Black Hills (27 page)

The gentleman’s voice was very smooth, modulated—Paha Sapa guessed—by decades of polite but informed conversation, but also moderated by an almost but not quite audible sense of humor, an unexpressed chuckle that came through despite the sadness that Paha Sapa still felt flowing from the man.

—
When my friends the Camerons insisted that I come with them on this flying visit to the Fair—all the way from Washington, DC, mind you!—I was quite certain that it would be a waste of time. How could Chicago—I proclaimed in all my insular arrogance—how could Chicago do anything but fling its brash, new-earned millions in our faces and show us something far less than art, far less than business, even, but some demonstration less than either.

Paha Sapa listened hard over and under the dynamo hum. If most men he knew were to craft sentences like that, Paha Sapa would have
laughed or left or both. But somehow Mr. Adams interested him deeply.

The older man gestured at the dynamo and showed a broad smile.

—
But
this!
This, Mr. Slow Horse, the ancient Greeks would have delighted to see and the Venetians, at their height, would have envied. Chicago has turned on us with a sort of wonderful, defiant contempt and shown us something far more powerful even than art, infinitely more important than business. This is, alas or hurrah, the
future,
Mr. Slow Horse! Yours and mine both, I fear… and yet hope at the same time. I can revel and write postcards about the fakes and frauds of the Midway Plaisance, but each evening I return to the Machinery Hall and to this very chamber to stare like an owl at the dynamo of the future.

Paha Sapa had nodded and glanced at the little gentleman. Embarrassed, Adams removed his straw hat again and mopped at his scalp.

—
I must apologize again, sir. I babble on as if you were an audience rather than an interlocutor. What do
you
think of this dynamo and of the wonders of the Machinery Hall, where I’ve seen you staring even as I do, Mr. Slow Horse?

—
It’s the real religion of your race, Mr. Adams.

Henry Adams had blinked at that. Then he put his hat back on and blinked some more, obviously lost in thought. Then he smiled.

—
Sir, you have just answered a question I have been posing to myself for some years. I have long been interested—in my distant, unbeliever’s vague and insolent way—in the role the Virgin Mary played in the long, slow dreams that were the construction of such masterpieces as Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres. I believe you have given me my answer. The Virgin Mary was to the men of the thirteenth century what this dynamo and its brothers shall be to…

At that moment another man entered, and Adams interrupted himself to welcome him. They had obviously arranged to meet there at that time. This other gentleman was very tall, with a sharp beak of a nose, pomaded dark hair slicked back, and with eyes so piercing they reminded Paha Sapa not of an owl but of an eagle. The man was dressed all in black and gray with a brilliantly white shirt, which reinforced Paha Sapa’s impression of being in the presence of a predator, vigilant eagle in human form.

Mr. Adams seemed flustered.

—
Mr. Slow Horse, may I present my companion at the Fair today, the eminent Sher… that is… the eminent Norwegian explorer Mr. Jan Sigerson.

The tall man did not offer his hand but bowed and quietly clicked his heels together in an almost Germanic fashion. Paha Sapa smiled and nodded in return. Something about the tall man made Paha Sapa afraid to touch his bare hand and risk learning about his life.

Sigerson’s voice was soft but sharp edged and sounded more English than Norwegian to Paha Sapa’s untrained ear.

—
It is a true pleasure to meet you, Mr. Slow Horse. We Europeans rarely get the opportunity to meet a practicing
wičasa wakan
from the Natural Free Human Beings.

Sigerson turned to Adams.

—
I apologize, Henry, but Lizzie and the senator are waiting at Franklin’s steam launch at the North Pier and inform me that we are all running late for Mayor Harrison’s dinner.

Sigerson bowed toward Paha Sapa again and he was smiling slightly this time.

—
It has been a sincere pleasure meeting you, Mr. Slow Horse, and I can only hope that some day the
wasichu wanagi
will no longer be a problem.

Wasichu wanagi.
The white man’s ghost. Paha Sapa could only stare after the two men as they left, Mr. Adams speaking but not being heard by the young Indian.

He never saw the man named Henry Adams or his Norwegian friend again.

M
ISS DE
P
LACHETTE LEADS THE WAY
onto the Midway Plaisance—a mile-long strip of attractions, private shows, and rides that extends away from the lake from Jackson Park to the edge of Washington Park, as straight as a broad arrow fired into the back of the Columbian Exposition from the west.

Ahead are scatterings of exotic structures on either side of the low, broad, dusty Midway boulevard: Old Vienna medieval homes and a Biergarten; Algerian mosques and Tunisian minarets from which alien music blares and voices screech; a Cairo street where Paha Sapa and his friends have seen the overrated belly dancer; glimpses of Laplanders and Samoans and two-humped camels and a small herd of reindoor being hurried across the boulevard by men in shaggy fur despite the heat;
the long water-propelled sliding railway; the Bernese Alps theater; a glimpse of the captive balloon far, far down the strip and to the right.

And in the middle of the boulevard and seemingly growing taller every minute, the 264-foot-tall Ferris Wheel, which, according to Miss de Plachette, boasts thirty-six contained cars or cabins (each larger than many log cabins Paha Sapa has known), with each car or cabin capable of carrying up to sixty people.

