Time of the Wolves Page 7

  If John sensed that something more terrible than a wolf attack had transpired during those dark hours, he never spoke of it. Certainly he knew Sarah was in grave trouble, though, because she never said a word throughout her entire convalescence, save to give her thanks when William returned—summoned by them from the East—and took her home. Within the month the Carstairs had deserted their claim and left Kansas, to return to their native state of Vermont. There, Alma hoped, the young woman would somehow find peace.

  As for herself, fear still curled in the pit of her stomach as she waited for John on those nights when he was away. But no longer was she shamed by the feeling. The fear, she knew now, was a friend—something that had stood her in good stead once, would be there should she again need it. And now, when she crossed the prairie, she did so with courage, for she and the lifesaving fear were one.

  Her story done, Mrs. Clark smiled at the historian. “As I’ve said, my dear,” she concluded, “the women of the Kansas frontier were uncommon in their valor. They faced dangers we can barely imagine today. And they were fearless, one and all.”

  Her eyes moved away to the window, and to the housing tracts and shoddy commercial enterprises beyond it. “I can’t help wondering how women like Alma Heusser would feel about the way the prairie looks today,” she added. “I should think they would hate it, and yet. . . .”

  The historian had been about to shut off her recorder, but now she paused for a final comment. “And yet?” she prompted.

  “And yet I think that somehow my grandmother would have understood that our world isn’t as bad as it appears on the surface. Alma Heusser has always struck me as a woman who knew that things aren’t always as they seem.”

  Sisters

  The first time Lydia Whitesides saw Curious Cat looking through her kitchen window, she was more startled than frightened. She was sifting flour preparatory to making the day’s bread, and had turned to see where she’d set her big wooden spoon when a face appeared above the sill. It was deeply tanned, framed by shiny black braids. The dark eyes regarded Lydia solemnly for a moment, and then the face disappeared.

  Well, that’s quite something, she thought. The Indians in this part of central Kansas were well known for their curiosity about the white man’s ways, and Lydia had heard tell of squaws and braves who would enter settlers’ homes unbidden and snoop about, but none had ever paid the Whitesides a visit. Until now.

  “Thank the Lord it was a timid squaw,” she murmured, and went on with her baking.

  Lydia was not unfamiliar with Indians. She and her husband, Ben, operated a general store on the main street of Salina, and, when she clerked there in the afternoons, she traded bolts of cloth, sacks of flour and sugar, and dried fruit—but never firearms or whiskey; the Whitesides stood firm on that point—for the pelts and furs that the Kaw tribesmen brought in. The members of this friendly tribe spent hours examining the many wares, and the women in particular displayed a fascination with white babies. Their demeanor, however, was restrained, and previously Lydia had seen no evidence of the Indians’ legendary boldness.

  In the remaining few days of that month of April, 1866, the squaw’s face appeared frequently at the kitchen window. At first she would merely stare at Lydia, then her gaze became more lively, moving about the room, stopping here and there at objects of interest. Lydia watched and waited, in much the same way she would were she attempting to tame a bird or squirrel. Finally, a week after her initial visit, the woman climbed up on the sill and dropped lightly to the kitchen floor. Lydia smiled, but made no move that would frighten her.

  The squaw returned the smile tentatively and glanced about. Then she went to the nearby stove and put out a hand to touch it. Its black iron was hot, and the woman quickly drew back her hand. She regarded the stove for a moment, then went on to the dish cupboard, drawing aside its curtain and examining the crockery. As she proceeded through the room, looking into drawers and cupboards, she barely acknowledged Lydia’s presence. After some ten minutes of this, she climbed through the window and was gone.

  Curious, Lydia thought, like a cat. And at that moment, in her mind, Curious Cat was named.

  The next day Curious Cat returned and reëxamined the kitchen. The day after that she moved boldly through the rest of the house. Lydia followed, not attempting to stop her. She had heard from other settlers that an Indian intent on snooping could not be reasoned with; to them, their behavior was not rude and intrusive, but merely friendly. Besides, Lydia was as interested in the squaw as the squaw was in the house.

