Black Hills (13 page)

The highway is especially churned up into ridges and gulleys here, a Badlands in miniature, and Paha Sapa stays silent as he bounces the Nash across the least threatening patch of frozen road and shoulder. He remembers the time, only nine years after the rubbing out of Long Hair at the Little Big Horn, when Sitting Bull traveled east with Bill Cody’s Wild West Show—this was eight years before Paha Sapa went to Chicago with the same troupe—and was so impressed by the numbers and power of the
wasichus
and by the size of their cities and the speed of their railroads. But Paha Sapa spoke to a missionary who
had known
Tatanka Iyotake
upon his return to the agency, and Sitting Bull had said to the white holy man—
The white people are wicked. I want you to teach my people to read and write, but they must not become white people in their ways of living and of thinking; it is too bad a life. I could not let them do it. I myself would rather die an Indian than live a white man.

Paha Sapa finds it difficult to breathe. There is a wild pounding on the inside of his rib cage and a pressure of pain in his skull that blurs his vision. Another man might think it was a heart attack or stroke happening to him, but Paha Sapa knows that it is the ghost of Long Hair gibbering and capering within him, pounding to get out. Does Long Hair hear these words through Paha Sapa’s ears, see the Needles columns through Paha Sapa’s eyes, and imagine the large sculptures of the Lakota men mentioned—Robinson has certainly not mentioned Custer for one of the sculptures—by seeing into Paha Sapa’s mind?

Paha Sapa does not know. He has asked himself similar questions many times, but although the ghost speaks to him nightly, he has no clear idea as to whether Long Hair sees and hears through him or shares his thoughts the way that Paha Sapa is cursed to suffer Long Hair’s.

—
Did you know Sitting Bull, Billy?

Doane Robinson sounds concerned, perhaps embarrassed, as if he is worried that he has offended the Lakota man he knows as Billy Slow Horse.

—
I knew him slightly, Mr. Robinson.

Paha Sapa makes his voice as friendly as he is able to.

—
I saw Sitting Bull from time to time, but I was, of course, only a boy when he fought and then surrendered and then was killed by the Indian policemen who came to arrest him.

T
HE
WIWANYAG WACHIPI
S
UN
D
ANCE
at Deer Medicine Rocks two weeks before they killed Long Hair lasted only two days.

The older boys and young men who had come for their manhood ceremony lay down at the base of the tall
waga chun
now bedecked with paint and poles and braided tethers. The boys and young men had been similarly painted by Limps-a-Lot and the other holy men, and did not move or cry out as the
wičasa wakan
then cut strips out of their chests
or backs so that loops of rawhide could be pushed in under the strong chest or back muscles and tied off, usually to a small bit of wood. These loops were then tied to the long braids running up to the top of the
waga chun
.

Then the young men, streaming blood on their painted chests and backs, would stand and begin their dancing and chanting, leaning back from or toward the sacred tree so that their bodies were often suspended totally by the rawhide and horn under their muscles. And always they stared at the sun as they danced and chanted. Sometimes they danced the full two days. More often, they would dance and leap until the pain caused them to fall unconscious or—if they were lucky and
Wakan Tanka
smiled on them—until the rawhide and horn ripped through their powerful chest or back muscles and freed them.

Sitting Bull had danced this way many times before in his youth, but now, as Paha Sapa and Limps-a-Lot and two thousand others watched in this summer of 1876, he stripped naked to the waist and walked to the
waga chun
and sat with his scarred back against the sacred tree. Paha Sapa remembers noticing that there was a tiny hole in the sole of one of Sitting Bull’s old but beautifully beaded moccasins.

Sitting Bull’s friend Jumping Bull approached the chief chanting, knelt next to the man of forty-two winters, and used a steel awl to lift the skin on Sitting Bull’s lower arm. Taking care not to slice into muscle, Jumping Bull cut away a square of skin the size of the nail on Paha Sapa’s little finger. Then he cut another. Jumping Bull worked his way up Sitting Bull’s right arm, cutting fifty such squares.

And during this, ignoring the streaming blood and never reacting to the pain, Sitting Bull chanted his prayers, asking for mercy for his people and for victory in the coming battle with the
wasichus
.

The cutting of the flesh from Sitting Bull’s right arm, Paha Sapa remembers—thinking of the time now in
Wasicun
terms—took about forty-five minutes. Then Jumping Bull began cutting fifty more squares of flesh from Sitting Bull’s left arm.

When Jumping Bull was finished with the slow cutting, when there was more red blood than ceremonial paint flowing down Sitting Bull’s arms onto his belly and loincloth and legs and spattering the ground all around the
waga chun
, Sitting Bull stood and—still chanting and
praying—danced all the rest of that long June day and all through that night of the full moon and halfway through the next humid, sweltering, cloudless, fly-buzzing day.

