RavenShadow

by Win Blevins

  We rode to the corral and tied the horses to the rail. Our gear would go ahead of us to tonight’s camp in the support vehicles.

  Half the riders were still trying to catch their mounts and get saddled. Among these was Pleasant Sunday. He wore a beautiful, flowing capote, made from a powder blue Hudson Bay blanket with a black stripe, but he couldn’t flick his loop over the horse’s head. It was a big, black, active gelding quarter horse, and the head was practically bouncing toward the clouds. Way Plez was going, he’d still be in this corral on the twenty-eighth.

  I slipped into the corral, said, “Lemme?” and took the lariat from Plez. Then I got the bridle from the fence post.

  Yeah, let me help you do something.

  I pussyfooted the animal toward the narrow end of the corral against a building. I was moving like a cutting horse, gently but quickly, nothing wasted, nothing big, anticipating the animal’s moves. It watched me. It knew.

  We eyed each other. I stood so still he didn’t even blink. After a while, the black seemed to sigh, and lowered his head. I walked easy to him, touched his muzzle, slipped the bit into his mouth, and put the bridle on. Never even bothered with the lariat.

  Meanwhile, there was a pandemonium of whinnies, pounding hoofs, and whirring lariats all around us.

  I was watching Plez without seeming to watch. He accepted the reins and said, “You got a touch with horses.”

  “Thanks. You ride much?”

  Plez was putting on the saddle. “Naw,” he says. “You know, my dad’s people. Cherokees, we’re more farmers and tradesmen than horsemen. Hundred fifty years ago your great-great-grandfathers were riding down the buffalo, big stuff, big adventure. Know what mine were doing? Running the general store. Planting and harvesting crops. One was editing the first newspaper among the Cherokees.”

  He pulled the cinch too tight. I adjusted it, and showed him how to slip three fingers behind the cinch—if you can’t get them in, it’s too tight.

  We hopped up on the rail next to Emile. I was feeling a little better about Plez, but not about the day.

  “You feeling marbinschilling?” he asked me, beaming as usual.

  “Marbinschilling?”

  “It’s a word my grandfather taught me—means a little out of sorts.”

  “Cherokee word?” I asked.

  “Naw, it’s a word a grandpa made up for the fun of his grandkids. Well, are you marbinschilling?”

  “I’m cold,” I said.

  I was done up in longjohns, pacs, a padded working man’s zipper suit, gloves and liners, ski mask, and hooded parka. The only thing exposed was my eagle feather. I had to turn my whole body to check the corral with my eyes. It was going to be a while before we started.

  “I’m gonna find us some hot coffee,” said Emile, and slid off the rail.

  “My grandfather taught me a lot,” Plez rambled on. “Can’t tell you how much. He also give me my name. I mean the first name and the family name, Sunday. Our original name was Cheatham. My grandfather, Pleasant Cheatham, was born again at a revival held in Oklahoma by Billy Sunday. Accepted Jesus, praise the Lord!” (Plez’s eyes hinted at irony here, but his smile was tireless and his tone enthusiastic.) “When my dad was born, later that year, my grandfather wrote himself down on the birth certificate as Pleasant Sunday, and my dad was Orel Sunday. That’s how I come to be Pleasant Sunday, the Second. That’s the truth. You can see I was born to be a man of Spirit.”

  Now I had some ammunition. “You’re Indian and a born-again?” I know plenty of those, but I was about to do a Tyler Red Crow on him—“All Christian churches are my enemies.”

  “Naw,” says Plez, “I walk the Indian way only.” He considered what he wanted to say. “And I have the gift. I see things.”

  “What do you mean, see things?”

  “I see things of the Spirit. I see you’re irritable now. Last night I saw you’re afraid about this ride. You wanna know what happened to your relatives, and at the same time you don’t wanna know. You feel maybe like a fool. You think maybe I can help you, but you’re half-scared of that.”

  I looked at him in the eyes, white-man style. They were merry and his grin was easy.

  “You might be wrong.”

  He shrugged with his eyebrows. “I have other gifts, too,” he said. “Journey through time.”

  “You what?”

  “Told you, I’ve been to Wounded Knee, saw the massacre.”

