by Win Blevins
Now he wanted to hear her words. He would ask. What would she say?
Crazy Horse spent a while looking for her tracks. No luck. She must have been careful to walk away from the trail on rock. So, as one more chance, he decided to walk where he would have gone, had he wanted to leave no tracks. He led his pony and put one foot in front of the other carefully. It was dark, and the rocks had fissures.
Then he found himself looking at a dark blob. It was a bush. No, it had the shape of a person. It was a bush. No …
“Unci Plum?” he tried tentatively.
Her first words after twenty-five winters were English: “Goddamn it.”
Crazy Horse jumped off his pony and ran to her. She was crouched on an outcropping, huddled in one thin blanket against the whipping wind. He put his arms around her shoulders. “Unci Plum,” he said gratefully.
“I don’t suppose you’ll leave me alone,” she said. “I want to die.” She looked into his face challengingly.
“Unci Plum,” he murmured.
“Oh, all right, build us a fire.” She sounded half-friendly and half-crabby. “It’s goddamn cold out here.”
He half picked her up and got her in the lee of the rock. He cracked flint against his steel, got sparks on his little bit of tinder, and blew on them. Even here the wind snuffed them out. He repeated the process. This time the wind scattered them everywhere, and they went out again. “This is goddamn good,” said Grandmother Plum. “We’ll both freeze to death.”
After the third failure he had to gather more tinder. His hands were shaking. He got a little blaze started.
“Son of a bitch,” Plum said in English, squatting close.
Crazy Horse gathered sagebrush to feed the fire and said nothing. He was surprised his grandmother was so quick with words after all these years and so casual with what the white people said were disrespectful words. Had she been voluble when he was young? He didn’t remember. He supposed she had picked up all these white-man words when the people hung around Fort Laramie. Normal then, probably, but they seemed like sand in his food now.
He broke sticks off a dead twisty tree and built up the fire. Finally he broke off most of the trunk of the cedar itself, and they had a fine blaze.
He squatted beside her and offered her a little pemmican. She grabbed it hungrily.
“This is a miserable business, killing yourself,” she said. “I don’t know why I tried it.” She looked sideways at him. “I guess I’m grateful to you,” she said. “When I’m not pissed off at you for not letting an old woman die when she wants to.”
He felt a chill. Rattling Blanket Woman was hovering near the fire like a specter, maybe beckoning them both into the darkness and to death.
“Unci, after twenty-five winters why are you suddenly talking? And … disrespectful words?”
She bit off another piece of the pemmican and made big chewing motions while she stared into space. He saw her face deepen and soften.
“You don’t know about me,” she said. “Your father and the others never talked about it.”
Slowly, hesitantly, she began a story. When Curly was a small boy, she said, she lived near Fort Laramie with the loafers for two years. Curly’s band was around there most of the time then, not like now. That was before the troubles. Well, her husband was dead, and she stayed around the fort. To tell the truth, she was drunk most of the time. To tell the rest of the truth, she belonged to any man who wanted her, if he had the price of a cup of whiskey. Since she managed to stay drunk the whole time, she must have had a lot of cups.
“That was when I picked up the white-man words,” she said. “Many of us loafers did. The soldiers thought it was funny.” She ruminated for a moment. “I walked under the blanket with a lot of soldiers, drunk, drunk, drunk.” She looked sideways at her grandson. “Maybe I was forty winters old, but I was still beautiful. Or that’s what people said.”
She gave him a look that meant, “You were too young to notice.”
This must be one of the reasons Worm was so set against whiskey, he thought.
Grandmother Plum rambled on: Rattling Blanket Woman had asked her to come live with her and Worm, who was known as Tasunke Witko then. It would be inconvenient—a husband and his mother-in-law could never speak to each other—but it was necessary. “I had no husband, my parents were gone beyond the pines, Rattling Blanket Woman was my only living child, and I had to live with someone and get away from the fort, get away from whiskey long enough to get my spirit back. Besides, Worm was away all the time that summer, gone against the Psatoka.”
