RavenShadow

by Win Blevins

  I asked silently to find it again. I pledged to look for it with the eye of my heart. I couldn’t reason toward it, but I might be able to feel my way.

  That day in the low lodge I asked to see truly, to see with the chante ishta, to know the meaning of what I saw on Bear Butte, to discover again the voice that came to me and disappeared. But my heart was dead. And the killer, O the killer is me.

  When Pete told me to open the door, and the steam drifted out and the lodge cooled, he looked at me for a while without a word. “I dunno,” he finally said. “Maybe I can’t help you.”

  I studied his stolid face. It told me nothing. Lips and eyebrows were expressionless, mute. This was a man who simply said what he meant.

  “Maybe only you can help you.”

  I felt a quiver. I was not ready to walk strong on my own feet. My whole spirit was begging Pete in silence, Help me, help me.

  “I do see one clue.” My heart stirred. (What a coward I was, thinking I could live as a man only with Pete’s help!) “You are not telling me something.” He looked at me indifferently but softly. “You are holding something back, as you should, something for you and you only to turn over and over in your mind, to look back at. That’s good. But you are holding back something else, something you need to tell me. You know what it is.”

  He waited.

  He was mistaken. I didn’t have the power that day to know clearly, from the heart (what you call intuitively), what I should tell and what I should not. But empowered by his confidence, I began to know.

  Uncertain, in a tremulous voice, I started singing the song I heard in paradise. High and sweet I sang it, just as I heard it behind the faces of my people, and their ancestors, and their ancestors. In a pale and quavery voice I sang it once through, saying “hi-ye hi-yo” where I should have used words.

  Then, with the power of the sweat lodge, I began again from the beginning, and this time came the day’s second miracle. I sang the words of the first two lines. Where the words came from, I do not know. I did not understand them that night on the mountain, despite straining to hear them, despite yearning to hear them. Now they flowed from my mind and my tongue.

  The father says so,

  The father says so.

  But there were more lines, and the other words were beyond my grasp, the words that bore the real meaning. And I felt an impulse to utter some shape—SOMETHING was itching deep in my throat, wanting to come forth. But I could not find that utterance. I looked at Pete ruefully, for my spirit as yet had no strength. I swam in feelings of guilt, foolishness, weakness, and mocked myself for diving into those feelings so quickly.

  He nodded to himself, and nodded to himself again. He knew something, I could see, and whatever it was surprised him. “Close the door,” he cried in a loud and sudden voice.

  Once more into the darkness and the heat, painful and oppressive for the weak, healing for those with the strength to find healing in it. In this third round I was feeling unsure of myself. Oh yes, my heart might have been singing. Hadn’t the words from my vision come to me, suddenly, vividly, miraculously? But I was quailing yet.

  I suffered. Pete’s arm tilted the water from the dipper onto the hot lava rocks continuously, and he prayed in a crackling roar, entreating the powers … for whatever I needed.

  I was busy suffering. My mind told me the steam falling on my shoulders would blister the skin. My lungs told me I could not breathe. My eyes spoke of darkness. I cowered. I wanted to whimper. When Pete cried “Open the door!” I wanted to dart out like a rabbit.

  I forced myself to wait.

  Pete sat there, his eyes half down, his face intent. I could see he was searching for something inside.

  Finally he said, “Maybe I know that song a little. Maybe. I’m not sure.”

  He heaved a big breath in and out.

  “I can’t think of anyone you can ask.” He nodded to himself. “You need to talk to old people who know something, who remember the old songs. Chup can give you names to start on. You need that song.”

  Then he did something completely un-Pete-like. He rolled his eyes with a bizarre effect, comic and scary at once, and cried, “Close the door!”

  The last round was the hottest time I can remember in the sweat lodge. But my spirit felt a little stronger. I did not spend the time feeling sorry for myself. I put my mind into Pete’s prayers, and added the small strength of my spirit to send them up to Tunkashila. And somehow, somehow, in the way of the sweat lodge, the suffering was sweet.

