Reason To Believe (12 page)

"You got a helper now," his father said tonelessly as he poured strong stove-top coffee into the first mug Anna handed him.

"Yeah, but he's not ready to take over for that long."

"And you're not ready to take over for me, so don't be thinkin' I'd step aside, either."

"Yeah, you
wish."
Ben chuckled ruefully, then cast Clara an incredulous look. "So, what, you've decided to go?"

Before she could answer, Anna handed her a cup of coffee. "Lala, can you take the pipe out again so my mom can see it?"

"She's seen it before."

"Yeah, but let her see it now. Anyway, I wanna see it again before we go home." She touched her mother's arm. "It's real old, Mom. You can just tell it's, like, an actual relic, and it's not even stuffed in a glass case or anything."

"And it won't be. Not as long as we have a pipe carrier." Dewey handed Anna a cup of coffee for her father, then took the red bundle down from the cupboard and claimed a cup for himself. "The pipe is only sacred if it is used for sacred purposes. Its age means nothing. Just look at me." Hands full, he squatted over his chair and lowered himself carefully. When the feat was accomplished, he nodded. "I'm pretty old myself."

"Glad you finally realized," Ben muttered.

But no one paid him any mind.

"Tell Mom about my great-great-grandfather, Lala. Tell her the story about Iron Hammer."

"Haven't I told you that one?" Dewey set his coffee on the yellowed linoleum floor and started loosening the ties on the red felt bundle. "About my grandfather bein' at Wounded Knee?"

"I think you might have, but it's been a long time."

Dewey nodded, his attention focused on old fingers and stubborn knots. "You always listen better than my son. Ben, he can't sit still for a story. Rather be out there messin' around with horses or cars."

"I've heard 'em all," Ben said. "And I don't forget 'em, so you don't have to keep—"

"That's the way it's supposed to be. You don't forget the stories, or we'll have other people remembering them for us.
Their
way." Lovingly he unrolled the long felt strip as he spoke. "But not your wife. She isn't like that. I read that paper she wrote when she was in school. It was a good one."

"Well, sure," Ben said with a smile. "It had Dewey Pipestone written all over it."

"How would you know, Ben?" Clara challenged. "You never read it."

"Yeah, I did. That's how I found out how smart you were. I had to get out the damn dictionary." Ben wrinkled his nose and gave a nod in Anna's direction, as though he had the final say. "It was pretty good, though."

"But did you know that Iron Hammer was there when Sitting Bull was murdered?" Anna took a cross-legged seat on the floor at her grandfather's feet. "He was at Sitting Bull's camp. He saw the whole thing. But back then people didn't say too much about what they saw, right, Lala? Because the army was saying Sitting Bull was like a criminal or something."

The old man nodded. "My grandfather was a young man that time," he said, putting the time into perspective by way of the generations of their relatives. "Early twenties, had a cabin not too far from here. My grandmother was young then, too, and she liked to go to the mission church they had over to Little Eagle. Back then, I think there was only one. But Iron Thunder had started in with the Ghost Dancing the summer before. People were gettin' together secretly, more and more all the time, sayin' they had a new religion now. They was all tryin' to dance back the buffalo and the dead relations, the way different ones were sayin' they learned to do in a dream."

"Turned out it didn't work," Ben flatly pointed out.

"No harm in tryin', they said." Dewey smoothed the felt strip across his knees and set the pipe atop it, laying the bowl in his palm. "They were supposed to try farming, and that sure wasn't workin'. That year it was so dry, they were eatin' mostly dust for every meal, they said.

"So Iron Hammer was out to Sitting Bull's camp that time with some of the Ghost Dancers. It was almost winter, but no snow yet, so they'd make this big circle and dance, shoulder to shoulder, and sing the songs. Sitting Bull, he wasn't one to stop nobody from dancin', even if he wasn't gonna take to it himself. And the truth was, he didn't put much stock in it. He'd had some powerful dreams himself, and lotta people looked up to him.

