Louise Erdrich - The Master Butcher's Singing Club

Roy sat up, gestured for some pillows to prop at his back, took a sip of the water into which Delphine had mixed a bit of ginger to calm his stomach and help the blood flow quicker to his heart.

“Picture a Christmas service in a snug built church deep in the heart of plains country!” Roy spread his fingers wide before him. Eyes narrowing, he stared into the back of his hand as though it were made of prophesying crystal. “A ragtag bunch of starved and freezing Minneconjou Lakotas — what the layman will call Siouxs — rap humbly at the door of this Christian house of worship. They’re on the run, mostly women and little children, and a few wore-down warriors half mad from their strivings and their defeats. Their chief is dying in a wagon they got dragged by two racks of horse bones that used to be war ponies. They have seen Sitting Bull betrayed and their everyday survival shot to hell. They have this idea they can dance the world back, sing to the dead and the dead will hear them and all will rise and live. They are very lonesome people, is all, and I know about lonesome. Just ask me. They want to see the faces of the ones they love. It is Christmas on the plains, mind you. These poor folks come begging for a handout, a little mercy. And do they get it?” Roy glared blindly at the scene in his head. “What do you think?”

“Well from how you set it up,” said Delphine, “no.”

“No,” said Roy. “It’s the God’s truth. They were turned away.” He was breathing quickly, his storytelling tongue on fire. “Among them there is a girl from the Indians I have mentioned, those Indians up north who blended with the French. Her daddy is a Cree who was sent down by his people to learn of this new method of dancing to bring back the dead. He is supposed to report back and tell the old people of his own tribe if it works — so far, he has seen no resurrections. On this trip, he took his favorite, his youngest, his daughter. The others are left behind. This girl and her father traveled first to the camp of the Hunkpapa Lakota, where folks are leaving for the village of Chief Hump, to the south. They meet up with a Minneconjou bunch there and walk deeper into the Badlands territory with the remnants of the believers, who at this point are just trying to go home. Pretty soon they got nothing, food nor shelter, except the steep bluffs of a place called Medicine Root Creek. It is there that they entertain an army major of the notorious, inglorious, Seventh Cavalry, Major Samuel M. Whitside. At Porcupine Butte he convinces them to follow underneath the white flag of surrender to a military camp near a place called in Lakota something unpronounceable by me, and in the English language, Wounded Knee.”

Roy paused for a long moment, squinting into the darkest corner of the room, moving his tongue across his lips as if to find a word or two caught there like a crumb. With a jerk of energy, he roused himself and continued.

“Camped at this place they are headed for is an army of men which has declared themselves a shelter for the Lakota, the Siouxs if you will, should they be so desperate as to approach. With their chief, old Big Foot, dying of pneumonia in that wagon bed and with no food, starving mainly, these people beg protection. They give up their guns and set up camp where they are told. Minnie’s father has an old piece of bannock in his pocket, their last food, which he shares with a woman who has invited them into her tent. She has a baby tied to her and no man in sight. After it is eaten, they have nothing. But the woman picked up something thrown to her by a member of the congregation in the church way back there. It is a tough one-legged gingerbread figure. This, she offers to share with them. She divides it crumb by crumb. They eat it, and fall asleep in her tent. That next morning, the woman fills a pot with snow and puts the little pot upon a fire of twigs. The woman takes a bundle of roots from the bodice of her dress and she stews one of those roots in the pot of melted snow. She tends the pot with the root like it was something special, watching it so careful, hushing her baby, testing the potency of her brew with a finger, withdrawing the root and examining it from time to time. She removes the little pot from the fire, eventually, and she allows the tea to cool just enough. Then she motions to Minnie to drink it. And just as she is drinking this tea, there is a shot fired outside the tent.

“Well, you can read about this in the history books if you want to, though rarely is the full extent of its pity told or believed. Minnie’s father, running out of the tent, is gunned down right off, for that accidental shot brings down thunder. A great, crackling ripple of sound! Smoke and brimstone! Bullets ripping through the cloth, Minnie plunges from the tent with this woman, who grabs her arm and steers her for the white peace flag of surrender. They stand underneath it, shots whizzing and whining in swarms. The woman still has her baby at her breast, tucked in a tied shawl, at her nipple. Again, that thunder rolls! It is Hotchkiss guns trained down straight on the camp of women and on the children and on the white flag of surrender, too. This lady, she keeps nursing. Even as she’s struck and killed, she slumps down with that baby still drinking and now covered in its own mother’s blood. And Minnie’s father, she curls next to him a moment, just in time to receive his last words, a message, and to feel the life go out of him. Which is when Minnie walks right off, through it all, just mystified. She scrambles down a ravine, where she sees sights that she never can get out of her mind. She sees grown soldiers ride down women and then fire their guns point-blank as the women hold their little babies in the air. She climbs out of the dry wash and under a wire fence. From there, she watches a grown soldier on horseback chase down a skinny, weeping, stumbling boy. Another strips a dead girl naked for her figured shirt. The soldiers leave Minnie alone, maybe because she wears a farmer dress and farmer coat, not a blanket, or maybe they see her lighter brownish hair or her skin paler than the skin of those Lakota or they see her French eyes. She walks out of there and zigzags behind some others who are fleeing too. She walks through snow, following the tracks of those others when she falls too far behind to see them anymore. Their tracks save her. She puts her feet in them and never quits walking until she reaches a mission run by an old priest named Jutz. That’s all that happens. I can’t tell you no more.”

* * *

DELPHINE STARED at Roy in a fit of skepticism. There was suddenly a big noise in her head. It was too much, and just like Roy to give her this strange and terrible information, and then to quit just as soon as the scene had unrolled in her mind. She thought she’d heard of the place he mentioned, but had long forgotten the how and why of what happened there. She hadn’t known any Indians well, except Cyprian, to whom, if she believed Roy, she might now be related.

Delphine’s suspicious reception of his story disappointed Roy. He waited for some sign of appreciation for his efforts and lost interest when Delphine continued blinking at him and drumming at her lips with a finger, deciding whether or not to believe the story. He shut up, turned away, and stared at Minnie’s blurred photograph. His eyes glazed over, his face grew peaceful.

After a while Delphine knew it was no use to gather herself, to ask anything else. Real questions sat on her heart. Simple, undramatic. What was Minnie like? Had she been happy to have a daughter? Had she loved her? Loved Roy? Had he really felt such an extraordinary happiness with Minnie? Why had he used his loss of joy as a sorry excuse to make his daughter’s life miserable, not to mention waste his own? Would he now die happy, living on memory — was that his booze now? Was he telling the truth?