RavenShadow (26 page)

When the song ended, Plez said to me, like in the middle of a conversation, “He loved the old ways, you know, way loved them.”
Lot of folks completing my thoughts around here
. “That scared the agent on his reservation, and he marked Sitting Bull down as one of them backward ones, a force for ‘savage’ ways. Which put him on the government’s list of conservatives to be silenced.
Indian policemen rode out one cold morning and murdered him on the steps of his own house. The agent didn’t order the killing, but he set it up.”

I stared at him.
Who is this Cherokee-Shoshone telling me my own history?
Of course, I’d just learned it myself.

Tyler pitched in. “He didn’t go for the Ghost Dance, Sitting Bull, or go away from it neither. He was sitting the fence when they killed him.”

A woman I didn’t know, Celene Not Help Him, had started a talk about Wounded Knee, what it really was. She was the granddaughter of Dewey Beard, a man also known as Iron Hail, the best-known of the survivors of the massacre. Our stories about that fight don’t always match the white-man stories, and I believe our people. Unlike the white soldiers, they didn’t have anything to cover up.

I listened carefully to Celene. Though I’d read the white-man books, I wanted to hear a Lakota tell it—sounded like she’d researched it deep. She started with Wovoka, way over in Nevada. That Paiute medicine man had a vision of a better world. The Indian people’s ancestors were alive again, the buffalo were back, and the white people were gone. Indians from a lot of different tribes made the journey to Mono Lake to hear Wovoka tell his vision. They took it back to their people, with the dance he told them to do, the Ghost Dance, and the Ghost Shirt he told them to wear.

From there it was the basic story of Big Foot. How Big Foot’s people took off from Cheyenne River across the Badlands toward Wounded Knee. How Indians from the Pine Ridge and Rosebud Reservations were doing the Ghost Dance day and night up in the Stronghold, a far corner of the Badlands. That had the whites bad scared. But Big Foot wasn’t going to them, he was headed for Pine Ridge.

The army chased all over hell and gone, looking for Big Foot, but never found him until he sent word to Pine Ridge where he was, and that he would arrive the next day. Then they
intercepted him and made him camp at Wounded Knee, guarded close by the Seventh Cavalry. The idea was to take all his guns away. That was a hard, strict order.

Everybody was tense the next morning. All the men were gathered at a council, all in one place, with troops all around them. The young men didn’t want to give up their rifles, good repeating Winchesters. They needed those guns to feed their families. The soldiers insisted, and were searching them, one by one. One Indian’s rifle went off accidentally, straight up in the air. The soldiers had been ordered to fire at the first sound of shooting. Two troops of cavalry fired point blank into the grouped-up Indian men, and the killing was on.

But that was only the beginning, Celene Not Help Him insisted. Then the soldiers fired the fast-shooting cannons straight into the Indian village, mostly women and children. After those left alive fled the village, they tried to hide in the ravine. The soldiers shot their rifles and their Hotchkiss guns down into the ravine, slaughtering people at random, warriors, old men, women, children, everyone, not caring who.

The white people say about a hundred and fifty of Big Foot’s people died. The Lakota’s estimate, and they know better, is about three hundred.

When she finished, people started crawling into their sleeping bags. Emile, Plez, Chup, and I untied each other’s eagle feathers. Ever helpful, Plez stitched them onto our hats for tomorrow, with needle and thread. We put the hats on top of our packs, well off the ground. You don’t let an eagle feather touch the ground.

Then Plez and Chup stretched out on either side of me without a word. Plez tucked his broccoli hair to one side and lay on his back. My sponsor on one side, good—but this new guy between me and my oldest friend? Seemed odd.

After lights out, I felt restless. Soon comes this whisper. “You ’sleep?” It’s Chup.

“Hell, no,” I said.

“Let’s go somewhere,” says Plez. “I got a thermos of coffee still hot.”

“You go,” says Emile. He was halfway asleep already.

We went up to a far, high corner of the bleachers where no one else was. Looking down on the gym floor was eerie. People left candles on so kids could go the bathroom and such, and it looked like a big tapestry, circles of glow and caverns of darkness. I wished Emile was seeing it.

Plez handed the plastic top of the thermos around. The coffee tasted strange but good. “What’s that in it?” I says.

“Sweetgrass,” says Plez.

Hadn’t tried that before; liked it.

