Heartsong

by James Welch

  Near the entrance to the first bar he had encountered on the street, he slowed, then stopped to look back. The street was empty. He looked into the bar and saw the same two drinkers and the woman with the loose hair. She was eating something with her fingers.

  Charging Elk stood for a moment. He wanted a drink of the mni sha, but he was undecided whether to stop here or continue on to the Old Port. The more he attempted to decide, the more he knew that he should go back to his flat in Le Panier. The evening had become strange, as though the treacherous siyoko had called him to this street and now would wish to do him great harm, perhaps to steal his nagi. What loss could be greater?

  But even as Charging Elk thought these thoughts, he was walking slowly, carefully, back to the furniture house, only now he knew that it was not a furniture house, but something that was open to the street. Perhaps the siyoko lived there and made it attractive to entice men like himself to enter.

  Now he was at the window with the gauzy curtain. He glanced up and down the street, but all he saw was the yellow lights of the doorways. Inside, he saw the two men. They were sitting on a divan, drinking amber drinks in round glasses. One of them was smoking a cigarette and talking to the round man, who stood before them with his hands clasped before his belly. He seemed to be the owner of this house. He turned to the back of the room and clapped his hands two or three times. Charging Elk could hear the faint, hollow claps above the wind and he ducked back away from the glow. When he looked again, he saw a curtain part and five women emerged and walked single-file into the room. They were dressed in long, shimmery robes and they walked slowly, cheerlessly, as though they were on their way to the iron house. Then they stopped and the round man, twirling his hand, had them turn around, and around again. One of the young men on the divan stood and walked around the women. The other sat back among the plush red cushions with his legs crossed, blowing smoke into the air. He seemed uninterested in the young women.

  But Charging Elk was very interested in the women. He knew what he was seeing now. In Paris, some of the wadkhus who worked with the Wild West show went to places like this. Broncho Billy had told the Indians to stay away from the loose women of Paris. But most of these women stood out on the street or in doorways and called to the Indians when they walked by. Some of the Indians went with these women to their rooms, in spite of Broncho Billy’s warnings about disease, even robbery by the rough “hombres” these women consorted with. Buffalo Bill himself had made a speech when they got to Paris about the evils of life in the city. He told the story of one Indian, a Shyela, who had gone with one of these “whores” in the Grandmother’s big town of London and when he came back, he was all skin and bones with sores all over him. They buried him a few days later in the Grandmother’s country. By then his arms and legs had melted from his body.

  Now Charging Elk was seeing the very whores that infected men with such horrible diseases. But they looked nice in their robes. They looked like the young women that he longed for day after day and dreamed about at night. Even as he thought this, one of the women opened her robe and twirled around. She was wearing only a white shift and black stockings and lace-up shoes. As she twirled in his direction, he could see the bulge of her breasts above the lace top of the shift and the flesh of her thighs above the rolled stockings. His mouth went dry and his cock stiffened almost in the same instant. She was not much more than a girl, but her figure was stout and her face pretty beneath a shock of dark curls that cascaded down over the collar of the light blue robe. She wore a velvet band around her head and her lips were painted a deep red. Charging Elk thought he had never seen such a wondrous sight as this nearly naked girl with the big thighs. He had seen pictures of completely naked white women in Paris—you could buy them in kiosks. Featherman had quite a collection of them and would let you look at them at night for a few centimes. The young Indians marveled at the pale amplitude of these women as they passed the pictures around.

  Charging Elk was embarrassed by his stiff cock and again looked up and down the street but it was still deserted. When he looked back, two of the girls had sat down beside the men while the other three, including the desirable one, were filing back to a curtained doorway. They walked with that same slow, almost defeated gait they had displayed earlier. He watched until the light blue gown disappeared behind the curtain.

