IT IS THE THIRD FUNERAL THIS MONTH. ANTOINE STANDS AT attention, picked for the honor guard for reasons he is not aware of, staring into the red, creased back of the neck of Father Dolan from St. Patrick’s as he half-sings the Latin—
“In manus tuas, Domine, commendo spiritum ea—”
The girl’s coffin is slightly bigger than the last one they stood witness to. When they gave Antoine his footlocker it reminded him of what his cousin Terese’s little boy who drowned was put in, only that had been decorated with crosses and angels by her people.
“Omnis chorus Iustorum, orate pro ea—”
A Cherokee boy died last month, but his parents had the money to have him sent home for burial. Antoine’s A Company was chosen to walk as the honor guard after the ceremony in the auditorium, Carlisle students lining both sides of the road as the boy’s coffin was carried to the train station and the band marched behind playing a dirge. Clarence says they put the coffin in a car on the mail train and make sure to keep track of it. He says if it’s going west of the Rockies, they put it in a refrigerator car. Antoine looks past the priest and over to the line of older girls—
“Omnes sancti Innocentes, orate pro ea. A poenis inferni, libera eam, Domine—”
Grace has tears streaming down her face. She told him she knew the girl from her nursing, an Apache girl who barely got off the train before she was in the infirmary, her parents, if still living, obviously too poor to send for her body. The oldest graves are scattered at the bottom of the hill behind the shop buildings, most of the crosses and tablets made of wood, some of them fallen over. There is a new cemetery area started, the graves in a more orderly line, and plenty of space left to be filled.
“Per gloriosam resurrectionem tuam, libera eam, Domine. Requiem æternum dona ei, Domine, et lux perpetua luciat ei.”
Captain Pratt watches from the rear of the small boys with Marianna Burgess by his side. Funerals at the school are always bad, and there are too many of them. Early on he made more of a protest to the Indian agencies for sending children who were already afflicted, but has come to believe that the medical care offered on the reservations is most likely far inferior, whether through lack of funds or criminal neglect, to that here at the school, so why not give them a better chance at survival? But soon more land will have to be dedicated to the cemetery. He thinks of the little boneyards at each of the military posts where he has served, filled mostly with private soldiers who may well have enlisted under invented names. He had one artful dodger at Fort Gibson who had signed on and deserted at least three times, enjoying the government meals and relative lack of fighting every winter, then gone with the spring. The tribes Captain Pratt is acquainted with are very serious about death, of course, each with their particular mode of mourning, not shy of self-mutilation or taking foolhardy risks to retrieve a slain comrade from a battlefield—
“The Romans,” mutters Miss Burgess as the priest begins to make gestures over the coffin with the ornate cross in his hand. “Dazzling their followers with colorful vestments and elaborate theatrics—”
“Yes,” agrees the Captain. “They do love a ritual.”
“Requiescat in pace. Amen.”
The brass band eases into Chopin’s Funeral March then, and the various companies begin their march back to their dormitories as one of the groundsmen and, if Pratt is not mistaken, the overgrown Sioux boy, Sweetcorn, who has been such a disappointment, wait to carry the box to the school cemetery. A fire had to be set on the spot to thaw the earth enough to dig a grave.
The band acquit themselves remarkably well with the sonata, solemn without becoming dreary, trumpet, trombone, and tuba a slow-flowing river of sorrow above the rattle of the snare drum.
Lord knows they’ve had plenty of practice with it this year.
It is always a pleasure to meet somebody who is passionate about trains. The Sioux boy has just helped him shoe the gelding, stroking its head and cooing to it in a language he probably shouldn’t be speaking, even to a horse, when he saw Drayton’s railroad map of the country on the table they use to lay out harnesses to teach the young boys how to hitch a team. Went to it like a housefly to buttermilk.
“Now, when I was a boy,” says Drayton, turning the map so north is at the top, “there wasn’t even a wagon that could take you crost the country. Nowdays, seventy, seventy-five dollars, railroad’ll let you off right at your doorstep in—where is it? Your home?”
“Stannin Rock,” says the Sioux boy.
“Standing Rock. You’d get the CVRR—that’s the Cumberland Valley Railroad—right here from Carlisle to Harrisburg”—the boy watches intently as Drayton traces the route with his finger—“then switch to the Philadelphia, Harrisburg, and Pittsburg road—”
The boy, Trouble something, has a real knack for the horses and does a good job mucking and feeding. You get the feeling there’s a story going on in his head though, a story he’s keeping to himself—
“—then on to the Pittsburg, Cincinnati, Chicago, and St. Louis—that’s the PCC and St. L—get off in Chicago, and from there you got the Chicago and Northwestern all the way to Pierre in the Dakota Territory—though it’s states out there now, isn’t it?”
The boy puts his thumb on Pierre, then slides his index finger up from the Missouri River to where the Standing Rock reservation is marked, as if calculating the walk—
“If you got the train fare,” says Mr. Drayton, “we’re practically neighbors.”
The cover of the book is the most upsetting thing, a photograph of poor Evangeline, though the character is named Stiya and is a Pueblo girl.
“No, mother, I have not become a white woman,” Grace reads out loud. “Talking Indian as fast as they could they tried to help me from the train—”
There are a dozen girls seated around the reading room, as well as Miss Burgess, the proud author, and Miss Redbird, sitting solemnly beside her.
“My father took my valise and my mother threw her head upon my shoulder and cried for joy.”
Grace usually loves reading out loud, trying to match her voice and emotion to the characters portrayed. But this she tries to speed through—
“My father? My mother? cried I desperately within. No! Never! I thought, and actually turned my back on them. I had forgotten that home Indians had such grimy faces—”
Grace lowers the little book away from her face. “I’m sorry, Miss Burgess, I’m feeling a little shaky.”
Concern from Miss Burgess. “Are you ill?”
“No, just feeling a little dizzy on my feet. I didn’t eat much today—”
“You girls, worrying about your figures. Sit then, and Lizzie will pick it up. Lizzie?”
Lizzie gives Grace a hard look as they change places, then finds the page and reads in a flat, colorless tone—
“I had forgotten that my mother’s hair looked like she’d never passed a comb through it, that she wore such a short, queer-looking buckskin bag for a dress. ‘My mother!’ I cried, this time aloud. I rushed frantically into the arms of my school-mother, who had accompanied me this far, threw my arms around her neck and cried bitterly, begging of her to let me get on the train again. ‘I don’t want to live in a filthy place like this,’ I cried, ‘I cannot go with that woman!’”
Miss Redbird stands abruptly. “I’m sorry, but she doesn’t look at all well to me,” she says, stepping to Grace and extending her hand. “I’m taking her to the infirmary.”
“Very well. You go ahead, Lizzie—and don’t read in such a hurry—”
They are halfway across the parade ground before Grace speaks.
“It’s not anything like that when I go home! My mother dresses as well as anyone, and we live in houses!”
“Miss Burgess says it’s based on her visits to the Pueblo.”
“I’d never treat my mother that way.”
“I should hope not. White people”—Miss Redbird struggles with her thought—“When they look at us, they only see what they want to. Even here—”
“Save the man, kill the Indian.”
“Sometimes I fear we’re only doing the second part of the task.”
Grace stops walking, rubs tears from her eyes. “I’m not really sick, you know. I just couldn’t—”
“You gave me a good excuse to get out of there. I thought I might scream.”
This confidence stops Grace in her tracks. “You’ve done so well in their world.”
“Treason has its rewards,” mutters Miss Redbird, veering off toward the teachers’ quarters. “I’ll tell Burgess you took a bromide and went to lie down in your room.”
Jesse Echohawk, healing well, has developed a quick forward gait with the crutches, swinging his body between them and landing on the foot of his good leg, the other boys having to hurry to keep up with him.
“I don’t even play football,” calls Antoine as he trails the group.
“That’s why we need you,” Jesse calls back. “This should be pure logic. The Captain loves oratory, and you represent the school body—”
“I wouldn’t go that far—”
“Better than that, you can remember a load of talk.”
“That poem took me weeks.”
“Then let’s go over the argument again.”
Antoine closes his eyes for a second, then recites—
“Football is the all-American game—”
In Captain Pratt’s office their order is reversed, Antoine standing to the fore, and Jesse between two of the bigger boys so his crutches are less prominent.
“As rough a game as it is, when people think about football, who do they think of? Harvard, Yale, Princeton, West Point—”
The Captain listens without expression.
“It’s where the elite young white men in this country show their discipline, their courage, their willingness to tackle adversity.”
Antoine feels like it’s sounding too rehearsed, tries to hit a more common note—
“Gosh, if us Indians are gonna compete in their world, why shouldn’t we be allowed to compete in their most cherished sport?”
“‘We Indians,’” corrects the Captain.
“Sorry. Sure, there’s always a risk of injury, a risk of failure, but like you always tell us, Captain Pratt, nothing worthwhile comes easy.”
Antoine, out of ammunition, holds his hands out pleadingly, feeling like what Clarence Regal would call a sap.
The Captain takes a long moment to consider.
“Aptly stated, young man,” he says finally. “Let me make a bargain with you boys—” and here he looks past Antoine to Jesse Echohawk. “Football, including matches against outside schools, will be reinstated on two conditions—first, you must never slug. This has become a lamentable part of the game, and when white players do it, it is merely considered football. If you slug your opponent it will be taken as a confirmation of the inherent savagery of the red man.”
“We can manage that, sir,” says Jesse.
“Very well. The other condition is that you must promise me that within the very near future you will beat the football squads of Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and West Point.”
The boys are stunned. They can barely stand up to the Dickinson students from across town.
“We’ll do our best, sir,” says Jesse.
“No, you must promise that you will defeat them. Best intentions don’t get the job done.”
Jesse smiles manfully. “We’ll run them off the field, sir.”
“That’s the spirit! I’m only sorry that the season has ended.”
Captain Pratt waits till the boys have given their thanks and gone before he begins to chuckle. Harvard, Princeton, Yale, indeed. Though no devotee of the sport, he knows those august institutions are apt to lower their academic expectations to bring in some dreadnought to run the fullback position, that Yale’s Pudge Heffelfinger is rumored to tip the scales past two hundred pounds, while his reservation boys, though often sprightly athletes, would be as delicate antelope before a charging buffalo herd should they ever venture forth against a real college eleven.
But give them something to strive for.
And who knows, he thinks then, what with a real coach who understands the game—
SATURDAY AFTERNOON, the Carlisle streets busy with white people who have places to be and affairs to attend to. Even if the mere thought of it didn’t make her palms sweat, Miss Redbird doubts if any of them would be able to direct her to an immigrant luthier’s repair shop if she did stop them to inquire.
They’re looking but not staring. It is a skill Miss Redbird appreciates, having been sufficiently scrutinized since adopting what they call “civilian dress.” She is slight enough and young enough to be mistaken for a Carlisle student, but students are not allowed to venture this far from the train station when not in uniform. A fixing and holding of their gaze at her just a tad longer than necessary, something akin to “Do I know you?”
But this is “What are you?”
In the Southwest, perhaps, she could pass for a Mexican woman and be ignored if she wasn’t also carrying the violin case. That is the second flick of the eyes, and then they pass by, wondering.
Let them wonder.
The curiosity is natural, she knows, as they don’t see people who look like her in their everyday lives, and are too polite to come straight out and question her provenance. In the Dakotas or Nebraska there would be anger behind many of the stares, and she once experienced a man vehemently objecting to her being allowed in the same train compartment with him. The conductor, to his credit, politely escorted the man to a seat in the next car.
Miss Redbird pauses to look at the little map that Dennison Wheelock, a student who is all but running the school band, has drawn for her. She has passed Blumenthal’s Clothing Shop and the Flickenmeyer Bakery, has marveled at the imposing stone prison, so like a picture-book castle, and there realized she had somewhere taken a wrong turn. The white people step around her as she attempts to puzzle out where she is at the moment, and she senses that it is more than skin color that sets them apart.
They belong here.
And Miss Redbird, virtuoso musician, erstwhile debate champion, paragon of her endangered race, has nowhere to call home.
She walks on, lost, till she sees a sign ahead for Pitt Street, which is on her little map with an X marking the music shop location. She steps to stand beneath the sign, looks both ways—it is a very long street—makes a guess, and turns left.
In New York she was treated like a rare and valuable animal, interesting to look at but not to be trusted out of sight, and therefore escorted everywhere she was to perform or be shown off. She tends to become disoriented when surrounded by buildings, always relieved when there is a river in sight to anchor her position. At what used to be her home you could literally see for miles, each substantial hill and creek bed with a story attached to it. In these cities, loaded horse carts and carriages full of people working their way around each other, men under hats, women carrying umbrellas even when it isn’t raining, she struggles not to despair. She can’t imagine ever being a part of it, any more than she can imagine herself again living on the blighted reservation with her mother.
And now the people staring at her are colored.
It happened very suddenly, and though they are not dressed so differently, there is not a white face among them. She has seen plenty of black men before, soldiers at the fort when she was a small girl, the men who lift baggage at the train station, but she has never been this close to the women.
Now, she fears, she is staring back.
The women’s hair, what she can see underneath their hats, is so different, and they are in fact all different colors. She wonders if they venture from these few blocks around her, if they walk alone in the white city. And, shamefully, she wonders if she is safe here.
Then there are young men stepping up in front of her from Briscoe’s Oyster Cellar, in this season advertising pigs’ feet, turtle soup, Yuengling beer, but NO SHELLFISH. Three young Negroes, and then a young man she recognizes from school, though he is dressed as colorfully as the others. They pass in the opposite direction, talking and laughing, seeming to be having far too much fun this early in the day. She and the student, who she has heard stories about from the other faculty, look through each other as they pass.
Sweetcorn. His name is Sweetcorn and he is Sioux and restricted to the school grounds.
I am a music teacher, thinks Miss Redbird, not a prison warden.
And then, in the window of a narrow wooden building with paint peeling on the outside wall, is a hand-lettered sign.
