Black Hills

Chapter 20 George Armstrong Custer

Libbie.

I know now that you will never hear this. This or anything else I have ever said to you from here or will ever say to you. But I will talk to you anyway, this final time. This final time for both of us.

There was that second when you leaned forward and looked Paha Sapa in the eye—looked into him and at me was my thought at the time—when your lips silently formed two syllables I was sure, then, were “Autie.”

But I am probably wrong about both the meaning of your look and of the syllables whispered below the range of Paha Sapa’s (and thus my own) hearing. I know you were having difficulty seeing your guest, so it is more probable that you were simply leaning closer to have at least one clear image of the Indian who had invaded your parlor. And perhaps the syllables whispered were “oh, my” or even “good-bye.”

It was Paha Sapa’s idea for us to come to New York to see you in person. He had suggested it once years before, in the mid-1920s, I believe, and I said no then and he never brought it up again. It wasn’t until this past winter, when I realized that since you were approaching your 91st birthday you could die soon—a concept that had never been real to me before—that I raised it with Paha Sapa in one of our few conversations, and he agreed.

I wanted it to be on your birthday, April 8. That seemed important to me for some reason. But Mr. Borglum was starting some very serious blasting on the possible new site for the Thomas Jefferson head that very date and he let Paha Sapa—whom Borglum knows as Billy Slovak—know that if the powderman took time off from the job that week, there would be no job for him to return to.

So Paha Sapa did the best he could, losing pay he could not afford to lose, and we took the long train ride to spend the weekend of April 1 and 2 in the city.

My reluctance to see you rather than merely remember you as you were when we were young and in love and then married was threefold: first, I was acutely aware that our marriage lasted a little longer than twelve years but, by the time I made up my mind to ask Paha Sapa to bring me to New York, your widowhood had gone on for fifty-seven years. Being a full-time professional widow would change anyone. Second, I did not want the arrival of this sixty-eight-year-old Indian to alarm you. I knew already through the occasional newspaper accounts that Paha Sapa encountered and shared with me that you, the most famous widow in America, were constantly being harassed by letter and in person by various publicity seekers claiming to be “the unknown” or “last” survivor of the massacre at the Little Big Horn. Charlatans all. Third and final, I confess to you now—since you will never hear this—that I dreaded seeing you as an old woman.

You were always so youthful and so beautiful in the time I knew you, Libbie, my darling. Those dark curls. That soft and mischievous smile was unlike that of any woman I had ever met. The full, firm, and—as I discovered so soon in our married lovemaking—infinitely responsive body.

How could I trade those memories for the reality of an old woman in her nineties: wrinkled, sagging, rheumy eyed, lacking hearing, sight, mobility, humor, and any glimmer of her youthful self?

That was my fear. That turned out to be too close to the fact.

The only thing that allows me to pardon myself a little from charges of cruelty here, Libbie, is the fact that I knew so well that you used to be put off and appalled by old people as well, but especially old women. There was something about a truly old woman that terrified you almost as much as the thunder that used to send you hiding under the bed in the early years of our marriage. (All of the years of our marriage seem like early years to me.)

In recent years, Paha Sapa borrowed and read all three of your published books—Boots and Saddles, published in 1885; Following the Guidon, from 1890; and Tenting on the Plains, published in 1893—and in one of those books, I believe it was the last one, I clearly recall this passage (a rare use of elaborate description from you, my dear) in which that fear of aging and of old women becomes all too obvious. We had ridden to this Sioux village not too long after my victory on the Washita and a group of old women, most of their husbands killed in my attack, had formed a sort of welcoming committee for us. You wrote:

The old women were most repulsive in their appearance. Their hair was thin and wiry, scattering over their shoulders and hanging over their eyes. Their faces were seamed and lined with such furrows as come from the hardest toil, and the most terrible exposure to every kind of weather and hardship….

The dull and sunken eyes seemed to be shrivelled like their skins. The ears of those hideous old frights were punctured with holes from top to the lobe, where rings once hung, but torn out, or so enlarged as they were by the years of carrying the weight of heavy brass ornaments, the orifices were now empty, and the ragged look of the skin was repugnant to me.

I remember you talking to me in bed that night after we saw those Sioux, Libbie. You where shivering, your shoulders shaking as if you were sobbing, but there were no tears. The widowhood of these old crones was part of their ugliness, you said. They had become nothing after their warrior husbands died—merely an extra mouth to be fed, grudgingly, by the men in the band who would pay them no attention for the rest of those empty women’s sad lives. “The orifices were now empty… ” indeed. Empty forever, and dried up and forgotten and useless.

That was your fear then, when your complexion was still flawless and your breasts were high and firm (due, in part, perhaps, to the fact that we never succeeded in having a child) and your smile was still a girl’s quick smile and your eyes sparkled with energy. So when, several years ago, Paha Sapa read some rare newspaper account of you—perhaps it had to do with an equestrian statue of me being erected somewhere, or with the 50^th commemoration of my murder at the Little Big Horn—and you were quoted as saying, “I am an antique, but I do enjoy myself. I have a delightful time,” I knew you were lying.

Paha Sapa had some personal business to attend to in New York—from what little I saw, it seemed yet another ritual to appease one of the endless list of his dead—and then he returned to the little hotel near Grand Central Terminal. The hotel obviously had been recommended to Paha Sapa, an Indian, because the clientele was largely Negro with some foreigners, also of color. But in truth, Libbie, the rooms were somewhat nicer than the one we stayed in across the street from the Brunswick that last winter we spent in New York, and while our view, you remember, had been of rooftops and alleys and water towers atop those rooftops, Paha Sapa’s actually looked out on a busy and moderately attractive boulevard.

He spent no time looking at the view, but waited his turn to use the bath down the hall. Then he dressed in fresh underlinens, new socks, his best white shirt, and his one tie and rumpled suit and trousers. His cheap shoes had been scuffed up a bit during some exertion he’d expended on the Brooklyn Bridge and now he spit-shined and buffed them. They still looked cheap and uncomfortable, but one could see one’s reflection in them when he left the room.

Paha Sapa had stopped at a hot dog stand on his way back from the Brooklyn Bridge, but I could tell he was still very hungry. But he had only two days in New York City and he couldn’t spend all of his quarters the first day.

The walk to 71 Park Avenue was only a few blocks and Paha Sapa was almost an hour early when he got there. After looking at the tall cooperative apartment building and then at the doorman—who seemed to be looking back suspiciously—Paha Sapa put his hands in his pockets and thought about which way to walk to kill the time. He was nervous… I could tell. I thought I would be terribly nervous as well and certainly the anxiety had been building in me (in what was left of me) all during the three-day-and-night train ride east from Rapid City, but there was a strange, cold emptiness descending on me as well. It was a sensation that it might be impossible to describe to you, Libbie, so I won’t try.

We were standing in front of the Doral Hotel (somewhere, in something Paha Sapa had read, someone had said that you liked to walk past this hotel when you still got out on walks, Libbie, although I can’t imagine why) and that doorman was also giving us the evil eye, so Paha Sapa strolled on, crossing the street and heading east toward the river.

