Dalva (49 page)

Lena called to say she'd be out in an hour. I read on through a long historical gloss of Michael's which was an astute belaboring of the obvious—the quality of the umbrage was appropriate but a little beside the point. Northridge had finally been stripped of his Methodist affiliation but avoided being kicked out of the area through the political influence of Grinnell and Ludlow. This influence waned as Northridge came to be considered a menace by government Indian agents and the army. When he finally was ordered to return to Nebraska and make no further contact with the Sioux he went to Washington and used bribery, an easy convenience in the Reconstruction era. The irony of his malnutrition in Buffalo Gap with Small Bird was that his nursery business was thriving and widespread. On his way to Washington he had stopped in Chicago to “secure a carpetbag of money for the swine.” Meanwhile he was kept busy in the hiatus between the death of Crazy Horse in 1877 and the enactment of the Dawes Act in 1887 in teaching, feeding, and clothing the maverick Sioux who were avoiding the newly created Dakota reservations. His mission became pathetically ordinary to him—how to convince people that turnips, cabbage, salt pork, and bad beef were a substitute for buffalo. He was also battling against the government's program of forbidding the Sioux to perform any and all ritual dances, or to meet in any but the smallest groups. The few Sioux who were attempting to learn farming tended to “squander” the harvest on feasting and giving away the crop to others. The point was if they couldn't be made Christians they must be forced to behave like provident imitations.

I noted that the Mohonk Conference was next in Michael's manuscript so I put it aside and went up to my bedroom for a few minutes. I wanted to change my mood before I made dinner and could usually accomplish this by 100king through books of reproductions of my favorite artists, Hokusai and Caravaggio, an unlikely pair. This time, however, I was distracted
by the James Dean poster, so old now the edges were crinkled and frayed. Duane had thought James Dean was wonderful and bought the same sort of red windbreaker Dean wore in
Rebel Without a Cause.
I adored him too despite the obvious and curious mixture of fatalism, bravery, arrogance, perhaps ignorance. I caught myself being drawn ceaselessly back into a past that I wished mightily to emerge from—I had come to know only recently that one
could
emerge without forgetting, and that to remember need not be to suffocate. It was unfair but funny to look at the poster and wonder what kind of asshole he would have been as a grownup. It was anyway a tonic to Northridge's coming madness, and I thought of a question a Cree had pointedly asked—“What do stories do when they are not being told?”

Dinner went well. Michael was affable if groggy and was resigned to the tranquilizers. He brought his clipboard to the table to ask us questions. He sipped his marrow and was fascinated by Lena's peculiar impressions of Europe and the life in Paris of her daughter Charlene. Michael reminded me of a graduate-student boyfriend years before who was startled on seeing Grandfather's collection of paintings and wondered if they legitimately belonged in a Nebraska farmhouse, though it was to Michael's credit that he enjoyed having his preconceptions destroyed.

After dinner Lena suggested we do some weeding in Naomi's garden so she wouldn't get too far behind. Michael helped by amusing the pup, taking it for a walk down the road. While we weeded Lena spoke of Charlene and it was nearly dark when she turned to me with a question.

“The girls were talking to this customer last week, a young man, and I went up to remind them to clean off the tables, and I could have sworn he looked like Duane. Do you think he could have been your boy?”

We washed up and made a nightcap, sitting out on the porch where Michael was drying the pup, having bathed it after it rolled in a road-killed rabbit. The sounds he made through his wired jaw must have reminded the pup of its
mother. My efforts to soothe Lena were interrupted by the phone. It was Paul to say he and Luiz would come up with Ruth on Saturday. They would meet at Stapleton and Bill, the farm-implement dealer, would come down to get them in his plane. It seemed an awkward match but Bill and Paul were boyhood chums who had once planned to roam the Seven Seas together, as Bill called it. At his request Paul was enrolling Luiz in a military prep school in Colorado Springs for the coming fall. I nearly protested this choice but let it go in the good feeling of the impending visit. Later it occurred to me the choice was quite natural—if you had been hurt that badly a spiffy uniform and the rigors of military discipline would be a comforting posture of defense.

Lena left after making plans to take Michael to the movies the following evening. You would have thought he had been invited to the Inaugural Ball, which made me plan to wean him from the tranquilizers as soon as possible. There was this image of an ambulatory cabbage wearing a smile. I tucked him in bed as one would a child while he monkeyed with the old Zenith radio on the night table, tuning in a popular but contentious talk show where the evening's discussion was to be the Star Wars controversy. Before going upstairs to read myself to sleep I went outside to look at the uninterrupted stars themselves, the night a “deep throw of star” as some poet said, a silken and thickish Milky Way accompanied by the war of thousands of grass frogs calling out to one another, land miniatures of those Baja sea lions of long ago, a call to life so dense, so impenetrable, that it perhaps equaled the magnitude of the night sky.

July 17, 1886

I am quite abashed on my fifth morning in jail. The authorities are drawing up papers that when signed will insure my release, or so I am told. I am to be taken to the train in Albany, there to board a train going west, & am not to get off the train in the state of New York, or ever return there on pain of prison internment. I have failed thoroughly as John Brown with not a corpse to my credit, and my wife's dream will not be fulfilled, as I left her pregnant & wailing despite my assurances to the contrary. She had managed to never see a train though she had heard of one.
She is staying with He Dog & his band, who comforted her telling her that my mission was essential to the Sioux.