GIOVANNI DIVINCENZO
FIX ALL INSTRUMENTS
The sighting by the music teacher doesn’t worry Sweetcorn. He’s already packed a satchel for his trip to Philadelphia. If he can shovel coal at school he can do it in the big city, and be paid for it. Otis has been there and says a man can breathe, can live in a neighborhood no white man dare enter, can write his own ticket. Independence—isn’t that what the Captain has always wanted for them?
The farm woman has offered Miss Ely tea, which she sips between filling in the visit form.
“She’s been attending church with you?”
“She’s a good girl,” says Mrs. Hauptman. “Minds what I say, does her chores well—though she does mope a tad on laundry Monday—very polite at the table. My girls just dote on her.”
Wilma stands just back from the door to the kitchen, hidden from their view, ready to bustle away with an armful of sheets if they get up—
“And you’ve been monitoring her—you know—?”
“Oh, she’s been having her courses, just like clockwork. I see it in the wash.”
“And her health otherwise?”
“Excellent, excellent. She has a hearty appetite—I’d swear she’s gained ten pounds since she came to us.”
Wilma has taken to wearing an apron all day but leaving it untied in the back. There is something going on in there, she can tell, and wonders how long it will remain her secret alone.
“General cleanliness is acceptable?” asks Miss Ely, checking boxes on the form. “No nasty habits?”
Saturday night features a cakewalk. There is even cake, several different sizes and shapes and flavors of icing, laid out on the tables near the entrance to the gymnasium. Lizzie Cloud plays a 2/4 march on the piano as Carlisle boys in their uniforms and Carlisle girls in their nicest dresses move in opposite directions, the boys making a squared pattern as the girls weave through them. Lizzie hits the chord to signal and the boys one by one take a corresponding girl’s arm and promenade down the center of the square, Antoine pushing two small boys past him to end up with Grace, who smiles as she offers her arm to him.
They promenade together, passing the phalanx of instructors by the punch bowl. Miss Burgess, appeasing the Captain’s nostalgia for the few elaborate officers’ balls he has attended, has organized the evening, hoping that the positive effect of the required gentlemanly behavior toward the young ladies, something she found sorely lacking in her Pawnee Agency experience, will outweigh any worry that the boys and girls will “pair off.” There is no face-to-face dancing in a cakewalk, which will be followed by a sedate square dance or two, the farrier, Mr. Drayton, set to call the figures. Miss Redbird, though touted to be a virtuoso on the violin, has declined to serve as fiddler, and so a fellow from out in the county has been engaged. Miss Burgess notes that the Captain and his wife seem pleased, and the young people, segregated by sex except in the classroom, appear to be enjoying the opportunity.
Trouble and Asa, among those judged still too sluggard in their comprehension to hazard on the dance floor, watch from the west wall bleachers. They are accustomed to the white people’s music by now, but this random pairing of male and female seems to them slightly scandalous, and wonder if the girls’ parents, should they still be alive, know what goes on here at Carlisle. If there is a reason for this dancing, a message to the spirits or even a celebration of a victory, they have not been told what it is.
Later, Grace and Antoine sit at one of the small tables set out on the floor as ice cream and cake are served, acutely aware that fellow students as well as chaperoning adults are watching them, and trying to appear more lighthearted than their conversation.
“If you pretend for long enough,” she says, “maybe that’s who you become.”
“But you like it here. That’s not pretending—”
“I don’t like everything about it.”
Antoine nods, then waves to Jesse Echohawk, just off his crutches, who is making the sign for “pretty girl” across the room to him.
“Back home they tell me I’m not Indian enough cause my father is half white,” he tells her. “Here I’m not white enough cause I still think like an Indian.”
“You do?”
“Everything I do here, I got to think, What’s gonna make them happy? What’s gonna keep them off my back?”
“I just do what seems right at the moment.”
“Your people been around them a lot longer than mine have.”
“Maybe. My brothers went here—they made it sound important. So I wanted to be part of—you know—”
“The Carlisle tribe.”
She smiles. “Yes.”
“Sometimes I feel like the Old Ones are watching me—talking about me in Ojibwe. They don’t approve.”
“They lived in a different world.”
“They were never alone. Back home, I come inside and find my mother—nobody else is in there—and she’s talking to the Old Ones, or to the animal spirits—”
“Do you miss your home?”
“Only when I think about it.”
Grace laughs. She sees Miss Burgess heading across the floor toward them—
“But if I didn’t come here,” says Antoine, “I wouldn’t have met you.”
Grace has only an instant to be thrilled.
“Grace,” calls Miss Burgess, speaking as she drifts past their table, “young ladies are meant to circulate and be lovely, dear, not set up camp. Like butterflies.”
SNOW FALLS ON CARLISLE in the first week of December. Sweetcorn, expert with a shovel now, is tasked to help clear the wooden boardwalks laid out on the parade ground, and the students’ feet flatten the drifts where they muster in the mornings. The Man-on-the-Bandstand takes note—
Winter’s downy mantle hugs our school grounds once again, and it is a joy to see our students taking full advantage. The skaters and sledders are in their glory—
—as Antoine trots along pulling little Tecumseh Starr behind him on a slider improvised by the carriage-making apprentices, and as he listens to the swoosh of the runners he thinks of his brothers out on the lake, ice fishing—
Meanwhile the Messiah craze continues its deadly grip on the superstitious minds at our Dakota reservations—
—and Trouble imagines his westward odyssey, train by train, as he curries the gelding in the freezing stable, the steam from his breath and that of the horse mingling in the air—
But there will be no Messiah, no Great Flood, no opening of the earth’s surface—
—Clarence Regal reading these words in The Indian Helper as he sits in a club chair in the large boys’ library—
Thousands, perhaps, of your people will suffer and many will be killed before they get their eyes open. Boys and girls, if you were there you could not help them.
General Assembly.
Captain Pratt understands that the best antidote to barracks fever is preemptive intervention.
“I know you are aware of the reports from Rosebud and Pine Ridge,” he says. “I believe them to be greatly exaggerated. These ghost dancers are more a figment of the overheated imaginations of avaricious eastern correspondents hoping to whip up war fervor, so that they might have something to spill their ink on, than exemplars of a true spiritual movement among the Indians!”
He takes a moment to meet the eyes of his solemn, tightly packed students, then addresses the faculty section, front left, hoping to remind them of their true mission.
“Teachers—we cannot sit idly on the sidelines and watch as a quarter million of our fellow citizens”—he pauses for this to sink in—“for I do firmly believe that they should be granted that status—remain chained to the socialism of the tribe and the reservation, and be crushed by the whims of ancestral oligarchy.”
He notes that Marianna Burgess isn’t in her usual seat, and Skinner is absent from his vantage at the back of the aisle—
“We’d have dismissed the boy,” says the disciplinarian as he and Miss Burgess move down the girls’ dormitory hallway, voices muted, “but he disappeared last night. Lit out to the east from what we can tell—”
“A scoundrel.”
“If he were still here he’d be facing an F and B.”
“Pardon?”
“Fornication and banditry—it’s still a crime in Pennsylvania, no matter what your race.”
“Oh dear.”
“And I’m afraid he’s one of those who regularly snuck into town to worship at the altar of Venus. Dr. Hazzard examined the boy on Tuesday—some concern about his lungs becoming contaminated in the boiler room—and reported he’d acquired a little souvenir.”
“Are you implying—?”
Skinner nods gravely, enjoying the drama. “The young lady is not only in a delicate condition, she may be diseased.”
“Do we tell her this?”
“To what end? Our wire will arrive at Crow Agency before she does.”
Miss Burgess, truly distressed at losing another of her charges to sin, shakes her head. “She was a poor student, but so willing to try. And doomed now to be only another camp girl—”
—while in their room Grace helps Wilma, betrayed by a week of vomiting and a doctor’s visit, gather her possessions and arrange them in a cardboard suitcase. It feels like they’re about to attend another burial.
“You’ll get to see your mother and father,” offers Grace.
“They’ll be ashamed of me.”
They speak English together so easily now, Wilma having very little when she first arrived, but through their years of rooming together it has progressed to where the Crow girl no longer thinks in Absaroke.
“They’ll be thrilled to have you back.”
She knew Wilma was sneaking out to see the Sioux boy—really a man by now—but had no idea it had gone this far. She feels a bit hurt not to have been confided in.
“I think I’m supposed to leave all the school clothes,” says Wilma, laying a folded uniform dress on the edge of her bed. “They don’t fit me now anyway.”
She turns to the wall to take down a color advertisement for Old Sachem Bitters and Wigwam Tonic, featuring a drawing of a handsome, idealized warrior, looking it over and then adding it to the pile in the suitcase.
“I was just a little girl when I came here.”
Miss Redbird, given the word by Lizzie Cloud, the other roommate, hurries across the slippery boardwalk between the snowbanks to the dormitory, arriving just in time to relieve Skinner and Miss Burgess of their escort duties.
“I’ll take over from here,” she tells them.
Such a tiny thing, thinks Miss Burgess as she nods her assent, but fierce when she wants to be.
Miss Redbird takes one of Wilma’s arms and Grace, carrying the cardboard suitcase, takes the other. It is snowing again, big wet flakes on a nippy wind, and Miss Redbird was in too much of a rush to throw on her heavy coat. She waits till they’re far enough away from Burgess and the disciplinarian to speak.
“I’ll write to the agent at Sweetcorn’s reservation—”
“I doubt they’ll pay much attention,” says Grace, “with all that’s going on.”
“He doesn’t want anything to do with me!” says Wilma in a teary burst. “He never wrote once while I was on Outing.”
“If he did, his letters were likely kept from you.”
The girls slow to look at Miss Redbird, shocked.
“Even if he went to a postbox in town, they have an agreement with the school. The school acts in loco parentis—as if you’re literally their children—just as the government does with all of us. And they do what they can to avoid scandals.”
“Or just to keep them quiet after they happen,” says Grace, brooding.
Two cadet guards, a dusting of snow on their caps and shoulders, open the gate to reveal a one-horse cab waiting, the driver standing beside it. Wilma turns to hug her roommate—
“If it’s a girl I’ll call her Grace.”
“I reiterate that civilization and savagery are habits,” states Captain Pratt, “which can be learned and unlearned. And the first step for the Indian in that learning process is to hold his own land as an individual.”
The Captain drills his eyes into those of the older boys, the ones who might soon be going back to allotments created through the Dawes Act. All this carping about Indians selling their land to whites—it is theirs to do what they wish with. The free man, the citizen, takes responsibility for his actions—
“And let that individual thrive upon it by the sweat of his brow, or lose it and sink into penury.”
Do you wish me to take the earth, my mother, thinks Clarence Regal standing at the back of the hall, recalling Red Cloud’s response to the farmer sent to demonstrate the plow to the Oglala, and cut into her flesh? Do you wish me to break her bones?
“This Messiah business, this ghost dancing, is a mere distraction and will soon fade away,” the Captain reassures them. “Believe me.”
AGENT MCLAUGHLIN SAID to bring a wagon, but a rattling wagon will wake the whole camp up. The plan was originally to wait till Saturday, when most of the people, even the ghost dancers, will be in at the agency to pick up their issue. But then Bullhead saw the number of horses, fast-riding horses, increasing by the medicine man’s cabin every day and warned McLaughlin, and the arrest was moved forward.
The ride from Bullhead’s house to the compound by the river is only a few miles, the road between well traveled enough that they can move swiftly even in the dark. It is bitter cold, ground frozen under the horses’ hooves making a hollow, metallic sound as they ride, two companies of Indian police and a few volunteers, at an easy trot. Bullhead has gone over the strategy with them all at his house—who will go into the cabin, who will bring the riderless horse they’re stringing along up to receive the prisoner, which men will dismount to form a protective perimeter, which will remain mounted. More and more of the ghost dancers have been gathering around the cabin, some even coming up from Cheyenne River and Rosebud and camping out in the cold, but this early they should still be asleep.
If he’ll cooperate it should go smoothly.
Agent McLaughlin says it might only be for a serious talk, and if Sitting Bull will change his mind, agree to stop stirring the people up, they’ll escort him back home. But if not—he has said several times that he is ready to fight, ready to die—and the Messiah says those who die now will have a short journey and not wait long before they return to the land as it was before the whites arrived. If that’s what he wants, Bullhead is bringing forty men to help him on his way.
When they see the first canvas tents and tipis, ghostly white in the darkness, Bullhead prods his mount into a canter and the others follow. Get it done before the people can object. It will be good to be well on the way back to the agency before the detachment from Fort Yates reaches them. The ghost dancers have been told that their ceremonies have bewitched the white soldiers, made it so their bullets lack the power to break an Indian’s skin, and some fool is sure to want to see if this is true—
Bullhead and his men are not white soldiers.
Forty-some mounted men pull up outside the cabin, plenty of dogs barking but no people about yet, and deploy, Bullhead leading Sergeant Shavehead, Little Eagle, High Eagle, Warrior Fear Him, and Red Tomahawk in through the unbarred door.
Sitting Bull is in bed with one of his wives. He is pulled to his feet while a rifle beside his bed and one from the wall are taken.
You are under arrest, Bullhead tells him. You’ll be taken to the agency, where Major McLaughlin wishes to talk with you.
He can come here to talk, says Sitting Bull.
My orders are to bring you to him. Get dressed.
Sitting Bull considers this for a moment. He is surrounded by policemen holding rifles. He turns to his wife.
Make us some coffee.
There won’t be time for that, says Bullhead.
What is the hurry? Am I fighting you?
Get dressed.
Sitting Bull’s son Crowfoot, more than a boy and not quite a man, steps in then from another room, looking upset.
What do they want?
They’ve come to take me away.
Only to the agency, says Bullhead. Those are my orders.
You’ve come to kill my father.
If that was true he would already be dead.
Crowfoot looks to his father.
Are you going to go?
Sitting Bull is dressing, very slowly.
You see how many rifles they have.
And there are more outside, Bullhead tells him.
You’ll kill him on the way, says Crowfoot. You’ll lie and say he’d tried to escape.
You can help, Bullhead tells the young man. As we leave, you can tell the people here not to follow us, not to cause trouble.
Shoots Walking steps in from outside.
People are coming, he says. All around us. It’s too dark to see their faces.
Sitting Bull, dressed now, sits back down on his bed.
