In the Quadrangle:
Wonsevu

On the prairie, upright sturdy things, like fenceposts, acquire an importance they rarely have in wooded country. Out here they become reminders that you are, despite having seen no other person for a couple of hours, not entirely alone: a fencepost implies a landowner, someone somewhere nearby to look after it and whatever it protects. Barbed wire across miles of open country is not so desolate to a traveler as an empty road because a fence bespeaks the continuing presence of ownership; it says, “See me or not, I’m here. This is mine.” But an empty road says, in the words Spanish explorers carved in rocks of the American Southwest, “Paso poi aqui,” “I’m passing here.” No place is emptier than the one where someone has been and will not return to. A county road lies in nearly perpetual silence, but a four-strand barbed-wire fence can whisper in the wind like the strings of an aeolian harp, as if the Wind People themselves are asking after their land, “How goes it?” although a fence was a foreign, even abhorrent thing to them.

In this land where openness can sometimes begin to seem like blankness, I found myself paying attention to fenceposts, especially old wooden ones of cedar and Osage orange so bent and crooked and knobbed that I could dream them into shapes the way ancient peoples saw bears and warriors and zodiacs in the night sky. Like stars, prairie posts came to guide me. In Chase, especially in the southwestern quadrangles where the hills appear to deflate from rounded fullness, where cardinal-direction gravel roads and the pastures can look one like the next, I began naming fenceposts that served me as guides: Old Scratch’s Walkingstick, Boomer’s Bent Dick (looked like one), Buns Brown (nicely steatopygic), Sam Wood (all shot up), Geronimo (last two letters of Chief Paints sign rusted away), Gipper Bonzo (top rotted off), Hester Prynne (orangish lichen-covered forked post supporting another to form an A). I even started keeping a list of objects countians hung from or set atop posts, and I came to see the custom as a response to isolation. Besides the usual auto tires painted NO HUNTING and the lost hubcaps, I found a pair of red long johns stretched over a post as if to warm it, and pulled over another a woolen sock like a nightcap, and a bleached aitchbone of a steer turned upside down to make a monster head, and an oval rock that looked as if an archaeopteryx had laid a big petrous egg atop a post.

On days of grim weather, when I found nothing of interest and began feeling desolate—especially after coming across a fence-hung sign like KEEP OUT OR U WILL B SHOT and even one with a logic that should have amused me, NO TRESPASSING WITHOUT WRITTEN PERMISSION—then those friendly and anthropomorphic fenceposts lifted me, in spite of my belief that this prairie is more beautiful without barbed wire hacking it up and declaiming ownership of something that cannot really be owned.

The best fence object I came across was different from the others. One hot Indian summer afternoon, I was going down a county road north of Wonsevu (or what the Syndrome has left of the village) and finding little of interest. The topography here is much like the Cedar Point quadrangle. My canteen was empty, road dust stuck in my sweat and itched, and I was ensnared in a mean solitude. I saw something hanging from the top strand of a barbed-wire fence: it looked like a long-handled dipper, the kind to splash down into an oaken bucket of sweet well water. I walked to it. Swinging slowly in the dry wind was indeed an aluminum dipper, dented but not shot up by gunners like most things on fences. But why a dipper? Then I saw why: between it and the edge of the gravel road was a small conduit, and from it bubbled a cold outwash of clear water onto a little bed of watercress. An artesian well just above Coon Creek. I took the ladle, filled it, and drank from the neighborly thing. I’ve since used it often and learned the well was an accidental strike of an oil driller years ago.

When I was down in the Wonsevu quad in my last weeks of roaming the county, for three days I poked around to find a worthy topic. (The village name is a corruption of the Cheyenne word for deer, vaoseva, which literally means “bob-tail high.”) All that remains now are three well-kept frame buildings: the 1885 school, a meeting hall, and a church. Finally, one afternoon, my anthropologist friend, Joe Hickey, and the geographer Charles Webb took me into a remote piece of the quad west of the village to a great stone circle on a hilltop. We looked the peculiar thing over, all of us hoping it was an ancient medicine wheel, but, we concluded, it was a geologic feature and not a grand artifact of aboriginal sky-watchers.

