I felt vindicated, but this was short-lived. I had failed to appreciate fully how Waldner’s loosey-goosey management style fit in perfectly with my irresponsible approach to teaching. Waldner’s replacement was a tall, stern former marine with a crew cut named Phillip MacGyver, who did not like to be called Phil. During his first week at Little Wound, he stood at the front door in the mornings with a clipboard and a pocket watch, noting the exact time of arrival for each teacher. The Waldner party was definitely over. Looking back, it’s no surprise that MacGyver called me into his office on the last day of school to tell me my contract would not be renewed for the following year, that I was being fired for not following the curriculum. I halfheartedly fought back, wrote a letter to the school board, kicked up some dust, but knowing there really wasn’t much I could do to bring positive change to Little Wound School, I let it go.
I feel painfully sad parked here in front of my old house. Not for getting fired—getting fired by the BIA is for me a matter of civic pride, something I brag about to my grandkids; it’s the garden I feel sad about. During the long recovery time following hepatitis, my doctor said I could return to teaching but I needed to get plenty of moderate exercise, preferably outdoors, and gardening was ideal. There was a splendid spot for a large garden behind our house—plenty of sun, access to water, and if it was properly fenced in, the rabbits, gophers, coyotes, deer, horses, and many other varmints that ran free in Kyle wouldn’t be able to help themselves to my lettuce. So I hired Vernell and a couple of his friends to build the fence and drove to Rapid City to buy basic gardening tools. I started hoeing the ground in early May, worked in readily available horse manure, and started planting with cool-season crops: spinach, peas, lettuce, and radishes. Soon I was on to cabbage, broccoli, carrots, onions, turnips, and, by late spring, tomatoes, corn, and watermelon. After school and on weekends, I spent hundreds of hours in the garden, watering and excessively weeding. Having had no horticultural interests before, I was thrilled to discover that I really liked gardening. Gardening helped me regain my energy and not get too crazed when Principal MacGyver insisted I take down the Indian chief posters from my classroom wall. After I was fired, though, Linda was offered a teaching job at Crazy Horse High School in Wanblee, about fifty miles east of Kyle. We had to move. The garden was left untended.
ACT THREE
The Great Spirit made us, the Indians, and gave us this land we live in. He gave us the buffalo, the antelope, and the deer for food and clothing. We moved our hunting grounds from the Minnesota to the Platte and from the Mississippi to the great mountains. No one put bounds on us. We were free as the winds, and like the eagle, heard no man’s commands.
—CHIEF RED CLOUD, IN HIS FAREWELL ADDRESS TO THE LAKOTA PEOPLE, JULY 4, 1903
WHITE THUNDER RANCH
KEEPER OF THE SACRED ARROWS
I don’t know the name of the road to White Thunder Ranch; I just know it when I see it. Turn right near the end of town and drive past the odd, weirdly out of place geodesic dome put up by Vista workers when they weren’t busy smuggling weapons into Wounded Knee. Originally a meeting place, then a restaurant, then who knows what, it looks deserted, but many people are sitting outside as it is an unusually warm April day—they look up at me as I pass, but no one waves or seems that interested. More of the usual: junked-out old cars; dogs without collars; little girls playing in dirt yards; boys on bicycles, not horses; tall weeds; piles of trash; poverty; a movie theater … whoa … a movie theater! An awkward-looking corrugated metal building with double doors, no windows, and a marquee—two Indian characters with braids, one smiling, the other frowning, have replaced Thalia and Melpomene on a sign:
TONITE’S MOVIES
NOAH RIO2
FREE POPCORN!
Now I’m getting excited. I haven’t seen Vernell in six years. We’ve talked on the phone, exchanged texts and e-mails, but not seeing him for so long was dreadful. While it may seem silly, we’ve been “blood brothers” for forty-two years (he was fifteen, I was twenty-four)—a bond that cannot be broken. It came about unexpectedly; I don’t think it was meant to be serious, but then, over time, as we joked about it, it gained meaning. On a hot summer day in the Badlands, we were riding bareback on one frightfully powerful stallion Vernell called Thunder Hawk, Vernell in front and me precariously hanging on to him.
