I drew back. I was here in response to a 911 call. “Well, let’s see what needs to be done.” I sat down with him and got him through the night.
The next night we had sex and the next. It was warm and wonderful and I allowed myself to hope. So did Gentle.
“What was that business about Wounded Knee? Is that for real?”
As Gentle told it, there were two Wounded Knees. In 1890 it was the site at which a Pauite prophet, Wovoda, proclaimed that white men would disappear and the buffalo return, if the rites and rituals of the Ghost Dance were faithfully performed. At this messianic promise, the Indians fell into a self-induced hypnotic state. They danced without food or drink. They danced until their feet bled. They danced until they fell. The government, fearing the ecstatic cult and the fanaticism it bred, sent in the Seventh Cavalry.
The Indians were greatly outnumbered and surrendered. But there was a skirmish and Sitting Bull was killed while being arrested. This led to several hundred Sioux fleeing the reservation and hiding in the Badlands. They were pursued and surrounded as they camped at Wounded Knee.
The Indians again surrendered. But as they were being disarmed, a young brave refused to give over his new rifle. The trooper tried to take it from him, it discharged, and the trooper fell dead. That did it.
Machine guns fired into the disarmed Indians. A hundred and fifty-four died there, including forty-four women and sixteen children. They weren’t buried until the following spring, when weather permitted and the army returned to clean up the mess.
“Well, that was the Wounded Knee massacre that took place in December of 1890. The second Wounded Knee occured six years ago—February 27, 1973—when two hundred members of AIM, the American Indian Movement, took the present hamlet of Wounded Knee by force and occupied it. Their leaders, Russell Means and Dennis Banks, vowed to stay until the United States threw out the government-appointed tribal leaders, who ran the res like a penal colony. They further demanded a judicial review of all Indian treaties and an impartial commission to investigate government treatment of Indians.”
“Where did all this happen? Where is Wounded Knee?”
“South Dakota. It’s a tiny place on the edge of the Pine Wood Indian Reservation.”
“So how did it end up?”
“With a reign of terror. A seventy-one-day siege by federal marshals, who surrounded them and let no food in. It was pathetic. Hunger versus resolution…with hunger winning.”
“It’s all so sad. I suppose the land was worthless anyway?”
Gentle laughed. “That’s what the U.S. government thought initially when they ceded it to the Indians. It was for sure no good for farming. But here’s the catch. As it turned out, the Good Lord deposited something far more valuable than gold—uranium—in the Black Hills.
“Naturally, the government wanted to remove the Indians and start mining. Congress, falling into step, passed legislation aimed at getting the Indians off welfare and integrating them into urban life. To most people, this seemed a laudable goal, and the ancient treaty was abrogated. To nudge the Indians to leave, their welfare checks were cut. When they began to starve, the Indians themselves brought the matter before a federal judge, who ruled in their favor, saying, ‘The waters of justice have been polluted.’”
“That’s good. The ruling was in their favor.”
“The ruling was, but nothing happened. The mining goes on. That’s what we’re giving this concert for—to reinstate the Fort Laramie Treaty. I thought of you immediately. Would you,” Gentle finished up, “donate your time, be one of the headline singers?”
“Could I sing my Cree songs?”
In answer Gentle swung me off my feet and polkaed around the room to the triumphant strains of Beethoven’s Ninth. “I do believe you are waking to this great world around you. Yes, I do believe it.”
On top of everything I was doing, Gentle and I took our plans out of cold storage. I was to write and sing my indigenous material. An Indian repertoire was certainly appropriate for a benefit seeking the restoration of Indian land. Jim would get it together. As for me, the sheer thrill of working on the pieces I had dreamed of doing for so long kept me going, allowed me to do without sleep, kept me on my feet.
I had to call my father and postpone our get-together by a week.
“I’m heading a delegation to Mexico City and I’m leaving that Sunday. But if I can make decent connections from Nashville, I’ll leave from there.”
