Winter Count (5 page)

1847 One man alone defended the Hat in a fight with the Crow

1847 White buffalo, Dusk killed it

1847 Daughter of Turtle Head, her clothes caught fire and she was burned up

1847 Three men who were women came

He got up and went to his bag. He took out three stout willow sticks and bound them as a tripod. From its apex he hung a beaded bag of white elk hide with long fringe. The fringe was wrinkled from having been folded against itself in his suit pocket.

1891 Medicine bundles, police tore them open

What did they want from him? A teacher. He taught, he did not write papers. He told the story of people coming up from the Tigris-Euphrates, starting there. Other years he would start in a different place—Olduvai, Afar Valley. Or in Tierra del Fuego with the Onas. He could as easily start in the First World of the Navajo. The point, he told his students, was not this. There was no point. It was a slab of meat. It was a rhythm to dance to. It was a cloak that cut the wind when it blew hard enough to crack your soul.

1859 Ravens froze, fell over

1804 Heavy spring snow. Even the dogs went snow-blind

He slept. In his rumpled suit. In the flat, reflected storm light his face appeared ironed smooth. The wind fell away from the building and he dreamed.

For a moment he was lost. Starlight Room. Tarpon Room. Oak Room. He was due—he thought suddenly of aging, of illness:
when our children, they had strangulations of the throat,
of the cure for
any
illness as he scanned the long program—in the Creole Room. He was due in the Creole Room. Roger Callahan, Nebraska State College: “Winter Counts from the Dakota, the Crow and the Blackfeet: Personal Histories.” Jesus, he thought, why had he come? He had been asked. They had asked.

“Aha, Roger.”

“I’m on time? I got—”

“You come right this way. I want you in front here. Everyone is very excited, very excited, you know. We’re very glad you came. And how is Margaret?”

“Yes—. Margaret died. She died two years ago.”

1837 Straight Calf took six horses from the Crow and gave them to Blue Cloud Woman’s father and took her

1875 White Hair, he was killed in a river by an Omaha man

1943 John Badger Heart killed in an automobile crash

He did not hear the man. He sat. The histories began to cover him over like willows, thick as creek willows, and he reached out to steady himself in the pool of time.

He listened patiently to the other papers. Edward Rice Phillips, Purdue: “The Okipa Ceremony and Mandan Sexual Habits.” The Mandan, he thought, they were all dead. Who would defend them? Renata Morrison, University of Texas: “The Role of Women in Northern Plains Religious Ceremonials.”

1818 Sparrow Woman promised the Sun Dance in winter if the Cree didn’t find us

1872 Comes Out of the Water, she ran off the Assiniboine horses

1904 Moving Gently, his sister hung herself

He tried to listen, but the words fell away like tumbled leaves. Cottonwoods. Winters so bad they would have to cut down cottonwood trees for the horses to eat.
So cold we got water from beaver holes only.
And years when they had to eat the horses.
We killed our ponies and ate them. No buffalo.

Inside the windowless room (he could not remember which floor the elevator had opened on) everyone was seated in long rows. From the first row he could not see anyone. He shifted in his seat and his leather bag fell with a slap against the linoleum floor. How long had he been carrying papers from one place to another like this? He remembered a friend’s poem about a snowy owl dead behind glass in a museum, no more to soar, to hunch and spread his wings and tail and fall silent as moonlight.

1809 Blue feathers found on the ground from unknown birds

1811 Weasel Sits Down came into camp with blue feathers tied in his hair

There was distant applause, like dry brush rattling in the wind.

Years before, defense of theory had concerned him. Not now. “I’ve thrown away everything that is no good,” he told a colleague one summer afternoon on his porch, as though shouting over the roar of a storm. “I can no longer think of anything worse than proving you are right.” He took what was left and he went on from there.

1851 No meat in camp. A man went to look for buffalo and was killed by two Arapaho

1854 The year they dragged the Arapaho’s head through camp

“… and my purpose in aligning these four examples is to clearly demonstrate an irrefutable, or what I consider an irrefutable, relationship: the Arikara never …”

When he was a boy his father had taken him one April morning to watch whooping cranes on estuaries of the Platte, headed for Alberta. The morning was crucial in the unfolding of his own life.

1916 My father drives east for hours in silence. We walk out into a field covered all over with river fog. The cranes, just their legs are visible

His own count would be personal, more personal, as though he were the only one.

1918 Father, shot dead. Argonne forest

The other years came around him now like soft velvet noses of horses touching his arms in the dark.

“… while the Cheyenne, contrary to what Greenwold has had to say on this point but reinforcing what has been stated previously by Gregg and Houston, were more inclined …”

He wished for something to hold, something to touch, to strip leaves barehanded from a chokecherry branch or to hear rain falling on the surface of a lake. In this windowless room he ached.

1833 Stars blowing around like snow. Some fall to the earth

1856 Reaches into the Enemy’s Tipi has a dream and can’t speak

1869 Fire Wagon, it comes

Applause.

He stood up and walked in quiet shoes to the stage. (Once in the middle of class he had stopped to explain his feeling about walking everywhere in silence.) He set his notes on the podium and covered them with his hands. In a clear voice, without apology for his informality or a look at his papers, he unfolded the winter counts of the Sioux warrior Blue Thunder, of the Blackfeet Bad Head, and of the Crow Extends His Paw. He stated that these were personal views of history, sometimes metaphorical, bearing on a larger, tribal history. He spoke of the confusion caused by translators who had tried to force agreement among several winter counts or who mistook mythic time for some other kind of real time. He concluded by urging less contention. “As professional historians, we have too often subordinated one system to another and forgotten all together the individual view, the poetic view, which is as close to the truth as the consensus. Or it can be as distant.”

