“We have to get out of here,” I said still trying to open the car door.
“Maybe you should stay here while I get us some help.” I wasn’t sure what I was saying. I pictured Felicia all alone in this beat-up car at night and I knew that I shouldn’t leave her alone.
“I ain’t staying here by myself. Are you crazy?” She yelled echoing my thoughts. I opened the window and slipped out of the car. The ground felt firmer and harder than I had expected. I could suddenly feel every inch of my body responding to gravity.
I ached all over but seeing Felicia still inside the car, made me push the pain out of my mind and motion for her to slide onto the passenger seat. As she struggled to move where I had sat, I could see that her forehead was bleeding more than ever. The blood was trickling onto the car seat as she leaned forward.
“Push on your forehead to stop the bleeding. Push on it.”
“I can’t, I only have two hands Owl, and I need to get out of this damn car!” I’d never heard Felicia use my name in annoyance before. I’d never seen her in danger, her body in crisis. The bleeding really scared me, but I knew to stay calm.
Felicia struggled her way out of the car. I handed her one of my socks I’d taken off and told her to push hard on the wound. We made our way back to the road and limped along in silence. Now that I knew I would be a father, the whole world seemed different. I could smell danger all around me.
An hour went by before a car drove by and stopped to pick us up. I took one good look inside the truck and saw the man had a good face. He was about the age my father would have been now. Lines of laugher and hard work marked his worn face. His hair was greased up real good like he hadn’t seen a shower in a while. He took one look at me and said:
“Hey aren’t you John’s son Edgar Owl Feather?
“Sure am.”
“Your dad and I worked together for 10 years at McWright. A good man your father. Hop in.”
Felicia got in the car and I slid along side of her.
“You don’t look so good little lady. What are you two doin’ here this time of night?”
“Two men drove us off the door. Our car is in a ditch about four miles back.” I explained.
“Yep, and it’s too bad I didn’t get killed ‘cause my father sure is gonna kill me now.” Felicia was still pressing my dirty sock against her forehead. The bleeding seemed to have slowed.
“Two men drove you off the road, you said? Sounds like goon activity.”
“What do you mean?”
“A couple of months ago, Dick Washington brought in some US Marshals and parked them on the Bureau of Indian Affairs office building roof. They got rifles and when they’re not aiming their guns at us, they’re terrorizing people in town. Don’t bother reporting it; Dicky’s men will put you in jail for being attacked. Ain’t that something?” Felicia and I sat in silence grateful to have a ride to the hospital.
“Did ya hear about the Bad Heart murder over in Buffalo Gap?”
Felicia and I both shook our heads no.
“I’m down on my way to a meeting in town. An Indian boy, about 20 or so; Wesley Bad Heart was his name. He was beaten to death with a 2x4 studded with nails by a white guy in a bar just for asking for a drink.”
Chills ran up my spine. “When did this happen?” I asked.
“Happened just last night. I tell you this mess ain’t gonna stop here. Some of us are gettin’ God damn sick and tired of our people gettin’ killed for being Indian.” He ran his hand over his face, like he was trying to wipe the anger from his skin.
“I’ma drop you off at the hospital in Pine Ridge. You better get that forehead of yours checked. Looks like it’s bleeding pretty bad.”
We walked into the hospital that smelled like chlorine. Hobbled in was more like it. Felicia was holding on to me. A nurse, white as all nurses in the Pine Ridge hospital were, looked us up and down when we approached the registration desk and said sharply:
“Can I help you?”
“My wife…my girlfriend here is hurt real bad. We were in a car crash just now.”
I’d let the word “wife” slip out for no reason. It wasn’t like I was thinking we were married. Wasn’t thinking it so much as feeling it.
The nurse looked down at her registry like we weren’t there at all. But she addressed us anyway.
