Stone Song (15 page)

“After a while, during a storm, he would just scratch at door flaps or even try to crawl under lodge skirts and people would drive him away. As he left, running splayfooted, they would call after him that he ran stupidly, like a duck.”

Curly would know they said that because they wouldn’t speak of the more serious matter, the way he was endangering the whole band.

“Finally a
wicasa wakan
got him into a sweat lodge and nearly sweated that boy
dry
.” Hump took the risk of smiling sideways at his
hunka
. “He didn’t let the boy out until he told what he had dreamed. After that he was a sacred clown all his life,” meaning one who obeyed the
wakinyan
by doing everything backward. Hump chuckled a little. “He walked pigeon-toed after that.”

Curly felt his breath catch again. He didn’t know what to do.

So Buffalo Hump knew about him.

Shame pumped through Curly’s veins like a dye.

Buffalo Hump knew Curly was bringing danger to his people every moment. Curly was inviting the anger of the
wakinyan
tanka. Grandmothers and grandfathers could be killed because of him. Children. Warriors, fathers, mothers.

Curly stood up on the edge of the precipice. He looked down.

Once, maybe one winter ago when they were here, he’d taken off his red breechcloth, thrown it over the edge, and watched it curl and twist and float through the long seconds. He’d felt every lilt and lift and flutter all the way down, a dance in the air. He’d felt in his knees and spine the dance his body could never do. When the breechcloth came gently to rest
at the bottom on Maka, Earth, he looked at the bloody spot for too long a moment.

Then he and Hump laughed, alive, and started climbing down to get it.

Hump asked again. “Do you have anything you need to talk to your father about?”

It was beyond decency for Hump to ask twice, really, but Curly could not be angry. He felt a water-flow of relief. He turned back to his
hunka
, to speak. The words should have begun, “When I went beyond, I saw Rider….” They gushed up into his throat. They clotted into a ball, like thick, gooey blood.

He could not speak. The words were strangling him.

Curly turned to the edge of the cliff. He looked out into emptiness. His eyes danced downward as his breechcloth had danced, as a leaf would fall. The dance made his knees queasy.

Curly felt Buffalo Hump’s hand on his arm, warm, friendly.

He looked into his
hunka
’s eyes. His knees steadied.

“Spirit does not expect us to do what we can’t do,” Hump said companionably.

He seemed sure.

Curly clasped his
hunka
’s forearm.

“I have an idea. Why don’t you wait for me here?”

What did Hump mean? Normally Curly loved to stay here alone. But was Hump saying he should stay here and make the decision to tell what he saw beyond? Was Hump pushing him?

“It’s something we might do together,” said Hump lightly. “I want to talk to some people in the village.”

Curly nodded.

Hump began to climb. From the top of the cliff Hump looked back and smiled. Curly felt afraid. Afraid to think about telling what he saw beyond. Afraid to think of his mad love for Black Buffalo Woman. Almost for the first time in his life, afraid to be alone.

Hump came back in the predawn light. Curly heard the call of the hoot owl and answered it with the same call, twice. Then came the scraping sounds of Hump’s feet and hands on the rock as he climbed down.

“Want something to eat?” asked Hump.

He handed Curly some pemmican. Curly chewed on it. They sat on the edge of the cliff, wordless. They dangled their legs and smiled to themselves and watched the light of the sun seep into the world.

When they’d eaten plenty and the sun was fully up, Hump said, “Did
you know the Sahiyela woman Yellow Woman and the child are going to join their families on the Red Shield River? With Stick and Lark?”

Curly jerked his eyes into his
hunka
’s face and smiled. The woman he had saved in the lightning storm and her son, plus her sister and brother-in-law.

His spirits lifted.

“You want to go adventuring to the Sahiyela?” asked Hump, his eyes merry. “You and me?” It was another country, far to the south.

“
To!
” Damn right!

Curly felt the power in the beat of the drum. Subtle and insistent, this was the pulse of the dancing, the life force of the ceremony.