He felt the necklace of hawk talons pressing against his clavicles under the weight of his shirt.

The applause was respectful, thin, distracted. As he stepped away from the podium he realized it was perhaps foolish to have accepted the invitation. He could no longer make a final point. He had long ago lost touch with the definitive, the awful distance of reason. He wanted to go back to the podium. You can only tell the story as it was given to you, he wanted to say. Do not lie. Do not make it up.

He hesitated for a moment at the edge of the stage. He wished he were back in Nebraska with his students, to warn them: it is too dangerous for everyone to have the same story. The same things do not happen to everyone.

He passed through the murmuring crowd, through a steel fire door, down a hallway, up a flight of stairs, another, and emerged into palms in the lobby.

1823 A man, he was called Fifteen Horses, who was heyoka, a contrary, sacred clown, ran at the Crow backwards, shooting arrows at his own people. The Crow shot him in midair like a quail. He couldn’t fool them

He felt the edge of self-pity, standing before a plate-glass window as wide as the spread of his arms and as tall as his house. He watched the storm that still raged, which he could not hear, which he had not been able to hear, bend trees to breaking, slash the surface of Lake Pontchartrain and raise air boiling over the gulf beyond. “Everything is held together with stories,” he thought. “That is all that is holding us together, stories and compassion.”

He turned quickly from the cold glass and went up in the silent elevator and ordered dinner. When it came, he threw back the drapes and curtains and opened the windows. The storm howled through his room and roared through his head. He breathed the wet air deep into his lungs. In the deepest distance, once, he heard the barking-dog sounds of geese, running like horses before a prairie thunderstorm.

M
Y FATHER GREW UP
in the north of Spain, in a fishing village in Asturias called Cudillero. He moved later to the south of England, then to America. As he grew older he lost his desire to travel alone and asked me to accompany him. We always went to Spain together. I met members of his family who still lived in Asturias and came to know better his relatives in Madrid. I still thought of them as his relatives rather than my own, for they remained distant and unfamiliar to me, even after I met them. They had opposed his marriage to my mother, I understood.

Europe changed for me during those visits. It became somber and melancholic. Or perhaps I only grew older and more serious, and now memory seeks some end of its own. Europe drew me powerfully when I was younger. When I graduated from high school, the product of a rigorous Jesuit education, I was awed by European culture, and impressionable. I went there immediately after graduation with several classmates and did things anyone could have predicted. Not wanting to be taken for an American, I spoke only French. I learned to prefer espresso. I even affected what seemed to me a European habit—tearing, rather than biting, pieces off my dinner roll. For three months I rose each day at dawn and went out, not wanting to miss any part of the day. I walked about nearly overwhelmed by the opportunity before me. I put off going to the bars at night; the sensual experiences I wanted were with the things that had become metaphorical fixtures in my mind. The gardens at Versailles, because of their contrived but soothing order. I wanted to see Assisi, the high Gothic cathedral at Rheims, Bosch’s
Garden of Delights,
and Newton’s rooms at Cambridge.

In that superficial but harmless way of boys of seventeen, I decided that summer that Christopher Wren was not highly enough regarded, that Mann was correct—something evil did lurk in Venice—and that the paintings of the Prado far surpassed those in the Louvre. This all passed in time, though some of these judgments proved to have a certain foundation and were long-lived. On subsequent trips I often visited the Prado. I spent long hours standing among the Rubenses, the Velazquezes and Goyas and Grecos. It is by such early, seemingly inconsequential and innocent passions, of course, that we are formed.

The spring after my father’s death I went to Madrid to close out his affairs, and, as seemed proper, stayed with his relatives. One evening, a dinner guest who had known my father from Cudillero, Eugenio Piera, invited me to visit the Prado where he was a curator. I hesitated to accept, wary of a guided tour, however well intentioned. Museums were places of intense, private feeling for me. But I accepted Piera’s invitation. He was genial; he seemed sincere and kindly disposed. We arranged to meet in his office in the basement of the museum the following day.

The next morning I walked the several miles from the apartment down the Paseo de la Castellana, had coffee and croissants in one of the open cafes, and was glad again I had come in April. The air was cool, the trees in leaf, well-dressed people were walking about. The order, the endurance of Spain, soothed me now.

I met Piera at his office. He put me immediately at ease and I felt a twinge of embarrassment at having vaguely mistaken his warmth for acquisitiveness the day before, as one can do in the wake of death. We spent most of the morning in the galleries of the main floor. He told wonderful, arcane stories about some of the acquisitions, was self-deprecating about the petty jealousies of museum collectors, and tried with anecdotes to make the artists more real and fallible. He made serious points, too, but not in a heavy-handed way.

We ate lunch at a nearby restaurant, Las Puertas. He asked if perhaps on another visit to the museum I had seen a fifteenth-century Flemish tapestry that had once hung in my grandfather’s house in Cudillero. I had not. But of all the members of my father’s family I felt closest to my grandfather, whom I had never met; I was immediately interested.

“How did it come to be in the museum?”

“Your uncle, Ramirez. He got it when your grandfather died. It’s unusual, I think, haunting, more like Bruegel or Bosch. It’s a very good piece.”

The tapestry hung in a storage room. I expected it to have an effect on me right away, but it didn’t. It was large, eighteen feet by twelve, depicting scenes of rustic and courtly life separated slightly from each other by a pattern of tiny, bright flowers.