RavenShadow (6 page)

Bird Without a Nest

T
he three of us came around the corner, face to face with my family’s place.

Have you ever been shocked, truly? Beyond a so-to-speak use of that word? Or is your white world too well protected for that?

Our house was burned to the ground.

Nothing was left but pieces of tarpaper, rows of char where walls once were, and little bits of studs sticking up like broken bones.

Where am I going to live?

For a moment, I swear, I smelled burning flesh. In my mind’s eye I saw the blackened bodies of my two sisters, my mother, and Senior, smoldering.

I started to heave—the bile actually started to churn—when a kid’s voice saved me. Mayana’s voice, girlish and sweet! “Bud! Bud!”

She was waving from behind the hood of the half-stripped, rusted-out auto body that resided in Senior’s yard. All four of them were there, kind of shuffling to their feet. I noticed Senior slip a pint-shaped brown bag into one pocket of his baggy pants. When we got close with the wagon, we saw they were eating
supper right off the ground, without even a blanket. They looked ashamed and slinky, like dogs that have been kicked.

“
Washtay
,” says Grandpa, meaning good, like in good to see you. What was good about it nobody knew.

“
Washtay
,” everybody mumbled, including me. My tongue felt like a rock in my mouth.

We piled out of the wagon. Grandpa spoke up. “
He, he, he
, troubles.”
He
meaning regret.

Mom came toward me, drew me to her. I was taller than she was now, so she couldn’t fold me into her breast, but she did her best. “
Washtay, washtay
,” she said.

I couldn’t get any answer out.

Unchee set aside her ill spirits for a while and pitched in. “Time to eat,” she said in Lakota. Although my parents spoke Lakota fluently, and my sisters spoke it well enough, they didn’t like to use it. Our family get-togethers were kind of funny for language. Grandpa and I didn’t speak English more than a few words. Unchee, Senior, and Mom spoke both languages fine, though Unchee sounded like English was a bitter taste in her mouth. My sisters understood Lakota but didn’t speak it much, or didn’t like to. Old-timey stuff, they said impatiently. So my sisters and I communicated kind of hopscotch. I’d speak in Lakota and they’d understand, but they’d answer with gestures, or a few words of English and Lakota mixed. They didn’t take any stock in back-to-the-blanket.

A glance told Unchee that the family’s food was gone, and there was hardly any to begin with. We’d counted on supper with them. Unchee always packed plenty for lunch, though, so she set out the leftovers, jerk meat and dried corn with berries. We polished them off right quick, and I was still hungry. It was as sad a supper as I ever ate.

I didn’t hear much of the conversation. My mind was raging—
Where am I going to live?
However, I pieced together bit by bit what happened to their home.

“Five days ago,” I heard Senior mumble. That was when
the house burned down. “In the middle of the night,” said Angelee, like that was the worst thing about it. “We don’t know why or how,” said Senior. From Mom’s look I knew she did know, and pretty quick I got a clear mental picture—Senior passed out in bed with a cigarette in his hand.

Grandpa gave me a warning look and spoke up himself. “Who has it in for you?”

“I’m sure gonna get whoever done it,” said Senior. He futzed around and scratched at the ground while he said it. It was the performance of a man ashamed.

Nothing was ever admitted nor proven, against Senior or anyone else. I didn’t need any proof.

What kept hurting my eyes was that auto carcass. The four of them were living in that thing. What few of their belongings they’d saved were stashed in the lidless trunk, and they slept inside, or underneath, or nearby, maybe on top, whatever worked. No tipi-dwelling Indian was ever as poor as my family. As Senior explained things to us, his tone was craven and his smile was fawning.

I cast my eyes down and tried to keep my stomach calm. The car said everything. It was the first car anyone in my family ever owned. Had no tires, wheels, fenders, windshield, windows, trunk lid, headlights, taillights, or license, but it was a car. Was once.

I walked off into the evening a bit and hunkered down. Then I walked back, looked Senior in the eye, reached in his shirt pocket, slipped out the pack of Marlboros and took one, and his matches. My first cigarette. I walked away and squatted down again and put my anger into the hard scratch of the match head and the first pull into my lungs. I held the match at arm’s length and watched it burn. The flame died just before it touched my fingers.

