Touchstone Season Two Box Set

by Andy Conway

  “Ow!” I screamed.

  “You have taken worse punishment than this,” Stand at Crossroads laughed, touching my cheek.

  She brushed my hair for an hour before tying it up.

  They stripped me naked, but for the white ghost that still hung at my breast, and dressed me in yards of cotton undergarments that seemed fussy and restricting, black woollen stockings tied above the knee with ribbon, a red cotton blouse, a blue cotton dress, a pair of slightly worn leather boots, a thick woollen jacket and a bonnet with false flowers that tied under my chin.

  “Do you remember wearing this before you became Lakota?”

  “No,” I said, feeling awkward. I had no memory of ever wearing clothes like this. I thought back to the young girl Katherine in my ladybird vision, wearing nothing but a flimsy rag of yellow, cut above the knee.

  They stood me before a mirror in one of the huts and I gasped. For years now I’d only seen myself reflected in water, my face swirling and eddying in black, but here I faced myself as I was now. I had not expected to see a white woman.

  My face was a little cracked and beaten but, the longer I gazed on myself the more I wondered at who this person was; this woman who had fallen from the sky and lived with the Hunkpapa and knew only words and scraps of images from fleeting dreams to tell her who she was and where she had come from.

  They left me there, the women drifting away one by one, bored with me staring at myself, or respectful of this private moment. It was not the dress of a respectable lady, more that of a woman who had known work. But I would pass alongside any white woman.

  As if she read my thoughts, Stands at Crossroads whispered, “No wasichu would know you were a Lakota.”

  She meant to be kind, but she might as well have stuck a knife in my guts. Was I, after all, not a Lakota, and never had been, even in my heart, which was silently breaking under the blue cotton dress?

  She led me out of the hut and there was a great crowd there to meet me. A flurry of wonder rippled through them at my transformation. I was no longer one of them. I tasted salt on my lips and only then knew I was weeping.

  They gave me a carpetbag for the possessions I did not have, and loaded it with food for the journey — hard tack and biscuits, some bread for the first day or two, apples — and there was money too. I added the notes I already had, looted from the German soldier. My Running Away Money.

  Everyone on the reservation had contributed what they could, and it was all I could do not to melt into a pool of tears at their feet.

  Billy Roka, the squawman, pulled up in his wagon and I climbed aboard.

  Red Shirt did not smile or embrace me when I left. He only nodded and pointed to the horizon and bumped his fist against his heart.

  We rode off the reservation and I could not see them through the blur of tears, so turned to stare at the road ahead.

  We said nothing for ten miles and Billy let me weep in peace.

  The tears had barely dried on my face when we passed through Wounded Knee and spiders crawled all over my skin at the memory of what I’d seen. Of what was to come. There were no cannons on the hill, and no Miniconjou tipis below, but I could hear the guns of the soldiers and the screams of the women and children.

  I said nothing till we were a mile or so past it.

  “Billy?” I said.

  “Yes, Miss Bright?”

  I stared in shock at being called this. But I was a white woman now, with a white woman’s name.

  “There’s something I want you to do for me, once I’m gone.”

  “What is it?” he asked, a thread of worry in his voice.

  “Chief Red Shirt told me of a vision he had. No one knows about it but me. He saw some terrible things happen to two of our great leaders. I’m going to New York to warn Sitting Bull of who is going to kill him.”

  “Okay.”

  “But Red Shirt also saw a terrible thing happen at Wounded Knee.”

  Billy twisted and looked back down the road.

  “Some time soon, the soldiers are going to take a Miniconjou band to Wounded Knee. Chief Spotted Elk will lead them. They will surrender their rifles and the soldiers will massacre them. Braves, women, children, the old people...’ I caught a lump in my throat. “All of them gunned down in the snow like animals. You need to go find Chief Spotted Elk and tell him this.”

  Billy thought it over and eventually said, “I’ll do that.”

  We drove along a dirt road for two days, passing through a few little settlements every twenty miles or so, and none of the white folks there heard the Indian hearts that beat in his chest and mine.

