Touchstone Season Two Box Set

by Andy Conway

  He had protected me, even though he thought I had come to end his people.

  I was bound to him.

  I watched Red Shirt ride off to the south, not looking back. I knew that in telling me so precisely where he lived, he had given me an invitation.

  It thrilled me, but I stood paralysed, my heart torn in half.

  The moon when the wolves run together

  WHITEWATER, JANUARY 29TH, 1877. All that long, cold march north I was filling the pages of the notebook I carried. I never wrote anything in it while others were around. I suppose I felt guilty, having taken it from the dead soldier at the Greasy Grass, and having played my part in cursing us all. I filled the pages in quiet moments I had to myself, when alone in my tipi, or on my pony straggling way to the rear of the train as we snaked our way to Canada.

  I scratched out pictures that came to my dreams and words in English that were whispered to me by the spirits. These words meant nothing to me, other than the faint familiarity of a dream suddenly remembered in the day and then snatched away on the wind.

  Touchstone. Birmingham. Danny. Hudson. Mitch.

  And my own name, Katherine. The girl I once was.

  I stared at my name on the page for many hours, as if it might talk to me and reveal my secret.

  There was one other word, but I did not read it again and again like the others, because it scared me, as if it carried bad wakan that could harm me.

  I had written the word in the middle of a page of flames.

  Rachel.

  However I had ended up here in this world, with no memory of who or what I was, I knew this Rachel to be the cause.

  Since my two spare ponies had been slaughtered and eaten, the whispers had fanned into life again, like the dying embers of a campfire revived by the old women in the morning. Their bitter lips sang their song of hatred and the flames of animosity rose again.

  It was not long before they came to burn me.

  I had known it all along. Like the stray dog that follows the camp, feeding off scraps till one day it finds itself thrown into the pot.

  I knew they would come to kill me.

  I suppose I had always known it would be that moon when they would come for me. It seemed appropriate somehow. It had been the same moon when I had run from the camp after seeing them count coup on the Crow horse thief, and found myself on Wolf Mountain.

  The moon when the wolves run together.

  It had been a whole year since then. A whole year to the very night. And just like that night, they came to count coup again. Only this time it wasn’t a Crow horse thief they were going to kill and beat to a bloody pulp with their coup sticks.

  It was me.

  The whispers had quietened down for a few days, like when the birds stop singing just before an enemy attacks a village. I slept cradling my rifle, fully dressed, my pouch over my shoulder, ready to run. The slightest noise would wake me, so much that I must have grown tired over the days, losing sleep, never sinking into the dream world.

  It was a whisper that woke me.

  “Wake up, my sister,” said Little Star. “It is time to run.”

  I rolled over and groaned to shush him for waking me in the night, then remembered he was dead.

  The whispers were outside my lodge. Low, women’s whispers that one might mistake for the night wind.

  I knew this was the moment. They were giving themselves courage before they came through the tipi flap with their knives drawn.

  I was up in a moment, swift and silent, my knife in my fist, not breathing, eyes closed, placing their voices.

  I peeped through the bullet hole that one of Custer’s soldiers had shot through the buffalo hide of my tipi.

  Dark shadows out there. A many headed monster.

  All at the front flap.

  Leaving my rifle — I don’t know why; even though I knew they were coming to kill me, I couldn’t shoot them dead, feeling it would be impolite somehow — I stepped to the rear wall and rent it open with my knife, climbing out into the snow before the blade had reached the floor.

  They heard.

  And I was running.

  Out into the black woods.

  They did not shout or call after me, but I heard the crump of their feet, swift as a pack of dogs on my tail.

  They were letting their men sleep, in case they stopped their wives from killing me.

  I hurtled through the trees, cursing the snow that reflected the full moon and lit me up like a buffalo on the open plains, leaving a trail for a blind man to see.

  The further away from the camp, the louder they became, till they called and shouted, and their cries echoed all around me.

  “There!”

  “Catch her!”

  “Kill her!”

  Red Flea’s voice loud and shrill, urging the pack on. She wanted to paint her face with my blood.

  I dodged side to side in case any of them had a bow.

  Only as I thought I was leaving them far behind and would escape did I think of all the things I had left behind. How would I even survive a night out here without my blanket, without my horse, with nothing but my knife, and the only thing protecting me a medicine bundle, and my pouch, with nothing but a soldier’s notebook.

  A tree smacked me in the face, my lips split and I tasted blood.

  Swooning, I raised my head from cold snow, the forest dancing around me.

  Blood on my fingers. I had cracked my face open. My whole body hummed.

  They were on me, surrounding me, shouting in triumph, and I could not move, sitting dazed in the snow, my teeth chattering.

  Six of them.

  Not all the women of the camp. Just Red Flea and five others whose minds she had poisoned. Back there in the camp were men and women who would stop this, who would protect me, but they were all asleep.

  Only these six she-devils were awake.

  These six and me.

  I could have screamed. Maybe people in the camp might have woken and come to my rescue. But terror made me dumb. And something else, something frightening.

