by Win Blevins
My grandparents had a cabin, you could call it, except the word cabin calls up the wrong picture. Basically it was a freight car. Where Senior (that’s my dad) got it, or how he hauled it to my grandparents’ little piece of land, I’ll never know. The rest of the house was (and still is) catch-as-catch-can. Tree trunks support the roof. Tarpaper, newspaper, scraps of two-by-four, odd remnants of plywood, pieces of two-by-twelves. We even had our version of the great housing fashion of the 1950s, a picture window. It was a two-piece windshield filched from a wreck and carefully framed by Senior into the kitchen wall. In the summer we could have another picture window, a giant one, plus air-conditioning—we just slid the big freight-car door open.
Grandpa and Senior built a privy and a squaw cooler too. This was a brush shelter, pine boughs on poles. In the summer Unchee cooked on a wood-burner in its shade, we ate there, and it was our hangout place away from the heat of the house. I remember her squaw bread fondly, and the black coffee with molasses, and the dried corn with berries. That was a good time.
When I was a kid, during the 1950s, Senior was over at our place all the time, building this and that onto the cabin for Grandpa and Unchee. Since he was my dad, it didn’t seem strange. Not until I moved to town did I realize, really, that the shack my parents lived in was much poorer. My dad spent his time, energy, and dollars fixing up his parents’ house and short-changed his own family. I have not decided whether that was love for Grandpa, Unchee, and me, or the out-of-kilter behavior of an alcoholic, or something else.
My dad was a natural builder. Give him the magic implements of his trade—as little as two kinds of hammers, a rip saw and a crosscut saw, a plane, and a sack of nails—and he could make your dream come true. He learned his craft in the Army Corps of Engineers, and he had that can-do attitude—can do anything with any materials under any handicaps in any amount of time, just point me in the right direction. He got his chops building bridges for American armies on the move up the Italian peninsula, and he was proud of it, to the extent he had any pride at all.
You should remember some stuff about him. He built a good house for his parents and lived in a hovel himself. Most of the time he didn’t have any tools because he’d pawned them for drinking money. He beat my sisters. I don’t even know where he is now. One day he’s gonna freeze to death in a snow bank with a bottle in his hand.
Maybe I loved my father those days, but for sure I hated him. Here’s one reason I’m walking the red road now. If I have any children, I don’t want them to say the same about me.
Want to know how confused my childhood was? Think of all the names my own family called me. To Grandpa and Unchee, when I was a little kid, I was Dreamer. To my sisters, Angelee and Mayana, I was Bud. They wanted an English name to use for me—they didn’t speak much Lakota. So they came up with Bud, of all things. Well, Grandpa liked it because it seemed like a common, ordinary, white-man name, but also meant a beginning a leaf or flower, a little miracle—so he thought it was a perfect disguise for an Indian. Mom and Dad called me Junior. (After I got permanently mad at him and refused to call him Dad, I called him Senior.) White people and my schoolmates (after I started going to school) called me Joseph.
Also, our family name was Good Road, but I was given the name Blue Crow.
Altogether I didn’t know who I was.
I just said something about going to school. That was the earthquake in my life, brought by none other than Oliver Walks Far.
The Earthquake
The year 1967 was a big one in the white world too. When I got into music and became a jock, I learned all about what it meant to my white friends. The summer of love in San Francisco, hippies, the Monterey Pop Festival, the beginning of flower power, Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, the Beatles, the flowing together of rock and folk and protest songs into the new music—a new era, the dawning of the Age of Aquarius.
Which just went to show how far their life was from mine. I was a fourteen-year-old kid on the Pine Ridge rez, living far from electricity. My color TV was the Badlands, my music was the sacred song and the drumming, and my new era would start when I went on the mountain and got a vision to live by.
Oliver Walks Far ended all that. He was a life-long acquaintance of my grandfather, I do not say friend. Oliver was a strange, solitary blanket Indian even to us blanket Indians. He had once been a yuwipi man, but no more. He liked to live way out by himself and see nobody.
