by Win Blevins
“I said Big Foot was a negotiator. Well, the chiefs at Pine Ridge fell into conflict. Some of their people were out in the Stronghold with Kicking Bear and Short Bull, dancing up a storm to bring the millennium. You know about the Stronghold?”
“Yeah,” says I. I figured if I moved my lips once in a while they wouldn’t fracture.
“No,” says Emile. The word sounded swallowed.
“The Stronghold is way in the northwest corner of the Badlands, a sort of table separated from the rest of the country by a land bridge no wider than a pickup. Hard to approach and easy to defend. The most keen Spirit Dancers, led by Kicking Bear and Short Bull, about the first of December they marched to the Stronghold. They meant to dance night and day until the millennium came, and they weren’t gonna let anybody stop them.”
“This is sad,” says Emile. “This is hard.” He also must have been looking for a reason to move his lips.
“Yeah?” says Plez, like a question.
“Hearing about people of faith, people searching for a way, people following their hearts and heading into so much trouble.”
“Yeah,” says Plez. He reflected for a moment. “You bet.
“Anyhow, some were dancing at the Stronghold, mostly Rosebud people. At Pine Ridge, some were dancing in their camps, some refused to have anything to do with the dance. Pretty big disagreement. The Pine Ridge chiefs, they sent word to Big Foot to come help them settle their differences. Promised him a hundred horses to do it. So Big Foot, he’s thinking Fort Bennett, and he’s thinking Pine Ridge, and he’s not interested in Fort Meade, though he doesn’t tell Sumner that.
“On the appointed day, the twenty-second, that’s a hundred years ago yesterday, Big Foot doesn’t show up at Sumner’s camp. So Sumner sends a local rancher, name of Red Beard, to repeat the message. Now, no one knows exactly what Red Beard said. But the impression the Mniconjou got was, You got to come to Fort Meade or the soldiers will march you in at gunpoint, and when you get there, your leaders will be arrested and put in chains and sent by train to an island in the eastern sea.”
“I know that one,” I said through stiff lips. Now my teeth ached every time cold air got in my mouth. “The Dry Tortugas, where the soldiers planned to send Crazy Horse if they could arrest him.”
“That evening, when the scouts reported soldiers on the way, they lit out for Pine Ridge.
“Hey, that’s enough of the story for now, gets us almost up to where we are. You want, I’ll tell you more later.”
“I want,” says Emile.
“How you feeling, brother?”
Plez wasn’t gonna let me get comfortable in my ignorance.
“I have a bad sense. Feel like I’m sinking into a swamp, the sticky muck and dank water of the past. I’m afraid if I go in, I’ll never come out.”
“Friend,” says Plez, “you been in all your life. Only way you can go is out.”
The Camp in the Straw
Come dark we were still riding. Camp, they told us, would be at the place of a friendly white rancher, and it would be set up, fires burning, food ready, when we got there. Those of us without a tipi or tent could sleep in the barn. I figured I wasn’t going to make it that far.
I couldn’t remember pain like I was feeling. My joints felt raw, like my bones were mortar and pestle. Shoulders and elbows were bad, hips and knees terrible. I couldn’t move my head for fear it would fall off my neck.
I wondered if it was better or worse for the walkers. A picture of the monks and nuns came to mind, banging their prayer drums, chanting, walking forever. One of them had the face of Sallee, yellow-skinned, second in line, banging her drum and chanting a language I would never understand. She wore huge glasses that kept me from seeing her eyes.
I saw Plez take off his glove and touch the eagle feather tied to the blue hood of his capote, almost caressing it. He noticed me looking at him, smiled, and said, “Soul food.”
I imitated his action, felt the feather sewn to my hood in back. Through the mittens, gloves, and liners that wrapped my fingers, it seemed barely present. But I lacked faith to take off the hand wraps and try for real soul food.
Emile and I hadn’t spoken in a couple hours. I was far past any place I could move my lips, or move my brain to convey words to my tongue. Sometimes Plez was riding beside us, sometimes gone, like a ghost.