“Would you! It’s just that I have an opportunity to sing my Cree songs. You know what that means to me.”
“Don’t worry. I’ll work it out.”
Half-truths must be what the road to purgatory is lined with. Or was it Loki, once again, who lured me into it?
Because when we got together, I had to tell my father that the Cree songs were for a benefit.
And when he asked more specifically about the benefit, it came out that Jim was organizing it.
“Jim Gentle? The one on drugs? You’re back with him?”
“He’s been clean for a year. And when he was tempted to go back on them he called me, and I was able to help him. He fought it off. He’ll be okay now.”
“I wish you could hear yourself, Kathy. For God’s sake, don’t get in too deep with this person.”
“I don’t know what you mean, too deep. But I’ll tell you this about me, I don’t do things by halves. It’s all the way with me. I’m back with him, and we’re going to bring this concert off together. I know everyone at the Ole Opry, and I’ll help him recruit other headliners.”
“Kathy, can’t you see he is using you? You want to sing your Cree songs…but he has his own agenda. He’s a dangerous man.”
“How can you make such a judgment? You don’t even know him.”
“I’m looking out for your welfare, Kathy.”
“Are you? Don’t you think the father bit is somewhat overdone? Like maybe thirty years too late?”
“You’re quite right, I haven’t earned the right to criticize.” He stood up. “Well, I’ve an early flight in the morning.”
A few awkward words on both sides, and he was gone. I knew I’d fought not only with my father, but with myself. He was probably right and I was probably wrong. I didn’t care. I was betting on Gentle.
TO get a feel for the background, Jim sat me down and had me tell him every scrap of conversation I’d ever had with Elk Woman about music. He took copious notes and drew black boxes around sections he thought particularly valuable, such as when Elk Woman compared Cree singing with pop and rock. “White people listen with half an ear to music, while doing something else. With us, when the spirits give you a song, you pay attention.”
Gentle ploughed into research, taking the phone off the hook to study. When I saw him next he was primed with prairie and Northwest Indian cultures. “Instead of being crafted note by note and bar by bar, their songs come in a vision, all at once.”
“Yes, yes. That’s how it is with me too.”
“Their word for ‘singing’ means musical sounds. Even drumming is a kind of singing. In American and European music, the drums beat out the rhythm, which the voices follow. Not in Indian music; there drum and voice can beat to totally different pulses.”
“Yes, that’s true of words, too. Indian music goes for ideas that can’t be put into words. Like what you feel when you’re desperately lonely, or someone dies that shouldn’t—like my sister Elizabeth.”
“Do you know how to put a scream into words?” he asked. “Because that’s what you’ll have to do, Little Bird. Turn this whole rotten life into music, the way First Nation people do.”
“I can do it. I know I can. Still, for an American audience, I’ll have to throw in a few words—or they’ll walk. Another thing I remember about Indian music, the silences. Toward the end of the wildest celebration or the sweetest love song—sudden silence! Then crescendo to the climax.” I leaped up and dragged him into a howling and a growling Indian-style dance.
There was special
joy in working so closely with another human being. I realized I had come to look on this benefit Jim was organizing as a contribution, a public service, which no one else was doing: not the politicians, not the newspapers or TV, only a few churches and us, the music community. We were a voice for the underdog, for the victims, for those who got caught in the machinery and ground up.
An unexpected plus was the many fine musicians Gentle assembled. Their willingness to give of their time and their talent to help regain treaty land was very touching to me. Not an Indian among them, but they felt injustice. And they wanted to stand up for what was right. They were willing to sing and play for people who had no way of speaking out for themselves.
And who were these performers? Professionals. Many of them big names. We got together, never all at once, but as we could, and everyone ran through their numbers, which Gentle tried to put into some sort of framework and make into a show. His first thought was to hold it outdoors at Wounded Knee itself. But there was no way the Bureau of Indian Affairs would let us into a reservation. The state of South Dakota was a different matter, however. There were several little towns in the vicinity, under the same northern sky and awe-inspiring Black Hills. Jim found a natural amphitheater belonging to a defunct gold-mining operation, whose absentee owner was happy to rent it for a day and get his name in the papers.
