II
“How long, O Lord?”
The only light in the buffalo hide lodge was the glow of the remnants of the cook fire. It was a soft light and warm, and the meal prepared over it sat happily warm in the old man’s belly. The lodge smelled pleasantly of wood and tobacco smoke, stewed pemmican and worked leather. He sat with his legs crossed and his back to the door. The chief sat across from him, beyond the fire, and studied the old man in the firelight. Somewhere out in the dark a woman’s voice wailed a song of mourning for her infant son. As she passed through the camp the voices in the lodges nearest her quieted, evening mirth frozen by minor notes that pierced the soul. The old man did not speak Dakota but he had heard the song many times, in untold variations, and could sing it by heart.
The old man’s hands straightened his beard and he watched the chief, who watched him. The chief sat with his legs crossed and his body wrapped in a fine woven blanket. Under the blanket he wore a breechclout and leggings and a buckskin shirt beaded with porcupine quills in patterns of blue and yellow. He was barefoot and his beaded moccasins sat by his side. His grey hair fell loose about his shoulders and around his neck hung a collar of bear claws. A lifetime of joy and sorrow and staring into the west at sunset was etched on his face. His black eyes were as hard as the winter ground was hard and they searched for the story written on the face of the old man. The old man understood why he must be read but his hands continued to straighten his beard.
There were four lesser elders from other villages in the lodge, two to either side of the chief. They had come to listen only and they watched the fire and smoked their pipes. The translator John Cheyenne sat to the right of the old man with his hands in the slit pockets of his blue sailor’s pea coat. He was a short man and thick, with close black hair that was of one piece with his curly black beard. His name was from the French chien jaune, a translation of Yellow Dog which was his name in Dakota. The son of a Frenchman and a Wahpeton woman, his Dakota was perfect, his French passable, and his English heavily accented but grammatically sound. He had yet to translate a single word. They had eaten in silence.
One of the elders offered his pipe to the chief. The chief held it carefully in both hands and took a long draw from the mouthpiece. He blew the smoke out slowly through his mouth and nose and his eyes never left the old man.
He said something in Dakota with a voice as low and percussive as a bass drum. He passed the pipe back to the elder, who passed it to the elder to his left, who passed it to John, who handed it to the old man.
“He wishes you to share the pipe,” John said.
The old man cradled it in both hands. It was of red pipestone with a tall bowl and a wooden stem hung with owl feathers. He looked up to John. “How must I-?”
John kept his voice quiet. “This is not a ceremony, simply a gesture of hospitality. Smoke, and return the pipe to me.”
The old man nodded and lifted the mouthpiece to his lips. As he drew a deep breath the embers in the pipe bowl glowed under a layer of black ash. Releasing the smoke through his mouth and nose he tasted good tobacco, bearberry, leaves of peppermint. He gave the pipe to John.
“Please tell the chief that this smoking mixture is very agreeable,” he said.
John translated the old man’s words and passed the pipe around to its owner. The chief gave no sign of acknowledgement and the old man looked away for a moment. The elder dumped the ashes from the bowl into the fire and began to pack it again with kinnikinnick from a leather pouch. When the old man looked back at the chief he was still being watched. He looked down at the fire.
At last the chief began to speak. If it was true as the old man had read that oratory was foremost among the Dakota political skills, on the strength of his voice alone the chief was a great chief indeed. John leaned a little closer to the old man to translate.
“I am Wahkeeyah Hotonna,” said the chief. “I am chief of this village as my father was chief before me. This summer past, I sent to the east by written letter for a white man I once knew. This afternoon, several of my young men, and this John Cheyenne who is speaking for me, returned from fishing the ice on the lake. You returned with them. John has told me that you emerged from under the snow near the lake, as a bear does when he has been disturbed in his den.”
The chief brought his hand out from under his blanket and it held a folded piece of paper. “You then showed this letter to John, which you carried in your pocket, and asked his help to find the village of Thunder Voice. This is the very letter which John helped me to write at summer’s end, and which he sent east by mail carrier from St. Paul. I did not send this letter to you. Why do you have it, and why have you come here?”