This was the eighth day of the medicine lodge ceremony of the Sahiyela people. All the people were gathered here on Beaver Creek in this land the Lakota called Fat Meat Earth, far to the south and east of the country of Curly’s people. All the Sahiyela were here, dancing and singing and drumming as the sun came back to its full strength.

It was a ceremony for all the tribe held every Moon of the Ripening Berries, which the Sahiyela called the Time When the Horses Get Fat and the
wasicu
called June. The people gave thanks to Maka, Earth, for the things that grew, the things that nurtured and fed human beings. They gave thanks to Power for the great pattern of birthing and growing and dying that was the energy of life on earth.

Some men made private gestures during this ceremony. Having made pledges to Spirit during the year, they danced and fasted and thirsted for the final four days. They gazed at the live sunpole tree cut down and planted, still green, at the center of the sundance ground. They called it the sun pole and filled its leafy branches with tobacco ties of buckskin, each representing a prayer. They shed their blood through cuts on their chests or backs. They tied themselves to the sun pole by their bloody breasts or dragged buffalo skulls around camp by the wounds in their backs.

But these were private matters. The great matter was the welfare of all the tribe, the sustenance of the great cycle of nurturing between the Sahiyela and Earth.

For that reason all the Sahiyela were here each year—every tribe, every band, every village, and every lodge.

It was a year of change. All sun cycles were times of change, for change was the nature of life. But this time the changes were sharper, and caused by
wasicu
.

This Fat Meat Earth lay between two great rivers, the Shell River, which the
wasicu
called the Platte, on the north and the Feather River, which the
wasicu
called the Arkansas, on the south. These
wasicu
, whom the Sahiyela people called
veho
, as the
wasicu
called them Cheyenne, were running up the trails on these two rivers like ants to carcasses, as many
wasicu
as buffalo in one of the greatest herds. This was what was happening in the
wasicu
’s summer of 1857.

But it was one of the endless summers that the Sahiyela did not number, in one of the endless circle of years that made up time, yet spiraled beyond time, and what was happening was the medicine lodge ceremony. It renewed the ancient way, the earth’s giving the people sustenance.

The drumbeat, ever-present, inexhaustible, eternal.

Curly looked sideways at Buffalo Hump. Both the young men felt the spirit of the Sahiyela pump like blood into this dance. They had talked about it. For one more than twenty winters now, since the
wasicu
who came for the beaver had built the big lodge they called Fort Laramie where the Swimming Bird River flowed into the Shell River, the Lakota had not given this kind of spirit to the
wiwanyag wachipi
, the gazing-at-the-sun-pole dance. Instead many people loafed around the fort. They brought in hides and traded them for the
wasicu
’s knives and pots and beads and bells and guns and powder, and
mni wakan
, holy water, whiskey. Especially whiskey.

Curly and Hump’s band, the Hunkpatila Oglala, had stayed close to the fort too, but now they were keeping away. Otherwise you might become dependent, helpless, willing to do anything for the
wasicu
. Women might become every man’s women in exchange for a drink. Worst of all, when you drank, you lost control of your spirit. You had no power and no connection to Power. You had no spirit to give to the great ceremonies and could take none. So the strength of the ceremonies among the Lakota had waned these last twenty winters.

Curly and Hump thought it was grand to see the Sahiyela still so strong, so fervent, so united in their awareness of the sacred, their connection to Earth and Sun. They thought now that traveling all these many sleeps and spending these moons among the Sahiyela was beyond doubt worth it: They knew that the Lakota people must stand as unified in spirit as the Sahiyela.

Now Curly began to wonder: He had had a vision. He thought of it as his own, and how he triumphed or suffered through it was his own business. But was that so?

Here he saw that visions and all connectedness to Power in some sense belonged to the people. Individual power was the people’s power.

Did Curly have a right, however weak or strong his vision might have
been, to keep it secret? To not live it? Did not all the people own the strength in it?

