Fervent Charity (10 page)

Chapter 8: November 1900

C
loudy night blanketed Shoonkatoh as
Gustie stood on the shore. Behind her, the mission with its campfires and the lanterns glowing dimly through the windows of the church and rectory shone like a mirage of light in a desert of darkness. The light, dampened by opaque night, shed no illumination outside its own tiny sphere. Facing Shoonkatoh, without starlight, without the risen moon, water, night, and her own soul were one darkness.

The smallpox had savaged the reservation and departed, Gustie had to think, fully sated; nearly half of the population of the Red Sand had perished.

The mission churchyard gleamed with new white crosses. Fresh burial mounds scarred the reservation. Embers still glowed from burnt houses and tipis.

Through it all Gustie had shed no tears. Once, she vomited when, first to enter a tipi, she found a family in a pile where they had fallen and died, being eaten by their dogs.

After that, the homes of the dead and dying all blended into one confused nightmare. Gustie could not remember where they found the grandmother rocking a baby’s corpse, the rest of her family dead in their beds, or whether it was Shoonkatoh or Crow Kills where a woman had run to the shallows seeking a cool refuge, finding cold death instead...or where it was, exactly...behind which cabin, they had found a boy, the only survivor of his family, hungrily gnawing on a maggoty calf’s head.

What Gustie had expected—the sick, covered with pustules, moaning in death agonies—she did not find. She had traveled to the farthest reaches of the Red Sand and had been met time and time again with the silence of the dead. Winnie had prepared the church to receive the sick, but none of her beds were ever occupied by anyone suffering from smallpox. “The dead don’t need much,” she said, sadly eyeing the stacks of donated blankets, canned goods, and clothes that lined the walls of the sanctuary. The beds had been used only by the people who had come to the reservation to help.

They had gone out in small groups. Little Bull, Father Flagstad, Gustie, and Dr. Llewellyn in one; Jordis, Mary Kaiser, Sheriff Sully, and Doc Moody in another. They returned to the mission where they rested, ate a decent meal, got fresh horses, supplies, and were joined by others, including Father Gregory the Catholic priest and the four nursing sisters he had sent for from the Yankton convent, re-grouped and went out again.

They were grateful when they found the living. Those who did not have the mark of the pox lived through at another time or the scar of the physician’s needle were vaccinated. This was not always easily done. Often Little Bull and Father Flagstad had to talk them into it. Earnestly. Pleadingly.

They found people with swollen bodies, already comatose whom they knew would be dead by morning. If they were members of his church, Father Flagstad performed the proper rituals; if not, he simply prayed silently. They were buried on the return trip and their homes torched. At one time, Gustie looked behind her and it seemed to her that the whole northeast quarter of the Red Sand was burning.

They slept in the open, or, when it rained, in the homes of the dead and the dying. They ate out of cans, went unwashed in dirty clothing day after day. They were in a race, trying to move faster than the rotting face. For, if they found people before they were stricken, they could save them. One night, Gustie at last asked the question that had been on her mind. “Why weren’t they vaccinated before? All of them?”

Little Bull silently stared into the campfire. Father Flagstad answered. “Miss Augusta, you must understand that the white man has given the Indian many things—most of which have turned out to be a curse. One of the few things we offered that would have been a blessing, they were afraid to take.”

They all watched the fire until Father Flagstad wrapped himself in his blanket and curled up and went to sleep.

Gustie said, “I seem to ask the wrong questions.”

Little Bull lay down and pulled up his own blanket. “Some people don’t even ask. Get some sleep.”

Of all the sights and sounds, the one Gustie would never forget, even if all else dimmed across time, was that of Little Bull exchanging his usual denim blues for his ceremonial buckskins and his father’s war bonnet, carrying his sheaf of sacred eagle feathers out onto the open prairie. She watched the chief of the Red Sand Dakotah raise the sheaf high above his head and listened as he chanted the death song of his ancestors.