The old man swallowed and his hands fretted together in his lap. “Several weeks ago I received a letter from the widow of a man I knew by reputation only. She was putting his affairs in order after his death, and came across your letter. She sent it to me with the request that I come to you in her husband’s place and render to you whatever service you had in mind to ask of him.”
The face of the chief fell as John translated for the old man. He waited a moment after John had finished before he spoke. John took a deep breath and switched to English again.
“He was a man unlike any other I have met,” said the chief. “He was a good man who worked among us for many years as a faithful servant to us and to his God. This news of his death greatly saddens me. How did he die?”
“As I said,” said the old man, “I did not know him personally, only by reputation. What I am able to report are only rumors. I first heard that he had weakened considerably in his old age and eventually died in bed, as he was older even than myself. I was later told that he had gone to visit a parishioner of one of the rural churches that were under his care, a church member who was experiencing some personal emergency. It was told that he stayed late after supper to pray with this member and his family. Around midnight, and against the family’s wishes, he mounted his horse to return home. On the way he was caught in a sudden rainstorm, and that night contracted an affliction of the lungs that killed him very soon after. That is all I have heard.”
The chief unfolded the letter and his fingers traced the ink of his request across the page. “He was a man who served selflessly all souls under his authority,” said the chief, “and this that you have told me is in agreement with his character as I knew him.”
The chief stretched out his hand and placed the letter carefully atop the coals of the fire. The edges of the paper smoked and curled before bursting into bright orange flame. The letter blackened and disintegrated and drifted up through the vent hole of the lodge into the night.
The chief studied the old man again. The old man’s face and chest were almost unbearably warm from the fire but his back was cold from sitting by the door and the chill in his muscles had passed into aching numbness. Like the poor moon must feel, he thought, with her unchanging faces.
“So you have been sent in my friend’s place,” said the chief. “Tell me, if my friend and his widow did not know you personally, why did she elect to send you on behalf of her husband? I do not know you either, and have never seen you at work among our people. You are not also a man of God, are you?”
“I am,” the old man said. His stomach turned and he straightened his beard.
“Are you a missionary, as my friend was?”
“Not as your friend was, no.”
“Then what kind of holy man are you?” said the chief.
The old man met his gaze and knew in an instant what was meant by the question. Those eyes were lit with the flame of unassuming pride that only graces the souls of truly capable men who have never betrayed themselves in any test of courage or self-control. He had known such men before and for a long time he had known that he was not one of them. Not once had they ever mistaken him for one of their own, and he knew the chief was not a man to be fooled. He looked down into the fire again.
“I suppose,” said the old man, “that to some I still have a certain reputation as an authority on the mysteries of God.”
“You have seen visions and dreamed dreams,” said the chief.
The old man looked up. “Yes,” he said. “But mostly I have studied in books.”
“We have men like that among us as well,” said the chief, “who dream dreams and learn our stories by memory.”
“I have heard as much,” said the old man.
“There are also white men who move among us and proclaim the will of God,” said the chief. “Some are honest men, servants of God Most High. Others are thieves and murderers who serve themselves.”
“Yes,” the old man said. “I have known men of each kind.”
“And you?” asked the chief. “Are you of those who require us to cut our hair? Who teach us the planting of corn and the usury of animals? The usury of black men? Who have confused eating as a white man eats and laboring as a white man labors with being a Christian?”
“I am not,” said the old man. “I have preached against the usury of men for as long as I have preached anything. I have also seen that the gospel of God has been sent out for the salvation of every man of every tribe and nation, no matter how he eats.”
“My friend the missionary was a man of this kind,” said the chief. “He brought the message of God to us, and lived as we live for a very long time so that he could thoroughly teach it to us. He did not try to make us white. Instead, he learned our language and our customs and when he had proven himself, and we would listen, he taught us daily from the book he carried.”
“Did many of your people learn from him?” the old man said.
