The Sundown Man

by Jory Sherman

  That night, each of the men spoke of his brave deeds that day. They acted them out around the fire so that each action was vivid and stark and clear by their movements.

  They all waited for me to stand up and recount what I had done. My face felt hot and I knew that I must be blushing. They teased me and called me a little girl. They called me a dumb white man. All of them were goading me to tell my story of blood and death.

  “You talk,” One Dog said.

  I thought about what had happened that day. I could see the Ute rise up and take aim with his bow.

  I spoke and told them what I saw.

  Then I danced what had happened, forgetting where I was. I relived the fight, and the same emotions I had felt when I had killed the Ute came back to me. I became lost in the story, in the acting, the dancing. I pounced on the imaginary Ota and fought with his shade and plunged my knife into thin air, empty space.

  I stopped and hung my head like an actor on stage about to take a bow in front of the curtain.

  The Arapaho cheered me in their fashion and I sat down, strangely elated and satisfied in both body and spirit.

  I looked around at all the men and at One Dog, their faces lit by firelight. That’s when I knew what had happened to me without my even knowing it. These men had become like my own people. We were friends. I was one of them.

  At that moment, I had become an Arapaho brave, bonded to them in blood and spirit.

  Eleven

  After a few days, it became clear that we were heading north. This was crushing news to me, since the wagon that had taken Kate had been heading south. When we came to the place where the women and children had gone, there was a jubilant reunion, and many of the young girls my own age began to regard me with more than passing interest. But I was thinking only of Kate, and now that I had a pony, my plans for escape became even more feasible.

  One of the other young braves had died on our journey back. I hadn’t realized that he was even wounded. His name was Mouse Whiskers. He carried an Ota arrowhead in his chest.

  The arrow had gone in through his armpit, and he had broken off the shaft and told no one of the injury until the second day out, when we all stopped so that Mouse could sing his death song.

  Mouse Whisker’s body too was left to rot on a scaffold, and we rode on, ever northward.

  “Why do you leave Lizard where we killed the Ota?” I asked One Dog, after leaving behind the dead body of Mouse Whiskers. “The other Ota will know who killed their men. They will hunt us and try to kill us.”

  “The Ota will know. If Little Blue Lizard does not tell them, our tracks will tell them.”

  “You want the Ota to know?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  It seemed to me a strange way to live. Even though the Arapaho had exacted revenge on the marauding Ota who had first attacked them, it seemed to me it would have been wiser to have erased our tracks and let the Ota who discovered the bodies or skeletons of their brethren wonder who had killed them.

  “Do you want war with the Ota?” I asked.

  “The Ota is the enemy of the people. They steal from us. We steal from them. It has always been this way with the people.”

  The women of the Arapaho band fell upon the riches One Dog had brought back with him. Besides tobacco, salt, some flour, and beans, there were brightly colored beads of various sizes and shapes, and cloth, thread, needles with which to sew. Their delighted chatter floated to my ears, and I began to look at the faces of the women and the children. I had never really paid much attention to them before, blindly hating all of them for being associated with the murderers of my parents.

  There was one woman who seemed to be the matriarch of the clan. All of the others deferred to her and asked her questions, always listening intently to her answers. Her name was Hisei Hiisiis, Sun Woman. Her eyes were as black as agates, and the wrinkles on her face were like the fine brushstrokes of an artist, deep furrows that seemed to tell a tale of her life and travails. Her face was round and small, the eyes deep-set, bordered by high smooth cheek-bones that were tinged with rouge, or vermilion. She had bad teeth and smoked a small clay pipe, giving her the look of a wise old philosopher.

  The other women had similar faces, faces that seemed to tell the stories of their hard lives, but that was only my own perception and interpretation. The women, as the children, all seemed happy. Some of the women were pregnant, their bellies swollen beneath their deerskin and elk-skin garments, their faces glowing with the life of the child growing within them.

  All of us hunted and brought back deer and elk that the women skinned and cut up for meat. We had brought back cooking pots and utensils that the Ota had once owned. It was clear to me that they had traded with the white men in the wagon for more than rifles, because the trifles, beads and cloth and thread, all seemed new. The women tanned the hides and were busy all the time, sewing beads on moccasins and dresses, leggings and shirts, washing, cooking, scraping hides that added to their riches.

  A brave named Nech Nihaayaa’, Yellow Water, befriended me one day after we had been out hunting and came back to camp empty-handed. The children were playing with sticks and rocks. The women were sitting in the shade, sewing moccasins and such. Yellow Water had some dried deerskins that had been rolled up, some little pots and things.

  “Come,” he said. “We make talk.”

  We walked over to the creek, where he laid out one of the skins and sat down. He began to place the little pots in a row next to the irregularly shaped, very thin, and soft skin. The other skins he left rolled up and out of his way. Each little clay bowl had a substance in it. He pulled some sticks from inside his shirt. Tufts of hair had been glued or tied to the sticks. He mixed some sprinkles of creek water in the pots, stirred each one with the end of a different stick.

  “You look, White Man,” he said. “You see what Yellow Water makes.”

