Heartsong

by James Welch

  He had been a child then, nine or ten winters, and his people were on the run but free. Now he was twenty-three and lost in a big white man’s town. For a moment or two he pitied himself, but the smell of the bread was making his guts rumble and he knew he would have to do something about it.

  Just a few days ago, he had been part of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show and he had had plenty of centimes in his new purse, enough to buy coffee and chocolate bread and ice cream, and on the sly, mni dha, the forbidden wine. When he and the others walked down a street in their blue wool leggings and fancy shirts and blankets, with their earrings and feathers and brass armbands, the French would stop and stare. Sometimes they would clap their hands and cheer, just like the audiences in the arenas. But the Oglalas would walk by as though they were alone in their own world. Only Featherman would smile and wave. He was never sick for home. More than once he said that if he found the right woman who would take care of him, he would stay. There was nothing left at home. The American bosses were making the ikce wicasa plant potatoes and corn. What kind of life was that for the people who ran the buffaloes?

  Now Featherman was dead. He had no woman but he got to stay here. And his nagi would never go home to be with the long-ago people. Charging Elk felt a sharp shiver go up his back and he knew he would have to stand up. As he contemplated his move, he wondered if he could find Featherman. In Paris, he and the others had toured a big stone field where the white men buried each other in the ground. If he could find Featherman’s stone, maybe he could perform a ceremony, just as he had seen the wicasa wakan do many times at the Stronghold, to release his friend’s spirit. The thought brightened him for an instant, until he remembered how many stones there were in such fields.

  Charging Elk steadied himself against the wall, rolling his shoulders and flexing his knees. He was too cold to feel the pain in his ribs. He had thought earlier, after his escape from the sickhouse, that he should undo the tight cloth around his abdomen, but he hadn’t, and now he was grateful for the skimpy layer. But the coat was good and heavy and he soon felt a little warmer. He pulled the lapels closer under his chin and looked at the yellow light coming from the open side door. The smell of the bread made him weak and he knew he would have to try for some or he might go hungry all day.

  Just as he took a step toward the door, he heard the clop-clop-clop of a horse’s hooves against the cobblestones of the street. He flattened himself against the wall and listened to the clop-clop-clop come closer. Then he saw the horse. It was pulling a wagon filled with something under a bulky covering. A man sat bundled up in the seat, holding the reins, a pipe between his teeth. As Charging Elk watched the wagon disappear beyond the alleyway, he smelled something sharp and unpleasant. It was a smell he recognized. The smell of the sea.

  But now he knew it was light enough for anyone coming by to see him, so he eased himself toward the door. He held his breath, alert and unafraid. He glanced quickly around the corner and he saw a woman bent over a table. She was rubbing some raw bread into a long shape. As he stood against the wall, he thought of what else he had seen. Two heavy black ovens in the wall, a sink, another table, three or four long baskets. Then he heard a voice, a man’s voice. The woman said something and the voice answered, then it was quiet. Charging Elk peeked around the corner again. And he focused on the baskets. There were three of them and they were filled with the longbread. He knew this bread. Sometimes he and his friends would eat at the big grub tent at the Buffalo Bill compound in the Bois de Boulogne and they would have this longbread. It was crackly and soft at the same time and it was good to dunk into their pejuta sapa in the morning.

  The woman was of middle age and small. Her sleeves were rolled up and her arms were strong and wiry. Her hair was tucked up under a white cap and she wore a white apron. She was standing sideways to the door and Charging Elk knew that she would see him right away if he tried to sneak behind her. He thought of just running in, and if necessary, throwing her aside and grabbing a longbread. But he knew he couldn’t run in, much less run away, and they would catch him and take him back to the sickhouse, or worse, the iron house, where they kept the bad ones.

  Just as Charging Elk thought of getting away from there, he heard the mans voice calling from another place. He heard the woman answer and she sounded annoyed. He peeked again and he saw the woman wiping her hands on her apron. Then she walked slump-shouldered and grumbling to the front of the store with its glass cases. Charging Elk wasted no time. He stepped up into the room and sneaked as quickly as he could to the baskets. He took two longbreads, tucked them into his coat, and left as quietly as he had come.

