RavenShadow (37 page)

She lurched to her feet, and the pain stabbed her. She grabbed her thigh near her elk medicine, near where the unborn child would emerge, must emerge.

She did not scream. She did not make a sound. She stood there. After a long time she thought to staunch the bleeding with her skirt. Then she staggered down the ravine, she didn’t know why or where.

Iron Hail limped along the ravine with his two wounds, calling, “Wears Eagle! Wears Eagle!” He heard no answer. In the din no ears could have heard an answer.

I looked for his wife and saw her. She was still there under the rim, where she’d been digging a place for Wet Feet. Below her right eyelid was a crusty red hole. The little boy, a few weeks old, nursed at his dead mother’s breast.

“Wears Eagle! Wears Eagle!” cried Iron Hail, wandering on.

Now soldiers ran to both rims and fired down directly at whatever appeared to stir—man, woman, child, or play doll.

An old man shoved a rifle at Iron Hail. With two others he
climbed the south rim and charged some soldiers. His comrades fell, and Iron Hail was driven back.

He stumbled down the ravine in a chaos of flying bullets, dust, smoke, and the screams of the wounded.

In the haze he suddenly saw a woman’s figure staggering, about to fall but still on her feet. Suddenly he realized,
Mother!

He ran to her. She was bleeding, walking like a drunk, swinging a pistol wildly. She said to her son, “Pass by me. I am going to fall down now.”

Suddenly bullets from both rims racked her body, and she fell dead.

Both mother and father dead!

He crawled, limped, and staggered on down the ravine, dazed, stunned, maddened. He cried, “Take courage! Take courage!”

Suddenly appeared in the murk his brother William, collapsed up on the bank next to his friend White Lance. Both were shot. William tried to speak but couldn’t. He bled from a wound in the chest.

Iron Hail and White Lance helped William to the bottom of the ravine, and he wheezed, “Shake hands with me, I am dizzy now.”

“Take courage!” cried Iron Hail. “Our father told us it is better that all of us should die together than we should die separately at different times!”

William clumped hard to the ground and sat, his eyes glazed.

Now the fire came thick as hail from the sky of Wind Storm and Thunderstorm.

Surely the word
terrible
was invented for this moment and the ones that followed.

Iron Hail dragged William to the overhang, which gave the best remaining protection. He and others crawled to the top and shot.

A corporal in one of the batteries saw that the overhang was
the source of what little return fire still came. “Roll this gun!” he ordered his fellows. “Get ’er down there!”

The batterymen rolled the Hotchkiss downhill. A captain hollered for them to come back, but the corporal ignored him. They fired at the edge of the overhang.

Still return fire came.

“Get closer!” yelled the corporal. The men pushed the gun nearly to the ravine. A lieutenant ran down the hill yelling at them, but a bullet stopped him.

The gunners fired again.

Still fire came. Indian bullets tore the batterymen’s clothing. Their bullets bored holes in the gun’s big wheels. One shot knocked a live shell out of the corporal’s hand. Somehow the shell did not explode.

“Closer!” bellowed the corporal.

Crying “Remember Custer!” and “Remember the Little Big Horn!” the gunners pushed the cannon point-blank to the edge of the ravine.

At the rate of nearly one round a second, they shelled the ravine and the overhang itself.

When other artillerymen yelled for them to come back, they hollered, “Someone bring us a cool gun!”

They pummeled the overhang with their shells.

It collapsed on the Indians.

Men, women, and children squirted in every direction. Their last shelter was gone. Bullets and Hotchkiss shells hailed on them.

A bullet shrieked past Iron Hail’s head and whacked into a woman’s back. Her face brightened, she laughed out loud, sagged to her knees, and died.

I saw other incidents of horror, so many that even today I cannot bear to write them down.

Now, in this storm of gunfire, these dying people sent up their sacred death songs. The sound was wild, barbarous, heroic. Each song was grief and acceptance in one.

