Authors: Win Blevins
Stone Song
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A Novel of the Life of Crazy Horse
Win Blevins
mitakuye oyasin
Look at the real reality
beneath the sham realities of things.
Look through the eye in your heart.
That’s the meaning of Indian religion.
—
LEONARD CROW DOG
Nothing lives long
,
Nothing lives long
,
Nothing lives long
,
Except the sky and the mountains
.
—
THE DEATH SONG OF WHITE ANTELOPE
PART ONE
SEEKING A VISION
A sundance ground:
It is twilight
.
The dance ground has not been used in years
.
The shade branches of the arbor are brown
.
Dead pine needles lie in the dust
.
The sundance pole in the center is gone
,
the gaudy prayer flags gone
.
The circle of prayer sticks is gone
.
This place is empty, physically
,
except for you, and me, and others
standing under the skeleton arbor
perhaps in hopes of…
Is that the whisper
of ghost moccasins against the earth?
The darkness deepens a little, plush
.
The evening star glimmers
.
From somewhere beyond the horizon
,
or beyond all direction
,
or within the earth
,
to the ear of the mind and spirit
come once more pulses and throbs, supplications
,
the drums and songs of the sacred dance
.
Where the sundance pole once was
suddenly comes a shift in the air
,
a flux, a breath, a whirl of dust
.
To the eye of the heart only appears…
the shape of a man
.
He stands at middling height
,
in his thirties
,
boyish in his slimness
.
Except for a deer-hide breechcloth
he is naked
.
His face is daubed with white paint
,
like hailstones
.
He may be an Indian
,
but his skin is not dark
,
and his hair, falling to his hips
,
is the brown of river sand
.
He is not ordinary:
See his assured carriage
,
the look of aliveness in his eyes
,
the unnaturally bright colors
of his body and paint, and
,
when he moves
,
the illusion of looking
through him
into eternity
.
He fixes us with his eyes
,
commands our attention with his gaze
.
At this moment the drum starts thumping
,
the open, hollow pong
of a wooden drum
,
slow, hypnotic, insistent
,
a seducer of spirit
.
The man slaps the ground hard
,
once, in a ritual manner
.
The drum punctuates the slap
.
He begins to speak
in a voice clear but soft
.
We must listen attentively
to hear his words:
Tasunke Witko tanagi he miye,
malakota, na Hunkpatila Oglala.
Though he speaks in his language, Lakota
,
somehow we understand what he says:
“I am the spirit of His Crazy Horse
,
from the Hunkpatila Oglala of the Titunwan Lakota
.
I look
,
and I tell you truly what I see.”
The drum throbs
.
The spirit disappears
.
Light blazes
,
as though the world is being born, or ending
,
and the sun is rising at sunset
.
Where a shadowed sundance ground lay unused
now stands a village of buffalo-hide tipis
.
The air is filled with
the smoke of campfires
,
the babble of children
,
and the yaps of dogs
.
A youth approaches one lodge
,
lifts a door flap
,
and enters
.
HAWK
Hawk was restless in the youth’s chest. She turned and turned, uneasy on her perch. Sometimes she beat her wings against his ribs. He was afraid she would lunge against his chest wall and scream.
He couldn’t tell anyone.
He had to talk.
He looked around the shadowed lodge desperately. His home where he never felt at home. The robes where his father and two mothers slept at the back. His father’s willow backrest. Weapons hanging from the lodge poles, women’s things hanging from other poles. Beside the lodge skirt, parfleches with the family’s belongings. On one side the robes where he and his brother slept. Opposite, his grandmother sitting on the robes that made a bed for her and his sister, Kettle. A home, but not his home.
Hawk stirred.
He had to talk.
“My Grandmother,” the youth Curly said, “Unci,” in his language. “Unci, will you come sit with me?”
She didn’t respond. She never did. She hadn’t spoken for ten winters, or responded in any way to words. She acted deaf and dumb. But he thought she knew things.
Light Curly Hair walked sunwise around the center fire to the side of the tipi where she always sat on her robes, staring into the shadows. He sat next to her and thought he heard her sigh. Though she didn’t speak or act as if she knew anyone else was there, sometimes he thought the way she moved showed some awareness. And she was not feeble. If you called her name, Plum, or addressed her as Unci, she didn’t respond. But if you gave her a spoon, she would stir the stew. If you gave her the knife, she could cut up a rabbit. She could get up and go outside to relieve herself.
He thought maybe he was crazy. Was he going to talk to someone who couldn’t hear or speak? Except he thought she could hear and could speak but chose not to.
He scooted directly in front of her, took one of her bony hands between his hands, and held it. He studied her eyes, which were blank.
She will never tell my secrets
.
“Unci?”
Now, because of another dying person, he had to talk. He had seen them moving Bear-Scattering-His-Enemies this morning. Curly’s brother by choice, Buffalo Hump, his
hunka
, was helping. Curly had squatted and looked between Hump’s legs and seen the chief. And smelled him. Bear-Scattering was rotting.
