Stone Song

by Win Blevins

  She embraced him and made her body speak understanding. It was part of her woman’s wisdom to understand that gestures said more than words. She knew this seeing beyond was a big step for him toward being a man. She knew he hadn’t yet spoken of it to anyone but her. She knew the loneliness of his silence.

  He loved her beyond imagination.

  She sat up, and her skirt fell far enough to cover most of her thighs. He was sorry. She tried the ring on three fingers of her left hand, and it fit the index finger perfectly.

  “It is a custom among the Sahiyela?” she said softly. “The man gives a pledge, and the woman gives a pledge?”

  She spread the fingers of both hands and looked at them. She had two rings of her own. One was hammered copper in the style of the Indians to the far west who always ate big fish from the salt sea, and one was silver, from the Indians to the south and west who lived in stone houses. The silver ring had small inlays of turquoise and onyx. Both of these rings had come to the Lakota country across long trade routes, probably brought here by the wasicu who went everywhere to hunt the beaver. The rings were so costly that only the daughter of a successful father could have afforded them.

  She slipped the silver ring off and put it in Curly’s hand. “Turquoise for an unclouded mountain sky for Hawk to fly in,” she said, “and black for the wakinyan that bring the rain. One side of life and the other.”

  He held his breath in. She did not know he was a wakinyan dreamer.

  Curly looked at the ring in his palm. His heart thumped in his chest, and his pulse thumped at him what he should have known all along.

  He raised his eyes into Black Buffalo Woman’s. He could not wear any ornamentation. The wakinyan would bolt disaster at him. No, she hadn’t guessed why he dressed shabbily.

  He accused himself: why hadn’t he thought of this before he carved the ring?

  He whipped himself: This was what came of doing things in strange ways, getting a vision when you weren’t ready. This was what came of keeping your vision a secret.

  He nearly stuttered the words: “I cannot wear your ring. Not yet. I saw something….” She would understand he meant he saw beyond.

  Maybe she did, but her face hardened. She took his ring off and closed it into the palm of her hand. “Light Curly Hair,” she said, “the people say you are Our Strange Man.” She glanced down and back up. “You are.”

  She stood up, and her skirt fell below her knees. She held her hand out flat, offering him his ring back.

  Curly shook his head. He didn’t offer her ring back. “I will … I will keep your ring and treasure it.” He looked up at her. He had no idea when he might be able to wear her ring. Never, probably. His eyes pleaded with her. “Will you keep mine?”

  She looked into his face for a moment, then made a motion that wasn’t quite a shrug. “Yes,” she said. “A secret pledge.” Her lips trembled with scorn.

  She turned away, picked up her chastity belt, and walked away stiffly.

  TWO PATHS DIVIDE

  In the huge council lodge the leaders said they’d been giving in to the whites far too easily. To the east they were taking everything, putting the Indians onto little squares of ground and saying, “Stay put while we grab everything else.” The Indians couldn’t even leave their allotment to go hunting or visit relatives without begging permission, and many times the agent of The One They Used for Father didn’t say yes.

  One of the traders’ sons said the white talk about The One They Used for Father was silly. They used the English words “Great White Father,” which was one of their ways of making themselves important and treating Indians like children.

  Other Lakota said the whites usually promised to teach the Indians a new way, a better way. Despite these offers, the result always looked the same. Before long the people were poor and dispirited. Half of them stayed drunk. No one paid much attention to the ceremonies anymore. People even sold their sacred objects for a little powder and lead, or some food, or even a bottle of poison drink.

  In return the Indians gave their land, their way of life, their spirits, their connection to Power, everything.

  Regardless of what the whites promised and whether they meant well or not, declared the leaders, these were the actual results.

  One man made up a song about the way the whites were coming, coming, coming and bringing destruction:

  “In the half of the sky

  where the sun lives

  clouds are gathering.

  In the half of the sky

  where the sun lives

  dark clouds are gathering.

  In the half of the sky

  where the sun lives

  dark clouds are gathering,

  and white men storm upon us.”