  Curious Cat seemed fascinated by the mantel clock; she stood before it, her head swaying, as if mesmerized by its ticking. The spinning wheel likewise enchanted her; she touched the wheel and, when it moved, pulled her hand away in surprise. She gazed for a long moment at the bed with its patchwork quilt and lace pillow covers. When she turned her eyes to Lydia, they were clouded by bewilderment. Lydia placed her hands together and tilted her head against them, her eyes closed. Curious Cat nodded, the universal symbol for sleep having explained all. Before she left that morning she placed her hand on Lydia’s stomach, rounded in her fourth month of pregnancy.

  “You papoose?” she asked.

  “Yes. Papoose in five moons.”

  Curious Cat beamed with pleasure and departed her usual way.

  Thus began the friendship between the two women—so different that they could barely converse. Lydia did not mention Curious Cat’s morning visits to her husband. Ben had spent a year in Dodge City before he had met Lydia and settled in Salina. He had arrived there in 1864, shortly after the government massacre of the Cheyennes at Sand Creek, Colorado and had seen the dreadful Indian retaliation against the plains settlers. Murder, plundering, and destruction had been the fruits of the white man’s arrogance, and on the frontier no settler was safe.

  Although Ben was fully aware of the differences between the peaceable Kaws and the hostile Comanches, Cheyennes, Arapahoes, and Kiowas, he had been badly scarred by his frontier experiences—so much so that he preferred Lydia or his hired clerk to wait on the Indians who came to the store. He would have been most alarmed had he known that a Kaw woman regularly visited his pregnant wife at home. Although Lydia was not afraid of her husband’s anger, she held her tongue about the squaw. After all, she did not wish Ben to be troubled, nor did she intend to bar the door—or, in this case, the window—to Curious Cat.

  During her afternoons at the store, Lydia made discreet inquiries about Curious Cat among the squaws whose English she knew to be better than average. The woman was easy to describe because of an odd buffalo horn necklace she habitually wore. When Lydia did so, the women exchanged glances that she could only interpret as disapproving.

  Finally a tall, raw-boned woman who seemed to be the leader of the group spoke scornfully. “That one. Cheyenne squaw of White Tail.”

  That explained the disapproving looks. White Tail was a local chieftain who at times in the past had allied himself with the hostile tribes to the west. That he had taken a Cheyenne wife had further proven his renegade leanings to his people. Curious Cat undoubtedly lived a lonely existence among the Kaws—as lonely, for sure, as that which Lydia herself lived among the ladies of Salina.

  It was not that the townswomen shunned her. If anything, they were exceptionally polite in their dealings, particularly when they came to trade at the Whitesides’ store. But between them and Lydia there was a distance as tangible as the pane of glass that would stand between her and Curious Cat should she close the window to her. The townswomen did not mean to ostracize or hurt Lydia; they simply had no way of engaging in social intercourse with one of her background.

  She had been born nearly eighteen years before to parents who traveled with a medicine show—one of the first small rag-tag bands to roam the frontier, hawking their nostrums to the settlers. Her parents had performed a magic act—The Sultan and Princess Fatima—and Lydia’s earliest recollections were of the swaying motion of the wagons as they
moved from outpost to outpost. Even now she could close her eyes and easily conjure up the creak of their wheels, the murmur and roar of the crowds. She could see the flickering of torchlight on the canvas tent. And she could smell the sweat and grease-paint and kerosene and—after her mother died when she was only five—the whiskey.

  After his wife’s death, her father had taken to drink, and to gambling. After the shows he went to the saloons in the strange towns, looking for a game of faro. Often he took his young daughter with him. Lydia learned to sleep on his lap, under poker tables, anywhere—oblivious to the talk and occasional shouts and tinny piano music that went on around her. When she was nine, he put her to work as Princess Fatima. She hated the whistles and catcalls and often-evil attention from the men in the crowd. Many was the time that she stumbled with weariness. But in her world one did what one had to, even a nine-year-old. And she was effective as Princess Fatima. She knew that.