Chup says, “Watch this.” He sets one of those big six-volt flashlights on its base, and fixes his riding wristlet around it with the rawhide thongs he uses on his forearms. When he turns it on, a dramatic-looking cone of light shoots up into the dark depths of the rafters. In the half-light, half-shadow around it, our faces look gobliny.

Chup grinned at us. “Like that?”

“Yeah,” says I.

We looked at each other conspiratorially. I felt like giggling like a kid. I slugged on the sweetgrass coffee.
Let’s whisper, like kids after lights out
.

Chup says—it seemed real sudden, real abrupt—“Blue, you found anything on your great-grandfather at Wounded Knee?”

“No,” says I, miffed that he would bring it up in front of a stranger.

Chup goes on, “Try Plez.”

Uncomfortable silence. Three goblins fidgeting in the otherworldly light and sort of smiling at each other.

“
Kola
, what’s happenin’?”

I didn’t answer.

Chup looked at me expectantly.

Plez sighed. “I think I can help you. I have that sense. I got it when I first heard about you from Chup and Tyler.”

“Tyler?”

“He said you went to Cemetery Hill with him, never been there, fell down unconscious, give him a scare.”

I looked hard at Chup.
My friends’ve been gossiping about me
.

Chup says, “Your sponsor, I can’t talk about some things to other people. But you came to here to get help—we all did. Get help for ourselves, give help to the people. I’ll tell you, Plez is your man. I know him a long time.”

I had this trembling in my throat. I was afraid it showed, afraid the skin was wobbling. I decided to stop it. “I don’t know what happened that day,” I said to Plez. “I kind of passed out. I saw things….” I looked up into the rafters, asking the dark reaches to help me. “It was like a dream, only brighter and stronger.”

Plez chuckled, “Oh, you’re a good one. That’s easy to sort out, in a general way. You got a glimpse of the other side.”

I waited and sort of nodded.

Plez gave me a canny look. “That happen to you before?”

I nodded bigger. “When I went on the mountain, coupla months ago.”

“So you had it before, you know that’s what it was. What was so different?” He grinned, “Oh, yeah, on the mountain you were looking for it.”

“Yes.”

“At Wounded Knee it jumped up and bit you. Scared you.” He cocked an eyebrow at me.

“Yes.”

“Anything you want to tell me about it?”

I waited a long time. He must have thought I wasn’t gonna answer, but he never stirred. Finally I says, “I saw a guide. Raven.” I looked up at his lighted face and down at my shadowed knees. “A special raven. Now I tell myself to call him Spirit Bird. Scares hell out of me, always has. I didn’t go.”

Plez nodded slow several times. “You know much about Spirit Bird?”

“What I see around me. He’s a capital-R Raven, and ravens feed on death. And what I see in my dreams. Raven is black shadows.”

He nodded slow several more times. “Yeah, you want to work on this Raven, things are there for you. Maybe I can help you a little. For sure I can point a way toward help. Meanwhile, how do I say … ? Why are you on this pilgrimage to Wounded Knee?”

“To seek healing for myself and to wipe away the tears of the people.” I was surprised at how easy it came out.

“That’s good, but … you have relatives there?”

My hands felt like drumming on my knees, and at the same time felt frozen. I looked and saw they were shaking. I knit my fingers together.

“Yeah. My great-grandfather was there, name Blue Crow. Anybody heard of him, I’d like to know. My grandmother was born the day after. That’s all I know.”

“Don’t know anything about your great-grandfather, great-grandmother?”

“I don’t know what happened. Unchee never talked about it. Would never.
Hard
would never.”

“Oh,
kola
,” says Plez. Then he surprised me. “I’m so glad you came. I can help you.”

I looked at the two of them. For some crazy reason a memory flashed into my mind, me sitting, legs crossed like this, with my dad and his brother, playing that silly game where you clap your knees and then clap against another’s guy’s hands, and clap your knees, all in a certain pattern and rhythm.

“It’s true, Blue, I don’ have any ancestors at Wounded Knee, being Cherokee and Shoshone, you know. But my wife, she is Mniconjou, she had relatives there. So I started with the second ride, three years ago. Between rides I been out putting together the story behind the story.” He smiled. “Reading the books, going around gathering up people’s stories, what’s been handed
down in their families, and the best way. Journeying there in spirit, seeing it for myself.”

He said it so easy.

Something in my belly lurched. All those demons leapt at me with their sweet voices of reason—
See, this pilgrimage stuff is looney tunes. Back to the blanket, back to the nuthouse
. The demons had ninety-nine choruses of such stuff to sing, but I cut them off.
I saw miracles on the mountain
.

