Faithful Travelers

by James Dodson

  “I sometimes think there’s a bit of poetic justice in my father’s heading out to the prairie to gamble,” he said, getting up slowly as we watched the girls park their bikes on the walk. “We took their fathers’ land and now they take our fathers’ money.”

  —

  Just across the line in South Dakota, we stopped at the “world-famous Corn Palace” in search of coffee and a pee, depositing the grasshopper in a small park behind a rank of large motor homes, and wandered into the Corn Palace, which disappointingly turned out to be just an auditorium with a lot of corn husks creatively arranged on its walls. While I waited for Maggie to inspect the plumbing, I busied myself reading a brochure about the place and tried not to be mistaken for one of the elderly sightseers who were gathering to take the official guided tour of the premises. They looked gaunt and agitated, as if they’d merely stepped into the building to escape the fierce Dakota sun and had then been asked to serve on a hanging jury. According to the brochure, Mitchell was such a pleasant boomtown because it was located on part of the Oregon Trail and a couple enterprising real estate men had come up with the idea of creating the Corn Palace to try and drum up business and convince settlers passing through on their way West that Mitchell was really someplace they ought to stop and put down stakes. By the look of the small town’s congested main street, though, only junk jewelry dealers and T-shirt shop owners seemed to have been impressed enough to stick around. We bought coffee and soft-serve ice cream and fled down the highway to Chamberlain, where we suddenly saw the Missouri River for the first time, wide and brown and glittering majestically in the late afternoon sun.

  Many of those same settlers had believed this was the start of the real West, the great high grassy inverted bowl of the plains leading to the Dakota Badlands and the sacred Black Hills and the very feet of the Rockies beyond. The thought of passing through such an unbroken and forbidding place, I thought, surely must have made more than a few of them wish they’d never left home, and surviving this barren windswept world must have been no small miracle.

  I suggested to Maggie that we try and get a glimpse of what it might have been like heading alone through the desolation of the prairie. She looked at me and smiled. A bowl of melting vanilla ice cream was on her lap, her bare feet were safely propped against the dash, Mary Chapin Carpenter was singing about stones in the road, and Amos was busy ignoring the Great Plains in back. She was practicing the Eiffel Tower with yarn, having already established a world record for doing cat’s cradle in five-point-two seconds flat. “That would be cool,” she said, casually looking out at the sere landscape to the north.

  We followed Route 50 up a dry canyon through the Creek-Crow Indian Reservation, passing through the rundown junction town of Fort Thompson, which boasted a sky-blue post office, an Indian-run casino called the Lode Star, a tribal school, and a modest subdivision with brown yards, several liquor shops, and a boarded-up bingo hall. We stopped at the post office to mail postcards from the Corn Palace and I casually asked the white clerk what people did in Fort Thompson to help make the time pass. The sound of locusts filled the open door, making the air outside electrified.

  “Think about moving someplace else,” he replied without even looking up, calmly sorting mail. He told us there was a campground across the Big Bend Dam, right on the river’s edge, pretty good fishing, especially near the dam. We drove on and crossed the Missouri and found the campground, a dusty patch of cracked-open earth with no freshwater facilities. The temperature must have been closing fast on one hundred and no one was about except the locusts. I opened the road atlas on the hood of Old Blue and considered following the Missouri farther north to Pierre, where there was another state park and we could camp and fish before dark, but suddenly the heat and the dust and the vast isolation felt a bit too overwhelming and I thought it would be no small miracle to put up a tent and unpack the gear and find a decent night’s sleep in this godforsaken place. I suggested to Maggie that we push on to a town called Murdo and maybe find an air-conditioned motel room with a pool and a nice home-cooked dinner.

  We rolled on, encouraged by the thought of a swim in a pool but silenced by the relentless heat and openness, rising after what seemed like half-hour intervals to the summits of long grass hills that simply afforded us more views of brown hills and baking grasslands.