  The cobblestones of the narrow alley were damp and grimy as he hurried away in the direction opposite that which he had entered. It was dark in the lee of the tall buildings and he had to watch his step, but the bread felt warm against his chest. Any moment he thought he might hear some shouting and steps running after him. He couldn’t run and even now his ribs were aching with a sharpness that caused him to catch his breath in shallow gulps.

  Finally he reached the opposite end of the alley and he slipped into an alcove that had been a doorway but was now bricked up. He glanced back. There was no one there. He stood for a moment until he could breathe almost normally, then he slid down until he was squatting on his haunches. He didn’t want to sit because it took so long to get up.

  He reached into the coat and broke off a piece of longbread and chewed it greedily. It was warm and good and it reminded him of his mother’s bread. Doubles Back Woman had learned to bake bread in the iron stove in her little shack. When he and his good kola, Strikes Plenty, went to visit his parents, she would bake bread for them. They would eat bread with butter and honey and drink pejuta sapa. She always had a pot of black medicine on top of the stove and they would drink it out of tin cups with handles. Then she would fix some boiled meat, if they had meat, and turnips and potatoes. Even as his mouth was full of good bread, he longed for the boiled meat. He and Strikes Plenty could eat as much food as his mother put in front of them.

  Charging Elk now chewed less greedily and more thoughtfully as he remembered the day Buffalo Bill’s scouts came to Pine Ridge to select the young Oglalas who would go away and tour with the Wild West show. Charging Elk and Strikes Plenty had been visiting his parents when his father, Scrub, casually mentioned that the young men of the village were to gather in three sleeps to show themselves off for the scouts. They were very excited because the show would take them to a land beyond a big water. It was the favored land to the east where the white men came from. They had never seen Indians and they would treat the Indians like important chiefs. A handful of the men had gone to another land across the water two years before and they saw Grandmother England and her man. This Grandmother had many children in many lands. She was called a queen and her man was a prince. The prince had ridden in the show’s stagecoach while the Indians chased it around the arena. Then all the white chiefs wanted to be chased by the Indians. They may have been important bosses in their land but they were like children who wanted the Indians to chase them. One of the Indians, Red Shirt, even got to shake hands with these royal chiefs. It was he who told the Oglalas that the queen was Grandmother to all the Indians across the medicine line to the north. He said it was a small world to the white men.

  Charging Elk and Strikes Plenty went back into the hills after learning this news, but they did not return to the Stronghold. Instead, they camped along a small creek and talked for two days. The second day it rained, a light cold spring rain, and they built a small shelter of willows, draping their canvas groundcloths over it. They sat before a fire and chewed on drymeat and frybread that Charging Elk’s mother had given them. They were young and had never been out of their country. The thought of crossing a big water frightened them. Scrub had told them that, according to Red Shirt, it took several sleeps to cross this water in a big fire boat. Sometimes the water was angry and tossed the boat like a twig on a river during runoff
time. That’s when everybody got sick and wanted to die. This is what Red Shirt said.

  Such a frightening prospect was tempered by many good things: The Indians were treated well, they got enough to eat, they saw curious things, they got to show off before thousands of people, and they made more of the white man’s money than they could spend. The bosses sent much of their money home to their parents.

  Still, Charging Elk had hesitated. The thought of dying on the big water terrified him. What good would such a journey be if you didn’t come back from it?

  Strikes Plenty, though, was tired of life at the Stronghold. Sometimes the meat was scarce. The winters were always harsh in the badlands. He was beginning to feel isolated from his family at the Whirlwind Compound. When he went there, he felt more and more like a stranger, as though he were of a different band, the Stronghold band. “What good is this life we now lead?” he had said to Charging Elk. “What good will come of it? One day we will be old men and we will have nothing but memories of bad winters and no meat and no woman. I do not want this.”

