Black Hills

Chapter 10 George Armstrong Custer

Libbie, my dearest.

I have been lying here in the healing darkness thinking about how you looked that first time I met you—formally met you, since I had seen you as a little girl and even worshipped you from afar years before in Monroe—in 1862 at that Thanksgiving party at the girls’ finishing school. Your dark hair, all in perfectly formed ringlets, fell down over your bare shoulders that night. Your pale face and exposed skin glowed like ivory in the candlelight. I remember how I was stunned by the dark slashes of your eyebrows above your daunting, expressive eyes, and by how even your slightest and most demure of smiles brought out those dimples. You were twenty-one years old that autumn, and your body had ripened far from the stick-figure girl in the blue pinafore I had glimpsed on Monroe’s main streets in earlier years. The gown you wore that night to the Thanksgiving party was cut low enough for me to see your ample bosom. I could have set my hands fully around your slim waist and felt my fingertips touch.

Do you remember last autumn, when we spent our leave from Fort Abraham Lincoln in New York? We were so poor—in all my years of service and, some might say, of fame, I have never chosen to profit from my service to my country—so poor that we had to stay at the dreadful boardinghouse and take the freezing, drafty horsecars to the various receptions and dinners to which we were invited because we had no money for a cab. I had my one civilian suit. Only one. You had several lovely dresses for those balls and receptions, but they were dresses you had used and mended and made small changes on for many seasons and carried back and forth in your trunk across the prairie and continent with you many times.

You remember that forty times that cold autumn and colder winter in New York we went to see Julius Caesar performed, not because either of us liked the play that much—I grew to despise it—but because the actor and our friend Lawrence Barrett always left two complimentary tickets for us whenever he appeared. We suffered Julius Caesar forty times those cold months because it was free and gave us an excuse to leave the loud, crowded, food-smelling boardinghouse.

But do you also remember that December when, on a rare quiet night in our boardinghouse room when everyone but us seemed gone from the place, you and I lay in bed and talked about how we wished we had actually met when we were both children?

“What would you have done with me if you’d known me when I was a wee maiden?” you asked.

“Seduced you,” I whispered. “Made love to you at once.”

And then, you remember, my darling, you asked me to shave away your glorious thatch of black hair there, using my campaign razor and the hotel shaving soap. And you remember how I lit the extra candle and set the small mirror—at your request—so that you could watch the transformation even as it took place. Oh, how you trusted me, my darling. And how you shuddered and blushed when I kissed your now pale and hairless mons and continued kissing lower.

And how, when we were in the box at yet another performance of Julius Caesar or arriving at yet another general’s or politician’s home for yet another reception—I was the Boy General, perhaps the most famous young general of the war, and much in demand, as were you for your loveliness—you would squeeze my hand without looking at me and blush most becomingly, and I would know you were thinking about the maidenly absence beneath your silk gown and petticoats. And both of us then could think only about the play or reception being over and of returning to our sacred little room at the odious boardinghouse.

My darling Libbie.

I have been thinking about the autumn three years ago, just after my Yellowstone Campaign, when you finally came out to join me at Fort Abraham Lincoln. The frame house the soldiers had built for us there was beautiful; the first real home you and I had ever occupied.

That first Saturday you were there, you and I rose before dawn and rode far west out on the Dakota plain, leaving the fort far behind even before the sun rose. You complained because decorum demanded that you ride sidesaddle, even though I know you prefer to ride like a boy. By nine a.m. we were far, far out on the prairie and we roughly followed the meanderings of that one small stream that curled east back toward Bismarck and the fort and the Missouri River, the few cottonwoods along that sad little creek the only signs of life except for the low-nibbled grass and sage and Spanish bayonet.

We came across a single bull buffalo and I told you to stay back while I shot it, but you rode along close behind, clinging tight to your saddle horn with your free hand as your horse galloped faster than any lady riding sidesaddle had a right to demand of the animal. The bull was old enough—and perhaps alone enough—that he quit his half-hearted loping within a mile and merely stood there on the prairie, head down, occasionally taking an absent-minded munch of the short-cropped prairie grass, acting as if we were no threat at all.

