Neither Wolf nor Dog (24 page)

He got in the car and gave Dan a nod. Other than that he didn't say a word. His crisp white T-shirt clung tight against his sinewy torso. His jeans were held up by a tooled leather belt with a huge oval turquoise and silver buckle.

He looked over at me, then reached in the pocket of the jacket he had been carrying over his shoulder. He pulled out a pack of Lucky Strikes and wordlessly offered one to me.

I was in a momentary panic. I didn't want a cigarette, but was unsure if perhaps this was not a gesture of thanks and respect.

I declined.

He reached the pack over the front seat. Dan extracted two cigarettes and handed one to Grover. Grover nodded and
slipped the cigarette into the corner of his mouth. Still, nobody uttered a word.

The silence was disconcerting to me. Moments before Dan had been warming to the subject of Sitting Bull and had given every indication of launching into a lengthy discourse on the matter. Now, with the arrival of the stranger, all conversation had ceased. We were riding in Indian silence — unselfconscious, wordless, and without pretense. I felt like a complete outsider.

I studied the new passenger out of the corner of my eye. He had the handsomeness of the land. He was burnished brown, almost mahogany, with gigantic, knobbed hands that hung like axheads from his sinewy forearms. Though he was skinny, every muscle on his body stood out, as if the hot sun and endless hard labor had pared every ounce of extraneous fat from his body. But despite his raw physicality, there was something refined, even feminine about his manner. He had the physical presence and readiness of a large cat.

He pulled a comb out of his front pocket and ran it meticulously through his shiny, black 1950s hairdo. Then, in a practiced automatic gesture, he squared his massive hands over his head and boxed and shaped the hair above his forehead into a blocky, protruding wave.

His face was taut but lined. Smile or squint crinkles had worn their way in around his eyes, though sitting in the car he showed no expression. He reached over and scratched Fatback's head without bothering to let her smell his hand. He had obviously spent his life around animals and had no fear of the unexpected.

Grover negotiated the serpentine road with obvious relish. These easy, rolling curves of backroads America were the stuff for which his huge Buick was made.

“Going up to the grave site?” I asked. I was hoping that
some minor conversation might compensate for any perceived snub that was contained in my refusal of the cigarette. Dan stiffened in his seat.

“Getting out up here,” the man answered laconically. Dan was rigid.

I had backed myself into a corner. Dan was clearly uncomfortable about something, and the man's clipped answer indicated that either by choice or by nature he was not a talker. Grover just wheeled the car around the looping curves. He was not going to help me out.

I wedged myself into the corner of the seat and stared out the window. My simple sentence hung like a dark spider in the middle of the car. What had I said and what had I done? And how could it be so pregnant with significance when it had had so little content?

“Here's good,” the man said. Grover pulled to a stop and the man stepped out as lithely as he had gotten in. There were no “thank-yous” or “good-byes” or ritual pleasantries of any sort. Yet there had been no threat, no danger, no animosity anywhere.

“White man's disease,” Dan snapped to me as the Buick got underway.

“We call it politeness,” I said testily. “I asked him where he was going.”

“No you didn't. You asked him if he was going to the grave site. Some things run deep, Nerburn.”

“Like what?” I said, nonplussed.

Dan spoke in a dark anger. “You know what happened to Sitting Bull?”

“No,” I admitted, though I saw no connection between the question and my apparent faux pas.

“He was killed by the damn reservation police. Bunch of blanket Indians afraid of losing their food rations.”

“Called them ‘coffee coolers' in those days,” Grover interjected, the unlit cigarette still dangling from his mouth. “Good name for you, Nerburn.”

Dan was not amused. “Sitting Bull wouldn't sign the treaties. He knew they'd make blanket Indians out of all of us. If it hadn't been for the damn blanket Indians . . .” He snorted angrily through his teeth. “If they would have listened to Sitting Bull and stayed with him, we never would have signed away the Black Hills.”

I wanted to say that it was likely that the Black Hills would have been taken some other way, but I didn't feel like contradicting Dan's thinking, wherever it was leading. He was far too angry.

“He was a real chief, Nerburn. He didn't hate the white man. He just loved the Indian people. He knew if we had anything to do with the
wasichus
, we'd turn white ourselves.

“Do you know what he said about the Indians who lived in the white agencies?”

“No.”

“I remember the speech. It was one of those I learned when I was young. I learned it in English, too. It went like this. ‘I do not wish to be shut up in a corral. All agency Indians I have seen were worthless. They are neither red warriors nor white farmers. They are neither wolf nor dog.'”

He turned in his seat to face me. “Do you see what I mean, Nerburn?”

“No,” I answered. I was still peeved at being berated for a simple act of civility.

“That's what happened to us. We listened to the white man. Now we're neither wolf nor dog. Sitting Bull was right.”

“So what does this have to do with the guy we picked up?” I ventured.

“Lot of people up in Fort Yates are related to those policemen
who tried to arrest Sitting Bull,” Dan said. “It was right around here he was camped. The agent sent Indian police to get Sitting Bull. Sitting Bull's people were just trying to go down to see what the Ghost Dance was all about. But the agent didn't want him to see. He thought he'd make trouble. They didn't want Sitting Bull to do anything except be a damn farmer, so they sent Indian police to arrest him. The police shot Sitting Bull in the head. Bunch of cowards. So some of Sitting Bull's band shot the Indian policemen. Killed a bunch of them. You just don't talk about it too much unless you know who you're talking to.”

“After a hundred years?” I exclaimed.

“Same thing as the Civil War for white people in the South. Sometimes in towns where things happened there are things you just don't bring up.”

