by Win Blevins
Will she ever speak again? he wondered. Will she talk to me? He stared into the embers.
This thought returned him to the memory of the brother who would never speak again. Crazy Horse heard his voice, telling a joke. He could not hear the words, but he remembered that it was a joke, and he recognized the antic tone.
He could not smile. A tear ran down each cheek. He clasped his grandmother’s hand a little tighter, and together they faced the dying center fire.
The next day he hunted buffalo. Slowly, carefully, like an old man, but he hunted. It felt awful, but it was his duty to his family. He told himself that duty and family were more important than they’d ever been.
Riding back to camp loaded with meat, he saw a rider on a friend’s pony hurrying away, galloping. Then he came upon the friend. Surprised, he asked who was riding his horse. “No Water,” was the answer. “He’s afraid of you.”
Crazy Horse was like a pony that breaks its stake rope. He cut the meat loose, let it fall onto the ground, and rode like a madman. He was dizzy, he was weak, he was about to topple off, but he rode. Yes, his father had accepted the gift ponies from No Water. Yes, they had sent Black Buffalo Woman back willingly. Yes, the peace was made, the rift smoothed over. Yes, Crazy Horse knew all this was for the best. He didn’t care.
At this moment he loathed No Water. This man had cast a spell on the woman he loved. This man treated people like ponies, to be bought, sold, traded, trained, used, killed. Crazy Horse saw a gun coming up in his face, flinched at a flash in his eyes, and felt day after day of pain.
When No Water jumped the borrowed pony into the water and swam the flooding Elk River, Crazy Horse reeled. He caught the pony’s mane and let himself down to the ground.
He watched his enemy flee.
The sense of wrongness, the wrongness of everything, sat in his gut like a foulness. He hated No Water, and he hated himself.
“Now the Big Bellies have their excuse,” said Worm.
Nevertheless, Crazy Horse would not go to the council. He knew he could ask to speak to the Big Bellies on his own behalf, and they would hear him out. He knew, if he did not, what the result of the council would be. And he would not go.
They met in a big lodge, circled around the fire, the chiefs of the Oglala, two young men who not long ago had started wearing the chief’s blanket of their fathers, Young Man-Whose-Enemies of the Hunkpatila and Sword of the Oyukhpe, plus their fathers. Sitting Bear for the True Oglala and Bad Face for his band. They paid no attention to the fact that eight or ten young Bad Faces stood outside, clamoring for the Big Bellies to take the shirt signifying an owner of the people away from Crazy Horse.
Bad Face stated the case against the Hunkpatila warrior. He had chosen a course of action that disrupted the people gravely. (Black Buffalo Woman was not mentioned by name.) Since he had known it would cause division, he clearly had acted with flagrant disregard of the common welfare. And after the rift was sewn together by the efforts of many good men, Crazy Horse had done ill again. Though his father had accepted the horses from No Water, ending the matter, the Strange Man had chased No Water and tried to kill him.
No one needed to say that No Water and his family had gone south with their lodges, permanently away from the trouble.
One by one, the other chiefs said the same. No one mentioned Crazy Horse’s heroism in war. That was not at issue here. The only question was, Had he lived up to his responsibility as a shirtman?
No one mentioned, either, that this council was taking place because the enemies of Crazy Horse had agitated for it. No one mentioned that neither the young warrior nor any of his relatives was here to speak for him, yet the opposition was well represented. It didn’t matter. The chiefs were less concerned with justice to one man than with keeping the peace among the people.
Crazy Horse knew they were coming. He was waiting in Worm’s lodge, the case holding the shirt in his lap. He didn’t take it out and look at it. He pictured it lovingly, the two bighorn sheep skins, the dewclaws, the many pieces of hair, the multicolored quills representing Hawk. Since his spirit guide Hawk had died, he cared nothing about the shirt.
One of his mothers, Red Grass, slipped under the lodge cover. “They’re on the way. Eight or ten Bad Faces are with them,” she said. “Including Black Twin, White Twin, and Standing Bear,” Woman Dress’s brother. “Armed.”
