Custer's Luck

Three dead. Nine wounded, two of whom would not see the week out. Custer read the numbers twice, and they held still on the page, and that was the trouble with them. Benteen stood in the tent door with his hat in his hands. He had a way of waiting that made waiting into a comment. "A cheap day," Benteen said. "It was a cheap day." "General Terry will be pleased." "General Terry will write it up." Custer set the paper down and squared it against the edge of the field desk, which did not need squaring. Outside, a mule was complaining about something, at length. "Four hundred lodges burned. Eight hundred ponies taken. The village went north in the dark and we let it go north in the dark, because the infantry could not come up before noon and I would not move without the infantry." "You would not have said that in April." "No." Benteen's mouth did something that was not a smile. "It will read well in the reports." "It will read," Custer said. That was the whole of it, and Benteen had the decency or the cruelty to leave it there. The column had come down the Rosebud in three parts and closed like a hand, and the hand had closed on smoke. Gibbon's foot soldiers had held the bench. The Gatling guns had gone into battery on the high ground and thrown perhaps two hundred rounds into a river bottom already emptying, and one of them had jammed in the first minute, and the gunners had been very apologetic about it afterward. Somewhere in the middle of all that competence there had been a moment when the Seventh might have gone in alone at a gallop, and he had looked at it, and he had let it pass, the way a man lets a train pass when he has decided to be sensible about the fare. He had cut his hair short before this campaign. He remembered thinking, when the barber finished, that it was a small economy, and that small economies added up to a career. "Sir," Benteen said, "the interpreter says the runners are calling it a scattering. Not a fight. There's no word in it for what we did." "Then we did something new." "We did something quiet." Benteen put his hat on. "Good night, General." The lamp guttered. It should not have guttered, because the tent flap had already fallen and the air inside was dead. Custer smelled dust that was not the dust of this valley, dry and hot and full of powder, and under it a smell like copper left in the sun. The light went the color of an old bruise. Then there was too much of it. --- He was standing on a slope in white noon. The grass came to his boots and it was the wrong grass, and the river below was the wrong river, running the wrong way against the bluffs, and the dust rising off the bottom was a mile of it, a weather system of it, and out of the dust came the sound of a village that had not been warned. His own voice was speaking twenty feet away. "They'd slow us to a walk. The village will scatter the moment they see us. Speed is everything now, gentlemen. We will not be waiting on Terry." He was looking at his own back. The buckskin jacket, the red tie, the short-cropped hair going pale at the temples under the hat. The set of the shoulders, which he had never seen from behind and recognized instantly, the way a man recognizes his own handwriting on an envelope he does not remember addressing. He tried to speak and had no throat to speak with. He put his hand out and it went into the sleeve of Lieutenant Cooke's coat and came out the other side without disturbing the thread. *This is the twenty-fifth of June,* he thought. *This is the day I did not have.* The other Custer turned in the saddle and gave his orders, and Custer stood on the hillside and listened to himself sell it. It was well done. That was the terrible part. Every argument was one he had made in April and abandoned in June, and hearing them again from his own mouth he could feel the pull of them, the clean logic, the way they arranged the world into something a bold man could pick up in one hand. *Speed. Surprise. The scatter.* He had believed it. Standing there he still half believed it, and the half of him that believed it was the half that had been alive. Reno's battalion went down the valley and into the dust. The other Custer took five companies right, along the high ground, and Custer went with them because he could not stay behind. He had no legs and covered the ground anyway. There was a place where the ridge shouldered up and the whole camp opened below, lodge after lodge after lodge, running downriver farther than a man could count from horseback, and he watched his own face when it saw that. He watched himself understand the size of it. He watched himself decide it did not change anything. Cooke wrote the message on a page from his order book, and Custer read it over the lieutenant's shoulder without a shadow to fall across it: *Benteen. Come on. Big village. Be quick. Bring packs.