Savage Beloved

Or the most agonizing spy

An enemy could send.

—Emily Dickinson

Candy was awakened abruptly by a sound like hailstones pummeling the tepee, yet the glow of the rising sun through the buckskin proved it was not a stormy morning.

“What can it be?” Candy asked, hurrying into a dress as Two Eagles threw on his clothes.

The sound increased in volume, and Candy jumped in alarm when something strange began falling through the smoke hole, crackling and popping as the objects fell into the flames in the fire pit. It sounded to her like corn popping.

She gazed, wide-eyed, as she recognized the objects.

She said “grasshoppers” at the same time that Two Eagles said “locusts.”

“Lord, I can’t believe my eyes,” Candy said as she stared at the insects falling into the flames, their bodies popping at contact.

“We’re being invaded by a swarm of locusts!” Two Eagles said, hurrying to the entrance flap. He shoved it aside, flinching when more locusts flew inside the tepee.

He dropped the flap closed, but not before he had seen what was happening outside. The sky was black with the swarm of locusts. They were dropping onto everything in his village; all of the tepees were crawling with them. He could hear the whinnying of the horses in the corrals as their flesh was struck by the insects.

“How bad is it?” Candy asked.

“I have never seen this many at one time,” Two Eagles said, watching as more insects continued to fall through the smoke hole.

“I remember one time long ago, when my father was stationed at Fort Jefferson Barracks in Missouri, grasshoppers came in such great numbers that everyone’s crops that year were ruined by them,” Candy said, shuddering.

She remembered the horrible insects getting caught in her hair that day. She would never forget how she’d fought in vain to remove them as she ran to her house. Her mother had finally managed to get them out, but not before some had burrowed in so deeply that those strands of hair had to be cut in order to remove the horrible insects.

“It is good that our crops are already harvested or we would have lost everything,” Two Eagles said, less tense now that the thumps against his lodge covering were beginning to lessen.

“But there are surely those who have not had their harvest yet,” Candy said, swatting at a locust that had landed on her arm. She shivered as she plucked the creature from the sleeve of her dress and tossed it outside.

“Perhaps you should stay inside while I go to see about the horses,” Two Eagles said.

“I would rather go with you,” Candy said. “I want to see what damage the grasshoppers have done.”

“You call them grasshoppers while I call them locusts,” Two Eagles repeated, sliding his feet into his moccasins as Candy did the same. “Why is that?”

“That is what we have always called them,” Candy said. “Back when they were so bad in Missouri, they were said to be Rocky Mountain locusts, yet we called them grasshoppers because they looked like the insects we normally saw in the summer in Missouri.”

She flinched when another locust fell down through the smoke hole and settled on the inside skin of the lodge, clinging upside down, its bulging eyes looking slowly around it.

“They came that summer day in sky-blackening swarms, devastating all vegetation in their path,” she said as Two Eagles plucked the insect from the wall, studying it as he held it closer.

“A relief and aid society was organized, but only to help people whose skin was white,” Candy said. “The Indians that lived in that area, the peaceful Shawnee, lost everything that year, yet they received no assistance.”

She watched Two Eagles hold the entrance flap aside and release the insect into the air rather than kill it, and she thought what a kind man he was.

“No public outcry was heard for the hungry Shawnee, but they would not allow themselves to beg,” Candy said. Even then she had felt the plight of the red man, yet she was too small a child to offer them any help.

She had begged her father to help the Shawnee, but he had told her to mind her own business. He had told her never to offer redskins any kindness, for if she did, they would never stop asking things of her.

It was as though fate had determined that eventually her father would be shown no pity by red men, just as he had never shown pity to them. The Sioux had come and taken his life, as though they had known of the man’s past transgressions against men and women of their skin color.

Even children.

Yes, she had heard about her father’s raids on villages where no one was left living, man, woman, or child. But she had not wanted to believe such stories about her father. She had closed her eyes to the truth.