Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Creative Nonfiction (39 page)

My mother paces the living room. Me and my sisters pray to St. Francis of Assisi.

The following morning, I find my mother sobbing at the dining room table. She’d woken up early to check on Tirzah and found her motionless in the water bowl. The thirsty owl had leaned over the rim and fallen inside. Too weak to climb out, Tirzah drowned.

My uncle digs deep in the backyard cactus garden, grunting white puffs of steam. My mother stands beside him holding a shoebox. Inside it lies the owl, wrapped in a washcloth. The air is still. The sky is pink and orange, the colors of dusk, of dawn. My uncle tosses the shovel aside and it clangs against the cold ground. He and my mother shuffle away, heads down, seeking driftwood or a rock to mark the grave. I stare into the hole, another space I will never fill.

After a few minutes, my uncle returns with a piñon branch. Without a word, my mother lowers the shoebox into the fine red sand. We bury Tirzah among the prickly pear, yucca and chamisa, beside the goat, the peacock and the mallard duck named Hercules.

Diane Glancy

 

DIANE GLANCY
has published many books of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. Her newest collection of poems,
Asylum in the Grasslands
, was published in 2007. She is also the author of
Rooms: New and Selected Poems, In-Between Places
(essays), and
The Dance Partner: Stories of the Ghost Dance.
She was awarded a 2003 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and the 2003 Juniper Poetry Prize from the University of Massachusetts Press for
Primer of the Obsolete
. Her novels include
Stone Heart: The Journey of Sacajawea on the 1804–06 Lewis and Clark Expedition
and
Pushing the Bear: The 1838–39 Cherokee Trail of Tears.
She is currently working on
Pushing the Bear: Resettlement
. Glancy also received an American Book Award, a Minnesota Book Award, the Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry, and the Cherokee Medal of Honor. She is a professor at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota, where she has taught Native American literature and creative writing. She is now on a four-year sabbatical/early retirement program. She holds the visiting Richard Thomas Chair at Kenyon College for 2008–2009. She received her MFA from the University of Iowa.

 

 

She practiced both religions at the same time and at random. Her soul was healthy and at peace, she said, because what she did not find in one faith was there in another.

—
Gabriel García Márquez
,
Of Love and Other Demons

 

It was raining when I left St. Paul on Interstate 35 south for the Sun Dance on the Rosebud Reservation just west of Mission, South Dakota. It’s 523 miles to the particular dance I was going to. There are others. But this one I knew through Mazakute Native American Mission in St. Paul. I went to the Sun Dance last summer, and wanted to go again to find some words to put it in perspective. To understand more than my own way. To understand why I wanted to return to a ceremony that was not in my culture.

Two hours later, at Interstate 90 in southern Minnesota, I turned west. Another four hours, and I stopped at the lookout above the Missouri River nearly halfway across South Dakota. There isn’t much between the low sky and the prairie, except the Missouri River which cuts into the land. The river is green in its valley. Like one of those nineteenth-century landscapes. If you don’t look at the bridge. And the traffic.

I read a plaque.

 

Lewis & Clark / 1804 / ate plums & acorns from the burr oaks / killed a buffalo & magpie / dried equipment / repacked boats / camped again 1806 on the return trip.

 

I felt the raised letters on the plaque with my hand as if they were the low hills. I ran my finger between them as if my finger were the river. I thought of the site of the Mandan village farther north on the Missouri, where another plaque says the whole tribe was wiped out by smallpox.

A few hours later, I exited Interstate 90 at Murdo. I took Highway 83 south for the last sixty-three miles of the trip. At the junction of Highway 18, I turned west a short distance, then south again at a sign that says
Mission
. Later I turned onto Highway 1, with the
1
on an arrowhead. Somewhere, after one turn or another, the road to Mission goes east and the open land of the Rosebud Reservation is west. The highway descended into a sharp valley, curved around a gas station and convenience store, and a few buildings of Sinte Gleska College, then climbed the hill. No name of the town. No names on streets. Nothing to let you know where you are. At the top of the hill, I turned south again at a sign marked
St. Francis
. Somehow the roads shift and boundaries are not remembered once you passed.

