Jonis Agee - The Bones of Paradise

Soon more and more troops arrived, their camp crowding her tipi until she had to sign to Crockett for permission to sleep on the office floor. He dared to pinch his nose and point at her bundle to suggest it smelled, and she smiled her not-smart smile and nodded. He shook his head, shrugged, and returned to his room to drink and sleep, despite the chattering key he couldn’t keep up with.

It was early October, and she was sweeping the worn wood planks, listening to the code, writing it in her head and deciphering the words, more news about Sitting Bull, who was an old man with little influence except over his Hunkpapas. Kicking Bear visited him and now the Hunkpapas had joined the Ghost Dance. It seemed possible the army would kill Sitting Bull, and her heart was sick as she tried to think of a way to warn her mother, who still didn’t understand about the telegraph, or the newest invention, the telephone, which captured a person’s voice and sent it across the land. Rose wondered if the voice would sound the same when it returned from its journey. The whites created tendrils like bindweed that trapped their lives together. She had to do something.

At dusk she watched for her people on their way to the dance and sent a message to her mother, who never replied, which meant Rose was to remain in town. When her cousin finally brought word, Rose asked about Star. “She is young enough to be safe,” her cousin explained. “Your mother says, ‘Too many white men here now. You must not come back yet. I will tell you when it’s safe. When the buffalo return, when we are free.’” Rose never heard from her again.

By late fall, the town had doubled and tripled with soldiers, men and women making money from the troops. Photographers from Chadron and Omaha and news reporters from Chicago and New York rode the train to Rushville and came to the telegraph office daily to send their stories home. Much of what they wrote was wrong or made up or both, but there was often a seed of truth Rose could find if she looked carefully enough. Big Foot grew lungsick and Buffalo Bill Cody visited Sitting Bull in late November to convince his old friend to cooperate with the white men and come to the Indian agency to be arrested, but the visit ended with Cody giving up in disgust. The old leader was finally killed during his arrest in the middle of December. More troops poured out of the trains. The stories grew wilder. Rose didn’t dare walk outside during the day for fear of being pushed, cursed, spit on. At night the danger was drunken white men seeking a fight, even if it meant an Indian woman.

She realized from the telegrams and the increasing troops that her people’s world had changed too fast, too hard, to make a return. Crockett would send a telegram to Washington, D.C., one day, and mere days later, more trains arrived, hissing and clanging, to disgorge soldiers and guns and horses and provisions. Her people had a few rifles and old muskets, though the army tried to take them, but they had nothing like the big Hotchkiss guns that could kill so many so easily. Her people had little ammunition, too; they couldn’t afford to shoot randomly on the chance that a bullet would strike home, no matter how much they prayed. She could see the end before it began. Again and again, she tried to send messages to her mother, begged her to flee.

Rose couldn’t bear to think of those last days in December. The troops chased the dancers to Wounded Knee, surrounded them, and when the signal to dance was given, opened fire with rifles and cannons. Afterward the troops patrolled the reservation, preventing a flood of people in search of loved ones, so she waited and heard Star was safe with relatives, but her mother was dead. Later, when she met her sister again, she learned their mother’s fate and began to plan her revenge.

The troops left as quickly and smoothly as they’d arrived. By February, Rushville was quiet and the telegraph man drank harder and fumbled through her clothing for stolen items more often. She took to wearing her skinning knife under her blouse and stole a gun from a cowboy passed out in the alley behind the saloon. The gun she wore snug against her chest on a string around her body, spinning away from Crockett before he could find it. As game flees before the hunter who has not prayed and spoken to the animal spirits, men began to avoid her. She could walk day and night across town and no one dared meet her eye. Since she’d found the pistol on the cowboy in the alley, Rose had taken to waiting in the dark outside the saloon. Sometimes she searched and stripped the unconscious men, sometimes she helped them asleep. She chose only what she needed or fancied, and would make a tiny cut on their hand or neck to count coup. Without a coup stick, she amended the ceremony to the use of her skinning knife and drawing a single drop of blood. Upon waking, the man would guess he had scratched himself when he fell. Rose thought of the old warriors feasting on the liver and heart of a downed enemy to gain his power, but she could not bring herself to even taste the blood. She learned enough from the telegraph to know the enemy was everywhere, the people vanquished.

There was a white woman who came every week to send a telegram that fall and into the winter. By spring she sent a telegram only every two weeks, then once a month. Her name was Dulcinea Bennett, and while Crockett was full of courtesy when he took the message, afterward he would laugh at the garbled words he was too stupid to translate. Rose knew they were code, such a simple one it took her only a few nights to break it. The messages, so full of longing, made her miss her own mother and sister. Soon Rose made a practice of remaining in the room when Dulcinea visited. Pretending to sweep or dust or wash windows, she watched the white woman, and, as if she could feel the eyes on her, Dulcinea began to nod and smile at her when she came and went. Once the white woman dropped a coin and it rolled behind the potbellied stove they used for heat, and Rose used her broom to edge it out and picked it up. Dulcinea gave her a surprised, grateful smile and thanked her when Rose held it out to her. Forgetting Crockett, Rose smiled, too, her eyes catching the other woman’s in a quick exchange of understanding despite their differences.

“Back to work!” Crockett yelled with a wave of his hand. “She’s mute,” he explained. Dulcinea lowered her head to hide her smile as she placed the coin on the counter as payment for her message.

As she left, the white woman placed her hand on Rose’s shoulder and thanked her again. “It’s nothing,” Rose murmured with an eye on Crockett, who headed to the back room and his whiskey.

Then one evening in late winter, Dulcinea invited her to tea. Rose followed the woman to the back stairs over the notions store, where there were several rooms to let. Inside the tiny room was a single bed, a battered wardrobe, a small pine washstand with a chipped white pitcher of water, and a table with two chairs. The white woman turned up the lamp on the table and went about pouring tea. It must have been some time since she had spoken to another because she began to talk about her life and continued until dawn, even weeping once over her sons. They continued to meet, and their unlikely friendship bloomed as they walked quietly through the hills, catching the scent of new grass and wildflowers. They didn’t speak a great deal after that initial conversation, merely spent time together.

One evening in late April, the telegrapher finished his meal of eggs, fried potatoes, and bacon and sat at the table with a whiskey bottle and glass, drinking more than usual. After a while he grew talkative. He didn’t expect Rose to respond since in his mind she was mute and stupid. Finally, he spoke of last winter and Wounded Knee.