Jonis Agee - The Bones of Paradise

“Boys.” The widow ran out of words as she searched their faces. Neither boy moved. She started to open her arms to them, then thought better of it and let them settle at her sides. “I’m sorry about your father.”

Hayward dropped his gaze to the ground and shoved the toe of his boot through the sandy dirt. Cullen stared at her with his small flat eyes, tilting his head and lifting his chin the way his mother did. Suddenly Cullen lurched forward and wrapped his arms around her, rubbed his muddy cheek against hers and nuzzled her hair, then stepped back and held his arms out and performed a deep bow. His mother’s expression was startled, then grateful, but quickly turned to anger when she saw that filth stained her dress from his mocking embrace.

“Mother—” he began. “May I call you that? It’s so kind of you to come calling.” His mouth curled in a sneer and he gave Hayward a quick cuff on the back of his head. “Say hello to your mother, stupid! You remember her, don’t you?”

Hayward stretched out a hand, realized how dirty it was, rubbed it on his pants, and then held it out again. She ignored his hand, stepped closer, and embraced him, casting Cullen a defiant glance, while Hayward kept his arms at his sides as if suffering from her touch.

The older boy nodded once, looked away, and the meanness fell from his expression, replaced by something that made his lips tremble. When his mother dropped her arms and stepped back, there were tears in her eyes, and neither boy would look at her.

“Need to take care of that horse,” Graver said.

Hayward sighed and started to turn. Cullen caught his arm.

“Who the hell you think you’re talking to?” Cullen took a step toward Graver, who shifted his left leg back a few inches, preparing to fight.

Hayward grabbed Cullen’s arm and muttered something that made the older boy glare at Graver and then turn away. Graver almost followed him when he yanked the reins and pulled the horse off balance so it about went down before managing to steady its spent legs.

“That wasn’t necessary.” Mrs. Bennett turned toward him, her chin high, face pale. When she swept past him in her dirt-streaked dress and muddy hair and face, there was an overbright glitter of tears in her eyes and it struck him to the quick. He wanted to whip those boys within an inch of their lives, make them apologize to their mother, make them comfort and care for that poor broken horse, make them sober and clean and respectable. He wanted her world to be just what she needed it to be. He would do that for her.

But she paused at the gate and called back, “Graver, help them with the horse.”

It was enough to make him feel like he’d taken a mouthful of flour, dry, tasteless, impossible to swallow. He should walk away, and he would, he thought, except he didn’t own so much as a horse, let alone the clothes on his back. And there was still the question of who shot him and killed J. B. Bennett and the girl. He meant to find out before he left.

Fall of 1889 Rose got a job in Rushville, Nebraska, which sat below the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. The school gave her a letter saying she was able to perform the duties of a servant. In other words, she swept and cleaned, washed clothes, and sometimes cooked for Crockett, the white man who ran the telegraph office. He slept in the back rooms of the little house in a nest of his own sweat and alcohol and sometimes waste. No matter. Day and night, the chattering key like a trapped ground squirrel could only be escaped through drink, in his case, or by sleeping in a tipi behind the livery stable, in Rose’s. The two did not speak. He believed her mute, and he signaled her work with broad hand gestures or shouted single words. For some reason he thought she might be deaf as well.

It was the telegraph that drew her to the job. She studied his stained fingers as he tap-tapped, and then the book beside the key, the one that formed the words. It was a secret he did not want her to have, but she watched and memorized. Practiced at night while he was passed out drunk, the moon spilling a slender column of light on either side of the window cover and knifing across the counter where she sat, learning to tap the code.

Rose had always been drawn to secrets. She was a member of the Turtle Clan and knew their stories, which she would later tell only to the next in line, her daughter. She didn’t tell her the “Morse code,” though. After the taps brought the troops against her people, she wouldn’t spread its poison. She only wanted to know its power. The next year, 1890, was the summer of the “Ghost Dance,” as the whites called it. Indians on their way to Pine Ridge Reservation passed along the edges of town, and she often met with them, shared food or goods they needed after their long journeys. Word spread across the West, and the Cheyenne and Paiutes, along with her own Lakota, hurried to Pine Ridge. She longed to join them, but her mother sent word by her nephew that Rose was to stay away until she sent for her. Even then, her mother was uncertain about the white men who peered restlessly at the dancers through their glass eyes, some intent on dragging the older girls behind the tipis. Her mother feared for Rose’s safety.

The keys never stopped chattering in those months, and as Rose learned the code, she discovered what foolishness the army believed, fed to them by frightened white ranchers and townspeople who feared Indians whenever they saw more than two at a time. In their eyes a family with children became a raid, a potential massacre.

Rose could not enter most of the stores in Rushville if she wished it. She gave drunk Crockett a monthly list of goods and he purchased them for her, giving her the few coins left over as her remaining pay. She knew he cheated her.

By late summer, the number of dancers had doubled, and Big Foot, Short Bull, Kicking Bear, and Sitting Bull’s names appeared often in the telegraphs. A man named McLaughlin, Standing Rock agent, called the Ghost Dance “demoralizing, indecent and disgusting” before he’d even witnessed it. The white men wanted her people to become Christians. They called Wovoka the devil, because he predicted the whites and their soldiers would drop dead if the people danced.

Sometimes her nighttime studies left her sluggish for work. Soon Crockett started to empty her pockets and remove her shoes at the end of each day, sometimes force her to lift her skirt and let him pat her blouse in case she was stealing—only his codes, only secrets too small for her pockets, too large for the heavy, stiff shoes with laces he made her wear instead of moccasins, so he could hear her clumping heels on the bare wood floors.

At night, she wore the moccasins her mother had made, beaded with wild roses, and she wove sly as a snake. She opened the wood file drawers and found copies of telegrams starting that summer, from the agent to Fort Niobrara and Fort Robinson to General Miles and from there to the president, congressmen, anyone who would listen, so great was the fear of a half-starved people, broken, in ruin, who only wanted to dance in hope again. The son of God is come, they said, and they danced to hold off the belly hunger, the desire of the spirit so much greater. By fall of 1890, the tone had grown harsher still, demanding the immediate deployment of troops to finish the business on Pine Ridge. She shivered in the night coolness as she read the messages.

She thought of her days in the Indian boarding school, staring out the tall windows at the corner of the cemetery where the small white crosses and short beds of humped soil sat row after row, too close together, and told the story of other Lakota children. She vowed not to be one of those who withered and died there. She pretended to be patient, obedient, and dumb so they would trust her and leave her alone.