Stone Song (51 page)

He was also painted with the long story of his life of many winters. His face, arms, and trunk were yellow, showing that he was a member of the Kit Fox Society. His legs and feet were painted red, indicating that he had danced a sun dance. The red on his hands declared that he was in compliance with Lakota ceremonies, and so entitled to touch sacred objects. Horizontal lines of red on his yellow arms and chest showed the exact number of battles he had been in, six. Dabs and dots of red said that he had been cut by knife, arrow, and spear twelve times.

He wore many other small signs of his accomplishments, all of them clear to an initiate but a mystery to the whites, who neither understood nor cared.

His membership in the Kit Fox Society was also bespoken by the fox skin that dangled from his right hand. This society had been formed to aid the poor and helpless. One of a member’s models was the activity and cunning of the kit fox. The eagle feathers on the skin showed that he was a leader in the society and the red feathers that he was a leader in war.

Red Roach’s face also told a story. It was hardened and burned by sun and wind and deeply crevassed. His clear eyes spoke a long transit on the
earth, much living, much gladness, and much sorrow. On this day, as the last of the leaders of the old way surrendered, his eyes were springs, and their tears flowed down his ancient cheeks. From his mouth flowed a song, and its words spoke the time-honored pledge of the Kit Foxes:

“
I am a Fox
.

I am supposed to die
.

If there is anything difficult
,

if there is anything dangerous
,

that is mine to do
.”

Over and over he lifted this song to the sky. Though he no longer possessed much strength, he promised what he had to the people, today and forever.

Another warrior, much younger, was a wolf, and wore the four stripped feathers of his office. He had painted his upper face red to say that he was in compliance with Lakota custom. He had painted his trunk and arms yellow to show that he was ready to go to war. He sang for Crazy Horse an honoring song:

“
Tasunke Witko
,

He whose heart for greatness is known
.”

It was simple in words, heartfelt, tender, and gently eloquent in its melody. He sang it in a beautiful, high voice, repeatedly, from the first moment he could see Crazy Horse until the Strange Man was out of sight.

Several men recognized the end of an era here, and so sang their death songs. Blue Hawk sang an honoring song of the Strong Heart Society, a beautiful melody in a minor key with the feelings of a slow, sad march:

“
His Crazy Horse
,

Take courage
.

A short time you live
.”

Crazy Horse and his main leaders so passed down the lodge trail toward the fort and the field beyond where they would give up their possessions, and surrender to a future they could not see. Behind them rode nearly a thousand Oglala, first the older warriors, then the pony drags, alongside these the women and children and the aged, and behind them the herds, nearly two thousand horses. Like the ponies, the people were skinny and run-down, showing the effects of a hard winter. They needed
more of the food promised them by Clark, needed it immediately. They also needed the blankets, awls, hatchets, tobacco, and cloth. They were poor.

But this noon they were proud, too. They walked into the Red Cloud Agency through a corridor of song, of feelings given voice, of hearts lifted to the sky. In the many voices they heard honor, praise, lament, and acceptance. In every voice they heard the sense of the sacred, throbbing.

A group of officers, most of them young, stood outside Fort Robinson to watch the rebel leader give up. This was a great moment for the army. For a year and a half the soldiers had chased these people desperately and had gotten whipped too damn often. Then there was the one whipping so disgraceful you seldom mentioned Custer’s name.

They mostly just watched, these officers, with feelings even they hardly knew—rage, admiration, regret, celebration, doubt, savage satisfaction. They could not, dared not, speak their real emotions.

Sometimes one would make a sarcastic comment. There were several remarks about the goddamn devil music. Yet they were all mesmerized, entranced by the spectacle and the sound. They were beholding the ending of an age.

After the soldiers and police came the wild Indians. The officers coughed and sputtered and looked strangely at each other when they saw the leaders and the slight, insignificant-looking man at the head of all. They knew that somehow this man had raised in his people a spirit no one thought they had, not even themselves. Most of the officers just gawked, stupefied. The brightest marked Crazy Horse down as someone to study, someone to learn the true nature of leadership from.

