Dan Simmons - Black Hills

That was in my letter for public consumption—and, perhaps, as I knew you would know, for later publication in the book of memoirs you and I had long planned to write together—but I knew how you would respond to it privately, and you did not disappoint me, my darling. I knew that you would tease me about the girl in a way that only a wife perfectly secure in her husband’s love and adoration could tease her lover.

No more than a week later, somewhere on our freezing march through the panhandle of Texas and around back into Oklahoma, your responding letter caught up to me:

My Darling Autie,

Your second bride sounds ravishing, my dearest. As the victor in your lightning siege and burning of that Indian Troy, you certainly deserve this ravishing Helen whom you describe in such delightful (one might almost say “breathless”) prose. Few white women have ever received a love letter of their own with such rapturous phrasings and felicitous paeons, so I have no idea how your Cheyenne Helen (whose name apparently sounds a little like “Minnesota,” which is appropriate, since you took her, one might say, in the snow) feels about this praise. Can she read? Oh, that makes no matter, I’m sure, since while you must send me letters, I am certain that you need not even raise your voice to talk to her on these long, long winter nights. She does share your tent, of course? It would hardly be gallant of you if she did not.

So, my darling Autie, my dearest Beloved, what does our— your—Mo-nah-se-tah (and I see while actually writing the name, that she has much more “moan” than wintry state in her sweet name) look like beneath those soft and beaded doeskin dresses which I’m sure she wears only when outside your shared sleeping quarters?

Are Mo-nah-se-tah’s ravenlike “luxuriant growth of the most beautiful silken tresses” matched by the richness of her escutcheon, my dearest connoisseur of all such luxuriance?

I interrupt only to say that I remember when you first used “escutcheon” to describe what you are discussing here, my darling Libbie. It was in Monroe, when we were lying naked on our bed that summer evening after we’d bathed together and I was playing with the rich tangle of what I then called your maiden-hair and you asked me if your “escutcheon” was, as you whispered that warm afternoon, “too prolific?” I assured you then that it was not, that I loved the luxuriant growth of it, and then I ended any verbal argument by other means.

Your winter ’69 letter continued, and I think I remember each word correctly:

Are your new friend Mo-nah-se-tah’s attributes higher and firmer than mine?

I wrote you back that I had seen the lady bathing and that although she seemed to have almost no escutcheon, her seventeen-year-old’s breasts were high and firm, but immediately assured you that they did not compare in attractiveness to your full, white bosoms. (I could have told you the truth, that Indian women’s busts were almost always sagging, wrinkled old dugs before they were out of their twenties, caused, I presume, by suckling far too many Indian children and perhaps by never being supported by any proper undergarment, but I thought perhaps you knew this already. You were always put off by the appearance of old, wrinkled, sagging Indian women.)

You wrote more:

Is her skin a golden, dusky tawny all over (except for the parts that are pink on me)?

I assured you in the next mail that Mo-nah-se-tah’s skin was indeed a golden, tawny color, unblemished except for an odd tattoo carved into her left shoulder. Her nipples, I explained, were a light brown and thus not nearly as attractive or exciting as your pink tips, my darling Libbie. You then abandoned all subtlety:

Do Indian maidens named Mo-nah-se-tah moan in your presence, my dearest Autie?

I laughed then and wrote you that the day before, the 14th of January, 1869 , Mo-nah-se-tah had moaned softly for hours. It was the day her baby was born, and during most of the time I had glimpsed her briefly naked in my tent, the small girl was grossly pregnant with some brave’s child. I often wondered if we had killed the father of her child that morning of November 27 (odds are good we had), but I never asked Mo-nah-se-tah, and she never mentioned the warrior or his fate.

The girl was always cheerful and never a drag on the regiment. Indeed, it was due to her excellent guiding that on March 15 of 1869 we found Little Robe’s and Medicine Arrow’s village in north Texas, thus ending a chase that had preoccupied us all that long winter. Since they had some white captives with them (the memory of those two dead white women in the burned village along the Washita, their throats so cruelly cut, had stayed with me), I chose to parley rather than immediately attack the village, but when Medicine Arrow proved especially recalcitrant, I seized four of their men as hostages and promised the chiefs I would hang these men at sunrise the next morning if they did not immediately hand over their white captives. Still, the recalcitrant Cheyenne resisted, so we sent the captives—after grabbing a few more—away to Fort Hays with a second ultimatum that these hostages would be freed only after Medicine Arrow and Little Robe brought their bands to the reservation and released the white captives. Luckily for us, the guards at Fort Hays killed two of these Cheyenne hostages, and Medicine Arrow released the captives and led his people to a reservation.

Then I returned to Fort Hays and you, and we had two of the most pleasant years of our marriage there, with you teasing me about Mo-nah-se-tah at some of the most intimate moments of those two happy years. Why such conversation excited you, my dearest, I do not know, but your excitement always incited mine—and perhaps, to be totally truthful, the fantasy discussions of Mo-nah-se-tah did as well—so of all our little bedroom games, the Mo-nah-se-tah game may have been one of the most stimulating for both of us.

Libbie, my darling, even while thinking these thoughts to you, I am overcome by a strange and deep foreboding.

I am sure that I am merely dreaming, almost certainly in the arms of morphia, after being wounded at the Little Big Horn yesterday (or recently), but sometimes here in the darkness I feel insubstantial, no longer connected to my injured body or the world, in a word—untethered—except to you.

Even while I was reminiscing about the Washita victory and our ongoing Mo-nah-se-tah game, another memory chilled me.

Do you remember last winter in New York, when, weary of seeing Julius Caesar for free (more than two score times, until we could—and did—recite all the dialogue from memory), we were allowed by our friend the actor Lawrence Barrett (the very same friend who’d left all those complimentary tickets for us to Julius Caesar ) to sit in on the dress rehearsals for Henry IV Part I and Henry IV Part II ?

Neither of us knew the plays that well, but you were highly amused at the character of Henry Percy, the so-called Hotspur. When I failed to see the source of your amusement, you whispered, “Oh, Autie… Hotspur is you!”

I frowned at the martinet of a war leader strutting and fretting on the stage—the theater, I remember, being filled only with other actors and immediate family, was not heated, and we were shivering—and I whispered back, “I fail to see any resemblance.”

“Oh, Autie,” you whispered again, still giggling as softly as you could at the scene unfolding on the stage, “he loves his wife madly. Don’t you see? But the two of them are always teasing and threatening and playacting toward each other.”