I’d been carrying the embers of anger inside me for a while. At Sun Dance earlier that summer, Angelee was sporting a bruise
like a pint-size eggplant around her left eye. “Where did you get that?” I said.

She snuffled and hid her face.

“Tell me Senior didn’t put it there,” I demanded.

She flung a wild look at me and hurried away, sobbing.

I didn’t need to ask if he was sober at the time.

That’s when I started calling him Senior instead of Dad.

I stubbed out the cigarette on the hard, dry ground. I stared at the dry hills all around me. My anger could have set them on fire.

One good thing about anger, it keeps you from knowing how scared you are.

When I walked back to the family, Mom pulled me down beside her, and my heart sank.

“I’m taking Angelee and Mayana to Wambli,” Mom said to me softly.

Her words leapt at my throat.

Wambli was where her family came from, over east toward Rosebud.

“I’m going to Martin to look for work,” said Senior.

I raised my eyes into his, not caring about respect, not feeling any, and wanting him to know it.

“Tomorrow,” said Senior. “We’re all leaving tomorrow.”

Which meant they’d planned to leave without letting us know.

I stood up, unsteady. “Grandpa, I want to go home,” I squeezed out.

He looked at me and his eyes were hard as rocks. Though he was a kind man, he could be hard. “The school will board you,” he said.

Watch out, be good, or the white man will come and take you away!

So that’s how it went. Grandpa and I spent the night under the wagon in case it rained, the last time I would see him for the
longest month of my life. Unchee, Angelee, and Mayana got the wagon bed, Senior and Mom the front and back seat. In the middle of the night I woke up. Probably, until then, I’d never wakened in the middle of the night in my short life. I felt odd, out of sorts, itchy. Little sparks ran up and down my arms, like flicks of electricity. I looked up at the black bottom of the wagon, and suddenly couldn’t stand being penned in.

I rolled out. The sky was brightened by a half-moon, the this-or-that-way moon. The hills around caught the moonlight and held it. The grasses glowed softly, and even the parched earth of August looked gentle, inviting, and beckoning. My legs felt jumpy. I could take off. I knew that. I could take off. There would be spot work on the ranches—it was haying season, and beet harvest time. Maybe I could hook up with someone and do the Indian rodeo circuit, which attracted me. Maybe I could improve my hoop dancing and do the competitions on the powwow circuit. People did make a living that way. My legs were jumping, saying “Go, go, go!”

I turned and looked at the wagon. The women were out of sight behind the sides, and Grandpa was invisible underneath. I looked at the car. Somehow a glance of moonlight hit part of the front seat just so, the driver’s side. My father’s head, upper chest, and arm were caught in the light. The arm was crooked against the steering wheel in a way that looked uncomfortable, and the head propped against the door at an awkward angle. It looked to me like his neck was broken. My lungs and belly felt a breath of fire.

I stood there in the moonlight a long time. Finally I crawled back under the wagon.
Nowhere else to go
.

In the morning, without breakfast, they caught a ride to Wambli. Senior went along, intending to thumb to Martin from there. Martin is a white-man town between the reservations. I told
myself that this time he would really look for ranch work, that he wouldn’t just booze everything away, that he would put together some money, go get my mother and sisters, and make them a family again.

But I knew the real story, past, present, and future. The story of booze doesn’t change.

I didn’t have much time to think about it. “I have something to give you,” Unchee said. She looked at me, and it seemed like she was there with us, not off in her own world. I felt … hopeful.

From underneath the wagon seat she took a long, hide-wrapped something. Grandpa stood to the side and looked on.

Had I not been in a funk, I would have been thrilled. I knew what it was.

Unchee set the package on the seat and unfolded the deer hide. There lay a Pipe bag, elaborately beaded. “Open it,” she said.

Reverently, I took out the Pipe within. The bowl was an L shape of pipestone, which you call catlinite, with four parallel rings carved in the upright part, representing the four directions, and lead inlaid in the rings. The stem was of water birch, decorated with brass tacks, and near the mouth part, tight beadwork with tiny beads. Tied to it with red ribbon was sage. Though the Pipe had the look of something a hundred years old or more, the sage was fresh. I looked at Unchee and thought, You have been changing the sage regularly all these years. Her face was unreadable.