  Ben Whitesides had realized it, too, the first time he saw her in Wichita, where he had drifted after leaving Dodge City. But, as he confided to her later, he had seen more than her prettiness and easy charm, had seen the goodness she hid deep inside her. In spite of the unwholesome reputation of the show people, he had courted her. For three weeks he had followed the caravan as it made its way from Wichita to Montgomery County; at night his clean, shining face would be the first she would spy in the crowd. Lydia had her doubts about this gentle, soft-spoken young man—his fascination with her, she thought, bespoke a lack of good sense. And much as she hated her nomadic existence, it was all she had known. Much as her increasingly besotted father angered her, she loved him. But Ben persisted, and in one month more he made her his wife.

  Ben Whitesides had given her a home, a respectable livelihood, the promise of a child. But he could not eradicate the loneliness of her life here in Salina. No one had been able to do that. Until now. Now there were the eagerly awaited visits from the Indian woman she had named Curious Cat.

  At first the two could converse very little. Curious Cat knew some English—as most of the members of the local tribe did—but she seemed reluctant to speak it. Lydia knew a few Indian words, so one day she gave Curious Cat a piece of fresh-baked cornbread and said the word for it in Kaw. She was rewarded by an immediate softening in the other woman’s eyes. The next day Curious Cat pointed questioningly at the stove. Lydia named it in English. Curious Cat repeated the word. Their mutual language lessons had begun.

  In the weeks that followed, Curious Cat learned the English for every object in the house. Lydia learned words, too—whether they were Kaw or Cheyenne she wasn’t certain. Curious Cat told her her name—Silent Bird—and Lydia called her by it, but since the woman was neither bird-like nor silent, she remained Curious Cat in Lydia’s mind. In a short time she and her Indian friend were able to communicate simple thoughts and stories, to give one another some idea of their lives before the day Curious Cat had decided to look into the white woman’s world through Lydia’s kitchen window.

  The first of these exchanges came about on the day after Lydia’s birthday, when she wore for the first time a soapstone brooch etched with the shape of a graceful, leafless tree—her gift from Ben. The tree, her husband said, reminded him of those he had seen on the far western plains, before fortune had brought him to her.

  Curious Cat noticed the brooch immediately upon her arrival. She approached Lydia and fingered it hesitantly. The intensity of emotion in her liquid brown eyes startled Lydia; the squaw seldom betrayed her feelings. Now she seemed in pain, as if the brooch called forth some unwanted memory.

  After a moment she moved away and went to see what Lydia was baking—her ritual upon arriving. Her movements were listless, however, her curiosity about what was in the oven obviously forced. Lydia motioned for her to come into the parlor and sit beside her on the settee. Curious Cat did so, placing her hands together in the lap of her faded calico skirt.

  Lydia touched the brooch with her forefinger.

  “What is it? What is wrong?”

  Curious Cat looked away, feigning interest in the spinning wheel.

  “No, you must tell me.”

  The anguished brown eyes returned to Lydia’s. “The tree . . . my home. . . .”

  “The tree reminds you of where you were born, on the plains?”

  Hesitation. Then a nod.

  “Tell me about it.”

  Curious Cat’s face became a battleground where emotions warred: sadness, yearning, and anger. For a moment Lydia feared that what she wanted to say would be too much for their shared rudimentary language, but then Curious Cat began to tell her story in a patchwork of broken phrases, gestures, and facial expressions that conveyed far more than the most eloquent speech.

  She had been born on the far western reaches of the Great Plains, to a chieftain of one of the Cheyenne’s most powerful clans. When she reached womanhood, a match had been arranged with the son of another powerful chieftain—a union that would ally the two great clans. The young man, Curious Cat indicated, was far more than agreeable. She had watched him from afar, and found him brave as well as handsome.

  But then came the massacre of the Cheyennes at Sand Creek. Curious Cat’s father was killed, and her brother disappeared after subsequent hostilities near Wichita. It was said among his tribesmen that he had fled, a coward. Now Curious Cat and her mother found themselves ostracized as family of a traitor, with no man to protect and provide for them. The young brave to whom Curious Cat had been promised would no longer look upon her face.