He knew that summer was when his father stayed away for months taking revenge against the Psatoka. The time when …
“You always blamed your father for what your mother did,” she said. He felt the death of his mother in his chest, like a sack around his heart, a sack full of tears. In his mind she was always hanging by her neck from his lodge pole, a memory he could never look at directly, but one always in the margin of his vision. “But it was not his fault,” she said.
She looked at him oddly, her eyes flashing in the light of the fire. “I wonder whether you’re ready even now to hear it.” She nodded as though to herself and plunged on. “You decided she was distraught because Worm was always gone. But you made that up. She didn’t dread his absence. She dreaded his return. Because she had lifted the lodge skirt to a young Sicangu.”
Plum barely hesitated and marched forth again. “She didn’t want to marry this man. He had seduced her and then told ail his friends about how he sneaked into the lodge and what he did inside. And how he would do it night after night—she lacked the will to stop him. She was humiliated.”
Crazy Horse was dizzy. Unsteady. He put out both hands to support himself where he sat.
“Humiliated,” Plum repeated. “That’s why she hanged herself. She couldn’t face Worm.”
He bit his lower lip hard, and she read his thoughts. “Yes,” she said, “you have a lot to apologize to your father for.”
She stared off into space for a little. “Me too. I encouraged her. I had had many men. I thought your father was mistreating her by being gone all the time. I teased her about not having the heart to take what she wanted. Another man if she wanted.” The old woman snorted. “I didn’t care about myself anymore. Drunken fool. I was still sneaking the whiskey when I could.
“Your mother cared about herself. So she couldn’t stand what she’d done.” Her voice dropped to a whisper. “My fault.
“Yes, that stuff about your father being gone all the time was something you made up.” She spoke matter-of-factly. “You missed her. You were not far past your time of sucking at her breast. You didn’t think it up about him being gone until later.”
Crazy Horse just sat there. He felt the truth of his life dropping onto his head like rocks.
“Why did you stop talking, Unci?”
Grandmother Plum shrugged. Then she went on in a matter-of-fact way. “Didn’t want to do anything at first. Not eat, not sleep, not stay awake, nothing. Guilt.” She sat looking into the shadows of the past. “When we found her, I just sat down, fell down, almost. Didn’t move. You ran outside crying and brought help. I just sat there. I felt so terrible I… I didn’t want to move, to breathe, to exist. Didn’t want to die, just wanted to … evaporate.”
She fell silent for a while. “Couldn’t stop breathing. Holding my breath would have been doing something. Intended never to move again. Wished I could just turn to rock. Know what it was made me move finally? Got up to pee. Wanted to stay there and never move, tried, but it was too uncomfortable. Next morning I drank water, never drank whiskey since. After a while I ate a little. Couldn’t help it. Hated it, but couldn’t help it.”
“But why didn’t you talk?”
She didn’t answer for a long time. “For many winters I lived like a person walking around underwater. Muddy water. Moved slowly, didn’t see anything clearly, didn’t hear much, didn’t feel anything.” She paused. “Finally m
y spirit started to come back a little and things weren’t so murky. But I didn’t want to talk, didn’t want to feel, didn’t want to tell your father what I’d done. I still wanted to turn into a rock, so that I wouldn’t feel the rain or the wind, even the winter snow could sit deep on me and I wouldn’t feel it.
“It was you that started me back.”
She turned her head toward him with a bird-like jerk, and he saw something alive in her eyes. “Twenty winters ago.”
He waited.
“Give me your blankets,” she said. “I’m cold.” She flashed him a crooked grin. “Which is what I intended to be.”
He lifted the two blankets off his shoulders and draped them over hers. She pulled them tight.
“You remember when Bear-Scattering was dying? On the Running Water? You came and took me outside and sat me on a log and talked. That … reached me. You took me by the arm, sat with me, talked to me. Nobody had done any of that for ten winters.”
She seemed to shiver for a long moment.