  When the door was opened the last time, Pete thumped his fingers on the ground in an odd way, perhaps distracted. He beat all five fingers of his right hand on the ground at once, like drumming. All of a sudden his eyes came back to this world and time, to me. He said, “I can tell you something.” He drummed his fingers on the ground. “I think you saw Big Foot’s people, the dead ones.” Suddenly came a faraway look, and then he was back with me. “The other people, in that good place with the ancestors, I don’t know. You better find out.”

  Now he drummed with both palms flat on the ground, beating out a rhythm I could hardly follow, wild and mad. For a moment I thought Pete might have something of Coyote in him, the trickster.

  The grin he gave me was all challenge. “Are you ready,” he said, “for a big vision?” He cackled. “Were you ready? Are you ready?” Now he whooped the words. “Ready are not, here we come! Ollee ollee oxen free!”

  The big man laughed, and the laughter sounded free and easy.

  Now he settled down. His body stopped shaking, and his eyes grew both serious and kindly. “Don’t worry,” he said. “No one is ever ready. You can’t be ready for this.

  “But on second thought,” he said with another cackle, “do worry! Yes, a big vision! Do worry! Every reason to worry! Spirit,” he declared in a mock-important way, “is gonna kick your ass!”

  Pecking and Hunting

  I steered out of Pete’s driveway, if you could call a two-track loop a driveway, bumped down to the highway, trundled to the crossroads, and stopped. Pulled onto the dirt. Turned the engine off, threw my arms on top of the steering wheel, plopped my head on my arms.

  I didn’t have any energy to go on. Don’t mean being tired from the sweat, though I was. I mean my life was out of energy. Tank on empty, ergs zero, no more zippedy doodah for Blue Crow.

  I flumphed out my breath, let my lungs sit a minute, eased air back in.

  Maybe it was a hopeless task. I mean the song I sang in the lodge, and the missing lines. Oh shit.

  Eased air back in again. “You need that song,” Pete said. Know all the words. Maybe know who made it, who sang it, when, and what it was about. That was the road I needed to walk, for now. I asked for a vision, Spirit gave it to me. I didn’t understand it. And it looked like the first big step was finding out about the song.

  Maybe I can go on. Don’t know how? That’s why they call it faith.

  Umm-hmm. And how was I gonna do that? Where was I gonna point the hood ornament of the Lincoln from right here on the side of the road? Just drive up and down the dirt roads of this rez, pick up hitchhikers, and hope? Drive the Cheyenne River rez, where the Big Foot people came from? All the other seven Sioux rezzes, and the highways in between?

  I didn’t have the gas in my tank, in my body, or in my spirit.

  I got out, opened the trunk, and got into the cooler that was acting as my grocery store. Palmed out two apples, bit into one (you shouldn’t clobber the digestive system after a four-day fast). To the right Chimney Butte jutted up. To the north, out of sight in the bottoms, White River coiled its way through the Badlands, slithering northeastward, gooey with sediment and colored with the clays of the hills. In every other direction the buttes and cliffs jipped and jopped and jumped up. Since the autumn sun was setting, they caught its horizontal light. The natural whites flamed quietly, rose-colored.

  My home country, the strange, haunted Badlands. Or once my home country, when I had a home. Not far from h
ere, as rez distances go, lived Grandpa and Aunt Adeline. They would be eating in the squaw cooler about now. To go home, that’s supposed to be the easiest thing, that’s where you can always go. This is more true among my people than yours. But I didn’t feel it, not then. I hadn’t felt it for twenty years. As long as I was falling between two stools, I couldn’t feel it.

  Okay, Emile’s, my temporary residence. But I couldn’t face the thought of home-among-the-white-folks tonight. I’d been in that place, from South Dakota to Seattle, for twenty years. I didn’t want to be there now.

  So I thought about what I wanted right now. To be around Indian people. Thought where I could do that, be around a bunch of Indians, not just find one family in these lonely hills. I headed north to Scenic, South Dakota, and the Longhorn Saloon. Hey, if it’s a sad decision to hang out with drunks, that’s what my people are right now.

