Blue Ravens: Historical Novel (38 page)

This Black Elk was actually bedridden in Paris, near death with a serious disease, but slowly recovered and returned home to the Pine Ridge Reservation. Nathan had never heard stories or even rumors about a devoted nurse or progeny.

Buffalo Bill's Wild West performed for several months at the Paris
Exposition Universelle
in 1889. Nathan had attended the fair and met the trader Julius Meyer with a group of natives on a tour of exhibitions, the Gallery of Machines, and the Eiffel Tower. Nathan was downcast over the memory of the
Village Nègre
, Negro Village, at the exhibition, but he reminisced with pleasure about the native rodeo riders, ceremonial dancers, and the spectacular performances of the sharpshooter Annie Oakley.

Coyote Standing Bear was another prominent pretender who attended our weekly native commune at the Café du Dôme. He declared with no shame or hesitation that his father was Luther Standing Bear of the Oglala Lakota on the Pine Ridge Reservation. Coyote either denied or was not aware that several natives had the very same translated nickname that became the surname of Standing Bear. Chief Standing Bear, the Ponca from Nebraska, the Lakota Standing Bear, cousin of Black Elk, who traveled with Buffalo Bill's Wild West in France, Germany, and Austria three years before the Wounded Knee Massacre in 1890, and Luther Standing Bear who graduated from the Carlisle Indian Industrial School and traveled later as a translator with Buffalo Bill's Wild West.

Nathan was certain that one season of Buffalo Bill's Wild West shows opened in April 1905 in Paris, and closed in Marseilles six months later in October. That was the critical exhibition season that complicated the paternity stories of Coyote Standing Bear.

Coyote was a generous romancer and related that he was the true son of Luther Standing Bear. He was pleased to declare that his mother was Louise
Rieneck, an Austrian from Vienna, and the family returned to live near the Pine Ridge Reservation and later moved to Chicago.

Coyote had confused the names and stories of his counterfeit native ancestors the three Standing Bears. Luther had not arrived in Paris until 1905, and his wife was Nellie de Cory. Chief Standing Bear was Ponca and married to Susette Primeau. She was not a nurse, and they never lived on or near the Pine Ridge Reservation. The Oglala Lakota were the enemy of the Ponca.

The Lakota Standing Bear traveled with Buffalo Bill's Wild West to the Austrian Empire. He was seriously injured in an accident and hospitalized in Vienna. He recovered and married a young nurse named Louise Rieneck. Standing Bear and Louise raised three daughters, Hattie, Lillian, and Christiana, at White Horse Creek near Manderson, South Dakota.

The Café du Dôme was our native commune. We were Dômiers, cordially bound by the convention of native stories and the ironies of character and liberty in Paris. Aloysius teased Coyote and Olivier about their great ancestors, and at the same time praised their curious tribute and promotion of the names Black Elk and Standing Bear. We actually celebrated the pretenders because they were always out front to enchant and distract the romancers of native cultures.

Coyote and Olivier were eager to recount the ironic stories of native traditions, and generously provided the promise of cultural prominence to the curators, tourists, and romancers at the Café du Dôme. Our tease of the posers was an ironic tribute to their escape from the burdens and boredom of the customary.

The Enlightenment and heyday of civilization had ended in the bloody trenches of the
zone rouge
, the deadly destruction of reason, manners, piety, ordinary humor, and empire traditions, and at the same time native soldiers created a sense of presence with ironic and visionary stories, and restored the pleasure of imitation and mockery. So, we named the pretenders the
gardians
, our cowboys, and teased that they were conceived slowly in the back of a circus wagon on the Camargue south of Arles, France. Later the teases were graced with the ironic paternity of monks in the Order of Saint Benedict.

The pretenders were overeager to be recognized as natives, and grateful to be asked by admirers about native traditions and cultural practices, so the
rightful native veterans at our weekly commune were seldom summoned by curious strangers or obligated for any reason to relate or counteract a cultural anecdote, misconception, or the secrets of shamans.

Pierre Chaisson was the mastermind of the weekly commune of native Dômiers. He had served in the infantry, and was wounded by shrapnel at Château-Thierry. The long gash down his right forehead to eyebrow and jawbone was slow to heal because of an infection, so he was hospitalized for more than three months in the Base Hospital at Bazoilles-sur-Meuse near Paris.

