Well, Olga and Little Horse come in again and cooked that dog and served him up, and my ex-wife bawled Younger Bear out from time to time and give me no more notice than she had before, and I reckon if Little Horse had told her anything about me, it was some fantastic story that would never remind her of Jack Crabb.
Somehow I ate enough to be polite and when done even extended the return invite that manners called for.
I says: “I am married to the daughter of Shadow That Comes in Sight, who you know was a great warrior.” I had some pride, too, and it had begun to get me that this Indian was bragging about having my white wife in his tepee. Though I wasn’t angry at him, really, and if I hated him, it wasn’t in the fashion that I had imagined I would hate the man what held Olga. For he wasn’t detaining her: that much was clear. And though she seemed in a foul mood, it was the kind a female finds strangely satisfying. She had something on him; had found out probably, I guess from Little Horse, that he had showed the white feather at Sand Creek and was never going to let him forget it.
I hadn’t seen this side of Olga when we was married, thank the good Lord, though I realized now that I might have, had she known about that business flop I suffered in Denver. But she hadn’t. She never knew about anything in them days but keeping house and tending to Gus. She hardly knowed any English, I believe that’s why. But by Jesus how she had took to Cheyenne life! After cooking that dog, she had went out and worked alongside and bantered with them other Indian women and beyond her skin and hair you’d never been able to distinguish amongst them.
I be damned! Excuse my cursing. It’s just that it was a wonder to me and I don’t know how to express the measure of it. I wasn’t sad and I wasn’t mad. I wasn’t even embarrassed, though I might have been if I hadn’t been wearing that buffalo hat and face paint. For it was Jack Crabb who had lost his wife, not Little Big Man; that was the way to look at it. You might think I should have been dying for the details of the final moments in which that little group of whites was overrun by the Indians down on the Arkansas and Olga and Gus was carried off; I should have wanted to discover from Younger Bear the name of the brave what had sold them to him, and go kill that Indian to protect my honor.
But none of that occurred to me at this time. No, seeing my wife and boy in Younger Bear’s tepee, both of whom was apparently prospering in their own style, I was impelled rather to make that announcement of my own marriage to Sunshine. I done more: I boasted that, because her father was dead and she didn’t have no brothers, I didn’t pay nobody a single horse for her.
Now like most braggarts, Younger Bear couldn’t stand to hear nobody else steal his thunder. He commenced to pout and chewed forever upon the same fragment of gristle. His eyes had got more Oriental as he grew older, and now they almost disappeared beneath the bulge of his low forehead and the underlying tear-sacs traced in paint that hadn’t been altogether washed off by his bath. I had had a feeling all along on this visit that he didn’t recognize me—that is, of course he knowed I was white though dressed like a Cheyenne, but did not connect me with his boyhood. The only other time I had seen him since the old days had been that once when he was a Contrary, lost in his backwards scheme.
Well sir, he don’t say a thing now until we finish off our chuck and wipe our hands upon our garments and go outside, and there is Olga and some other women fleshing a fresh hide that is staked down upon a spot from which they have swept the snow—her big bottom is pointed towards me, and I would never have recognized it, for back in the old days Olga was robust but never portly. And little Gus runs by, ducking an imaginary bullet fired from a stick-gun by a brown playmate who he must have euchred into impersonating a white enemy. Only a son of mine could have pulled off such a trick, and damn me, that incident touched me more than anything so far. That was the closest I come to calling him, saying: “I’m your Pa, boy. Don’t you recall your old Daddy?”
But of course I never, for it wasn’t the place nor the time, and how in hell would I ever explain the get-up I was wearing to a five-year-old. I’m telling the truth here, and the truth is always made up of little particulars which sound ridiculous when repeated. But I’m prepared to say that maybe I didn’t take back my wife and boy because I was wearing them buffalo horns, when everything was said and done.
Well, I took leave of Younger Bear and renewed the invite to come and eat at my lodge the next day and went so far in a bravado intended to cover up the emotion I felt on seeing Gus as to add: “And bring the whole family!”
The Bear suddenly come from his coma and says to me, very keenly: “You have decided to stay.” So he did recall me.