“Many listened,” said the chief. “All of these teachings were new to us and we listened with great interest. We have many mysteries ourselves, and some of the answers to these things were found in his book. But at the end, before he returned home, there were only a few of us who believed in the death of Jesus for the forgiveness of our sins, and in the resurrection of the dead, and in the commandments of God. Most of our people have remained in the ways of our ancestors, and we Christians are looked upon as a rare thing.”
The old man turned to John. “What did he say, John?”
“He said he is a Christian,” John said.
“Yes he did,” the old man said. John translated this to the chief.
The chief nodded and watched the old man. “Yes, I am a follower of Jesus,” he said. “With the help of my friend I memorized many of his sayings in Dakota. I try to obey what I have learned. But I do not like to farm corn and wheat. I prefer to walk with a blanket and a rifle. I like to eat whatever I shoot, and I give thanks to God for the deer and buffalo he provides. I try to love the Lord my God with all my heart, with all my soul, with all my strength, and with all my mind. I try to love my neighbor as myself. I try to treat my wife as I should. All this I do while I still live as a Dakota lives, and as a chief of my people. I am happy to live this way, but many missionaries sent to us by your government have condemned me as a savage because I will not adopt the ways of white men. What do you say about me, man of God?”
The old man pulled his beard and looked at the chief, longhaired and barefoot, hung with totems of animal power and woven with pagan designs. How many times have you preached the doctrine for sport, he thought, to scandalize Puritan women or subvert your Pharisaical overseers? Well, old man, here is at least one last chance at a true application of your long-held ideals. Remember why you came and do not fail yourself now.
“I call you brother,” said the old man, “for God has forbidden us to call unclean that which he has cleansed.”
“Yet were it not for the commandment, would I not be unclean in your sight?” said the chief.
“As you are,” said the old man, “you have been made by God in his own image. I am to call him brother, of any appearance, who has made his heart humble before his God and who calls on the name of his son Jesus as Lord.”
“Then my hair does not offend you? Or my blanket, or my hide lodge?”
“They do not,” said the old man. “Does my beard offend you, or my baldness?”
“They do not,” said the chief.
One of the elders made a joke that John did not translate and the elder across the fire from him laughed. The chief’s face retained its innate gravity and his eyes did not slacken at their work.
“In the warmer months there are missionaries who come to us from your government,” he said. “They wish to steal away our sons and daughters, to force them to live at schools in the east. The children are made to forget their families and traditions, are made to behave as white Christians. They suffer unnamable cruelties. It is rumored that many are mistreated to the point of death, yet their so-called caretakers face no retribution. You are not of these, are you?”
“No, I am not,” said the old man. “The children God entrusts to a man and his wife are a sacred gift. The practices you describe and those who preach them sicken me.”
The chief said no more. He continued to watch the old man. The old man looked down into the fire and his teeth chewed his bottom lip. The elder’s pipe travelled around the lodge and the air filled with its smoke. Far away in the night the mourning woman cried her song of woe.
How deeply does his scrutiny penetrate? thought the old man as he waited. Could he read you back your seasons like the rings of a tree? The good start you made in your youth, aflame with visions of a coming kingdom, discerning spirits and interpreting tongues. How you went at the head of the multitude to the house of God with the voice of joy and praise. How you prophesied with the two-edged sword in your mouth and hasted the day of the Lord in your time. Your disillusionment when for all your goading the fervor of parlor theology could never be wrested from the parlor. Your outrage as conviction turned to winks and secret gestures and you were left to wonder at the longsuffering of God. How you called fire down upon the head of the hypocrite and purified the temple with a scourge of cords time and again. How injustices were multiplied and ecclesiastical excesses were excused and the vengeance you proclaimed did not appear. Your sorrow as your eyes were opened to see the true judgment, not in the earthquake or the tempest but in the slow wrath of time, as the faces of your brothers fell under the hard use of gravity and every error of pride set in their hearts forever in unbreakable stone. How the law of God never left your lips even as the collar drew tighter round your neck and the worm of doubt gnawed to pieces the vine of certainty that had always shaded your labor.
