Touchstone Season Two Box Set

by Andy Conway

  “Well, I’ll be a son of a gun,” said Buffalo Bill Cody. He reached out and gripped my arm, suddenly earnest. “Do you think you can persuade him?”

  “No one can persuade Sitting Bull to do what he doesn’t want to do,” I said. “Custer couldn’t.”

  “This is very little use to me.”

  “But I’ll do it. I’ll talk to him.”

  “Good,” he said.

  “On one condition.”

  Buffalo Bill sighed. “How much?”

  “You take me to England with you.”

  Buffalo Bull Who Sits Down

  BUFFALO BILL AND NATE Salsbury did not hang about to see if I was successful in my mission. They stalked off across the camp towards the music of the Cowboy Band, and Bronco Bill led me back to Sitting Bull’s lodge.

  The guards rose to their feet, ready to throw me out again, but Bronco Bill explained to them I had Colonel Cody’s express permission to call on the chief. I remembered the dogs that had guarded this tipi back at the Greasy Grass camp, how they’d leapt up and barked at me as I’d approached. And now he had a bunch of white men who did that for him.

  Bronco Bill stepped inside and my soul cringed at how rude it was to walk in and not sit outside and wait to be invited.

  The shovel-handed guards glared, aware that the pecking order was now reversed. I just smiled. Bronco Bill stepped out and waved me in. I did not have to bow to Seen by the Nation, his older wife, and her younger sister Four Blankets Woman, like I had last time. This was how low Sitting Bull had fallen: a white man in moccasins could walk right in and tell him he had to speak to me.

  As I bent over and climbed through the opening flap I felt the warmth of his lodge fire and stood uncertain, adjusting to the darkness.

  An old figure bent over the fire. I thought it was his mother, like the last time, but it was the chief himself.

  The last time I’d been in this tipi he had been lying on buffalo hide blankets, the cuts all along his arms still raw, his eyes swollen from the Sun Dance. Now he was wrapped in a thick blanket, wearing a white man’s suit, with a white shirt and necktie, beads over his breast, a derby hat with a single eagle feather.

  An old man, bent, all alone.

  Defeated.

  The curse had played out. We had coveted the white man’s belongings, and here he was, starving at the white man’s door.

  He looked up, keen eyes searching my soul, and I saw there was still fire in him. Once more, he waved me to the seat that faced the doorway, the place of honour.

  I had come through a decade and travelled thousands of miles for this moment, and now I had no idea what to say.

  “Bright Star Falling,” he said. “Is it you?”

  “It is me.”

  He gasped. “You are alive and this is not a vision?”

  “This is not a vision,” I said.

  “I am older. Ten years older. And you are the same as when I last saw you. Except...”

  I touched the scar on my face.

  “I’m alive,” I said. “I travelled many miles to find you, with the help of Chief Red Shirt and the Wagluhe people. They gave me these clothes, and the money to get to New York.”

  He nodded and smiled and said, “We thought you were dead.”

  He reached for his pipe and began the slow ceremony of preparing it to smoke. I watched in silence, entranced, found my eyes closing, so weary, and even nodded off, jerking my head up when he offered the pipe to me, the fire scalding my face.

  We smoked a while and then he talked.

  “Remember when you first came to my lodge?” he said.

  I nodded and lowered my gaze, as if in respect, though it was really that it was so sad to see him here alone, and remember him then, surrounded by his children, his beautiful wives and his mother. The twins had just been born. I didn’t ask if they were still alive, or any of his family. It did not matter. He was here alone.

  “You had seen Long Hair approaching, but you also came with a vision of our victory.”

  “A vision that was no news to you.”

  “I had also seen it. The spirits had spoken to us. You did not think you were White Buffalo Calf Woman.”

  “And I still do not.”

  He chuckled, the first sign of anything resembling joy I’d seen in him. “And yet your coming heralded the death of my people, as it was foretold.”