  The radio station faded out. I told Maggie about a man I’d once visited out here on the High Plains for an interview, a rancher whose family had been on the land for over a hundred years. He’d grown up in a predominantly Norwegian Lutheran household but his great-grandfather had been a full-blooded Cheyenne Indian medicine man, a survivor of the massacre at Wounded Knee who practiced the “old ways” and taught his grandchildren the Ghost Dance.

  “What’s a Ghost Dance?”

  I explained that the Ghost Dance was performed in a circle, a ritual dance that sometimes lasted over several days, with participants holding hands and dancing until exhaustion dropped them into a deathlike trance. The participants believed the ceremony would summon their dead ancestors back to the earth, along with the vanquished buffalo herds, thereby restoring life to the way it was before the white man arrived with his bullets and new religions. Warriors believed it would also make them invulnerable to the bullets from soldiers’ guns.

  At its height of popularity in the late 1880s, I explained, inspired by the visions of a Paiute prophet named Wovoka, thousands of disaffected Indian youth began performing the ritual dance in a desperate attempt to assimilate Christianity into their religion, in defiance of U.S. government laws forbidding them to practice it. Frightened by rumors of new Indian hostilities, the government’s response to the Ghost Dance was to dispatch half of the entire U.S. Army west to the plains reservations, resulting in a massacre at a place called Wounded Knee where 146 men, women, and children were cut down by drunken soldiers of the Seventh Cavalry. On New Year’s Day, their frozen bodies were tossed into a mass grave and hastily covered over.

  “That’s a terrible story,” she said. “Did they really kill children, too?”

  “Afraid so.” I explained that those children who survived Wounded Knee and many other Indian massacres like it got sent either East or to special Indian schools on government reservations, where they were whipped for speaking in their native tongue and even sometimes killed if they got caught worshiping anything but a white Christian God. The idea was to transform them into something they could never be—white Christians. I reflected that Aunt Emma, her great-great-grandmother, the Cherokee foundling, had undoubtedly endured such a fate.

  As I said this, it suddenly hit me that perhaps I’d stumbled upon the answer to the family’s most perplexing and troubling mystery, a possible explanation as to why Aunt Emma had finally removed herself the way she did. Out here on the plains it suddenly seemed to add up. The world of her childhood had been utterly destroyed, her people marched West at the point of a soldier’s gun. The world she was asked to live in as an adult belonged entirely to someone else. She’d had great courage and wisdom but no true spiritual home and maybe the imbalance of nature was simply far too much to bear and so, unafraid of death, she eventually followed the path of her ancestors home.

  Maggie gazed out the window for a moment and asked if the rancher I’d visited showed me how to do a Ghost Dance.

  “No. But he drove me out to a spot on the plains where he believed his grandfather was buried. There was a cluster of cottonwoods and the wheat grass was very green around a small creek. He showed me a steer skull that had been bleached white in the sun and warned me to watch for rattlers. He said there was no marker because Indians didn’t believe in marking graves the way white men did because they felt they belonged to God’s earth, not God’s earth to them. He knew it was the spot, though, because he claimed he could ‘feel it.’ ”

  “What did it feel like?”

  “I don’t know. To me it seemed kind of empty. All you could hear and feel was the wind.”

 
—

  I made a serious miscalculation in Murdo, expecting a pretty High Plains town with a few nice shade trees, a good diner, and perhaps a clean motel with Mom and Pop Birdsong catching the evening breeze in lawn chairs, sipping a cool iced tea by the pool. But Murdo was your basic interstate trucker town, full of noisy big rigs and cheap motels and dust-covered tourist cars gassing up for the all-night haul across the Badlands.

  We took the last room at the kind of neon motel where the management changes the sheets daily—at least room to room—and ventured out to try and scour up some grub at the nearby Buffalo Lounge. Buffalo burgers were the special that night and there was a noisy group of bikers yukking it up under beer lights in the back room. There was an all-you-can-eat salad bar with nothing much you’d care to eat, so I ordered the buffalo special. The waitress wrote that down and then stared hard at Maggie. “Better try that burger, sugar,” she said, snapping her gum. “It’s some tasty.”