“I remember perfectly what you talked about. Hawk. Hawk living in your heart. You wanted to know if everybody had a Hawk in the heart.” She smiled broadly at him. “No, not everyone does. Not everyone finds his animal guide as a youth, as you did. Some never find it. Most animal guides aren’t a constant presence, like Hawk.”
She thought awhile. “I knew then that you were very special. You are like her. You have a big gift. I knew then, and I should have warned you: Great trials come to those with great gifts.
“You also wanted to know whether you should seek a vision. I didn’t answer you. Force of long habit, partly. But had I felt like answering, I wouldn’t have. You knew the answers in your heart. You needed to learn to look into your heart and see them and trust them and act on them.
“Right away you went out crying for a vision. I was proud. When you came back, I saw in your face that you had seen beyond, and seen much. I was thrilled for you, and afraid for you. I couldn’t say any of that. Feeling anything was nearly too much.”
She stopped. After a little while Crazy Horse went into the darkness to find some more wood for the fire. When the tongues of the blaze rose high, she began again.
“It is for you I have wanted to stay alive these past twenty winters. You walk in a sacred way. In you my daughter walks in a sacred way. In you I walk in a sacred way.
“These are terrible times. Maybe the end of times, I think. In any time it is possible to walk in a sacred way. In some times, like this one, it is the only way to live like a human being. You are doing that.”
When she didn’t speak for a long time, Crazy Horse asked his question. “Unci, things are hard. What shall I do? What shall we do?”
She answered promptly and softly. “I don’t see into the future. Listen to Hawk. Walk as she tells you. Look with the single eye that is the heart.
“Listen for the Inyan, too. Maybe they will begin to speak. Mainly listen to Hawk. Act accordingly. That’s all human beings are asked to do.”
After a long moment she looked him in the eye. “I don’t want to live much longer,” she said. “Don’t say you need me—you don’t. My hands hurt, my knees hurt, my back hurts, the pain is terrible sometimes in the morning. I want to go on. A person knows when it’s time to go on.”
“Unci,” he put in quickly, anxiously, “will you come back to camp with me in the morning?”
She hesitated. “Yes,” she said. “Thanks for coming to get me. There’s something I must do.”
The next day they got to camp about midday, cold, tired, and hungry. That evening Grandmother Plum went to Worm’s lodge and stayed a long time. Crazy Horse went to his sister, Kettle. Since she was older than he, she’d recall the months and years after their mother died better than he did. He asked her what she remembered of how his father had taken care of the two children in that difficult time. She told him.
The next morning Crazy Horse started the painting.
First he went to his uncles Little Hawk and Ashes, who were in camp. He got from them detailed accounts of his father’s attacks on the Psatoka to avenge the death of their brother, understanding carefully what coups were struck, what enemies killed, scalped, injured, what ponies stolen.
He admitted to them that he was ashamed of himself. Full of resentment of his father’s absence, he had never paid attention with sufficient care to his father’s formal singing and dancing of these events. His uncles told him of the coups simply, soberly, without reproach.
Then he took a fine, luxurious robe Black Shawl had tanned. He got out his paints, red, white, and ocher from clays of those colors mixed with the fat scraped off a buffalo hide, black from ashes, blues and greens from lichens, bitterbrush, and blueberries.
Slowly, scrupulously, he painted his father’s deeds during those months of holy war against the Psatoka. His father mounted, riding fast and shooting arrows. His father throwing a spear, swinging a club. Psatoka wounded and bleeding from the head, the neck, the chest.
It took him six days to finish the painting. Since he was not a skilled painter, the pictures had a certain crudeness, rawness. He hoped his heart showed even through that.
Black Shawl did not understand what he was doing and gave him curious looks. Grandmother Plum knew, voiced her approval, and provided a few details. She understood that the son was honoring the father’s war deeds at the time the mother died. Honoring, and saying he’d been wrong.
