Promised Land

Rousseau’s brave savages had circled her covered wagon, leaving vestiges of life that could have been: dreams of a promised land, a son and rag-doll daughter, a scalped Scottish husband, and not a drop of water. Raping her on the prairie from nightfall to red dawn, they did not call her “Mary, ” but “whore of the Cheyenne.” They tethered her with rope, taught her new kinds of pain, her only living hope: the fury of white men. Years later she would watch the braves flee cannon shot, the chief squeal like a wretch, the buffalo meat rot. Three blows with a hatchet would prove her only saviour, a scalped head and a facelift. And no tears could raise her.