When I was next in the county, I went back up to Elk Cemetery for another try at deciphering the eroded stone. I made a rubbing of it, and at last I thought I could make out E — S — RO —. That night I sat with the Chase County Historical Sketches, four volumes of nearly two thousand pages of testimony about life here, written by the countians themselves (literate expression declines from the first collection, of 1940, to the last in 1984, another manifestation of forgetfulness). I turned pages in search of—whom? Erastus Roe? Effie S. Roberts? I wasn’t coming up with anything plausible, and I kept getting sidetracked in the details of the early countians’ lives. Then it struck me that maybe I was, after all, finding somebody under that worn rock. I took out paper and copied down details that seemed to compose themselves into a man, a woman:
he: came into the county from New York Pennsylvania Illinois in 1859 1860 1865 rode with John Brown and took a minié ball at Pea Ridge and got captured at Chickamauga and sent to Libby Prison (so crowded there the men had to sleep on their sides on the floor and when the hardness became too much they would all turn at the same time on a signal from a leader) had to survive Libby by getting food from prisoners too near death to eat (in 1892 took the train from Chase to Chicago to see the Columbian Exposition and oh god stunned to turn a corner and find himself again in front of the nightmare the three-story brick prison reconstructed there and with his wife walked through it crowded as before and not able to believe what was happening);
heard that Lincoln once said If I went west I think I would go to Kansas and came into the county with a soldier’s warrant for 160 acres;
she: came into the county in 1858 1861 1866 from Ohio Indiana Missouri (her youngest brother sixteen put creek stones in his boots to make himself tall enough to enlist but got no farther than Fort Leavenworth and died of pneumonia and a friend took Billy’s hat and wore it at Second Manassas) came with her father by ox team with a brace of cooped chickens in the wagon and the going slow because of the milch cow tied behind and the four beeves herded along and nothing so bad as fording creeks infernal muddy banks and had to lay tallgrass under the wheels and followed the Santa Fe Trail to the Grove and down the old Kaw Trail;
whenever he saw an approaching prairie fire always thought how it looked like a line of battle and got burned when one jumped the neighbors’ guard and took his pole bam and before that no rain for eighteen months and the Cottonwood went dry and sloughgrass covered the riverbed and won’t-mention-who let a fire get loose and it came right up the river like a flood and of course the earthquake two years after the war and he was laying up a roof beam in the new barn and the rumbling commencing to shake the timber and he running to the cabin for her and she holding on to the wall and what a racket the furniture was in;
she said about the cabin logs the gaps was big enough you could nearly throw a cat through them and the door only a hung rug and she said the wind would come through and blow out the grease lamp nothing but a saucer of animal fat with a flannel rag twisted on a nail;
sometimes the Kaw passed by and stopped to look through the gaps and once to make friends she held a mirror up to a gap and scared tarnation out of a painted brave and then there was laughter like you wouldn’t believe and they took turns gaping into it and admired and chortled and thereafter when passing always stopping to use the mirror;
(down on Cedar Creek the Kaws came out to see that new French woman and the husband saying she was gone but the pesky redskins waiting around and he bolted the door and hid her between two feather mattresses for three days and took his meals on the bed so he could slip food to her and she getting up only after dark to answer nature’s calls);
walking home one noon with her youngest and caught in a thunderstorm and ducked into an encampment and Kaw women mocked her drenching and laughed at her baby and later he had to remind her how she’d said she’d rather take her chances with Indians than border ruffians (not she that woman complaining about moving on west because there’d already been enough pioneering in Ioway) later she saying I never complained—I was the one wanting to come west and proud she never took her children out to hide in some creek-bank hole and she wasn’t the woman who heard coyotes howling and then skulked all night in a cold thicket to escape “Indian attack”;
(didn’t the children gracious sakes alive love the terror of Kaw visits);
learning after a few years they’d settled on a railroad grant and had to abandon their place and build again just another burden to bear but not so bad as her brother’s—filed on land some miles southwest but decided it was worthless and gave it up and three years later a town founded on his old claim (called Wichita);
homesick much of the time until he met her (once walked back to Illinois to see the folks) and when the food ran out their first spring together went on foot to Fort Leavenworth 150 miles and back with a bag of flour on his shoulder and hoping it wouldn’t rain and had to split rails for a month to earn eight bushels of wheat;
walked in the house one evening and Land of Goshen if there wasn’t a big old ratsnake unwinding out of the canary cage and no canary (she told him for the last time to get a door up);
(the woman near the Falls who was making lye soap in a kettle in front of her house and three Kaws riding up and motioning they wanted some soup and she shaking her head and saying Soap—not soup and they growing vexed she wouldn’t share and one grabbing the stir spoon and taking a big slurp and his eyes reddening and tears welling up but without a word he passing the spoon to the next and he tasting and giving the spoon to the third and he likewise then handing her the spoon and they riding off and that was the only time anybody could remember a Kaw crying without wailing);