“Want to see how we defeated Custer?”
“Sure, why not?”
“AYYY, YA TAY HEY!”
Vernell willed Thunder Hawk to the top of a steep ravine and came to an abrupt stop on a tiny bit of flat land just inches before an impossibly steep drop into the abyss, then shouted out, “Custer had no chance!”
Following this display of Lakota horsemanship, Vernell asked me if I wanted to be his blood brother. Still in shock, I didn’t reply, just looked at him dumbfounded as he pulled a penknife out of his pocket, opened it, and stabbed a hole in the tip of my forefinger, then repeated the operation on himself. We intermingled our blood. Vernell claimed this was a traditional Lakota custom, but I think it was something he learned at Waldner’s Boy Scout camp.
“Now we are blood brothers.”
I don’t know when the little three-room house Vernell and Suzy live in became White Thunder Ranch (Wakinyantuwan Tiwahe), with its own Web site promoting horseback-riding lessons, trail rides across the reservation on “beautiful Watogla Lakota ponies,” and overnight accommodations in an authentic Lakota teepee, but I do remember the first time I stayed at the “ranch,” in 1980, sleeping on Vernell’s front room floor under his stunning painting of a male buffalo trudging through a blizzard, with only a thin blanket, my blue jeans rolled up to serve as a pillow. It was late fall, and even though I curled up in front of the little propane stove, it was terribly cold, and it didn’t help much that Vernell didn’t have hot water. At least there was an indoor toilet. Vernell was living alone while Suzy was in Chadron, Nebraska, studying at the local college to be an IT manager. At that time, White Thunder Ranch was more like a slum bachelor pad: kitchen cluttered with refuse-filled grocery bags, stacks of moldy dishes, half-eaten cans of Dinty Moore beef stew, dozens of empty Perrier bottles. There must have been cockroaches, but I didn’t see them, perhaps because it was too damn cold for cockroaches. (All that has changed now. White Thunder Ranch is a now a rustic but charming tourist destination.)
That first morning, Vernell got up before sunrise. I could hear him shuffling about in his bedroom and the bathroom, trying to be quiet so he wouldn’t wake me. I got up, went outside with him to feed the horses. Treading carefully so as not to slip on newly hardened ice, I could see our breath, and up ahead, near the barn, the breath of the horses patiently waiting for their morning hay. My hands were stiff and painfully frigid because I had forgotten to bring gloves. Oblivious to the cold, cheerful and alert, Vernell said he had been up since three a.m., reading The Cherokee Trail by Louis L’Amour.
“It’s all you fault, you know?”
“Why my fault?”
“‘Cause I was a dumb happy Indian, and you taught me to read.”
* * *
As I continue driving, it seems Vernell’s ranch is farther south of Kyle than I remember, but then I see a few people mingling on the built-on deck of a trailer house to my right on the far side of a small valley. I must be getting close—I have been here, sat on this very deck with Vernell and his friends, drunk coffee out of tin cups, and listened to them gossip about and tease one another, seamlessly switching back and forth from Lakota to English.
It must be time for Viva VW to slow down, as the view of the ranch from here is blocked by a steep, sage-covered ridge; here you have to keep a lookout for the sign, WHITE THUNDER, hand painted on a plywood board. Nailed on a post, it marks the turnoff to a gravel access road over this ridge and down a long, gentle hill into Vernell’s sprawling front yard. I worry that I might have already passed by and will end up wasting precious time before I give up and turn around, but at last, there it is! I turn, go u
p the ridge and over a cattle guard, and see the same little white house, the separate garage, the red barn, the corral, several horses, three horse trailers, four or five cars, a flatbed truck, a couple of pickups, a snowplow, a tractor, a backhoe, and hay wagons, plus a large metal building I don’t remember. As I pull up near the front door into an empty spot between vehicles, I wonder if Vernell is home or maybe out in one of his pastures, but before I open the car door, he comes bounding out the screen door and down the steps to greet me. He is wearing the same grease-stained black cowboy hat he’s had for twenty-five years, its sides turned up just right; a pink cowboy shirt hanging outside his blue jeans, the sleeves rolled up; and scuffed cowboy boots. He’s heavier than when I last saw him, with a few more wrinkles and a few less teeth but the same ironic grin, same distant black BB-pellet eyes. His ruddy face is weatherworn in that handsome way reserved for good-looking older men like Clint Eastwood and Harry Belafonte. Vernell has always been a prime male specimen, a ruggedly beautiful man, testimony I suppose to the superiority of Lakota DNA. He says something I don’t want to hear—“You’re older”—but everyone is getting older. Tail wagging, his dog, a pure white part-coyote, part–Australian shepherd named Cookie—alarmingly friendly for a rez dog—jumps up to lick my face. We go inside through the front porch, Vernell cautioning me not to fall through the hole in the floor that has always been here, and then through a second door to the living room of his little castle. Everything inside is clean and orderly, a sure sign Suzy must be around … and sure enough, she emerges from the kitchen. “Hi, David. Nice to see you after so many years.”