Thus we made several circuits, four blocks east, two blocks north, then back again, until it was time to present ourselves at the door. Paha Sapa actually stopped at one of the windows of the Doral Hotel to inspect himself. His expression did not change, but I could feel him frowning. Then he braced his shoulders and crossed the street.

It was a strange double doorway to the apartment building, somewhat like one of the air locks on Colonel Roebling’s caissons as Big Bill Slovak had described them to Paha Sapa. Trapped in the little space with the burly, absurdly dressed guard—Paha Sapa was remembering a similar uniform on the guard-conductor on a Ferris Wheel at the Chicago World’s Fair forty years earlier—my host repeated the fact that he had a four p.m. appointment with a resident, Mrs. Elizabeth Custer. The doorman spoke into a brass speaking tube of the type I’d seen only on the bridge of riverboats and there came back a long, inhuman squawking. The doorman continued to squint suspiciously at us, but he told us the floor and pushed a button to open the inner door.

Before we could seek out an elevator or begin ascending the staircase, there was a nunnish flurry and rustle of black skirts and an eager or otherwise determined female motion descending that dark staircase and for a brief but thrilling moment I was sure it was you, Libbie, more spry than I had imagined you being near the end of your ninetieth year and also supernaturally aware of who was visiting and wildly eager to greet me after all these years. But when the woman’s face hove into view, a sense of disappointment and reality washed over me. She was far too young to be you, although she was one of those women who go through life appearing as if they were born old. She was also scowling fiercely.

“Are you the Indian, the Mr. Slow Horse?” It was a demand and a challenge. The emphasis on certain words seemed random, an old affectation. Her voice was hoarse, as if from being raised in indignation far too many times.

Paha Sapa stepped back toward the air lock to make room for her at the base of the stairs. He did not remove his hat. He did not, I noticed, end his sentence with “ma’am” as he tended to do with lady tourists at Mount Rushmore.

“Yes.”

She stayed on the bottom step to give herself physical as well as moral authority over Paha Sapa, but this woman was tall enough—and Paha Sapa short enough—that she needn’t to have bothered with the physical and couldn’t have succeeded with the moral.

“I am Miss Marguerite Merington… ”

Before Paha Sapa could nod recognition of the name (which he did not, I knew, actually recognize), she swept on.

“… and I must tell you, Mr. Slow Horse, that I was totally and unequivocally opposed to your seeing and wasting Mrs. Custer’s time and energy in this way!”

The doorman had taken a step back and not merely so that he could open the outer door while Paha Sapa held open the inner door of the air lock for the aggrieved lady. It was obvious that the doorman knew Miss Marguerite Merington and had long ago devised a strategy of keeping the maximum distance he could in such a small space.

“Well, shame on you for wasting this fine lady’s time in this way is all I have to say, and I hope that May knows what she’s doing, but she rarely, in my humble opinion, has Mrs. Custer’s wel fare in mind when she allows these ri diculous appointments….”

Paha Sapa had not tried to speak. Perhaps he, like me, was watching the outraged emphasis creep into syllables now as well as complete, if random, words.

Then Miss Marguerite Merington was gone, out onto the sidewalk of Park Avenue, sweeping out through the door which the doorman, wisely, held from behind on the outside as she bustled through, using the door and its window as a shield, I thought.

“Is that Mr. Slow Horse down there?” came a shouted but still somehow softer voice from several floors above. It was not your voice, of course, Libbie. I guessed it was either your housekeeper’s or, more likely since the voice held no servant’s diffidence in it, that of the lady Paha Sapa and I had been writing to in order to arrange this interview, my so-called favorite niece (whom I had never met), a certain May Custer Elmer.

Paha Sapa walked over to the stairwell and raised his face. Now he did remove his cap.

“Yes.”

“Come up, please. Come up. Take the stairs, if you are able. The elevator takes forever to react to its summons. Come up, Mr. Slow Horse!”

I was sure that I was ready for the encounter with your little apartment there at 71 Park Avenue—I’d read about it, or rather Paha Sapa had, including the long 1927 interview where the reporter referred to your home as “a delightful return to the elegance of the previous century,” but the truth was far more powerful than that: entering your apartment was the equivalent of taking one of Mr. Wells’s time machines back to 1888. Outside, through thick panes of glass on windows shut tight even on such a lovely spring day, came the bus and train and automobile honking sounds of the 20th Century; inside, 1888 in all ways. The windows, although properly clean, seemed nailed shut, and each of the little rooms we moved through smelled increasingly musty—a mixture of furniture polish, of stale air, of hidden dust, of aged things, and of aged people. Your apartment, my beloved, had an old-woman smell about it. (I remember in the early days of our marriage we each were forced to come to terms with the fact—which no one warns newlyweds about—that in such cramped, one-room-and-a-bathroom quarters, one soon must learn to live amidst all the other person’s all-too-human smells. There had been something strangely exciting about that then. Now, through Paha Sapa’s still-keen senses, I noted only that the apartment smelled of old women.)

There was amidst all the dark, ancient furniture, however, a proud new console radio, a gift from friends, I learned later through something Paha Sapa read. It looked anachronistic there amidst all the furniture, photographs, and paraphernalia from the previous century. The dial was dark.

I remember Paha Sapa reading years ago that for the 50th anniversary commemoration of my regiment’s short-lived battle at the Little Big Horn, you’d owned no radio and thus had been invited to a nearby hotel on June 25, 1926, to listen to the radio broadcast ceremony and reenactment. Had it been the Doral across the street? I forget. The hotel had kindly offered you a deluxe room for the night but, according to published reports, you sat quite upright in your wicker chair, staring at the radio during the entire broadcast, and left—hobbling on your cane—immediately upon that broadcast’s conclusion. Your only recorded comment to the actors’ (one playing me) shouts and simulated hoofbeats broadcast from Montana—“Yes, that is how it would have been.”

How could you possibly know, my darling? How could you possibly know what it could have been like? For all your daring trips into hostile Indian territory with me and visits to this fort or that, how could you possibly have any idea what those final minutes were like with fifteen hundred or more bloodthirsty Sioux and Cheyenne closing in on our thinning ranks? How could you possibly have any idea?

There were two more women Paha Sapa had to meet before being led into your presence in the back parlor (where the single window did indeed, just as the 1927 reporter had told us, still retain a thin view of the East River). The first, the lady who had called down the stairway to Paha Sapa, was Mrs. May Custer Elmer, our interlocutor over the past year in setting up this brief meeting. I’ve mentioned that the newspaper in our hometown of Monroe, Michigan, during the time of the unveiling of one statue of me or the other, once referred to Mrs. Elmer as my (“the General’s”) “favorite niece,” but she was a grand-niece, and I had no memory of her. She was a smiling, pink-cheeked, slightly flustered middle-aged lady and did welcome Paha Sapa decently, without offering to shake the Indian’s hand.

