A voice to the spirits, eh?
Hank wasn’t convinced. For much of his life, he’d watched his grandfather mix healing potions and pastes and perform rituals meant to cleanse evil spirits, draw the soul to peace, or cajole the forces of nature to aid in hunts or harvests. The more his grandfather gave, the more he suffered, and Hank wanted none of that, particularly when he realized the risks involved—when he understood that to cure sometimes meant great sacrifice, as when his grandfather contracted influenza from a family he’d tried to heal and the disease had killed him, taking Hank’s grandmother as well.
But even those fears didn’t lessen Hank’s respect for the powerful acts he had witnessed. When his grandpa had performed his brand of “magic,” Hank had believed as much as anyone else.
“I’m no shaman,” Hank told his folks, because he didn’t feel anointed by any gift save for his physical ones: the chiseled jaw; the strong, straight nose; the width of his shoulders; and his formidable height. If there was anything especially spiritual about him, he figured he hadn’t grown into it yet. “I have to go,” he’d insisted. “I don’t feel like I belong here. I have to find my own way.”
Sad as they were to see him leave, his parents did not stop him.
Hank didn’t fancy living his life the Otoe-Missouria way any more than he wished to live the white man’s way. He just wanted to do things his way.
So that was precisely what he did.
Since opportunities in the theater for men like him—meaning, with colored skin—were virtually nonexistent, he made a conscious decision to get his foot in the door any way that he could. After fruitlessly following leads in local newspapers and countless auditions with often cruel rejections, he met a man in St. Louis who managed a vaudeville troupe that traveled from the upper Midwest down to Texas, performing “Incredibly Entertaining Feats of Daring, Comedy, and Burlesque.” Wilbur Coonts’s Caravan of Wonders, it was called, hardly lacking in hyperbole.
Coonts had advertised for a thespian whose skills extended to wearing greasepaint and a headdress, portraying an Indian chief with a daughter who dances her way into the heart of a lonesome cowboy. Yes, the plot was trite, demeaning even. But Hank would have done just about anything at that point to get a toe in the door.
He showed up in ceremonial buckskin and turquoise beads for the audition, his dark hair braided and embellished with a single eagle feather, although his attire paled in comparison to the costumes worn by dozens of others, all Caucasians in “war paint,” black wigs, and enormous headdresses. Hank watched from the wings as each actor took his place center stage, more than willing to spit out the “you, cowboy, me, Indian,” routine. When it was Hank’s turn, he realized he couldn’t do it. He couldn’t utter the offensive dialogue without getting sick to his stomach. So he shucked the script, instead telling a vivid tale of his shaman grandfather who could make it rain and heal the ill. Then he proceeded to dance in a small circle, chanting words he’d memorized from childhood, doing an abbreviated and exaggerated version of the tribal rain dance.
When he was done, his face dripping sweat, Coonts was on his feet. His face beet red, he dismissed the others and waved Hank down from the stage. Hank braced himself, certain he was about to be browbeaten for refusing to play the part as written or, worse, for the color of his skin.
Instead, Coonts tucked his thumbs into his suspenders, rocking back on his spats.
“That was the bee’s knees, kid,” the stout, balding fellow told him and clapped him on the shoulder, grinning. “Better than anything I could have written.”
“So am I hired?” Hank asked, hardly willing to believe it.
“Something like that, yes.”
Coonts agreed to take him on for two months—at half pay—to see how things went. “As long as I’m happy, you’ll stay,” his new boss told him, and they sealed the deal with a handshake. Hank got his own act, aptly labeled “Chief Littlefoot’s Authentic Rain-Making Ceremony,” portraying an Indian shaman in the vaudeville show.
