The Bones of Paradise

by Jonis Agee

  She tried to take a deep breath, but her ribs pressed in too hard, binding her body like a wet hide, and she could only form a gasp that ended in a cough. She could almost feel her sister slip inside her then, as if following the tear she had placed on her heart.

  Without warning, the light outside began to fail, and the tipi sank into shadows. It was time. Rose folded her mother’s ghost shirt that Star had saved and tucked it inside the quilt beside her sister. There was no bone comb or beaded mirror, nor fancy quilled hair fasteners or colorful beaded moccasins saved for courtship, only the bloody shirt to be carried into the next world as evidence of their people’s unhealed grief.

  Rose glanced at her own special things in their small parfleche box. She had nothing else of value for her sister’s journey, her life to the next world. If she had only known, she might have, but it was no use. She found the sweetgrass bound with thread next to the tipi entrance, held it over the fire, then blew the small flame down to smoking embers, which she used to bless the four directions, the sky and the earth, and then swung the smoking grass around and across her body. When she was done, she called Some Horses and her daughter, Lily, to begin the final journey.

  The night was dark with only a quarter moon to lead them through the woods to the ancient pine Some Horses had chosen, one he could climb with the body strapped on his back. The white priests had tried to stop their practice of placing the dead in the open air to encourage the journey to Wanagi Makoce, but there was no question as to where her sister belonged. Rose shuddered at the thought of ground burial or burning.

  She listened to her husband’s breath as he struggled up the tree, and tried not to think about what would happen if someone discovered the body. In a year they would end their mourning with a wanagi yuha to remember Star’s spirit. What few relatives were left would tell stories about Star and distribute her possessions, except there was nothing left. Rose and Some Horses would have to buy and make clothing and tools to exchange.

  “Now,” Some Horses whispered from the tree, and Rose began a blessing song, torn even now between wanting to release her sister’s spirit into the other world and holding it here until Rose could avenge her death.

  The wind quietly grew around them and began to push the pine and cedar tops side to side, tossing Horses and her sister like a boat on a lake.

  “Hurry,” Rose called. Some Horses grunted with effort as he lashed the body to the limbs and trunk.

  Rose tried to recall the other song in the burial ceremony, and couldn’t. She was empty, numb; her own tears wouldn’t fall though she could feel the salt warmth of her sister’s drowning her heart. She knew she shouldn’t, but while she waited for Some Horses to slowly descend, Rose looked up at the sky, the sliver of moon, and finally the dark mass of her sister’s body, and whispered her promise.

  The wind rose and quieted as if it had captured the moonlight that settled like a flock of silver birds around her. It was then that her sister’s spirit began a tale that would send Rose on a journey for the man’s heart. It must be taken so Star could rest:

  I am Star of the Miniconjou. This is the story I never had the chance to tell, though I whispered it to the deer I spied fawning in the marsh grass one spring morning. The doe’s pain fresh, like my mother’s that winter morning ten years before, at Čhankpé Ópi Wakpála, what the whites call Wounded Knee. Later I wondered if I had ruined the world for that babe as it stood wobbly on long, spidery legs, gazing about at the dew-sparkling grass and the water alive with light while his mother licked him clean and dry. Did I curse him as my people have been cursed?

  Would he fall prey too soon, as my sisters and brothers did that morning, the bullets finding their running backs and skulls as they stumbled in the hard dirt and icy clumped grass? We gave thanks for the mild weather, believing Wovoka’s promise that the world would open again as we sang, “The buffalo are coming, the buffalo are coming . . .” Someone looked up at the weary winter sky and said she could smell their hot, grassy breath, and then she saw their powerful legs galloping down a ray of light and clouds, and we threw up our arms to rejoice, and sang even louder, “The whole world is coming!”

