The Bones of Paradise

by Jonis Agee

  J.B. saw he was right, and wished he hadn’t turned down the earlier offer of whiskey. As far as he could tell, there were no weapons in the camp except for the guards’ Winchesters. He wondered where the young photographer was, where any photographer was when a fight could erupt at any moment. He saddled his horse as a precaution, pulled the rifle from the boot, confirmed it was loaded, and then checked the load in his revolver. He made sure he had extra ammunition in his saddlebags, took a handful of bullets and slid them into his buffalo coat pocket. He didn’t question his actions. He knew how quickly things could change. In the back of his mind he wondered exactly who he was going to shoot. Shortly after, as the bystanders watched from what seemed a safe distance, Colonel Forsyth and Major Whitside demanded the Indians hand over their weapons.

  The soldiers held their breath while the Indian leaders met and finally brought a handful of old, broken rifles and muskets to Forsyth and Whitside, dropped them on the ground before the two men, and refused to meet their eyes. Father Hansen drew a sharp breath and J.B. grabbed his arm to stop him from rushing into the confrontation. The officers indicated that the guards must hand over their rifles, too, and allow them to search the camp. A long, heated argument followed while four big Hotchkiss cannons were wheeled into place on the hillsides around the camp. J.B. looked at the soldiers lying or kneeling on the ground, guns at the ready, fingers on triggers, except when they took time to puke or gulp water to nurse their hangovers.

  When the dancing was set to begin, a man hit the group drum once, twice, and the men and women in their ghost shirts moved into a ragged circle, oblivious to the guns trained on them. Beside him, J.B. heard Father Hansen take a deep breath as he pointed at the Indian who chanted and raised his arms in the air. “Stosa Yanka, Sits Up Straight,” he said, “will signal the dance to begin.” The man bent, grabbed a handful of dirt, and threw it at the sky, offering the road for the return of the buffalo—

  Later the officers would testify that they thought the thrown dirt a signal to attack, despite the women and children in full view. And when a rifle was fired into the air by one of the Indians, the red-eyed, confused soldiers took it as their cue to begin.

  J.B. threw up his arms and started to yell stop but Father Hansen grabbed his arm and pulled him backward as returning bullets cut close in the din of gunfire, men shouting, and horses and women and children screaming. Several Indians ran to their tipis to retrieve hidden weapons while camp animals and people scattered, running in all directions for cover. J.B. and the priest crawled to the end of the soldiers’ line as the other white onlookers ran for their buggies and horses. J.B. did not draw a gun. He was afraid of what he might do, especially when he saw the men prepare to fire one of four big Hotchkiss guns on the rise nearby.

  “There’s no target,” he muttered, then shouted, “There’s no target!” as the gun roared, splashing through two women running away. After that, J.B. witnessed the sickening horror of superior weapons against an unarmed people, and the exhaustion of patience. The soldiers’ fear surfaced in a kind of violence he had only heard about from earlier days. Some of the Seventh Cavalry from Custer’s old command was part of the deployment, so there was a special vengeance at work, too. J.B. felt paralyzed to do more than witness as the soldiers rose from their positions to chase down stragglers, finish off children and crippled old people. It happened so quickly. Later he would learn that Big Foot, sick with pneumonia, was one of the fallen.

  A cry went up among the ranks that people were escaping at the ravine on the opposite side of the camp, and a group of soldiers took after them. At that point J.B. rose and followed. His head swam in the terrible sounds and sights of the massacre, hoping he could stop the horror, despite Father Hansen’s shout at him to stay. By the time he came to the ravine, the soldiers were already shooting down the fleeing women, children, and old people. A woman and child were felled by the same bullet as it passed through her back and took the top of the baby’s skull. The men cheered. Two young sisters holding hands with their younger brother between them met a shower of gunfire that produced red roses on their legs and arms, torsos and faces, and they fell still linked, as if made of pasteboard. The elderly were the easiest targets, and the soldiers were methodical in cutting them down. A hunched old woman, her gray braids long enough to sweep the ground, tried to hobble past by creeping along the edge of the ravine. A soldier kept his rifle trained on the back of her neck, as if hunting a wounded deer. Finally, he squeezed the trigger and watched with satisfaction as she fell. Her head was severed from her shoulders and rolled a foot beyond the body as if it still inched toward escape. Often two or three soldiers fired on the same person and the body would fall, spurting blood from a dozen wounds.

