ALSO BY ALEXANDRA FULLER
Leaving Before the Rains Come
Fallings
Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness
The Legend of Colton H. Bryant
Scribbling the Cat
Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight
PENGUIN PRESS
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Copyright © 2017 by Alexandra Fuller
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“Quiet Until the Thaw” from The Wishing Bone Cycle: Narrative Poems from the Swampy Cree Indians, gathered and translated by Howard A. Norman (Stonehill Publishing, 1976).
Reprinted by permission of Howard A. Norman.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Names: Fuller, Alexandra, 1969– author.
Title: Quiet until the thaw : a novel / Alexandra Fuller.
Description: New York : Penguin Press, 2017
Identifiers: LCCN 2016056759 (print) | LCCN 2017001457 (ebook) | ISBN 9780735223349 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780735223356 (ebook) | ISBN 9780735225145 (international edition)
Subjects: LCSH: Lakota Indians—Social life and customs—Fiction. | Indians of North America—Fiction. | Domestic fiction. | BISAC: FICTION / Literary. | FICTION / Historical.
Classification: LCC PS3606.U49 Q54 2017 (print) | LCC PS3606.U49 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016056759
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Version_1
T.D.F.
1940–2015
Nunc dimittis servum tuum, Domine, secundum verbum tuum in pace
Contents
Also by Alexandra Fuller
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Part One Quiet Until the Thaw
The Eternal Nature of Everything, as Described by Mina Overlooking Horse
Rick Overlooking Horse’s Tiny, Blown Mind
Mina Overlooking Horse’s Winter Count
You Choose Watson and the Sugar Debacle of 1962
The Etymology of the Name “You Choose Watson”
A Month After You Choose Watson Was Born
All Are Related, Related to All
The (Other) Red Scare(s)
Meantime, Names for a Red Man, and Why He Doesn’t Care
A Quick Note on the Word “Indian”
Victor Charlie and the Indian
Dog Tags Are Forever
Unless There’s Extreme, Unforeseen Heat
Thanatopsis
You Choose on Turtle Island
Candlefish Forever
Thaté: Wind
Time
Mni: Water
Maka: Earth
Phéta: Fire
Thaté, Again
Italians/Indians Cry Too
Mina Overlooking Horse Drinks Coffee as a Substitute for Having a Feeling
Thaté, Yet Again
Mina Overlooking Horse Crosses (the Hell) Over
MINA OVERLOOKING HORSE, 1904–1966
The Bright, Shining Beginning of the End
Tales of Longing, Belonging, and Camouflage Tricks That Didn’t Work
How to Make a(n Honest) Living on the Rez
Rick Overlooking Horse Accidentally Becomes a Medicine Man, a Chief, an Elder
The Old Buffalo Bull, Again
Rick Overlooking Horse and the Ugly Red Stud
Indian War Ponies
Pony Trading
Trouble
You Choose What Son Comes Home
High Noon on the North American Plains, and Why It Is Better to Meet Some Other Time
The Transmission
The Somewhat Accidental Early Political Career of You Choose What Son
The Campaign
Nepotism, Just Between Friends and Family
A Warning
Meantime, on the Moon
Did the White Man Take Smallpox to the Moon, and Other Good Obvious Questions
The Second Siege of Wounded Knee
Hé Sapa
The Length of a Siege
The End of the Siege
Meantime, Mean Time
You Choose What Son’s Fit of Rage
You Choose What Son’s Very Vigorous Rage
Part Two The Great Fertility Crisis of Le-a Brings Plenty
The 1965 Chevy Impala
One Common Myth About the Rez, Dispelled
Le-a Brings Plenty Gets Many DWIs
Le-a Brings Plenty’s Father Issue
Le-a’s Certificate of Degree of Indian Blood
You Do the Math
A Secret Is Something You Don’t Already Know
Le-a Does Her Time
The Battle of the Junkyard
The Warrior
The Easiest Way to Find a Warrior on the Rez
Le-a’s Other Men, and One Woman
What Happened Next
Mona Respects Nothing Comes to Whiteclay
Mona Respects Nothing Delivers
Afterbirth
Post-Delivery DTs
Dallas, the Soap Opera, and the Rez
Everything Is Not Going to Be All Right
Mona Respects Nothing at the Broken Two-Mile Marker
The Famous Indian Rescue of Jerusalem and Daniel Respects Nothing
Tray Tor and Squanto Are in Charge of Two Very Small Babies for Less Than Three Hours
Part Three The Ugly Red Stud, at Last
Vigil
Tray Tor Two Bulls Seeks Refuge
Ready to Move
Staying Babies
The Moon of Fattening
Rez-Famous Babies
An Origin Story
Preschool for Indian Babies
Children’s Questions, Answered
How Turtle Island Got Its Name
You Choose What Son, Out of the Second Rez
You Choose What Son’s First Days of Freedom
You Choose What Son Buys a Way Out
The Moons of August
Recipe for Berry Stew
You Choose and the Other Full Moon
You Choose What Son’s Near-Death Experience
RICK OVERLOOKING HORSE, 1944–2004
You Choose What Son and the Life Sentence
Feeling Returns
Rain
Le-a Brings Plenty Hears the Voice of Rick Overlooking Horse
Le-a
Brings Plenty Buries the Hatchet, as They Say
You Choose Watson’s Very Born-Again Indian Conversion
A Good Thing for an Indian to Know
You Choose Watson, Indian Activist
Daniel and Jerusalem (Don’t) Win a Thousand Dollars
Wanted: A Job for Indians
The Recruiter
The Audition
The Youth of Today
Marne-la-Vallée
Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, Disneyland Paris
Jerusalem, Regained
(There Is No Such Thing as) The End
Greenland
The End
About the Author
Life is a circle and we as common people are created to stand within it and not on it. I am not just of the past but I am the past. I am here. I am now and I will be for tomorrow.
