Neither Wolf nor Dog (34 page)

“Don't you see? If it was important that an earthquake happened when Jesus died, then why wasn't it important that a lot of stars fell in the year the buffalo froze?”

A far-off blast of lightning lit the edges of the billowing clouds. “I'll tell you why. Because white people wouldn't believe the two things had anything to do with each other. You believed that Jesus and the earthquake had something to do with each other, but you didn't believe that the buffalo and the stars had anything to do with each other. An earthquake could happen because Jesus died. But the stars couldn't fall because the buffalo died.

“Here's another one. There was a star in heaven that led those kings to Jesus when he was born. But there can't be a star that is given to our people as a guide. When our people talk about the seven stars and how they taught us to have seven council fires, you don't believe it is real. You say it is a myth or a legend. Well, maybe the star leading the kings is just a myth or a legend, too.

“I think you should think about this. You have two different stories about how history works. It doesn't make any sense.”

“This is a big sucker,” Grover interrupted, gesturing across the dashboard toward the sky. “I'm going to try to outflank it.” He was once again the captain, guiding his ship away from the dangers of the treacherous reefs and shoals. He took a left down a long ribbon of asphalt that stretched off southward into the hills. The storm lay in wait, grumbling and flashing, along the western horizon.

“Never do it,” said Dan.

“Maybe,” Grover answered. He pressed the accelerator harder and the Buick surged forward. The wall of dark to the west glinted and flashed at us like dragons' eyes.

Dan went on with his story. “The reason my people listened when you talked about Jesus was because we could understand
how you were thinking. It was like what happened to Jesus then is important now, the same as it was the day it happened.

“We could understand that, because that's how we learned about our past. If my grandfather's grandfather made the buffalo turn away from the village one time, then that was how I knew the year. It was the year the buffalo turned away from the village. It was the year my grandfather gave me the power to turn danger away from our people. I still have that power, because he gave it to me by what he did.

“That's how you taught me about Jesus. He was alive a long time ago, but he gave you power to do things today. But when you wanted to learn about my grandfather's grandfather, you don't believe he gave me power. You want to know how many buffalo, and what year it was.

“Well, why don't you go try to find out what year Jesus was born and how many people were there when he was killed, and the scientific reason why there was an earthquake then? Why isn't all that important? That's what you want to know about the buffalo, if maybe they had some disease that made them charge the camp, or if maybe we had the camp in a different place that year. If I talk to you about the power that gave me, you don't want to listen. But you want me to listen all about the power that Jesus gave you.

“It doesn't make any sense. Either it's the way things work, or it isn't. If it's okay for you to not know what year Jesus lived, but just to start numbering the years from then, then it's okay for me not to know what year my grandfather's grandfather lived. If it's okay for what Jesus did to give you power now, then it's okay for what my grandfather's grandfather did to give me power now.

“But your mind lives in two worlds. In one of those worlds, things that happen always have power, like Jesus. In the other world, things only happen once, and they only have power
when they happen, and you have to get a perfect picture of it, with how many people were there and all the things that were there and all the things that lead up to it and all the things that happened because of it. That's the only way you really understand it.”

He stopped to let me absorb what I'd heard. “What do you think of that, Nerburn?”

I was dazed. I didn't know if I was ten steps ahead of him or ten steps behind. “You know, Dan,” I said. “Sometimes I think you're just toying with me.”

“Why do you think they couldn't catch Geronimo, or Joseph?” Grover said proudly. Dan just came forth with a few more low, rumbling “heh, hehs.”

“Now you will hear about Abraham Lincoln,” he said. “I said I was thinking about him, too. To me he was like one of your great chiefs. When I think about him I see how different we really are. To me, he was your greatest leader. He wasn't afraid to do things for people he never saw. He tried to do right. I think he would have been a good Indian.

“But you teach about him like a dead man. He's not like Jesus to you. He's not alive to you any more. So you make children learn when he was born and where he was born and everything about him. You make them learn him like he was a stuffed bear in a museum. This is your mistake.

“Why don't you say that he is still alive today in the hearts of your people? Why don't you teach your history so that your children have to keep him alive in their hearts and make that more important than knowing how tall he was and where he was born?

“You teach your children that Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves. Why don't you teach them that he made you all slave-freers and that you are now his children and must uphold his honor?

“That's what we do.”

“But you want your children to pass a test about when Abraham Lincoln signed some paper that freed the slaves. If they know that, then you say they know about Abraham Lincoln. It makes your history thin and ugly because it puts things in boxes on shelves to be taken down and examined instead of keeping them alive. I think our way is better. I really do.”

“I can't disagree with you, Dan,” I said.

“You'd better not,” he laughed. “I was starting to think you were stupid. I'll tell you just a little more, now. Just a little more.

“See, we have always had history like white people history, too. You just wouldn't believe us. We had our stories and our pictures. We had our ways of doing things that were passed down to us from our elders. That was just like white people history. It had facts, too. But they weren't good enough for you.

“If I show you how my grandfather made something, you didn't trust me. But if some white person who didn't even know what he was seeing wrote it down, then that was good enough to be history.

“There is too much to know everything. We Indians just tried to know the important things, so we could live better and understand.

