Ghost Dance

by T C Donivan

  Spencer got out his sketchpad and began to make their likenesses. As the night wore on, Tree Owl gave a demonstration of Cheyenne dance, complete with war whoops which elicited shrieks of delight from the children. Not to be out done, one of his cousins, Running Wolf, who had made a great show of threatening my life before Tree Owl’s intervention, put on a show of Sioux war whoops so fierce it made some of the women cry and Trotter cling to his rifle. The Indians did not leave until well after midnight, at which time warm handshakes and eternal vows of friendship were made all around.

  Tree Owl, Spencer and I had become especially close during the course of the evening. Before he left, the great warrior made us an invitation, “I will return in seven days and you will come with me to the camp of the Sioux where you will be my guest.”

  “We shall be ready in a week,” I said.

  Tree Owl gave me a perplexing look. “I know nothing of weeks. Seven days is the flight of the eagle from Chimney Rock to the place of spirits where I will make my medicine for the coming winter. Life is measured only in the turning of the stars and sun Clayton.”

  Spencer tore a sheet from his sketchpad and handed it to Tree Owl. “What do you think?”

  Tree Owl stared at the drawing for several minutes with awe. Then he turned and fed it to the fire and chanted over the ashes as they drifted away into the twilight. I was astonished at the insult, but Spencer grinned at the fate of his sketch.

  “My good man, why did you do that?” He asked.

  “You have made me immortal and now my likeness resides with the wind. That is good,” Tree Owl said.

  With that, he and his companions mounted their ponies and slipped away into the night. We posted a guard as always, but while our company slept, Running Wolf and one of his brothers slipped back into camp stealing the mules, Sheepskin and Mutton and two immigrant horses. The next day, Trotter was obliged to negotiate a ransom for the animals’ return as was the custom in those parts. Outright theft was considered bad manners, the kidnapping of animals being a ritual through which a payment of tribute was attained by the locals.

  I thought it amusing, my estimation of our newfound friends only increasing at the thought of their wiliness. Trotter cursed the savages and vowed never again to be lulled into a state of content, as he observed that the sneaking thieves could as well have cut our throats as stolen our mules, a warning that fell on deaf ears.

  Chapter 10 – The Proposition

  “If we are to proceed with Berkeley’s theory…”

  Spencer paused, paint brush raised in mid stroke, eyes fixed as if in mortal combat with the gray promenade of rock that jutted from the prairie floor like the spine of some long dead behemoth of stone. The brow of his nose wrinkled in consternation and he poked at his beard with the stub end of the brush. He splashed the sky above the crest of Scott’s Bluff’s upon his canvas with a smattering of clouds and smiled.

  Having subdued the beast of his imagination, he went on, “We must assume that only one reality can exist. I would naturally opt for my own – i.e., that you dear friend and all about me are but inhabitants of a mid summer night’s dream of which I am the author. But! That is not to preclude the possibility that the reverse is true – that you are the dreamer and I the figment.” When I did not duly respond, Spencer turned to me. “What’s wrong? Haven’t you an opinion?”

  I sat on a rock, baking in the sun like a lizard, journal open on my knee, pencil idly twitching between my fingertips, my inspiration spent. I was bored by Spencer’s perpetual monologs on the nature of reality. More pressing to me was the anticipation of our coming adventure with Tree Owl and impending separation from Rachel. Tired of my internal struggle, I confessed the truth to him.

  “I love her,” I said mournfully.

  Spencer wrinkled his nose as if a passing skunk had wandered too near. “Who?”

  “Rachel.” I sighed, not surprised at his ignorance as to the emotions of those around him.

  “You must be joking?” He chided, a strange look in his eye.

  “Not at all,” I said putting away the journal. “Oh, she cares little for me, that I know, but it changes not one whit my emotions for her.”