—Oglala Lakota maxim
There are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before.
—Willa Cather, O Pioneers
Quiet Until the Thaw
Her name tells of how
it was with her.
The truth is, she did not speak
in winter.
Everybody learned not to
ask her questions in winter,
once this was known about her.
The first winter this happened
we looked in her mouth to see
if something was frozen. Her tongue
maybe, or something else in there.
But after the thaw she spoke again
and told us it was fine for her that way.
So each spring we
looked forward to that.
—Swampy Cree narrative naming poem*
All persons, living and dead, are purely coincidental.
—Kurt Vonnegut, Timequake
Part
ONE
Quiet Until the Thaw
They say Rick Overlooking Horse didn’t talk much.
Actually, it was a little more than that. From the start, even for an Indian, his silence was bordering on worrying. For example, in his fourth spring, when You Choose Watson shot him in the leg with an arrow, he didn’t go wailing to his grandmother like any normal kid. He turned his back on his Rez cousin’s mocking laughter and limped away with the arrow still in his leg, down the hill toward the third in a row of tar-paper lean-tos on what is now Second Street in Manderson village. Then he stood in the kitchen, silent as ever, staring at his Closest Immediate Relation.
Mina Overlooking Horse, accustomed to her grandson’s silence, took a long time to look up from the backseat of the 1935 Ford coupe that had served as her sofa since it had been torn from its crumpled mother chassis in a ditch outside Chadron, Nebraska. Then she noticed the dark, viscous pool spreading on the earth floor beneath Rick Overlooking Horse’s feet, and the arrow juddering from his leg. “Ayeee! You’re making a mess of everything!” she said.
But Rick Overlooking Horse just blinked and stared at the dirt on which he was standing. Maybe he was wondering why You Choose had just shot him in the leg with an arrow. Or maybe he was wondering how he could mess everything up any worse than it already was. But no one would ever know what he was thinking about this, or much of anything else, because the child wouldn’t talk.
It was like that Swampy Cree Indian poem, “Quiet Until the Thaw,” as if his tongue must be frozen. Eventually, his grandmother and some of his More Concerned Immediate Relations thought to look in his mouth to make sure. But nope, everything was all defrosted and accounted for. Rick Overlooking Horse was simply a child, and then a man, of shockingly few words.
The Eternal Nature of Everything, as Described by Mina Overlooking Horse
By the time Rick Overlooking Horse was fixing to enter his second decade, he had uttered, all told, about enough words to fill a pamphlet from the Rezurrection Ministry outfit based out of Dallas, Texas. And those pamphlets were exceedingly short, designed as they were by little ladies with big hair for heathen Indians who had been out in the sun too long, so to speak.
Although to be fair, the little ladies were just doing their Christian bit. And to be accurate, some of them were very far from what you might describe as little. Plus, this was back in the early 1950s, which was a confusing time for a lot of people, particularly for people who counted on time being linear, one thing following another, one foot in front of the other, one breath after the other, from cradle to grave, accounting for all the time between birth and death, but accounting for none of the time between death and birth.