  Within months, Curious Cat’s mother had died, broken and weakened by the struggle to survive. Curious Cat lived off the meager kindnesses people showed her. When White Tail of the Kaws traveled west, hoping to strike an alliance between his tribe and the war-like Cheyennes, his eye was caught by the ragged outcast; he spoke of his interest to the chief of her clan, and it was deemed suitable that she leave as White Tail’s squaw. With her departure, a shameful reminder would be removed.

  Now, Curious Cat told Lydia, she lived among the Kaws much as she had among her own people. True, she had White Tail to protect her, and life was not such a struggle. But his war-like ways had made him and his family suspect, and the women kept their distance from his squaw. She was to be forever a stranger in the Kaw village.

  So this, Lydia thought when Curious Cat was still, was the root of the bond she had sensed between them. They were both strangers condemned to loneliness. After a moment she told her own story to the Cheyenne woman, and, when she was finished, they sat silently, yet at ease. The bond between them was welded strong.

  The trouble began when customers at the store told Ben they had seen a squaw entering and leaving his property on a number of occasions. Ben was concerned and questioned Lydia about it. She readily admitted as much.

  “The Kaw are a curious people, Ben. The squaw comes to spy. But she is harmless.”

  “She may very well be, but what of her tribesmen?”

  “No one has come here but her.”

  “Still . . . they say she is a strange one. An outcast.”

  “And how do they know this is the woman of whom they speak?”

  “The buffalo horn necklace she wears makes her recognizable. It is Cheyenne, and they are war-like.”

  Lydia pictured the necklace, which Curious Cat fingered often, as if to preserve her last link to the people who had sent her into exile. “But if she is with the Kaws, she is Cheyenne no longer.”

  “You cannot be sure of that. The Indians are a peculiar race . . . who knows what they may be thinking, or where their loyalties lie?”

  Lydia was quite sure that Curious Cat’s loyalties lay with no tribe, but she knew she could not explain that to Ben. She fell silent, seeking a way out of the dilemma.

  Ben said: “I am only thinking of you and our child. The next time this squaw comes around, you must bar the door.”

  The way out was in his words. “That I will,” she agreed. Ben was unaware that Curious Cat had
entered and left by the window. By saying she would bar the door, she was not actually lying to her husband.

  As spring turned to summer, Lydia continued to enjoy the Indian woman’s companionship. Curious Cat came most mornings, cautiously so as not to come to the further attention of the townspeople. Together they baked bread, and Lydia demonstrated the uses of the spinning wheel, which was still an object of fascination for the squaw. They conversed with greater ease, and sometimes Curious Cat would sing songs with strange words and odd melodies that somehow conveyed their meaning. Lydia reciprocated with the lullabies that she would soon sing to her child. The child quickened within her, and the days passed swiftly.

  The weather turned hot and arid. No breeze cooled the flat land. From the west the news was bad: prairie fires swept out of control near Wilson and Lincoln; a sudden fierce gale had caused fire to jump the Saline River and destroy the tiny settlement of Greenport. The Indians were on the rampage again, too. Enraged by the wholesale slaughter of buffalo, the Cheyennes and Comanches attacked railroad crews and frontier settlements, plundering and murdering. Nearby Mitchell County was in a constant state of siege, and the people of Salina began to fear that the raids would soon extend east to their own territory. Of the prairie fires Lydia and Curious Cat spoke often. About the Indian raids they remained silent.

  As the news from the beleaguered settlements worsened, the populace of Salina grew fearful. The Kaws, always welcomed before, were looked at askance when they came to trade at the Whitesides’ store. Peaceable merchants such as Ben, who seldom handled guns, armed themselves. Women kept doors locked and rifles close to hand. The heat intensified the undercurrent of panic. Tempers grew raw; brawls and shootings in the saloons increased. During the first week in August the distant glow of prairie fire intruded on slumber.