  Charging Elk was saddened that the girl had gone away. He had desired her so fiercely he could almost taste her creamy flesh as one tastes a glace a la vanille on a hot August day. He had an overwhelming need to taste her and fuck her. Without thinking, he looked down at his crotch, but his erection was hidden by the thick wool coat. Fuck. In spite of his almost keening need, he stifled a breath of laughter. “Fuck” was one of the words he had learned in Paris. Many of the young Indians, whether they were playing cards or waiting on their ponies to enter the arena for the show, talked about fucking. It was all bravado, of course. When they were around the white women, they were reserved and even a little fearful.

  Charging Elk thought of the young white woman in Paris, the one named Sandrine. He knew now that she was a holy person and the card she had given him was a picture of Jesus, the savior of the wasichus. He had saved them by telling them to worship his father, who was named God Almighty and who Sees Twice had said was even stronger than Wakan Tanka. Although he hadn’t believed Sees Twice then, now he wasn’t so sure. After all, the wasicuns ruled the world.

  Sandrine. He tried to picture her in his cante ista that day on the edge of the little lake in her simple dress and white bonnet, but all he saw was the stern gray dress and the hat with the sleeping duck. For a long time he thought he would never forget her, but he now realized with some shame that he hadn’t thought about her for more moons than he could count. Now he closed his eyes and he saw the stout young woman in the blue gown, her swelling breasts and white, chunky thighs, the velvet band around her hair, and his desire became fierce again.

  During the next several weeks, Charging Elk made a point of staying away from Rue Sainte. In fact, he seldom left his room after work, except to buy food and bathe at the bathhouse around the corner. He still took his Sunday meals with the Soulas family and he enjoyed his conversations with Mathias and Chloé, but they were growing up and had many interests that did not include him. He knew he was being foolish, but it hurt him to listen to Chloé go on about her friends in the church group or Mathias talking about a train trip with his classmates to see the wild bulls of the Camargue. He listened politely and understood most of their talk but he could see the shine in their eyes as they told of their new adventures and he knew that they no longer considered him a big part of their lives.

  After dinner, he and René would walk on Cours Belsunce, stopping for an anisette along the way in René s favorite café. Here the little fishmonger would exchange insults and laugh with his friends while Charging Elk sat and smoked, waiting for an opportunity to escape.

  Ironically it was Madeleine who made him feel most at home during his Sunday visits, as she set food before him or darned his socks or prepared a packet of sweets for him. Charging Elk realized that the two of them had become friends at long last. Once he brought her an embroidered shawl in a box tied with a satin ribbon. When she opened it and held up the shawl to admire the embroidery, he saw that her eyes glistened with pleasure. And when she stood and kissed him on both cheeks, he thought happily that although it had taken a long time to reach this point, he did not know of a better woman in Marseille. He was surprised to think this.

  But all in all, this was not a happy period in Charging Elk s life. He was not happy with his job—shoveling coal all day, day after day, had become a dreaded chore. He hated to come home covered with coal dust and smelling of oil and lye. He had not made another friend at the soap factory since Louis Granat of the Hautes-Alpes had been sent away to cut soap bars. In spite of René s constant reminder that he was fortunate to work for such a man as Monsieur Deferre, he wished desperately for another job. Bu
t how would he find one?

  And Charging Elk was discouraged with the amount of money he was managing to save. He had only 140 francs tucked away in the bottom of his duffel bag and he had figured out, with Mathias’s help, that it would take him at least another two years, more likely three, to save the money necessary for the trip home. He had begun to have serious misgivings about ever seeing his country and his people again.

  More than anything, though, he was tired of living alone in the one room, of eating the tough chickens from the rôtisserie or the rough country pâté and the goat cheese on baguette. Once a week he ate at the North African restaurant around the corner, always the couscous and flatbread. He was even tired of that. But most of all, he hated the early, cold nights when he would sit and smoke and wait until it was time to turn off the oil lamp and crawl into bed. The only satisfaction he got during this period was when his mind began to drift into sleep. Often, he would see the clean morning sun as it cleared the distant craggy hills of the badlands, or he would see a golden eagle circling above the plain, its cries so sharp and haunting he would sit up and listen—only to hear a cat fight or footsteps echoing on the cobblestones. He enjoyed these memories, the immediacy of them, but they only led to a more desperate loneliness.