Mina made an attempt to get that confusion squared away early and often. “They say you’ve been here from the very start, and you’ll be here to the very end,” she told Rick Overlooking Horse when he was just nine years old. “Every last drop of you and everything around you. Nothing has ever been taken away. Nothing will ever be added.” Then she sighed as if the very idea exhausted and perhaps saddened her. “Ayeee, they say that’s true for you, it’s true for You Choose, and it’s true for me. Yep, it’s true for the whole steaming, rotten lot of us.” Mina let this sink in for a moment. “Like that breath you just took. In the beginning, a dinosaur breathed that breath. Then a tree. Then an ant. Then you, now me. And maybe it’ll be You Choose next. Or maybe that breath will sink to the bottom of the ocean for one of those blind, ugly fish. Or maybe it will be someone’s dying breath. You see? They say you just borrowed that breath. It wasn’t yours to begin with and it won’t be yours to end with.”
Rick Overlooking Horse’s Tiny, Blown Mind
Nine-year-old Rick Overlooking Horse gave this a lot of thought, and his mind did what all minds have done since time immemorial while dealing with such a boundless, mysterious, obdurate idea. It blew up. Quite literally, it stopped working the way most people’s minds work and it started off on its own kick. And that made Rick Overlooking Horse sleepless and also exalted. It was like angels should have been hovering in the clouds above his head, singing a chorus of sweet surrender. It was like his mind should have been able to trip heavenward on shafts of sunlight. It was like that.
Rick Overlooking Horse tried to come to some resolution about why he had chosen to be born now, at this time. He felt he needed some certainty, something that would make him feel less vulnerable, less miraculous, less unlikely. But in the end, he could not comprehensively solve a single thing about the reasons for his existence. All his answers opened trapdoors to further questions and those in turn revealed yet more trapdoors that slapped open to yet more unanswered questions.
Rick Overlooking Horse concluded that even half believing that you might be part of an incomprehensible, infinite, celestial phenomenon does not necessarily help a person figure out what to do with the bit of more or less graspable earthly life he or she has been given. For a start, he reasoned, a lot of what you do with your life depends on the body you find yourself in. To be born at this time, in this place, a more or less whole and healthy human being, for example, surely brings with it different complications and obligations than being born a more or less whole and healthy nematode more or less any time or place, let’s just say.
“So, here I am,” Rick Overlooking Horse thought, “and here it is: My life, as a human being. What are my choices?”
Well, Mina would argue that just for starters, being born into this world, in this time, was one choice. “You could have chosen not to be born now.” She says this to You Choose whenever he winds himself up to whining pitch, which is often. “You could have been born when you had a chance to hunt buffalo, and live the way of All Our Ancestors. Yeah, and don’t look at me like that, little Tapeworm. You ain’t my doing. You’re your doing.”
Although to be fair to the choosers, Rick Overlooking Horse figured, perhaps almost all choices are mostly illusion given that alm
ost all people seemed to be in a prison of their own making: Mina Overlooking Horse in a prison of resentment; You Choose Watson in a prison of need; some of the More Concerned Immediate Relations in a prison of fear, despair, and/or anger.
And for certain almost all people are in a prison of someone else’s making. The way Rick Overlooking Horse saw it, one go-around, for example, a person might be a Oglala Lakota Oyate with the whole, high plains of buffalo to hunt. Next go-around, he’s a Red Nigger orphan stuck with cornmeal, commodity cheese and beans, and Mina Overlooking Horse for a caretaker. Was that your choice, really?
Mina Overlooking Horse’s Winter Count
Waníyetu. Meaning, from first snowfall to first snowfall.
Wówapi. Meaning, flat surface.
Waníyetu wówapi. Meaning, Winter Count.
The year she got the boys, Mina Overlooking Horse drew two round bundles with wide-open mouths that represented the boys, and a bigger stick figure with a straight-across mouth that represented her. She wrote the number 216, and underneath it, the number 12. Then she drew a line under that, and wrote 204. Every Winter Count after that, the stick figures of the children grew taller and thinner, and the stick figure that represented her grew shorter and fatter. And every year, Mina Overlooking Horse subtracted another 12 months from her sentence as reluctant caretaker.
192, 180, 168, 156
Winter Count after Winter Count.
Winter Count after Winter Countdown.
“Oh, take them from me,” Mina Overlooking Horse had prayed the words aloud one night after both boys had eaten larkspur flowers and spent two days vomiting and sweating and twitching. And then she had slapped her hand over her mouth and held her breath because someone had once told her that in order to think, you had to get oxygen to the brain, and Mina Overlooking Horse did not want to think about what it was she had just said, or why.
Then, in 1952, when they were eight, and Mina Overlooking Horse’s Winter Count was down by 96, the boys were shipped off to Fort Carmichael Indian Boarding School in Oklahoma, where the matron shaved their heads, threw away their beads, and burned their blankets. The following year, Mina Overlooking Horse’s stick-figure boys looked willow thin, and hollow eyed. The figure that represented her had its arms stretched out, as if reaching for someone or perhaps pushing someone away.
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