As much as I love Vernell, there was a time when I couldn’t understand how Suzy could be married to such a wild, untamed man who was happy taking his occasional cold showers outdoors, eating a can of beans for breakfast, another for lunch, and another for dinner—happy as long as he could raise horses and live the life that he calls “playing cowboys and Indians.” I sometimes wondered how she could take on all the household and child-rearing responsibilities, serve coffee but stay in the kitchen when Vernell’s friends dropped by. But Suzy has a PhD and she is not in the shadows as much as you might think. She shares the hard life with Vernell, cleaning and cooking for a big Indian man on the rez when she could be making good money in Denver. Suzy teaches online college classes, manages most of their tourist business, and behind the scenes has a much bigger voice in family decision-making than either lets on. She grew up here too and loves the rez.
I notice that while the White Thunder kitchen is still barely big enough to turn around in, it has been remodeled, the old tile floor replaced with polished white oak, matching cabinets, new furniture; “A present for Suzy,” Vernell says. Otherwise, the rest of the house is the same. Vernell’s dramatic painting of a buffalo charging head-on through a blizzard still hangs behind the cozy sofa covered with his grandmother’s star quilt—hundreds of diamond-shaped patches of fabric, in tones of blue and white, intricately fashioned into eight-point stars. The little propane stove I fondly remember is still in the corner, and the antler rack for hanging cowboy hats is still above the bedroom door. Vernell motions for me to sit on the sofa; he plops down in an old easy chair. Suzy hangs back in the kitchen; she’s boiling water for cowboy coffee.
Vernell wants to know about my family; not the family I live with now, but the first family he remembers: my ex-wife, Linda; my daughters, Mara and Buffy; Linda’s mother, Blanche; her sisters … where are they living, what’s new with them? He also asks about my brother, Roger, who lives in Alliance. Does he still work for the railroad, is he still building dragsters, does he still collect assault weapons? He moves on to my current family, remembers when Jackie was here for the Fourth of July powwow, remembers posing next to her for a photograph while holding up a rattlesnake he had just killed. What about my stepdaughter, Jazz, and my granddaughter? He even asks about our dogs, Charlie and T2. He sees all of us as part of his tiyospaye, one big extended family that includes Suzy; their son, Chris, and daughter, Ellen; his brothers, George and Anthony; his dad; his cousins; and if not his dog, most definitely his horses. If we were Lakota and living in the nineteenth century, our tepees would be clustered together along the Niobrara River. At night, we’d feast on newly killed buffalo, share the sweat lodge, and dance around the campfire until dawn.
Vernell called me when his mother died a few years ago—he was very sad; he could hardly talk and said he didn’t know what to do. I wanted to drop everything to be with him, but I was leaving the very next day for a conference in New York. He didn’t actually ask me to come, but I knew he wanted me to, and I still feel guilty because he was there for me during my times of sadness: my dad’s death from a protracted illness, and the unexpected tragic death of my son, Aaron, who was only twenty-six. Vernell and his son, Chris, then a teenager, came to both funerals—my dad’s in Alliance and my son’s in San Francisco. At each service, they burned sage, played traditional buffalo hand drums, and sang sweet-sad Lakota memorial songs. They were warmly received in San Francisco but met with suspicion in Alliance, where before the service, my brother took me aside to say, “I hope they aren’t going to do some mumbo jumbo.”