With Mrs. Elmer (who was busy telling Paha Sapa that her husband was quite the amateur astronomer) in that first room of the warren of small rooms running back to the parlor, was a Mrs. Margaret Flood, the equally middle-aged maid, who squinted at Paha Sapa (and thus at me) with suspicion as open (but much quieter) as that of Miss Marguerite Merington down in the foyer. Mrs. May Custer Elmer interrupted her description of her husband’s passion for astronomy to explain that Patrick, that is, Mr. Flood, the handyman, was off running an errand today, as if that had some relevance to Paha Sapa’s meeting with the dead general’s widow.

And then we were in the little parlor, lit mostly by the afternoon light from the west reflected back from taller buildings and windows outside the east-facing window, and there you sat waiting, Libbie, my darling.

Except, of course, it was not you.

Being saved from the scourges of aging myself, I am not sure if any human being can keep the countenance and “selfness” of his youth and middle years so deep into old age. Perhaps men can be more successful in such indolent ambition since a few salient features—a beak of a nose such as mine, perhaps, or a mighty mustache—can stand in for the missing person the way a caricaturist’s bold, cruel lines stand in for reality. But for women, alas, the ravages and betrayals of time are much more cruel.

You were seven days away from your 91st birthday on that first day of April 1933, when Paha Sapa visited you, my dearest.

Only you—the Libbie that I had known and loved and made love to and dreamt of even in my death sleep—that you was not there.

You were dressed in crepey widow’s black (with some sort of cream-colored cloth at your throat, attached by a brooch from another century, my century), which seemed absurd to me fifty-seven years after the unlucky day that made you a widow.

Your hands, your lovely, soft, slender-fingered, smooth-skinned, loving Libbie hands, were now liver-spotted, tendoned, arthritis-swollen and contorted claws. The nails were yellow with age, like an old man’s toenails.

You made no move to offer your hand to Paha Sapa and this relieved both of us. Even though Paha Sapa’s looking-into-vision skills seemed to have waned in recent years, neither he nor I wanted to take the risk of any physical contact between him and you. At one time, years ago, when I first became aware of where and what I had become after my death at the Little Big Horn, I had fantasies of Paha Sapa going east and deliberately touching you so that my ghost-self might leave the aging Indian and dwell in and with you for the rest of our lives (yours and mine, I mean, my darling). How wonderful and intimate our silent conversations might have been over those last years. How that might have assuaged your loneliness and my own. But then I realized that I was not a ghost, nor a soul waiting to travel to Heaven (as I had preferred to think upon discovering my place in Paha Sapa’s mind), and the fantasy died with that revelation.

Your face was very, very pale and the blush or whatever the makeup on your cheeks was called only made the truth of the paleness—like rouge on a corpse—more painfully obvious. All of the newspaper and magazine accounts of you over the years had stressed how much more youthful than your chronological age you looked, and based on the few photographs Paha Sapa had seen—you at age 48, age 65, age 68—that had once been true. The smile and eyes and curls on the forehead (from dyed hair?) had indeed looked similar, if not the same. But now age had erased those vestiges of my Libbie’s continuity and beauty the way an angry schoolboy might draw a wet eraser over a chalk-filled blackboard.

Your old-woman’s throat was a mass of cords and cables—the Brooklyn Bridge again!—that your high, black, lacy collar did not succeed in concealing. The bone structure of your cheeks and jawline were lost to folds and dewlaps, jowls and wrinkles. I remember us—you and I—once remarking that the men on your father’s side of the family, the Judge especially, resisted wrinkles far into old age. But it looked now as if you had finally taken after your mother. The few laugh lines that we—you and I—had joked about, almost celebrated, in those last months of our lives together, now possessed all parts of your face. Time had worked like a fat spider weaving its webs everywhere.

I remember, however ungallantly, that you had weighed 118 pounds that June before I left Fort Abraham Lincoln forever. Whatever you weighed now in our last real encounter, your body appeared to have collapsed inward on itself as if your bones had long since liquified, save for the bent spine so common to very old ladies and the obvious boniness of your sticklike forearms.

I would love to tell you, my darling Libbie who cannot hear me, that your eyes were still your own—blue, bright, intelligent, mischievous, alluring—but they had also undergone what Shakespeare called a “sea change,” and not for the better. They had somehow darkened and seemed lost in the shadows of your deep-sunk orbital bones—the way you and I had commented on Abraham Lincoln’s eye sockets near the end—and the eyes themselves seemed rheumy and unfocused.

I shall describe—and remember—no more. But these observations were made in the shadows of an April afternoon in the most indirect and already-fading light. The large, heavy, dark furniture in the room seemed to be soaking up the light. (I admit that I looked for the small signing table from Appomatox Courthouse that Phil Sheridan had given us, but it was not in this parlor and I hadn’t noticed it on the way in.)

I was introduced by my “favorite cousin” May as “Mr. William Slow Horse, the gentleman with whom I have been corresponding and of whom I’ve recently spoken.”

Mrs. Elmer waved Paha Sapa to a seat and when she herself had plopped into a chair, Paha Sapa sat us down across from you, Libbie. In the crowded room, his knees were only about four feet from yours (if one could discern where knees or any other anatomical components were in that wrinkled mass of black crepe, silk, muslin, and whatever else went into that mourning pyre of a dress).

And I confess again that in all my images of meeting you again through Paha Sapa’s visit, I had never—not once—imagined another person in the room with us. Even after Mrs. Flood—“Margaret” to Mrs. Elmer—had excused herself to go about some domestic chore (or perhaps just to sit smoking in the kitchen or back stairway), the room seemed far too crowded with the three living persons and my own hovering, nonliving presence there.

I also realized at that second that I was the second ghost of General George Armstrong Custer (even though I was no ghost) to enter this room. The first ghost had been carried everywhere by Mrs. Elizabeth Custer for almost fifty-seven years and was certainly in the room with us.

When you spoke, my darling, your voice was simultaneously phlegm husky and as wispy as the spiderweb wrinkles concealing your features. Paha Sapa and Mrs. Elmer both bent forward to hear you.

“Did you have a pleasant trip to New York, Mr. Slow Horse?”

“Yes, Mrs. Custer. It was fine.”

“All the way from… where? Nebraska? Wyoming?”

“South Dakota, ma’am. The Black Hills.”

You were not leaning toward us, but I could see you straining to hear, Libbie. I could see no hearing trumpet in the room, but you were obviously having difficulties. I wondered how much of Paha Sapa’s conversation you could actually hear. But there seemed to be a glint of recognition in those unfocused eyes at the sound of “Black Hills.” I remembered Paha Sapa reading something you wrote in 1927: “There was a time after the battle of the Little Big Horn that I could not have said this, but as the years have passed I have become convinced that the Indians were deeply wronged.”

If I’d lived, my darling Sunshine, I would have convinced you of this long before 1927. I remember Paha Sapa reading—I believe it was in your Boots and Saddles—something to the effect that “General Custer was a friend to every reservation Indian,” meaning, obviously, that I would help those who submitted to the orders of the U.S. Government, carried out by such agencies as my Seventh Cavalry, and who stayed at the agencies, ceased hunting, waited patiently for our allocations of beef for them to arrive by rail, and who tried a little farming while waiting.