I looked up at his eyes. Even in the weird light his face was sweet and kind of simple. “So I can help you, you wanna know,” he said, his voice gentle. “What happened to your relatives, what hold it has on your spirit.”

“Part of me doesn’t want to know.”

Silence, while he thought this over.

“What was your grandmother like?”

“How would I know? She kept herself closed off. Mad. Mad inside all the time, I think. She gave me my name, didn’t tell me it was my great-grandfather’s. Gave me his Pipe, told me nothing about him.”

“
Kola
, you need to know.”

I didn’t answer. My stomach felt like a pot being stirred.

“You’ve needed to know your whole life.”

They Ride

T
he next morning at Bridger, South Dakota, where the Big Foot people started running south, the corral was chaos. Riders tried to move gently among the horses, twitching their lariats and then floating them over the necks of their mounts. But the horses spooked, dashed from one side of the corral to another, reared and pranced. When the riders got saddled and mounted, the horses reared and crow-hopped. Lots of riders had to start again from the ground up.

Emile and I looked for a two-horse trailer with a four directions wheel painted on the side. This would be a guy from Wambli Mom knew, who had promised to rent us horses. Right away we found it and got them unloaded, a sorrel mare and a dun gelding, both young-looking. When I hauled out the saddles, I got a nice surprise. Mom apparently had saved my old saddle from Grandpa’s. Since my bottom hadn’t changed much in twenty years, it would still fit. I looked at the horses with a hard eye. Would they hold up for a week of riding in this cold? Word was, the high today would be ten below or the like, and no change in sight. Would we end up hoofing it and carrying our saddles over our shoulders? I checked their hooves. I checked the way they moved. They looked sound.

Emile paid the guy and reminded him to meet us at Wounded Knee on the twenty-eighth. That place was what I was trying not to think about.

Emile said gently, “May I ride the sorrel?” He went to the muzzle, held his nose to the horse’s nostrils, and exchanged frosty breaths.

I mounted, noted that the dun didn’t move off. The saddle felt good. I pulled on the reins and said, “Back!” and it even backed a few steps. It seemed to have a soft mouth. It might do. We would get to know each other.

We rode to the corral and tied the horses to the rail. Our gear would go ahead of us to tonight’s camp in the support vehicles.

Half the riders were still trying to catch their mounts and get saddled. Among these was Pleasant Sunday. He wore a beautiful, flowing capote, made from a powder blue Hudson Bay blanket with a black stripe, but he couldn’t flick his loop over the horse’s head. It was a big, black, active gelding quarter horse, and the head was practically bouncing toward the clouds. Way Plez was going, he’d still be in this corral on the twenty-eighth.

I slipped into the corral, said, “Lemme?” and took the lariat from Plez. Then I got the bridle from the fence post.

Yeah, let me help
you
do something
.

I pussyfooted the animal toward the narrow end of the corral against a building. I was moving like a cutting horse, gently but quickly, nothing wasted, nothing big, anticipating the animal’s moves. It watched me. It knew.

We eyed each other. I stood so still he didn’t even blink. After a while, the black seemed to sigh, and lowered his head. I walked easy to him, touched his muzzle, slipped the bit into his mouth, and put the bridle on. Never even bothered with the lariat.

Meanwhile, there was a pandemonium of whinnies, pounding hoofs, and whirring lariats all around us.

I was watching Plez without seeming to watch. He accepted
the reins and said, “You got a touch with horses.”

“Thanks. You ride much?”

Plez was putting on the saddle. “Naw,” he says. “You know, my dad’s people. Cherokees, we’re more farmers and tradesmen than horsemen. Hundred fifty years ago your great-great-grandfathers were riding down the buffalo, big stuff, big adventure. Know what mine were doing? Running the general store. Planting and harvesting crops. One was editing the first newspaper among the Cherokees.”

He pulled the cinch too tight. I adjusted it, and showed him how to slip three fingers behind the cinch—if you can’t get them in, it’s too tight.

We hopped up on the rail next to Emile. I was feeling a little better about Plez, but not about the day.

“You feeling marbinschilling?” he asked me, beaming as usual.

“Marbinschilling?”

“It’s a word my grandfather taught me—means a little out of sorts.”

“Cherokee word?” I asked.

“Naw, it’s a word a grandpa made up for the fun of his grandkids. Well, are you marbinschilling?”

“I’m cold,” I said.

