Ghost Dance (14 page)

‘We’re chasing ghosts,’ Andie remarked at last, sighing. ‘Maybe it was just a coincidence that I found the cross in Olga’s field. Maybe it doesn’t have to do with Charun after all.’

‘Or maybe Olga hid the pouch somewhere else,’ Gallagher replied.

‘I wouldn’t know where to begin to look,’ Andie said in despair.

‘Why don’t we go back down and figure out what to do next after we’ve rested?’

‘I don’t think
we
will figure out anything,’ she retorted. ‘I was wrong to even let you tag along up here.’

‘Tag along? If it wasn’t for me, you would have been—’ He stopped in mid-sentence, not wanting to finish.

Her shoulders drooped. ‘Go ahead, say it.’

Gallagher felt like he’d just kicked a sick dog. She handed him the flashlight with an expression of total defeat plastered across her face. ‘Shine it into the tunnel so I get home to my bottle,’ she said.

‘Andie, I’m sorry—’

‘Just shine the light, Gallagher. You’ve got no reason to believe in me.’

He squatted, furious with himself. He pointed the beam into the tunnel and happened to tilt it toward the roof where it doglegged. Andie gasped. Just visible over the lip of a narrow ledge was a strip of faded green ribbon and the faint outline of a liver-covered leather pouch.

Andie fumbled with the ties and turned back the flap while Gallagher held the flashlight. She drew out a wad of folded papers and then two polished stones.

‘There were stones mentioned in your piece of the journal,’ he said.

Andie nodded and handed them to Gallagher. He rolled them in his hands. They warmed quickly and he flashed on the uncomfortable sensation generated by the lock of hair in Andie’s pouch. He dropped them back in the bottom of Olga’s pouch, then pointed the light at the pages now unfolded on her knees.

‘December 29, 1891?’ Andie said. ‘This section was written almost two years earlier than my piece. And look, you can see the ragged edges where they were torn out of a book of some kind.’

The light flickered. They moved closer so they could read together. During that awkward moment Gallagher thought of Emily dropping her sarong in the Tannic temple, but the faint scent of vodka on Andie’s breath forced him to turn to the labored handwriting on the yellowed parchment.

DECEMBER 29, 1891

Miss Mary Parker taught me to read and write at the mission school at Standing Rock. She said, Sarah, writing shall set you free. Some folks at Standing Rock did not like me reading and writing the white language.

But Sitting Bull, Painted Horses’ brother, said it was a good thing that I had the tongue for it even if I was a girl. Speaking the white language, I might help my people be free again, he said.

I don’t rightly know what freedom is. Sitting Bull used to talk about the free life along the Grand River when he was young, about the buffalo and the deer and the eagle. He told us about the Thunder Beings who lived on the cliffs of the Black Hills and watched over us. But these days I get to thinking the only way a Sioux can be free is by dying or dancing the Ghost Dance.

Gallagher glanced up at Andie, ‘That’s where I heard that line about the “Grandfather” in your piece of the journal. It’s from the Ghost Dance.’

‘Ghost Dance?’ Her skin seemed to glow in the flashlight.

‘After the War for the Black Hills, when Crazy Horse was killed and the last of the Indians were sent to the reservations, there was this Paiute shaman named Wovoka out in Nevada who had a vision in which the Great Spirit showed him a Ghost Dance that could drive all whites from America, revive the warrior dead and bring back the buffalo herds. The ritual was an odd mix of Native American tradition and Christianity—with its messiah imagery—and it spread like wildfire, especially among the Sioux. Sitting Bull was killed because of it.’

‘And she says she’s Sitting Bull’s niece.’

‘Amazing,’ Gallagher agreed.

More than thirty of us walked six days to Big Foot’s camp at Cherry Creek after Sitting Bull was killed because of the dance. Then his band and ours lit out toward the agency at Pine Ridge for Red Cloud’s protection.

Some of us went on foot, some on horses, a bunch of us in wagons. Big Foot kept us along the river so the soldiers would not see us. The sky turned ice-blue and held like that for three days. Day and night we moved south. Big Foot lay sick in a wagon. His cough sounded like a rusty saw biting a green tree.

