One String Guitar

by Mona de Vessel

  “Why don’t we have our own meetings?” he asked. I watched Grey holding his head square, never cocked, never like an animal at slaughter as he listened to the excitement in their voices. I liked Grey Stone’s silence. I liked my own; it had the kind of weight of something you could cover yourself up with—like a blanket, something making me feel proud again.

  It all started happening quickly after that. That spring—that April to be precise—Washington took office. This fat bastard liked to wear his hair in a tight crew cut, military style with his belly pulling tightly at his clean cotton shirts. Washington always wore dark shades: I later learned to never trust a man who hides behind glasses.

  Spring was here for an instant and the grass turned red again in the black hills. A million and one blades of red grass breathe as one while nothing stays the same. I live in the windy land of tall, uprooted grass, if left unburnt, will turn from red to silver by the middle of summer. Silver grass that puffs up and rises like a snake coiling around the poverty of our res.

  That spring, I saw Felicia as much as I could. We met in hidden places, away from the world. This was not because we were ashamed of our love, but because we wanted to protect it. We met around Felicia’s schedule. I was a roaming boy of the res and planned my days around hers. Felicia saw me when she was not taking care of her grandmother, when she was not watching her sister or caring for her parents’ home. We rarely had a place to meet; we had no money, and privacy was a luxury we couldn’t afford.

  Felicia would borrow her brother’s car and we’d drive around the res. I had no place to take her. No place decent. I lived in a tiny barrack: a small four-cornered room made of planks that let in the light on bright sunny mornings in the places where the large wood stove meets the walls of my home. I grew up in darkness because light required money and windowpanes and everything that my parents could not afford.

  My father built the shack when I was born. He said he didn’t want to live in government housing so he bought the material for the shack and built it with the help of his friends when my mother was expecting me. My father was a man of his word. He was a quiet man who spoke only in times of necessity. Necessity on the res was like a monster turned on its head, so that after a while, we didn’t need nothing.

  My father had a large armchair he brought back from some rescue mission one day. The church was giving away old furniture to people on the res and my father came home with a monster chair. He placed it in front of the stove and spent his life looking at the glow of the fire. In the spring, he’d leave the shack to cut wood, and in the summer, he spent most of the nights with his friends roaming bars and cafes outside of the res. My father’s regular bar was The Blue Wolf, owned by a white woman named Minnie. She’d made a fortune selling booze to Indians right outside the res since alcohol was illegal there.

  I was an only child, not because my parents didn’t want other children, but because my baby sister, Winona, died before I was born. I often wished I had another sibling. Mostly because I wanted someone who could help me with the work I had to do around our home growing up. When I turned ten, my father said, “Now you’re strong enough to go down to the well.” The well, which we shared with four other families living within a quarter-mile-radius was a place I hated.

  Every morning after breakfast when the sky was still coal black, I would empty the large slop bucket outside in the outdoor john. The worst were those days in the winter when it was too cold to go outside in the middle of the night and we used the bucket for more than just peeing. After emptying the slop bucket, I’d march down with an empty pail and carry water back from the well. The truth is, I was terrified of walking outside in the dark to get water. Every time I had to go, I’d rush and spill half of it on the way home. Most mornings, I’d have to go back for a second run. I never told anyone how scared I was. Never told a soul. For a long time, I didn’t know why, but my father wanted nothing to do with the well. Then one morning, while I was outside, just on the other side of the thin wooden panel separating my home from the cold, I heard my parents talking about Winona and how she had died.

  “Why do you make Owl go down to the well when he’s still a boy?” my mother asked my father, who remained silent.

  “Why did you make Winona go to the well when she was still a child? You knew she wasn’t strong enough,” my mother relented.

  “Do you want me to say that I killed our daughter? Is that what you want me to say?” my father burst.

  “She was too young to go to the well, and you know it,” my mother cried.

  “The rope broke and she fell in.There was nothing any of us could have done.”

  That was the first time I ever considered the possibility of accidents unraveling lives and being unable to do a damn thing to stop it from happening. I never mentioned hearing that conversation between my father and mother, but I never forgot it.

  For a long time, the shack was all I knew—the darkness, the smoky winter evenings when the wind would kick the smoke back into our home. We slept on piled up mattresses along both sides of the room. My parents slept on one side and I slept on the other. This is how I lived with my parents.

  **

  Felicia drove me to Hawk Eye, this place near Wounded Knee where the earth meets the sky. Remembering that night reminds me of our prairie fires when the smoky air travels fast while every blade of grass burns to the ground until it reaches a river and the wind goes down with the sun.

  We pulled the car up right by a quiet piece of road and we sat still, looking at each other. Felicia took my hand in hers and she told me about the hunts. She was almost whispering as she explained to me how the women made the paint for the men’s horses.

  “They’d make a fire,” she whispered. “They’d make a fire with stones in the pit and they’d mix buffalo fat with the sacred colors.” I came back to myself on those nights when Felicia talked to me about our ways. I came back to myself as she told me about the colors that came from the earth.