Oliver lived further back in the Badlands than we did, because (in my opinion) he was an ornery old bastard who couldn’t get along with people. I didn’t see why Grandpa and Unchee acted so respectful around him. They went even further. They said, “That fellow, he knows things.” This is a quiet compliment among our people, not given to just anyone. It means, ‘That person is wise, pay attention to what he says.’
That summer Oliver Walks Far got sick and came to see Grandpa a lot, because Grandpa was a pezuta wicasa, the sort of medicine man who cures people, not with drumming and singing but with herbs. Old man Walks Far came a lot for treatment of whatever was wrong with his lungs, and by way of payment he stayed to help Grandpa around the place.
Part of Grandpa’s living came from the horses and cows. We ran them on Grandpa’s land and wherever they felt like going in the Badlands. Grandpa broke the horses, and he had a reputation for making gentle saddle mounts.
“I do it the old way,” he told me. “I hand-raise them. Just let them hang around the house like dogs, like pets.” Grandpa also handled them all the time, and told us to do the same. They nosed around the kitchen door a lot, looking for treats.
“Comes time to get up on a horse,” he said, “no trouble. That horse, he’s learned I’m always good to him, I never hurt him—he trusts me completely. Doesn’t sound like a secret, but those white ranchers, they never figured it out yet. What they do, they treat horses like somebody separate. They fear their horses and their horses fear them.”
Maybe what else Grandpa did was a secret. When they were born, he put his head close and mingled his breath with theirs, and his spirit.
Later he got a good price for those saddle horses, though he never had much use for the ranchers. They leased Indian property for grazing, and ended up being our bosses on our own land.
The rest of his living came from what people now call migrant labor. Plus Unchee made a little money by doing beadwork and selling it at the trading post.
Though we never had much, we had enough to eat. Once a month we would go for the issue, the commodities the government gave us, staples like lard, unroasted coffee beans, rice, white flour, beans, and sugar. This lousy food is what has made my people fat—it’s given lots of us com bod, the lard body you get from commodities that are all fat and sugar.
Also, Grandpa and I would hunt. There were hardly any deer or antelope left in the Badlands in the sixties (for sure no buffalo), and we didn’t have a gun, so we would smoke rabbits out of their holes and club them. Or we would catch mud turtles and sand turtles. Grandpa was very fond of mud turtles.
The hard part was, I was like an only child—just me, Grandpa, and Unchee. I was kept away from Indians who were white in their ways. Which left only a few back-country folk like us to talk to or play with, and we seldom saw them. So my main playmates were buffalo and ponies carved from cow bones, stones I used as marbles, and slingshots Grandpa and I made from inner tubes.
When we did see other people was at family get-togethers or issues or ceremonies. Ceremony was a big part of our lives not only spiritually but socially. Grandpa kept track of the days with a moon-counting stick, notches for days on one side, months on the other side, and a new stick every spring. When the time came, we’d take the wagon for miles and miles, didn’t matter how far. Ceremonies were serious, though, and not as much fun as issues (where they issued commodities). At issues I first played the bear game (throwing sharp grass stems at each other), pit slinging, shinny ball, and grab-them-by-the-hair-and-kick-them. Mostly, though, I was one lonesome kid.
Back to that summer. Oliver helped us repair corrals and put up a little of the wild hay, when he was up to it. He would also rest a lot, and when I had time, I would listen to his stories. Lonely as I was, I’d have listened to anybody’s stories.
I liked the stories. It was from him I first heard the tale of the Mysterious Lake, the story of Lame Rabbit, and the story of Stone Boy—these seemed like magic to me. But I didn’t like Oliver Walks Far. I liked him even less when he said what he did to Grandpa and Unchee.
We were at the squaw cooler of an evening in late summer. The grown-ups were talking and I was stretched out under a cottonwood, dreaming. Daydreaming, you white folks call it. It’s that and more.
