Heartsong (54 page)

One of guards exclaimed and slapped a handful of cards down. The other groaned. And Charging Elk searched for lights in the pitch-black landscape outside the rumbling wagon as it made its way along the Mediterranean coastline bound for Perpignan and, finally, La Tombe.

C
harging Elk spent his first week in an underground cave secured by iron bars. The cave was one of a series dug out by the Crusaders to store their wine and grains and dried fish. They butchered animals in the caves and hung the carcasses to cure and keep in the cool, dry air. Now the prison utilized the caves as a kind of reception area. All new prisoners had to undergo this trial by claustrophobia and light deprivation. The only lights were gas lamps on the walls of a central corridor. Charging Elk shared his cave with three others, all of whom seemed to choose to suffer in silence. In fact, there was very little in the way of noise down there. He learned to recognize the squeaking wheels of the trolley that brought the soup and bread. He could hear a murmur of voices from the guard's station at the head of the corridor once in a while.

One night he heard a roar coming from a cell across the way, followed by a silence. Then another roar, and another; then it was quiet. Charging Elk had gotten up and walked to the bars and looked around. He was almost certain there was some kind of wild beast in one of the caves. But he could see nothing. And he never heard another roar.

When the week was up, he was led aboveground and across the dazzling yellow earth of the yard to one of the long buildings. Although his eyes were squinted almost shut against the harsh light and he could barely see the back of the guard in front of him, he felt the warm tears leaking down onto his cheeks. Then he was in the building and his eyes didn't hurt so much.

He was led into a small room, where he was ordered to strip and wash himself. Then he was deloused and given a pair of thin gray trousers and a blouse made of the same material. Both garments had vertical stripes, which had once been black but now were just a darker shade of gray. He was given a folded blanket, a slop bucket, and a battered tin cup. Then he was led through a walkway into another building by the two guards. They climbed a set of iron stairs up to the second level, then walked down a wide corridor flanked by cells on both sides. The cells all had floor-to-ceiling iron bars, unlike his cell back in the Préfecture, so the inmates within could see clearly into the corridor. But there were no windows looking outside.

Charging Elk was surprised, after the silence of the caves, to hear the inmates talking with each other across the corridor or in their cells. Although he looked straight ahead, he could see out of the corners of his eyes that the cells had two beds and two inmates in each. He wasn't surprised that the conversations stopped when he walked by. He could feel the eyes of all the men in the cells watching him.

Finally the lead guard stopped and inserted a key into one of the
cells near the end of the corridor. He swung the door open and motioned for Charging Elk to enter. Only when he locked the door behind Charging Elk did he speak: “This is your home now. Keep it clean.” Then he and the other guard walked off.

“Insufferable bastards.”

Charging Elk turned just as a clean-shaven man jumped off his sleeping platform and walked up to him with the quick, fluid movement of a dancer or an acrobat. Charging Elk took a step backward, but the man extended his hand.

“Marcus Aurelius Causeret—and I too am innocent.”

Charging Elk took the hand. “I am Charging Elk.”

The man laughed. “Just as I thought. When I first laid eyes on you just one moment ago I said to myself, ‘Believe it or not, that is an American Indian/ Well, Monsieur Charging Elk, welcome to our suite.”

“But how could you tell?”

“How could I not tell? Did I not go to the Wild West show every night when it was in Paris? Did I not wander through your village of tipis every chance I got?”

Charging Elk was still holding the blanket, the slop bucket, and the tin cup. This was the first time anybody, except René, had mentioned the show in such a way. He was stunned. “Did you see me?” he said.

The man's eyes grew wide and a grin lit up his face. “You were there? At the Exposition Universelle?”

“Yes. I performed every afternoon and every evening. I played poker in the village and saw many famous sights in Paris.”

“Small world!” The man laughed. “I'm certain I saw you, but no, I don't recognize you. I just recognize the physiognomy. The American Indian is very striking, but there is a similarity among them. To an untrained eye like mine, you all looked alike—no offense intended, my friend.”

“No, no.” Charging Elk smiled. He couldn't believe his luck in
finding a man who had seen him perform in Paris, whether this Causeret knew it or not. “The people of Marseille—except for the immigrants—all looked alike to me.”

“Ah, Marseille. We French call it the armpit of France. We look down our long noses at this foul, flyblown dark hole of—what?—pestilence! See? We don't even know what. That's what.” Causeret held his head back so that he did actually look down his nose at Charging Elk. He had to lean back a way because he was a head shorter.

“What are you here for?” Charging Elk set the slop bucket down and threw the blanket on the unoccupied bed. He didn't know what to do with the tin cup.

“Right to the point. I like that.” Causeret climbed back onto his cot and sat with his legs crossed beneath him. “They say I murdered my wife and her lover. They say I found them in bed together—my marriage bed, incidentally—and cut both their throats. They say it was a particularly gruesome affair. They say I actually laughed when I described the murders to the police. The newspapers called me a heartless fiend. No remorse. They say if I had shown just a bit of remorse I might have gotten off—crime of passion, you see, the wronged husband.”

