by James Welch
Charging Elk awoke and it was already dusk. He lay there for a moment, his naked body wet with sweat. Although his two windows were thrown open, there was not yet the familiar, faint breeze that began a couple of hours after the sun went down. As usual his first thought was of food. He didn’t have an icebox, so each evening he had to decide whether to go out to the charcuterie or the épicerie to buy a meat stick, or sometimes a rotisseried chicken, or pâté and rough bread. If he didn’t, he would eat stale hardtack and sweating cheese, a pomegranate or an orange. Since he never seemed to have enough food around, he usually ended up going out to the shops.
As he weighed his options, he suddenly remembered that it was Saturday. He had been so dazed from the week’s work and the heat that he had forgotten that he had drawn his money from the man in the little window and tomorrow he didn’t have to work. He stood and walked over to the small bench beneath one of the windows where he had thrown his work pants. He pulled a handful of bills and coins from a pocket. He smoothed and counted the bills, then counted the coins, arranging them in neat stacks: twenty-eight francs and thirty centimes. He counted again, not believing his arithmetic, but he came up with the same sum. Had the payman made a mistake or had he received a raise in his wages? Over four extra francs. That was half of his room rent for the week.
As surprised as he was, Charging Elk suddenly knew that this was all part of Wakan Tanka’s plan for him. He wanted his child to come home to him even sooner than the original plan.
Charging Elk felt a surge of energy and excitement that caused him to shiver in spite of the heat. Although he hadn’t seen Brown Suit in well over a winter, perhaps two, and had never seen Yellow Breast again after he had first visited Charging Elk in his stone room, Wakan Tanka had taken it upon himself to see that his child would return to his people. Charging Elk made a prayer of thanks as he tucked the money into a purse he kept at the foot of the duffel bag. Then he opened the purse again and took out five francs. He would go out tonight. He would celebrate his newfound good fortune.
Le Petit Zinc was a small restaurant on the Quai de Rive Neuve, not far from the Quai des Belges, where Charging Elk had helped René load his fish only eight months before. The man who owned the restaurant, Monsieur Valentin, was a close relative of Madeleine’s, perhaps even her brother, although Charging Elk didn’t know for sure. But sometimes the family and he ate at Le Petit Zinc, the only restaurant they went to—the only restaurant Charging Elk had been to in Marseille before the few meals at the North African hole-in-the-wall in Le Panier.
Now he sat at a small outdoor table, near a low iron fence garnished with pots of geraniums, the only barrier between the customers and the passersby. Across the street was the broader promenade that led to the ships and boats moored in the brackish water of the Old Port. During the day, nets were spread out as men, and sometimes women, sat on the stones, mending them. But tonight it was a promenade for families, for friends, for lovers.
Charging Elk smoked a cigarette and waited for his dessert. He felt good and not a bit lonesome. He even allowed himself to think of what his homecoming might be like. It was still a long way off—he had only eighty-five francs saved in the purse. It would take him some time to get up to a thousand. But with his new wages, he was that much closer; hence his feeling of well-being, his lack of self-consciousness as he watched a fancy open carriage with gold trim and brass oil lanterns rattle rapidly over the cobblestones. And perhaps Mathias was wrong—perhaps his passage would cost less than the boy thought. Charging Elk put a reminder in his cante iste to have Mathias help him find a fire boat bound for America. Together they would find out exactly how much it would cost.
Charging Elk was now of twenty-seven winters. He was not the same young man who had crossed the big water with Buffalo Bill and Featherman and the others. Lately, he had been thinking of Black Elk and that night he had come to the camp in the Bois de Boulogne. All of the Oglalas had welcomed him heartily, yet he seemed almost haunted, even fearful of all he had seen. His eyes had seemed young with apprehension but his body looked stooped and weak. Charging Elk had now been gone two years longer than Black Elk. What would Charging Elk be like when he arrived in Pine Ridge? Would his parents be happy to see him? Surely, they would believe that he had returned from the dead. But what if they themselves were dead? No, not in four years. They would be themselves, just a little older. His mother would hug him and cry and hold him close, then make him a big meal of roasted beef and the potatoes they were now undoubtedly planting. His father would also hug him, then tell him all about High Runner as they sat and drank pejuta sapa. And the people—they would feast him with honoring songs, perhaps even give him a new name, but would they know him? Perhaps he had changed more than he knew from living among these strangers.
Charging Elk watched the waiter set the dish with a slice of apricot torte before him. His thoughts were so far away he didn’t see the waiter staring rudely at his dark face and his long hair, but if he had, his only reaction would have been a small amusement. The waiter scraped the breadcrumbs from the tablecloth with a knife, then took the empty half-liter and glass away, along with the cheese plate, all the time looking at the lean dark face.
