Stone Song

by Win Blevins

  Curly stepped slowly toward No Water, feinting left and right with his hips and head. The knife blade stayed still, point up.

  Uncertain, No Water backed up.

  In a flash Curly knocked No Water’s blade aside and hit him twice on the chest. Soot blackened each nipple.

  Hump was thrilled at his pupil’s quickness.

  Black Elk and Young Man-Whose-Enemies minced like women and made the trilling sound mockingly.

  No Water exploded. He gave a huge yell and bolted forward, straight at Curly, knife high this time.

  Curly ducked under the blade. He came up under the armpit and let No Water ride onto his shoulder. They toppled, Curly going backward. Into the dust they fell, No Water on top. The big man’s gut bounced off the point of Curly’s knife.

  “That’s enough!” yelled Hump. No need to say that Curly had won, that with an exposed tip the blow would have been fatal.

  Rolling off Curly, No Water jabbed him in the face with an elbow. “Didn’t mean to,” he said baitingly.

  Hump saw Curly start to flash in anger and then control himself. Good.

  “That hurt!” complained No Water, rubbing his gut and scowling at Curly.

  Curly said nothing.

  “Did you come to gloat?” Black Twin asked Young Man-Whose-Enemies challengingly.

  But the youth was not the son of a chief for nothing. “No,” he said, “we came to tell you that Horn Chips has looked into Inyan and seen that the buffalo are at the forks of Rattlesnake Creek. We’re going with the wolf,” scout, “to make sure.”

  “Why don’t some of you Bad Faces go, too?” said Chips. He was related to both bands but lived with the Bad Face people.

  “I’ll go,” said Black Twin quickly. White Twin said the same. They looked at their brother expectantly, but No Water walked off with an angry look, rubbing his belly.

  As the group headed back toward camp, Horn Chips said to Curly, “Come with me.”

  Curly started to speak, but he didn’t know what to say. He shrugged. He started to speak again, and nothing came out.

  Chips just turned his back and set off for the Bad Face circle.

  Scared, Curly followed Chips to his lodge. The wicasa wakan sat behind his center fire and got out his canupa and lit it. Curly noticed how he watched the shifting shapes of the smoke as they wafted toward the center hole. He wondered if Chips saw the future in the smoke, which was the breath of the earth.

  Chips patted the ground and Curly sat next to him. Chips burned a little sweetgrass to invite the presence of the spirits. Curly accepted the canupa and smoked. When he was finished, Chips said, “You must tell your father what you dreamed.”

  Curly gushed his breath out. He had been afraid Chips would make him tell his vision right now, to Chips. He was half-afraid of the wicasa wakan. The man had power, and all power cut both ways, for good and ill.

  Curly’s throat tried to squeeze shut before the words could get out. “I understand, Cousin.” Having to tell his father was not a bit better.

  “When you’ve told your father,” Chips said, “come to me. I have things to show you.”

  Curly felt riven. Fear, panic, excitement, he couldn’t tell his own feelings. Hawk was clasping and unclasping her claws in Curly’s heart.

  Chips knew the spirit power of Inyan, Stone, a great power, hard to control. Curly hoped that wasn’t what Chips wanted to show him.

  “That’s all, Cousin,” said the holy man gently.

  Curly hurried across the Bad Face circle through the darkness toward his father’s lodge. His legs felt unsteady. He kept an eye out for the Bad Face youths other than He Dog. Curly was sure they would dislike him more now. It showed what gaining power did to you, any kind of power.

  Hawk pranced within him, tense.

  At the Hunkpatila camp he stopped and let himself be aware of standing within the circle of this village, of sleeping in the circle of his family’s tipi, of living in the big circle of the Oglala and the bigger circle of all the Titunwan Lakota. He looked up at the moon. He lived within the circles made by Moon and Sun every day. This was all a sacred hoop, and it was his life.

  He murmured into the infinite night, “I should tell my father my wakinyan dream.”

  Curly stood there looking up, waiting for an answer.

  He heard nothing.

  Hawk dug her claws into his chest.

  So he wouldn’t tell, not yet. He didn’t know why, but he didn’t think Hawk wanted him to.

  Yes, for Hawk I will defy Horn Chips.

