by James Welch
The man wandered off down the length of the room away from the place of the yellow light, stopping now and then to rest against a footboard. Then he pushed open a swinging door and disappeared.
Charging Elk began to have hope. He too could put on these things and walk out. He would eat something first, to give him strength, then he would leave. But as he thought this, he felt a slow, crushing fear enter his heart. Where would he go? He looked at his dark hands, which lay on the blanket on either side of his body. He was not of these people. He was a different color and he couldn’t speak their tongue. He was from somewhere a long way off. And he was here, alone, in this house of sickness. He tried to fight off the panic by remembering something about himself. He remembered night and he remembered bright lights and the sound of a voice loud and clear over many voices. When the big voice spoke the other voices grew to a roar, until the lights began to swim and he was falling suddenly and violently into darkness.
“Monsieur? Monsieur?”
Charging Elk opened his eyes.
“Votre petit dejeuner, monsieur.”
A young woman put a square tray on his lap. He glanced down and he saw a bowl of white mush, a piece of hard morning bread, and a glass of orange juice. The woman put a soft cloth over his chest, sat down on a stool beside the bed, then dipped a spoon into the mush. When she brought it toward his face, he moved his hand up to block it. She said something in a tone of voice that suggested she was used to this kind of behavior. Charging Elk kept his hand up but he looked at her pale hand and peculiar ice-green eyes and recognized her, in spite of her mask, as the first woman who had fed him soup. Now she held the spoon about six inches from his hand. He reached for the spoon and took it gently from her hand. He looked at the mush, smelled it, then took a taste. It tasted like nothing. It was neither sweet nor spicy. But it slid down his throat and warmed his belly. He had another spoonful and nodded to the woman. “Café,” he said.
“Non, non, monsieur,” she said in an excited voice. She said something else, then she rubbed her own belly and shook her finger.
“Café,” he said again.
She said something, then stopped. After a moment, she stood and hurried toward the end of the room where the yellow light had been the night before. Charging Elk watched her. Then he dipped the heavy iron spoon into the mush and ate. He ate half the mush and drank his orange juice. He left the hard bread—he had seen it before, a small slice curved on top and flat on the bottom, like the sign for sunrise—to dunk into his pejuta sapa, black medicine.
He thought of sunrise in another place. A place of long views, of pale dust and short grass, of few people and no buildings. He had seen that sunrise over the rolling simple plains, he had been a part of it and it had been a part of him. Many times he had seen it and he had been with his people.
Charging Elk suddenly moaned as he remembered the ikce wicasa, the natural humans, as his people called themselves. He remembered his mother and father, his brother and sister. He remembered the villages, the encampments, one place, then another. Women picking berries, men coming back with meat, the dogs and horses, the sudden laughter or tears of children, the quiet ease of lying in the sunny lodge with the skins rolled up to catch a breeze. He had been a child then too and he had spent his days riding his horse, playing games, shooting arrows at gophers, eating the sarvisberry soup that his mother made.
He remembered the big fight with the longknives on the Greasy Grass, the naked white bodies the women counted coup on with their butcher knives and axes. He and two of his friends, Liver and Strikes Plenty, had fought over a soldier’s agate ring. They had cut off his finger to get it. But one of the older boys, Yellow Hand, had taken it away from them.
Charging Elk lay back on the pillow and closed his eyes. He had been proud to be an Oglala then and he thought they would never surrender. The young boys talked about Crazy Horse and how he would lead them far away from the longknives. They would grow up to be hunters and to make war on their enemies. They would kill off the soldiers when they got old enough. Meanwhile the people spent the summer and fall moving from place to place, at first high up in the Bighorns and the Wolfs, then when the weather changed and the snows capped the peaks they moved back onto the plains. Sometimes they would camp for six or seven sleeps, sometimes only one or two. The scouts kept track of the longknives and they were never far away. But the game was plentiful during those warm times and the people didn’t suffer. Wakan Tanka, the Great Mystery, rode with them. The Oglalas seemed almost exhilarated, as though they knew this was to be their last time together as a free people and they were determined to make the most of it. They had won a great victory and they were prepared to face the consequences, even if death came to live with them. Charging Elk, in spite of his youth, felt this spirit and had never been so close to his family, his people, the land. He hung on to every experience, every change of country, every night under the stars or in his father’s lodge.
