Stone Song (41 page)

Little Big Man told Crazy Horse this story in a tone of outrage. “They call us friendlies and hostiles,” he said, “the Lakota who live at the agencies and the ones who follow the old way. Now maybe they will find out that we are all hostiles.”

Crazy Horse smiled a bitter smile, thinking maybe for once his fiery young friend was right. Even the agency chiefs …

At a big council of the headmen of the wild camps, the whole story came out. It seemed that the whites were hungry, too, back in all their towns. They needed money, lots of money. So Custer was going to look for gold in Paha Sapa and tell everyone, and then the whites would come to the Lakota and beg to buy the Hills. The peace paper said that Paha Sapa belonged to the Lakota as long as the grass grew and water flowed. Or until three out of every four grown Lakota men signed a selling paper.

“Even the cowards on the agencies won’t give them three out of four,” said He Dog.

“So they will steal what they want,” said Little Big Man. Then, with a sardonic laugh, “Or they will kill the three and let the fourth sign.”

The Strange Man sat quiet and let his friend speak for him.

Could they keep Custer out?

The headmen shook their heads. Everyone was willing, but the men had only one or two shells each. Every soldier would be carrying dozens of shells, with more in the wagons, plus the wagon guns. Against that many bullets you needed more than a big heart.

Maybe they could get enough shells from their relatives at the agencies,
they said. Maybe the agency warriors would come to fight against this killer of women and children. Maybe even Red Cloud would stop maneuvering for more pay and say no.

No one knew. Right now they could do nothing against Custer.

The wolves had a worse story to tell. Ahead of Custer lots of white men with pans and shovels were already on the way. Hundreds of them, in small groups, moving fast and going wherever they wanted, not caring a bit that the land was promised to the Lakota.

These miners were the real problem, everyone knew. What did it matter if the Lakota refused to sell the Hills and the white government relented? If thousands of miners streamed in, what could you do? A man can’t catch every drop of rain in a cup. Soon the miners would be cutting big holes in the ground and the deer and elk would be gone from the Hills. Someone said a man seeking a vision would have to find a place to stand among the white people’s droppings.

The two friends laughed with their eyes and bit their tongues. Crazy Horse jerked his head sideways, and they left the council. When friends understand each other, they don’t have to say much. Little Big Man could have said the words for Crazy Horse: “This council isn’t going to lead to anything. Councils usually don’t. Besides, a warrior does not sit and calculate the odds, or figure how to make a show and dishearten the enemy. A warrior fights. That is his honor.”

What Crazy Horse actually said was, “Let’s go discourage some miners.”

In the Moon When All Things Ripen, messengers came from the white men or from Red Cloud, which some of the people said was the same thing.

Some of the young Mniconjou went out to meet the messengers ahead of Crazy Horse, and he heard them egging each other on. “Let’s count coup on them,” one young man said, and two or three yelled, “
Hoye!
”

“Lash them with bowstrings,” said someone, and Crazy Horse hurried to the front. Some wild young Lakota had deliberately insulted some Sahiyela leaders by acting like this, treating them like enemies.

Crazy Horse was glad to see Big Road and Touch-the-Sky hurrying out, too. His uncle Touch-the-Sky had brought his Mniconjou to the Crazy Horse camp recently, wanting to live free. They greeted their agency relatives and led them to the big council lodge. The three headmen understood that whatever happened, Lakota must not fight Lakota.

Crazy Horse was pleased with his people. The loaf-around-the-forts laid presents out on the ground. No one except the headmen touched them, and the headmen took only
cansasa
—they called it “tobacco” now—to show a willingness to talk.

When amenities had been exchanged and it was time, the loafers said they had come to get Crazy Horse and the other headmen to come to Red Cloud Agency to talk about the sale of Paha Sapa.

The outcry shook the lodge hides. Some of the young men shouted, “Traitors!” One young warrior yelled that they would talk with bullets, not words.

It was all impolite, but Crazy Horse kept his face neutral and rebuffed no one. Out of turn or not, his young men were right. He felt proud of them.

