Quiet Until the Thaw

by Alexandra Fuller

  After all that, perhaps figuring nothing could kill him, Somebody took up bronco riding. Subsequently he courted death every Friday, Saturday, and most Wednesday nights at rodeos from California to Oklahoma. Like all those other men beating themselves senseless against the flanks of a flying bull, or a cat-shaped horse, Somebody was looking in vain for an external pain that would come close to matching the other, nameless internal pain.

  So far, broken ribs, smashed molars, a pulverized ear, a broken nose, a broken jaw, and crushed testicles manifested to Somebody as little more than a dull annoyance, a slight hindrance. When he was knocked completely unconscious for a week, came out of it, rode six seconds on a saddle bronc in Reno before smacking himself out again on the arena fence, Mina said: “It’s hard to tell why he doesn’t just shoot hisself and be done with it.”

  How to Make a(n Honest) Living on the Rez

  A man has to eat, but out of pity for a people who seemed just as hurt by their prosperity as they were by their poverty, and out of concern for his own spiritual hygiene, Rick Overlooking Horse decided never to lay so much as the tip of a single finger on the diseased currency of the White Man, not even in the form of his military pension or his disability allowance. Many of his Immediate Relations were incensed. “Ayeee,” one of them said. “Complete loss of the eye, code 6063. Do you know what that’s worth?”

  Another said, “It’s the only way we’re worth anything to them. Give ’em an eye. Give ’em an arm. Give ’em a leg. Heck, give ’em an eye, an arm, and a leg. A whole, healthy, working Indian ain’t worth the skin he’s in to the U.S. government.”

  Rick Overlooking Horse rigged up a greenhouse of windowpanes salvaged from an abandoned White Man’s farm on the Rez border and grew a crop of potatoes, beans, squash, and spinach. Then he dug up a section of the meadow that got the best of the morning sun, and he planted a crop of corn, a row of potatoes, and a patch of Wahupta.

  In four months he had his first half-pound harvest of the sacred weed. It was the perfect way for him to make a living. For a start, what’s to say? He handed people twisted buds from the healing plant and they handed him a bushel of corn, or a sack of salt, or a bag of coffee, or maybe they sang him a song or two, and no money need change hands.

  So in spite of what some of his Immediate Relations had predicted, Rick Overlooking Horse was never lonely on his land out there beyond Porcupine Butte. Not only were there enough men and women in need of herbal medicine to keep him abreast of the latest Rez gossip, but also the meadow around his teepee started to fill bit by bit with creatures that must have felt comforted by his presence. First ravens, rabbits, field mice, then a family of coyotes and an owl, and finally one summer morning an old buffalo bull wandered into view, as if he’d finally found the place he wished to retire.

  The old bull had a brand on his rump, but Rick Overlooking Horse didn’t put much credibility in human ownership of the sacred Tatanka, so he never bothered to find out from whose sacrilegious ranch the old bull had escaped. On cold nights the bull lay up against the teepee and Rick Overlooking Horse found he was comforted by the sound of the great creature chewing his cud, the rumble of his breathing.

  On hot days, the two of them lazed in the shade of the cottonwood trees, where a little ground spring coursed west. Rick Overlooking Horse dangled his feet in the little stream and watched dragonflies. The old bull scratched himself against the trees’ rough bark and cropped the sweet bluegrass that grew along the bank.

  Summer moved through the meadow as waves of color.

  The tender purples and yellows first.

  Locoweed, flax, bluebells, mustard.

  Then a wave of white and pink.

  Geraniums, chickweed, yarrow, and roses.

  And then, just before the hottest week of the summer, a riot of blooms, balms, and cures of all colors.

  Beard tongue, prickly pear, field mint, catnip, mullein, aster.

  The whisper of dandelion gone to seed.

  Rick Overlooking Horse Accidentally Becomes a Medicine Man, a Chief, an Elder

  Things got around, as things do on the Rez, that Rick Overlooking Horse was war-returned, and whatever he’d seen and done over there, it had fixed him up in an uncommon way, so now he was also a man of rare wisdom. And after that, people started to go to him with their wounded hearts and curdled souls. Drug addicts and alcoholics, newlyweds and spurned lovers, soldiers going to war and soldiers coming back.

