The Bones of Paradise (12 page)

F
all of 1889 Rose got a job in Rushville, Nebraska, which sat below the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. The school gave her a letter saying she was able to perform the duties of a servant. In other words, she swept and cleaned, washed clothes, and sometimes cooked for Crockett, the white man who ran the telegraph office. He slept in the back rooms of the little house in a nest of his own sweat and alcohol and sometimes waste. No matter. Day and night, the chattering key like a trapped ground squirrel could only be escaped through drink, in his case, or by sleeping in a tipi behind the livery stable, in Rose's. The two did not speak. He believed her mute, and he signaled her work with broad hand gestures or shouted single words. For some reason he thought she might be deaf as well.

It was the telegraph that drew her to the job. She studied his stained fingers as he tap-tapped, and then the book beside the key, the one that formed the words. It was a secret he did not want her to have, but she watched and memorized. Practiced at night while he was passed out drunk, the moon spilling a slender column of light on either side of the window cover and knifing across the counter where she sat, learning to tap the code.

Rose had always been drawn to secrets. She was a member of the Turtle Clan and knew their stories, which she would later tell only to the next in line, her daughter. She didn't tell her the “Morse code,” though. After the taps brought the troops against her people, she wouldn't spread its poison. She only wanted to know its power. The next year, 1890, was the summer of the “Ghost Dance,” as the whites called it. Indians on their way to Pine Ridge Reservation passed along the edges of town, and she often met with them, shared food or goods they needed after their long journeys. Word spread across the West, and the Cheyenne and Paiutes, along with her own Lakota, hurried to Pine Ridge. She longed to join them, but her mother sent word by her nephew that Rose was to stay away until she sent for her. Even then, her mother was uncertain about the white men who peered restlessly at the dancers through their glass eyes, some intent on dragging the older girls behind the tipis. Her mother feared for Rose's safety.

The keys never stopped chattering in those months, and as Rose learned the code, she discovered what foolishness the army believed, fed to them by frightened white ranchers and townspeople who feared Indians whenever they saw more than two at a time. In their eyes a family with children became a raid, a potential massacre.

Rose could not enter most of the stores in Rushville if she wished it. She gave drunk Crockett a monthly list of goods and he purchased them for her, giving her the few coins left over as her remaining pay. She knew he cheated her.

By late summer, the number of dancers had doubled, and Big Foot, Short Bull, Kicking Bear, and Sitting Bull's names appeared often in the telegraphs. A man named McLaughlin, Standing Rock agent, called the Ghost Dance “demoralizing, indecent and disgusting” before he'd even witnessed it. The white men wanted her people to become Christians. They called Wovoka the devil, because he predicted the whites and their soldiers would drop dead if the people danced.

Sometimes her nighttime studies left her sluggish for work. Soon Crockett started to empty her pockets and remove her shoes at the end of each day, sometimes force her to lift her skirt and let him pat her blouse in case she was stealing—only his codes, only secrets too small for her pockets, too large for the heavy, stiff shoes with laces he made her wear instead of moccasins, so he could hear her clumping heels on the bare wood floors.

At night, she wore the moccasins her mother had made, beaded with wild roses, and she wove sly as a snake. She opened the wood file drawers and found copies of telegrams starting that summer, from the agent to Fort Niobrara and Fort Robinson to General Miles and from there to the president, congressmen, anyone who would listen, so great was the fear of a half-starved people, broken, in ruin, who only wanted to dance in hope again. The son of God is come, they said, and they danced to hold off the belly hunger, the desire of the spirit so much greater. By fall of 1890, the tone had grown harsher still, demanding the immediate deployment of troops to finish the business on Pine Ridge. She shivered in the night coolness as she read the messages.

She thought of her days in the Indian boarding school, staring out the tall windows at the corner of the cemetery where the small white crosses and short beds of humped soil sat row after row, too close together, and told the story of other Lakota children. She vowed not to be one of those who withered and died there. She pretended to be patient, obedient, and dumb so they would trust her and leave her alone.