The loafers could be impolite, too. “Fools!” said one. “Don’t you see Paha Sapa is already lost? The whites took it—stole it!”

“We may as well get something for it!” snapped another.

Their voices were not wise and patient and thoughtful, as council voices should be, but roiled and contemptuous.

Crazy Horse raised a hand slightly. He looked into the eyes of the loafers, one by one. He knew what they expected. They thought they would hear from Big Road or Black Twin or Touch-the-Sky or Little Big Man, but not Crazy Horse. The Strange Man spoke only in privacy, and let others express his thoughts in public.

So maybe his words were worth something. Maybe because he had never spoken in council, he could make his words remembered. He looked at their eyes, pair by pair, slowly, letting them see that the words were welling up in him.

Then, quietly, almost inaudibly, he said to them, “A man does not sell the earth the people walk on.”

That was all.

No one else had anything to say.

They looked at each other. One by one and two by two, they got up and left.

After a while Crazy Horse was sitting there alone.

He was pondering a fact: Lakota people had come to him with a suggestion to sell Paha Sapa.

The first thing he saw was dried blood on the legs of Stick and her sisters. They were not even his relatives, but he knew then. And blood on their arms, and their hair cut above the shoulders. Yes, he knew.

They-Are-Afraid-of-Her.

Worm and Little Hawk came out to take his lead rope and his weapons and lead him to the lodge. As he walked behind them, his feet made hollow thumps on the earth.

Black Shawl was sitting on their robes hugging herself, swaying, moaning, her clothes torn, and her face smeared with mud.

Yes, They-Are-Afraid-of-Her, three winters old, was dead.

Her cradle board was gone. The place where they had spread her robes was empty.

“How long?” he mumbled.

“Four days,” said Worm.

So while he was out killing miners, his daughter had died. He was stunned that he hadn’t known, hadn’t felt the change in the air itself.

Crazy Horse looked at Worm and Little Hawk and saw that Worm’s lips moved, but he could not make out the words. He felt he was somewhere very odd, maybe underwater, and they were far away.

Crazy Horse knelt beside Black Shawl and put an arm around her waist. As far as Worm could tell, she did not respond.

Amazingly, the old woman did respond. Grandmother Plum got up off her robes and came and sat on the other side of Black Shawl and held her hand.
A-i-i-i
. Crazy Horse put his hand on both of theirs. He did not act as though Grandmother Plum had done anything unusual. Worm glanced at his brother, Little Hawk. His eyes were wide.

“Be strong, Son,” murmured Worm. Little Hawk said the same words.

“It was the coughing sickness,” said Worm.

Crazy Horse sat there unaware. He looked downward into nothingness, as though into a lake infinitely deep, and he was sinking slowly in the dark water, slowly, inexorably sinking, and the water was blacker every moment.

A quarter-day or several days later—he didn’t know how long he, his wife, and his grandmother sat with their arms around each other—his father came in bringing food and Crazy Horse asked, “Where is she?”

Worm gave no emotional reaction. He simply told his son how to find the scaffold.

He knew it was the right one from a distance. He saw her red blanket. From closer he saw the cradle board Black Shawl’s sister had beaded, hanging from one of the poles. He imagined the toys they would have folded into the blanket with her small form, a rattle, a rawhide doll.

He tied his pony to a sapling, pulled himself onto the scaffold, and wrapped his arms around the lump in the blanket. “It is my fault,” he said. “I was not meant to have children.” He sank into oblivion.

The buzzard perched on top of the vertical pole. It looked at the pile spread out below, red cloth and bare flesh. This was a puzzle. It watched flies land on the flesh and crawl around. It watched ants crawl from the ground up the pole and under the blanket. But something was wrong. The buzzard saw all the indications of death and smelled death, a certain sign. But it saw the flesh above the ribs moving slowly but unmistakably, up and down, up and down.

How could something be alive and dead at the same time? How could this conflict of pictures and smells be? It knew rotting, and it knew what was not yet rotting.

It heard sobbing noises. But death was silent. It saw movement. But death was still. It smelled decay. Everything was confusing.

The sobbing noises got louder, very loud. A scream came from the pile. Part of the pile sat up.

