Heartsong (52 page)

A young man in a collarless shirt and bright yellow straw cap broke loose from the crowd and ran alongside the wagon. He pointed at Charging Elk's face, or that portion of his face that was visible, and shouted back at the crowd. Suddenly they too pointed and clapped and shouted his name and
“Vive!”
and
“Libre!”
The placards bobbed above their heads, and Charging Elk grew dizzy from trying to see so much through the little window. He lurched to the back when the wagon abruptly picked up speed, and by the time he got back to the window, there were only a few people in the street and no placards. And when the wagon turned into the service entrance to the Prefecture, he heard only a slight buzzing in his head and he knew he was in danger of passing out from the heat. Still, he had heard them—
Vive!Libre! Charging Elk
!—and he tried to think what it all might mean.

M
artin St-Cyr had watched the demonstration with a great deal of satisfaction. Although there were only a few gendarmes present and no threat of violence, the anger and self-righteousness reminded him of his student days in Grenoble. The daily rallies and marches that took the students and workers from the university to
Place St-André, to the Palais de Justice, came back to him with a fuzzy warmth that obscured the fear and panic he felt when the gendarmes waded into the crowd with their truncheons swinging. But he did remember looking out from the safety of the Palais and seeing his fellows stagger away, their hands holding their bloodied heads, or lying in the street, moaning and twitching. He was confident this demonstration (or, he hoped, series of demonstrations) wouldn't come to that, but one could never be certain. The riots in Grenoble had started out with such boisterous but peaceable intentions.

St-Cyr's columns had created a sensation in the streets. Everywhere he went, people were talking about the trial, and it was true that the great majority had the opinion that the Peau-Rouge was being tried for a crime that was not rightfully his own. The crime happened before the killing when the invert performed his nefarious act. And the girl, this Marie What s-her-name, should be locked up for her role in the deception. Too bad the savage hadn't done her in too.

Although St-Cyr had been pleased at this reaction, nothing much was happening. The people stood in markets or sat in cafés and restaurants and talked about the scandal as though it were too exotic to be a part of their lives. He heard time and time again a man or a woman, with a knowing shrug, say, “But that is what happens down there,” meaning the waterfront with all of its foreigners and thugs and whorehouses and American bars, which was not the same Marseille they lived in.

Three days before the first demonstration, St-Cyr had decided to get involved in more than a journalistic way. The time was ripe to organize something that would shake the city fathers to their well-polished boots. Some months earlier he had interviewed three students from the Faculté des Sciences et Techniques who had led a series of demonstrations against the Centre Universitaire for firing
a professor for his socialist views. The students' fervor and his own column had not dissuaded the university from its intent, but St-Cyr had been impressed with the young anarchists. So he had tracked them down. They had been expelled from university for the rest of the year but they were popular troublemakers and still met at the Café Belfleur on Rue de Crimée, where he had interviewed them before. And they were more than interested in the cause of the savage, Charging Elk. They had led small demonstrations protesting the exploitation of the Algerians, but the persecution of “the vanishing American” (as St-Cyr himself termed the plight of the American Indian) was more than they could bear. They began immediately to make plans, to suggest names of the union leaders, the socialists, the radical Catholics, their university comrades, even immigrant leaders, who could use the rally to protest the treatment of immigrants in France. By the time St-Cyr caught a hansom cab back downtown, he was full of high hopes and more than a little impressed with his own behind-the-scene machinations.

And the protests had come off. The crowd increased day by day, from less than a hundred to six to eight hundred, which completely filled Place Montyon beside the Palais de Justice. The leaders took turns making speeches, not all of them protesting the injustice done to Charging Elk, but all containing the same object of protest: government. The French government, the American government, the government of Marseille and the Midi. Most speeches blasted the corrupt politicians who looked the other way or actually facilitated the exploitation of the workers and immigrants by business interests.

Songs were sung—Provençal songs about bravery, loyalty, and independence. At least twice a day “La Marseillaise” was sung in the proper fighting spirit of the Revolution. Even the great poet Frédéric Mistral gave a speech about the pride of the Provençal people and the necessity to speak their native tongue to ensure the
survival of their culture. He ignored the plight of Charging Elk and the other immigrants. And in fact, while the crowd listened with patience and even awe, the small, white-haired poet seemed strangely out of place among the protesters. Nevertheless, St-Cyr made him the hero of his next day s column, portraying him as the fiery patron saint of the Félibrige, a movement to preserve the Provençal language and traditions against a “cold, grasping French government, which had on more than one occasion threatened him with silence . . . and still he sings the songs of the people, undaunted, fearless in the face of the puppet-politicians who would still the tongue of Provence's—and yes, France's—greatest poet by any desperate means possible.”

