Jonis Agee - The Bones of Paradise

The boys go down, all at once as if in a game, and I open my mouth to scream. The buffalo are running across the camp, over the hills, up the ravines, follow us, they cry, and we do, though people fall all around me, and the crying grows louder than the guns or the pounding hooves, and my mother is forced to lie with her legs spread and the other man, the tall, thin one with the blond hair and narrow face, holds a saber point at her heart and smiles while crooked eye pulls down his pants and shoves inside her, my mother keeps her eyes closed and bites her lip against the pain, blood drips on her cheek, and it makes crooked eye both hungry and angry, for he begins to beat her while he does his business, then he trades places with skinny man, and crooked eye mounts her from behind like a dog, holds her hair while she rears back but cannot throw him off, and crooked eye beats her about the head and that isn’t enough so he curses her and pokes her with his knife and kicks and pulls her to pieces. By the time they are through, they have stabbed and cut chunks of flesh and each takes an ear, then crooked eye her scalp. Skinny man cuts off her breast and scrapes away the flesh to make a pouch, he says, for his coins. As he shoves it in his shirt, a small gold object falls out unnoticed and drops into the snow at his feet.

If this were your story, you might tell it differently, the pieces in order, the way I waited in that hole, crying without sound for hours, my shoulders shaking dirt loose until I hoped to be buried alive, anything but having to wait for dark when I crawl out, find my mother, and try to help her home. I start back to camp, must ease past bodies stiffening in the cold night air. I had not known so many were undone.

As I get closer, the field is alive with movement. Wovoka was right! We are reborn! The bullets didn’t tear into our ghost shirts, didn’t kill our flesh, we are unharmed! A man scrambles to his feet, holding up the eagle talon necklace that Black Coyote wore, and the beaded moccasins his mother made for him, ah, the scavengers, like crows they cover the dead, stealing what doesn’t belong to them, sending my people into the next world naked and full of pain. They strip the bodies of everything, even the hair. This they do to women and children who have not made war upon them, while the cavalry eats and drinks at their fires like warriors who have done a good day’s battle on innocents, sick and old, so few young men here anymore, and now I have no past, no future, the husband I am promised still running, though the back of his head is blown apart, his legs seem to churn beneath him in the dirty cold.

That night I go back to the badger hole, climb in, and dream half a dream, in which I tell the hummingbirds that they must fly in the four directions of the winds and tell all the people what has happened here at Čhankpé Ópi Wakpála,, let the world know of the slaughter. It is growing light when I remember to look for the object the thin man dropped by my mother before he left. It is a yellow chain with a round disc that opens to reveal tiny pictures of a white woman and skinny man. I put it over my head and tuck it in my blouse. The murderers were too drunk on blood to search her, so I am able to find the beaded deerskin turtle she wears around her waist that holds my mother’s life cord. I find her large knife in its sheath on her thigh and wonder why she did not reach for it. I pull off her tattered, bloody ghost shirt, fold it carefully, and place it inside my dress.

There is nothing I can give her except to cut a hank of my braid and tuck it in her hand that she may use my life spirit to carry her home. I kiss her bloody cheek, cover her face with my blanket, and know that where I am going, there will be warmth and food. I begin to walk, carefully avoiding the men who search the dead for booty, half-starved for the last feather, the last bone necklace, the last deer-foot whistle, the last ragged pants, the last half-torn belt with the beads falling off like bread crumbs for the people to follow into the earth. We do not bury our dead. We do not! They need their funeral rituals! I want to shout at them, but I must stay quiet and scuttle along like a mouse, unseen, unheard, until I reach the church at the trading post, where I will find what people remain alive. I will tell them how our people were loaded on wagons like twisted limbs fallen off dead trees, and carried to pits and dumped while dirt was piled on top, their spirits crying out for help so loudly I had to cover my ears, and all the others cover theirs and weep silently. Finally we understand the malice of the angels their god sends.

You might think this is the end of my story, but it continues for the next ten years until one day I saw skinny man again. He came into the trading post, asked to speak with the Indian agent, and pulled out a coin purse, made a show of it as if daring anyone to ask. Our people recognized the shame and turned away. My heart thumped hard and seemed to stop. It didn’t matter, I said my prayer to my mother’s spirit, pulled out the locket, and let it sit on my blouse where he might notice it.

The night before I went to meet him for the third time, Rose, I told you that I was going to see a white man who had something of our mother’s that he wanted to return. I never had the chance to tell you the rest. You see how you must send the story of wrong out into the world, but since the hummingbirds don’t come when I die, I am telling you now.

I meant to taste the sweet white ends of ripe grass, to let the deep rock coldness of water rinse my mouth, and to marry the boy who was always meant to be my husband and have many babies suckling while I ground corn and dried berries and pounded the meat flat and laid it out in strips to dry rich and fragrant in the sun, I meant to have such a good long life, I meant to lie in the arms of my love and watch the stars I am named for wheel their great paths in the sky, telling of our years to come, I meant to listen to the wind and its messages, and to come to a fine old age, my body ready to be received back into the world, but I am only a girl, a wound in the earth that will not close, I unbury myself over and over until there is justice. Rose, it is up to you now.

Three days after the funeral, Drum Bennett strode through the kitchen door with his usual quick steps, his boots landing lightly on the plank floor. “Where is he?” His barrel chest pushed against his faded brown flannel shirt like a threat. There was nothing apologetic about the way his gaze swept over the foreman and his wife seated at the table finishing their breakfast after the men had been fed and sent to work. At five foot eight, it wasn’t height that gave Drum menace. It was the thickness of his body, the arms as hard as axe handles, the thick-fingered hands with knuckles the size of walnuts that possessed the hard speed of a former boxer. Bennett had had to fight his way clear of his past, had taken to the road as a young man and staged boxing matches with locals in the small towns of Missouri, Illinois, and Iowa before coming west. Almost every man who’d ever worked for Drum Bennett had felt the teeth-cracking blow from one of his fists. Drum was a man who hit first and didn’t talk later.

Higgs merely lifted his chin toward the upstairs. Vera cleared her throat, drawing Bennett’s quick eyes. She pushed back her chair and laid her hands flat on the table on either side of the plate of doughnuts she’d made for the men.

“Coffee?” she said without offering a doughnut. Bennett’s gaze wavered, shifting to the plate. It took an almost visible will for him to shake his head and stiffen his shoulders. He hadn’t removed his hat when he barged in, and he did now. Drum was preternaturally uncomfortable in the company of women. He blocked up like an old bull with a young cow. His hard eyes took on a surprised look that made him seem younger than his years. His nose, broken several times, seemed to collapse a little more, as if the sheer will of his cussedness was the only thing holding it up; his round, fleshy face shimmered briefly, showing a glimpse of a joyful, curious boy who had retreated too soon.