  He began to draw outlines of animals and men on the supple surface of the skin. He made these little stick figures with black dye or some kind of ink. He gave them bows and arrows, and rifles. He put them on horses and on foot. He did two rows of these on the top, and then painted some symbols that made no sense to me at the time. I watched him in fascination as he painted other figures in a fight with stick figures who were not on horses. He used red for blood and showed heads splitting open, arrows in chests. The tableau continued with depictions of scalping and mutilation.

  I realized that Yellow Water was painting the fight in the meadow with the Ota. He even showed me plunging a knife into one of the men. He drew a symbol over my head to show that I was different from the Arapaho. It looked like a little white eye.

  When he was finished, Yellow Water laid the painted skin in a patch of sunlight. He watched as I studied the drawing. It told the story, and it was interesting to me that its message dealt with men, with no attempt to depict where the fight took place. There were no landscape features whatsoever. It was all just flat and no sign of mountains or the meadow, the grass, the little creek that ran through it. It was odd, but my mind began filling in those spaces with descriptive words that I did not utter to Yellow Water. I supposed this came naturally to me since I read so much. I could still see that place so vividly in my mind and the painting gave me none of that feeling, as if the essence of the meadow had been omitted from the drawing. Yet, I had to admit, the stick figures did tell a grim and gruesome story.

  “Do your eyes tell you what I drew?” he asked.

  “Yes. It is the fight with the Ota.”

  He smiled.

  “One Dog asks if you can put the talking scratches on the skin of the deer.”

  “One Dog wishes me to write the white man words on the skin of a deer?”

  “He has spoken of this.”

  “Why? He does not read the scratchings of the white man’s words.”

  Yellow Water jabbed a finger toward his painting.

  “This I learned,” he said, “from the Lakota, who have many such skins in t
heir lodges. These pictures of the Lakota tell the stories of their people for many summers.”

  He spoke slowly, as if he wanted to make sure that I understood his words.

  “The Lakota call these the ‘winter count’ and they are good to see. They are good stories of their people.”

  “So, you would make the drawings for the people and One Dog wants the white man words.”

  “That is so.”

  I considered what Yellow Water had told me, and I admit I was fascinated by the idea. Ever since I had lost my books and my writing paper, my fingers had itched to write down all that I had seen and learned.

  Yellow Water pointed to the other rolled-up deerskins. He picked one up and handed it to me. I unrolled it and studied it. The leather was very soft and pliant. I had seen what Yellow Water had done with the brushes. Perhaps, I thought, I could modify them to make the hair thinner and actually write down letters of the alphabet, form words that would become sentences and paragraphs.

  “I will do this,” I said.

  “Good. I go now. You make the scratches on the skin.”

  Yellow Water arose from the ground and walked away.

  I picked up one of the brushes he had cleaned and studied how it was made. The hair looked to be from a mule deer. The strands were stiff until they were dipped in the dye or paint. If I could trim one of the brushes down and bring the strands to a point, I might be able to write with it, although I wished I had pencil and paper.

  I had no idea why One Dog wanted such a record. Unless he planned to give them to a white man one day, it made no sense. But I knew that the Arapaho loved to tell stories and to listen to them. And this was not only a challenge, but an opportunity to test my writing skills and, perhaps, to teach One Dog a few more English words.

  I took out my knife and began to trim the brush I held in my hand. I pared away the outer bristles and began to shape the brush so that it came to a point. I picked up the deerskin from my lap, then laid it flat on the ground. I made it as flat as I could and as stable as it could be on that piece of ground.

  Then I dipped the tip of the brush into the pot with the black dye.

  The writing would need a title, so I began with that at the top of the skin.

  I wrote the title in capital letters thusly:

  THE MEADOW FIGHT WITH THE OTA

  I didn’t know the Arapaho word for meadow, so I wiped out the title and wrote another one:

  THE FIGHT IN THE GRASS WITH THE OTA

  I realized that I was thinking in Arapaho as much as I was thinking in English. But I knew that I would have to read what I had written to One Dog.

  Suddenly, I got excited about writing an account of the battle.

  I would make it simple and clear. I would choose each word carefully from a small vocabulary that could be easily translated into the Arapaho tongue. Images began to form in my mind. And I had Yellow Water’s drawing to look at for not only my inspiration, but for the flow of the story. I would embellish it, of course, and make One Dog the main character, the hero.

  I thought of the words I would put down and when I had enough courage, I began to write, slowly and carefully forming each letter. Time lost its grip on me as I entered another world, the world of imagination and creativity. I drew my inspiration from the pictures in my mind and from Yellow Water’s skimpy stick figures.

  In my mind, I wasn’t just writing a little story about a battle between two warring tribes. I was writing an epic, a smaller version of the Odyssey or the Iliad.

  I was creating a myth from my own time and experience perhaps, just as Homer had done many thousands of years ago.

  I began to write:

  I speak of a great man, One Dog, and the great men of the people. I speak of bows and arrows and rifles and the bad hearts of the Ota.