  “Blue earth called thó came from Minnesota when our people were still free. And the white earth or makhá ská, was found on the plains.” Her voice was clear on those nights. A clear voice that breathed me back to life. She told me of makhá gí, or brown earth that the women mixed with the fat. The sacred colors: red, yellow, white and black were painted on the men’s horses to tell the spirits that it was a sacred animal, a messenger of thunder. It was spring and I wanted to be a messenger of thunder. But I had no horse and I barely knew who I was.

  Felicia pressed her lips against my ear as she whispered the stories of the early hunts in darkness. Prairie fires are quick and unpredictable with flames jutting out ahead, burning everything to the ground on its way. This is what happened that night.

  “Makhá gí,” she whispered, “the brown of the earth; this is how the men honored their horses. This was still a time of honor.”

  I took Felicia’s hand in mine. Her hand was small and soft, firm with nervous fingers that could turn into claws if protection was needed. But that night, she turned to softness. She placed her hand in mine, open palm facing the sky and she offered me her neck. I thought of the way the men circle their way around the buffalo using the animal’s strength to turn it against itself. I kissed her softly on the nape of her neck as she continued to whisper.

  “Makhá ská.” The white of the moon was absent that night; I closed my eyes and listened to her breath quicken like the wind carrying the prairie fires for miles.

  I sometimes circle around the memory of that night for hours, for days making myself drunk with it. Felicia’s voice trails off into the distance, like a dying echo until I can’t remember her no more. Then suddenly, like a storm returning from itself, I am flooded with desire from that night, with Felicia’s scent, with the lines of her body, the curves of imaginary hills. The kind of hills that only exist in distant places.

  Felicia cried when I kissed her. She didn’t make a sound. I know she cried because her tears fell along the line of her ja
w like a river that could arrest a fire.

  When she offered herself to me, I remember thinking about the way hunters become one with their horses.

  “Messenger of thunder,” she had whispered. “You are my messenger.” She gasped when I first kissed her breast. A small gasp, like an animal surprised to find itself cornered. When the hunters roamed the prairies freely for days, time became as flat as the land with only moments of change with the moon, and the shifting sun in the sky. How can I still visit this place of desire now that I have lost everything? When I close my eyes, I hear her breath quicken against my cheek, shallow, like the silver fox in winter.

  I entered her in darkness, and when I did, her body folded onto itself, onto me like a young sapling bending in the wind. I held her there, without moving, without making a sound. My desire for her threatened to take hold of my mind for good; I remembered the story of a medicine man who’d been trained in the ways of the sun dance. Breaking the body allows it to be whole again, this was the path to manhood. I did not move inside Felicia for what seemed like the end of time. We held each other, she with her legs wrapped around my waist, her chest fallen against mine, her breath buried inside the moisture of my neck. Her words hidden, fallen words that waited to return under the ground of our desire. I wanted to look at her; I didn’t know if I could. I didn’t know if I had the strength to hold her with my desire and with my eyes at the same time. This I did not know. The way of the sun dancer is to look for his own strength, to search past the strength of the body, past its weakness for the spirit to rise.

  Felicia began to move on top of me, slowly at first, so slowly I thought we were sitting still on a shifting ground, and then quicker, with more force. We traveled together along the line of our desire. We moved along the path of the wind, like the prairie fire. At times, she jumped ahead of the flame. At others, it was me who traveled quicker than the fire. We followed the trail of our scent until we came upon a river.

  “Wakan,” she whispered. “Wakan.”

  Later, I asked her what the word wakan meant.

  “Wakan,” she whispered again and when she looked at me, I knew that she had said the word, “sacred”.

  Chapter 20 – Owl

  When I think of my childhood, I think of myself in the four-cornered world of the one-room cabin my father built so we could live in peace. “Live in peace,” he had said.

  The summer after my father got his job at Wright Mc Gill making fish hooks, we added a wood floor to our cabin. Up until then, it had been dirt, and when it rained, the ground became muddied when we came home with our wet shoes and filthy boots.

  My father was a full-blood who didn’t speak a word of Lakota. Most full bloods his age spoke a combination of English and Lakota but not my father. One day, I asked him why he didn’t know the language of our ancestors and he told me that he’d been sent to the Holy Rosary Mission School in Pine Ridge, where they punished children for speaking anything but English. This was the school where the children were forced to be as white as white could be.

  “If you didn’t act white, you were beaten.” My father said.

  I never met my father’s parents. My grandmother died of diabetes when I was two and my grandfather died before I was born. I never knew how and where or what happened to him. Whenever I’d ask my father about him, he’d say:

  “What is past is past,” and he’d grow quiet and sit in his oversized armchair by the stove and stare off into space.

  My father was a happier man before the war. As happy as a man can be after tragedy hits. Sometimes, he’d take me fishing into small creeks on the res. We’d spend an afternoon sittin’ by the side of the creek waiting for the fish to bite. Some days, they’d bite and when they did, we’d come home to my mother feeling all proud, feeling like men who could provide.

