by Jon E. Lewis
He took a long pull at his cigarette, and his next words came out in a cloud of smoke.
“This particular creation savours somewhat of opera bouffe!”
With severe unconcern the preacher mended the broken thread of his discourse. “Quite an exceptional race in many ways. The Omaha is quite as honest as the white man.”
“That is a truism!” The pencil-pusher drove this observation between the minister’s words like a wedge.
“In his natural state he was much more so,” uninterruptedly continued the preacher; he was used to continuous discourse. “I have been told by many of the old men that in the olden times an Indian could leave his tepee for months at a time, and on his return would find his most valuable possessions untouched. I tell you, gentlemen, the Indian is like a prairie flower that has been transplanted from the blue sky and the summer sun and the pure winds into the steaming, artificial atmosphere of the hothouse! A glass roof is not the blue sky! Man’s talent is not God’s genius! That is why you are looking at a perverted growth.
“Look into an Indian’s face and observe the ruins of what was once manly dignity, indomitable energy, masterful prowess! When I look upon one of these faces, I have the same thought as, when travelling in Europe, I looked upon the ruins of Rome.
“Everywhere broken arches, fallen columns, tumbled walls! Yet through these as through a mist one can discern the magnificence of the living city. So in looking upon one of these faces, which are merely ruins in another sense. They were once as noble, as beautiful as—”
In his momentary search for an eloquent simile, the minister paused.
“As pumpkin pies!” added the newspaper man with a chuckle; and he whipped out his notebook and pencil to jot down his brilliant thought, for he had conceived a very witty “story” which he would pound out for the Sunday edition.
“Well,” said the Agency Physician, finally sucked into the whirlpool of discussion, “it seems to me that there is no room for crowding on either side. Indians are pretty much like white men; liver and kidneys and lungs, and that sort of thing; slight difference in the pigment under the skin. I’ve looked into the machinery of both species and find just as much room in one as the other for a soul!”
“And both will go upward,” added the minister.
“Like different grades of tobacco,” observed the Indian Agent, “the smoke of each goes up in the same way.”
“Just so,” said the reporter; “but let us cut out the metaphysics. I wonder when this magical cuggie is going to begin his humid evolutions. Lamentable, isn’t it, that such institutions as rain prayers should exist on the very threshold of the Twentieth Century?”
“I think,” returned the minister, “that the Twentieth Century has no intention of eliminating God! This medicine-man’s prayer, in my belief, is as sacred as the prayer of any churchman. The difference between Wakunda and God is merely orthographical.”
“But,” insisted the cynical young man from the city, “I had not been taught to think of God as of one who forgets! Do you know what I would do if I had no confidence in the executive ability of my God?”
Taking the subsequent silence as a question, the young man answered: “Why, I would take a day off and whittle one out of wood!”
“A youth’s way is the wind’s way,” quoted the preacher, with a paternal air.
“And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts; but what is all this noise about?” returned the reporter.
A buzz of expectant voices had grown at one end of the oval, and had spread contagiously throughout the elliptical strip of shade. For with slow, majestic steps the medicine-man, Mahowari, entered the enclosure and walked towards the centre. The fierce sun emphasized the brilliancy of the old man’s garments and glittered upon the profusion of trinkets, the magic heirlooms of the medicine-man. It was not the robe nor the dazzling trinkets that caught the eye of one acquainted with Mahowari. It was the erectness of his figure, for he had been bowed with years, and many vertical suns had shone upon the old man’s back since his face had been turned toward the ground. But now with firm step and form rigidly erect he walked.
Any sympathetic eye could easily read the thoughts that passed through the old man’s being like an elixir infusing youth. Now in his feeble years would come his greatest triumph! Today he would sing with greater power than ever he had sung. Wakunda would hear the cry. The rains would come! Then the white men would be stricken with belief!
Already his heart sang before his lips. In spite of the hideous painting of his face, the light of triumph shone there like the reflection of a great fire.
