One String Guitar

by Mona de Vessel

  “You’ll wake him, Bill. You’ll wake your son.”

  “Maybe he should wake up. Maybe it’s time he knew there are ghosts on this land.” Then something changed in his voice. Something strange happened and I realized that my father was crying. I almost sat up; I wanted to see his face in this moment. But I knew that if I moved, I would be pulled into his fury.

  “I heard ‘em Mary. I heard ‘em crying in the bushes.”

  My mother shuffled over to him. She’d learned not to touch him in these moments when his body and spirit were not in the same place. My father’s body lay drunk on our floor and my mother was consoling him. She was whispering words I could not hear. He continued to cry out as if he were alone in the room.

  “Little children crying, little children crying for help and I did nothing. I did nothing.” My father was sobbing now. He was downright sobbing. I sat up slowly in bed and I looked in the darkness. I had learned to see inside the heart of darkness since birth.

  I saw him sitting on the ground with his muddied boots still on his feet, his legs spread open like a broken doll trying to sit upright. I searched for his eyes; I searched for the sign of tears in his eyes. I wanted to see a sign of what I had heard. My father could cry.

  My mother was crouching next to him, keeping her distance, but close enough to touch him. He was looking at the ground, his face lost in a place neither me, nor my mother could see.

  “Crying women and children.” From the distance of my bed, I saw the strange gleam of his tears in the silver light spilling into the cracked lodge where we lived. The moon was full outside, its light leaking onto my father’s tears.

  Suddenly, his face jerked as if he had been called back to this place. He looked at me like an arrow being shot by faith. I saw the fear in his eyes turn to shame. For the first time, my father had seen me and what he saw was a crying man, a broken, fearful man being watched by his son, his body fallen on the muddied ground of his homemade shack.

  My father never spoke to me again.

  Chapter 21 – Owl

  I spent all of those summer weeks with Felicia, the year Washington was elected as tribal chairman. When I say elected, I don’t mean democratically chosen by the people of the res. That’s not what happened. Washington was a puppet leader placed in power by the white-led government. Even though he was an Indian just like us, everyone said he was an apple. Truth be told, Washington didn’t give a shit about us people of the res. Didn’t give a damn about our safety or anything that had to do with justice. The only thing Washington wanted was power. But I have to wonder how powerful can you be when your ass is bought and you can’t make a move without having the white man breathing down your neck. To talk about Washington is to talk about hate amongst brothers. I remember the night Felicia and I almost died together. Sometimes I can’t help but wish we had lost our lives that night.

  When fall came, colors changed and the air became crisp and our bodies quickened in the cooling air. By then, people had grown restless on the res. Washington wasn’t playing by the rules. Instead of holding regular quarterly tribal council meetings, the way it had always been done, he’d just skip out on them altogether. Felicia was the first one to speak out against the injustice. Truth be told, it’s the women that started getting organized.

  Washington skipped the October meeting and called it in November instead. Grey Stone later told me that the chairman is required to call the Council into session under the Tribal Constitution. But Washington didn’t care. All he wanted was to make money off of the res.

  The night everything changed, Billy Joe came running into The Crazy Horse Café where me and the boys were sittin’ having a beer.

  “Craziest shit just happened. I just been to a meeting at Billy Mills Hall.”

  “What were you doin’ there man?” Grey Stone asked Billy Joe.

  “I was just comin’ out of work when I found out about the meeting for tribal employees, so I figured, why the hell not. Sat my ass down and listened to the elders say something about AIM comin’ to the res to celebrate their takeover in DC last week.”

  Truth be told, I didn’t know much about my own history and who was what and what had taken place on my own land. I think that Grey knew how ignorant I was. How ignorant most of us were. Brainwashed is what he’d called us. “Not our fault,” he said, “if we were taught to fear our own people.” Grey liked to explain things to us in words we could understand.

