However, I couldn’t have asked for a more ardent wife than Sunshine. That woman was utterly devoted to me, so much so—and I hate to say this, but it was true—that she commenced to bore me. I reckon the circumstances of our meeting had to do with the respective attitudes of us both. She saw it as a perculiarly touching thing that I had showed up in her hour of grievous need—though she exaggerated that: she was tough enough to have had that baby and escaped by herself—whereas to me she had started out as a burden, which while I freely assumed it there in that ravine as an emergency measure, seemed to gain weight as we lived in the camp.
I have to explain, for as you know the Cheyenne male never does what the white world understands as labor. When not hunting I spent most of my time on the flat of my back beneath a tree or, failing that, in the shade of a tepee. I gambled a little with the other braves and occasionally raced my pony which had been give to me by Old Lodge Skins, but was somewhat leery about winning on account of I didn’t want trouble with the losers. I did not join no war or raiding parties, for nowadays they was always against white men. You might see mine as an impossible position to maintain, but if so you don’t know Indians, whom you can live among on almost any terms but those of outright enmity, and I expect you could even survive the latter situation as long as you had one loyal defender. I had two: the chief and my wife. Sometimes an overwrought young man would come in with a fresh white scalp and offer to insult me with it, but I’d either handle him like I did Cut Belly or look right through him as if he was glass, depending on the situation and my judgment of his character. Or if Sunshine was around, she’d light into him so rough I’d usually end up secretly on his side, for she had a right sharp tongue and I don’t remember as I have said that whereas Cheyenne maidens was shy and soft-spoken, the married women was just the reverse and specialized in themes that in civilization was more common to the saloon than to where ladies gathered. They had license to talk this way, I guess, because in practice they was so respectable. You seldom saw a cut-nosed woman among the Human Beings—did I mention that a Plains Indian clipped off the end of his wife’s nose if she dallied with another man?
Well sir, I suppose a bachelor is at a peculiar disadvantage up against a respectable married woman everywhere in the world, and Sunshine would cast reflection on the young fellow’s potency and speculate unfavorably on the quality of his endowments, etc., with the other women laughing nearby, maybe including some young girl he had a crush on, and away he’d slink, poor devil, having arrived a hero and departed a buffoon.
Now, as if it wasn’t bad enough to be defended by a woman in that style, next Sunshine would get to boasting about me. First it was how I saved her from the Pawnee, and that story growed from what had really happened, us cowering in that bush, to my standing off five or six of them and dropping three. She wasn’t a liar: I reckon that somehow that is what she saw through the distorting spectacles of her recollection. Then of course if she could be vocal about another man’s sexual abilities of which she knowed nothing, think of what she might do with the man on whom she stood as the local authority: I become a champion stud.
And I tell you it embarrassed me to be so characterized, but you know how it is, a person is sometimes the victim of his own vanity, so I fair killed myself trying to live up to my reputation, during the nights under our buffalo robe. Jesus, there was mornings when I couldn’t stand up straight, feeling like I had been kicked by a horse into the small of my back. I guess it ain’t right to tell this, for Sunshine was my wife and though a man can talk endlessly of his adulteries and fornications, the subject is in bad taste when it concerns respectable mating, I don’t know why.
The only way I finally got off the hook was that Sunshine one day turned up pregnant. That must have been about late March of ’68, figuring on the basis of what happened nine months after; otherwise I’d never have had any idea of the time, for by then I had been with the Cheyenne for three seasons and fallen back into the style of dating things by the northward flight of the wild geese, for example, which meant the oncoming of spring, as did the appearance of hair on the unborn calves taken out of buffalo cows we killed.