  LEAVING HOME

  The hunt was good, lots of meat and robes for the Oglala and Sicangu. Curly got a four-teeth, a four-year-old, the best for robes. When his two mothers had the meat on a travois and headed back to camp, he nudged his pony alongside Buffalo Hump. His hunka’s eyes were glittering. “They say the Sahiyela and the Mahpiyato are hungry.” Their friends the Cheyenne and Arapaho had stayed back at the soldier fort after the troubles. “The wasicu’s rations weren’t enough.” Hump’s eyes glanced toward Curly with a smile and went back to their restless watching.

  Curly just nodded. Hunka didn’t have to put everything into words. When you loafed around the wasicu fort, you starved. When you got away from them and hunted in the old way, your children were so full their bellies pooched out.

  Tasunke Witko rode up alongside. They were heading back to camp slowly.

  Curly’s father had that look, the one that meant “I’m worried about my older son.” Curly could read his looks instantly. He knew them all, and they were all objectionable.

  “You did very well hunting,” he said. “Corn will make you a fine robe from the four-teeth.” Some young men would get their mothers or sisters to paint the robe or bead or quill it. Curly would keep his plain.

  “We will eat the tongue tonight,” said Tasunke Witko. Tongue was Curly’s favorite cut.

  The youth still didn’t look up, keeping his eyes on the ground, flicking them around toward the horizons but not toward his father. “I’m going to eat with Spotted Tail,” the boy said. “I’m going to stay with Spotted Tail for a while.” He kicked his pony to a canter, and Hump followed.

  Tasunke Witko looked after Curly, the slim form fading in the dusk. This wasn’t like his elder son. First he stayed away from camp for three days, scaring everybody, and acted remote and indifferent when they found him. When he came back, he lived with his brother by choice and seldom visited his parents’ lodge. He wandered around camp distracted, looking broody. He dressed as though he belonged to a very poor family. Now the boy was going to live with his uncle Spotted Tail. Anywhere but home, it felt like.

  This boy … One day a great name would be passed down to Curly, father to son. Tasunke Witko, His Crazy Horse, the third consecutive eldest son of that name.

  He had to earn it, naturally. Tasunke Witko knew the boy would earn his name, many times over.

  But why was he so odd? Always courteous but never really present in his mind. Thirsty to learn, but never satisfied, never pleased with himself. His eyes far away, always listening for something in the distance. Troubled, as though with a pain he never spoke about.

  Tasunke Witko thought he knew part of why the boy was strange. The woman who gave birth to him was dead. He had two mothers now, and it was all the same, they were real mothers. But Tasunke Witko thought Curly was constantly remembering the woman who gave him birth, longing for her.

  Tasunke Witko held her face in his mind. He would never speak her name again, but her face was with him all the time and sometimes the feel of her next to him in the robes at night. Rattling Blanket Woman, that was the name he would never speak and Curly would never utter again. A Mniconjou, the daughter of Lone Horn, a chief, but that was not why he had married her. She was an imp. Her face, round as a plate, was all mischief and play. Even respect for her husband didn’t stop her practical jokes. To her everything was play, even what went on in the buffalo robes. Especially what went on in the robes. The children
loved her. Tasunke Witko loved her.

  Curly was just six when she died, his sister, Kettle, two years older.

  The trouble came when Tasunke Witko’s brother He Crow got killed by the Psatoka, the enemies the wasicu called the Crows, in battle. He was just two years younger than Tasunke Witko, both in their early thirties. Tasunke Witko took an oath of revenge and cut a bloody path through the Psatoka men for six moons. When he got back from slaking his blood thirst the last time, Rattling Blanket Woman was dead.

  She had gone crazy, they said, in her grief for her brother-in-law. Or from loneliness, thought Tasunke Witko, from missing the husband who was never home anymore, even when he was in the lodge, a husband who had abandoned her in mind and body to keep company with the dead. Either way, she killed herself.

  The six-year-old Curly came into the tipi with Plum and found his mother hanging from a lodge pole by the neck, her head twisted, her body twisting slowly.

  Tasunke Witko knew what the faces of hanged people looked like, what Curly must have seen. But he could never get the boy to talk about it. And Plum dropped into madness.

