Fervent Charity (11 page)

All her life, Gustie felt like she was in some kind of free-fall, with no place and nothing to hang on to. It was only upon waking up in Dorcas’s cabin that she felt like she had landed. There, in that tiny, one-room cabin with only two cowhides on the wall for insulation and decoration, that queasy, falling-through-space feeling had left her. When she was broken in body and spirit, Dorcas Many Roads had literally picked her up off the prairie and put her back together again. Dorcas was the nearest thing to a mother she had had. Her mother had died when she was small, and Gustie had been raised by a warm and loving woman who always carefully acknowledged the barrier between them; who never forgot her place as housekeeper; who, as the hired help, could never embrace her employer’s child with the fullness Gustie craved. Recognizing no barriers, Dorcas had cradled Gustie in her arms, sung to her and let her cry, had cleaned her up and fed her. For the last three years, whenever she had felt herself unraveling, Gustie had come back to this old woman to eat her stew, drink her coffee, and listen to her stories about the buffalo days, nourished by her warm, often silent presence, clinging to her like the motherless child she was. For her part, all she could ever do for Dorcas was make sure her shelves were never empty and that she had a comfortable bed and a rocking chair for her tiny porch.

“I am not a blood relative either,” Jordis said to her once. “You are as much her granddaughter as I am.” And, at the time, it had felt true. Dorcas had given her a new name, Woman Who Sees the Deer, and a piece of polished antler on a leather cord that she wore around her neck. But it wasn’t true, much as Gustie would have liked it to be. Gustie was white. She felt this land deep in her bones and could lay claim to a patch of it by virtue of having buried a loved one here, but still, her ties were more wished for than real, and she had demonstrated that painfully when she killed the dog. Dorcas had never mentioned that incident, and Gustie had been afraid to ask her how she felt about it.

Little Bull replaced Gustie at Dorcas’s side. Leonard puttered around the campfire, keeping the flames high and hot on this bitterly cold day. Gustie went by herself to sit alone under the trees behind the cabin. She sat on the cold ground, her knees drawn up, her head in her hands.

Gustie knew that this day was the beginning of the sad last act of a two-month-long tragedy. Survivors of the plague, already burdened with the loss of friends and family, now began to appear, paying their respects to a tribal grandmother whom they would mourn because they loved her and because she was one of the last of the old ones. With her passing would go one of the last living memories of the days before contact with the
wasichu
. She remembered when the deer were plentiful and the buffalo herds were so large you could walk for many days and never see the end of them. Dorcas’s first contact with whites had been her first experience of death without honor, disease unaffected by her healing plants. She remembered the days before the Black Robes, when the Sioux danced for all occasions, when their singing rang out over the prairies and plains, when the drum was the living heart of a village and seldom silent.

On her deathbed, she longed to hear the drum, to hear the old songs.
Where was Red Standing Horse?

Gustie was the first to see them as they came around the trees from the east, Red Standing Horse on his big roan, White Eagle riding a shabby mule harnessed to a travois that appeared to bear the drum as well as some other bundles. Behind them, on their own swaybacked ponies were Jimmy Saul and Clarence Cut Bow, another singer of old songs. Gustie followed them back around the house and watched them set up in the shelter of the trees where they would be somewhat protected from the wind that cut across the prairie like a scythe.

Now Jordis also worried that Dorcas was too exposed to the elements. As if in answer to her worries, Jimmy unrolled from the travois some poles and steer hides and left them in a jumble at her feet. She smiled.

“What’s all this?” Gustie asked.

“A windbreak.”

Jordis pounded the stakes and propped up the short poles fashioning a sort of three-quarter, miniature tipi around Dorcas sheltering her from the direct blast of the wind, but not cutting off completely her view of the sky and open ground.

And so the drumming began and continued with White Eagle taking very few breaks, and Jimmy Saul and Clarence Cut Bow singing in the high-pitched Sioux style that had so startled Gustie when she first heard it and that now relieved the aching in her breast as she sat vigil with the others at Dorcas’s deathbed. For now, Gustie could hang on to the sound. She felt better.

Dorcas seemed to rally with the singing. She asked to sit up. “Will someone dance? I want to see the buff’lo dance.” This was not a dance anyone had done in a long time. They no longer had the buffalo masks and headdresses they used to wear, but, to keep the dance alive, Little Bull had learned it from his father and taught it to his son, and Clarence could do it, old as he was; the three danced, imitating the buffalo. Other men joined them and Little Bull returned to sit with Dorcas.

