The Bones of Paradise

by Jonis Agee

  It was early October, and she was sweeping the worn wood planks, listening to the code, writing it in her head and deciphering the words, more news about Sitting Bull, who was an old man with little influence except over his Hunkpapas. Kicking Bear visited him and now the Hunkpapas had joined the Ghost Dance. It seemed possible the army would kill Sitting Bull, and her heart was sick as she tried to think of a way to warn her mother, who still didn’t understand about the telegraph, or the newest invention, the telephone, which captured a person’s voice and sent it across the land. Rose wondered if the voice would sound the same when it returned from its journey. The whites created tendrils like bindweed that trapped their lives together. She had to do something.

  At dusk she watched for her people on their way to the dance and sent a message to her mother, who never replied, which meant Rose was to remain in town. When her cousin finally brought word, Rose asked about Star. “She is young enough to be safe,” her cousin explained. “Your mother says, ‘Too many white men here now. You must not come back yet. I will tell you when it’s safe. When the buffalo return, when we are free.’” Rose never heard from her again.

  By late fall, the town had doubled and tripled with soldiers, men and women making money from the troops. Photographers from Chadron and Omaha and news reporters from Chicago and New York rode the train to Rushville and came to the telegraph office daily to send their stories home. Much of what they wrote was wrong or made up or both, but there was often a seed of truth Rose could find if she looked carefully enough. Big Foot grew lungsick and Buffalo Bill Cody visited Sitting Bull in late November to convince his old friend to cooperate with the white men and come to the Indian agency to be arrested, but the visit ended with Cody giving up in disgust. The old leader was finally killed during his arrest in the middle of December. More troops poured out of the trains. The stories grew wilder. Rose didn’t dare walk outside during the day for fear of being pushed, cursed, spit on. At night the danger was drunken white men seeking a fight, even if it meant an Indian woman.

  She realized from the telegrams and the increasing troops that her people’s world had changed too fast, too hard, to make a return. Crockett would send a telegram to Washington, D.C., one day, and mere days later, more trains arrived, hissing and clanging, to disgorge soldiers and guns and horses and provisions. Her people had a few rifles and old muskets, though the army tried to take them, but they had nothing like the big Hotchkiss guns that could kill so many so easily. Her people had little ammunition, too; they couldn’t afford to shoot randomly on the chance that a bullet would strike home, no matter how much they prayed. She could see the end before it began. Again and again, she tried to send messages to her mother, begged her to flee.

  Rose couldn’t bear to think of those last days in December. The troops chased the dancers to Wounded Knee, surrounded them, and when the signal to dance was given, opened fire with rifles and cannons. Afterward the troops patrolled the reservation, preventing a flood of people in search of loved ones, so she waited and heard Star was safe with relatives, but her mother was dead. Later, when she met her sister again, she learned their mother’s fate and began to plan her revenge.

  The troops left as quickly and smoothly as they’d arrived. By February, Rushville was quiet and the telegraph man drank harder and fumbled through her clothing for stolen items more often. She took to wearing her skinning knife under her blouse and stole a gun from a cowboy passed out in the alley behind the saloon. The gun she wore snug against her chest on a string around her body, spinning away from Crockett before he could find it. As game flees before the hunter who has not prayed and spoken to the animal spirits, men began to avoid her. She could walk day and night across town and no one dared meet her eye. Since she’d found the pistol on the cowboy in the alley, Rose had taken to waiting in the dark outside the saloon. Sometimes she searched and stripped the unconscious men, sometimes she helped them asleep. She chose only what she needed or fancied, and would make a tiny cut on their hand or neck to count coup. Without a coup stick, she amended the ceremony to the use of her skinning knife and drawing a single drop of blood. Upon waking, the man would guess he had scratched himself when he fell. Rose thought of the old warriors feasting on the liver and heart of a downed enemy to gain his power, but she could not bring herself to even taste the blood. She learned enough from the telegraph to know the enemy was everywhere, the people vanquished.

