Mean Spirit, page 32
The fire smoked toward Horse. He coughed and moved aside. He stirred it with a stick, then he blew on the coals to make them hot again.
The Hill Indians were like Iowans that evening. Stace smiled at his own thought. They were watching the corn grow. They were elated with the new corn and the speed with which it grew. But they were not yet sure if a corn that rose up as fast as this corn could bear sweet juicy kernels.
Stace sat down beside Michael Horse and was silent. Horse didn’t look up. With his rod, Horse caressed the stones. Then he took some egg-shaped stones from along the edge of the fire and held one of the warm stones against the top of his shoulder. “It’s such hard work,” he explained. “To sit and watch a fire. It makes my back ache.” He flashed a smile at Stace and the firelight caught on his gold teeth.
Just then the priest passed by with a smoking censer. Stace watched him pass, then he asked Horse, “Why is he up here?”
“Everyone is coming up here. The people are beginning to worry. I have a feeling Ona Neck herself will come up here one of these days. But the father, he was driven out of his own place by the army ants. He happened along the path by accident.”
The priest stopped when he heard Horse mention the ants. “They were terrible,” he said, after he greeted Red Hawk. Then he turned to Horse. “I wonder why you don’t have ants here?”
“We do. We feed them. That way they stay away from our food.”
“That never occurred to me.” The father wagged his head, looking incredulous at his own ignorance.
“We also feed the crows,” Horse said to the priest. “That’s why the corn is still alive and no blackbirds are eating it.”
Then Stace saw Martha Billy out in the cornfield, moving among the green bladelike stalks and leaves.
“She looks darker every day,” Horse said. “You’d swear she was Indian.”
Most of the Hill People stayed away from Stace, Horse, and the priest. They were taught to be wary of those who came from the town. And despite the fact that they knew Belle Graycloud as one of the mothers of Nola Blanket, they remained silent when she arrived the next day and asked to meet with the council of elders.
Finally though, when enough time had passed, they gave in to her request to meet with the elders. That night, she sat before them and let them look at her for a while, as was the custom. Then a woman said, “What do you need?”
“I need help. When Nola was in trouble, you sent the runners down to watch over her.”
They nodded.
“Now we are the ones that need help.”
“Hmmm,” said the oldest woman. Her hair was white. She listened as Belle spoke. Then she said, “So he wrote a letter to the United States? And now he’s in danger. That is why we don’t talk to their government.” She continued to eye Belle.
“Another thing,” Belle said. “My grandson. He came back from the Haskell school and he was sick. He stole a horse. He cursed his father.” She let her words trail off. She was struggling with tears.
“Yes,” said the woman. “They come back with a quick fist. They hit their own mothers and fathers.” She was quiet only a moment. “You have been good to us, Belle. You’ve loved and cared for our children. You’ve traded with us, always honest. We will spare you two of our runners. One will go to watch over your home. The other will stay with Ben. And our new runners speak English now, so that should be of help.”
Belle felt much gratitude. She nodded thanks and sat with her head slightly bowed.
The old woman turned her head and spoke to a young man. He left but returned dressed in town clothes. Then she spoke to a girl. Immediately the girl stood up, and the old woman turned to Belle. “She is going to guard your house.”
“But a girl?”
“Okeena’s no ordinary one. You’ll see.”
The girl, dressed in soft white buckskin, was already gone.
“Now you have to eat,” the old woman said and she motioned Belle over to the fire where the other people sat.
Belle was surprised to see Stace. “Why is that Sioux medicine man here?” she asked, but before anyone answered, Belle saw Horse and she addressed him point blank. “What are you doing here?” But then she saw the priest, and before she could say a word about the whole of Watona being up at the settlement, Horse told her, “I am writing a new chapter of the Bible.”
The priest looked startled by Horse’s words. He interrupted, “You can’t do that.”
“And,” Horse added, “I am looking for my red horse.” Then he turned toward the priest. “I thought maybe you would know how I could get this chapter added to the whole book.”
“So. You still haven’t found Benoit’s horse?” Belle looked at him.
Michael shook his head. His brows wrinkled a bit. “That is one wild horse.”
The priest was irritated. He interrupted again. “You can’t write a chapter of the Bible. That is the word of God.”
“Well it has men’s names in it. Like the Gospel of John, for instance. Why not the Gospel of Horse?” He continued the discussion without looking at Father Dunne. Belle Graycloud went to sit across the fire with the other women.
But the priest didn’t give up the argument. “They copied down what God told them to say. That was different.”
“That’s what I am doing.” Horse glanced at the father. “I just want to know how to get it copyrighted, is all. I thought you would know about that.”
The priest’s face was rigid.
“Well, son,” Horse said to the priest, “I think the Bible is full of mistakes. I thought I would correct them. For instance, where does it say that all living things are equal?”
The priest shook his head. “It doesn’t say that. It says man has dominion over the creatures of the earth.”
“Well, that’s where it needs to be fixed. That’s part of the trouble, don’t you see?”
