told him about some Sioux wintering a couple of days south on Powder River. If he got hit by a big storm, Reshaw could retreat to their camp. He knew better than to come back here.

Mac had failed to find out exactly what sort of insult Reshaw offered. Calling Eagle clearly intended to say no more about it, and Strikes Foot silenced Mac’s clumsy hints with glowers. Blue claimed to know nothing about it.

Mac wondered if Blue knew about himself and Annemarie. He wondered if anyone knew, or everyone knew. Every day he took long rests in the tent, and most days Annemarie slipped in to make the second half of his rest glorious.

Mac was wonderstruck at what lovemaking could be in the presence of love.

When he was alone and started thinking, Mac was damned nervous. He was not yet sure the affair of Reshaw wouldn’t come back at him. He was also concerned about getting back to the fort. Though too weak to leave and reluctant to be away from Annemarie, he was afraid to stay much longer. His men and enterprises were unsupervised, and Reshaw wouldn’t help them—he might cause trouble. Though the winter had been easy, the snow was deepening steadily, and huge storms could come at any time.

Most of all, Mac was uneasy about his liaisons with Annemarie. What would Strikes Foot do if he found out? Denounce her? Run her off? Run the two of them off? Or would he wave it off as the white man’s way?

Mac couldn’t hope for the last. And he couldn’t stop himself from touching Annemarie. Yet he condemned himself for risking his entire trading enterprise and their future for lust.

Lust, yes, that was what he called it in bad moments. But he knew it wasn’t lust.

He counted months. If she got pregnant, they could have the wedding in June, which was only five months away, and she wouldn’t be showing yet. If he could leave, simply get himself out of her presence, maybe they would survive their desire. Their love.

Late one afternoon Calling Eagle came to the tent, again just after Annemarie had left, and announced she would hold a sweat for Mac the next night. Mac thanked her graciously and started to worry.

On the night of the sweat, Mac was acutely apprehensive. He hadn’t done a sweat before—he had refused opportunities with ironic remarks about self-punishment. He dared not refuse this one. It was a sign of good faith by Strikes Foot and Calling Eagle, and the last gesture of his healing.

He watched the preparations. The sweat lodge, a little away from camp circle, was a low hut of willow sticks stuck in the ground and lashed into a frame. Calling Eagle and Buffalo Berry got a sizable fire going four or five steps from the entrance, which faced east, and pushed big rocks into the coals. In the middle of the hut was a pit for the stones. Under Calling Eagle’s supervision, the boy covered the willow framework with scraped buffalo hides—covered it tightly, to keep the steam in. From the lodge Calling Eagle brought a rattle, a firkin of water, and some sage branches.

At dark the company assembled. Strikes Foot, without his hoof appendage. His brother Three Feathers, a gangly, gap-toothed man given to practical jokes. Buffalo Berry, who would stay outside during the sessions of steaming and provided fresh-heated rocks during the intervals. Calling Eagle, the leader. And Mac, nervous.

Everyone was casual, chatting, at ease, despite the serious nature of the event. When Calling Eagle said it was time, all stripped to a small breechcloth.

As they entered, Mac noticed that a huge moon, as yellow and textured as grapefruit rind, was rising in the east. He had been gone from Fort Platte one moon already.

When the lodge door closed, the blackness inside was absolute. Mac was edgy. By prior instruction he sat erect in the darkness, legs crossed, knees near the hot rocks. Skin brushed his shoulder—Calling Eagle stirring. He was naked in the dark with men of strange customs, and he was afraid.

Mac heard Calling Eagle dip the sage into the water. Hissing erupted. Heat exploded in Mac’s face, searing him—he feared he couldn’t breathe.

After a moment his panic eased. Perhaps the heat had subsided, too, but it was terrible. He was sure he was gasping out loud. He wondered if the others were chuckling at his agony. He wondered if he’d have to slip out, and so humiliate himself. He wondered if he
could
slip out.

Mac heard a brushing sound, heat flared at him again, and the smell of sage came strong into his nostrils.

Calling Eagle began a chant. Mac ignored the words, but the drone distracted him a little from his pain, took the bitter edge out of the heat. From time to time he heard his name. Mac thought he was going to survive.

