Heartsong (9 page)

Of course, Buffalo Bill rode at the head of the procession on his great white horse, waving his big hat and bowing to one side of the
street, then the other. Annie Oakley, the one Sitting Bull had named Little Sureshot, and her husband and the big bosses rode behind him. Then came the cowboys, some with the woolly chaps, and the soldiers with their neat blue uniforms and the vaqueros with their big upturned hats. And finally, the Indians, led by Rocky Bear, who had been designated chief by the bosses. From the Paris shows, Charging Elk knew that next to Buffalo Bill, the audiences wanted to see the Indians most. They called the Indians Peaux-Rouges—redskins. When the Indians rode by, the people whooped and pointed at the dark painted faces. Some of the women threw flowers, but the Indians rode by without recognition of such enthusiasm.

Charging Elk remembered that day as one of the longest of his life. They had ridden the iron road all night after a performance in a big town somewhere south of Paris. It was late night when the workers finally struck the tents and grandstands and awnings, packed up the food and furniture from the large eating tent, shut off the generators, and took down the lighting and the immense rolls of canvas backdrop painted with endless scenes of mountains and plains and rivers and villages and forts. They disassembled the booths and seemingly hundreds of other small structures and took it all by wagons to the train station. There they loaded up the thirty-eight big wagons of the special train with equipment and animals and human beings for the all-night trip.

Some of the Indians complained because they had been to this side of the big water before and they knew that, unlike the white performers and crew, they were riding in third class, where the benches were harder and the wagons noisier and rougher. Charging Elk noticed that Rocky Bear was not among them. On this side of the water, the big bosses treated the chief well because the French people liked him better than the Americans had and considered him a noble leader. But the bosses didn't hesitate to
lodge the other Indians in the last wagon before the animals and equipment. Even Featherman, the
iktome
who joked, grumbled as he tried to stretch out on a bench.

The show had reached Marseille an hour before first light and all the wagons were unloaded and the equipment was taken to the field to be set up. Charging Elk had been surprised to see the crowd of people watching the predawn activities.

By then Charging Elk was a seasoned performer. The show had not only played in the American town of New York, but had played for close to seven moons in Paris. He was used to the curiosity of the big town people—in both New York and Paris, they had wandered among the lodges of the Indian village, watching the women cook or sew or repair beadwork. They stood over the squatting performers and watched them play dominoes or card games. Some even entered family lodges, as though the mother fixing dinner or the sleeping child in its cradleboard were part of the entertainment. Rocky Bear said that Buffalo Bill and the other bosses approved of this rudeness because it made the people hungry to see the Indians in the arena.

At midmorning, the performers lined up to begin the parade. It was a cold, gray day, and Charging Elk, like the other Indians, wore his blanket over his shoulders. He was tired and sleepy and he wasn't looking forward to performing that day.

But when the Cowboy Band on their matching white horses broke into the song they called “The Girl I Left Behind Me,” a song he had heard hundreds of times, and the procession began to move slowly forward, Charging Elk folded his blanket and draped it over his horse's shoulders. And by the time the Indians entered the street, and the crowd gasped and applauded, he felt a familiar shiver of excitement that made it difficult to sit his horse as calmly as he wanted. Nevertheless, he managed because he knew the French people wanted the Indians to be dignified. And too, the
young Indians wished to be thought of as
wichasa yatapika
, men whom all praise, men who quietly demonstrate courage, wisdom, and generosity—like the old-time leaders.

As Charging Elk rode his painted horse in the procession, he couldn't help but think how fortunate he was. Instead of passing another cold, lonely winter at the Stronghold, or becoming a passive reservation Indian who planted potatoes and held out his hand for the government commodities, he was dressed in his finest clothes, riding a strong horse, preparing himself to thrill the crowds with a display of the old ways. Of course, he knew that it was all fake and that some of the elders back home disapproved of the young men going off to participate in the white man's sham, but he no longer felt guilty about singing scalping songs or participating in scalp dances or sneak-up dances. He was proud to display some of the old ways to these French because they appreciated the Indians and seemed genuinely sympathetic. Rocky Bear had once told him, while they were sitting around a fire after the evening show, that these people on this side of the big water called the Indians “the Americans who would vanish,” that they thought the defeated Indians would soon disappear and they were very sad about it and wanted to see the Indians before they went up in thin air—unlike the real Americans, who would be only too happy to help the Indians disappear.

S
o Charging Elk had entered this city in triumph and the people had welcomed him. Now they looked at him with suspicion, even with hostility, just as the Americans did.

But Charging Elk had quit these thoughts, and now, as he hurried through the dark street toward the Gare du Prado, he entertained no other thoughts and very little hope.

And as he crossed the empty staging field, where the parade had
formed itself, he felt the flicker of hope go out entirely. The station was dark, except for a small yellow light in a window.

The Gare du Prado was a freight station, with a series of long brick buildings, each with a wide loading platform. There were many switching tracks, and even now, several lines of freight wagons sat idly in the darkness.

Charging Elk stepped up on a loading platform and walked without sound to the lighted window. He saw a man dressed in a dark uniform sitting at a table. The room was small and lit by a single yellow wire which hung from the ceiling. The man was breaking off a piece of longbread. Then he sliced a piece of cheese from a wedge. Two small dark apples sat on one corner of the table next to a tiny pine tree. The tree had some glittery red rope wound around it. The tips of its branches were white, as though it had just snowed in the small room.