Of course, the main thrust of Hank’s performance was making it rain in the theater, a bit that was full of pageantry and intensity, as well as smoke and mirrors. While stagehands worked the lights and sound to simulate the crackle of lightning and pounding of thunder, Hank shuffled in a circle on the stage, wearing buckskin and a full headdress—Coonts insisted on the latter—chanting the words he’d memorized from hearing his grandfather utter them time and again during droughts on the reservation. With the magic of dry ice and fans and an improvised sprinkler system rigged up above, soon a misty rain began to drizzle onto the tarp-covered boards. The audience ate it up, often giving him a standing ovation, even though they had to know the spectacle was merely sleight of hand, not a miracle.
“But you do make it rain, Hank,” Nadya Celeste, the magician’s doe-eyed assistant, told him one evening when he took her out for coffee at a twenty-four-hour diner after the show, requiring a shared umbrella as a light shower fell upon them from the evening sky. “Haven’t you noticed it’s always wet after your performance?”
“No,” Hank told her, because he hadn’t thought anything of it, not until she had pointed it out.
But when he began to pay attention, he realized she was right: every time without fail, no matter how clear the night was to begin with, it would be raining outside when the theater emptied. Sometimes it was no more than a drizzle; at other times, water came down in buckets. And it never seemed to reach more than a few blocks beyond the venue.
“It could be coincidence,” he suggested, but Nadya didn’t agree.
“What if it’s not? Maybe what you do is more than an act. Maybe you have a real gift,” she said, echoing what his father had once told him.
Hank didn’t want to admit that he felt something quite beyond the ordinary when he did the rain dance, a kind of current rushing through him, a sense of being outside himself and part of the air around him. If he’d tried to explain that to Nadya, she would’ve thought he was insane.
So he just smiled and squeezed her gloved hand, thinking the only gift he truly wanted was to make enough money to buy some land, build a house, and ask her to marry him. Then he could wake up to her dimples and wide eyes every morning, and he’d never have to deal with Wilbur Coonts again.
When his probationary eight weeks had passed, Hank went to see Coonts and asked for more money, and not just the usual rate. He knew by the ads Coonts had been running in the newspapers that “Chief Littlefoot’s Authentic Rain-Making Ceremony” was the show’s biggest draw.
He even lied and told Coonts he’d had an offer from a rival vaudeville troupe, a remark that instantly quieted the man. His boss rubbed fat fingers together before nodding his double chin. “So long as the box office keeps coming in, I’ll pay you what you ask. But the public’s a fickle bunch, Littlefoot, and if they tire of you, your check will be the first I cut in half.”
Hank was hardly worried about the crowds losing interest. In fact, they only seemed to swell, and Coonts added shows in Omaha and Springfield, Leavenworth and Salina, Peoria and Des Moines. Every night, Hank found more folks standing outside the venues, farmers in coveralls with grim faces who waited for him in the damp after the theater lights dimmed.
“We haven’t had rain in two months,” one would step forward and say. “My crops are turning to dust. I’ll give you whatever I’ve got if you’ll come do your tricks on my land and make the sky loosen up.”
At first, Hank wasn’t sure what to do with this newfound attention. He would mumble, “I’m sorry, but I can’t help you,” and hurry off with one hand clutching Nadya and the other his umbrella.
Then the letters started arriving, at first in a trickle and then in a flood so great that Coonts turned red-faced, stuck his thumbs inside his vest, and blustered at him, “For God’s sake, Littlefoot, if you can make it rain outside the theaters every damned night we have a show, don’t you figure you can give these poor bastards a shot?”
But the the
ater was the theater, Hank knew. Playing God with people’s lives was something else entirely.
“I can’t do it,” he said, shaking his head, because he wasn’t his grandfather. He hadn’t even stayed true to his native roots. If his father realized what he was doing, he would doubtless be ashamed. Because what Hank did was pretend. He didn’t know how to talk to the Great Spirit, to any spirit, not really. His gift was mimicry, not magic.
Then even Nadya began to nudge him, stroking his hair and whispering in his ear, “Aren’t you curious, my sweet? Don’t you want to see if you can make the sky listen to you speak?” She touched the teardrop-shaped mark on his bare shoulder. “If you can’t do it, then at least you’ll know for certain, yes?”