Gustie watched and listened. She couldn’t tell if the singing was just vocalizations, or actual words. She asked Little Bull.

He nodded, “This one has words,” and paused to listen a few moments to the singing then he translated for Gustie,

“In the north...

the wind blows...

they are walking...

the hail beats...

...they are walking...

It is an old song,” he added.

Gustie shivered. She could almost believe this song had the power to summon the shaggy walkers—while they lived. But there were no more beasts to answer the call of the Sioux.

Dorcas’s eyes sometimes closed. She did not sleep. She was probably, Gustie thought, letting her mind wander back over happier times. So Gustie was surprised when the old woman’s eyes opened and focused directly upon her. “Grandmother? Can I get you something?” Gustie asked.

“Little Bull, go away.” Dorcas’s voice was labored.

The chief rose and ambled over toward the singers. The dancers dispersed. The drum and the buffalo song continued.

Last words? Is that what they were going to hear? Gustie didn’t want to hear any last words. She wanted Dorcas to rest, and regain her strength, and for things to go back to the way they used to be.

“You know how we used to do the sun dance?”

Jordis nodded. “Yes, Grandmother.”

Would she request a sun dance? Gustie knew enough to know that the sun dance was a bare-chested, if not close-to-naked dance done in warm weather, not in the spiteful cold of late November.

Jordis answered. “You have told me, Grandmother. I will not forget.”

Dorcas motioned with her chin toward Gustie. “Tell her, like I told you.”

“In the full moon of July,” Jordis began, “the sacred tree was chosen, cut and brought to the dancing circle. A man, if he had a special sacrifice to make, or if he had made a promise in battle, would stand up in front of all the people. His chest was pierced through in two places.” Jordis touched the two places on her own body, reminding Gustie of the two points of the cross made by Catholics. “Pointed willow sticks were pushed through and ropes were tied to the ends, the ropes that hung down from the sacred tree in the center. He had to pull back on these ropes, hard and dance until the willow sticks broke through his flesh. He suffered. He suffered in the heat, from the pain, from exhaustion, and from staring into the sun, for he danced in a circle always facing the sun, looking straight into the sun.”

Dorcas moved her hand slightly to rest on the piece of blanket rolled up at her side. Her eyes opened full upon Gustie once more. “Have you seen him yet?”

“Who?”

“The buff’lo.”

“No... I...”

“You see the deer, still?”

Gustie saw a white-tailed deer occasionally. No one else ever saw them. She was told that the deer had been wiped out of this part of the country along with the buffalo. She didn’t understand it, but she had gotten used to it. Anyway, she no longer mentioned it, and the visions had faded. She got impressions, glimpses in the periphery of her vision of deer leaping, skimming over the prairie with their graceful running stride. She answered truthfully, “Sometimes. Not like before.”

The old woman nodded. The small hope that had flickered in her eyes faded and she closed them. “Thought you might see buff’lo spirit too. We are calling him. You tell me if you see him.”

“I’ll tell you.”

Gustie joined Little Bull again at the fire. Neither of them felt the urge to speak.

Jimmy Saul’s voice now rose alone, in a plaintive song that was clearly different from the buffalo song.

Gustie said, “That’s a different song.”

“Yes.” Little Bull listened and translated the words for her as he had done before.

“From the north

a dry wind

blows cold

like the breath

of the dead.”

“Is it old, too?” Gustie asked.

“I do not think so. I have never heard it before.”

The drum never stopped. The singing was intermittent, the songs and the singers changed; sometimes Jimmy Saul, sometimes Jimmy and Clarence, and from time to time others joined in or replaced them. Gustie thought it was only the drum that kept the survivors on their feet, the earth spinning, and the sky from falling.

People continued to come to the half-moon tipi, as Jordis had begun to call it, and Gustie once more retreated. Alone, she walked far out on the prairie. With all that Dorcas had given her, Gustie had never given back more than a few trifles.

Not expecting to see anything, Gustie scanned the horizon. No birds remained, no insects. Behind her, the cottonwoods were barren of leaves. There was nothing now to stir the prairie, nothing to resist the wind. Only rabbits and the occasional raccoon would venture out of warm burrows and not till dusk. Right now the marriage of wind and earth was a sterile union. Gustie stared into the distance, wishing she could have given Dorcas something. Then she realized that she could. She threw the shawl back off her head, spun around and ran all the way back to the half-moon tipi.