  I was writing in the English language, but I was telling the story the way Homer might have told it if he had been speaking in Arapaho to the Arapaho on a dark evening when the fire threw skulking shadows on the wall of a cave and the people sat around, listening intently to the immortal words written on the soft skin of a deer.

  Twelve

  My body became brown that summer and my hair grew long. If you had seen me with the Arapaho, you would have thought we were all of the same blood. When I saw my reflection in a lake one morning, I jumped back, thinking someone else was in the water, coming straight at me. No, not just someone else, a savage Indian whom I did not recognize.

  I knew that my birthday had passed, in June, but I didn’t know the day or date, since the Arapaho didn’t keep any calendar that I could understand. It didn’t seem to matter anyway. I had turned eighteen, grown an inch or two taller, and a young pretty girl named Blue Owl braided my hair. It took her some time, and the touch of her fingers on my bare shoulders not only soothed me, but conveyed some of the affection I had missed from my mother and my sister.

  I didn’t know how old Blue Owl was, but she told me how she got her name.

  “When my mother gave light to me,” she said, “the sun was unborn. The little owl called from a tree. My mother saw the owl. It was blue because the light in the sky was small. To my mother, the owl looked blue.”

  “It’s a pretty name,” I said.

  “I do not like your name.”

  “My name is Jared. Jare Edd.”

  She twisted my name in her mouth, but it was hard for her to pronounce.

  “The name One Dog gave you, I mean to say,” she said.

  “White Man.”

  “Yes. That name. It is an ugly name.”

  “My other name is Sundown.”

  She could pronounce that one.

  “What does Sundown mean?” she asked.

  “Before the sky eats the sun,” I told her, “it sits above the land. When it falls and you do not see it anymore, but it brings light to the clouds, that is sundown in our language.”

  “That is a pretty name,” she said. “I will call you Sundown.”

  The words she used in Arapaho were not an exact translation, but meant something like Sun Gone or “The sun has been eaten by the sky.” It was a mouthful to say and she laughed when I told her so, so she just shortened it to Sun and made a sign that showed it had sunk over the horizon.

  One Dog liked the story I wrote about the fight in the meadow. He liked being the hero of the story and bragged about it to anyone who would listen. Which gave me an idea.

  I knew that the Arapaho would soon leave to hunt buffalo again before they went to winter quarters on the prairie. The herds, they complained, were small and hard to find since the white eyes had shot most of them, left their bodies to rot in the sun. The Arapaho were bitter about the decimation of the great buffalo herds that had once thundered across the prairie like an endless river.

  I was going to escape, but I wanted to set matters straight before I left. And I hoped I would not have to kill One Dog or any of the other braves, some of whom I liked and found to be pretty good companions at times. But I needed to enlist the artist, Yellow Water, to help me with my project.

  Three of the women had given birth that summer, and one of them was the wife of Yellow Water, a woman named something like Bad Temper. She was aptly named, for she had a scathing, scolding tongue and was constantly berating her husband or ordering him about as if he were her personal slave. Yellow Water was quite docile under such tongue-lashings, but I knew he was not happy to be around her.

  “Yellow Water,” I said to him one day, “I would like you to make a painting for me. It is to be a gift for One Dog. Will you make this painting for me?”

  He was suspicious.

  “What do you wish me to paint?”

  “A story.”

  “What story? You do not know the story of the people.”

  “This is a story about my father and the two young boys who hunted the antelope and were killed by the long rifles.”

  “That is not a good story.”

  “It is a true story,” I told him.
r />   Yellow Water said that he would think about it, and he moped around for a couple of days while his wife chastised him for everything he had done or hadn’t done and should have done to make her happy.

  Finally, Yellow Water came to me with some tanned deer hides, his paint bowls, and brushes and said that we would go to the creek.

  “If I do not like the story you wish me to paint, I will beat you up,” he told me.

  “One Dog will like the story. You do not have to like it.”

  “If I paint it,” he said, “I will have to like the story. It must be a good story.”

  “It is a good story. It is a true story.”

  “So your mouth speaks, White Man.”

  We sat down and Yellow Water laid out a skin and dipped his brushes in water and then into the bowls.

  “Draw an antelope,” I told him.

  I had him draw the two boys, lying on their backs, their legs lifted like the blades of a scissors. He drew in the bows and arrows. Then I had him draw two white men with rifles. These were depicted as being on horseback.

  I asked Yellow Water to draw a scene showing the two white men taking the scalps of the two boys after they had shot them. Then, for a final panel, I had him draw a wagon showing the men putting the scalps inside the wagon. Beside the wagon, but looking the other way, I had him draw a white man and woman with two children, a boy and a girl. Over the boy’s head I told him to draw a white eye.

  “Why do you ask me to draw this eye?”

  “Because that is my sign,” I told him.

  “What do you say to me, White Man?”

  “I say that another man killed the two boys of your people and put the scalps inside the wagon of my father so that he would take the blame for the kill. My father did not kill the two young men of your people.”

  “Ah. So, this is why you have me draw this story?”

  “Yes. It is the truth.”

  “One Dog will not like this story.”