We both dismounted. You held the horses’ reins while I removed my custom-made Remington sporting rifle from its scabbard. There was no tree or branch to use as a support, but I went to one knee and steadied the relatively short but heavy rifle as best I could.

The Remington No. 1 Sporting Rifle had become my favorite during my Yellowstone expedition, and I’d killed antelope, buffalo, elk, blacktail deer, white wolves, geese, and prairie chickens with it at distances up to 630 yards. (I confess to you, Libbie, that some of the prairie chickens simply exploded into feathers upon the impact of the 425-gram .50-caliber bullet backed by 70 grains of black powder.) The .50–70 had allowed me to bring down forty-one antelopes at a distance of 250 yards, so I had little doubt that it would serve for this single old bull bison at less than a hundred yards.

It took only one shot to the heart. The ancient bull dropped as if eager to leave its lonely world.

When you and I rode up to the fallen beast, you said, “What will you do now, darling?” and I replied, “Oh, send some of the men out to carve up the carcass, although I fear this old fellow will be tough chewing. But the head is magnificent.”

“What would the Indians do?” you asked.

“The Indians,” I said, surprised. “You mean the Sioux or Cheyenne?”

“Yes,” you said, smiling sweetly at me as we sat there in the heat, the saddles creaking under us, flies already beginning to buzz around the dead bison’s blood.

“The Indians would immediately cut its belly open and eat all or part of the poor fellow’s liver,” I said.

You slid off your horse and looked up at me. Your face, so radiant in the clear, warm autumn sunlight, held a new kind of excitement, one I had never seen before.

“Oh, let’s do that, Autie,” you said.

I remember that I stayed mounted and just laughed. “We would both be covered with blood,” I said. “Hardly the way for the commanding officer’s wife to return from a ride during her first week at Fort Abe Lincoln. What would the men in the regiment think?”

In response you began stripping out of your clothes. I remember glancing around anxiously, but the prairie was its usual tan and barren early-autumn void. Except for a low line of willows along the creek a mile to the north, only twenty miles of mid-morning flat prairie emptiness met the eye. I dismounted and rushed to disrobe next to you.

When we were naked except for our boots (the prairie is a living pincushion of tiny cacti and not-so-tiny thorns and stickers and quick-scuttling biting things), I took my long hunting knife from its beaded scabbard and slit the bison along the length of its distended belly. The mass of organs and connecting tubules and endless yards of gray-glistening guts slid out as easily as the dumped contents of a black and hairy purse. You couldn’t believe it when I cut away the liver and held it up between us.

“Dear God.” You laughed excitedly. “It’s as large as a man’s head.”

“Larger than this man’s,” I said, and began slicing into the heavy mass. A fluid thick and black burbled up in the cuts along with the blood. “Do you want the first slice?” I asked, glancing yet again over my shoulder to make sure that we were alone and unobserved.

“No,” you said. “Do not cut it up as if we were at a table, Autie. Let us take communion here as if we were Sioux or Cheyenne.”

You took the liver—you were barely able to hold it up, I remember, and I had to help you steady it just above your face—and your perfect white teeth flashed as you bit deep. You gnawed that chunk of the old bull’s liver off and away and then chewed maniacally rather than choke. The blood and bile (or whatever that darker fluid was) spattered your chin and cheeks and bare breasts and the slight bulge of your belly.

I would have laughed then, but there was something too ceremonial, too ancient, too physical… too terrifying… in watching you take yet another bite of that liver, the blood now flowing down over your chin like a red Niagara.

Straining, your shoulders and soiled upper arms showing muscles I’d never noticed, you handed the heavy, bleeding, seeping mass to me.

I managed to chew off three heavy chunks. I usually enjoy the cooked liver from bison, antelopes, deer, or cows, tossed in flour perhaps and fried up with bacon and onions, but this raw, thick-skinned organ tasted overwhelmingly sour. There was as much of the blood and heavy liquid in my mouth as there was meat.