  “No thank you. Are you really going to eat a buffalo?” she asked me somewhat incredulously.

  “Well, not all of it.”

  She shook her head. “I don’t care for anything, thanks.”

  Something was chewing at her—the heat, the dust, the Bates Motel, the waitress who did her evening facial in cement, perhaps even the story I’d told her earlier about Indian children being shot by cavalry soldiers. Maybe that had been a mistake, one story I should have kept in the jar. It probably didn’t help that her parents had decided to get divorced, either. Some sadness you can’t outrun.

  “If you could have anything in the world right this moment,” I said, “what would it be?” I was afraid she was going to say McDonald’s chicken nuggets or for her mother and father to get their act together.

  “A swimming pool,” she replied without hesitation. Our luxury roadside spa, alas, didn’t have one and the Mom and Pop running the place looked as if they might be blood relatives on their last stop in the federal witness relocation program.

  Just when you think you’ve got somebody neatly pegged, though, they go and change everything. The waitress gave us a sweet sympathetic smile. I noticed that her canine tooth was perfectly edged in gold. “You know, hon, there’s a nice community pool up on the hill. My niece swims up there every night. I think it stays open till dark.”

  I thanked her, left a five for her trouble, and we drove up the hill and discovered a beautiful pool full of clean cold water. A group of teenagers on bikes was hanging around by the admission table. Bats or flickers swooped low in the purpling evening sky. The view was sensational. I asked the teens how the water was. “Pretty good,” a large boy with acne replied. “But that was this morning ’fore all the little kids pissed in it.” He pronounced it “kee-ids.”

  The teenagers giggled.

  “What kind of dog is that?” a tall and gangly girl wondered, pushing stringy hair behind a sunburned ear.

  “Old and hot mostly,” I said. Amos had already deposited himself on the cool wet pavement by the entrance to the changing rooms.

  “A retriever,” I added.

  “What’s he retrieve?” More giggles.

  “Not much.” Amos had never been one for fetching things. If you threw a stick, his view seemed to be that you ought to go pick it up instead of wasting his valuable time.

  We swam laps. The water was a real surprise, cold as a Maine lake in July and thoroughly refreshing. I got out and sat on the side of the pool until Maggie begged me to come back in and race her. She was a splendid swimmer for seven and I suppose I let her win, though it wouldn’t be too much longer before she would have to let me win. I got out of the water and flopped in a plastic chair while she padded toward the diving end of the pool, where a pudgy nutbrown Indian boy wearing cutoff shorts with a belt was doing cannonballs off the low diving board. There was a large splash. The kid did good cannonballs.

  I opened a book from the Medicine Bag called Dakota: A Spiritual Geography, by poet Kathleen Norris. I’d been rereading this lovely memoir of faith slowly for weeks, snatches here and there, an account of Norris’s return to an ascetic life on her family’s bleak ancestral lands in northwestern South Dakota. Maine was extreme, I thought, but nothing quite like that.

  The idea of personal transformations and Norris’s description of killer blizzards, combined with Maggie’s question earlier that day, made me think of the boy I’d run over three winters ago. He was about the same age as the Indian kid doing cannonballs. I’d gone to the store at the start of the season’s first good snowstorm, a real Atlantic howler, in a deep holiday funk, just needing to get out of the house for a while to try and clear my head. Something was gnawing at me but I couldn’t figure out exactly what.

  Perhaps it was that I was about to turn forty, but I didn’t think so. So much in my life seemed, by anyone’s standards, almost idyllic—children who were healthy and happy, a career that finally made sense, a sturdy house I’d built with my own hands, surrounded by rose gardens and a beautiful forest. In two days’ time I was scheduled to play my classical guitar during the annual family Christmas Eve service at Settlemeyer’s barn. All of which made this sudden Christmas funk even more maddening and intolerable.