  I didn’t scream out because a part of me thought it might offend these women, to accuse them of wanting to murder me, even as they stood over me, about to beat me to death with their sticks and hang my limbs from the trees. I did not scream because it might hurt their feelings.

  This was my shame. I have always wondered since, how many murdered people are silently complicit in their own deaths? How many of us go to the spirit land quietly cooperating with our killers?

  I glanced around for my knife. It had been in my hand and was lost in the snow.

  “Here she is,” cried Red Flea. “Here is the evil that has cursed our tribe.”

  I had heard that voice before. It was the voice the weakest of the tribe used when they had someone to kill, when they could act the warrior for once. She had always been too scared to face me but now she knew I couldn’t fight back she could play the brave.

  “Here is the evil that has taken the food from your babies!”

  They were all around me, brandishing sticks, knives, sewing awls, screaming their hate.

  “Here is the evil that has reduced your warrior husbands to starving beggars!”

  The first blow came from behind and stung my ear. I felt no pain, only knew that someone had hit me with a stick, because the air had whistled and the world tasted different and they all cried out in delight.

  The second blow slashed my cheek and burned like snake venom and I saw my blood spurt across white snow.

  The third blow came from Red Flea and turned everything black, and I could not count the blows anymore because they came too fast, all over me.

  I fought them, but the earth pulled me to itself, as if to protect me, and I sank into a black hole as they killed me.

  Fight no more forever

  THE BLACK EARTH TAKES me and then the black earth is lit by stars. There are stars in the black earth, buried under the ground.

  A flash of blue light, and
the sun bleaches out the stars, sitting low in the sky.

  I am standing in a fort.

  Is this what the Spirit Land looks like?

  A fort with a guardhouse and a few field Howitzers lined up.

  Didn’t the medicine men tell us there would be no white men in the Spirit Land? Didn’t they tell us there would be no pain, no hunger, no loneliness?

  And I feel all three.

  This cannot be the Spirit Land.

  And now I see them. So many soldiers, so many Indians. As if they all live together in this fort. Is this a vision of the future? Is this where the white men will force us to exist?

  In the throng of Indians, one man stands out — as he has always stood out — there, walking across the fort, a scarlet blanket wrapped around him.

  Crazy Horse.

  What is he doing in this blueshirt camp?

  Have they caught him? And if so, why are there so many other Indians around?

  An army captain walks across the open ground holding Crazy Horse’s hand — something I thought I might never see — perhaps the world is all upside down.

  Crazy Horse’s fellow warriors are there, those who followed him everywhere, but they are guiding him to that guardhouse door like the captain. Two soldiers follow, gesturing to the group of Indians all around to keep back.

  What is this?

  They walk towards the guardhouse where the door is open. Another group of Indians cluster by the door: The Men who are Talked About .

  A guard holds a rifle with a bayonet. He has a red beard with no moustache, like the man on the dollar bills.

  I see now that there are two groups of Indians. I sense the enmity between them — these warriors who once fought side by side now fight each other. Some are on horses, which stutter nervously, as if they too sense the bloodshed about to happen.

  Crazy Horse walks inside the guardhouse.

  Someone shouts, “It’s the jail!”

  A cry goes up all around.

  Crazy Horse lunges for the door, trying to escape. Little Big Man holds him round the waist.

  “Let me go!” cries Crazy Horse, pulling from under his red blanket his tobacco knife.

  He slashes Little Big Man’s wrist, blood spurting, and the warrior squeals in pain.

  Both of them burst out of the door and scatter bodies outside.

  The sound of guns cocking all around.

  “Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot!” an officer yells.

  Crazy Horse makes the brave sound: a growl that gives him the power of the bear.

  Two braves I’d always seen side by side with Crazy Horse, shout, “Shoot to kill!”

  The blueshirt officer with his long knife pointing at the sky shouts, “Don’t shoot!”

  “Kill him!” shouts an Indian.

  In this dream everything is the wrong way round.

  An Indian aims his rifle at Crazy Horse, but Crazy Horse swings free from the men holding him with blood running down his arm.

  They hurtle, a beast of many legs, towards a blueshirt soldier who stands with his rifle held out, bayonet gleaming.

  And I see they are falling towards that glinting blade.

  The guard lunges and stabs Crazy Horse in the back.

  “Let me go!” he shouts. “You’ve killed me!”

  His former friends step back and watch as the great warrior staggers from them.

  He falls and lets out the growl of a bear.

  “I am finished,” says Crazy Horse.

  He is doubled over in the dirt, convulsing.

  Several times he says, “Father, I want to see you.”

  Blood runs black from his back, in the gash above his hip.

  Someone fetches his red blanket and drapes it over him.

  Soldiers crowd around him and a bunch of Indians around them, all shouting, fighting.

  Blood flows from his nose and his mouth and I know he is going to die.

  And I am flying above the earth and can see the great plains covered in white snow. The Lakota people are scattered far and wide and penned into tiny reservations like farm animals. All shuffle as one, dancing in circles and singing to their dead ancestors.