After his prix-fixe meal, which came to two francs twenty, Charging Elk walked farther along the Quai de Rive Neuve, again lost in thought, and because it was dark now, he began to have a memory that at first puzzled him. Although he had been this way a couple of times before, it had been crowded and noisy, just as it was this night. But the farther out he went, as the numbers of people diminished he began to have a memory of a cold, dark night in winter. It had been raining and the cobblestones were shiny under the gaslights. His feet were wet and cold. He was weak and his ribs were tender and ached with the constant throbbing of his heart.
He suddenly stopped and looked up a side street that led away from the Old Port. He saw a basin full of small ships with folded masts just a short distance from the side street. And he saw a yellow glow in the longer distance and he knew where he was.
A wave of fear swept through his body, threatening to reverse the bouillabaisse and the torte, as he remembered that night, his last night of freedom before the stone room in the iron house. He remembered the procession with the holy men and the statue of the woman in blue. He remembered the torches bobbing as the people climbed the steps up to the high church. And he remembered the voice in the darkness behind him: “Pardon, monsieur.”
The warm summer night came clear and vivid with memories of the sickhouse, his escape, his search for the Buffalo Bill show, which ended with him staring at the empty train tracks at the Gare du Prado. The small room with the single bright light, the akecita and Brown Suit, and finally his cold stone room. And then he heard himself singing, not singing really, just a low rumbling as he mouthed the words to his death song.
He had wanted to die then. He had sung his death song for two, three, four sleeps, and he had fully expected Wakan Tanka to call him home. But he had also been fearful, afraid that his nagi would not know the way home, that it would wander here in this country of strangers. Now he felt a wave of shame creep over his face like crawling ants as he remembered his pathetic attempt at a ceremony, using one of the cigarettes that Yellow Breast had given him. He was no wicasa wakan and he had no right, other than to sing his death song and make his prayers, to pretend to be a holy one of such power.
Charging Elk was overwhelmed by his memories of those early times in Marseille. For the most part, especially after he came to live with the Soulas family, he had learned not to think of those days. When he did, he became fearful and ashamed and was haunted by nightmares that left him exhausted in the morning. So it was out of self-preservation—because he had to get up early each morning to accompany René down to the Quai des Belges—that he had put such thoughts out of his mind.
Now he swallowed against the threat of the meal coming up and turned back, toward the people and the lights. But he didn’t stop at Le Royal, as h
e usually did when he came down to the Old Port. He walked by and climbed the several stone steps up to Le Panier and kept walking until he reached his building. Once inside his room, he tore off his sweat-drenched clothes and sat on the bench before the window. He sat there for a long time in a shaft of moonlight until his mind finally became a blank, erased of the kaleidoscopic images of loneliness and despair. Only then did he creep over to his narrow bed in the alcove. His legs were heavy and his back had stiffened up, as it always did at night from the hours of shoveling coal into the fires beneath the vats, and he vaguely remembered wondering if he would be able to sleep, or if the images would come back in his sleep, but when he laid his head tentatively on the bolster and closed his eyes against the moonlight, he was gone into a dark world of blessed nothingness.
The next Saturday, after another insufferably hot week of work and eat and sleep, Charging Elk put his pay, which again totaled twenty-eight francs, thirty centimes, into the purse and tucked it into the bottom of the duffel bag.
He walked down to the end of the hall and filled his pitcher from the faucet, scarcely noticing the foul stench from the squatter across the way. He had become used to the smells of sewage, of rotting meat and fruit, of garbage piled at the curb. The Old Port had a particularly bad smell from all the sewage pipes that emptied into it. At first, such smells had offended his nose—he was used to the clean air of the plains—but now he was almost used to it. He was used to the garbage scows, gathered on one side of the Old Port, that would be filled with offal and dead rats and dogs and other rotting things to be towed out to sea and dumped. It took an unusual smell to make him take notice—like the dead baby his nose had scouted out in the alley earlier in the summer. The smell attracted his notice because it was an overpoweringly sweet, yet sour smell. And when he investigated, he almost cried out in horror. But as he made a prayer for the small bloated infant, he noticed a curious thing: The pale baby lay with its arms and legs in the air, and he recognized it. It was the same baby as the one in the windows and in the markets at Noël. It was the baby Jesus. René and his family had such a baby, along with its parents, who weren’t really its parents, and some shepherds and animals and men in turbans. Every Noël they set up the small immovable figures beside the fireplace. The season was an honoring time for the infant.
Back in his room, Charging Elk put the image of the dead baby out of his mind as he washed his body with a cloth he dipped in the soapy water. There was a bathhouse on the street around the corner, but the only time he had gone there, all the other men had stared at him as though he were a giant, so he cleaned himself in his flat. It took three or four basins of water to get all of the coal dust out of his pores and his hair, but he had become adept at making a little water go a long way.
He was already sweating by the time he got his clean white shirt buttoned. In spite of his fearful episode the week before, he was going down to the Old Port, but this time he would eat in the cheap brasserie on the Quai du Port beside the Café Royal. It was a big place and most of the customers were sailors and the kind of people who hung around a port, who wore rumpled suits and tatty dresses but had enough money to eat out. He had studied the posted menu one night after his anisette at Le Royal and he recognized pork and lamb.