Charging Elk sat down tentatively on his cot and looked at the lithe, clean-shaven man. At first glance, he had looked almost frail, but now Charging Elk could see that Causeret s shoulders were wide, his arms longer than usual, and his waist small. There was an energy, a quickness, about him. Even his speech was fast—but clear. Charging Elk could understand much of what he said, especially the part about cutting the throats of his wife and her lover.

“But you are innocent,” he said.

Causeret laughed again. “Of course, my friend. You will find that we are all innocent in here.” He suddenly shouted, “Dax! Are you innocent?”

A lazy voice from across the corridor answered, “It goes without saying.”

“You see? Ill bet you're innocent too.”

Charging Elk was still looking across the corridor. He hadn't really thought of himself as innocent or guilty—except in the eyes of the courtroom. He had done what he had to do. It was that simple.

“And what did you do that you're innocent of?”

“Killed a—a man.”

Causeret leaned forward with his hands on his knees and an almost gentle smile. “Did he need killing?”

“He—he was evil.”

Causeret slapped both knees and laughed. “Good enough for me! ‘He was evil.' I hadn't thought of that one.” He suddenly flopped back and stretched out on the cot. He lay perfectly still, looking up at the ceiling.

Charging Elk waited, but when the man said nothing, he took off his shoes—the brown dress shoes which by now were dull and scuffed beyond hope—and lay back on his own cot. He closed his eyes and felt his whole body melt. He hadn't realized how tense he had been for the past several months. It had become his natural state ever since he had killed Breteuil. But now that he was here—and would remain here until he died—he felt it all, all the days of jail and the trial, the train ride, his past, let go and he didn't care if he ever moved again.

“Buckwheat and horsehair—that's what these pads are stuffed with. You'll get used to it.” The man spoke without moving. When Charging Elk didn't respond, Causeret said, “You want to know what I did on the outside?” After a pause, he said, “I was a juggler. I juggled at flea markets, outside theaters, velodromes, fairs, you name it. Did lots of fairs, all over. Batons, torches, balls—I could juggle watermelons. Think of it. Big, fat watermelons. I could balance a watermelon on a stick on my chin. I could balance a chair on
one leg on my chin. Crazy, isn't it? I'm probably the only man you'll ever meet with a callus on his chin.” Another long silence. “That's how I came to be at the Wild West show in Paris. I performed outside the gate before the show. And when the show began, I went inside. I'm sure I saw you.” Causeret lay quietly for several minutes. Then he said, “Itinerant juggler. That's what they called me, because I performed all over—Lyon, Orléans, Tours, Besançon, Bordeaux. Never got to Marseille. Pity. Can you imagine? They call me itinerant because I go where the work is. How can I be itinerant when I have a wife and a home, I tell them. So the magistrate says, Well, you don't have a wife and home anymore. You killed your wife and you are in jail. If you can find the justice in that, please enlighten me, monsieur.”

But Charging Elk had fallen into a deep sleep, one beyond voices or thoughts or even dreams. He had never slept this deeply before, not even as a child on the Little Bighorn River, nor as a young man out at the Stronghold, nor as a bone-weary performer in Paris, not even after an exhausting day of shoveling coal into the furnaces of the soap factory. If he could have caught himself on a limb on his way down into the black hole of unconsciousness, he would have gladly let go, for he would never again in his life come as close to joining his ancestors as he did that late afternoon in La Tombe. The sleep of death, he would later think ruefully, but not the real thing.

C
harging Elk and Causeret were cellmates for three years, and they became very close. Even out in the yard, during their one hour a day of fresh air, they would wander the perimeter together, Charging Elk for the exercise, Causeret looking for a means of escape. He had no doubt that he could scale the stone walls—that was the easy part. But what would he do on the outside? He had plans to go to America, but he didn't want to leave without
Charging Elk. Together they could make their way to Charging Elk's homeland and hide out in the hills. He was especially interested in the gold miners in Paha Sapa. Where did they find the gold? How much did they find? Where did they sell it? Charging Elk, of course, cared nothing about the gold, but to placate the juggler, he said the miners picked the gold up from the ground, big chunks of it. Once he had stubbed his toe on a piece of gold as big around as a watermelon. Causeret would become silent, almost sullen, at such news and Charging Elk would regret feeding the juggler's dreams.

But for the most part, Causeret was a good companion. He had a job in the kitchen and so twice a day, at four-thirty in the morning and again at three-thirty in the afternoon, he would be gone for three or four hours. Because he helped prepare food for the administrators and the guards, he would sometimes smuggle back a treat—a croissant in the morning, a sausage or chicken thigh in the afternoon. Once, a few days after Charging Elk had lamented that he would never see a piece of real meat again, he came back with a chunk of beef the size of his fist. As he watched Charging Elk tear into it, he said, “Good Lord, you have the jaws of a wolf.”

Near the end of his third year, Charging Elk was summoned to the warden's office in the administration building in the corner of the yard near the heavy iron gates. As he was led into the small anteroom, he almost stopped in astonishment. Behind a desk of dark wood sat a woman who looked to be in her mid-thirties. She wasn't particularly attractive—her hair was pulled up into a tight bun, she wore no rouge or lipstick, her blouse was a stark white, and her long skirt, what he could see of it above her shoe tops, was black and slightly frayed at the edge. But she was a woman and he hadn't seen one in three years. He bowed awkwardly when the guard announced him.