  And these circles are rings of light that glow across the plains and form a chain link that protects the people from the white men and my heart sings with hope, for here is a way to turn them back.

  And I am standing in the snow.

  A cold dawn.

  The first fingers of light on the horizon.

  The kind of bleak morning you want to stay in your tipi and not go out.

  A log cabin.

  A troop of forty Indians in blue shirts come to the cabin and bang on the door. They remind me of the Indians who wore the blueshirts of the dead at the Little Bighorn — who marched towards the soldiers on the hill, the soldiers who held out and survived the battle, only to taunt them with the hope that their comrades had come to rescue them.

  The door opens and Sitting Bull stares out at the men.

  He is older than when I saw him this morning.

  He now lives at the white man’s door, as he foretold.

  And I know this is the future.

  “You are my prisoner,” says the Indian in charge. “You must come with me to the agency.”

  Sitting Bull yawns and does not seem to care. “Let me get dressed. Put a saddle on my horse.”

  He shuffles back inside his cabin and the soldier Indians wait for him. As if they heard it all, a group of two hundred braves ride in and surround them.

  “You think you are going to take him?” shouts one of them. “But you shall not!”

  Sitting Bull stands at his door.

  The Indian soldier pulls him towards his horse saying, “Come now. Don’t listen to them.”

  Sitting Bull pulls against them, so they have to drag him.

  My belly falls to my feet.

  What happened to Crazy Horse is going to happen to Sitting Bull; the same ceremony re-enacted: the great chief murdered by his former friends in a scuffle in the night, not a battle on the plains.

  An Indian throws off his blanket, brings up his rifle and shoots the Indian soldier. His shoulder explodes and he falls back and shoots his own gun.

  The bullet smashes into Sitting Bull’s chest.

  Another bullet, from the gun of the other Indian soldier, shoots Sitting Bull through the head, and he falls to the snow.

  Gunshots ring out from all sides and men fall into the snow.

  But all fall silent and stare as Sitting Bull’s horse, in the midst of it all, begins to dance the Ghost Dance.

  The medicine man lies dead in the snow.

  I turn and run.

  A vast expanse of white.

  My breath in clouds about my face. My tears turning to ice on my cheeks. My heart burning with bitter pain.

  Do not show me these things. Do not torture me with this death.

  I run and run through the snow, until I see a camp in the distance, tipis standing below a white hill.

  A wooden sign points an arrow and bears the legend Wounded Knee.

  I am many miles from where Sitting Bull fell.

  And as I walk into the camp, I see that the crowd of Indians gathered there are Miniconjou. They are cold, tired and hungry, and there are soldiers there too. Many soldiers.

  Up on the white hill above the camp, more soldiers, with cannons pointing down at us.

  I walk through the crowd to the middle of the throng, and no one sees me.

  I am not here.

  Chief Spotted Elk is carried out of his tipi in a chair, and the elders stand around him.

  I saw him once during that first summer on the plains. He was the leader of the Miniconjou and these were his people. But he is old and ill now, coughing blood on his lips, dressed in a shabby coat, a scarf wrapped round his head and under his chin, as if his jaw might fall off.

  They call him Chief Big Foot, instead of his real name. He looks like an old dying woman, not a great warrior.
/>   This is what the white man has reduced him to.

  The Miniconjou gather in a frightened cluster, whispers flitting around them: these soldiers are the survivors we left on the hill at the Greasy Grass, they say. They want revenge; they will kill us all.

  Their white faces stare down at the camp. They wear greatcoats and some have fur hats. They point their rifles at us and there is murder in their eyes: murder and glee.

  An officer stalks among us, shouting orders. We are all to be moved to the Pine Ridge reservation just as soon as our weapons are handed over.

  Soldiers go into the tipis and come out tearing bundles open, finding knives, tent stakes and axes, which they throw onto the pile of rifles, which stands high like a bonfire waiting to be lit.

  They bark out more orders.

  “There are more weapons hidden here! Everyone must be searched! Everyone must remove their blankets!”

  The men are angry, but submit.

  A medicine man cries out, “Their bullets will not hurt you!” He dances a few steps of the Ghost Dance.

  A struggle breaks out in the crowd and I know what will happen.

  One of the braves holds a rifle above his head, crying, “This rifle cost me much money! It belongs to me!”

  The soldiers shout and try to snatch it from him. He is walking towards the pile of rifles, anyway. He means to give it up.

  They shout and shout, and rifles all around are cocked, the metallic harbinger of death.

  The brave holds his rifle above his head and wades through them to the pile of rifles and axes and knives.

  “Black Coyote is deaf!” someone shouts in English.

  “Stop! He cannot hear your orders!”

  Two soldiers jump on him from behind.

  The gun goes off.

  And I know what will happen.

  All the guns in the world go off.

  Bullets fizz and whistle through the throng of men and women and children.

  The sky fills with screams.

  Women clutch their children to their breasts and are shot down.

  Braves rush to the pile of rifles and are shot down.

  Old men call to the spirits for protection and are shot down.

  Children totter in the snow, wailing, and are shot down.