Soon more and more troops arrived, their camp crowding her tipi until she had to sign to Crockett for permission to sleep on the office floor. He dared to pinch his nose and point at her bundle to suggest it smelled, and she smiled her not-smart smile and nodded. He shook his head, shrugged, and returned to his room to drink and sleep, despite the chattering key he couldn't keep up with.

It was early October, and she was sweeping the worn wood planks, listening to the code, writing it in her head and deciphering
the words, more news about Sitting Bull, who was an old man with little influence except over his Hunkpapas. Kicking Bear visited him and now the Hunkpapas had joined the Ghost Dance. It seemed possible the army would kill Sitting Bull, and her heart was sick as she tried to think of a way to warn her mother, who still didn't understand about the telegraph, or the newest invention, the telephone, which captured a person's voice and sent it across the land. Rose wondered if the voice would sound the same when it returned from its journey. The whites created tendrils like bindweed that trapped their lives together. She had to do something.

At dusk she watched for her people on their way to the dance and sent a message to her mother, who never replied, which meant Rose was to remain in town. When her cousin finally brought word, Rose asked about Star. “She is young enough to be safe,” her cousin explained. “Your mother says, ‘Too many white men here now. You must not come back yet. I will tell you when it's safe. When the buffalo return, when we are free.'” Rose never heard from her again.

By late fall, the town had doubled and tripled with soldiers, men and women making money from the troops. Photographers from Chadron and Omaha and news reporters from Chicago and New York rode the train to Rushville and came to the telegraph office daily to send their stories home. Much of what they wrote was wrong or made up or both, but there was often a seed of truth Rose could find if she looked carefully enough. Big Foot grew lungsick and Buffalo Bill Cody visited Sitting Bull in late November to convince his old friend to cooperate with the white men and come to the Indian agency to be arrested, but the visit ended with Cody giving up in disgust. The old leader was finally killed during his arrest in the middle of December. More troops poured out of the trains. The stories grew wilder. Rose didn't dare walk outside during the day for fear of being pushed, cursed, spit on. At night the danger was drunken white men seeking a fight, even if it meant an Indian woman.

She realized from the telegrams and the increasing troops that
her people's world had changed too fast, too hard, to make a return. Crockett would send a telegram to Washington, D.C., one day, and mere days later, more trains arrived, hissing and clanging, to disgorge soldiers and guns and horses and provisions. Her people had a few rifles and old muskets, though the army tried to take them, but they had nothing like the big Hotchkiss guns that could kill so many so easily. Her people had little ammunition, too; they couldn't afford to shoot randomly on the chance that a bullet would strike home, no matter how much they prayed. She could see the end before it began. Again and again, she tried to send messages to her mother, begged her to flee.

Rose couldn't bear to think of those last days in December. The troops chased the dancers to Wounded Knee, surrounded them, and when the signal to dance was given, opened fire with rifles and cannons. Afterward the troops patrolled the reservation, preventing a flood of people in search of loved ones, so she waited and heard Star was safe with relatives, but her mother was dead. Later, when she met her sister again, she learned their mother's fate and began to plan her revenge.

The troops left as quickly and smoothly as they'd arrived. By February, Rushville was quiet and the telegraph man drank harder and fumbled through her clothing for stolen items more often. She took to wearing her skinning knife under her blouse and stole a gun from a cowboy passed out in the alley behind the saloon. The gun she wore snug against her chest on a string around her body, spinning away from Crockett before he could find it. As game flees before the hunter who has not prayed and spoken to the animal spirits, men began to avoid her. She could walk day and night across town and no one dared meet her eye. Since she'd found the pistol on the cowboy in the alley, Rose had taken to waiting in the dark outside the saloon. Sometimes she searched and stripped the unconscious men, sometimes she helped them asleep. She chose only what she needed or fancied, and would make a tiny cut on their hand or neck to count coup. Without a coup stick, she amended the ceremony
to the use of her skinning knife and drawing a single drop of blood. Upon waking, the man would guess he had scratched himself when he fell. Rose thought of the old warriors feasting on the liver and heart of a downed enemy to gain his power, but she could not bring herself to even taste the blood. She learned enough from the telegraph to know the enemy was everywhere, the people vanquished.