“Just fill this out.” She pushed a piece of paper in front of me without looking at us. I’d seen the hatred in her eyes when we’d first walked in. She must have been no older than 28 years old. Married. I’d noticed the ring on her finger. She was the proper type. The type of white woman who should have lived in a large city away from us Indians but for some reason just kept on sticking around for more torture. Hers and ours.
After an hour’s wait, when we finally got to see the doctor.
“You can wait outside in the waiting room,” the doctor said when I tried to join them.
“But she’s my…”
He interrupted me looking down at his chart. “It says here that she’s single.” And he walked away. Felicia looked back with an air of a sad smile as if to say Don’t worry, I’ll be back.
I sat down in the waiting room, full of patients waiting for care. There were two other Indians in there. The first one was a guy my age with a bleeding hand, he was holding it wrapped in a handkerchief. The other person was an old woman whose hands were shaking uncontrollably. She tried to hide them under her shawl but even then I could see the motion of her hands under the fabric. She must have been a few years older than my mother.
I thought of my own mother and wondered if she’d realized I’d gone. Would she have woken up in the middle of the night and seen that I was missing? I knew she would. Now that my father was gone; I was all she had to worry about.
I went to the payphone and called Grey to see if he could pick us up. I was torn about waking him up but I knew Felicia and I shouldn’t try to hitch now. I heard his voice, clear as day on the other end.
“You’re not sleeping?” I asked him almost forgetting the reason I’d called.
“Owl! What’s up buddy?”
“I got in an accident with my girl Felicia. We sure could use a ride back to the res from the hospital.”
Felicia came back what seemed like an hour later with two stitches on the side of her head, her arm in a cast and a sprained ankle.
“Shouldn’t you get checked?” she asked me when she came out.
“I’m fine,” I told her.
Grey’s Cougar pulled up in the circle. I opened the back door for Felicia and sat shotgun next to Grey. He didn’t even look at us and started driving before my door was barely closed.
“Something just went down. One of our boys was murdered again. A meeting’s about to start.You’re coming with me.” Grey said as soon as we got in his car. I’d never stood up to gray before, but this time I needed to protect Felicia. She needed to go home.
“Grey. We’re real hurt. Here. Can …”
“Oh shit! You both look bad!” He said finally looking at my face.
“We were driven off the road by some crazy guys in a truck. You should have seen it.”
“Goon activity, no doubt.”
“Some guy on the road was nice enough to give us a ride to the hospital,” I told Grey.
“You were lucky that’s for damn sure! You go home and I’ll go to this meeting. I’m gonna fight this right.”
**
When we got back, the moment of truth when I’d have to face Felicia’s father and tell him we’d totaled his car, and his daughter was hurt came to hit me head on.
The house was as dark and as quiet as houses are in the middle of the night. Felicia limped to the front door, took a key from under a plant and opened the door.
“Shhh,” she said. “Don’t tell anyone about the key.”
Felicia was smiling. I didn’t understand how she could still find the strength to make a joke at a time like this. The house was dark and still smelled like home cooking
of beef soup and the sweetness of Indian fry bread.
We made our way through the kitchen in darkness. Felicia knew the house and she moved easily in spite of her injuries but I couldn’t see a damn thing. She was ahead of me and I could barely see her hobble.
“This way,” I heard her whisper. I tried moving my hand along the wall’s surface like the blind getting to know a face. I felt a strange shape along the tips of my fingers, and before I could realize that I was pushing my hand along a shelf, I heard the sound of a dish crashing to the ground. No sound had ever seemed so loud, so startling in my life.
“Oh shit!” Felicia giggled nervously.
The lights came on in the other room. I heard a door opening and closing and then a body filled the doorframe.
“Hi daddy,” Felicia said sounding like a little girl.
The light came on in the kitchen. Felicia’s father was a large man with a healthy belly hidden by a white work shirt. I noticed he had it on backwards and thought about him fumbling for his clothes when he must have heard us. He took one look at me, one look at his wounded daughter and he grabbed hold of her. His arms were long and broad like the limbs of an old maple.