Tyler rode by and told us Chup’s mare had gone lame. He was one of the walkers now. However bad walking was, seemed like it couldn’t be worse than this.
Dark and an hour beyond dark, on into the night we rode, the temperature plummeting, who knew how far, probably thirty below or worse.
I’m gonna die.
Plodding on, plodding on.
I don’t know how long until we turned into a lane bordered by trees, and I knew this had to be the ranch. I didn’t think I could ride the last few hundred yards.
Plez pointed, and I saw lights ahead in a field, headlights. I grinned, and it felt like my lips shattered, like they were water ice given a sharp rap. We rode toward the lights.
When we got a hundred yards out, Plez said, “Watch!” and pulled his horse off to the side away from camp. “Look!” Riders passed us, now silhouetted by the headlights. The passing forms were eerie. Their shadows stretched long and rippled across our chests and faces, ghostly fingers touching our hands, lips, and eyes. The strangest part was, the one thing I seemed to see on every rider—man, woman, and kid, was his eagle feather—his will, his determination, his vow.
We rode into camp last, and into the circle around the big council fire. I wanted to get off the horse, but I didn’t—I was afraid of the pain of moving, and afraid I would fall.
Someone in the circle prayed, and his words seemed to fracture in the cold between us—I couldn’t make out what he was saying. The drum sang a song, and the melody, punctuated by the sharp drumbeats, was eaten by the cold. Waziya, the mean giant of the north, is hungry.
When the song ended, I lurched off the horse. I stumbled out of the stirrup, but was caught and held up by, surprise, Sallee and Chup. I thought Sallee smiled at me in the dark, and her hands felt good. They led the way, and us three riders staggered fast toward the fire to get close. We were too cold to eat. We burned first our fronts, then our backsides at the fire, then each side again. We rubbed our hands together, moved the fingers, then rubbed our cheeks and noses, snaked our lips around. We stomped our booted feet and waggled our toes. After this workout we trundled toward the pots, where the women had made huge batches of buffalo soup and fry bread.
I sat on the ground to eat, then got up because the earth was freezing my ass. I ate, and ate some more. When feeling human rose on my horizon, I said, “Where’s that barn?”
Straw can be your friend, and it was tossed thick over the floor of the hay loft. We took a place by the second-story door—the five of us seemed to accept that we were traveling companions now—and piled up straw deep. Other folks were in the stalls, in corners, everywhere. We laid our sleeping bags on this pallet, and piled straw on top of the bags. The prediction for tonight was forty below. Emile and I crawled in one side, Chup and Sallee in the other, Plez in the middle. I felt a little jealous about Sallee being next to Chup, except he was her uncle, her mother’s brother. Plez tucked the straw up close to everyone’s heads, like a papa. Then, of course, we were too tired and achy to sleep, and there was too much talk in the barn.
I turned and squidged and flopped. “Somebody say something,” I says. The voice I really wanted to hear was Sallee’s.
Plez sat up, and I could see in the moonlight he’d snugged the blue hood of his capote around his face. “Seeing as we are in a manger,” says he, “I will tell jokes on the clergy. Being a man of the cloth myself, sort of, I am entitled.”
Emile and I groaned and moaned instead of laughing for maybe twenty minutes, but we liked them. I will repeat my favorite.
Two nuns were driving down a street in New Orleans, the younger one at the wheel. A small de
mon jumped up on their windshield. The younger nun flipped on the windshield wipers and knocked him off.
But the demon jumped right back on the windshield and cast his baleful eyes upon them.
“What’ll I do?” cried the younger nun.
“I filled the wiper fluid with holy water,” says the older nun. “Squirt him!”
The young nun squirted the water and flicked the wipers. The demon steamed and fell off.
But he jumped right back up in their faces, hissing horribly. “What’ll I do?” wailed the younger nun.
“Show him your cross!” said the older nun.
The younger nun rolled down the window, leaned her head out, and shouted, “Get off my fucking windshield!”
We laughed so loud a male voice hollered, “Pipe down over there!” Then we talked quietly.