  Ha, ha, I caught you. You think I was gonna get drunk. Actually, I was determined not to drink. Oh, I had the desire. I’m an alcoholic, and an alcoholic always has a hole inside needs filling with booze, and he always feels the hole. But the mountain and the sweat had left me strong in myself. Times like that, the hole don’t feel like much.

  I liked the Longhorn for a couple of reasons. One, it had a giant sign on the roof, NO INDIANS ALLOWED. Of course, being just off the rez, no problems with the law, it was a hard-core redskin watering hole. On the same roof sign words scrawled big in Lakota said, INDIANS WELCOME HERE. Guess the owners didn’t read Lakota. So it was the closest place I might find a few friends. Felt like right then I needed friends.

  Who I found was Sallee Walks Straight.

  She sat alone on a bar stool, looking sexy in a powder blue tank top. I hauled up next to her and her Virgin Mary.

  When she finally noticed me, she said softly, “What are you doing? You tried to kill my cousin.”

  “I’m glad to see you,” says I.

  “I wouldn’t sit there. You’d be letting yourself in for some adventure.” Her voice was mimicking someone or something, and she showed a corner of a grin.

  “I’m sober. Going to AA. Haven’t had a drink since that night.”

  “Goody-goody for you.” Rosaphine—it was Rosaphine she was imitating. “I think the little woman’s about to get square with the big man.”

  At that moment an arm took a choke hold on me from behind, oomphed me backward off the bar stool, and dropped me hard on the floor.

  Cuss words were slapping me upside the head. Rosaphine’s voice.

  I could take the words but not the kick. I rolled.

  Rosaphine’s foot sailed into the air like a punter’s. She fell backward, but from the bar stool Sallee caught her with both hands. I noticed Rosaphine’s vocabulary of cussing was quite creative, combining mother, the f word, bitch, bastard, asshole, and other epithets in ways I hadn’t heard before.

  Came the kick again. I crabbed sidewise, moving good for a big man. Rosaphine’s foot slammed a chair into a table and cracked the back.

  Her second round of cussing descended from creativity to chaos. I heard mother-bitching and son of an asshole, among others.

  People were clearing out of the way. Out of the corner of one eye I saw the barkeep heading for the corner of the bar with a baseball bat.

  Rosaphine stepped closer and wound up the third kick, which was meant to score from a hundred yards.

  I was pinned between chairs.

  The barkeep appeared behind her, cocking the bat.

  “Behind you!” I yelled.

  She grinned maliciously, and I thought, That’s how our women used to look when they tortured prisoners.

  When the bat was at full cock in back of Rosaphine’s head, Sallee grabbed it and held on.

  Here came the roundhouse kick.

  I rolled under the table.

  Crash!

  The heel of Rosaphine’s cowboy boot caught the edge of the table.

  The table teetered away from me.

  Then it tottered back my way. I was crabbing out from under, belly up.

  A full pitcher of beer cruised sweetly off the edge, pivoted in midair, and dumped its full load, right on my crotch.

  I fell back.

  Rosaphine howled.

  Sallee did a cat screech. The barkeep hee-hawed. The rest of the crowd made up for Sallee with a handsome roar.

  The beer was trickling through my crevices, you know where.

  After forty days in the wilderness of abstinence, my cock finally gets a drink.

  Rosaphine grabbed a glass in each hand off the next table and dumped them where the pitcher went.

  Matter of fact, it got plastered.

  The roars got louder. The barkeep was crying and choking on his own laughter. He’d dropped the bat.

  “Done put that fire out!” declared Rosaphine. She paraded around, her fists raised in triumph.

  “Rosaphine, I’m sorry,” I called loudly. “What I did was dumb beyond dumb.” She just kept on parading.

  I stood up next to Sallee, who was covering her giggles with a hand.

  “Can we talk?” says I.

  She caught the bartender’s eye, said, “I think we’d better go.”

  I’ve never liked baseball bats.

  Outside she said, “You sure don’t smell clean and sober.”

  I rubbed my hands flat down the front of my jeans. No way to get wetter. I looked around at the starry night. “Thirty-eight days,” I said.

  “Not thirty-eight days dry, that’s for sure.”

  “I want to see you.”

  Something dark ran through her eyes.