  The Lakota Oglala don’t have words like chief, and elder, and medicine man the way the White Man does. And still the White Man can’t help himself, “Take me to your leader.” Perhaps it is beyond the imagination of the White Man that some people live together not in hierarchy but in stages, and circles, and cycles.

  Rick Overlooking Horse simply became. Everyone knows there is nothing more powerful or difficult. And that it is often necessary to have a guide out of all the noisy unbecoming we do between birth and death.

  Rick Overlooking Horse, thinking of nothing better, sent them with some Wahupta and water for as many days as they needed into the middle of the meadow. Sit on an empty stomach and an open mind in the full force of the weather and stare at nothing but prairie grass and an old bull buffalo long enough, and eventually you might see yourself in the old buffalo bull.

  Or in a blade of grass that feeds the old bull buffalo.

  Or in the thin skid of a cloud in the sky that will soon water the blade of grass that feeds the old buffalo bull.

  Buffalo, or Tatanka.

  Tatanka. Meaning, He Who Owns Us.

  Everyone is born knowing this: We cannot be unless we first belong. Soil is flesh in waiting; flesh is soil in waiting. We spend years forgetting this, and the return to that knowledge is always painful, never easy.

  Meditation, vision quest, hamblechya, childbirth, grief, prayer, proper and rigorous intoxication; they say there are many ways to the summit of the mountain. The people who exhaust themselves are the ones who run around the base of the mountain shrieking that theirs is the only real, proper way to the top.

  Although Rick Overlooking Horse didn’t see the point of saying any of this.

  Time will teach, he figured.

  World will teach.

  The Old Buffalo Bull, Again

  Seasons turned. Rain turned into mist, and mist turned into clouds of steel grey. The Thunder Beings shook the earth, tossed the cottonwood trees, and threw bolts of lightning to the ground. Then after two or three moons, temperatures plummeted, the little stream froze, the cottonwood trees let their leaves fall, and the clouds drifted landward in thin sheets and then piles of snow. A few moons after that, the snow receded and the little stream began to run again, and the leaves of the cottonwoods emerged, lime green and shiny.

  Then the cycle started over again.

  The third winter of their time together, the old buffalo grew gaunt. Rick Overlooking Horse procured a few bales of alfalfa but the old bull turned his head from the offer of the food that smelled too much like his long years of captivity, and Rick Overlooking Horse felt chastened by the implicit reprimand. After that, he let the creature find his own way home.

  The old bull lay in the meadow day after night after day with his back to the wind, his coat clotted with snow so that he looked more like a drift than anything alive. Finally, on the afternoon of the shortest day of that third winter, the great creature’s spirit surrendered.

  Rick Overlooking Horse wafted sage over the old bull’s body, skinned the beast, sprinkled the hide with salt and stretched it out on lodgepole saplings. Thereafter, he kept watch as the family of coyotes sang and yipped around the carcass of the old bull, and the ravens gurgled and tut-tutted, and a pair of bald eagles sawed south from the Bad River on the scent of carrion.

  The following thaw, Rick Overlooking Horse awoke one morning to find another old buffalo bull had wandered into the meadow. There was no
brand on this bull’s hide. “Hau kola,” Rick Overlooking Horse said. The buffalo lay next to the teepee at nights, and on hot summer days he scratched himself against the cottonwood trees by the creek and cropped the sweet grass. He allowed ravens and magpies to settle on his coat and to comb for parasites.

  And so it went.

  Seasons turned, and turned again.

  Rick Overlooking Horse and the Ugly Red Stud

  Once a year, so that he did not lose the habits of his fellow humans completely, Rick Overlooking Horse walked twenty miles cross-country into the town of Pine Ridge for the annual Lakota Indian Rodeo. It was at this rodeo on a hot Saturday afternoon in the already baking August of 1969 that Rick Overlooking Horse came into possession of the hardiest, and possibly the wisest, stud to commit seed to the brood mares of Turtle Island in seven generations.