When the ground opens up and the white men sink into it, he says, you’ll be buried too. That metal on your chest will be your doom.
Bullhead touches the tin badge pinned to his vest.
You don’t really believe that.
I have had the vision myself.
Then what do you have to be afraid of?
I’m not afraid. I’m deciding whether I’ll allow you to take me away or not.
You’re going to the agency, says Bullhead, one way or the other.
He can tell the old man is stalling, giving his followers time to gather. There is shouting outside now, both men’s and women’s voices. High Eagle and Warrior Fear Him have their rifles leveled at Crowfoot.
You can walk out the door like a man, Bullhead continues, or be carried.
The old man is thinking. Even Red Cloud, a greater warrior in his time, has made a peace with the whites, accepting that the Sioux are outnumbered, they are outgunned, that to fight more is to starve, is to see the young ones die, is to end as a people. But Sitting Bull is a medicine man who claims to have visions, who, maybe, even believes that the Creator of All Things is ready to deliver them from the prison of this reservation—
Sitting Bull stands.
We go now.
They start for the door, Bullhead leading, Little Eagle and High Eagle each taking one of the prisoner’s arms, Sergeant Shavehead just behind them. Crowfoot follows them all, taunting.
You’re the white man’s dogs, he says. He throws you a scrap of meat and you lick his hand.
When they reach the door, Lieutenant Bullhead turns to Sitting Bull. If there is bad trouble, he says, you’ll be the first man we shoot.
When they step out the darkness has thinned enough to see shapes if not recognize faces. Bullhead sees the backs of his policemen forming a rough rectangle that they move into as quickly as possible, and beyond them the angry followers, shouting out insults and threats, pressing in, maybe three times more of them than there are of his own men. The people, torn from sleep, have not dressed for the cold, most with only a blanket thrown over their shoulders.
Blankets can hide weapons.
Afraid of Soldiers is trying to pull the horse meant for Sitting Bull forward, but it sulls and fights him, eyes rolling, frightened by the shouted oaths, sharp as gunfire in the cold, dark morning. And now the medicine man, still strong, is doing the same, digging in his heels and calling to his people.
Don’t let them take me! he calls. They have no power here!
Tell them to back away, orders Bullhead, reaching for his pistol. He hears the rifle shot before he feels it—
THE STUDENTS ARE IN THEIR FREE TIME, dozens of boys pelting each other with snowballs as Miss Burgess crosses the parade ground with her brother.
Eddie is grinning like a wolf, as always.
“Quite a battle. You think it’s one tribe against another?”
“The Sioux, because of their number here, can form a bit of a clique,” she tells him. “Not something we encourage.”
She feels self-conscious walking with him, though doesn’t know why she should. At least he’s not in one of his ridiculous costumes.
“Doesn’t look like it will lead to bloodshed,” he says, flinching away from an errant throw. “Good to get it out of their systems.”
“They’re given sports for that.”
“Any notable riders?”
Eddie has become an expert at lassoing running livestock from horseback, paid to exhibit this skill in popular frontier-themed entertainments around the country.
“I wouldn’t know. Riding is not in the curriculum.”
Eddie laughs. At the agency, both in Nebraska and in the Territory, he was always off with the wilder Pawnee boys, hunting rabbits and birds, catching and riding horses not their own, though always returning them in short order. “If you don’t ride them,” he’d explain to their disapproving father, “they’ll go wild.”
“I had a boy in the Mormon play,” says Eddie. “Comanche boy, younger than some of these fellows, who could ride full-tilt hanging on the side of his mount, no saddle, just holding on with his knees and a handful of mane.”
“Why would one wish to do such a thing?”
“Ride past your enemy that way, he can’t even see you, much less shoot you.”
“And this boy portrayed a Mormon?”
Eddie turns to back up in front of her, surefooted on the frozen boardwalk, eyes glowing. His enthusiasm was always infectious, though the objects of his passion—
“May Cody, or Lost and Won. Written for Bill Cody by Major Burt, the Indian fighter. May Cody—this is an actress, now—plays Bill’s long-lost sister, who has been boarding in a house in New York City, till turned out into the streets by her landlady, whose son has fallen in love with May—”
“Very few Comanches in New York, I’d presume—”
“Oh, he comes in later. May is being romantically pursued not only by the landlady’s son, but by the Mormon bigamist, John D. Lee—”
“Wasn’t he recently—?”
“Executed by firing squad. Took him to the scene of his depredations, stood him on a coffin, and shot him down.”
“But then how can he be—”
“The play is set in the recent past. Like, what—Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Slavery has been gone for decades now, but people still thrill to see Eliza dashing across the ice floes with her babes in arms.”
“It is a very moral play,” says Miss Burgess.
“As is this—just listen. Bill finds his sister, May, and with the landlady’s son, Stoughton, attempts to bring her back with him to California. But they are pursued by Lee, who when they reach the Utah Territory, kidnaps her and takes her to Salt Lake. But there his superior, Brigham Young, takes a fancy to her and announces that he will take her as one of his many brides—”
“And they consider themselves Christians.”
“The wedding is proceeding in their special endowment house, when Bill, Stoughton, and some native allies, all dressed as Ute warriors, break in and spirit her away. That’s one of the scenes the Comanche boy—his name was Broken Spear, or at least that’s how he was listed in the program—is in. He’s also one of the attackers at the Mountain Meadow massacre.”
“There is a massacre onstage?”
Eddie throws his hands out. “How else is Brigham Young to get Lee out of Salt Lake so he can wed poor May?”
“And you appeared in this—?”
“In several roles. I was a Mormon, I was a Ute Indian, I was in the Baker-Fancher party that is slaughtered, and in the added attractions after the play I did some roping and riding.”
“Horses onstage?”
“Of course—people paid a quarter to see this show.”
“And gunplay, I suppose—”
“Not during the story—we’d just shoot off blanks then—lots of noise, lots of smoke. The live rounds are saved for Bill’s shooting exhibition.”
“When he executes several Latter-day Saints.”
Eddie laughs again. He and his brother Charley, raised so far from the Friends’ Society, were wont to doze through the Quaker meetings at the agency, and grew up believing their responsibility in life was to have fun.
“He’s an incredible sharpshooter. A potato—actually a series of potatoes—is balanced on the head of the actress who plays May—”
“Ah, the life of a thespian—”
“And Bill shoots them off—sometimes one little piece at a time. Straight on, ducking his head through his legs, back turned to her and looking in a mirror—”
“Nobody killed in the wings?”
“There’s a bale of hay just offstage to soak up the lead. Then for the finale one of our Indians, Cha-sha-cha-o-pogo, lights up a cigar and Bill shoots the lit end off of it from the other side of the stage.”
“You had several Indians?”
“A dozen in that show, more in Life on the Border. You probably remember a few from the agency. They’re my responsibility on the road, while Charley is in charge of the bear.”
“A bear among the Mormons?”
“Bill puts the bear into every show. When they wrassle it really looks like an attack. Women faint.”
“I shouldn’t wonder.” They have reached the print shop, and Miss Burgess unlocks the door. “I take it you two are currently at liberty.”
The worst was when the dime novel was published and circulating. Edwin Burgess or Yellow Hair, the Boy Chief of the Pawnees—a pack of fabrications that would have her brother, just in his teens, kidnapped by the Sioux, living as their slave for a spell, before escaping to warn his friends the Pawnee of an imminent attack, which he helps to repel and is rewarded by being named their youngest chief. Oh, and a fight with a cougar along the way, his knife triumphing over tooth and claw.
“Oh, we’ll be Wild-Westing soon enough,” he smiles. “I’m helping to put a combination together for Pawnee Bill.”
They step in and Eddie takes a deep breath.
“Ah—that smell. Like every one of Father’s news dens.”
After he was forced to resign as agent, their father had returned to his former trade, serving as editor and business manager of the Intelligencer, the Gazette, the Leader. Marianna had learned the mechanics of it before they left Pennsylvania, when he ran the Wyoming Republican in Tunkhannock—
“Linseed oil and turpentine, in the ink,” she says. The shop has been left clean and organized, something that always pleases her upon first sight. “I assume Pawnee Bill is another army scout turned showman.”
“You know him,” grins Eddie. “It’s Gordon Lillie.”
“That boy?”
Marianna knew him as a teen boy who followed them from Nebraska to the Territory, even helping to build the new agency house on Black Bear Creek, becoming fluent in Pawnee and even teaching at the school for a spell after her father had been bullied out of the service. He would go out hunting and trapping with her brothers and the Indians, but was no leathery frontiersman.
“He helped Bill Cody recruit some Pawnee for a show and served as their interpreter and chaperone, where he caught the bug. He’s putting together Pawnee Bill’s Historical Wild West Indian Museum and Encampment. Folks are ripe for a Western show again what with all this ghost dancer business—”
“Courtesy of that old murderer Sitting Bull.”
“Who Bill Cody paid a fortune to just to mount up and ride around the ring a couple loops at the beginning of the festivities. The first night he asked me why the people were mooing like cattle. ‘Those are boos,’ I told him, ‘from the people who don’t like you.’ And he makes a face which is as close as he ever come to a smile and says, ‘Good. I don’t like them either.’ ”
“Is there room for another Bill to be gallivanting around the country, pretending to shoot redskins and subdue grizzly bears?”
“Sure. Lillie—Pawnee Bill—is quite celebrated now. Mr. Ingraham, who wrote that book about me, has done a couple on him. The Prairie Shadower, The Buckskin Avenger—”
“You’ve seen my book?” she asks, holding up a copy of Stiya from a crate.
Eddie grins. “Read it twice.”
“And—?”
“You always could sling the words around. Hey, I’m one of your regular subscribers—I get back to San Francisco there’s always a couple issues of the—what’s it called?”
“The Indian Helper.”
Eddie winks. “You’re that Bandstand fellow, right? I recognize the tone—’a gentleman does this, and proper young lady does that—’ ”
He is booked at the Mansion House Hotel, so she won’t have to offer him lodging at the school. If possible, the Captain, with his undisguised loathing for Cody and his ilk who celebrate the Indians’ regrettable past rather than their hopeful future, can be avoided during this visit. Eddie is well dressed at the moment, if a bit flashily, and can’t be here to borrow money—
He pulls a slip of paper from his pocket. “Actually, it’s the Helper I came to talk to you about. I’d like to purchase an advertisement.”
“We don’t run advertisements—”
“This is more of a Help Wanted notice. Read it—”
The text has been roughed out in pen and ink—
WANTED—Young men, tribe not important, yearning for adventure, good pay. Must be proficient with bow and arrow, excellent horsemanship. Inquire H. E. Burgess, care of this periodical.
Marianna is aghast.
“You expect me to help lure Carlisle boys to join this perverted circus?”
“Twenty-five dollars a month.” Eddie grins. “More if they bring their own horse. They get to ride, shoot arrows, whoop it up, see the country—maybe see the world if the show does well.”
Marianna was born here in Pennsylvania, of course, before she traveled with her parents to Nebraska and then the Indian Territory. Her father took her to the Philadelphia Exposition—you could climb onto a platform to see the arm and torch for the proposed Statue of Liberty. But Eddie and Charlie have been everywhere, sending her letters and postal cards from places she has to search for on the pull-down map in the geography-and-history classroom.
“Absolutely out of the question,” she says, then lowers her voice as a few of the print boys enter, preceding the bugle call by at least five minutes. “That’s exactly the sort of behavior we’re hoping to stamp out.”
“But it’s pretend.”
“It is a travesty—”
“Where, honestly, are these fellows going to make that kind of money once they’ve left here?” Eddie waves the boys over.
“Wherever it is, they won’t be making a mockery of themselves.”
The Ojibwe boy who so ardently rendered Hiawatha and the little office boy approach.
“Gentlemen,” booms Eddie, thrusting out his hand, “a pleasure to meet you.”
The boys shake, uncertain.
“This is my brother, Henry Edwin,” Miss Burgess tells them. “Visiting us from the West Coast. This is Mr. LaMere and Mr. Starr.”
Eddie brightens. “Related to the Cherokee deputy marshal?”
“He was my father,” says the boy.
“A terrible loss. I met him in Tahlequah shortly after he broke up the Dick Glass gang. You can wear that name with pride.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“My brother is just passing through,” says Miss Burgess, folding the paper with Eddie’s advertisement on it. “I’ve been showing him the school.”
She is relieved when Cato Goforth steps in and motions for the boys to join him by the rollers.
“Love the uniforms,” says Eddie. “Makes them look like regular little soldiers.”
“Captain Pratt is still a commissioned officer. We have regular drill, student-led court-martials—”
“I’ve seen the boy give that bugle a working over. You must have some Pawnee here—”
“One of our finest students is Jesse Echohawk—”
“Whose father was the trader at the Genoa agency—?”
“He’s become a master sergeant here, leading the other boys.”
“Sounds like he could take over my job.”
Marianna sighs. There is a line between irrepressible and obnoxious—
Cato makes sure Burgess isn’t looking at them before he hisses it in a whisper.
“They killed him! Right in front of his house!”
“Killed who?” asks Antoine.
He holds the folded copy of the Carlisle Sentinel up for them to read, the headline in 24-point font—
SITTING BULL SHOT DEAD!
OLD CHIEF KILLED DURING ARREST ATTEMPT
Little Tecumseh looks up to the older boys.
“What’s going to happen now?”
The students from the Plains tribes, most fluent in sign language, spread the news.
Hands held close to the temples, index fingers partially curved while the thumbs and other fingers are closed, then raise the hands above the head and push them slightly forward—then bring the right hand down to the center of the belly, extending only the index finger out and upward—
Horns and a penis. A buffalo bull—
Close the right hand and bring it in front of and almost up to the right shoulder, turn the back of it to the right then move the hand down several inches—
A buffalo bull that sits—
Bring the right hand back near shoulder height, ball of the thumb pressing against the second joint of the index finger, hand nearly closed and wrist bent so the knuckles are higher, then strike quickly forward, down, and a little to the left in a sharp twisting motion with a slight rebound when the hand stops suddenly—
Killed.