“Baby, what happened to you?” and then dropping his voice: “You! Don’t move!” I could see that he was shielding Felicia from me.
“Daddy. I can explain.” Felicia’s mother peered in the doorway.
“Daughter! Are you hurt?” Her mother said grabbing her by the arm. It was a cross between a punishing and nurturing gesture.
“No, mother. I’m fine.”
“Get in here! Felicia! Do not dishonor us like this! Have you no shame?” The woman who had given her birth grabbed her daughter and pulled her into the other room.” I heard the women’s voices fade. They were gone. I was alone with the man who had raised the woman I loved.
“We were in a car accident, Sir. That’s how we got hurt. People drove us off the…”
“Were you driving?”
“No, sir. Felicia was driving.”
“You let women drive you around, boy?”
“Well, sir. It was your car.” I saw that his hands became fists. He made his way towards me and for a second, I was certain he would hit me. I didn’t move. There was nothing I could do. If I fought back, I’d lose my honor forever. His body came right up. I closed my eyes heard him push by to the front door where he searched for his missing car.
“Where is it?” he was yelling now. “Where is my car?”
“In the ditch, sir. It’s in the ditch.”
We spent an hour talking until dawn.The four us at the kitchen table. Her father made me promise I would pay him back for the destroyed car. I had no idea how I would do that but I gave the man my word.
At the first sign of light, they sent me on my way. I walked the eight miles back to my mother’s place until my legs couldn’t hold me no more and I dropped onto my cot to sleep.
**
The week that followed the accident, I became bound by Felicia’s family. It was as if the crash had pushed me through and into her family. The next day, I came back to Felicia’s house and she took me to see her grandmother Ihanblapi who’d told her about the ways of the elders. We walked up the hill behind the house to a grove of apple trees surrounding a small house. I could see colorful leaves blowing in the wind, and when I came closer, I saw that they were pieces of cloth wrapped around the tip of the tree’s branches.
“Tobacco ties.” Felicia said to me as she saw me observing the branches.”They’re sacred offerings.”
We entered the small house that smelled of sweet grass. A woman the size of a child sat up slowly from her chair. Her hair, whiter than snow was pulled into long braids. She came to meet us at the door as we waited patiently for her to reach us. Grandmother Ihanblapi radiated with sweetness and love. I felt like I’d known her my whole life. The three of us stood in the frame of the woman’s house.
Winunhˇcala, she said pointing to herself. “Old woman.” And she smiled a toothless grin. She then placed her hand on my chest and held it there: “Koškalaka. You young man.”
We walked in and sat on wooden stools in the center of the house. Grandma Ihanblapi placed her hands on Felicia’s belly and said: “Wacanheja.” She smiled again and this time I saw that she was missing all of the teeth on her bottom gum.
“Children,” smiled Felicia. My heart was racing. I looked at Felicia who knowingly smiled.
“Numpa. Two babies.”
“We’re having twins?” I asked not believing my own words.
“How does she know? You’re not even showing!” I said looking at Felicia.
“She can feel these things.” The old woman handed me a cup and told me to drink.I took a sip nervously.
“World begin with two babies,” she said.
I turned to Felicia looking for an explanation.
“There is a myth about the world ending in a flood. As the world was getting swallowed, an eagle saved a woman from the waters and made her his wife. They had twins who became the renewed people of the Indian race.” I looked around the woman’s house. It was small but neat. There were pieces of polished wood resting on a wooden table. A pile of rocks surrounded a porcelain bowl containing an animal’s jaw. She placed her hand on my chest and said:
“You cut from people.” When she said this, she made a gesture with her hands that showed a hatchet cutting down a tree.
“You cut,” she repeated again making the hatchet gesture with her gnarly hand. “You find people again,” she said pushing my body towards Felicia’s. “And you become hocokatoya.”
When she said hocokatoya she made the sign of a full circle with her hands.
“You need to reconnect with Indians again,” Felicia translated for her grandmother.