The medicine lodge ceremony was basically like the sun-gazing dance of the Lakota, but not exactly like it. Curly and Hump had been learning the differences every day. The first four days were a kind of building up, and the camp moved each day. The Sahiyela built three lodges, what they called a gathering lodge, a lonely lodge, and at the last camp the medicine lodge. The first two were tipis, but the third was an arbor of poles, with a sunpole tree in the middle, the sacred center.

In the gathering lodge, as far as Curly and Hump could tell, the leaders planned the ceremony. In the lonely lodge people who had pledged to offer the ceremony, two men and a woman this time, got instruction from experienced medicine lodge givers. The medicine lodge itself was the sacred heart of the ceremony, with its center sun pole, its buffalo skull, its prayer mound. It was a circular arbor supported by poles, with an opening to the east. In and around this lodge was done the painting of the makers and the dancers, the praying and offering, and singing and dancing, ever to the drumbeat.

The drum throbbed now, the voice of Earth herself, her pulse. The pulse that sounded in the streams, that made the winds blow, that pushed life through the trees until buds came out, that brought the grasses back, that birthed the buffalo. Thump, thump, thump, the beat of Earth.

The dancers were making their final ceremonial homage to both Earth and Sun. Curly and Hump had watched their mentors prepare them. They were already painted, many with red suns on their chests and crescent moons on their left shoulder blades, others with white spots of hail or long forks of lightning. Now the instructors made smoke from sweetgrass for each dancer, rubbed and blew on the bodies of each one, put dried grass in their hair, showed them just how to salute the sun pole or the sky itself.

To the beat of the drum they danced. They blew their eagle-bone whistles. Four days ago the sound had often been energetic, jubilant, defiant. Now it was faded, thin, forlorn. The dancers had taken neither food nor water for four days. Their only energy now came from the drum-throb itself. Curly could feel their weakness in his knees, their dizziness in his mind. The women sang stoutheart songs to keep the dancers going. He could see in their dances and feel by sympathy in their bodies what was happening to them: The heartbeat of the drum moved their legs and arms, its force kept their bodies upright, its spirit entered them, animated them, and became them. All of existence became the thump of the foot on Mother Earth and the beat of drum, which was the pulse, the rhythm of the blood, the body, the rivers, the earth.

Curly felt it primally. He felt it in the soles of feet, in his legs, his balls, his belly, heart, and brain. He wondered:
Is this the song of Inyan?Is this the song of Maka, Earth?
But it didn’t matter. He felt it.

Yet another pause came. Most of the dancers, all except those who had dreamed of
wakinyan
and wore hail spots, wiped off their paint and left the medicine lodge wrapped in blankets. Yellow Woman slipped up beside Curly and Hump. Her son, the one saved in the thunderstorm, toddled behind her. “This is the last dance,” she said softly. Only the lodge givers and the hail-painted dancers, those who had dreamed of
wakinyan
, were left. They were being painted one final time.

One of the men put four bundles of white sage on four sides of the sun pole, to the southeast and southwest, then the northeast and northwest. One by one the lodge givers led two hail-painted men in dancing from the bundles to the sun pole and back, waving their right arms as they advanced toward the pole, left arms as they retreated. As they danced, each lodge giver dropped his clothing and it was wrapped back around him.

Then the mentors of the lodge givers did similar dances.

Now the sun was just down. The throbbing of the drum spoke climax.

A command was shouted.

One of the mentors stood just east of the sun pole, hail dancers to his left and right. He held a peeled willow stick as tall as a man, with a scalp tied to the tip.

Driven by the drum they danced forward toward the east entrance. Then stopped and danced in place. Thump, thump, forward to the door again, and again in place. Thump, thump, once more forward and in place. The fourth time they charged out onto the prairie to the east, circled the lodge, and dashed back to the pole.

Out they charged three more times in different directions, the leader waving the willow stick like a lance, running back to the pole, bursting out again.

Just before full dark the voices fell silent and the drum ceased. Curly could still feel it from Earth herself.

The dancers sat on the ground in the lodge and washed their paint off. The ceremony was over.

“Come eat with us,” said Yellow Woman. She was remarried, to her older sister’s husband, Stick.