Custer saw all his possible deaths converging.  Every one of them coming his way.  Arrows, volleys of bullets, warclubs.  Indians swarming below the ridge.  Cavalry sabres wrested from the already dead used on the soon to be.  Knives, hatchets.  Sioux, Cheyenne.  Gunshot—American, Indian—snapped the air.  He thought of God, his Father.  He thought of home.

     He saw his scalp on the poles outside the Indian camps.  Saw his teeth stove in, falling to the back of his throat, and he coughed.  He saw his eyeballs fingered from their sockets, their fluid drained by the Indians the way pretty girls drain juice from quartered oranges.

     Custer watched his men fall and become strange prairie creatures prickled with arrow shafts.  Watched them fleeing, then falling.  No escape, even with prayers on their lips.

     He saw his scrotum hacked from his loins, the sac fashioned into one of the Sioux pouches, full of their tobacco.  Saw his testicles flung into the scrubby brush on the hillside, food for the gophers.

     He listened to his men crying, invoking God’s help, blaspheming their Father’s name, calling out for loved ones—for mothers, wives, and lovers as yet unmet and unmarried.  He thought of his Elizabeth, their never conceived children simmering in the stomachs of gophers.  He thought of home.

     The battle was a drumbeat.  Indian voices raised in song as American blood seeped into native soil.

     A horse toppled on a nearby slope, breath rasping in its throat.  He thought of his Elizabeth.  The horse laboring in its last moments.

     He saw his death in the horse’s death, and then he saw his only choice.  He saw his home in the horse.  He slit the horse’s belly as it kicked against the pain and pulled its guts from the cavity.  Intestines, stomach, heart, liver pushed against his knees, their warmth competing against the pounding sun overhead.  He pulled the uterus from the horse’s gut and a tiny fetus stared up at him, shiny white through the membrane, eyes as flat and black as jacket buttons.  An albino.  He slit its throat and crawled inside the horse.  A small act of mercy.  He drew the flaps of horse skin together and held them closed with bloodied hands.  He rocked inside the horse and its body slipped and slid down the slope, away from the pile of guts, fooling the Sioux.  He thought of home, of his Elizabeth.

****

     The lady from the church had given Yellow Bird the little diary a month ago.  “Record your prayers here, let our Father know your wishes.”  It fit in the pocket of the dungarees all the boys wore.

     She didn’t call him Yellow Bird though.  She called him Joseph.  White names had been written on a blackboard when he arrived at the school three years earlier.  One-by-one the children were handed a long stick and instructed to touch the name they wanted.  Being American was being free to choose, he later learned.  Once a name was selected, Teacher erased the name from the board and recorded it in a book.  Joseph.  He had liked the curl of the J chalked on the board, it reminded him of the way his mother’s hair curved on her back when pulled into a ponytail.  Her dark hair, a gentle wave so black in the sunlight it seemed blue; his dark hair streaked with yellow strands, the mark of his perhaps father.  Inverted, the J was a kind of question mark.  The curve of his mother’s ponytail flipped upside down in his memory.

     Yellow Bird thought about his mother everyday.  Me-o-tzi.  Spring Grass in this white language.  Her father—his grandfather—killed in battle by Long Hair, the white soldier Custer, at the Washita River encampment eight years before Custer met his own death at the Little Big Horn—five years ago now.  He thought everyday about his Father.  His mother became the killer’s lover according to the old crows who unlike his grandfather lived to gossip about the battle and its survivors.  She lay down with him and months later the child with yellow strands woven through the black cried its first questions.  The milk of her breasts the first answer.  Love, of course.  A mother always giving, but never any answers after that.  Only the gossip of crows.  Their withered breasts were bitter grass to his memory.

****

     Air inside the horse was thick, dense with the damp stench of slaughter.  Custer’s long hair was dank with raw blood.  Death smelled like warm blood cooling.  It was dark in there, black, but it felt red; a red midnight—a dying fire and black stars.  His face pressed against the slick flesh of the horse’s ribs, he could taste what was left of its life raw against his lips.  He tasted spring grass on his tongue and it filled his mouth like a memory.  Like something he once knew.  Like home, like Elizabeth, but not home, not Elizabeth.  He pulled the flaps of horse skin closer together, hiding himself against the memory, and the body of the horse tightened around him.  When he breathed, the horse breathed with him.  The Sioux would see the movement if there was any.  He felt its body move as he filled his lungs.  He thought about the Indians and held his breath.