The buzzard pushed into the air and flapped upward. It winged away. It could wait.

Crazy Horse did not come back from their daughter’s scaffold for nearly half a moon. When he did, he looked more gaunt, more dispirited, more distracted than Black Shawl had ever seen him. She tried to get him to stay and eat and rest and take the comfort of her body, but he would have none of it. He gathered together some warriors, including Little Big Man and her brother Red Feather, and went back out against the miners. Custer was come and gone now—his survey was completed and gold officially discovered. The miners infested Paha Sapa. Crazy Horse acted as though he intended to kill each one, like a man savoring his favorite fruit, bite by slow bite.

When he got back, he had little to say. He sat around indifferently, in a world of his own. A sad world, she supposed, a melancholy world. A bitter world? She didn’t know.

It was the feeling of helplessness that drove her wild. They had not made love for four years, since she knew she was making life within. Good husbands did not approach wives when they were with child or nursing. Now she was ready for him, but he would not come to her. It was as though she had nothing that could please him, nurture him, ease his heart.

And if she could not give him solace, neither could she take it from him. She was helpless and lonely.

She heard the talk of the camp. Little Big Man said Crazy Horse had acted brash and reckless against the miners. “Ah,” the people murmured, “recklessness killed his brother.”

Until now Crazy Horse had been known as bold but judicious. He never shot his rifle from horseback, for instance, but always dismounted to make sure of the shot. He would charge the enemy head on, but only when he felt his bullet-proof medicine rising him. He never led others into unnecessary risks.

Now all that was changing, said Little Big Man.

Black Shawl could hardly sleep for fear.

In the Winter Seven Loafers Were Killed by the Enemy, which the whites called 1875, Red Cloud and many other chiefs went back to Washington. Most of the agency chiefs went this time, all but Young Man-Whose-Enemies. When they got back, they said Red Cloud insisted on a new agent and someone to keep him from stealing from them. They were tired of cattle being driven around the mountain and counted twice. They were tired of sacks of food that didn’t weigh what they should. They were tired of being hungry.

“And what else did he say?” the people in the wild camps wanted to know.

“The whites asked us to sell Paha Sapa,” said the chiefs, acting surprised.

“Of course, you’re surprised,” said the hostiles. “Who would think the whites would ask for Paha Sapa?”

“We said we’d have to talk to the people,” the chiefs went on.

“Of course. And do you want to listen, or are you just telling the One You Use for Father that as a tactic to get a few more dollars?”

Young Man-Whose-Enemies came to Crazy Horse and they talked a long time. The agency chiefs and the whites had agreed on a big talk in the Moon When Leaves Turn Brown. They were going to talk about selling Paha Sapa. Young Man-Whose-Enemies, the peace chief, had come to ask Crazy Horse, the war leader, to join in the talk.

The chief said what direction he was leading the people. The world was changing, like it or not. He was not living in the past. He was trying to make a future for the people. The Lakota were going to have to live a new way. They would farm, because there were no more buffalo. They would come to terms with the white man. They would make a transition into a new order of existence.

All this was not unprecedented, said Young Man-Whose-Enemies. Twice seven generations ago, before the memories of the oldest men now living, the Lakota had lived by growing corn and other crops along the Muddy Water River. Then they had learned to follow the buffalo herds. That seemed a better way at the time—Young Man-Whose-Enemies himself loved it. But it was over now.

A wise leader thought of the children, the aged, those who could not fend for themselves. He did not make a life only for the strongest hunter-warriors but for everyone. That was what Young Man-Whose-Enemies was doing. Now the old life was too hard. The Lakota had to find a new way. He asked his friend Crazy Horse to join him in the search.

Crazy Horse puffed on his short pipe a long time, to let his friend know that his words were heard. He rubbed the scar below his nostril. He turned all the words over in his mind once more. He thought of what he would say. He thought how much Young Man-Whose-Enemies’s words were like his uncle Spotted Tail’s. And how treacherous the words seemed to him, and how hard it was for him to remember that he was dealing with honorable Lakota leaders, men who were looking out for the best interests of all the people.