Gustie knelt close to Dorcas. “I saw him, Grandmother! The buffalo bull. He’s come back! He came up over the rise and stood there with his big shoulders high. He lowered his head at me. His nostrils blew hot steam. His horns were new moons curved around his head. His coat was shaggy and silver in the sunlight, like the edge of a thundercloud. He was like thunder, Grandmother. He roared like thunder.”

The old woman smiled, gave a tiny nod of her head, and relaxed visibly. Then Gustie walked out alone again leaving Jordis holding Dorcas’s hand when she died.

Gustie, inured to the cold wind, stayed out on the prairie and waited for Jordis, who eventually came to her and wrapped herself in Gustie’s arms and wept.

They buried Dorcas a short distance from Clare Madigan on the rise, looking down over the cabin and the lake and looked over by the cottonwood Gustie had planted there. “We will plant another in the spring,” said Jordis.

Dorcas had never accepted the white man’s religion, so Little Bull said an Indian prayer over her grave. He began a traditional Sioux prayer in his own language, then stopped, and out of deference for Jordis and Gustie, began again in English:

“Oh Great Spirit

Whose Voice I hear in the Winds

And whose breath gives life to all the world,

Hear me. I am small and weak and need your strength and wisdom.

Let me walk in beauty and make my eyes ever behold the red and purple sunset.

Make my hands respect the things you have taught my people.

Let me learn the lessons you have hidden in every leaf and rock.

I seek strength not to be greater than my brother but to fight my greatest enemy—myself.

Make me always ready to come to you with clean hands and straight eyes.

So when life fades as the fading sunset my spirit may come to you without shame.”

Jimmy Saul and Clarence Cut Bow chanted more prayers in Dakotah and then they moved the drum to the mission church to drum for the living and the dead. Father Flagstad did not mind. Drums, pianos out of tune, what did it matter?

Chapter 9: December 1900

J
ordis knelt at water’s edge
and stared into the cold, glassy surface of Crow Kills, her face reflected clearly in the green-tinted water.
My face. I do not recognize it. It is an Indian face. But I am not Indian. I am not white, though I speak their language, have read their books, and survived their schools. I do not think like an Indian or act like a wasichu. I am neither wolf nor dog.

Three winters had passed since she cut her hair. The plaints of hair, now long again, flowed through her hands like water.
The only thing about me that is truly Indian. My hair has no thoughts, does not feel. My hair has only to grow. Three plaits of hair I hold tight in my hands: one for Gustie; one for Dorcas; one for me. I lay one plait over the other: Gustie, Dorcas, me and pull them tight. Gustie, Dorcas, me…pull them tight till I reach the end of the black water and bind them like three rivers come together.

Her braid tied securely, she looked up at the sky, suddenly black. The December sky. The Trees Popping Moon sky.
The Milky Way is the path of souls, but Dorcas Many Roads has a year before she will walk there.
At the moment of her death, Jordis took a lock of Dorcas’s hair. She placed it in her memory bundle. This act placed her grandmother’s soul in her keeping.
No one left to teach me the traditional way of soul keeping, so I honor her presence as I am able. I know only that I must bring food offerings; that I must walk and talk and do all things with respect.
I have to stop swearing.

Lena wished she had never agreed to come. She carried Gracia, who was cocooned in a blanket with just her nose and eyes peeking out under her red knit cap. Lena’s own boots, she had lined with pieces of an old felt hat she had found at Ma’s. To Ma it was just something she never used but couldn’t throw or give away. So Lena took it and Ma was none the wiser. In front of her, breaking a path through the ankle-deep snow, Will carried the highchair and her pie box. Lena squinted against the winter glare and stayed fixed on Will’s broad back.

This Christmas Day was the first family dinner since Pa’s death, and if Lena knew anything, it would probably be the last. Holidays with this bunch were dismal in a good year. The death of the family patriarch had not had a sweetening effect on anybody.

Mary had suggested it as a kindness to Ma, so the old battleax wouldn’t be alone at Christmas—so she’d be surrounded by her boys on Christmas. Fiddlesticks! Ma Kaiser didn’t give a snap about her boys except for what they might do for her. She cared less for her daughters-in-law—not Mary, who did the most for her mother-in-law, nor Nyla who did her share, that’s for sure; certainly not Lena who’d done plenty before she’d had her baby, but now her own family came first. Ma didn’t even seem to care much for her one and only grandchild. The woman was cold as a mackerel. Lena cast a squinty eye up into the crystalline blue. Not a cloud, not a haze on the horizon. No excuse to leave early on account of the weather.