Sitting Bull’s old friend Black Moon caught him when the chief was finally ready to faint. And then Sitting Bull whispered to Black Moon, and Black Moon stood and shouted to the waiting thousands—

—
Sitting Bull wishes me to tell you all that he just heard a voice saying unto him, “I give you these because they have no ears,” and Sitting Bull looked up and saw, above him and above us all, soldiers and some of our Natural Free Human Beings and our allies on horseback, and many of the
wasichus
were falling like grasshoppers and their heads were down and their hats were falling off. The
wasichus
were falling right into our camp!

And Paha Sapa remembers the cheering that had gone up from the camp at hearing this vision.

The bluecoat soldiers had no ears in Sitting Bull’s vision, they knew, because the
Wasicun
had refused to hear that the Lakota and Cheyenne wished only to be left alone and that the Lakota refused to sell their beloved Black Hills. The women would drive their sewing awls through the eardrums of dead
wasichu
on the battlefield to open those ears.

And then the
wiwanyag wachipi
ended after only two days and after Sitting Bull’s triumphant vision, and the thousands there moved southwest a few miles to the larger campground on the Greasy Grass, where Long Hair and his Seventh Cavalry
wasichu
soldiers would attack them and where Paha Sapa would become infected with Long Hair’s ghost.

P
AHA
S
APA DROPS OFF THE HISTORIAN
and the Nash just after dark. It is already snowing lightly but consistently. Doane Robinson follows Paha Sapa up the front walk to where Paha Sapa is pulling his oversize leather jacket, leather gloves, leather helmet, and goggles from the sidecar. Snowflakes fly horizontally beneath the glowing streetlamp above them.

—
Billy, the weather looks bad. Stay the night here. That road up to Deadwood is terrible even in the daylight and when it’s dry. It may not be passable in half an hour, even for a motorcar.

—
It’ll be all right, Mr. Robinson. I have other places to stay along the way—if I have to.

—
Well, it’s a very handsome motorcycle. I’ve never really looked at it carefully before. American made?

—
Yes. A Harley-Davidson J, made in 1916.

—
At least it has a headlight.

—
It does. The first of its kind to have one. Its beam is a little weak and shaky and, unfortunately, it’s broken right now. I keep meaning to fix it.

—
Stay with us tonight, Billy.

Paha Sapa throws his leg over the saddle. The motorcycle is a beautiful machine—long, sleek, painted light blue with the
HARLEY-DAVIDSON
lettering in reddish-orange script. Over the nonworking headlight is a stubby horn that works quite well. The intake manifold is curved, a piece of true sculpture in Paha Sapa’s judgment, and feeds the reliable sixty-one-cubic-inch F-head V-twin engine. It is the first of its make to have a modern kick-starter. There’s a plush leather passenger seat attached over the rear wheel (although no back for it), and though the sidecar is detachable, Paha Sapa keeps it on as a carryall for his tools and gear.

He reaches behind the engine and uses his key to switch on the magneto. Three kicks and the engine roars to life. Paha Sapa throttles it up and then down so he can hear the historian.

—
Billy, it’s beautiful! Have you owned it long?

—
It’s not mine. It’s my son’s. He gave it to me to keep for him until he came back from the War.

Doane Robinson is shivering from the cold. He rubs his cheek.

—
But the War has been over for… Oh, my. Oh, dear.

—
Good night, Mr. Robinson. Please let me know if Mr. Lorado Taft writes you back.

P
AHA
S
APA AND
L
IMPS-A
-L
OT RETURN FROM THE
G
REASY
Grass much more quickly than they traveled there, but word of the rubbing out of Long Hair has already reached their village, carried by the fast-riding young warriors from the band and by other groups of Lakota passing by. The word of the defeat of the Seventh Cavalry and of
Pehin Hanska Kasata
, the rubbing out of Long Hair, travels faster in that week through the world of the Great Plains tribes than it does through the
wasichu
army or telegraph lines.

For some days after his return, no one has time for or interest in Paha Sapa’s tale of counting coup and catching a ghost.

Paha Sapa was always sorry that there had been no time that morning after his meeting with Sitting Bull, Long Turd, and the other men to go up the hill and show them the corpse of the
Wasicun
whose ghost had entered him. That morning there was a pillar of dust visible to the north of where Major Reno and his surviving men were still pinned down on the hill three miles from where Paha Sapa had touched his dying
Wasicun
, and while the
wasichus
feared that it was still more Indians, the scouts serving Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse and the other chiefs knew that it was a large detachment of mounted bluecoats, almost
certainly General Terry’s column coming from the same jumping-off point—the steamer
Far West
parked where the Yellowstone River meets the Rosebud—from whence Custer and his men had come.