Slowly he approached the circle of drummers who sat in the glaring centre of the ellipse of sunlight. It was all as though the First Century had awakened like a ghost and stood in the very doorway of the Twentieth!
When Mahowari had approached within a yard of the drums, he stopped, and raising his arms and his eyes to the cloudless sky, uttered a low cry like a wail of supplication. Then the drums began to throb with that barbaric music as old as the world; a sound like the pounding of a fever temple, with a recurring snarl like the warning of a rattlesnake.
Every sound of the rejoicing and suffering prairie echoes in the Indian’s drum.
With a slow, majestic bending of the knees and an alternate lifting of his feet, the medicine-man danced in a circle about the snarling drums. Then like a faint wail of winds toiling up a wooded bluff, his thunder song began.
The drone and whine of the mysterious, untranslatable words pierced the drowse of the day, lived for a moment with the echoes of the drums among the surrounding hills, and languished from a whisper into silence. At intervals the old man raised his face, radiant with fanatic ecstasy, to the meridian glare of the sun, and the song swelled to a supplicating shout.
Faster and faster the old man moved about the circle; louder and wilder grew the song. Those who watched from the shade were absorbed in an intense silence, which, with the drowse of the sultry day, made every sound a paradox! The old men forgot their pipes and sat motionless.
Suddenly, at one end of the covering, came the sound of laughter! At first an indefinite sound like the spirit of merriment entering a capricious dream of sacred things; then it grew and spread until it was no longer merriment, but a loud jeer of derision! It startled the old men from the intenseness of their watching. They looked up and were stricken with awe. The young men were jeering this, the holiest rite of their fathers!
Slower and slower the medicine-man danced; fainter and fainter grew the song and ceased abruptly. With one quick glance, Mahowari saw the shattering of his hopes. He glanced at the sky; but saw no swarm of black spirits to avenge such sacrilege. Only the blaze of the sun, the glitter of the arid zenith!
In that one moment, the temporary youth of the old man died out. His shoulders drooped to their wonted position. His limbs tottered. He was old again.
It was the Night stricken heart-sick with the laughter of the Dawn. It was the audacious Present jeering at the Past, tottering with years. At that moment, the impudent, cruel, brilliant youth called Civilisation snatched the halo from the grey hairs of patriarchal Ignorance. Light flouted the rags of Night. A clarion challenge shrilled across the years.
Never before in all the myriad moons had such a thing occurred. It was too great a cause to produce an effect of grief or anger. It stupefied. The old men and women sat motionless. They could not understand.
With uneven step and with eyes that saw nothing, Mahowari passed from among his kinsmen and tottered up the valley toward his lonesome shack and tepee upon the hillside. It was far past noon when the last of the older Omahas left the scene of the dance.
The greatest number of the white men who had witnessed the last thunder dance of the Omahas went homeward much pleased. The show had turned out quite funny indeed. “Ha, ha, ha! Did you see how surprised the old cuggie looked? He, he, he!” Life, being necessarily selfish, argues from its own standpoint.
But as the mi
nister rode slowly toward his home there was no laughter in his heart. He was saying to himself: “If the whole fabric of my belief should suddenly be wrenched from me, what then?” Even this question was born of selfishness, but it brought pity.
In the cool of the evening the minister mounted his horse and rode to the home of Mahowari, which was a shack in the winter and a tepee in the summer. Dismounting, he threw the bridle reins upon the ground and raised the door flap of the tepee. Mahowari sat cross-legged upon the ground, staring steadily before him with unseeing eyes.
“How!” said the minister.
The old Indian did not answer. There was no expression of grief or anger or despair upon his face. He sat like a statue. Yet, the irregularity of his breathing showed where the pain lay. An Indian suffers in his breast. His face is a mask.
The minister sat down in front of the silent old man and, after the immemorial manner of ministers, talked of a better world, of a pitying Christ, and of God, the Great Father. For the first time the Indian raised his face and spoke briefly in English:
“God? He dead, guess!”
Then he was silent again for some time.
Suddenly his eyes lit up with a light that was not the light of age. The heart of his youth had awakened. The old memories came back and he spoke fluently in his own tongue, which the minister understood.