"But the Indian agent, Major James McLaughlin, he was tryin' to get the people to sign another agreement to give away most of the land they had left. Sitting Bull was talkin' against it, so McLaughlin wanted him dead.
Arrested
was what he said." Dewey shook his head.
"Dead
was what he meant.

"McLaughlin sent his Indian policemen out to Sitting Bull's camp really early that frosty morning. Most everyone was still asleep in their blankets, and the place was real quiet. The police had some troopers ready to back 'em up, just a couple miles away, so they went in the cabin, got the Old Bull up, and took him outside. They said he was their prisoner and they was gonna take him up to the agency at Fort Yates.

"But that quick, the Ghost Dancers were there, wantin' to know what was goin' on. Pretty soon somebody brought up a rifle and said they wasn't takin' the old man anywhere, and all hell broke loose. The two policemen who shot Sitting Bull, they got shot, too. And the police killed Sitting Bull's boy. The soldiers came ridin' in, saved what was left of their hand-picked Indian police, and the people camped there, they all scattered.

"After that, Iron Hammer and some of the other ones thought the army would come lookin' for them. My grandma was gonna have a baby, and that baby was my father. So she stayed with her missionary friend. A white woman, like your mother," he told Anna solemnly.

He looked at the pipe, turning it in his hands as he spoke quietly. "Grandma never went to Wounded Knee. She used to say that the way some tell it, havin' a baby could kill you, but it could save you, too. Her husband left her behind to have the baby, and he rode down to Cherry Creek to join up with Big Foot's camp." He raised his head, spoke to Anna first, then Clara. "We're gonna be ridin' to Cherry Creek, too. And we'll be meetin' up with the riders from Cheyenne River, and some from Pine Ridge."

"And cameras from the damn TV stations," Ben grumbled.

His father nodded. "We want those people to tell the story."

"So Iron Hammer was with Big Foot and the Minneconjou people on the journey to Wounded Knee," Clara said, tugging on the story's loose end.

Dewey nodded again. "The army was tryin' to break up the Ghost Dancing, and there were certain ones that were on the Indian Bureau's list of troublemakers, like Sitting Bull and Big Foot. Big Foot was old and sick, and he didn't know how he was gonna feed all these people, his own plus the cousins from Sitting Bull's camp. Some people believed the Ghost Dancing was really gonna bring everything back the way it used to be come spring, but they still had a lot of winter left to go. So then Big Foot was thinkin' if he could take his people down to Pine Ridge, to Red Cloud's camp, they could make it through the winter under Red Cloud's protection." He chuckled. "Eatin' ol' Red Cloud's rations."

"I'm sure Red Cloud would gladly have shared," Clara intoned, completely absorbed even though she knew every detail of the story.

Ben found himself taking some satisfaction in the fascination he saw in his wife's face. Damn, he must have been hard up for satisfaction. She'd always been one to lap up all that old Indian stuff, which was what he was fast becoming. Old Indian stuff.

So he came up with something an old Indian might say. "When people come, you feed them, even if all you can do is add water to the soup."

Dewey grunted in agreement. "But most of them didn't get there for any soup, because the army stopped them at Porcupine Creek, then took them to Chankpe Opi Wakpala."

"Wounded Knee Creek," Ben translated.

"They made camp there, with the soldiers camped just north of them," Dewey continued. "The major in charge posted guards and set up his Hotchkiss guns, aimed at the tipis. Iron Hammer put on his Ghost Dance shirt before he went to sleep that night. It was made of muslin, painted with moons and stars. He believed it could stop bullets, and for this reason he wondered whether the soldiers might try to take it from him. But then he said to himself, they probably didn't know about this medicine. He kinda didn't want them to know because that might make them wanna test it out. And he kiiin-da didn't want them to do that, 'cause he'd never tested it out himself.

"But the major had given them some food and put a nice stove in Big Foot's lodge to help the old man with his cough, so Iron Hammer thought maybe it would be okay." Dewey rubbed the smooth red pipe bowl with a leathery thumb. "But it wasn't okay. Because the next morning they made everybody gather in the camp circle. And they separated the men out. Right away Iron Hammer thought this was no good, because the women and children had no protection. And then they took all the knives and guns—even the sewing awls and tent stakes—put 'em all into a big pile.