The day had been hot, the evening was only beginning to cool off. I’d look up into the canopy of the tree and hunt for shapes. My favorites were the thunderbirds, not because we needed the rain, though we did, but because the thought of thunderbirds excited me—O powers of the west wind! Or, moving only my head, I’d look at the shadows on the Badlands. During the hot mid-summer days, when the sun was straight overhead, the Badlands seemed fried, the grass dry, the ground scorched, and earth and sky alike one big glare. In the evening, though, the sun slanted shadows across the land. The strange shapes of the bluffs and chimneys and other outcroppings threw even stranger shadows across the jumbled ground, purple shapes on the yellow-brown earth. I liked to imagine that I was a shadow, creeping across the land, insinuating myself through a gully, slinking along a dry wash, easing up a cutbank and wrapping myself around the spiky sagebrushes on the far side, or pooling deep under the leafy roof of a cottonwood. I liked that feeling of crawling along the ground, curling myself around plants and stones, making deep darkness on the back sides of boulders, fingering my way into things.
Anyway, I was doing my version of dreaming.
“Dreamer,” called Grandpa softly. He was respectful of my day-dreaming—said it was keeping one eye on the other world, the one seen with the heart, which was my task in life. Unchee often said my name in a different way, the tone white people use impatiently for people who pay no attention. Mostly Unchee didn’t talk to anybody, lived kind of sullen in her own world. When she spoke up, it was like as not to accuse me of being a daydreamer.
“This man has something to say to you,” said Grandpa.
I knew right off away it was something I wouldn’t like.
Oliver Walks Far sat on the only chair at Unchee’s table—actually, he propped himself like a log, stiff and almost straight, on the old ladderback. He was a big man, head like a watermelon with his black hair pulled back hard, belly like a boulder, and he moved no more than need be. I noticed, though, that his eyes moved, following me as I approached the table and sat at the place Unchee was patting, on the automobile bench seat beside her. With Unchee acting real sympathetic, I knew it was something bad. Grandpa sagged against one tree like he was wore out.
“I been thinking about you,” said Oliver Walks Far. “I think you are taking an easy path, not going to school. Nothing good comes from an easy path.” This is a strong principle among us.
I glanced across at Grandpa. He wouldn’t look at me—he knew what was coming, and he wasn’t going to help.
The old man repeated it softly and gently. “Nothing good comes from an easy path.”
I squirmed. I could guess what this meant, and I felt prickly about Oliver Walks Far meddling in my life. What fourteen-year-old wouldn’t?
What I really was, was scared. Scared to go to town, scared to go to school.
When Lakota children are little, the grown-ups say, “Go to bed right now, or the ciciye will get you.” When that monster ceased to be enough, they said the siyoko would get you. But when the kid was old enough to understand, they said, “Wasicu anigni kte”—the white man will come and take you away. That was enough to do the job.
A fourteen-year-old boy, however, does not speak either his fear or his anger to his elders, especially not to a man who “knows things.” You simply thank older people for their wisdom. Since I didn’t have the heart for that, Grandpa did it for me.
“What you say,” Grandpa went on, “we will consider it carefully.”
Oliver Walks Far rose heavily, eyeing me. Without another word he lumbered off toward the hay shed, where he slept. I could hear his feet heavy on the earth, thumping like drumbeaters.
The next morning the man who knew things was gone, two-footing home on those thick legs of his, and never mind the weak lungs. I never saw him again, and soon heard his relatives had put him on a scaffold. But he had rolled a boulder into the creek of my life, and the creek had divided, and now would flow sundered, split into two courses, red and white.
We did not in fact consider what he said carefully. We just did it.
After breakfast the next day Unchee helped me pack my belongings into a cardboard box, my clothes underneath my ceremonial things. I helped Grandpa hitch the team, and we had nothing to say. Unchee was almost as silent as she packed two gallon jugs of water, and some lunch. When she brought her parfleche of little beaded things, key rings, barrettes, and the like, each worth a couple of bucks, she said, “I want to stop by the trader.” (If hippies were beginning to sport Injun stuff, the effect hadn’t reached the rez yet. It never did.) I hoisted my skinny body and my heavy heart onto the plank seat, Grandpa clucked, and we were off. Uprooting my life from the only place I knew, casting it into the wind, like tumbleweed.