  It was not so bad for Tasunke Witko. He married Red Grass and Corn, two Sicangu women, sisters of Spotted Tail, whom everyone admired. Together they gave his children mothers, and one bore him a second son. But Tasunke Witko had never stopped worrying about Curly. The boy seemed half here and half … somewhere. Tasunke Witko imagined sometimes that boy had a melancholy spirit song in his head and even when he talked to you, he was always listening to that music.

  Tasunke Witko wondered if the one who once gave Curly suck was singing the song.

  For whatever reason, the boy’s mind was always somewhere else. Now it was worse. He was sure Curly was avoiding him. Tasunke Witko hoped it was just the surliness of a boy in the becoming-a-man time.

  He hoped so, but he didn’t think so.

  He called in his mind after his riding-away son: Stranger, stranger, come back!.

  Curly sat in the lodge of his uncle Spotted Tail, listening to the men, his uncle and Little Thunder, the war leader and the chief of this band of Sicangu. Curly liked to be able to sit quietly behind the men, between them and his uncle’s four wives and all the children, in the dark away from the fire, where no one would look oddly at him.

  The men were busy with reports of troubles. The wasicu were furious about the killing of the twenty-nine soldiers. The bands would have to stay away from Laramie, which meant losing this winter’s annuities. Some of the people wanted to go back to their old northern hunting grounds for good. Others, even those who thought the soldiers had gotten what they deserved, wanted to make up with the wasicu and get the gifts and be able to trade.

  “We’re entitled to those goods,” said Little Thunder. The annuities were what the wasicu paid them back for the disappearing buffalo. That was the deal of the big papers signed at Fort Laramie three years ago: The wasicu could keep the Holy Road and travel on it. For all the game the emigrants killed, the wasicu would pay wagonloads of goods. It amounted only to a dollar or two per Lakota and often was paid late, short, or not at all.

  “If they don’t deliver them, or too little and too late,” said Spotted Tail, “we’ll go take them.” He smiled in a bloody-minded way. “Or just take the money.”

  Little Thunder chuckled when Spotted Tail said this. He and several other warriors had robbed a mail coach this autumn. Among the valuables they had found was lots of paper money. Not knowing what it was, they had scattered it in the wind. When the traders told them in an incredulous tone that it was $20,000, they had a good laugh. The wasicu and his money. But you could use it to get the annuities they cheated you out of.

  Back there in the dark Curly liked his uncle’s attitude. Simple. Clear. Strong. Based on what was right.

  Spotted Tail had a fine contempt for wasicu. Something in Curly celebrated this contempt.

  “We’ll talk to the agent next summer,” said Little Thunder, getting ready to leave.

  “You talk,” said Spotted Tail with a smile. “I’d rather go hunting. And stay sober.”

  Spotted Tail hated whiskey. Curly did too. He’d seen it make Lakota kill each other.

  He moved up beside his uncle next to the fire. Spotted Tail lit the canupa and without a word handed it to Curly. One thing Curly liked about this man was that he knew how to share a companionable silence.

  After a while Spotted Tail spoke up. “Would you like to spend the winter with us?”

  “Yes.” He was grateful to his uncle for understanding.

  “Give it to me.” Curly handed Spotted Tail the canupa, which had gone out. “What do you want to do this winter?”

  “Keep working with Hump on the skills and spirit of a warrior. And with you.”

  “Here.” Curly took the canupa filled with cansasa, tobacco. “You want to go live near the fort and learn the wasicu ways?”

  Curly shook his head. “They’re disgusting and dangerous.”

  “Anything else you want?”

  Curly picked up an ember with sticks and dropped it on top of the tobacco. He drew in hard, watched the fire glow, and let his mind go upward in a prayer with the smoke.

  “I don’t know.” He shrugged.

  He did know. He would remember what he had seen beyond, picture by picture. He would ponder the old ways, which were disappearing, the ceremonies less often performed, the akicita weakening, fewer men gaining fighting honors. He would consider the danger of the wakinyan, and Chips’ instruction to tell his father. He would try to figure out why he wasn’t going to tell anyone.

