Heartsong

by James Welch

  When he turned around the girl was looking at him, or rather at his cock. She seemed unperturbed as she leaned against the washstand. “Come over here,” she said, as she slipped a wash mitt over her hand and plunged it into the water in the basin.

  It took Charging Elk only two steps to cover the distance, but in that space, he had what seemed to be a hundred different emotions, including wonderment and fear. He looked at her hair as she rubbed the mitt with a bar of soap. Again he smelled the lavender and he became almost faint. He leaned farther forward and sniffed the top of her head, breathing deeply as though to keep the fragrance in his nostrils forever, and then he felt the cold, soapy mitt on his cock. At first the touch was like the shock he felt when he used to flop naked in a runoff stream in Paha Sapa. It took his breath away and he almost withdrew himself from the mitt. But then the rubbing and squeezing of the hand inside the mitt, the slickness of the suds, the scent of lavender, excited him so much that he looked at the statue of the holy woman beyond the girl’s hair to keep from embarrassing himself. He thought of many things, of the horse he had drawn for Chloe, of his own horse, High Runner, of the venomous snakes in the badlands, to take his mind off what was happening to him. He did not look down, for fear the sight of what she was doing to him would carry him over the precipice.

  Finally the girl dried him with a thin towel and told him to lie on the bed. He glanced down at the narrow bed, then sat on the edge. A wave of nausea came over him and he felt dizzy and sick, as though he had drunk too much of the mni wakan. But the girl gently pushed him back until he was lying, helplessly, weakly, drunkenly, on the hard mattress with his head wedged against the wall and his feet hanging over the other end. He watched the girl straddle him, and even in his weakened state, he was momentarily disappointed that she hadn’t taken off the shift. He had wanted to see her breasts, perhaps even touch them. But that feeling disappeared into the ether when he felt her stubby hand grasp his cock, holding it upright, as she eased herself down. He felt her thick thighs on either side of his hips and he imagined the whiteness of them, like the thick cream Madeleine used to make sweet things. He was surprised by that thought, but by now his thoughts were jumping around like the green singers after a good rain. He had spent the past four years thinking without consequence and now his mind was running wild, images crowding one on top of another, as he felt the warmth of her sex pocket, slick and powerful, pulling and sucking his cock deeper inside of her.

  He looked at her face, and at first she was looking down at him and he saw the depth of her large, brown eyes. It was the first time she had actually looked at him, looked into his own eyes. But soon she closed her eyes and moved her hips, first one way, then another, now fast, now slow, and she began to grunt, a series of grunts, a sound he had not heard before from a woman, and then he raised his hips off the bed and he felt his warm juice go out of him and into her, and she squalled abruptly, holding herself above him, then collapsed heavily on his lap, and he fell back and closed his eyes against the soft glow of the beaded lamp.

  Marie Colet sat at the large table in the kitchen, listening but not really hearing the other young women talk about the men they had been with the night before. It was just past noon and she was still half asleep, as usual.

  “Look at my arms. And here—” The girl across the table, Aimée, stood and lifted her robe. “Voilà!” she said, pointing to a bruise on the inside of her perfect thigh, her eyes dark with triumph.

  “You should tell Olivier—or Gérard. These so-called gentlemen can’t abuse us like this.”

  “Humph. That would be like telling a monkey you don’t like his fleas. Fat chance.”

  “And now I have to go out and buy a new shift because he ruined my only good one. A judge, too. Can you believe it?”

  “Pass the butter, Chantai. And do share those croissants. You’re fat enough as it is.”

  Marie absentmindedly stirred her café crème, although it was cold by now. She was more tired than usual and she thought she might be coming down with something. She almost wished it were so, because she had to work tonight. It would hardly be worth it. Sunday nights were the quietest of all, as the good bourgeois took a light meal with their families and prepared for the week ahead. The only men who came in were those who were too shy or wished to hide their identities. And they usually went with one of the boys in the back parlor. Just as well. The way they slunk around made her feel ill at ease.

  Marie thought again about the tall dark man in the shabby clothes. She couldn’t believe that Gérard had let him in, and even more astonishing, that he had chosen her and that she had gone with him. But it was her duty and the consequences would be grave if she started refusing customers.

  She couldn’t remember the last time she had been truly afraid of a man, and she hadn’t been afraid of this one until he turned from the hall tree, naked and erect. He seemed so big and full of lust. She had hidden her feelings, of course—one had to in this business. But the massive dark body had filled her with apprehension. She could tell he hadn’t had much experience with a woman, and perhaps that was what scared her. She hardly ever made a man lie down first, unless he was so drunk that he needed working on. She could usually coax him up and then she could control him by being on top. But she was afraid of the dark uncertain mass of the man last night. One of the girls, just last year, had been found dead, and the rumor circulated among the others that her last customer had been a huge Levantine. Marie had thought this absurd, since Gerard did not allow them in. But now, she was not sure. The man last night was not a bourgeois.

  But he had done something to her that almost none of the other gentlemen had—he had made her come. She smiled sheepishly to herself.

  “What is it, Marie?”

  “What is what?”

  “I recognize that grin. You are holding a secret from us.” Aimée was looking at her like a cat.