Kyle—I’d never lived in town. My family—I hadn’t lived with them since I was a suckling. Their tarpaper shack—I was used to Grandpa’s cabin. My sisters—I only half knew them. Mom—she hid behind Dad, I hardly knew her. Dad—he hid behind booze, I hardly knew him.
I was flat-out scared.
But I was going.
Had I been a couple of years older, it might have been different. I might have already gone on the mountain for the first time and brought back a vision, some medicine of my own as a guide. I could have claimed that I knew my way for myself, and meant to follow my vision. But a youth who lacks his own medicine, among our people, is a blind man, and must be guided by others.
Bird Without a Nest
The three of us came around the corner, face to face with my family’s place.
Have you ever been shocked, truly? Beyond a so-to-speak use of that word? Or is your white world too well protected for that?
Our house was burned to the ground.
Nothing was left but pieces of tarpaper, rows of char where walls once were, and little bits of studs sticking up like broken bones.
Where am I going to live?
For a moment, I swear, I smelled burning flesh. In my mind’s eye I saw the blackened bodies of my two sisters, my mother, and Senior, smoldering.
I started to heave—the bile actually started to churn—when a kid’s voice saved me. Mayana’s voice, girlish and sweet! “Bud! Bud!”
She was waving from behind the hood of the half-stripped, rusted-out auto body that resided in Senior’s yard. All four of them were there, kind of shuffling to their feet. I noticed Senior slip a pint-shaped brown bag into one pocket of his baggy pants. When we got close with the wagon, we saw they were eating supper right off the ground, without even a blanket. They looked ashamed and slinky, like dogs that have been kicked.
“Washtay,” says Grandpa, meaning good, like in good to see you. What was good about it nobody knew.
“Washtay,” everybody mumbled, including me. My tongue felt like a rock in my mouth.
We piled out of the wagon. Grandpa spoke up. “He, he, he, troubles.” He meaning regret.
Mom came toward me, drew me to her. I was taller than she was now, so she couldn’t fold me into her breast, but she did her best. “Washtay, washtay,” she said.
I couldn’t get any answer out.
Unchee set aside her ill spirits for a while and pitched in. “Time to eat,” she said in Lakota. Although my parents spoke Lakota fluently, and my sisters spoke it well enough, they
didn’t like to use it. Our family get-togethers were kind of funny for language. Grandpa and I didn’t speak English more than a few words. Unchee, Senior, and Mom spoke both languages fine, though Unchee sounded like English was a bitter taste in her mouth. My sisters understood Lakota but didn’t speak it much, or didn’t like to. Old-timey stuff, they said impatiently. So my sisters and I communicated kind of hopscotch. I’d speak in Lakota and they’d understand, but they’d answer with gestures, or a few words of English and Lakota mixed. They didn’t take any stock in back-to-the-blanket.
A glance told Unchee that the family’s food was gone, and there was hardly any to begin with. We’d counted on supper with them. Unchee always packed plenty for lunch, though, so she set out the leftovers, jerk meat and dried corn with berries. We polished them off right quick, and I was still hungry. It was as sad a supper as I ever ate.
I didn’t hear much of the conversation. My mind was raging—Where am I going to live? However, I pieced together bit by bit what happened to their home.
“Five days ago,” I heard Senior mumble. That was when the house burned down. “In the middle of the night,” said Angelee, like that was the worst thing about it. “We don’t know why or how,” said Senior. From Mom’s look I knew she did know, and pretty quick I got a clear mental picture—Senior passed out in bed with a cigarette in his hand.
Grandpa gave me a warning look and spoke up himself. “Who has it in for you?”
“I’m sure gonna get whoever done it,” said Senior. He futzed around and scratched at the ground while he said it. It was the performance of a man ashamed.
Nothing was ever admitted nor proven, against Senior or anyone else. I didn’t need any proof.