“These times are not like the old times. The young men have caught some of the wisdom of the white man. Nothing is sure. It is not good. I cannot understand. Everything is young and new. All old things are dead. Many moons ago, the wisdom of Mahowari was great. I can remember how my father said to me one day when I was yet young and all things lay new before me: ‘Let my son go to a high hill and dream a great dream’; and I went up in the evening and cried out to Wakunda and I slept and dreamed.
“I saw a great cloud sweeping up from under the horizon, and it was terrible with lightning and loud thunder. Then it passed over me and rumbled down the sky and disappeared. And when I awoke and told my people of my dream, they rejoiced and said: ‘Great things are in store for this youth. We shall call him the Passing Cloud, and he shall be a thunder man, keen and quick of thought, with the keenness and quickness of the lightning; and his name shall be as thunder in the ears of men.’ And I grew and believed in these sayings and I was strong. But now I can see the meaning of the dream – a great light and a great noise and a passing.”
The old man sighed, and the light passed out of his eyes. Then he looked searchingly into the face of the minister and said, speaking in English:
“You white medicine-man. You pray?”
The minister nodded.
Mahowari turned his gaze to the ground and said wearily:
“White God dead too, guess.”
HAMLIN GARLAND
Under the Lion’s Paw
HAMLIN GARLAND (1860–1940) was born in West Salem, Wisconsin, to a family of poor farmers. Unable to afford a university education, Garland moved to Boston at the age of 24, where he spent 14 hours a day in the public library reading. His success as a writer began with the publication of short stories in Harper’s Weekly magazine; eleven of the stories were collected in 1891 as Main Traveled Roads. Dedicated to his parents, ‘whose half-century pilgrimage on the main roads of life has brought them only toil and deprivation,’ the book drew much acclaim for its unsentimental portrayals of frontier farming life. Garland called his literary realism ‘Veritism’; however labelled it was a significant influence on Stephen Crane, and later Sinclair Lewis and John Steinbeck. Garland’s numerous novels, unhappily, veered between crude Populist propaganda and exactly the romantic Western fiction his short stories debunked. Two volumes of autobiography, A Son of the Middle Border and A Daughter of the Middle Border repaired his critical reputation, with the latter book winning the Pulitzer Prize in 1922.
1
It was the last of autumn and first day of winter coming together. AR day long the ploughmen on their prairie farms had moved to and fro in their wide level fields through the falling snow, which melted as it fell, wetting them to the skin – all day, notwithstanding the frequent squalls of snow, the dripping, desolate clouds, and the muck of the furrows, black and tenacious as tar.
Under their dripping harness the horses swung to and fro silently, with that marvellous uncomplaining patience which marks the horse. All day the wild geese, honking wildly, as they sprawled sidewise down the wind, seemed to be fleeing from an enemy behind, and with neck outthrust and wings extended, sailed down the wind, soon lost to sight.
Yet the ploughman behind his plough, though the snow lay on his ragged great-coat, and the cold clinging mud rose on his heavy boots, fettering him like gyves, whistled in the very beard of the gale. As day passed, the snow, ceasing to melt, lay along the ploughed land, and lodged in the depth of the stubble, till on each slow round the last furrow stood out black and shining as jet between the ploughed land and the gray stubble.
When night began to fall, and the geese, flying low, began to alight invisibly in the near corn-field, Stephen Council was still at work “finishing a land.” He rode on his sulky plough when going with the wind, but walked when facing it. Sitting bent and cold but cheery under his slouch hat, he talked encouragingly to his four-in-hand.
“Come round there, boys! – Round agin! We got t’ finish this land. Come in there, Dan! Stiddy, Kate, – stiddy! None o’ y’r tantrums, Kittie. It’s purty tuff, but got a be did. Tchk! tchk! Step along, Pete! Don’t let Kate git y’r single-tree on the wheel. Once more!”
They seemed to know what he meant, and that this was the last round, for they worked with greater vigor than before.