  One chilly Saturday evening in early December, the Moon of the Popping Trees, Charging Elk decided that he had had enough of his stark life in the little room and thought a walk down to the Old Port would cheer him. He had already washed himself at the bathhouse, but now he clicked open his push-button pocket knife and cleaned his fingernails, which were always black from the coal grime. He put on a clean shirt and tied his poet’s tie loosely around his neck. Then he slapped some scent he had bought during his dandy days on his face and took five, then ten francs from the purse at the bottom of the duffel bag. He put on his good shoes, his long coat, and his hat. He glanced at himself in the mirror above the washstand and almost liked the dark, chiseled face, which was no longer the face of youth, and the hair, which hung shiny and black down past his shoulders.

  Night came early now and the wide stone steps that led down from Le Panier were already glistening beneath the gas lamps. They felt greasy beneath the slick soles of his shoes as he took them two at a time. But he was becoming more and more excited as he thought of a Saturday night away from his room, out among people again, the smells of roasting chestnuts and brazier fires filling his nostrils, the sounds of people laughing and chattering. It was near the time of Noël and the Old Port would be lit up, strings of electric lights draped from mast to mast of some of the larger ships, garlands of evergreens and fruit decorating the shopfronts. The cold would keep down the stench that usually came from the sewage of the port.

  Charging Elk stopped suddenly at the base of the steps, a short block from the Quai du Port. A dark thought had intruded on his growing excitement, one that filled him with a familiar dread. This was almost exactly the time of year he had gone to the sickhouse four winters ago, the time he had almost gone away from this life, the time the show and his companions did go away and left him here to die. He remembered the moaning men in their beds, the cold night streets when he was on the run, the emptiness of the Gare du Prado, the touch of the gendarme—“Pardon, monsieur.” And he remembered lying in the stone room singing his death song.

  Charging Elk, since moving out of the Soulas home, had lived mostly with the isolation of his own thoughts, his memories, good and bad. He did not have the luxury of intrusions into his life, of children like Mathias and Chloé making demands on him, of a woman like Madeleine making jokes of his ambitions as she did with René, of René himself constantly talking even when he’d like to be quiet. He did not haggle with the fishmonger or the green-grocer; nor did he exchange jokes and jibes with the other men at work. He listened but he didn’t talk, couldn’t talk like ordinary men. He had no real language to share with these wasichus. So he carried the freight of his thoughts and memories around with him and sometimes welcomed them and sometimes hated their insistence.

  Now he tried to tell this latest thought to go away, to leave him to enjoy this evening, but as he tried to roll a cigarette he found that his fingers were trembling. In disgust, he threw down the paper and tobacco. It was no use to go out this night. No matter where he went his thoughts would go with him. But just as he gathered himself to climb the stairs, he heard a whining sound behind him, like one of the cats of Le Panier. He grew even more disgusted, but when he turned to shoo it away, he saw a thin figure dressed in dirty heaps of cloth. Even the feet were wrapped in damp cloth. The figure was bent to the side, as though it were deformed, but when Charging Elk looked, he saw that a smaller figure was riding almost upright on its hip. The figure yowled again and stuck out its small, clawlike hand.

  As though a great wave of cold air rose up from the cobblestones of the narrow street, Charging Elk felt his back twitch uncontrollably, almost violently. He had not felt such cold since he had escaped from the sickhouse. But now he saw that the figure was a young woman, her dark face shiny with grime. Her upturned palm was pale and delicate and the baby on her hip was no larger than the dead baby Jesus he had found in the alley.

