Beauty for Ashes (24 page)

Bell Rock chose a spot to erect the sun dance lodge. There he planted a small cedar tree and tied the effigy to it.

Before Sam lay down in the whistler's lodge for the night, he asked Coming-from-the-Water for a drink. She gave it, adding, “Drink as little as you can. The more you sacrifice, the more quickly your vision will come.”

The next morning they built the sun dance lodge, which was huge. Bell Rock blackened his face. He and Sam wore cedar headdresses. Sam kept feeling more and more odd, like he wasn't himself.

The women cut willows. This lodge would be enclosed not with hides but limbs, and a head-high space would be left open so the people could watch.

First, though, a half-dozen groups of men came one at a time. “War parties,” said Bell Rock quietly. They marched into the lodge and pantomimed fighting. “They hope the effigy's medicine will give them a vision of a dead enemy,” said Bell Rock.

Sam watched. He tried to give his undivided attention to the mock war, and to everything. He wanted to see, listen, smell, take in everything that happened, know completely what his sun dance ceremony was.

But his mind kept wandering. Sometimes he felt sleepy. As one group left and another entered, Sam smacked himself in the head with his own hand. He blinked his eyes several times and shook his head.

“Hard, isn't it?” Bell Rock gave him a half smile.

The worst was that his mind kept nagging at him.
Why are you doing this? This is absurd. You aren't an Indian. This is all superstition. Worse, it's savagery. What the devil are you thinking?

“What you want,” said Bell Rock, “is not to think. Just lose yourself in observing.” He paused. “Some of the difficulty, though, is that you're weak from not eating. Tomorrow or the next day, that will get better.”

Sam wondered why, as he got further and further from his last bite of food, his weakness would ease off.

 

T
HE NEXT DAY
, it turned out, was the first of the great days. That's what Sam called them to himself. True, he didn't know why they were great, or even have a clear sense that they would be. He simply made up his mind to call them that, purely as an act of faith.

Dressed ceremonially in his kilt, skunk hide, and black moccasins, Sam left the whistler's tipi and, stopping four times, carried the effigy to the sun dance lodge. There Bell Rock met him and tied the effigy to the cedar tree at the height of Sam's eyes.

“From now on you will drink nothing until your vision comes,” he said.

Coming-from-the-Water (no other woman was permitted to be near Sam) built a center fire, hung pots, and put buffalo tongues in them to cook.

Warriors entered the lodge one at a time and reenacted their fights against enemies.

At last Flat Dog appeared, carrying two hide ropes. Sam hadn't seen him since the ceremony began. Dressed only in a kilt, he came to be first to make the sacrifice of his blood.

Altogether seven young men came bearing hide ropes. They tied their rigging high on lodge poles, painted themselves white all over, and lay down on buffalo robes. Bell Rock went to Flat Dog, and afterward each man in turn. He handed Flat Dog an eagle-wing fan. Flat Dog put the hide handle in his mouth and bit down on it, Sam supposed to keep from crying out.

Between the nipple and the collar bone on each side, Bell Rock made two shallow, parallel cuts. Then he slipped a wooden skewer beneath the skin, so that it stuck out from behind the flesh of the chest on both sides. Finally he tied the ends of the ropes, which were fashioned into a Y, onto each skewer.

One young man, a tall fellow with a piratical scar on his face, sat calmly while Bell Rock made cuts on his back, above his shoulder blades. Bell Rock fixed the ropes from these skewers to buffalo skulls, and the young man danced out of the lodge, dragging the skulls behind him. He would dance until the skulls broke the skin and pulled free.

The drum began, and the day's first song swirled through Sam's mind. The young blood sacrificers danced. Sometimes they leaned back on the ropes and stretched their skin away from their chests. But always they danced. They would dance, Sam understood, as long as the musicians played, to the end of the day. Blood rivuleted down their chests and into their kilts.

Warriors came into the lodge, and went with the skull-dragger, to help. They recited their own brave deeds in the face of the enemy and added beseechingly, “May this man do likewise.”