Silence. The dip of sage. Mac caught his breath. Again pops and hisses, again the heat erupting in Mac’s face, up his nose, and into his lungs. He felt a desperate need to cough, but he couldn’t.

After a moment the pain eased. The smell of sage came to him again and Calling Eagle resumed chanting. Too exhausted to follow the Cheyenne words, Mac let them flow over him like water. He imagined the creek, its current ambling over smoothed rocks, and he felt cooler.

After a while, a measureless while, Calling Eagle threw back the lodge cover and cooling air rushed in. Across the rock-filled pit, Strikes Foot lifted the edge of a hide and slid out. Mac did the same. The cold air was delicious.

He lay next to Calling Eagle, a banked fish, panting.

Strikes Foot and Three Feathers, on the other side of the lodge, were murmuring. Mac sensed Calling Eagle waiting and at last the words came.

“Son, you are uncomfortable with
hemaneh
.”

Oh, God, not now, Mac cried to himself. Calling Eagle waited. At last Mac nodded. Buffalo Berry was taking new rocks into the sweat lodge.

“It is important that you hear me.” Mac nodded again. She raised her voice liturgically. “
Hemaneh
are born so. We are chosen. We are neither man nor woman.”

She let it sit a moment. “We discover our calling in dreams.” She was speaking seriously, eloquently, joyously. She was a saved soul softly extolling her salvation. “Everything about us is neither man nor woman. Even our dress speaks that.” She smiled a little. “I am no secret among Cheyennes—only you did not know me.”

Mac remembered touches about her attire that were usually masculine, oddities he had ignored.

She began in singsong again. Her tale—her song—seemed mesmeric. “We
hemaneh
are chosen to do many things for the people that neither man nor woman can do. When a young man needs an irresistible love song, we dream one. When he wants a bride, we make the arrangements. We build the bonfires for the scalp dances. When couples have difficulties, we help them understand each other. We raise other families’ children. We heal, and so serve on the warpath. We dedicate the medicine-lodge ceremony.”

Mac knew this last alone would make the man-woman central to Cheyenne religion.

Then in a soft, dovelike utterance, Calling Eagle added, “And we have sex like women.”

There it was. She was looking at Mac as though with deepest compassion.

“It is time,” she said, and reentered the lodge. Powerless, Mac crawled after her into the darkness.

The second session seemed identical to the first, but Mac’s experience of it was different. He felt more relaxed. Letting his chest open, he drew in the heat confidently. The pain seemed less—or maybe only his fear was less. He felt a little woozy, a little dreamy. He could nuzzle up to the pain of the steam. Once again he paid no attention to the words of Calling Eagle’s song.

In good time she opened the door, and Mac followed her out into the night again. The air was deliciously cold. The moon was risen now, not so bulbous, and chastely white.

Calling Eagle started in matter-of-factly, as though she hadn’t stopped. “You Frenchmen misunderstand
hemaneh
. We hear that you shun and despise your own
hemaneh
. You also shun and despise your crazy ones. You might as well hate the trees and the grass.

“Then you make no sense again. Hating
hemaneh
, you then ask us for things we cannot do.” She waited, then went on in her matter-of-fact way. “It is not our nature to play the man in the buffalo robes. Only the woman.” She seemed to mean particulars Mac did not want to think of. He was amazed she could speak without embarrassment. “And only at the times and places chosen for us.”

Mac breathed in the sweet cold, watching the infinite stars. He heard sweetly, without thought.

“There are many ways,” Calling Eagle concluded. “Each has something to offer the people. You need not be afraid of my way.”

“Thank you for this,” Mac murmured.

Calling Eagle got up. “I’m not finished with you, Frenchman. You have lots to learn. But I’ll wait till we finish sweating.” Said without a hint of smile.

Mac and Calling Eagle stood in the snow, bare-footed and almost naked. Annemarie spread elk robes on the ground, and the three sat. Mac was still light-headed from the sweat.

