Black Hills (41 page)

—
Oh, Paha Sapa. Oh, dear.

—
It’s time to go, Rain. We don’t want to be late meeting your father.

P
AHA
S
APA AND
R
AIN
are five minutes early at the steps outside the Administration Building facing the Columbian Fountain set in the broad waters of the basin. Her father arrives twelve minutes late.

Miss de Plachette has said nothing since his story about Sitting Bull’s death. But she looks even paler than she did earlier. He assumes that she has been put off by his story—all the sordid details, from Buffalo Bill Cody showing up drunk to betray his old friend to the very real violence threatened by the Ghost Dance and its Prophet. He knows he will always love her for… if nothing else… that moment of standing higher than anyone else at the top of the Ferris Wheel, looking as if she were preparing to fly the way his spirit-self had flown more than once in his life. No, not just for that. Perhaps not for that at all. Just because he does love her and knows he always will.

But she is, after all, a twenty-year-old
wasichu
girl, wise, perhaps, to the ballrooms and churches and embassies of Washington and Paris and the world, but having a four-year-old child’s understanding of the West and of her mother and of Paha Sapa’s world, where great warriors like Crazy Horse and rare
wičasa wakan
like Sitting Bull are cut down by little men no longer Natural Free Human Beings, little men neither natural nor free, little men on
wasichu
payrolls who wear oversized, flea-infested, cast-off cavalry blue coats and who kill the best of their own kind on
Wasicun
command.

No, she will never understand Paha Sapa’s world. Even if she learned the language of the Lakota, he knows then, it would be as alien and
adopted to her as French or German or Italian. More so, he realizes, since she has spent time as an adult or near-adult in those places, and remembers Nebraska and the West only in a distorted child’s blur of half memory.

And he will not see her again, he knows. He is certain of this. As certain as if he
had
allowed another
small-vision-forward-touching
to occur. Miss Rain de Plachette may or may not move to the Pine Ridge Reservation with her father this coming September, but she and Paha Sapa will not meet again. Not after the terror and distaste and—
alienation
, he thinks, is the word in English—the
wacetug la
and
wo
he saw in her hazel eyes as he spoke.

It doesn’t matter, he tells himself. Like so much else he’s seen and experienced and survived since the Vision of the Stone Heads emerging from the Paha Sapa and the
wasichu
Stone Giants rising to finish the job that is all but finished on the Plains and in the Hills, this is just one more thing that does not matter.

Reverend Henry de Plachette arrives in a huffing hurry, accompanied by three men wearing very formal tails and top hats. There are introductions, but Paha Sapa does not hear or remember the names. None of the three men extends a hand to shake—they clearly see that he is Indian, despite, or perhaps because of, his ill-fitting suit and overly polished shoes.

But the Reverend de Plachette is extending
his
hand there at the head of the stairway to the dark waters of the basin. He is saying something.

—
…
so
much for escorting my daughter to our little rendezvous here, Mr. Slow Horse. It is much appreciated. I know that Rain enjoyed the diversion and I appreciate your gentlemanly offer to escort the young lady.

Paha Sapa grips the old man’s hand.

The world swirls, the Great Basin becomes a huge mural, a fresco, larger than the Mary Cassatt mural in the Women’s Building, as the water becomes a vertical wall and the images and sounds and feelings rush in.

And then everything is black.

H
E REGAINS CONSCIOUSNESS
lying on the topmost step. One of the well-dressed men has dipped a silk handkerchief into the basin and is applying the wet cloth to Paha Sapa’s forehead. His head is on Miss de Plachette’s lap, and she is cradling him in her arms.
His head is on her lap.

Paha Sapa realizes that tears are flowing down his face. He has been weeping while he was unconscious. He shakes his head.

—
Too much sun…

one man is saying.

—
Perhaps the vertiginous effects of that infernal Wheel…

another man is saying.

—
A problem with the heart, perhaps.

This last is the Reverend Henry de Plachette, who has taken over the mopping with the wet silk handkerchief. A small crowd has gathered, and uniformed Exposition personnel are running toward them from the direction of Machinery Hall.

Paha Sapa blinks away the tears and looks up at Rain’s face above him.

The images were few, fast, and terrible.

The prairie. Wind blowing. A winter morning.

The cemetery atop the small rise. There was one tree.

The grave with the plain pine coffin just lowered into it.

The Reverend de Plachette there, unable to conduct the funeral service. Surrendered to weeping.

And Paha Sapa there—seen through the old man’s rheumy, tear-filled eyes—Paha Sapa looking older but not older enough. Paha Sapa taking the baby from the Mexican woman, a servant of the minister’s. Paha Sapa holding the baby as he looks down at the first clods of dirt falling on the coffin of his young wife, Mrs. Rain de Plachette Slow Horse.

The image, from the Reverend’s point of view, the Reverend who is also ill and who would give all he has ever had or believed in to take his daughter’s place in that grave, the image of his Indian son-in-law, Billy Slow Horse, holding the distraught Reverend’s dead daughter’s only child—the baby who may have helped kill her in her weakened condition—the boy.