  The atmosphere was almost joyful, a kind of play at work as they took turns and pointed out the wounded who needed to be shot again until not even a foot twitched. J.B. looked at his hands and found he still held his pistol and rifle. He wanted to raise his weapons and kill every soldier in sight, but could not lift his arms, could only watch. As if in a dream, he saw two white men, not soldiers, chase a mother and young daughter. They passed out of sight where the ravine curved, narrowed and deepened. He hoped it was a trap for the white men, yet knew that it wasn’t. He heard the men hooting as if chasing coyotes for the kill. It was too late to save them. He was too late.

  When there were no more Indians to escape, the firing finally stopped, and there was only silence. The bodies in the ravine lay unmoving. The soldiers stepped back, and some collapsed and shook their heads as if to clear the terrible sight from their eyes. It was obvious now what they had done. They could embrace it, bury the corrosive memory to etch them like acid, killing them slowly, or they could shrink from it in horror and relive it for the rest of their lives as if the dead could rise like spirits looking for form.

  The gorge rose in J.B.’s throat and he swallowed hard. He felt someone beside him, and heard Father Hansen praying in Latin, the monotone of the chant so discordant J.B. had to walk away. He should have used his guns against the soldiers. He couldn’t use his guns against the soldiers. The snowy ground of the ravine was splotched pink and red and black with blood that looked like shadows of the fallen in the midwinter light of later photographs. Even as he made his way back to where his horses were tethered, the intermittent firing continued as soldiers chased people up to three miles to kill them. Though he tried not to look, he could not help himself.

  The relic hunters and soldiers searching for souvenirs were already stripping the bodies, holding up their trophies: moccasins, beaded belts, hair ornaments, necklaces, and ghost shirts, especially with bullet holes and blood, the irony doubling the value in their minds. A group of schoolboys, caught in the midst of a game, lay in a row like a sad picket fence. Bodies everywhere. Later the military would underestimate the number by at least a hundred, a mistake made in part because the Indians retrieved as many of their wounded and dead as they could after nightfall. J.B.’s journey across the camp was a tortured winding path around the grotesque bodies twisted and contorted in every manner of agony with gaping wounds and sometimes worse: the top of a skull taken, the brain matter spilling and freezing pink and gray on the ground, the expression on the face peaceful, a hand resting on the chest as if the man were asleep. A woman with a missing lower jaw and her throat ripped open, her arms extending from her sides, eyes staring up as if she had fallen from the sky. A family whose mangled bodies seemed to exchange shards of bone and blood, faces shocked and outraged.

  J.B. thought he heard a small cry, and stopped and knelt beside a woman whose body rested higher than the others. He hesitated, then carefully rolled her off her back and found that the cradleboard strapped there held an infant. The child silently scrutinized his face as he cut the straps off the mother’s shoulders and lifted the board, then removed the baby and cradled it in his arms. A shadow rose behind him as he stood.

  “You want I should get rid of that?” A soldier held his rifle
so the butt was raised and ready to club the babe. His cartridge belt was hung with booty. He grinned, and J.B. could smell the liquor sweating from his skin.

  J.B. shook his head and brushed past the man, prepared to shoot him if needed. He pulled the deerskin wrap over the baby’s head and hurried on toward his horse without any idea what he was going to do. Several scavengers stopped work to stare after him, wondering what prize he’d managed to secure, wondering if it’d be worth it to follow him and take it.

  He was untying his horses when Father Hansen found him. “You don’t want that child,” the priest assured him. “I can take care of it. We have room. Don’t worry.”

  J.B. sighed, slid his rifle in the saddle boot, and drew his gun, pointed it at the priest, barely registering the other man’s blood-streaked face and hands, the black robe bearing deeper black splashes. There was a bullet crease along his jaw and a knife wound on the back of his hand that the priest ignored as he held out his arms. “You need to leave. Go back to your ranch, your son. There’s nothing here for you. I shouldn’t have asked you to come.” The priest looked around. “Nothing for anyone now.”

