Ghost Dance (21 page)

“Primitive man was better,” he said out loud.

I looked at my grandfather and saw the imprint of a young girl’s patent-leather shoe emblazoned on his chest.

Fletcher was already asleep. I put my head on mv grandfather’s lap, closed mv eves, and listened to the droning of the rain on the windshield as we pulled away.

My grandfather turned around for one last glimpse of the fair.

In 1939, FDR opened the fair in New York as a symbol of peace. But nothing, of course, could stop w hat had already begun to happen, and before even one season was over, world war was declared and the lights in many foreign pavilions went out.

The World of Tomorrow was the fair’s theme and, standing there on opening day, the sixty thousand who gathered to hear the president must still ha\e been filled w ith dreams w hen thinking about the future.

But they could hardly have imagined w hat tomorrow would bring.

My grandfather turned his back on the lights finally and shook his head with the tremendous sorrow of someone w ho has been betrayed at the core. I watched him as he closed his eyes and extinguished, one by one, every beautiful light in the fair. I le patted my head, “everything’s going to be all right,” he whispered, but his voice cracked. And with those words on that April night, suddenly gone dark, in 1964, he began his journey back through time, to a simpler place, where he would live the last years of his life.

Falling Water, the holy man, spoke slowly and with difficulty in the bright light. The young man who listened felt a terrible yearning as he attempted to stop the fall of those words. “Falling Water,” he said, “why must this be?”

“I see the circle being broken. I see the sacred hoop pulled apart,” Falling Water said. “I see the white man everywhere I look.

“They kill everyone—our women and children, too. They give us a magic water to drink that makes us crazy

“I see caravans of them moving across our land and making us sick with their diseases and taking away our homes.”

“Say this will not happen,” the young man cried. “Say you have made a mistake.”

Falling Water shook his head. “They will put us into camps.”

“We will fight them,” the young man said. “We will fight them forever—our best warriors.”

“We will die in the snow,” Falling Water whispered.

“No,” the young man said.

“Great roads like rivers will pass across the landscape and they will build roads in the sky as well. They will talk to each other from great distances through cobwebs.

“I have seen many wars,” he said. “White men in gray coats and white men in blue coats will kill each other. And a terrible war will be fought under a black and red symbol of the rising sun.” Falling Water looked straight ahead. He did not flinch; he did not look away.

“I see one last thing.”

“No, Falling Water, say that is all.”

“It is said by the Great Spirit that if a gourd of ashes is dropped upon the earth, then the most hideous of all events will occur. I have seen the gourd suspended in the blue sky, tilted, about to spill over. I was once the eyes of my people. But now I can see nothing beyond that great gourd.

“I am old and tired. This was once my home. But now I go to a different place, far south, into the grandfathers’ country, where I will leave my good breath. Do not forget what I have told you.”

Fletcher became, as he grew up, our ambassador from the outside world, and he traveled a long way back into the shadows to bring us news. Mother would listen for hours, asking endless questions, engrossed, it seemed, in the details of residential zoning or a new mash being fed farm animals or the latest dance steps or the infant mortality rate in the inner city. She watched him like a tourist, trying to hold onto the dizzying ride of another language, breathless, her eyes wide. I imagine that my face looked the same. We both held on tightly to Fletcher’s stories, held on for life.

Father never shared the outside world with us. I imagine he walked through the world of stocks and bonds painfully. He was so vague when it came to his workday that I often wondered whether he really went to a job at all. I could never visualize him there. He could not possibly have chatted with other people on the train or had drinks at lunch with his fellow stockbrokers. Perhaps he did what he did at home—drew endless lines on graph paper alone in a dark room with the radio playing. He never spoke of his office or what he did there. That world must have seemed nonexistent, unreal, when he walked in the door at the end of the day and saw my mother. Everything next to her must have been pale to him, unmentionable.

But, like some foreign correspondent, Fletcher reported everything to us. He lingered on every detail and we would drift in and out of his wonderful stories and their implicit message; everything he said indicated it: the truth was something you could get at. The pursuit of it was a noble ambition. The world was a good enough place to live. Anything was possible.

