Ghost Dance (13 page)

Chance smiled, remembering the knife in the grove of cottonwoods.

"I will not forget," he said, "my Brother."

In the saddle, Chance turned and unbuckled one of the saddlebags, drew out the briar pipe he had smoked with Running Horse in the cottonwoods, and handed it to him.

"I am grateful to my Brother," he said.

Running Horse accepted the pipe, simply. "Wait," he said.

Chance watched as the young Indian went back into the cabin and returned, carrying his own pipe, the beaded, long-stemmed, fragile clay pipe with the high bowl.

"No," said Chance.

Running Horse handed the pipe to Chance.

Chance, sensing he must take it, did so.

Carefully Chance tied the pipe across the blanket roll behind his saddle.

Then he lifted the reins, pulled the sorrel's head west and touched his boots to the horse's flanks.

As he rode from the cabin he turned in the saddle and lifted his hand in farewell to Running Horse, who also raised his hand, the palm open and facing Chance.

The physician from New York rode alone down the street between cabins.

He was running again.

Chance looked around him, at the squatty cabins and the scattered tepees in the background. This morning, in the quiet, he could hear the Grand River slushing between its banks.

A dog barked in the distance, and Chance, turning, saw to his surprise five mounted Indians, young men all of them, leaving the camp and riding gently into the back prairie. They carried rifles. Among their number was Drum, whom Chance recalled had once fought Running Horse before the cabin of Sitting Bull. He dismissed them from his mind, and rode on.

Then Chance reined up.

Standing near the door of a cabin, under the eaves, he saw a girl, a lovely Sioux girl in blue calico, who lifted her hand as though she might speak to him. Her eyes, for some reason, seemed frightened.

He walked the horse to the side of the cabin.

She looked up at him, and then her eyes fell as though she could not speak.

Chance made to move the horse away but her small brown hands held the horse's mane.

"What do you want?" asked Chance.

"Sing your death song, White Man," she said, not lifting her eyes.

Chance did not understand.

The death song was sung by warriors who go into battle.

"I am not on the warpath," he said, smiling at her.

"Sing your death song," she said, and loosed her grip on the horse's mane, and turned and ran into the cabin.

"Wait!" called Chance.

The cabin door shut, and Chance could hear the wooden latch snap into place. The door could not be opened from the outside unless the latch string were, from the inside, thrust through the tiny latch hole in the wood.

Chance puzzled for a time and then pulled his horse to the center of the street between the cabins and continued his journey.

Inside the cabin, Winona, the daughter of Old Bear, leaned against the door, her back pressed against it, her head thrown back, the latch string knotted in her left hand.

She was sick with what she had done.

She had jeopardized the lives of one or more of her own people, perhaps even that of Drum, who was to be her husband. But she could not let the white man ride foolishly to his death, not knowing. Why she could not do this she did not know.

To herself she said, "Good-bye, White Man. Good-bye, Friend of Running Horse."

 

* * *

 

Lucia Turner shut her eyes to close out the mud walls of her soddy. She ground her fingernails into the cracked palms of her hands. She felt so dirty, always so dirty.

Lucia sat on a wooden kitchen chair on the dusty floor of the mud soddy she shared with Aunt Zita.

Aunt Zita had been called by the Almighty to bring salvation to the heathen.

God bless the heathen, thought Lucia to herself.

In front of Lucia was an unpainted plank table. This morning she had run a splinter into her finger and had dug it out with a needle sterilized in the chip fire in the range against the north wall. Putting her hand on the table it wobbled. On the table there was a cracked coffee cup, turned upside down so as not to catch the dirt that seemed to drop from the ceiling when the wind blew.

Lucia looked about herself.

The sod bricks of the house were flaking, and a thin line of dust lay along the base of the walls, where spiders chased game among the particles.

In one corner, incongruously, there loomed a high walnut china cabinet filled with porcelain from Saint Louis.

It had stood in the dining room of her father's house on a thick blue and red rug, now sold, which had come from China on a clipper ship more than forty years before.

The only other large memento of the house, that beautiful quiet stone house in Saint Louis, was the huge brass bedstead with its eiderdown mattress, against one wall, on which Aunt Zita slept.

