Death Chants (24 page)

"Help!" she
screamed.

There was an
answering chorus, a lightning bolt of startled gasps from the other room. The room shook with a
small thun­der of rushed footsteps and the door to the room burst open. The Stanhopes entered en
masse, with Doctor Maddsen leading an embarrassed charge up San Juan Hill.

"You must have been
glued to the door," said Bound Woman with ironic glee. "Well, you can wipe the smile of hope off
your face. I'm not dying, if you think that's what I was screaming about."

"My dear, I assure
you," began Amanda, the apologist for the family.

"Save it," said
Bound Woman. "I want to be carried outside. I want some air and some sunshine. I'm sick of this
damn bed."

"I wouldn't
advise—" began Doctor Maddsen.

"Then consider
yourself fired," said Bound Woman.

There was an
unmistakable note of command in her voice. The best Doctor Maddsen could do was see that she was
noi

unduly jostled as
several of the male Stanhopes made a chair of their arms and carried her out into the
garden.

The relatives stood
all around her in a half circle as she was gently lowered into a wicker lawn chair.

"Move off and give
me some damn air," grumbled Bound Woman. "I came outside to see the outside, not all of
you."

They moved off in a
group, coming to a stop at the edge of the long circular driveway. They seemed engaged in a
rather ani­mated dispute with Doctor Maddsen. It was not a particularly happy group.

Bound Woman looked
up at the sky and felt a part of herself drifting off, lured by plains of white snow to the
north, long cool green rivers from the south.

She did not regret
Barrett's death.

She only had one
life.

She was only one
person. Perhaps in this thing, which she felt in the sky, Barrett and his white ways, perhaps
they had once come for her but only now did she know, that she had never really been where she
had thought, and Barrett thought, she

was.

She had to call to
that part of herself that had always been her, before Barrett and the Stanhopes, and the kind of
life made for her that had been shared and not shared in their long years together.

She touched the sky
then with an Indian child's little stick

hand.

The thing that
approached, possessed her.

Now it was just her
and the sky.

No more pretended
whiteness, just whispered words that burst from her lips. "I am Indian again! I am
free!"

They were words
that sang in the blood. Her heart pounded with the joy of it.

Oh, there was loss,
for Barrett had loved her, and she him, but they had grown into two people who were not who they
once were and should always have been. She knew she would weep again when his face was in her
eyes but she saw beyond that, to suddenly perceived years, that from this moment on, would belong
only to her. The bird rode the sky again.

She had no one else
to live for, and now under the good true sky of mother earth, could live for herself.

She could be a
small child again, running to jump into the shadow of a bird flying above her.

She had lost love,
a fire that warms in mystery, but gained in its loss, possession of her true self
again.

She breathed a
quiet prayer to the tree of all trees that life might now be long, a wish against yesterday's
horrified fear that life would be all too long.

She traveled in her
mind, in her sense of herself and in her freedom, and might have traveled there the rest of her
days had there been no commotion.

The Stanhopes were
agitated, talking loudly, making a great deal of fuss over someone who had just stepped out of a
long black car.

A figure pushed
through the crowd of Stanhopes. It was Bar­rett Stanhope, undead, unaware he had ever been
thought dead.

"Bound Woman! I'm
here! What's going on here?"

His voice was
unmistakable, demanding, self assured, from a lifetime of being in command.

Bound Woman was
pulled back by the voice, the word, free, shattering on her tongue. A bird, pierced with an
arrow, screamed in the sky.

She toppled
forward, dead before she hit the ground, her heart exploding into soundlessness.

Doctor Maddsen said
she died of sudden shock, of a killing joy, at the unexpected return of the love she thought she
had lost.

It was the truth as
far as he knew it.

But something on
the back of an obscene bird of night, some­thing climbing to nothingness in the sky knew her
death in another way.

She died because
she had lost herself.

The old man sat by
the burning ruin of his house. His hands still smelled of gasoline.

"I don't understand
why you want to leave everything be­hind?" said his son, watching the old man with
apprehension.

"Everything has
left me behind," said Wild Horse Dancer. "My old woman is dead. My old friends are dead. And you,
my son, and Makes Pretty, my only daughter, you both belong as much in the white world as I do
not."

"But where will you
go? What will you do?"

"The world has
changed. White people now own it. I am too much of the old world to take my place among them. If
I stay near this place which they say must be torn down for the big road, I would have to live
with a highway through my heart. I go (o the mountains to live out my last days in a place that
is still my world."

"But how will you
survive?"

"I won't. But I
will live well as long as I can. My heart yearns for the mountains, unchanged and dark and still
full of the great mystery. Yes, I go to the mountains that still look as if part of the blackness
of the night lingered in them."

The old man pushed
his long gray braids back over his shoul­der. He turned from his burned house and stooped to pick
up his rifle and his pack.

"I shouldn't let
you do this," said his son. "You still have a lot Of good years left."

"Left to do what?
Guard the old bones of my relatives until I become old bones beside them?"

The old man stared
defiantly up at the sky. "No! As I have
walked the path of life, I have learned that I am nothing, a leaf blown by the
wind.

"But if my bones
rest in the lap of night, even so, I would ask that you listen this last time, for a word is like
a wind and a thousand words are like a storm.