The cold air felt good. He reached down, scooped up a handful of snow, and rubbed it on his arms. Wonderful. Then he rubbed snow on his face and chest. Amazing. Something he’d never have tried. Naked and giddy in the snow under the stars.

Calling Eagle directed him with a hand to sit. Annemarie handed him the four-hole capote, but he didn’t put it on yet. The night might be near zero, but Mac felt flushed from the sweat.

“She’s with child,” Calling Eagle said. For a crazy moment Mac thought Calling Eagle meant herself or Buffalo Berry or…Annemarie? Pregnant?

By an act of great self-control he did not put his arm around her. He threw the capote over his shoulders.

“We love each other,” he said simply, seriously.

Calling Eagle spoke a little sharply. “The child is not yours. Not so soon.”

Right.

“She was carrying a child when she and Lame Deer came back from the Assiniboins in the plum moon. I saw the changes in her body. Her mother saw. No one else knew.”

Mac looked at Annemarie. Her eyes were on her knees.

“Lame Deer should have kept her away from the Assiniboins. They live too near the Frenchmen. Besides, they have loose ways of their own.”

Calling Eagle glared at Mac. “She will be shamed among the Cheyenne people, Frenchman. Perhaps she is shamed in your eyes. Do you still want her?”

Mac looked at Annemarie. She would not lift her head. By the full moon he could see her cheeks wet and glistening.

“You must decide now, Dancer. Do you want her? And the child? She says the father is a Frenchman.”

“Annemarie, do you want me?”

Calling Eagle broke in harshly. “She cannot tell you what is in your heart, Frenchman. Do you want her?”

Mac felt dumbstruck.

“Speak up.”

He nodded his head. “I want her.”

“Are you sure?”

“I am sure.”

“She has told me she wants you. It is settled.”

Annemarie was weeping openly.

“She will be in disgrace with her people—the Cheyennes may not trade with you.”

“I want her. I want her for my wife.”

Calling Eagle nodded. Twice. “You are fortunate, daughter.” Then to Mac: “You must go. Tonight. Now. Your gear is packed. The Blue has the horses, your clothes, and the furs. He is waiting in the cottonwoods a mile down the creek. There is no ring around the moon, and you may have good weather.”

Calling Eagle stood up, and smiled, perhaps softly. “I wish you well. Sometimes love matches are the best, sometimes not.” Mac and Annemarie were on their feet too, murmuring thanks. “Ride hard for two days. Strikes Foot may get angry. I can appease him, but he may insist on following and punishing her. Who knows? He is a man.”

Calling Eagle wheeled and crunched off toward the lodge.

Mac stopped her with a call. She came back.

“Will you do us a service?”

“If it is quick.”

Mac turned to Annemarie. The girl was still struggling against her tears and wouldn’t meet his eyes. He wrapped his arms around her and drew her close. He could feel her sobs against his chest.

“I promised her we would be married properly, in the Frenchman style. We will be later. For now, will you say the Frenchman words?”

Calling Eagle smiled crookedly and shrugged.

“In nomine Patris”
recited Mac, and he waited for Calling Eagle to repeat the phrase.

“Et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti…”

Calling Eagle parroted the syllables.

“Ego conjungo in matrimonio.”

When Calling Eagle finished, she held up one hand and made the only Christian gesture she knew, the sign of the cross.

To Mac her hand loomed huge and dark in front of a bland, inscrutable moon. Her smile was ancient, ironic, world-weary.

For Mac the long journey toward home was a strange and shifting wandering across a desolate dreamscape.

The days were brief but seamlessly sunny, and cold, as midwinter days in Powder River country could be. The sun turned the vast, broken plains into an empty, rumpled, glistening desert of snow. The dark dots of sagebrush and distant cedars only accented the luminous whiteness. An occasional dark line of willows acted as visual relief. But the plains were ever the same, unendingly flat, monotonous, folding and unfolding, unbroken.

Annemarie, uncomfortable, widened the eye holes in her bandanna without telling Mac or Blue. By the middle of the third day she was snow-blind. At dawn and dusk she could look around gingerly. The rest of the time Mac was obliged to lead her horse and both pack horses, and she rode darkly, miserably, through a landscape of dazzling light.