  “Hu ikhpeya wicayapo!” the young men cried, meaning, “Let’s whip the enemies so bad we could bugger ’em.” And they smiled fiercely at each other and slapped shoulders.

  Curly watched with envy. He wanted to go to war and wasn’t invited. He thought he had prepared himself meticulously under Hump’s tutelage. He had seen himself as Rider, riding into war. In war Hawk would be at ease in his breast.

  Some Lakota were concerned that they’d promised the wasicu when they signed the paper that they wouldn’t go raiding against the other tribes anymore. To Curly that was no issue. To begin with, the wasicu didn’t keep their promises. More important, how else could a man show his spirit, show he was a man? How could a young man with a vision calling him to war …?

  The Bad Face warrior Red Cloud took some of the young men against the Psatoka, all Bad Faces, including He Dog, the twins, and No Water, going as warriors. Though he was He Dog’s age, sixteen, Curly wasn’t invited.

  It was the Moon of Shedding Ponies. Not until after the moons of lightning and rain, the sun dance, and into the Middle Moon, July, Wicokannanji, did he get his chance. Then Little Thunder and Spotted Tail decided to go east, where the Two Circle People, the ones the wasicu called Omaha, would go away from their reservation for their summer buffalo hunt. Aside from the leaders, all the raiders were to be youths. “Why don’t you come along?” said Spotted Tail.

  Curly stood rigid in the sunshine, waiting for the words he was afraid of. Such as, “You can hold the horses,” meaning wait while the others fought. Or, “You can go for water,” meaning sneak to the creek at night to fetch drink for the real warriors.

  The words didn’t come. So the invitation was to fight for the first time. This was his mothers’ brother offering, the man who traditionally helped teach you shooting and tracking and hunting and war. He was one of the men you called leksi, a mother’s brother. Now his uncle was saying, “Come show us you are a warrior.” Curly was barely able to murmur, “Yes.”

  Curly ran fast to his lodge to tell Tasunke Witko and his mothers that he was going raiding against the Omaha. When he got inside, he looked at them and couldn’t say it. He sat down. He shared a little food with them, and his parents talked idly. Hawk was restless on her perch. They said they were going in to Laramie to see about the rations.

  Finally Curly said softly, “My mothers’ brother has asked me to go with him to fight the Tw
o Circle People.”

  The three parents looked at each other. Curly supposed they were happy but also afraid for him. They didn’t understand.

  He stood up. “I think Hump and I will stay with my uncle the rest of the summer,” he said softly. He pushed the lodge flap open and walked into the sunlight. He felt set free.

  FIRST WAR

  They went to war this Middle Moon in the spirit of a lark. Spotted Tail and Little Thunder took their wives with them, as though to say, “These Pani and these Two Circle People,” whom the wasicu called the Pawnee and the Omaha, “they’re nothing. There’s so little threat in fighting them, we’ll even take our women along.” Buffalo Hump went, too, and Young Man-Whose-Enemies, Lone Bear, Black Elk, and from the Bad Face band He Dog.

  Spotted Tail was a genial man, strong, stocky, with a slow, wide, easy smile. He loved to play practical jokes on his brothers-in-law and his nephews. He seemed to think everything in the world was an occasion for fun.

  He seemed so big, so burly in the upper body, so friendly, so protective that Curly always felt small and taken care of around him. Curly saw his father’s brothers constantly, the ones he called ate, “father,” in the Lakota way, Long Face, Spotted Crow, Bull Head, and Ashes. Of his mothers’ brothers, he saw Spotted Tail most often. Curly’s other favorites, the Mniconjou brothers of his blood mother, Rattling Blanket Woman, Lone Horn and Touch-the-Sky, usually camped far to the north. But the Hunkpatila were often with Spotted Tail’s band. The first time Curly rode among the buffalo, he had felt sure that if a herd father, a big bull, fell on him, Spotted Tail would simply lift it off, chuckling at his own strength.

  Sometimes Curly had trouble realizing that this man was not only one of the main war leaders of the Sicangu, but a shirt wearer as well, one of the four men not yet Big Bellies but responsible for the welfare of all the people. It was a hard job, putting the whole tribe before your family, even before yourself. Spotted Tail seemed too much interested in having fun for all that.