* The trumpeter took it and put his heels in and was gone down the back slope, and the dust of his going was the last clean thing on that hill. Then the fight came up the ridge to meet them. He would not, afterward, be able to hold it in order. It went in fragments, and the fragments did not connect, and he came to believe that this was not a failure of his attention but the actual shape of the thing. Men shooting horses to lie down behind them. A sergeant hammering at a jammed carbine with the heel of his hand, patiently, the way you would work a stubborn latch. Dust so thick that the sun came through it brown, and out of the brown, riders, and more riders, coming not in a mass but in a long unhurried arrival, the way water arrives. A young man on a paint horse rode within three feet of him and Custer saw his face very clearly and could not stop seeing it later: a Lakota man of maybe twenty, jaw set, entirely unhurried, doing a job in a place he knew. He was not a force of history. He was a man defending his family on a Sunday afternoon. The line on the ridge stopped being a line. His brother Tom was there, and his brother Boston, who was a civilian and had come along for his health, and his nephew Autie Reed, who was eighteen and had been hired as a herder so that he could see the country. Custer had signed for all three of them. He watched them do what men do at the end of a thing like that, which is mostly work, and mostly quiet, and quicker than anyone tells it. Near the last of it, the other Custer stood up on the high ground with his revolver in his hand and his hat gone and the light behind him, and the shape he made was already the shape from a painting that did not exist yet. Then the shooting stopped, and the sound the hill made afterward was not silence. Silence is empty. This was full. --- He stayed on the ridge for what might have been an hour and might have been the rest of his life, and in that time he came to understand what he had been given. He knew this hill. Not from being on it. From having read about it. The knowledge came to him whole, the way the smell of a house comes back: the name of this fight was going to be in the mouth of every man in the country by the middle of July, and every man's son after him, and the name attached to it was his own. Not the Seventh's. Not Reno's. His. Books would be written, and then more books arguing with the books. Towns would take the name. There would be a lithograph in every saloon from Bismarck to San Antonio, hand-colored, with the light coming in behind him exactly as it had just come in behind him, and men would stand in front of it with a beer going warm in their hands and feel something they would not be able to name. He would be permanent. He would be one of the four or five names a nation keeps. And it had cost this. That was the arithmetic and there was no arguing it. It was not hidden or deferred or paid by strangers in a later generation. It was here, on this ground, wearing the faces of men whose enlistment papers he had signed. Two hundred and some. His brothers. His nephew. The price was itemized and the receipt was lying on the grass in front of him in the shapes it made. In the other place, in the tent, with Benteen's boots going away over hard ground, he had bought a different thing at a different price. Three dead. Two more coming. A village driven north to be run down by somebody else in some other month, and a report that would be filed and abstracted and reduced, and reduced again, until it was one line in a table of engagements. *Little Bighorn, June 1876. Enemy dispersed. Casualties light.* He had known, sitting there with the paper squared against the desk edge, that no one would ever say his name in a certain tone of voice again. That was what Benteen had come to tell him without saying it. *You will be a competent officer. There are hundreds of those, and they are all dead in thirty years, and their names go into the muster rolls and nowhere else.* Two lives. In one he had spent his men and bought the future. In the other he had kept his men and bought nothing that could be held. *Which of us won.* He caught himself asking it, and he asked it again on purpose, because a man should know what he is. He tried to answer it honestly. Honesty was not a habit with him but he had heard it described. If he had stood on the hill above the Rosebud with the whole of it laid out on a table, the two columns written fair, the cost of each in ink, would he have chosen this? Two hundred and six men, and Tom, and Boss, and the boy, in exchange for a name that would not wear out? He wanted to say no. The wanting was very strong and he did not trust it at all, because he had been on the hill above the Rosebud two weeks ago and he had not had the table, and the thing he had chosen instead of this was a thing he had been quietly grieving ever since. He had sat in that tent grieving the fight he did not have. He had not been able to name it until now. Three dead, nine wounded, and the sourness in his mouth had been *disappointment*. So then. He knew what he was. He went to find himself. The other Custer lay near the top with his men around him and there was no reaching him, and Custer had not really expected there to be, but he tried anyway. He put his mouth next to his own ear and told himself to wait for Terry. He told himself about the Gatling guns, which were absurd and slow and jammed, and which would have held that ridge for an hour and an hour would have been enough. He told himself that the village was six times the size of the estimate and that the scouts had said so and had been thanked for their opinion. He shouted his brother's name into his own face. The air did not move. The dust did not part around the words. There was no evidence at all that anything had happened, and afterward he would remember only one thing that troubled the account: earlier, on the ridge, before the fight came up, his horse Vic had shied at nothing and his other self had turned in the saddle and looked back along the empty grass for a moment. One moment. Then he had turned forward again and given the order. That was all. It was almost certainly a fly. He worked at it for a while regardless, because there was a