A Quality of Light (41 page)

I’d learned how to fletch arrows with feather and sinew from an old Cheyenne guy the summer before and I set to work doing that. I’d gathered the shafts and a thick switch of Osage orange that I wanted to make into a bow. When I left that meadow I had a handmade bow with a sinew string and thirteen fletched and sinewed arrows with a parfleche quiver. I made pair of moccasins too. But the thing that I learned the most from was sitting there night after night scraping and shaping the fluted length of a pipe stem.

Not just anyone can have a pipe. Being a pipeholder is an honor bestowed upon those who have proved themselves spiritually and morally worthy. But I’d learned that we can have pipes of our own. Not the sacred redstone pipes you see in ceremonies but harder gray stone pipes. So I sat down and began shaping the stem. It’s a complicated process and it requires your utmost attention. I carry it with me in a pipe bag I made out of elk hide. Someday I want to either make a bowl or get fortunate enough to have one given to me, but for now, that pipe stem and the teachings it brought me are my most cherished possessions.

While I carved, whittled and sliced that length of wood into shape, I thought about nothing else except what it was to be used for. Maybe it’s part of the mystic or monastic experience that says solitary work and musing on spiritual matters results in an enlightenment, an elevated
awareness, an epiphany even. Christ had his forty days in the wilderness, after all. I began to see what this life of mine was all about as every inch of that pipe stem took shape. We all have a purpose here, some gift we emerge with that we carry into the great mix, and I’d assumed all along that mine was to be a warrior. I thought my life had prepared me for that — the aloneness, the bleakness, the loss and the anger.

But as I worked on that pipe stem I began to realize that I had no idea what my purpose was. The stem, as you know, is made of wood and symbolizes all living things, life in this reality. But the stem also symbolizes humility. It is wood after all, a finite thing, like life. Only when the stem is joined to the bowl does it become a sacred item. Because the bowl is faith. The bowl symbolizes the universe and all it contains, the eternal, the invisible. Humility and faith require each other to be vital energies. That’s a spiritual law. You can’t have one without the other. When the humility that comes from life is joined to an eternal faith, a reliance on the unseen, the invisible forces of the universe, it is a sacred union. The People used the pipe to symbolize that sanctity, that wholeness, and to anchor their lives with it. That’s why a pipe ceremony is such a solemn ritual, because of the critical joining of humility and faith. I knew all of that but I’d never considered it in the context of myself. I’d been too distracted, too intent on the display of my allegiance, the great fireworks and fusillade of my loyalty, my worthiness, my mettle, my strength. I began to realize that courage without faith and humility is just the strut and preening of a fragile vanity. I’d been a strutter all along. Staatz’s words came back to me again, only this time rife with meaning. Conflict isn’t fighting without belief and the tangible sense of the heartbeat you’re fighting to protect, he said. I got a tangible sense of that heartbeat through the storms and howlings of that Rocky Mountain winter. I felt the humility that the land and the unseen powers of the universe ask of us. I felt the tough, elastic resiliency that is born through recognition of that humility and the tougher sinew of a faith born of survival. I found courage. I found my warrior essence.

See, there’s a conceit to this warrior thing. That’s the big lesson I learned in that meadow. There’s also something that you’d probably call grace. The conceit lives in the belief that you carry within yourself the
power to alter things. To perpetuate the way of the People. Conceit tells you that power is enough, life force is enough, grit, determination, forcefulness are all enough. The conceit is fueled by bravado. Most of us, I think, at least me, were being warriors of conceit.

But grace lies within the application of the teachings. The teachings ensure the survival of the warriors, not the reverse. I lived under the warrior creed that “it’s a good day to die.” I believed that this meant that I was brave enough to face death in order to fight for the People. I was wrong. “Today is a good day to die” doesn’t suggest sacrifice. It suggests acceptance, humility. When warriors headed out for battle it was after prayer, earnest prayer for the survival of their families, survival of themselves and for the well-being of their enemies. If you can face conflict praying for your enemy as well as yourself, you enter that conflict armed with humility, belief and faith, and if you come armed with those weapons, it is indeed a good day to die. You can face your Creator knowing you’ve discovered wholeness, rightness and yourself.

