Twenty-one, The Journey of Crazy Horse

The old man and his wife drove their wagon through the darkness until they reached the edge of the soldier town and saw the team of horses and another wagon appear as dark shapes. The old woman began to sob softly again when she saw the soldier wagon in the darkness.

The men waiting with the wagon were afraid; someone had pointed a gun at them, they said. Nervously, they helped to lift the body down and place it on the drag poles behind the travois horse Worm had brought along. One of the men said Lieutenant Lee ordered them to turn over the wagon and team, but Worm refused. His son had lived as a Lakota and his final journey across this Earth would be as a Lakota, across the drag poles pulled by a good horse, not in the bed of a white man’s wagon. The men unhitched the team and led them away, leaving the wagon.

The old woman pulled aside the blanket covering his face and stroked his hair, then threw herself across his chest and loosed her pain and grief from the very depths of her soul, giving voice to the darkness all around.

Worm waited, wiping his own tears. Anger and confusion were waiting in the night. The young men who wanted to follow his son back to the old life, who hoped he would lead them out, were honing their shock and disbelief into the sharp edge of revenge. In the lodges along Cottonwood Creek, the harangues for war mingled with the tears. Inside Camp Robinson, the soldiers and all the whites waited, wondering when anger would swoop in from the darkness. At the Red Cloud and Spotted Tail agencies, they waited, too, wondering how many would carry out the attack.

The old woman gathered herself together and gently caressed the pale face and lifted the blankets over his head. Worm helped the old woman onto the seat of the wagon and handed her the reins; then he mounted the travois horse. She shook the reins of the two sturdy horses and the wagon creaked. They moved off into the night to begin the saddest journey they would ever make.

Worm wanted to move quickly. He knew that someone was out there. Whether white or Lakota, it didn’t matter. They were after the reward for the head of their son. Two hundred dollars.

The sun was rising when they reached Beaver Valley. Already - people in the camp were awake. Many didn’t know what was happening, but when they saw Worm and his wife with the blanket-covered body, they knew.

The daughter of Bad Heart Bull and two others had been waiting and helped the two old people. They took the travois horse and untied the poles. Worm warned two men who approached that they had been followed through the night and whoever it was may still be looking to cause trouble. The men went back for their weapons.

The young women wept as they uncovered the body. They removed the shirt and washed away the dust and blood from his face, arms, and the wounds with fresh water from two buckets. They cut away the leggings and slipped off his moccasins and finished washing him. Then they prepared him for burial.

Down the sides of his arms, they anointed him with red and wept again as they remembered his words, spoken not two months before: If anything should happen to me, paint my body red and put me in water and my life will return. If you do not, my bones will turn to stone and my joints to flint, but my spirit will rise.

They brushed his hair and painted him as if for war, the yellow lightning mark over the left side of his face and the still visible scar from the pistol wound, then blue hailstones on his chest. To his left ear they tied a reddish brown stone.

Worm next braided a narrow strip down the back of his head, and then cut it close to the scalp. The lock of hair would go into his spirit bundle. Finally, the dried body of a red-tailed hawk was tied to the top of his head.

His mother helped wrap him in new deer hides, tenderly touching his cheek before his face was covered for the last time. Over the deer hides was sewn a buffalo hide with the hair side out. After they finished, Worm smudged them all with sage and sweet grass and sang an honoring song. Then the body was reloaded onto the drag poles.

They led the horse to a meadow above Beaver Creek on the west side. A tree had been chosen by some of the men, a sturdy ash whose main branches were like the fingers of a hand. Across one of its forks, a scaffold had been built and onto it the men placed the body.

That day and into the night, Worm and his wife sat beneath the tree, their clothes cut like ribbons to show they were mourning. Warriors came, among them the five who had pierced themselves in his honor at the Sun Dance. People brought food and ate together to show they shared the grief. Old men stood in front of the gathering and wept as they told stories of he who had left them—of his deeds, of his strengths and weaknesses, of his good quiet ways. What is to happen to us now? they asked.

After sunset the following day, the scaffold was taken down and the body loaded once more onto the drag poles by warriors old and young, by those who had followed him and those who wished they could have. And the people watched as Worm and his wife led the travois horse holding the body of their son off into the darkness. It was their wish to do this final task alone.

The old man and the old woman walked without fear across the land, for they knew it well. Neither did they fear death, for they knew it well, too. The other mother of their young man had left them before he did.

Across meadows and dry creek beds they moved steadily, now and then stopping to rest briefly, and then finally to the base of a long slope. There, they rested once more, and then found a narrow trail that took them to their final destination.

Sunrise found them back among the people at Beaver Creek. Worm paused to look across the land and went into the lodge that had been pitched for them. The old woman walked to a far hillside and found a rock to sit on. There, she sat looking across the valley until the sun went down.

No one asked the old man or the old woman where they had taken him because they knew that knowledge would go with them to their graves. But many could see that Worm carried the spirit bundle, and when he spoke of his son, there was one thing he would always say: