The Holy Road dww-2

by Michael Blake

  "Yes," the colonel affirmed. He waved a hand over the city. “Almost every house you see has a room for cooking meat and other foods.”

  Ten Bears squinted skeptically at the vast settlement.

  "But I see no one hunting. I see no game being brought in. How does the white man make meat?”

  "We slaughter it," the colonel answered matter-of-factly.

  "Slaughter it?"

  "We kill animals in a big house.”

  "Where is this big house?" Ten Bears asked and the colonel pointed north across the city.

  "The biggest one is over there," he said.

  "I will go there," Ten Bears stated.

  The colonel and the interpreter looked at one another helplessly.

  "But you are to have your portrait made this afternoon,” reasoned the colonel.

  "I don't care about that," Ten Bears grunted, looking in the direction the colonel had indicated. "I want to see how the white man makes meat."

  Leaving Ten Bears to wait outside with the interpreter the colonel disappeared into the offices of the war Department, where he relayed the visitor's request. After twenty minutes of bureaucratic maneuvering it was decided to grant Ten Bears' wish.

  To the colonel's consternation, no one else could be persuaded to go and, within an hour he, the interpreter, and the old Comanche man were breezing through the city streets on a course for the great slaughterhouse that supplied much of Washington's meat.

  End-of-day shadows were beginning their march across the landscape when Ten Bears' carriage came to a stop in front of a sprawling maze of stock pens, many of them crowded with the condemned.

  Two unhappy-looking men, their clothes lightly spattered with blood, waited for the visitors at the head of a track that cut between the pens and terminated in front of a cluster of massive, dark, almost windowless buildings.

  "You Colonel Bascom?" one of the men asked dully.

  "Yes, and this is our guest, Ten Bears, and his interpreter, Mr. McIntosh," the colonel replied.

  The man who had spoken made a little nod of acknowledgment and, with his companion, turned up the track leading to the gloomy set of structures.

  “He want to see anything in particular?” the dull man asked over his shoulder.

  "I don't think so," Colonel Bascom replied.

  "We're doin' hogs right now," the man offered a remark to which Colonel Bascom did not reply.

  Ten Bears had not been able to imagine the white man's place of making meat and was totally unprepared for what he saw as they passed pen after pen. He had never seen so many animals enclosed in one place, nor had he ever encountered such wholesale misery.

  Many of the pens held what he recognized as the four-leggeds the whites held in high regard and called "cows'" A large number of the enclosures held a much smaller, hairless four-legged the whites called "pigs." He came upon a pen of horses and paused to stare in shock at the forlorn animals. Ten Bears had eaten the flesh of horses a few times in his life, but only to keep from starving. To think that any race would willingly kill and devour horses was incomprehensible, even if they were as poor as these.

  That they would soon be killed was evident from the attitude of the animals themselves. Like the cows and pigs, the horses seemed fully cognizant of their fate and stood about in pronounced gloom, their heads hanging sadly a few inches from the ground, moving only when jostled by other animals. Some of them were suffering from broken limbs and a few carried ghastly wounds on their flanks or hips or chests where slabs of flesh hung open as if a butchering had been interrupted.

  The strongest animals churned incessantly about the pens, whinnying, snorting, lowing, and squealing in abject terror, their eyes bulging to the whites as they danced in the ankle-deep quagmire of waste.

  Ten Bears had killed animals all his life yet he knew them as brothers, and he pitied these, for the expressions on their faces were the same he had seen in his village when a child died in sickness or a warrior failed to return from a raid or a mother succumbed in childbirth. It was the same expression of abandonment he had seen on the faces of the men who returned from the battle at Adobe Walls, the men who had witnessed a nation of buffalo dead on the plains.

  Through helpless eyes the animals in the pens asked the same questions over and over: Where is the Mystery? How can life end in this way?

  As they neared the entrance to the gigantic box that was the largest in the group of sullen buildings, the dull man stopped and pointed to the end of the structure. Ten Bears was barely aware of Mr. McIntosh's translation, for he had already seen what the man had pointed out and was watching it carefully.

  A long path, enclosed on both sides, angled up from the holding pens and went through a hole high up on the box. On the path were the beasts called pigs. They were moving forward in a single line, being driven by men on either side who were hitting them repeatedly with heavy sticks. The white men yelled angrily as they beat the animals, but this rough encouragement was muted by the shrill, cacophonous screams of the pigs themselves as their round, thick bodies vaulted and twisted and bucked in hopeless denial of what was about to happen.

  Colonel Bascom did not want to go inside. Neither did Mr. McIntosh, and a brief squabble ensued before it was decided that Ten Bears would not need an interpretation of what he was about to see.

  The old man followed the two men with bloodstained clothes through the doors of the slaughterhouse. Inside, they climbed a long stairway which led to a catwalk that gave a comprehensive view of every thing going on below.

  But all that Ten Bears saw could not be taken in at a glance. And it could not be absorbed, even over time. The sight was too bizarre, and in the course of his watching, the images that settled in the old man's eyes had the sharp, surreal quality of something dreamt.