Whenever Curly saw death,
she
came back to him from ten winters ago, his blood mother, Rattling Blanket Woman. That death had silenced his grandmother, and perhaps destroyed her mind. Grandmother Plum and Curly had walked into the lodge and found his mother, Grandmother Plum’s daughter, hanging from a lodge pole by a rope around her neck.
Grandmother Plum had screamed, a terrible outburst full of all the evils of the black road of this world. At its loudest she cut off the scream so violently she seemed to choke on it, as though a great hand had seized her throat and was strangling her. Somehow the silence was louder and more awful than the scream. She had never spoken since. She didn’t lose her voice and her mind, not in Curly’s opinion. She threw her voice away. And maybe her mind was still there, in the shadows.
He held his father responsible for that suspended body.
Was he a fool to talk to Grandmother Plum? He shook his head, uncertain. She held her eyes blankly toward the shadows. There was no one else to talk to.
She will never tell my secrets
.
It was time to force himself to speak. He sat there and held her hand and breathed the air she was breathing and tried out different beginnings in his mind. There was no way but to blurt it out. “Sometimes I feel a bird in my chest. Beating her wings.”
He looked hard at her face. Maybe now she would laugh at him, or her eyes would mock him. Her lips didn’t move, though, and her face was as blank as ever.
He plunged on, like a fallen tree being washed downriver by a rushing current. “Ever since I can remember, since I was a small child, I’ve felt it. Most of the time things are quiet. When things are hard, and I get scared, I feel it. A bird in my heart. A red-tailed hawk, female, I think, beating her wings.” The female was normally bigger.
No response. He imagined a glimmer in his grandmother’s eyes, but her face was shadowed.
“Hawk gets jumpy sometimes. Sometimes … When people make demands of me, she’s like one of those eagles the Sahiyela men trap and raise. They keep the legs tethered to perches, so the eagles lunge against the tethers, shrieking, and lunge again and again. Sometimes Hawk lunges and shrieks until I can’t stand it.”
He just sat there for a moment. “Unci, does everyone have that feeling?”
He didn’t know what answer he wanted. Maybe he was ordinary, which he didn’t like. Or maybe he was very strange.
Surely he was strange. He never forgot for a moment how conspicuous he looked. Not only did he have light skin, but his long hair was the tawny
color of sand. In his people’s dances, with their blue-black hair and earth-dark flesh, he stood out like a candle flame in darkness. He avoided dances.
They called him Light Curly Hair, a name he didn’t like. He heard the whispers: Somewhere in his family, maybe, they said, was
wasicu
(white-man) blood. Not only the
wasicu
on the Holy Road noticed his hair and pointed at him rudely and said he must be part
wasicu
. His own people did, too.
He never answered in any way. Never. But the whispers made him angry. He would say to himself,
My father is the Oglala called Tasunke Witko, His Crazy Horse, a name revered among the Lakota. He is the son of a father also called His Crazy Horse, later known as Makes the Song. My blood mother bore the honored name Rattling Blanket Woman, because she could make her blanket crackle and pop when she danced. She was the daughter of Lone Horn, one of a line of chiefs, all named Lone Horn, of the Mniconjou band. My uncles are honored warriors and leaders. I am utterly Lakota
.
In camp he wore his light hair braided. On the warpath, where they gave him only boys’ duties, he let it flow free. It hung not to his heart, where most Lakota men cut their hair, but to his waist. The sun made it gleam like brass. In the village he felt ill at ease. On the warpath Hawk was always calm in his chest.
He repeated the question softly, more to himself than Grandmother Plum: “Does everyone have this feeling in the chest?”
Grandmother Plum seemed to be looking off into the past.
He said loudly in his mind,
I am confused. I don’t know whether to feel proud or fortunate or peculiar. I only know that in my spirit I am Hawk. I feel fully at ease alone, and only in solitude. With Hawk
.
Now he looked into Grandmother Plum’s face again. He wanted to provoke her into speech. So he asked the other big question: “Unci, shall I cry for a vision?”
Nearly sixteen winters old, he was powerless. He had no wing feathers of the war eagle, or tail feathers, no whole wing to be used in prayer. He had no coups, no vision, no power. When he let himself think of that, shame blotched his spirit like boils.
Out of his shame and weakness he had been thinking of going onto the mountain to cry for a vision, to enact the great rite
hanbleceyapi
.
From early boyhood he had been taught that seeing beyond, into the spirit world, is a man’s medicine, his personal power.
But he had not gone to an older man for counsel about this crying for a vision. He was afraid the counselor would say he was too strange, too peculiar. The refusal would humiliate him.
“Unci, shall I cry for a vision?” Crying to see beyond had been on his
mind all summer. His friends and comrades and rivals were doing it. Both the twins from the Bad Face band had sought visions this summer, and found them. He had been waiting for … he didn’t know what.
No answer.
Now Hawk turned in his chest. He felt a faint flutter of her wings against his ribs.
All right
, he told Hawk silently.
Wait. I will take care of you in a moment
.
He looked at Grandmother Plum. Her face was unreadable, blank as a dried-up mud puddle.
He hadn’t solved anything. She wouldn’t speak. He knew that when he came here. But talking to her had soothed his hurt.