  We reached Running Water as night fell. It was the largest of the towns we had so far encountered. Billy whispered to me the place’s Lakota name but quickly added, “We best speak English from now on, just to be safe.”

  It was a few streets of wooden buildings with muddy roads edged by duckboards and more people than there could be rooms in the whole town. I hadn’t seen so many white men in one place before, except maybe on the hills around the Little Bighorn, and the throng of them, the noise and the stink of them, scared me.

  As I stepped from the carriage, my backside sore as hell from rattling along the dirt road all day, Billy rushed to take my hand and I froze, wondered what the hell he was doing. Did he think I didn’t know how to jump from a wagon by myself?

  “This is what white men do for white women,” he hissed. “It’s the custom.”

  I gave him my hand and climbed down.

  A scream split the air.

  I near jumped for Billy’s rifle.

  He held me close, glancing around, all nervous, seeing who had noticed.

  “That’s just the train. You best get used to that noise.”

  He took my bag and led me into the Running Water Hotel, which looked more like a roughhouse saloon from the glimpse I caught of it as Billy rushed me up the stairs to a tiny room with a bed.

  “I’ll be sleeping on the floor,” he said, moving to the window and peeking out of the lace curtains. “It’s a shame that train ain’t one you can catch. It goes north to Scotland, then you’d have to come back south to Yankton tomorrow anyways. Might as well rest up here and get the steamship down river in the morning.”

  He left me to go stable the horses, telling me not to open the door to anyone else. I waited for him, examining the white sheets on the bed and wondering how anyone could sleep on such a thing. It was more like a scaffold where you would lay a dead person.

  Outside came drunken shouts and cries and once or twice a gunshot. This was the civilisation they wanted to bring to the plains?

  I felt a pang in my belly, like hunger, for the banks of the Little Bighorn and the giant camp with its tipis glowing under starlight. I was happy then. But it wasn’t there anymore. Those camps had been wiped out and the Indians now lived in wooden shacks. There was no way back.

  Billy returned and we ate the frybread I had in my bag.

  “This was a quiet town,” he said, “till the railroad reached here from the east. It emptied out a pile of desperadoes – cattlemen, outlaws, land sharks, gamblers – all looking for that gold under the Black Hills’ grass.”

  I sat up on the bed, hugging my knees, and listened.

  “Before that train came in, Running Water was just a handful of wooden shacks and about thirty people. Anyone scared of the Indians stopped right here and said this is far enough West for me. But someone — maybe it was the owner of this hotel — put out the rumour that the station wasn’t the end of anything, but was right on a mainline that ran straight into the Black Hills. The price of land shot up and the speculators and prospectors flooded in.”

  “But it does end here. Surely anyone could see that on a map?”

  “Didn’t matter,” he said. “Even those who arrived and saw it for themselves still wanted to believe it. “Gold makes them crazy. Gold makes them lose all reason. Running Water was nothing more than a campfire on the plains. Now it’s got two thousan
d people and a newspaper.”

  Another gunshot rang outside, followed by howls of laughter. Maybe someone was dead. It didn’t matter.

  “How safe are we here?” I asked.

  “We’ll be fine,” he said, hunkering down on the floor with a blanket, rolling his jacket under his head for a pillow. “Once we’re out of here, you won’t see many towns like this. Out east it’s more civilized. But here it’s just a place where men buy elk steak, whiskey, and...’ He coughed and his eyes fell to the floor.

  “A woman?”

  “With me, you’re fine, but alone, you’d be safer out on the plains with the wolves.”

  We lay still for a while, me on the bed, him on the floor, listening to the screams and singing outside, and the babble of talk downstairs. Footsteps staggered along the corridor sometimes and once, someone banged against the door, but groaned and then stumbled on down the way.

  “Is it true you have wakan?” he said suddenly.

  He wasn’t asleep, as I’d thought. I wondered how long he’d been framing the question in his mind.

  “Who says I have magic?”

  “My wife said it. Some of the women talk about it.”