…How your shame is none of those things but that you chose your own expedience at every opportunity, worked to better your position in a tomb whitewashed and corrupt. How the work continued, the scroll bitter to your taste. How the tongue of strange fire will not leave its station in the hollow of your chest, will not release you from its burden. How your visions of a kingdom have turned to nightly dreams of coming wrath that grow in their intensity and steal away your sleep. How, estranged as you are from the Other within, you resent his work and in your soul you wander the ruins of a tower that in the end was too costly to build.
The pipe came to him and he smoked and passed it to John. He still felt the eyes of the chief upon him and he did not raise his head.
Do the self-traitorous old men of this tribe, long after they have squandered the last of their spirits to erect facades of insufferable vainglory, in the end abandon even that idolatrous construction to make final grasps at redemption through desperate feats of unsolicited piety? Oh, that we all could be suffered a little longer in our foolishness and given to die with our ceremonial dignity intact.
“I know you very little,” said the chief at last. The old man sighed and looked up to see that, mercifully, the chief had himself buried his eyes among the coals. “And you know very little of me and my people. Yet I asked God to send a friend to me, to make inquiries after the future of my people, and you are what he has sent. I have a question that is heavy on my heart, and although I have asked it of the Lord many times, the answer remains hidden to me. Perhaps you will be able to help me with this. Perhaps not. I will ask you what I have asked the Lord, and if you are able, you will consider my question and answer me.”
The old man nodded. “I will hear your question, chief, and if the Lord moves me to answer, I will proclaim it to you as best as I understand it.”
The chief’s face darkened and he seemed to gather strength to himself. The corners of his mouth turned down and he did not take his eyes from the fire.
“My question is this,” he said. “How long?” He paused and waited for John to translate.
“How long?” said the old man. His pulse quickened and he felt something more than the cold creeping in from under the door behind him.
“Yes,” said the chief. “How long. How long shall I cry, and God will not hear, even cry unto him of violence and he will not save? Why am I shown iniquity, why must I behold grievance? For spoiling and violence are before me, and there are those that raise up strife and contention. How long will the abuses against my people continue? How long must I look upon the evil done to us and our children? How long will the treaties we have signed be ignored? The law is slacked, and judgment never goes forth. For the wicked surround the righteous, and wrong judgments proceed.”
The old man’s face flushed and he felt faint. The echo of his old despair resounded in his heart. How long, it rang as the familiar dart penetrated his time-worn armor at the very joint of neglect. The shock of the strike to his inveterate wound sucked the breath from his lungs. So in the dry places where it wandered it found no rest and in the waning of your years it returns sevenfold to reclaim its swept and carefully ordered house.
The chief looked at him. “Old man?” he said and John translated. His voice came from a great distance.
He was powerless to answer and powerless to stop it. He clenched his jaw against the oracle but he could feel the ghost pouring in under the door flap and there was nothing he could do. Oh Lord, he prayed, and that was all. Oh Lord. He began to tremble and wrapped his arms tightly about himself. His teeth clattered in his mouth and his eyes lost their focus in the coals of the fire. He felt himself falling and he tried in vain to still his teeth. His spine arched and his eyes rolled back into his head. Radiant light engulfed him and burned mercilessly in his eye sockets and he pleaded with it until it slackened. Shapes formed in the brilliance and cast long otherworldly shadows in every direction and when at last he comprehended what were the shapes he found his breath and cried out in desperation.
He stood on a barren plain scourged by a blistering east wind. Skinless buffalo carcasses innumerable littered the plain in a ceaseless reach to the western horizon. The ravens that feasted were too glutted to fly and steam engines groaned at endless trains of flatcars stacked with hides. In Leavenworth it was one eagle-backed silver piece per tongue, three little gold Indian heads per robe, and the smoke and the stench from the tanneries ascended up unto heaven forever. In the sky on the far horizon feathered warriors on painted horses charged cavalrymen dressed in blue and all the riders rode upside down.