  “See, we Indians were never intended to survive the settlement of Europeans in the Western Hemisphere. They’d counted on all of us all being dead by now. But it didn’t turn out that way, now did it?” Grey raised his glass and laughed. “Cheers, assholes, cheers!”

  Billy Joe told us, “everybody got spooked at the meeting. They kept saying you can’t let AIM take over the res. You can’t let them hold a victory dance. And people got to votin’ and they said that dances couldn’t be held at Billy Mills Hall no more.”

  “People like to talk shit about AIM. They like to say the devil this, the devil that. AIM doesn’t just stand for the American Indian Movement, it stands for the restoration of the treaties that were violated by the United States government. It stands for giving our Indian leaders a place to address Congress. It stands for the restoration of 100 million acres of land having been taken away from Native Nations by the United States. And most of all, it stands for the integrity of our people and our freedom on this land we call Turtle Island.”

  I’d heard about the take over of the headquarters of the Bureau of Indian Affairs offices in DC a week earlier. Everyone had heard about it. It was not the first time our people had tried to occupy land that had always been ours. In 1969, people from several tribes had occupied Alcatraz for 19 months to reclaim federal land in the name of Native Nations. But this was the first time most of us were ready for change. Our leaders who had organized the Trail of Broken Treaties and marched on Washington occupying the Bureau of Indian Affairs headquarters presented a 20-point solution paper to President Nixon. Did we really think that Nixon would listen to our demands? Did we really believe that change would come? All I know is that I was ready to join my brothers to reclaim ourselves.

  Grey Stone grew real quiet. I didn’t know what to think. Broken Arrow who had been listening to Grey telling us about our own history, didn’t seem to give a shit about our revolution. He just held his beer like we weren’t in the middle of a land where war was about to break. Sometimes, I try to think and see if I knew that my whole life was about to shift. All I knew, I think, is that I was a boy, a boy so green, so young and foolish I didn’t even know I should have run to Felicia that night. I should have run to her and held her forever instead of everything that followed.

  Grey Stone let silence return to our table and took a sip of his beer and then he told us: “We have to take this into our own hands.” When he said we, I remember feeling a lump in my throat, like I was trying to swallow a small egg. I thought about Felicia on the other side of the res. I thought about how much I wanted to hold her in that moment. Something about Billy Joe’s words and the way Grey Stone was speaking to us made me want to hold everything that was precious to me. All I had was Felicia. She was all I had.

  On the way back, I asked Grey Stone to drop me off at Felicia’s. I knew she’d be sleeping and I knew I had no plan to get home that night, but I didn’t care. I needed to see her. They drove away leaving me standing in the moonlit night. It was getting cold already. Late November and the night sky had changed. I’d taught myself all of the stars, the map of the sky, and when I looked up I saw that summer was gone. I stood in silence waiting for a plan to come to me when I saw that she was standing outside in her nightclothes, holding her arms across her chest like she was trying to grab hold of herself.

  “What are you doing here? Are you crazy!” She was shivering. “If my father sees you here, he’ll kill you!” She was whisper-yelling, and all I wanted to do was laugh.

  “I just wanted to see you. I wanted t
o see you so I came.” Was all I said and I saw her body relax and her face open into a smile.

  “I’ll get some clothes, I’ll be right back.” And she was gone again. I thought about what Grey Stone had said to us that night.

  We need to take this into our own hands. What did he mean? What did I have to offer to my own people? I didn’t know. When Felicia came back, she was wearing oversized boots and a large coat and she was dangling keys in her hands. Now I was the one who was whisper-yelling.

  “Are you crazy! Your father’s car! We can’t take your father’s car. He’ll kill us!” I’d only met her father once and he’d given me the once-over look and just nodded hello. I knew then that he’d never like me. What did I have to offer his daughter? Who could blame him for not liking me?

  “Shhh,” she whispered taking me by the hand to her father’s car.

