Jonis Agee - The Bones of Paradise

She tried to take a deep breath, but her ribs pressed in too hard, binding her body like a wet hide, and she could only form a gasp that ended in a cough. She could almost feel her sister slip inside her then, as if following the tear she had placed on her heart.

Without warning, the light outside began to fail, and the tipi sank into shadows. It was time. Rose folded her mother’s ghost shirt that Star had saved and tucked it inside the quilt beside her sister. There was no bone comb or beaded mirror, nor fancy quilled hair fasteners or colorful beaded moccasins saved for courtship, only the bloody shirt to be carried into the next world as evidence of their people’s unhealed grief.

Rose glanced at her own special things in their small parfleche box. She had nothing else of value for her sister’s journey, her life to the next world. If she had only known, she might have, but it was no use. She found the sweetgrass bound with thread next to the tipi entrance, held it over the fire, then blew the small flame down to smoking embers, which she used to bless the four directions, the sky and the earth, and then swung the smoking grass around and across her body. When she was done, she called Some Horses and her daughter, Lily, to begin the final journey.

The night was dark with only a quarter moon to lead them through the woods to the ancient pine Some Horses had chosen, one he could climb with the body strapped on his back. The white priests had tried to stop their practice of placing the dead in the open air to encourage the journey to Wanagi Makoce, but there was no question as to where her sister belonged. Rose shuddered at the thought of ground burial or burning.

She listened to her husband’s breath as he struggled up the tree, and tried not to think about what would happen if someone discovered the body. In a year they would end their mourning with a wanagi yuha to remember Star’s spirit. What few relatives were left would tell stories about Star and distribute her possessions, except there was nothing left. Rose and Some Horses would have to buy and make clothing and tools to exchange.

“Now,” Some Horses whispered from the tree, and Rose began a blessing song, torn even now between wanting to release her sister’s spirit into the other world and holding it here until Rose could avenge her death.

The wind quietly grew around them and began to push the pine and cedar tops side to side, tossing Horses and her sister like a boat on a lake.

“Hurry,” Rose called. Some Horses grunted with effort as he lashed the body to the limbs and trunk.

Rose tried to recall the other song in the burial ceremony, and couldn’t. She was empty, numb; her own tears wouldn’t fall though she could feel the salt warmth of her sister’s drowning her heart. She knew she shouldn’t, but while she waited for Some Horses to slowly descend, Rose looked up at the sky, the sliver of moon, and finally the dark mass of her sister’s body, and whispered her promise.

The wind rose and quieted as if it had captured the moonlight that settled like a flock of silver birds around her. It was then that her sister’s spirit began a tale that would send Rose on a journey for the man’s heart. It must be taken so Star could rest:

I am Star of the Miniconjou. This is the story I never had the chance to tell, though I whispered it to the deer I spied fawning in the marsh grass one spring morning. The doe’s pain fresh, like my mother’s that winter morning ten years before, at Čhankpé Ópi Wakpála, what the whites call Wounded Knee. Later I wondered if I had ruined the world for that babe as it stood wobbly on long, spidery legs, gazing about at the dew-sparkling grass and the water alive with light while his mother licked him clean and dry. Did I curse him as my people have been cursed?

Would he fall prey too soon, as my sisters and brothers did that morning, the bullets finding their running backs and skulls as they stumbled in the hard dirt and icy clumped grass? We gave thanks for the mild weather, believing Wovoka’s promise that the world would open again as we sang, “The buffalo are coming, the buffalo are coming . . .” Someone looked up at the weary winter sky and said she could smell their hot, grassy breath, and then she saw their powerful legs galloping down a ray of light and clouds, and we threw up our arms to rejoice, and sang even louder, “The whole world is coming!”

Stosa Yanka throws dirt into the sky to make a road for the buffalo we can all see and smell and hear, dreaming already of the rich meat stews and the warm robes they will give us, and deer and elk and antelope and bear following, the eagles arrive, the air yellow with the whip of their wings, and then crows come, hundreds, they walk among the dancers, proud bobbing heads keeping time, and it is all happening as Wovoka has promised and the people sing louder in time with the animals, and the ghost shirts come alive, birds and butterflies and animals lifting off men’s shoulders and chests and backs to join the dance, and the thrown dirt hangs in the air like a road to welcome back the world, and only the hummingbirds are shy and hold off, as they are wont . . . and then a sharp crack and the air is split, the dirt spilled, and the new world collapses down on us in pieces, the guns boom and the people fall, running, falling, screaming, falling, and I am away, my hand pulled by my mother as we follow the others up the ravine, running like deer now, light and bounding until we come to a place where badger dug a hole in the side of the hill and Mother shoves me inside, no matter what awaits me, stay, Star, she whispers with her finger to her lips, her eyes wild as a bird in a grass net, stay. I close my eyes so I will not see what is in the hole with me or watch her disappear, but soon they are opened by the men’s voices.

“First you taste the meat, then you drink the blood,” says the man with one eye that searches for me while the other eye looks at my mother, held by her hair, a knife at her throat. She won’t look at me, but I can’t stop seeing her. I feel at my waist for my small skinning knife, but I dropped it while we played chase the prairie hen, so already my story is not the story I meant to tell and I have confused that morning with the day before and the day before that.

Maybe the dancing had not yet begun . . . the sacred tree was in the middle where we danced but we were not allowed to include it in our game. Our older brothers in their mission school clothes played on the other side of the camp, their hair shorn, the backs of their bare necks embarrassed; they tried to act as if they were too old to play the fox and hen game. I saw Lame Dog, with the deep scar on his calf where he was attacked by a dog before he was taken away to the school. He was watching me the way he’d always watched me, knowing as I knew that one day we would share our tipi and have many fine children. I had seen it many times and not told anyone except my sister, Rose, who sees as I do. He was there playing a boy game, a contest of rock throwing, or stick fighting, or fighting. It made me happy, I know that, to feel him across the camp, my husband-to-be, and so we were not dancing, not seeing the buffalo, and in my haste to tell this story I have poured all the stories into one, so when the medicine man threw the handful of dirt in the air—and it must have been powerful, because we were seeing the road and also doing our morning chores, and also playing, and all of this in that moment when the buffalo hooves touched the earth again, and the birds cried out a warning of salvation and loss—the gun fired. At first we did not know what the sound meant, and then the big gun, the Hotchkiss, and the Springfields, the Colts, their horses branded front and back, numbers and letters, their hides scorched, shook their heads, the curb chains rattled, the flash of sabers and spurs and somewhere the tinkling of bells, of silver spur chains, of men loading guns, the guns.