  “Have you found a patron, Marie?” Laurence was the youngest of the girls, barely older than Marie herself when she had first started.

  “Of course not. Don’t be absurd, you silly thing.”

  As the girls went back to their complaints, Marie tried to figure out what about the dark man had excited her into an orgasm. He had done nothing really, except lie there like a statue with an erection, while she did all the work. She had done it hundreds of times over the past two and a half years and she had never succumbed to her own pleasure. She wouldn’t allow herself. In that way, she could feel almost virginal—as though she were performing a duty, just as a scullery maid cleans up the kitchen or the factory girl sews women’s dresses or men’s shirts. She stirred the cold coffee and watched the thin film of cream swirl, then disappear into the caramel-colored liquid. It could be only one thing: her fear of him. Somehow that fear had at some point turned into an excitement she had not felt before.

  But she was quite certain she would not see the man again. Just as well. What he was doing in here in the first place was a mystery to her. Still, even now, sitting in the bright kitchen, listening to her friends gossip and complain, she could feel a pleasant heat that made her face flush and her arms tingle. And she somehow knew that she had nothing to fear from the tall gentleman—should he ever come to the whorehouse again. Perhaps he would. It was possible.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Charging Elk still didn’t know much about love, its complications, heartaches, and rewards, but he had learned enough to make life almost unbearable and yet worth the waiting. Ever since he had left the Soulases’ home it seemed that most of his waking hours had been consumed with desire. And now that the girl in the blue wrapper had satisfied his desire once, he wanted more. Just thinking about her, the way she rode on top of his loins, the scent of lavender in her hair, her small square hands washing him, aroused him to a point of sweet agony. He thought about her constantly, riding the omnibus to and from work, shoveling coal into the flat furnaces, eating his lunch of bread and cheese, soaping himself in the bathhouse—his last thou
ght at night was of her as he lay in bed.

  He spent half of his saved-up francs to order a tailored suit, buy two shirts, some collars, and a new pair of shoes. The only shoes the clerk could find that would fit him were brown and just a bit cruder than the ones the gentlemen wore around town. And in fact, the brown shoes looked somewhat awkward when he tried on his black suit a week later. Nevertheless, they were new and shiny and a vast improvement over his old ones, which he threw into the very alley in which he had found the dead baby. He thought that one of the vagabonds who often slept there might have a use for them.

  Madeleine taught him how to tie a proper gentleman’s tie that Sunday after dinner. René made several comments about his love life until Madeleine scolded him for being so rude and made him leave the room. Charging Elk enjoyed standing beside Madeleine in front of the mirror, both of them tying ties simultaneously, he just a step behind. After five or six attempts, Charging Elk tied a decent-looking knot, with both tails coming out just about even. Then Madeleine had him tie another knot all by himself. After a time, he did it just right. As he admired himself in the mirror, she asked, “Is it true? Have you found yourself a girl?”

  Charging Elk felt his face go hot with shame. He hadn’t expected that René and Madeleine would guess that he was dandifying himself for a woman. How could he tell them that the girl was a whore? Without turning around, he said, “Perhaps so, perhaps not. It is early yet.”

  He sneaked a quick glance at her in the mirror and saw a hint of a smile on her face. He liked her to smile—she rarely smiled more than she was doing now—but now he wasn’t sure what the smile meant.

  But then she said, “If so, you must bring her to dinner. Perhaps next Sunday. But you must ask her parents for permission.”

  Charging Elk thought about Madeleine’s invitation for the next few days. He wondered if whores were allowed to leave their whorehouses, if they were allowed to go with men, if they had parents to ask permission of. Madeleine had inadvertently planted a seed in his mind, a seed which grew until he began to glance around his flat, imagining the girl sitting on the bench in front of the window or washing her face at the washstand or lying in her white shift—or even naked!—on his bed. He even imagined her cooking a big piece of meat on a kitchen stove like his mother’s back at Pine Ridge while he sat at the small table paring potatoes, which he often did for Madeleine.

  One night Charging Elk dreamed. He had wanted to dream of the girl, because in dreams many things happen that one desires. But this dream was not a happy one; nor was it about the girl in the blue robe. In his dream he was standing on one of the sheer cliffs of the Stronghold. Something was wrong and he was weeping. He wanted to jump off the cliff, but every time he tried, a big gust of wind blew him back. He tried four times, five times, ten times, but each time the wind pushed him back, until he was exhausted from his labors. But the next time he approached the cliff, too weak to even attempt to jump, he looked down and he saw his people lying in a heap at the bottom. They lay in all positions and directions—men, women, and children, even old ones. They lay like buffaloes that had been driven over the cliffs by hunters, and Charging Elk understood why he had been weeping. As he stood and looked down at his people, he heard the wind roar in his ears like a thousand running buffaloes, but in the roar, he heard a voice, a familiar voice, a Lakota voice, and it said, “You are my only son.” And when he turned back to his village at the Stronghold, there was nothing there—no people, no horses or lodges, not even the rings of rock that held the lodge covers down—not even one smoldering fire pit. Everything was gone.