“They won’t dare come into this lodge with their weapons,” said Worm.
Crazy Horse smiled at his parents gently but kept silent. Since he had acted foolishly against No Water, he felt oddly meek, like a man who had been sick in spirit and was now convalescing.
A scratch on the door flap. Worm bade them enter. As Sitting Bear led the way in, Crazy Horse heard Young Man-Whose-Enemies tell the young Bad Faces, “We won’t have any trouble here. And we aren’t going to have any ‘accidents’ either.” The young warriors made no attempt to come in.
The chiefs sat in a half-circle around the center fire, next to their host, Worm, honored guests. None of them would meet the eyes of Crazy Horse. They smoked a little. Finally Worm scraped the ashes out of his canupa. Then Crazy Horse rose and handed the case bearing the shirt to his war comrade and fellow shirtman, Young Man-Whose-Enemies.
Everyone sat in melancholy. No one had anything to say, except the one who seldom spoke. “I am not angry,” he said. “I am at peace with what has been done. I regret the trouble I caused among the people.”
Everyone sat in stupefied silence. Worm actually smiled—smiled lovingly at his son. After a while the Big Bellies filed out silently.
Young Man-Whose-Enemies walked last, behind the other Big Bellies, carrying the shirt.
“Our great man deserves the shirt,” said Black Twin from behind the chiefs, his voice low and squeezed.
“That shirt should go to Red Cloud.” Standing Bear’s voice sounded belligerent. “As soon as he gets back from Washington.”
The Big Bellies just walked on.
Young Man-Whose-Enemies knew perfectly well that the Bad Faces were sensitive because the Oglala had never entrusted Red Cloud with high leadership. In theory he himself wanted to heal whatever wounds were hurting the people. He almost walked on in silence, back to the council lodge. But he turned back, holding the shirt. He fixed Black Twin with his eyes angrily and said, “I have seen enough bad work tonight.”
“Your man has been stripped of honor,” said Standing Bear mockingly.
Young Man-Whose-Enemies thought a moment. Then he said, “No, a man can lose honor, but no one else can take it away from him.”
He stared at the Bad Face until the man dropped his eyes and the young warriors backed away.
Worm looked at his son’s face in the light of the center fire. Crazy Horse had filled an old canupa, a short one, the sign of a man with few honors. He sucked in the smoke from this canupa and blew it out several times, like a slow pulse.
Things were a little better now. The sounds had stopped from the robes where Worm’s wives slept, the sounds of soft crying.
Crazy Horse blew out the smoke once more. Finally he said, “It’s all right, Father. I deserved it. I was false to my vision.”
Worm regarded his son.
“I’m not angry, Father.”
Worm touched his son gently on the arm. He would not say all that was on his mind now. He knew Crazy Horse wasn’t angry. He knew his son felt he deserved humiliation.
Worm thought anger would have been better than what he envisioned in the landscape of his son’s spirit now. A cold, bitter wind whistling through a parched desert of the heart.
PART FOUR
SOLDIERS FALLING INTO CAMP
THE WINTER RED CLOUD’S HORSES WERE TAKEN AWAY (1876)
The spirit of His Crazy Horse
sits in the center of the sundance circle
at a small fire.
With his knife he cuts a hank
from a braided strand of sweetgrass.
He lays the piece carefull
y
on the blaze
and watches its smoke
ascend to the sky,
ritually inviting the spirits
to attend him in this place.
ACCEPTANCE
Worm nodded briefly at He Dog, meaning, “Go ahead and speak for us all.”
He Dog started so softly that Crazy Horse couldn’t understand the words. Rubbing the new scar below his nostril, he said so.
His friend He Dog spoke again, softly but not hesitantly: “We suggest that you marry. An excellent choice would be Black Shawl, of Big Road’s band.”