I knew that when Zebulon Pike passed through just north of here in 1806 his Osage guides told him this was all Kansa hunting ground, and I knew that a branch of the old Kaw Trail passed by not far to the east, so I returned to the stone circle in hopes I’d missed something, but I found nothing. Then it came to me what I was overlooking was the Kansa nation itself, people who had made their slow way down the old trace after being dispossessed of their reserve to the north: the place to begin was not here but at the head of the Kaw Trail, across the line in Morris County. Archaeologists, to avoid what they call “redundancy of sampling,” rarely dig every grid of a big site. So, the next day, I didn’t go back to Wonsevu but went instead to Joe Hickey’s classroom and called him from Introduction to Anthropology and asked if he’d like to go up to the Kaw Agency. He looked out at the day and said, I’m finished at noon.

Joe, who grew up in Northport, Long Island, has lived with and studied the Fulani tribe in Africa and made several films about Great Plains Indians. Soft-spoken, with a keen memory and a Celtic wit (that is, he finds a sad humor in historic inevitabilities), he is deliberate, diligent, and dedicated. After ten years of research on the Thurman Creek settlements in Chase, he began looking into the Kansa, especially their twenty-six years on the reservation in southern Morris and northern Chase counties, an area the government moved them to when an 1846 treaty forced them to cede two million acres along the Kaw River where it cuts through the northern Flint Hills. In 1873 the government compelled them to move again, this time into the new Indian Territory—Kansas was the old I.T.—now Oklahoma.

In the upper Neosho Valley in 1847, the Kansa set up three villages southeast of the Santa Fe Trail where it forded the little river, a crossing that became Council Grove. One village lay near the mouth of Big John Creek (Big John Walker was the member of George Sibley’s trail survey crew who carved the first sign naming Diamond Spring); the second village lay about six miles farther southeast, just below the present settlement of Dunlap, and the third a couple of miles farther south, along Kahola Creek near the Chase line. Toward the center of the Kansa Reserve, the government in 1861 built a two-story stone agency-headquarters, and also, along the Neosho and tributary creeks, 150-some rock cabins as permanent houses for the Indians, as well as a mill, mission, school, and council house. Only the ruins of the agency building and a few cabins remain in this valley where the people who gave their name to the state watched a ten-thousand-year-old way of life disappear, and with it their hopes for continuance.

The agency sits in the mile-wide vale of the Neosho (the book Indian Place-Names gives five pages to explaining the word, which, among other possibilities, may mean “clean water” or “dirty water”; the small river has also been called the Blanche, the White, the Grand, and Six Bulls); the building is just below the juncture of Little John and Big John creeks and almost directly in front of where the larger stream flows into the Neosho. The well-watered but narrow valley cuts through the rocky, tallgrass hills, and today it grows milo, wheat, soybeans. Immediately north of the agency, on a rounded and grassed ridge, stands a forty-foot obelisk of limestone visible for miles; morning and evening, it casts a long and slender shadow as if a giant sundial. In the broad base of the monument, a small crypt holds the remains of an unknown Indian whose grave the river tore open, and with him is a copper box of “historical matter” to be opened in 2025, the bicentennial of Sibley’s treaty for right of passage through Kansa and Osage hunting grounds. Although the obelisk has no words inscribed anywhere on it, people call it the Monument to the Unknown Indian. When the Neosho exposed the grave in the 1920s, antiquarians found bones of a man and horse (the Kansa customarily strangled a warrior’s favorite horse and buried it with him to ride to the far village where time doesn’t exist; less honored dead received only their moccasins; today a can of chili or a chocolate bar may go into a casket); they also found numerous artifacts suggesting the man had been both a chief and a soldier in the Union army.

Frank Haucke, an unsuccessful candidate for governor and the son of the German immigrant who managed early to get title to this piece of the Kaw Reserve, convinced Boy Scouts and American Legionnaires to walk the nearby hills and gather good stones, and he paid masons to lay them up. The old Kaw at his reburial received a full military funeral: casket on a caisson, riderless horse with empty boots backward in the stirrups, and volleys from a battery of the Seventh Cavalry, the unit famous as Indian killers. A biplane sputtered over and dropped flowers on the four thousand people (whites had last gathered on the hill in 1868 to watch and cheer a halfhearted battle between the Kansa and Cheyenne—the final Indian engagement this far east); Roy Taylor, grandson of Ahlegawaho, the fine orator and last Kaw head chief in Kansas, gave a short allocution in the old tongue, a language that would never be heard here again.

