tightly to the Indian boy’s arm and slaps him across the face, causing the boy to cry out.
One of the pilgrim women shouts something in German at her husband or at the Indian woman who is holding her baby. Until now the white woman has been smiling and trying to take her baby back from the Indian woman, who is teasing the Mennonite mother, making to hand back the baby and then pulling it away. The Indian woman holding the baby sees the Mennonite man slap the boy and shouts something back. She shoves the baby into its mother’s arms, nearly dropping it.
Kohn can comprehend some of the German spoken by the woman to her husband. It is a dialect he is unfamiliar with—and nothing like the Silesian German spoken by his father until his father learned enough English to never speak it again, but many of the words the woman shouts are close enough to his mother’s Yiddish that he can make out the admonishment in them—“Stop” and “Don’t hit”—and there is much about God and something about peace and the Book, and as he scans the group of pilgrims and the Indians intermingled among them he does not sense threat but there is confusion and an atmosphere of antagonism. Indian children chase one another, oblivious, under the wagon wheels, and another of them, older than the first, climbs out of the covered back of another of the wagons holding a rag doll. One of the Mennonite children begins to cry and another mother shouts up at the soldiers.
She shouts something in German and then in accented English. “Please, make them depart! They take things from us.”
Kohn answers her in a rough, simple German that is much colored with eastern Yiddish. Though his father mostly abandoned his native German soon after arriving in America, his mother raised him and his siblings with Yiddish in the home and it was much spoken in shul. There was a time when Kohn spoke it fluently. But like every immigrant kid on the streets around his Cleveland tenement home, he turned to English on entering school and soon was answering his mother’s Yiddish—he thinks she must also have spoken Polish though he cannot remember hearing her ever do so—in a language she often only barely understood. It pains him to remember this and so he rarely does. The only time his childhood Yiddish—and the faint remaining traces of his father’s German—is of any use, he thinks, is when he occasionally barks orders in pidgin German at immigrant Bills but does not think a soldier should be coddled in his own tongue when he is in the employ of an English-speaking army and so rarely does it. The words feel awkward in his mouth.
“Seien Sie ruhig, meine Frau.” Be calm, missus. “We will try to be rid of them.” He turns in his saddle and Jonathan appears to understand what he will ask before he asks it.
The Pawnee slaps his mount with the reins and gives a whooping shout that reminds Kohn and Molloy of the rebel yell that so many times froze their blood in the war.
“Do not harm any of them, Jonathan. Not a hair on their heads, do you hear me?” Molloy shouts, as if sober. “And put that bloody rifle back in its scabbard, Rawson, or I’ll plug your arsehole with it.”
Kohn smiles again. Something of the old Captain in the words and the way he says them.
He turns to watch the Pawnee maneuver his pony among the wagons, whipping the Indian children with long cavalry reins, lashing out with his moccasins. The Sioux women appear to see him for what he is for the first time and begin to shout and call their children. Kohn and Molloy can hear the concern in their shouting and watch carefully as Jonathan goes among them, whipping and kicking the children, once snapping an old man across the back with his reins and saying something to him and laughing. The older Sioux shuffle away, averting their eyes from the Pawnee, and the boys on ponies gallop in among the wagons now. One of them, a chubby boy in a bright red shirt and breechcloth, his hair in two long braids, swings down from the bare back of his horse, holding onto the pony’s flanks with just his legs, and swoops up an Indian toddler by the arm as he rides past. Kohn smiles at the feat. Five years a dragoon and he has