Nothing could be further from my feelings, then and later. I confess that I had and still have contempt for the reservation Indians, those who submitted under our threats and attacks and who became docile agency redskins. It was the warriors I admired—them and the women and children and old men who risked everything by going back out onto the Plains with them in a sad and doomed attempt to regain their old way of life… an attempt that was already all but impossible due to our extinction of their buffalo herds. All of us in the Seventh, from the officers down to the newest immigrant enlisted man, used to complain about the fact that the Agencies gave the Sioux and Cheyenne new repeating rifles with which to hunt the occasional game and the young men took these rifles, often superior to our own, and rode out onto the prairie to do battle with us.

We complained, but we in the Seventh Cavalry admired such behavior—we would not have wanted anything other than a fair fight—and during negotiations we soldiers tried to hide our contempt for the lesser, “tamed” Indians both on their reservations and lounging in their ill-kept tipis near the forts. They were little better than the tramps and panhandlers that Paha Sapa had passed on the streets of New York that morning.

You had been saying something.

“Have you had time to sightsee in New York yet, Mr. Slow Horse?”

Paha Sapa smiled slightly—I saw his reflection in the tall glass-covered piece of furniture holding china near you. I had not seen or felt Paha Sapa smile many times in the years I had been aware of him and of my place in him.

“I walked down to the Brooklyn Bridge this morning, Mrs. Custer.”

“Oh, Auntie,” interrupted May Custer Elmer, “you remember how, years ago, you used to take the taxi to the New York side of the bridge and walk partway over on the promenade and I would come from Brooklyn and meet you on the promenade deck?”

Paha Sapa had been sending his letters to Mrs. Elmer at 14 Park Street in Brooklyn.

You did not turn your face in May’s direction, Libbie. You did cock your head and smile slightly, as if you were listening to pleasant music from the radio. But the radio was not on.

Mrs. May Custer Elmer cleared her throat and tried again.

“Auntie, I think you remember that I told you that Mr. William Slow Horse was in Mr. Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West Show that you enjoyed so much. It’s why we decided that you should meet with Mr. Slow Horse. Do you remember, Auntie?”

Between the very loud voice and the slow exaggeration of almost every syllable, your grand-niece was speaking to you as if you were not only old and a little deaf but also a foreigner, Libbie. But you finally quit listening to the inaudible music and looked first at her and then at Paha Sapa.

“Oh… yes. I saw you perform in Mr. Cody’s show, Mr.… Slow Horse, is it? Yes. I saw you perform and noticed you in the finale where Mr. Cody impersonated my husband. I remember it well…. It was at the Madison Square Garden in November of eighteen eighty-six. You rode very well and your war cries were most chilling and convincing, both in the Deadwood Stage act and in the Little Big Horn finale. Yes, very convincing. Very good performance, Mr. Slow Horse.”

“Thank you,” said Paha Sapa.

I knew that Paha Sapa had never been to New York before and that he hadn’t joined Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show until spring of 1893, shortly before the Chicago World’s Fair. But whoever you were thinking of, Libbie—whichever Indian—this seemed to have broken the ice and I understand why Paha Sapa didn’t correct you.

“Oh, I saw it many times after that,” you continued in that soft, husky yet sibilant whisper, turning your almost blind and formerly blue eyes first in our direction, then in the general direction of May Custer Elmer, and then toward nothing at all but the furniture. “Miss Oakley… Little Sure Shot, you people called her in the program… became a very good friend of mine. Did you know that, Mr. Slow Horse?”

“No, Mrs. Custer, I didn’t.”

“What?”

Paha Sapa repeated his answer.

“Well, it is true, Mr. Slow Horse. Of course, Mr. Cody had been one of my husband’s scouts long ago. Everyone in the Army knew Mr. Cody long before he opened his Wild West Circus. That November when his show premiered at the… where was it, May?”

“Madison Square Garden, Auntie.”

“Oh, yes, of course… I believe I just said that. That November when Mr. Cody’s show premiered at the Madison Square Garden, quite everyone was there…. General Sheridan, whom I never cared for that much, to be bluntly honest, and General Sherman, and Henry Ward Beecher… I believe that was before his scandal… was it before his scandal and the adultery trial, May?”

“Yes, Auntie, I believe so.”

“Well, he was there… a strange, heavy, long-haired, and unattractive man dressed in a black cape-suit that made him look like a bag of suet. Beecher had one drooping eyelid that made him look like an idiot or stroke victim. It was hard to believe that he was the greatest speaker and evangelist and—evidently—ladies’ man of that era, but so it was. August Belmont was there for the premiere of Mr. Cody’s show as well as Pierre Lorillard. And I. I had complimentary tickets, of course. You and Charles weren’t there, were you, May dear?”

“No, Auntie.”

Paha Sapa was looking at the niece and I think both of us were wondering if May Custer Elmer had even been born by 1886. Probably. There was an arroyo of wrinkles under the lady’s heavy makeup. You, Libbie, were still talking—like an old toy which, once wound up, took a long time to wind down.

“Well, it was that same autumn that our old cook and fellow traveler from the frontier days, Eliza, came to town….”

I confess that I started a bit at this. Eliza, our Negro cook—my Negro cook during the war even before I’d married Libbie, Eliza, whom my cavalry unit had liberated from slavery in Virginia and who had then followed me (and then Libbie and me) to Texas and Michigan and Kansas and points west—Eliza in New York at Madison Square Garden watching Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show and its finale where Cody pretends to be me being murdered by Indians pretending to murder me? Eliza? Only ten years after my real death?

“… She had married a Negro doctor and left us while Au… while the Armstro… while the Colonel was still alive…. Or was it a Negro attorney, May, my dear?”

“A Negro attorney, I believe, Auntie.”

“Yes, yes… At any rate, I loved showing Eliza around New York that autumn and I gave her a ticket to the Madison Square Garden show…. I felt she should see it, you understand…”

For the first time in several minutes, your gaze, Libbie, returned to Paha Sapa.

“… because Eliza and I had lived through so many of the scenes depicted… not the attack on the Deadwood Stage, of course, or the Grand Review, but so many of the other scenes… and I felt sure that nothing could better call back for dear, faithful Eliza, could call back so vividly as it were, our shared experiences on the frontier as this most faithful and realistic reprsentation of a western life that has ceased to be, what with advancing civilization and all.”

You paused for breath, my darling, and I paused to review Paha Sapa’s memories of his brief time with Cody’s show. It was, essentially, the same show that you had seen in 1886, Libbie, and which so many thousands had seen in the years after that and at the Chicago World’s Fair. Cody rarely tampered with a winning formula, whether in his scouting or in his Wild West Show or in his lying about history.

“So after the performance, which I had not been able to attend—again—due to other obligations, Eliza took a card I had given her back to Mr. Cody’s tent—the two had not previously met, since Eliza had left our service before Mr. Cody began scouting for the cavalry—and she reported to me later… ”

And here, my Sunshine, you slipped into a cackling, Amos ’n’ Andy–exaggerated imitation of Eliza’s old Virginia slave patois. (Paha Sapa owned a tiny radio that his son, Robert, had built for him and had also heard fragments of Amos ’n’ Andy a hundred times in bars and other workers’ homes, its broadcast blasted off the ionosphere by the powerful WMAQ as part of the NBC Blue Network that reached even to the Black Hills on good listening nights. When the Ruby Taylor character had almost died of pneumonia two years ago, in the spring of ’31, half the men on Mount Rushmore could talk of little else.) And you, my darling Libbie, also must have been listening to it religiously, since your voice now was more the Harlem screech of Kingfish’s wife, Sapphire, than of our old, slow-southern-speaking cook Eliza.