     Sound inside the horse was muffled.  Feet rushed past for awhile, whoops and shouts penetrated the horse’s body as distant noises, and the snap of bullets became dull thumps.

     Then—

     Crack!

     And again—

     Crack!

     Not dull thumps.

     The horse’s body jerked with the shots and Custer felt lead graze his temple and then the flash of a bullet burst in his chest.  The horse was not armor.  The horse was flesh and he began to bleed into it, his life spilling into its belly.

     He thought of home and weakened, his grasp on his body slipped and he drew heaving breaths.  Helpless, he began to push against the pain, his boots kicking at the horse’s pelvis.  He thought of his Father; he thought of home.  His Elizabeth.  He kicked but his kick was only a weak push anymore.  He thought of tender grass on the prairie.

     He hadn’t seen this death coming.  Hadn’t seen his body opening like a book, folding back until its covers touched and the pages fanned out, every one of them exposed.  Hadn’t seen his heart becoming the horse’s heart, his intestines becoming the horse’s guts, his testicles becoming the horse’s ovaries.  Hadn’t seen his body folding back into itself, a spent shell.

****

     Joseph.  The lady from the church said it was the name of her Lord’s father.  Not his father, really, but the man he called father.  Her Lord was like Yellow Bird.  He knew a man and he knew many stories, but he never really knew his Father.  He had never held his hand or learned to track from him, had never learned the ways of horses or men from him, and really only ever had his dreams of the man that some said was his Father.

****

     “Comanche!”

     The sound outside was sharp, no longer dull.  Custer’s eyes jerked open.  It was light, day.

     “It’s not.”

     He felt a shiver run through his flesh, a rippling quiver that rose from the loins into the spine and up into the base of his skull.  He rocked where he lay, his eye fixed on a cloud above.  It was alone.  White in the blue, then he rose to four feet.  He felt a weight slip from his belly.  He stumbled down the hill toward the two talking men.

     “It is.”

     “Look here.”

     One man put a hand on his flank.

     “What do you see?”

     He turned his head and saw the two soldiers squatting there, examining his loins.

     “Nothing.”

     “Comanche’s a stallion.”

     He knew Comanche as Captain Keogh’s mount.

     “Whose mare is this then?”

     The soldiers were filthy, the kind of men sent in to collect the dead after battle—to bundle them up and pack them on wagons for the journey home. They were smoking, these soldiers, gray tendrils trickling from their noses and lips.  Tobacco smoke against the stench of death he now realized filled his own head.  Days must have passed since battle.  One of the soldiers smacked his rump and he stumbled back up the slope. 

     “That old pack horse has seen better days,” one of the men said.

     Pack horse.  He turned at the lip of the ridge and looked at the scattered dead, the strange transformations of battle.  The three eyed man prone at his feet, two eyes brown, one red, darkening to black around the edges on his left cheek.  The man with the exposed brain, the shell of his skull placed like a dish on his chest; the man with arms but no hands; the man with a rusted knife where his tongue once was.  The man who was twenty feet long—who had dragged himself to die in the shade of a bush, his path marked by a strew of blood and intestine.

     “He’s here!”

     He turned to the shout and saw a soldier down the slope standing over a body.  Heard the soldier add, “It’s Custer.”

     His horse brain couldn’t make sense of the words.  Words were impressions, feelings, like a pat on the neck, more than information.  He felt a rope loop around his neck and a hand stroking his withers.

     “There you go, old girl.”

     He turned to the voice.  Another soldier, this one with a handful of horses leashed to ropes behind him.

     “There you go,” he patted again and knotted the rope.  “We’ll get you home.”  The soldier held some sugar cubes under his mouth.  He took them in without thought.