St-Cyr was not satisfied with this column. He had tried to associate the poet with the Indian, but it was next to impossible. The man sounded more like an academician than an activist. He apparently had no interest in the cause at hand and certainly no interest in playing to the crowd. But the crowd was there, and that was the important thing. With a few deft strokes of the pen, St-Cyr had made it seem that the poet was as outraged at the proceedings inside the courtroom as all the citizens of Marseille.

B
ut things were not going well for Charging Elk and his advocate. After the first demonstration the chief magistrate had ordered the windows closed and the drapes drawn. And while the sounds were not completely muffled—for instance, “La Marseillaise” almost raised the spectators to their feet—the rest became a dull background noise, interrupted briefly by shouts and applause.

Of course, everybody in the courtroom knew what was going on. Except for the jurors, they read the newspapers every day. And when court adjourned for the day, the spectators rushed outside to stand among the demonstrators as they waited for the black police
wagon to begin its journey back to the Préfecture. And when they saw it, they cheered as loudly as anyone. The jurors themselves were kept informed by the bailiff, who swore them to secrecy.

But the protests only seemed to make the magistrates irritable and seemingly anxious to get to the closing arguments. Charging Elk did get a chance to speak, but he made a poor job of it—at least in French. The advocate had coached him in the ready room, appealing to him to admit his guilt but explain that it was an impulsive act in response to the terrible act being committed on him. Above all, he said, ask for the court's mercy.

And so Charging Elk began, “I am Charging Elk, son of Scrub and Doubles Back Woman, grandson of Scabby Bull and Goodkill. I am of the Lakota tribe. I come from America with Buffalo Bill and my Lakota friends. But they are gone now and I am alone. For four years I have lived among you but you do not know me and I do not know you. Even the white birds that fly among your fire boats and fishing boats I do not know. The fish that you bring from the big waters are not tasty to me. Even the meat of your animals is not filling to one who has tasted the flesh of the buffalo. I do not know of this room full of laws or that man”—he pointed to the prosecutor—“who tells you that Charging Elk is a bad man. I see these men in the long box listen to him with big ears and I know they are with him. And yet I have only done what any of my people would do when they come upon a
siyoko
—” Charging Elk stopped suddenly and ran his hand over his nose and mouth. He hadn't thought about it before, but now he realized that he did not have the French words to explain about evil. It could only be explained in the Lakota tongue. He stood for a moment, confused, feeling a helplessness that hadn't visited him for some time. But slowly his thoughts swirled and gathered themselves in his head, as a bird builds a nest out of all those bits of things that lie on the ground and in the trees and are of no use to men. Then, in Lakota, he explained
about evil, how the
siyokos
were there among them even now, how the spirits wandered about searching for an opportunity to perform their evil, how the bespectacled one, Breteuil as he was called, had the misfortune to be susceptible to evil. And yet there he was in Marie's room that night, with the
siyoko
within, doing the evils bidding. And so Charging Elk had had to kill him to get rid of the evil.

Charging Elk kept his eyes on the magistrates as he spoke but he knew, by the silence, that all of the people gathered in the courtroom were listening. Even the dull noise outside the room seemed to have stopped. Many times in the past four years Wakan Tanka had made him invisible to the people in this land, but now he wanted them to see him, to hear him. And in some way, the Great Mystery had opened their ears to his words. And so he thanked Wakan Tanka for giving him the good words that opened the hearts of these people and allowed them to see into his own.

After he finished speaking, Charging Elk remained standing, hands lightly gripping the railing of the prisoner's dock, and looked around at all the people in the courtroom—the jurors, the prosecutor and his helpers, his own advocate, the tables of reporters, and the people in the balcony. They were all looking at him, even the reporters, who had written nothing during his speech. But he was especially interested in the balcony. Marie was not there, but he didn't expect her to be. But René was there, not far from him. If the dock had been a little closer to the balcony, René could have leaned down and shaken his hand.

The fishmonger had a sad smile on his face, but Charging Elk saw him as he first saw him in the office of the police captain—the slicked-back black hair almost gone on top, the missing lower front teeth, the kind eyes—and he was sorry for the shame he had brought on the home of the family that had cared for him when he probably would have died on his own. He wanted to thank him—
and Madeleine. But she wasn't there. Charging Elk knew that she had little patience for things that went on outside her home, and the many sleeps of the trial had bored even him. Still, he was disappointed that he wouldn't see her again.

The chief magistrate finally cleared his throat and all eyes swung from Charging Elk to him. “I hope the jurors understood the accused's statement better than I did,” he said, and the whole courtroom burst into laughter.