  I shuddered, remembering Red Flea and the Hunkpapa women battering me in the snow. It was on my tongue to tell him I had seen visions of the future, my fury had destroyed my enemies, I had travelled through time and I would go to the white man’s biggest city and tear it down with my magic.

  “No,” I said. “It’s just a rumour. Because I look different.”

  “Oh.” He seemed disappointed.

  “People make up stupid stories about anyone who looks different. People mostly talk horseshit.”

  He said nothing in reply. I sank into a dream where two great eagles flew into two great towers and brought them to the ground and the air was filled with screams as I wept for my enemies and the death I had visited on them.

  Steamboat

  MISSOURI RIVER, JANUARY, 1887. Billy didn’t talk much in the morning and I wondered if my lie had brushed him off a little too harshly. I didn’t care much. There had been too much bad blood over my wakan for me to go blurt it out to any stranger I met. There was no one I trusted in the world. Maybe only Red Shirt and Sitting Bull. If Little Star were here I would have trusted him with any of my secrets, but Little Star was dead and gone and I still wore his white ghost around my neck, hidden under my cotton blouse.

  The town was quiet as we left the Running Water Hotel, its population of drunks all sleeping. It even appeared quaint and peaceful — the kind of sleepy town you might want to grow old in.

  Billy put me on the first steamboat, once again going through my travel instructions, as if I didn’t know them all already.

  A careful route had been planned for me, which meant I could travel in reasonable safety. The Running Water steamboat would take me to Yankton where I would buy a ticket for the train to Sioux City, from where a network of railroads would take me all the way to New York.

  Once again I asked why not stay on the steamboat all the way to Sioux City.

  “The train is quicker. To tell the truth, this is just about the last chance you’ll get to ride a steamboat. The railroad has damn near wiped them out.”

  Like us, I thought, but didn’t say.

  So, I would take this leisurely trip down the Missouri river, for little more than six hours and then ditch the old way for the new. The train would get from Yankton to Sioux City in an hour instead of twelve.

  The steamboat looked like a white mansion that had decided to float downriver and join the town. It let out an almighty scream and sent a plume of smoke shooting into the grey sky. The crew busied themselves loading cargo and there was a milling of passengers boarding and a crowd already on board watching from the upper deck, waving, but I could not see to whom. Perhaps it was to me and I was supposed to wave back.

  The words General Terry were painted on the side.

  “General Terry,” Billy said, as if greeting an old enemy. He spat in the dirt. “He was the general who found Custer after the Battle of the Greasy Grass.”

  I remembered the column of dust approaching from the west that morning. The reason we had left those men alive on the hilltop.

  He lowered his voice, like a man speaking treason. “Terry got his own back running Chief Joseph and the Nez Perce to ground, so they couldn’t escape to Canada.”

  “Is there a steamboat named Custer?”

  Billy laughed and nodded. “They named one just after he was killed. Lasted three years then sank.”

  Billy kicked up some dust around his feet, rolled his shoulders and scowled, like he still wanted to dance on Custer’s grave. I said nothing. I wasn’t sure what I felt about Custer anymore. I’d seen his dead eyes staring at the sky, his pathetic naked body in the grass. I’d seen what Monahsetah had done to him. That was no man to be scared of anymore.

  “This vision, about Wounded Knee,” he said suddenly.

  “Yes?”

  “It’s yours, isn’t it? Not Red Shirt’s.”

  I stared into his eyes and smiled.

  Billy Roka nodded and I felt the weight of my wakan pile onto his shoulders. He wanted to run as far away from me as he could.

  He picked up my canvas bag and gave it to me.

  “Safe journey,” he said aloud, then whispered, “Tanyan omani.”

  I nodded, thanked him for his help, took up my bag and walked down the gangplank to be swallowed by the ship.

  Billy wasn’t there when I got to the upper deck and looked down. He was heading back to Pine Ridge and the warmth of his wife as fast as the horses could carry him. The only thing left of Billy was his spit in the dirt.