I was welcomed to the Mohonk Conference on the “Indian Question” with a great show of friendliness from my hosts, due to my efforts with Congress and my articles in
Harpers
and
McClure's.
By evening, though, the participants began to shy away from me, sensing I was utterly serious in my plan to create an entire Indian Nation out of the western Dakotas, the western parts of Nebraska, Kansas, and Oklahoma, the eastern portions of Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, northeastern Arizona, and northeastern New Mexico. No matter that it is just, this plan is viewed as madness by these folks who are said to be the conscience of our Nation, both religious and political. Dawes is not here and is said to be vacationing, perhaps from the rigors of chicanery. These are not landgrabbers but men, I am told, who wish to help the Indians by destroying their tribal organization in the Dawes Act. I am told that at Mohonk last year Dawes said, “When you have set the Indian upon his feet, instead of telling him to ‘Root, hog, or die,' you take him by the hand and show him how to learn to earn his daily bread.” This man I vainly hoped to shoot to stop this horror would give each Indian a small farm to till or sell! Without their tribal authority they will be swindled and die.

Despite my anger I am amused the second day to discover that only three of the eighty participants have actually lived among the Indians, an item that ascribes us no particular authority as we are said to be blinded by this contiguity. Of the other two men, one has worked as an agricultural missionary to the Apaches in Arizona and has witnessed the slaughter of ninety of them by a posse from Tucson in Arivaca Canyon. The other has been teaching the Cheyenne to grow crops, and being quite poor is dressed in buckskins which elicits amusement from the gathering. The three of us are asked after a lavish dinner to speak of the pleasures of lives spent “tenting in God's nature,” but decline to do so. Here in the East, and elsewhere, I am told there is a great deal of aping of Indian outdoor customs.

My downfall came on the afternoon of the third day. It had become clear to me that I was not to be permitted to present my
case, and was everywhere avoided and shunned except by my two colleagues who had taken to drink out of despair. At a luncheon on the grass we were to be entertained by groups of dancing Mohawks & Iroquois. At one time the latter would have been quite happy to roast and devour their hosts. I refused to witness this humiliation and took a walk in the woods along the lake, seeking a quiet spot to pray for guidance. My prayers, however, stuck in my craw and I returned for the afternoon guest address determined to seize the lectern. I listened attentively to Reverend Gates who was also the President of Amherst College, who said something of the following, “The Savior's teaching is full of illustrations of the right use of property. There is an immense moral training that comes from the use of property and the Indian has all of that to learn. We have, to begin with, the absolute need of awakening in the savage Indian broader desires and ampler wants. In his dull savagery he must be touched by the wings of the divine angel of discontent. The desire for property of his own may become an intense educating force. Discontent with the ‘teepee' and the starving rations of the Indian camp in winter is needed to get the Indian out of the blanket and into trousers—and trousers with a pocket in them, and with a pocket that aches to be filled with dollars! . . .”

On hearing this blasphemy I found myself running to the front of the hall. I shook the fool and hurled him into the crowd & attempted to begin my speech but was restrained by many from doing so. It was determined I had caused some injuries and was ultimately cast in jail from which I now await my deliverance.

The house had been quiet except for the muffled sound of Michael's radio, but now a slight and distant thunderstorm was causing sharp static and the pup began to whimper. I went downstairs and turned off the radio, picked up the pup, and dimmed the light—Michael refused to sleep in the dark, for which he had offered me a dozen reasons, including if he awoke in the dark how would he know conclusively if he were alive? I rocked the pup back to sleep on the porch swing, feeling not so much that I was getting old but indeterminably older. It was an oddly pleasurable sensation, and up to that moment quite unique: at forty-five I had finally accepted my life, a matter that given my supposed intelligence I might have
managed earlier but hadn't. Somehow you are trying when you don't even know that you are trying. It is peculiar how people who think they are helping others—in my own family, from Northridge to Paul to Naomi, to myself—often are so neglectful of the most ordinary realities that men like Grandfather would counter directly and with dispatch: Paul in his drifting after the most viable abstractions, Naomi sitting on this porch for more than thirty-five years talking to a dead husband though all the while giving youngsters her energetic literacy. I was a mixture of Paul and Naomi.

My ears popped from the low pressure in the air and the dense smell of corn and wheat was oppressive, so different from the alfalfa and varied trees at my own place just three miles away. I recalled this sort of weather before a violent storm when I was a child. The wind-driven rain and hail had demolished that year's crops. We went to the basement when Father saw it coming just before dark. It was a storm-cellar room they had prepared with two beds, a couch, a table, and oil lamps. Our dog Sam lay frightened and stiff on the floor and Ruth and I comforted him while my parents played gin rummy. Then Mother read to us from the
Book House
while the actual house creaked above us and the wind was a hollow roaring sound. When we all awoke in the total silence of daylight and went upstairs the trees were stripped of their leaves and the wheat and corn were flattened in the fields. Ruth and I ran around in the big pools of water in the lawn while Father comforted Naomi for her destroyed garden. The trees restored themselves but it was too late in June for the crops to recover. My parents had been amazed to discover that the storm had struck only a small portion of the county before sailing off to the northwest.

Northridge had returned home after paying a fine and damages which were ample when the authorities discovered the amount of money in his carpetbag. He had learned the desperate and not very attractive measure, passed on to his son, that when things become impossible you must try to buy the obstruction. It never seemed to work more than temporarily. When he went home he literally became an Indian, or a version thereof, started a headquarters in the Badlands, away from ranchers, as a small fiefdom supporting as many as fifty
charges, including a miniature army of a dozen headed by He Dog and Sam Creekmouth. Other than several irritating visits by his officer nemesis and former friend from Cornell, the government ignored him, using the effective policy of benign neglect to combat a man who was anyway widely considered in the West to be a total lunatic.