  “I want apologize to you,” says I.

  She shrugged.

  “It was dumb. It was the worst day of my life. No, that’s wrong, it was the best. Because it made me start climbing out.”

  I took a couple of breaths. Like a blast, I remembered. Fourth step: Take a serious moral inventory of myself. Eighth step: Make amends to all I’ve hurt, where doing so would not damage them or others. I hadn’t gotten as far as these steps yet, but I knew I owed Sallee. “I deserve for you to be angry. I deserve it.”

  She looked into my face, probably hunting for signs of a con job. Finally she said, “Rosaphine more.”

  “Absolutely, amends. I don’t think she’s listening.”

  Sallee burst out with high laughter.

  Rosaphine honked the horn, and Sallee held up a hand at her.

  Yeah, that’s what they say about the eighth step. You can make amends, but you can’t control how the person responds.

  “I’d like to tell you my story,” I said. I realized with some surprise that I was telling the simple truth, not selling something.

  “Why me?” said Sallee.

  “Just do,” I said.

  The horn honked again. Sallee turned and hollered, “Cool it!” I was pleased to hear how the ladylike young woman had been with her sisters.

  “I know things about you,” she said. “Uncle Chup has your phone number on the refrigerator with the other man he sponsors. He hasn’t broken your confidentiality, but I hear you guys talk long times on the phone. I know you’re taking your recovery seriously. I like that.”

  The horn honked again, and Sallee ignored it. “I don’t think there’s time for a story right now. And I’m involved in something big, take a couple of months. You know about the Big Foot Memorial Rides?”

  I shook my head no.

  “Why don’t you ask Uncle Chup?” I looked at her, wondering. “Really, do it. And we’ll talk sometime.”

  She turned away from me, and I watched her glide to the car. Rosaphine cranked the engine and ground across the gravel. Sallee didn’t look back.

  The Big Foot Memorial Riders

  Maybe I heard vaguely about them, some rides honoring Big Foot’s people who got killed at Wounded Knee. Emile’s father, who was a full-blood, dismissed it as something the half-breeds were doing. I guess I did too.

  “Sallee’s made a commitment to ride this
year.” Chup looked at me, and I could see the questions in his eyes.

  Some people consult their advisors in the confessional. I have coffee with mine at Lucky’s.

  “Tell me.” I had a feeling beginning to rise inside. I didn’t know what all it was, but it was sizable, and it was eager, maybe too eager.

  Chup took a sip of his coffee, which was so unusual I wondered what to expect. Probably he was feeling like he oughta protect his niece against a drunk and depressive who had attempted suicide.

  But this is what he said. “I see your heart is good.” He started rolling another smoke. He could spend a lot of time at that. “Okay. 1986, some of us started doing rides to Wounded Knee, to remember. Started from Big Foot’s camp, followed his route to Wounded Knee. Arrived in time to be there, where it happened, on December twenty-nine.”

  The day the Seventh Cavalry, Custer’s old outfit, attacked a whole village of Mniconjou on the way to Pine Ridge to make peace. Killed three hundred men, women, and children, almost all unarmed.

  I’d avoided that place my whole life, except the day Unchee’s funeral was there.

  “Four rides so far. Last one coming up this December, one hundred years since the massacre. Seven generations. Ceremonies on the big day, Wiping Away the Tears ceremony, and Feeding of the Spirits ceremony. Big doings.

  “I tell you, in the winter those rides haven’t been easy. Cold.”

  The feeling was singing in me. On the mountain I’d seen Big Foot’s people, that’s what Pete said. On the mountain … but I didn’t want the feelings. Something in me didn’t want to hear the song.

  “I need to ride,” I said.

  He nodded slowly, and I could see pain and doubt behind his eyes. “Only you can know.” He sighed, I didn’t know why. I thought he might ask me if I was wanting to be around Sallee. He sighed again. “I have a feeling about this, about hard things. Sometimes hard things, they’re what we need.” He eyed me while he thought on it. “Only you know.” He blew smoke out. My nose was getting raw from all the smoke, and I thought how different cigarette fumes are from the smoke of the sacred Pipe.