by James Welch
Long Knife kicked one of the big rear tires and nodded. I put the cap on the water bag and hung it on the door handle. Lame Bull had his back to us. He was grinning at the field full of bales. I could tell.
“Look, you give me a ride back to town and I’ll buy you a beer,” Long Knife said.
I avoided his eyes. I didn’t want to be his ally.
Long Knife turned to Lame Bull: “But look at my hands—they’re cut and bleeding. Do you want me to get infected?”
Lame Bull refused to look at his hands. “I’ll pay your doctor bills when we’re through.”
“My head is running in circles with this heat.”
“I’ll pay for your head too.”
“We better get started,” I said, but no one moved. I sat down on the running board.
“Look at my hands.”
I looked at his hands. It was true that they were raw from throwing around the bales. One finger was actually cut.
“You did that last night on one of those movie magazines,” I said. “Besides, you should have wore gloves like the rest of us.”
Long Knife folded his arms and leaned against the rear fender of the pickup. It was clear that he wasn’t going to work anymore, no matter what happened. We were wasting time and I wanted to get the field cleared. It was the last field.
“Listen to me, Lame Bull—let’s let him go. You and me’ll work twice as hard and when it’s done, it’s done.”
My logic seemed to impress Long Knife. “Listen to him, Lame Bull.”
Lame Bull didn’t listen. He wasn’t listening to anybody. I could tell that, as his eyes swept the field, he was counting bales, converting them into cows and the cows into calves and the calves into cash.
“You can’t keep me here against my will. You have to pay me and let me go back to town.”
“Listen, Lame Bull—you have to pay him,” I said.
“You’re damn right,” Long Knife said.
“And let him go back to town.”
“You tell him, boy.”
“He ain’t a slave, you know.”
There was a pause. I could see the highway from where I sat, but there were no cars. Beyond the highway, the Little Rockies seemed even tinier than their name.
Without turning around, Lame Bull pulled out his sweaty hand-carved wallet, took out a bill, crumpled it into a ball and threw it over his head. It landed at our feet.
“That’s more like it,” Long Knife said, smoothing out the bill. It was a twenty. “You going to give me a ride, boy?”
“I don’t have a car.”
“You could take the pickup here.”
“It isn’t mine. It belongs to Teresa,” I said.
“But she’s your mother.” Long Knife was getting desperate.
“She’s his wife,” I said, looking at Lame Bull’s back. “Why don’t you ask him for a ride?”
Long Knife thought about this for a minute. He pushed his hat back on his head. “I’ll give you two dollars,” he said, as though he had just offered Lame Bull a piece of the world. “Two dollars and a beer when we get to town.”
The magpie floating light-boned through the afternoon air seemed to stop and jump straight up when Lame Bull’s fist landed. Long Knife’s head snapped back as he slammed into the pickup, his hat flying clear over the box. It was a sucker punch, straight from the shoulder, delievered with a jump to reach the taller man’s nose.
“Jesus Christ almighty!” I said, leaping from the spray of blood.
Lame Bull was not grinning. He picked up Long Knife and threw him in the back of the pickup. “Get in,” he said. I retrieved the hat—the sweatband was already wet—and climbed into the cab. Lame Bull had wrapped a blue bandanna around his hand. With shifting gears and whining motor, the pickup shot off across the fields toward the highway.
“You might have to get a tetanus shot for that hand,” I said, looking through the back window at Long Knife, his face smeared with blood, his little eyes staring peacefully up at the clear blue sky.
11
Lame Bull didn’t grin much after that; at least, not as a rule. For one thing, his hand had become infected; for another, he had decided that it was improper for a property owner to grin so much, as it just caused trouble with the hired hands, who felt they could get away with anything so long as the boss grinned.
“That’s another thing the matter with these Indians.” He nodded gravely.
Ferdinand Horn nodded gravely.
“They get too damn tricky for their own good.”
Ferdinand Horn’s wife nodded gravely.
“On the other hand, where would we be without Long Knife? He’s not a bad worker and he used to be a champion—saddle bronc.”
The rocking chair in the living room squeaked.
“By God, you should have seen that hat fly!” A grin flickered across Lame Bull’s face.
I shook my head and grinned.
Ferdinand Horn grinned. His wife grinned. Teresa did not—she hated fighting.
“Yep.” Ferdinand Horn turned to me: “I saw your woman down in Malta today.”
“What woman could that be, Ferdinand?”
“What woman he says … no, it was her all right. She was having herself quite a time.” He grinned.
“Clean over the pickup—thought his head was still in it for a minute there.” Lame Bull poured himself another glass of beer from one of the quarts.
“Were her brothers around?”
“Just that one—that little guy …”
“Whoo! They were having some time for themselves,” Ferdinand Horn’s wife said. Her small brown eyes glistened behind the turquoise-frame glasses.
“Maybe I ought to go get her.” I glanced at Teresa.
“Oh, she can take care of herself. At least that white man thinks so …” She also glanced at Teresa.
“Hell, Long Knife ain’t such a bad guy,” continued Lame Bull.
