RavenShadow (29 page)

The father says so
,

The father says so
.

The song cycled once more to its ever-beginning which proceeded to its never-ending. My eyes became the soft, damp
earth. They gave forth the sweet trickle of a spring. My face was the mosses it ran upon, and the water was sweetness, and it was succor, and it was forgiveness.

Now I had lost the mesa and the dancers and the people who lifted their voices in song. I drifted in a world of mystery, wail, despair, promise, fate, the music of the earth.

I felt myself gather in some way, as a mist gathers itself from the thin air. I felt myself lift, airy, and I felt myself as mist, as breath, as spirit, and I felt the goodness of this way. Gently, I lifted myself from the dewy grasses and the sparkling needles of pine trees, and I rose, filling, completing myself, and I raised my eyes to the high peaks above me, peaks beautiful when wreathed in mist, and I beheld the infinite sky above and beyond things, the sky where go our breaths, our mists, our spirits, and I most gently lifted….

The drum
ratattat-tatted
hard, fast, rude, in my ear.
I don’t want to go there, I want to go
… The mountain cat cuffed me, the drum banged me down, thumped my awareness back to earth.
Will you come back?

Yes. I promised.

With infinite reluctance I reached for Sallee’s hand. Her grasp was warm and fleshly. I was glad, yet … I was glad. I settled into my body and onto the floor of a gym in western South Dakota. After a long time I opened my eyes. The faces of Plez and Sallee gazed down at me, loving. “Welcome back,” said Plez. “You looked like you were getting lost in the other world. Welcome back.”

I looked into his eyes, and then into Sallee’s, and held them, and said, “Thank you.”

Sallee kept holding my hand. I felt … vastly tender toward her, vastly loving, without man-woman overtones. Toward Plez too.

“Now you know,” he said.

“Now I know.”

“Did you like it?”

“It was … indescribable. It was wonderful. It was incredible.”

We sat for long moments. I felt no need to do or say anything.

“Maybe later you want to tell me what you saw. Good idea the first few times.”

I looked into Sallee’s eyes. “There are things I don’t understand,” I told Plez.

“You bet. Tomorrow,” he said. He rolled onto his side and then slipped into his sleeping bag, stretched out on the far side of Sallee’s.

She let go my hand but kept smiling at me. She tucked her sock feet into her sleeping bag, then her bluejeaned bottom, then everything up to her shoulders.

I rolled onto my side, facing her. She faced me. I looked into her eyes, which felt like another way into the new world I had discovered. I smiled at her and myself and the universe.

As I drifted off to sleep, I held my mind in the small space between our faces, and our breaths mingling in the center.

Blue’s Past Leans on His Present

T
he next morning, Christmas morning, we came to Big Foot Pass, which meant the Badlands. People who haven’t seen this country can’t really believe it. It is torn up, humped up, eroded, washed out, gouged—everything that can make a country up and down and hard to get through has happened here. That’s why they call it the Badlands.

A hundred years ago Big Foot’s people had their hard travel here. Some scouts led the way down a ridge that switched between ice, snow, and slick clay. The horses hated the footing, and the sheer drops on either side. The wagons had to be lowered with ropes. It was a nasty descent, and the few hundred feet took several hours.

Now Plez, Emile, me, and all the riders lined up at the top of the pass, staring down at the same icy ridge. It looked treacherous as hell.

“After this we’ll be on Indian land,” said Plez. I gave him an impatient glance, but he ignored me. “No fences, no roads—we’ll sleep in our own place.”

I could feel Emile wanting to put a stop to this cheerful baloney, but my friend would never act rude.

“Look at that nice, flat run over to White River.”

“No problem but getting down this nasty shit,” I said. I wondered about this horse that I didn’t really know. If he got skittish there … On the other hand, if we stood in this cold wind any longer …

“This was a big moment on the first ride.” It was Tyler’s voice, and his mount nosed up next to me. If he’d arrived, all the riders were here. “We stood looking down and couldn’t figure which way to go. We were cold and we were scared. Too many choices, all of them looking like short ways to hell. Then we saw two coyotes trotting up this ridge right here. They stopped and looked at us. Riders pointed up. Two golden eagles were circling over our heads. The coyotes looked at us some more to see if we got the point, turned, and trotted down the ridge. We knew the coyotes and eagles were showing us the way. We followed and came to the bottom okay.”

Ron McNeill started down, leading, and we all reined our horses after him. I didn’t like the way my mount’s hooves slipped around on the clay, not a bit. I kept him slowed right down and talked to him easy and kept my eyes looking for the best footing. It was over sooner than I expected, and camera crews waited at the bottom to film us. Like everyone else I hooted and whacked my horse on the rump and scooted across the flat at a run.

Bridle to bridle, I told Plez what I saw at the Stronghold. I told him about the people’s zeal for the dance, about Short Bull’s preaching, about my mixed feelings about having Raven as my guide.

In his eyes I saw he was pleased.

I was damn well pleased.