  I was about to protest, all over again, but he held up his hand.

  “You have another vision for me.”

  I nodded.

  “I had a vision of you too. This afternoon,” he said. He grinned at the surprise on my face. “But I wish to hear yours.”

  I thought of how to frame it in the best words, thought for a while as the fire crackled.

  “When Red Flea and the other women chased me from the camp and tried to kill me, I was taken up into the air by the spirits and saw many things. I saw the death of Crazy Horse, which was, and of chief Spotted Elk, which is to come.”

  “Spotted Elk... he is to die... Like Crazy Horse?”

  “And I saw your death also.”

  I looked up from the flames and held his gaze.

  “Tell me,” he said. “I am not afraid.”

  “You are living on a reservation, in a wooden cabin like a white man. A cold morning. Forty or more Indians dressed in blue shirts come to take you prisoner. You make them wait while you dress and tell them to put a saddle on your horse. A great group of braves ride in and surround them — two hundred or more. They tell them they will not take you. The soldier Indians are scared, but their leader still tries to drag you to your horse. You resist. It is just like with Crazy Horse — his own brothers trying to lock him up for the white man — and they fight over you. The first gun goes off and then all of them. You die in the snow.”

  I said nothing more.

  He considered it for a long while.

  “I could have died in battle,” he said, “like a brave, but I am old now. Old men do not die in battle, so this will be good enough for me.”

  “But you can stop it. I have been shown it so I can warn you, so you can avoid this.”

  “How can I avoid this?”

  “Stay in the cabin. Let them fight outside. Your braves will protect you. No bullet will harm you if you don’t come out.”

  “What you have seen,” he said, “is written. It is not the future. It is not something that can be changed. All time is the same time. I am here talking to you and I am standing on the hill over the Greasy Grass watching our braves destroy Long Hair and all his soldiers. I am being welcomed to Canada by a man in a red tunic who represents Grandmother England, and I am being forced back over the border into the hands of my enemies. I am a boy counting coup in my first ever battle and I am an old man giving my young son my rifle to surrender to a white general. It is all happening at the same time. It has all happened already.”

  “Your death hasn’t happened yet!”

  “Yet you have seen it happen.”

  His quiet certainty struck me dumb. I had seen it, therefore it had happened already, and nothing could be done to change it. I had a sudden taste of something, a memory of the past: someone had changed the future and a terrible thing had happened.

  “And even if it can be changed, it does not matter,” Sitting Bull said. “I will die one day like everyone else. It does not matter if it is today or tomorrow. It will be a good day to die.”

  He passed the pipe to me and I sucked in the bittersweet taste of kinnikinnick.

  “My vision of you was stranger than this,” he said. “I was wearing what I wear now — this white man’s suit with this feather in my hat to show that I will never fully adopt the white man’s ways, never fully dress in his clothes and walk in his shoes — and I was waiting at a station for a train to come. An old white lady made me something called tea, which was nicer than this coffee the wasichus drink. You came through the door, dressed like you are now, and you had that same look on your face.”


  “What look?”

  “That look that hates the world. Eyes that say the world has done you a great wrong and you want your revenge on it.”

  “I don’t feel like that.”

  “The most useless lie is the one you tell yourself,” he said. “In my vision, you told me to prepare for one last act of defiance against the whites.”

  I didn’t doubt that this vision of his was real.

  I didn’t doubt that it had happened, or it would happen, in my future. I had never visited him and told him this, but I knew that I could, and that I might, just as I had seen him killed with my own eyes on a dark morning that was yet to happen.

  But I could not see how it could be that I might persuade him to take up arms again. I’d seen how the war was lost. I’d seen how futile it was.

  I shook my head. “You cannot fight anymore. You must have seen how many of them there are out there?”

  “I have seen them,” he said. “They are locusts. They are many. But you have told me how to defeat them.”

  “No. I have seen you killed.”

  “Then perhaps my death shall inspire a dance that will stamp them out from our land forever.”

