Painted Horses (28 page)

The drummers circled on a baseball diamond behind the schoolhouse, the rickety stands already packed with spectators. Earlier Catherine feared a self-consciousness, feared she might stand out like a naked person on a stage. Now she rounded the end of the bleachers and got her first look at the dancers, and knew she was not likely to become the center of attention.

The dancers appeared solely female, mostly young women but a few small girls as well, whirling and prancing in a blur of fringe and sailing braids and with the shimmer and flash of adornment. The haunting, wailing cry went up again, shouted by the drummers and others who knew the tongue in the crowd. Catherine shivered again.

She tried to find Miriam among the dancers and found this impossible, her eye racing from one kinetic figure to the next, then wrenched elsewhere by sunlight glancing from silver or chrome. The costumes varied, some constructed of pale buckskin and others of red or black cloth, some beaded in geometric patterns and others accoutered with all manner of dangling ornaments, tiny jangling bells or rows of cowrie shells, the sawn tips of antlers or feathers plucked from birds. One girl fairly glimmered with dozens of jumping brass rifle cartridges.

On and on they went, sometimes rotating in tilting, marching circles with their arms outstretched, sometimes hopping in a line, but always full of motion. Catherine couldn’t imagine how they didn’t drop from exhaustion, but even the little girls never seemed to tire.

Once for an exercise in polytonality a piano teacher made her learn part of
The Rite of Spring
, and in typical fashion she found herself more interested in the surrounding legend than the actual music. The original ballet choreography was of course long lost, but it struck her now that primeval dances such as these were what Nijinsky must have summoned out of some haunted and time-shrouded netherworld, and so turned his own staid discipline inside out. The premiere in a Paris theater famously sparked a riot, with punches thrown and the police called.

Here, with the contoured hills slinking into shadow and the thump of drums like the pulse of the earth, she didn’t know what might force a riot. A pink tutu, maybe.

The dancers shuffled off and the drums shifted, assumed an ominous drone, on and on until finally a single, hunched figure danced into view, a man with bare legs and a tremendous feathered headdress swaying down his back, chains of bells chiming at his ankles. He let out a long whoop and got an answer out of the air itself, the same blood-freezing cry as before only this time rising and falling and rising again, pausing a long moment and finally resuming in the same matchless, mysterious instant, as though many voices from many directions had been possessed by the same shrieking spirit.

The song rose like a fever, horrifying and beautiful at once, an ancient thing with ancient meaning and ancient power utterly intact. Other dancers joined the first, all men, some shaking rattles or blowing whistles and some nearly naked save for breechclouts and face paint, some with breastplates fashioned from thin bone cylinders and others bare chested and scribed with geometric lines.

A war chant, that’s what it was, and could be nothing else. A song of glory and mourning and revenge, with drums bashing like the blows of a club and voices like women hysterical with loss, other voices like souls wailing back, across a chasm that couldn’t be crossed. She thought if hell were real and Custer had gone there, he doubtless heard something like this now, and always, and forever.

As for Catherine, eventually all she could hear were bells. Hundreds of them, shaking with the movement of so many dancers, the collective sound saturating the air like the shimmer of a cymbal.

It was true she possessed a developed ear, could hear the faint tick of her nails on the ivories when they grew too long, could sequester instruments in an orchestra. Fifteen years at a keyboard and it was second nature. The voices and the drums kept on but she allowed these tiny tinkling bells to lure her away, half in shame because they were a bridge to her own culture, her own century, knowing such a sound couldn’t have been part of this world originally. Then again, neither had horses.

She was next aware of the drums by their absence, twenty of them vanished on a single shattering beat and the voices gone with them, a silence the depth of a fathom hanging in the air. She caught the gleam of firelight on elk’s teeth and silver bracelets. Uneven illumination danced against the ground. Night had descended. A bonfire burned.

The bleachers and the outer dark came alive with applause and the drummers stood from their drums. Dim figures moved in the light and once when the fire flared she glimpsed a rider on a horse, skirting the far side of the field. She rose unsteadily herself.

She was nearly to the church and just within the cone of light from a yard lamp when her name came out of the darkness. Catherine stopped. “Miriam?”

“Here. I’m right here.” Miriam emerged from the night as from a different century. She wore dancer’s attire, beaded moccasins on her feet and a red broadcloth overshirt. Her hair hung in two straight braids, bound in silver wire. She fumbled for her glasses in a fringed bag and put them on and her eyes and mouth went wide. “Look at your eyes! I haven’t been able to see all night. I almost missed you just now. Look at that little top!”

“Were you dancing?”

Miriam nodded. “Were you in the audience?”

“I was. I tried to find you but I guess I didn’t come close. For awhile I thought it was you with bullets all over your dress.”

Miriam laughed. “God no. That was Alma Pretty Shield. She and I don’t even resemble each other.”

“Oh. Oops.”

Miriam shook her head. “Doesn’t matter. We think all you whites look alike too.”

A fiddle sawed in the street beyond the church and Catherine could see light coming from there too, and hear the mild din of a crowd. “What’s going on?”

“Street dance. You should go.”

“Oh I don’t know, Miriam, I’m not going to know anybody. Are you going?”

“Later. I’ve got someplace I need to be for awhile.”

“Can I come with you?” Catherine asked, and she saw Miriam hesitate. “I mean it’s okay if I can’t. I’ll just wait for you at the dance.”

“No,” said Miriam. “I think you should come. I think it might be all right.”

They went back to the darkness outside the churchyard. The moon seemed utterly absent, the church standing pale and weird behind them, its steeple a blank mass pointed against the stars.

They went through the grass toward the river. Catherine heard its sibilant swirl, heard a faint strain of wind in the line of trees. They went over a hump in the land and when they dropped down again the town of Agency may as well have been miles in the past. Miriam had yet to speak. Catherine followed along and kept silent herself.