  Stosa Yanka throws dirt into the sky to make a road for the buffalo we can all see and smell and hear, dreaming already of the rich meat stews and the warm robes they will give us, and deer and elk and antelope and bear following, the eagles arrive, the air yellow with the whip of their wings, and then crows come, hundreds, they walk among the dancers, proud bobbing heads keeping time, and it is all happening as Wovoka has promised and the people sing louder in time with the animals, and the ghost shirts come alive, birds and butterflies and animals lifting off men’s shoulders and chests and backs to join the dance, and the thrown dirt hangs in the air like a road to welcome back the world, and only the hummingbirds are shy and hold off, as they are wont . . . and then a sharp crack and the air is split, the dirt spilled, and the new world collapses down on us in pieces, the guns boom and the people fall, running, falling, screaming, falling, and I am away, my hand pulled by my mother as we follow the others up the ravine, running like deer now, light and bounding until we come to a place where badger dug a hole in the side of the hill and Mother shoves me inside, no matter what awaits me, stay, Star, she whispers with her finger to her lips, her eyes wild as a bird in a grass net, stay. I close my eyes so I will not see what is in the hole with me or watch her disappear, but soon they are opened by the men’s voices.

  “First you taste the meat, then you drink the blood,” says the man with one eye that searches for me while the other eye looks at my mother, held by her hair, a knife at her throat. She won’t look at me, but I can’t stop seeing her. I feel at my waist for my small skinning knife, but I dropped it while we played chase the prairie hen, so already my story is not the story I meant to tell and I have confused that morning with the day before and the day before that.

  Maybe the dancing had not yet begun . . . the sacred tree was in the middle where we danced but we were not allowed to include it in our game. Our older brothers in their mission school clothes played on the other side of the camp, their hair shorn, the backs of their bare necks embarrassed; they tried to act as if they were too old to play the fox and hen game. I saw Lame Dog, with the deep scar on his calf where he was attacked by a dog before he was taken away to the school. He was watching me the way he’d always watched me, knowing as I knew that one day we would share our tipi and have many fine children. I had seen it many times and not told anyone except my sister, Rose, who sees as I do. He was there playing a boy game, a contest of rock throwing, or stick fighting, or fighting. It made me happy, I know that, to feel him across the camp, my husband-to-be, and so we were not dancing, not seeing the buffalo, and in my haste to tell this story I have poured all the stories into one, so when the medicine man threw the handful of dirt in the air—and it must have been powerful, because we were seeing the road and also doing our morning chores, and also playing, and all of this in that moment when the buffalo hooves touched the earth again, and the birds cried out a warning of salvation and loss—the gun fired. At first we did not know what the sound meant, and then the big gun, the Hotchkiss, and the Springfields, the Colts, their horses branded front and back, numbers and letters, their hides scorched, shook their heads, the curb chains rattled, the flash of sabers and spurs and somewhere the tinkling of bells, of silver spur chains, of men loading guns, the guns.

  The boys go down, all at once as if in a game, and I open my mouth to scream. The buffalo are running across the camp, over the hills, up the ravines, follow us, they cry, and we do, though people fall all around me, and the crying grows louder than the guns or the pounding hooves, and my mother is forced to lie with her legs spread and the other man, the tall, thin one with the blond hair and narrow face, holds a saber point at her heart and smiles while crooked eye pulls down his pants and shoves inside her, my mother keeps her eyes closed and bites her lip against the pain, blood drips on her cheek, and i
t makes crooked eye both hungry and angry, for he begins to beat her while he does his business, then he trades places with skinny man, and crooked eye mounts her from behind like a dog, holds her hair while she rears back but cannot throw him off, and crooked eye beats her about the head and that isn’t enough so he curses her and pokes her with his knife and kicks and pulls her to pieces. By the time they are through, they have stabbed and cut chunks of flesh and each takes an ear, then crooked eye her scalp. Skinny man cuts off her breast and scrapes away the flesh to make a pouch, he says, for his coins. As he shoves it in his shirt, a small gold object falls out unnoticed and drops into the snow at his feet.

  If this were your story, you might tell it differently, the pieces in order, the way I waited in that hole, crying without sound for hours, my shoulders shaking dirt loose until I hoped to be buried alive, anything but having to wait for dark when I crawl out, find my mother, and try to help her home. I start back to camp, must ease past bodies stiffening in the cold night air. I had not known so many were undone.

