Heartsong (65 page)

And he felt what seemed to be a little thump, followed by another. As he felt the sporadic kicks he thought that he had never been this intimate with a woman, not even when he and Marie—
and later, Nathalie—made love. There was a part of him within Nathalie's flesh, a part that he could feel through her gingham dress. Of course, he knew all about birth; he had watched horses, dogs, even an ape in the Paris zoo during the months of the Exposition; he had seen women out at the Stronghold big with child, and later, holding babies in the sun outside their lodges. But he had never felt anything like this before. This was his wife and his child. And soon that child would come out and look around and the first thing it would see would be its mother and father.

“You do want a boy, don't you?”

“Yes,” he said without hesitation, for he had been thinking of walking with his own son along the quais of the Old Port, showing him the sea from the parapet of Fort St-Jean, buying him a
glace
from one of the vendors on Cours Belsunce—just as he had seen other fathers do. He hadn't known until just this moment that he had envied them.

“What if it's a girl?” Nathalie's voice was almost hesitant. “It could just as easily be a girl. Would you like her as much?”

He thought for just a couple of seconds. “If she looks like you and not me,” he said.

Nathalie laughed.

T
oward the middle of October, the first real mistral blew down the valley of the Rhône, shaking the papery leaves off the trees, blowing the smoke sideways from the chimney pots on buildings, rocking even the steamships moored in the port. Instead of walking leisurely along La Canebière, people hurried from building to building, shop to shop, bundled up in their winter clothes. Horses trotted along the streets, as though the icy wind had given them new energy, or at least a desire to quickly reach whatever destination the driver chose, preferably in the lee of a building. The outdoor
cafés moved indoors, leaving the chairs and tables stacked under awnings. Almost overnight, far too early, Marseille had been transformed into a winter city.

But the dockworkers continued to load the ships, as though the cold weather were a small inconvenience, a minor discomfort to be endured. These were tough men, men who had carried clubs as well as placards during the strike. Some had been anxious to get the police involved, to “crack a few heads” just to show them they were serious. But when it came to work, they did their jobs efficiently, if not enthusiastically. And they accepted Charging Elk as one of them, a member of the union, in a way that he hadn't been used to—not in the market when he had worked for René; not in the soap factory; not even in prison. And he felt, for the first time since he had left the Stronghold, that he was a part of a group of men who looked out for each other. And he liked it.

As far as he could tell, in spite of his singular appearance, none of his fellow workers knew who he was—except for the union boss, Picard, a big-chested man with curly black hair and a drooping mustache, who wore loud plaid suits and a chocolate-colored bowler. As unlikely as it seemed, he was an acquaintance of Madame Loiseau's and had taken on the Indian as a favor to her and her organization. The boss sometimes winked at Charging Elk, but that was all the contact between them.

On the 17th of October, a day that he would never forget, Charging Elk took a few minutes of his midday break to walk down toward the Quai des Belges to buy some tobacco. Although the mistral had blown itself out, the day was cold and the sky was a flat pewter over the port. The hills to the north of the town were completely invisible; to the south, the sea and the sky blended in a gray seam that defied distinction and distance.

Charging Elk had been watching two men put up a poster along a wall beside the tobacco shop as he walked along. The wall had the
remnants of many posters, some of them still readable, others faded or partially peeled away The men stood on a platform and with long-handled brushes smoothed the wet poster into place. Charging Elk had often looked at the posters on his way home from work, and although he couldn't read the words, he could tell the subject of most—bicycle races, circuses, theater events. The posters changed often, sometimes between the time he went to work and the time he came home.

Now he was close enough to the tobacco shop to see the sign in detail as the men smoothed the last corners into place. And he stopped. He didn't believe what he was seeing. The last thing he ever expected to see again was the image of Buffalo Bill, with his white hat and goatee, surrounded by smaller images of cowboys, soldiers—and Indians. He walked slowly, hesitantly, closer, until he was just a few feet away from the men, who were now taking down their scaffolding. He looked at the three Indian portraits. They seemed realistic, like real faces, but he didn't recognize any of them. The headdresses and beaded tunics looked like they could have been Lakota. He looked at the words, but the only ones he could recognize were “Buffalo Bill,” “Indiens,” “Wild West,” and the dates: November 1—12.

Charging Elk shuddered against the bite of a cold breeze that crawled up his backbone, but there was no wind that day.

