Neither Wolf nor Dog (36 page)

Grover's tires spit up rocks. The shadows were stretching long across the land. Dan's good eye flashed like an animal's. “Now is not a good time for me to speak. My heart is heavy with the past. This is hard land for us. The spirits of our dead fill the skies.”

“That's why you should talk,” Grover said. “Sometimes when your heart is heavy you speak more truly.”

“Hnnh,” Dan said.

I looked warily from one to the other. I could not divine what was happening. Grover was clearly pushing the old man, and the old man was clearly listening to some inner voices. Again, their lapse into an almost formal manner of speaking hinted of serious intent.

“I will speak,” Dan said suddenly. Grover tapped a cigarette triumphantly on the steering wheel.

“Yes, this was bad here. Babies froze in their mothers' arms. But it was the same everywhere. In Montana with Chief Joseph. With Geronimo. Everywhere. We were a good people. But we were not allowed to live.”

The long shadows began to bend around the pillars and cones, enclosing them in darkness.

“You can tell us time has passed. You can say the world has changed. But the bones of my fathers still cry. My son is buried in a conquered land.” This was the first he had ever mentioned his son since the first time I had visited him.

He looked at me, through me, beyond me. His face shone like fire in the waning light.

“We are not memories to be lost, like wind in the grass. What I am about to say to you are hard words. But I choose to say them, because this is hard land, and it invites hard words. Hear me. Then I will be quiet for a while.”

He squared himself in his seat and began.

“There is no Indian alive who dares to think too much on the past. If we looked too long at the past we would be too angry to live. You try to make it up to us by making us into heroes and wise people in all your movies and books. That's fine for you. But I can still go to a museum and see my grand-mother's skull in a case and hear someone talk about it as an artifact.

“Would you want your grandmother's skull to be in a case in my house? Would you be angry then?”

He cast his gaze out onto the shadowy formations. His bad eye glowed like an ember.

“And sometimes I think about all the wars between my people and your people. Those white men that fought us were men without any families, lots of them. They were young men out in the West making money. Some of them were convicts. Some of them were still blood drunk from the Civil War.

“They weren't your best people. Many of them were brutal and stupid. They did terrible things because it was fun. Not all of them, but they were soldiers and it was their job to kill people.

“My people never had a chance. We were families. We were in our homes, with our old people and our babies. And the soldiers attacked us. They attacked our homes and killed our elders and our children.

“The government sent men who didn't have anything or didn't fit anywhere, and gave them guns and put them on horses and told them to go out and attack the villages where we had our women and our old people and our little babies. There were
little girls playing with dolls and little boys who were just learning to walk. The soldiers killed them all.

“Then your people have the nerve to talk about massacres by the Indians.”

He turned in his seat and stared directly into my eyes. “Do you know why we ambushed the soldiers?”

I sat quietly. There was no answer I could give.

“Because,” he said, “we were trying to keep them away from our children and babies and our old people. We had to get to them before they got to our families. We couldn't move fast because we had all our old people and children. All we had on our side was surprise and that we knew the land. We didn't have weapons and we couldn't run. We knew white soldiers always stayed together when they fought and we could out-smart them, so we did.”

He paused for a moment to gather himself. The moon had cast off its ghostly aura and taken on a life of its own.

“We did kill innocent people. I know that. It happened when our young men got angry at what was happening to the old people and the children, when they were starving or being killed. The young men would get so angry they wouldn't listen to the old men.

“The old men knew we couldn't win and that more white people would come and there would just be more killing. But the young men were so angry that they attacked anyone.”

“What do you think?” he said. His gaze was steady and direct. It left me no escape. “If you saw your father lying on his bed too weak to stand up because he was starving, or you saw your baby crying all the time because she was hungry, and you knew it was because someone took their food away from them, wouldn't you be angry?

“What if some men came through and killed your grandmother and didn't have any reason? They just did it, then they
laughed and rode away. And you stood there and looked at her cut up or shot. Can you tell me you wouldn't be angry?”

He emitted a harsh and bitter laugh.

“This is why I shouldn't think about these things. Because, you know, I don't blame my people who ambushed the white soldiers or even raided the homes of the settlers. I don't say it was right. I just say I understand. We lost everything. Your government sent heartless, greedy men to keep us under control and they lied and raped and stole from us and they could kill us for any reason and it was okay.”

He stared me down, an old man, bearing eighty years of pain, speaking his mind to one of the race that had almost destroyed his people. This was personal now. He wanted me to feel his pain and he wanted to see my shame.

“What if someone raped your little sister?” he said. “That happened all the time.”

“What if someone took your wife and slit open her belly and pulled out your unborn child, then laid it on the ground like a trophy still attached to her dead mother? That happened, too.”

“See, we weren't even people. Did you know that? The Catholic church even held a conference to determine if we were people or not. In their great wise religion they thought they should decide if we were people or animals. That's the way we were thought of and treated. It was okay to do anything to us.”

Perspiration had formed on his upper lip. He took a dirty rag from his pocket and swabbed his face. His expression was as dark as the land outside; his eyes as hollow as the moon.

“I think this is hard for you to understand. But our old people were our best people. Nowadays, the world is all for the young people. It wasn't that way for us. We were taught that the old people and the babies were the closest to God and it
was for them that we all lived. They were the most helpless and they needed us the most.

“And your people came in and killed them. We couldn't protect them and that was what we had to do. But you were too strong. There were too many of you. We had to do what we could to protect our old people and our families and we couldn't because your soldiers broke into our houses and killed them when they couldn't get away.”