  As I get closer, the field is alive with movement. Wovoka was right! We are reborn! The bullets didn’t tear into our ghost shirts, didn’t kill our flesh, we are unharmed! A man scrambles to his feet, holding up the eagle talon necklace that Black Coyote wore, and the beaded moccasins his mother made for him, ah, the scavengers, like crows they cover the dead, stealing what doesn’t belong to them, sending my people into the next world naked and full of pain. They strip the bodies of everything, even the hair. This they do to women and children who have not made war upon them, while the cavalry eats and drinks at their fires like warriors who have done a good day’s battle on innocents, sick and old, so few young men here anymore, and now I have no past, no future, the husband I am promised still running, though the back of his head is blown apart, his legs seem to churn beneath him in the dirty cold.

  That night I go back to the badger hole, climb in, and dream half a dream, in which I tell the hummingbirds that they must fly in the four directions of the winds and tell all the people what has happened here at Čhankpé Ópi Wakpála,, let the world know of the slaughter. It is growing light when I remember to look for the object the thin man dropped by my mother before he left. It is a yellow chain with a round disc that opens to reveal tiny pictures of a white woman and skinny man. I put it over my head and tuck it in my blouse. The murderers were too drunk on blood to search her, so I am able to find the beaded deerskin turtle she wears around her waist that holds my mother’s life cord. I find her large knife in its sheath on her thigh and wonder why she did not reach for it. I pull off her tattered, bloody ghost shirt, fold it carefully, and place it inside my dress.

  There is nothing I can give her except to cut a hank of my braid and tuck it in her hand that she may use my life spirit to carry her home. I kiss her bloody cheek, cover her face with my blanket, and know that where I am going, there will be warmth and food. I begin to walk, carefully avoiding the men who search the dead for booty, half-starved for the last feather, the last bone necklace, the last deer-foot whistle, the last ragged pants, the last half-torn belt with the beads falling off like bread crumbs for the people to follow into the earth. We do not bury our dead. We do not! They need their funeral rituals! I want to shout at them, but I must stay quiet and scuttle along like a mouse, unseen, unheard, until I reach the church at the trading post, where I will find what people remain alive. I will tell them how our people were loaded on wagons like twisted limbs fallen off dead trees, and carried to pits and dumped while dirt was piled on top, their spirits crying out for help so loudly I had to cover my ears, and all the others cover theirs and weep silently. Finally we understand the malice of the angels their god sends.

  You might think this is the end of my story, but it continues for the next ten years until one day I saw skinny man again. He came into the trading post, asked to speak with the Indian agent, and pulled out a coin purse, made a show of it as if daring anyone to ask. Our people recognized the shame and turned away. My heart thumped hard and seemed to stop. It didn’t matter, I said my prayer to my mother’s spirit, pulled out the locket, and let it sit on my blouse where he might notice it.

  The night before I went to meet him for the third time, Rose, I told you that I was going to see a white man who had something of our mother’s that he wanted to return. I never had the chance to tell you the rest. You see how you must send the story of wrong out into the world, but since the hummingbirds don’t come when I die, I am telling you now.

  I meant to taste the sweet white ends of ripe grass, to let the deep rock coldness of water rinse my mouth, and to marry the boy who was always meant to be my husband and have many babies suckling while I ground corn and dried berries and pounded the meat flat and laid it out in strips to dry rich and fragrant in the sun, I meant to have such a good long life, I meant to lie in the arms of my love and watch the stars I am named for wheel their great paths in the sky, telling of our years to come, I meant to listen to the wind and its messages, and to come to a fine old age, my body ready to be received back into the world, but I am only a girl, a wound in the earth that will not close, I unbury myself over and over until there is justice. Rose, it is up to you now.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Three days after the funeral, Drum Bennett strode through the kitchen door with his usual quick steps, his boots landing lightly on the plank floor. “Where is he?” His barrel chest pushed against his faded brown flannel shirt like a threat. There was nothing apologetic about the way his gaze swept over the foreman and his wife seated at the table finishing their breakfast after the men had been fed and sent to work. At five foot eight, it wasn’t height that gave Drum menace. It was the thickness of his body, the arms as hard as axe handles, the thick-fingered hands with knuckles the size of walnuts that possessed the hard speed of a former boxer. Bennett had had to fight his way clear of his past, had taken to the road as a young man and staged boxing matches with locals in the small towns of Missouri, Illinois, and Iowa before coming west. Almost every man who’d ever worked for Drum Bennett had felt the teeth-cracking blow from one of his fists. Drum was a man who hit first and didn’t talk later.