He got up, put her hand back in her lap. “
Ake wancinyankin ktelo
.” Until I see you again. The Lakota did not say good-bye, like the
wasicu
, unless they meant good-bye forever.
He had no answers. Maybe no one could give him any answers. Maybe his way was to find all answers by himself, alone. A hard way.
He lifted the door flap and looked back and said softly, “Thank you, Unci.”
He kicked his pinto away from camp, along the river bluffs.
Often riding alone calmed him, and Hawk.
He had nowhere special in mind, just a ride. He didn’t pay any attention to the river or the bluffs, but he did notice the old eagle pit, a little way up the hill. It was a
wakan
place, one of holy power, that cavity in the ground where dedicated men trapped eagles to earn some of the power of this all-seeing bird, closest of all creatures to Wakan Tanka, his people’s word for Spirit, Power, Mystery. He had sneaked out there a couple of times and lain in the pit, his senses alert to the spoor of Spirit, trying to see and feel and hold the power.
His father, a holy man, had talked to him about the
cante ista
, the single eye that is the heart. It meant, said his father, the whole and true way the heart sees and comprehends. This stood in contrast to the way the two physical eyes worked, a double seeing, the sight of the mind and not the spirit, and often false. The eyes of the head saw only horses and magpies, said his father, while the single eye of the heart saw Horse and Magpie.
When he had lain in the pit trying to see with the
cante ista
, little had come to him. He was only a boy then and had no power. He still didn’t.
He ought to have power. His people needed his help. Bear-Scattering’s
wounding and dying were just a symptom. Everything was askew—this whole time on earth, his time for being alive, was aberrant.
Three years ago the Lakota had signed a big treaty, which had brought many obligations, no rewards, and starvation.
Now new troubles. The Oglala and the Sicangu had gone to Fort Laramie in late summer to get their annuities, the beef and cloth and other goods the government had promised them for signing the peace paper. They were hungry. For five winters now buffalo had been scarce. In the winter camps some people actually had starved to death. They needed those rations desperately. But the goods were late, and the people were sick of waiting.
While they waited, a Mormon cow wobbled right into the village of the Sicangu, their brother Lakota band. Seeing that the beast was about to die anyway, a visiting Mniconjou killed it for food. The people worried that the soldiers might make a fuss, but they couldn’t speak unkindly to one of their guests.
The soldiers made more than a fuss. They refused to accept the payment the Sicangu offered for the cow. They damn well would arrest the culprit, they said.
They didn’t know what they asked. The Sicangu’s obligations to a guest were sacrosanct. Besides, every Lakota knew what was done to a captured enemy. They weren’t about to turn over one of their own cousins to be tortured and killed. Or jailed, which was worse. All because of a cow that was already dying when he shot it.
So the soldiers came blustering among the lodges, led by the loud, arrogant Lieutenant Grattan. The Sicangu chief, Bear-Scattering-His-Enemies, was the one who had supported the treaty so strongly that he was named the big chief by the
wasicu
. This time he stood his ground about not surrendering the Mniconjou. Somehow the firing started. For his courage Bear-Scattering got shot.
The Sicangu warriors wiped out the soldiers to the last man, all twenty-nine of them.
A-i-i-i
, bad trouble.
Both bands rode hard away from Laramie and the soldiers. “Don’t wait for the rations,” said the wounded chief. “Run. Get as far you can from the soldiers.”
They fled here to the Running Water River at the mouth of Snake Creek, Bear-Scattering suffering with every step. The women gathered berries, currants, and plums, and the young men and boys shot small game, and Chief Bear-Scattering got on with his dying.
The people needed the power of every Lakota, especially the young men.
For no reason Curly stopped the horse. He looked around. He noticed the sun warm on his skin. He felt the slight breeze. Then it stopped, and he sensed something else.
He could have been in any of a thousand places nearby on these plains. Beyond the old pit, by a sunpole tree, a cottonwood, a plain lifted into a hill. The dry slope was full of loose stone, prickly pear, and low bushes. Below a dry watercourse started, finger-joint deep, a crack in the earth breaking its way toward the creek. The plain rolled away from him in every direction, broken by dry gullies, dotted with sagebrush. Each direction from this junction of earth and sky was home to every kind of creature, animals and plants, all earth’s children, so many that only the high-flying
wambli
, eagle, Wakan Tanka’s emissary, saw them all.
This place was not exceptional. It was anywhere and everywhere. Yet Curly sensed something.
He looked around. He had a queer strangled feeling. In his chest Hawk fluttered her wings.
The four first spirits were here too: Wi, Skan, Maka, and Inyan—Sun, Sky, Earth, and Rock. Their companions Moon, Wind, Contention, and Thunder were here. The four winds were here. This place was nothing special, but it was every place, and the powers were as much here as anywhere.
“
Mitakuye oyasin
,” Curly murmured, acknowledging his kinship to all living things.
A peculiar avidity clutched him. It was a voracity, a lust, and it had him by the throat.
He looked up the hill. He hadn’t seen it at first. Off to the left, more than halfway up, a rocky projection with a flat top jutted out from the hill, like an altar. The kind of place where Lakota …
