Black Hills (58 page)

—
Did you ever want to be a warrior
?

This was Robert asking his father an unexpected yet strangely overdue question. It was summer 1912, during their annual summer camping trip, and Robert was fourteen years old. They’d camped in the Black Hills many times before this, but this was the first time Paha Sapa had brought his son to the top of the Six Grandfathers. The two were sitting at the edge of the cliff, their legs dangling over, very close to where Paha Sapa had dug his Vision Pit thirty-six years earlier.

—
What I mean is… weren’t most of the young men in your tribe expected to become warriors in those days, Father?

Paha Sapa smiled.

—
Most. Not all. I’ve told you about the
winkte.
And the
wičasa wakan.

—
And you wanted to become a
wičasa wakan,
like your adoptive grandfather, Limps-a-Lot. But tell the truth, Father… weren’t you ever tempted to become a warrior like most of the other young men?

Paha Sapa thinks about the one silly raid on the Pawnee on which he’d been allowed to accompany the older boys—and where he hadn’t even been able to hold the horses and keep them silent well enough
to avoid ridicule from the others, who themselves had retreated fast enough when they saw the size of the Pawnee camp of warriors—and then he thought about how he’d rushed into the huge fight at the Greasy Grass without bringing a weapon. He realized he hadn’t even wanted to hurt the
wasichus
then, on the day Long Hair and the others had attacked the huge village there, but had simply ridden with the other men and boys because he
didn’t want to be left behind
.

—
Actually, Robert, I don’t think I ever did want to be a warrior. Not really. There must have been something lacking in me. Perhaps it was just a matter of
canl pe.

Fourteen-year-old Robert shook his head.

—
You were no
canl waka,
Father. You know as well as I that it’s never been a question of cowardice.

Paha Sapa looked at the few clouds moving across the sky. In 1903, after Big Bill Slovak died in the Holy Terror Mine, Paha Sapa had taken his five-year-old son away from Keystone and Deadwood and out onto the plains, where the two had camped for seven days at
Matho Paha
, Bear Butte. On the sixth day, Paha Sapa awoke to find his son gone. The wagon he’d brought was still hidden in the secret place below, the horses still tethered where he’d left them, but Robert was gone.

For three hours Paha Sapa had searched up and down and along all sides of the fourteen-hundred-foot-tall hill rising out of the prairie while filling his mind with images: rattlesnake, rock fall, the boy falling, strangers. Then, just as Paha Sapa had decided that he must ride one of the horses to the nearest town to get help with the search, little Robert had walked into camp. He was hungry and dirty, but otherwise fine. When Paha Sapa had demanded his son tell him where he’d gone, why he’d been hiding, Robert had said, “I found a cave, Father. I was talking to the man with white hair who lives in the cave. His first name is the same as mine.”

After breakfast, he’d asked Robert to show him the cave. Robert could not find it. When Paha Sapa asked Robert to tell him what the old man had talked to him about, the boy said only, “He said that what he told me and the dreams he showed me were our secret—only his and only mine. He said you would understand, Father.”

Robert never revealed what Robert Sweet Medicine had said to him that day in 1903, or what visions he had shared. But every summer since then, Paha Sapa and his son had gone camping for a week.

Robert was dangling his long legs over the edge of the Six Grandfathers and looking at his father when he said softly—

—
Ate, khoyákiphela he?

Paha Sapa did not know how to answer. What
did
he fear, other than for his son’s life and well-being? What
had
he feared, other than for his wife’s life and happiness when she was ill or for his people’s future? And had that been fear or just… knowledge?

And perhaps he feared the violence of other men’s memories that lay in his mind and soul like dark nodes: Crazy Horse’s depressions and explosions into fury; even Long Hair’s memories of joyous murders in the low light of winter sunrise with the regimental band playing on the hill behind them.

Paha Sapa just shook his head that day, not knowing how to answer the question but knowing that his son was right—he, Paha Sapa, had never been a coward, not in the usual sense—but also knowing the depths of his own failure as a father, as a husband, as a Natural Free Human Being. Paha Sapa had thought, before this summer’s trip in 1912, that he might tell Robert some of the details of his
hanblečeya
on this mountain thirty-six years earlier—perhaps even specifics of the Vision the Grandfathers had given him—but he realized now that he would never do that. Beyond telling Robert that he’d gone on vision quest here, he mentioned nothing of the vision itself during this week of camping around the mountain and—interestingly—Robert did not ask.

Robert Slow Horse had inherited his mother’s light skin color, hazel eyes, thin physique, and even her long eyelashes. The lashes did not make Robert look effeminate. Perhaps unlike his father, Robert was a born warrior, but a quiet one. There was none of the Crazy Horse rage and bluster in him. He allowed the bigger, older boys at his boarding school in Denver to tease him about his name or about being a “half-breed” for a while, then warned them softly, and then—when the bullies inevitably continued bullying—Robert would knock them on their asses. And he continued knocking them on their asses until they altered their behavior.

At fourteen, Robert was already four inches taller than his father. Where the height came from, Paha Sapa did not know, for Rain had been small, as had her father, the missionary minister and theologian, who had moved away from the Pine Ridge Reservation the year after his daughter’s death in 1899 and died himself before the actual new century arrived in 1901. Perhaps, Paha Sapa thought,
his
own father, the teenager Short Elk, had been tall despite his name. (Even a short elk, Paha Sapa realized, was relatively tall.) He had never thought to ask Limps-a-Lot or Angry Badger or Three Buffalo Woman or any of the others around him how tall his young father had been before he’d staked himself down to die fighting Pawnee.