  Higgs merely lifted his chin toward the upstairs. Vera cleared her throat, drawing Bennett’s quick eyes. She pushed back her chair and laid her hands flat on the table on either side of the plate of doughnuts she’d made for the men.

  “Coffee?” she said without offering a doughnut. Bennett’s gaze wavered, shifting to the plate. It took an almost visible will for him to shake his head and stiffen his shoulders. He hadn’t removed his hat when he barged in, and he did now. Drum was preternaturally uncomfortable in the company of women. He blocked up like an old bull with a young cow. His hard eyes took on a surprised look that made him seem younger than his years. His nose, broken several times, seemed to collapse a little more, as if the sheer will of his cussedness was the only thing holding it up; his round, fleshy face shimmered briefly, showing a glimpse of a joyful, curious boy who had retreated too soon.

  “Where is he?” Drum asked again.

  “Hayward?” Higgs asked. Although his voice was neutral, a small muscle in his jaw tightened. He was already tired of Drum Bennett’s questions.

  “You know who I’m talking about. Suppose the boy’s up there with the killer, too.” Drum was on the verge of beating the foreman to the floor.

  “He didn’t kill your son,” Higgs spoke carefully. “He’s just a farmer.”

  Drum wanted to fire this mealymouthed bastard right now, but he didn’t have anyone to put in charge yet. Cullen wasn’t ready, no matter what he thought. Nineteen and still unbroke as the day Drum took him. J.B.’s wife sure hadn’t added any grit to the bloodline. Look how easy it was to convince her to leave and stay gone.

  Higgs stood, forcing Drum to look up, another damned irritating thing about the man. “Look, Ry Graver found the bodies and got shot for his trouble. We need to be looking for the killer, not fighting each other. Graver said the
shooter sounded young. Good shot, too.”

  “What do you mean, ‘bodies’?” Drum tilted his head to study the man.

  Higgs looked confused for a minute. “We found an Indian girl with J.B.”

  “What Indian girl? What the hell are you saying?”

  Higgs ran a hand through his thick gray hair and shook his head. “Don’t make a lick of sense. Didn’t recognize her. Fourteen, sixteen, you know how those women are, growed at twelve.” He described the scene in a few brief sentences, his eyes fixed on Drum.

  Drum nodded and searched the man’s face, then let his gaze wander the kitchen. “What else?”

  Higgs took his time, glanced at his wife, who lowered the coffeepot to the table. “I can’t figure out why the shooter didn’t finish Graver. Rode off and left him. Kills two, leaves one. Don’t make sense.”

  “You’re sure about this man?”

  Higgs thought a moment, and then slowly nodded. A fly bumped the window glass over the sink, buzzed angrily.

  Drum released a long breath and stretched his neck to the right until it cracked. “Reckon Hayward could come down here?”

  “I’ll give a call,” Vera said.

  Drum watched Vera’s swaying hips as she left the room and again wondered if J.B. was blind.

  “How’s Cullen?” Higgs asked.

  Looking around the kitchen, Drum let the question linger in the air. The fly buzzed louder, banging into the glass with tiny bumps hard enough to knock it down to the sill. J.B. hadn’t done so bad for himself. Curtains on the windows, swept floor, lamp chimneys shining clean, wild roses in a vase on the table. His own house was a lot rougher. He and Cullen too tired of a night to do more than eat the bland beans, beef, and stewed fruit on tin plates Stubs served up to the hired men. The smell of those doughnuts clung to the room, made his mouth water. Maybe he should hire Higgs and his wife to come work for him. He glanced at Higgs, standing with his hands braced on the back of the kitchen chair. When their eyes met, Higgs didn’t shy away, as a lesser man would. He held his ground. Drum knew he tended to low-rate other men. The man would have to sharpen his spurs to ride for Drum Bennett, though.