His eyes opened unseeing and his fingers separated three long whiskers from the growth of beard on his chin. With a quick jerk he plucked them from his face and held them up to the firelight. One whisker he pulled from his hand and cast onto the coals. It curled from the heat and vanished in a tiny wisp of white smoke. The second he tossed into the air and it drifted away into the shadows of the lodge. The third he rolled between thumb and forefinger until it made a little bead and this he hid in the breast pocket of his wool coat.
The light faded from the old man’s eyes and he was in the lodge once more, seated before the fire across from the chief with his back to the door. He stopped his muttering. John was watching him, the elders were watching him, the chief was watching him, and he wanted to weep for them. They were waiting for him to speak. He had never imagined himself as the one to declare such a thing to those who would suffer under its burden and he recoiled at the thought. He started to ask his leave of the chief, just until morning, to walk outside under the stars and supplicate for a stay of judgment as once had Abraham or Moses. Try as he might the words would not form on his tongue. If not you, who will declare the oracle of God to these men, old man? Certainly no one who respected them as he did. They were men in a way that the majority of his own race could no longer recognize, each a father and a soldier, a hunter and a poet, a craftsman and a priest. As such men they deserved the truth as clearly as he could tell it. So the old man did not weep. He spoke.
“Thus says the Lord. ‘Behold among the incredulous, and regard, and wonder, and marvel; for I will work a work in your days. You will not believe it, though it be told you. For lo, I raise up that bitter and furious nation, which shall go upon the breadth of the land to possess the dwelling places that are not theirs. They are terrible and fearful; their judgment and their dignity shall proceed of themselves. Their horses also are swifter than the leopards, and are more fierce than the wolves in the evening; and their horsemen are many, and their horsemen shall come from far. They shall fly as the eagle in his haste to meat. They come all to spoil, for their faces shall be an east wind, and they shall gather the captivity as the sand. And they shall mock the kings, and the princes shall be a scorn unto them. They shall deride every stronghold, for they shall heap up the dust and take it. Then shall they take courage, and depart to do wickedly elsewhere, always imputing this, their power, unto their god.’”
The old man stopped and cleared his throat. He waited for John Cheyenne to finish translating before he spoke again. His hands straightened his beard and he said, “For many years there has been a disturbance in the east. The eastern tribes have been overrun and pushed into your lands. Their food has been eaten, their forests cut down, their hills and their valleys built with houses and roads. You have not believed that such a thing would ever happen among you. It shall. The people who have done this are greatly feared wherever they go, and wherever they go they themselves fear nothing. In many other lands men of our kind have done the same as they do in the east, and as they will do here. They speak endlessly of laws and of justice. They claim to know God, but whatever seems right to them is what they always do. Their laws are for themselves, and are no protection for you. Many of them would say that God himself is for them to know and not for you to know. In truth their only god is their strength. But the Lord my God is the holy one. You and your people shall not perish from the earth. My people have been ordained for judgment, and established for correction, but they will be held accountable for all they have done, and all they will do to you.”
When John had finished rendering his words the old man looked up to see storm clouds on the faces of the elders; yet none could match the face of the chief, a mask carved in anguish. Everything he had feared had been confirmed, and into that pronouncement of doom he had a people to lead. The chief looked across the fire at the old man and the old man’s jaw clenched tight. The night was very cold on his back and he felt an emptiness growing within him.
The chief’s voice began to thunder and this time John waited until he finished speaking to render his words into English. The chief also appeared empty and sat staring into what was left of the embers of the fire. He smoked the elder’s pipe and the muscles under his cheeks protruded and receded as he clenched and unclenched his jaw.
“He says,” said John, “that God is of pure eyes, and cannot look upon evil with favor. He cannot look upon wickedness. How, then, can he look upon these who deal treacherously and hold his tongue, when the wicked devours the man that is more righteous than he? Your people make all men as the fish of the sea, and as the creeping things, that have no ruler over them. They take up all with hook and line, they catch them in their net, and gather them in their nets, and they rejoice and are glad. They sacrifice unto their net, and burn incense unto their nets, because by them their portion is fat, and their meat plenteous. Shall they therefore stretch out their net, and not spare continually to slay the nations? Will God keep silent when your people, who claim to know him, swallow up our people, who are innocent and live without knowledge of him? Will God allow you to march over the whole earth and consume everything that is not you?”