Charging Elk often wished he could read. Sometimes he bought illustrated magazines to look at the pictures, but when he tried to figure out what was being said of them, he just saw neat black marks, in spite of Mathias and Chloé’s patient teaching. Once he saw a picture of tatanka and he did recognize the word “bison” in the writing beneath it. He took the magazine to Mathias, who told him that the magazine said that all the bison were gone, all that was left of them was bones and memories. Mathias was alarmed at this thought, because he had been thinking of going to America with Charging Elk, although he was only fifteen at the time. He had wanted to see the Indians in their homeland and perhaps become one. Charging Elk had assured him that one day he could go to the land of the Oglalas and become a brother by ceremony; furthermore, he assured Mathias that the words beneath the picture were wrong, that he knew where the buffalo had gone. At first he wouldn’t tell Mathias how he knew this because it was not good to tell of another’s dream, but when the boy grew more and more despondent, he finally told the story of Bird Tail’s dream of the buffalo entering the cave in Paha Sapa. He drew a picture of the mountains, the cave, and the buffalo entering. Then he swore the boy to secrecy.
The Brasserie Cherbourg was large and full of noise. Charging Elk sat at a rickety table near the open windows that looked out over the Old Port and watched the waiters dart by with trays of food or liters of wine over their heads. He marveled at their agility as they squeezed between tables and swerved to avoid a carelessly flung arm or another waiter or a drunken sailor. Most of the tables were occupied by men, mostly sailors, some with young women, who seemed to enjoy the chaos. But it was the noise that made Charging Elk happy—the constant hum of voices, the barely heard accordion of a roaming musician, the occasional clatter of dishes or the shouted toast. Although he was dining alone, he felt that he was part of the festive crowd.
He ordered the rôti de pore because he recognized “roast” and “pork.” Most of the other items he didn’t recognize, although he was sure Madeleine had cooked some of them at one time or another—especially those dishes listed under poisson. Now he only ate fish on Sunday with the Soulas family. He had grown to like some of Madeleine’s fish dishes, especially those with crisp skin and firm white meat, but he never ate fish on his own. He had a small oil burner but the only time he used it was when he could afford a piece of beef.
When the waiter brought his half-liter of red wine and poured a glassful, Charging Elk looked up and said, “Très bien, monsieur, merci,” but the waiter had already turned his back and was threading his way back to the kitchen. The visit had been so brief, Charging Elk couldn’t remember what the waiter looked like, beyond the hairy arm and square fingers below the rolled-up sleeve.
As Charging Elk drank his wine and waited for his meal, he studied the people around him. He had come to recognize sailors around the port. Usually there would be three or four of them and they would be dressed in a way that suggested a life on the sea—canvas pants and shoes, striped shirts with no collars, or if they were Arab, long dresses of white. But the more he studied his fellow diners, the more he was aware that they were all wasichus. They had turned the color of walnuts from the days in the sun, but they were white men, like the ones in New York and Paris and the miners he had seen in Paha Sapa. Not one of them was dark like him or the Arabs or the negres.
Charging Elk began to feel uneasy. He had become so used to the people of this town and his own uniqueness that he had not thought of himself in terms of color. He had no one to identify with, no group that he belonged to, and so he thought of himself as one who had no color, was in fact almost a ghost even though his large dark presence always attracted attention from both light and dark people. But now he felt that he was in a place where he did not belong. He took a sip of the mni sha and stared out the window at a juggler in face paint who was entertaining a crowd down by the ships. He was tempted to just slip out of the eating house—he was only a couple of tables from the door—but he knew if he was caught, they would send him back to the iron house. No, he would stay and eat his roast pork, pay up, and leave quickly.
But halfway through his meal, a young man approached his table and stood, feet planted and arms crossed. Charging Elk had seen him coming—he was aware of everything now—but chose to ignore whatever trouble this young man might bring. He speared a chunk of pork with his fork and sprinkled some salt on it, seemingly engrossed in the act, but his eyes were seeing more than the meat. The man stood so close to the table Charging Elk could see the curve of his penis under the canvas pants. Above a large silver belt buckle, the man wore a blue shirt, which was open halfway down his chest. His forearms were heavy and naked and one of them had a raised welt from a knife wou
nd. A blurred likeness of an eagle decorated the other.
Charging Elk chewed the piece of pork deliberately, and when the sailor said something, he swallowed and took a sip of wine. The man said something else and it seemed to be a question. Then he repeated the words and Charging Elk looked up at him. His face was surprisingly youthful, round and red from the sun, with a wispy blond mustache above his thin red lips. Charging Elk knew that the man was somehow challenging him, but at first he didn’t recognize the language. It was not French but there was something familiar about it.
Charging Elk lifted his shoulders and made his face blank and said, “Je ne comprendd pad votre langue.”