  I drove out into the blizzard to try and figure out what was making me so miserable. The supermarket was virtually empty because anyone with any sense was already safely home. I bought a box of Cheerios, a quart of Diet Pepsi, four lightbulbs, two cans of cat food, and a newspaper, and checked out behind an elderly woman who was buying a potted plant and a copy of Time magazine, the annual year-end special that summarizes the year’s total of natural and man-made disasters, celebrity deaths and marriages, hot movies and holy jihads. “Isn’t it beautiful the way the snow covers everything?” the elderly woman suddenly said to me. I looked out at the empty parking lot, at the prehistoric shapes of the few vehicles still out there, and may have nodded. “You’d think people would slow down and notice all that beauty, wouldn’t you?” I smiled at her as you would at any unbalanced person, noticed that she was wearing only cheap running shoes, assumed she was perhaps someone “from away” or simply unacquainted with the ferocity of Maine winter storms. I confess I thought: Crazy as a widow loon.

  I got back in Old Blue and drove along Meadow Road. I turned on the radio and suddenly heard Bach’s Sleepers Awake, the very melody I was preparing to perform at Settlemeyer’s barn. And then the words of the crazy lady floated back into my head; I cut my truck’s speed nearly in half, noticing the way the snow slanted across the fields as I approached my favorite old homeplace on the hill. I’d never seen the people who lived there.

  As I rose over the small knoll between the house and the barn, though, a shape suddenly materialized out of the storm, a boy bouncing on a sled. I cut the wheel sharply to the right but saw him vanish beneath the wheels, heard a small cry, and felt a sickening crunch. The truck tilted on its side as it slid down the embankment. This took only an instant to happen and I was still strapped in my seat harness, which for a change I’d worn, staring at the ruptured Pepsi bottle spraying cola all over the dash and the small round oats of Cheerios scattered everywhere. For a moment I sat, dumbly suspended in my seat harness, trying to comprehend what had just happened, and then I heard another cry and was scrambling like a madman to get out of the truck and up to the boy. I found him lying on his stomach in the middle of the road. I touched his head and asked him if he could move. My legs, he said with a whimper. I can’t feel my legs. I picked him up and moved him to the side of the road, fearing the sight of a snowplow roaring over the knoll. I told him not to move and said I would go get help. Just then, the door to the farmhouse swung open and a heavyset woman came plunging down the snowy yard, wailing and out of control. She fell in the snow and struggled to get up. I went to help her and, as I gripped her arms, we briefly did an absurd minuet of terror on the slippery county road. I had never seen such grief in a mother’s eyes. She was thinking the unthinkable. And then her eyes suddenly changed, softened somehow in
wonder. I turned around. The boy was standing up. It’s okay, Mom, he said, rubbing his back. I think I’m okay.

  There was another large splash. The Indian boy had done another cannonball.

  “That’s my grandson. I think he’s trying to impress your daughter.”

  I shielded my eyes from the low sun to see the woman seated just a few feet away. Maine winter was gone, Dakota summer was back. The sun was behind the woman’s head but I could see she was an Indian woman, I guess about sixty or seventy, fully dressed with a large floppy straw hat on, also reading a book. I wondered what she was reading but couldn’t quite make out the title, though for some reason I imagined it was something by Rosamunde Pilcher, a fantasy of English cottage life, taking her about as far from here as you could get.

  “Those are some splashes. I’m sure she’ll be impressed.”

  “She’s quite a swimmer. Y’all headed West?”

  “Yes ma’am.” I wondered vaguely if I was right to have addressed her as “ma’am,” a holdover from the days when among my greatest ambitions was to make a good cannonball.

  “I figured that. Where to?”

  “Yellowstone. Maybe into Idaho. We’re kind of wandering, to tell the truth.”