Yes, anything might be possible, we thought—with hard work, with faith like Fletcher’s, with love. Rivers could be cleaned up. Whales might survive. Children might sleep in warm beds having eaten a decent meal. Each house, every apartment in New York might have a warm glow. The children of Vietnam might walk straight and live. Shrapnel would be dug from their legs and they might get up and run. It did not seem so impossible.

Yes, I thought, looking at his face. The smallest efforts made out of love every day mattered. Fletcher was proof of it. He spoke softly and slowly. I listened carefully. He was the crystal in a brooding, murky family. He was my clearing in the woods, my friend, my great friend.

“Talk to me, Vanessa,” he would say, even w hen he was busy designing banners, looking up addresses in the phone book. “Come on,” he’d say. He would not allow me to become completely like Mom and Dad. We would talk. We would not lose each other.

My tenacious brother.

“How beautiful the birds must sound to one another,” he said, taking a deep breath one afternoon as we walked by the lake. What a lovely day it was. I looked out onto the shining water where it seemed to me that the flat bodies of lily pads or angels floated, giving off their pale light. Fletcher looked out, too. “Vanessa,” he said, shaking his head.

“What is it?” I asked, but he was already knee-deep in water, spouting blue and gold and green: my marble boy, my fountain of light.

“Hey, come here,” he shouted, and in his hands he held something that glittered; his whole body seemed to glow.

They were fish. Hundreds of them floating on the calm surface. “Sewage overflow,” he said. “That’s what’s killing them.” He piled them into my arms. “Hold these,” he said. He filled his arms, too, his jacket, his pockets. “Let’s go,” he said.

“Where?” I asked, though I should have known.

We carried those fish through the center of tow n and over to the mayor’s office. People joined us along the way. “Come,” he said, “come on, everyone. Look what’s happening,” he shouted through the fish stench of death.

My dramatic brother.

“This is our fault,” he said to those who looked on. The rotting, open-eyed fish clung to my body, changing me, the shape of my arms, making me understand: it was my fault, too.

“This is what we’re up against,” he said, coming into my bedroom late one night when he could not sleep and showing me what I could not help but see ahead of time in his eyes: a fox, a bear, a dog, a raccoon, their legs in steel-jawed traps. Some of them had died there finally. Others had gnawed off their own legs to get free. He made me look at every picture.

“This can be stopped,” he said. That he believed so fervently that it could be stopped prevented him from being consumed with rage. “It will stop because it must,” he whispered. My just brother—my restless brother.

Each day Fletcher lived life with the strange urgency of someone about to leave it forever. It should have exhausted him, but he seemed only to grow stronger. My diligent, my hard-working brother—he never rested.

If college gives you direction and confidence, then Fletcher did not need it. If it keeps you sealed off from the rest of the world, then he did not want it. And when he looked into colleges he could not find one he might be interested in that did not own stock in South Africa.

Fletcher finished high school in three years and so he and I graduated together. I chose to go to my mother’s college, and Fletcher that year moved into a special residence, not far from the house, where he worked with the emotionally disturbed who had been released from a nearby institution.

“I am more happy here than I can say,” he wrote to me that fall at college. These are the words I love to hear—my loving brother, my patient, happy brother.

“The soul,” my grandfather said, and we smiled, hoping that soon we’d be standing on chairs up near the ceiling. “The soul,” he whispered. “To help make the soul pure and the body, too, the Indians have something that they call the sweat lodge ritual. Heat and steam are made by sprinkling water on huge white-hot rocks.

“They laughed when I went into one for the first time and told me stories of other white men who had stopped the ritual by standing up and tearing off the top of the lodge or by running away because of the heat.

“‘Now don’t run away on us, little white man,’ Two Bears laughed.

“Even before the water is sprinkled on the rocks it’s so hot in there. It’s impossible to lean back without burning yourself. Even as the first rock was put in, I was sweating a lot. Imagine being in there with thirty or forty of these enormous rocks.