The Strange Man smiled a little at what he saw. His best friend among the Bad Face people, his father, and his father’s brothers had put their heads together for the welfare of the two main divisions of the northern Oglala and his personal welfare. Without asking him, they had spoken to this woman and her family and gotten consent. She belonged to the other division, the Bad Faces. They were still trying to mend the hoop of the people.
Yes, probably it would be good for him, besides.
He drew on the short canupa he now smoked because he had lost high status. His family said that was unnecessary—it was no disgrace to be brought low by your enemies, they said—but he himself had made the choice. He was accustomed to losses.
He knew Black Shawl by sight. A good woman, to all appearances, of great dignity in her bearing, though no special beauty. It had never occurred to him to wonder why, but she had never married, and she looked older than twenty-five winters.
He looked around at these men, the ones who had acted more wisely than he in the affair of the woman he’d thrown himself away for. Their wisdom had saved the people another rupture. He looked around his lodge, a lodge kept by an old woman generally thought deaf and dumb, a woman who did not have many years stretching before her. He knew she would like a younger woman to do most of the work.
He thought of himself. He would like a woman companion. His brother was dead now. His brother by choice lived with his family in his own lodge. Yes, he would like a companion. He didn’t think his heart could be healed, but it could be eased. If he were not feeling so much like a man just getting his health, he might have thought of this himself.
“I thank you for being so considerate of me.” He let that sit. “Is the woman willing?”
Worm nodded yes.
“I want to say yes, I will share my life with her, such as it is. If she understands how I am. My medicine may make me a poor husband. I will give you an answer in the morning.”
He took the old woman’s elbow, and they turned together to the fire for its warmth, her shoulder pressing against his this time. He stared into the embers for a long while, until they began to seem to glow and darken, glow and darken, like the pulse of a person, or of the earth. “Unci,” he murmured, “should I marry?”
He thought of what he had wanted from the people. Not position, no, or influence or wealth or even glory. Yet even while he shunned honors, he had wanted honor. He had wanted the people to see him in a certain way, a special way. “Even strangeness can be thought of as special,” he said into the darkness.
He looked at his grandmother. He thought of what he should have been keeping his mind on. Seeking to be Rider in a pure way, without wondering how people thought of him. Listening for wisdom from Inyan. Attending to the guidance of Hawk. Walking his path simply, without wondering whether he cut an impressive figure in the walk. Pursuing a sacred way without asking whether people noticed, respected, admired.
“So much is vanity,” he said.
He thought of all he had wanted with Black Buffalo Woman. Passion, romance, mystery. All that was gone now, and so was the desire for it. “Foolishness,” he said.
He thought of marrying, having a companion. He thought of loving, not as a big feeling but as a continuous attention, and the deeds that came from that attention. He thought of sharing food, staying warm by the same fire, sleeping in the same robes, moving the lodge together, hunting and skinning and tanning and cooking, all together.
“Am I fit to be married?” he asked his grandmother.
He thought of life being born and dying, every day, a relentless churn of births and deaths, the biggest circle of all the circles on the earth. He felt within himself the lust of flesh to be born, the surge of its will to live on Maka, Earth. He felt within himself the desperate clutch of flesh to hold on, live longer, never let go.
Once he had seen a wheel on a white’s wagon come off and squirt downhill, headed nowhere. It had finally rolled out of sight. Maybe it was still going somewhere, just rolling and rolling, pointlessly, the way he was living.
He started to speak, hesitated, then spoke. “Sometimes I’m …” The words he thought of were “weary of it.”
He sighed instead of uttering the words. They weren’t enough for the feeling.
“Should I marry, Unci?”
His grandmother just looked blankly into the darkness.
It was very late, but Red Grass said to come in. She knew his footstep.
“Don’t get up,” he said. The center fire was only a few coals. She came to him in the darkness and led him outside by the hand. “Mother,” he said, “I have a request for you.”
She squeezed the hand.
“In the morning will you go to Black Shawl in Big Road’s camp? Tell her I want her very much.”
His mother slipped her arms around him. It was hard for her to be near him these days without weeping, hard to see the powder-blackened scar under his nose, see the melancholy in his eyes.