Lucia slept across the room on a military cot, supplied by the agent, the Irishman McLaughlin, and probably obtained from the quartermaster at Fort Yates.

It was not particularly comfortable but it was as far away as possible from Aunt Zita.

Lucia liked that.

Moreover Aunt Zita prayed aloud at irregular hours and occupied not infrequently the intervals between her devotions with noises of righteous, stentorian slumber.

Lucia listened to the wind outside.

It never seemed to stop blowing.

A bit of dust slipped from the ceiling and filtered its way to the planks of the kitchen table. Lucia brushed some of it from her hair.

Lucia's fists clenched on the table.

She would leave.

She knew she would.

She would win yet.

Aunt Zita, of course, had simply refused to leave, and had ordered Lucia to dismiss the subject from her mind, and rapidly.

It is here that God has placed us, Aunt Zita had said, and it is here that we belong.

He may have placed you here, Lucia thought, but He didn't place me here, and I'm leaving.

Leaving!

But how could she leave?

Could she simply pack and hitch up the buckboard and drive away?

That didn't seem possible.

What of Aunt Zita?

My work, had said Aunt Zita, in this forsaken place is not yet done, and you will stay with me until I have finished.

I want to go home, said Lucia to herself. I want to go home.

 

* * *

 

Chance was riding toward the western borders of Standing Rock but he hadn't been much out of the settlement on the banks of the Grand River when a small white building, with chipped paint and a wagon box leaning against its north side, caught his eye.

Curious, he rode up and looked at the school.

There was a padlock on the door, some tumbleweeds caught against the building, and under a bench which stood near the door.

He moved his horse away, over a rise, and happened to see a small boy, Indian, about nine years old, digging with a sharpened stick among some rocks and cactus.

The boy did not pay him attention, but he knew the boy had seem him almost immediately, and then had applied himself again to his digging.

Chance rode up to see what he was doing, and looked, but didn't see. What was the point of it?

The young Indian had torn up the ground in a hole about two feet deep and as much wide, digging well past the frost line.

"What are you doing?" asked Chance.

The boy did not reply.

"What are you doing?" asked Chance again, this time, as well as he could, putting his question in Sioux.

Immediately the boy looked up and the small brown face broke apart in a wide happy grin.

Chance saw plenty of teeth in the broad little face.

The boy said something in Sioux, probably that he was digging or hunting. Chance made out the word "rattlesnake."

"Go slowly," said Chance in Sioux. He wanted something like "Be careful," but he didn't know the expression.

The concern on his face was read by the boy, who laughed.

"I watch," said the boy, and he had spoken in English.

It was not yet winter, but it was late fall. The snakes, Chance supposed, would be hibernating, somewhere in nests under the frost line.

"You speak English," said Chance.

"If I want to," said the boy.

"Good boy," said Chance in Sioux.

The boy laughed.

Chance asked to see the stick and the boy handed it up to him. Chance sharpened it with the bowie knife at his belt and handed it back to him, wiping the knife on the side of his pants, then sliding it back into his sheath.

"What's your name?" asked Chance.

The boy told him and Chance didn't understand.

"In English," asked Chance.

"William Buckhorn," said the boy.

Chance knew he hadn't said "William" before.

Chance wondered why he was digging for snakes. It was a foolish and dangerous thing to do. He supposed the boy's parents might have sent him off to kill snakes, and bring the skins home. He shuddered. It was a stupid, foolish thing to do. Dangerous.

Chance, in both English and his smattering of Sioux, tried to convey his objections to the lad who listened intently.

The boy thanked him and then returned to his digging.

As Chance turned to go, the boy, not looking up, said, "You are the man they are looking for."

Chance stiffened in the saddle. "Who?" he asked.

"At the agency," said the boy. "Two men. One from far away with red hair, very big, very strong. And a soldier from Fort Yates, two yellow stripes."

It would be Grawson, thought Chance, and someone to help him, to guide him through the reservation, to furnish another gun. Two stripes. A corporal. Maybe Totter. "What does the soldier look like?" asked Chance.

"Like all white men," said the boy.

"That's not much help," said Chance.

"He has a crooked nose," said the boy, looking up and smiling, making a gesture across his face, as though his nose were being bent to one side.