I felt a sense of peace in this house. A deep sense of peace I’d never felt before. The house reminded me a place I’d always known, but I could not remember visiting.
“You have wowakan wowašake but careful of wowahtani.”
“She says that you have sacred powers but you must watch out for evil.”
“You take vision.”
“She wants you to go on a vision quest.” Felicia translated.
Grandma handed me something. I opened up my hand and saw that she had given me a stone carved in the shape of a wolf. I’d never had a spiritual practice before that day. Been cut off from my culture for so long, I knew enough to respect the old ways but not enough to know what grandma was talking about.
“Šungmahetu. When you ready. He find you.”
I had no idea what she was saying, but I said nothing. I saw that we were sitting in a circle now, a perfect closed circle. I did not remember moving, but our line of chairs had magically turned into a circle. I drank the rest of the tea. We sat quietly absorbing the peace of the house. Later, as she walked us to the door grandma said: “Important I tell you, cincala waziyata .”
“What does that mean?” I asked turning to Felicia. But I saw that she was as puzzled as I was.
“I am not sure what she means exactly. The baby is in the place of the pines is the literal translation which I think means the baby lives in the north. I am not sure.”
“One day he understand. One day he understand.” Ihanblapi told us.
Chapter 23 – Owl
All hell broke loose on the res, after the murder of Wesley Bad Heart who was stabbed to death by a white Air Force veteran named Darld Schmitz in Buffalo Gap, South Dakota a month earlier.
Grey Stone traveled to Custer, South Dakota with a man I later came to know as Jerome Bean. I didn’t know Jerome very well but I’d seen him around with Grey. He had a large forehead, wide open like the plains at the belly of the Black Hills. He wore his hair in braids that thinned out at the ends, so thin they looked like woven black thread pointing to the ground. I could feel there was much to know about this man.
When they came back from Custer to clean up the mess of the Bad Heart murder, they were in bad shape. I don�
�t mean just physically but they were torn up and angry inside about the crazy shit that went down over there. The boys and me, we went to The Crazy Horse for a beer so we could get the story from Grey. When we sat down, I noticed something new in Grey’s eyes. A look that said something had broken loose inside him.
“I’d called the Rapid City Journal and asked them to put the meeting we had called at the courthouse in the paper, so we could get other Indians to show up and support us. Trouble is, some feds called up the paper pretending to be one of us and said the meeting was cancelled. This is the kind of shit they pull so people won’t show up. 200 still showed.”
Even Grey’s voice had changed; it was lower somehow, trailing out like a broken piece of music.
“We went to the courthouse, it was snowing like crazy. Sarah Bad Heart, Wesley’s mother was there. That woman was shaking. They’d killed her son, you know?” Grey wasn’t looking at us when he spoke; it was like he was retelling the story to himself.
“We get there and they let us Jerome, Don and me through but they stop the others.” I notice Grey’s hand shaking as he puts his palms out flat on the table, pushing hard as if he was trying to find meaning in the wood.
“I’m thinking, this ain’t right. They told us they’d meet with us. They said they’d meet with the Indian community to address Wesley’s murder. So Jerome’s yelling at the cops to let ‘em through and I go to get Sarah Bad Heart ‘cause you know it ain’t right to leave that woman standing out there in a blizzard when we’re talking about the murder of her son. And all of a sudden an officer blows his whistle and about 90 cops run in there, like fucking termites in a tree trunk. They start grabbing Sarah and me and hitting her with an ice stick. I’m yelling and some asshole throws some fucking tear gas in the room. I’m thinking, shit we’ve got to get out of here. So I grab a billy club from one of the cops and I break a window. The cops just grabbed my ass and threw me in jail.”
The place was silent now, silent and still like the whole place was listening. I heard the sound of glasses clanking on the other side of the café.
“Sarah’s in jail. The mother of that boy is in jail while her son’s killer is out free.”
One String Guitar Page 26