“Tell her, though, that it will be marrying a man who is half-dead. I have no joy in life anymore. I don’t want to live. Maybe I will seek death.”
He hesitated, and finally decided those words were enough.
“Ask her if she will have me, now that she knows.”
Red Grass embraced him.
Red Grass saw that Black Shawl recognized her before she told her name and the name of her son. She sat with Black Shawl in front of the lodge and busied her hands with helping cut the prairie-turnips. She found it hard to start talking. She didn’t know what to explain, whether to offer any comment.
“My son says to tell you he wants very much for you to be his wife.”
Red Grass saw the tremulous … something … pass across Black Shawl’s face. But the woman kept her head down, not showing her emotion nakedly to her future mother-in-law.
“He says, though, that you would be marrying a man who is half-dead. He says to tell you he has no joy in life anymore.” Red Grass waited and watched. No, she didn’t think she would put in a mother’s explanation about her son’s heart. If the woman couldn’t surmise the truth, she would make a poor wife anyway. Red Grass studied her face.
The next words cost Red Grass a lot. “He says to tell you he doesn’t want to live,” she said, her voice gravelly. “Maybe he will seek death, he says.”
Black Shawl looked up into Red Grass’ face, and Red Grass cast her eyes down. She had been impolite, she realized, scrutinizing Black Shawl like that. But what she saw in those eyes in the moment Black Shawl raised them made her heart flutter with hope. It was pride and awareness and determination.
So the family of Crazy Horse didn’t know, thought Black Shawl. Didn’t know that she too knew what it was like to love someone and lose. She too knew what it was like to grieve. And unlike Crazy Horse, she knew how the spirit could survive anguish and emerge stronger.
She was excited to come into the Strange Man’s life in this way, so much to help him with, so much to give.
She looked at Red Grass for a long moment and got up and went into the lodge. She reached into the shadow of the lodge skirt for a pair of moccasins, took them out, and set them in front of Red Grass. Red Grass would not be surprised that the beadwork was meticulous and beautiful. Black Shawl saw the surprise on her face when she saw what Black Shawl had pictured there: the lightning from Crazy Horse’s vision.
“Tell him I have watched him fro
m afar,” she said. “I believe I know his heart, and I admire him. Tell him that if he wants me, I consider myself the luckiest woman among the Oglala.”
BEGINNING AGAIN
She glanced at his face from time to time as he ate. She was sure of what was on his mind. As soon as he felt his full strength again, he would go to the Shining Mountains to get the bones of his brother. Any day now, she thought.
She imagined it over and over. He would carry a leather sack to put them in and a blanket to wrap the filled sack in on the scaffold. The bones would be picked clean by scavengers, dried by the wind, whitened by the sun. She saw her husband squatting beside them, washed with feelings.
Abruptly she banished the picture from her mind. It was hard sometimes to know him and look into his eyes and see the melancholy and the world-weariness and endure the way he kept it all to himself.
She filled his bowl again. He rubbed his scar and looked into the shadows of the lodge, his mind seeing … she had no idea what. She turned to fill Grandmother Plum’s bowl, but it looked full. Sometimes she wondered if the old woman ever ate anything.
He was extraordinarily considerate, this husband of hers. He treated her with great respect. Often he was tender, especially in the robes. She knew that sometimes he took real solace from her, especially from the warmth of her body and the generosity of her robe loving. But his one true mate seemed to be his melancholy. She did not have to compete with Black Buffalo Woman but with despair. She saw, she was not afraid, she wanted them to share whatever came. She didn’t think he would let her, not fully.
Sometimes she thought what would change everything would be their son. A son would draw him out of the recesses where he lived. He would want to teach a son everything he knew. Then, even if they had to struggle as a family, because the buffalo were getting few or because the white men wouldn’t leave them alone, that would be grand. The shirt, the other woman, the humiliations, the loneliness—none of them would matter. Their struggle would bind them.