It would be Totter, thought Chance. Both of them. Grawson and Totter. I've got to get out of here. Still there's no immediate hurry. They won't come this far out, not with the Ghost Dancing. I'll have time. "Thanks," said Chance to the boy, and then, in Sioux, told him that his heart was light that he had spoken with him, that he was happy to hear what had been told him.

Then Chance bid the boy farewell, mistakenly addressing him as a man, which mistake did not displease the boy, and rode away.

Before Chance had left, the boy had said, first in Sioux, then in English. "I am William Buckhorn. Let the snakes watch out."

Then he had gone back to his digging.

 

* * *

 

Lucia Turner was alone in the soddy.

Aunt Zita, more than an hour ago, had put on her black carriage gown, taken the buckboard, her box of Bibles and pamphlets, and departed for the ration point, an area marked on the prairie not far from the administration buildings of the agency.

There she could preach to the Indians.

"It's Saturday morning, ration day," had said Aunt Zita that morning.

"Yes," Lucia had said.

"They'll have to come in for their handouts," had said Aunt Zita, pulling on her black gloves.

"Then you can preach to them," observed Lucia.

"Man lives not by bread alone," had said Aunt Zita.

"You are kind to think of the Indians."

"My duty," had said Zita.

"Blessed are the merciful," Lucia had said.

"For theirs is the Kingdom of God," Aunt Zita had added.

"For they shall obtain mercy," Lucia had corrected.

"Not unless they repent their heathen ways," had said Aunt Zita, and turned curtly and left the soddy.

A moment or two later Lucia had heard the buckboard rattle away.

Aunt Zita, staying overnight at the agency, would not be returning until the next day, perhaps about evening.

As yet Aunt Zita had not been given permission to use the building set aside as a Protestant meetinghouse, primarily because her credentials, perhaps in order in heaven, had not seemed sufficiently impressive to the agent at Standing Rock, a most prejudiced decision in Aunt Zita's mind, undoubtedly motivated by ulterior considerations. His name was, after all, McLaughlin, and he would be Irish, and was undoubtedly a secret and sinister instrument of papism, diabolically attempting to propagate Romish superstitions among the innocent heathen of Standing Rock.

He had even had the gall to point out to Aunt Zita that her presence on the agency was lawful only by virtue of her kindred relationship to the schoolteacher, Miss Lucia Turner.

You shall not foil the work of God, Aunt Zita had told him.

I hope that I shall not, he said.

My work, Aunt Zita had told him, is that work.

What work, he had asked.

The work of God, she had said, and left him without a further word, left him to his conscience.

For they shall obtain mercy, Lucia thought to herself.

At least it would be safe for Aunt Zita at the ration point, used every second Saturday.

There would be soldiers there.

Of late, because of the Ghost Dancing, Aunt Zita had not visited the settlements and encampments themselves. She had been turned back more than once, at rifle point, by strangely clad Indians.

Aunt Zita had thought the better of martyrdom, and had turned the buckboard about and driven away.

Martyrdom would interfere with my work, Aunt Zita had pointed out to Lucia.

Lucia had agreed.

With God's work, Aunt Zita had added.

Lucia had said, oh. Once, in a careless and unwise moment, Lucia had asked Aunt Zita the grounds of her assurance of her call, her vocation. It came to me in prayer, Aunt Zita had said.

Lucia had thought about this for a while, and then had decided to stop thinking about it.

Lucia's father, now dead, had given her books to read which were not available at the finishing school. Though she was a girl, he had taken her for walks, and spoken of the trees and the stars, of insects and the changes of animals, and the mysterious world of which all she knew occupied but the corner of a particle. They had spoken gravely of many things, and Lucia had learned how much that men did not, and perhaps could not, know. She had learned not simply the records of empires, the tracks of the bones of time, but tried to see if they spoke the stories that she had been told, and found that they did not. Though she was a girl, and destined for the home, for sewing, the work of a house and the raising of children, he had wanted her to sense the depth of the puzzles about her, and the flatulence of the common formulas that would trivialize the depth of mysteries, humiliating and domesticating them into the comforting, cardboard truths that men, terrified of the dark, would sell their lives by rather than renounce.