“… ‘Well, Miss Libbie, when Mr. Cody come up, I see at honce his back and hips was built pracisely like the Ginnel… Eliza always called my husband “the Ginnel,” Mr. Slow Horse, even after the war when all the officers who remained in the army were reduced in rank and Autie… my husband… retained only the rank of colonel… ‘Well, Miss Libbie,’ she says, ‘when I come on to Maz Cody’s tent, I jest said to him: “Mr. Buffalo Bill, sir, when you done come up to the stand and wheeled around like dat, I said to myself, Well, if he ain’t the ’spress and spittin’ of Ginnel Custer in battle, I never seed any one that was.” ’”

After this relatively loud recitation of the Amos ’n’ Andy version of Eliza’s Negro-ese, you cackled laughter, my darling, until you began to cough, and May Custer Elmer also laughed hard, making her broad red cheeks broader and redder, and even Paha Sapa smiled very slightly, I think (unless there was a slight vibration of a passing elevated train shaking the reflecting glass of the china cabinet). Your coughing continued until everyone else’s reaction was finished, and then Margaret—Mrs. Flood—brought in a tray with a steaming teapot, once fine but now spiderweb-fissured china cups and saucers for all of us, a matching little pitcher and sugar bowl, tiny spoons, and—on a separate dish—tiny wedges of what might possibly have been cucumber sandwiches. Since you were still coughing into a white handkerchief that seemed to have appeared from nowhere (although I had learned when I was alive and married to you that the only thing more mysterious than a woman’s heart is the contents of her sleeve), Mrs. May Custer Elmer did the honor of pouring the tea. By the time she had concluded with the pouring, you had concluded with your hacking and coughing.

I knew that Paha Sapa was starving but was afraid to take a tiny sandwich wedge, not being totally sure of how such things should be eaten in the presence of the ladies. If I remember correctly, you and I, Libbie my dearest, were once, in the earliest days of our marriage, confronted with precisely such miniature-sandwich fare at one of ancient General Winfield Scott’s last official soirees as head of Lincoln’s army before his great age and even greater weight carried him off into History’s oblivion, and that afternoon I had simply popped two or three of the tasteless little cucumber-and-bread-and-butter triangles into my mouth and washed them down with a giant swig of the general’s seriously substandard wine.

You had frowned at me, but your eyes were merry in those youthful days and then, when none of the crowd was watching, you winked at me. There was no winking or conspiratorial twinkle in your eye this day, the first of April 1933, and you addressed both the cup of tea that niece May had poured and one of the tiny sandwich triangles with deadly, frowning seriousness. It’s been my observation that interest in food is one of the—if not the—last things to go with the truly elderly.

It was while you were eating and chewing with such unladylike total concentration, my dearest, that I realized yet another reason that I was having trouble identifying the Libbie-you that I so wildly loved with this old-woman-Libbie in the high-backed chair opposite me: your teeth were different.

You had always had lovely teeth, but very small—each one looking like a miniature of one of those white Chiclet pieces of candy-covered gum that Paha Sapa used to discover young Robert chewing somewhere around 1906—and your perfect but tiny-toothed smile was part of your charm.

Now you obviously had full dentures. The dentist or denture maker had made no effort to match your original, lovely little teeth and these new, larger, much more aggressive substitutes changed your entire face, giving it an almost rodentlike thrust-forward and far too much exposure of the imitation teeth when you spoke or chewed.

I apologize for these unkind remarks, my darling Libbie. I make them because I know now you will never hear them.

My favorite (if unknown to me) grand-niece May cleared her throat. She was our facilitator here and she obviously believed that her aunt’s mistaken belief that she had seen Paha Sapa perform in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show (or Circus, as it had been called in New York City in 1888) was the perfect segue to the heart of our proposed discussion.

I was happy to hear this, since we had promised May that our visit would take up no more than fifteen minutes of your sacred time and energy, Libbie, and—according to the loudly hammering clock on the north wall—we had used up a little more than half that time already with our senseless chitchat.

“Auntie Libbie, perhaps you remember me mentioning that Mr. William Slow Horse wrote to us that not only was he in the re-creation of the… ah… Battle at the Little Big Horn in Buffalo Bill’s show, but he was actually there. At the Little Big Horn, I mean. He was… he saw… I mean, he was there on the field with Uncle Armstrong twenty-five June that year when… ”

I saw the transformation in you then, Libbie. From leaning forward to eat and sip your tea, you set down the saucer with a clank and sat far back in your high chair, your curved spine as rigid and vertical as you could make it, the expression on your face becoming guarded, protective, and neutral.

Paha Sapa had read to me an old article about your presence at an unveiling of some ridiculous equestrian statue of me in Monroe back in June of 1910: you had hobnobbed with his Immenseness, President Howard Taft, with Michigan’s Governor Warner, and with countless others that weekend, but—you said to some reporter much later—what had almost finished you off (not your words, my darling) was the evening meeting at the Armory with hundreds of veterans of the Seventh Cavalry. Some unkind wit there, I think it was a humorous officer in the infantry (the same one who had made you laugh when he said that his infantry following our cavalry during the War had been fascinating, since there were no fence rails left for a fire, no pigs or chickens left for a meal, no full smokehouses left untouched, or anything else that might inhibit their hungry advance in our wake), had commented drily that reports of the massacre of me and my men must have wildly exaggerated if there were so many regimental “survivors” there that weekend. You had ignored that, but what you could not ignore was this mandatory personal meeting with hundreds of aging, toothless, white-haired, white-mustached, wrinkled old veterans in their red neckties—I had worn one, of course, and some of the men had picked up the habit then and apparently all of the grizzled old veterans thought it a good idea—all of them insisting that they knew and remembered you well and that they had been “dear friends” with the General.

Other than a few staff officers, you admitted that you remembered not a single one of these men (much less the wives and children and in-laws and grandchildren they had dragged to the unveiling of the equestrian monument there in Monroe and whom they insisted on introducing to you as if they also had been dear friends and followers and intimates with you).

But it was more than this, I am certain, that made your spine rigid and your face expressionless this first day of April 1933.

Even through the severely restricted lens of Paha Sapa’s reading in recent years, I understood all too well that when it came to the topic of my death—my death and the deaths of 258 other officers and troopers of the Seventh Cavalry, including my two brothers, my very young nephew, and my brother-in-law—everyone who had taken the energy to form an opinion on me fell into either the category that considered me a megalomaniacal fool who managed to get my men, my relatives, and myself killed through sheer, arrogant stupidity, or in the opposing category wherein I, Lieutenant Colonel (still called “General” by those who loved me) George Armstrong Custer, had died following orders and in a valiant attack on the largest concentration of hostile Indian warriors in the entire history of our nation’s warfare against the Indians.