     He followed the soldier and the other horses the rest of the day until finally he was hobbled and set out to graze well away from the battlefield.  The grass was trampled flat where it wasn’t torn, but he was able to fill his belly.  He thought of Elizabeth and she tasted like grass. 

     The next days were measured in steps and effort.  His leg tore on a prickly pear and the wound festered until it became a limp.  Still, he sometimes pulled a laden wagon as one day rounded into the next.  Sometimes he walked behind it, drawn forward by a rope tied to its back gate. 

     The stink of the dead hung over the wagon in a thick cloud of flies.  They buzzed his eyes and lit in his wound.  Maggots began to churn there.  Soldiers, always smoking, sifted lime over the dead to stifle the smell.  These dead began to wither as the lime leached the moisture from their bodies and pulled their flesh so taut that sharp edges of bone began to pierce through the skin.  Every man a frozen grimace.  He saw all this, but knew nothing of it.  Grass was everything, was Elizabeth.  Water in the creeks and lakes was everything else, his Father.  Home was this long walk.

     But home became a train yard.  Men herded into long cars, the dead relegated to those at the rear of the train, horses reared and bolted but were forced eventually into still other cars.  The wounded were culled from the herd and tied to a fence.

     The soldier with the ropes pressed sugar cubes under his nose.  “That leg’s just no good.”  The soldier rubbed his neck, long soothing strokes that became tender stalks of grass in his horse thoughts.   “I’m afraid it’s the glue factory for you, old girl.”  The soldier’s hand fell from his shoulder and sweetness melted on his tongue.  He lowered his head and found a tuft of grass growing next to the fencepost.  He ate.  Elizabeth.  Sweet grass.  Home.

****

     Yellow Bird had filled the diary, had run out of pages and so was now filling the endpapers with his words.  The glue binding the endpapers to the rigid covers softened under the paper when his hand warmed it and the endpapers were now pocked with little bubbles of air that dimpled where the nib of his pen pressed on them and the ink there bled into the paper and the glue.  His words becoming ink becoming glue.  Teacher had told him the glue binding books like the diary was made from dead horses—their bones, tendons, and hooves boiled into this something else and made useful even in death.  The lady from the church said her Father did the same to man’s living soul.  Made it something else in death.  His words were dead horses, were living souls.  The ink ran under his hand, the nib of the pen digging into the last white corner of the endpaper.  His words tore the paper and the warmed glue seeped out from the tear and covered the tip of his pen.

     Yellow Bird touched the nib to his tongue—the bitter gall of the ink tanged there a moment and then became something else.  The taste of spring grass filled his mouth, sugar melted on his tongue, and the cool water of warm days rippled down his throat.  He thought of his mother.  Of home.

     He squeezed more glue from the tear, dabbed his finger tip in it, and brought it to his nose.  He smelled the musk of a horse and saw his grandfather’s mount, saw the lather of it after a long day’s ride.  It filled his head with home again and then it shifted.  He saw its gut pulsing and churning, as if filled with something unnatural, something other than horse, and he watched it split open and a cascade of maggots spill from the belly and cover the ground in a seething white mass.  He thought of death then, of his Father.  He smelled the blood and the buzzing flies and threw the diary into the fire that warmed the boys’ dormitory if you got close enough to it.  The diary fell open, the covers folding back until they touched one another, and Yellow Bird saw the glue bubbling out and dripping on the hot coals.  Dead horses in the embers.  The pages of the diary fanned open and he saw the words he had written there, his prayers, the same few words filling every page—me home Father bring me home Father bring me—laid end to end in a chain of hope that reached for that something he never knew but that now turned to flame, to ash, to smoke, and vanished up the pipe of the chimney.

	About the Author: Of Irish, Norwegian, and Ojibwe heritage, Carter Meland teaches American Indian Literature and Film courses for the American Indian Studies Department at the University of Minnesota.  His writing has appeared in places like Yellow Medicine Review, The Battered Suitcase, Scruffy Dog Review, and Expanded Horizons.  He is currently at work on a collection of stories tentatively titled, Indians in Space and Other Speculative Fictions.

Home    About Us    Submissions    Pushcart Nominees     Masthead     Archives