Captain Pratt is for once well behind his students while he shepherds a new group of potential donors around the school grounds, blissfully unaware of the incident as they approach the classroom used for advanced English study—
“—and of course we manufacture much of what we wear and consume here at the Carlisle School—uniforms, shoes, mattresses, dining utensils, milk and butter—”
He slows as they reach the open door of the classroom, touching a finger to his lips and lowering his voice—
“You can peek in at some of our most successful students, a few of whom will graduate this year—”
The visitors tiptoe to look in past the Captain, seeing a tall boy with master sergeant’s stripes on his uniform sleeves, standing to face another with a captain’s bars on his shoulder, reading roles in The Tempest out of their books—
“For this, be sure,” says Captain Cornelius with some venom, “tonight thou shalt have cramps!
Side-stitches that shall pen thy breath up. Urchins
Shall, for that vast of night that they may work
All exercise on thee—”
“This island’s mine,” snaps Master Sergeant Regal in response, “by Sycorax, my mother!”
He pauses for an instant, noting the white faces in the doorway, Captain Pratt looming behind them.
“Which thou tak’st from me. When thou cam’st first,
Thou strok’st me and made much of me, wouldst give me
Water with berries in’t, and teach me how
To name the bigger light, and how the less,
That burn by day and night—and then I loved thee,
and showed thee all the qualities o’ th’ isle—”
Pratt has seen Clarence recite classic texts before, but never with such passion—
“—The fresh springs and brine pits, barren place and fertile—”
He turns from Cornelius to look to the visitors. “Cursed be I that did so! All the charms
Of Sycorax—toads, beetles, light on you!
For I am all the subjects that you have,
Who was once mine own king!”
Clarence spreads his arms to indicate the classroom, then wider, to encompass all of the Carlisle School. “And here you sty me,
In this hard rock, whiles you do keep from me
th’ rest o’ th’ island!”
The Sioux boy and the superintendent stand staring at each other for a long moment, then Captain Pratt begins to clap, a few of the lady visitors tapping their gloved hands together in agreement.
“Clarence Regal, you have taken classic verse and given it wings! Very impressive! We shall leave you to the Bard—”
The Captain leads the visitors away, Clarence watching, then speaking almost to himself, completes the outburst—
“You taught me language; and my profit on’t
Is I know how to curse.”
GENERAL BROOKE ISN‘T five steps out of the tent before the War Scare Department are upon him, firing questions he has no intention of answering.
“Who ordered the killing?”
“Who fired the first shot?”
“Have they attacked the agency staff up there?”
It is these fabricators who have led to the veiled reprimands in the statements by General Miles that have undermined his authority over his troops and no doubt caused serious unrest where there was only religious fanaticism.
“Was his son armed when he was shot?”
“Are the renegades in the Bad Lands on the warpath?”
“Did he have any dying words?”
He doesn’t deserve this. Nearly killed at Gettysburg, spotless record of service, and then to be dragged into this—this insanity. It’s not even his department—General Ruger handles Dakota, both of them under Miles, and it is a constant puzzle as to which of them needs to be informed first of new developments. The agent is a ninny and the Indians—well, they are besotted with this Messiah craze, and when they get a notion, however strange, into their heads—
“Has McLaughlin asked for more troops?”
“Is there an outbreak at Cheyenne River?”
“Is it safe for us to travel to the Stronghold?”
It is the youngest of them, Kelly, who asks this, not the worst liar among the pack. Brooke is tempted to assure them they are in no danger and let them get their worthless hides perforated by Kicking Bear’s wild young bucks—serve them right. But he’d be blamed for that as well.
“If I were you, gentlemen,” he snaps as he continues toward Royer’s office, “I’d stay in the hotel and make up your stories there.”
Inside, he first sees Sword, the most sensible man on the agency payroll.
“I need a party of the respected men to go out to the Bad Lands and talk to those people,” he tells him. “Who do you suggest I get to head it?”
The police captain considers this. Something is being hammered on in the Indian agent’s office.
“I’ll tell Plenty Buffalo Chips to come see you,” he says. “He might do it.”
“What do you think happened up there?”
Again Sword ponders before he answers. The hammering is insistent.
“Sitting Bull lost power over people when he was up in Canada,” he says finally. “And when Bullhead and them come to get him, he must have been ready to die.”
In the office, Agent Royer stands watching one of his carpenters nail boards over the window.
“I’ve already called all my people in,” he says when General Brooke enters. “Sword has some of his men out at the mission to protect Father Jutz and the nuns—”
“The students have been sent away?”
“They stay locked in there till this is over. The hostiles have already stolen part of the herd and they’re terrorizing the Christian Indians, taking their food—”
“Who will no doubt be coming here for shelter. We can supply some tents.”
“I’ve wired to General Miles for more troops—”
“Half the United States Army is already in the department.”
“This is my responsibility—”
“It’s in our hands now,” says General Brooke. The carpenter stops hammering. It is dark in the room, a single oil lamp on the desk between him and Royer. “I think you’ve done quite enough.”
Outside there is a cheer from the reporters as Charlie Seymour and R. J. Boylan pull up in a one-horse carriage.
“We thought you were gone for good!”
“So did we,” says Boylan, climbing down. “‘Not enough action,’ says my editor, ‘Fold your tent and come back to the paper.’ But we roll into Rushville—”
“That wagon didn’t roll,” comments Seymour, tying the lathered horse to the porch rail. “It’s like it had square wheels—”
“—and you know Rushville, if the railroad didn’t stop there it’d be a prairie dog village—”
“I had no idea they had that many two-legged humans in the town, and here’s every one of them in a panic, packing up their belongings to run south, ‘cause they’ve heard personally from our Agent Royer that the whole Sioux nation is up in arms and looking to murder some white folks. Only took us a minute to hear about Sitting Bull and to know we’d better hightail it back here, only the jasper who’d brought us in the wagon just snapped his reins and lit out for Oshkosh.”
“How’d you manage to snag this rig?” asks the Professor.
“Well, there was a great deal of confusion. New troops were coming in off the train—they’ll be here once they get organized—and like Charlie said, people are all in a panic, so we were able to sort of borrow it—”
“Horse thievery is a serious offense in Nebraska,” says Tibbles.
“With savages on the hunt, I doubt anybody will be coming up here to look for it. What’s Royer up to?”
“Preparing for a siege, from what we can tell. Hate to tell you this, but a couple fellas from Sioux Falls already took your room.”
“Hell, that don’t matter,” grins Charlie Seymour. “We’re back in business!”
ON THE FRONT PAGE of The Indian Helper, right-hand column—
Mr. Henry Edwin Burgess, of San Francisco, visited his sister at our school on Tuesday. Mr. Burgess has had considerable experience among the Indians of the Plains, his father having been agent for the Pawnees during the boyhood days of the first named. Mr. Burgess speaks the Pawnee language with the fluency of a native, and can carry on an intelligent conversation for hours with any of the tribes of the Southwest in their interesting sign language. In 1875 he was intertribal interpreter for the Cheyennes, Arapahoes, Comanches, Kiowas, and Pawnees, being employed by the Government to assist in adjusting the deal which the latter made for the Pawnees with the tribes of the Southwest, at the time the Pawnees bought their present reservation. He was struck with the gentlemanly bearing and demonstrativeness of our boys and girls in contrast with the taciturn Indian youth he is used to see hanging around the reservation agencies.
—and just inside the second page, the Man-on-the-Bandstand weighs in—
According to the Dakota medicine men, the world as we know it was supposed to have ended today—but the Man-on-the-Bandstand notes no apocalypse. Poor Sitting Bull is dead, however, and nobody weeps.
Makes-Trouble-in-Front continues to wear the ghost shirt he has made under his uniform. The white teachers still look at him, speak to him, but their eyes and words no longer pierce his skin—
His is a woeful legacy—born in ignorance, steeped in treachery and violence, died in confinement and obscurity—
—while Clarence Regal sits alone on a seat in a passenger car of a westbound train ready to pull out of Carlisle station. The conductor takes the ticket from his hand, glances at it, hesitates—“Heading home, are we?”
Clarence lifts the folded letter he has forged, gives the man a sad smile. “Death in the family,” he says.
The conductor punches the ticket, slips it into the loop on the back of the seat in front of the boy. “I’m sorry to hear that,” he says.
GRACE FEELS FLUSHED today, despite all the other girls complaining about how cold it is in the girls’ dormitory. “Sweetcorn is gone,” they joke, “and there’s nobody left to pick up his coal shovel.”
She lies back on her bed, exhausted though it is only just after supper, looking up at the photographs she’s pinned to the wall. Evangeline, scissored from the cover of Miss Burgess’s book, the rest of it thrown in the garbage bin in the kitchen in a moment of pique, and Wilma, a shot of her taken by Mr. Choate when she first arrived from the Crow Agency, procured for Grace by the Puyallup boy who serves as the photographer’s assistant. Little Wilma, in a simple cotton dress with a blanket thrown over her shoulders, looks scared and defiant at the same time.
“Seems kind of empty without her,” says Lizzie Cloud, collecting a book from her footlocker.
“We’ll get used to it.”
“Are you all right?”
“I’m fine.”
Lizzie starts out the door. “We’re practicing in the library.”
They have been taught all the Christmas carols in English, and the tradition has become for the older girls to sing them from the balcony on the holiday morn. Grace sighs. “I’ll be right down.”
The short days are part of the problem, of course, and the cold, so much more oppressive here somehow than it ever is in Green Bay. And the news from Dakota. She will graduate this year, like her brothers before, and should feel more excited about that. But she will miss so many people when it’s over, the girls from tribes all over the country, her sisters in the Longstreth Society—and Antoine, he’ll have to stay here for his people to keep their enrollment—
Grace wills herself to her feet, crosses to the mirror on the wall they share, checks her hair, frowns. There is some kind of rash beginning on her face and neck.
If they weren’t all in their flannel long johns, the four boys would make a picture of the sort printed on the postcards the school sends to solicit donations—Antoine, Smokey, and Asa sitting on their beds, staring into open books, while Trouble sits at the desk, pencil in hand, intent on his task. He is drawing a kind of pictogram escape route—lengths of railroad track, one leading to the next, with the letters he has learned from the blacksmith’s map—CVRR, PCC St. L, GN—letters that will be on the sides of the train cars, so he can choose the right one to climb onto.
What their School Father, Pratt, says is true—to equal the white man you have to learn his ways.
Jesse Echohawk throws their door open, calls inside—
“La Merde! Downstairs!”
Antoine and the other members of the debate team have been marched into the large boys’ library and stand facing Captain Pratt and Mr. Skinner. It is cold in the room, cold inside everywhere for the last week.
“I cannot believe he would not have shared his plans with at least one of you,” says the Captain, standing close enough to tower over them.
“He wouldn’t want to compromise us, sir,” says Jesse Echohawk.
“Did he seem discontent?”
“No more than usual—I mean to say, he was full of moods, Clarence. And some of them were very dark.”
“He was awful worried about this ghost dance business,” Antoine volunteers. Antoine saw Clarence only once after the news of Sitting Bull’s murder broke, the master sergeant passing by him with no hint of recognition in his eyes.
“But he doesn’t believe in any of it,” blurts Jesse.
“We’re all of us upset about the ghost dancing,” says Captain Pratt. “It is a desperate, pathetic—”
“Those are his people,” says Antoine.
Antoine has seen the headlines every day as Cato brings them in to share with the print shop boys, the newspapermen at Pine Ridge obviously enjoying the drama if not the locale—
ON WITH THE DANCE!
—then—
STARTLING STORIES
—then—
GEN. MILES ALARMED
Captain Pratt is giving Antoine a hard look. “His people? I wouldn’t think so, not after all his education, his accomplishments—”
“Maybe not, sir.”
“In any case, he won’t be gone long. Every train depot between here and the Dakotas has been contacted to look out for Clarence Regal—”
“War Eagle,” says Jesse.
“Pardon?”
Jesse is staring straight ahead, standing at attention, the obedient master sergeant.
“If you remember, sir,” he says, “his name was changed at the blackboard. When we first came here, he was War Eagle.”
There was a choice in Minneapolis between the Great Northern road and the Northern Pacific, and Clarence had a premonition that they’d be checking for fugitives at Sioux City. So he is reboarding the NP westbound, newspaper folded under his arm, from the platform in Aberdeen. The passenger cars are only half full and he easily finds an empty seat. He’ll have to change once more in Pierre, now the capital of a state that didn’t exist when he first left for the school. The conductor shouts his litany, then the train snorts and spits and lumbers into motion.
The Saturday Pioneer is published in Aberdeen, just off the press, and Clarence is hoping for some news of what may lie ahead of him. But he can’t get past the editorial, written by one L. Frank Baum. “Sitting Bull, most renowned Sioux of modern history, is dead,” it begins:
He was not a Chief, but without Kingly lineage he arose from a lowly position to the greatest Medicine Man of his time, by virtue of his shrewdness and daring.
The line from Macbeth comes to Clarence—Nothing in his life / Became him like the leaving it. Savages, he has learned, tend to grow nobler the longer they’ve been dead—
He was an Indian with a white man’s spirit of hatred and revenge for those who had wronged him and his. In his day he saw his son and his tribe gradually driven from their possessions; forced to give up their old hunting grounds and espouse the hard working and uncongenial avocations of the whites. And these, his conquerors, were marked in their dealings with his people by selfishness, falsehood, and treachery. What wonder that his wild nature, untamed by years of subjection, should still revolt? What wonder that a fiery rage still burned within his breast and that he should seek every opportunity of obtaining vengeance upon his natural enemies.
When Clarence first left for Carlisle, Sitting Bull had just led his people back from their Canadian exile. It was still the Great Sioux Reservation then, easier for a red man to shift from one area to another, and the famous medicine man’s movements and pronouncements did not take long to be known of down at Pine Ridge. His imprisonment at Fort Randall, his return to Standing Rock, even the crazy rumor that he had converted to Catholicism were all discussed and debated. Clarence’s first years at the school coincided with Sitting Bull’s sojourn with Cody’s Wild West show, Captain Pratt extremely vocal in his disapproval, citing a lack of both dignity and foresight in the notorious leader’s actions. Until the dance reached the Dakotas, Clarence regarded him as a relic of the past—
The proud spirit of the original owners of these vast prairies inherited through centuries of fierce and bloody wars for their possession, lingered last in the bosom of Sitting Bull. The nobility of the redskin is extinguished, and what few are left are a pack of whining curs who lick the hand that smites them. The whites, by law of conquest, by justice of civilization, are masters of the American continent, and the best safety of the frontier settlements will be secured by the total annihilation of the few remaining Indians. Why not annihilation? Their glory has fled, their spirit broken, their manhood effaced; better that they die than live the miserable wretches that they are.