  Charging Elk had been surprised to hear his kola talk like this. They had never spoken of leaving the Stronghold. It was true that Charging Elk himself had had these very thoughts, but when he visited his parents and saw the way the people lived on the reservation, he quickly put them away. “And if we go, and if we come back, how will we live? What will be here for us?”

  Strikes Plenty had looked down at his moccasins that were drying beside the small fire. In the silence, Charging Elk thought himself wise to bring up such a far-seeing concern. He pitied his friend for dashing his excitement. But then, Strikes Plenty had looked up and said, “What if we don’t come back?” He had a grin on his face.

  It was a great shock when the Buffalo Bill bosses did not choose Strikes Plenty to accompany the show to the land across the water. Charging Elk and Strikes Plenty had looked at each other in disbelief when Strikes Plenty’s name wasn’t called. They had participated in the horsemanship contests and they were both good, the best. They had been riding hard for ten years, while the reservation Indians only rode for work and pleasure. They had the fastest horses, they rode bareback while the others used saddles made of sheepskin and leather. They were both lean and hard from the years of living on meat and turnips and sometimes with nothing.

  The people who had come to watch the contests at the powwow grounds cheered them, the women trilling, the men shouting. There was a recklessness about the way the two friends rode, as though they had not been tamed by the white bosses. Even their soiled, ragged deerskin leggings and shirts seemed to suggest a life lived the old way. The other riders wore their best clothes, beaded and fringed buckskins, blue felt leggings, calico blouses, some even full headdresses. They painted their faces and their horses and they rode their woolly saddles with a practiced recklessness. Charging Elk and Strikes Plenty grinned at each other.

  But when the twenty-five names were called, Strikes Plenty’s wasn’t among them, and so Charging Elk decided not to go. He would persuade his friend to return with him to the Stronghold. Whatever that life lacked, it was better than living among these reservation people.

  The two friends rode out of Pine Ridge and rode for another couple of hours in silence. Strikes Plenty had fallen several paces behind and Charging Elk glanced back once in a while to make sure he was still there. It saddened him to see his kola slumped on his horse, with his head down, thinking how miserable he was. But after a time, Charging Elk heard Strikes Plenty’s horse break into a trot, and soon his friend rode up even.

  “I’ve been thinking, brother,” said Strikes Plenty, with his familiar grin. “You must go back and say goodbye to your mother and father. They won’t be seeing you for a long time and they need to remember you clearly.”

  Charging Elk looked at his friend’s grin and he felt his own jaw drop in disbelief.

  “When you go across the big water to the land where the sun comes from, they will miss you.”

  “I’m not going. Right now I’m going to the Stronghold.”

  Strikes Plenty looked at his friend for a moment, his grin gone now, replaced by a look of resigned determination. “No. You must go with Buffalo Bill. You have been chosen and if you do not go, you will become doubtful and melancholy. In one sleep’s time, or seven sleeps, or two moons, you will wish with all your heart that you had gone. You will be at the Stronghold but your thoughts will be in the faraway land. I will not like to be around you.”

  “My thoughts will be here,” Charging Elk said. He was angry that his friend presumed to know so much about him. His red horse gasped and lunged forward with the force of the kick in its ribs. Then it began to trot with an easy gait that it could maintain for hours at a time. Many times High Runner had carried Charging Elk through the badlands to the Stronghold at just such a pace.

  But Strikes Plenty rode up and grabbed the twisted rawhide rein just behind the horse’s neck, turning its head. Both riders stopped then and looked at each other. For the first time ever, something crackled in the air between them. Charging Elk started to say something he would regret, but Strikes Plenty held up his hand to stop him.

  The two friends were alone on the plain. There was nothing around them but the rolling hills and swales. There were no trees, no shacks, no animals. Only a lone hawk, circling to the north of them, a speck of a bird that caught Charging Elk’s eye for an instant, then was gone into the space of blue sky.

  “I am not going back to the Stronghold,” said Strikes Plenty, looking away, his voice soft but determined. “I have been thinking this for a long time. It is no use for me out there anymore. At first, it was fun, for a long time it was good to be free, to have good times, but last winter, during the Moon of Snowblind, I went out hunting and I saw one of the older ones—he was hunting beneath another ridge far off—and he was dressed in coyote skins with a wolf cap on his head and his dunka wakan was gaunt beneath him, and I thought, That will be me. My brother, Charging Elk, will be married, he will have a warm lodge and children, and I will be out here alone with others like me, starving and cold in the winter, wandering in the summer.” Strikes Plenty was now looking off toward the long-setting sun. His eyes were narrowed against the yellow glare and his lips were tight, as though he had said what he wanted to say and was waiting for a response.

  But Charging Elk didn’t know how to respond. He suddenly felt unsure of himself. Strikes Plenty was right—not about Charging Elk being married and his friend wasting his life at the Stronghold, but about the past couple of years not being fun. The two kolas had become increasingly concerned with filling their bellies with meat and surviving the winters. If they went back out now, they would lose touch with their relatives for another winter. Charging Elk didn’t want that either.

  “If I go with Buffalo Bill, what will you do?”

  Strikes Plenty brightened, his grin returning. “Find a woman, settle down. There are plenty of women out at Whirlwind.”

  “But what will you do? After you find your woman? Plant potatoes?”

  Strikes Plenty laughed. “Maybe. Maybe I’ll have my woman plant potatoes. They say the wasichu makes his woman do the planting. He plants something else when he goes to town.”

  Charging Elk’s horse grew restless beneath him, alternately trying to graze and hopping around, making great shuddering snorts. High Runner wanted to return to the Stronghold. There were mares out there.

  “It is for the best,” said Strikes Plenty. “You will see the land where these white men come from. You will see many great things, make money, enjoy yourself. Me, I will become fat with potatoes, and maybe I will have a winy an and many children when you return.”

  “I will miss you too much. I will miss our good times, brother-friend.”

  “Those times are gone, Charging Elk. We must follow our eyes and see what lies ahead. Today we go our separate paths and we are not happy about this. When you come back, things will be changed. But we will not be changed. We have been broth
ers together for many years, we have raised ourselves from children, and we are still young. Much lies ahead for us, but we will be strong brothers always.” Strikes Plenty rode closer and leaned over and hugged his friend. “When we are old tunkadhlicu together, we will laugh at this moment.”

  Charging Elk stood in the alcove and remembered how he had felt when he watched his dear friend ride away that early spring day in the direction of the Whirlwind Compound. It was the end of nine winters of brotherness and he felt a great emptiness, as though Strikes Plenty had taken away half of him.

  Two days later, he had ridden High Runner in the procession of riders and wagons down to the iron road in the town of Gordon, Nebraska. His parents had ridden in a wagon, and while the young men were unloading their bundles of clothing and equipment, Charging Elk had handed the reins to his father. “He is yours.”

  In return Scrub lifted a bundle out of the wagon. He unrolled the blanket and lifted up the hairpipe breastplate. Charging Elk recognized it. His father wore it when the Oglalas were free on the plains. He wore it when he took the horses of the Snakes and Crows. He wore it during ceremonies. He wore it when he fought the soldiers at the Greasy Grass. And he wore it when the Oglalas surrendered at Fort Robinson.

  Charging Elk ate a last bite of bread as he remembered holding the bundle on his lap during his first train trip in America. He had had his badger medicine and his father’s protection and he had felt ready for what lay ahead. But he had been a little unnerved by the look in his mother’s eyes as she watched the iron horse and the big wooden wagons pull away from the station. He had seen that look when he was a child, twelve winters earlier, when the Oglalas came in to Fort Robinson. But the music of the peace song had made Doubles Back Woman strong then, and even as the train made the lonesome sound and picked up speed, she had been singing a strongheart song with the other mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters and old ones on the platform. Still, he could not get her frightened eyes out of his mind. He was her only remaining child. He prayed to Wakan Tanka to bring him home safely, so he could honor his mother for all the days of her life.