The Dying Grass, page 82
Supporting her on her horse as she sways, caressing her back, Heinmot Tooyalakekt walks beside Springtime for awhile; and their baby sleeps in the cradleboard, well tied to the pommel of her saddle.
Towhee rides behind her son-in-law, who will not turn to look at her. Her daughter rides alone, kneeing her horse when anyone tries to speak with her.
As she rides away on Helper, Sound Of Running Feet watches the rocks shining at the bottom of the lake, and the brook flowing through the wet grass at the south shore;
we are fleeing, hating as we go:
high summer, so that the cowbirds are everywhere.
6
Next morning, Helping Another is ready to ride again even though her breast-wound still hisses like a musselshell when she breathes, and Wounded Head whispers: Síikstiwaa, you are strong
as they come into the wide plateau of golden grass, mountains all around
(the sun glaring on Lean Elk’s brass-buttoned trade vest),
air and yellow blossoms,
locusts singing tekh-tekh-tekh-tekh-tekh!
in the golden grass of Horse Prairie,
white with yarrow and purple with daisy fleabane,
where White Bird’s father used to hunt buffalo
(long have they pass’d);
and Five Snows,
who is always longing for getting-drunk liquid,
begins singing his WYAKIN song, hoping to soon kill some Bostons.
Arriving at a pretty creek, Good Woman leaps off Short-Tailed One to gather sweetgrass for the wounded,
while Swan Woman, Cloudburst, Welweyas and Old Wolf Woman gather tarragon, to poultice the children’s tired legs;
watching over them all, Peopeo Tholekt,
he whose left arm is crooked,
sits on a log, tapping kinnikinnick into the ancient pipe which Looking-Glass gave him; now he is smoking with Wottolen, with their rifles beside them
as his yellow horse says: Hinimí,
—but White Thunder, unable to forget
(my heart should not remember him)
that the final expression of Shore Crossing,
he who won every long race,
was bewilderment,
thirsts for something to kill:
and a doe, glowing reddish in the sun, runs from the thicket, speeds across their gaze, rocking as she goes:
he brings her down.
Good Woman lends her deerhide scraper to his mother,
whose heart thirsts for a shiny new hide.
Hurry, hurry! Lean Elk warns us; we are nearly as helpless as buffalo swimming across a river; what if some band of killers awaits in the tall grass?
But the horses must graze, and the People are tired. So we follow his words, but not too much.
7
Traversing the sagebrush bluff of golden grass, descending a shoulder of sagebrush through a few willows, they come into fine buffalo grass
and meadows whose summer flowers are now beginning to die,
Looking-Glass silent:
just now, although he does not wish it, his heart will not stop turning toward Night-Fishing Place, which once lay in his country, just for awhile:
here my father used to bring me, and after we had set our nets he would teach me all the SAYAK STARS
and the STAR called BEAR SNEAKING UP and
Lean Elk wondering where to lead these People,
Helping Another longing to be lowered from her horse and be left to die
(her husband Wounded Head will not do it; her mother Towhee promises that she will live),
Heinmot Tooyalakekt turning his heart back toward home:
now on the Lo Lo Trail the birds will be eating the scarlet berries of the mountain ash
and it will be Salmon Spawning Season in all our rivers,
yes, and in Wallowa,
as they ride on through the Horse Prairie, hungering to hide among the Crows,
our buffalo hunters remembering that in time they will reach a sagebrush slope on the edge of an arroyo with a river in it, where pines will begin to burst out of the sand and then they will look down a riverine draw, so green, with a cloud of white aspens,
into a secret Medicine Place,
the others knowing nothing
as Only Half Grizzly Bear dies in the saddle.
8
At prairie’s end the Bostons have now made a ranch
from which the People steal eighty-seven horses, the young men laughing áhaha to have harmed the Bostons,
whom our grandfathers permitted to be our guests, giving them every good thing:
the Boston way is crime!
(Burning Coals grows angry; we refuse to share with him because he would not lend two stallions.)
So we ride forever, killing as we go,
we who have been as war-thirsty as the Three Red Blankets, as greedy as Burning Coals, as blind as Looking-Glass
(our copper bracelets tarnishing on our arms);
and now White Thunder, Shooting Thunder and Red Spy, riding ahead of the People, hunt out another ranch, where food is cooking,
Looking-Glass riding hard behind them on Home From Capture, raising a rifle in one hand,
Red Spy laughing: I had thought to meet some Bostons to-day, and now I have met them! My heart tells me what to do with them,
after which White Bird says: Some of Cut Arm’s killers dress like Bostons. Therefore, we shall now begin to kill Bostons,
and his brother chiefs answer nothing against this,
except that Heinmot Tooyalakekt calls out: Young men, listen! While he lived, my father often said: We should make up our minds before we talk,
to which the young men reply: We know our minds,
so that Looking-Glass sits still upon his horse as his younger wife Asking Maiden fans him with grass
and Heinmot Tooyalakekt, turning aside, wraps himself in his King George Blanket,
Toohhoolhoolsote singing his heart into joyous anger,
Ollokot rigid on his cream-colored horse, staring forward like one who is sick
as our young men, handing off their horses to the eagerest boys, surround the house,
and Sun Tied, the silent one whose sister, wife and baby the Bluecoats have killed without reason, chambers a cartridge in his Sharps
—now Cut Arm will learn that we too may show the rifle!—
and they are shooting through the walls:
Pim!
pim! . . . . . . . . . pim!
