Chapter 37: A dance couple of light

Some of it was directed at the white soldier. She hated him for coming to their country, for being a soldier, for being born. She hated Kicking Bird for asking her to do this and for knowing that she could not refuse him. And she hated the Great Spirit for being so cruel. The Great Spirit had wrecked her heart. But it wasn’t enough to kill someone’s heart.

Why do you keep hurting me? she asked. I am already dead.

Gradually her head began to cool. But her bitterness didn’t diminish; it hardened into something cold and brittle.

Find your white tongue. Find your white tongue.

It came to her that she was tired of being a victim, and it made her angry.

You want my white tongue, she thought in Comanche. You see some worth in me for that? I will find it then. And if I am to become no one for doing that, I will be the greatest of all the no ones. I will be a no one to remember.

As her moccasins scraped softly over the grass-tufted path, she began to cast herself back, trying to find a place at which to start, a place where she could begin to remember the words.

But everything was blank. No matter how much she concentrated, nothing came to mind, and for several minutes she suffered the terrible frustration of having a whole language on the tip of her tongue. Instead of lifting, the mist of her past had closed in like fog.

She was worn out by the time she came to a small clearing that opened into the river a mile upstream from the village. It was a spot of rare beauty, a grassy porch shaded by a sparkling cottonwood tree and surrounded on three sides by natural screens. The river was wide and shallow and dotted with sandbars crowned with reeds. On days past she would have delighted in finding such a place. Stands With A Fist had always been keen for beauty.

But today she barely noticed. Wanting only to rest, she sat heavily in front of the cottonwood and leaned back against its trunk. She crossed her legs in the Indian way and hiked her shift to let the cool air from the river play around her thighs. Finally she closed her eyes and resolved herself to remembering.

But still she could remember nothing. Stands With A Fist gritted her teeth. She raised her hands and ground the palms into her tired eyes.

It was while she rubbed her eyes that the image came. It struck her like a bright splash of color.

five

Images had come to her the preceding summer, when it was discovered that white soldiers were in the vicinity. One morning while she lay in bed, her doll had appeared on the wall. In the middle of a dance she had seen her mother. But both images were opaque.

The ones she was seeing now were alive and moving as if in a dream. There was white-man talk all the way through. And she understood every word.

What appeared first had startled her with its clarity. It was the torn hem of a blue gingham

dress. A hand was on the hem, playing about the fringe. As she watched through closed eyes, the image grew larger. The hand belonged to a young girl. She was standing in a rough earthen room, furnished only with a small, hard-looking bed, a framed spray of flowers mounted next to the only window, and a sideboard over which hung a mirror with a large chip at one edge.

The girl was facing away, her unseen face bent toward the hand that held the hem as she inspected the tear.

In making the inspection, the dress had been lifted high enough to expose the girl’s short, skinny legs.

A woman’s voice suddenly called from outside the room. “Christine . . .”

The girl’s head turned, and in a rush of realization, Stands With A Fist recognized her old self.

Her old face listened, and then the old mouth made the words: “Coming, Mother.”

Stands With A Fist opened her eyes then. She was frightened by what she had seen, but like a listener at the feet of a storyteller, she wanted more.

She closed her eyes again, and from the limb of an old oak tree a scene opened through a mass of rustling leaves. A long-fronted sod house, shaded by a pair of cottonwoods, was built against the bank of a draw. A crude table thrown together with planking sat in front of the house. And seated at the table were four grown-up people, two men and two women. The four were talking, and Stands With A Fist could understand every word.

Three children were playing blindman’s bluff farther out in the yard, and the women kept an eye on them as they chatted about a fever one of the children had recently conquered.

The men were smoking pipes. On the table in front of them were scattered the remains of a late afternoon Sunday lunch: a bowl of boiled potatoes, several dishes of greens, a pile of cornless cobs, a turkey skeleton, and a half-full pitcher of milk. The men were talking about the likelihood of rain.

She recognized one of them. He was tall and stringy. His cheeks were hollow and high-boned. His hair was pushed straight back over his head. A short, wispy beard clung to his jaw. It was her father.

Up above she could make out the forms of two people lying in the buffalo grass growing out of the roof. At first she didn’t know who they were, but suddenly she was closer and could see them clearly.

She was with a boy about her age. His name was Willy. He was raw and skinny and pale.

They were side by side on their backs, holding hands as they watched a line of high clouds spreading across the spectacular sky.

They were talking about the day they would be married.

“I would rather there was nobody,” Christine said dreamily. “I would rather you came to the window one night and took me away.”