All together the voices rose to the Powers as one great wail. It was as though a thousand great bells rang out at once, and every leaf of every tree shrieked, and the rocks of the mountains themselves cried out in anguish.

The anguish was not only for themselves and their dying relatives, but for a people, and that people’s way of living, and their dream.

I wept, and wept, and wept.

As the songs rose stronger and stronger, my eyes dried. I entered the realm of sorrow that is beyond weeping.

Iron Hail was one of those few Mniconjou who survived the horror at the overhang. He scrambled out of the ravine, by luck hitting a spot that had no soldiers. Blind with pain, he staggered across flat ground.

And thus came Joseph, his brother, a ghostly figure materializing impossibly in the haze of dust and smoke. Earlier, when Captain Wallace told Joseph to warn the women and children and get away, Joseph went to the village, and delivered that warning. While he was gone, the fighting erupted. Now, returned to help his family, he boosted Iron Hail onto a horse and led him away.

Deliverance often appears as miracle.

In the ravine, only faint stirrings of life.

The rank smell on the wind was death.

About that time, far too late, a thought struck the half-blood Philip Wells.
More people, red and white, might survive this awful day
. He walked to the edge of the ravine, his nose still swinging on a bridge of skin, and called in Lakota, “All of you who are still alive, get up and come on over! You will not be molested or shot anymore!”

One by one they emerged, walking and crawling. As they approached the soldiers, many still cast their death songs into
the winter air. Some soldiers walked forward to help the afflicted.

Then Wells walked to the council ground, strewn with red and white bodies. He called out, “These white people came to save you, and you have brought death on yourselves. Still the white people are merciful to save the wounded enemy when he is harmless, so if some of you are alive, raise your heads. I am a man of your own blood who is talking to you.”

Perhaps a dozen figures began to struggle up from the ground.

From the west edge of the ravine came a burst of gunfire from E Troop. These soldiers had not heard the call for truce.

Colonel Forsyth, the officer in command, stalked down off the Hotchkiss gun hill, through the wreckage of the village, past mutilated bodies, through carnage, to the ravine. When he shouted his order, the screech in his voice gave him away. “Stop it!” he yelled. “For God’s sake! Stop shooting at them!”

But the soldiers stopped only slowly. Here and there shots split the air; other flesh was savaged. People hidden in a clump of brush were shot down like dogs. Another group at the head of the ravine came out only after several Oglala scouts talked to them for half an hour, and the soldiers backed off completely.

An Indian woman was found three miles away, shot in the back.

On and on went the slaughter, away from the central area. Most of the Mniconjou fighting men had died on the council ground or in the ravine, trying to defend their relations, a warrior’s death. Now few but women, children, and old men were left alive. The troopers tracked fleeing Indians across the plain, into brush, into ditches, over hilltops. There they took aim at cold, stunned, terrified people and slaughtered them. Skulls were hammered with rifle butts, stomachs slashed with sabers, dead bodies riddled with bullets. The butchery went on for hours, into the afternoon.

The energies of killing, once aroused fully, subside slowly.

I avoided looking into the hearts of the soldiers. I knew what was there, and it made me ashamed to be a human being.

A fleeing woman tried to protect two children not her own. A mounted trooper caught her and shot the two children out of her arms. Then he reloaded and shot the woman. While she pretended to be dead, he lifted her skirt with his saber, looked, and rode on.

Again: A woman sat rocking a baby. A soldier tore it from her arms and shot it. The woman leaped for the baby. The soldier clubbed her in the back of the head with his pistol, put his boot on her throat, and shot her four times.

I moved back to the village, to where the community once was, where the people once made a circle of life. Fires still smoldered. Bodies were flung everywhere, as by a malicious god-giant. They lay on their backs, on their faces, and in great piles. They were hacked, contorted, mangled. Their mouths opened to the sky, arms and legs fixed in excruciating gestures of protest. Dead mothers held the corpses of infants. Old men and women reached forth, their hands as empty as their eyes. The smell of burned flesh twisted my guts.