But in the midst of the nightmare, flourished bright little astonishments:

Mary Kaiser arriving in a large wagon, Leonard perched in the back atop bundles of bedding, clothing, and food she had gathered by going from door to door in Charity, Doc Moody at her side (he had succeeded in vaccinating everyone in Charity in fewer than eight hours). Next to Doc Moody, driving a pair of Walter’s Percherons, sat Sheriff Sully, his saddle horse and Swallow were tied to the back of the wagon.

Father Flagstad bearing the strain of those weeks with dignity and sadness. Only once did she see him break down and weep—when they found Sarah and Clayton Nighthawk. Sarah was propped up against straw pillows with Clayton’s head in her lap. Clayton had died of the pox. Sarah had shot herself.

The devotion and sheer stamina of Little Bull and of Red Standing Horse who traveled the length and breadth of the reservation, making sure the living were vaccinated, the dead buried and all contaminants burned, and gathering in to the care of their wives at the mission, the orphans, of which there turned out to be about forty, children who had been inoculated at the mission school, children who had watched their parents and grandparents and younger siblings die.

And the greatest astonishment of all—Jordis, who became Little Bull’s right hand, chief by proxy in his absence, since he could not be all places. She held the dying in her arms and spoke softly to them and gave them water and closed their eyes in death and helped to dig their graves. She soothed the fears of the well, showed them her own scar and lightly caressed their arms as Dr. Moody or Dr. Llewellyn or one of the nuns outraged small ovals of their flesh to save their bodies. A vitality she had never used had been stored within her, earning interest, and she drew upon it now. She glowed with purpose. She transcended her own grief and left her rage like an old skin on the prairie to disintegrate in the wind.

And Gustie marveled, too, at the way life continued to stream around them, like a river flowing around and filling in the spaces behind rocks and boulders after an avalanche:

Father Flagstad and Jordis, as well as the chief and Red Standing Horse, taking their rifles with them to bring back waterfowl and rabbits to add to the provisions necessary to feed the increasing number of people who began to gather at the mission.

Dorcas at her fishing pole.

The children who fished, washed dishes, carried water, and who, when their chores were done, played raucous games running wildly all around the mission grounds.

Owen Braaten, the Indian agent, who was not adept at hunting or fishing or much else, dug the graves in the churchyard and filled them in, and made the trips back and forth to Wheat Lake to pick up mail and supplies that arrived daily in answer to his many telegrams to government agencies and surrounding communities. He quietly made himself useful and was, along with another, observed by Jordis, casting wistful, if not lustful, glances in the direction of Mary Kaiser.

It happened one evening toward the end of the nightmare, when many of the helpers as well as those who were merely taking refuge were gathered at long tables made from boards laid across saw horses in front of the church. Mary was one of the women bringing the food from the rectory kitchen to the tables. Jordis whispered to Gustie, “Owen Braaten and Dr. Llewellyn are looking at Mary Kaiser like she’s the main dish.”

“Jordis!” Gustie kicked her under the table.

“Look at them!”

“They’re young, new to this country, considering their prospects,” Gustie whispered back and tried to keep from smiling.

“She’s married!”

“Jordis, I think there’s some Philadelphia in you, too.” Under the table, Jordis kicked her back.

When Mary finally took a place at the table, it was safely between Dennis Sully and Father Gregory—the law to her right and the church to her left—what could be safer?

The air grew colder, though not cold enough to snow. Gustie pulled her coat tighter at the throat and hoped it wouldn’t rain. Rain would be worse than snow.

The night blotted out detail. Gustie felt disembodied. She could not even see her own hands clasped before her as she turned to walk along the shore, occasionally wetting her feet before correcting her course again to the left, to dry sand. In its unlovely voice, a cricket sang on, determined to sound the last note before the winter freeze, which was late in coming.

She sensed them and stopped. Then she heard the gentle thudding, the disturbance of water and their breathing as they came nearer. She remained still, feeling them all around her. Once, blinded not by darkness but by snow, she had found herself surrounded by creatures that, she was assured later, could not possibly have been there. She did not assume now that she was surrounded by flesh and blood, even though she heard them, felt them, smelled them. She was not afraid.

A vein of lightning illuminated the landscape with a blue-white shimmer. She knew then that they were real. She was surrounded by the horses of the dead. Dozens of them. In one flash she could only get a sense of many, not how many, the paints and piebalds, and grays, blacks and browns and the one magnificent white—Moon.