A couple of years ago I went up to look over the agency and photograph it and three nearby rock cabins along the bank of the Little John Creek (it really should be the Little Big John). Charles Curtis, eighth-blood-Kansa vice president to Herbert Hoover, spent time here as a boy, a link that did not stop him from helping to dispossess the Kaw of their reservation in Oklahoma: even when this people saw one of their own reach the second-highest office in America, it worked against the survival of this luckless tribe. The agency, of cut and dressed limestone, once had twin chimneys, both now collapsed as are the west and east sides so that the sky pours in to light the one remaining fireplace now hanging to the wall with no floor beneath, its stones still rosy as if warm from burning logs; in places, plaster sticks to the end walls, both partly held upright by hackberry trees. What should be a splendid and informative historic site is merely a rather elegant ruin useful only for dreamtime. The possibilities for restoration now are remote in this place where the sense of history runs to genealogy, heirloom quilts, and embossed bottles.

Sixty feet south and also facing west stands a small one-story wooden house, sixteen by twenty-four, losing its siding to expose the adze marks on its frame timbers. Hackberrys support it too. In shape and color and condition, it looks like Dorothy’s house after it crashes down in Munchkinland in the 1939 version of The Wizard of Oz. I have heard various purposes—council house, dispensary, home—ascribed to the little place, none of which I can verify. One afternoon I went into it. Trash lay over the floor—wine bottles, antifreeze jugs, a pair of women’s red shoes (no ruby slippers these), and much rodent scat. At one time the place had been cut up into animal stalls, but the original floor plan was still evident, and, on the north wall near a small chimney, I could even yet read words on bits of newspapers pasted up for insulation, most of them stuck on sideways or upside down (would a literate person fix them like that?) so I had to wrench around to read them. I found one date, 1869, and on another scrap I could make out:

 

 

and on another:

 

 

I was lost in these accidental archives when a loud thump came like a huge footfall behind me; I wheeled around. No one there. I went back to reading, and another thump. Nothing. Paso por aqui.

On the Indian summer day when Joe and I were headed up along back roads to the agency, I told him about the noise, and he said, smiling, So speaks the Unknown Indian! Sometime I’ll tell you about a dream I had this spring when I was reading the Kaw Reserve archives.

We stopped at the agency and probed around, measured it before the rest fell in, and speculated on the general layout of the lost buildings. Across the road was a heap of cut stone, the remains of something neither of us could identify. Joe said, When I first came up here just a few years ago, the walls of the agency were still standing. It was looking pretty good, and then, suddenly, half of it was down. There’s been no archaeological work done here that I know of, although the state historical society once suggested stabilizing it, and I know the Haucke family wanted it preserved.

We tried to find the site of the second Kaw mission (the first still stands in Council Grove as a state museum) but concluded it disappeared when the Missouri Pacific Railroad rerouted its track bed. Then we went a quarter mile north to the wooded bank of Little John Creek and scared up a covey of quail that startled six deer into running that alarmed a bird into a cry unlike anything I’d ever heard in Kansas. There’s something weird here, I said. Surrounding one of the rock cabins were hackberry, dogwood, redbud, coffee trees, and a big clump of old pokeweed stalks bleached like skeletons. The little sixteen-by-twenty-four, one-room limestone house with dressed quoins and a manteled fireplace once had two windows and a single door, but now the roof was gone and a wall had collapsed just since I’d last seen it. The masons had laid the stone with some eye toward simple aesthetics, unlike the Kaw cabin the local Rotary Club took down to move into Council Grove a few years ago and inaccurately rebuilt. I asked Joe what had happened to all the rock houses once in the valley: They’re in fences, foundations, porches. I muttered that if Americans recycled trash instead of historic buildings, we’d be on to something in this country.

The cabin sat only thirty feet from the creek, an odd tiling, since the most repeated advice the Kansa offered settlers in Chase was not to build houses in bottoms. I asked whether this placement in the flood zone was a deliberate effort by the government to make the homes almost uninhabitable, and he said, I doubt we could ever prove that, especially since whites built their own houses in flood-plains, but the thinking behind such a scheme would coincide with what squatters wanted. The Kansa didn’t take to the houses anyway—claimed they weren’t healthy. They preferred their traditional bark lodges and buffalo-skin tepees, although they did apparently use some of the cabins as stables. A tepee is definitely easier to move out when the water’s rising than a rock house.

A tree had fallen and mashed in two walls of the next cabin. Joe said, A couple of years ago, one of my students tried to get the Kaw tribe in Oklahoma interested in preserving these last few houses and the agency, but nothing came of it—I don’t know why. Maybe some of them see the place as a reminder of the final days of their decline.