Paha Sapa feels a growing, if unfocused, anxiety. He is not afraid of the Wheel or of heights, but something suddenly seems perilous to him, as if he and this young lady he barely knows are approaching some point of no return.

—
Are you sure you want to do this, Miss de Plachette?

—
Call me Rain, please.

—
Are you sure you want to do this, Rain?

—
We
must
do this, Paha Sapa. It is our destiny.

H
E KEEPS TRYING TO RISE INTO THE AIR BUT FAILS EACH TIME
.

What once came so easily to Paha Sapa, like effortless play, now seems impossible, as if his soul has grown inescapably heavy. It is the ninth day of his
hanblečeya
, the ninth day of his total fast, and his weakness is matched only by his weariness and sense of defeat. He has come to believe that this quest for a vision was premature, presumptuous, and doomed to failure. Many braves much older and wiser than he have failed before this—no male of the Natural Free Human Beings is ever
assured
a Vision and those few who receive them often do so only after years of frustration and many repeated
hanblečeyas.

Except first for the hunger, which has departed, and then the weakness of his long fast, this
oymni
—his wandering time—has been mostly pleasant. When Paha Sapa awakened in Robert Sweet Medicine’s cave at Bear Butte, there was no sign of the old man—not his drinking or eating bowls, not even a trace of the rabbits they’d eaten—and Paha Sapa could almost have believed that the old Cheyenne
wičasa wakan
had been a dream. But Worm and White Crane were rested and well fed when he found them still hobbled in the entrance to the cave that morning, and though the sun had not come out, the days of downpour outside had changed to an increasingly heavy drizzle.

It was then, for a scrotum-tightening panicked moment, that Paha Sapa untied the bundle on Three Buffalo Woman’s white mare, seeking wildly for the
Ptehinčala Huhu Canunpa
, the sacred and irreplaceable Buffalo Calf Bone Pipe that he, Paha Sapa, had foolishly told the old Cheyenne he was carrying to his
inipi
first real sweat lodge ceremony.

It was there, separated into its different segments, each segment wrapped in a red cloth, the red feathers intact.

Paha Sapa’s knees went weak then, as he realized how easy it would have been for the old Cheyenne—if he had been more than a dream—to steal Paha Sapa’s tribe’s most sacred object. And then his knees
stayed
weak as the full weight of Limps-a-Lot’s trust sank in. Paha Sapa was heading to the Black Hills, reportedly rotten with
wasichus
, soldiers and miners both, who would kill him and rob him on a whim, even while enemy tribes swarmed—as they always did—around those Hills, always on the lookout for a lone Lakota boy to kill and rob or enslave.

Paha Sapa wished to the depths of his heart that morning that Limps-a-Lot had sent with him only an ordinary stone pipe for his
inipi
and
hanblečeya
ceremonies, even if the chances for a true Vision were lessened by not having the more
wakan
and powerful
Ptehinčala Huhu Canunpa
with its special tobacco.

But the day’s ride through occasional heavy rain into the Paha Sapa themselves was uneventful, Paha Sapa riding the gelding and leading the mare in a wide arc to the west to avoid the roads and heavily traveled paths the
wasichus
used to get to their mining town of Deadwood.

In later years, especially when taking his son on their own small
oymni
wandering time to the Black Hills and what was left of the open Great Plains, Paha Sapa will find it very difficult to explain what the world was like during these days of his people’s proud years, when the Lakota gods still listened to their worshippers and when the earth was alive for them.

These days, entering the Black Hills and riding down streambeds and across long meadows between the trees, always being careful to avoid ambush, Paha Sapa and everything he perceives seem to
exist and interact simultaneously around him and within him, and interact on at least two levels: the joyous physical level on which he feels the horse between his legs and the rain on his face and smells the wet aspen leaves and hears the breathing of the gelding and mare as well as the chatter of squirrels and cry of crows, and the overlapping, more stirring and soul-touching
nagi
level of himself and everything else existing and touching each other as pure spirit-essence.

He feels the
waniya waken
—the very air as alive. Spirit breath. Renewal.
Tunkan. Inyan.
The rocks and boulders are alive. And holy. The storms that move above the prairie behind him and mass against the hills rising before him are
Wakinyan
, the noise of the Thunder Spirit and language of the Thunder Beings. The late-summer flowers blooming in the high, wet grass of the meadows show the touch and color preferences of
Tatuskansa
, the moving spirit, the quickening power of the All. In the rivers Paha Sapa fords dwell the
Unktehi
, monsters and spirits both. Sleeping under his canvas shelter and warming robes, Paha Sapa hears the howl of coyotes and thinks of Coyote, who will trick him during his
hanblečeya
if he can. The glistening spiderweb on a tree bears unreadable messages from
Iktomé
, the spider man, who is a worse trickster even than Coyote. In the evening, when all of the other spirits are quiet and the sky is emptying of light, Paha Sapa is able to hear the breathing of Grandfather Mystery and—sometimes—of
Wakan Tanka
himself. And at night, during the rare times the clouds part, Paha Sapa watches the stars spread from dark horizon to dark horizon, his viewing undimmed by any light (he has no campfire), and in these minutes young Paha Sapa can trace the path of his life, past and future, knowing that when he dies his own spirit will travel south along the Milky Way with the spirits of all those Natural Free Human Beings who have gone before him.