Good Woman, Cloudburst and Sound Of Running Feet watching in excitement, holding their skittish horses,
and Welweyas the half-woman, her face as heavy as a warrior’s, her lips as narrow but her eyes much wider, sits her pony quietly behind Cloudburst,
Springtime sweating, holding her wounded arm,
Toohhoolhoolsote’s women happily singing their WYAKIN songs
(their WYAKINS are NIGHT GHOSTS)
while their careful husband watches back along the trail,
and from within, a shotgun begins to speak,
our children covering their ears, for its snarling is nearly as loud as Wahlitits’s buffalo gun:
Heinmot Tooyalakekt leads them back (he is certainly no war chief).
Parting the shutters ever so slightly, a Boston shows his greenish eye, and we shoot it:
Tsálalal!
—the other Boston’s shotgun barking like a terrified angry dog—
and from its voice we determine where he must be crouching behind the wall; in this way we kill him also,
remembering how Eya-makoot was pickaxed to death when her dog won a fight with a Boston’s
(now the murderer lives freely on our land);
then the young men discover two more Bostons riding foolishly toward us, driving their hay wagon:
Swan Necklace shoots one of them
(gunsmoke fouling his grinning face)
while the other flees into the willows,
and Looking-Glass sits grimacing on his horse, while Heinmot Tooyalakekt turns away,
the locusts singing tekh-tekh-tekh!
From the hayfield three more Bostons come running, then see the People and begin to run away. Strong Eagle rides after them, and catches one, shooting him in the liver so that he cannot die without screaming. The other two run into the river, and in the quicksand their boots come off. This makes the young men happy.
9
Inside the house
(bloody handprints all over the walls),
hang rifles and pistols from nails just over the fireplace, on whose pallid ashes squats a sooty soup pot—
our hearts are now happy; we are taking whatever we please!—
one Boston lies powderburned and bleeding on the floor; the other has crawled in his blood to the bed
on the edge of which he used to sit and cross his knees so that the sunlight caught the greasy grime on his buckskin trousers while Arabella, clad in practical brownish-black, turned away from his stench, bending over her sewing and wishing she had never left Tennessee; to-morrow the neighbors will be condoling with her and saying: JEHOVAH lift up His countenance upon thee & give thee peace, and she will be thinking: Maybe I’ll get peace now that I don’t have to live there no more; it was never my notion to live there; he could of lived there without me and I would of just took the children, which will happen now in any event, so why not tell myself I never lived there and only he lived there
and died there, slowly enough for his fingernails to tear open the feather mattress:
Áhaha!
White Bird comes lightly in. His narrow-braided head turns from side to side; his deep, alert eyes are neither triumphant nor sad. Red Spy enters smiling. Shooting Thunder is peering under the bed, hoping to find some Boston cringing there. Wounded Head looks around, then leaves, touching nothing. Lean Elk searches vainly for ammunition for Shore Crossing’s buffalo gun, while Over The Point and Strong Eagle take up the dead men’s rifles.
Heinmot Tooyalakekt,
he who once fancied that he could make Cut Arm good by talking,
stands gazing down at the pallid and blackened face on the bed, then pulls a blanket over it. He says: Do not rob them. Cover them all with blankets,
and just as he has said, so it is done.
Then we strip the house of its curtains, blankets, bed-ticking, everything we can use for a bandage
(Good Woman comes quickly in to cut off a strip of quilt to help Springtime’s arm
—when her husband first wished for a second wife, she said to him: How could I turn away from your desire? and indeed she has always loved Springtime as would an elder sister—
and Arrowhead gleans a dead man’s handkerchief with which she can splint an orphan boy’s shattered hand
as Towhee slits a pillowcase into something long and soft to tie around her daughter’s bubbling, bleeding chest);
then we gather in all the dead men’s horses, to enrich ourselves and impoverish Cut Arm
—and some happy young men pile our horse-dung into a conical mound, to teach Cut Arm exactly how our hearts conceive of him—
while Looking-Glass and Heinmot Tooyalakekt stand apart
and Toohhoolhoolsote insults his old women, who had hoped to join in the plundering,
as Lean Elk commences shouting: Hurry, hurry!
—so that we fail to burn the place.
10
Heinmot Tooyalakekt says: We should not kill anyone for nothing,
but White Bird replies: A Boston must have no respect for himself. It makes no matter how well we treat him; he will take advantage of us.
