12.

Some men need a mate. And a qualification for matehood is the ability to share small things that will be forgotten tomorrow, fleeting feelings of joy and the dreams of the night before, such as when I come in for lunch and say, “I saw a tree swallow today—plain-looking little bird, dressed like a flying nun.”

And Imaging says something like “Yesterday you wanted to know where the horses were in the horseradish, and today it’s flying nuns.” And we both laughed without laughing. I might choke on myself and die if I didn’t have someone with whom to share small, irrelevant nothings.

I remember an old mountain man with whom I’d had little more than a passing acquaintance. We bumped into each other in the grocery store one day. His wife had recently been killed in an airplane crash—not the way for a mountain man to lose his wife. I told him I was sorry about his terrible loss, and suddenly he came bursting out with it: “I used to get up in the morning and I went to shavin’ right off, and she’d holler up, ‘How do ya want your eggs?’ She knew how I wanted my damn eggs. I like ’em over easy. I been tellin’ her that for almost fifty years now, and I always hollered back, ‘I’d like ’em over easy, honey,’ and then I’d go on shavin’, and every morning it was like that—she’d holler up and ask the same thing, and now I still get up and shave, and sometimes I forget she’s gone, and I keep waitin’ for her to holler up and ask me how I want my damned eggs.” And then the old man wept, and I wept with him.

Clarence Tollefson had been peacefully painting the house that morning and left a note to his wife before he left:

Fertilized dandelions.

Poisoned tomatoes.

Garbage to dump.

Shooting near Victoria.

(1 mile)

Tollefson—Tully they called him—made little jokes all the time that people didn’t always laugh at but silently appreciated, such as saying he poisoned the tomatoes and fertilized the weeds. Why not make small jokes?

But a person shouldn’t have tried to push Clarence Tollefson around, especially on an issue of place, which had been the issue on the ridge above the camp when he was killed.

“This is our place, white man,” the Indians had said,

“Show me your deed, then,” Tollefson had said, and the Indians said their bodies were their deeds, like a coyote staking out his territory by wetting on a tree trunk—that was the coyote’s deed, signed, sealed, and wetted.

What makes a place? A hole for a mole, the long prairies for the antelope. I thought of Tollefsen and the Indians again. The white men and the Indians had a bloody history of fighting over place. It was locked in their cells.

“This case is about place,” I said to Leach. “Every creature will fight for its place.”

For me, the kitchen is the heart of my place, like a lodge fire in the middle of a tepee. Kitchens, like the heart, should be near the center of the house and, like the heart, slightly to the left. Kitchens hold memories for me of the safe sounds and smells of mother and of the hungry boy, face flushed, still too young to sweat, hollering for a glass of strawberry Kool-Aid. It is a place for babes and men to be nourished.

“Nobody’s home until they’re in the kitchen,” Imaging said.

The kitchen is the tribal meeting place where family members come stomping in out of blizzards and sniffing up to a pot of stew built around good neck meat and potatoes, with carrots and onions and garlic added and a pinch of parsley mostly for color. I’ve forgotten what else Imaging puts in hers, but the gravy comes out a good sort of brown and tastes slightly salty and is satisfying.

The place for the Lakota was the Black Hills, the Paha Sapa. The Lakota, too, were lashed to the past. They longed for the “old ways.” They had their tepees, yes, but inside were stoves, and they drove cars, their Indian ponies only memories and white bones on the prairies. The Indians no longer jerkied their meat. They ate their food out of cans along with wienies and potato chips and chocolate bars. They drank firewater, cheap wine, and when they were not at the Yellow Thunder Camp, most lived in small shacks on the reservation. But the reservation was a place.

“How do you make this bread, Imaging?” Carole asked timidly.

“I got the recipe already,” Leach said before Imaging could answer.

“He’ll probably make it, too, when we get home,” Carole said shyly.

“The hunters and the warriors are making bread nowadays, and the women have taken up the spear,” I said. “People have their roles reversed.”

“He likes to cook,” Carole said of Leach.

I said, “He likes to chew the hides to make the moccasins, too, I suppose.”

“That’s simply an offensive statement,” Leach stated. “Nobody scalps anybody anymore. We’re out of the tepee.”

“No,” I said. “We napalm fields of innocent children, wipe out cities, turn millions to cinders with the push of one red button, and women can push buttons as easily as men.” I didn’t know what to make of my own argument. Sounded chauvinistic. Sounded like the mourning of some creaky antediluvian who was still hammered to the past.

“We are out of the tepees,” Leach said again, busily chewing on Imaging’s bread.

I liked to watch Imaging make bread in the kitchen, to see her get up on a stool to knead it because she’s too short to stand on the floor and work the big, heavy globs of whole wheat dough on the countertop.

“Fresh bread is wealth,” I said, “and I’m a wealthy man. Do the men bake bread in the Yellow Thunder Camp?” I asked Leach.

“That’s different,” he said. “They’re trying to recapture the old ways.”

“Ah, yes. There was a division of labor then. The men killed the enemy, and the women scalped them. And the women also made pemmican.”

“The buffalo are gone,” Leach said. “This is a different time.”

“Well, maybe the Indians were regaining their old ways when they killed Tollefson. He was the white man, the enemy, standing over the camp looking down on the women and children. Wasn’t it natural for them to kill their traditional enemy?”

Finally, Imaging said, “I never did understand what Tollefson was doing there.”