The boy named Robert.

Paha Sapa lies there on the top step of the staircase leading down to the Great Basin near the Columbian Fountain, too staggered to try to gain his feet again no matter how embarrassed he may feel at lying there with his head on this young lady’s lap with the crowd gathering around.

Her hand is stroking his forehead now. Her bare hand. She has taken her glove off. Her bare hand.

Paha Sapa receives no vision from the contact, but he receives a terrible twin certainty: she loves him already and will do everything she must do so that they will be together; there is no escaping their fate-entwined destiny.

For the first, last, and only time in his life, Paha Sapa, inexplicably, ineluctably, gasps out three words that cause everyone except Rain to freeze in place.

—
Oh, dear Jesus.

P
AHA
S
APA IS RIDING IN THE RAIN
. T
HE HORSE BENEATH HIM IS
old, scabbed, and slow. And it is wearing a saddle. Paha Sapa has never ridden in a saddle before and it hurts his ass.

The hard rain keeps wiping the blood off his face, but the blood keeps returning. He does not even bother to blink it out of his eyes.

His eye. One eye is swollen shut or destroyed forever. He does not care which. The other eye sees only the blur of the fifty or sixty other men ahead of him and around him. He does not care that they are there. They are
wasichu
cavalry. He is dimly aware that he is their prisoner, to do with as they wish: torture, slow murder, whatever they want. He does not care.

Paha Sapa has been slipping in and out of consciousness for most of this long, wet day. He knows that he’s riding with these dark forms and he knows that his head hurts more than any pain he has ever imagined. But he also knows that the Crow—the old man named Curly—did not strike him with the rifle butt in anything meant as a killing blow. After hours of half listening to Curly, who rides nearby and continues talking in his terrible, patchy language of the Lakota—the old man uses many words from the women’s language, which makes him sound like a boy-who-decides-to-dress-and-act-like-a-woman
winkte
. Normally this would be terrifically amusing to Paha Sapa, but today nothing amuses him.

He wishes he were dead. He plans to be dead. In a real sense, he
is
dead.

He has lost Limps-a-Lot’s and his band’s
Ptehinčala Huhu Canunpa
, the most sacred Buffalo Calf Bone Pipe that was the most important and
wakan
object the band ever had. Oh, why had Limps-a-Lot entrusted the pipe to him, to Paha Sapa, to a miserable boy with no more sense or brains than not to look over his shoulder when traveling alone on the plains with the greatest treasure it was possible to carry?

Two great treasures, he realizes through the pain and rain. The
Ptehinčala Huhu Canunpa
, lost forever now to the swollen river, and the details of his Vision, granted by the Six Grandfathers. Limps-a-Lot and the other elders and chiefs and holy men will never listen to his Vision now, even if he were somehow to escape the
wasichu
cavalry. By losing the pipe, Paha Sapa has lost all credibility forever. He is sure of that.
Wakan Tanka
and the Six Grandfathers and all the spirits and Thunder Beings would
never
grant a man or boy such a Vision and then steal the
Ptehinčala Huhu Canunpa
from him. Such a loss is a statement by all the gods and powers and the All himself that Paha Sapa is not to be trusted as their servant and messenger.

His head hurts in unimaginable ways. He wishes he were dead. He plans to be dead soon. He welcomes it.

Each time Paha Sapa blurs out of his semiconscious, unhearing state, wobbling in the accursed leather wedge of a saddle, the old Crow, Curly, is talking at him. This old man keeps telling him how he, Curly, saved Paha Sapa’s life by knocking him down before the Fat Takers’ bluecoats shot him just out of meanness and misery—they have been lost and separated from their main detachment for four days now, terrified because Crazy Horse is said to be on the warpath nearby—and how he, Curly, the scout, told the
wasichus
that the almost-naked boy who had startled all of them by crawling up out of the mud and river was a Crow boy, probably a good scout but a little stupid, a little deaf and dumb and retarded, but it was worth keeping him alive anyway and giving the slowest horse, the one that had belonged to Corporal Dunbar before he was killed, to little Billy.

Billy?

Curly… When did he tell Paha Sapa his name? He cannot remember. Curly told the
wasichu
bluecoats that the near-naked and mud-covered boy’s name was
Bilé
, which evidently is Crow for “water.” The soldiers laughed, called Paha Sapa Billy, and gave him the dead corporal’s old, scabbed, slow horse.

Paha Sapa, when he is conscious enough to form a thought, just wishes the stupid old man
psaloka kagi wicasa Absaroka
sonofabitch would just shut the fuck up. The words hurt Paha Sapa’s head, which already feels as if he is spilling out his brains. Sometime later in that rainy, gray, miserable day, he realizes that he has been shot by the other Crows, the wild Crows, and there is a filthy bandage wrapped around his upper arm. The bullet wound throbs. His head is going to kill him.