Killing Custer by Margaret Coel Read Free Book Online

balanced between his jaws. They were crossing Circle Drive when Father John told the old man what Darleen had said, thinking how good it was to have an older priest to talk to. There wasn’t much Bishop Harry hadn’t seen as the bishop of Patma. Horrendous experiences that came up from time to time, as if the past were always present. Young girls taken from the mission school, sold into marriage, burned to death. Young boys with hands and legs amputated by their own parents to make them more successful street beggars.
    â€œWhat do you think, John?”
    Father John took a moment to marshal his thoughts into a logical sequence. There must be logic that deals with the present, explains the causes and effects that have nothing to do with the past. He shook his head. “It’s not logical for someone to shoot a man who had nothing to do with what happened in the past,” he said.
    The bishop stopped. He was half a head shorter than Father John with a rounded stoop to his shoulders. He started up the steps to the residence, then turned and looked Father John in the eye. “Still, it might be true,” he said. “Events move across time according to their own pathways. What will you do?”
    Walks-On had dropped the stick at his feet. Father John picked it up, tossed it across the front yard, and watched the dog lope with surprising grace on two front legs and one hind leg. There was a logic here. Toss stick. Dog runs. Dog retrieves stick. But anything might intervene and stop the sequence. Nothing was inevitable.
    â€œI don’t know,” he said.
    From the time I was a boy, I knew I wanted to portray Custer, a great and noble American, courageous and daring. I wanted to follow in his footsteps.
    Father John sipped at the hot coffee he had brewed and read through the black text on the screen. When he had typed “reenactments” in the search box, a page of Web sites had materialized, and he had clicked on “My Life as Custer, a biography of Edward Garrett.” The first pages had been a travelogue of the cities and counties, parades, rodeos, and county fairs where Garrett had appeared as Custer. Sometimes with 7th Cavalry reenactors; sometimes with his wife, Belinda Clark, dressed like Libbie Custer; sometimes alone. Photographs dotted the text. Garrett, in buckskins and wide-brimmed hat, squinting in the sun, aiming a rifle at some distant point, serious-looking and straight-shouldered, a man in command.
    I found an old buckskin jacket in the thrift store where we used to shop and begged Mother to buy it for me. It was perfect. Could have been worn by the great man himself. Mother wasn’t happy about laying out the money on what she called my wild dreams, but I promised to pay her back. I gave her every dime I made off my paper route until I had paid off that debt, and I was proud. I was sure Custer was the type of man who never welshed on a debt. From somewhere else, I got a wide-brimmed hat that looked like Custer’s. That was the beginning. I read everything about Custer. I knew how to walk and talk like him. Some of his famous Custer luck rubbed off on me, and I started acting like Custer in school shows. I talked myself into parades. Soon as I got out of the army, I found other reenactors as inspired by Custer and the 7th Cavalry as I was, and we started putting on mock battles based on the Little Bighorn battle.
    â€œFrom those beginnings,” the article went on, “Edward Garrett has become the foremost interpreter of General George Armstrong Custer in the nation. He has appeared before crowds of thousands who no doubt wish that the fate of the great general might have been different. Look for Garrett at the reenactments of the Battle of the Little Bighorn . . .”
    Father John closed the site. A wave of senselessness washed over him. Edward Garrett, alive on the Web site, reminiscing about how the larger-than-life image of Custer had taken hold