  We sat there and looked at each other for a moment. Plez kind of looked like he was laughing—not laughing at me, but laughing at everything, enjoying the world.

  “That’s hard for me.”

  “It’s the shaman’s way. I can go into the Spirit World. I can talk to spirits there. I can talk to our departed ancestors. Sometimes, if things are right, I can go be with our ancestors somewhere they were. Like Wounded Knee. Beyond people’s stories, beyond what I read, was what the spirits showed me. Direct. I was there.”

  I felt a spasm, anger roiled up with nausea.

  “Anybody ever call you crazy?”

  “Oh yeah, that’s a favorite.” He was just grinning and nodding.

  I jumped down from the rail, untied the reins, and switched the post with them hard, like I meant to hurt it. I was getting out of there. I glared at Plez.

  “Remember, that’s what Wanagi Wacipi, the Spirit Dance was about. People went and visited the Spirit World.”

  I stood there with my mouth hanging open.

  “Yeah,” he said, “you might be able to go back there. Some people can, some can’t. When we talked last night, I thought, This fellow has the gift. At least I bet you could do it now, when your mind and spirit are so close to that day a hundred years ago.”

  I made myself turn away, looking for Emile.

  Plez put a friendly hand on my shoulder. “You wanna go see what happened to your relatives there, Wounded Knee, you lemme know. We’ll try.”

  I pretended I hadn’t heard and walked out from underneath the hand.

  I stomped around the corral and stood on the other side. Here the cold wind was in my face, and it hurt. I realized I was aching terrible: ears, nose, fingers, feet. Where’s Emile? Where’s that hot coffee? I stomped on, searching for my friend. My eyes were tearing from the cold, or anger, or fear that Pleasant Sunday, man of the old ways, might be telling the truth.

  After way too long a time, all the horses were saddled, and we riders formed a big circle in the empty space next to the store on the highway south. We were a funny-looking crew in all our winter headgear: cowboy hats, parka hoods, knit caps, Scotch caps, baseball caps with eagle feathers jutting everywhere—up, down, sideways, and just swinging in the breeze. At powwows you see Indians wearing eagle feathers with their dance outfits. Here everyone wore one with the way we dress now. I thought it meant we were bringing our religion into this life today, and I liked that.

  Later I heard there were 129 of us riders starting out. There were also a lot of walkers, including the monks and nuns. And people, more and more people, would be joining us every day, until we came to Wounded Knee.

  Some of the leaders, men who had put the rides together, sat their mounts in the middle of the circle—Arvol Looking Horse, Birgil Kills Straight, Alex White Plume, Jim Garrett, Ron McNeill, men I didn’t know. A medicine man prayed, and the men of the drum pounded out a rhythm. Then we kicked the horses to a trot, circled sunwise, and we were off.

  Eagle feathers fluttered in the cold wind. Women trilled—a sound you don’t hear much any more, exciting. In front we heard riders yelling, “Heyupa! Heyupa!” and we all joined in, voices raised together.

  After all that standing and sitting around, the motion of the horse felt good. Being Lakota felt good too.

  When we settled down to a walk, someone brushed my stirrup, and I was glad to see it was Emile, not Pleasant Sunday. Today was Sunday, two days before Christmas. “This ain’t no pleasant any day,” I said. Emile smiled his beautiful, delicate smile at me.


  Matter of fact, it would be a long day, thirty miles to ride, and it was going to be brutal. How was my butt going to hold up for thirty miles? I hadn’t ridden in years. How was I going to survive the wind and cold? This country is sagebrush plains, oceans of ridges of sagebrush, nothing to break the wind.

  How was I going to pass the time?

  I told Emile about what Plez said, claiming he could time-travel, saying he’d been to Wounded Knee, saying maybe he could take me there.

  “I don’t think it’s exactly time-traveling,” Emile said. “My grandmother’s brother, he could journey to the Spirit World. He wouldn’t tell anyone much about it. I heard he could go to the underworld and bring people back, people who had just died. He also got a language from there somehow, his own language. Songs too. Brought ’em back.”

  “You believe that?” Don’t know why I sounded so challenging. I’d always heard yuwipi men could do some of that.

  Emile didn’t answer for a moment.

