Dances With Wolves (13 page)

Find your white tongue. Find your white tongue.

It came to her that she was tired of being a victim, and it made her angry.

You want my white tongue, she thought in Comanche. You see some worth in me for that? I will find it then. And if I am to become no one for doing that, I will be the greatest of all the no ones. I will be a no one to remember.

As her moccasins scraped softly over the grass-tufted path, she began to cast herself back, trying to find a place at which to start, a place where she could begin to remember the words.

But everything was blank. No matter how much she concentrated, nothing came to mind, and for several minutes she suffered the terrible frustration of having a whole language on the tip of her tongue. Instead of lifting, the mist of her past had closed in like fog.

She was worn out by the time she came to a small clearing that opened into the river a mile upstream from the village. It was a spot of rare beauty, a grassy porch shaded by a sparkling cottonwood tree and surrounded on three sides by natural screens. The river was wide and shallow and dotted with sandbars crowned with reeds. On days past she would have delighted in finding such a place. Stands With A Fist had always been keen for beauty.

But today she barely noticed. Wanting only to rest, she sat heavily in front of the cottonwood and leaned back against its trunk. She crossed her legs in the Indian way and hiked her shift to let the cool air from the river play around her thighs. Finally she closed her eyes and resolved herself to remembering.

But still she could remember nothing. Stands With A Fist gritted her teeth. She raised her hands and ground the palms into her tired eyes.

It was while she rubbed her eyes that the image came.

It struck her like a bright splash of color.

five

Images had come to her the preceding summer, when it was discovered that white soldiers were in the vicinity. One morning while she lay in bed, her doll had appeared on the wall. In the middle of a dance she had seen her mother. But both images were opaque.

The ones she was seeing now were alive and moving as if in a dream. There was white-man talk all the way through. And she understood every word.

What appeared first had startled her with its clarity. It was the torn hem of a blue gingham dress. A hand was on the hem, playing about the fringe. As she watched through closed eyes, the image grew larger. The hand belonged to a young girl. She was standing in a rough earthen room, furnished only with a small, hard-looking bed, a framed spray of flowers mounted next to the only window, and a sideboard over which hung a mirror with a large chip at one edge.

The girl was facing away, her unseen face bent toward the hand that held the hem as she inspected the tear.

In making the inspection, the dress had been lifted high enough to expose the girl’s short, skinny legs.

A woman’s voice suddenly called from outside the room.

“Christine . . .”

The girl’s head turned, and in a rush of realization, Stands With A Fist recognized her old self. Her old face listened, and then the old mouth made the words: “Coming, Mother.”

Stands With A Fist opened her eyes then. She was frightened by what she had seen, but like a listener at the feet of a storyteller, she wanted more.

She closed her eyes again, and from the limb of an old oak tree a scene opened through a mass of rustling leaves. A long-fronted sod house, shaded by a pair of cottonwoods, was built against the bank of a draw. A crude table thrown together with planking sat in front of the house. And seated at the table were four grown-up people, two men and two women. The four were talking, and Stands With A Fist could understand every word.

Three children were playing blindman’s bluff farther out in the yard, and the women kept an eye on them as they chatted about a fever one of the children had recently conquered.

The men were smoking pipes. On the table in front of them were scattered the remains of a late afternoon Sunday lunch: a bowl of boiled potatoes, several dishes of greens, a pile of cornless cobs, a turkey skeleton, and a half-full pitcher of milk. The men were talking about the likelihood of rain.

She recognized one of them. He was tall and stringy. His cheeks were hollow and high-boned. His hair was pushed straight back over his head. A short, wispy beard clung to his jaw. It was her father.

Up above she could make out the forms of two people lying in the buffalo grass growing out of the roof. At first she didn’t know who they were, but suddenly she was closer and could see them clearly.

She was with a boy about her age. His name was Willy. He was raw and skinny and pale. They were side by side on their backs, holding hands as they watched a line of high clouds spreading across the spectacular sky.

They were talking about the day they would be married.

“I would rather there was nobody,” Christine said dreamily. “I would rather you came to the window one night and took me away.”

She squeezed his hand, but Willy didn’t squeeze back. He was watching the clouds intently.

“I don’t know about that part,” he said.

“What don’t you know?”

“We could get in trouble.”

“From who?” she asked impatiently.

“From our parents.”

Christine turned her face to his and smiled at the concern she saw.

“But we’d be married. Our business would be our own, not someone else’s.”

“I suppose,” he said, his brow still knitted.

He didn’t offer anything more, and Christine went back to watching the sky with him.

At length the boy sighed. He looked at her from the corner of his eye, and she at him.

“I guess I don’t care what kind of fuss there is . . . so long as we get married.”

“I don’t either,” she said.

Without embracing, their faces were suddenly moving toward one another, their lips making ready for a kiss. Christine changed her mind at the last moment.

“We can’t,” she whispered.

Hurt passed across his eyes.

“They’ll see us,” she whispered again. “Let’s scoot down.”

Willy was smiling as he watched her slide a little farther down the back side of the roof. Before he went after her he threw a backward glance at the people in the yard below.

Indians were coming in from the prairie. There were a dozen of them, all on horseback. Their hair was roached and their faces were painted black.

“Christine.” he hushed, grabbing her.

They squirmed forward on their bellies, edging close for the best possible view. Willy pulled up his squirrel gun as they craned their necks.

The women and children must have gone inside already, for her father and his friend were alone in the yard. Three Indians had come all the way up. The others were waiting at a respectful distance.

Christine’s father began to talk in signs to one of the three emissaries, a big Pawnee with a scowl on his face. She could see right away the talk was not good. The Indian kept motioning toward the house, making the sign for drinking. Christine’s father kept shaking his head in denial.