“Jordis?”

“Here.”

In another flash she again caught sight of the white mare, and when the darkness flowed around her again she made her way around the flank of one horse, ducked under the arched neck of another and was at the mare’s side. She found Jordis’s hand and held on. Jordis had been absent from the mission, out on her own for three days. “Little Bull told me you stayed out to get the horses.”

“I could not leave them to fend for themselves with winter coming on,” said Jordis.

Gustie said, “There is no corral here.”

“We’ll tether a few, the rest will stay close by.”

“What are you going to do with them?”

“They belong to the tribe. People who need them will take them. Leonard and I can look after them in the meantime.”

What will I do?
Gustie didn’t say it and only held tighter onto Jordis’s hand, not eager to return to the mission, now as populous as a village. They had begun to gather, people who had lost one or more members of their family, whose homes and possessions had been put to the fire, who had nothing and would start over with the things donated. The pots boiled, the church was slept in, prayed in, and sung in; and Matthew Flagstad pounded the rickety, out-of-tune piano in accompaniment to the liturgy and hymns sung by the faithful in gratitude for surviving and in grief for the dead. Holding Jordis’s hand, Gustie relished the night, the company of her beloved, and the warm comfort of horses. Her tranquility came to an end when thin voices called to her from out of the darkness, “Miss Gustie! Miss Gustie!”

“Here, Matt, Tim. Over here.”

“Dorcas Many Roads is taken sick. We’ve been looking for you.”

Gustie let go of Jordis’s hand and began to run. Jordis squeezed the sides of her mount and Moon broke away from the herd and took her up the bank. They ran toward the light, Jordis passing Gustie and flying ahead of her on the white horse.

Dorcas, she was told, lay on a pallet in the church. As Gustie made her way through the crowd, Dr. Llewellyn came out, his stethoscope around his neck. “It’s not the smallpox. But she’s not good.”

“What’s wrong with her then?”

“Miss Gustie, all the strain of the past month...has taken its toll.”

“That’s it? Strain?” Gustie found herself angry with this young doctor, as if he were at fault for Dorcas’s age, for her collapse.

“And old age. She is a very old woman.”

Jordis came out of the church and announced, “She wants to be taken back to Crow Kills. Now.”

“Carry me outside, Granddaughters. I do not want to die in here. Is the drum here? I want to hear the drum.”

They had made the journey from Shoonkatoh to Crow Kills in the pitch black of a moonless night—and, Little Bull had said—by the seat of their pants and their horses’ whiskers. When they finally reached the cabin and carried Dorcas to her bed, they made a fire in the stove and another outside where they put the coffee on to boil.

Dorcas had begun asking for the drum as soon as they carried her out of the church. Leonard rode Swallow, Little Bull drove Gustie’s wagon with Gustie and Jordis in the wagon bed holding Dorcas across their laps. Red Standing Horse rode out in the opposite direction, thinking that he would bring back old Jimmy Saul, too, because, although White Eagle had the only decent drum on the reservation, he couldn’t sing. Jimmy Saul was the best singer and knew the old songs.

By the light of one dim lantern, Jordis and Gustie had taken turns throughout the night sitting inside the cabin with Dorcas, while outside one of them sipped coffee with Little Bull and Leonard. Nobody talked much. Winnie and Carrie remained at the mission to care for the orphans and their own children. At first light, Dorcas had insisted on being taken outside, asking again for the drum.

“The drum is coming, Grandmother.”

Dawn came, cloudless and cold. The sun itself seemed without heat. Gustie worried that Dorcas would die of chill if they took her outside. She wanted her to stay in the cabin where they could maintain the fire in the stove and keep her warm. Jordis disagreed firmly, “No. This is what she wants. Let’s take her out.”

They laid her on a soft pallet of blankets facing west, with Crow Kills on her right, the prairie sweeping away to her left. They covered her with more blankets and wrapped her shawl snugly around her head and neck, and waited. Feather, Jordis’s gray cat, appeared and tucked himself under Dorcas’s blankets. She seemed content.