I shook my head. “You pick the guy up and then you don't talk to him because he might be related to a policeman who's been dead for a hundred years?”

“That's right,” he said harshly. “I don't care if you understand it. For Indian people the family matters. So does the clan. It doesn't stop mattering just because someone dies. It doesn't hurt to have respect for the past. Things aren't dead just because they're over.

“Besides, we're not like white people who have to fill up every damn second of silence with a bunch of talk.”

“Okay. Point taken,” I said. I didn't want to engage him in any further argument. I turned my attention to Grover. “Tell me really, Grover. Is Dan overreacting?”

Grover looked at me through the rearview mirror. “The old man knows things. I don't know. Only time I've ever gone into Fort Yates is to get a taco. They've got one of those Taco John places there. It doesn't hurt to keep your mouth shut, though.”

A momentary image passed through my mind of people standing in sullen silence at Taco John's, eyeing their linemates
suspiciously and brooding over past hurts. I was tempted to say that maybe they should have two windows — one for Sitting Bull's relatives and one for the relatives of the policemen — but it seemed way beyond the bounds of good taste.

“You don't understand, Nerburn,” Dan said. He was still on a roll. “That's why I'm trying to teach you things. Everyone acts like they're proud of Sitting Bull. ‘He was a great chief. He finished off Custer.' All the Indians will tell you that. But that's for white men. Underneath people still remember, especially the old ones. And if the young ones don't remember, they ought to. It's a hell of a lot more important than the kind of tennis shoes you wear.”

I said nothing, but Dan wouldn't drop it.

“How'd your grandfather die?” he said.

“I don't know,” I answered. “He just died. Lived a hard life. Drank too much.”

“Well, what if he'd been shot in the head for wanting to go to church, and the guy who shot him had been given a medal?”

“I'd think it was wrong.”

“Would you be angry?”

“At what happened, yes. But probably not at the grandchildren of the shooter.”

“Well, Indian people don't forget.”

“Or forgive,” I muttered.

Dan heard. “It doesn't have to do with forgiveness. It has to do with honor. I tried to tell you that. Forgiveness just sets you free. Lets you think only about yourself. Honor makes you strong. It binds you to your past. Sitting Bull is alive in the hearts of his people. That is how they honor him. They don't honor people who dragged him out of his bed naked and shot him in the head so the
wasichu
agent would give them a medal.

“But his people had to run away to Pine Ridge after the shooting. It's the policemen Indians up here. The ones who shot
him. That's what I mean about blanket Indians. Now they get all misty and talk about how great Sitting Bull was, but they were willing to shoot him in the head so they would get their rations.”

I marveled at Dan's ferocity, and the way the past and present wove themselves together into a seamless experience in his imagination. He was right; it was like the South and the Civil War, or the Vichy French and the Resistance. There were currents that ran too deep, bones that should not be dug up. Even if his caution were a paranoid delusion, at least it made sense by his own terms.

I turned back to look one more time at the stranger. He was just a tiny figure in the distance disappearing from view as we made a final turn. He was still walking on the road in that rhythmic, loping gate, heading exactly in the direction we were driving.

S
itting Bull's monument was an obelisk on a promontory overlooking the Missouri River valley. It stood against the cloudless blue sky with a proud singularity. Though bizarrely classical in its concept, it had a solitary nobility that seemed strangely appropriate for a man who stood alone against a conquering nation.

In front of it was a square stone pillar topped by a garish, ill-carved bust that looked like the work of a junior-high student. I assumed it was a labor of love by some self-trained Indian artist who had wanted to commemorate Sitting Bull in his own humble way.

Since unsolicited comments were not standing me in good stead at that particular moment, I kept my counsel. I kept
reminding myself of the advice one of my dear friends had given to his jabbering ten-year-old daughter: “Just because it comes into your mind doesn't mean you have to say it.”

Grover and I stood silently in front of the monuments while Dan wandered off on his own. “This one's by that guy who's carving the Crazy Horse sculpture,” Grover said as he pointed to the bust.

“You mean the mountain?” I asked, incredulous.

“Yeah. Same guy.”

Grover was referring to a Polish immigrant named Ziolkowski who had wanted to help the Indian people memorialize one of their own great leaders in the same way that four white presidents had been commemorated on the side of Mount Rushmore. Self-trained, intensely proud, and with a will of steel, he had begun blocking a mountain in the northern Black Hills into a likeness of a mounted Crazy Horse pointing toward the sacred lands. He was now dead, but his sons were carrying on the task. The sentiment was noble and the task gigantic. But the thought of a sculpture of the quality of this bust as big as a mountain made me shudder.

I didn't have long to contemplate. Dan returned and stood be-side us.

“You know why this is here?” he asked.

“What? The carving?”

“No. The whole thing.”

I admitted I didn't.

“After Sitting Bull was killed the blanket Indians were so damn scared that they didn't even dare demand a decent burial for him. The soldiers put him in a pine box and threw him in a hole. Left him wrapped in a bloody blanket. I heard they even threw some chemical stuff on his body so he'd decompose faster. This was a man who should have been honored by his people and they were throwing chemicals on him so he would rot fast.

“They gave the policemen who had been killed this big military funeral with all the blanket Indians crying and mourning. Buried them in the Catholic cemetery. Then they stole everything Sitting Bull's people had. This was all up at Fort Yates.

“Sitting Bull's people didn't want to leave him up there. They wanted to take him down here where he was born. I remember hearing about it when I was a boy. Then a few years ago they decided to flood the whole place where Fort Yates is. Make a dam and flood it. Sitting Bull's relatives weren't going to let them flood his grave. They stole his bones and brought them up here. Buried him in his own land. Set his spirit free.”