Three mornings after Christmas. Miss Mary Parker’s favorite day, our wagons stopped. Painted Horses whispered there was cavalry below on the creek called Wounded Knee near Red Cloud’s camp, and to make ready to run. Four braves went down the side of the cliff in a morning light that made the earth glow like a copper penny. They carried a white flag and came back with a doctor who said Big Foot had the wet cough.

By sundown we was camped and soldiers watched from cliffs on three sides above us. I went with Painted Horses to the ravine to get wood for the fire. A soldier with black teeth and hair like hide strips dipped in buffalo fat asked if I wanted to go to the creek bottom with him. I ran hard.

Eight soldiers and six of Big Foot’s men guarded the chief. Painted Horses and I were asked to help tend him because they knew that Ten Trees had taught us medicine. The soldiers kept poking the old men with their guns, asking them if they was at Little Bighorn. I heard Big Foot tell one of his men to be humble for the sake of us all.

A bugle woke me at dawn. Painted Horses said the menfolk had been ordered to the center of the camp for talks with the soldiers. She pointed up on the hillside and said the soldiers had brought guns on wheels.

They searched our wagons, took our axes, our knives, guns and awls. They pointed guns at us and pulled the triggers on empty barrels. Above us I could hear the click and slide of soldiers loading.

When Painted Horses and I reached the council circle, my father’s cousin, a medicine man named Yellow Bird, was dancing the Ghost Dance toward the rising sun. Shakes Bird joined him, calling to our dead for help. I wanted to dance with them, but Painted Horses held me back.

The foot soldiers told Yellow Bird and Shakes Bird to stop, but they did not. Yellow Bird sang to the spotted eagles that he wanted to the instead of us. He picked up fresh ash from the council fire, threw it into the air and sang, ‘This is the way I want to go, Grandfather—back to the dust.’

Some foot soldiers tried to get to Yellow Bird. Others had their hands on Black Coyote, who was old, sick and could not hear right. They wanted his rifle. In the struggle it went off. And the soldiers commenced to shooting.

Painted Horses spun and dropped at the first firing. Part of my mother’s right arm hung by a strip of skin. She looked up at me stupid-like. ‘Save yourself, Many Horses,’ she said.

The guns on wheels boomed like thunder. The cold sunny day turned smoky and the only sound was guns and screaming.

I picked my mother up and dragged her from the smoke toward the ravine where we’d picked firewood. We almost made it. But the cannon roared behind us and Painted Horses rose up like roosters at dawn. A river of blood poured from my mother’s mouth and she fell down the ravine into the plum bushes where old men, women and children hid.

The horse soldiers rode the top of the ravine, firing. The guns on wheels rolled in above us and everyone hiding commenced to run down toward the river. But there were too many in front of me to make—it to the bottom, so I dragged Painted Horses’ body into a thicket of cedar and pulled it over me while thunder shook the day.

When it was dark, the shooting slowed to the sound of wood popping in the night fire and then, at last, the night was just the creak of wagon, the moan of the wounded and the shout of faraway soldiers. I crawled out from under my mother. Her eyes were open and I shut them. I cut off a lock of her hair so I might free her spirit as Ten Trees had taught me. And then I left her.

At dawn I walked alone to the south. The sun was hidden in clouds and a wet cold blew the yellow grass where our steaming bodies lay.

A horse kicked stone on the butte above me. The soldier with the black teeth and the hair like hide dipped in fat saw me, laughed and spurred his bay into a dogtrot gait. I did not run, but faced him. I prayed to Grandfather that the soldier might shoot me down.

The soldier kicked out his boot. It struck me in the jaw and all went to night.

I woke to the pain of him between my legs. Snow fell. I took his thrusting, and pretended to sleep still. When he fell on me, his eyes closed, mouth wide and slick like a summer dog’s. I bit his nose off and spit it in the snow.

He howled and rolled off me, clawing at his face. I tugged the pistol from his belt and shot him twice between the legs and left him to scream.

From the top of the butte I saw a blizzard hunting us from the west. The frozen bodies of us all were twisted far below me, like branches burned, then tossed in the snow.

I turned and walked east with the soldier’s horse, singing songs of death as the storm came for me.

‘T
HAT POOR WOMAN,’ ANDIE
murmured for the twentieth time as they trudged back down the mountain. ‘That poor, poor woman.’