  There was a white woman who came every week to send a telegram that fall and into the winter. By spring she sent a telegram only every two weeks, then once a month. Her name was Dulcinea Bennett, and while Crockett was full of courtesy when he took the message, afterward he would laugh at the garbled words he was too stupid to translate. Rose knew they were code, such a simple one it took her only a few nights to break it. The messages, so full of longing, made her miss her own mother and sister. Soon Rose made a practice of remaining in the room when Dulcinea visited. Pretending to sweep or dust or wash windows, she watched the white woman, and, as if she could feel the eyes on her, Dulcinea began to nod and smile at her when she came and went. Once the white woman dropped a coin and it rolled behind the potbellied stove they used for heat, and Rose used her broom to edge it out and picked it up. Dulcinea gave her a surprised, grateful smile and thanked her when Rose held it out to her. Forgetting Crockett, Rose smiled, too, her eyes catching the other woman’s in a quick exchange of understanding despite their differences.

  “Back to work!” Crockett yelled with a wave of his hand. “She’s mute,” he explained. Dulcinea lowered her head to hide her smile as she placed the coin on the counter as payment for her message.

  As she left, the white woman placed her hand on Rose’s shoulder and thanked her again. “It’s nothing,” Rose murmured with an eye on Crockett, who headed to the back room and his whiskey.

  Then one evening in late winter, Dulcinea invited her to tea. Rose followed the woman to the back stairs over the notions store, where there were several rooms to let. Inside the tiny room was a single bed, a battered wardrobe, a small pine washstand with a chipped white pitcher of water, and a table with two chairs. The white woman turned up the lamp on the table and went about pouring tea. It must have been some time since she had spoken to another because she began to talk about her life and continued until dawn, even weeping once over her sons. They continued to meet, and their unlikely friendship bloomed as they walked quietly through the hills, catching the scent of new grass and wildflowers. They didn’t speak a great deal after that initial conversation, merely spent time together.

  One evening in late April, the telegrapher finished his meal of eggs, fried potatoes, and bacon and sat at the table with a whiskey bottle and glass, drinking more than usual. After a while he grew talkative. He didn’t expect Rose to respond since in his mind she was mute and stupid. Finally, he spoke of last winter and Wounded Knee.

  “Needed to clean them out,” he said. “Look at you—” He took a drink. “Inbreeding. No morals to speak of. Can’t be taught.” He finished his glass. “Best Indian I ever knew. Can’t talk and not too lazy. I’ll keep it!” He whooped with laughter and slapped the table with both hands. He gazed at her, and there was a shift in his eyes. Despite her efforts to stay ugly, dirty, to keep temptation from his mind, he took out a small tortoiseshell comb and cleaned the food from his mustache as he did nightly, winked at her, and demanded to know what she was stealing.

  Then he swiftly wrapped his arms around her so tightly she could barely breathe and pushed her backward onto the bed, landing on top of her. She couldn’t reach her knife or gun while his hands groped and his body pushed the air from her lungs. He had to roll off to unfasten his pants and she was able to slip on top, grab the pillow, and press it over his face, leaning with her entire weight. Much of his fight had been spent getting her on the bed, and his limbs were heavy with drink. She fought off his clawing hands and bucking torso by hooking her feet and hands to the sides of the bed. When the scratching sound
of his breath beneath the pillow quit, and his body shuddered, and then softened again, she lifted it. She had meant to put him to sleep, but was angry and now his hands lay carelessly at his sides, a shred of meat nested in his mustache.

  She left him there and went to the front office, determined to find anything that would offer clues or names of the men who’d killed her mother and massacred her people. She found Bennett files listed by individuals and ranches. Drum Bennett wrote short, blunt orders for land and cattle deals, which made him richer over the years, but J. B. Bennett’s were coded like Dulcinea’s. Some she sent to him from Rushville, but others came from Gordon, Chadron, Cody, Valentine, Ainsworth, towns that sat above the Sand Hills. Hers was a restless spirit, Rose had already concluded, and she did not bother to decipher the code. She did wonder why they thought it necessary to hide their messages. And why Crockett kept them. She never found a message to or from a Lakota.

