by Roger Wall
“I could hear the towers crashing to the ground! A whining, steel colliding into steel!” Otis’s voice rose. “Government thought that without electricity we’d give up Tony LePerle. No sewer, no water, no heat. It was the cool season, remember. A few people left on bicycles, but the rest of us hung on. Resolute. Tony LePerle used his ammunition to kill deer, once a stray cow. We ate very well.”
Otis looked content, wheezing on the bench, as though he had just killed the cow himself and could remember how the meat had tasted, whether it was oily, well salted, perhaps rubbed down with black pepper, a spice he sometimes spoke of but which we never found in the destroyed kitchens in the town’s ruins.
“But you knew they would send Machine,” I said to keep the story moving.
“Yes, Machine came,” he stated and then stopped and opened and closed his eyes and rubbed his thumbs together over folded hands, as though he was trying to remember what happened next. “Come on, man, you know how it goes!” I should have said. Or, “Take a breath!” But I didn’t; instead, I blurted out:
“Just like in your vision, right?”
I realized my mistake immediately. I gripped the handle of the knife hanging from my belt. I wanted to cut myself to draw his attention away from that word. Vision.
Otis swept the tin cup off the bench. It rolled in the dust. Water spilled on the dusty ground.
“Take me to my grave!” he shouted, and then started wheezing hard, his chest pumping in and out under his shirt.
“Yeah, we’ll do that right now,” I said. I went over to the bench and backed into him, grabbed his arms, and snapped him onto my back. He gasped, as if I were about to throw him over my head.
When I was probably fourteen or fifteen, I had started to notice that Otis couldn’t work as long and hard as he used to. I began to think about my parents, Javier and Maria. Our life would be easier, I had pointed out to Otis while we were weeding, if they were here to help us. Then I’d asked, “Didn’t your vision show you what happened to them?”
Otis had answered in a flat, weary tone, speaking more to the ground than to me: “Our life—this is all the vision showed me.”
His response had angered me, and I had wanted to hurt him. I had straightened up on my knees and said, “I guess they wouldn’t have wanted to live with you, anyway.”
Otis had glared at me and shouted: “Give up, is that what you want? Wander across the prairie looking for them? End up at an agricultural preserve? A strip mine? The Center? Agents would detect us before we knew it. I’m still in the database. An old man like me they’d shoot right on the spot and splay for the vultures to eat. And they’d probably kill you, too, just to save time. Two shots. Bang, bang. They wouldn’t even stop their truck. This land is what we were given. Our purpose is to work it and defend it with our lives. Your parents are dead!”
I had walked away at that point and sat in the river. Otis had never before said they were dead; just that he didn’t know what happened to them. We only found skeletons in the demolished houses, none on the playing field where town people had gathered to roast animals during the period before the town was destroyed.
A few days later I had asked Otis if we could perform a burial ceremony for my parents, bury two remnants of wallboard on Cemetery Butte, but Otis had resisted: “We don’t want building materials to pollute the earth up there.”
For a while after that I had carried two pieces of concrete in my pocket, but they had worn a hole in my shorts and had fallen out.
The next time Otis had told the story, he hadn’t shouted, “They were murdering us!” and raised his hands above his head as though he were receiving the glorious vision that had showed us the route through lingering clouds of dust to destiny, a new life as traditional Hidatsa Indians, with me riding on his shoulders to scout the way up the terraces to the cave. Instead, he had focused on the stupidity of Tony LePerle, or the sadness of Sammy Goldrausch’s murder, the brutality of the government’s response, things we could get worked up over. He never used the word vision again.
I pulled him tight against my back to calm his angry breathing. As we humped across the footbridge over the White Earth River, he wrapped his arms firmly around my stomach and panted over my shoulder. I’m sure his foul breath made me frown.
Instead of taking the path to the left, which led to the boathouse and playing field, I took the one to the right, which followed a steep, north-facing slope and meandered through a stand of willows and a mix of grass and sunflowers before entering a forest of elms, box elder, and juniper. The long traverse uphill forced me to bend forward and strain to keep Otis secure on my back while he squirmed and rose up and down, as though he wanted a better view.
