Baked Earth
by Steve Carr
The earth was baked by the intense rays of the summer sun. The thudding of the horses hooves on the hard ground as the soldiers rode through the outpost made the floor of the cabin vibrate. Wearing the thinly tanned deer-hide moccasins worn by a young Sioux Indian girl, raped and murdered by six fur traders less than fifty miles from the outpost, Amanda felt the shudder of the vibrations through the soles of her feet. The moccasins were similar to the ones she wore for the ten years she lived with the Sioux tribe. She was only sixteen when captured and taken to the Sioux camp after the murder of her parents and two brothers by a Sioux war party as they were crossing the plain in a covered wagon. For the next year she was passed from one Sioux brave to the next until she was taken in by Rushing Wind as his third wife. By then she was so traumatized that she lost all memory of anything that preceded her capture. Who she had been and where she came from, she had no idea.
She was brought to the outpost the year before as Fallen Dove and given the white man's name Amanda.
The door to the cabin opened just as the last of the soldiers rode by leaving a cloud of dust in their wake. Amanda turned from the small window from where she had been watching them and saw her husband, Jackson Riley, walk in. She realized that while being lost in thought, time had gotten away from her and that she had forgotten to add salt to the pot of stew she had placed on the stove. He hung his hat on the hook in the wall by the door, glanced at her, his face sunburned, and went to the bucket of creek water she had brought in earlier in the day. "It's hot as hell today," he said and then scooped out a dipper full of water and poured it over his head. He shook the dripping water from his beard. "That foal born last night didn't make it."
"That's too bad." she said as she crossed the room to the stove and grabbed the tin of salt from the shelf above it. "How's the mare doing?"
"A bit tuckered out, but fine," he said.
"That's a blessing at least."
Amanda had a child, a boy, soon after joining Rushing Wind's longhouse, but suffered several miscarriages after that and then never conceived again. It was the child, Running Elk, she was thinking about. He was still an infant when the soldiers had forced her onto one of their horses while she was out gathering berries and brought her to the outpost. For the first year after being brought to the outpost they had kept her ankle chained to a post in the floor in a room at the soldier's barracks to keep her from running away. Slowly re-introduced to the white man's ways of talking and thinking by the women of the outpost, she gave up thoughts of returning to the Sioux tribe, knowing they would kill her on-sight. She was married to Jackson, the outpost's livery stable owner, initially not out of love, but because the other women demanded it.
"We can't have a Sioux whore, even if she is white, going about this outpost unmarried," they said.
She unscrewed the lid from the tin of salt and poured a palm full into the pot and stirred the boiling stew. "The soldiers have been back and forth a few times today," she said. "Are the Sioux on the warpath again?"
"There's rumors of secession," he said. He sat at the table and watched as she ladled stew into a bowl and placed it in front of him."
"Secession? What's that?"
He put a spoonful of stew in his mouth. "The southern states are threatening to break away from the north. There's talk of war," he said. "It has thrown the local garrison into turmoil since there are men in it from both the North and South. Colonel Matthews is doing everything he can to keep this outpost from being torn apart."
She sat at the table. "What does it mean for the Dakotas?"
"Not much," he said, "The Sioux will continue killing settlers and we'll continue to kill the Sioux."
She put a spoonful of stew in her mouth and coughed. Too much salt. She hadn't forgotten to put in the salt earlier after all.
"A small wagon train that has stopped on the border of the outpost brought with them a young Sioux male that tried to steal a horse from them" he said. "They had him trussed up like a pig ready for slaughter. They handed him over to the soldiers."
She rose from the table and took their cups to the water bucket. "If he's young, I hope they go easy on him."
"They hang horse thieves, no matter what the age, and especially Sioux horse thieves. You can't teach a Sioux savage right from wrong." He glanced at her seeing that her back had stiffened. "You were never actually a Sioux," he added contritely.
She scooped the cups into the water, filling them, and brought them back to the table. She placed his in front of him. "Strange that he was all by himself," she said.
He took a large swig of the water and then wiped dribbled water from his beard. "Stranger still is that the word going around is that the boy has blonde hair and blue eyes but has Sioux facial features and skin coloring. A half-breed, no doubt."
Shocked, she accidentally knocked over her cup of water onto the floor. As she bent down to pick it up her blonde hair fell across her face.