“The one she was riding with. They had her brother in the backseat but that didn’t seem to bother them any.” She took a sip of wine.
Lame Bull’s hand was in a sling made from a plaid shirt. The more he drank the more the sling pulled his neck down, until he was talking to the floor. The more he talked to the floor the more he nodded. It was as though the floor were talking back to him, grave words that kept him nodding gravely. Teresa sat beside him, glaring at the bandaged hand.
“I guess I ought to go get her,” I said.
“If only he’d learn to keep his mouth shut. I wouldn’t have cut my knuckles up …”
“These days it’s hard for a man to get good help,” Ferdinand Horn said. “You run into these assholes who don’t want to work.”
His wife dabbed at her nose with a pink handkerchief, then tucked it up her sleeve. “You should talk—with your payroll.” She was impressed with Lame Bull, the property owner.
The property owner nodded to the floor.
The rocking chair squeaked three times.
“How you doing, Mama?” Teresa called into the living room.
I settled back in my chair beside the refrigerator. It was a hot day—even the flies sat heavy on the windowsills. One was wading through a puddle of wine on the table. Behind it a row of bottles glistened in the shadows of the kitchen. I scratched my knee.
“Are you going to go after her?” Teresa asked. She was wearing a pair of slacks and cowboy shirt, white anklets and sneakers. Her hair was pulled straight back from her forehead into a loose ponytail. Although never beautiful, she was a woman who had grown handsome, more so each year—First Raise had been the first to notice this trend. We were all astonished, even Teresa, but she accepted it. Her face remained unwrinkled; the skin over the bridge of her nose remained shiny and taut. Her hair was still black, almost blue in sunlight. Perhaps it was because her appea
rance hadn’t really changed that she had become handsome. Her figure had always been stout, but it had not gone to fat. Her knuckles had not become big, though they had darkened from years of sun and garden dirt, and her fingernails were still long and fine, slightly curved over her fingertips. Perhaps it was in the eyes that she had become handsome. They seemed to grow darker, more liquid, as the years passed.
Ferdinand Horn stood up and drained his glass, then walked outside to take a leak.
Lame Bull nodded gravely to the floor.
The fly had reached the other side of the puddle of wine. First he cleaned his head with his front legs, then his wings with his back legs. He rubbed his legs together and fell over. A steady buzzing filled the room as the fly vibrated on his back. Another fly buzzed up and down the windowpane by the washbasin, then dropped to the sill. Lame Bull poured Ferdinand Horn’s wife another drink. She shrieked as the wine overflowed the glass and stained the butterflies on her wrinkled print dress. She grinned at me, her eyes glittering behind the turquoise-frame glasses: “Are you going to go after her?”
I nodded gravely to the floor.
Lame Bull let out a great laugh and fell over backwards in his chair.
12
She was Cree and not worth a damn. Not worth going after. My grandmother, before she quit talking, had told me how Crees never cared for anybody but themselves. Crees drank too much and fought with other Indians in bars, though they had never fought on the battlefield. She told me how Crees were good only for the white men who came to slaughter Indians. Crees had served as scouts for the mounted soldiers and had learned to live like them, drink with them, and the girls had opened their thighs to the Long Knives. The children of these unions were doubly cursed in the eyes of the old woman. So she sat in the rocker and plotted ways to kill the girl who was thought to be my wife.
I lay in bed and listened to the old lady snoring in the living room. She slept in a cot beside the oil stove. Three army blankets and a star quilt covered her frail body.
Though almost a century old, almost blind and certainly toothless, she wanted to murder the girl, to avenge those many sins committed by generations of Crees. Her hands, small and black as a magpie’s feet, rested limply in her lap, palms up, as she rocked the days away in the brightly lit living room—the only moving part of her her feet pushing against the floor to send the rocking chair squeaking back, then forward, and back again. If the girl had thought that her life was in danger, she would have laughed to see my mother hold the tiny body over a bedpan, to hear the small tinkling of an old lady as she sighed with relief.
This woman who was Teresa’s mother had told me many things, many stories from her early life. My brother, Mose, had been alive at the time when, one winter evening as we sat at the foot of her rocker, she revealed a life we never knew, this woman who was our own kin. She told us of her husband, Standing Bear, a Blackfeet (like herself) from the plains west of here, just below the Rocky Mountains. She was a girl, barely in her teens, when Standing Bear bartered with her father, a man of some renown, a man with many scars and horses. Her husband gave her father two ponies and three robes for the young girl. The reason she came so cheap, she said, was because her father had already given away four daughters. One of these daughters was Standing Bear’s second wife, so she became the third and sat between his older wives and his daughters. His sons sat on the other side of him. When guests came for meals, she sat even further away from him, but she was happy to be the wife of such a man. Sometimes she slept with him, though he was almost thirty years older than she was. On those nights, beneath the woolly robes, she snuggled against his large body and sang softly in his ear. He was good, gentle and, like her father, a chief. She sang to him.
It came as no surprise when the Long Knives rode onto the plains up near the mountains. Camps were dismantled, the tepee poles serving now as travois frames to carry supplies, furniture and old people. The dogs panted beside the horses, trying to catch what little shade the larger animals offered. Women and children walked the long sagebrush miles, in the heat, in the dust the travois kicked up, behind a small band of mounted warriors.
