Tangled Roots

by Marcia Talley

  I purchased a large coffee at the gas station which made the endless miles of widely spaced farms, pastures and ponds south of Kadoka less soporific.

  At a stop sign at a cross roads in the vast prairie of nowhere, I gained an hour when the time zone changed from Central to Mountain time. SD44 eventually merged with the Big Foot Trail on the outskirts of Kyle, a rather soulless sprawl of widely-spaced, one-story buildings.

  ‘Your GPS will do you no good,’ Sam had emailed when giving directions. ‘When you get to Little Wound School in the center of town, turn left on Allen Road. At St Barnabas Episcopal Church, check your odometer. The dirt road that leads to Wasula’s house is exactly one point two miles past the church, on the right.’

  Little Wound School, a massive, multi-storied red block of a building, was impossible to miss. St Barnabas Church? Not so much. I’d driven past the barn-like structure twice before I saw it and got myself back on track.

  Wasula’s modest ranch-style home sat one hundred yards off the road, surrounded by acres of fenced pastureland where a half-dozen cows, two horses and a buffalo grazed in contented harmony.

  Mai answered my knock. ‘Hannah, so good to see you.’

  We exchanged hugs.

  ‘Did you get Julie’s message?’ she asked in a rush.

  ‘What? No. I haven’t had any cell phone service since Pierre.’

  ‘Sucks, doesn’t it?’ She gave me a what-are-ya-gonna-do kind of shrug. ‘Julie’s been accepted in an AmeriCorps program.’

  I set my overnight bag down on the carpet and shrugged out of my jacket. ‘I knew that, actually. She told me she’d applied just before I left to come here.’

  Mai grinned slyly. Something was up. ‘But you haven’t heard the best of it. I don’t know how Father did it, but he must have pulled some strings because Julie’s been assigned to the Red Cloud Indian School here on the rez.’

  Deep down in her DNA, Julie carried the genes of another pioneer woman, venturing out into Indian territory to help better the lives of others. Like her great-grandmother before her, would Julie find her knight? I prayed that unlike Charlotte, Julie’s fairy tale would have a happily ever after.

  ‘That’s wonderful,’ I told Mai, meaning it. ‘What will she be doing?’

  ‘Teacher’s aide, I think, for the Head Start program.’

  ‘Ah, Julie loves working with toddlers,’ I told her. As long as they’re not named Declan, I thought to myself.

  ‘She’ll homestay with a Lakota family near the school,’ Mai babbled on. ‘It’ll be so cool.’

  The reservation, I knew from driving only a part of it, was huge. ‘How far away will she be?’

  ‘Only sixty miles.’ She dismissed the distance with a wave of her hand. ‘I drive more than that to work every day. Speaking of which, I gotta go or I’ll be late.’ She snatched a fleece hoodie from a peg on the wall. ‘Bingo waits for no man … or woman.’

  Before Mai breezed out the door, slamming it behind her, she pointed me in the direction of the living room where I found Aunt Wasula perched on a loveseat, hands folded in her lap, waiting patiently. She wore her usual uniform – a flowered dress and cardigan – but this time, she’d slipped her feet into a pair of fur-lined slippers.

  I wasn’t certain of the protocol, but I took her hands in mine and planted a light kiss on her cheek. ‘You look well,’ I said.

  She smiled. ‘Every day is a blessing.’

  Wasula inquired about my trip, then asked if I wanted anything to drink.

  ‘No, but thank you. I had some coffee earlier.’ I grinned. ‘Mostly, I could use a bathroom.’

  When I returned, carrying my overnight bag, Wasula said, ‘You have brought some things to show me.’ She moved her feet off the ottoman, indicating that I should sit there.

  ‘I have, and I also need your help.’ I dug Charlotte’s scrapbook out of my bag, laid it on Wasula’s knees and opened it to the first page. I watched silently as she leafed through Charlotte’s life, using her hand to smooth each page as she came to it.

  At the photograph of Charlotte on the Model T, she paused. ‘That’s Lottie.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Wasn’t she lovely?’

  I agreed that she was.

  ‘I found some notes, too,’ I said, reaching again into my bag. ‘Most of them are written in Lakota.’ I handed the first one to her. ‘I didn’t know my grandmother spoke Lakota.’

  Wasula’s old eyes sparkled. ‘Lottie was very smart. She picked up our language quickly while tending to patients on the reservation, especially the elder ones who did not speak English. By the time she left us, she was almost fluent.’

  I called attention to the note, in case she’d forgotten she was holding it. ‘Can you tell me what this says?’

  Wasula’s eyes strayed to the paper. After a moment she said, ‘It’s from White Bear. He’s asking Lottie to bring extra flour when she comes. He tells her he will pay for it.’

  ‘How about this one?’ I handed her the next note in the little pile.

  ‘White Bear is arranging to meet Lottie to see a movie when he comes to Pierre with two horses to sell.’