Then, with fumbling, I told him about how the first song of the Spirit Dance had come to me in my vision at Bear Butte this
autumn, how hearing had half-transported me to that experience, how it and the song got mixed up. “The words to the song, I felt like I heard the words originally but couldn’t understand them.” I sang the song half-voice for him. “The words …” I hesitated. “They’re the great promise. ‘You will see your relatives.’”

I looked at him with longing. “I felt like I could go into the world Wovoka saw, the perfect world, and that’s what I wanted, the only thing in the universe I wanted.”

He didn’t say anything, but I could feel how he was toward me.

“Can we see our ancestors again?” It was a lament.

“Vision is truth. What you see, that’s fact. Vision is truth. How to understand vision, how it may come to pass, that is the hard part.” We rode. “Wait and it will become manifest.”

“I want to go back.”

He chuckled. “What a surprise!” He changed tone. “You have the gift. Know that. You have the gift. You accomplished great things for the first time.”

Now I committed the sin of pride.

The horses walked, and today it was a good walk. We’d grained them well. The cold was not so painful today. I felt like a new man.

So now I said to him, “I liked having Sallee hold my hand.”

“There are good things between your hearts and spirits,” he said. “I want to help your relationship blossom.”

Says I, “Our relationship is her thinking I’m a bum.”

“Yes,” said Plez, “and a drunk, but she has other thoughts too.”

“How’d you know I’m a drunk?”

“I didn’t, that was a guess.”

At least Chup and Tyler didn’t tell him that
.

“Not too hard a guess. An Indian man like you, sensitive, he feels despair. He seeks to numb the despair.”

We rode on a little. We tied the horses, stood in some cottonwoods along a main ditch, and had cigarettes.
Okay, I gotta speak up
.

“Numb despair, it’s worse than that.”

He looked at me kindly.

I told him about Delphine.

I told him all of it. How I sought her as a way out of what I am, a reservation Indian. How she was never comfortable with being what she was, black. How we never knew each other. How nobody ever knew Delphine, knew the darkness she lived in. How she put an end to it.

“I live in the shadow of her death,” I said. “I call it ravenShadow.”

“Raven shadow?”

“One word,” I said, “small
r
, capital
s
.”

He pondered that and nodded.

I corrected myself. “I have lived in the shadow of despair and death all my life.”

“Yeah, you have,” he said.

“More than I know.”

“More than you know.”

We rode in silence.

“You want to do something would be good for you?”

I started to say “maybe,” as is my habit, and changed it. “Yes.”

“Tell about that tonight. Tell me, Sallee, Emile, Chup. Open it to your friends. Better yet, tell the talking circle. How you live in ravenShadow.”

That scared me. I couldn’t say anything, and the horses’ breathing banged in my ears.

“You have come on this trip to lay your burdens down,” he said.

“Okay,” I said. Which didn’t make me any less afraid.

I waited for the talking stick to come around the circle to me. Damn, I’d broadcast to a hundred thousand people on the radio, but it felt hard to talk to these hundred folks, on the same pilgrimage, people of hearts like to mine. Hard to tell them about my real self, truly.

I stared into the bonfire in the center. I didn’t see Christmas night, 1990, I didn’t see Red Water camp, or the ride leaders, or the people in the circle, even my friends next to me. I saw a fourteen-year-old boy a few days before Christmas, 1967, in the road outside the general store, a lonely crossroads in Kyle, South Dakota.

The stick came to Sallee, on my right, and she passed it to me without a word. I grabbed that thing like I was gonna strangle it. I made myself run my eyes around the circle once.

“I’m going to tell you a story. About how I betrayed myself and my people,” I began, “and how I came to live in ravenShadow.”

They waited. I looked left and took strength from Emile’s face. “I didn’t go to school till I was fourteen. My grandparents held me out. Didn’t speak English, didn’t know how to use a grocery store or filling station, nothing.”

I didn’t have to explain to the Lakota here what that meant—held aside to be a bearer of the old ways.

“Couldn’t stand school. Unbearably lonely except for you, Emile, and … You guys know about that. Come Christmas, I was gonna go home to Grandpa and Unchee, hadn’t been home since first day of school. Wanted bad to go home, didn’t want to come back, knew Grandpa would make me. Christmas was, I don’t know, was always a bad time anyway.” I grinned at them, knowing they were thinking how this was Christmas again, another hard one. That white-man God, he liked to send us Injuns hard ones. We were all tickled in a sad way. “Hardly any sunlight, dark by 5:30. Day before my ride home, I went outside in the last light, looking around, doing nothing, nothing to do. Walked up the road aimless-like and saw …

“They were maybe a dozen ravens feeding on a deer carcass. Out in the sagebrush. I’d seen that all my life but never
seen
it. Walked close, so close I was nervous. First they flew off and fussed, me being there. I was fascinated. Suddenly one of them, the biggest, flew up at my face. He was different now, really big and commanding and for sure capital-
R
Raven instead of an ordinary bird. He’d somehow quick-like gotten white tips on his wings, but he wasn’t a magpie—he had a raven shape. I felt like he was shouting something threatening at me. I backed off a few steps, fast, and fell backward and blacked out. I was down there a few minutes, and I can’t say whether I lost consciousness before I fell or after. I think before. Something was going on down there, I was seeing things. At the same time the part of me that laid by the deer carcass was scared that the ravens were eating me. So I jostled myself and made myself come back. The ravens were still on the dead deer, hopping and pecking, hopping and pecking, fluttering, lifting, landing, pecking. I felt like something big happened.”

