Gloryland (14 page)

“When the bugle blared out it startled me, even after all these years. The horses had been bunched up cause they knew what was coming, and then, well, we let them loose and followed the crying of that bugle down to the river, through the reeds there, and then we were heaving up, down, up, down, through the water. It was so cold it bit my legs like fire. Then rising out of it, out and up, leaning forward as we rose up in a line, and I heard
Charge!

“And then it got real still, like back home when a hurricane comes over and the wind blows round you but doesn’t touch you . . . anyway, in the middle of all that I could hear a flute playing off somewhere, the notes rising and falling like our sabers, high enough so’s we could hear it through the firing of our carbines and the yelling of
the children looking for their parents and the screams of the parents looking for their children. That flute sound just riding over everything, clean and pure, the only thing clean that day.

“The sound got louder when everything else stopped, and then I couldn’t hear it no more. That flute just died away until you couldn’t tell it from the wind. There ain’t no noise like the sound of a battlefield when the battle is over, but the noise ain’t out there, it’s in your head, the other side of that hurricane finally catching up to you. And the smell of burning, I can still taste it in my clothes. I can’t get the smell out. I wear the smell of that day, put it on in the mornin and sleep in it at night.

“This flute was lying on the ground for anyone fool enough to take it, next to the old man, that Indian who died holding it. I took it, and after a while I started playing it. I figured if he could play it through all that, then I could play it after. Here it is . . .”

And now he was plainly holding it out to me.

“I play it,” he continued, “and even when I don’t try to remember, hell,
it
does, it can never forget the music it made on that day, but I don’t want to hear that day no more, so you can have it, boy. It’s yours. You ain’t got to that day yet, you’re still green. I bet you sleep fine! So you’d be doin me a favor by taking it away.”

I didn’t say anything, just reached out my hand and took the flute. Sergeant Trouble nodded and slowly turned and walked out of the fort, down the dusty road. He never looked back. I guess that was one thing the army taught him, to not look back.

Trouble never told me his name. He didn’t have to. It was all about getting rid of something that hurt too much to hold. I never knew you could give away your pain so easy, hand over to a stranger what’s been eating at you from the inside.

The sergeant gave me the pain of that day on the river, and I took it. What could I do, he outranked me. I couldn’t just say, sorry, sir, got enough pain of my own, don’t need more, try someone else, please. I took it in silence and walked with the flute in my hand back to the barracks of Fort Robinson. I was a soldier now.

T
hat’s what the Indians called us. All of them, Cheyenne, Lakota, Dakota, Kiowa, they called us buffalo soldiers because our hair was just like the hair between the horns of the buffalo.

It’s the most respectful of all the names we were called, and it’s interesting that it came from people we were fighting. Folks don’t usually say kind things bout the people they’re in a war with. Yeah, the Indians respected us, at least some of them did, maybe not the Absaroka, but the Absaroka didn’t take to anyone who wasn’t Absaroka, which means “children of the large beaked bird,” and that’s what those folks called themselves, but people who weren’t part of that tribe called them Crow. The Absaroka, like most of those Indians on the Great Plains, are pretty fierce people, and some of them speak and read English, so if any of them read this and get upset cause I got something wrong, I meant no offense.

Grandma Sara used to say that wars are started by people who ain’t got any manners. If the government ever said it was sorry for taking the Indians’ land, maybe a lot of what was bad wouldn’t have happened. Maybe a war is just a bunch of people all being rude at the same time, and it keeps on getting worse cause no one ever apologizes.

It was hard for me being mixed up in it, cause I’m part Seminole, and even though those Indians weren’t Seminole, I felt something in common with them that I didn’t feel with most white people. But many of the colored soldiers I served with hated Indians, and the hate was hot, you could feel it. It was strange cause a lot of those soldiers had Indian blood in them, too.

Maybe it was just a relief to them that the violence was against
strangers and not their own families back in South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas. Instead of a white sheriff putting on a hood and joining a lynching party, the law was going after someone else, and they were part of the law, and it might’ve felt good to not be the victim. But if you weren’t the victim, then you were probably the man wearing the white hood, or the blue uniform.