  “Plez said that’s what the Ghost Dance was about, talking to the departed spirits.”

  Emile looked at me. “Yes.”

  “You believe in the Ghost Dance? I mean, our ancestors thought the Ghost Shirts would turn away bullets, and it got them killed.”

  “I don’t know what went wrong there. They got killed, that doesn’t mean the whole Ghost Dance was wrong.” He hesitated, then went on in his delicate voice. “I danced one. At Crow Dog’s. While you were away at college.”

  “So you do believe in it.”

  “Yes. Mostly I believe in the unseen. It’s there, it’s real, people don’t see it because they’ve learned not to look. I believe something else, too.” He looked at me openly, seriously. “Art brings the unseen into the world. That’s why I don’t paint what I see, or things based on old paintings. I paint what I dream. I’m bringing the other world into this one.”

  What do I say now?

  “Blue, you know this. You haven’t been living it.”

  “Drunks can’t live much of anything.”

  I stared into the wind and held my eyes open until they teared. The tears froze my ski mask to my lower lashes.

  “Kola, he’s offering you a gift, why don’t you take it? I mean, try it?”

  Something ran up my gullet, burning bad. I kicked my horse to a canter, wheeled around, and raced back along the margin of the road to get away, alone.

  I walked the dun back along the line of riders, looking for Sallee. Not a tree in sight on the plains, and the wind slapped at me. Front to back, I didn’t find her. All the way at the rear I found Tyler.

  “Where’s Sallee?”

  “The walkers are going another way.”

  “Oh.” He rode an old, wheezing bay mare. “Why you at the back?”

  “I’m keeping an eye out, making sure nobody drops behind unnoticed, helping them as gets in trouble. We keep count, especially after dark. Last year one of the walkers fell back in the dark, spent the night out, almost died. That woman who’s the leader of the monks and nuns.”

  I eyed his mount suspiciously.

  “Friend, it’s a hard time. We lost twelve horses already, lame, breathing problems, everything. We been picking them up with horse trailers. Then the riders become walkers.”

  I looked back along the way and saw nothing. We’d been riding up a big hogback on someone’s ranch. “Where are the walkers?”

  “Us riders go cross country, like Big Foot. The walkers follow the roads.” Which in country like this would mean right angles along the section lines. I wouldn’t see her until camp tonight. I felt a pang.

  “It’s gonna get worse, kola. When we top this hogback? Think about the wind up there.”

  When I hit the wind about midday, I thought some riders would die. Wi, Father Sun, was out full, giving us what he could. But Waziya, the cold giant who lives in the north, and Tate, the wind, they were stomping us. Maybe worst weather I ever saw in this country. Is this Evil One, the Wind Storm, toying with us?

  At the top of the ridge overlooking the Cheyenne River valley, where we came from, I rode past a support vehicle parked beside the road, a blue van. The wind hit it so hard it swayed on its springs. I looked at the window-framed face of the white man in the driver’s seat, and saw he looked kind. Easier to be kind when you’re next to the heater! He rolled down the window and handed me his smoke. I dragged deep, and it felt good. “I’m Tony,” he said.

  “Blue.” We shared the smoke. He was warm, I was cold, he was white, I am Indian, but I felt a bond with that man for that moment. It was lovely. When he stubbed out the cigarette, I rode on without a backward glance. Not that comfortable with the bond.

  I swiveled in my saddle and looked at the other riders. Everybody’s head was down, arms drawn to the body, trunk squeezed tight on itself. Every scarf was wrapped as high as the eyes, hats pulled down, ear flaps extended, big goggles in place over the eyes. Emile had no scarf, so his face had the color and texture of setting concrete.

  The horses looked worse. Their chests and front legs were sheeted with frost. Their breaths came in gasps and snorts. Their eyes were red. Their gait was near a stagger.

  Why, Grandfathers? We are doing a good thing. Why must we suffer so?

  Maybe it wasn’t the Evil One doing this, maybe the Grandfathers were testing us. We Lakota say the only thing that is truly ours in this world is our body. So when we want to make a sacrifice for Spirit, we let our bodies suffer, like in the Sun Dance.

  Now the wind slapped me, and I wanted to cuss Iya, the Evil One who performs his role with malicious glee. He pissed me off.