Black Shawl could hardly get over the fact that Grandmother Plum talked. When Plum spoke to Crazy Horse, Black Shawl hung on every word, tickled. She reported mundane comments to neighbors. Everyone in camp exclaimed about it, hands over their mouths. Plum acted like it was the most normal thing in the world. She chattered merrily at everyone, sometimes with a mordant tongue. Sometimes she made them wish she’d shut up again.
Crazy Horse chose Little Hawk to take the robe to Worm as a gift. Little Hawk returned to say that Worm accepted. They all understood that Worm knew the meaning of the gift. Not only did he see the events depicted, he knew from the beginning what was in his son’s heart. He sent word by Little Hawk that he invited Crazy Horse for a meal and a talk the evening after next.
They ate first. Crazy Horse’s mothers disappeared into the shadows at the back of the lodge. Worm got out tobacco and canupa and they shared the comforting ritual and the companionship of a smoke.
Then Crazy Horse began. “I apologize to you, Ate. I’ve kept hard feeling toward you in my heart.” He simply breathed in and out a couple of times. “When the one we both loved left us, I felt…” He had hoped he wouldn’t be this poor in words. “You know how I felt, how you felt. My mistake was that I blamed you. That was wrong. I know it. I wanted someone who wasn’t there, so I blamed the person who was there. I was wrong. You were doing everything you could for me, I know that now.” He looked up into his father’s eyes and back down. He was not so much ashamed as sad, infinitely sad.
“After a while I made something up in my mind.” This was the worst. “I made it up that she … died … because you abandoned us, you were gone all the time. I told myself I hated you for that.”
Now he looked his father full in the face. “I have behaved very badly. I’ve acted like you were … cruel when you were acting like a true father. I’m sorry for what I’ve done to you.”
He let it sit. He felt a little anxiety, a little yearning.
Worm just looked back at him. Benevolently. After a long while, he said, “A father understands such things. It was natural for you to feel hurt, to act hurt. I’m glad you’ve set down your own burden. There was no burden on me.”
Nine days later the winter’s second big snowstorm came. Worm and Crazy Horse were out hunting that day. By turning around promptly, they got their ponies back to the village before the drifts got bad, and not long before dark. At his lodge Crazy Horse asked Black Shawl, “Where’s Unci Plum?”
“At your mother’s lodge.”
He stood there. He was always uneasy
about Plum now. Against reason, he said, “I’ll get her.”
He walked through the softly falling snow. He could see clear sky to the west, over the Shining Mountains. The storm would clear soon.
His scratch brought “Come in.” When he lifted the door flap, he saw only his father and mothers.
“How long since Unci Plum left?” he asked.
“A long time,” said Red Grass. “Midafternoon.”
“Isn’t she with Black Shawl?” asked Corn.
She had a head start of a couple of hours.
“Let’s go,” he said to Worm.
They circled the outside of the village in opposite directions. When they met at the far side, Crazy Horse didn’t need to ask. Worm’s face showed that he had seen no prints leading away from the village in the fresh snow. They circled again and met back where they started. Almost all sign—children playing, women setting traps, men going out to tear off sunpole tree bark, the prints of the sentries coming to and from the pony herd—almost all sign was drifted in. They found nothing that looked like Plum’s moccasin.
Black Shawl, Red Grass, and Corn stood in front of Worm’s lodge with worried expressions. “She’s not at any other lodge,” said Black Shawl.
“No one has seen her,” added Red Grass.
Now it was full dark, and the sky was clearing. Tonight would be very cold. Father and son looked at each other and started off. They walked out where it was possible to walk, along the rimrock above the river, and on the slopes where the snow wasn’t deep. Then they walked where it might be trouble, through the drifts on the hillsides, in the gullies deep with snow. Wordlessly, they had the same thoughts. She must have left a track somewhere. Maybe she had thrown herself into a drift.
They walked from darkness until night-middle-made, in circles ever wider around the camp. They called her name frantically. They walked faster and faster, for the cold was bitter. They found nothing.
They walked until almost dawn. When they turned back toward their lodge fires, they knew they would not see Grandmother Plum alive again.
ULTIMATUM