  When the fish didn’t bite, my father would make up crazy stories about how a fish so huge had jumped out of the creek and almost knocked me out before my father had to release him to the waters. My father was a storyteller. He liked to tell tales of monster fish and traveling spirits who lived in the waters and the land and the trees.

  One day, my father told me about the spirit of the north who consumed people. He described him as an enormous monster, a glutton who spent his time eating people as they tried to travel across the land in the winter months. In the end, the only thing that could kill the monster was fire; who when he died spit out all of the people he’d eaten throughout the history of the land.

  Whenever my father had a bit of free time, he’d take me somewhere. We’d get in his truck and drive around the seven districts of the reservation: White Clay and Medicine Root, Porcupine and Eagle Nest. We’d drive to Pass Creek and LaCreek and Wounded Knee. My father never spoke of the shame of our history. He never liked to talk about the past. No matter how hard I’d try to ask him, he’d always come back with the same answer: “What’s past is past,” and that was that. It wasn’t until I met Felicia that I really found out about our people’s story. I had to wait to be a man to find out about my past.

  When I was 12 years old, my father left for Vietnam. I remember the day my father was drafted like it was yesterday. The mailman came to the door. We never got any mail. Never got a thing worth reading. My father took the letter in his hand and opened it. We all knew what it said before he had read a word of it. He read it real slow, to himself and then he said, “I’ll be leaving early next week.” The next day, he quit his job at the fish hooks factory.

  When my father left for the war, my mother got a job at the BIA (Bureau of Indian Affairs) office in the village. She hadn’t worked before then, not in an outside job anyway. My mother worked her whole life making our meals, keeping our cabin clean, sewing our clothes, and planting vegetables on the small plot of land around our home. In early fall, she’d go to work in nearby Nebraska and pick beets or potatoes when it came time to harvest them. But when my dad left, she had to get a full-time job. Jobs were real hard to come by, but my mother had two things going for her: good looks and good luck for heartless things. She’d told me once how she was unlucky in matters of the heart but lucky in everything else. I always wanted to ask her if that meant marrying my father was part of the bad luck, but I never dared.

  My mother was a mixed-blood with light hair the color of wheat. She wasn’t one of those mixed-bloods where you couldn’t see the Indian in her no more. She was clearly one of us, but you could see the traces of her French bloodline trailing back from the time when they they came to pillage our land and kill our people.

  For a while, when my father was gone in Nam, my mother and I got into a rhythm of life together that was easy. I’d go off to school and she’d go off to work and after a while we never mentioned my father. It wasn’t that we didn’t care about him being gone; it was that his absence was all that we had left of him and we couldn’t carry it around no more. So we said nothing.

  Before he left my father worked at Wright-McGill making fish hooks. He’d leave every morning at dawn and come home when the sun was getting ready to set. He used to say that putting food on the table for his family was the best feeling in the world. The best feeling in the world

  My father and I used to laugh a lot. I liked to play the trickster, play jokes on everyone. One time, I told him it was snowing outside when it wasn’t. We didn’t have windows and he got all dressed up wearing his wool pants and long johns and everything else only to find out it wasn’t even that cold outside. That night, he said he’d spent the day sweating like a hog.

  “My son made me sweat today,” he told his coworkers. Everyone laughed. I was never that funny, but I could always laugh with my father. In school, I remember the kids that could make everyone laugh. It wasn’t me. I wasn’t one of those kids. I was always trying too hard, thinking too much about what was and what wasn’t funny. Later I realized that the funniest people don’t think about it, they’re just funny. I was never one of those people.

  Every time I think of my father, I th
ink of him in those years before Nam. I try not to think of him in those years after he came back.

  My father came back from the war four years before I met Felicia. After he came back, he spoke in his sleep and cried out at the enemy. When my mother and I would wake him, he’d look at us with empty eyes, with his arm raised like he was holding a gun and he was getting ready to shoot. This was the beginning of the end for my father. People say that around here a lot, the beginning of the end. But when I think of this now, when I think of the ways my father died, when I think of the time I spent with Felicia, I know that nothing really ends. Nothing starts and nothing ends because we are of the earth.

  Sometimes, my father would sit in the sweat lodge praying.

  “I can hear them women crying,” he’d say when he changed his clothes after the lodge. Those times of prayer were the only times when he would ever speak openly about the spirit world and what he saw and heard, not counting the times when he was drunk.

  “They’re hurt,” he’d say. “Hurt real bad.” I knew he didn’t like to talk about the spirits.

  One night he came home drunk from The Blue Wolf. My mother and I were already asleep in our beds, when the door banged open. I didn’t move; I’d lived through my father’s drunken returns a million times and I knew there was nothing for me there. I pretended I was sleeping. I heard my mother, her wounded animal voice, like a fox in a trap.