  My arrival had put a vision in his head — and led him to precisely the thing I’d come to warn him against. He was going to return to his reservation, to be murdered by his own people.

  “Buffalo Bill wants you to go to England. To see the Queen. He let me talk to you so I could persuade.”

  Sitting Bull shook his head with a smile. “I will not go across the sea to Grandmother England, she who pushed me out of Canada and back into the arms of my enemy. I will not travel the world as a Show Indian. Let some others, who have made their peace with the wasichus, be paraded like animals.”

  And there he killed my hopes of getting to England. I would walk out of this lodge and tell Buffalo Bill that I had failed, and he would direct his guards to show me to the street and that would be the end of my journey.

  I had failed to tear down the white man’s city, failed even before I had set foot in it. I had failed to warn Sitting Bull of his death. I had failed to find my way home, either to this Birmingham in England, or to the plains of the Lakota.

  It was all for nothing.

  The only thing I could do now was walk out into the night and find a place to die.

  “Farewell, chief Sitting Bull,” I said. “Thank you for taking me in, even when you thought I would bring the end of your people.”

  “We are all related,” he said.

  I clutched the white ghost that hung at my breast, and left him there alone.

  Without them, we are nothing

  BRONCO BILL WAS WAITING for me when I crawled out of Sitting Bull’s tipi. I shook my head. He seemed disappointed.

  “Take me to Buffalo Bill. I should tell him what the great chief said.”

  He nodded and walked me across the camp, away from the guards who might throw me out if only they knew what an imposter I was.

  As we walked through the icy grass, I caught glimpses of the Indian life in the huddle of tipis and longed to throw off my white woman’s clothes to join them again. Even a phoney camp like this, a show camp, a living museum, was better than nothing.

  As we moved on to the white performers’ tents and caravans, I was trying to form a plan that might save me. What could I tell Buffalo Bill other than that I’d failed?

  His tent was a giant marquee, the size of a log cabin, with a buffalo head and a Stars and Stripes flag above the door.

  Bronco Bill led me inside to the oil lamp glow where several men sat around a table smoking cigars and drinking brandy. Buffalo Bill was regaling them with a tale, and I recognized Nate Salsbury, minus his top hat, and there were two other men I didn’t know.

  They looked to me without expectation. They had known my boast was empty. They had expected nothing of me, a mere woman.

  “He won’t go to England,” I said. “Nothing can persuade him.”

  “Then good day to you, ma’am,” said Buffalo Bill, not looking at me. “Our business is at an end.”

  “You said if I talked to him you would take me to England with you.”

  “No, madam,” he wagged a finger at me, still not turning to look me in the eye. “You said that. I allowed you to talk to him on the understanding that you persuaded him. But if the old fool is immovable then you have failed me.”

  I was about to turn and walk out, like a dog sent to its kennel, but he suddenly slammed his fist on the table, jerked up, his stool flying back, and wheeled around the room, yelling, “Where in tarnation might I find an Indian chief with a name to match that of Sitting Bull!”

  He didn’t seem to be shouting at me. He had finished with me. The moment he stopped shouting and noticed I was still there, he would kick me out of his camp.

  Nate Salsbury chewed on a cigar and shrugged. “Why, don’t get all het up about it, Colonel. We’ll find another Indian chief.”

  “I guess I’ll just walk out onto Fifth Avenue and stop the first one I meet! Stick a feather in his head and walk him right up to the Queen of England! We can call him Crazy Horse. She’s bound not to know he’s been dead ten years!”

  He railed and railed at the four canvas walls and I wanted him to keep on railing forever so I didn’t have to face what remained of my complete failure of a life.

  “And no doubt the great Sioux chief will take all his Indians home with him too. Which leaves me with a chief and a tribe to find in just two months!”

  As he talked, I thought of Sitting Bull’s death knell pronouncement on all my hopes.

  Let some others, who have made their peace with the wasichus, be paraded like animals.