But when the weather changed, everything changed. The buffalo seemed to disappear soon after the first snowfall, the deer and elk, even the rabbits and prairie hens, grew scarce, and the winds blew bitterly and constantly. Many of the people grew sick, some died, and they became frightened of what lay ahead. When the soldiers finally caught up with Crazy Horse’s band on the Powder River that winter, the people escaped into a blizzard with few casualties but the sentiment around the meager fires now was more about coming in to the fort on the White Earth River rather than remaining free, which amounted to running and running. But Crazy Horse refused to listen to this talk. He began to spend more time away from the camp, riding off by himself into the surrounding hills—some said he was searching for a vision that would save the people; others thought he didn’t like to be around their suffering. Charging Elk’s own father said that Crazy Horse was too stubborn to be a good leader, that he put his own pride before the welfare of the people. Still, Charging Elk and his friends vowed to follow Crazy Horse, even to death if he wanted it that way. Like most of the young ones, they idolized Crazy Horse and thought he could bring forth a miracle when spring came. He would lead them somehow to a land where there were no white people, a land filled with blackhorns and berries and good water. There would be plenty of enemy horses to be taken, many enemies to be struck.
But that spring Crazy Horse led the weary, ragged people to Fort Robinson and Red Cloud Agency. They surrendered their horses and weapons, everything but their garments, cooking utensils, and lodges. The piece of paper that the leaders marked was dated May 6, 1877. Four months later, in the Moon of the Black Calf, Crazy Horse was killed by the soldiers with the help of some of his own people.
Charging Elk sighed and opened his eyes. The tray and the woman were gone, but two men in suits stood at the foot of the bed, looking at him.
“Bonjour,” said one of them.
“Hello,” said the other.
Charging Elk recognized both greetings but he said nothing.
The one who had said hello said, “Charging Elk?”
Charging Elk considered a moment. He knew it would be futile but he asked how long he had been in the sickhouse. Both men just exchanged glances. The one who had said hello was dressed in a bulky brown suit. He had a mustache that curled down around the corners of his mouth. The other wore a dark neat suit. His tie was neatly knotted between the collar points.
“Canyou speak English? American?” The man in the brown suit leaned closer, and said again, in a loud voice, “American? Do you speak American?”
Charging Elk gestured toward himself with his hand. “American. Lakota.” As he thought of something else to say, he remembered how he had gotten there. “Pahuska. Buffalo Bill.” Then he remembered the Lakota who had been appointed the chief of the show Indians. He had no power over the Indians—only the white bosses did—but the wcbticuruf, the fat takers, liked him because he was very handsome and his buckskins were heavy with beadwork. Surely these men would know him. “Rocky Bear,” he said. “Big medici
ne. Oglala. Wild West.”
“Buffalo Bill, yes. But you are Charging Elk.” The man spoke slowly and loudly.
“Charging Elk. Yah.” But it was becoming clear that he would not be able to communicate with these men, even though he knew of their languages. He could do nothing but look at their suits, even though his eyes took in their somber faces.