The Kaiser house loomed before them. The front step creaked under their weight. They were inside. The only good thing was that Gracia was too young to know what she was missing. Next year, Lena would insist on having their Christmas dinner at home. She would decorate the house with red paper ribbons and popcorn on a string. During the year she would save up for a few candles to light. She would bring out the angel that her grandmother had made out of white sheeting and scraps of lace from her wedding dress. The house would be festive, and only happy people would be allowed to enter it. Let one day of the year be totally happy and magical for a child. That’s all she would ask. Next year.

This year, there was nothing for it but to put on a good face and make the best of the next few hours. That’s all she had agreed to give to this sorry event.

Mary greeted them, smiling and flushed from the warm kitchen. A white apron covered her dress from neck to hem.

“Something sure smells good, Mary.” Will grinned as he stamped the snow off his feet on the entry rug.

“I’ve got a duck roasting in there, with stuffing, and Nyla is doing the potatoes.”

Well,
sniffed Lena,
what’s to do with a potato? You peel it, you boil it, you mash it. What an
accomplishment!
But it was one less thing Mary had to do, so it was something at that.

Mary took the highchair and the pie box while they got out of their winter wrappings. “What a pretty girl you are today,” she crooned to Gracia, as she led them into the warmth of the kitchen.

“Hello, Ma. Merry Christmas to you,” Lena greeted her mother-in-law. “Merry Christmas, Nyla.”

Nyla nodded and tried to smile, “Merry Christmas.”

Gertrude Kaiser responded in mumbled German. Lena understood German, though she was no good at speaking it. She thought she heard, “Oh, yes, another Christmas,” as if the holidays were a burden; or perhaps it was just a lament on the passage of time.

Lena softened. “Gracia, there’s Grandma.” The baby gurgled. The old woman did not look up from her work. Lena came up beside her to see what she was doing. Gertrude stood at the kitchen table, toiling over a floured board. Her sleeves were rolled up and flour coated her hands and wrists. She was kneading and shaping rolls. She had a row of them along the side of the board. When she finished the one she was working on she placed it on line with the others, then took another from the row and started kneading it again, as if she wasn’t satisfied with the job she had done the first time. She worked the roll of dough into more flour. The dough had a gray cast to it.

Lena went over to the sink where Mary was rinsing a few dishes. “How long has she been doing that?”

“All morning. She had the dough mixed when I got here.”

“What time was that?”

“Five-thirty.”

“Oh, for Pete’s sake! The dough is…it looks dirty!”

Mary shrugged. “She’s done other things, and then gone back to the rolls.”

Lena looked aghast at her sister-in-law. “What other things?”

Mary covered her mouth with the back of one of her wet hands to stifle a giggle. Lena buried her face in Gracia’s wool sweater to do the same. They turned their backs on their mother-in-law and, as quietly as possible, choked on their laughter. Mary got out, but barely, “I told Walter…not to eat…the rolls.” They had to stifle another torrent of giggling.

Mary got control of herself and went back to washing a couple of dishes. Ma looked around at Lena still snuffling into her baby’s sweater. Lena held up her hand. “I just swallowed wrong. I’ll be okay.”

“Ma,” Mary said, “you better put your rolls in the oven now. Dinner will be ready in about twenty minutes.

Ma sighed and dropped each wad of dough on a greased tin and carried it to the stove. Mary took it from her and slid it into the oven.

“Why don’t you go rest now, Ma. Go sit with the boys. We can finish up here.”

From the living room, Lena heard Walter’s voice sounding like pouring gravel. Oscar’s responses were bearish grunts. She heard nothing from Will. He was probably reading the paper. That’s what he did to stay out of arguments.

The house, Lena noticed, was cluttered almost as badly as before the baptism. Gertrude was unhappy unless she was hemmed in by junk. None of it worth a blame thing either, to look at or in usefulness, except maybe to line an old boot.

Since Ma was too cheap to have more than one stove lit at a time, the living room was cold. Lena looked at Nyla, quietly mashing her big pot of potatoes. The poor woman must freeze at night upstairs or be crushed under all the quilts needed to keep her warm. Lena always felt sorry for Nyla, but it was hard to know how to help her. She couldn’t remember ever having a conversation with her that was longer than a single sentence uttered by each of them.

Fortunately, a lot of the warm kitchen air found its way into the dining room. Lena claimed the chair closest to the kitchen door and set up Gracia’s highchair next to her. The rest of them could sit where they pleased, but she wasn’t going to have her baby be cold because Ma was a tightwad.

Lena secured Gracia in her chair and left her some colored paper on the tray to play with. Lena made these folded paper trinkets from paper scraps that Kenneth O’Grady saved for her.