“But what if I flop? What if they see I’m a sham?” he said, because onstage he performed; he didn’t control the weather. The fact that it was damp outside when he finished could be no more than dumb luck or coincidence.
“The only way you can know is to try,” she told him.
“What if they put their faith in me, and I fail?” he asked.
She merely shrugged and smiled, assuring him, “Then I will love you still, no matter what.”
So Hank bit the bullet and agreed to perform a ceremonial dance on a farm outside Jefferson City, Missouri, when Wilbur Coonts’s Caravan of Wonders decamped there for a week of gigs at a theater in the state capital.
Though a solitary cloud hung over the downtown that evening, spitting out a hint of moisture as Hank left through the stage door and got into a waiting pickup with a farmer named Bert Peckinpaw, once they were a couple blocks beyond the venue, the sky was clear and full of stars.
The road out to the farm was all gravel and as bumpy as a camel’s back. With the window rolled down to let in the hot breeze, Hank felt covered by a layer of silt by the time they arrived.
“Can I get you anything, Chief Littlefoot?” Peckinpaw asked once they’d exited the truck.
Hank cringed at being called “Chief” outside his vaudeville act. It felt downright sacrilegious. “No, just leave me be, and I’ll find you when I’m done.”
It was a sultry June night and dry as a bone, the ground so parched cracks ran through the dirt like empty veins. Hank did ask Peckinpaw to keep his kin and any curiosity seekers away. He hadn’t even wanted Nadya to come along because he was too nervous.
Why was he even doing this? To prove something to himself? To see if he really had the gift as his father insisted, or conversely to prove his father wrong?
Whatever the reason, it was too late to turn back. Hank stood in the parched grass near the anemic-looking stalks of corn spread out before him in a gently undulating wall. He felt the scant breeze on his face and gazed up at the stars, knowing he had no props to make the weather change. He had only faith in himself, which was hardly unshakable. He hoped the Great Spirit would be generous and not dismissive of him for using the rain dance in his act for entertainment. If he could not provoke the thunder and lightning, he would fail, and that would be that.
With a sigh, Hank touched the single eagle feather woven into his hair to symbolize the wind and then the leather cord with the turquoise beads tied around his throat, the stones a symbol of the rain. Finally, he spread out his arms and took in a deep breath.
“Grandfather,” he said quietly, “if you’re in the clouds watching me now, please, don’t laugh and think me a fool. I’d appreciate a little help, if you’re not too busy. I just want to know if I have this great blessing my father talked about. If it’s true, I need to use it.”
The stars merely winked at him, and the warm air rustled through the field, setting the stalks of maize to whispering; but he heard no laughter, no sign that they were mocking him.
With a grunt, he began to shuffle, his feet light as they moved in a circle, stirring up dust from the dry earth. He chanted words he knew well, ones he’d heard in the ceremonies of his childhood, calling upon the spirits of the land and the heavens to bring the rain.
Hank fell into a trancelike rhythm as he danced, his thoughts becoming one with his intuition; his blood flowing fiercely through his veins, charging the air around him; his heartbeat pulsing outward as though speaking the language of the earth and the stars. A fierce connection gripped him, his soul attaching to the sky and the dirt; electricity surged through his limbs the more he moved, until he sensed something bigger than himself bubbling up. Beneath his doeskin moccasins, the parched ground trembled.
Then the sky darkened and crackled, rippling with the boom of thunder, powered by flashes of lightning so bright that Hank saw the silver bolts through his eyelids even when he closed his eyes. But when he opened wide and glanced up, there were no clouds in sight, nothing to obscure the same stars he’d glimpsed when he’d first arrived. The light and the noise may as well have been stage tricks.
It was as before: barely a tepid breeze to stir the heat, the chirp of crickets, and the anxious throb of his own heartbeat.
But nothing more.
Whatever caused the rain to come outside the venues when he performed—if he had anything to do with that at all—seemed not to be working here. Perhaps his only gift was in making a fool of himself.