  Curly wondered whether the new wakinyan, the new destructive powers, were the wasicu.

  Some of the chiefs had traveled all the way to the big white town St. Louis and witnessed these things with their own eyes. Others had seen them on the far side of the Muddy Water. Everyone had heard about them. All the leaders agreed, but they noticed Spotted Tail didn’t speak. He’d just been among the whites for a whole year. They heard he had some strong opinions. But he sat quiet.

  Well, the whites had caused the Sahiyela, brother people to the Lakota, a lot of trouble. And the Wasp had stung Little Thunder’s band on the Blue Water. But the Sahiyela were few. Little Thunder’s people had been caught alone. If the Lakota stuck together, if they watched the soldiers and opposed them everywhere, the whites could do nothing. For they were not the Sahiyela, with a few hundred fighting men. They were the Lakota, with ten lances for every Sahiyela spear.

  Now, finally, Spotted Tail stood up and spoke.

  “Brother-in-law,” said Tasunke Witko, “will you eat with us?” It was the next night. He handed Spotted Tail a bowl of stew and a horn spoon. The two of them sat behind the center fire in the lodge of Tasunke Witko, honored guest and considerate host.

  “Is it mud soup?” asked Spotted Tail with a big grin. Though the two were host and guest, they were also brothers-in-law, which meant that teasing was in order. With Spotted Tail, often rough teasing and practical joking.

  Uncertain, Tasunke Witko answered that he would serve his honored brother-in-law only the best mud, from Paha Sapa.

  Curly’s mothers smiled at each other. They loved it when their brother came to visit. They sat at the back of the lodge. Curly and his younger brother, Little Hawk, watched from one side of the fire.

  “I have mud soup for my special medicine,” said Spotted Tail. “At least the white men think so. I’m afraid I practiced deceit at Fort Leavenworth.”

  “Your sisters are always embarrassed to hear about your exploits,” said Tasunke Witko.

  “Hai!” exclaimed one of his wives from the back of the lodge, meaning she was surprised her husband would say such a thing.

  Spotted Tail grinned. “I told one young officer—Blue was his name—that I can live on mud soup and mud soup alone.” More scoffing sounds from the rear, as if the women didn’t know who was more wayward, their husband or their brother. “ ‘Plenty of stuff in mud soup that’s good for you,’ I said. This Blue acted skeptical, so I showed him. I mixed up some mud soup and drank it down.”

  Tasunke Witko rolled his eyes. Grunts from the rear spoke mock disgust.

  “I mixed it weak,” Spotted Tail went on, “because mud’s so good I don’t need much of it. ‘Earth,’ I said to Blue. But you know, he wouldn’t eat any.

  “So I said I’d show I could live on nothing but mud soup for a month. Every day I got mud from a special place on the riverbank known only to me and this officer. I took Blue over to the well and made a ceremony of mixing up a big bowl of soup. I told Blue that my prayers added greatly to the richness of this life from Earth, so I didn’t need much of the mud in the soup. Just a little.”

  He smiled sideways at his brother-in-law. “I figured that, with just a little mud in it, this soup was no worse than drink
ing the water of the Muddy Water River, which the whites and the Two Circle People and their dogs drink every day.

  “Then I spoke a few genuine words to mitakuye oyasin and drank the soup. Every day, of course, I also swore to Blue that I would eat nothing but mud soup that day.”

  His sisters tittered. Spotted Tail was the biggest eater they’d ever known.

  “Then I would go home to the cabin where the soldiers made us live and have a good meal of prairie-turnip and pemmican stew. What good is a white man if you can’t have a little fun with him?

  “At the end of the month Blue admitted that I still looked really good. To him I looked just as fat as when I started the diet, maybe even fatter.

  “On that last day I got Blue to eat a bowl of the soup. I told the officer that since he didn’t know the prayers, he would need stronger soup to get the benefit.” Everyone’s eyes were big now. “So I put plenty of riverbank mud into the officer’s water. Ah, how the fellow slurped up the goop.

  “But I liked him,” ended Spotted Tail, laughing. “I really did. He was a good white man.”