Now Sam came to it. He didn't understand, and he had to act. He faced the sun dance effigy tied to the cedar. He stared at it. And slowly, to the beat of the drum, he began to dance. He did a simple toe-heel step, repetitive, monotonous, soon automatic and forgotten. He blew the eagle-bone whistle, sending an eerie piping above the music of the singers.

At the beginning he repeated in his mind Bell Rock's words: “The people have been wounded. With or without fault, you brought that wound. Now you can gain the strength to heal it.”

Soon, though, he lost track of all words, and of language itself. His mind drifted into a state…He could not have described it. The drum pounded, the songs rose, the men's blood ran down their chests, and Sam's mind ran headlong into the effigy.

The lower body of the effigy was wrapped in buffalo hide, hair turned in. The face had eyes and mouth roughly drawn in black. The hair was parted in the woman's way, and sprouted feathers in every direction. And the whole was littered with morning star crosses. Sam stared into the crude, blank eyes of the effigy. “Give me whatever power you have for me,” he said silently. He danced. He stared. He danced. He danced until he forgot he was dancing, and why. Dancing was all.

Songs were repeated over and over. Men came to recite their deeds and went. The seven making the sacrifice of their blood danced. Sam stared into the blankness, or mystery, of the sun dance effigy, and he danced.

Sometimes he failed, or thought he was failing. He got distracted. He remembered the day his brother Owen's fiancée made love to him, or the day he slugged Owen. He remembered cowering inside the buffalo carcass during the prairie fire. He remembered the massive Gideon's gentle wit, and missed him.

Suddenly, he would snap back to it.
Attention. What I must do is pay complete attention to dancing and to the effigy
. And his mind would flow again into the song and the motion.

At some point he imagined, or dreamed, or envisioned himself as a sac being filled with the voices of the singers and the beat of the drums. Like an ambrosial liquid it flowed into him, sweet and satisfying. The sac of himself swelled with the liquid of…he didn't know what and he didn't care. He swam on the sea of music, he floated into the air like one of Benjamin's Franklin's balloons he'd heard about, he drifted, joyous, fulfilled.

Suddenly—or it seemed sudden—the singers and drummers stopped. In his fantasy the sac that was Sam Morgan began to lose…whatever was him. The singers left. Fluid kept trickling out of Sam's sac. The tears leaked from his eyes. All his bodily fluids seeped away. Even his blood ran onto the ground, and he was a dry husk.

Those making the blood sacrifice leaned back against their ropes hard and broke free. Bell Rock removed their skewers. One by one, they departed.

Sam felt utterly deflated, drained of all energy, even of self.

Bell Rock helped him onto a bed of cedar leaves. He felt barely able to stagger, even with support. In his private world he had become a nothing.

Coming-from-the-Water put cedar on the burning charcoal at the foot of his bed, so the purifying smoke would drift through the lodge. And they left him, they thought to sleep, but in truth, as Sam felt things, to lie there empty.

It was the strangest feeling of his life, utter emptiness, everything gone that made up Sam Morgan, his memories, his feelings for people and places and things, his convictions, his skills, everything he had fashioned into a self. Yet in a way, it was pleasant.

He put his left hand out idly and felt something that shouldn't have been there. He picked it up. A pouch, a…A
gage d'amour
! Despite all, Meadowlark had managed to send him a message, one of love. Flat Dog must have left it here.

Now he decided to enumerate the things he was, things he could be glad of and grateful for. He was alive. He hadn't begged for water. Young men, though not as many as Bell Rock hoped, had used this sun dance to seek visions. The gods hadn't sent lightning bolts or an earthquake to punish him for presuming to dance like a Crow.

Then he switched moods. He railed at himself. He had no vision yet. He didn't even have a glimpse of what corner a vision might be hiding behind. Was he going to humiliate himself by failing to see anything? Was he going to thirst and starve and dance until he died, blind?

Now he had shaken the feeling of emptiness, but he was full of a mental business that was uncomfortable. He told his mind to gentle down, treating it like a skittish horse. After a while, it got out of the way, and after another while he slept.

 

E
VERYTHING MAY HAVE
been the same on the second day, but Sam felt changed, so everything was different.

