Quiet Until the Thaw

by Alexandra Fuller

  Still, no one on Earth knows the answer to the ultimate question: “But then what?”

  Eugene “Gene” Cernan stepped onto the lunar surface in the Taurus-Littrow lunar valley, and was hit by the full force of the sun. He said, “Oh, my golly. Unbelievable. Unbelievable. But is it bright in the sun.” He sounded both ecstatic and blinded. But also as if his voice had been put in a tin and left without air for a long time.

  As Eugene “Gene” Cernan was leaving the moon, he said, “We leave as we came,” which seemed an odd thing to say. Like saying, “Our having been here is the same as our not having been here.” Or, “We want nothing more from this experience than this experience.” But, if you kept listening, he kept talking. In fact, there were whole other clauses to his sentence. “And, God willing, as we shall return, with peace and hope for all mankind.”

  Perhaps it was too much to say.

  And maybe he didn’t say it well.

  He didn’t sound pensive, as he might have were he in a movie of his life, instead of in his actual life. He didn’t sound wistful, like it was the beginning of every wonderful thing. Like we’d see ourselves the way he did—mere ideas of energy on a breathtakingly beautiful and utterly improbable planet—and would therefore fall too in love with ourselves to keep up the killing.

  Like now we’d seen, and now we couldn’t unsee the truth.

  Like we’d change our ways, and do better.

  Instead, Eugene “Gene” Cernan sounded trounced, as if now he’d actually, really seen, and now couldn’t unsee the truth. It was as if he knew there and then that it was going to take something more than human intelligence to get us out of the trouble we were in. We would never change our ways. We couldn’t figure out on our own what better was.

  Did the White Man Take Smallpox to the Moon, and Other Good Obvious Questions

  There were some Indians on the Rez who paid attention to the fact that there was a mission to the moon, and that among the astronauts was a White Man expressing hope and peace for all mankind.

  But what were you supposed to make of a White Man on the moon when there had been violence and nothing but violence on Indian land for so long? And now the place was burning up, it was on fire. You’d hear something like that, from a White Man like Eugene “Gene” Cernan on the moon of all places, you’d shake your head and get on with the war at hand.

  Those poor aliens don’t have a clue what’s about to happen to them.

  “Burn the blankets they give you!”

  Someone shot fourteen rounds from a 1951 AK-47 assault rifle into the air and howled a great, terrible, heartfelt war cry.

  And so it went on, through the fall and into winter, and past the longest darkness of the season, when the constellation of stars known as the Racetrack was at its zenith, on and on, into the deep cold nights of the Moon of Hard Times.

  Oh, All My Lakota Relations, that winter was wicked for its violence.

  The Second Siege of Wounded Knee

  On the morning of February 20, 1973, Rick Overlooking Horse collected up the old buffalo hide, a small, black, three-legged pot, a sack of beans, a pound of buffalo jerky, and a bag of cornmeal. He roped a filly out of the Ugly Red Stud’s herd, put a headstall on her, threw his provisions across her withers, and then vaulted onto her back. Then he rode past the bluffs, past Porcupine Butte toward Wounded Knee hill until the sun was low in the western sky.

  When he came to the creek, he crossed it, cut above the willows and through the snow-crusted sagebrush meadow, on toward the cemetery and the little white church. Once he reached the top of the hill, he dismounted and set the filly loose to forage on whatever she could find. With the last of the day’s thin light, he made a snow wall against the wind. After that, he coaxed a low fire into life. He melted snow in the pot. Before the cold had time to settle in his bones, Rick Overlooking Horse ate a little cornmeal and salt. Then he wrapped himself in the old buffalo bull’s hide and slept.

  By the end of a week, other Indians from around Pine Ridge and other reservations around the country had joined Rick Overlooking Horse. They silently drifted into the small, makeshift camp in groups of three or four, then dozens, and scores, and finally hundreds.

  The Indians vowed to stage a peaceful standoff at Wounded Knee until further notice. They made three demands: The removal of the tribal chairman; the restoration of treaty negotiations with the U.S. government; and the return of Hé Sapa to the Oceti Sakowin Oyate, to the People of the Seven Council Fires.

  Hé Sapa

  According to the Oglala Lakota Oyate, and the standard theories of cosmology, there is no center to the universe. It is everywhere. So the Lakota are not wrong to say, “This here, where we are, is the center of our sacred lands.” Here, right here, where since 1941 there have been the outsized faces of four American presidents carved into the granite batholith.

  Hé Sapa. Meaning, Black Hills.

  The Length of a Siege

  A siege makes a single day appear to last longer than the time it takes for the sun to break over the prairie hills, span the sky, then vanish behind the pine bluffs. When you’re doing it, a siege is more than a full-time job. It’s a full-time life.

  Quite aside from the issue at hand, people cannot divorce themselves from hunger, or from the need to relieve their bowels, or from exhaustion. There is nothing romantic about being cold, weary, and frightened. It’s easy to forget this about social movements. People don’t cause chaos, foment rebellion, and use their own bodies as a form of stubborn protest because they have nothing else to do. People do these things because they have nothing else to lose.