  ‘And this?’ I handed her the longest of the notes, written on a single sheet of notebook paper, White Bear’s bold capital letters covering both sides.

  As Wasula read, her face clouded, her eyelids drooped. At first I thought she’d dozed off. I reached out to nudge her gently awake when her eyes flew open and, startled, I drew my hand back.

  ‘After the rodeos became successful,’ she began, ‘the Lakota decided to manage the money themselves. One year, after the rodeo was over, the cash receipts went missing.’ She turned to me, her face serious. ‘You can guess which year that was.’

  ‘1932?’

  She patted my hand and nodded. ‘One of the young bull riders, Red Shirt, was accused of the crime. Nothing was ever proven, but he left the reservation in disgrace. White Bear is telling Lottie that he knows it was Hawk who stole the money. He’s asking her what he should do.’

  The room grew quiet as we let the significance of that fact sink in.

  ‘I know what Grandmother would have said,’ I told her. ‘She would have advised him to talk to his brother, convince him to give the money back.’

  ‘Yes,’ Wasula said. ‘And I fear that’s exactly what White Bear did.’

  ‘Do you believe that Hawk murdered your brother, to keep him quiet about the money?’

  ‘Sixty-three dollars and seventy-six cents, that’s all it was,’ she said. ‘My brothers never got along, but I never thought …’ Her voice trailed off.

  It’s all about the money, I thought, thinking about my brother-in-law’s murder. It’s always about the money.

  ‘A newspaper in Deadwood claimed it was a rodeo accident,’ I said, ‘that White Bear was injured while riding a bucking bronc.’

  ‘Ah, yes,’ she said. ‘Father thought it was better that way.’

  ‘What happened to Hawk?’ I asked, seething quietly over the cover-up.

  ‘He married, had children, a normal life,’ she said. ‘Hawk died in 1990. Whatever actually happened that day was a secret he kept all those years and took to the grave with him.’

  There was one final note in the pile. ‘This is the last one,’ I said. ‘Can you translate it for me?’

  Wasula studied the single page for what seemed like an eternity. ‘It’s a love letter,’ she told me at last. ‘White Bear’s words to Lottie are private, not meant to be shared.’

  ‘But …’ I protested.

  ‘I will tell you this, Hannah,’ she said, as if to soften the blow. ‘White Bear writes this letter to wínyan-mit-áwa: my wife, my lover.’

  My throat grew tight; I suppressed a sob.

  ‘White Bear won some money at the Celebration rodeo,’ Wasula said. ‘He could afford to marry. But, after my brother died, I never saw Lottie again. I kept asking myself, why didn’t she come to say goodbye?’

  A single tear, that
of a heartbroken sixteen-year-old girl, rolled down her wrinkled cheek.

  ‘She must have been devastated by his death,’ I said. I turned to the back of the scrapbook, to the newspaper article describing the eclipse. I pointed out the date on the masthead. ‘She was still in South Dakota then,’ I said, ‘but this article must have been important to her.’

  Wasula closed the scrapbook and laid both hands protectively on the cover. ‘In Lakota culture,’ she explained, ‘a total solar eclipse is the physical manifestation of the sacred union of the Divine Masculine, represented by the sun, and the Divine Feminine, represented by the moon.’ She patted the seat cushion next to her. ‘Come, sit by me. I will tell you a story.’

  Like an eager toddler at storytime, I moved from the ottoman to the loveseat and sat.

  ‘You may have heard of the peace pipe?’

  ‘Yes,’ I told her, ‘but everything I know about it comes from movies and television so it’s probably not very accurate.’

  ‘Whenever the white men and the Indians got together to talk about treaties, the Indian way was to smoke a pipe first, so the negotiations could be witnessed by the Great Spirit. White men usually associated the pipe with the discussion of peace, so they are the ones, like in the Western movies you saw, who named it the peace pipe. To our people, however, it’s always been called the Sacred Pipe because when we smoke it, we are communicating directly with the Creator.

  ‘You are a Christian, Hannah?’

  ‘I am, yes, of the Episcopalian persuasion.’

  She nodded, looking wise. ‘Think of the Sacred Pipe as a portable altar. Our great Lakota holy man Frank Fools Crow once described praying with the Sacred Pipe as having the same significance to our people as if you, a Christian, prayed while holding Jesus Christ in your arms.

  ‘So, you can understand that the Sacred Pipe was a great gift to the Lakota Nation.’

  ‘You say gift?’

  ‘The Sacred Pipe was brought to us by the White Buffalo Calf Woman. Many have heard the legend of the White Buffalo Calf Woman, but this part of the story is often left out. The Sun and the Moon are husband and wife and they had one daughter: the Morning Star. And it was the Morning Star who came down to earth as the White Buffalo Calf Woman and brought the Sacred Pipe to the Native people.

  ‘So the sun and the moon joining together in a solar eclipse can be a time of Creation,’ she said, reaching for my hand. ‘Your mother is the Morning Star.’

  I rested my head against Aunt Wasula’s comforting shoulder and wept.