It is not hot in the passenger car, windows frosted with rime and impossible to see through, but Clarence has begun to perspire under his suit. He thinks of the Thanksgiving debate, and that the Invincibles could have recruited Mr. L. Frank Baum to argue their position. He has heard that the new state of South Dakota is offering a bounty for killing wolves, which is mostly done with strychnine. Perhaps in the next issue of food staples on the reservations—
History would forget these later despicable beings, and speak, in later ages of the glory of these grand Kings of forest and plain that Cooper loved to heroism. We cannot honestly regret their extermination, but we at least do justice to the manly characteristics possessed, according to their lights and education, by the early Redskins of America.
Clarence does not feel honored as a king of forest and plain. A man in a checkered vest sitting across the aisle from him flicks his eyes from the open newspaper to Clarence’s face.
“You can read that?”
It will not be a long ride to Pierre, but there is no telling if the man will be a fellow passenger on the next leg of the journey. Clarence folds the newspaper carefully.
“After a fashion, yes.”
The white man grins. “What do you think of them killing your man?”
He knows this means Sitting Bull, no more “his man” than President Harrison. He decides to engage the fellow.
“Sitting Bull was Hunkpapa,” he says. “My people are all Oglala.”
“That’s still Sioux, right?”
“Yes.”
“And that’s which reservation?”
There is always the chance that the man is a railroad detective, tasked to sniff out suspicious travelers.
“I’m currently on a mission from the ERA,” Clarence tells him.
“That’s an organization?”
“Early Redskins of America.”
“Ah,” says the man in the checkered vest, attempting to make sense of this information. “And you’re heading for Standing Rock.”
“Pine Ridge.”
The man makes a face. “Likely you’re heading into a hornets’ nest.”
“Perhaps.”
The man seems a bit flummoxed, as if he’s encountered a talking dog.
“So what do you think of this ghost dance business?”
In point of fact Clarence has not thought much about the dancing, or even the armed troops that have flooded into the area, surrounding the agencies, scouring the Bad Lands for Short Bull and Kicking Bear’s runaways. What has preoccupied his mind during the journey is his shaky ability to recall the Lakota tongue. He can’t remember what year he actually began to think in English, but it has happened, and there are things he has forgotten how to express in Lakota.
“I think I’ll have to see it with my own eyes,” he says.
CHRISTMAS DAY IS SUNNY but still cold. Grace joins the others on the balcony of the large girls’ dormitory, dressed in their heavy coats, the other students ranged below them on the parade ground in their companies—
“God rest you merry, Gentlemen,
Let nothing you dismay,
Remember Christ the Savior
Was born on Christmas day—”
Feeling dizzy, she has to hold tightly to the rail—
“To save poor souls from Satan’s power
Which long time had gone astray
Bringing tidings of comfort and joy!”
—they sing until the bells of St. Patrick’s begin to chime in town, and then the girls who are in the chorus join the Catholic students, not marching but hurrying to be ready at the church by nine o’clock. Grace goes back to her room to lie down.
The chapel at St. Patrick’s is decorated with evergreen boughs. The Carlisle chorus sing to the students gathered for the special service—
“Adeste Fideles læti triumphantes,
Venite, venite in Bethlehem,
Natum videte,
Regem angetorum—”
Antoine recalls how when he was very small he thought Latin was just the language God and Jesus and the angels spoke with each other, and that somehow Père Etienne had learned it—
“Venite adoremus,
Venite adoremus,
Venite adoremus, Do-ominum!”
—and later, in the large girls’ library, Miss Burgess pushes colored glass slides into the new magic lantern Miss Longstreth has bought for the school, throwing images of the Holy Land onto a sheet hung over the wall.
“A view of Jerusalem, taken from the north,” she says. “Some of these buildings were no doubt standing in the early Bible times. And now here—”
She has become adept at operating the device, smoothly pulling one scene out and sliding the next in—
“—here we are in the narrow streets of Bethlehem. Imagine, children, that His feet may have trod upon these very stones—”
Grace feels flushed and swoony. She thinks of Christmas, which her parents and most of her relatives celebrate, at home. She wishes she was there—
“And this is the Sea of Galilee, where Peter’s faith was tested and found wanting—”
Religious services over, the students congregate in the gymnasium, also bedecked with evergreen, a tall tree hung with ribbons and strings of popcorn standing in the center of the floor. Miss Redbird and Miss Noble supervise as the small boys and girls empty their stockings, filled with oranges, nuts, combs, pencils, and fresh popcorn.
Trouble sits with the large boys, curious. There was a white people mission church on the reservation, run by the Black Robe Craft, but he never set foot in it. Trouble understands Christmas by now, the story being explained over and over here, knows that the baby grew up and then spoke as the Messiah Wovoka has spoken, but was captured, was tortured and killed by his enemies. What he doesn’t understand is why worship such a weak man, who allowed himself to be nailed to a pole without raising a hand to defend himself?
The small boys are disappointed to find no marbles in their stockings.
But shortly after, they are entranced by Fannie Noble, small boys and girls sitting cross-legged on the floor around her as she tells them a story from a book, now and then showing them drawings in it. In the story a cruel man who loves only riches is visited at night by spirits that warn him of his future—
—while at the sociable that night it is the school custom that for once the boys are the servers. The mess hall has been decorated lavishly, a small manger with cardboard figures representing Mary and Joseph and the Wise Men propped up on the hay, and a haloed baby doll made by the sewing girls placed in the cradle. Lizzie Cloud and Miss Redbird play a piano/violin duet while the older boys wait on the long tables.
Captain and Mrs. Pratt sit at the head table, smiling and chatting with a few of the most loyal benefactors to the school. Fifty-three turkeys have been obtained to feed the children, the Captain knows, having had to mount a last-moment campaign to avoid settling for pork-and-veal pie this year, Congress proving as stingy and suspicious as always, and one of the school’s Philadelphia stalwarts dying intestate. He makes sure to smile as he looks out over the gathering, though feeling weary and disappointed. The Regal boy, with all his bright potential, absconding and still unaccounted for, the troop movements on Rosebud and Pine Ridge—
Antoine carefully carries two pitchers of eggnog from table to table. For the sociable the students are seated with girls on one long side and boys on the other, and he finds Grace at one end.
“Eggnog here! Straight from the chicken and the cow!”
The first girl nods that she wants some and he pours, serving from the left, then moves on to Grace.
“No, thank you,” she says, smiling wanly. She doesn’t look right, with some kind of rash on her neck.
“Are you all right?”
“I’m fine,” she says. “Just tired from all the preparations. Is it really warm in here?”
CLARENCE SITS on a wooden bench in the drafty office waiting to see the Indian agent. He has come down from Cheyenne River, riding in a sutler’s wagon that skirted around the Bad Lands, passing several small detachments of cavalry moving about in a hurry. His first encounter on arrival was with the gang of correspondents who seem to have taken over Finley’s little three-bedroom hotel near the agency offices, sitting out on the vine-covered front porch teasing each other and cooking up stories. Fascinated, he stood to stare at them, the newsmen assuming he understood none of their jibes and exaggerations.
“And what do you think about it, chief?” the boldest of them would ask every now and then, to the great amusement of his fellows, eventually pushing it beyond tolerance.
“But what they reserve for special occasions,” he said, a grin on his face, “and I’m talking about very important guests—is puppy soup. Wouldn’t you agree, chief?”
Clarence fixed him with an appraising look. “You must be Cressy.”
The others looked amused, the journalist uncomfortable. “And wh-who are you?”
“Only a long-haired, blanket-swathed musk bag,” he said, quoting the Bee correspondent. “Or perhaps an ocher-covered memento of a fast-vanishing race.”
He was halfway to the agency office, the other pressmen still laughing, when intercepted by Yankton Charlie, one of Cody’s barnstorming Indians who have returned and signed on with the Pine Ridge police force. Claiming not to know any of Clarence’s relatives and maintaining that nobody from here could speak Lakota so badly, he escorted Clarence inside as a “trespasser” and told him to wait. It is a long, one-story barracks building tacked together with flimsy cottonwood boards, fine dust sifting through the cracks to form little drifts on the bare floor, the police quarters and the reservation doctor’s dispensary and living space stacked beyond the agent’s office like cars on a passenger train. Pine Ridge looks worse than when Clarence was last here four years ago, though some of that may be the bleak winter and the obvious tension among the different factions. The sutler who gave him a ride, a half-white man named Sturgis, said that the Christian Indians are afraid of the ghost dancers, and neither group is happy to have the government troops here.
The cavalrymen camping just south of the agency enclosure are black and wear heavy buffalo-hide coats and muskrat fur hats with earflaps. Even closer there are white infantrymen in rows of white tents, and even an artillery unit, their cannon lined up and pointed out toward the clusters of tipis that have been thrown up since the agent ordered all the so-called friendlies to come in where they can be “protected.”
A bluecoat lieutenant steps out from Agent Royer’s office and an impatient captain, who has remained standing and tapping his leg with a riding crop, steps in. Clarence can read their ranks from their bars, but is not close enough to divine which units they serve in. A dark-skinned Indian in a corduroy riding suit and new, thigh-high boots steps in, and the agent’s assistant tells him to sit at the bench. He offers a hand to Clarence and speaks to him in Lakota.
It is good to meet you, he says, sounding like he might be a Santee, the people from the East. I’m the new doctor here.
Clarence has never met an Indian with a medical degree.
“You’re working for the bureau?” he asks in English.
“You’re educated!”
The man has a wonderful smile. The people here might trust him, even if he is an outsider.
“Eight years at Carlisle.”
Dr. Eastman smiles again. “Lucky for you. I moved around quite a bit—but finished up at Dartmouth and Boston Medical College. I arrived here only two weeks ago, and it has been—well, you’ll meet the agent.”
“A politician?”
“Back in Alpena he was postmaster, city treasurer, chairman of the board of education, and county coroner—as well as a trained dentist. I taught Sunday school at his church.”
“And somehow he’s landed here.”
Eastman sees the captain step out and switches back to Lakota.
He’s afraid the ghost dancers want to kill him.
Perhaps they do, says Clarence.
The new doctor considers this for a moment.
My father became a Christian while he was in prison, he says. Now he believes that someday heaven’s army will come to earth, that all people will be judged, and the good will live forever in paradise.
The captain hurries outside and there is a blast of cold air.
“The Book of Revelation,” says Clarence. “And what do you believe?”
Dr. Eastman is not smiling now. “I was raised to be a hunter and a warrior,” he says. “Raised as an Indian. I lived in exile in Canada. I have never seen our people in a sorrier state.”
Clarence nods. “It used to be only the Loafers who stayed close to the agency.”
“Everybody has been ordered in. A lot of the Christians left solid log cabins and are now stuck freezing in canvas tents. I’ve been busy fighting la grippe.”
“What can you give them?”
“Cod liver oil in alcohol is very popular,” he says. “I’m not supplied with much else.”
“You,” calls the young assistant, pointing to Clarence. “Stand and spread your arms out.”
Clarence stands, as does the doctor.
“He’s a Carlisle student.”
“We’re taking no chances. Spread your arms out wide.”
The assistant nods to an Indian policeman who has been half dozing in a wooden chair, leaning against the wall. The man only pats the pockets of Clarence’s coat and pants, then nods to the assistant. The assistant points to the door to the agent’s office. “He’ll see you now.”
If I’d had a weapon, thinks Clarence, I could have killed the assistant first—
We’ll talk later, says the Indian doctor in Lakota. Welcome home.
Agent Royer has a red face and wears a mustache. He glances up from his desk, annoyed.
“What are you doing here?”
“I live here.”
Royer has only been agent since October, replacing Gallagher in the election shuffle.
“You’re supposed to be back east at Carlisle—”
Clarence has prepared a half dozen lies, banking them for the occasion. “There’s an outbreak of the Russian fever there,” he says. “Half my dormitory is in the hospital and they’ve sent the rest of us away.”
The man appears too overwhelmed with crises to bother telegraphing the school. He scowls—
“Try to stay out of trouble,” he says with some finality.
“I shall,” says Clarence. “Thank you, sir.”
They love being called sir.
He steps out and waves to Eastman in passing, choosing his words in Lakota carefully.
You could be very useful here.
Outside, Clarence buttons his coat and heads for the stables, hoping, with the little money he has left, to be able to rent a horse for a few days. He has heard that his uncle Strong Bow is living up by Wounded Knee Creek, and though no kneeling Christian, the man wears citizen’s dress and has a logical mind.
If spirits do exist, Strong Bow has always said to whoever will listen, they abandoned us when the white people came.
Clarence has always been struck by how lonely the government buildings look, scattered here on the frozen, barren prairie. They appear no less lonely fenced in now with barbed wire and surrounded by the little tipi camps of refugees, and the new obscenity of rows of white Sibley tents.
There was game here on the White Clay Creek when his father was a boy, but it was hunted out before Clarence was born, and the people went south to chase buffalo and kill Pawnees. Now, he thinks, it is land fit only for ghosts.
He approaches the government warehouse, remembering vividly the Issue Days of his boyhood, pack horses and lumber wagons crowded together, women dressed in their brightest calico, men already making bets on the horse races that would follow the giveaway. Out at the government corral the scrawny longhorns would mill uneasily till family names and their beef allotments were called out by the issue clerk, then a warning cry sent children scampering away from the rail as the beasts were driven out, one or two at a time, gleefully chased and shot from horseback. A thrilling few minutes of sport before the younger women joined with knives and axes in hand for the butchering, camp dogs nervously eyeing the process, ready to swarm and fight over whatever was left in the grass.
