Black Hills (74 page)

But even as Paha Sapa acknowledges these things to himself, he realizes that Custer is not finished with his rant.

“When the Army called your leaders to that first peace powwow at Fort Laramie in eighteen fifty-one, you Sioux kept talking about territory you’d owned forever but which in reality you’d just taken away from the Arikara and Hidatsa and Mandan on your way west from Canada and Minnesota. You bragged about territory that had belonged to you forever but which really had belonged to the Crows and Pawnee just a few years earlier. You Sioux were a ruthless, relentless invasion machine.”

—
We didn’t take all the land away from the Cheyenne.

“Not for want of trying, my red friend. Besides, you liked teaming up with the Cheyenne and Arapaho to kill the Pawnee and the Ponca and Oto and Missouri, all the weaker tribes.”

—
They were weak. They deserved to die or lose their lands. That was the thinking then.

“It still is, Paha Sapa. At least among us whites. Look at that Hitler fellow you were reading about when we went to New York three years ago. He knows the price of weakness—his and his enemies’ both. But
your so-called Natural Free Human Beings have lost the balls to live and die that way—through your own courage, taking what you want from those too weak to keep it. You’re all fat, slow reservation Indians now, wearing cowboy hats, working for
wasichus
, and waiting for handouts.”

Paha Sapa has no reply to that. He thinks of his own decades working for the Fat Takers. He thinks of the brash, ambitious, confrontational energy that Gutzon Borglum exudes, breathes in and exhales, and that he knows in none of his own kind any longer, including himself.

“When Mitchell and Fitzpatrick called that original eighteen fifty-one meeting at Fort Laramie, they had to deal with the Cheyenne who killed and scalped two Shoshones whom the Cheyenne had specifically given safe passage to so they could get to the council… ”

The ghost’s voice bores on like one of the pneumatic steam-powered drills that Paha Sapa has listened to most days of his life through the past five years.

“So when Mitchell helped calm things down and convinced the Cheyenne to say they’re sorry and to pay the Shoshones their blood price of knives and blankets and tobacco and colored cloth—all stuff the Cheyenne had received from the whites as bribes just weeks earlier—the Cheyenne couldn’t help but insult the Shoshones again at the peace banquet by serving boiled dog.”

Paha Sapa has to smile.

—
Yes, the Shoshone never developed a taste for dog.

“But you did, didn’t you, my friend?”

Paha Sapa remembers well the feasts when he was a boy and the joy of spooning through the kettle with the other boys, searching for the dog’s head. It was a delicacy. Just the memory makes him salivate.

“Eaten any of your neighbors’ puppies in Keystone recently, Paha Sapa?”

—
What are you doing, Long Hair? Trying to make me angry?

“Why would I do that? And what are you going to do if I am trying to provoke you… shoot me? Speaking of which, why the Little Big Horn? Why not here? One Montana river or creek is as good as another, isn’t it? And this way at least someone will get the use of the motorcycle. Old Mr. Strange Owl looks like a nice fellow to me… for a
Northern Cheyenne, I mean. That greedy old bastard was probably there at the Little Big Horn as a greedy young bastard, fighting alongside your relatives and stealing from my brothers’ mutilated bodies on the day you all killed me.”

Paha Sapa realizes that the ghost
is
trying to make him angry. He has no idea why.

The ghost-voice continues.

“I have a question for you, Mr. Black Hills. Why didn’t you self-proclaimed Natural Free Noble Human Beings When Others Aren’t Human At All ever rub out—or try to rub out—the Nez Percé or Flatheads or Ute or Plains Cree or Piegan or Bannock or Blackfoot?”

—
All the others were too far away or too high in their mountains—although we did try to wipe out some of them—but the Blackfoot are just too tough. They’re scary people, Long Hair. The men will kill you just to take your teeth to gamble with, rolling them on a blanket like dice, and the women will chop off your
ce
and hang it on their lodge pole as a children’s toy.

The ghost laughs again.

Paha Sapa returns to the campsite, folds up the dry tarps, closes his valise, and walks back to the town of Busby.

H
E’S ON THE ROAD
by midnight.

Poor Tommy Counts the Crows, assigned by Mr. Strange Owl to make sure that Paha Sapa did not steal anything, had fallen asleep by ten p.m. Paha Sapa made sure the tools were returned to their right places and left the young man sleeping, pushing the rebuilt motorcycle a hundred feet down the road before kick-starting it to life.

The electric headlamp was new to motorcycles in 1916 and Paha Sapa has repaired but never replaced the original one on Robert’s machine. The beam it casts is flickery and not very bright at the best of times. On the road headed west tonight, he would have turned it off completely and navigated by moonlight, except that a solid cloud cover has moved in and the moonlight is too diffused to drive by. It’s still bright enough, however, for Paha Sapa to see that the Crow houses he’s passing on either side of the road tend to be tumbledown hovels and shacks… not so very much different, he decides, from the majority of tumbledown hovels and
shacks he saw on the Northern Cheyenne reservation or, for that matter, on Pine Ridge and the other Sioux reservations in South Dakota.

—
Long Hair? General? You still here?

“You can call me Colonel. What do you want now? To tell me how tumbledown the shacks and hovels are here in Crow country?”

—
No. I wanted to explain to you why I didn’t push the plunger down on Mount Rushmore. But the shacks did make me think of it.

