Burial (47 page)

The shadow rose out of the ravine and moved across the ridge to the Deep Coulee. The soldiers were crying out and confused. The shadow swallowed them up. Then Crazy Horse blew his eagle-wing-bone whistle, and the Sioux charged into the shadow and killed those soldiers who were not yet dead
.

Chief Red Horse had drawn a turmoil of horses of different colours (black, red, brown, blue and even lilac), and up above their heads a huge black cloud. McChesney's comment was,

‘The limitations of sign-language made it difficult for me to discover exactly what Chief Red Horse had been attempting to draw. I asked him if it were the smoke from the soldiers' guns and the dry adobe earth kicked up by the horses. In particular the dust must have been choking, because although there was some vegetation on the ridge — sagebrush and Spanish dagger plants and prairie pea vines — it was too sparse to cover the soil, and most of the draws in this part of the river were nothing but barren washes.

‘However, Chief Red Horse said again and again that this was neither smoke nor dust, but
shadow
. He further elaborated by covering his face with his hands, and parting his fingers so that I could see only his eyes. I had no idea what he meant by this, and I could find nobody who could explain it to me further.

‘I assumed that he must be mistaken when he said that Crazy Horse had blown his whistle
after
the shadow had swallowed the soldiers. The dust and smoke would not have
risen as thick as Chief Red Horse had drawn it until the battle was well under way. There was no doubt that the river valley was very dark that afternoon. One account says that it “seemed like twilight; under the pall gunflashes winked like fireflies. At times, the blasts of rifles and carbines sounded like the ripping of a giant canvas down the wrinkles of the hills.” But the darkness surely developed
because
of the fighting and did not precede it.

‘I was also puzzled by Chief Red Horse's suggestion that the shadow
itself
had done for a great many of Custer's men. He insisted that Crazy Horse had done nothing more than follow the shadow and dispatch the wounded, although how a shadow could have killed anybody, he refused (or was unable) to explain.

‘Whenever I pressed him on the matter, he simply repeated the action of covering his face. He said that he was unable to describe the shadow further, in case he incurred the anger of the wonder-workers.'

I examined Red Horse's shadow-drawing for almost twenty minutes. It couldn't have been a cloud, because Red Horse hadn't drawn clouds or sky in any of his other pictographs. Nor had he drawn any dust — even in his illustrations of the most furious fighting. This was the only pictograph in which a shadow appeared and unlike his other drawings, which were light and sketchy, the shadow was drawn thick and black and complicated, as if he had drawn something very detailed but then changed his mind, and tried to obscure it with layer upon layer of heavy pencil-shading.

There was no way of telling what was under all that shading unless I went to the Smithsonian and examined the original pictograph. But all the same, I thought I could make out a mass of coiled or wavy lines, almost like the tentacles of an octopus. At the top of the picture one of these tentacles appeared to have emerged from the shadow
and thrust itself into a trooper's stretched-open mouth.

That chilled me more than ever. It reminded me too closely of Martin Vaizey, when he had been possessed by that buffalo-headed shadow at the Greenbergs' apartment and thrust his arm down Naomi Greenberg's throat.

Maybe that same shadow-buffalo had been there, at the Little Big Horn. Maybe the massacre had happened exactly as Chief Red Horse had described it.

I turned over the page, and it was then that I was sure that I was thinking in the right direction. Here was a pictograph of the Indian dead, scattered on the ground in warbonnets, their rifles and their bows lying beside them.
The soldiers killed 136 Sioux, but the wonder-worker performed the necessary rituals to make sure that they would live contentedly in the Great Outside until the day came when all white men would be buried, when they would again walk free
.