  In the bottom drawer, tucked behind the other files, and without a name, she found the pictures. Photographs and newspaper drawings from before and after the massacre, some dated back ten years. A picture of Rose with the other children at the school. She stared at the photo from the Ghost Dance village for a long time until she began to hear their voices chanting, her mother’s, see the dogs circling, whining, tails down, looking for food when there was little to eat, the picture said, yet the people built fires and cooked big kettles of stew from commodity meat, wild rabbits and birds, roots and vegetables to keep the dancers going. She rubbed her thumb across the image of the bodies frozen in a ravine, arms reaching out, legs still running in the mass grave. Photos of soldiers lying with guns at the ready and onlookers behind them. She pounded that picture with her fist. Didn’t they realize, didn’t they know what would happen? The priests told the dancers to go home. Jesus is coming! The Savior is coming, the dancers insisted while the soldiers cleaned and loaded their guns, and the cannons were rolled to the top of the ridge for a better field of fire on children playing games, dancers, old and crippled ones watching. So few escaped. She searched the images for her mother and sister but didn’t find them. Finally she tucked the photographs and drawings into the large envelope with the newspaper clippings, stood, took one last look around, and poured lamp oil on the floor. She touched a burning candle to the oil and it smoldered so long she wondered if there was some white witchcraft at work, but when she opened the door, the fire swooshed alive.

  When they found Crockett’s body, the sheriff said it was a mishap caused by too much drink, and no one remembered the stupid mute Indian girl who used to work for him.

  Rose went to Dulcinea that night and the two of them rode up to Pine Ridge Reservation for the first time since the massacre the winter before.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  J.B. was always on his way to Dulcinea. First, that fine April afternoon in 1880, as he walked along the Lake Michigan shore in Chicago, marveling at the water that extended past the horizon, flat instead of hilly like home. Although he would never see the ocean, he decided it must be like this, no way for the eye to comprehend the vastness before it. He half expected to see steamships bound for Europe and the Far East, and was momentarily confused by the freighter that appeared to crawl sluggishly along the line where water met sky. Then he saw a young woman, half dragged by a pair of small white curly-haired dogs who leapt and ran, straining to swim at the water’s edge, jumping on passersby and snapping at the toy balls she threw ahead of them.

  He admired her grace and beauty, but most of all her patience handling the dogs. She was unafraid of appearing relaxed and awkward when they tangled her in their leashes or muddied her long skirt with their paws. When the fatter of the two managed to slip off his collar and wade in fearlessly, the waves up to his ears, she threw back her head and laughed, then followed to retrieve him and give the other dog a good soaking, too. J.B. looked up and down the beach. She was the only woman in the water. It was too cool for swimming. He’d been warned the lake stayed cold until midsummer, but she didn’t seem to mind. The dark line of the water wet her gray dress past the long bodice to her small waist. It must have weighed on her, yet she still moved with grace. Once she’d secured the collar around the dog, he bounded out of the water, bouncing up and down with his paws waving in the air as J.B. approached.

  Fortunately, the little rascal slipped out of his collar again and headed straight into J.B.’s arms, licking his face as if they were old friends. J.B. never forgot that dog, and felt as brokenhearted as Dulcinea when he finally passed.

  “My dogs won’t bite,” she called with a smile.

  “Might get licked to death.” He laughed and stood with the dog in his arms.

  “You’re getting wet,” she said, her own long gray sleeves dripping.

  “J. B. Bennett,” he said. “Nebraska Sand Hills. Cattle. That’s what I grow, I mean raise, cattle.” Stop, he warned himself, hush now. He grinned foolishly.

  “Dulcinea Woodstone,” she said with a tilt of her head as if to get a better view of him. “Three blocks away. Play with dogs, read books, attend boring parties, theatrical and musical performances. What are the Sand Hills?” It was her humor that capped it for him.