11
The hot day is cooling,
and even the babies are silent; they are sleeping as they ride
but two wounded old women cannot stop moaning
(White Bird will sing over them again to-night)
and we ride on, loose-wrapped in striped blankets, hoping to smear our hearts with enemy blood.
12
Just before sundown we find another ranch,
our hatred rising steep as an antelope’s horn,
and Springtime’s dog lays back his ears:
behind the barn is a gulch where some Bostons are placer mining, wounding OUR MOTHER. At once they begin to flee, crying like children.
White Thunder, who once learned some words of Boston talk from Tsépmin, calls out: Come back here! We good Indians, never hurt no white man!
so that one Boston removes his gun and slowly walks toward us with his dog, with his head down,
while his brother watches,
our horses still except for their swishing tails,
and the young men leap down laughing, handing the halters to the adoring young boys.
Again Heinmot Tooyalakekt seeks to straighten them by talking
—he is telling them three times!—
but they turn away, sometimes even smiling,
and neither White Bird nor the other chiefs will say anything, so fiery are their hearts against all Bostons,
even this trembling one here who grows as white as the pine tree mushroom called lílps as he slowly, sadly comes to us
(he is not so tall):
his dog is whimpering as it comes.
Swan Necklace shoots the dog: Pim!
so that we can enjoy the Boston’s face:
Áhaha! Áhahahahahaha!
(Good Woman and Cloudburst watching without pity, because they remember Fair Land)
and when he falls to his knees (better plead than run), Red Spy raises his Springfield, with an exploding cartridge in the chamber:
Let us do it!
GODd——n you, Boston! For what you mean killing our children?
Fellows, I swear to GOD I never—
Pim! . . .
flaming from the barrel, reddening the cottony smoke:
Tsálalal!
—his brains detonating into purple like the inside of an Oregon grape—
Áhaha!
—now we are beginning to get even with Cut Arm the Moldy;
but it is nearly dark,
cooler and colder
as we pillage the ranch
(Sound Of Running Feet now bending down to touch the dead Boston so that her heart may understand what her father and her uncle have already told her, that the Bostons were truly made in this other color, which does not rub off like paint:
once we arrive in the Buffalo Country, where we shall be happy because no Bostons ever ride there, she will rest and then begin to remember this strange thing that she has now touched),
and because the chiefs wrap themselves in their blankets and turn away, we forbear to sing the victory song;
then once more begin to ride
southward toward the Lemhi Country
(where Toohhoolhoolsote’s father and Old Looking-Glass used to hunt buffalo, in the days before the Shinbones came)
because Looking-Glass told us to ride to the Crows, and his way is no good;
if the Lemhis do not receive us well we can still go to the Crows.
We ride through the dark, and the wounded are groaning.
Lean Elk leaps down from his racehorse; we shall camp exactly here,
lighting small fires, boiling soup,
wrapping ourselves in robes and blankets,
since Cut Arm has again devoured our lodgepoles.
White Bird is now singing over the two old women
and Peopeo Tholekt, whose WYAKIN is a WOODPECKER, elongates his index finger to touch the curse-spot on Springtime’s arm,
because her nephew, his war-friend White Thunder, has asked this of him,
so that his Power begins to peck at the evil inside her, hammering it away as he sings his WYAKIN song:
This badness is going;
this badness is going—
until the sad woman begins to feel better.
Now Fair Land’s son is sleeping,
and Springtime’s child is suckling (perhaps we shall name her after my mother),
and later in the deep night, knowing his women by touch and smell, Heinmot Tooyalakekt creeps to them, first Good Woman, then Springtime, comforting their tears
as Ollokot, smiling in his sleep, Dreams of Dark Green Place back home on the north shore of the Enemy River, where he used to ride so many times with his father,
and Sound Of Running Feet’s dog licks her face.
At dawn we are digging more graves for our People;
we are becoming bad; we shall soon be mean.
13
Looking-Glass takes no part; neither he nor Heinmot Tooyalakekt
(whom the Bostons once baptized Ephraim, and now call Joseph);
from these killings those two stand aside like women:
Heinmot Tooyalakekt, who was never more than camp-chief
(he has never made himself brave)
although after Cut Arm showed the rifle he presumed to tell us: Finish your talk,
desiring us to become slaves and cattle, since he could not keep his own country from being sold,
and Looking-Glass, who also obeyed Cut Arm,
penning himself up on a scrap of painted-off land, trusting the Bostons for nothing,
trusting them again at Ground Squirrel Place, even after Wottolen told his dream:
it is he who killed us, I am telling you three times!
—while Heinmot Tooyalakekt is nothing; he cannot kill Bostons.
14
We are pleasing our hearts, punishing Cut Arm
while Looking-Glass
(he who is unexcelled)
rides silently, treasuring his last dream, the Buffalo Country,
where we were given our Owl Dance long ago;
and just as a buffalo shakes himself when he clambers out of the river, so Looking-Glass shakes off his grief; he will lead the People to the good far-off place where we shall all grow rich again,