There was a white woman who came every week to send a telegram that fall and into the winter. By spring she sent a telegram only every two weeks, then once a month. Her name was Dulcinea Bennett, and while Crockett was full of courtesy when he took the message, afterward he would laugh at the garbled words he was too stupid to translate. Rose knew they were code, such a simple one it took her only a few nights to break it. The messages, so full of longing, made her miss her own mother and sister. Soon Rose made a practice of remaining in the room when Dulcinea visited. Pretending to sweep or dust or wash windows, she watched the white woman, and, as if she could feel the eyes on her, Dulcinea began to nod and smile at her when she came and went. Once the white woman dropped a coin and it rolled behind the potbellied stove they used for heat, and Rose used her broom to edge it out and picked it up. Dulcinea gave her a surprised, grateful smile and thanked her when Rose held it out to her. Forgetting Crockett, Rose smiled, too, her eyes catching the other woman's in a quick exchange of understanding despite their differences.

“Back to work!” Crockett yelled with a wave of his hand. “She's mute,” he explained. Dulcinea lowered her head to hide her smile as she placed the coin on the counter as payment for her message.

As she left, the white woman placed her hand on Rose's shoulder and thanked her again. “It's nothing,” Rose murmured with an eye on Crockett, who headed to the back room and his whiskey.

Then one evening in late winter, Dulcinea invited her to tea. Rose followed the woman to the back stairs over the notions store, where there were several rooms to let. Inside the tiny room was
a single bed, a battered wardrobe, a small pine washstand with a chipped white pitcher of water, and a table with two chairs. The white woman turned up the lamp on the table and went about pouring tea. It must have been some time since she had spoken to another because she began to talk about her life and continued until dawn, even weeping once over her sons. They continued to meet, and their unlikely friendship bloomed as they walked quietly through the hills, catching the scent of new grass and wildflowers. They didn't speak a great deal after that initial conversation, merely spent time together.

One evening in late April, the telegrapher finished his meal of eggs, fried potatoes, and bacon and sat at the table with a whiskey bottle and glass, drinking more than usual. After a while he grew talkative. He didn't expect Rose to respond since in his mind she was mute and stupid. Finally, he spoke of last winter and Wounded Knee.

“Needed to clean them out,” he said. “Look at you—” He took a drink. “Inbreeding. No morals to speak of. Can't be taught.” He finished his glass. “Best Indian I ever knew. Can't talk and not too lazy. I'll keep it!” He whooped with laughter and slapped the table with both hands. He gazed at her, and there was a shift in his eyes. Despite her efforts to stay ugly, dirty, to keep temptation from his mind, he took out a small tortoiseshell comb and cleaned the food from his mustache as he did nightly, winked at her, and demanded to know what she was stealing.

Then he swiftly wrapped his arms around her so tightly she could barely breathe and pushed her backward onto the bed, landing on top of her. She couldn't reach her knife or gun while his hands groped and his body pushed the air from her lungs. He had to roll off to unfasten his pants and she was able to slip on top, grab the pillow, and press it over his face, leaning with her entire weight. Much of his fight had been spent getting her on the bed, and his limbs were heavy with drink. She fought off his clawing hands and bucking torso by hooking her feet and hands to the sides of the bed.
When the scratching sound of his breath beneath the pillow quit, and his body shuddered, and then softened again, she lifted it. She had meant to put him to sleep, but was angry and now his hands lay carelessly at his sides, a shred of meat nested in his mustache.

She left him there and went to the front office, determined to find anything that would offer clues or names of the men who'd killed her mother and massacred her people. She found Bennett files listed by individuals and ranches. Drum Bennett wrote short, blunt orders for land and cattle deals, which made him richer over the years, but J. B. Bennett's were coded like Dulcinea's. Some she sent to him from Rushville, but others came from Gordon, Chadron, Cody, Valentine, Ainsworth, towns that sat above the Sand Hills. Hers was a restless spirit, Rose had already concluded, and she did not bother to decipher the code. She did wonder why they thought it necessary to hide their messages. And why Crockett kept them. She never found a message to or from a Lakota.