He made up his mind not to think about whether he was empty or full or in any other state, simply to do the ceremony. Quietly, he let Coming-from-the-Water dress him as before, and Bell Rock painted him the same way.

As they walked ritually to the sun dance lodge, Bell Rock said softly, “Remember, whenever there is singing, you must dance. Later in the day that will get hard, very hard, but you must dance.”

The first song rose up, Sam fixed his eyes on the effigy, and his feet moved.

Time passed, measured only in drum beats. The sun's shadow moved from northwest to north in the lodge, but Sam didn't notice. Seven pairs of feet, plus Sam's, were drawn to the earth as the stick was drawn to the drum.

Men came into the lodge and spoke words retelling their brave deeds. The people watched, and they hoped.

The music stopped. All the songs had been sung and repeated several times. The dancers rested. In a few minutes the endless motion began again.

During one break in the music Bell Rock cut a root Sam didn't recognize and held it to his nose. It felt like an elixir, and his spirits rose.

Music. Dance. Music. Dance.

The sun's shadow slid from the north side of the lodge to the northeast. Sam didn't notice. He danced and saw nothing but the effigy and heard nothing but the words, the melodies, and the thump of the drum. He swayed with the words, he undulated with them, he circled with them. He was the words and melody.

Sometimes pictures floated into his mind, every odd kind of picture, things not seen before on earth or in heaven, things he was seeing or dreaming or imagining now. Often he reminded himself to put his mind on the effigy and in the music. What worked best was to dance more vigorously. He lifted his knees high, bent his body double, threw his arms high, tried to dance himself to exhaustion.

Except that he was already exhausted. In his emptiness he didn't know where his strength came from. He asked the effigy for more strength, and felt it flow into his arms and legs. He felt it animate him. But the energy was the effigy's, or the music's, and he only borrowed it, as a wing borrows lift from the wind.

One more time the drum stopped. Four times they will stop, Bell Rock had said, and after the fourth you will sleep. Unless you have seen something.

Shadows rose on the brushy walls of the lodge—the wintering sun was falling.

The musicians rolled into a cadence that promised the last repetition of the last song. The day's dancing slid toward an end.

But the women would not let it end. They trilled their tongues, they cried out, they themselves danced—they forced the singers and drummer to go on.

And on they went, louder, stronger, firmer of beat, more passionate of voice. Sam swam into the lyrics. He heard no sentences but some words were Sun, Eagle, courage, blood, Grandfather.

When the singers rolled into the fourth repetition, normally the last one, the women again would not let them stop. In Sam's mind their trills turned into commands. “Dance, dance, fly, fly.”

Harder and harder he danced, wilder and wilder, he knew not why.

Again and again the women insisted. Again and again the musicians roused themselves for one more time. Again and again Sam somehow, barely, found energy where there was none, and he danced, and danced…

He collapsed.

“Do not touch him!” the women cried.

Bell Rock sat quietly beside the fallen dancer.

 

S
AM FELL FREELY
. He saw nothing, heard nothing, couldn't know that he was falling, except for the sense within that he was…

Sam was within the earth. He grasped the tail of a snake.

My oldest enemy.

The snake looked back at Sam and smiled, a smile impossible to interpret, maybe inviting, maybe mocking.

It writhed forward, dragging Sam behind.
Unconquerable enemy
.

Sam scraped against nothing, felt no resistance—being dragged felt almost like floating.

They slid through a kind of tunnel.

Sam accepted whatever was happening to him, and accepted the snake as his guide. Within him all was acceptance.

They came to a widening, a kind of chamber. The snake turned. Gradually, it coiled itself—not round and round, as snakes do, but stacking itself upward, lining itself against the wall.

Instantly, the snake's face was hideous, eyes flashing evil. The tongue lashed out into Sam's face. Scornful laughter flash-flooded through the labyrinth of his mind.

Sam shuddered. He wanted to duck backward, but there was nowhere to go.

He thrust his face toward the snake. Abruptly, within the storm, he felt calm. Yes, calm. Confidently, he reached around the slavering tongue and grasped the body of the snake with both hands.

So quickly and deftly even he didn't know what he was doing, he tied the snake into knots.