Leach answered. “Tollefson told his girls’ soccer coach, who’s a psychologist, that he thought the camp ought to be blown off the face of the earth. He was real upset about the Indians. The psychologist said that it terrified him the way Tollefson talked like that, and he said Tollefson had a wild look in his eye.”

“It was an issue of place,” I said again.

The kitchen grew silent. I waited. Then I said, “A lot of the folks in Rapid City feel the same way as Tollefson—hating the Indians for taking over the National Forest.”

“I think Tollefson was inviting trouble up there,” Imaging said. “It takes two for a fight like that. That white man went up there into hostile territory by himself, with his guns, looking for trouble.”

I pulled out the sheriff’s report and began to read it aloud. “‘Tollefson was an experienced gun handler and a good shot, his friend Ed Murphy said. Murphy had seen Tollefson at various times shoot a large-caliber pistol one-handed. Murphy said Tollefson was a man to hold his ground. He enjoyed the Black Hills and felt the national forest was a recreational area for both himself and everyone else. He was determined to go there and be where he wanted to be. Murphy advised that Tollefson would speak his mind. He didn’t buy that the 1868 treaty gave the Black Hills back to the Indians. And he wouldn’t back down in any conversation.’”

Leach said, “Tollefson liked to drive his four-wheel camper around, shoot turkeys, shoot targets and tin cans. At the same time, the Black Hills are sacred to the Lakota,” Leach said, “like the Holy Land is to the Christians. How would the Pope and all the world’s Catholics like it if the Indians set up a recreation center, a bowling alley, say, in St. Peter’s Cathedral?”

“A lot of Indians are Catholic,” I said.

“You can buy a Coca-Cola where Jesus walked,” Imaging said.

“Christ ran the money changers out of the temple,” Leach said.

“He didn’t kill them,” Imaging was quick to reply. She should have been a trial lawyer.

Leach said, “Tollefson was symbolic of the white culture standing up there on a high place looking down at the Indian and threatening him.”

“I should try to explain that to the jury as our defense, right?” I asked.

Imaging said. “It’ll be an all-white jury, and they’ll hate Collins, and it won’t make any difference who killed Tollefson. Tollefson was killed by some Indian, and so that justifies the whites to kill an Indian—any Indian.”

Leach walked out to the sun porch to take in the Grand Teton and to check out the landscape for the moose again. I followed him out, and we stood there together for a moment enjoying the winter scene.

“Beautiful,” Leach finally said. He shook his head in awe. “You have it all.”

“You ready to talk?” I asked.

“What about?” Leach asked.

“About what we don’t like about each other.”

Leach seemed surprised.

“I feel as if I’ve put you off,” I began. “I’ve been trying for fifty years to improve—haven’t made much progress. People seem to think I have a lot of power, and some are afraid of it.”

He nodded.

“We’re different,” I said, “and what I don’t like about you is that you won’t share your feelings with me.”

“I’m not used to saying what I feel. I’m not good at it,” he said.

“I know. But I need to know how you feel. I trust feelings. In trying this case, I’ll often be asking, ‘What’s going on? What are the jurors feeling?’ Things happen in a courtroom in front of your face, and everybody else sees it except the lawyer who’s doing the fighting. I’ll need to know how the jurors are feeling. I’ll be fighting. It’s hard to see what’s happening when you’re fighting.”

“Yeah, I know,” Leach said.

“Are you ready to talk about your friend Bruce Ellison?” I asked.

“Okay,” Leach said.

“What’s going to happen if I get in the case and I have to attack Ellison to save Catch the Bear?”

“I talked to Bruce,” Leach said, speaking to me like a son who wanted his father to believe him: “Bruce is a great man.”

“I don’t know him,” I said.

“I talked with him a long time about this. I told him in the beginning that if I took Collins’s case, that’s how it would have to be. He agreed then, and he still agrees. Says he’s only human—that he might not speak to me for a week or two if what I do hurts him, but what he was trying to say was that he understood. Bruce is at war, too, Gerry. He’s in a battle for the Lakota. He’ll lay it all down for them if he has to.”

“I hope it doesn’t come to that. I won’t try to hurt him,” I said. “But I’m not fighting for a cause. I’m fighting for one powerless Indian.”

Leach nodded his understanding.

“If you’re fighting for a cause, you can find yourself asking, ‘Who is more important to the cause, Catch the Bear on the one hand or, say, the Lakota people?’”

Leach nodded.

“And you can find yourself arguing that Bruce Ellison is a decent man who has helped a lot of Indian people and who has the capacity to do a lot more good with the rest of his life, while the loss of Catch the Bear wouldn’t be missed by many, if any.”

Leach didn’t answer.

“That’s why I’m not a cause lawyer,” I said.

Leach listened.

I continued: “You have a client. If you can’t take advantage of every lawful break available for him, then you have to get out of the case. Cause lawyers are at war. They make their own rules like you would in war. They can sacrifice their clients, or themselves, whatever the cause requires. But I’m not at war. I’m defending one powerless Indian kid who is nothing to nobody.”

“Bruce Ellison understands that,” Leach said.

“And you’re in conflict in another way,” I said. “He’s your friend, and Collins is your client. Which one has the right to your greater loyalty?”

“It’s hard,” Leach said, and the troubled look came back to his eyes. “But Bruce made it easy for me. He said I have to represent Collins.”

“Can you do that?” I asked. We were both staring at the Grand Teton, which stood like a monument to the Sioux, to Wakan Tanka, “the Great Mystery.”

“Yes, I can do that,” he finally said, and his eyes grew soft. Then we walked back into the kitchen together, and I asked Imaging for another piece of her homemade toast.