I suggested that, with only six full-bloods left, it could be difficult to stir up interest in a tribe now composed of many people who are seven-eighths white or half-Cherokee or three-quarters Choctaw or what have you. Given the American penchant for honoring places of bloodshed, if the Kansa had fought their last eviction with guns and turned this place into a Wounded Knee, it might have been preserved.

Joe said, Maybe, but only if whites had been killed too. Without that old magic word massacre, too many Americans of European descent think Indian history irrelevant—there’s no emotional tie. The popular notion of what to do with an Indian site is to loot it. People want Indian commodities, not their way of seeing the world. Turquoise rings, not significant concepts.

Back on the road, we drove toward Council Grove and past the “Madonna of the Trail” statue, her artificial-stone breasts grand enough to nurture a generation of pioneer squatters, and on to the franchise ice cream stand only yards from where the old Santa Fe Road crossed the Neosho. I ordered us a couple of milk shakes, passed Joe his, and said, fruit of the dispossession. We took them to the south edge of town, to the little park commemorating one of the honored stumps in the Grove, this one the Custer Elm, a sixteen-foot-circumference bole suffering from dry rot under its little roof; on the sign:

 

 

Even if we ignore the pejorative “tragic” and “massacre,” the “shortly before” was actually almost a decade, but then Council Grove has always been handy at making history suit its ends: a mile west of here, on another rounded ridge with a stone monument, is the alleged site (the evidence is less than scanty) of the murder and burial of Father Juan de Padilla, the Franciscan who accompanied Coronado on his trip into central Kansas in search of the gold of Quivira and returned the year following to try to convert Indian souls.

I said something about the insanity of missionaries and government agents expecting a tribal people, who had followed a successful stone age way of life for thousands of years, just to drop it along with their deepest beliefs and, in a few months, embrace industrial-age agriculture, as if Native Americans would take one look at whites and say, Thank you for coming to save us from our long degradation, you lovely people. The records show, to the contrary, that many Kansa considered it ruinously degrading to imitate squatters, merchants, or bigoted clergymen.

Joe, who had brought along a briefcase of documents to show me, sat down at a picnic table and said, Given what squatters and missionaries and politicians really wanted, I’m not sure insanity is as accurate a word as insidious. The standard argument has always been that the Kansa were among the most resistant and stupid of Indians and that they refused to give up traditional ways and accord themselves with Thomas Jefferson’s idea for them as “Christian-farmers.” But that argument is mostly a myth perpetrated by whites who made sure the Indians failed. Traders wanted them out hunting to supply the fur market, squatters and speculators wanted their land, missionaries wanted their souls, and bureaucrats wanted the power and money attached to sales of Indian land, so it became expedient to blame the Kaw themselves for lack of progress in learning how to farm. The myth also conveniently absolved whites from guilt and complicity in genocide. The Kaws’ failure to leave old nomadic ways was almost foreordained by whites.

These last few months I’ve been reading in the federal archives about the Kaw Reserve here—lots of letters to Washington from agents and missionaries—and they make clear what happened even though the history is complex, with many different people pulling different ways. But at the heart of it was the government forcing several land-cession treaties onto the Kansa over the years when they were still on their ancestral grounds up along the Kaw River. First, Congress made them cede twenty million acres—that’s the size of South Carolina—in return for two million acres and annuities from the sale of their lands. Then, in a later treaty, the government took that reservation away and handed them roughly a quarter of a million acres here along the Neosho, and then reduced that to the Diminished Reserve before finally forcing them into Oklahoma, where the Kansa had to buy land from the Osage. For the nineteen million acres they lost, they received a pittance, money that wasn’t a handout but the interest from sums received from sales of their land. But it was even worse than that because much of that pittance didn’t make it back to them. All of this done to a people who never went to war against the United States and never broke a treaty with a government that never entirely kept one with them.

When the Kansa arrived here after the 1846 cession, their earlier resistance to giving up the old nomadic ways began to diminish, especially when, a couple of decades later, whites began overrunning their western hunting grounds and slaughtering the bison that sustained their culture. The Kaw were open to farming because the women had cultivated plots long before even the Spaniards met them, but it was to the benefit of whites to make sure that Indian attempts at a new agriculture couldn’t succeed: in 1860, Indians with bows and arrows and rifles weren’t going to survive, but ones with plows and oxen might, and then they could hold on to their land.