His inner turmoil was titanic now. His hands shook and his eyelid twitched. He looked toward the sky as if beseeching some greater power for help. The moon hung empty over the towering spires.

“It wasn't the same when we fought the other tribes. They respected the old people and the children, too. When we fought each other there were some things more important than the fight. The greatest act of bravery was to touch your enemy — to ‘count coup' upon him — not to kill him.

“But not for your soldiers. They just wanted to kill us. They were hunting us in that way your people hunt things where they kill as many as they can just to see them die or to count them and say they killed more than anyone else. It's something I can't understand. You even have to have laws saying how much of something you can kill or people would kill everything.

“That's what happened to us. There weren't any laws saying how many of us could be killed. We were treated worse than deer or fish. You could kill as many of us as you wanted, and the old people and the children were the easiest.

“Now there are skulls of my grandparents in museums and sacred blankets and drums on walls of museums for rich people to look at. You go there and talk about how sacred it is. You call it sacred because you don't have anything of your own that's sacred. But it's not sacred because you took the sacred out of it,
just like you take the sacred out of everything, and now we can hardly feel it ourselves anymore. You killed our people and you took what was sacred to us and then you told us that's what proved you were better than we were.”

I felt a great shame come across me. Dan was sparing me nothing now.

“Sometimes I think I would like to go into one of your cemeteries with a bulldozer and knock over all the headstones and plow up all the coffins. Then I'd take the bones and put them in plastic bags. I'd put them all in the window of a store with a sign that said, ‘White People's Artifacts.' Then you could come down and point at a bag and say, ‘That's my grandmother.' If you were lucky, I might even have the measurements of her skull on a little card on the bag.

“If you wanted the bones back, I'd just laugh. I'd say they were part of an exhibit and that we were treating them with respect. I might even charge you a dollar to come in and look at them. But I'd let your children in cheaper because I'd say they should learn about their past and how sacred it is. Then I'd take their money and show them the bags.”

He stopped abruptly and let out a little sound that was somewhere between a sob and a yelp. He breathed deeply and stared hard at the darkening sky. Far in the distance the faint echo of thunder rumbled from the west.

Gathering himself, he spoke again. His voice was lower, almost contrite. “I am sorry to say these words to you. I shouldn't talk like this. It doesn't do any good. It just makes me feel angry and makes you feel bad. It all happened. I have to learn to forgive you and your people. We have to live together. I have to look to my grandchildren now. Maybe it will be better for them.

“I just wish I knew why it happened this way. I really do. I could be so much more peaceful if I just knew why it happened this way.”

He leaned his head forward like a man in prayer. Grover

 

 

stared at the road and gripped the steering wheel with both

 

 

hands. The moon sat silent above the jagged peaks, hollow and

 

 

empty, like the socket of an eye.

W
e drove in heavy silence. I sat, pensive, chastened, saddened. Dan hunched in front of me, within a hand's grasp, but a thousand miles away. The looming sandstone menhirs and dol-mens became fewer, then smaller, then gave way completely to rolling grasslands. The badlands had disappeared as abruptly as they came.

Grover's Buick cut through the night. Here and there we would pass by some tiny shipwreck of a town, devoid of lights, with a huddling cluster of abandoned wooden buildings standing swaybacked against the cold illumination of the moon.

Under the empty lunar gaze the whole world turned to silver. Everything was alive, yet there was no life anywhere. It was a land of phantoms.

Our car seemed a tiny projectile coursing through a silent universe. It was as if we were the observed, not the observer; we had to pass through quickly, benignly, without intrusion or incident.

To our left the hills rose up to meet rocky outcroppings that had pushed through the earth, like bone through skin, to make high grassy ridges that ran for miles along the side of the road.

Carcasses of abandoned cars rested silent on the hillsides. Where the ridges broke, long draws ran down between them, dry memories of forgotten creeks and streams. Scrub oak clustered against them, like animals gathered to slake their thirst. In the dark they could have been huddled herds of buffalo, or grizzlies, come together under the full moon.

In the distance I could make out the ragged contours of the Black Hills. The outcroppings and draws we were passing were the first hint of their presence.

I remembered the journeys as a child, in a borrowed car, through the seemingly endless spaces and unforgiving Dakota heat, toward those same ragged outlines. But then it was to ride the narrow-gauge trains and visit the reptile gardens and pony rides that had sprung up everywhere to take advantage of the presence of those four gigantic stone faces carved in the side of the mountain called Rushmore.

Now, this tiny outcropping of mountains was something less seen than felt — a home, a presence, a gathering place of spiritual forces — the
Paha Sapa
, the sacred center of the universe for the Lakota people. Their presence seemed active, more like a sentinel than a destination.

For a moment, and dimly, I lost my own eyes and saw with the eyes Dan had given me; saw the huddled people in their blankets, desperately trying to outrun an army that had committed itself to killing every man and woman and child and infant that had dark skin or spoke in a tongue born of this land.
I heard the voices of mothers trying to keep track of each other in the swirling snow, slowing to help the old people who could neither walk nor understand why they had to flee, pulling their own clothes from their bodies to wrap their freezing children tighter against the winter night; saw them huddling together in the freezing darkness, afraid to build a fire against the ice and wind of December because the men who were hunting them like animals would see it and come riding in and rip their children from their arms before pumping bullets into their hearts, their legs, their skulls, and then riding off.