They went down a shallow wash and followed the curve of a hill and around the base of the grade a haze of light came into view, a golden nimbus in the dark. Tepees, lit from the inside, radiating like giant lamps. Catherine saw figures move like shadows in one of them, felt the sudden burn of smoke in her nose. She heard a wail go up, half cry and half song, in that tribal tongue with its jolting strangeness. Miriam led her through the shelters toward the voice and they stopped outside a much larger structure, twice the size of the others and oddly shaped and emitting no light at all although when Miriam peeled back the flap that served as a door Catherine glimpsed the interior, fairly ablaze and packed with bodies.

Miriam told her to wait and disappeared within. The singing had stopped, replaced with a soliloquy in the same language, spoken softly by a man. Miriam stuck her head out.

“Are you on your period?”

“What? No. I’m not.”

Miriam beckoned, and Catherine ducked through the entry. The flap fell behind her.

A fire burned in the center of the lodge and in the throw of flames she saw people seated three or four deep in a ring around the perimeter, and at first felt relieved she was not the only spectator. But she was wrong, knew it a moment later when her eyes focused in the light. She scanned a line of copper skin and braids, narrow eyes peering back. She was the only white person. The youngest as well, except for Miriam.

The others stared toward the ceiling and she looked up too and with a start took in the shadow of a great bird, wings in a spread across the skin of the lodge. A female voice chanted. She wondered if the shadow were in fact a painting, then started again when she spied the bird itself. An eagle, frozen in motion atop a pole with wings six feet across, the beak fierce but the cup of its eye eerily empty. Somebody beat on a drum.

A figure approached and she tore her gaze from the bird, looked at the cupped hands coming toward her, the face obscured by shadow. The hands unfolded to release a burst of smoke, blown slap in her face as if by a wind. Her eyes smarted and she screwed them shut, her nostrils too, and she twisted her head and fanned to clear the fog. She choked a little but still the smoke bore her back, not toward the doorway but into her own sensory past, her brain impulsively racing to the cedar closet in her parents’ Tudor, its pungent red-streaked wood.

The smoke thinned. She forced her eyes open. The figure had moved on, let go another cloud farther along. A woman in tribal clothing, with locks from the mane of a horse fixed down the sleeves of her dress. When the woman turned toward the light Catherine could see one half of her face painted green, the other half red. Catherine turned to exchange a glance with Miriam, but Miriam was gone.

Other drums began to thump with the first. A second figure in like paint danced out to the center and fed fresh sage to the fire. The flames rushed up and devoured the leaves in a mad spew of smoke, dense gray-green billows that rolled through the lodge and made her wince yet again, the air heavy with the stuff, her lungs blazing.

A song started and a woman began to dance near the fire with her eyes fixed on the eagle, which appeared to float through the smoke. She wailed out from time to time but never stopped moving, never seemed to close her eyes against the sting of the air. Voices in the circle joined the song. Catherine alone seemed to fight the urge to cough.

Two men brought an irregular box and set it near the dancer, a battered-looking container that Catherine at first mistook for simple cardboard, with the sticklike figure of a horse drawn in red on the front. They lifted the lid and she looked closer and saw the box was actually made of rawhide, its corners laced with thongs. The men reached in and withdrew rattles, which they shook in the interstices of the drums, one on each side of the dancer.

Catherine felt herself swoon and realized with a sort of distant recognition how hot she was, her neck and her face burning from the inside out. She shook her head with the vague notion none of this could possibly be real. She looked at the eagle. Still there, its shadow also. She looked back at the dancer. Still dancing.

She brought her wrist into the light and squinted at her watch. Surprisingly not much time had passed since she’d last checked it. She didn’t know how much longer she could stand the hot thick air. She again looked for Miriam and still couldn’t find her.

She verged on fleeing when another player came into the circle, a woman with a flowing head of iron-gray hair and a robe over her shoulders, the robe bearing a circular pattern across the back, hung with feathers and black bolts of horsehair. She approached the dancing woman and held out her cupped hands, appearing to offer something though Catherine couldn’t see what it might be.

The dancer had taken her eyes from the eagle and though her feet continued to step in place she stared now into the woman’s outstretched hands, seemed to search for something contained there, and a moment later broke her step and lunged to make a swipe and a murmur rippled through the ring. The robed woman withdrew her hands and retreated. The dancer looked at her own empty palms and let out a crushing wail, began to step in place again.

The man rattling to her right went to the box with the horse and reached inside. He brought out what Catherine dimly took to be a quirt, and when he handed the quirt to the dancer the woman did indeed commence to flagellate her own shoulders. Catherine shook her head against the fog.

Twice again the robed woman moved in with cupped hands, and twice the dancer tried and failed to receive something. Finally as the dancer appeared close to collapse, wringing with sweat and panting with exhaustion or lack of oxygen or both, the singing and the drumming hit a frenetic pitch and the robed woman stepped up and proffered not her hands but the gape of her mouth, and the dancer feebly reached out and made to pluck something from her tongue.

Apparently she succeeded because she let out a warble that occurred even to Catherine as a mix of jubilation and relief. A general cry rose from the ring and the gray-haired woman sunk into the floor, robe folding like a tent with the poles kicked loose. The dancer halted now and held something up in her hands, extended it toward the eagle overhead. Whatever it was, Catherine couldn’t see.

Other dancers surrounded the woman, some blowing whistles, some with red-and-green faces. Another sage bundle roared up on the fire. Catherine felt a tug on her wrist.

Miriam, minus her glasses and squinting again. She led Catherine out of the circle to the far end of the lodge and the people seated there slid away to let them pass. Miriam’s grandmother waited in the dim light, swaddled despite the heat in her mountain of blankets. Crane Girl.