My ears popped and the land seemed high under the sky. I saw a butte to the west and the gray trail of the highway up and down across the land to the south. And it rained. I watched the cattle grazing through the nodding wipers. I passed the Rosebud Timber Reserve, a few clumps of pastel reservation houses, some with satellite dishes, and a trail of smoke from the garbage burn.

In St. Francis, I found the water tower road and turned west on BIA 105. It was about seven miles to the ridge where the Sun Dance is held. Soon I saw the large camp of tents and teepees. I left the road and drove through the rutted field toward the north section where I found people I knew from St. Paul.

The field is on a ridge high above a valley filled with pines. It’s pasture except for the third week in July when it’s used for the Sun Dance. I passed the vans and trucks and cars, the teepees and tents, the Coleman stoves and campfires. Children ran everywhere and groups of people sat by their tents. It stopped raining and the smell of cedar and sage and cooking fires filled the air.

In the center of the camp is the Sun Dance arena, which looked like an old brush-arbor church-camp meeting in Oklahoma. But this was the Sun Dance and I was going to see it on its own terms.

In the middle of the Sun Dance arena is the cottonwood tree that had been cut and carried into the circle and placed upright again. The cottonwood because it holds water. Its branches were tied up with ropes, and prayer ties or tobacco ties hung from the tree. Black for West. Red for North. Yellow for East. White for South. Green for Earth. Blue for Sky.

It was evening and everyone was resting. After the nine-hour trip from St. Paul by myself, I pulled a borrowed tent from my car and unfolded it. Others helped me set it up.

In the dark, I moved my sleeping bag several places on the hard, uneven ground inside the tent.

I slept, and at 4:30 I heard the wake-up song on the loud speaker. There was no reason to get up. I was an observer. I knew the sun dancers were on their way to the sweat lodges for purification. When I heard the drums, I knew they began in the first light, in their long skirts and bare chests, moving inside the circle of the arena around the cottonwood, singing the Sun Dance songs and blowing their eagle-bone whistles. The women danced in a larger circle around the men.

Soon I got up and walked to the brush arbor, which surrounded both circles of dancers and the tree.

Others watched as the piercing began. A man who had danced and prayed and was in the right frame of mind lay on the buffalo robe by the tree in the center of the circle. Two elk bone skewers were pushed under the skin on his chest. He stood connected to the tree with two small ropes and joined his group of supporters in the circle that surrounded the tree for however many rounds he chose. Then he pulled back on the ropes until the skewers broke free and he was released.

Men are not suspended from a pole, nor do they stare at the sun until they’re blind. The Sun Dance is a commitment, more a way of life than a religion. It’s keeping a promise. Doing what you say you’re going to do. It’s a prayer service to the Great Spirit. An intercession for relatives in need. It’s humility and respect and supplication. It’s a strengthening ceremony. A thanksgiving.

There were testimonies between rounds. And the humor of the announcer mixed with the endurance, the suffering, the seriousness. Over and over, the announcer said to pray for the dancers who were having a difficult time in their fight against heat, thirst, hunger, and tiredness.

There was an assortment of people from several states at the Sun Dance. The Indians are mainly Lakota and Dakota. They open their ceremony to others. There were many white people. Some come from Europe. One family was from Australia. I don’t know numbers. Maybe there were four hundred. Probably more. Cars came and went each day.

It was an old ceremony of death and resurrection. A connection to the tree. A release.

The Sun Dance continued all day until about 6:00. Then the dancers sat once more in the sweat lodge and returned to their tents or teepees. They cannot eat or drink water.

There are those who are pierced. There are those who just dance. There are those who watch. I stood in the brush arbor that circled the dance arena. For the second year, I forgot a lawn chair. I watched. Prayed. Thought of my own needs and others. Danced in place. Raised my hands to the tree like the dancers and the other watchers. Sometimes I walked back to the tent. I made tobacco prayer ties that someone would hang on the tree. I was not part of the Sun Dance and could not enter the arena.