  The natural light entering through a series of small, square windows mounted high on the walls of the cavern-like place steadily lost power as it drifted downward and was swallowed by the nightmarish, yellow glow of work lamps spaced at regular intervals along the walls.

  Hatted men were moving about in the tawny, submerged light. Splotches of white shone through on clothes streaked with red as they went about their gruesome work with an air of impunity.

  At the far end of the trileveled floor, men wielding axes chopped mechanically at the bodies of pigs, severing heads and limbs which were then cast with practiced ease into huge wooden tubs.

  At the next level, Ten Bears saw a team of three men in the act of disemboweling one of the short-legged, flop-eared animals. One worker slit open the pig's belly and, with a few quick swipes of his long-bladed knife, emptied the abdomen of what little viscera had not already spilled onto the floor.

  Another member of the team grasped the animal's hind legs and spun it across the slippery, metal floor to the lip of a slide. With a push from a glistening black boot the heavy body cascaded down the slide, coming to rest in close proximity to the choppers. A third man pushed the animal's viscera with an implement Ten Bears had never seen. The tangle of intestines and other vital organs disappeared over the edge of the floor and plopped into a large barrel already half full with the bowels of countless predecessors.

  Directly below him, on the third and highest work level, two big white men waited on an expansive metal floor at the foot of another slide. No white at all could be seen on these men's clothes. Though they wore extra covering, every inch of their attire was covered with blood, as was the floor they stood on.

  The man holding a thin-bladed, slightly curved knife stared up at two workers looming near the top of the slide. He nodded and, following a clank of metal and a thump, a living pig, its piercing screams echoing off the walls, slid across the floor to where the two big white men were waiting. Grabbing the crazed animal by its ears, one of the white men jerked the animal's head back while the other's knife sliced through its throat. Jets of blood struck the men's chests, and a moment later, they were guiding the still-bucking body to the slide that would carry it
to the disembowelers.

  Ten Bears saw the process repeated again and was astonished at how quickly and smoothly the white men worked. They seemed oblivious to their surroundings and its nature, to the stench of so much blood and flesh, the earsplitting cries of their victims, the eerie light and barely breathable air.

  A third pig tumbled down the chute, but as the man who held its ears tried to stretch its throat for the knife the animal unexpectedly threw its head back with such power that its human captor was knocked to the floor, losing his grip.

  Ten Bears heard sudden laughter and turned to see that the man who had brought him up the stairs was laughing. He shouted something our and the man who had fallen looked up from the floor and made what Ten Bears took to be a sign of anger with one of his fingers.

  The man's partner had caught the pig and was still trying to restrain it when the one who had put up his finger wrathfully pulled another knife from its place on the wall.

  The laughter next to Ten Bears grew louder as the angry white man rushed across the floor. Bellowing words of rage at the struggling pig, he drove his knife into the animal's face. Then he stabbed and slashed until blood seemed to be squirting everywhere.

  For some reason the man was treating the animal like an enemy and it was then that Ten Bears' head began to reel. Sound and smell and sight seemed to merge as he pushed away from the catwalk rail and followed the tops of his moccasins down the stairs.

  He hardly glanced at Colonel Bascom or Interpreter McIntosh when he got outside. He tried to keep his eyes on his feet as they walked past the pens, for every time he looked up the same thing would happen. The faces of the animals, the tint of their coats, the heaving of their nostrils — all that he saw would swirl together like multicolored ripples of grease on the surface of a boiling cook pot.

  As they drove away, Ten Bears asked if they could make the horse go faster and when the breeze began to pass over his face he could see clearly again.

  He spoke only once more on the trip back to town, and that was in answer to a question from Colonel Bascom. The colonel recognized that the old man was shaken, and, certain that any Indian was inured to the sight of blood and death, assumed that he was overwhelmed by yet another achievement of modern civilization.

  "You have seen how the white man makes meat,” the colonel stated rather smugly. "What do you think?”

  Ten Bears never looked at Colonel Bascom, directing his reply instead to the space in front of his face.

  "I do not believe it," he said.

  As he sat talking with Kicking Bird that evening, Ten Bears tried to describe the way the white men made meat, but what he had seen so violated the basic tenets of his life that no portrayal seemed adequate.

  Kicking Bird listened to Ten Bears' description in horror. To see blood, to smell death, to kill an enemy without mercy were aspects of life with which he was intimate, but hearing what had gore on in the white man slaughterhouse frightened him, and when Ten Bears told him about the choppers he had to stop the old man.

  "They don't use all of the animal?" he asked, his voice hushed.

  "Maybe half. They throw the rest away."

  "You saw this? "

  "Yes, I saw it. They didn't say any prayers, either."

  "No. And one of the animals was attacked by one of the white men. . like it was an enemy."

  Kicking Bird could not make sense of such a thing and the thought crossed his mind that Ten Bears might be afflicted with some sort of dementia. People of great age were often invaded by transforming spirits.

  "The white man must have been insane," Kicking Bird theorized.

  "I'm certain of that," the old man retorted. “There's no understanding this white man's holy road. I wouldn't be surprised to see Comanches in those pens next."

  "The white people do not eat the flesh of other people, Grandfather."