The jokes wound down, and I never heard Sallee say anything, or even laugh. I wasn’t ready to go to sleep—I liked the comradeship in the strange light. It was peekaboo light from a quarter moon coming through the cracks between the barn boards. The only face I could see was Plez’s, round and glowing like a little moon. So I says to Plez, “So. Is it true that the Ghost Dance, I mean Spirit Dance, was all about trances? All about visiting ancestors in the other world?”
“Sure,” said Plez.
“Guess I read that, but I didn’t get it.”
He was quiet. I turned my ears toward Sallee, but she seemed to be neither breathing nor stirring.
“Tell us,” Emile said.
“They went into trances. It’s an ultra-simple, repetitive dance, hypnotic, so it gets the mind on the edge of the other dimension. In the old days maybe a medicine man would come up when you got to the edge and wave a feather in front of your eyes, get your concentration on that, and soon you would slip into a trance. Fall down, journey, talk to your ancestors. Mooney thought it was hypnotism, but that’s just because he took the secular view, didn’t believe in the other dimension.”
“What did they see?” says I.
“Wonderful things. The Messiah, the one the white people killed when he came before. He came back and turned everything into a glorious world. The main thing was, the ancestors were alive again. The buffalo came back, too, and there was plenty of good hunting. Everyone was happy, nobody was cold or hungry, and nobody ever got sick. Some people said there were no white people in that world.”
“That’s what caused the trouble?”
“Sort of, not really. What scared the whites, the Indian agents especially, was just what looked like a comeback of the old religion. They held the silly idea, which they thought was a hope, that the Indians would learn to farm, learn to read, become white men, and become Christians, in that order. The dancing meant to them that the Indians were backsliding, would remain savages, might go on the warpath again, might even take their land back. The Indian agents got really worried, and did everything they could to stop the dancing. The dancers out in the Stronghold had them most worried.
“But the dancers holding out in the Stronghold, and some others, they had an agenda. Word went around that if they danced hard enough, and prayed hard enough, the Messiah would come back, green-up of 1891. They were ready for that. They were fed up with not being able to hunt—hey, they were starving, freezing in the winter, children dying of diseases no one ever heard of before. Fed up. Bring on the millennium.”
“Sounds like you’re making fun of it.”
“Not at all. There is another world where our ancestors are alive, and all things dwell in peace and beauty. I know that place.” I waited for more words, but he didn’t say them.
“How come the Messiah didn’t come back and change everything?”
“Because he’s already here. That beautiful world is already here. It’s spiritual, not physical, so it exists in the dimension of Spirit. It doesn’t happen yonder, neither at green-up or after you die. It’s within you if you know how to find it. If you don’t know, it’s still not yonder, it’s not in the hereafter.”
“Hau!” said a whisper, and to my surprise I recognized it as Sallee’s voice.
“That’s where the people misunderstood Wovoka’s vision. That’s where the Christians misunderstood the words of Christ. It’s a world of Spirit.”
We were silent for a while. I felt like we were on the edge of quicksand.
Finally I asked Emile, “You saw these trances at the Ghost Dance you went to?”
“Yes.”
“You thought they were real?”
“No question.” He pondered a little, maybe remembered. “One woman wore the Stars and Stripes upside down, just like the old Ghost Dancers did. She went into a trance and saw Big Foot’s people die at Wounded Knee again.”
He said nothing more. I repeated the words to myself several times. Saw Big Foot’s people dying at Wounded Knee.
“Hear that, my friends? She saw it. Blue, you wanna know what happened at Wounded Knee?”
Before he could go on, I interrupted. “No.”
“Yeah, right.” He grinned, and gleamed his eyes at me. “You wanna know what happened, you ain’t gonna know it from me or any teacher. You got to go see for yourself.” He laughed in a sweet, silly way. “Seeing is believing,” he sang in a childlike voice.
“Hau!” whispered Sallee.