  Tasunke Witko enjoyed his brother-in-law and did not turn him toward the evening’s business. Spotted Tail knew without being told that Tasunke Witko wanted something urgently, and what it was—he could read his wives’ brother that well. Later Spotted Tail would get around to it. So they traded stories, teased each other, talked about family and friends, and told the news of the two years since they’d last seen each other.

  When it was fully dark and the fire was dying, the Sicangu himself said quietly, “Some Lakota say the white men have made Spotted Tail a coward.”

  Tasunke Witko made a demurring sound that was not a denial and then said, “Those who know you would never say that.” Yet some Lakota did. Even Tashunka Witko himself saw something impossible, his brother-in-law, a renowned Lakota warrior, a shirtman, talking conciliation toward these arrogant and very aggressive enemies, the wasicu. Talking it now, when confrontation was on the way and all the people were beating like one heart and the drum of the heart said, “Fight, fight, fight.”

  This was why, after yesterday’s long council, when Spotted Tail finally spoke, Tasunke Witko asked him to come for dinner tonight.

  It was like the man to bring it up so directly, Curly thought admiringly. Whatever it was, Spotted Tail would always take on it straight ahead, in a frontal assault.

  Then why did he speak of compromise and retreat? The camp was a hubbub of gossip about Spotted Tail. No one could understand. This was the man, afoot and armed only with a sword, who had knocked thirteen of the Wasp’s charging soldiers off their horses. Why did he suddenly want to bend his knee to the wasicu? And want all the Lakota to kneel with him?

  How could he talk such talk and be the same man?

  Curly wondered if imprisonment could really have frightened him—everyone said so. Unspeakable. It should have been unthinkable. But everyone agreed. The thought felt awful to Curly, like a rash. He itched to get rid of it.

  Spotted Tail said it again: “Some Lakota say the white men have made Spotted Tail a coward.” Then he let it sit there in front of everyone, ugly as spilled intestines—in front of his brother-in-law, who was a respected wicasa wakan, his two nephews, his beloved sisters, especially himself. He was not being subtle or oblique—he wanted everyone to feel the ugliness. He wanted it to hurt. It hurt him. Maybe if they could see, maybe if they realized he would be the last Lakota of all to turn tail, maybe then they would begin to understand.

  “I am a shirtman,” he began. He met the eyes of his host. He felt his sisters’ eyes and ears from the dark in the rear of the lodge. He knew his nephews were eating up not only his words, but every gesture and every nuance. None of them wanted to think ill of their relative. He must accept the fact that his nephews probably would think ill, especially his favorite, the gifted and hot-blooded Curly.

  This was a responsibility life should not have brought Spotted Tail. It was his nature to live heartily, without second thoughts, relishing battle and the hunt. It was not his way to analyze, to try to see deeply, to peer into the future. He hated the winter he had spent among the whites. He hated being the only one to know.

  “My responsibility is to everyone,” he said. If he stated the obvious, they would see how loud he meant them to hear his words. “I do not like what I see, but I will tell you what it is.

  “The white men are ants that feed on a carcass and in tiny pieces carry it away. You wonder what happened—it’s almost gone—it was here yesterday—it’s too big to carry—then it is gone.

  “They are flies. They buzz around you, more of them than you can imagine, and soon you have the sickness they bring and are dying. They are the wind. It seems slight, niggling, but it parches the hungry wandering coyote, fells it, and shrivels its body until only bones are left.

  “You cannot imagine how many of them there are. On the Muddy Water River are several villages with as many as all the Sahiyela people. Where that river flows into the River of Canoes, Mississippi, there is a village as big as all the circle of Lakota lodges. They have a hundred such villages on this side of the big salt water and a thousand on the other side.”

  He paused for effect. “I have seen some of this. They showed me more in pictures in the talking papers. They told me still more. They said they have villages as many as all the Indian people, all put together, and these villages are only part of one nation, and they have many nations.” After a moment he went on, “I looked with the cante ista, the eye of my heart, and listened with the ear of my heart, and I know this to be true.”