This was the long stem of an important man. If you were going to carry such a Pipe, you need to be working for the people. Correction, if I was going to carry this Pipe, I needed to work for the people.

I touched both stem and bowl gently. The bowl of a Pipe is of stone, and it represents Earth. The stem is wooden, and represents all that grows upon Earth. The Pipe is the center of
the Lakota way, and has been since White Buffalo Woman brought it to us long before the memories of the grandfathers of the oldest men.

Grandpa looked uneasily at Unchee, back at me, back at Unchee. Finally he said, “This Pipe belonged to Unchee’s father. She wants you to have it. When the time comes for you to carry a Pipe, you may carry this one. In the meantime, take care of it.”

No, I was not a Pipe carrier—not old enough. I wanted to be. And I wanted to go on the mountain and get a vision that would guide my life.

I put the bowl and stem in the Pipe bag and wrapped them both in the deer hide.
O yes I will take care of it
. I looked around at the dusty, nowhere town. I made a point of not tearing up.
It is my connection to you, and to being Indian
.

“I have something else to give you,” said Unchee.

I waited respectfully.

“You will not understand yet, but it’s important. From this day take a new last name—Blue Crow.”

I felt conked on the head.

Unchee waited.

“I take the last name Blue Crow,” I said respectfully, but I felt confused.

“So today we enroll you in school as Joseph Blue Crow.”

Right away they took me to the boarding school. It was a Saturday, but we walked through the half-dark corridors, hoping to find someone. A white man with white hair and a sweet face, kind of like that guy Dave in the Wendy’s commercials on TV, he was working in the main office, said he was the principal, Mr. King. (These days employees of the Bureau of Indian Affairs are mostly Indians, but not in 1967.) He asked some questions about who my family was, where I’d been living, and what my schooling was. Unchee had to answer, on account of she had the only
English. Mr. King did a double-take when she said I hadn’t been to school, and a triple-take when she said I didn’t speak any English. She treated him the way she treated all white people, like he was a worm. I didn’t know what it was she had extra special against the whites, not yet I didn’t.

Nevertheless, Mr. King enrolled me, said I could go home for Christmas.
Christmas!
my mind screamed. I couldn’t go that long with seeing Grandpa and Unchee—it was months away. Besides, it wasn’t any holiday of ours. “I’ll come to see you at the half-moon,” said Grandpa to me softly. Mr. King scowled at hearing words in Lakota, though he didn’t know what they meant.

“This is a BIA school,” said Mr. King. “That means it’s free, devoted to helping Indian children make better lives for themselves.” (When Unchee translated that word “children,” she put a little stress on it, underlining the implication.) “We’re not like Red Cloud Indian School,” which was near Pine Ridge, “or St. Francis,” southwest of Rosebud, both run by Jesuits. “Kyle is a U.S. government school and promotes no religion.” He emphasized the last phrase with a smile.

“No religion?” Grandpa asked through Unchee. His tone was surprised.

Unchee and Mr. King back and forthed a little. “No
particular
brand of the Christian religion,” she summarized to Grandpa. She added her opinion. “It’s better to get an education without the white-man religion.”

Grandpa eyed her and said, “Both religious and secular are basically an attempt to nub the red out, so it doesn’t make much difference.”

Silently, I agreed with Grandpa.

Mr. King stood, came around his desk, and stood next to me, sort of like saying we’d talked among ourselves enough. “Everything is going to be fine,” he said. That was the first of a thousand lies. “You’ve made the best decision.”

He put his hand on my shoulder, and I knew I was trapped.
A schoolboy for the first time in my life. Not a student for the first time—my whole life was learning—but a schoolboy. My skin jumped under his touch.

Because Mr. King looked like Dave Thomas, to this day I can’t go into a Wendy’s.

Grandpa and Unchee got an early start home. They’d shared the last of their food with the family, had no money, and would go hungry until they got back to the place on Medicine Root Creek.

We walked outside, the four of us. Kyle didn’t look like much those days, no handsome Little Wound School, no college, not even a Wild Horse Cafe. Kyle was just a few houses, a place to get gas, and two general stores. Except for the school it wouldn’t have been a town at all. The school was a red brick affair, unimportant-looking.