They had been in the woods for hours. Splattered with mud, anesthetized by fatigue. Gallagher could barely put one foot in front of the other. The rain had ebbed, but the woods were soaking and soft underfoot. His pants were sopping wet. The wind had turned out of the northwest again, a sordid Canadian breeze, and Gallagher had to fight to keep his teeth from chattering, unable to dispel the grim pictures the journal had provoked and the questions it had raised. How had Sarah Many Horses, as they had taken to calling her, gotten from Wounded Knee Creek, South Dakota, to Lawton, Vermont? If Many Horses had been murdered, as they assumed from Andie’s portion of the journal, who had done it? And how was that mystery related to the Charun killings?

Lurking along the edges was an idea Gallagher could not ignore—that he was using these puzzles as a way to avoid dealing with his own problems. Not that that was surprising. He’d been doing that for years. Only now he might destroy his partnership with Jerry Matthews, something he could ill afford to do. Gallagher’s last look at his bank account had given him a rotgut feeling. He had to tell Jerry what was happening in Lawton.

They crossed a hickory bench just above Andie’s cornfield. A hundred yards below them on the flat adjoining the field, a man who moved like a professional football linebacker leaped over a rotting log, then zigzagged into a softwood grove that ran due south. The man was dressed head to toe in a camouflage suit made of hundreds of loose strips of fabric. Each strip had been dyed dull green, black or dun. He carried a matte-black, pump-action shotgun.

Andie’s face screwed up. ‘I’ve had the place posted for five years and the damned turkey hunters still sneak in here. C’mon, he’s using a trail that loops the fields before cutting across the road to your cabin.’

Using the thin beech trunks as handholds, she swooped down the embankment. Gallagher’s heels went out from under him in the wet leaves and he had to scramble to catch up. Andie angled into the softwoods without looking back. Gallagher huffed and puffed after her on a trail carpeted with pine and hemlock needles. The running hunter had kicked up wafers of forest duff. At a fork in the trail, he had gone left.

Andie waved to Gallagher over her shoulder to take the right fork. Even at less than a hundred yards, the shaggy camouflage made the hunter difficult to pick out. Then Gallagher saw a flash in the thick hemlock understory. The hunter was jogging sixty yards in front of them where the trails rejoined.

‘Stop where you are!’ Andie yelled. ‘You’re trespassing on posted property!’

The hunter twisted athletically at her shout. His face mask was a cowl that came down across his face and shoulders like a medieval executioner’s hood. The strips of camouflage fabric were soaking wet. They threw off spray and slapped at his torso as he spun toward her, putting Gallagher in mind of a painting he’d once seen of a bog man, a monster in Celtic legend that comes up out of the mire caked in swamp vegetation to wreak havoc on the world.

The hunter slid to one knee and shouldered the gun in the same motion.

Even with the last dregs of the vodka fuzzing her perception, Andie caught his intent. Just before he pulled the trigger, she lunged toward a moss-covered log, not knowing that as she dove, Olga Dawson’s leather pouch came free of the pocket of her rain jacket and spun in the air.

Gallagher halted flat-footed, watching the pouch fly across the trail and land in a pile of dripping brush. The leafy cowl followed its trajectory, too. Gallagher took a step toward it. The hunter’s gun swung in his direction. There was flame and deafening noise and Gallagher’s legs kicked back from under him and he sprawled on his belly in the middle of the trail.

‘I’m hit,’ Gallagher said dumbly.

The hunter pumped another round into his shotgun, rose and aimed down on Gallagher, who looked up and across the narrow clearing into that cowl. The unblinking eyes inside were like polished black marble. They held Gallagher transfixed the way a cobra’s stare freezes prey—by reflecting an infinite, timeless vacuum that defies understanding.

Andie rose from behind the log with her pistol cupped in two trembling hands. ‘Police officer!’ she shouted.

The hunter stared as if recognizing her. He whispered, ‘Angel!’

‘Drop your weapon!’ Andie commanded.

The hunter tugged the gun to the left and pulled the trigger. A branch next to Andie blew to the ground. Andie’s pistol went off and the bullet ricocheted off an exposed rock to the gunman’s left. He pumped the gun. She dove again and he shot once more, the pellets ripping the air high over her head. Then the hunter was up and sprinting away. He wove through the trees, looped west, and with that leafy camouflage on, his shadows became the shadows of the forest. He was gone.