Charging Elk watched the man eat the bread and cheese and he thought about knocking on the window. But what could be said or done? Besides, judging by his uniform, the man was some kind of soldier. He might think Charging Elk was a thief, or an enemy, and try to kill him. On the other hand, he might know what had happened to Buffalo Bills train.

Charging Elk almost raised his hand to the window but the uselessness of the action and the potential danger stopped him. Instead, he walked quietly to the end of the platform and looked off to where the iron road disappeared into darkness. He felt more resigned than disappointed because he didn't really believe that the Buffalo Bill train would be there. He almost felt better for having not believed it.

He was about to jump off the platform when he heard a noise behind him. He glanced back and saw the large yellow light of an open door. The man in the uniform was standing just outside the door, lantern in hand, looking up at the sky. Charging Elk dropped
to his hands and knees and slithered down off the platform. The hard cinder earth was four feet lower than the dock. He hunkered down and after a few seconds peeked up at the yellow light. But the door was closed again and all he could see was the small window. Then he saw a circle of light bobbing along the platform away from him. In the dark, he could just make out the man's legs.

Charging Elk waited until the light disappeared off the other end of the dock; then he wasted no time, shinnying up onto the platform, walking quickly toward the room. He tried the doorknob and it turned. He slipped inside, closing the door behind him. The first thing he spotted was the food—half the longbread, the cheese wrapped in heavy paper, and one of the apples. He stuffed these things into his coat pockets, then opened the drawer beneath the table. He looked over the small things, things he didn't recognize except for a writing pen and a ticket punch, just like the ticket sellers at the Wild West show used. He was about to close the drawer when he noticed a small metal box near the back. He pried the lid off and his heart leaped up. Three silver coins and a handful of centimes gleamed in the light of the yellow wire. Charging Elk quickly dumped them into his pocket, then closed the box, then the drawer. As he turned to leave he spotted an umbrella and a wool scarf hanging from a hook. He wound the scarf around his neck and gripped the umbrella like a weapon. But when he opened the door and looked up and down the platform, there was no sign of the bobbing lantern.

As Charging Elk hurried away from the railroad yard, he too looked up at the sky and made a silent prayer thanking Wakan Tanka for guiding him to such good things. Then he ate the apple and thought of the chocolate bread and tobacco he would buy the next morning.

 

 

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER THREE

C
harging Elk sat on a fruit box in a small funnel-shaped arcade that
led to two shop doors and ate the bread and cheese. He was too hungry to remember that he didn't like cheese, and in fact, the creamy cheese tasted strong and smoothed the tight ball in his guts. The windows on either side of him were shuttered, but he could see through the iron mesh and he looked into the one that seemed to have nothing but hats in it. There were the tall hats and the round hats that rich men wore, and some others that looked like cowboy hats with the brims turned down or level as a tabletop. Most of the men at Pine Ridge Agency wore hats like this now. The older men wore black hats with beaded or horsehair hatbands. They wore old
wasichu
clothes given to them by white holy men and their helpers, and black shiny scarves bought from the trader. Charging Elk had been surprised, when the Oglalas came in to Fort Robinson, to see some of the very men who had fought at Little Bighorn only a year before dressed this way. They seemed to have
picked up the style from the reservation Indians, most of whom had quit fighting eight years before.

It almost shocked Charging Elk to remember that he had gone to the school at the agency for nearly a year. He had sat in one of the rows of long tables watching the freckle-faced white woman write her words in white chalk on the black board: Boy. Girl. Cat. Dog. Fish. She showed them colored pictures of these creatures. The humans were pink, the cat yellow, and the dog black-and-white. The fish were orange and fat, unlike any he had ever seen. But he was most interested in the cat. He had seen the long-cat and the tufted-ear-cat, but they were wild and only once in a while seen. The cat in the picture was small and had a happy look. He had just seen his first small-cat right there at the agency but it had been rangy with frostbitten ears and it ran away from people and dogs. Still, it lived among humans.

He remembered the word “Indian.” She had pointed directly at him, then at the board, and said “Indian.” She made all the children say “Indian.” Then she showed them a picture of a man they could not recognize. He had sharp toes, big thighs, and narrow shoulders; he wore a crown of blue and green and yellow feathers and an animal skin with dark spots. His eyes were large and round; his lips tiny and pursed. The white woman said “Indian.”

Charging Elk and Strikes Plenty were three years older than the other students, a fact that made them ashamed. All the things they had learned out in the buffalo country were of no use here, and their smaller classmates had to help them spell, and add and subtract the red apples. About the only thing the two older boys—they were thirteen winters then—were good at was art. The woman gave them colored sticks and they drew pictures of the life they had just left—villages of lodges, men on horseback, buffaloes, mountains, and trees. Charging Elk once drew a picture of himself, Strikes Plenty, and Liver cutting off the finger of the dead soldier at Little Bighorn to get his agate ring. The woman had scolded him
and torn the picture into little pieces, which she made him pick up and put in the wood stove. He didn't bother to explain, even if she could understand, that the soldier's knuckle was too big to slip the ring off. Instead, he remained silent, and when the Moon of the Red Grass Appearing came, he and Strikes Plenty took off for the Stronghold. And that was the end of his white man's learning.