Dan Simmons - Black Hills

“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.