Jim’s other thought was to make the date May Day. South Dakota weather scotched that. We settled for June. From the various points of the globe performers would assemble, along with Indians, journalists, and we hoped a large audience.
“WHEN you make plans, the devil laughs,” is the way whites phrase it. But for the Indian, Loki the Trickster hides in the shadows.
Trimble picked up the phone and handed it to me. “One of the band.”
I took it carelessly. Rono Hart said in a voice without tone or inflection, “It’s Gentle. I’m calling from the hospital…”
I remember a sort of gasping sound. I didn’t know it came from me. The next thing I remember was asking for his room. He didn’t have a room. He hadn’t been admitted. They told me they were working on him in emergency—an overdose.
A nurse with a stripe on her cap showed me to the waiting room. “We’ll call you,” she said.
“He’s going to make it,” I replied. If this was a question, no one answered. If aphorism, it was ignored.
I sat down. There was a goldfish swimming aimlessly in an aerated tank with dyed shells and colored seaweed. It came to the surface and gulped air. I picked up a magazine, well worn. Somebody had torn something out. What could it have been? Something that in some way applied to their life? Or was it simply a recipe? But a recipe might not be simple. It might be profound, a recipe for life.
You don’t get off drugs, that’s what my father said. It was what I’d always been told. It’s stronger than willpower, stronger than the person. Vietnam had done this to him. He’d seen inhuman things, taken part in them. No amount of expiation eradicated them. Only drugs could drive the scene back into hidden recesses of his brain.
I’d known this a year ago. I knew it when I started up with him again. I hadn’t known he might end up dead.
If Gentle died I couldn’t bring myself to face the waste. A guy so loving, so full of ideas for helping, improving, making better. I couldn’t think of him except as reaching out…teaching through music, me for instance.
I thought of the 911 call, and further back to the foolish grin. “Snowbird, come fly with me.” I had the feeling then, and I had it now, that he was rushing to meet death, anxious to shake hands with it.
…And here was I, sitting on a vinyl couch in a sterile waiting room with a small, trapped fish and a pile of magazines whose pages were sized with the imprint of dread and fear. The nurse with the stripe on her cap was coming back. Had he been brought in too late? Had they given up?
I got to my feet. I wanted to be on my feet when she told me. I tried to ask, but no sound came.
The nurse smiled. “He’s going to be okay. You can go in now, but only for a minute.”
I turned away from her, away from the ER, away from Gentle. Outside I took a deep breath of rain. How odd it felt to be crying from outside myself.
I WOULDN’T see Jim, or take his calls. This time I made it clear to Trimble he was at the top of the “No” list.
But I did work like a dog to save his reputation. If the benefit was allowed to collapse, that would be the end of him in the business. I spent hours on the phone soothing everyone down. I saw to it that no hint of drugs ever came up. Gentle’s hospitalization was attributed to a flare-up of last winter’s bronchitis, coupled with the pressure and the threats he had been receiving. This was the first I heard of threats. Apparently, Rono Hart told me, he was a target for every skinhead in Tennessee. Which made me all the more determined that the benefit take place.
It was less than a week to countdown. The work was essentially done, the P.R. released, the fees paid, reservations made. So I worked the phones, reassuring everyone that the concert was on track. Rono Hart, whom I had hardly spoken to, turned out to be a pillar of strength.
Gentle’s sense of drama in choosing the large, flat valley floor, was unerring. It was, he had told me, the ancestral home of the Lakota.
My part in all this was to sing, to release the ethnic songs that had been bottled up in me so long. My mum’s people would hear them. Indians know no border; they slip back and forth between Canada and the States, and many would be in attendance at the concert. As for the rest, it was the kind of audience I had always imagined. “Young,” Gentle had said, “idealistic. They live in alternative worlds. They stopped the killing in Vietnam with flowers—make love not war.”