  Mozart sat in the spidery shade of a scrub bush, playing his flute. The three of us were alone on the prairie, the wagon train some miles behind. We would meet them by nightfall and camp somewhere below the bluff. It was a fine day for painting and talking. The air was dry and still. Waves of heat shimmered in the distance and hawks cawed in the sky overhead, circling like string-less kites tethered to an invisible hand. The horses, Elijah, Blue and Mozart’s nameless spotted pony, shifted restlessly in the sun awaiting their evening feed, the sparse grass of the prairie barely enough to satisfy their hungry bellies.

  “Tell me your thoughts,” I asked. When Spencer did not respond I pushed the point, “I want your opinion.”

  “It’s not my concern.” he said.

  I persisted. “She’s a beautiful woman, intelligent, worth the effort, don’t you think?”

  “So was Eve I’m told and look what it got Adam – though I’m sure the snake enjoyed himself,” he mocked. I could not help laughing out loud. Having retaken the stage, Spencer continued his monolog. “Good, now that we’ve established that fact, let’s get back to the real business at hand. In whose dream do we reside – yours, or mine?”

  “Neither, I think it may be Elijah’s dream. He seems to have a mind of his own,” I said dryly.

  Glancing at the horse Spencer nodded. “I think you may be right. He does have an intelligent look. But supposing…”

  “What would be the difference?” I wondered with some annoyance, tired of the conversation. “We are alive in our own heads, I can assure you that. The emotions I’m feeling are very much my own. I do not opt for Berkeley’s ideas. That is what they are after all; ideas.”

  “Yes but I am a very imaginative fellow. Suppose I’m dreaming you and you only think you’re alive. When I doze, or dream some other reality, you may cease to exist at all. Have you thought of that?” Spencer countered.

  “Sometimes you make my head hurt,” I said.

  “And you mine with your talk of women,” Spencer replied, returning to the subject he’d been so eager to forego a moment earlier. “Do you think a man looks for his mother in the women he beds?” He asked.

  I was shocked at the question. “I would hope not.”

  “Your mother and mine are both dead. It would be only natural if we did. My mother had red hair and I was inexorably drawn to every redheaded whore and shop girl on the Champs-Elysees. What about you? Is that how your taste runs.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Father’s are either monstrous tyrants, or insignificant bores. Which was yours?” Spencer asked.

  I found the question insulting. “Neither,” I answered.

  “I’ve struck a raw nerve,” Spencer said with unerring accuracy. “Which was the senior Donegal, an insufferable brute who pushed his sons to do all the things he could not, or soft as clay, manipulated by his wife and business partners to the point of bankruptcy?”

  I turned on Spencer, fists balled, ready to strike him. “Shut your mouth,” I said coldly.

  For the first time since I had known him, I had actually shocked my traveling companion. The mocking smile fell from his face.

  “I’m sorry Clayton. I had no idea. I spoke from my own experience. Though a successful man, my father was the latter, pushed and pulled about by my mother and his family. I suppose if he hadn’t been, he wouldn’t have tolerated me, so it worked out for the best as far as I was concerned. You don’t have to tell me about yours if you don’t wish.”

  At his own admission of familial shortcomings, I felt an increased sense of camaraderie. “Mine was a combination of both. He drove my brother Albert and me relentlessly as boys. It was why Albert went to sea, to escape him. I was the opposite. I attempted to follow in his footsteps and be like him.”

  “There’s more,
you said he was an amalgam of both types.”

  “I’ve never told anyone this, but I suppose it doesn’t matter anymore, they’re all dead now. Mother had an affair with father’s business partner at the newspaper. It was when I was a boy, about fourteen. I remember them arguing horribly. She left us to live with the bastard, but returned when she got sick. She died a few months later. The partnership broke up, of course. My father bought the traitor out and put himself in debt to the bank which led to his downfall in the end. It destroyed him, sucked away his ambition and his hard edge.” I stared at Spencer. “Why do I tell you these things?”