"Then the soldiers wanted to make sure they had everything, so they started to search. Iron Hammer dropped his blanket and showed them he had nothing. But there was this one Minneconjou who was hard of hearing, and he had a new Winchester. And he
really
hated to give up that new Winchester. He wasn't gonna shoot nobody, but he'd paid plenty for that gun. He was pretty confused, too, because he couldn't hear everything that was goin' on. Everybody was gettin' nervous. Then one of the old men started singin' one of the Ghost Dance songs, tellin' about the sacred shirts. 'The bullets will not hit you,' he sang.

"My grandfather couldn't say whether it was the deaf man's Winchester that was fired when the soldiers spun him around, tryin' to get it away from him, or what. But after that one shot, the gunfire came crashing down on them, surrounding them like a thunderstorm. Some of the men were able to grab a weapon, but mostly everybody tried to run. Iron Hammer didn't have anything to fight with at first, so he took off toward the ravine. Then he felt a bolt of fire shoot through his leg, and he went down. But he got up again, didn't pay no attention to the pain. He was too scared. All around him, people droppin' like they was shootin' cattle in the stockyard pens. This man whose foot was shot clean off and he was bleeding bad—" Dewey touched his right eye "—from here, he gave my grandfather a rifle.

"Some women and little children were trying to get away, so Iron Hammer flopped on the ground to cover their retreat. He couldn't see nothin' but smoke, so he just fired the gun whenever he heard hoofbeats or got a glimpse of black boots.

"Hard to imagine the things my grandfather saw that day. So many women got killed. So many little children. When he got to be an old man, my grandfather still believed he saw more blood that day than he saw in all the rest of his days put together. And he wasn't talkin' about his own blood. He tried not to look at that, he said. He was shot again, here." Dewey touched his shoulder, then the side of his neck. "Here, too. But he remembered his wife and the baby she was havin' for him, and he fought hard to stay alive. So maybe his shirt protected him some way. Or maybe it was..." Tears stood in the old man's eyes as he ran his fingers along the wooden pipe stem. "He carried his pipe bag. He had the pipe with him the whole time." The pipe drew three stares.

"The same one?" Anna wondered, childlike in her amazement. "So they said."

"Did Iron Hammer tell you this himself?" Clara asked.

"I didn't get the pipe until long after he was gone. But I heard him tell about that day at Wounded Knee, many times." For Dewey, the connection was as true as blood. "We had to carry the pipe in secret all those years. We could have a pipe, but not the sacred way. Not with the ceremonies. No sacred dancing, no
inipi,
no
yuwipi.
The government said our religion was against their laws. But we kept it, some of us, in secret. It was hard for everyone after that day. Hard to live the Indian way, the way our fathers said it used to be." He looked at Ben. "The sacred way."

It was a legacy of grief. The old man always ended up getting tears in his eyes over it. Ben knew the story right up to the last word, which always had to do with sacred ways. Still, it sounded new to him as he watched its impact unfold in Clara's and Anna's eyes. Not because he grieved the way his father did. He couldn't bring himself to shed tears over the past. What was the use? What was done was done. It couldn't be changed. He'd never laid eyes on his great-grandfather, didn't have any strong feelings for him and couldn't bring himself to fake any.

But his women did. He could see it in their eyes. He didn't understand why or how, but somehow they knew Iron Hammer's sadness. And they were going to follow Dewey. And he himself could either take his place with them or stay behind and fix rattletrap cars.

"We're gonna need some really warm sleeping bags," he said, resigning himself to it once and for all.

Clara nodded. "Yes, I suppose so.
Really
warm."

Anna's face brightened. "I could tell she'd made up her mind. I could just see it in her eyes."

Ben sighed and shook his head, turning to Clara. "You wanna take the pickup?"

"How can I drive and ride at the same time?"

With a look he asked when she'd lost her mind.

She answered with a mindless shrug. "Well, if I'm going to do it, I'm going to do it right. Did you say you had an extra horse?"