version of this in which the warning arrived, and he needed to see whether he could stand in that version. Say it landed. Say the other Custer heard it, and pulled up, and waited for the packs and Benteen and the infantry behind them. Then this ridge would be empty grass. Tom would live and get fat and bore people about Kentucky. The lithograph would never be printed. Some other officer would run this village down in August and take the credit for it, and the name Custer would go where the names of competent officers go. And the man who came out of that would be him. Would be exactly, precisely, the man sitting in the tent with the sour taste in his mouth, grieving a battle he had not fought, and not knowing that what he was grieving was two hundred and six graves. That was the trap, and he saw it complete. He could choose again. He believed that. Whatever had taken him off the chair and set him on this hillside could presumably do it a second time, and there was no reason to think the machine ran out of timelines. Choose prudence, and get the tent, the report, the small clean numbers, and the lifelong suspicion that he had been a coward once on a June afternoon. Choose the charge, and get the ridge. Choose again. Choose again. Somewhere there was a Custer who had waited for Terry and then gone in on the twenty-seventh and been killed for nothing on a nameless creek with no painter present. Somewhere a Custer had never come west at all and had died at sixty in a bad chair in Michigan, still telling the story of the Wilderness to people who had stopped listening. Each of them, presumably, standing at some point on some hillside, watching one of the others, asking the identical question. *Which of us won.* The question was the disease. He understood that with the flat clarity of a man reading his own diagnosis upside down across a desk. Because the question could only be asked by him. That was its property, and its whole property. Every version of the question had a Custer in it, alive, doing the asking. There was no version in which the sergeant with the jammed carbine sat down and weighed his options and selected one. There was no timeline offered to Boston, who had come out for the dry air. Autie Reed had been given a job as a herder and a chance to see the country and nothing else, ever, in any arrangement of the world, and the boy was lying forty feet away with his hand still in the grass. They had not chosen prudence and they had not chosen glory. They had been *spent*. In this timeline they had been spent on a name, and in the other one they had been kept in the pocket like coins that had not yet been counted, and neither of those was a life they had been consulted about. He stood on the hill and did the only arithmetic left. In the tent, three men had died. Three, and two more coming, and they had names too, and he had not asked what they were. He had read the number twice and been disappointed by it. So there was no clean side. In the quiet timeline he had bought his small economy with five men, and had been irritated that the purchase was not larger. In this one he had bought immortality with two hundred and six and would be admired for it forever by people who would never have to look at the receipt. He had wanted, very badly, for one of these to be innocent. --- He did not go back to himself, in the end. He had said everything he had to say to that man and the man had never once been able to hear anything, in any life, from anyone. He went down the slope instead and walked the ground where the companies had come apart, and he made himself look at each one. He had never done this. Not after Gettysburg, not on the Washita, not anywhere. There had always been a report to write, and the writing of the report was a kind of covering. Now there was nothing to write with and nowhere to send it, so he looked. The sergeant with the carbine had a burn scar on his wrist, old, probably a stove. One of the Irishmen had a photograph inside his shirt and Custer could not turn it over to see the face and stood there a while wanting to. A trooper he did not know by name had died holding a horse's bridle, which was pointless and which the horse had not asked for either. He named the ones he could name, out loud, in the dust that did not move for him. It took a long time. It was not absolution and he did not mistake it for absolution. It was simply the one act available in this place that neither of the men called Custer had ever performed, and he performed it, and when he was finished the light on the ridge had gone long and orange and the far bluffs had begun to go blue. --- The lamp guttered and stood up straight. "—good night, General," Benteen said, and his boots went away over hard ground, and the mule outside was still complaining, and the canvas held the day's heat the way it had held it a moment ago. Custer sat with the report in front of him, squared against the edge of the desk. Three dead. Nine wounded. He picked up the pen to ask the adjutant for the names, and found that his hand smelled of powder, and that he was not going to be able to explain that to anyone, tonight or ever. Somewhere the ridge was still full of noon. He could feel it running alongside this evening the way a second river runs beside the first, and he understood, sitting there with the pen in his hand, that he was going to spend the rest of a long dull creditable life listening for it. There was no arrangement of the world in which he did not pay. There were only arrangements in which he paid with different men.