Black Hills (59 page)

Paha Sapa smiled.

—
And?

The smile Robert returned looked like Rain’s when she had been embarrassed.

—
And, well, I just wondered if there were religious reasons for these visits as well as just great places to camp—or places important to your people.

Paha Sapa noticed the “your” rather than “our” but said nothing.

—
Robert, when the whites summoned various
Ikče Wičaśa
and
Sahiyela
and other tribes’ chiefs and holy men and war leaders to Fort Laramie in 1868, to work out the boundaries of the Indian territories, the white soldiers and diplomats speaking for the distant Great White Father said their purpose in mapping our lands was “to know and protect your lands as well as ours,” and our chiefs and holy men and warriors looked at the maps and scratched their heads. The idea of putting a limit to one’s people’s territories had never occurred to the Natural Free Human Beings or to any of the other tribes represented there. How could you know what you might win in war the next spring or lose the next summer? How could you put a
line
showing
your
land in areas that really belonged to the buffalo or all the animals that lived in the Black Hills… or all the tribes that sheltered there, for that matter? But then our holy men began to make marks on the
wasichus’
maps showing places that
must
belong to their tribes and people because they were so
sacred
to them—big loops around
Matho Paha
and
Inyan Kara
and
Maka Sichu
and
Paha Sapa
and
Washu Niya
and
Šakpe Tunkašila,
where we sit right now….

Robert was already grinning as Paha Sapa continued.

—
The
wasichus
were a little shocked because between just the Cheyenne and the Natural Free Human Beings, we considered just about
every
damned rock and hill and tree and creek and river and mesa and piece of prairie sacred in one way or another.

Robert was laughing now—that free, easy, natural, always unforced laugh that sounded so much like Rain’s sweet laughter to Paha Sapa.

—
I get it, Father. There’s no place you could take me in or around the Black Hills that
wouldn’t
be part of the
Ikče Wičas´a’s
faith. But, still, don’t you ever… worry… about me in terms of religion?

—
You were baptized Christian by your grandfather, Robert.

Robert laughed again and touched his father’s bare forearm.

—
Yes, and
that
certainly took, didn’t it? Actually, I don’t think I’ve written you about it, but I often do go to various churches in Denver… not just the required chapel at school, but with the other students and some of the instructors and their families on Sunday. I especially have enjoyed a Catholic church in downtown Denver, where I’ve attended Mass with Mr. Murcheson and his family—especially at Easter and other Catholic holy days. I like the ritual… the smell of incense… the use of Latin… the whole thing.

Wondering what his wife and Protestant missionary-theologian father-in-law would think of this, Paha Sapa said—

—
Are you thinking of becoming a Catholic, Robert?

The boy laughed again, but softly this time. He looked back at the shadowing summit of Harney Peak.

—
No. I’m afraid I don’t have the ability to believe the way I know you did… probably do… and perhaps the way Mother and Grandfather de Plachette did.

Paha Sapa was tempted to tell Robert of how his grandfather had seemed to lose his faith in that year and a half after his daughter had died young. The danger, Paha Sapa knows too well, of having only one child… one child who becomes a human being’s only connection to the unseen future and, oddly but truly, to the forgotten past.

Robert is still speaking.

—…
at least no religion I’ve encountered yet, but I look forward to seeing and learning more in different places. But I guess for right now, the only religion I can lay claim to is… Father, have you heard of a man named Albert Einstein?

—
No.

—
Not too many people have yet, but I suspect they will. Mr. Mülich, my mathematics and physics instructor at the school, showed me a paper that Professor Einstein
published about three years ago
, “Über die Entwicklung unserer Anschauungen über das Wesen und die Konstitution der Strahlung,”
and the implications of that paper, according to Mr. Mülich—the idea that light has momentum and can act like point-particles, photons, well… that’s probably as close as I get to religion these days.

Paha Sapa looked at his son at that moment the way one looks at a photograph or drawing of a distant, distant relative.

Robert shook his head and laughed again, as if erasing a blackboard.

—
But you know what the Catholic and Methodist and Presbyterian churches I’ve attended most reminded me of, Father?