Pierre was Houma, an ancient native culture from the many bayous at the great mouth of the Mississippi River near New Orleans, Louisiana. He returned home to Terrebonne Parish, scarred forever by the war, and was altogether discouraged by the policies of the state and federal governments. Houma children were forsaken, he told the native Dômiers, and not allowed to attend public schools, and the reason was racial savagery.

French Acadian relatives had provided a home and a chance for him to be educated in New Brunswick, Canada. Pierre lived there for several years and graduated from public school. He returned to the bayous and then enlisted to serve as an infantry soldier and scout in the American Expeditionary Forces in France. Private Lawrence Chaisson, his cousin, enlisted and served nearby in the Twenty-Sixth Infantry Battalion of the Canadian Expeditionary Forces.

The native situation was similar at both ends of the river, the federal fraud and grift at the source and mouth of the
gichiziibi
, the Mississippi River. Our ancestors might have met as continental traders and storiers on the river routes, hundreds of years before the
voyageurs
of the fur trade, and clever sway of the French. The Café du Dôme became our new commune of native storiers that had started many centuries earlier on the Mississippi River.

Pierre decided three years after the war to leave the bayous, and returned to study philosophy, ethnology, and literature at Sorbonne University in Paris. He was a fluent speaker of Houma, English, and Louisiana French. The French waiters at the Café du Dôme tried to imitate his bayou accent and dialect.

The stories that afternoon were more memorable than at any other native commune. Pierre leaned forward over the three round tables, turned
his head to the side and steadily chanted
mille huit cent quatre-vingt-douze
, the ordinary numbers of the year eighteen ninety-two, in the tone and style of a plainsong. Then he turned in the other directions and clearly chanted
mille huit cent quatre-vingt-treize
, the year eighteen ninety-three, in a deep and tremulous voice. He paused, turned toward me, raised the tone of his voice and sang
mille neuf cent seize
, nineteen sixteen, several times. The waiters and customers in the café turned toward our tables. The chant of dates ended with a lingering tone and then silence.

Pierre glanced at the waiters, smiled, and then turned away. The Gregorian chant or plainsong was intense and heartfelt, but the significance of the dates was not obvious. We waited for some idea or explanation of the chanted numbers and dates.

Pierre ordered three carafes of white wine and then told the incredible story about the woman named
Mère de la Zone Rouge
who chanted early in the morning at least twice a week for seven years the very same numbers and dates at the
épicerie
and street markets on Rue Mouffetard near the Panthéon.

Aloysius was moved by the passion of the chant and stories, and painted a scene of blue ravens with the dates daubed on the bridges and huge numbers adrift on the river. The other natives at the commune that afternoon were hesitant to intrude or inquire about the meaning of the dates that were chanted to honor the woman.

I had never heard a chant or plainsong of ordinary numbers with such emotion, vocal power, concentration, and certainty. The chanted dates created a sense of native presence, but with no direct reference or obvious meaning. Names and dates in songs, recitations, canticles, and shouts could be ironic, but the apparent calendar years chanted at the market were surreal by intonation and character.

The grocers and street merchants never learned the actual name of the woman who chanted, but they interpreted the distinct numbers as the birth dates of her two sons, and
mille neuf cent seize
, nineteen sixteen, as the year her two sons died on the very same day in the Battle of Verdun on the Meuse River.

That lonesome woman earned the nickname
Mère de la Zone Rouge
, Mother of the Red Zone. The
zone rouge
was a designation of the area of total devastation in the war zones of France. Nothing more than scraps of
bones, slivers of femurs, shards of foreheads, cheek and nose bones, traces of broken molars, tendons, tufts of hair, buttons, buckles, helmets, and unexploded enemy artillery shells remained in the deadly muck of the
zone rouge
, a wasteland of forsaken memories.

Mother of the Red Zone chanted at the street markets on the Rue Mouffetard to honor the birth, memory, and death date of her sons,
mille neuf cent seize
, and by her dedicated chant honored the memory of more than three hundred thousand other sons who had died in the same crazed Battle of Verdun.