Drenched in sweat, his dark hair stuck to his skull and neck, Hank gathered up his things and trudged back to Bert Peckinpaw’s house. The whole family seemed to be waiting on the porch and each face looked crestfallen when Hank said to them, “I’m sorry. I did my best, but it didn’t work.”
“It’s all right.” The farmer shrugged. “I figured it was a long shot. So what do I owe you? It’s only fair considering you came all the way out here for nothing.”
All the way out here for nothing.
The words stung, but Hank kept his chin up. “You don’t owe me a dime,” he said and climbed in the cab of the pickup truck, hanging his arm out the window and feeling miserable as they headed back into town, to the rat-trap hotel where Coonts had put up the troupe.
They’d barely gotten a half mile down the dusty road when Hank felt the first plop of moisture on the back of his hand. And then another and another after that.
He turned his gaze toward the windshield and stared as drops began to quickly splatter, gathering force and turning larger until they were caught in one hell of a downpour.
“Holy cow!” Hank whooped and stuck both hands out the window, the wind rushing at him as he caught the rain in his palms and wiped the damp on his face. It shocked his system, feeling the wet, knowing it was real and that he was very likely responsible.
I did it, he said to himself again and again. I did it!
“Is that what I think it is?” Bert Peckinpaw said and started breathing roughly, like a man about to hyperventilate. “I can’t goddamn see,” he cursed, but he had a smile on his face as he pulled hard on the steering wheel, jerking the truck off to the shoulder of the road and hitting the brakes.
Hank threw his palms against the dashboard, fighting to stay in his seat, both of them breathing hard once they’d stopped. And still the rain sluiced down upon the truck, the steady patter sounding like a tap dance on the roof.
For a long moment, they just sat there in the truck’s cab: Bert staring at the blur of the windshield, his noisy breaths steaming up the glass, and Hank shaking his head, equally stunned by the turn of events.
Then the farmer turned to Hank and blurted out, “My God, Chief, you did it! You goddamned did it! I knew you could. I knew it!” And he leaned over toward Hank, pulling him into a bear hug and patting his back so hard Hank felt the wind knocked out of him.
Finally the rain slowed to a drizzle, enough so that Bert could drive him safely back to his hotel in town. As Hank got out of the truck, the farmer said, “I won’t ever forget this, Littlefoot. I’ll be around the stage door tomorrow to pay you back.”
“You don’t need to give me anything,” Hank told him, so drained that it was all he could do to shut the door and wave as Bert drove off. He dragged himself up the steps and through
the dingy lobby to the second-floor room he’d been secretly sharing with Nadya. He saw the light beneath the door before he unlocked it and stepped inside.
“You did it, didn’t you?” she said from the bed, where she sat, propped up against the pillows. “You made it rain. Geez Louise, you made it pour!”
“I guess I did,” he replied and gazed down at the water spots on his buckskin, pulling the damp feather from his hair. He got his shirt off and swayed, suddenly dizzy, as the life seemed to drain from his limbs.
Nadya sprang from the mattress and grabbed him, holding him up as she walked him to the bed. “Are you all right?”
“I don’t know,” he mumbled, unable to focus. The room blurred before his eyes as he leaned back against the pillows. “I’m so tired,” he whispered. “I feel like I’ve had my guts sucked out.”
“Hank, are you okay? You’re burning up. Hank?”
He thought he heard her saying his name, imagined he felt her cool hand upon his brow, but he fast sank away into nothingness.
As he slept, he had the most vivid dreams: of an eagle whose wings beat like thunder against the sky and whose yellow eyes shot bolts of lightning to the ground. He walked through a field of tall grass lit afire to find his grandfather awaiting him, dressed like a farmer in denim and plaid, feathers braided into dove-white hair, smiling at him, his weathered face cracking. “This is not a game,” he heard him say. “Such power is not to be trifled with. Take it seriously, young one. Do not become greedy because of it. Know that it will take its toll on you until you have no more to give. Before it does, walk away.”
The Truth About Love and Lightning Page 7