  Unable to mount his horse or move at all, J.B. stood and waited, heard the wind rustle the grass, the shouts of soldiers torn between their desire to kill the wounded enemy and their obligation to drag them back to the medics for care, and then the first wails of the survivors upon discovery of their dead. Finally his arms loosened, and Father Hansen took the baby, tucked it expertly on one shoulder as he gripped J.B.’s arm. “Go home. Forget this.”

  J.B. stared at his retreating back until the priest disappeared into the crowd of gathering Indians searching for their kin.

  He intended to ride straight through to the ranch, but snow and bitter cold forced him to stop in Rushville. He was able to find a bed in a large room crowded with twenty cots at the hotel despite the newspaper reporters and government officials and thrill seekers. When he went downstairs to the saloon crowded with soldiers and civilians, he stood at the end, head down over his whiskey glass, unable to avoid overhearing the noise of men celebrating their victory over a vanquished enemy.

  He was on the verge of leaving when a man pushed his way into the narrow space beside him and called for whiskey. Turning to J.B., he raised his brow and nodded toward his empty glass. J.B. shrugged. The barkeep poured their glasses full and both men drank them half down.

  “Percival Chance,” the man said. He was tall, thin, and handsome in a varnished eastern kind of style, despite the rugged condition of his clothing. He had a thin nose and an angular face with elegant planes, a high forehead with longish blond hair. J.B. imagined he was the kind of man women appreciated. He still had decent teeth.

  Chance raised his brow at him and J.B. remembered to introduce himself and thank him for the drink.

  The high atmosphere of the saloon fit Chance. As he drank, the color mounted in his cheeks and his eyes seemed charged with electricity as if they held a secret. J.B. wondered if a touch would ignite his own clothing.

  Finally Chance spoke. “That was something out there today, was it not?” His language and dialect was an unsettled mixture of sounds, as if he had lived in another country and forgotten how to speak his native tongue. Chance turned his back to the bar and leaned against it, propping his elbows and nodding toward the corner where the loudest group almost shouted in their efforts to out-tell each other’s tales.

  “That man in the middle there is my employer, Lord M. We were fortunate enough to take part in the skirmish with the red men today. He’s thrilled and I received a very large bonus—in addition to other benefits.” He pulled an eagle talon necklace from inside his shirt and worked it over his head. Laying it on the bar, he said, “An Indian has to earn this. Shows his prowess and bravery. I’ve always wanted one, though the talons are so sharp they dig into the skin. Indians are more disciplined to endure pain, I’ve found.” He smiled and rubbed the back of his hand, which was raked with long scratches. When he turned his head, J.B. could see three long marks on his neck as well. J.B. pushed away from the bar, suddenly sickened by his suspicions. Skirmish? He couldn’t dislodge the word now that he’d heard it.

  “Oh don’t go—” Chance straightened and lifted his glass in invitation.

  J.B. pushed his way through the crowd, unable to tolerate another second of the man’s company. When he met Chance ten years later, he still remembered his suspicions and regretted not beating the man to death right there in the saloon. For the rest of his life, J.B. was haunted by the execution of the Indians, and later the mass grave where soldiers dumped 146 bodies stripped of any possible relic or souvenir, half-naked and unwashed, their forms frozen in grotesque positions by the bitter cold, handled as if they were tainted firewood.