McChesney remarked, ‘I took this as a reference to the cult of the Ghost Dance, which claims that white people and all of their works will one day fall into the ground and be swallowed up, leaving America free for Indians once more. Because he had drawn him so tall, and in such great detail, I asked Chief Red Horse to give me the wonder-worker's name. Chief Red Horse said there was no sign for the wonder-worker's name, because any warrior who tried to describe him in sign-language would find that his fingers caught fire. Instead Chief Red Horse scratched in the dust some hieroglyphs which looked like two cups and a curled ear, a lozenge with four horizontal lines on it, and a bowl with two necklaces on either side of it. I had never seen a Sioux write hieroglyphs like these before, and I had no understanding of what they might mean. I made a note of them, however, and some months later in Connecticut I met the French missionary Father Eugene Vetromile, who was something of an expert on Indian writing. He studied the hieroglyphs with great interest and proclaimed them to
be Narragansett, in spite of the fact that they had been written by a Sioux. Their meaning was: Darkness, Terror, Eternal, Man — or, He Who Brings The Terror Of Eternal Darkness. The phonetic pronunciation was m — q — m — c, or miskamakus.'

I opened a can of Miller Draught that I had brought into the library along with my hamburger and other essential items of sustenance, like a large bag of Ruffles and several sticks of beef jerky. I was just about to take my first swallow when I became aware of one of the library ladies standing over me.

‘Pardon me, sir, but eating and drinking are not permitted.'

I turned around. She was small and sweet and quite petite, a serious brunette in her mid-twenties, wearing a crisp blouse and a camel-coloured skirt.

‘I'm sorry,' I said. ‘I haven't eaten today.'

‘Well, I'm sorry, too,' she said. ‘But we can't have people bringing their meals in here.'

‘I see,' I told her. ‘A restaurant for the brain, but not for the belly.'

She blinked furiously. I don't think she understood me one bit. It was the eastern accent, no doubt, and the eastern sense of humour. They don't have a sense of humour in Arizona, and who would, living in 90-degree heat amid geriatrics and mafiosi, and even some geriatric mafiosi.

‘Actually,' I told her, leaning back in my chair and crossing my ankles and putting on my full Harold Erskine M.D. act, ‘actually I'm researching the Battle of the Little Big Horn, and Custer's Last Stand, and I've been finding some very interesting research material here … better than anyplace else.'

‘All the same, sir, you can't eat and drink while you're doing it.'

‘Can I finish my beer? Would that be allowed?'

‘I'm sorry.'

‘Well,' I said, ‘I'm sorry, too. Very sorry. Just when I thought I was making progress.'

She flushed, and eyed the can of beer with uncertainty. ‘You can stay provided you don't actually drink. The Little Big Horn, that's a real interesting subject. Did you see our book of contemporary newspaper stories?'

I set my beer-can down on my desk. ‘No, I didn't, but I'd like to.'

‘You'll have to promise me not to drink.'

‘Hey, come on, Boy Scouts' honour.'

She disappeared on squeaky rubber-soled shoes. I sat and drank the rest of my Miller in a leisurely fashion. Outside the windows the night was now glossy and black, like the lake of shadows which lay beneath our feet. Eventually the librarian returned, and laid an oversize book in front of me.

‘There,' she said. ‘We're really proud of this book. Facsimiles of newspaper pages, all the way back to 1840.'

She had opened the book to the front page of the
Bismarck Tribune
, published in Bismarck, Dakota Territory, on July 6, 1876. The headlines cried, MASSACRED — Gen. Custer And 261 Men The Victims — No Officer Or Man Of 5 Companies Left To Tell The Tale — Squaws Mutilate And Rob Dead — What Will Congress Do About It? — Is This The Beginning Of The End?

The first paragraph was electrifying. ‘It will be remembered that the
Bismarck Tribune
sent a special correspondent Mark Kellogg with Gen. Custer's expedition. Kellogg's last words to the writer were, “By the time this reaches you we will have met and fought the Red devils, with what result remains to be seen. I go with Custer and will be at the death.” How true!'

The type was tiny, and my eyes were bleary, but in the third column of the report, I read, ‘The body of Kellogg alone remained unmutilated and unstripped of clothing.
Perhaps they had learned to respect this humble shover of the lead pencil and to that fact may be attributed this result. Perhaps they feared that his photographic equipment had captured their souls, and that he would wreak an awful revenge on them if they desecrated his remains. As it was, his camera remained untouched also, and his photographic plates have been safely returned to Bismarck for development.'