  Spotted Tail listened to the silence around him and felt it and considered. He could sense that they didn’t understand.

  Well, he had said almost this much in the council lodge. Everyone knew this. He had decided that tonight, among his relatives, he would say what more he knew, as far as he could see it.

  “The worst is, they have a terrible blindness, these wasicu. They do not understand choice.”

  He was referring to a most sacred subject, and none of his hearers needed any explanation—no Lakota who had even started on the path to adulthood did. A human being had skan, something-that-moves, spiritual vitality. The force of life itself gave the person skan when he or she was born. It also gave him choice, and through choice he or she grew into the man or woman he or she became. Skan was the motive power, choice the direction.

  A Lakota had a choice between good and evil, the red road and the black road, between what made life beautiful and what made it ugly. He or she had help in making choices—the quiet voice that is in everyone, the spirit helper (usually in the form of an animal), what he or she saw when crying for a vision, personal medicine, prayer, ceremonies performed alone or with others. Still, choice remained, inviolate.

  Whether your way was to paint yourself in a certain manner, to wear something of iron or never touch iron, or whether you should charge the enemy first or simply swell the ranks, that was your nature, your vision, the route of your spirit on the earth. Other Lakota would respect it. None would try to coerce it or even influence it. None would mock it. Your understanding was the essence of you, and to follow it your sacred choice.

  All this was so fundamental as to not need saying. So what could it mean that an entire people did not understand choice? It was almost unthinkable. Were they human beings?

  “Among the whites some think they can see and choose for others.” It was so stunning that Spotted Tail just let the words hang in the lodge, heavy and oppressive. “Then comes what you would expect. They quarrel with one another not only about small things, but about the biggest. They fight and kill each other. Instead of respecting another man’s way, they stop at nothing to get him to adopt their way. Like the Mormons.”

  The Lakota knew the U.S. government this very summer was sending an army against the Mormons at the big salty lake to make the Mormons live like the other wasicu, especially not to take more than one wife. Incomprehensible.
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br />   “They hate our way,” said Spotted Tail. His voice was weary now and faint. “Their deepest desire—believe me about this—is to change our way of living. Their deepest desire is to make us like them. I swear it.”

  Tasunke Witko coughed. Spotted Tail understood that he was voicing everyone’s horror.

  Why would anyone do such a thing? No Lakota would commit this sort of murder of spirit.

  “I was as shocked as you are,” Spotted Tail said, “and also found this difficult to believe. Eventually, I believed it. Then I began to see that they have power to inflict their will upon us.”

  He paused.

  “So I went to the mountain near the fort and saw a little,” he said. “They would not let me go far, but I sat on the bluff above the river and cried for a little vision. Something came to me, but not to my eyes. It came to my whole body. A trembling. A rumbling. A great shaking. A shuddering, a quaking, a violent upheaval, as of Maka, Earth, herself.”

  He let a long moment go by, so they could absorb his meaning. “The old stories tell of upheavals like that. Maka shakes, and even her ancient face is changed. Trees are uprooted. Rocks that were high fall low. Cracks open in the earth. Mountains become plains, and plains erupt into mountains.

  “It is all swift beyond imagining, violent beyond imagining, terrible beyond imagining.

  “I hope my words make you afraid.

  “I have a sense, my relatives, that what is coming from the white men is swift beyond imagining, violent beyond imagining, terrible beyond imagining, like an upheaval of the earth.”

  Spotted Tail let this claim sit. Maybe now they would see.

  “When the entire surface of the earth is changed, there is nothing to do but live on it as it is. We cannot camp by the shore of a lake if it is now a creek. We cannot follow a trail the earth has swallowed up. We cannot eat buffalo that died in the time of our grandfathers.”

  He would sum it up now. He felt his words were not enough.

  “I am a shirtman. I must help take care of everyone. I have a little foresight. What I see is terrible, and I hate it. I wish I could live as an ordinary man, and hunt and fight and couple with my wives and teach my sons to do the same. I wish it…” He did not add “more than you can imagine.”