Later Sidney Bird, one of our elders, said, “The hearts of the white men who executed the deed were full of evil. What else would compel them to behave so outrageously?”

Yes, evil.

Iya, the ancient Evil One, Wind Storm—he blew the evil in their hearts from embers to conflagration.

Which does not balm my grief.

Which did not ease my hatred.

All my relations
.

Those words felt like gall to me. Yes, all creatures are my relations—all two-leggeds, four-leggeds, wingeds, swimmers, crawlers, and the rooted, all sentient beings, even the flowing waters and the stones and the star people. But that day I could not bear to say it, not about white people.

I hated them. I hated you.

I flailed for Sallee’s hand. Plez clasped mine in one of his and snapped the tape player off with the other.

Up through the tunnel in the altar I came. I gasped my way into this world like a fish flopping onto the bank.

His face looked grave. “Are you okay?”

I breathed. Then I whispered, “I’m in a rage.”

Sallee sat up in her sleeping bag, rubbing her eyes.

Plez took that in for a moment. “Tell us,” he said.

I kept my eyes closed tight and hard against the evils of the world and there in the darkness, in the nether regions of the small Catholic church that could absolve nothing, I told Plez and Sallee what I saw on these grounds a hundred years ago. So as not to wake Emile and Chup, and so as not to agitate myself, I murmured low. The words alone, half-whispered, were dreadful enough.

“You must go back again!” he said softly.

“No!” I cried.

“Better for you,” he said.

He reached out his hand. I put mine up to block it. His eyes smiled at me. He clicked the cassette player on.

A Search for Miracles

I
floated into a sky, perfectly clear, perfectly blue. An empty sky far, far away, cleansed by interstellar winds.

I’m lost. I’ve never seen this place
.

Desperately I looked around for Raven. I had not seen him, he had not been beside me for a long time.

At that moment Raven filled the sky. He was huge, he made a mountain look petite, he dominated the sky and took up maybe half the range of my vision. He appeared as Thunderbird often does, breast to the front, wings opened to the side, head turned to the left beak and eye seen in profile.

He was black. Blacker than tar, blacker than pitch, blacker than black-black—he was a vibrant, pulsating, eternal black.

A thrill of darkness ran through me.

Raven turned white. Utterly white. Glistening, gleaming white, whiter than the snows of unclimbed Himalayas, vaster, softer, more radiant, more inviting.

Nothing changed but his color.

And in a blink there was nothing but the sky.

I floated lightly to the ground in the valley of the Mniconjou dead. A few flakes of snow drifted light and feathery beside me. The night was dark, the clouds low and threatening. Earlier tonight, the night of the killing, new snow fell heavily, and froze everything in place, as though preserving it for posterity.

I was shocked that no one was there to bury the bodies. Then I remembered what the books said. The contract for burying was given to civilians. They didn’t come for five days because they were haggling over the price per corpse. When at last the detail showed up, they dug a mass grave on the Hotchkiss cannon’s knoll, thereafter known as Cemetery Hill, and interred 146 bodies: eighty-four men and boys, forty-four women, and eighteen children.

Many more Mniconjou dragged themselves away from Wounded Knee and died elsewhere. The bodies of others were taken away by their relatives. My people believe that as many as three hundred perished in the massacre.

Suddenly I felt revolted by myself. I knew I was floating to avoid being on the Earth, truly seeing the death spread before me, smelling it, knowing it. Immediately I forced myself to the council ground.

The scene of carnage looked like a field where men have been felling dead trees; bodies like logs scattered everywhere, with bare limbs sticking up at grotesque angles. Big Foot sat half-reclining, his trunk sticking above the white snow.

No, don’t punish yourself
. It was no use to look at one after another of these contorted bodies and grimacing faces, to wallow in horror. But I didn’t know what I did want, why I had come.

I wandered. I stumbled through the ruined village. I stood at the edge of the ravine. The merciful snow spared me the details of the vast tapestry of death woven by Iya, Demon, and other gods who bring evil to Earth. I could feel the abyss, and it was in the pit of my stomach.