Indians had come before, and Christine’s father had always shared what he had on hand. These Pawnee wanted something he didn’t have . . . or something he wouldn’t part with.

Willy whispered in her ear.

“They look sore. . . . Maybe they want whiskey.”

That might be it, she thought. Her father didn’t approve of strong drink in any form, and as she watched, she could see he was losing patience. And patience was one of his hallmarks.

He waved them off, but they didn’t move. Then he threw his hands into the air, and the ponies tossed their heads. Still the Indians did not move, and now all three were scowling,

Christine’s father said something to the white friend standing by his side and showing their backs, they turned for the house.

There was no time for anyone to yell a warning. The big Pawnee’s hatchet was on a downward arc before Christine’s father had fully turned away. It struck deep under his shoulder, driving the length of the blade. He grunted as if he’d had the wind knocked out of him and hopped sideways across the yard. Before he’d gone even a few steps, the big Pawnee was on his back, hacking furiously as he drove him to ground.

The other white man tried to run, but singing arrows knocked him down halfway to the door of the sod house.

Terrible sounds flooded Christine’s ears. Screams of despair were coming from inside the house, and the Indians who had held back were whooping madly as they dashed forward at a gallop. Someone was roaring in her face. It was Willy.

“Run, Christine . . . run!”

Willy planted one of his boots on her behind and sent the girl rolling down to the spot where the roof ended and the prairie began. She looked back and saw the raw, skinny boy standing on the edge of the roof, his squirrel gun pointed down at the yard. It fired, and for a moment Willy stood motionless. Then he turned the rifle around, held it like a club, jumped quietly into space, and disappeared.

She ran then, wild with fear, her skinny seven-year-old legs churning up the draw behind the house like the wheels of a machine.

The sun was slanting into her eyes and she fell several times, scraping the skin off her knees. But she was up in a wink each time, the fear of dying pushing her past pain. If a brick wall had suddenly sprung up in the draw, she would have run right into it.

She knew she couldn’t keep this pace, and even if she could, they would be coming on horseback, so as the draw began to curve and its banks grew steeper, she looked for a place to hide.

Her frantic search had yielded nothing and the pain in her lungs was starting to stab when she spotted a dark opening partially obscured by a thick growth of bunchgrass halfway up the slope on her left.

Grunting and crying, she scrambled up the rock-strewn embankment and, like a mouse diving for cover, threw herself into the hole. Her head went in, but her shoulders didn’t. It was too small. She rocked back onto her knees and banged at the sides of the hole with her fists. The earth was soft. It began to fall away. Christine dug deliriously, and after a few moments there was enough room to wriggle inside.

It was a very tight fit. She was curled in a fetal ball and, almost at once, had the sickening feeling that she had somehow stuffed herself into a jar. Her right eye could see over the lip of the hole’s entrance for several hundred yards down the draw. No one was coming. But black smoke was rising from the direction of the house. Her hands were drawn up against her throat and one of them discovered the miniature crucifix she’d worn ever since she could remember. She held it tight and waited.

six

When the sun began to sink behind her, the young girl’s hopes rose. She was afraid one of them had seen her run away, but with each passing hour her chances got better. She prayed for night to come. It would be all but impossible for them to find her then.

An hour after sundown she held her breath as horses passed by down the draw. The night was moonless and she couldn’t make out any forms. She thought she heard a child crying. The hoofbeats slowly died away and didn’t return.

Her mouth was so dry that it hurt to swallow, and the throbbing of her knees seemed to be spreading over the whole of her body. She would have given anything to stretch. But she couldn’t move more than an inch or two in any direction. She couldn’t turn over, and her left side, the side she was lying on, had gone numb.

As the young girl’s longest night ground slowly on, her discomfort would build and break like a fever and she would have to steel herself against sudden rushes of panic. She might have died of shock had she given in, but each time Christine found a way to beat back these swells of hysteria. If there was a saving grace, it was that she thought little of what had happened to her family and friends. Now and again she would hear her father’s death grunt, the one he made when the Pawnee hatchet sliced through his back. But each time she heard the grunt she managed to stop there, shutting the rest of it out of her mind. She’d always been known as a tough little girl, and toughness was what saved her.

Around midnight she dropped off to sleep only to wake minutes later in a claustrophobic frenzy. Like the slipknot on a rope, the more she struggled, the tighter she wedged herself.

Her pitiful screams rang up and down the draw.

At last she could scream no more and settled down to a long, cleansing cry. When that, too, was spent, she was calm, weak with the exhaustion an animal feels after hours in the trap.

Forsaking escape from the hole, she concentrated on a series of tiny activities to make herself more comfortable. She moved her feet back and forth, counting off each toe only when she could wiggle it separate from the rest. Her hands were relatively free and she pressed her fingertips together until she had run through every combination she could think of. She counted her teeth. She recited the Lord’s prayer, spelling each word. She composed a long song about being in the hole. Then she sang it.

seven

When first light came she began to cry again, knowing she could not possibly make it through the coming day. She’d had enough. And when she heard horses in the draw the prospect of dying at someone’s hand seemed much better than dying in the hole.

“Help,” she cried. “Help me.”

She heard the hoofbeats come to an abrupt halt. People were coming up the slope, scuffling over the rocks. The scuffling stopped and an Indian face loomed in front of the hole. She couldn’t bear to look at him, but it was impossible to turn her head away. She closed her eyes to the puzzled Comanche.

“Please . . . get me out,” she murmured.

Before she knew it strong hands were pulling her into the sunshine. She couldn’t stand at first, and as she sat on the ground, stretching out her swollen legs an inch at a time, the Indians conferred amongst themselves.

They were split. The majority could see no value in taking her. They said she was skinny and small and weak. And if they took this little bundle of misery they might be blamed for what the Pawnee had done to the white people in the earth house.