Fish had warned them. Fish, the medicine man. The Long Knives will be coming soon, he said, for now that the seasons change there is a smell of steel in the air. A week later the soldiers did come, but the camp was abandoned: everything had been taken and the only signs that a community had existed were the tepee rings and fireplaces and a few sticks which had been the racks that held the drying meat. It was a barren scene that greeted the soldiers.
It had been in the fall. According to our grandmother, two bands had come together at a campsite beside a snaking vein of water, flanked by stands of willow and lodgepole pines, that would become known as Little Badger. To the south, Heart Butte served as a lookout and fortress if necessary, and to the west, the great mountains with their snow caps and granite faces above the timberline.
The two bands had decided to winter together and settled in to wait for the first wind out of the north. The days remained hot but nights came colder. Fires dotted the campsite, and in the middle, around a larger fire, men sat and talked and played stick game late into the night. A feast celebrated their coming together, and for three days the old lady, then a girl, wailed with the women around the perimeter of jogging hunters. When the men rested, she owl-danced and threw “snakes” with other girls. A dust cloud hung over the campsite until the early hours of morning.
It was on the third morning that Fish made his prophetic announcement. A week later, the scouts rode down from the butte, their horses lathered and out of breath.
When the old lady had related this story, many years ago, her eyes were not flat and filmy; they were black like a spider’s belly and the small black hands drew triumphant pictures in the air.
The bands split up. Heavy Runner’s group went north, following the east slope of the mountains into Canada. Standing Bear’s people followed Little Badger, then Birch Creek east to the Marias River, which twisted through the hot dry plains until it turned south to enter the Missouri. They traveled east and slightly north of the morning sun until they made camp in the Bear Paw mountains. From here they made their way north to the Milk River valley, where they put in one of the hardest winters known to the old lady. Many of the band starved to death that winter. Standing Bear himself died in a futile raid on the Gros Ventres, who were also camped in the valley. When the survivors led his horse into camp, his eldest son killed it and the family lived off the meat for many days. The horse was killed because Standing Bear would need it in the other world; they ate it because they were starving.
My grandmother was not yet twenty when she became a widow. With gravity—and we had no reason to doubt her—she told us she had been a beautiful girl, slender, with flawless brown skin and long hair greased and shiny as the wing of a raven. But because she was the widow of Standing Bear, a great leader, the young men of the tribe shied away from her, and the women treated her as an outcast. She possessed a dark beauty, a gift the women envied, though they must have laughed at her willowy body’s barrenness, for she had produced no children, had slept with Standing Bear only to whisper her songs.
Now the old lady snored in her cot on the other side of the wall. The house lay in the shadow of a round moon. From somewhere down the valley three or four coyotes began to bark, sharp and high-pitched like puppies. A sudden breeze made the shade flap against the window. Naked beneath a single sheet, I thought of the many nights I had lain awake, listening to those coyotes, crickets, the old lady’s night sounds and my own heartbeat.
I never remembered my real grandfather’s face those nights, though I was four years old when he died. The old lady never mentioned him, perhaps for fear the image of Standing Bear would die in me. For whatever reason, she remained a widow for twenty-five years before she met a half-white drifter named Doagie, who had probably built this house where now the old lady snored and I
lay awake thinking that I couldn’t remember his face. They lived together, this daughter of one chief, wife of another, and the half-breed drifter, though I found out that they never married and only tolerated each other. Teresa was their only offspring. And it was questioned whether Doagie was her real father or not. The woman who had informed me made signs that he wasn’t.
A low rumble interrupted my thoughts. I sat up and looked about the dark room. When I was young I had shared it with Mose and his stamp collection and his jar full of coins. In one corner against the wall stood a tall cupboard with glass doors. Its shelves held mementos of a childhood, two childhoods, two brothers, one now dead, the other servant to a memory of death. Mementos. I slipped from beneath the sheet and tiptoed to the cupboard. Two brown duck eggs lay in a nest of hay. Albums full of stamps lay beside the nest and, on a lower shelf, a rusty jackknife that we had found in an Indian grave pointed solemnly at a badger skull. Shell casings from different-caliber guns circled neatly within a larger circle of arrowheads. In the center a green metal soldier crouched, his face distorted in a grimace of anger and his rifle held high above his head.
Another rumble, closer this time, rattled the glass doors. The jar that had held the coins was still there. I picked it up and walked over to the window. In the moonlight, I could just read the message inked on a piece of adhesive tape: “DO NOT TOUCH! THIS MEANS YOU! M.” I replaced the empty jar, then walked out through the living room, past the old lady’s cot, through the kitchen and out the shed door. I peed on a clump of weeds beside the fence. The smell of sage was heavy in the wind. The tops of the thunderheads shone silver-white in the moon’s glare. Below, the blackness was rent by jagged flashes that lit up the western horizon. In the valley to the east, I could see the silhouettes of the cottonwoods that marked the curving river. The coyotes had quit barking. It was going to rain.