“I know why you didn’t push the plunger down on Mount Rushmore, Paha Sapa. You lost your nerve. But do you have another explanation?”

—
The cemetery on Pine Ridge Reservation… the one at the Episcopal mission church and school. The cemetery where Rain and her father are buried.

The ghost says nothing. The purr and putter of the Harley-Davidson J’s rebuilt engine, working perfectly now, is the only sound in the night. It’s cool enough that Paha Sapa is wearing the long leather jacket Robert left him.

Paha Sapa considers not continuing—this ungrateful ghost does not deserve a conversation, much less an explanation—but after a while he goes on:

—
Every once in a while some boys… men too, I think… on the reservation would sneak into the cemetery at night and carry out some vandalism there. Most of the crosses and headstones were made of wood, of course, so they just kicked those apart, but a few of the larger headstones—the Reverend de Plachette’s, for instance—were of stone, and the vandals took crowbars or sledgehammers to the stone, smashing it as much as they could, tipping over what they couldn’t smash.

The ghost’s voice sounds weary.

“You didn’t want to be just another cemetery vandal.”

—
When I heard both Borglum
and
the president say that the Mount Rushmore heads would be there for a hundred thousand years, I could imagine the vandalized and broken fragments of the heads being there that long. Every culture honors its dead leaders
—you’re
honored at this place we’re headed. The thought of being like those vandals who come to the cemetery out of their stupidity and frustration and urge to destroy other people’s remembrances because they’re unable to create anything themselves… it felt wrong.

“Very noble, Paha Sapa. So you’ll let the
Wasichu
Stone Giants stand astride your sacred Paha Sapa and prairie rather than be a vandal.”

—
Your
Wasichu
Stone Giants have
already
risen and done what they did to us, Long Hair. Vandalizing Borglum’s life’s work wouldn’t have changed that. Look on either side of the road.

The headlight flickered and danced, illuminating little. But visible in the cloud-filtered moonlight were more shacks with packed dirt for front yards, a huddling of shacks in lieu of a community, filth where high-grass prairie had once grown.

“I know. I came this way in my last days alive, remember? I remember this prairie glistening after morning rains. I remember the flowers stretching from horizon to horizon here, just as the buffalo herds did. You Indians were always filthy in your ways, Paha Sapa. We could smell your garbage heaps from twenty miles away. The only thing that made you look and seem noble was the fact that you could keep moving, leaving your buffalo-run heaps of rotting carcasses and giant mounds of stinking garbage behind you. Then we came and you ran out of room.”

—
Yes.

It’s not the truth of it, or at least not all the truth, but Paha Sapa is too weary to argue.

H
E REACHES A HARD ROAD
—paved—before two a.m. and has seen signs to the battlefield from his road from Busby and now more directing him south along this paved highway. One way or the other, the Custer battlefield is less than a mile to the south and then back a mile or two the way he has come.

The town of Garryowen—obviously named after Custer’s and his regiment’s favorite song—appears to be composed of two houses along the road to the south, and the placed called Crow Agency looks to be composed of three buildings along the road to the north. He turns right and drives the eleven miles north to the little town of Hardin—small, but big enough to have a five-and-dime and a post office. The motorcycle’s tires sound strange to him as they hiss and hum on pavement.

H
E DOES NOT GET BACK
to the battlefield until almost eleven a.m.

Not wanting to be arrested for vagrancy in Hardin (and, as a strange Indian hanging around a
wasichu
town in the middle of the night, Paha Sapa knows this is a real possibility even with his motorcycle to show he’s not a hobo freshly hopped from a freight train and with a pocket full of money to back up that argument), after finding the five-and-dime and post office in the darkness, he drove back out of town and down by the river, rolling out of sight behind willows, and lay on the tarp until sunrise. Why he felt he had to do what he is going to do at the battlefield in the daylight rather than in darkness was a mystery even to him, but he knew he was not going out there at night.

Perhaps, he thought wryly as he lay there counting the few stars that deigned to show themselves between the slow-moving clouds, this Indian who has spent most of his life carrying a ghost from that battlefield is afraid of ghosts after all.

Sunrise was a cloudy, milky affair and the air was far cooler than normal for the fifth of September, the breeze chilly enough to send Paha Sapa rummaging in his gladstone for a sweater to slip on under Robert’s wonderful, perfectly aged and faded leather jacket. Unlike Mr. Strange Owl’s emporium in Busby, both the five-and-dime and post office were open on Saturday here in Hardin, but the latter did not open until nine thirty. Before he finally weighed, stamped, and handed James’s
The Ambassadors
to the postal clerk for mailing back to the Rapid City public library, he had put in a dollar, although he was certain that the overdue fines would be much less than that. Leaving town, he suddenly realized that he was ravenous. He saw Indians—Crow men with their black cowboy hats and distinctive Crow way of walking, half cowboy and half ruptured duck—going into a diner on Main Street. Paha Sapa parked the motorcycle diagonally at the curb alongside the old Model T’s and various jury-rigged attempts at ranch-worthy pickup trucks and went in to have breakfast. He ordered two eggs (sunny-side up), steak (medium rare), pancakes on the side, toast, orange juice, and asked the waitress—also a Crow, but not as sullen as most he’d known—to keep the coffee and maple syrup coming.