I sat back. Jesus. So that was it. That was what Samuel had been trying to tell me. Mark Kellogg had been a reporter and photographer for the
Bismarck Tribune
, and he had actually taken photographs of the massacre at the Little Big Horn.

I couldn't believe that nobody had ever said anything about these photographs before. In spite of the eyewitness accounts from Indian warriors, in spite of all the drawings, the truth of what had happened by the Greasy Grass River had never been fully explained. But if there were
photographs
…

The lady librarian came up to me and said, ‘We're closing now, sir. If you need to do any more research, I'm afraid you'll have to come back tomorrow.'

‘No, no thank you,' I told her. ‘You've been terrific.'

She picked up my can of Miller Draught, presumably with the intention of saying that I could take it outside now, and finish it off. But she realized at once that it was completely empty.

‘You
drank
it,' she said. ‘You
drank
it. In contravention of library regulations, and city ordinance, and state law.'

Obediently I held out my wrists in the handcuff position. ‘So arrest me,' I said.

I took her for dinner at Mother O'Reilly's up on the hills north of Phoenix, and afterward we sat on the terrace and finished a bottle of Chandon's Napa Valley Brut between us, while the night massaged us, soft and warm and Arizona-velvety,
with all the glittery lights of Sun Valley spread out below us.

She told me her name was Nesta and she was twenty-six years old and lived with her parents. She reminded me of those secretaries in true-love comics like
Apartment 3-G
or
The Heart of Juliet Jones
. She was shy and self-deprecating, almost as if she couldn't believe that she was at all attractive. She loved baking and horses and ballet and poetry — particularly Longfellow.

Once upon a time, I could recite almost the whole of
The Song of Hiawatha,
' she smiled.

‘As far as I'm concerned, Indians aren't the flavour of the month,' I told her.

‘Oh, dear! Well, how about
There is a Reaper whose name is Death, And with his sickle keen, He reaps the bearded grain at a breath, And the flowers that grow between
.'

‘Cheerful,' I nodded.

She said, ‘Will you read my palm?'

‘For sure,' I told her. ‘But let me tell you this: a palm-reading is very superficial. A palm-reading is like the
Reader's Digest
You know what I mean? Your whole life, condensed into six or seven crinkles. I mean, it'll give you a rough idea of how long you're going to live, and a rough idea of how happy you're going to be. But if you want to be specific and detailed — if you want to know what kind of men you're going to meet, and when, and what colour underwear they like the best, and the minute-hour-day when your cat's going to be run over by which particular make of automobile — then you need a full-scale card-reading.'

She smiled enthusiastically. ‘Great! Okay then, a card-reading.'

I patted my shirt pockets, I patted my pants. ‘Oh … just a minute. Oh … that's a pity. I left my cards back at my hotel.'

‘Oh,' she echoed, and she was much more disappointed
than I was. She was wearing a tight black sleeveless sequin top, and she had lovely rounded black-glittery breasts. She needed some frontal orthodonty, but then wandering Lotharios can't be choosers, can they?

‘Hey, no worries,' I told her. ‘You can come back and have a couple of drinks and then I can give you the whole shooting-match.'

‘I … unh, I don't think so,' she said.

‘Hey, what have you got to lose?' I said, and then I wished I hadn't I sounded like the Fonz.

She glumly shrugged. ‘I guess I can turn it down because I'm a twenty-six-year-old librarian and you're a forty-five-year-old fortune-teller, and if you think that's any kind of recipe for happiness? Even, what — even
fleeting
happiness?'

I could have said something but I decided not to. She was right and she was wrong. The main thing was that if she didn't feel like it, if she didn't feel like taking the chance, then it was best for her if she didn't. There was no point in her going to the library tomorrow and despising herself. There was no point in me over-exerting myself on a sweltering Arizona evening, just for the sake of company, or lust, or frustration, or God knows what

We sat in silence for a long time. We saw a faint distant display of shooting stars. She reached across the table and touched my hand.

‘I hope you're not angry,' she said.

‘Angry? Why should I be angry?'

‘You expected to take me to bed.'

‘No, I didn't'