  Find wood, cut wood, tend fire. Melt snow, make food. Mud takes over and is in everything. It’s in the skin of the people, and in their clothing. It’s in the pressing, public ache of bowels shot through with fire.

  Oh, All My Ancestors.

  How much strength must one people have?

  And for how long must they have it?

  It’s excessively wearying, All My Relations, excessively wearying.

  The End of the Siege

  The siege went on and on and on.

  Days rolled into weeks.

  Each day grew a little longer, by which I mean, not only did the days feel as if they started sooner and ended later—the makeshift latrines more overflowing, the food thinner—but also they were literally longer. The sun lingered in the sky for a moment more each day. The redwing blackbirds began massing in the willows along the creek. The snow began to recede up the south slopes of the cemetery and the smell of tree sap ran sharp in the air.

  A journalist in Rapid City got wind of the siege and the local media descended. Rick Overlooking Horse broke his customary silence. “Tribal violence is a corruption to the Oglala Lakota Oyate, and what is a corruption around one of our Seven Fires becomes a corruption to all.” Although it was mostly the photograph of his war-melted face that made the headline stand out: “WOUNDED VIETNAM VETERAN SPEAKS OUT FOR INDIAN RIGHTS.”

  A few dozen United States Marshals were sent in to the Rez.

  In the United States, domestic war looks a lot like a foreign invasion.

  It doesn’t hurt that the enemies of the federation are almost always Black or Brown, except for the occasional nonbreeding pairs of pro-peace homosexual Communists or anorexic vegan lesbians. Or those South American–influenced Jesuits, with their freakishly calm attitude toward physical violence, although they’re also typically nonbreeding, and most popes can be counted on to frown upon them.

  You Choose What Son strutted behind the marshals with a bullhorn, going on and on about rule of law until someone on the Indian side popped a bullet in his direction. Then he screamed, dropped his bullhorn, and ducked for cover. Which was just as well for him. In the next hours, days, and weeks, half a million rounds of ammunition were exchanged. “Those AIM terrorists are the only major Indian problem,” You Choos
e said. “They’re just bums trying to get their braids and mugs in the press.”

  On the sixty-ninth day of the siege, Rick Overlooking Horse sat with the other Elders. After two days of silent contemplation, prayer, and discussion, they decided a truce should be called. And on the morning of the seventy-first day of the siege, Rick Overlooking Horse scattered the last of his tobacco for the crossing-over spirits. Then he stood up, and he walked toward the guns of the U.S. Marshals like he didn’t care if he lived or died. The filly trotted after him, enjoying moving over decent ground again after such a long time on the frozen mud.

  Rick Overlooking Horse roped her then, and when she’d stopped fighting his capture, he offered the filly to a U.S. Marshal. “Take her,” he said.

  No one moved.

  Rick Overlooking Horse said, “Wacantognaka.”

  He flicked the end of the rope at the U.S. Marshal.

  The marshal swallowed. “Stand down, man!”

  Rick Overlooking Horse dropped the rope, turned his back on the U.S. Marshal, and walked away, knowing that for as far as a crow could fly there was a rifle trained between the blades of his shoulders.

  He noticed the ground was soft now, vigorous shoots of grass pushing up here and there where mud had forced an early melt.

  He heard a redwing blackbird trill from the willows.

  The air was raw with the smell of melting manure.

  In late May agents from the U.S. Department of Justice arrested the leaders of the Siege of Wounded Knee and charged them with incitement to riot. A month later, a judge in Minnesota dismissed the case.

  By the time Rick Overlooking Horse returned to the meadow, it was mid-June.

  All the mares had foaled, and he was a full crop rotation behind in the garden.

  For a nation with such a professed obsession about the cost and price of time, the White Man is very careless with the other people’s seasons.

  Meantime, Mean Time

  You Choose What Son knew that Rick Overlooking Horse and the other leaders of the Wounded Knee Siege would go down in history as heroes, and that he would be dismissed as a half-breed sellout and that knowledge gnawed at his soul like a junkyard rat. Sometimes, he wished he’d stood up to that Indian bullet instead of ducking.

  Provided the bullet had only nicked him, of course.

  You Choose riled up his GOONs. He reminded them of all the insults—real and imagined—that might have been aimed in their direction. He provided them with malt liquor for their veins and gasoline for their cars. Then he made sure to have a front seat to enjoy the conflagration.

  People took to boarding up their windows night and day to stop stray bullets, preferring to live in perpetual darkness rather than to risk flying glass. Schools across the Rez closed, and children were sent home. The only gas station on the Rez was set on fire, and the blaze roared for days. It seemed as if You Choose What Son was determined to get his revenge on every man, woman, and child on the Rez.

  You Choose What Son’s Fit of Rage

  You Choose What Son’s clay-splattered pickup roared into the meadow, careening over the season’s first snow and sending the ravens and magpies tumbling skyward.

  “I’m going to get you, you hear me. You’re nothing but a rotted-out, burned-up old Indian.”

  Rick Overlooking Horse didn’t bother to look up. He hung up the last of his shirts and went inside his teepee.

  He could hear You Choose revving his engine and kicking up mud, screaming and shouting. His pickup sounded like it was about to blow a piston, and he himself sounded drunk.