Custerphobes or Custerphiles, as one otherwise forgettable editorial writer had put it some years earlier. And it was true that there seemed to be no middle ground—no one who thought I was something between those opposite and mutually exclusive poles of arrogant fool or martyred hero.

Were you forgetting important things these days in your age and illness, my darling? Had senility begun to set in behind those rheumy eyes and that wrinkled, absent expression? Is it possible that you were, even as I sat opposite you, forgetting that you had led the Custerphile contingent now for fifty-seven long, bitter years? Ever vigilant in defense against any conceivable blot on my name or record of honor, you also led the offense at times, such as in 1926 and again in 1929, when you strongly objected to C. H. Asbury, then chief agent at the Crow Agency in control of the Little Big Horn battlefield that bears my name, when Asbury considered putting up even the smallest plaque honoring the name and memory of that drunkard and coward Major Marcus Reno—who, my darling, you were certain had left me and my three companies alone on that hill to die.

All those years and decades of never faltering as you led the Custerphiles in my name, never allowing the Custerphobes a foothold or fingerhold, using your grief and widowhood and dignity as your weapons, and during that time how many faux “unknown survivors” of my so-called Last Stand had you heard from or been forced to meet with? Dozens? Scores? Hundreds?

You, my love, had gone to the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago, only seventeen years after your husband had been turned into worm meat, and there had been introduced to Chief Rains-in-the-Face, who, it was bragged by the Indians even there in Buffalo Bill’s troupe, was the man who had killed me. You, my Sunshine, were all too well aware that the reason for that fat old smallpox-scarred Indian’s ascendancy in the Sioux and Cheyenne hierarchy there in Buffalo Bill’s Show—they had given Rains-in-the-Face Sitting Bull’s old cabin to live in at the Fair, the cabin transplanted right there on the Midway Plaisance, where poor Paha Sapa first met his wife, for God’s sake—was precisely the smiling, smirking Rains-in-the-Face’s claim of having personally killed me in the high grass of the Little Big Horn. And when Cody introduced the smiling, pock-faced old Indian fool, you had nodded curtly, feeling the pain slashing your insides as if someone were in your belly swinging a straight razor.

No wonder you were worn out but rigidly on guard and scowling this day, this day that only Paha Sapa and I knew was our reunion, yours and mine, my darling, when Mrs. May Custer Elmer began explaining how Paha Sapa had been there on the battlefield the very day and hour and moment that I—your husband—had died.

There was a real silence when May quit talking. Paha Sapa did not break that lengthening and audibly thickening silence, nor did you, my once and former and now lost lovely girl. The heavy clock on the bureau clunked away the passing seconds. Somewhere on the East River to the south, in the direction of the Brooklyn Bridge, a large ship’s horn bleated woefully.

Finally, after a full ninety seconds of our remaining six minutes had been fed to silence, you spoke even more softly than before, but with an inescapable edge in your tone that could have shaved me as cleanly as the straight razor even then slashing at your insides.

“You were there when my husband died, Mr. William Slow Horse?”

“Yes, ma’am. I was.”

“How old are you now, Mr. Slow Horse?”

“Sixty-eight this coming August, Mrs. Custer.”

“And how old were you then… that day… Mr. Slow Horse?”

“Eleven summers that August, ma’am. Not quite eleven that day in June.”

“What do your people call the month of June, Mr. Slow Horse?”

“Different things, ma’am. My band called June the Moon of the June Berries.”

You smiled then, Libbie, and the new, wrong teeth looked more aggressive than ever. An old predator’s overbite, not a rabbit’s.

“That name is a bit tautological, isn’t it, Mr. William Slow Horse?”

Paha Sapa did not smile or blink or look away from the cold, once-blue stare aimed at him.

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Custer. I don’t know that word… tautological.”

“No, of course you don’t, Mr. Slow Horse.”

“But my guess is that it means ‘redundant’—or, as my mentor, Mr. Doane Robinson, used to joke, ‘repetitiously redundant’—which I guess our word for June is. The Lakota word for June is wipazunkawaštewi, and it means more or less ‘the moon in which the cherries of that moon become ripe,’ and the dates for the lunar month, a moon, aren’t exactly the same as those for the modern calendar month of June.”

You squinted at him through this recital, my darling, perhaps the longest speech I’d ever heard Paha Sapa give, and everything in your squint, the set of your mouth and chin, and your posture showed that you were not listening, refused to hear, and did not care.

Finally you said flatly, “You claim to have seen my husband there on the battlefield, Mr. Slow Horse?”

“Yes.”

“Did you kill him?”

Paha Sapa blinked at that. “No, Mrs. Custer. I didn’t hurt him in any way. I didn’t have a weapon with me. I just touched him.”

“Touched him? Why would you do that if you weren’t attacking him, Mr. Slow Horse?”

“I was ten summers old and was counting coup. Do you know the term, Mrs. Custer?”

“Yes, I believe I do, Mr. Slow Horse. It’s what Indian warriors do to show their courage, isn’t it? Just touching an enemy?”

“Yes, ma’am. I wasn’t a warrior, but I was trying to show my courage.”

“Did you have with you a… what do you call it? A coup stick? I saw those when I traveled with my husband to Indian villages in Kansas, Nebraska, and elsewhere.”

“No, I only had my bare hand.”

You took a breath, Libbie, and while still sitting stiffly, leaned forward slightly, as if you were on a rusty hinge.

“Did my husband say something to you, Mr. William Slow Horse? Are you going to tell me that my husband said something to you?”

Paha Sapa and I had discussed what to say next many times. When he first suggested coming to see you, for me, several years ago, I had certain fantasies of having Paha Sapa share various secret things with you that only you and I would know, so you would understand that he was truly speaking for me. Some of the secrets seem absurd now—“Mrs. Custer, he said to remember how we went into the willows alone on the day the regiment left from Fort Abe Lincoln and what we did there… ”—and unless Paha Sapa explained that my ghost was inside him, it would make no sense anyway.

We actually discussed telling you that my ghost—what Paha Sapa thought of as my ghost—was inside him. Then I could tell you, my dearest, everything that I longed to tell you. After all, we had both lived through that strange era of spirit rappings and seances before and during the War, and more than once you had wondered aloud if there was anything to these mediums and these visits from the dead.

Now Paha Sapa could have proved that there was.

Only we decided against that. It was all too… vulgar. We had finally decided (I had finally decided) that Paha Sapa would explain to you only that I, your husband, had, with my dying breath, whispered to him, a mere boy, “Tell my Libbie that I love her and always will love her.” And we fully expected you to say, “Oh, and did you speak and understand English when you were ten years old, Mr. Slow Horse?” and he would reply, “No, Mrs. Custer, but I remembered the simple sound of the words and understood them years later when I did learn English.”

To that end, we’d shortened the message a bit to “Tell Libbie I love her.” Six simple syllables. It might seem possible, especially to a woman of ninety who had loved me all these intervening years, that I might have said that and that an Indian boy might have remembered six such syllables and finally carried them to her like six roses.