  I didn’t care much, but for the first time since saying farewell to Red Shirt I felt sad and alone.

  A man tipped his hat to me and I looked behind to check he meant it for some other woman before nearly falling on my face. I was a white woman now. If he’d only known I’d lived with the Indians for years and shot several of his precious Seventh Cavalry murderers at the Little Bighorn, I doubt he’d be so gallant.

  As it was, he turned and walked inside and probably wondered why I answered his deference with a scowl.

  Once the cargo was loaded, the great engines roared, the giant wheels turning, and we pulled away. The steamboat edged away from the bank and from Running Water and out along the narrow river.

  It seemed for a while that you could jump from the boat and hit land, the river was so narrow, winding here and there, with islands and mudflats marbling the water. A man nearby told his lady companion that it would be a good while before the boat turned and edged out of the rivulets to where the river opened as wide as a plain.

  I stood on the deck a while, watching the land ooze by, but the cold sent me inside to what seemed like a saloon, where most of the passengers were gathered and an entertainer was holding court.

  He was a silver haired man with the eyes of a fox, and I could see from the delight on the faces all around that he knew how to tell a story. I’d seen that look many times around the camp fires at night. A good storyteller could light up a sea of faces like a prairie fire.

  It turned out the man’s act was to place a person’s origin, almost to the street or farm post, just by hearing their accent.

  I watched along with the rest as he performed with astounding success on two people, a woman first, then a man. The audience was thrilled and gladly filled the hat with coins that he sent round after each trick. I didn’t give him any of my Running Away Money, though, because it looked to me like he was a huckster operating with a handful of plants in the audience.

  “Who next, ladies and gentlemen? Who next wants Old George W. Hancock, the world’s foremost linguist, to place their origin by careful attention to a handful of words? Who dares to have their origin revealed so precisely, so accurately, so definitively? Is there not another among you? Will you, lady?”

  And with a jolt of fear I saw them all look at me.
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  Terror gripped me, like I’d ridden my horse over the ridge and come face to face with Custer and the entire Seventh Cavalry all on my own.

  These people would tear me to pieces in a moment if they knew who I was and what I’d done. Of that I had no doubt.

  But they were all lit up with smiles and there was no hatred in their eyes.

  They saw only a white lady on her own.

  I shook my head.

  “Oh, don’t be modest, lady!” he called. “Give her a big hand, ladies and gentlemen!”

  The thunder of applause drowned my protestations and he grabbed me and pulled me close.

  “Now, you can speak, can’t you, ma’am? Otherwise I’m going to look mighty foolish!”

  Laughter. I felt my face flush crimson.

  “Yes, I can speak.”

  “Oh my,” he said, surprised. “Now this shall be most interesting.”

  Their laughter died and a respectful hush descended on them, only the roar of the engines intruding.

  “Now, ma’am, I’d like you to say a few words. Nothing that reveals anything about where you come from. You don’t have to introduce yourself. In fact, I very much forbid it.”

  What could I tell him: I, who knew nothing of who I was or where I had come from?

  He took a pamphlet from his pocket with a flourish and handed it to me.

  “Read any random passage from this work of literature, ma’am, and I will tell you when I have heard enough.”

  I leafed through it and began to read, quiet at first, till a murmuring around me produced several cries of, “Speak up!”

  I suppose I should be ashamed to say, I read, that I take the Western view of the Indian. I don’t go so far as to think that the only good Indians are dead Indians, but I believe nine out of every ten are, and I shouldn’t like to inquire too closely into the case of the tenth.

  A peal of laughter all around. Anger and shame jammed in my throat. I noticed alarm in the eyes of George W. Hancock, and wondered if my words had already revealed to him my years with the Lakota.

  The most vicious cowboy has more moral principle than the average Indian. Turn three hundred low families of New York into New Jersey, support them for fifty years in vicious idleness, and you will have some idea of what the Indians are. Reckless, revengeful, fiendishly cruel, they rob and murder, not the cowboys, who can take care of themselves, but the defenceless, lone settlers on the plains.