  “It’s too cold to sit outside.” We slid into the vinyl seats of the pick up truck and looked at the sky. I told Felicia about what Grey Stone had told us, and she said nothing for a long time. Later when I held her so close I could smell every inch of her skin, she said: “He’s right. It’s up to us to do something about this.” That’s when I knew that I didn’t have a choice. I had already been chosen to act.

  Felicia said we should go for a drive. She shot up and bam, we were off pushing her father’s truck slowly down the road so we could start it away from the house.

  Our love was bound by the motion of cars. We drove in silence for much of the trip until we saw the lights of the village ahead. Felicia took the wheel.

  “It’s best the fate of this truck rests in my hands, don’t you think?” Felicia laughed. I agreed. I’d never once driven Felicia anywhere and in the winter months that followed, I’d become obsessed with owning my own wheels so I could drive her around the res.

  We pulled over on the outskirts of town by the side of Oak Road. I’d learned to love the smell of vinyl, along with Felicia’s sweet softness and the way she always held me with her eyes. She leaned forward as if she was about to kiss me and just when I was about to close my eyes, she whispered in my ear: “I have something to tell you, but first I want to teach you a song.” I pulled away lightly to look at her and a truck drove by us slowly kicking up some dust from the road. Felicia looked in the direction of the road waiting for silence to return and then she leaned forward again in the same way she had done before.

  “This is the spirit invitation song our people sing during the cleansing inipi ceremony. We don’t usually sing this outside of the sweat lodge, but I want us both to sing it so that we can both be prepared for what I am about to tell you.”

  I had no idea what Felicia was about to share with me but I trusted her guidance. Her voice began to rise in the cool night air around us.

  “Tunkasila Wanmayanguye. Repeat after me.” She told me. “Tunkasila Wanmayanguye.”

  I repeated the words and followed the melody.

  “It means grandfather, come and see me.”

  With each word we sang in unison, I could feel my heart fill with pride. We sang that verse three times, each time varying the rhythm of the cadence, making it clumsy at first for me to follow Felicia’s voice.

  “Ikce wicasa tacannunpe. Wan yuha hoyelo.” Felicia continued to sing and teach me the ways of our people.

  “This means, I send a voice with the people’s pipe. It is calling all of us common folks to send our voice to call the spirits to join and purify us. And in the last verse, Mitaye ob waniktelo heyaya. Hoyewayelo, we are saying, so I may live with my relatives. This is a song of unity, calling the spirits to join us.”

  We sang the song a second time without any interruptions.

  “Tunkasila

  Wanmayanguyelo

  Ikce wicasa tacannunpe

  Wan yuha hoyelo

  Mitaye ob waniktelo heyaya

  Hoyewayelo”

  Grandfather come and see me

  I send a voice with the people’s pipe,

  So I may live with my relatives.”

  “Thank you,” I told Felicia leaning over to kiss her lips gently. Thank you for guiding me home.”

  “You don’t have to thank me for showing you what already belongs to you. What belongs to all of us Lakotas. The inipi ceremony is one of the seven rites practiced since the beginning of time. It helps us transform from our old selves to our new selves. What I am about to tell you will change us both forever. And we will be called to move in a new way. Do you understand?”

  “I understand that nothing will be the same again from this moment forward.”

  “Good,” she said pleased to see I understood her.

  “I’m pregnant,” she added. My heart stopped only to be jump-started again by the touch of her hand on mine and the feel of her belly under our fingers.

  “Here,” she said. “Feel.” And I remember the tiny roundness of her belly, small inflated hardness unlike softness of fat, or the airy bounce of a belly full of gas. I could feel the firmness of Felicia’s skin under the small mound of her flesh and this is where life was growing in the tiny pod body of my wife. Even though we had never wed in front of our community, that night, Felicia became my wife under the Orion sky of autumn. That night, my spirit married hers.