After Crazy Horse’s death, the Oglalas were taken from the Red Cloud Agency to their own agency at Pine Ridge. The children were put into the white mans school, and so Charging Elk became a student and learned some of the American words. But less than a year later, when he was thirteen winters, he and Strikes Plenty ran away and went to live with Strikes Plenty’s people at the Whirlwind Compound, far from the agency and the school. Later they would move again, when the wcwichud threatened to come get them, along with the other children. They moved to a place in the badlands called the Stronghold, a long tall grassy butte with sheer cliffs on three sides that could be easily defended. But the white men, soldiers and settlers alike, were afraid of the Stronghold. The Indians out there were considered bad Indians, even by their own people who had settled at the agency and the surrounding communities. Charging Elk and Strikes Plenty lived off and on at the Stronghold for the next nine years, hunting game, exploring, learning and continuing the old ways with the help of two old medicine people. Sometimes they rode into the Black Hills, Paha Sapa, and stole things from the gold miners. They visited Bear Butte, a lone cone-shaped holy hill where many Oglalas had sought their visions in the past but which was now surrounded by settlers and mining claims. Charging Elk had had his hanblechia in the badlands surrounding the Stronghold. He had been prepared well by his wiccua wakan, an old man who made many prayers in the sweat lodge, and when he turned sixteen he went out and made many prayers to Wakan Tanka to help him dream his power animal. He never told anyone what the animal was, not even Strikes Plenty, but he later killed a badger and made a small necklace of its claws.
Now Charging Elk tried to ask the two men what happened to the necklace, and he suddenly remembered the holy card the white woman had given him in Paris, which became his wasichu medicine, but he knew it was impossible. For the first time in his life, he wished he had stayed in school and learned the brown suit’s language. “Buffalo Bill,” he said, without hope. “Wild West.”
After the two men left, Charging Elk sank down into himself. He was alone, and the enormity of what that meant hit him hard. He had no friends here. He couldn’t tell the men in suits where his home was. But they had to know that he was an Indian and he came from across the big water as part of the Wild West show. He was an Indian, an Oglala from Pine Ridge, his home.
Even in his despair, Charging Elk found his mind clearing and he remembered more things. It was like waking up after a night of drinking mni wakan, the white mans holy water, but this night seemed to have lasted a long time.
Charging Elk almost felt the impact again as he remembered falling from his horse and landing on the packed earth. That was the last thing he remembered before he was brought to this healing house. He had been chasing the small buffalo herd around the arena with his friends, an act he had performed hundreds of times since coming to this country of the Frenchmen. They liked to see the wild Indians chase the buffalo because it was one of the few acts in the show that was dangerous. And the Indians themselves made it more dangerous by eventually catching up and riding at headlong speed among the thundering animals. Charging Elk remembered a young bull, one that he had become familiar with in the several moons they had performed in the big Paris arena, suddenly swerve and swing its head. Its horn caught the horse on the left shoulder and the horse squealed and almost went down and Charging Elk tumbled past its head. And that was all he remembered until he got to the sickhouse.
But he had been sick before the evening’s performance and he became more ill during the course of the several acts. The night chill of December went right into his bones and his back was so tight it felt like someone had strapped a lodgepole to it. But he had performed the several acts before the chase—burning the settlers cabin, chasing the Deadwood stage, fighting with the soldiers in the big show of Custer’s Last Fight. But as he waited behind a barrier for the buffalo to be released, he suddenly felt very weak and almost fell from his horse as he leaned over and vomited. He knew then that he had the sickness that had swept through the Indian camp as well as the village of the white performers and workers. Badface had eased his horse next to Charging Elk’s and he asked if Charging Elk was all right, but just then the gateman pulled back the barricade and the Indians leaped forward, digging their heels into their horses’ flanks, yipping and yelling to the roar of the crowd.
But there was another Oglala in the sickhouse when Charging Elk arrived. As the helpers were lifting him into the bed, he had a sudden moment of intense pain which cleared his head and he saw a friend in the next bed. It was Featherman, an Oglala who had three winters on Charging Elk and who had caught the sickness two sleeps ago and now was quiet and unmoving as his eyes followed the activity of the helpers as they lifted Charging Elk from a rolling bed. The eyes seemed not to know what they saw.
Even as the pain of movement was subsiding into a deep ache, Charging Elk had looked over at Featherman and seen that his friend was going away. “Featherman,” he whispered as he looked into the flat eyes. “Stay. Don’t leave me.” But he could not hear his own words and soon he too was gone.