The Reverend de Plachette had moved to Wyoming to be near his friend William Cody for that final year of the minister’s life. Cody had started a town named after himself there and built some hotels in it for the tourists he was sure would come to the beautiful West by way of the newly opened Burlington rail line. Buffalo Bill had named one of the big hotels after his daughter Irma and a road he’d paid to have built running from the town of Cody up to Yellowstone Park the Cody Road. Another sign of the aging entrepreneur’s wealth was the giant TE Ranch he established along the South Fork of the Shoshone River there. Cody had driven all of his cattle from his previous properties in Nebraska and South Dakota to the ranch.

When Paha Sapa and little Robert first visited the failing Reverend de Plachette and prosperous Cody there at the ranch in early 1900, Buffalo Bill’s operation was running more than a thousand head of cattle on more than seven thousand acres of prime grazing land.

Buffalo Bill, his hair white but still long and goatee still in place, had always insisted that his former employee and the boy stay with him in the big house when Paha Sapa visited, and it was that second and final visit, just before Reverend de Plachette died on the day of the first snowfall in Cody in autumn of 1900, that Cody had watched the two-year-old boy playing with some of the servants’ kids.

—
Your son’s smarter than you, Billy.

Paha Sapa had not taken this as an insult. He already knew how intelligent his little son was. He’d only nodded.

Buffalo Bill had laughed.

—
Hell, my guess is that he’ll grow up smarter than
me.
Did you see how he took that empty lantern apart and then put it back together? Didn’t even break the glass. Little fellow can hardly toddle and he’s already an engineer. What do you plan to do for his education, Billy?

That was a good question. Rain had made Paha Sapa swear that Robert would go to good schools and then to a college or university somewhere in the East. Of course, she’d been sure that her father would be there to help—the old man had taught natural and revealed religion and rhetoric at both Yale and Harvard at different times—but she hadn’t counted on her father dying so soon after her own death. And she hadn’t counted on her father dying broke.

The schools near Keystone and Deadwood where Paha Sapa had just begun working in the mines after leaving Pine Ridge Reservation were terrible and didn’t usually take Indian children anyway. The one school on the Pine Ridge Reservation was worse. Paha Sapa was saving money, but he had no idea how to buy his son an education.

William Cody had patted him softly on the back as they watched the children play.

—
Leave it to me, Billy. My sister lives in Denver and I know of some good boarding schools there. The one I’m thinking of takes in boys starting at the age of nine and educates them right up to college age. It can be expensive, but I’ll be more than happy to…

—
I have the money, Mr. Cody. But I would appreciate you putting in a good word with the school. It’s not every school that takes in an Indian child.

Cody had looked at the four toddlers playing on the floor.

—
Who the hell can tell Robert’s part Indian, Billy? I couldn’t and I’ve been around your people for more than thirty years.

—
He’ll still have the last name Slow Horse.

William Cody had grunted.

—
Well, maybe he’s not as smart as we think he is, Billy, and he won’t need a good boarding school. Or maybe other people will get smarter in the future. One way or the other, we can always hope.

R
OBERT HADN’T DISAPPOINTED
his father. The boy had essentially taught himself to read before he was four; he was reading every book
Paha Sapa could find for him by the time he was five. Somehow he learned to speak Lakota as if he’d been raised by Angry Badger’s band, but he was also speaking Spanish by the time he was six (almost certainly because of the Mexican woman and her family and friends who watched him while Paha Sapa was working in the mine). By the time Robert did go to the boarding school in Denver in 1907—the trip to Denver from the Black Hills was daunting then, since there was no direct rail service, but Mr. Cody himself had driven them down the unpaved roads from Wyoming—the boy had already begun speaking and reading some German and French. He had no problem with his studies in Denver despite the fact that he’d rarely attended a real school in the Hills and that his father had been his tutor.

In truth, Robert and his father had been inseparable until that day in September ’07 when Paha Sapa had looked out the oval rear window of Mr. Cody’s automobile in Denver and seen his son standing with strangers in front of a red-brick building with green shutters; Robert seemed too shy or stunned or perhaps just too interested in the strange situation to think to wave good-bye. But Robert had written every week that year and in the years since—good, long, information-filled letters—and although Paha Sapa knew that Robert had been terribly homesick all of that first year (Paha Sapa had
felt
his son’s aching homesickness in his own guts and heart), the boy had never once mentioned it in the letters. By January of each year they would be talking about where they would go camping together that summer.

—
Did you ever bring Mother here?

Paha Sapa blinked out of his reverie.

—
To the Black Hills? Of course.

—
No, I mean
here.
To the Six Grandfathers.

—
Not quite. We came to the Hills when she was pregnant with you and we climbed there….

Paha Sapa pointed to a peak rising to the west and south.

Robert looked surprised, even shocked.

—
Harney Peak? I’m surprised you took Mother there—or even set foot on it.

—
Its
wasichu
name means nothing, Robert. At least to me. We could see the Six Grandfathers—and almost everything else—from up there. There was a dirt
road that went close to the Harney Peak trailhead and none here to the Six Grandfathers. You saw how rough the ride in here still is.

Robert nodded, looking up at the distant summit and obviously trying to imagine his mother up there, looking in this direction.

—
Why did you ask, Robert?

—
Ah, well, I was thinking of all the places you’ve taken me around here on our summer camping trips since I was little—Bear Butte
, Inyan Kara,
Wind Cave, the Badlands, the Six Grandfathers
…

Robert had used the Lakota words for these places, including
Matho Paha, Washu Niya
(“the Breathing Place,” for Wind Cave),
Maka Sichu
, and so forth. Their private conversations almost always slipped in and out of Lakota and English.