Here is our Lakota nation, he remembers Uncle Strong Bow saying as he pointed to the yipping curs. We are to the white people as the dogs are to us.
Nobody was pleased to hear this, but Strong Bow had been a brave warrior, and is still a good man who does what he can to help his family survive, even serving on the Indian police until Agent McGillycuddy was forced to leave.
A group of young men, dressed the old way and staring sullenly at the infantry tents, sit on the loading dock of the warehouse. Clarence recognizes a familiar face.
Hello, brother, he says.
The young man came to Carlisle at the same time he did, a Brulé known on the Rosebud reservation as Plenty Horses, which the school changed to Plenty Living Bear after his father, with the teachers eventually naming him Guy, and the other boys just calling him Plenty.
Plenty takes a moment to recognize Clarence.
You ran away, he says.
I didn’t run. I rode in trains.
One of the other young boys laughs.
He sounds just as bad as you do, he says to Plenty. They made you both stupid at that school.
He was always a big, quiet boy, in A Company with Clarence, and struggled in the classroom. The last couple years before he left they sent him on Outing for months at a time, often a sign that they’ve given up on you ever learning English.
What have you been doing since you came back? Clarence asks him.
Nothing, says Plenty. There is no work here, only waiting for the Issue to come. And now they’ve sent the solders to kill us.
The white people are worried.
Good, says Plenty. I hope they are afraid to sleep at night.
The other young men laugh. Clarence notices that one of them has a pistol tucked into his belt.
You were so good at being white, says Plenty. Why have you come back?
Because I am Lakota.
Not anymore, says Plenty Horses. Believe me.
NURSE TUCKER WALKS down the long row of feverish Carlisle girls with Dr. Hazzard. She can’t tell if he’s been drinking again or if he’s only missed even more sleep than she has.
“As much water as you can get them to drink,” he says. “Change the bedding when it gets too damp, cold rags to the forehead—just keep it all at arm’s length.”
Nurse Tucker knows that arm’s length is no protection from a disease as infectious as scarlatina, and has been ordering her staff to check each other’s temperature with a mercury thermometer every few hours.
She sees the boy’s face pressed to the glass of the door at the end of the corridor again.
“Excuse me,” she says to the doctor. “I have to deal with this.”
She sympathizes, but they are a people, like the Italians who are crowding into her native New York, who believe that sickness is a family affair.
She opens the door and feels the chill immediately.
“This ward is quarantined, do you understand what that means?”
The boy is an Ojibwe, very well-spoken in English, but annoyingly persistent.
“People have fevers, and if you’re exposed to them we’ll have to keep you here!”
The boy tries to look past her to the patients.
“Will you tell Grace Metoxen I came to see her? My name is Antoine—”
“Write her a note and I’ll see that she gets it. But do it outside of the hospital!”
IT IS ONLY FOUR MILES from the agency to the mission school and church, the mule slow but steady, Clarence pleased that he is able to ride it without a saddle. One of the policemen stationed outside, who Clarence remembers as an older boy named Fish, seems glad to see him.
They keep all the children locked up inside, he says in Lakota, even at night. So the ghost dancers won’t get them. Or maybe so their parents can’t take them away.
Do you know where Strong Bow has his lodge now?
Fish points to the East. Go that way till you reach Wounded Knee Creek, he says. Then follow it north.
Clarence points to the young man’s badge, pinned outside his heavy coat.
Do they pay you enough to wear that?
Fish grins. For now, yes. If people start shooting, maybe no. He points at the mule.
Is that what they ride at your school?
We don’t have horses, he answers, embarrassed. We ride on the train.
It is another hour on the animal’s back before he encounters a dozen people carrying their babies and their household possessions in their arms.
The ghost dancers took our horses, says the oldest of the men. They took the food we had left and told us to leave our cabins, told us we could either follow them to the Stronghold or go beg at the agency with the other cowards.
The Stronghold is in the Bad Lands, and there is little water there, and less to eat.
They are staring at the mule. It is one thing to lead a mule, and another to ride one.
There are many of our people living close to the agency, Clarence tells them, and many soldiers there. But for now it seems safe from fighting.
They look hungry and he feels bad that he has nothing to give them. They wish him luck in finding his family.
Clarence reaches the creek, and less than a mile to the north are three roughly built cabins, smoke coming from the chimney of only one of them. Inside, crowded around a government-issue woodstove, are his mother and his uncle Strong Bow and several of his cousins.
Why have you come now? asks his uncle, who as eldest of the lodge can be direct. Better to return when this Messiah wind has blown itself out, when war has been put back in the bag.
We’re not at war, says Clarence.
The shouting has begun, says Strong Bow, and bullets always follow the shouting.
They give him the seat closest to the stove, his mother avoiding his eye, as if he is a stranger whose intentions she does not trust. Half the people sitting around the smoky fire with them are in civilian dress, so it isn’t his clothes.
Maybe the reasonable people will keep that from happening, he says.
Strong Bow laughs. You even think in the white man’s language now.
It is true, but Clarence thought his Lakota might come back to him the moment he set foot on Pine Ridge. He finds himself struggling to remember the subtleties, struggling to make the proper sounds—
We aren’t allowed to speak Lakota.
They do this at Red Cloud’s school as well, says his uncle. As if forgetting their own tongue will make them white.
The Holy Rosary Mission was still being built when Clarence came to see his father’s grave, Red Cloud himself petitioning President Harrison to allow the Catholic priests and the Sisters of Penance and Christian Charity freedom to proselytize for their faith on his reservation.
At least those children live close enough to see their families, he says.
This is only allowed on the days of the government issue, says Strong Bow, making a disgusted face. Women and children weeping when they are parted.
Clarence can tell that all in the cabin are disappointed that he has come empty-handed, assuming that he must now be wealthy and powerful, full of the white man’s magic. But arriving on the mule—all that was available for rental at the agency—has somehow brought the Bible story of Mary and Joseph in Bethlehem to their minds, and three cousins have asked for reassurance that he has not become a Black Robe. His mother places a bowl of wohanpi in his lap, and he eats slowly, hoping not to be offered another portion. A little boy, looking far too thin like all the others, can’t take his eyes off the food, and Clarence’s mother has somehow fished out the one chunk of government beef left in the pot to give to him.
When will you return to school? his mother manages to ask him, stirring the pot that has almost nothing left in it.
I don’t know, he answers honestly. I don’t know if I will.
This does not please her.
This is not a place you should be. Not now.
He looks to his uncle. Strong Bow stares at the flames in the open belly of the woodstove for a long moment. Clarence has forgotten how impolite it is considered among his people to answer a serious question without taking time for serious thought.
Short Bull and Kicking Bear and their followers, his uncle says finally, are drunken with the idea of the Messiah, but these are not people who will ever be content. They have run off to the Stronghold, where there is no game to hunt, and no agency to hand them food. So now they must either starve or come back and surrender to the white man’s soldiers.
Who are afraid of them, says Clarence.
How can they be afraid, says Strong Bow, when there are five of them to every Lakota who can raise a weapon?
The wind is cold and sharp on his ride back to the agency, Clarence declining to add himself to Strong Bow’s burden in the overcrowded cabin, assuring him that the deteriorating shed he is staying in with Plenty Horses and his friends is shelter enough. His overcoat is not nearly warm enough, and his uncle’s parting shot has put him in a sullen mood.
It is fitting that you ride on a mule, he said as Clarence mounted to leave. Neither horse nor donkey.
He has a pass from Captain Sword of the Indian police, which he will either reveal or hide depending on who he encounters, and wonders if he should buy a weapon. He is nearing the Holy Rosary Mission when a white man on a jittery bay stallion overtakes him.
“Hau, kola!” the man calls as he rides up from behind.
Clarence is tempted to answer that he does not know the man, and certainly isn’t his friend, but holds his tongue. As the man pulls up alongside, he can see a heavy metal crucifix and some kind of military medal hung conspicuously outside of his overcoat. He remembers that it is Sunday, and that he didn’t even think of attending Mass.
“Catholic?” he asks in English.
The man grins. “How’d you guess?”
“White Robes wear a cross, but nobody has been nailed on it yet.”
“Father Craft,” says the man, shifting reins to offer his hand. “Black Robe.”
Clarence warily shakes his hand, glad that his mule is at least as tall as the priest’s bay. “You run the mission school?”
They are passing near the modest building now, with even the police guard inside dodging the cold wind.
“That’s Father Jutz—Austrian fellow. Of course the sisters really rule the place. I’m more of a traveling apostle.”
“Is that allowed?”
Father Craft laughs. He is youngish, handsome, strong-looking, and an American, unlike the Catholic priests Clarence has met at Carlisle.
“I’ll let you in on a secret,” he says, leaning toward Clarence and lowering his voice as if there is a human in sight within a mile of them. “I’m on a confidential mission, in the secret service of the War Department.”
Clarence eyes the gold medallion. “You look like a soldier.”
The priest smiles, pulling the medal over his head and handing it to Clarence to examine. A bit of colored ribbon holds up a golden oval with thirteen stars on a blue background around it, a minuteman carrying a long rifle etched on one side and a profile of George Washington on the other.
“Sons of the Revolution,” says the priest. “General Greene was on my mother’s side of the family.”
Clarence hands it back. The chiefs who go to Washington to be condescended to by government officials always return laden with decorations, copper and brass popular for their heft, which they proudly wear along with the eagle feathers and other tribal honors they’ve earned for important ceremonies.
“If you travel alone here,” he advises the priest, “you don’t want to look like a soldier.”
Father Craft only smiles. “I was one, in another life. I fought with the Chasseurs d’Afrique against the Prussians, fought against the Spanish in Cuba with the insurgentes—”
“A soldier of fortune—”
“A revolutionist, in that case. Of course I was trained as a medical man, like my father—with those I can’t cure, I can at least administer the Last Rites.”
Clarence wonders if the man could be sporting with him.
“You fought in wars and then you had a—what is it called? Visitation? Revelation?”
“Vocation. I wasn’t born into the True Faith, I converted—as have many of your brethren, some of them three or four times. I’m afraid the devil is extremely active here.”
“No more than anywhere else.”
Craft gives Clarence a careful look. “You’ve been away, I gather.”
“Carlisle.”
“No stranger to the bugle’s call.”
“Our rifles are never loaded.”
“For the safety of your instructors, no doubt. I’ve crossed swords with your Captain Pratt a few times. He was at Rosebud on a recruiting trip, explaining his credo through the interpreter, when I stood to inform the gathering, in Lakota, that shipping children thousands of miles from home to educate them might not be necessary.”
“That must have gone over well.”
“He and Agent Wright and the big chief of the Episcopals had me banished from Indian country. It took me a year to be reinstated up at Standing Rock.”
Clarence has heard the story of the great Brulé chief Spotted Tail, coming to Carlisle to visit the children and grandchildren he allowed to be brought there and being horrified to discover they were being assigned menial trades and disciplined like soldiers instead of merely learning the white man’s language. Threatening to take the entire Rosebud group, which then was a substantial portion of the student body, back home with him, it required considerable pressure from Pratt’s supporters in Washington to limit the chief to removing only his own close relatives, with the added insult that he was required to pay for their transportation home.
“Captain Pratt,” says Clarence, “has a whim of iron.”
“How long have you been back?”
“A few days.”
“But you’ve heard of our situation here? The ghost dancers?”
“It’s in all the newspapers.”
“I attended one of the ceremonies hosted by Short Bull, over on Rosebud. Very intriguing.”
“Dangerous?”
“Only if one attempted to interfere, something I’d caution against at a Baptist tent revival. What struck me was how open to religious ecstasy your people are—there is an enormous opportunity here to win souls.”
“You think so?”
“They’ve merely chosen the wrong messiah to follow. The Sioux remind me of the ancient Israelites—though they have not degenerated as fully as that execrable race.”
A Black Robe unafraid to offer his opinions, thinks Clarence.
“So do you think we need all these bluecoats?”
Father Craft considers this. “Allowed to fester unbridled till the spring, when the believers were promised they’d be up to their eagle feathers in buffalo, the craze would have disappeared par levibus venti.”
“Like the swift winds.”
Father Craft raises his eyebrows. “They must have loved you at Carlisle. Trotted out to impress the Quaker ladies, no doubt—has Pratt sent you here to spread his gospel?”
“I came on my own. I’m Lakota.”
The priest laughs at this.
“Is something funny?”
“I’ve never seen a Sioux hu-bo ride a mule before.”
Clarence scowls, embarrassed. “It’s all they had at the stable.”
“All they said they had. Our friend Royer must have put out the word on you—an Indian agent is something of an emperor.”
“Especially when he’s got half the federal army at his disposal.”
“They have a debating society at Carlisle, as I remember. Your command of the language—”
Clarence feels his blood come up. “I can read a treaty, if that’s what you mean.”
Father Craft looks at him shrewdly. “Well enough, I hope,” he says, “to never sign one.”
Clarence can’t help but notice the bulge at Father Craft’s hip, the kind a pistol in a holster would make. He feels as if he’s being tested.
“So whose side are you on?” he asks.
Craft grins. “I am but a lieutenant in the service of God, through the Sacred Heart of Jesus.”
“Does Agent Royer know that?”
Father Craft waves his hand dismissively. “Indian agents, army generals, politicians—they are as fleas to the King of Kings.”
The first Pine Ridge agent Clarence remembers was McGillycuddy, known as Little Whiskers for his drooping mustache, and then for years the less volatile Gallagher. A Lakota needs the agent’s permission to travel off the reservation, to build or take down a structure, to slaughter his own cattle. The Indian police are the agent’s disciplinarians, though family ties and fear of reprisal make them less imposing than the men who bear the rod at Carlisle.
“Interesting times here,” says the renegade priest. “Apocalyptic. I wouldn’t miss it for the world.”
They are approaching the agency, riding past the most recent arrivals, Seventh cavalrymen jockeying a quartet of cannon mounted on huge wheels to point out toward the clusters of tipis recently thrown up.
“Hotchkiss guns,” says Craft, nodding to the cannon. “Woefully impractical for raid-and-run warfare, but they make a big noise and lots of smoke—very persuasive.”