We didn’t stop at the overlook, where I usually cooled off on my way from digging the grave. I was sweating, and Otis’s wool sweater made my skin itch. I followed the hard, wind-blown path around the contour of Cemetery Butte and marched up the last stretch of the path and through the knee-high grass to a short wall made from rocks left behind by the glacier. Farmers had probably built the wall centuries ago when they had cleared the fields. I lowered Otis onto a wide flat rock. His breathing was calm now, but mine was hard.
“You were flopping around,” I said after my heart slowed down.
“I was imagining myself on a horse, a great warrior riding into battle,” Otis said.
“Well, if I’m the horse, I want a better saddle than your scratchy old sweater,” I said.
I sat down beside him and took his leathery and wrinkled hand. His fingers were rough and coarse. We didn’t speak but stared into the tall grass of the prairie.
The wind atop Cemetery Butte wasn’t as strong as the wind outside the cave, perhaps because Cemetery Butte wasn’t as high as Windy Butte; its top was flatter, more spread out, better able to absorb the wind. The breeze was just strong enough to counter the sun’s intensity and disperse the smell of Otis’s sick and unwashed body. After a while, Otis spoke:
“I’m sorry we never built an earthen lodge here, During-the-Event,” he said.
I groaned at the sound of my name, the Hidatsa one that Otis had given me to honor my birth during the period of time he called the “Event,” when Sammy Goldrausch was murdered and the power was cut off and the government destroyed White Earth River. So I became During-the-Event Pérez. My nickname, D. E., is okay: short, direct. “Hand me the ax, D. E.” Nothing complicated about that. I never found out what my parents named me, if they did.
“Well, Silvertooth,” I spoke Otis’s family name, “you didn’t do too badly without an earthen lodge.”
“I could’ve done better. . . . Sammy and I used to come up here to sing and pray,” Otis began to recount. “But the others, the old Hidatsa living in town, laughed at me, called me Wannabe, said, ‘Show us the blood test, Otis, show us the results.’ But really they didn’t want to stretch their minds or their mouths or their legs. They preferred the happy services of the Catholics in town. They liked the booming soundtrack, the bright monitor with its easy words, the good feelings that came from standing in a row like corn and praising the rewards of salvation. And the Catholics always had something to eat afterwards. That’s why they were fat and couldn’t walk up the butte to worship properly.”
“Wannabe?” I asked.
“They questioned my ancestry. But what did they know?”
“Lazy sons-of-bitches,” I spit out in my best disgust-filled voice.
“And after worship was banned, and Sammy locked up the church, they cowered in their homes, whispering the weak songs about grace. I was the only one who came here, even in the cool season, and danced by myself and wailed so my voice would travel down to Lake Sakakawea. Who was going to arrest me? Sammy was my friend! We chanted together, here up on the butte! Goddamn Tony LePerle!”
Otis’s face was orange with rage, but the color quickly faded to yellow, and he slumped forward, worn out, wheezing again. It was always a good story, one of my favorites, about the spiritua
lly empty Hidatsa, and I wanted him to know how much I liked it.
I squeezed his hand. I figured as long as we continued to repeat the story of our existence, he wouldn’t die. I looked south, to the juniper, where I had dug Otis’s grave near a thick root.
Otis wanted his grave to be oriented in “an east to west direction,” so the sun would track straight over his body, ensuring that his spirit felt the sun’s warmth from morning to night. This had never made sense to me, but I had humored Otis and bitten my tongue not to ask, “What about in the peak of the cool season when the sun isn’t overhead?”
Otis had scattered Malèna’s ashes under a thin juniper root, but she was Catholic, not Hidatsa. The other Hidatsa from town were buried in the cemetery, under standard government-issue grave markers. Otis never told me the history of the burial tradition we were following. We had no books about it. Perhaps it wasn’t Hidatsa but one that he’d made up as death got closer. “We’re going backwards, you know,” Otis said. “I’m sorry that we didn’t sing together more often so you’d know the old songs better. That was part of my failing,” he said.