  They saw each other every day after that, as long as possible until her parents began to worry, then he’d gone home for a month, only to return and ask for her hand in marriage. She’d been waiting, packed, her trousseau consisting not of dresses and furs, but of specially ordered ranch clothing as she called it. The only outfitting he had to do in Omaha when they stopped on the train out to North Platte was to buy her a pair of cowboy boots and a real cowboy hat. He didn’t care if she wore a coronation crown and a ball gown, but she insisted that she be ready for her part in their western adventure. Years later he wondered how their life had changed so easily, from this to that, and from that to this: He’d spent the last ten years tracking her to some rooming house or hotel in a town above or below the hills, or a few times to a tent she pitched far from their house. He never knew when she’d summon him for another argument, never knew if he could leave work to meet her. Last time, she told him he must bring both their sons if he expected them to be together again. He’d held off as long as he could, intending to wait until after branding and culling, then woke and decided today was the day he’d ride to his father’s ranch and retrieve their eldest son. It was Drum who’d taught him to always do the hardest work first thing in the morning.

  On the last morning of his life, J.B. rode out to retrieve his son from his father, deep in memory. He remembered that Dulcinea had waited until after breakfast that final May morning ten years ago, when the hands had ridden out to collect the cattle for spring branding. It was a day like today. As soon as the last hand mumbled thanks for the breakfast and with hat clutched against chest backed his way through the door and carefully closed it, she stood and walked with a determined step, shoulders back, chin high, and stopped in front of the big Union Pacific calendar he kept on the wall above the baker’s table and pie safe, despite her objections. He liked the western themes. This month a lone cowboy rode hell-bent for leather across the sagebrush after a wild-eyed longhorn. J.B. never tired of that picture, even though it was already mid-May and he’d faced it every morning and evening. Later he would wonder that he never thought to ask why she’d written a small x in each day for the past two weeks. On May 15, she drew a slash across the whole box rather than the small, discreet x. He’d always been a little slow on the uptake, Drum assured him later that day when he rode in for the cow sorting since both their herds ran together each winter. After Dulcinea left, he spent money he didn’t have to build a fence between his land and Drum’s, but the cattle still broke through on occasion. Too little too late.

  “Looks like she was wishing it was your throat she slashed rather than that little ole paper. What did you do to that girl, J.B.?” Drum’s mouth had widened into a grin when he’d heard. J.B. remembered her preoccupied air, how she ignored Hayward as he tried to lift another ladle
of syrup onto his pancakes, succeeding in dribbling it across the table and dropping the large wooden spoon on the floor without any of it landing on his plate. The child had looked fearfully at his mother, his lower lip quivering, and J.B. had picked up the spoon and wiped down the table without a word. Dulcinea stood watching them, a thoughtful expression on her face, arms folded, then she turned and walked swiftly to the stairs, lifting her skirt as she hurried up almost soundlessly. J.B. thought he’d seen tears in her eyes.

  She came down wearing a long ivory linen duster over one of the two traveling dresses she had brought with her all those years earlier.

  He slammed down his coffee cup, pushed the chair away so hard it fell backward to the floor, and strode across the room to grab her arm.

  “What is this?” He knew it was the wrong tone, the wrong words, because her eyes flared then flattened and her mouth settled into a grim line. He dropped his hand.

  Hayward began his peculiar sobbing-hiccupping that was much too babyish for a five-year-old boy, his father would later assure him.

  “Go outside, son,” J.B. told him, but he sat quietly, stubbornly at the table, kicking the legs of his chair and scowling at his mother.

  Dulcinea took a deep breath, squared her shoulders, swiped at the corner of her eye with the edge of her gloved hand, and peered around J.B. “Come here, Hayward, come to Mama.”

  The boy picked up his fork then purposely dropped it on the plate to produce the clanging sound the adults hated, but which he seemed to understand he would not be reprimanded for in this moment of crisis. Satisfied, he ran his forefinger once more through the syrup and melted butter smeared on his plate. She had made his favorite breakfast—donkey pancakes, including the bacon pack-saddle that he’d gobbled first.

  “Son,” J.B. said.

  “Leave him alone.” She adjusted the black-plumed hat on her head, draping the veil across her forehead so it could be pulled down and tied in back.