The songs reached a new intensity as Crazy Horse passed in front of the fort. Every soldier’s eye was on him, every man held by his simplicity, the eloquence of his posture and his carriage. Just as the Strange Man drew even with them, one officer said out of the side of his mouth to another, “This is not a surrender. It’s a goddamn triumphal procession.”

Crazy Horse did not feel triumphant. He saw that people were curious about him and his fellow holdout leaders. He saw that some admired him. He knew others envied him. He noticed that the people used this occasion to celebrate the way the Lakota had lived for hundreds of winters. To celebrate it, and to say a tender and regretful good-bye to it. He shared those feelings. He knew that he personally and the brave men who rode beside him were merely the vessels of the feelings.

To be such a vessel seemed to him an honor, and it touched him.

Yet in his heart was muted, melancholy music. As he accepted this honor offered, he would have to accept the envy, jealousy, and rivalry that
would come his way tomorrow and every day from now on. That was the nature of being a chief. He was weary of it, deeply weary. It was past time to lay leadership down.

Many arrangements needed to be made. He might have to go to Washington to see The One They Use for Father. He needed to obtain an agency back in Powder River country for his people, so they could be away from the Red Cloud people and the Spotted Tail people and all the maneuvering and manipulating that came from being too close. Besides, they wanted to live in their own homeland. He needed to get back enough ponies to hunt, and some ammunition. Perhaps he had the power with the people and the soldiers to get these things done, and that would be the last.

Below those commitments, those awarenesses, pooled desolation in his heart. As he looked around at the agency Indians, dependent, destitute, spiritless, it was clearer than ever that an agency offered no life to him and no prospect for the return of Hawk. The people might be able to live here, he didn’t know. Hawk would never come to him here, and he would die. And until his death, live gutted of spirit.

He walked his pony and felt in its hooves the pulse of the drum, tapping the earth. Maybe that beat would help him against his melancholy. Soon he must go to the hills alone and listen for Hawk. He felt the meaning of the song Hawk would sing without words. He deliberately did not think of the high hills and the secret, lonely places, not yet. For now he had to sink into this cold bleakness, a body at the bottom of a lake. He hoped that, later, Hawk would lift him from the waters of desolation.

Lt. William Philo Clark of the Second Cavalry declined another cup of coffee with his hand. Crazy Horse poured himself one. The chief was very fond of coffee, the lieutenant had noticed, and with lots of sugar in it. Sometimes it was the small things that converted a barbarian to civilization, the lieutenant thought—something sweet to eat or the small luxuries women liked, like needles, soft cloth, or bright ribbon.

Tonight Clark had made Crazy Horse a gift of an army coffeepot, three pint tin cups, two filled with roasted coffee beans and one with sugar, and a tin coffeepot. He was at once pleased and ashamed of his gift. Pleased because it was politic, and they really did appreciate it. Ashamed because the coffee offered no nourishment, and the Crazy Horse people were half-starved.

He wasn’t responsible for their lack of food. Not him and not the army either. It was the damned agent and freighters and the whole Bureau of
Indian Affairs. They were slow, they were inefficient, and their contractors stole every time provisions changed hands. Or the goods got lost. Or the wrong things came. Recently Clark had supervised a distribution of rations of wool cloth in the middle of summer, pots for the meat the people didn’t have, rancid bacon, flour they wouldn’t eat, and two cows. This for a thousand people. And then he had to refuse the men permission to leave the agency to hunt.

It was a disgrace. As Crook had told him, the army might shoot the Indians, which was honorable, but it wouldn’t starve them to death, as the Bureau of Indian Affairs did, children and old folks first.

Still, Clark thought Crazy Horse knew the difference between his government’s ineptitude and his personal generosity. He’d nipped these items from the quartermaster’s store, and he couldn’t do much of that. Now he and Crazy Horse had told stories all evening, war stories, hunting stories, the kinds of tales men of action tell on the way to becoming friends. Crazy Horse had told how his people’s leaders had bargained away what the soldiers had won on the battlefield. Which was how every every soldier felt.

“Did I tell you about the first time my mother got coffee?” asked the chief in signs.

Clark gave his smile, tight on his face. “No.”