I was done up in longjohns, pacs, a padded working man’s zipper suit, gloves and liners, ski mask, and hooded parka. The only thing exposed was my eagle feather. I had to turn my whole body to check the corral with my eyes. It was going to be a while before we started.

“I’m gonna find us some hot coffee,” said Emile, and slid off the rail.

“My grandfather taught me a lot,” Plez rambled on. “Can’t tell you how much. He also give me my name. I mean the first name and the family name, Sunday. Our original name was Cheatham. My grandfather, Pleasant Cheatham, was born again at a revival held in Oklahoma by Billy Sunday. Accepted Jesus,
praise the Lord!” (Plez’s eyes hinted at irony here, but his smile was tireless and his tone enthusiastic.) “When my dad was born, later that year, my grandfather wrote himself down on the birth certificate as Pleasant Sunday, and my dad was Orel Sunday. That’s how I come to be Pleasant Sunday, the Second. That’s the truth. You can see I was born to be a man of Spirit.”

Now I had some ammunition. “You’re Indian and a born-again?” I know plenty of those, but I was about to do a Tyler Red Crow on him—“All Christian churches are my enemies.”

“Naw,” says Plez, “I walk the Indian way only.” He considered what he wanted to say. “And I have the gift. I see things.”

“What do you mean, see things?”

“I see things of the Spirit. I see you’re irritable now. Last night I saw you’re afraid about this ride. You wanna know what happened to your relatives, and at the same time you don’t wanna know. You feel maybe like a fool. You think maybe I can help you, but you’re half-scared of that.”

I looked at him in the eyes, white-man style. They were merry and his grin was easy.

“You might be wrong.”

He shrugged with his eyebrows. “I have other gifts, too,” he said. “Journey through time.”

“You what?”

“Told you, I’ve been to Wounded Knee, saw the massacre.”

We sat there and looked at each other for a moment. Plez kind of looked like he was laughing—not laughing at me, but laughing at everything, enjoying the world.

“That’s hard for me.”

“It’s the shaman’s way. I can go into the Spirit World. I can talk to spirits there. I can talk to our departed ancestors. Sometimes, if things are right, I can go be with our ancestors somewhere they were. Like Wounded Knee. Beyond people’s stories, beyond what I read, was what the spirits showed me. Direct. I was there.”

I felt a spasm, anger roiled up with nausea.

“Anybody ever call you crazy?”

“Oh yeah, that’s a favorite.” He was just grinning and nodding.

I jumped down from the rail, untied the reins, and switched the post with them hard, like I meant to hurt it. I was getting out of there. I glared at Plez.

“Remember, that’s what
Wanagi Wacipi
, the Spirit Dance was about. People went and visited the Spirit World.”

I stood there with my mouth hanging open.

“Yeah,” he said, “you might be able to go back there. Some people can, some can’t. When we talked last night, I thought,
This fellow has the gift
. At least I bet you could do it now, when your mind and spirit are so close to that day a hundred years ago.”

I made myself turn away, looking for Emile.

Plez put a friendly hand on my shoulder. “You wanna go see what happened to your relatives there, Wounded Knee, you lemme know. We’ll try.”

I pretended I hadn’t heard and walked out from underneath the hand.

I stomped around the corral and stood on the other side. Here the cold wind was in my face, and it hurt. I realized I was aching terrible: ears, nose, fingers, feet.
Where’s Emile? Where’s that hot coffee?
I stomped on, searching for my friend. My eyes were tearing from the cold, or anger, or fear that Pleasant Sunday, man of the old ways, might be telling the truth.

After way too long a time, all the horses were saddled, and we riders formed a big circle in the empty space next to the store on the highway south. We were a funny-looking crew in all our winter headgear: cowboy hats, parka hoods, knit caps, Scotch caps, baseball caps with eagle feathers jutting everywhere—up, down, sideways, and just swinging in the breeze. At powwows
you see Indians wearing eagle feathers with their dance outfits. Here everyone wore one with the way we dress now. I thought it meant we were bringing our religion into this life today, and I liked that.

Later I heard there were 129 of us riders starting out. There were also a lot of walkers, including the monks and nuns. And people, more and more people, would be joining us every day, until we came to Wounded Knee.

Some of the leaders, men who had put the rides together, sat their mounts in the middle of the circle—Arvol Looking Horse, Birgil Kills Straight, Alex White Plume, Jim Garrett, Ron McNeill, men I didn’t know. A medicine man prayed, and the men of the drum pounded out a rhythm. Then we kicked the horses to a trot, circled sunwise, and we were off.