It was a long time before I fell asleep, a long time of mind drifting. What kept coming back was that painting I saw on the mountain. I wondered if I should tell Emile I’d seen a painting the way he would do it. I wondered if I should tell Plez, or anyone else, about what I saw. “Don’t work on it,” Pete had said. “Just let the picture come back to your mind. It will tell you what it means, you don’t have to chase it. And don’t talk about it without a good reason.” No, I would keep this to myself.
I floated the picture again and again into in my mind, the big field of white, the jagged slashes of red, the blackness above with its icy, bluish stars.
Suddenly I am in the painting. I am in the edge, red against white, I am in the violence of the slashes.
I see around me. I feel horrendous pain. I cannot move.
I become aware of the other slashes, like a jumbled pile of pencils, and of long shapes in the whiteness below the slashes. We are a jam of logs in a river deeper and darker than any river of Earth. The water coils around us, prods, pries. The cold here is terrible, but I know, we all know, the cold is more terrible below, where the current will eventually take us. The night is black, but not as black as the depths of the waters. One by one, each log of us is growing colder, coming to the cold of the waters of death. One by one we let go, ease off, and slip downstream in silence.
With a start I came back to the world, the loft where my friends laid sleeping, and I laid remembering. I touched my face, and it was wet with salt tears.
Now I know.
The Second Day, Christmas Eve
Over coffee in the morning I felt shy, didn’t want to meet anyone’s eye. I saw Plez and Sallee looking at me like they had thoughts of some kind. We went into the circle for prayers. Emile, Plez, and I stepped out sunwise with all the riders for another day’s journey. Chup and Sallee headed off with the walkers. All I put my mind on was camp tonight. Camp tonight, camp tonight—at a church, we were told.
The wind eased, the temperature rose, the day was not so bad. Of course, the painting kept coming together in my mind. I’d tried to stay blank, just to ride, but my mind …
Silence, seeing, silence, seeing, it was unbearable.
“Okay,” I finally said to Plez. “You can go see the ancestors, talk to them. By choice.”
“By intention,” said Plez.
I took that in and nodded. “See the ancestors by intention. How?”
He beamed like a slow student was finally catching on. He and Emile smiled at each other like they were in cahoots some way.
“Hey, medicine men know how to go into the other world. We’ve done this for thousands and thousands of years.”
“Yeah, but, I mean
, how exactly?”
“I’ve done it a lot of ways. Dancing. Drumming. Hungering and thirsting. Praying ceaselessly. But there are easier ways now.”
“Out with it, out with it.”
He grinned. “Well, normally I would beat the drum for you. But when we don’t want to disturb other people, I use a tape.”
“A what?”
Emile chuckled out loud.
“A cassette tape.” He reached inside his big capote and fished out a Walkman. “Right here. I carry the other world on audio tape.” He was really enjoying himself, and Emile was enjoying him. It was like Emile knew everything ahead of time, but he didn’t.
“This Michael Harner, he’s a white guy, but he’s a shaman. He learned how to go journeying. He also learned drum beats work really good, really send people into a trance. Put two different beats on opposite sides of a tape, fast and slow. Works great.”
“A white guy.”
“Yeah.”
“On tape, nine bucks and ninety-five cents or something.”
“Yeah. Cheaper than Delta. You don’t get frequent flyer miles, though.” He shook the Walkman. “And I’ll tell you, beginners do well with this. What’s best is going to a Spirit Dance. Sing and dance your way to the Spirit world. The tape is twenty minutes. For people I work with, though, I spliced it into an hour tape.”
“There are still Ghost Dances.”
“Yeah. At my mother’s rez, the Shoshones do one. They say the dance is real old and was originally theirs.”
“You guide people to the other world.”
“Yes. You need a guide. Some people don’t come back easy. Until they learn the way.”
“You do this.”
“My gift is to bring other people blessings of Spirit.” There was a big difference in his tone now.
“A lot of people.”
“People who have the awareness, people who have the desire.”
“God,” I said, “I want not to go. Most of me.”
“You know, it’s not easy. No one can do it for you, to you. You gotta concentrate, you gotta commit, you gotta be brave. You have to fly on your own wings. Hey, it’s easy not to go.”