When Lena came back into the kitchen, Nyla was still hard at mashing potatoes.
Good grief
!
She’s going to turn them into soup.

“Well, what can I do, Mary?”

“Everything’s done. Just bring it to the table.”

They carried in bowls of vegetables: Mary’s canned beans from her garden, mashed turnips, and candied squash; a dish of pickles, a ham, the roast duck, and a bowl of stuffing on the side. Mary was as good a cook as Lena, maybe better, Lena had to admit. But Lena had it all over her with her pies. She had it all over everybody with her pies. Nyla finally finished the potatoes and carried them in along with a bowl of pickled herring. Butter, salt, and pepper were already set, and―Lena breathed a sigh of relief―a loaf of Mary’s wholesome, snowy-white bread.

Walter rattled on and on. He always seemed to have the hardest ground, the most rocks, and the worst time collecting his money from the farmers. No one had it as rough or worked as hard as he did. Will just shook his head and laughed, and Oscar didn’t seem to pay attention. The talk irked Lena, who knew Will worked as hard as anybody, with worse equipment. Pa Kaiser had seen fit to leave most of his good machinery and tools to Walter and Oscar, neither of whom was inclined to share with a brother.

When Mary called them to the table, Walter at least took his soggy cigar stub out of his mouth. Oscar claimed the chair at the head of the table. He wore his permanent scowl, and she noted that he was getting jowly. His hair had started to turn an iron gray at the temples. They had all been handsome boys. Will was the only one who still was. Not just because he was the youngest, but because he still did all his own work. Oscar always had one, sometimes two, hired men. He never did any of the hard lifting or pulling. Walter, the shortest and stockiest, was also doing less and less of the hard work.

Even so, strength was relative; they were strong men, with big powerful hands. Even Oscar, if you put him in a contest with, say Lester Evenson, the banker or Pard Batie the lawyer, would win with one arm and not get winded.

Lena took her place by the highchair, Ma sat at the opposite end of the table from Oscar, and Nyla and Will, Walter and Mary found their chairs in between.

Lena said, “Mary, do you want to say grace?”

“You go ahead, Lena.” Mary smiled and bowed her head.

Lena folded her hands, closed her eyes and said, “Bless this food which we are about to receive, in Jesus’ name, Amen.”

Only Mary responded with her own
Amen
. Oscar reached for the duck and Walter the ham. They each cut off portions for themselves and passed the dishes on. Soon everyone had a full plate and the conversation picked up where it had left off in the living room.

Walter: “The winter sure is dry.”

Oscar: “In ’92 it was dryer.”

Will: “A little more snow would be a good thing, though. Don’t feel right, so little snow in the winter.”

Walter: “Might mean a drought and we don’t need that.”

Will: “No, we don’t need that.”

Oscar: “Drought would have to last more than one summer before it affects me.”

Will: “Well, sure. One summer you could still find water, but you wouldn’t get paid for doin’ it.”

Lena asked, “Nyla, I haven’t seen you it seems like in such a long time. How do you…?”

Oscar interrupted her: “Did you ever get paid for that job you did for the Lauterbauers?”

Walter: “It took ’em three years. But I got all my money.”

Oscar: “I heard you had to take the last payment in a side of beef.”

Walter: “Where’d you hear that?”

Will: “That’s still payment. You gotta have beef.”

The men continued in the same vein, and Lena gave up trying to bring the women into the conversation. She at least could occupy herself with feeding Gracia, who played with her mashed potatoes and milk-soaked bread, getting more food in her hair than in her mouth. Mary and Nyla ate in silence.

When the meal was over, Mary said, “Why don’t you go take it easy now, Ma, in the front room with the boys? We’ll clean up.”

“I’ll just finish my pie,” the old lady said. She had eaten well, if more slowly than the others, and had just started picking at her slice of apple pie.

Lena said to Nyla, who looked more tired and put-upon than usual, “You go sit down now and relax. You helped do the cooking, the least I can do is clean up.”

Lena knew it was no use to tell Mary to relax, but at least Mary was good company, though she was quiet when the men were around.

They discreetly threw Ma’s rolls away. No one had eaten any. They put the left-overs in the ice box except for what Lena said she would take home—a little ham and stuffing for Will’s supper.

The men went into the living room, and Lena heard Nyla’s heavy foot falls on the stairs. She had looked so tired. She was probably going up there to get some sleep. Lena looked up. The vent from the kitchen to the upstairs was open. Maybe it would be warm enough up there, now, for her to get a better sleep than she was used to.