The first nine years on the reservation here, the Kansa had no agent living nearby to guide them in such a huge cultural transition or give them a voice to Washington. Almost as soon as they arrived, squatters began creeping onto their land even though Kansas wasn’t legally opened to white settlement until 1854. In 1855, the first resident agent wrote his bureau in Washington and requested a survey of the reservation to settle disputes over squatter claims, but all he received was a rough sketch that was useless because there were no boundary markers on the reserve. By then, more than fifty squatters had taken up Kansa land, nearly all of it in the fertile valley. Council Grove was founded within the reservation although merchants denied that fact and fought for years to prove their claim. Since virtually no whites would benefit from helping the Kansa, the government talked but did nothing significant to stop squatters from taking land. Keep in mind that there were a couple of dozen other tribes in Kansas also being dispossessed.

All the while this went on, the Kaw were supposed to be receiving their treaty annuity of eight thousand dollars: for their sixteen hundred people, that’s five dollars each. They also received two thousand dollars annually for agriculture and education: a dollar and a quarter per person. A sum like that will guarantee failure in farming and schooling.

Throughout all this Joe was pulling out documents to show me. I said that local pioneer accounts are full of complaints about Indians begging and stealing, but the usual reasons are that the Kaws were degraded savages and constitutionally indolent. I’d not found any pioneer reminiscences that speak of the livestock and crops—and land—squatters stole from the Kansa. One account even mentions the settler who kept his tobacco in an Indian skull, yet, in Chase County, there is not a single report of a Kaw harming a white.

On the Neosho, the mam weapons were treaties, starvation, and whiskey. The placement of the reserve astride the Santa Fe Trail with all the desperate frontier riffraff it attracted was either misguided or criminal. The first attempt to help the Kansa here came from the Methodist mission and school where Council Grove is today, but the missionary, Thomas Huffaker, it seems, was always interested in finding where his personal financial benefit could coincide with the Kaws’. The later Dimmished Reserve is mostly his work. The Indians complained that the children they sent to his mission ended up hoeing crops that he sold at a profit to other whites, and, increasingly, they resisted this forced child labor so that within three years the mission closed, but Huffaker remained to speculate in Kansa land. Even had the schools been conducted properly, a few years is hardly enough time to move a people from the Stone Age into rock houses. The second mission, down by the agency, had similar problems and didn’t last any longer. Assuming that whites were sincere about these efforts, they learned nothing from their failures.

During all of this, the Kansa continued to hunt buffalo in the West because they could dependably earn ten to twelve thousand dollars a year and sometimes twice that. But the chiefs also continued asking the government to fulfill its treaty obligations and supply the plows, hoes, livestock, seed, fencing, and teachers promised them. What they received were short rations of this and that but lots of talk about a new treaty that would—this time—really fulfill promises. That’s when the agency and stone cabins and mill were built. All the Kansa had to do in return was give up 176,000 fertile acres of their 256,000. The proceeds of that land sale were to pay off and remove squatters: in other words, to receive what was already theirs, the Kaw had to agree to give up two thirds of it.

After they signed the new treaty, the government failed to evict more than a few squatters and again didn’t supply enough agricultural assistance even though everything was to be paid for from the Kaws’ own money—which bureaucrats controlled. Worst of all, this treaty abolished tenure-in-common and stipulated forty-acre family plots. One missionary, who inspected the rocky uplands where most of the tracts were, said they were “nearly destitute of timber and water and but poorly adapted to agriculture.” By forcing them to cede their lands for a pittance and then keeping much of that money from them, whites were able to assure the failure of any Kaw transitions. Some of our most revered leaders did nothing, even Lincoln, who granted the town patent to Council Grove.

I said that wherever Indians have had land distributed to them individually, sooner or later it ends up in white hands.

The buildings the government put up at that time with Kaw money were inferior, and the profits from construction went to white builders, primarily a scheming New Yorker named Robert Stevens, an associate of Sam Wood, who, by the way, was a leader in the movement to land-job the Kansa. Many border-warfare heroes became more venal when the issue was Indian dispossession. The mill never received a burr to grind corn and wheat, so it was useless and soon began falling apart and then ended up going to a businessman who bought it for a fraction of its cost.

Other things conspired against the Kaw. Without fencing, they couldn’t protect what crops they did put in from squatters’ livestock. Then there was flooding and drought: between 1855 and 1868—the years when the epithet “Drouthy Kansas” was born—there were six droughts. In other years, floods washed away crops. And, during one winter in the 1850s, smallpox killed four hundred Kansa.