  In those days the Lakota Indian Rodeo was an even wilder affair than it is now. Cowboys and Indians came from Wyoming, Nebraska, South Dakota, Arizona, Montana, Utah, and from Indian reservations across the West. Decent bucking stock was brought in from a contractor in Garfield County. Entry fees were steep, twenty dollars a shot, back then when a loaf of bread cost twenty-three cents, and it was winner take all. Bookies set up stands and trade was brisk. Mexicans from Nogales set up kiosks and sold enchiladas and tamales. Indians set up shelters under old tarpaulins and sold fry bread and stew.

  The undisputed champion bareback rider in a three-state area at that time was Rick Overlooking Horse’s uncle, Somebody. Although, at first glance, the horse Somebody drew wasn’t anything to put your money on. It was mostly blotchy red with white freckles on its haunches, a pink face, and four white hooves. It had a prominent nose and pale eyes that suggested cunning rather than intelligence. Its hind end looked chewed up and it sloped at the shoulder, like it had started life as something else, wilder than a horse, and changed its mind at the last minute.

  “Well that’s a nonstarter,” one of the Immediate Relations said. “You’d be better off riding a freaking wheelbarrow.”

  But when Somebody lowered himself on the Ugly Red Stud’s back, the muscles from the animal’s chest to its haunches contracted, and its neck swelled. “Yep,” Somebody said. “It goes.” He gripped the rigging. The horse battled the gates, stomping and kicking. Cowboys had to scramble out of the way. Somebody smiled. “Let’s dance,” he said.

  The chute was opened; Somebody brushed his spurs lightly up the Ugly Red Stud’s shoulders. The horse gathered itself from its haunches, and released up and up, twisting into the air a whole twelve feet before flipping nearly backward on a hot-touch landing. Somebody Overlooking Horse paddled the air with his toes, his left hand whipping above his head. The Ugly Red Stud pirouetted skyward again, and again. Somebody pressed all his weight into his ankles, turned his face to the sky, and laughed. Those close to him say they saw tears on his cheeks.

  Eight seconds of pure beauty. Even the Mexicans from Nogales who’d seen everything in Tijuana and Sonora agreed there’d never been a ride like it in their lifetimes; such an unexpected partnership. As if Somebody had finally met his soul’s partner in this strange, ugly, untried creature. The eight-second bell rang. The crowd cheered. A Lot of Relations started streaming to the bookies to collect their winnings.

  But the Ugly Red Stud and Somebody were still bucking around the arena. Then, seeing the pickup men come for him, the Ugly Red Stud stopped bucking, flattened himself, and bulleted out of the arena—which is to say, out of the circle of pickups and station wagons, and lawn chairs—in such a blur it took a while for the crowd to start laughing, and then gasping, at the sight of Somebody and the Ugly Red Stud making dust far out onto the prairie.

  The pickup men, experienced Indians all, plus one good Cowboy from Cheyenne, used up three sets of horses going out for them. Time after time after time they came back for fresh mounts, shaking their heads and sweating rivers. That Ugly Red Stud was still making for the Black Hills, they said, with Somebody riding along with a smile on his face like he’d been kissed by God.

  They said it looked like he’d stopped caring if he’d been at it eight seconds, eight hours, or half the week. They said he looked delirious with joy. So they gave up sending good horses after bad and came back without either man or beast.

  The rest of the rodeo went on. First the rest of bucking horses, then the calf roping, and then the bull riding. After that people began packing up their lawn chairs and quilts and picnics and going home. Even the concessionaire from Garfield, Nebraska, who had brought the bucking stock in the first place, was all loaded up, except for the Ugly Red Stud. He waited, and looked at his watch and waited some more. Finally, he spat and looked at the sky.

  “Tell you what,” he said to Rick Overlooking Horse, the only Indian left at the rodeo grounds. “Give me fifty bucks and if that horse ever comes back, he’s yours. And I don’t care what you do with him. You can break him, you can shoot him, or you can eat him. He’s an Injun horse anyway, roped him myself off a band south of here a couple seasons back.”