“We had people who could tell us about the old days and why they were important to us. We made our children learn the stories so they could repeat them just as they were told. Our history was alive. But your history was dead, even though it was written down in words.

“I will tell it to you one more way. If you hear a song, is it real? Or is it only real once somebody writes it down?

“Well, for us, the story of our people was like a song. As long as somebody could still sing it, it was real. It never mattered if someone wrote it down. When you came you said that
our song wasn't real because it wasn't written down. Then you wrote it down the way you wanted it.

“You are still writing down our story, using your words, and you are still getting it all wrong. Your words are all full of sharp edges that cut us. But we have been bleeding so long we don't even feel it anymore.

“It doesn't hurt me. I am old. I knew the old language and so did my friends. We still speak it. It is still the song in our heart. It is the young people who must learn to sing the song again.”

He folded his arms and fell silent.

Grover hit the steering wheel like a baseball fan celebrating the announcement of a home run. “Damn!” he said. “Nerburn? I hope you're learning something.”

I was still trying to take in everything I had heard. I rewound the tape recorder and listened to a few words to make sure I had it right.

Dan had returned to sitting upright in his seat and staring straight ahead, as he often did when he had finished speaking. But his mind was still working. “I will tell you one last thing,” he spoke up. Once more, it was as if he were hearing a voice, and passing along what it said. “It is why you
wasichu
are in trouble. For you nothing is
wakan.
You have taken the power out of the Earth and the sky and the things that live there. Everything is a fact. You will drown under your facts.”

Grover was positively ecstatic. I realized that he, too, had been concerned about Dan's descents into melancholy. This was the old man he knew and revered. He turned at me and grinned like a coyote. “In the old days, people brought gifts to elders who taught them like this,” he said.

“Oh?” I answered.

“Yeah. It was a sign of respect.” There was a playful twinkle in his eye.

“What sort of thing are you thinking of?”

 

 

He looked out at a red-and-white sign mounted on a hillside.

 

 

“Steaks. Chicken. Ribs,” he read.

 

 

“Ah,” I answered. “I suppose they bought dinner for the

 

 

man who drove the horse, too?”

 

 

“I'm just reading the signs, Nerburn,” he said.

G
rover packed the last of his rib bones into a napkin for Fatback. I paid the bill and we started out to the car.

One step outside the door and we could feel that the storm had caught us. The air had been moody and unsettled all day; now it was so close and thick you could hardly breathe. The light had taken on an unearthly green hue. Sheets of lightning flapped beyond the horizon.

Grover pulled back on the highway and took a turn directly west. “Got to make some time,” was all he said.

“This one's got us,” Dan said.

I sat dumbly, transfixed by the drama taking place in the heavens around me. Off to my right the sky was a crucible of darkness. It moved down upon us like a rolling night. Directly in front of us, the clouds were roiling and massing like a towering sea.

The sun was lost as if in the smoke of a prairie fire. Here and there it would find an opening and cut through with sickly shafts of sepulchral yellow light that burst across the hills and valleys fora moment, then were gone. Tiny electrical surges shot within the mushrooming cloud formations. The momentary flashes revealed angry interiors like avalanches or crashing rivers of sulphur. It was nature moving too fast, too large, to be subject to any human control.

A few raindrops hit like gunshots against the windshield.

“Big sucker,” Grover intoned again.

A momentary flash of lightning revealed a billboard all written in blood red with a quote from John 3:16 and a huddled form of a fetus. It melted from view as the rain sheeted and flowed down the windshield.

The weather had made Fatback nervous. She rose in her seat and started whining.

“Good dog,” I said, and scratched under her neck. She did not relax. Some primitive alarm had been raised in her. It was her duty to remain vigilant.

“I can see why people out here get religion,” I said.

“Got the wrong one,” Dan observed.

The cracking in the clouds revealed exploding billows of darkness, miles high and miles deep. Orange glows, like from a blast furnace, lit up the edges of the forms.

Lightning flashes cracked the sky and illuminated the tops of distant mesas.

“You going to drive through that?” I said, trying to keep my voice nonchalant.

Dan started chanting something in Lakota.

Rain cut like shards of glass on a diagonal through the pale cones of Grover's headlights. The roof of the car began to crack
and ping. Ahead of us loomed a wall of celestial darkness. It was impenetrable, biblical, devoid of all light.

Dan closed his eyes and began chanting in a singsong voice. The air was electric. I expected to be taken up in a firestorm.

Suddenly all rain and movement stopped, as if the heavens were holding their breath. Grover pulled quickly to the side of the road.

Then, like an earthquake, a surge of wind roared across the land. It swirled and hammered and blasted the car with sheets of rain. The whole car shook; water streamed down the windows. Cutting mists drove in through the cracks. We were cast into total darkness.

Involuntarily I slid down into the corner of my seat. Fatback crawled to the floor. Dan was still chanting, though his voice was hardly audible through the thunderous roar. Grover pulled a cigarette from his breast pocket and began to smoke.

The thick heavy odor of cigarettes and sweat filled the inside of the car. The wind roared like a banshee, a freight train, a herd of ten thousand buffalo. It buffeted us without mercy and clawed at the windows. Once or twice the car was rocked so violently I thought we were going to be blown over.