Just past sunrise, before Jackson was due to get out of bed, Amanda carried the water bucket out of the cabin, walked past the well, and headed for the creek. Getting water from a creek was one of the last holdovers from her time with the Sioux, something she did out of habit. Rapid Creek wound its way between the narrow grassy banks on the edge of the outpost. In normal weather its deep water rushed along and was cold, but the summer's extremely hot weather had turned it warm and and it ran slowly, as if it suffered the same lethargy brought on by the heat that affected the citizens of the outpost. She was the only person at the creek when she dipped the bucket into the water. When going to the creek in the morning she never wore shoes, and as the bucket filled, she placed her feet, one at a time, in the water and splashed them about. The times she had taken baths in the creek, even with all her clothes on, had so outraged the other women in the outpost, that she stopped doing it, but she longed to immerse her body in the creek. With her feet washed and the bucket full she walked back to the cabin in time to see a dozen soldiers on horseback on the road in front of her cabin heading eastward, toward the plains beyond the outpost. She placed the bucket at the door and swiftly walked toward the barracks.
At the eastern side of the barracks she heard soldiers inside talking and laughing, their words garbled, but it left no doubt in her mind that they were taunting someone. She made her way to the side of the barracks to a window in the room where she had been held, and peered through the bars. The blonde haired Sioux teen was chained to the post in the middle of the room. Four soldiers were in the room with him. They repeatedly kicked and slapped the boy seeming to try to elicit a response from the youth. But he remained sitting on the floor, neither looking at the soldiers, or looking at anything in particular. He had his head held high and stared straight ahead, his eyes fixed on something only he saw. The boy's deerskin jacket had been removed from him and lay crumpled in a corner. On his jacket lay his headband with a single hawk's feather sticking out of it and a pile of blonde hair that the soldiers had cut from his head. She knew without a doubt that the boy was Running Elk.
Ten minutes later she picked up the water bucket and went into her cabin. Jackson was seated at the table, still in his long johns. Although still hot, the morning temperature inside the cabin was better than that outdoors.
"Where have you been?" he growled.
She lifted the bucket. "I went to get water, as I always do."
"You were gone longer than usual."
"I stopped to watch soldiers leaving the outpost," she said. "It looked like they were planning on a skirmish with the Sioux."
"There's always a skirmish with the Sioux. Could you get busy making my breakfast? I've already lit the fire in the stove."
"Certainly."
She poured water from the bucket into a coffee pot, added coffee, and placed it on the stove. She then slipped on the moccasins and began making biscuits.
Mrs. Cavendish at the dry goods store scooped flour from a large barrel and emptied it into the feedsack that Amanda held open. The store was busy, with other women from the outpost, other merchants, cowboys, folks from the wagon train, and a few soldiers going in and out.
"Sugar also?" Mrs. Cavendish said after loudly clearing her throat. She was short, stout and her cheeks were the color of a ripened tomato.
Amanda realized that the store owner had been talking to her, and from the impatient expression on the woman's face she had been asked the question at least a couple of times.
"Not today," Amanda said. "Do you have any peppermints?"
Mrs. Cavendish eyed her curiously. "Peppermints? Has Jackson acquired a sweet tooth?"
"They're for me. I was having a hankering for them."
"I have a small tin of them in the back that I haven't gotten around to sitting out yet. Give me a minute and I'll go get them." She handed the sack to Amanda and disappeared through a doorway draped with a burlap curtain that led to the storeroom.
Amanda carried the sack over to the cash register and set it up on the counter. From behind the counter, Mr. Cavendish— as thin and pale as his wife was portly and full of color— was engaged in a conversation with one of the cowboys from the wagon train who was rolling a cigarette. The cowboy's hat was pushed back on his head, revealing thick red hair.
"We chased that boy about a mile before catching up with him," the cowboy said. "He put up a heck of a fight before we were able to tie him up."
"Awfully strange that a Sioux youngster that age would be all alone out there," Mr. Cavendish said.
"He only speaks that Indian gibberish so we couldn't understand a word he said so no one knows what he was doing, other than trying to steal a horse."
"Lakota," Amanda said.
The two men looked at her.
"What?" the cowboy said.
"The Sioux speak Lakota."
Mr. Cavendish rolled his eyes. "Give a woman a little bit of knowledge and she thinks she knows everything."
The cowboy laughed.
Mrs. Cavendish came out of the storeroom and placed the tin of peppermints on the counter. "How many of these do you want?" she said to Amanda.
"Just a handful," she said, "and give me a bottle of whiskey." Minutes later, Amanda left the store carrying the sack of flour, a bottle of whiskey. She had put the peppermints in the pocket of her skirt.