N
athalie had noticed a distance in her husband for the past several days. Even when he helped her with the dishes or brought her a cup of tea in the evening, his eyes seemed not to focus on her or on the small chore. Of course, he was obliging in his ways and even more solicitous since she had announced her pregnancy. But when he sat down at the kitchen table to work on one of his sketches, she would see him sometimes staring at the paper or the shuttered window.
And when she looked again, he would be looking at his hands or his teacup.

Although this behavior worried her, Nathalie hadn't inquired about the source of his distraction. She had problems of her own. It seemed that every morning she was sick, and when she wasn't sick, she was hungry, But nothing seemed to satisfy her. If she ate one thing, she would crave another; then another. And she could feel her body changing, growing heavier. Sometimes she felt at peace, even exhilarated on occasion, but at other times, she felt a great dread come over her. She knew nobody in Marseille that she could call a friend. There was no one to talk to, no one to help her when the time came. Except for Dr. Ventoux, whose office was just around the corner on Place des Capucins, and Madame Robichon, the midwife he introduced her to. But both of them were too professional to take a personal interest in her and her uneasiness. She did have a passing acquaintanceship with the woman in the fabric shop, where she bought cotton cloth to sew the tiny gowns and yarn to knit caps and socks. And there was the young mother she had met on the landing just below her flat. The woman had noticed Nathalie's stomach, and so they had a brief conversation about birth and motherhood. She invited Nathalie to tea sometime soon but she hadn't set a time. Nathalie tramped up and down the stairs more often than was necessary, running one errand, then another, on the chance that she might “run into” the young mother. She was tired of being alone all day. She wanted a friend.

But more than anything she missed her mother. She needed her now in a way that she never had. She needed someone to trust. How does one have a child? How does one raise it? On some days, when Charging Elk was at work, Nathalie would imagine conversations with her mother. She would imagine her mother there in the flat in Marseille, fluffing pillows, cooking a big pot of soup, dusting the sparse furnishings, sitting beside her daughter with her knitting
—“There, there, babies happen all the time, nothing to worry about, you have good hips, Nathalie, easy as falling off a wagon.” Nathalie took great comfort in these snippets of conversation, but when the daydream ended, she was alone, in a small flat, in a city far from Agen, and her mother couldn't help her.

Charging Elk knew none of this, and he was always surprised when she would run to him when he walked in the door and hug him tightly before he even got his coat and cap off. He would hold her, feeling her round belly against his lower abdomen, and kiss her on top of the head, smelling the clean scent of her. He would hold her, stroke her hair, whisper in her ear, but even then his mind would drift away.

C
harging Elk told Nathalie about the return of the Wild West show two nights before it was to open at Rond Point du Prado. She became excited and wanted to know all about it.

“Will there be Indians?”

“Yes.”

“Like you?”

“Yes.”

“And Buffalo Bill—he is a big man?”

“Very big man.”

“Will the Indians kill a bison?”

“Not really. They will only pretend.” But he wondered if there were any buffalo left. He thought of Bird Tail's dream of the buffalo entering the cave in Paha Sapa. He had never heard of the buffalo returning. All he ever heard about America—well, he heard almost nothing. Because he couldn't read, he didn't know what the journals said about his homeland. Sometimes he unloaded ships from America. Sometimes he heard his fellow workers curse America for being greedy and arrogant. President Roosevelt had
attacked the small country of Cuba for no reason. Now they were in the Philippines. The rabblerousers among the dockworkers often talked of refusing to unload American goods. Charging Elk didn't understand their anger and didn't know enough about America to come to its defense—even if he wanted to.

But now he would have his chance. He would be able to talk with the Lakotas in the Wild West show. He would see how it was in Dakota. He would learn how his parents were, how all of the Lakota people were. If they were still there. He hadn't forgotten his dream and the strange voice above the roaring wind:
You are my only son
. He had tried to put the voice out of his mind, and had succeeded for the most part in the winters he was in La Tombe. But during his several moons with the Gaziers, when he contemplated his freedom and the possibility of going home, the voice had come back, on rare and unexpected occasions—when he was picking plums or working on the horsehair belt—sometimes accompanied by the terrible vision of the broken bodies lying on the rocks below the cliff. And he would remember trying to join them and the terrifying hopelessness as the wind with the roaring voice pushed him back from the cliff time after time, until he lay in the grass and wept with frustration.

But the dream, as terrifying as it still was, was not the reason Charging Elk had become so distant from Nathalie, from his fellow workers, from this world. He was tormented inside, as though some animal were clawing at his guts. And the almost physical pain came because he was certain that he could have the one thing that he had wanted so desperately over the past sixteen years—and he didn't want to want it so much now.