But Charging Elk did come back, several times, and now he knew he was back to stay. He knew he was back by the heavy throbbing pain in his left side. Now he felt that side, those ribs, through the bandage that had been wrapped around his torso. His breath wasn’t so shallow now, even though the bandage was tight against his chest. He had broken some ribs before in another fall from his horse. That time had been in the badlands, a hot summer day, when his running horse had stepped in a badger hole. He and Strikes Plenty were heading for the Stronghold after some trouble with the miners in Paha Sapa. Sometimes the miners shot at them, either to keep them away or just to kill them. Charging Elk had been laid up for a few days with those broken ribs but they healed up, with the aid of the yuwipi’s medicine, and he soon was out riding again. Sometimes he and Strikes Plenty sneaked back to Pine Ridge Agency to visit his parents. They would make the two-day ride and wait for dark before entering the small settlement.
And always it was the same. His parents would try to talk him into staying. They told him there would be no punishment, that the white chief just wanted the young ones to come back and stay go to school and learn the ways of the white god. They lived in a one-room house with a door and two windows, neither of which contained glass. Squares of canvas were tacked to the top of the windows and rolled up to let in light. They had a table and two chairs and a white man’s sleeping bed. And a cross on the wall beside the cooking stove. But no children. Charging Elk’s brother and sister had died, a year apart, one of the great cough, the other of consumption.
Charging Elk loved his mother and could understand why she wanted him to come live with them and go to school and to holy ceremonies. He was all she had left. Sometimes he felt guilty and thought how it would be to eat her food and watch her do her quill-work. But he couldn’t figure out his father. Scrub had been a shirtwearer, one of the bravest and wisest of the Oglalas. He had fought hard at Little Bighorn and had provided meat when the people were running from the soldiers. But that winter when the people were starving and sick, he had become a peacemaker, just like the reservation Indians who were sent out by their white bosses to try to talk the band into surrendering. Charging Elk had been ashamed of his father that winter. And when he saw his father sitting idly in his little shack, drinking the black medicine and sometimes telling the holy beads, he could not believe his father had gone from shirtwearer to this. It was always this image of his father that drove Charging Elk time and time again back out to the Stronghold.
Charging Elk had to take a leak and he did not want the iron pi
ssholder. It shamed him to have one of the healing helpers roll him onto his side so he could hit the slop pan. And it was hard to piss with the helper standing there, looking away but listening. He didn’t like their face coverings. Although he had become adept at looking at their eyes without them seeing, he couldn’t tell the hidden expressions and this troubled him. Furthermore, he hadn’t taken a crap since coming to the sickhouse but he still didn’t need to and this worried him.
He pulled himself higher in his bed until he was sitting up without the aid of the pillow. His ribs ached and the bandage seemed even tighter against his chest, but the pain was bearable and he could breathe a little deeper. He watched another man get out of bed, put his robe on, and walk down the corridor between beds. He too disappeared through the swinging door at the end of the room.
Charging Elk threw back the covers and tried to swing his legs over the side of the bed. It was the first real bed he had slept in in his life. Even in France, the Indians slept in blankets and robes in their lodges. Charging Elk and his friends used to make fun of the soft white men who needed to sleep in feathers on a platform of wood or iron. Now, Charging Elk couldn’t make his legs obey him. He pursed his lips into a straight seam, put his arm under one knee, and pulled it sideways. A sharp pain in his side made him inhale sharply, deeply, almost a cry, but he kept his lips tight. He lay back on his elbows and worked his legs one way, his upper body the other, until he could feel the cold floor with one foot. He stopped, panting, and looked around, but nobody seemed to pay attention. He worked his other leg over the side and, with a sharp intake of breath, he slung himself up, until he was sitting on the edge of the bed. The pain in his ribs was intense, his whole side seemed on fire, but he held himself rigid, eyes and lips closed tightly, trying to concentrate on staying conscious. Then he opened his eyes and looked down to the other end of the room, where at night he saw the yellow light. He expected someone, maybe the woman with the white wings and gold cross, to come running. But again, he was undiscovered.