  And there it was, as if it had come from Sitting Bull’s mouth: two little words that might solve Buffalo Bill’s dilemma and get me my ticket home.

  Red Shirt.

  “I know where you can find a chief,” I said. “And a tribe.”

  They all looked at me.

  Colonel Cody seemed surprised I was still there.

  With an insane grin he pointed me out to Nate Salsbury. “She knows where she can find an Indian chief! And a tribe! And she knows Sitting Bull too!”

  Nate Salsbury eyed me like a card sharp with a busted flush. “Madam, this isn’t the time for empty boasts. We need a person who can deliver on their promises.”

  “Chief Red Shirt,” I said. “He leads the Wagluhe band of Oglala at the Pine Ridge Reservation.”

  “I’ve never heard of him,” said Buffalo Bill, waving a hand dismissively.

  “I have,” said Nate Salsbury, leaning forward.

  “He’s a great leader,” I said. “He was a delegate to Washington six years ago with Red Cloud. He speaks in favour of cooperation with the white man.”

  “The Washington delegation,” said Nate, fingers to his lips. “Was he the young man? The handsome one?”

  “He’s quite handsome,” I said, looking down at my feet, for no real reason I could work out.

  “I know the one,” said Nate, looking to Colonel Cody. “He has a strikingly noble demeanour. I’ll send a boy round to the New York Times office and procure a photograph of that delegation. You’ll see.”

  Buffalo Bill was swaying.

  “I can think of no one better to present to the Queen of England,” I said. “He has the bearing of royalty himself. You will see.”

  Buffalo Bill looked me in the eye now, striding over to me. “Madam, you said you knew Sitting Bull and could persuade him, and you failed. Am I to waste time on an empty errand, believing you with regard to this man, Red Shirt?”

  “I know him very well. I’ve just come from him. He gave me these clothes and sent me here. I now believe there was a reason for that. He will be open to any offer of friendship and will represent his people in any way that will give them a future and end the fighting.”

  He took my arms. There was a pleading tone that filled his voice. I’d seen him as showman and braggart, but here was a
vulnerable boy desperate to succeed.

  “My show is nothing without the Indians. I can parade a thousand cowboys and sharpshooters all around the world, and bison and elk, and we could even dress some Mexicans in feathers and war paint, but without real natives, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West is nothing but an empty sham. I know you think it’s just a show, but to me it’s more than that. I want to bring our nation’s history to the world, alive and raw, and the Indians are the biggest part of that history. They are the beating heart of our nation. We might pretend that we can carry on and forget all about them, but without them in our culture, in our sense of ourselves, we aren’t even American. Without them, we are nothing.”

  An astonished hush had fallen over everyone in the tent, and it seemed the entire camp outside, as if they’d all held their breath to listen. Even the New York traffic seemed to have stopped.

  “I think you two gentlemen need to meet,” I said. “You have a lot in common.”

  Thiánakitaŋ

  U.S.S. NEBRASKA, MARCH 31st, 1887. The boat rocked and swayed, and with each lurch I felt my belly turn over.

  What would it be like when we left the harbour and the sea took us?

  Though I had dressed as a white woman, Buffalo Bill had agreed that for this tour I would don Indian clothes once more and be a Lakota again. It pleased me. I was happy to wear my hair in braids again, to walk in moccasins, with a beaded dress covered in the finest quillwork, to wrap a blanket around myself against the cold. It felt like freedom, unlike those corsets and frills and bustles.

  Over a hundred of us huddled on deck against the bitter sea wind, but I allowed myself a feeling of pride at my part in it. I had not brought it all together, like Cody and Salsbury, but I had brought Red Shirt here and most of the Wagluhe men and women who would now be Show Indians.

  Some of the Indians had already gone to the hold gripping their bellies and moaning, but a great throng of us remained on deck, listening to Colonel ‘Buffalo’ Bill Cody’s speech.