That night, Jim Josh hobbled up the path. He smiled at the elders. They didn’t smile back and he felt at first like a foolish old man. It was nothing personal, but he didn’t know how much it added to their worries that one more man had found them, and they exchanged glances with one another when he said to them, “I heard about the corn.”
“What about it?” asked one man.
“I wanted to see it.”
“It’s over there,” one woman pointed.
Even Josh was amazed at the healthy green sheaves growing in their field.
* * *
Early the following morning, Belle left. She was accompanied by a runner. The man wore a western shirt and a pair of jeans, much like the cowboy ranchers wore. He was lean and wiry. His name was Silver.
Belle and the man were going to Tar Town, in order to look for Ben. They walked in silence for most of the morning. Belle could see that his eyes missed nothing, not so much as a pink-eared jackrabbit. She felt safe with him. They walked over a bridge that crossed the Blue River. Belle looked at the placid blue water and the river’s rust-red banks. It was a beautiful sight flowing out of Kansas, over the flatlands near Tulsa and on past the bluffs near the Hill settlement.
“It’s beautiful, but Hell has four such rivers,” Belle said to him. “And I know one of them is the Great Blue.” The devastation of the surrounding land made the river even more jewellike in its clarity. In places the banks were black from oil seepages like the one in Belle’s spring, and there were rusted oil drums stuck in stagnant pools along the area, and swampy, polluted places where insects thrived.
Toward evening they saw a coyote pawing at earth. They passed trees that had been killed by bagworms. Many of the fields had been burned black, and those that were not burned had been overgrazed by hungry cattle the world-eaters raised. It was a desolate sight.
Then they saw the beginning of the shantytown called Tar Town. The camp was an extension of the black and destroyed land, a scramble of structures stretched out a long distance behind the mesquite hills. The shacks and shelters had been put together in any way possible in order to provide cover from the rain, and most of them were covered with black tar paper.
Seeing the once-beautiful people living there in poverty and misery, Silver became very quiet. Belle thought how many ruined great people lived in that tar-paper village, broken men and destroyed women who had once been singers and kind mothers. The scrawny brown children did not look full of a future. Both Belle and Silver were silently afraid that the sickness of despair, as devastating as smallpox, might be contagious.
They prepared themselves for their journey through such a miserable underworld as they undertook to find Ben.
As they approached the encampment, they could hear the murmur of voices and smell the human smells of living, of cooking smoke and burning things, of human bodies that had gone to decay. Dogs chased around in the dust beneath clotheslines. Old men elevated their swollen, sore feet, and there were racking coughs that sounded like tuberculosis.
All the while he walked, Silver prayed for the wounded people. He remained silent. He vowed he would eat or drink nothing that was offered in this broken world, hell’s tinderbox.
Belle looked at the people. Pain had a way of changing the body. Human skin became something else, a wall, a membrane between the worlds of creation and destruction. She remembered this, it was the first thing she had learned from Sam Billy who’d been the helper of people for so many years.
It was bad enough what had already happened to the people, but this, this other misery, fell through her in a sinking hopelessness.
They asked a man if he knew where Ben Graycloud was. The man’s dark eyes were sad as he shook his head and looked away.
When finally they found Ben, he looked gray and emaciated there in that wasted place. Behind him was a dump yard of broken and discarded vehicles that had once held the proud Indian men and women as they drove over the curved earth.
Ben stood at a makeshift table. He stood with his legs apart the way he thought a man should stand. Across from him was Cal. Cal was wearing the clothing he’d stolen from the scarecrow in Belle’s cornfield. They were working at something in front of them, but when Ben saw Belle approach, he covered the object before him with an old red oil-stained cloth.
“Ben, I’m so glad to find you,” Belle said. Then she looked at the table. “What are you doing?” Belle asked the young man.
“Nothing.” Ben avoided her gaze. With shaky hands, he pushed his hair back away from his face.
Belle noticed the blood on his hands. She stepped forward and lifted the stained cloth. In front of her, under the filthy cloth, was a golden eagle. Its head was turned to the side on a limp neck. Its golden brown wings stretched out in death. One of them with its pattern of smooth feathers was partially severed. It was a poor job of cutting. The bloody knife the boys had used was dull and the wing had been partially torn away from its body. There was a gunshot wound at the soft-feathered chest.
Belle was frightened.
Ben looked at her sorrowfully. “Grandmother,” he said. His eyes pleaded with her to understand.
“What have you done?” Her voice was quiet.
“We wanted to pray,” he said. “We only wanted to pray.” He began to cry and he did not even bother to wipe the tears from his face.
“You killed an eagle for its feathers?” She spoke in disbelief. “You took a life in order to pray?”
Ben hung his head.
Belle turned and began walking away. She held back her tears. As she left Tar Town, people who had known her called after her. “Bring us some coffee,” said one. A woman, large with child, asked for bananas and shoes.
A few long-tailed rats scurried away as Belle walked. A cloud passed over. She did not speak. Nor did Silver. Both of them walked in silence, with only the sound of their shoes on the hot dusty earth.
When it began to rain, Belle thought, “Even the sky is crying.”
The raindrops left spots where they hit the dust.