I don’t know. It made sense at the time to hate Indians. Otherwise, how could you kill them? Looking back, I don’t think I ever actually killed an Indian. At least not directly. There weren’t many left to kill by the time I enlisted, and it always seemed like Troop K arrived a few hours late or a few days late.

But I know I was responsible for killing a few, sort of. We got orders to shoot buffalo whenever we came across them, and I knew even then that every good shot was bringing down more than just an animal. I felt bad bout that, still do. You see, to understand those Plains Indians, you got to understand that the buffalo was the heart of them. They ate it, almost all of it. It clothed them, kept them warm, and made it easier for them to see what’s hard for a human being to see, that you can’t go it alone, you need something out there in the world to help you.

That was the buffalo. It was a church, a shelter, a two-thousand-pound storehouse packed with goods, running round on four hoofs. And there we were, the Ninth, trying to take it all away, take food out of some child’s mouth, take away what was keeping her warm in the winter. All that and more you can’t say in English. I guess you can only say it in Dakota or dream it in Cheyenne or pray it in Kiowa, but I don’t know the words, and even if I did, the meaning would be lost on me. I wish I knew it in Seminole, but Grandma Sara felt it was tough enough being colored, so why would I want to be an Indian too?

What was it all about? Land. The land you were born on. The land you die on. The land you want your children to live and die on. The land that was given to you. How can you let that go without
putting up a fight? Just like the colored men and women on those slave ships, refusing to go along, fighting back, even jumping into the sea rather than living as a slave, cause you just can’t let go of what you had.

And the people coming in, the settlers, they couldn’t let go of what they wanted. They got children too, and some of their boys and girls were born on the way out. Those pioneers didn’t know or care that they were traveling through someone’s country, bringing cattle onto it or digging for gold in it, or breaking up the prairie for farms, because passing through someone’s country is not the same as building a house on it and putting up a fence.

I get angry thinking about it, and I ain’t Kiowa or Cheyenne, but I remember Grandma Sara raging bout how no respect was shown to the Seminole when white people came down into Florida, how none of them ever said, “Excuse me, I’d like to live here too.” They saw colored people and Indians living and working together, and that didn’t set too well with the white people cause they were outnumbered, so it made sense just to kill them all.

It’d be like a stranger walking into your house, sitting in your chair, drinking your whiskey, eating your food, sleeping in your bed, and then treating you like you’re just the furniture that come with the place, furniture he don’t particularly care for. How mad would you be? Yeah, I understand Seminole anger. So maybe I understand Cheyenne anger too, even if I don’t know the words they use to say it.

But I know that for an Indian to call me a buffalo soldier was being bout as respectful as he could, cause the buffalo was right there next to God. And it sure as hell sounded better than “nigger cavalry” or “brunette” or “darkey policeman,” no, I think buffalo soldier sounds just fine.

 

Being a buffalo soldier meant a bugle getting you up before the sun, meant feeding the horses, watering them, and drills for everything you might do on that horse. Drills taught you how to keep your seat if you suddenly had to speed up to a canter or come to a stop, drills
taught you how to turn your horse, back your horse, go at the walk or the trot, to sidestep, to do everything but dance. And the bugle would sound another day, and it’d be something new, firing from horseback or using the saber, riding in formation, learning to move as one unit and think as one unit, doing it again and again so you wouldn’t have to think because that was the point of drills, to not think but simply do, because it’s hard to think when other people are trying to kill you, when you’re afraid that you’re going to die, so the army puts you in that situation and they drill how you should act, over and over, so hopefully when you’re having that bad day you can survive it by just slipping into reflex, into the drill. Because crying or praying to God when bullets are flying don’t prepare you for the battlefield, but it does get you ready for what comes after, and a soldier’s duty is to fight so well that the man on the other side is the one with his hands pressed together, sobbing and praying for deliverance, the man no longer holding his rifle, the man who is already dead.

It meant the chaplain with the quiet voice who drilled you with letters of the alphabet, who made you string letters into words and words into sentences and sentences into paragraphs and paragraphs into stories and stories into reports, reports about patrols through country that was being emptied and filled up at the same time, patrols that brought Indians and belligerents into custody, warriors into custody, old men, women, and children into custody, into wagons, into corrals like stock, where they’d be standing round like dead people.

And that meant I could write letters too, letters home, like Daddy wanted me to do.