  He patted me on the shoulder then made a sweep of his arms to indicate the immense, open landscape that surrounded us. “It’s this place, it invites candor. Within it, we are like fleas on the back of a dog, the significance of our problems dwindling to nothing. What did your mother look like?”

  “She was small and dark haired.”

  “She sounds remarkably like the little Jewish girl,” he commented.

  I became angry, my mind unable to wrap itself around the thesis. “Not at all.”

  He carried on unrepentant. “Myself, I’m not the marrying kind. At least not to one as serious minded as your little Rachel no matter her charms – which are many.”

  I watched him as he filled in an intricate detail of a billowing cloud that lay upon the horizon, its sensuous curve wickedly filling me with imaginings of Rachel’s naked breasts. Nipples like ripe cherries, the mound of her love a thicket in which I could lose myself. The thought of it filled me like a river of fire coursing through my veins. I would surely burn in hell for such terrible fantasies I thought.

  Shaking me from my iniquitous thoughts, Spencer blurted out, “What do you think of Jews? Do they intrigue you?”

  “I think they’re an odd race,” I said.

  “My opinion as well. My old nursemaid believed them to be witches and summoners of evil spirits. She swore that they raised the dead at midnight and ate small children on their sacred days. Of course, she was ignorant having been raised among the Spaniards; they were the masters of the Inquisition after all. Many a Jew was made a Roman Candle at their behest” he commented wryly.

  “I’m not prejudiced,” I told him.

  “And what of the youngest girl, Sosanna?” Spencer inquired with a mischievous tone.

  “What about her?” I asked.

  Have you noticed young Mozart’s interest in the girl and she in him?”

  The boy had ceased his playing. I looked at him in amazement. He stared back at me with eyes seeming as wise as Solomon’s. The effect was unsettling. I turned to Spencer.

  “You remember how Sebastian and Trotter turned on him when he joked about the girl on his master’s plantation. Kingfish and the others would kill him if they found out!”

  “T’weren’t that way atall, twas she wanted me and I let her,” Mozart said sounding like an actor in a Shakespearean play.

  I was too astonished at his words to acknowledge them. I recognized what Zenobia had said, that the young African’s accent was fluid as mercury. I looked into his face and his eyes stared back at me hypnotically, the expression on his Moorish face changing not one whit. I turned away and gazed into the sun.

  “Oh I doubt he’s stupid enough to do anything about it, are you Moze? At least not without her enticement. But it is amusing, don’t you think?” Spencer said cheerfully.

  “You’d best discourage him, whether she entices or not,” I replied. “Though I have no great fondness for the darkie, I have no desire either to see him murdered for his ill advised interests.”

  “Nothing I can do it about it. You should learn that lesson Clayton. We cannot control the actions of others. Those who believe they can, are truly living in an illusion. Best to let things take their course. I’ve found that left alone, most situations will resolve as they should – whether their consequence is the desired effect or not. And besides, he’s a free man. I gave him his papers when we left independence.”

  I nodded at the stone tower of rock to the west. “Thank God we plan to part company with them soon. It may be the only thing that saves his black hide.”

  Spencer grinned. “But it is likely we’ll them again – at Fort Laramie. They’ll likely winter there. Perhaps I’ll leave Mozart with them until spring. Traveling seems not to agree with him as it does you and me. Who knows, by the spring he may be a father which would make me an uncle of sorts.”

  “You amaze me sometimes,” I answered with hushed incredulity.

  “And you I. Now, where were we? Oh yes, the dream my boy, the dream. In whose dream do we reside?” He persisted.

  “What about Kant,” I asked, desirous to put away thoughts of women and the world.

  “Kant? You must be joking. He set out to build a bridge between the scientists and the philosophers,” he replied.

  “Exactly. That’s why I like him,” I said.

  “He’s the fool who first disputed Thomas Aquinas’s Five Proofs of God and then added a sixth proof as if in penance. All of which was nonsense,” he said.