  When the dream ended, Charging Elk found himself awake and staring up into the darkness of his room. It was as though the dream hadn’t been a dream and he hadn’t really awakened because he had not been asleep. And yet he had seen everything as though he had been there. Even now he could see himself leap over the edge of the cliff, only to be pushed back by the wind. He could see the people lying at the bottom. He could hear the rush of the wind, and the voice breathing into his ear. But whose voice was it? And why had it chosen him?

  Charging Elk spent the rest of the night sitting on the little bench with his quilt around his shoulders, smoking cigarettes and looking at the dark sky beyond the window. There was no moon, no constellation of stars to remind him of home. But he didn’t need any reminders. His heart was not here; nor was it there, at the Stronghold. It was somewhere he could not name just now, just as he could not name the familiar voice.

  The dream haunted him for several days. It was not a question of understanding the dream but of not believing it. Bird Tail, the old wicasa wakan at the Stronghold, had interpreted dreams for Charging Elk, as well as for others. Often Strikes Plenty and he discussed these interpretations, and they discovered that there was a truth that the dreams told of. Now Charging Elk knew what Bird Tail would say of this dream, but he didn’t want to believe it. Instead he put the dream away in a corner of his mind. He was tired of being troubled. He had been troubled ever since he had left the safety of the Stronghold over four years before.

  But every once in a while, when he was least expecting it, when he was wiping the sweat from his face at the furnaces, while he stood in line waiting for his baguette, the dream would sneak out and he would hear the voice whispering above the roar of the wind and he would tremble with a dangerous knowledge.

  The only way he could think of to combat the persistent dream was to crowd it out with thoughts of the girl in the blue robe. And so he became even more obsessed with her, even to the point of practicing things he would say to her when next they met. He stood before the small, smoky mirror and made sentences in the French tongue—“Where do you come from? I am François from America. This night is very beautiful”—and he was pleasantly surprised that the words came out almost as he wished. Mathias and Chloé would be pleased with his attempts but perhaps not with the object of his desire.

  Charging Elk now not only desired the girl sexually but wanted her for his own. She was the woman he had been wanting for the past four years. That she was a whore did not diminish this wanting; rather, it only added a complication. How could he get her to come with him? He knew next to nothing about courting a girl. There had been a few girls out at the Stronghold that he and Strikes Plenty had flirted with, but he mostly hung back and listened to the happy teasing. Later Strikes Plenty would admonish him: “She had big eyes for you, anybody could see that. You are going to become an old man and you will still be grabbing yourself.” Now Charging Elk wished he had had the courage to ask René how one goes about getting a woman, but he would have had to endure the little fishmonger’s questions and jokes.

  On a Thursday, a week and a half after his first visit to Le Salon, Charging Elk walked purposefully along the Quai des Belges on his way to the whorehouse in Rue Sainte. He was wearing his new black suit, a starched white shirt with a neatly tied gray tie, and his new brown shoes and was carrying the duck’s head walking stick. The shoes were softer than his old ones but still they bit into his heels. He had left his topcoat at home. It was far too shabby and ill-fitting. When he had put it on over the crisp suit, he knew how ridiculous he must have looked last time in such splendid company.

  There was something of a festive atmosphere around the Old Port—a small band of horns and drums was playing songs of the Noël season; the juggler in the white face was throwing his burning sticks into the air and catching them in a kaleidoscope of flame; not far away, two acrobats in skimpy tights and singlets performed their feats of balance and strength. Several tables lined the quai, each displaying for sale the small figures that Charging Elk now knew were called santons. Lights strung from some of the ships’ riggings turned the murky water a golden velvet. The day of the Noël was only two sleeps away, and for some reason, Charging Elk dreaded spending such a long day with the Soulas family. On the other hand, the shops and cafés would be closed and the streets all but deserted. He remembered that first Noël when he had wandered the str
eets of the city, lonely and desperate. He would need the comfort of René and Madeleine and the children.

  Charging Elk thought for a moment of stopping at Le Royal and offering the old waiter a Joyeux Noël, a peculiar greeting that he had learned from the Soulases and their friends. It had to do with the birth of the holy child, who would later become the wasichu god’s child and sit with him in a place called heaven. Charging Elk wondered why Wakan Tanka never took a real child into his home to keep him company, to become his own. He had wondered a good deal about Wakan Tanka lately—the only real contact he had had with the Great Spirit had been in his dream, and he had only sent the dream. Why would he send such a sad dream if he meant to help Charging Elk? And why were these people so happy with their god? Charging Elk couldn’t bring himself to think the next thought.

  He thought about the old waiter, who seemed to know so much without saying much. Somehow, he knew the old man would have the answers to his questions. But now the girl in the blue wrapper was waiting for him and so he quickened his pace. He would wish the waiter a Joyeux Noël tomorrow night.

  But the girl wasn’t there. Charging Elk stood at the bar for two hours, checking the large watch that fit so snugly into his vest pocket every five minutes. The little fat man was also absent. The woman with the yellow hair was not at her table surrounded by fancy men. In fact, the whole atmosphere of the whorehouse seemed strangely subdued. The girls went to the back rooms with men occasionally but mostly they sat on the divans or wandered back and forth by themselves or in pairs.