I wandered to the ravine. I had last seen Elk Medicine staggering down the ravine to the east. I eased into the ravine and
followed her. The scores of bodies near the overhang, I had no need to check these—she’d been further along. Through the dark I walked. I felt glad that I was a spirit, and could move among these bodies, this rampaging death, without touching them, without corporeal intimacy. And I felt ashamed of that feeling.

I wandered. When I saw human-shaped lumps, I made sure the clothing was not Elk Medicine’s. I avoided faces.

I wandered through the vasty night, not knowing where I was going or why. Any sign of her passage would have been covered by the snow. I checked every body I saw. I listened for the cry of a baby, the cry that would be my grandmother, Unchee, Janey Running. I felt like a man rummaging for treasure in a garbage dump.

In the morning the carrion feeders would be here, the ravens, the vultures, the eagles.

I heard Raven call across a great distance. First I thought,
You were not with me today, you did not guide me through the horror
.

Raven was away, was somewhere else, and did not reply. But quietly and clearly, without words, he said,
You will not find Elk Medicine there
.

I knew where Raven was and what I would find. I climbed out of the ravine and strode back to the village. It was a charred forest of lodge poles holding up nothing, half-fallen, or splintered on the ground. In the devastation I could not remember where the body would be. I looked around the village, getting oriented in the dark. I felt a sharp fear—
I will never be able to find Blue Crow
.

Raven called without words,
Over here
.

I saw his black shape perched on the shards of a wagon, wheels splayed from a fractured axle.

When I stepped behind the wagon, I saw myself.

I caught myself in the mistake, and shuddered.

I saw Blue Crow.

I wondered how, in my spirit form, I could get the snow off
his face. I had a thought. I blew gently, and the snow swirled away. His countenance did not look serene, or angry, or surprised. It had no expression, was simply blank.

I looked at his chest, near the spot I did not want to see ever again. He wore a plain deerskin shirt, having thrown his blanket off somewhere. His Winchester, loose in his grip, propped itself against one hip. Someone would steal it tomorrow.

I looked at his features, which were mine. At his shoulders and chest, which were mine. I wanted to hold him.
Thank you
. My heart flowed with love for him, where it has often been dry for myself.
Thank you for being born of woman. Thank you for bringing your spirit into flesh and bearing its afflictions. Thank you for loving your children. Thank you for giving me life
.

A memory came to me, and it jolted. Way back in Seattle, Delphine, Daniel, and Li Ming took me to a movie I didn’t want to see, called
Virgin Spring
. It was a story set in medieval Europe, about the virgin daughter of a local squire. She rides her horse some miles toward the church, bearing an offering. But some goatherds, ruffians, rape her and kill her. When her father discovers the deed, he takes revenge on the herders. Then he rides out to find his daughter’s body. She’s laying there in her white dress, with her pale face framed beautifully by her golden hair. He lifts her bloodied head, and a miracle springs forth. Water gushes from the place it laid. Miracle and the promise of redemption.

I knelt by Blue Crow’s head. I pictured the father in the movie lifting the mortal skull and opening the way for the miraculous waters to gush forth.

As a spirit I had no hands to lift Blue Crow.

Besides, I knew there were no miracles, no redemption. Not here, not yet. Not for Wounded Knee.

This time I grabbed for Sallee like a man surfacing desperately from deep water.

She clasped my arm, and Plez clicked off the recorder.

“What did you see?” he asked softly.

I told them about Blue Crow, everything.

He said to me seriously, “Black Elk said the hoop will be broken and the tree will not flower until the seventh generation. The seventh generation. That’s now. The time for miracles is now.”

My faith in miracles felt shaken.

Finally I said, “I don’t know what happened to Elk Medicine.”

He pondered and hmmmed. “That can wait. For now, get some sleep. We have ceremonies to perform in the morning, and miracles to work.”