They picked their way through broken glass and old, torn clothes. They walked through the night. They passed piles of garbage and refuse until they came to a place that had no oil drums littering the land, none of the rats and other scavengers that had learned how to survive near people. There they stopped and rested for the night, but neither of them slept.
When they found a clean place, one that seemed untouched by the destroyers, they laid down on the green grass and gazed up at the night sky. The grass smelled new and fresh as spring.
“You know, Europeans have different constellations than we do.” Belle was thinking of the sky, how where she saw a man and a woman standing together, the ones called sky and earth, they saw twin boys. And how where she saw two people holding one another, they saw a man and a weapon. And how, at least, they did see a god who had learned his healing powers from a snake, but then she thought, Bats! They don’t have bats. She fingered the meteorite around her neck.
* * *
The next day, as Belle and Silver neared the region of Sorrow Cave, they heard the excited, high-pitched sound of young men talking. A shot was fired. It was followed with cheers.
Belle turned in the direction of the noise and walked far enough to see a number of men clustered together around the dark mouth of Sorrow.
Unknown to the Indians around Watona, a war had been declared on bats after the case of rabies that killed the young girl. They mistakenly believed bats carried the disease. There was a one-dollar bounty per “flying rat,” as the newspaper called them. And now a good number of well-dressed young men and their fathers stood outside the cave and shot into it, knocking the frightened bats to the ground, then shooting randomly while the animals screamed with terror, unable to escape the man-blocked entrance to the cave.
“Be careful of the bullets, boys. They might ricochet,” said one of the fathers.
Belle recognized another group of men as unemployed oil workers. They were smoking cigarettes and waiting for the younger men to finish up so that the older men could go in and gas the cave. The sheriff was among them, as was the mixed-blood Deputy Willis.
As she approached the cave, Belle heard the tumult of the animals inside, and she saw the guns in the smooth hands of the boys. They were excited. Their hands shook as they fired. One of them ground his teeth.
The sun was overhead. Belle stood in the shadow of a tree and watched, then she said to Silver, “Go get some of the people to help us. Tell them what is going on. Tell them these boys are shooting bats.”
Belle calmed herself. She held her emotions in check and tried to empty herself of anger, for it was dangerous to have strong human feelings feed a situation such as this. She felt the warm wind blow out of the west. Then she went up the hill toward the cave, picking her way around the stones.
The sheriff greeted Belle, but she didn’t speak. She walked to the entrance of the cave, took out her pistol and pointed it in the direction of the boys. “Stand back,” she said calmly.
They looked at her. One of them whispered, “She’s crazy. I think she means it. Get back.” The boys stepped away from the cave’s mouth.
Belle looked inside Sorrow for just a moment. In the shadowy cave, she saw some of the dead and bleeding animals. And some of them were trying to escape through the hole in the back. The place was alive with their fear.
She looked down at the men. “No one enters this cave.” She pointed a pistol at the men and fixed her face to show that she meant business. Behind her she still heard the crying of the bats.
A couple of young men snickered and scuffed their feet. “Ah hell, she’s just an old woman.”
They made a move toward the entrance, thinking she would give up easily. But Sheriff Gold, standing behind the men, knew better. “Get back, boys,” he said. The boys turned toward Gold’s authoritative voice and walked away.
“Jesus, Belle, this is serious,” the sheriff said. “Violence never solved anything.”
“You’re wrong about that. Around here violence solves everything.”
“You can’t go losing your head over every bird and snake.” He sounded tired. “C’mon, get out of the way, Belle.”
She lifted the gun. “Don’t come up here.”
He cleared his throat. “We have a rabies problem here, Belle.”
She aimed at him. “It probably comes from your biting people.” She didn’t move. “I’m staying. And I want all you men to leave.”
Silver walked up the hill a ways before he disappeared from her sight. None of the men or boys had seen him; their attention, all of it, was fixed on Belle.
The men and boys milled here and there, talking among themselves. “What are you going to do?” one of them asked the sheriff.
“I don’t know yet,” he said. The sun was in his eyes as he kept watch on Belle. She looked like a mountain. A raven flew in front of her and cawed. Gold called out, “Belle. Come on down now. Don’t be so backward.”
But Belle pretended to hear nothing as she remained there protecting the double world of bats with their whistling songs and their lives in the cool and deep darkness, the bats who were husbands to trees, the beautiful creatures who were hated by those who lived in what they called the light.
One of the boys spit on the ground. “Shit, she’s crazy. She doesn’t even make sense. Why don’t you just shoot her?”
Belle decided to keep silent. She wasn’t going to strike up any bargains with the law. She didn’t want to offer them even so much as her voice, so when the sheriff called up to her, “Bats are pests. They aren’t good for us,” she kept still.
The afternoon light took on a gold cast. Belle stayed just inside the shade of the cave. She could feel the cool air on her back. Behind her, the dark animals made soft yelping sounds now and then, and shifted their positions. Some of them, sheltered by the old woman, were busy dying, those animals whose voices were their guide like a prayer opening the way, showing them the passage through life. Others settled back into silence, opening and folding their wings, some hanging from stones and looking toward the doorway with their glittering eyes.