“People think the army is here to kill them.”
Craft’s expression darkens. “Troublemakers, mostly white, spreading lies.”
Clarence thinks of the editorial he read on the train. Extermination. How much easier for them it would be to just sever the root right here and forget having to drill their overcomplicated language into the heads of sullen Indian children—
“It doesn’t matter what’s true,” Clarence says. “It’s what people believe.”
“The line between faith and superstition,” smiles the priest. “Very narrow indeed.”
They reach the agency compound, Dr. Eastman stepping out, troubled, from his dispensary as they dismount.
“The very man I want to see,” calls the priest, “If I could trouble you for some camphor, I have an incipient toothache.”
Eastman ignores the request. “Word just came in that they’ve got Big Foot’s band,” he says.
“Was there a fight?”
“Apparently not, thank God. General Brooke is sending four more troops up to meet them all at Wounded Knee Creek.”
Father Craft frowns as he considers this information. “I know the bunch of incorrigibles from Standing Rock who’ve joined him,” he says. “I should be there.”
“They’re likely to be afraid for their lives,” calls Eastman to the priest, already pulling his recalcitrant horse toward the cavalry tents. “I’d be careful—”
“I’ve survived the Franco-Prussian War, the Cuban Insurgency, and three years among the Jesuits,” he calls back, eyes shining with excitement. “A handful of deluded pagans can’t scare me off!”
They watch him hurry away.
“Not your average missionary,” mutters Clarence.
“He’s—he’s very excitable—”
“He’s insane.”
“Very likely,” says Eastman. “He’s been accused of baptizing children after they’re dead.”
“And Big Foot?”
Eastman shrugs. “He packed up and left the Cheyenne River Agency with his people after Sitting Bull was killed, and others have been joining him. He keeps changing direction.”
Clarence hoped to speak about the situation with Red Cloud, still the most respected chief among the Oglala, but the old man, not wishing to be drawn into the troubles, has shut himself away in the big wooden house the government built for him, visible just beyond the Army tents.
“How many people with Big Foot?”
“They say a few hundred. But they’re already outnumbered by Major Whitside’s detachment, and then with this new bunch heading out—it’s a lot of fuss over nothing, if you ask me.”
Dr. Eastman sounds like he’s trying to reassure himself.
Soldiers have appeared to take the wheels off the Hotchkiss guns now, the cannon tubes loaded onto the backs of Army mules, and there is a bugle call that sends a mass of cavalrymen scurrying. One thing Clarence was looking forward to away from Carlisle was a respite from horns cutting the days into pieces and telling you what to do.
The bugler repeats the call. Boots and Saddles.
THERE IS SO MUCH left to discover. Even when the methods of transmission are somewhat understood, the origins of the diseases remain unclear. Despite strict adherence to Captain Pratt’s edict that filth, foul air, or polluted water never be the culprit at Carlisle, the children continue to sicken and die. Dr. Hazzard steels himself, steps into the isolation ward.
It is an assault on the ears, more than a dozen hackers and honkers at it in concert, with a handful either asleep with exhaustion or enjoying a period of respite. These few are mostly in the area where the Vapo-Cresolene lamps have been set up in between beds, the open kerosene flames heating black liquid in the metal dish above, the fumes hopefully a tonic for their severely compromised lungs. As Dr. Hazzard subscribes to the modern idea that the infection may be spread in fine droplets of sputum expelled by the sufferers, the whooping cough victims have been housed together, boys on one side of the aisle and girls on the other. As the great majority of them have not yet reached their teens, there has been no suggestion of impropriety from the puritans among the faculty. Dr. Hazzard fixes an all-purpose smile on his face and breathes, shallowly, through his mouth, vaporizing coal tar not his favorite perfume. He walks down the very center of the aisle, chin up—adults are not immune to the affliction—and waves vaguely to the children who catch his eye.
It has not been termed the “hundred-day cough” for nothing, some of his patients on their third visit to the ward—a few days without symptoms apparently not long enough to judge that the body has won its battle. Acute diseases merit symptom medications to relieve suffering and prevent complications while waiting for the disease to run its course. Once diagnosed—no great feat in this case—his only involvement is to declare the patient fit to rejoin his or her classmates, or to fill out the death certificate.
The rest is in the hands of his nurses.
The sheer number of children and the vast array of pathologies they exhibit as they pass through the school have, without doubt, afforded him the opportunity to make some well-founded observations, even to perform some experiments. In his experience, belladonna does indeed lift the stigma of bedwetting from the unfortunate piddlers, but the concomitant dizziness and blurring of vision is not worth its prescription. Ergot is somewhat effective against migraines but induces bizarre mental apparitions and a burning sensation in the fingers and toes, nux vomica is a poor restorative after excesses of food or drink, and yes, asafetida combats poor digestion and flatulence, but there is no human capacity to tolerate the odor of it as either a liquid or a gum.
Dr. Hazzard ducks around the barrier of blankets they have hung to dampen the noise coming into the next section of the infirmary—hard walls would seriously hinder the circulation of air so vital to the overall health of the patients—and finds Nurse Tucker waiting for him, already fixing him with that accusatory gaze. Why aren’t you doing something? it seems to ask, and he has no useful answer. She is rightfully distressed, so many of her “girls”—her nursing hopefuls—now down with scarlatina that the afflicted boys and students with other sundry ailments have been moved to temporary quarters in the old gymnasium.
It is an unsightly and debilitating disease, a painful redness beginning on face and neck, then spreading outward on the body, angry spots in most places, solid welts under the arms and between groin and thigh, then the fever itself—
“Have we lost any today?”
Dr. Hazzard has been gone since the first bugle call, consulting on an outbreak of la grippe in town. It has been a difficult winter.
“No. But three are in very bad condition.”
His nursing staff has been stalwart during this crisis, the changing and sanitizing of sweat-soaked linen alone a Sisyphean effort—the sheets and pillowcases are carefully transported and washed in a special superheated run at the laundry. One of the older boys’ companies has volunteered to bring buckets of snow to the back door every morning, a cold douche behind the neck an excellent tonic to start the day for girls who are burning up. Keep them hydrated—lemonade or buttermilk proffered depending on the acidity of the stomach—cod liver oil as a restorative, salicylic acid to reduce fever and inflammation, a calomel purge for those with sluggish bowels, and chloral hydrate, now that the stock of laudanum has been used up, to induce sleep.
What more can be done?
Sponge baths of course, cold to the forehead, tepid vinegar and water on the palms of the hands and soles of the feet. Besides the cooling effect and stimulation of the blood, the children are being handled, which, though there is no medical literature dealing with it, is a vital part of the palliative care.
He wishes one of his ladies in white would rub his temples.
The migraine, if that’s what it is, began in the carriage on the way into Carlisle, an ice pick just behind his right eye, then the undulating waves of pain and feeling of nausea. He has given up alcohol twice before without anything more than a week of jittery mornings and a dragging depression, so this may be something new, and, he fears, chronic. Doctors must not become ill, and if they do, they must grin and bear it.
Nurse Dantley is wielding her array of oral thermometers, taking and recording temperatures. With scarlatina, 105 degrees is the breaking point—let it rise above that and hopes of recovery are pointless. As the most effective antiphlogistics and antipyretics he knows of come with alarming counter-effects, the treatment they can offer is principally nonmedical—the sort of cosseting any good mother could do at home.
He counts eighteen girls in the beds. It might make sense to dispense with nightgowns and tent their top sheets to avoid contact with their inflamed skin, but these Indian maidens are much too modest. Dr. Hazzard is undecided on the theory that they are a doomed race, physically unfit to bear up to the infectious challenges of modern life, much as white citizens would be if condemned to dwell in the jungles of Honduras or Africa. The Apaches, lately, have been arriving already suffering from consumption, but he imagines that is the fault of their agency accommodations rather than a congenital weakness. The Sioux here at Carlisle have certainly endured hard winters before, and those from the Eastern tribes have often already survived rubella—
One of the girls suddenly disgorges, the vomitus spilling out over her chin and chest as she jerks upward and then begins to convulse, her eyes rolling up in her head. Nurse Dantley is at her side immediately, grasping her shoulders to keep her on the bed, and then there is Nurse Tucker on the other side, a pitcher of the cold meltwater in hand. She looks to Dr. Hazzard—
“Proceed.”
He doesn’t need to be there, of course, but it is proper to be consulted. Tucker dumps the chilled water on the girl’s head and it has an immediate effect, her eyes swimming into focus and her body ceasing to twist and arch.
“Grace?” says Nurse Tucker calmly as she bends close to speak. “Are you with us?”
The girl nods.
“We’re going to clean you up now, and change your nightgown. Do you think you could eat anything?”
The vomitus is mostly yellow bile, acid-smelling. Her face is drawn—feeding is always problematic.
“Thirsty,” whispers the girl.
Nurse Tucker smiles. “We’ll get you something to drink right away. Can I help you sit up?”
A change of gowns is the doctor’s cue to leave. He pauses by the door, giving his usual valediction to the nurses.
“I thank you, ladies. Carry on.”
The cold drives sharpened icicles into his brain as he steps out onto the parade ground, quickly buttoning his coat and pulling up the collar. The migraine, if that’s what it is, is near to overwhelming now, and here is Miss Burgess, handkerchief already pressed over her nose and mouth as she arrives for her daily review of the school’s ailing and infected—whether to sympathize or gloat he has never decided.
She produces muffled sounds from behind the handkerchief.
“I’m sorry, I can’t understand you.”
She pulls the handkerchief away.
“How are they faring?”
“As well as can be expected.” A phrase he uttered a dozen times this morning in town.
“We lost two already this week.”
“Yes—I’m afraid we did.”
Miss Burgess shakes her head. “I believe there is a principle of will involved,” she says. “Some of them just aren’t trying.”
And with that passes into the infirmary.
He’ll make his round of the students in the old gymnasium and then, having forfeited breakfast, see what the hospital kitchen can muster for him. Sleep has become a problem, the room spinning a bit when he lays himself flat in bed, the day’s frustrations and failures—for what is a doctor’s life but failure—dogging him, and then the sharp pressure in his skull. How can one sleep?
With his nightly alcohol tonic off-limits and the cupboard rather barren of hypnotics—the mere thought of paraldehyde making him wince—it is difficult to prescribe a remedy.
Cannabis indica perhaps, fired and ingested through an inhaling tube—
AT POINT-BLANK RANGE you keep your rear sight pushed down flat—that much he knows. The rest of it is a mystery, and just his luck that he wasn’t settled at Fort Riley a full week before they get sent off on this detail. As for telling the redskins apart so you know who to shoot, the “friendlies” camping back around the agency, even the ones who dress almost white, look pretty damn hostile themselves.
Though nothing compared to this bunch sitting and squatting in the council ring—
“The painted-up ones, those are your ghost dancers,” says Sergeant, who by good fortune is standing right next to Potter in the K Troop line, carbines leveled at the sullen Indians. “They been told if they sing their songs and wear these magic shirts, our bullets will just bounce off of ‘em.”
Potter wonders why they don’t just ask for a volunteer to prove or disprove this theory and have it done with. He also wonders why, if orders are to make all the bucks hand over their Winchesters and Navy pistols, it wasn’t done last evening when they came up to reinforce Major Whitside’s troops. He might have slept some in that damn freezing tent instead of worrying all night what they were up to. Barely time to boil coffee this morning, awake before sunrise and into formation—his K Troop making a picket line facing the council ground just to the left of the wall tent they had the old chief sleep in—word is that this Big Foot is down with the ague and might not last the trek to the agency—with B Troop stretched out at a close right angle to them, the Indian tipis with the squaws and squallers just up behind them on the north edge of the ravine, some of the squaws already gathering ponies and packing up. A and I Troops are dismounted as well, strung out in a line that starts by the ravine behind the Indians’ herd, then loops around behind the council ring all the way to Wounded Knee Creek. On a knoll off to the left and behind these troopers, maybe a hundred yards away, is Captain Capron and the Hotchkiss guns, which are aimed at the tipi village. What doesn’t make sense is that right now, Colonel Forsyth and Major Whitside, along with some captains and lieutenants, the doctor, the Catholic priest fellow, and a couple news correspondents are all standing on the other side of the hostile bunch, and behind them the A and I troopers, right in Potter’s line of fire should he miss nailing a redskin.
“Hit ‘em right here,” Sergeant told him and Johnny Rounds, tapping right over his heart. Only Potter has never shot at anybody before, in fact only fired his carbine ten times at a target back at Fort Riley, and Johnny, the numbskull who talked him into coming along to enlist, is in the same boat. Potter has one cartridge ready in the chamber and three more tucked and ready between his fingers like Sergeant taught them, knows how to flip the trapdoor open and load again if it comes to that, and has the hammer half-cocked just like Sergeant. But they’ve been standing for a godawful long time and his legs are getting shaky—
It’s mostly been palaver, Colonel Forsyth speaking out, then the interpreter, who is some kind of half-breed, then one or another of the Indians, and then they had maybe twenty of the bucks go back in between the B and K Troop lines to the tipi village, told to bring their weapons out for collection.
So far this has produced a pair of muzzleloaders that might have belonged to Daniel Boone.
Colonel Forsyth is getting steamed, but these redskins aren’t his soldiers, they’re enemy hostiles and Potter supposes you maybe got to sweet-talk them some to get their cooperation, even though they’re sitting like fish in a barrel, outnumbered four to one at the least with mounted troops waiting on all sides, and all the while there’re spectators watching by their wagons on the high ground and a bunch of Indian schoolboys still in their gray uniforms playing tag just behind their firing line, like it’s some damn picnic.
“Strip them blankets off the bucks and you’ll find plenty rifles,” says Sergeant.
“It’s cold.”
“Not so cold they won’t dance around naked if the spirit moves ‘em. I’ll bet there’s a couple dozen twelve-shot Winchesters in that crowd.”
Sergeant, one of the few left in the Seventh who was there to see the Custer fight, doesn’t have much use for the redskin, male or female.
“And the women will carry weapons for the men,” he tells them. “So don’t turn your back on no squaw.”
Potter trades a look with Johnny Rounds, three men down from him on the firing line.