—
I have no idea.

—
The Paiute Ghost Dance holy man you told me about a long time ago—Wovoka?

—
Yes, that was his name.

—
Well, his message of a messiah coming… him, I guess… and nonviolence and of how obeying his teachings would lead to the dead loved ones and ancestors returning to the world and the buffalo returning and how the Ghost Dance would induce a cataclysm that would carry away all the whites and other nonbelievers, sort of like the Tribulations and all that stuff in the Book of Revelation, sounded very Christian to me.

—
That’s what a lot of us thought when we heard it, Robert.

—
You told me about you and Limps-a-Lot planning to hear the Prophet with Sitting Bull up at Standing Rock Agency, but Sitting Bull getting killed when he resisted arrest…

—
Yes.

—
But you never told me about Limps-a-Lot. Only that he died shortly after that.

—
There wasn’t much more to tell. Limps-a-Lot did die shortly after Sitting Bull was shot.

—
But how? I mean… I know you’d thought that your honorary
tunkašila
had been killed years earlier, right after you’d had your Vision and the cavalry chasing Custer’s killers had burned your old village down, but you left that school the priests were running and went up to Canada to search for Limps-a-Lot when you were… gosh, you were about my age, Father.

Paha Sapa shook his head.

—
Nonsense. I was much older… almost sixteen. A visiting priest from Canada had described a man who sounded like my
tunkaˇsila.
I had to go see.

—
But still… my gosh, Father… just you riding all the way to Canada to find one man up there—and in the winter, I think you said. When you were fifteen years old. How’d you do it?

—
I had a pistol.

Robert laughed so hard then that Paha Sapa actually worried the boy was going to fall off the cliff edge.

—
That heavy Army Colt that you still own? I’ve seen
that.
What’d you kill for food with
that
monstrous thing? Buffalo? Antelope? Mountain lions?

—
Rabbits, mostly.

—
And you found Limps-a-Lot. After all that time?

—
It wasn’t so long, Robert. Less than five years after
Pehin Hanska Kasata—
the summer we rubbed out Long Hair at the Greasy Grass…

Paha Sapa paused then and rubbed his temples as if he had a headache.

—
You all right, Father?

—
Fine. Anyway, it wasn’t so hard to find my
tunkašila
once I got up to Grandmother’s Country. The red-coated police told me where he was and said that I should leave and take him home with me.

—
How had Limps-a-Lot survived the attack that killed his wives and almost everyone else in your village?

—
He stepped outside his tipi when the detachment of Cook’s cavalry swept in at dawn and a bullet grazed him right here….

Paha Sapa touched his forehead and felt his own scar there, the one imparted by the stock of the old Crow scout Curly’s rifle. He paused a second, his finger remaining on the raised white welt that had been with him for thirty-six years. It was the first time he’d ever considered the fact that he and Limps-a-Lot had carried almost identical scars.

—
Anyway, Limps-a-Lot was unconscious in the confusion, lying under the charging horses’ hooves, but two young nephews carried him from the battlefield, hid him in the willows, carried him out when the smoke from the burning tipis and bodies concealed their retreat. When my
tunkašila
awoke two days later, his old life and friends and wives and home—Angry Badger’s
tiyospaye—
were all gone forever, and he was on a travois and heading north to join Sitting Bull’s band in Grandmother’s Country.

—
But Sitting Bull came back from Canada before he did.

—
Yes. Limps-a-Lot had been ill with pneumonia when Sitting Bull took almost the last two hundred or so of his followers south—the rest had abandoned him, one family at a time, until his
tiyospaye
was a shadow of its former strength of eight hundred lodges—so I found Limps-a-Lot still ill up there in a village with only eight or ten dilapidated lodges and no food, my
tunkašila
living with only a couple of dozen old men and women too frightened to come back and too lazy or indifferent to take care of him in his illness.

—
That was… what? Eighteen eighty-two?

—
Eighteen eighty-one.

—
So you brought him back, but not straight to the Standing Rock Agency.

—
No, he went there later to be with Sitting Bull. First he rested and tried to recover while living with me near the Pine Ridge Agency. But he never fully recovered. And the pneumonia was not, I think, pneumonia—it never left him. I’m almost certain it was tuberculosis.