Anybody can die in battle. In the history of the world, millions have, but that doesn’t qualify them as warriors. I know that now. The warrior way is about a principled living. It’s about carrying the spirit of the People and their beliefs within you, acting upon them, living them. That’s what perpetuation is all about. It’s not fighting to bring back the wigwam or the buffalo hunt. They have passed like a shadow across the prairie grass, like Sitting Bull said. But the spirit of them is still here and that’s what we need to fight to perpetuate. The tangible sense of the heartbeat. The heartbeat that resounds in the sweat lodge, the pipe, the drum, the languages, the stories, the teachings, the connection with the land, the day-in and day-out motions of the People. Those are the tangible things we can pass on to the next generation, the things we can fight to protect. But we have to live them first. You can’t be a warrior without a tangible sense of that heartbeat. You can’t help soothe wounds without having felt them yourself, without having eased your own pain. And that’s the grace of the warrior way. You become a fighter only when you know what it takes to heal. Without that, all you have is politics, anger and bravado. If you carry the spirit of those things within you, the tangible echo of that ancient tribal heartbeat, then it doesn’t matter what happens politically.
It really doesn’t. Because your spirit and the People’s spirit will survive forever. In the end that’s all we really have. Our cultural souls. Salvation? It’s knowing that.

If I’m to fulfill this destiny of mine, I need to find somewhere to cultivate the faith, somewhere to learn what the mechanics of that are, how to live it. Funny, eh? I sound like you. I’m starting to think that maybe faith is a lot like inventing baseball. The only way to get it inside you is to get inside of it.

“S
omehow I always thought it would be more,” I said when I’d finished reading him the letter. “I thought for eight years that he’d eventually reappear but it would be more pacific, serene, spiritual. He sounded like he was on the verge of great discoveries. I have to confess that I’m at a genuine loss about how the man who wrote that letter got to be ensconced in an office building pointing guns and taking hostages.”

“Me too. Guess he missed it,” Nettles said.

“Missed what?”

“The Salvation Express,” he said and gestured upward.

“It comes around again,” I replied.

“It does?’

“Yes.”

“Think this is the time?”

“We can only hope,” I said as we headed for the car.

W
ar zones shrink you. Perhaps there is in all of us a primal caution that reduces us to a Paleolithic prowling, a hunkering down on the haunches of our past, when the most elemental
danger is found lurking at the edges of our worlds. We’re perched suddenly on the point of fight or flight and our innate sense of survival responds with a shocking immediacy. We cower against the rocks and bushes. Peering around us with darting, feral eyes, nostrils flared and every nerve and sinew bunched taut, our bodies compressed, flattened, diminished for the pounce or the bounding away, we become physically lessened and spiritually more. It’s a curious paradox, this outwardness and inwardness. We become ourselves because of it. It’s not so much the lurk and leer of death that elevates us in the face of war as the tintinnabulation of life within and around us.

Life. The primal desire.

We entered a war zone that morning. We left the city and all I’d come to accept as normal behind us and slid silently into a panorama of tension. It’s difficult to equate the words we use to describe society — civilized, democratic, just — with automatic weapons, bulletproof vests, camouflage, rocket launchers, helicopters and hordes of personnel. The flicker of police lights, the crisp bustle of movement, the frantic whir of chopper blades and the crush of the crowd beyond the police tape did not heighten things, they merely slowed them down.

I existed in a frame-by-frame world. Nettles handing me a bottle of pills. Dodge leaning close to talk with officers near the front doors. Waving us over. Nettles placing a hand over my shoulder. Cameramen hustling in a bow-legged trot. Native people under banners waving fists of encouragement. Officers kneeling behind cruisers with hands on their holsters. The police creating an opening in their huddle that Nettles and I eased into. All heads turning towards the glass doors. Frantic motion all around. A vested constable duck-walking with a hand-held radio, handing it to Dodge. Dodge gesturing to me. Nettles grim-faced, eyeing me. Sudden emptiness around me. The glass doors looming larger and darker with each step. A woman’s face behind the glass, ashen, shaking hands peeling duct tape from the handles. The door cracking open. Stepping out. Eyes pleading. Gone. A yell of victory. The unmoving air of the lobby. Johnny’s voice yelling something about the package
on the floor. I tape it securely to the door handles and turn to see him, yards away cradling a rifle, pointing its barrel towards the elevators. We enter and feel the push of the lift. I see his eyes. Blue. Impossible blue.

T
he doors slid open on the fourth floor and we stepped out. He seemed taller than I remembered him, thicker with years but still possessing the same animal grace. A bold smear of red covered one half of his face, with two black wavy lines running from his hairline down beneath his chin. He wore a single eagle feather in his hair, which hung in two braids with a smaller, thinner braid on the left side. On his feet were a pair of fringed moccasins that reached to just below his knees. He had a bone and leather choker around his neck, and a pale chambray shirt under a fringed and beaded hide vest. The beaded designs were pyramidal, one on each shoulder, front and back, green, yellow and white. The colors of growth, enlightenment and wisdom according to the teachings of the Medicine Wheel. With the paint on his face, his features were stark, the boyish good looks I remembered hidden except for the eyes, which looked out at me strongly, directly and clear. We studied each other in silence. There was a smile at the edges of those eyes and I wanted to reach out and hug him to me.

He nodded. “Hey,” was all he said.

“Hey.”

“Welcome to my kingdom,” he said expansively.