Eagle feathers fluttered in the cold wind. Women trilled—a sound you don’t hear much any more, exciting. In front we heard riders yelling, “
Heyupa! Heyupa!
” and we all joined in, voices raised together.

After all that standing and sitting around, the motion of the horse felt good. Being Lakota felt good too.

When we settled down to a walk, someone brushed my stirrup, and I was glad to see it was Emile, not Pleasant Sunday. Today was Sunday, two days before Christmas. “This ain’t no pleasant any day,” I said. Emile smiled his beautiful, delicate smile at me.

Matter of fact, it would be a long day, thirty miles to ride, and it was going to be brutal. How was my butt going to hold up for thirty miles? I hadn’t ridden in years. How was I going to survive the wind and cold? This country is sagebrush plains, oceans of ridges of sagebrush, nothing to break the wind.

How was I going to pass the time?

I told Emile about what Plez said, claiming he could time-travel, saying he’d been to Wounded Knee, saying maybe he could take me there.

“I don’t think it’s exactly time-traveling,” Emile said. “My
grandmother’s brother, he could journey to the Spirit World. He wouldn’t tell anyone much about it. I heard he could go to the underworld and bring people back, people who had just died. He also got a language from there somehow, his own language. Songs too. Brought ’em back.”

“You believe that?” Don’t know why I sounded so challenging. I’d always heard
yuwipi
men could do some of that.

Emile didn’t answer for a moment.

“Plez said that’s what the Ghost Dance was about, talking to the departed spirits.”

Emile looked at me. “Yes.”

“You believe in the Ghost Dance? I mean, our ancestors thought the Ghost Shirts would turn away bullets, and it got them killed.”

“I don’t know what went wrong there. They got killed, that doesn’t mean the whole Ghost Dance was wrong.” He hesitated, then went on in his delicate voice. “I danced one. At Crow Dog’s. While you were away at college.”

“So you do believe in it.”

“Yes. Mostly I believe in the unseen. It’s there, it’s real, people don’t see it because they’ve learned not to look. I believe something else, too.” He looked at me openly, seriously. “Art brings the unseen into the world. That’s why I don’t paint what I see, or things based on old paintings. I paint what I dream. I’m bringing the other world into this one.”

What do I say now?

“Blue, you know this. You haven’t been living it.”

“Drunks can’t live much of anything.”

I stared into the wind and held my eyes open until they teared. The tears froze my ski mask to my lower lashes.

“
Kola
, he’s offering you a gift, why don’t you take it? I mean, try it?”

Something ran up my gullet, burning bad. I kicked my horse to a canter, wheeled around, and raced back along the margin of the road to get away, alone.

I walked the dun back along the line of riders, looking for Sallee. Not a tree in sight on the plains, and the wind slapped at me. Front to back, I didn’t find her. All the way at the rear I found Tyler.

“Where’s Sallee?”

“The walkers are going another way.”

“Oh.” He rode an old, wheezing bay mare. “Why you at the back?”

“I’m keeping an eye out, making sure nobody drops behind unnoticed, helping them as gets in trouble. We keep count, especially after dark. Last year one of the walkers fell back in the dark, spent the night out, almost died. That woman who’s the leader of the monks and nuns.”

I eyed his mount suspiciously.

“Friend, it’s a hard time. We lost twelve horses already, lame, breathing problems, everything. We been picking them up with horse trailers. Then the riders become walkers.”

I looked back along the way and saw nothing. We’d been riding up a big hogback on someone’s ranch. “Where are the walkers?”

“Us riders go cross country, like Big Foot. The walkers follow the roads.” Which in country like this would mean right angles along the section lines. I wouldn’t see her until camp tonight. I felt a pang.

“It’s gonna get worse,
kola
. When we top this hogback? Think about the wind up there.”

When I hit the wind about midday, I thought some riders would die. Wi, Father Sun, was out full, giving us what he could. But Waziya, the cold giant who lives in the north, and Tate, the wind, they were stomping us. Maybe worst weather I ever saw in this country.
Is this Evil One, the Wind Storm, toying with us?

At the top of the ridge overlooking the Cheyenne River valley, where we came from, I rode past a support vehicle parked beside the road, a blue van. The wind hit it so hard it swayed on its springs. I looked at the window-framed face of the white man in the driver’s seat, and saw he looked kind.
Easier to be kind when you’re next to the heater!
He rolled down the window and handed me his smoke. I dragged deep, and it felt good. “I’m Tony,” he said.