When Paha Sapa had started this story about his beloved grandfather, he’d slipped into full Lakota. Somehow, the discussion of Limps-a-Lot’s final days required this, he thought, but he also knew it would be difficult for Robert to follow fully. As good at languages as his son was, Paha Sapa knew that Robert’s only chance to practice Lakota was during his few summer weeks with his father and whenever they visited one of the reservations. This was a language, so beautiful and natural to Paha Sapa, in which a simple “thank you”—
pilamayaye
—translated literally to something like “feel good-me-you-made,” and a request for directions to a specific house would receive a reply such as
Chanku kin le ogna waziyatakiya ni na chanku okiz’u icininpa kin hetan wiyoĥpeyatakiya ni, nahan tipi tokaheya kin hel ti. Nayašna oyakihi šni
—which Robert would have to work out as “Road this along northward you-go and cross-road second from-that westward you-go and house first there he-lives. You-miss you-can not.” Statements involving technology became even more difficult for a nonnative Lakota speaker, so that merely asking the time became
Mazaškanškan tonakca hwo?
or “Metal-goes-goes what?” Most of all, it was a language in which everything had a spirit and volition, so that instead of saying, “It is going to storm”—a passive form that did not exist in Lakota at any rate—one said—“The Thunder Beings soon arriving-will-be.” In their wonderful four years of marriage,
Rain—who was sublimely intelligent and had the advantage of being with many native speakers of Lakota—never really mastered the language and often had to ask Paha Sapa what someone from the reservation had said after a rapid-fire exchange of pleasantries.

But Limps-a-Lot’s spirit deserved having his final story told in Lakota, so Paha Sapa spoke slowly and in short sentences, pausing from time to time to make sure his son was following along.

—
Limps-a-Lot did not like the Standing Rock Agency, but he liked living near his good friend Sitting Bull. When Sitting Bull was killed just before the Moon When the Deer Shed Their Horns began—that is on December 17, and Sitting Bull died on December 15, 1890
, wasichu
time, my son—I believe it was only the widespread belief in the Paiute Prophet Wovoka’s Ghost Dance that kept the Natural Free Human Beings there at Standing Rock from slaughtering all the
wasichu
and the tribal police as well.

Robert was frowning to concentrate as he held up his hand almost shyly to signify a request for interruption. Paha Sapa paused.

—Atewaye ki, émičiktunža yo—
My father, excuse me, but is this because the Paiute Prophet Wovoka taught no-violence like the true-Christians?

—
Partially, my son, because Wovoka’s message, sacred to the Ghost Dancers, was “You must not hurt anybody or do harm to anyone. You must not fight. Do right always.” But mostly it was because the majority of the Natural Free Human Beings there at Standing Rock—especially the Hunkpapas, who had been listening to the Ghost Dancers the longest—believed in the Ghost Dancer’s prophecy that come that spring of 1891 and the greening of the grass, all the
wasichus
were going to disappear and the tall grass and the buffalos and their dead relatives would return. Most of the Hunkpapas had done their Ghost Dancing faithfully and well, dancing and chanting until they fainted. Many had their magical shirts to protect them from bullets. They believed in the prophecy. Can you understand me at this speed?

—
Yes, my father. I will not interrupt again unless I do not understand. Please continue.

—
After Sitting Bull was killed, the Hunkpapas had no leader. Most of them fled Standing Rock Agency. Some left for one of the Ghost Dance hiding places. Many went to be with the last of their great chiefs, Red Cloud, at Pine Ridge, where I lived at the time. I was going back to Pine Ridge, but Limps-a-Lot did not go with me. He and Sitting Bull had become good friends with the old leader of Minneconjous, Big Foot. This leader was also suffering from pneumonia that winter—or perhaps it
was tuberculosis, the same as Limps-a-Lot had, since they were both coughing blood by then—and Big Foot was sure that the
Wasicun
generals were planning to arrest him, just as they had Sitting Bull. Big Foot was correct. The order for his arrest had been sent out already. Can you still understand me, my son?