  “What about Aquinas’s Five Proofs? They seem related to Berkeley’s Theory,” I argued.

  “You can’t be serious?” He said.

  “I am,” I replied.

  “Really, you believe the argument that God is the unmoved mover and the efficient cause?” He continued, not waiting for me to answer him. “The second proof is a redundancy of the first. Motion and cause, semantics. It attempts to replace science with magic. And we can dispense with the fourth proof out of hand, that some beings are more and less noble than others. That’s merely a justification for the hereditary ruling class. The fifth, that natural bodies act with intelligent design is yet another assault on science.”

  “I didn’t say it held water. I only said was akin to Berkeley’s Theory. It was an argument of its time. But you left out the third proof,” I said.

  “Because I knew it was the one you’d latched onto. Tell me your pet theory,” he said in a mocking tone.

  I made my argument, refusing to be intimidated by him. “That all things in nature are both possible and not possible to be. At one time there was nothing in existence. If true, then all that exists was created by something already existing,” I said.

  “Garbage. Now you make my head hurt,” Spencer replied.

  “Doesn’t that sound suspiciously like what Berkeley was saying four hundred years later, only cast outside the box of religion? How different is it? What I perceive is real, but nothing else may exist,” I said.

  “You’re in error. You interpolate two entirely different concepts,” he said.

  “Now you’re insulting me. I understand it as well as you do. Why do you always have to act superior?” I asked.

  “Because I am superior,” Spencer said. His answer betrayed no trace of humor.

  “I’ve had enough of this. I know what I know. You’re no smarter than I am,” I said becoming petulant.

  Enamored of the sound of his own voice, Spencer went on, “Kant argued that the theoretical argument for God's existence was unsuccessful. Then he turned round and said that God is a moral being who is responsible for the character of the natural world. That’s just another weak defense of the Church as the arbiter of good and evil. There is another argument you know, that if God does not exist, then all things are permissible.” I refused to answer him. He sighed. “Well, if you won’t talk philosophy, then perhaps we should speak of women. To you, a woman is a romantic novel, waiting for you to open,” he said.

  “What is she to you then?” I asked.

  “That which she has always been; the womb that bears all our hopes and dreams. She is a complex bundle of conflicting emotion and ambitions that no man can know. She is a mystery even unto herself.” He began reciting.

  “A nighthawk lived among the trees, and often time she spoke to me.

  By the light of an August moon, she was a woman, that I knew.”

  The ver
se was familiar, but I couldn’t place it. “Who wrote that?”

  “I did,” he answered.

  “It’s good, like everything you do. Everyone loves you. You’re brilliant and clever. Women instantly take to you. They rarely like me,” I complained.

  “You don’t give much of yourself. You hold it all inside,” Spencer said.

  “My parents boiled away enough emotion in their arguments for ten generations in my family. I prefer to guard mine,” I told him.

  “Tis a pity.”

  He looked up from his painting. The sun had become a fiery ball in the western sky as it sank into the hills, bathing the landscape in a golden glow of odd, shimmering light. The outline of Scott’s Bluff seemed a dark cathedral of stone in a city of God without worshippers.

  “It’s time for us to head to our meeting place,” he said.

  We walked side by side leading our horses with the sun to our backs. We came upon the deep grooved wagon trail and turned east toward camp.

  “Do you truly love her?” He asked suddenly.

  “Yes,” I replied.

  “And you’re not going to do anything about it?”

  “I cannot.”

  “Good, then I shall. I think I’ve time enough before we embark on our adventure with the Indians.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “I shall seduce her,” he said.

  I was incredulous. “What?”

  “If you won’t, then I mean to sleep with her,” Spence said as matter of factly as if he were speaking of taking a walk in the park.

  “You shall not,” I countered.

  “And who’s to stop me?” He asked.

  “I will.”

  “You are a fine lad Clayton, but once I set out to seduce a girl, there’s no stopping me. There is one way though,” he told me.