“Once more, boys, an’ then, sez I, oats an’ a nice warm stall, an’ sleep f’r all.”
By the time the last furrow was turned on the land it was too dark to see the house, and the snow was changing to rain again. The tired and hungry man could see the light from the kitchen shining through the leafless hedge, and lifting a great shout, he yelled, “Supper f‘r a half a dozen!”
It was nearly eight o’clock by the time he had finished his chores and started for supper. He was picking his way carefully through the mud, when the tall form of a man loomed up before him with a premonitory cough.
“Waddy ye want?” was the rather startled question of the farmer.
“Well, ye see,” began the stranger, in a deprecating tone, “we’d like t’ git in f’r the night. We’ve tried every house f’r the last two miles, but they hadn’t any room f’r us. My wife’s jest about sick, ’n’ the children are cold and hungry—”
“Oh, y’ want a stay all night, eh?”
“Yes, sir; it ’ud be a great accom—”
“Waal, I don’t make it a practice t’ turn anybody way hungry, not on sech nights as this. Drive right in. We ain’t got much, but sech as it is—”
But the stranger had disappeared. And soon his steaming, weary team, with drooping heads and swinging single-trees, moved past the well to the block beside the path. Council stood at the side of the “schooner” and helped the children out – two little half-sleeping children – and then a small woman with a babe in her arms.
“There ye go!” he shouted jovially, to the children. “Now we’re all right! Run right along to the house there, an’ tell Mam’ Council you wants sumpthin’ t’ eat. Right this way, Mis’ – keep right off t’ the right there. I’ll go an’ git a lantern. Come,” he said to the dazed and silent group at his side.
“Mother,” he shouted, as he neared the fragrant and warmly lighted kitchen, “here are some wayfarers an’ folks who need sumpin’ t’ eat an’ a place t’ snooze.” He ended by pushing them all in.
Mrs. Council, a large, jolly, rather coarse-looking woman, took the children in her arms. “Come right in, you little rabbits. ‘ Most asleep, hey? Now here’s a drink o’ milk f’r each o’ ye. I’ll have s’m tea in a minute. Take off y’r things and set up t’ the fire.”
While she set the children to drink
ing milk, Council got out his lantern and went out to the barn to help the stranger about his team, where his loud, hearty voice could be heard as it came and went between the haymow and the stalls.
The woman came to light as a small, timid, and discouraged-looking woman, but still pretty, in a thin and sorrowful way.
“Land sakes! An’ you’ve travelled all the way from Clear Lake t’-day in this mud! Waal! waal! No wonder you’re all tired out. Don’t wait f’r the men, Mis’—” She hesitated, waiting for the name.
“Haskins.”
“Mis’ Haskins, set right up to the table an’ take a good swig o’ tea whilst I make y’ s’m toast. It’s green tea, an’ it’s good. I tell Council as I git older I don’t seem to enjoy Young Hyson n’r Gunpowder. I want the reel green tea, jest as it comes off’n the vines. Seems t’ have more heart in it, some way. Don’t s’pose it has. Council says it’s all in m’ eye.”
Going on in this easy way, she soon had the children filled with bread and milk and the woman thoroughly at home, eating some toast and sweet-melon pickles, and sipping the tea.
“See the little rats!” she laughed at the children. “They’re full as they can stick now, and they want to go to bed. Now, don’t git up, Mis’ Haskins; set right where you are an’ let me look after ’em. I know all about young ones, though I’m all alone now. Jane went an’ married last fall. But, as I tell Council, it’s lucky we keep our health. Set right there, Mis’ Haskins; I won’t have you stir a finger.”
It was an unmeasured pleasure to sit there in the warm, homely kitchen, the jovial chatter of the housewife driving out and holding at bay the growl of the impotent, cheated wind.
The little woman’s eyes filled with tears which fen down upon the sleeping baby in her arms. The world was not so desolate and cold and hopeless, after all.
“Now I hope Council won’t stop out there and talk politics all night. He’s the greatest man to talk politics an’ read the Tribune. How old is it?”