Mac was horrified by the whole affair. He was horrified that I had taken up with Jim Gentle again, and doubly horrified to see me swept up in something as stupid as Indian causes. He skulked about and would barely speak to me. I don’t know how he found out about the drugs. Maybe it was a guess, but he exploded in a series of grunts and stomped out. Was I a crazy woman, as he maintained? I didn’t have time to think about it.
The moment I met up with the little group of musicians at the airport, I felt I had done the right thing and that we would make it through. I asked Rono to phone the hospital and tell Gentle we were on our way to Wounded Knee. That, I knew, would help him in his fight back. “And oh, Rono, tell him this time it’s final. He’ll understand.”
I’d booked a commercial flight with an extra seat for the bass fiddle. Those of us coming from Nashville all sat together and went over entrance cues and tempo. Mostly we joked around, Willie did card tricks, and we got into Chicago, which was the hub, and out again without any mishaps.
The last leg of the flight I slept. It was a little one-horse town with a single motel, whose sign had a letter missing. All evening they kept pouring in, arriving by taxi, by motorcycle, by limo, by bus. There were hugs and kissses and people who had only heard about each other, meeting, and going off to pick a little guitar.
I was up early to look the place over. I rented a truck and drove to the location, passing a used auto lot filled with rusting skeletons.
What man had made was rather depressing, but what God had made was magnificent. I saw immediately how wise Gentle had been to turn down theaters and hold out for this spot. An oval meadow against a backdrop of hills cutting patterns in the sky made an acoustically favorable setting. Intuitively Gentle knew an open-air spot was right for open-air music. There’d be light breezes, and puffs of clouds…nature speaking. And my songs answering back in a kind of dialogue. Tomorrow there would be blankets and beach chairs and cushions strewn colorfully and haphazardly, as people listened to a sound they had never heard before. Of course there were a plethora of other groups and individual performers to balance what I did, but I concentrated on me.
A stage had been erected, and a truck stood by with our electrical grid. I tested the mikes, and the curve of the hillsides reverberated. It couldn’t b
e better; the place was alive to sound. Any worries I had about an al fresco performance being risky were put to rest.
I’d been too busy to notice the old car that rattled up, but when I turned around—there was Gentle.
I was shocked. Shocked that he was here, but shocked equally at his appearance. He looked as though he’d been buried, left in the ground for a week, and dug up. His long frame was skeletal, his eyes recessed, hooded over by a drooping lid.
“Hi, Little Bird,” he said, letting me know by his avoidance of “Kathy” that he abided by my rules. “Now,” turning to the others, “let’s get the show on the road.”
We had a good rehearsal without too many glitches. This did not reassure me, for stage lore has it that a good rehearsal means trouble during the show.
During the run-through Gentle had not uttered a private word to me. For my part, I was relieved. I didn’t want to fight with him. He looked as though he could barely stand on his feet as it was. But now he came up to me. I shaded my eyes and looked up, way up, as you have to with Gentle.
“I wanted to say thanks for seeing the concert through, for not letting it fold. It means a lot to me, as you know. And I believe it will mean a great deal to you too. I think it will bring you the audience you’ve been looking for. I think tomorrow your Cree songs will have found a home.”
I held out my hand. “We almost made it, Jim. We almost did.”
“About tomorrow, there may be trouble. That’s why I’m here. A bunch of Lakota are acting as lookouts. They should be able to spot any local gangs and keep them at a distance. Should a few rednecks slip in, they’ll be handled. So don’t worry about it. If there is a disturbance, it will be throwing some guy out on his ear. Keep right on singing. Leave the rest to me.”
I looked into the eyes that I had so often kissed, and the thick hair I had so often caressed, and the two sides of my nature sparred, the left-handed and the right-handed. It was an intense battle, but short. “Have you notified the police? Maybe they should be on hand.”
Kathy Little Bird Page 17