Again: the thirst, the fear, the smell of blood, horses, summer grass, sun-heated leather. Custer and his men reach the small rise on which they will die. Custer understands that Reno’s attack has failed, that he is badly outnumbered, that his famous luck has run out. Visibility is nil, for the dust. In those last moments he becomes keenly aware of his youngest brother, Boston, and his nephew Autie, just eighteen. Boston and Autie are not soldiers but he has allowed them to be here, on a lark, for the sheer adventure of it. Now, for this indulgence, they will die. It is possible he watches them die; it is possible he dies before them and they watch him die. It is possible that, in the dust and the mayhem, none of them sees the other(s) die. No one knows for sure. No one will ever know. But now they are all dying, in the dust, amid the sound of shouting, cursing, wailing, delirious laughter.

Then all falls quiet.

The dust-curtain slowly descends as the warriors move up to see what they have wrought. Some, sickened, go off to sit alone. Others, delirious with victory, give thanks. A few of the older men intuit the truth: this stunning victory is mere prelude; the colossus that is the white nation, galvanized by this humiliation, will soon enact a merciless revenge.

Now Ed and Sharon join me.

The three of us become the women who move among the fallen whites, stripping and mutilating their bodies in order to hamper and annoy their souls in the afterlife. We catalog arrows in rectums, sawed-off genitals sewn into mouths; the complete erasure, with rocks, of the face of Custer’s brother Tom; the piercing of one of Custer’s eardrums with an awl, for his failure, in life, to listen. This gives us no joy; we know that these, even these, were sons, husbands, fathers, brothers. But our hearts are bad. We hate them, we do, for the aggressive, murderous fools they were. Many of our own sons and husbands and fathers and brothers lie freshly dead at their hands. Why did they come? Why not stay home, loving what was theirs to love, wanting no more than what they had, enjoying the astonishing blessings already laid out before them? It now falls upon us to interrupt the energy of their terrible stupidity; it must not be allowed to flow unrebuked into the next world.

Here our Singers were to have made a sound imitative of the plains wind sweeping over the fallen, the still-mutilating women, the grieving loved ones back in the village, the exhausted, wounded ponies, limping down to the river to drink.

And that was to have been the end.