“As I said,” the old man said, “in time, they will be held guilty for what they have done. I am sorry to have answered you this way, but there is no other way it can be.”
The chief raised his eyes and the anger had not left them. “In time, you will be held guilty,” he said. “This is not an answer, little prophet. So I ask again, how long? But you cannot answer me this.”
He turned his face away and waved toward the door with his hand. “You must go out from here now, old man. I have much to ponder. You will stay tonight with John Cheyenne and I will call for you in the morning, or perhaps the day after tomorrow.”
“As you wish,” the old man said.
The chief did not look at him. After a moment the old man stood and ducked through the flap of the lodge and out into the night air. The cold stung his cheek like the slap of a hand. He straightened up and gathered his coat tightly around him. He stamped life into his feet, his boots crunching in the patch of trampled snow at the doorway of the lodge. There was no moon, yet the starlight reflected on the snow cast the whole world in bright silver. To the north over the pine trees a long ribbon of red aurora uncurled in hanging waves. John Cheyenne stepped through the hide flap, his hands in the slit pockets of his pea coat.
He glanced at the old man and gestured with a nod of his head. “You will stay at my lodge. I have no wife, so there is room and no inconvenience.”
“That is very hospitable of you, John,” said the old man. “After that council I am not so sure I rate it. But with all humility I thank you for your kindness.”
John did him the courtesy of a half-smile. “If you think he is terrible when he is angry, you should hear him laugh, old man,” he said. “Come. It’s cold enough to kill you.”
The old man followed John Cheyenne down the short path between the rows of quiet lodges. Small plumes of wood smoke stood above their vents in the still air and at the edge of camp a dog barked. The winter village was small but very orderly, twelve lodges arranged in straight lines with wide lanes between them. There was no refuse or other debris piled anywhere that the old man could see. Nor were there any unfortunate citizens in tattered clothing huddled around small fires behind boarding houses and drinking halls, praying to stay warm or for a crust of discarded bread to sustain them until sunrise. There were no raucous pianos to be heard rioting in whorehouse parlors nor any pompous pipe organs bellowing from the extravagant caverns of empty cathedrals. There was only stillness, not diminished in the least but heightened to the fine point of heartbreak by the approach of the woman and her mourning song. There were stars in place of gaslights and the depths of the forest in place of churches and real men as God had made them in place of devilishly ambitious merchant automatons.
The old man sighed. Was I summoned here solely for my torment? he prayed. I was content, you know. Content to pass my last days shilling for you in the houses of silly women festooned in their ornamental piety, as you avert your eyes from the treacherous and hold your tongue as the wicked devour. For you, I bore the shame of my blasphemous doubts in silence. I suffered the wounds in meekness and did not cry out. And now, in the winter of my years, just as I have learned to lay my accusations aside and strike a balance of some sort of peace between us, you sink your arrows into me once more. Very well. For in doing so you have revealed a brother to me, a comfort I have never had. I have seen how a man might with courage and righteousness ask the thing I have only ever dared to ask in shame, and to his voice I will now add my own. How long, O Lord, shall we cry and you will not hear?
The mourning woman came toward them along the path. She was wrapped in a frosted buffalo coat and her hair was parted into two tight braids that ended at her shoulders in little tufts of turkey feathers. Her voice was as clear and as beautiful as her song was jarring to the old man’s soul. When she passed him on the path she held his eyes boldly with hers even while she sang, but what nearly made him gasp was the quiet peace written on her face. She continued past them and the old man stopped and turned to watch her go. He saw her continue up the path between the lodges, the quiet, clean path where a young woman could walk at night without fear or escort, to the home of the chief. There she fell silent and ducked quickly through the door. The old man turned back and saw John Cheyenne a little way ahead, folding back the flap of his own lodge, and he hurried on to follow him inside.