  With my knees I urged my horse down the road, off this exposed ridge. But his best pace now was a funeral march.

  I rode alongside Emile so close our stirrups bumped. I wanted to reach out and squeeze him to me, intertwine arms and legs, so we could be each others’ extra coats. The high today had been eight below, so people’s car radios said. The wind mauled us.

  Plez stood his horse in the middle of the road, waiting for us. For an old man and an inexperienced rider, he seemed to be surviving better than we were. He stuck out that thermos to me. I took it—hell, I wasn’t proud. I fumbled at the cap and almost never got it off with my stiff fingers. It was sweet, hot tea with sugar and lemon. I don’t drink tea, but I never tasted anything so good in my life. I passed the thermos to Emile.

  “Kill it,” said Plez.

  We did.

  “I wonder if there was weather like this, them dancing, a hundred years ago. The Indian agents, the soldiers, the government all said, ‘Stop that dancing.’ Big Foot answered, ‘Our people will abide by our religion, and the white man has nothing to say about that.’ This is one of the reasons they figured Big Foot wrong, as a troublemaker.

  “You know this story? The whites, they sent an officer to Big Foot’s camp and he stayed with Hump a few days. These white and red soldiers, they were friends, they fought in the campaign against Chief Joseph together. The officer, he told Hump the Ghost Dance was a bad thing. Hump was an enthusiastic Ghost Dancer, and a lot of people followed him and they danced a lot—night and day for weeks, sometimes—many of Big Foot’s other people. But when this officer friend left, Hump turned against the Ghost Dance, and his followers did the same.”

  Plez was looking at us bright and birdlike all the time. Now he says, “Hey, you got questions, ask ’em.”

  He waited. I murmured clunkily, “My lips have turned to frisbees.”

  Plez laughed. “Big Foot, he was caught between the people who wanted to dance, who thought it was the only way of hope, and people who didn’t believe in it.”

  “Not everybody did the Ghost Dance?”

  “Okay, let’s call it the Spirit Dance. Better translation, at least truer to what the dance was.

  “No, not everybody. Among all the Lakota, maybe a third. Big Foot’s people, maybe half. Kicking Bear, he was one that went to Nevada and talked to Wovoka, he was Mniconjou, and he preached the dance hard to his
band. But by this time he was off in the Stronghold, dancing night and day.

  “Anyway, the people were divided about it. Big Foot, he was always a negotiator, a compromiser, that’s what he was good at. He told the dancers to buy more ammunition for their rifles, in case the soldiers tried to stop the dancing by force. And the people who didn’t dance, he counseled them to be patient. That way he kept them more or less together on it.”

  I’d read some of this, but it hadn’t stuck.

  “Well, you know, on December fifteen the tribal police killed Sitting Bull. That scared some of his people and they ran off. On the eighteenth maybe two dozen of them came staggering into Big Foot’s camp on the Cheyenne River. They asked for food and shelter, and of course Big Foot helped them out. They also told how Sitting Bull got killed. That scared everyone.

  “Hey, you got to watch out. Indian policemen killed Sitting Bull. Indian policemen arrested Crazy Horse and held him. Just happened the bayonet that killed him was held by a white man. You got to watch your ass. They can always find one of your own to do you in.”

  “Shot while trying to escape,” I mumbled gummily. “The traditional death of an American rebel.”

  Plez chuckled and went on. “The next day this officer, Sumner, he comes to camp. He suggests Big Foot throw the Sitting Bull people out—they’re troublemakers. But Big Foot won’t turn his back on his relatives when they’re in need. Later Sumner sends a courier, says, ‘Get your people ready and go to Fort Meade.’ Fort Meade was maybe sixty miles west of there, up toward Deadwood. Sumner has orders from above, and the soldiers are worried about this Ghost Dancing—it may stir everything up. The army isn’t saying so, but they’ve decided to disarm Big Foot’s band.”

  “They just ordered hundreds of people to march around here and there? In the winter?” I was pissed.

  “If you wanted your rations, you went. Matter of fact, Big Foot wasn’t thinking about going to Fort Meade. His mind was on Fort Bennett, same distance downriver. That’s where the people got their rations, and they were hungry. His mind was also on Pine Ridge.