Don’t get the impression that Vernell is a saint. He’ll tell you he hasn’t had a drink in thirty years and that’s true, but there were a few rowdy years out of high school when he could have easily become just another drunkard on the path to nowhere. When Vernell first visited me in Albuquerque in 1978, we ended up in a downtown honky-tonk bar on a side street behind the KiMo Theatre. It was the kind of hidden-away place where urban natives like to drink because the cops don’t give a shit as long as whatever happens stays out of sight. I bought drinks for the house, we flirted with a gaggle of pretty Navajo girls, may have left with them, but I’m not sure or don’t want to remember what all happened—I just know that around sunrise, I somehow ended up in my bed, the room spinning and spinning, no way to make it stop. Sad to admit, Vernell and I also went drinking in Kyle. Good white teacher man and his prize student copping cheap wine from the local bootlegger, going drunk to the powwow just as Waldner would have imagined it; a blight on my character much worse than Vernell’s. I am embarrassed about these things, but when I mention them to Vernell, he only laughs and launches into a story. “One time I was with a couple friends driving through Scenic on our way to Rapid City. We didn’t have money for beer, so we stole the front tires of the man who runs the liquor store, took them inside, and traded them to him for a case of beer.”
“Vernell, that’s crazy. But I want to know about your dad—how is he and can I see him?”
“Oh, I don’t know. These days he spends most of his time sitting outside his house, waving to people as they drive by.”
“How old is he?”
He laughs. “Eighty-nine going on twenty-nine. We try to get him here for dinner, but it is painful for him to move around much.”
I bring up the subject of the missing Crazy Horse memorial sign. What happened? Who took it and why?
“I don’t know. Must have been a couple years ago. They took it for the aluminum. They also steal copper wires, rip out the plumbing at the schools, whatever they can sell or trade for drugs and alcohol.”
“But that monument was sacred; all they left is a couple steel poles. And now people are leaving litter all over the place.”
“No one cares.” Vernell shrugs.
“But your dad wrote such great poetry honoring Crazy Horse. Someone needs to raise the money to restore it for future generations.”
I can see that my passion moves Vernell, but he says, “What is gone, is gone … there’s nothing we can do.”
“Sad if I don’t see him this trip. Remember when I was here last, he drove over in his old Ford pickup truck. He sat in this room, talked for a good hour before he went outside and saddled up one of your horses and took off.”
Vernell smiles. “He’s more ornery the older he gets.”
While Vernell and I talk, I hear S
uzy shuffling around the kitchen, setting the table, filling water glasses, opening and closing the refrigerator door; the sound and smell of sizzling meat soon follows. The moment things quiet down, Vernell looks over at her, pushes back his chair, and slaps his hands on his knees as he stands up.
“Lucky dude. You’re in time for lunch! Sorry, we ran out of beans, but I can get you some Jack Daniel’s for your coffee.”
Vernell makes me laugh not because it is particularly funny, but because he has been making jokes about Jack Daniel’s since he stopped drinking. He has never fallen off the wagon, but whiskey is constantly on his mind.
We amble into the kitchen, sit at a small wood table. Suzy sits down too, and I’m happy to see this; I would feel uncomfortable if she were just serving us. Lunch is more coffee, hamburger patties, and cottage cheese mixed with chunks of canned pineapple. And considering the probability that this meat came from the Sioux Nation Shopping Center, I am not unhappy that it is well done. Well done and dry. Vernell and I solve this problem by drenching our burgers in Worcestershire sauce.
“Both the Europeans and the natives owe a lot to the Greco-Romans for inventing this fermented sauce,” I joke. “You know, if you eat enough of it, it will make you drunk.”
“Not like Jack Daniel’s.” Vernell smiles and rubs his belly. Bemused, Suzy eats her hamburger plain.
Wanting to include her in the conversation, I think of something to ask her. “You have a brother … what was his name? I don’t remember.”
Good Friday on the Rez Page 13