Then I heard Paha Sapa reply to you in that little room… “No, Mrs. Custer, your husband did not speak to me. I believe he was dead when I touched him.”

You stared at him a long, long moment then—another minute of our short time together gone forever—and said coldly, “Then why did you come to see me, Mr. William Slow Horse? To tell me what my husband looked like in those last seconds? To tell me that he did not suffer… or that he did? Or perhaps to apologize?”

“No, Mrs. Custer. I was just curious to meet you. And I appreciate you giving me this time.”

Paha Sapa stood up. I felt myself fluttering in gales of inexplicable emotions—I did not even know what they were—but you still sat there and looked calmly up at this aging Indian visitor, my love, your gaze still cold but no longer suspicious or hostile. Perhaps a little puzzled.

“If you had apologized, Mr. Slow Horse,” you said to him in that whisper of a voice, “I would have told you there was no need. I realized long ago that it wasn’t you Sioux and your Cheyenne friends who killed my husband… it was those cowards and Judases in his own command like Marcus Reno and Frederick Benteen who killed my darling husband and his brothers and our nephew and so many of his troopers.”

Paha Sapa did not know what to say to that. I did not know what to tell Paha Sapa to say to that. He bowed and turned to leave. Mrs. May Custer Elmer hustled to show him out through the cluttered rooms.

There was a whisper from the parlor behind us and Paha Sapa turned back. You were still seated—seeming more shrunken somehow, my dearest, perhaps because you had slumped from that defiant posture and now looked only like a bent old woman—but you were beckoning Paha Sapa closer with a wiggle of one yellow-nailed finger.

He leaned over you, breathing in the scent of lilac toilet water and the deeper smell of a very old woman wrapped in her stifling layers.

You looked him in the eye then, looked us in the eye, and whispered… “Autie… ” or perhaps “Good-bye” or perhaps it was a pure nonsense syllable, something choked off or irrelevant to everything that had come before.

When Paha Sapa realized that you were not going to say anything else, he nodded as if he understood, bowed again, and followed May Custer Elmer out. The housekeeper, Mrs. Flood, had bustled in behind us, carrying what looked to be medicines on a tray into the parlor for you.

Back at the hotel for colored people, Paha Sapa slept well that night. His train was leaving from Grand Central Terminal at 7:45 the next morning. Although I never really slept, there were times when I faded into the nonconsciousness of the black background which I occupied when Paha Sapa did not summon me out to the light and sound, but I did not find escape there that night.

I found myself wishing that I could have told you many things, Libbie, my darling, my wife, my life.

I wish I could have explained to you that it wasn’t betrayal or cowardly officers that caused my death and that of my brothers Tom and Boston and my nephew Autie and the others there at the Little Big Horn. It was true that Major Reno was a drunk—and probably a coward—and that Benteen hated my guts (and always had) but proved his courage on the same field where Reno showed his cowardice, but none of that was relevant to my death. I know in my soldier’s heart that Reno and Benteen and the others couldn’t have come up to help me and my three surrounded companies; the four miles that separated us that day might as well have been the distance from the Earth to the moon. They had their own battle to fight, Libbie, my love, and no troopers could have reached us in time or to any effect other than dying with us.

There were just too many hostile Indians there, my dearest. Our best intelligence, the white agents at the Agencies, had assured us over and over that no more than eight hundred warriors in all, Cheyenne and Sioux, the Lakotas and Nakotas and Dakotas, all of them, had slipped away from the agencies to go hunt buffalo and fight. No more than eight hundred and probably far fewer than that, since such large bands rarely spent much time together—finding proper grazing for their horses was too difficult. And the sheer heaps of human excrement and other filth and garbage generated by camps of more than a few hundred Indians discouraged them from staying together long.

So we rode in expecting eight hundred and ran into… how many? You’ve heard all the figures, Libbie, my darling. They range from fifteen hundred warriors arrayed against us to more than six thousand, most coming from a village of ten to fifteen thousand men, women, and children, all of whom were willing to join in the fight—or at least in the scalping and mutilating. In the end, my darling, it turned out to be a matter of just too damned many Indians there waiting for us. It was unprecedented. It was unexpected. It was my undoing.

Even then, Libbie, we should have prevailed. Right up until the last minutes, I was sure we would prevail—even without Reno’s companies or Benteen’s or the supply train or the packs of ammunition.

The reason was simple: the cavalry in any solid numbers always had prevailed against Plains Indians. Our most trusted tactic was to charge any large band or village of hostiles. They might fight for a few minutes, or fight while running, but if there was a way for them simply to scatter and run in the face of a charge, they always had before. Always.

But this time they did not.

It is almost humorous when you think about it, my darling. It’s precisely what you once said to me about a skittish horse you were riding in Kansas—“Horses can be dangerous, but you can always trust them to act like horses. Once you know what they’re going to try to do to you, you can avoid it.”

I had trusted the Sioux and Cheyenne there at the Little Big Horn to act as they had at the Washita—as Indian warriors had everywhere else the Seventh Cavalry and other regiments had encountered them. Taken by surprise by a cavalry charge, they should have fought a few minutes but then scattered as they always had before.

But this time they didn’t. It was that simple, Libbie, my love.

If I had been able to talk to you that final day on April first, I might have explained to you that the sadness I felt was not for me, but for leading my young brother Tom (perhaps the bravest of all of us, he with his two Medals of Honor) and my non-soldier brother Boston (whom I hired as a scout at the last minute, on a whim, thinking that he would be sorry to have missed the Last Great Indian Fight), not to mention my nephew Autie, who had just turned eighteen and who came along precisely so as not to miss that promised Last Big Battle, all to that place on that day.

If I could, Libbie, if ghosts or Heaven were real, I would shake them by the hand and look them in the eye and apologize to all of them—especially to those men who’d followed me and trusted me for so long, like Lonesome Charley Reynolds and Myles Keogh and Bill Cooke—not for their deaths, for we all owe God a death (as Hamlet reminded us), but for the foolishness of my own assumptions and minor miscalculations that hot, humid June Sunday in 1876.

But I would also have reminded you of something, my darling. I would have reminded you of how much fun we had (and planned to continue to have, me earning money, at last, as a lecturer once that Final Great Indian Battle was over, and also writing my books, and perhaps some future in Democratic politics). But without worrying about our future, just remind you of how much fun we had.

I was a warrior and loved being a warrior. And you enjoyed the status and excitement of being a warrior’s wife, my love… or at least of being an officer warrior’s wife.

The Rebs had been the bravest enemy I would ever fight, and the hostile Indians served as a foe in the years after the War. But even then, even that last winter and spring, you and I knew that the days of an active warrior on the frontier were closing fast.

Finally, the last thing I would have told you that Saturday afternoon in your parlor of stale air was that you should have remarried. I had no doubt about that. You should have remarried as soon as you could after the Little Big Horn, Libbie, my love.

It was two years after our New York visit and totally by chance that Paha Sapa came across a newspaper quote by your “literary executor,” the same accusatory and strangely syllable-stressed Miss Marguerite Merington whom we’d met briefly down in the foyer, and Miss Merington quoted you as saying around the time we met you—“One does get so lonely. But I always felt I should be committing adultery if I were to wake up one morning and see any head but Autie’s on my pillow.”