  “You’re a freak,” You Choose What Son shrieked. “You should see yourself. Look in a mirror sometime!”

  Rick Overlooking Horse burned sage and smudged his hair with smoke. Then he lay on the buffalo hide with his hands over his chest.

  “I’m not done here,” You Choose was shouting. “I’m gonna get ya! You melted-down old cripple. I’m gonna finish ya!”

  Everyone knows that for rage to die it has to be left alone in the middle of nowhere, on stony, dry ground. Although the bigger the rage, the longer it will take to die, and the more likely someone will come along and feed it before it is quite dead.

  Meantime, rage will get by on scraps. And rage has no problem lying dormant for generations, fasting, if need be.

  Which is why forgiveness is such a trick. What events do we forgive? And who decides, lest we forget? Forget what, and whom?

  And what if forgiveness looks like all energies of destruction sucking suddenly inward, so that instead of a naked, screaming girl running from a rain of ruin the Time magazine photographer captures images of a villain unclothed and burning?

  Time, being what it is, it’s only a matter of time.

  You Choose What Son’s Very Vigorous Rage

  In any case, memory wobbles and floods. And how we remember has largely to do with everything else in our lives. In the case of You Choose, it was as if everything that had happened to him—or failed to happen to him—turned toxic in his brain, flooded his veins with urgency, set fire ants swarming on his skin.

  “I’ll be back for you!” You Choose screamed. He fired a few shots in the air.

  Afterward, he said he could not remember being at Rick Overlooking Horse’s teepee. Or firing off the shots that several people reporting hearing. Nor, he said, could he remember driving back into Pine Ridge village, parking in front of the old tribal government brick house on First Street, pouring gasoline over the contents of the house, and burning the whole place to the ground.

  No one believed him, of course. No one believed he could forget doing that. No one believed him either when he said he could not remember running into the little white Baptist Church on the road to Wanblee with his gun. He shot the windows out, fired several rounds into the walls, ran back to his pickup, spun it around, and drove off.

  You Choose drove off the Rez altogether after that, racing the two miles to Whiteclay, Nebraska. He piled out of his pickup, ran into the first liquor store he could get into, opened fire, and hurt exactly no one. Although there were cases of beer and a few bottles of Old Crow Kentucky Straight Bourbon Whiskey that would never give any more problems.

  Ten years he got for that impressive list of serious offences, with an additional thirty years slapped on for a host of offences he did not commit, but which the district attorney in Rapid City was relieved to be able to pin on someone without the money or connections to defend himself.

  The proprietor of the liquor store was back at the cash register a few hours after You Choose What Son was arrested. His concession to heightened security was to board up the windows, behind the bars. It made the liquor store’s unnatural greenish fluorescent light an almost exact preview of the light found in prisons, which, in fact, it was for a lot of Indians.

  Part

  TWO

  The Great Fertility Crisis of Le-a Brings Plenty

  If, as they say, everything happens for a reason, Le-a Brings Plenty had no choice but to be experiencing her Great Fertility Crisis at the same time as everything else that needed to happen. Which was everything else because, as Le-a had been saying for some months now, she could feel her babies calling to her from the other side.

  “They’re on their way,” she insisted. “I can hear them.”

  She said this spread out in the back room of Squanto’s HUD unit on a bottomed-out sofa, blankets over the window so she couldn’t see the white death driving in from the north. There were three pots of water on the stove, billowing humidity. Another pot contained water from Le-a’s own body. “Well, I’m sure as hell not going out there to freeze my Red Indian ass off,” she said. “You want me to die out there?”

  The storm of 1994 everyone was already calling it, although it was still only January and winter had a few months of fury in it yet. Worst winter in fifty years said the Elders, some of whom could st
ill remember the terrible cold of 1944.

  Le-a patted her belly. “Hey,” she said. “You want to keep me warm, soldier?”

  But Squanto was halfway out the front door, wrapped in all the winter clothes he could find over his uniform. “I’ve got to get to work, Crazy Love.”

  Not that being a security guard at the Lakota Oglala Sioux Tribal Hospital paid like real work. Still, with unemployment the way it was, and not much else to do on the Rez in the winter except attend to Le-a’s Great Fertility Crisis, Squanto was happy to have a reason to leave the HUD unit once a week and wrangle drunks and delusional diabetics at the LOST Hospital.

  “In this weather? Are you out of your mind?”

  “I’ll be back,” Squanto promised.

  “Squanto, babies don’t happen on their own!”

  “I know. I know, Crazy Love. But neither do paychecks.” Squanto blew Le-a a kiss and stepped outside. The wind slammed the door out of his hands.

  “Squanto!”

  The 1965 Chevy Impala

  Squanto hurried out to the 1965 Chevy Impala, held together with bungee cord, duct tape, and tie wire. He lit the candle in the empty five-pound coffee tin on the passenger side floor for heat, prayed the engine into life, scraped a hole in the ice on the windscreen just enough to give him tunnel vision of the road ahead, and jolted out of the yard, down the hill, past Pinky’s Grocery & Supply, letting gravity do the work until he hit the main road.