“You sang in the garden,” I said.
“Yes, but maybe that wasn’t enough,” he said.
I never became accustomed to Otis’s singing, the chanting in a distorted voice that resembled crying, the shouting in a strange language that I assumed was Hidatsa but had no way of knowing. Sometimes I struggled to follow along, to imitate the sounds Otis made, but his face, twisted in a painful expression, scared me.
“Did you sing when I was born, Otis?” I asked.
“The basement wasn’t a good place for singing.”
“What about my mother and father, did they sing?”
“Your father drank a new batch of tesgüino and hooted with his friends. I think Tony LePerle was there, goddamn him. Your mother was feeding you.”
“Did she give me a name?”
He didn’t answer right away.
“Little One. That’s what she called you. But she didn’t sing. No one sang. I’ll sing for your birth, now, if you wish,” Otis said.
Little One. Not much better than During-the-Event. And now he wanted to sing about it. How much could be left of a song that had lain unsung in his memory for seventeen-odd years, I wondered? Maybe he’d stumble over the words and give up. I’d be left with a handful of half-sung verses and two dumb names.
But Otis seemed eager to sing. He shifted forward. As he stared at the ground, he mumbled and licked his lips. Before I could say, “Don’t bother,” he sat upright, contorted his face, and filled his chest with a deep breath. His two arms, extended straight back to the rock wall, supported him. He raised his head to the sky and shouted to the wind.
Oh, Mother Earth and Father Sky, what have we done?
We’ve brought another one into this sorry world.
He’s skinny and small, but we love him so.
How will he survive when we’re gone?
Don’t hide animals from him.
Send rain and sun for the plants.
And wind to sing him to sleep.
Let him grow tall and strong.
Let him go forth and create.
And bless him, and bless him,
For he is the last as well as the first.
And bless him, and bless him,
For he is the last as well as the first.
When he was finished, he closed his eyes and folded his hands in his lap. His body slumped, and his chest heaved as he drew in air and whistled it out again in a hoarse, gravelly breath. He’d done okay; he’d gotten through it without stopping. Of course, I hadn’t expected a happy song, because Otis never sang those. But the words weren’t unfamiliar. Otis invoked Mother Earth often during the harvest, thanking her for being generous, although I never noticed a connection between his songs and the growth of the plants. Some years were better than others no matter what we did, or what Otis sang. But “skinny and small”? Was that why my mother called me Little One? Was that how Otis saw me, too? And “go forth and create?” Another garden plot, I guessed. As for being last and first, I supposed Otis meant the only remaining Hidatsa and the first to be born in the town. He was speaking in a vague way, which I attributed to his preoccupation with the spirit life. Something was off, though, and I had a suspicion about what it was.
“That wasn’t an old song,” I stated.
“No, a new one. I wrote it especially for you,” Otis whispered as he breathed slow and steady. I could have thanked him and not pursued my questions, but I pressed on.
“But not when I was born,” I said.
“No, recently. Just now, in fact,” he answered.
“That’s what I thought. You sang in English.”
“I can’t remember the old one.”
“That’s okay. I didn’t expect you to. This one was fine.”
“It’s a simple song. Birth songs shouldn’t be too complicated.”
Otis shifted on the rock. He looked as though he were in pain. “You’ll remember the one I taught you to sing when I die, During-the-Event?”
“Yes, Granddad.”
I had rehearsed the song for months, tolerating Otis’s coaching on the proper vocalizations and phrasing until finally, impatient, I had refused to practice it anymore.
“You promise?”
“I won’t forget it.”
“I’ll believe you. Now show me my grave.”
He was able to walk the short distance to the grave, with the support of my arm to steady him and bear part of his weight. We stood together and looked down into the hole. He leaned against me, an arm resting on my shoulder.