Pierre recounted a marvelous and spirited chant one morning last spring at the street markets. Mother of the Red Zone was always greeted by the
chiens bâtards
, the mongrel dogs, on the street, and the
chiens
howled in harmony when she chanted
mille neuf cent seize
, nineteen sixteen. That spring morning the
chiens bâtards
howled with great favor, more harmonic than in the past, and the people on the street and at the markets turned and chanted
mille neuf cent seize
for the first time. The chants were gentle, hesitant, almost whispers, but slowly the tone and volume increased, and a few minutes later every person on the street chanted to honor the memory of the soldiers who died at the Battle of Verdun.

Most of the chanters were moved to tears, and the very last and most hesitant of the street chanters, the market owners, became the most emotional, and actually conducted other chanters on the street. The market owners had heard Mother of the Red Zone chant on the street for many years, and the rhythmic phrases of that plainsong,
mille neuf cent seize
, were chanted with the spirit and rhapsody of memory. Several hundred people chanted the date several times in variations of harmony.

››› ‹‹‹

Aloysius was out early every morning to sketch scenes of the bridges over the River Seine. The sway and turns of the weather that late spring, hazy, gray, and rainy, presented a ghostly character of the moody river. He painted several direct abstract scenes of the bridges, instant portrayals for the gallery exhibition, but mostly my brother walked slowly around the bridges, lingered on the stone quays and riverbanks, and noted ideas, concise images, and themes. He painted the final crucial scenes of blue ravens and the river bridges in the afternoon light at the window of our apartment.

I walked with my brother two or three times a week along the River Seine. We gestured to each other but hardly spoke on those brisk mornings. The fishermen and others on the riverbank in the early morning conserved a sense of presence and privacy with only minimal gestures. The river ran high that late spring, another threat of floods in the city.

The River Seine was a great course of memory, and the natural motion created a sense of personal and communal presence for hundreds of people. Quai des Grands-Augustins near the Pont Neuf and other quays and riverbanks nurtured a humane sanctuary, and many people were loyal to certain bridges.

The Pont Saint-Louis, Pont des Arts, and Pont Mirabeau were my favorites of the more than thirty bridges over the River Seine. The Pont Saint-Louis was modest, almost stone bare, and yet the bridge had a heroic history, a truly unpretentious beauty. The bridge was destroyed by many floods and was always built anew. The Pont Saint-Louis could have been a native bridge over the headwaters at the source of the Mississippi River in Lake Itasca.

The Pont des Arts was a forthright gesture, gangly, always a good friend at any time of day, and the first iron bridge over the River Seine in Paris. The Pont Mirabeau was a muse of poetry, and my artistic inspiration in the natural motion of the river. The serene naked statues at the prominent bow and fantail of the arches sailed forever in both directions of the river, and one symbolic bronze figure raised a trumpet to celebrate the great memories of natural motion and native adventures.

I pointed at times to obvious scenes, the motion of waves, the slant and shimmer of sunlight, plane leaves in the eddies, and the curious shadows on the river, but never said a word to my brother. The River Seine was forever a natural state of sovereign gestures in the gentle hues of the morning.

Camille Pissaro painted winter scenes of the Pont Neuf and Musée du Louvre. The river was creased by shadows of steamers, and light was cursory, tousled with blue waves. The union of artistic perception and color was a spectacular turn of impressionism. Some twenty years later my brother created visionary scenes and portrayals of the bridges afloat with blue ravens on the River Seine.

Aloysius concentrated on the shadows, creases, and waves on the river, and imagined the shadows and natural motion of the stone arches, and the
marvelous flight of the bridges. My observations and notes were about the many communes on the quays and riverbanks. I gestured, of course, and then lingered with respect to talk with the fishermen, children, and with the veterans of the war.

The river anglers were the masters of forbearance and silence. The soldiers gestured with minimal glances, the turn of an eye, and with the slight motion of a hand or shoulder. Yes, the gestures were familiar, a common duty of battle memories, and the fugitive nature of war. The silent heralds of the anglers and veterans were the same from day to day, a certain cue of presence and natural dominion on the River Seine.