“
Hau, hunka
,” Emile said softly.

I looked at him. Time to tell the rest, what I hadn’t even told my best friend then.

“Then somehow I wanted to die. I felt it strong. I wanted to die, kill myself over Christmas vacation, go home, see Grandpa and Unchee, and before they could take me back to school, go to the country beyond the pines, where nothing hurts you. I thought about it while I walked back to town. Freeze to death, I decided, yeah, freeze to death, supposed to be a peaceful way to go.”

I looked at Emile, ashamed. “So I went and found the bootlegger. I didn’t have any money. I offered to trade my beaded turtle, my birth bag, for a bottle. He took the bag and gave me a pint. A pint for my connection to my mother.”

I took breath in and out. “But I never did use it to knock myself out.” Suddenly I felt unbearably self-conscious, kind of grinned. “I discovered basketball that Christmas vacation.” I
thought back on the True Bull brothers. “Sounds dumb, but that’s the way it was. Basketball, the modern form of warfare!” I looked at them, Sallee to Chup to Emile to Plez, and they were tickled. “I gave the pint away.”

“It changed me, though. RavenShadow, I’d seen it, recognized it, knew it as … Ever since, it’s been my closest friend. Not best but closest.”

I looked into Emile’s eyes, letting him know. I looked into all their candlelit faces and into their open eyes, one by one.
This is who I am, this is what I did
. I looked back at Emile.
I’m sorry
.

“I’m telling you this story because many Indian people live in ravenShadow. One of the biggest shadows is Wounded Knee.” Now I ran my eyes around the circle and saw the faces, attentive and sympathetic. “I came here to throw off that shadow, for myself, for my people.”

From around the circle came a chorus of staccato cries—“
Hau!
”

“I got a place,” says Plez. We trooped out of the gym after him, Sallee, Emile, Chup, and me. Tonight the Little Wound School in Kyle had opened the gym doors to us. The fasters were in tents out at Red Water camp, where Big Foot’s people stayed for two nights, resting, trying to let Big Foot get better. Since we were on the Pine Ridge rez now, many riders and walkers were at their homes, spending Christmas night with their families.

He led us through some halls, outside, through some more halls, and held open the door that said
CUSTODIAL OFFICE
. It was a big room, with utility shelves stacked with industrial-strength cleaners. Here and there were rotary polishing machines, push brooms, mop heads and handles, buckets. Just inside the door was an aisle, and Plez had put five candles in a circle there. Plez pointed behind the door. Improbably, for no reason I could
guess, a huge buffalo head, mounted, hung from the wall.

“Wasn’t this room locked?” I says.

Plez twinkled at me. “You think a lock slows down a shaman? Everybody sit behind a candle,” he says.

We did. “By the way,” says Plez, “we should honor this school. Little Wound was not only a big chief but a Ghost Dancer who had a great vision of the Messiah.”

I joked, “Should we honor the Messiah’s birthday? This is it.”

“I don’t know,” says Chup. “Santa Claus, he didn’t bring us redskins any presents.”

“No turkey, either,” says Plez. We’d eaten buffalo soup again.

He lit the candles and flipped off the fluorescent lights. Somehow the candlelight on our faces made us seem a true circle, a wholeness of some kind. He says to me, “You want to say more?”

I’d told him I did. In the pickup on the way into Kyle from Red Water camp I thought about it, and wanted to tell the rest of it. I looked up the buffalo head and asked silently to see deeper into myself and tell the deeper truth.

“My grandmother. I was raised by my grandparents; she was closed off and sullen her whole life. Never had much to give or take with me, or any of her grandchildren, or I think probably her children. She lived in darkness. Early on, my guess is, she let Grandpa share that with her. Time I come along, she made him an outsider too. Way it looked to me.

“Secretive, hidden. She gave me her father’s name, but never told me whose it was. She gave me his Pipe and didn’t tell me why. She never told me a thing about herself, or about Wounded Knee. Even yet I don’t know the name of her mother.”

I looked into the faces of my friends. “And I never asked. My ancestors were killed at Wounded Knee—I guess they were,
I don’t even know that for sure—and I never cared. I turned my back on it.

“I tell you, you can turn your back on the nine-hundred-pound gorilla, but your mind is right on it.

“I been living in the shadow of Wounded Knee and pretending I didn’t. I grew up with a strange, withdrawn parent because of it. I grew up with expectations I didn’t understand. I grew up to a mission, I didn’t know what it was. I grew up with the past weighing on me, and I pretended it wasn’t there. I felt the pain but held onto the pretense, held on hard.

“I am here to change that. I’m here to know what happened. Then I’m gonna march myself out of that shadow.

“I’ve resisted this like hell, knowing who I came from, what they did. Now I’m gonna look at the past. Not like a historian does. I look at the past because it’s biting me in the ass.”