"I would speak of a
life lived, of what I have understood and failed to understand.

"I have a dream. My
young life was wrapped in it. My old age will wear it yet again before my bones rattle on the
racks of the ancestors. I would speak of a Spirit Buffalo, a demon, a human being in animal skin,
a night walker! Him I must find!"

"A tale for
children," said his son. "Such things never ex­isted."

"NO!" raged the old
man with sudden heat. "I saw him born. He is to be the beginning and end of my life. He is all of
those things to me. I say he lives!"

"That is your
quest? Your great dream?" His son's voice sprinkled a tiny rain of contempt. "You've grown old,
Father. Maybe too old."

"Yes, I am old.
They called me Wild Horse Dancer in my youth because I once danced with wild horses. But in the
white man's world all the wild horse are now tame or dead, so perhaps now I am just Horse Dancer,
living again under the sign of my first child name. That which made me a man in this world is
gone. Perhaps I will be the child, Horse Dancer once again, like an old blind snake that touches
its own tail and thinks wrongly that he has found a new mate."

The old man bent
under the weight of his pack. He turned, shading his eyes, and stared off in the distance at the
mountain.

"In my youth, the
wind swept me out among the nations and tribes. I knew great battles and peace, great hunger of
body and soul and feastings. I was honored and treated like a dog. I found friends among my
enemies and enemies among my friends. Long I walked the stormy paths of glory and death but the
Great Spirit did not destroy me.

"I have withstood
much, but when my mind dwells on the Spirit Buffalo I become lost and my tongue tastes
blood."

"I should stop you.
The government promised you a new house. Bigger and better than the one you had. At your age,
you
should be content to have a nice
house over your head and a warm fire where you can comfortably sit and think back on your past.
Even an old dog deserves as much. There's no need for you to go. This is suicide!" said his
son.

His son's beer
belly ballooned over his wide belt buckle. Sweat streaked the collar of his Pendleton shirt and
stained the white brim of his Stetson.

The old man began
walking toward the mountain, which rose above the land like a black swan.

Wild Horse Dancer
trudged on in the heat and the dust.

His son stared at
him helplessly, powerless to act. When the old man went back into his own world, there was no way
for the son to reach him. They lived now in worlds too unlike each other.

"Why do you want to
kill yourself?" the son shouted at the old man, his words echoing like a rifle shot across the
land.

Wild Horse Dancer
stopped in his tracks. He turned slowly like a leaf in the wind.

He cupped his hands
to his mouth and shouted back.

"Every dream is
followed by awakening but the last in a man's life. And so, my son, this is the last one in
mine."

Horse Dancer
measured his ten summers against the trunk of a tree with the impatience of a boy who yearns to
grow to be a man..

It was the spring
of a long-ago spring, and all around the boy life stretched its many animal necks, shut its many
eyes and hissed passionately toward the sunrise.

Night had been a
time of fierce unrest. Wings had beat, claws had lorn and rent and the quick biting snap of sex
and death had Hounded in the early light of dawn.

They had told him
he was too young to hunt the buffalo.

And so, he stole
his uncle's old one-shot rifle with the cracked wooden stock and came out on his own to show the
world he was old enough to kill a buffalo.

He was old enough
and good with a gun but he was not wise enough.

He passed through
the trees as quiet as a trout gliding through deep water and so came unnoticed and unheard upon a
mother buffalo, giving birth.

It was a wonder he
was not wise enough to understand.

He did not see the
great mystery unfolding. He saw only a chance to prove his manhood.

The calf was on his
feet before Horse Dancer had crept within striking distance with the old rifle.

The calf wobbled on
weak legs to his mother and found her milk.

Horse Dancer loaded
the old gun.

The warm milk
flowed slowly from mother buffalo's body into the calf's, and the first joyous strength of life
began in him.

The calf, with each
gulp, felt the gray confusing clouds of birth roll away until only new blue sky flickered in his
eyes.

Horse Dancer
steadied his gun against the wind.

The reddish-brown
buffalo calf began to know time, the light and dark of it. There was a whole world to learn, if
he lived. He would learn that water is silent when it is still and noisy when it runs. He would
learn the wonders of night and the glories of day.

The rifle shot was
bad medicine.

It wounded fatally
but did not quickly kill. It was the kind of shot that makes death long and painful.

The mother buffalo
cried in agony and started to walk away from her calf. She tried to run, the brave heart of the
mother buffalo singing strongly to lead danger away from her calf, which she loved more than life
itself, but her body was too badly broken.

She swayed a
little, ran a few steps, her flanks heaving furi­ously.

The reddish-brown
calf understood nothing of danger, only the loss of his milk and of his one big love, buffalo
mother.

The little calf
stumbled alongside of his mother, trying to find the rich wonderful milk of life
again.

The mother buffalo
couldn't run. She was too badly hurt. The little calf, confused, butted his little head against
her chest, looking for the warmth of her love.

With each breath,
golden red clouds swirled, falling in a red rain on the little calf.

The calf bawled,
feeling the wetness all over his back from her breath. As little as he was, as new to the world,
perhaps he sensed that something was terribly wrong.