  Father Hansen had wanted a witness, but it made no difference. The true story was unthinkable, unheroic, so it was changed by the newspapers, the military, and the government. Afterward, J.B. lived on his Sand Hills land as if he rented it. He felt like he was waiting for a landlord to evict him, no matter what his father believed. And the worst part was that he had traded Cullen for a ranch that could never rightfully be his own. The events of his life felt like a spool of thread he kept trying to trace back and back, never to reach the end.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  Riding toward town, Cullen had just come from his father’s ranch, sent away by his grandfather, called a bastard for the thousandth time. He believed it as he watched his mother fawn over his younger brother, making too much of him as if he were still the favored babe in arms. He used to spy on his father and brother, though he said not a word to anyone, when the loneliness swept him to the black chasm and he had to find a way to crawl back. He’d followed them to Pine Ridge Reservation during the Ghost Dance that ended so badly. His grandfather was up there, too, meddling old man, trying to secure another government beef contract since it seemed war was likely. Later, he watched his father fall to pieces as the soldiers slaughtered the people. Cullen followed two men who chased a woman and a child into the ravine. What they did to the woman made him sick, but he was still a boy and couldn’t face the men. He almost froze to death waiting for them to leave the body, and then made his way back to the soldiers’ camp, desperate to kill someone for what they’d done. The girl disappeared, he hoped escaped. Later still he would dream about her, and give her new lives much better than the one she lived. Sometimes he even dreamed she was his sister. It had infuriated him, so much so he planned to stick a knife in General Colby after he paid fifty dollars for a Sioux baby to bring home to his wife like a souvenir. Instead Cullen got drunk with a couple of soldiers who found it great fun to watch him stagger around and vomit. He woke two days later alone in an abandoned tent. Then made his way back to the ranch with a splitting head, throwing up every few miles. He never told anyone what he’d seen.

  Now here he was again, unwanted by his mother and grandfather, hired hand and bastard to both. He wouldn’t be pushed out this time, though. He had a plan, and the thought made him smile as he nudged his horse into a ground-eating lope.

  “Cullen’s too old for toys,” Drum said the time his mother threw a party for his sixth birthday. The old man bent the silver flute over his knee, put his fist through the drum, and finally smashed the fiddle over the back of the kitchen chair. That set of music-playing instruments had been his favorite page in the wish book: the boys marching in a happy line filled all kinds of loneliness that dug itself a hole under his skin. There were picture books, too, and Drum pulled those apart between his ham-hock fists. Cullen thought his papa would explode, his face red as a frostbitten ear, but he stood by as Drum knew he would. Drum knew everything, Cullen realized that day. He hung the sky and cluttered the earth with cattle, and there wasn’t anything the boy could do about it. He believed that for the longest time. Hayward didn’t know anything, of course, except what Cullen told him—that his mother couldn’t stand him, that’s why she ran away. Came back with horses to bribe them. It wa
s easy to play with Hayward’s mind; he was still that little baby in his mama’s lap, watching while Drum dragged Cullen away.

  The time he was brought back he expected to feel the same, but Hayward was older, running around on his own two feet. Cullen stood and watched as his mother’s eyes followed Hayward’s every move, and his papa’s face was a book of happiness—and he understood how it was like he had died. And slowly, the Cullen who had been their fair-haired boy did die, he disappeared like a shadow that couldn’t be seen at noon, all that darkness driven inside a person, nothing splashed out, and that was him. He didn’t go back again until he was ten and by then it was too late. She was gone, and Hayward wandered around like a bucket calf, bellering for his mama, and Papa looked like an empty pail.

  When he turned thirteen he took off and stayed out at the line shack on the edge of the Lazy SK, some homesteader’s place that didn’t make a cent, on the banks of the Niobrara. When the old man found him, he gave him a good hiding, but it didn’t make a damn difference. Go ahead, Cullen grinned, wicked and hard as the old bastard by then. It was Stubs stopped him that time, and another cowboy who quit the next day. Don’t go on my account, Cullen told him. He ran away so often, it was like Drum’s house was the one he was visiting and the shack his real home, fixed up the way he wanted it. Books he gathered or stole from J.B., old magazines men left as they traveled through, new ones when he could sell something in town. Drum didn’t pay him more than his other hands, so there wasn’t much money for extras. He had a wall where he hung stuff: buffalo skull he’d found in a blowout; arrowheads; part of a Sioux legging, fringed and beaded, so old it crackled; fiddle without strings he found in the corner of the shack under a pile of rags; photographic picture of a family standing in front of their house—not a smile to be found among them except for the fool kid laughing it up behind them; pair of ladies’ white leather gloves, so soft he’d take them down just to hold them.