  Rick Overlooking Horse considered the man’s offer for a few silent minutes.

  “Okay, thirty,” the Cowboy conceded, spitting again. “Or what you got. I’ll take what you got.” He eyed the sky irritably. “This weather ain’t waiting for no one.”

  Rick Overlooking Horse removed a small bag of Wahupta from his shirt pocket and showed it to the Cowboy. The Cowboy looked over his shoulder, and then he dipped his nose in the bag. “Okay,” he said stuffing the bag into his jacket and hauling himself into his rig. “You got yourself a deal. And you have yourself a grand old Injun war reenactment of a time, you ever catch the son of a bitch.”

  The Cowboy laughed so hard he had to thump on his chest to restart his lungs. Rick Overlooking Horse chuckled too. That should have said something to the Cowboy, but by then his rig was all revved up, his beams were on bright, and he was burning rubber all the way home.

  Indian War Ponies

  Rick Overlooking Horse never did ride the Ugly Red Stud, didn’t even try, but in time he swapped several pounds of Wahupta for a few brood mares, hardy Indian ponies with good bones, independent minds, and vivid coloring. The subsequent colts were born able to make a living on marginal Rez soils; they showed up knowing all about wind and ice; they had unbeatable legs and unbreakable lungs. They’d ride into a hail of bullets, take flight off cliffs, or plunge into rapids for the right rider.

  It’s hard to explain how two nations so freshly acquainted—the Oglala Lakota Oyate and the horse—could have been such fast, easy, elegant companions. But it was as if tributary met tributary, blood flowed into blood. The Lakota and the horse met as sisters and brothers and together they were something more than either nation could produce on its own.

  So it was with Rick Overlooking Horse and the Ugly Red Stud. They saw each other, and an ancient contract was fulfilled. It was as if they were each able to see, in each other’s strengths and disfigurements, a fellow sufferer. By which I mean that since suffering is the only way to wisdom, they saw in one another a fellow soul of great sagacity. And they found in each other’s minds a place of tranquil solace.

  Pony Trading

  Cowboys from Wyoming with a thing about conquering the wind, polo players from California with a thing about speed, Scandinavians with a thing about Indians—they all found Rick Overlooking Horse’s herd the best place to acquire a mount of such stubborn stamina; it was well known that the only way to slow one down, let alone stop one, was to put a bullet between its ears while you were still up there on the saddle. They were that good.

  And the crazy, one-eyed, silent Indian would give them away.

  Literally give them away.

  For strips of cured leather, or fishing poles, or for nothing, you could get yourself a war pony with legs of steel and limitless lungs. Some of the Scandinavian women made it obvious they were prepared to pay for their horses in ki
nd, as it were, a body for a body. A few begged to be allowed to stay in the teepee forever, with the one-eyed, quiet Indian, but although Rick Overlooking Horse seemed quite happy to accommodate them under the old buffalo bull’s hide for a night or two, he had no intention of making a life of trouble for himself.

  Trouble

  Anyway, by the early 1970s on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, you didn’t have to make trouble for yourself. Trouble saved you the effort, and came looking for you. Indians fed up with the way things were broken, angered with the way their people’s souls had soured up from generations of abuse in those boarding schools, sick of seeing their reservations marinated in grief and trauma, joined up with other Indians.

  The effort was to repair the Indian way of life, restore Indian spirituality and culture.

  The intention was to hear the old ways again, to get clear of the scorching White wind that had come so devastatingly from the east, and from the south.

  Across the Rez, warrior societies formed.

  They called themselves the American Indian Movement.

  AIM, for short.

  There was anger and outrage and confusion. An Indian was shot in the back by her only son. It was all a terrible accident; he’d been firing over her head. But there he was with her blood on his hands, shouting loudly as if his angry denial could undo what had been done. That was the atmosphere all over the Rez those long, violent years in the late 1960s and early 1970s when anything felt possible, and everything seemed chaotic and urgent.

  You Choose What Son Comes Home