Well, my darling, to that I must say to you—horse apples.

The Creator designed you, more than He did most women, I believe, to be loved, to love in return, and to be a lover.

You should have found a good man as soon after June 25, 1876, as would not have seemed scandalous—an attorney would have served (as it did for our cook Eliza) or, better yet, a judge, since you always secretly wanted to marry your father the Judge—and you should have married a good man and put our life on the Plains behind you forever. No lobbying for equestrian saddles. No endless correspondence with yellow-mustached and mawkish old soldiers who write to say “I loved General Custer” but who are really saying “I would love you, Mrs. Custer, if you would let me.” No writing romantic fantasies about a not-quite-true past with silly titles like Boots and Saddles or Following the Guidon.

You should have lived for yourself, Libbie Bacon, not for your dead husband. You should have celebrated life, not my death, and you should have become a lover again and awakened every day you could with another man’s head on your pillow and your head on his. Perhaps you could still have had a child—you were 34 when I died. Stranger things have happened. You would have lived in fullness and celebrated life then, my darling.

Instead, you “lived” to serve a ghost. And there are no ghosts, my dear.

Someday I shall explain that to Paha Sapa, who thinks otherwise. I shall try to make him understand what I discovered some years ago—that I am no ghost, nor a soul waiting to go to Heaven, but only a node in his unique empathic consciousness, a sort of simulation of a self-aware memory.

It is all Paha Sapa and a twist of his odd gift of vision and always has been. There is no ghost, no “me” here, my love. There never has been.

And while I am neither ghost nor liberated soul, I have learned something about death in these years in the cradle of darkness, Libbie. I tremble to tell you that I do not think that there is anything beyond this life, my dearest, which is all the more reason I wish you had decided to live with another man and build a new life rather than choose to bury your future with me fifty-seven years ago.

But I am still glad that Paha Sapa—the loneliest man you have ever met or ever could meet, my love, a man who has lost his name, his relatives, his honor, his wife, his son, his gods, his future, his hopes, and every sacred thing ever entrusted to him—I am still glad that Paha Sapa brought me to New York on that first day of April 1933.

We were delayed a day and a night due to a freak spring snowstorm near Grand Isle, Nebraska, and two days after we finally got back to Mount Rushmore, the Rapid City Journal carried this, dated April 5 and reprinted from the New York Times—

Mrs. Elizabeth Bacon Custer, widow of General George A. Custer, famous Indian fighter of post Civil War days, died at 5:30 yesterday afternoon in her apartment at 71 Park Avenue after a heart attack that occurred Sunday evening. She would have been 91 years old on Saturday. She had been in her usual health and good spirit lately and had indulged in occasional drives and short walks.

At Mrs. Custer’s bedside yesterday were two nieces, Mrs. Charles W. Elmer of 14 Clark street, Brooklyn, and Miss Lula Custer, who had been summoned from her home on the old Custer farm at Monroe Mich., and Mr. Elmer.

It is expected that the funeral service will be held at West Point. Announcement of the arrangements will be made later.

For many years, almost up to the end of her long, eventful life, Mrs. Elizabeth Bacon Custer kept vividly alive the memories of the gallant cavalry commander, whose death in the Battle of Little Big Horn in Montana, in 1876, when his battalion was annihilated by the Indians, made one of the most tragic and dramatic pages of American history.

Mrs. Custer was born in Monroe, Mich., the daughter of Judge Daniel S. Bacon, where she led a peaceful and sheltered life until 1864, when she married “the boy General with the golden locks.” Her youthful soldier husband, General Custer, was born in New Rumley, Harrison County, Ohio, and was graduated at West Point in 1861. At the time of their marriage, he had already served successfully and won promotion in the Civil War, after having arrived fresh from the front on the day of the first battle of Bull Run.

He was then a Brigadier General in command of a brigade of Michigan volunteer cavalry, which under his leadership became one of the most efficient and best-trained bodies of cavalry in the Federal Army. After their marriage Mrs. Custer trod the unfrequented path for a woman of open campaigning. She slept where she could, drank water that in her own words contained “natural History,” and never dared confess to a headache, depression or fatigue.

She followed the General until the close of the Civil War. She was near him at Richmond, Va., when Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox. He was one of the officers in attendance on General Phil H. Sheridan, who bought the little table on which the conditions for the surrender of the Confederate Army were written by General Grant, and presented it to Mrs. Custer.

Indian Campaign in 1867

After the Civil War General Custer, who was still under 26, was transferred to Texas. As Lieutenant Colonel of the Seventh Cavalry, in 1867–68, he gained his first experience as an Indian fighter. For two years he was stationed with his regiment in Kentucky, and in the Spring of 1873 he was ordered to Dakota Territory to protect the surveyors of the Northern Pacific Railway while locating that line through the Indian country west of the Missouri River.

Mrs. Custer personally attended her husband on many of his most daring expeditions against the Indians. This was the era of the covered wagon, when the transcontinental trek was made by stage, canal boat, prairie schooner and afoot, and there was prairie fire and ever-lurking Indian peril to contend with.

Steamer Brought News

Finally, at Fort Abraham Lincoln, at Bismarck, N.D., Mrs. Custer waited while General Custer joined a huge expeditionary force in a campaign against the Indians that General Sheridan hoped would be decisive. Three weeks after the massacre, when General Custer with his entire command of five companies of Seventh Cavalry, numbering 207, were annihilated in about twenty minutes by the redskins, a slow-moving steamer brought the tragic news from up the river.

Following her husband’s death she wrote three books on his experiences, “Boots and Saddles, or Life With General Custer in Dakota,” “Tenting on the Plains” and “Following the Guidon.” This was a part of her fifty years and more task of defending his memory, around which controversy flamed. She lectured up and down the country and battled for his rights in Washington. In 1926 she expressed the feeling that the old wounds had been healed.

While the widow viewed the massacre at the Little Big Horn River in Montana as a terrible tragedy, she said at one time, that “perhaps it was necessary in the scheme of things, for the public clamor that rose after the battle resulted in better equipment for the soldiers everywhere, and very soon the Indian warfare came to its end.”

Before neuritis interfered with her walking she was a famous figure on the sunny side of Park Avenue as she took leisurely strolls about the neighborhood. She frequented the Cosmopolitan Club, which is near her home. She is quoted as saying that the modern club is a consolation for the widow and old maid. On her walks she was accompanied by her companion, Mrs. Margaret Flood, who, with her husband, Patrick Flood, an ex-service man, were permanent fixtures in the household.

In addition to war relics her apartment contained many Colonial treasures. One of her greatest treasures was the first Confederation flag of truce. In her hall was a long photograph showing the unveiling of a statue to her husband’s memory in Monroe, Neb.

Good-bye, Libbie. Farewell, my darling girl. We shall not meet again.

But, as Paha Sapa has taught me without knowing he has taught me—

Toksha ake čante ista wacinyanktin ktelo.

I shall see you again with the eye of my heart.