There are many rules.

For lunch I ate peanut butter on crackers, remembering somehow the burr oak acorns and magpies from the Missouri River plaque. I drank warm water out of a plastic bottle. You carry your water and food in with you. Whatever you need. I was reminded of church camp in Oklahoma when I had to put on my socks over dirty feet and felt the dust between my toes. There’s an outhouse but no bath or shower. You camp in an open field under the sun on a ridge above the valleys of dark pines maybe 150 or 200 miles southeast of the Black Hills. By midafternoon the heat was unbearable inside the tent. The only shade was in the arbor where sometimes a warm breeze moved the prayer ties on the tree.

That night I drove into Mission to hear an Indian leader. He began with a story about a minister who led his congregation in a hymn from the church, only he was walking backward as he led them, and at the edge of the churchyard he fell into a newly dug grave and couldn’t get out, his head appearing and disappearing as he jumped. Finally they pulled him out, and he had that white soil even in his eyebrows. The Indian leader used the laughter to enter the hardship of living, the meanness of reservation border towns. When you pray for us, he said, pray for alcoholism, aids, drugs, diabetes, joblessness, poverty.

I started back to the Sun Dance ground around 9:30. The sun had gone down and the sky was like a piece of blue tissue paper. Some thought or memory was wrapped in it. The land was dark and wavy beneath the sky. There was one star up there, and the telephone poles were crosses on the hills.

I thought it was about thirty miles back from Mission. I knew it was a long way and I felt unsure. It was hard to see the road in the dark. There was just the prairie and the sky and the centerline on the road and watching the shoulders for deer.

Sometimes, far off in the distance, I saw a few lights on the horizon. I thought it must be St. Francis, but the lights didn’t seem in the right direction. The road wasn’t headed toward them. I passed a lone building with a yard light. A school-bus parked in a yard. And where were the stars? The sky in the west still had not turned out its light. Maybe it was too early for them.

Yes, the few lights I saw were St. Francis. The highway finally curved toward them. On the water tower road, right after the post office, I turned west. I wondered if I could see the camp off
BIA
501 in the dark. I wondered if I would know when seven miles went by. There was a car behind me and I didn’t want to go too slow. But soon I saw car lights coming through a field. I knew the turnoff was just ahead. I signaled, and the car behind me also turned, its headlights on bright.

As I looked from my tent that night, I saw the stars. A sky full of them. I went to sleep on the lumpy ground.

At 4:30 this morning, I got up. I wasn’t comfortable. I wanted to leave. I was into something I didn’t belong in. A Sun Dance in the Lakota-Dakota tradition. I was in a magnetic field and I felt repelled. But I have felt outside of every tradition I’ve been in. The Methodist church as a child because I couldn’t figure out all the trouble of going to church. What did they preach other than the brotherhood of man and a sense of community? I needed more than that.

I needed salvation to help me out of the hurt and isolation and darkness I felt. The hardship of my own life. The years I’d worked. The invisibility I felt. The reservation border town that writing seemed to be. The weight of years pulling my children through the pitfalls. My daughter in college and law school calling saying she didn’t know if she could do it, just think of the student loans she’ll be buried under for years.

I had also attended the Presbyterian church through the years, which seemed to me like the Methodist. And later, the fundamentalist church I went to was opposed to the arts and a life of the imagination. Sometimes I attended the Episcopal church.

There was no belonging here either. I was from not the north but a shadow of a place where I used to live, but I wasn’t from there either. I was born long ago, to parents of different heritages. I’d lived several places and none of them is where I’m from.

I felt marginalization from both my white and Indian heritages. I was neither of both. Both of neither. My great-grandfather was a full-blood Cherokee born near Sallisaw in Indian Territory in 1843. His parents got there somehow. The only way was the Trail of Tears from the southeast. My mother’s people of European descent farmed in Kansas.