Sergeant has already explained to them how the Hotchkiss guns can fire exploding shells or grapeshot, and Potter wishes they weren’t pointed so close to where he stands. Colonel Forsyth now orders a handful of soldiers to go into the tipi village and see what they can find, one of the newsmen tagging along. This doesn’t sit too well with Big Foot’s bucks, one of the painted characters standing now and hopping about in little circles, making high-pitched noises with a little bone whistle and seeming to spit curses at the sitting and squatting Sioux. Every now and again he’ll bend down and toss some dirt in the air.
“That a ghost dance?”
“Naw,” says Sergeant. “He’s just trying to rile up them warriors.”
“And those other men moaning?”
“Maybe singing their death songs. Getting ready for a bad fight.”
“How can Colonel let them do that?”
Sergeant’s answer is to pull the hammer of his Springfield all the way back. Potter and the rest of the men on the firing line do the same.
The interpreter is trying to tell the yipping ghost dancer to sit down and be quiet when the troopers come back from the tipi village with only a few more old pieces and a bag full of knives and hatchets. The ghost dancer makes a final circuit around the sitting bucks, then sits moodily beside old Big Foot, who is wrapped in a couple blankets and barely watching the show. Forsyth barks something at the interpreter and then orders B and K Troops to step forward three paces, while the men who just came back search the Indians squatting right in front of them and then there is the ghost dancer throwing dirt in the air and some wrestling and a shot and the squatting men throw off their blankets and turn to aim right at Potter and there is a roar of gunfire and smoke in the air and he realizes he has already fired and is backing up, trying to get the next cartridge into the chamber as the bucks come screaming at him, firing and chopping with axes, Potter getting the breech closed and ramming the barrel of his carbine against the chest of the Indian attacking him and trying to pull the trigger but he hasn’t cocked it and he is smacked on the head with something hard, driven to his knees and cocking the hammer and firing into the groin of another man trying to run past and the Hotchkiss guns are blasting away now, troopers from A and I stepping forward to fire over his head at the scattering bucks and he sits up, feeling blood seeping through his scalp, hat gone, looking back to see the little tipi village and Big Foot’s wall tent blown apart, Indians running in every direction with mounted troopers and troopers on foot in pursuit, the bugle blowing and officers shouting orders he can’t understand, Sergeant kneeling to examine his wound and clap him on the shoulder—
“You’re done for the day, private. Just stay put.”
And then there is hanging smoke and the gunfire more scattered, more distant, and a circle of bodies—some Indian, some soldier—laying on top of each other where the council ring had been. Potter looks to his left and there is Johnny Rounds laying on his back, a hatchet sticking out of his forehead. There is movement in the circle of bodies lying in front of him, and Big Foot struggles to sit up but is immediately shot several times by men behind Potter, then his daughter, a sturdy, grown woman, runs out from the ruins of the wall tent and there’s a rifle crack and she goes down on top of the others.
Potter looks down in his lap and sees the rifle is still in his hands, two unused cartridges stuck between his fingers—
Cut Nose, from one of the Loafer bands, is trying Clarence’s mule in the wagon harness when they hear the Hotchkiss guns firing to the north.
I knew it, he says. They’re going to kill us all.
And then he lashes the mule into a gallop, his wagon rattling up the road toward the Catholic mission as Clarence steadies the spotted pony he was trading for. The vast collection of tipi camps scattered on the plain and ridges around the agency, tranquil only a moment before, are suddenly swarming with activity—horses and wagons loaded, tents pulled down or simply abandoned, people grabbing what they can and hurrying west toward the Bad Lands.
Plenty Horses and his friends are already gone when Clarence reaches the shed they’ve been staying in. The pony is skittish, adjusting to a new rider, and the continued booms of the distant cannon and the bugles and rushing troops of cavalrymen across from the agency buildings have it thoroughly spooked. Clarence considers following the soldiers, then can’t imagine what his role will be if he does.
He finds Dr. Eastman in his dispensary, packing medical supplies.
“If that’s as bad as it sounded,” says the doctor, the cannons finally silent, “there won’t be enough room here for everybody. You can help me get ready at the Holy Cross church.”
Reverend Cook, a Yankton Sioux, runs the Episcopal mission, and helps them tear out the pews and stack them against the walls. Miss Goodale, a young white woman who supervises schools on the reservation, arrives to help, and seems to be more than familiar with Eastman.
“They’re engaged to be married,” the reverend tells Clarence as they wait for word from Wounded Knee Creek. “I’ve been asked to preside over the service.”
Captain Sword of the Indian police comes by with the first rumor.
“The rider said it was a big fight, lots of people killed on both sides,” he tells them. “Agent Royer got us protecting his buildings, so you’re on your own out here.”
The Christmas tree is still standing in the chapel, ropes of evergreen hung along the walls. Clarence helps cover the floor with hay and quilts, then is sent back to the agency to wait. As he rides he looks up at the ridges, empty now of white canvas, and again wishes he had a weapon, though still not sure as to who he would turn it on. He is not challenged as he passes the military encampment—soldiers frantically digging a trench around the periphery, a large medical tent being filled with cots and operating tables—and ties his pony to a post at the warehouse, then sitting on the loading dock and considering his options. He envies Eastman, a doctor able to help his people and somehow absolved from choosing sides in the conflict. But the idea of more years of schooling in the white man’s world, the suspicion that he has no affinity for biology or chemistry, make that seem an unlikely path. Working for the Indian Bureau is openly treasonous, and farming—even the desperate Swedes and Germans, famous for their tolerance for drudgery, have despaired of and in many cases already abandoned their stolen homesteads on this blighted soil.
And he won’t be asked to teach at the Carlisle School.
It is nearly dusk when the first of them come in, three mule-drawn wagonloads of dead and wounded soldiers, two more packed with dead and dying Lakota. There is sniping at the agency buildings now, “hostiles” firing long-distance from the hills, the Indian police dug in behind the breastworks raised around the buildings returning fire when they can see something to shoot at, but Clarence is able to guide the wagons to the church unharmed.
Others have come to help, white and Indian, including the former agent McGillycuddy, here as a representative for the new state of South Dakota, but also trained as a doctor. Clarence climbs into the wagon to help hand people down, lifting them under the arms while Reverend Cook takes their legs. Most are women and children—a few are already dead.
Inside it is hectic work at first, bleeding to be stopped, a quick appraisal to discover who needs care most urgently. An Army physician, sent over by General Brooke, approaches one of the women, who begins to wail at the first glimpse of his uniform.
“Sorry,” he says to Dr. Eastman, “I don’t think I can help here.”
“Can you send Father Craft over? I think they’ll trust him—”
“We’ve got Craft on the table,” says the Army doctor. “He was stabbed in the back.”
Clarence does whatever he is asked, moving people as gently as he can, holding arms or legs down while Eastman pulls bullets and shards of canister out of torn flesh. The quilts, from a pile Mrs. Cook’s sewing group was hoping to sell, are quickly soaked with blood. He kneels to check on an old woman holding a screaming baby that has twisted metal from a Hotchkiss gun shell stuck in its bare legs, four other grandchildren sitting beside her, both of their parents killed in the first minutes of the slaughter.
We were inside the tipi, she tells him. And then it was gone.
He helps a white man named Tibbles, a reporter who left the camp shortly before the shooting began, pull off the rings from a young woman’s fingers. She has been shot through both thighs and her wrist is broken, wrist and hand swelling so badly that her fingers are blue above the rings. Clarence presses the rings, once free, into her other hand.
Squeeze on these, he tells her, when it starts to hurt too much.
Another woman refuses to let Dr. Eastman cut off her leg, torn and shattered beyond repair.
If you take my leg, she says, my friends in the next world won’t know me.
You’ll be there soon, Clarence says to comfort her.
Dr. Eastman, saw in hand, seems relieved to walk away.
Shot in the head, shot in the face, shot in the leg, shot in the back, shot in the back, shot in the back—
The wounded call for water and Clarence checks with McGillycuddy or Dr. Eastman before bringing it to them. Cheyenne scouts bring in four more, men this time, one shot through the lung and coughing blood. Clarence loses sense of time, Miss Goodale giving him a small mirror to hold under the noses of those who seem to be asleep. Somehow nobody dies right away. He feels dizzy, exhausted, splashes cold well water on his face.
Hours pass and nobody sleeps. Clarence recognizes a son of American Horse who has come over from the agency with a basket of apples, giving them to the children, who were desperately hungry even before the battle. They meet over a boy sitting naked except for a blanket he holds around himself with his bone-thin arms, eyeing the apple longingly. His throat has been mostly shot away.
I don’t think he can eat that, Clarence says to the son of American Horse, and goes to get the boy a bowl of the gruel Mrs. Cook has heated up. The boy takes the bowl in both hands, the blanket sliding down his back, and swallows as best as he can, gruel mixed with blood slithering out the ragged throat wound and onto his shoulder.
It is cold enough in the church that steam rises from the badly wounded as they struggle to breathe. A soldier comes to tell them that the day school has been burnt down, that the colored troops saved a detachment from the Seventh caught in an ambush near Father Jutz’s mission, and to request that Reverend Cook come to officiate over the burial of the thirty troopers who were killed at Wounded Knee. There will be a solemn march, holy words, but no rifle salute that might give anger a focus.
When he steps out with Reverend Cook to get a breath of air, Clarence realizes that a night and a day and another night have passed, that it is morning, with a blizzard roaring in from the north—
IT IS BLACK NIGHT and Grace is on a boat on the lake with all the other boats lit up, fishing with torches—but her boat is on fire, burning and sinking and the flames blister her skin but the black water rising from below is so cold, freezing cold, as if it’s winter but why would everybody be out in boats in winter and for some reason she can’t cry out, she can only burn or freeze, drown or burn, shivering in a sweat and the firelight so beautiful reflecting off the black water but she burns and she worries is Antoine in the boat too, he said his people did the same fishing at night with torches, but Antoine will survive, he knows how to swim, he is slippery like an eel, like an eel she can wrap her hand around his body thick and hard but not cold to the touch, no, it’s warm and alive and she’s burning, freezing, drowning then she shudders awake with a cry and pushes her body up to see—
No nurses in the room, the electric lights turned off, a pair of lanterns turned low, throwing patterns on the ceiling.
Night.
She turns to ask the Klamath girl in the next bed how long she has been gone, but there is nobody there, the mattress rolled up on top of bare springs. Grace is tired, so tired, she lays down flat and it feels like ice on her back, she has sweated through her nightgown and the sheet and even the top blanket is damp, laying heavy on her chest, so heavy, like she’s at the bottom of a lake full of freezing black water—
A crust of snow armors the parade ground now, the leafless trees black and sinister. Crows mob the branches in the early mornings, though there is never anything for them to eat. Antoine walks toward the hospital, breathing through his nose so his teeth won’t ache, and sees a pair of cadets carrying a body down the back stairs on a stretcher. He panics, runs till he catches up with them as they head toward the training buildings.
He pulls the thin sheet down to see the face of the dead student.
It is a smallish boy, not one he knows. The cadets stare at him over the linen masks they’ve tied over their mouths and noses.
“Sorry,” he says, and covers the boy’s face.
“We put them in the shed behind the metalworking shop,” says one of the boys. “There’s two there already.”
Nurse Tucker, her face drawn with exhaustion, has stepped out onto the stairs for some air, seemingly oblivious to the cold. Antoine crosses to hand her the note he’s written.
“Another one.”
“You’ll give it to her?”
The nurse wearily accepts the folded paper. “If she wakes up.”
“She’s still sleeping?”
“She’s unconscious, Antoine.”
Antoine feels like he’s been hit with a club.
“Please don’t forget.”
He is halfway across the parade ground when the Walla Walla boy blows Assembly and students come streaming out to form ranks. Jesse Echohawk runs A Company alone now that Clarence is gone, and Elmer White Shield, a fellow Invincible, has been made a corporal after Antoine turned the honor down.
“An officer is supposed to set an example,” he told Jesse, “and I don’t even want to be here.”
Smokey whispers without looking to Antoine as he takes his place.
“Soldiers kilt lotsa ghost dancers, lotsa Lakota.”
“Where?”
“The Sentinel says at least two hundred dead,” mutters Cato Goforth from behind him. “On Pine Ridge.”
“Where Clarence come from,” adds Smokey.
Antoine has been so fixed on Grace, held like a prisoner in the infirmary, that he hasn’t thought much about the news from the west. Lakota business. Sure, everybody here has to deal with some Indian agent back home, has had the white people’s army steal land from their tribe, but what does he really have in common with, say, the Apache boys here who barely utter a word and catfoot around like ghosts in blue uniforms?
Though maybe he is starting to hate white people as much as they must, people who will infect you with a disease they have no idea how to cure—
“Is it a war, then?” asks Antoine as he looks down the line to see Trouble, a Sioux like Clarence. The boy’s face is set in an angry glare.
“Hard to say yet,” hisses Cato. “The paper says it’s freezing there—”
“Eyes front, mouths shut!” barks Jesse Echohawk, then begins the roll call.
There are news scribblers from as far as New York and Boston, men disappointed to have missed the carnage in Dakota but here hoping the Captain will let slip an utterance worthy of his crucifixion. Eight of the jackals crowd his office, Pratt standing in front of the wall he has covered with before-and-after photographs early this morning, anticipating their arrival. They have asked his honest opinion, and he is determined to give it to them, with both barrels.
“It’s a case of damn poor soldiering, if you ask me! If General Miles had been at the reservation I can guarantee you there would have been no discharge of weapons, much less a so-called massacre—”
“But the ghost dancers have been on the warpath,” states the fellow from the risibly christened Scranton Truth.
“The dances,” he says, “though rooted in savagery and fueled by the ingestion of peyote, are religious rather than military in nature. This labeling of everyone who doesn’t care for you as a ‘hostile’ is witless and destructive!”
The men scribble on their pads. The sage from Pulitzer’s New York World, a man who has likely never ventured west of the Hudson River before today, weighs in.
“Are any of your former students involved?”
Pratt fixes the man with a withering look.
“Even a year at Carlisle,” he says, “would have cured them of such delusions.”