Every year, they fell deeper into debt to Council Grove merchants, who, at times, would help the Indians, since they were necessary to get hold of annuities. Many times, when a Kaw finally managed to receive a plow or ox—assuming he’d been taught to use it—he’d have to sell it right off to avoid starvation. Given the hopelessness they were driven into, alcoholism was rampant. The laws against selling liquor to Indians were so widely ignored it’s hard not to see the flouting as part of a conspiracy to destroy what remained of Kansa culture.

The interest on their debt was about equal to their annuity—the merchants kept the two balanced in order not to lose anything themselves—so that most Kaw money ended up in Council Grove. It was something like the postbellum sharecropper in the South. As conditions got worse and the demands for the last of the Kaws’ land increased, the governmental solution was to “persuade” them to move to Indian Territory, once again, of course, using the sale of their land to pay for it.

I was getting depressed by this history, and it got worse when three people wearing Plus Sizes fresh from some Blue Light Special drove up to pose for a snapshot in front of the Custer Elm, nearly obscuring its broad girth. I said to Joe that the general’s troops seemed almost benign compared to squatters, speculators, merchants, missionaries, congressmen, and a town founded on criminal conduct.

He said, American leadership here was nothing more than a grasping for individual gain—sometimes even among the Kaw themselves.

I told him about the sign I’d seen near Wonsevu: NO TRESPASSING WITHOUT WRITTEN PERMISSION. It could be the title for the story he’d been telling. I said that it almost made me wish the Kansa had countered with the other sign I saw: KEEP OUT OR U WILL B SHOT.

Joe said, The story of Indian America after Columbus is one of trespass. Did I mention that one of the early Grove merchants was Christopher Columbia and that the secretary of the interior who came out here personally to order the Kansa off their land was Columbus Delano? More apt names there never were.

Before we left, Joe asked whether I wanted a snapshot of myself standing by the Custer Elm, and I said that although I liked the symbolism of a rotting stump as a memorial to the Seventh Cavalry, the only way I’d pose next to it would probably get me arrested for committing a public nuisance. Not one of George’s fans? he asked, and I said I thought we remembered Custer for the wrong thing: had whites shown some of the perceptiveness of red people that his books do, the Kansa might have had a chance.

In the dusk we drove past the silhouette of the Unknown Indian monument and the dark ruins of the agency and the ghostly little wooden house. I said that had the people around here preserved these buildings, it might have called attention to their ancestors’ land-jobbing. Joe doubted that many of the heirs had any idea how they came to gain title to the land. Probably so, I said—that’s how you turn a faceless Indian into a loyal fighter for the Union and give him a cavalryman’s funeral. That’s also how, from an innocence born of ignorance, Council Grove businesspeople can concoct a “powwow” and call it Wah-shun-gah Days to hustle falsified history to tourists. (On the other hand, since Wahshunga, the so-called Last Chief of the Kansa, had no hereditary claim to the title and was a disheartened alcoholic whom whites used to sign land-transfer agreements, perhaps a street carnival with a mud-volleyball tournament and an ugly-truck contest and a couple of Indian dances performed mostly by mixed-bloods indeed was fitting.) Destroy a culture with economic weapons and then turn around and peddle bits of it to the descendants of those who reviled the Kansa but didn’t mind naming the state after them.

Joe said, I mentioned my dream of last spring when I was reading those reels of microfilm. I buried myself every afternoon from one to five in the agency records—four hours of greed, starvation, presumptions of cultural supremacy. Before I tell this, I’ve got to say that I’m an anthropologist—I’m not a believer in mysticism or the paranormal.

I said I like stories that open with disclaimers.

One night, about two in the morning, Mary heard weird noises coming from me, sounds she’d never known me to make before in the night. I was dreaming I was sleeping and that I suddenly woke up and saw three human silhouettes against the sheer curtain of the big window in our bedroom. I was in stark terror, but I tried to shout for them to go away. They just stood there. I dreamed I got out of bed to see what they wanted—I knew who they were—and I pulled the curtain. Looking in at me were three Kaws in dirty, ragged blankets. Nothing but bags of bones. Then I woke up—I mean I actually woke up.

We bumped along in the dark, and I waited for him to finish. Finally he said, I’m not sure what to make of it, but I think a dream can set you on another path.