“It was before I was born—it’s one of my father’s favorite stories. The people went in to Fort Laramie when it was first built. We traded for many things, including Spanish beans and American beans.” Clark knew this meant pinto beans and coffee beans. “That’s how we discovered that the Spaniards are much smarter than the Americans. The Spanish beans cooked right up, and they tasted good. The American beans never did get soft enough to eat, no matter how much you cooked them.”

Clark laughed, really laughed.

Crazy Horse poured from the coffeepot, but it was empty. “It’s time to go,” said Clark. Crazy Horse didn’t demur. The lieutenant wondered whether he’d almost overstayed his welcome tonight. He rose, and said “
Ake wancinyankin ktelo
,” until I see you again. His command of Lakota was improving. He stood and offered his hand. After a hesitation, Crazy Horse shook it. Clark lifted the door flap and stepped out.

Yes, it had gone well. He was gaining this chief’s confidence, as he had gotten the confidence of Red Cloud. He looked up into the summer night with a feeling of satisfaction.

A hand grabbed him. Clark recognized Grouard’s sleeve before he struck. Then he gave the scout a look that would blanch blue out of the sky. Grouard dropped his arms and stepped back and began to stutter. Clark brushed by him, paying the beggar no mind.

This Grouard was a contemptible nothing, the son of a Mormon missionary
and some native woman, one of the innumerable whores of the innumerable islands of Polynesia. The Lakota called him Grabber—Sitting Bull himself had adopted the fellow as a gadabout teenager. But now the Indians despised him. He had led Colonel Reynolds to the hidden camp of Sahiyela and He Dog’s Oglala a year ago March, before the big fights on the Rosebud and the Little Bighorn. At a skirmish at Slim Buttes Grouard had been so afraid they’d get even for his betrayal that he hid at the rear. Now he was sure that a knife would come out of the blanket of a hostile at night and his miserable life would ooze into the dirt.

“Lieutenant,” rasped Grabber, “you must not come to this lodge alone.”

Clark turned and faced the man. Clark disliked him, if only for his uncouth features and his yellow, sick-looking skin. Had the bastard lurked in the darkness to tell him this? His job was to get familiar with these Indians and report to Crook exactly what was on their minds. He certainly wasn’t going to reject the friendship of one of his main targets. But did this lowlife know something?

Clark motioned the man to keep up with him and walked toward his picketed horse.

“He is dangerous, this Crazy Horse,” Grabber went on. “He broods. He plots. You must not go to his lodge without me to protect you.”

Clark almost laughed. Grouard was not protection, he was a magnet for trouble.

He looked at Grouard hard. “How do you know he’s plotting?”

Grouard shrugged. “He looks no one in the eye. His mind is always off somewhere.”

Clark stared the man down. Well, it wouldn’t hurt to be careful. Everyone on this agency distrusted everyone else. The biggest danger to white man or red was a knife in the back. He lifted his foot into the stirrup.

“Is it true that the government is considering making Crazy Horse the head of all the Lakota?”

Clark snapped his head back at Grouard now. He thought he saw a gleam in Grabber’s eye. Maybe the scout was cunning enough to see the games being played here. Well and good. “Good night, Grouard.”

“Good night, Lieutenant. Remember, you cannot be too careful.”

Clark touched his heels to his horse. Crazy Horse the head of all the Lakota? Where did that rumor come from? Not the army, not likely. It wouldn’t do to put Crazy Horse above Spotted Tail. And Clark himself had promised Red Cloud reinstatement if the old leader brought in Crazy Horse. This Red Cloud had done, or at least made it appear so. If Red Cloud wasn’t put back as chief, it would be Young Man-Whose-Enemies. Not Crazy Horse, either way.

So where did the rumor come from?

Clark shifted his weight in the saddle and smiled. From some of the Indians themselves. The longtime agency chiefs clearly resented the attention given their younger rival. Especially that old bastard Red Cloud. And for good reason—Clark found Crazy Horse a better man than any of them, modest, straightforward, courageous, sincerely concerned first for the welfare of his people. Yes, this rumor would make many Indians angry.