  His first inclination was to run, to bound up the stairs as quickly as he had descended. He felt vaguely ashamed of his fear of this woman and her child, but he couldn’t help but feel that her sudden appearance was a bad sign, that she possessed some of the siyoko’s power, had perhaps even been sent by the bespectacled one to harm him. He knew about gypsies. He had seen the women begging around the Old Port—some were old and bent over on their canes and moved as though their legs were made of stone; others were young, like this one, usually with a child. The men could take one’s purse and disappear before the victim knew it was gone. Once Charging Elk had heard a man shout and saw a gendarme chase a gypsy through a crowd on the Canebiere. The gypsy dodged and wove his way through the people as dexterously as a big cat. Then he suddenly vanished, as though he became the very air that the people breathed.

  Charging Elk had been astonished at such an act, but he shouldn’t have been. René had told him that the gypsies contained l’esprit malfaisant. They could see deep into a man’s spirit, they could tell his future and put a curse on him. Charging Elk and René had passed a fortune-teller’s room every dark morning on their way to bid for fish and René always crossed himself in the way that made these Frenchmen wakan.

  Now Charging Elk dared to look into the wraith’s eyes, and they were dark and large, like the musky pools the beavers made in Paha Sapa. The small claw was raised before her, almost touching his coat. He glanced at the child but its eyes were closed, as though they were sealed shut with a line of white paste. The face was nothing more than a skull with dark skin, an old man’s face.

  Again Charging Elk felt ashamed of himself, but this time for fearing the frail woman and child. He dug into his pocket and then pressed the first coin he found into the woman’s hand. In the same gesture, he gently curled her small birdfingers over the coin, a one-franc piece. It was too much to give to a beggar, but he was now almost grateful for the simple human contact on that dark street. “Vous voilà, madame, pour votre bébé Jésus.”

  The woman hung her head and backed away, wailing as though her heart would break, and Charging Elk recognized the sound. He had heard the Oglala women wail that way when they lost a husband or child. His own mother had wailed when his brother and then his sister died of the coughing sickness. But he was surprised that the woman had reacted that way to his generosity. Perhaps he shouldn’t have touched her.

  Nevertheless, Charging Elk felt his spirits rise as he watched the young woman hobble away into the darkness. In some way, he felt that he had passed a test, that he was once again free to become the man of the streets again—perhaps even become a whole man finally—for the first time in a long, long while.

  But when Charging Elk entered Rue Sainte he began to have second thoughts. The street was crowded with men, mostly sailors enjoying th
eir Saturday night on the town. The two shabby bars were full of laughing, shouting men in short wool coats, some with caps with the little pompom on top. Glasses of beer in various stages of fullness rested on the bar or swung in slow movements between bar and mouth. There were other men too in their long coats and derbies or top hats, drinking wine and watching the sailors.

  Charging Elk had been so sure of himself as he walked alongside the Opera House only two short blocks from this scene. But now he thought of the incident in the Brasserie Cherbourg, the hostile sailors, the jeering women, and he became a little afraid. René had told him several times to stay away from the American bars. It was not unusual for men to fall in with the wrong crowd or the wrong woman or even to be killed in these places. Marseille was full of bad men from all the lands of the world, men who were not civilized like the French and who would slit your throat if you looked at them in the wrong way. René had slid his finger across his own throat when he said this, and Charging Elk had recognized the gesture immediately And so he had stayed away from the places where these bad men congregated. Until now.

  But the men were so involved with their drunken behavior, even those on the street who brushed by him, that the young Indian was beginning to feel invisible again. And his confidence began to grow. Still, he wished he had brought his walking stick with the heavy silver duck’s head.

  He walked deliberately down the middle of Rue Sainte, away from the two rowdy bars, until he came to the fancy whorehouse. He wove his way through a crowd of men, stepped up on the narrow stone walkway and looked into the window.

  The room looked just as he had memorized it the past several weeks in his own shabby little flat—the warm painted walls, the bright chandeliers, the mirror over the elegant wooden bar, the plush red divans. And just as he had envisioned over and over in the same length of time, he saw the girl with the blue robe. She was sitting on one of the couches, looking down into a tall glass of amber water that she held on her lap. She was wearing the same black velvet headband, and dark curls partially hid her face. Her legs were crossed, the robe falling away from one white thigh just visible above her stocking.