“‘Sit by the door, little white man,’ Lone Star said, ‘so you can get out in a hurry if you have to.’ The other Indians, sitting straight up with their eyes closed, chuckled.

“‘Too hot,’ Running Antelope said, water flowing from his body as the rocks were handed in.

“Once the door is flapped closed, everything is dark except the light that comes from the rocks. I sat there with them, sweating, and they took me into their prayers. The sacred person prayed to the spirits of people who had died, of animals, of birds, calling everyone Tunkasila, Grandfather. He prayed for his people, for his family, for health, and for important decisions that had to be made with President Nixon. And he prayed for me—that I might go back home and speak the truth about what I had seen and done. ‘Help the man who sits with us holding in his heart the whole burden of his race,’ they chanted.

“We sang many songs,” my grandfather said. “I grew large like an Indian in the steam. I sang out my sadness. Then Running Antelope sang—then Two Bears.” Help the little white man, they chanted, through the unbearable heat.

Fletcher once thought he might rescue my mother from that vast country that she wandered through if he learned how to predict the weather. He did not know that, even then, years before he was grown, it was already too late.

The day the thermometer and barometer came, wrapped in brown paper from Dayton, Ohio, Fletcher stared at the package a long time, not opening it, not touching it, just staring. It seemed unlikely to me that this small brown package could change the course of mv mother’s life, but Fletcher was convinced that, with some personal knowledge of the weather, life would be more reliable, the element of surprise would diminish, plans could be made.

He’s not made for this weather. A man like that sweats through his clothes in summer in less than an hour or two. His heart strains in his chest. It’s too much.

He is bent over a counter in his small shop. He sweats. The large slow fan hanging from the ceiling is not enough. He is clumsy in such a confining space.

A man his size in New York is always doomed to be uncomfortable—small theaters, small restaurants, narrow streets, subways. It’s a city of few Checker cabs, few Madison Square Gardens.

I dream that his thick fingers would know just how to touch me and that he would enter me skillfully. He is someone who is well aware of the texture and shape of muscle, the placement of bones, the flesh that surrounds them, the body’s cavities. He holds the entire body of a deer in his arms, draining the blood. He knows just where to cut, just where to hold. He turns deer into venison, pig into pork, cow to beef. He cuts his brothers into pieces in order to live.

Blood covers his apron. His arms to the elbow are smeared with it. He’s a little shy, but so capable, so handsome. His hair is short, much shorter than is the style of the time—anything to keep cool. He washes before coming to the front room of the shop, but under his nails I can see the browning blood still. He wipes his brow. He can’t go on. It’s too much.

A man as hot as that gives in easily. All you would have to do is brush against his hand when paying for veal or sweetbreads—or whisper to him, “how much,” or “I need two pounds, please.” Let him watch you wipe sweat from your own brow, show him your shoulder, or rub the calf of your leg. Call him by name: say, “Thank you, Jack.” Invite him to your apartment just down the street—so close by, surely he’ll come. He’ll stoop at the doorway. He’ll wipe his face on his sleeve.

My mother always looked exhausted to me. Some nights I massaged her neck for a long time just to watch those great lids of hers lower for a while. Other nights she would come to me in my bedroom, brush and hairpins in hand, and say, “Vanessa, darling, would you make me a hairdo?” It was strange to hear the word
hairdo
coming from my mother’s mouth. It sticks in my mind—her saying hairdo, me dividing the hair on the sides of her head into three equal parts, braiding them and tying them on the top of her head. I can’t decide now whether her hair felt heavy or light in my hands. It was wonderful hair, though, coarse and golden. It stayed exactly where I arranged it; I remember it perfectly. “Oh, another one, please,” she would always say after I had finished one and she had admired it in the mirror for a long time. “It feels so good,” she would say. My mother loved to feel my hands running through her hair, and I loved to see her relax there with me for a moment.

Her smile, her whole body wavers. Her eyes seem about to go out, to extinguish themselves. She looks from person to person. “You’re exquisite!” she gasps, looking at a woman only a few years older than I am. “You’re lovely,” she whispers. She laughs her high laugh and tosses her head back confidently.