I did not laugh. I chewed slowly, sacramentally, and then tossed the heavy liver back into the fly-gathering pile of guts and heart and stomach and more guts.

We both drank deeply from our respective canteens then.

I looked down at us—blood everywhere in streaks and rivulets and spatters and explosive patterns across my scarred flesh and your ivory-white skin, it looked as if I were wearing red gauntlets up to the elbow—and I said, “Now what, my dearest?”

Setting your canteen carefully back on your saddle, handling it gingerly so as not to leave more bloody handprints than necessary, you said, “Can we reach that creek on one horse?”

I looked toward the meandering line of willows to the north. “On one horse?” I understood your logic then. “There aren’t many horses I would trust with that duty, but Vic is one of them,” I said, and began removing his saddle and gear.

Leaving only the saddle blanket, I swung up on Vic’s broad (but not too broad) back. The sorrel (Victory had the blaze face and white socks, you remember, my dearest Libbie) smelled the blood seeping into the ground and on us and he was skittish, but I pulled hard back on the reins and told you to stand on the saddle on the ground, reach up, and I would swing you up behind me.

“No,” you said, that strange, radiant, laughingly mad and excited look on your face again, “in front of you, Autie.”

“It would be more comfortable for you riding behind me and holding on with…” I began.

You laid your breasts and face against my bare leg and thigh. “In front of you, Autie,” you whispered up. “Facing you.”

And so we rode the mile to the hidden creek. Your breasts pressed against me, and the bison’s blood flowed over them onto my chest and down. Your arms held me fiercely. In your left hand you held a wad of petticoats—our towels if we ever got to the stream.

I had Vic walking, but I spurred him to a canter and you set your hands on my shoulders and hitched yourself up higher against me, your blood-spattered white thighs rising and engulfing. I was already excited. Then you mounted me.

Your breath was hot against the side of my neck. “Faster,” you groaned.

I spurred Vic to a slow, steady, but still violent gallop. I rose and fell in you with each downward pounding of his hooves and great, heaving trunk. I held you tight with my right arm, held Vic’s reins with my left hand. The sorrel wanted to run hard. I let him.

We cried out together, I believe—both of us squeezing the other impossibly tighter and closer as we rose and fell, rose and fell to Vic’s hard gallop. We could not have been closer. Both of us threw our heads far back at the same instant, shouting at the sun.

I remember the ecstasy as being so intense that it went beyond pain. The blood smeared across us, dripping from us, flying behind us as Vic galloped, seemed appropriate. Even the sour-blood-and-bile aftertaste of the slivers of buffalo liver were part of the pain and sunlight and release—a source of unbelievable and never-to-be-recaptured strength and passion.

And love.

There was a tiny bit of water left in the creek, enough to get the worst of the blood and gore off us, but we had to take turns lying in the deepest part, our bodies wider than the stream, each of us rolling and rubbing against the pebbled stream bottom like crazy otters. We ended up using the petticoats more as sponges than as towels and simply buried them in the mud and reeds when we were done.

When we came out of the willows to remount Vic, I shared my fear with you, my darling Libbie… that all of the Seventh Cavalry would be coming into sight from the east just as we mounted up, still a mile from your hobbled horse and our clothes.

That set us laughing. You were behind me riding back, your breasts full and insistent against my back, one of your hands flat across my chest but the other possessively on my inner thigh, and we could not stop laughing even as we dressed (your one remaining petticoat did little to fill out the riding outfit). We laughed most of the way back to the fort and when we managed to gain control of ourselves, one of us would glance across at the other and the laughter would start up again.

It was love, of course, Libbie, and passion for each other, but it was you yourself who later said it—“I have never felt more alive, Autie!” I had, but only in the heat of combat. I did not tell you that then and do so now only because I know that you will understand.

Sometimes, my darling, I wonder if this restorative sleep I am in now might not slip into coma and the coma inexorably into death, but then I remember moments such as that morning on the prairie and know that this is not possible…. I will not, I cannot, I shall not die before seeing you again. Before talking to you again.

Before making love to you again.