I had planned the cuts in the earth to do the least amount of damage to the roots of the juniper and had managed to save the thin feeder roots, which remained suspended in air between the walls of the grave. At first Otis didn’t say anything, and I worried that he was estimating the depth of the grave. I had started digging it a few days before, but a tough layer of yellow-orange clay had slowed me down. I had to use the pick to break up the earth. And then I’d taken the morning off to go sailing.
Finally, Otis spoke in a whisper: “It’s very deep. You’ve done a good job. I can see it was a lot of work.”
At least an arm’s length short of your specifications, I thought.
“But it’s a sad end to life, even though this is the proper way to be buried, the most useful to nature, the only way my spirit will join my wife’s,” Otis said.
His eyebrows were squeezed together so two deep furrows formed. Abruptly, he relaxed them.
“You’ll keep my clothes, remember, so you’ll have an extra set. And my sheet, too, even though it’s old and the tradition is to be buried wrapped in it.”
“Yes, Granddad,” I reassured him, although I had no intention of undressing Otis and placing him naked in the ground without protection from the worms, insects, and moles that could tunnel through the soil. He’d go to the grave in the jeans and red-and-black-and-white flannel shirt he was wearing. We had pulled these from a house two seasons ago.
“You want to go back to the cave now, Otis?” I asked. He was wobbling, leaning more and more against me, grasping my shoulder more tightly.
“You’re forgetting about my wife,” he said.
“I’m sorry. We can visit her grave, too.”
“Haven’t I taught you anything?”
A sharp sound rushed from Otis’s mouth. I thought he was starting to cry, then his laughter filled the air.
“I have to make sure she gets ready for me!”
Otis’s foul breath almost made me choke, but I smiled anyway, relieved that he wasn’t crying, but unsure of what he found so funny. His laughter degenerated into a spell of coughing. After he’d calmed down, he untied the faded red ribbon that secured his long braid.
“I want you to tie a prayer ribbon on the limb above her grave,” he said and handed me the ribbon.
I rubbed the smooth material between my fingers. Otis had bound his
hair with it for as long as I could remember, sometimes in a loose ponytail, then once I learned to weave, in a braid.
We made a jagged path through the grass to the juniper. While Otis clung to my belt, I knotted the ribbon to a sprig of juniper leaves. The ribbon was almost gray, and the loose tails of the knot almost blended in with the bluish leaves of the juniper.
“That will be a sign for her and a marker for me, to help me find her, my wife.”
“I’m sure you will.”
I tried to imagine Otis as a spirit, traveling up the roots of the juniper. I had seen plants decay in the compost pile and the bones of animals bleach in the sun and had found the bones of humans dusty and broken in the rubble of the town. But where were their spirits? If I couldn’t see the spirits of the animals that lived in the butte, why did I think that I’d be able to see Otis’s? I wanted to believe that his would look like one of the thin, long fibers attached to the morels that I dug from mats of leaves in the forest. Something that I could touch and hold.
Otis interrupted my thoughts: “I’m so weak. Maybe you should leave me here, save yourself the trip after I die.”
“No, you need something to eat, that’s all. We’ll stop at the garden. The lettuce isn’t so bitter this year.”
“I’d like some meat.”
A snare I had set on a game trail in a clearing near a box elder thicket had been tripped, and hanging from the wire loop was a rabbit. I stroked its soft fur and felt its chest. It was not warm, and the limbs were resistant to movement; yet no flies buzzed over the dried blood on its nose. Maybe early that morning? I guessed at how long it had been dead. Was its spirit inside, or had it already gone to the butte, or somewhere else? I didn’t say a prayer of thanks but gutted the rabbit, buried the organs, and carried the animal back to the garden by its legs. The rabbit was big enough for a meal.
Otis had fallen off the bench and lay curled on his side, as though he had dropped from the sky. From a distance he appeared to be dead, but up close I saw his chest rising and falling. The years of working and living outside hadn’t prevented his black hair from turning gray or his body from shriveling up so his clothes hung from him like thick loose skin. I sat down beside him and placed my hand on his shoulder.