  We drove slowly on the way back. Slower than usual. It was as if Felicia’s choice to speak of the life she was carrying made everything else around us appear more dangerous and fragile. The roads were deserted for the most part, and when we crossed another car coming in the other direction, Felicia turned down her beam lights. I remember thinking that kindness to strangers on the road is a strange kind of brotherhood that moved me.

  When the lights of the car behind us shone in the reflection of the rearview mirror, Felicia was in the middle of telling me about how she’d found out two weeks earlier but she wanted to wait before telling me. The lights behind us became so bright Felicia had to shield her eyes so she could see the road. She rolled down the window and gestured for them to pass us but before we knew it, the car was pressing up against ours and honking madly.

  “What the…!” Felicia was cursing now. She kept gesturing outside the rolled-down window for the car to pass us. “Go! Go! You bastard.” But the car began to bump us. First lightly and then harder each time, our car would jerk forward. I searched for a seat belt but there was none and I held on tightly to the car door and the dashboard bracing for the worse. I thought about the life growing inside Felicia.

  “Speed up!” I yelled.

  “I can’t go any faster. The car won’t go any faster, not on this road.” Suddenly they passed us on the left but instead of moving past us completely, they stayed by our side threatening to hit us again. Two men I’d never seen before were in the car, the driver looked Indian, mixed blood I think, but the other was white with a trace of red hair, reddish blond in the moonlit light. He was laughing, his face all twisted up with a wild look in his eyes. The driver grimaced and then bumped us sideways pushing us closer and closer to the ditch.

  “That bastard’s gonna run us off the road!” I yelled. I could feel the car picking up speed. Felicia was trying to outrun them. But each time she moved past them, they caught up to us. The banging was pretty crazy now. They were hitting us sideways every few seconds; each hit harder than the first. I wished I had a gun in the car in that moment. I’d never owned a weapon before and definitely not a gun, but in that moment I knew that I had more than myself to protect. I had Felicia and the life inside her.

  She slammed on the breaks and my body went lunging forward; I banged my head against the dashboard. The other car kept on whizzing forward and they disappeared in the dark as we screeched to a halt and spun in a circle a few times before landing in the ditch.

  All I wanted was for Felicia to be OK. But my head was pounding and I couldn’t see out of my left eye where I’d hit the dashboard. Felicia was slumped over the wheel. She wasn’t moving.

  Chapter 22 – Owl

  I wanted to scream out Felicia’
s name to bring her back to me but found no sound. I couldn’t move. Outside, I heard crickets and imagined them all around us. The car rested almost fully on its side, leaning towards the passenger side but it was still upright where a boulder had stopped it from rolling.

  Felicia’s head was pressed against the dashboard; her body folded in half like a rag doll. She looked broken, as if someone had tried to fold her and succeeded. The road was quiet now. There were rarely any cars so late at night. I moved my hand slowly on the surface of Felicia’s back and neck like a dowser searching for a sign of water. I could feel her energy still vibrating. Felicia’s body was almost still but she was moving. I didn’t want to budge or even touch her after that. It was like knowing she was still alive had made her all the more fragile.

  I thought about something I’d seen on TV once about not moving victims from an accident sight and now I wondered if I’d ever be able to touch Felicia again.

  Something in me wanted to flee the scene. To run as far away as I could and pretend that Felicia wasn’t lying unconscious in this car in the ditch. I tried to open my car door but it was stuck. It was all banged up and wasn’t budging. I heard Felicia moaning. I turned to her as she sat up slowly. She had a small gash on the side of her forehead. She was bleeding.

  “Where are we?” She asked touching her head. Hearing her voice, made me come back to myself all at once. The desire to run disappeared and I was back again with Felicia alive by my side.

  “Don’t move.”

  “Your hand is bleeding,” she said still rubbing her head slowly. I held out my hand and saw nothing.

  “The other one,” she said trying to crack a smile. I saw that she was right. My left hand was badly scratched. Now that I knew about the hand, I could suddenly feel the achy pain of my scratched fingers and bruised knuckles.