  "How can that be known? The river of excrement was not known. The place they make meat was not known. I don't care to find out any more about the whites. I want to go home."

  "We are meeting the Great White Father tomorrow."

  "Of course we are meeting him. I will sit with him and hear his words. But I will have nothing to say. I want to go home."

  Chapter LII

  The delegation arrived at the Great White Father's residence in the early afternoon of the next day. The temperature had plunged overnight and the bundled warriors peered out from the hoods of blankets as they drove up, uniformly impressed with the size of the place called the White House. Various dignitaries fell into step with the party as it made its way through the vast rooms and corridors, all of them appointed with splendorous articles of white culture.

  The men from the plains were at last shown into the enormous room where they were to council with the Great White Father. Its center was dominated by a table the length of several horses and surrounded by the things called chairs. Above the table were the sparkling glass trees whites liked to attach to their ceilings, and at either end of the room huge fires were blazing.

  The warriors were seated at the far end of the table. Ten Bears was given the honor of the biggest chair, which faced the one standing empty at the opposite end, the one reserved for the Great White Father.

  Many civilians and a few high-ranking soldiers took the remaining places. A dozen of the white man's black-skinned slaves were posted at various points on the perimeter of the room, and shortly after all was in readiness, the Great White Father himself, a covey of assistants traveling in his wake, entered the room. The whites rose from their seats, but the Comanche, Kiowa, Cheyenne, and Arapaho, thinking that the rising was some kind of occult facet of encounters between the whites and their chief, stayed seated.

  The Great White Father was not quite what they expected, for despite the hair on his face being extraordinarily thick and his eyes being unusually small, he looked about the same as most other white men. But it was clear that he possessed incredible power. With a simple lifting of his hand he induced the other white men to resume their seats, and when he began to speak, his followers leaned forward as if their lives depended on his words.

  At the direction of the Great White Father the members of the delegation were made to stand up and arrange themselves in a line against a bank of windows. The Great White Father then started down the line, taking each man's hand and saying a few words of welcome. Over the men's necks he draped one of the heavy peace medals, each bearing a likeness of himself. When he reached Kicking Bird and saw that the Comanche was already wearing a medal stamped with the face of one of his predecessors, the Great White Father seemed especially pleased.

  "Here is a man who knows peace," he said.

  "I have always loved peace," Kicking Bird confirmed.

  "And what is your name, sir?" the Great White Father asked.

  "Kicking Bird."

  "Kicking Bird, uh-huh. .”

  The Great White Father shook Kicking Bird's hand and hung a second medal around his neck. When he was finished with the line, he returned to his place at the head of the table as the delegation drifted back to their seats.

  At some unseen signal the black-skinned slaves came forward to pour coffee into large white cups and lay thick, dark cigarettes called cigars in front of each man. The slaves fell back to their positions and the Great White Father commenced a talk, expressing gratitude to his “Indian children” for coming so far to meet him and hoping that their visit had been pleasant and informative. He spoke a long time of the need for peace and assured his guests that the key to peace and prosperity depended on their willingness to embrace the new world of the reservation and avail themselves of its many advantages. He closed his remarks by inviting each man to speak, pronouncing himself ready to hear their hearts.

  For more than an hour the tribesmen took turns sounding the familiar themes of contention between the races, concerns that the Great White Father deflected with paternal benevolence, constantly returning to the declaration that his greatest desire was to ensure t
he welfare of his children.

  The sharpest questioning came from Kicking Bird, who iterated a long list of conditions for a successful transition to the reservation, including freedom from assault by whites, limited sovereignty, hunting rights, and proper instruction in the ways of the holy road.

  The Great white Father proclaimed repeatedly that he would never abandon those of his children who promised to behave themselves, and Kicking Bird's questions, like those of his brethren, at last collapsed under the weight of platitude.

  Only Ten Bears was left to speak. He had sat placidly in his chair through the afternoon, listening attentively but expressionlessly to every exchange, and the Great White Father, though he was anxious to get on with his schedule, was curious about the old man.

  "The oldest of you has not spoken,” he said, pointing out Ten Bears. “I would like to hear what is on his mind.”

  Laying a hand on each arm of his chair, Ten Bears pushed himself up.

  "You made us an invitation to come to Washington, and we accepted. You have taken our hands and made us presents and cared for our needs with generosity, and no harm has come to us. We never invited the white man into our country but he came anyway, not looking for game to hunt but for people to kill. Comanches did not fire the first shot. . the white man did.

  "Why the white man wants our country I do not know. He has more than enough for himself. I do not understand why the white man wants to kill everything in our country and make it poor. When the Comanche resists, the white man says he is misbehaving and must be punished.

  "We have never tried to take over your country. All that we have ever asked is to be left alone. You will not grant that wish. Instead you want us to give up everything we love and come to live in a small space and wear your clothes and eat your food and pray to your god. You want us to walk with you on what you call the holy road. I will not do that.”

  As Ten Bears paused to wet his lips with a sip of coffee he could see and hear the whites shifting in their seats. Only the Great white Father did not move but kept his eyes steadfast on the speaker.