got good at taking perch and bass and bullheads out of creek holes and couldn’t afford a gun for the oldest boy and taught him to make bird traps and figure-eight deadfalls;
those first years ate side-meat squirrel buffalo salted-prairie-chicken-breasts quail turkey biscuits combread vinegar-and-sheep-sorrel pie wild plums and grapes gooseberries never any coffee and instead brewed parched corn and the only condiment vinegar-sauce and the only sweetening sorghum molasses and she said Never saw sugar after I came out to Kansas;
every dry year the grasshoppers came and the worst in ’74 ate up his crops and turned around and spit them on him and he walked in and said Ain’t never swore in front of you before but I’m going to now and he sure did and where her beets and turnips and parsnips grew were just holes in the ground;
one July the Kaws showing up led by Loshinga and she gave out watermelons (might as well they’d steal them anyway—oh did they love it) the littlest boy staring at the braves and one of them pulling out his long knife and brandishing it and cutting off a slice of melon and giving it to Johnny and he eating and another urged on him and he ate it and another and ate it too and braves watching and another and had to sit (let the boy learn a lesson) stomach round and hard like a melon itself and Loshinga reaching down and tapping it and the men laughing and wiping clean their knives and each rising and tapping the little blown belly before traveling on;
the oldest boy accidentally shooting an arrow into the face of his Kaw friend and the mother appearing at the cabin to seek reparation (gave her a calf);
six years after statehood he went with the governor to ask aid from the War Department to drive out them dang injuns and she said All they ever done was scare us;
crops busted and took work carrying mortar at the new county capitol and setting a bright penny in wet concrete under a stone;
little girl came down with typhoid and shook so bad it broke your heart and she wrapped her in blankets and set her outside in the spring sun and still the little thing shook (later he said Death come into our house four times) and the afternoon the child went she chattered out Am I dying Papa?
sometimes the whole night she’d hear the Kaws up on the hill where their dead lay buried wailing and moaning and that was the worst sound on the prairie and one spring she realized she ha
dn’t heard them that year and she never did again;
played the melodeon and filled the place with “Blue Juniata” “Paddle Your Own Canoe” “Money Musk” and lordy could she make that thing sing;
took his gun and went out west of Dodge City and came back with buffalo hides and meat enough for the winter and she joked You ain’t no better than an Indian now and that December she put hot rocks in the sleigh and wrapped them all in buffalo robes and they went to town;
on one hunt the boy had to stay in camp and sit there (and grumble) and crack open buffalo shin bones to fill a two-gallon bucket with marrow and was it good on pancakes;
always believed any man who worked wearing gloves couldn’t ever be a success (of course excepting the miller who had to keep the feel in his right hand so he could judge the texture of millings) wanted religion in small doses real small and got older and found he could make a speech if they asked him and he did and he often spoke in those later years how he saw resources being wasted by grasping men and a friend saying Ain’t there more than enough?
walking up the hollow that day (done it fifty times before) but that morning the big plum thicket swirling with hummingbirds hundreds and hundreds and she told about them all the way into the next century;
(if it wasn’t one thing it was another) the youngest not two years old sitting out watching his brothers play and from the high grass came a wild hog and got him by the dress and dragged him off toward the brake and she running and screaming and throwing everything she could find until the boar dropped him;
humane assistance parcels from the East in the early years and he opened theirs to find three moth-eaten suits and three stovepipe hats and three ladies’ ballroom dresses with matching slippers and he set a hat on his head and said Dost thou waltz, milady?
the neighbors south gave up but he told her We’ll live to see the day this land is worth forty dollars an acre;
carried with her into the county a piece of rose root called queen of the prairie and set it out and lived to see it cover the entire front of the cabin with pink blossoms;
if it wasn’t raining on Sunday and the circuit preacher got through they moved the furniture outside to make room for the neighbors and washed the children for the sermon (and nearly any day the wind was down they could hear the old bachelor who lived a mile off calling to the Lord to get him through another month praying so loud he must have figured God was deaf and one day she didn’t hear that anymore either);
raised four children lost three (typhoid diphtheria consumption) but when she arrived in the county she was sure it would be snakes that got them all and she said I learned what the Lord’s real serpents is;
grew older and sometimes he thought about selling out and moving into Strong and conducting the horse trolley and sitting down to earn a living;
thinking maybe they should move out there to Pasadena the daughter said to come on out;
reminisced about the first days how out riding he found the human teeth on the big rock and figured someone had been eaten by wolves and came to find out missus oh-you-remember lost her dentures a couple years earlier in the tornado that killed the husband just before she moved to Oklahoma and he mailed them to her and missus wrote back and said thanks they still fit just fine;
reminisced about how she put that small jar of butter down in the spring and forgot about it and two years later he cleaned the spring and found the butter and they ate it that night;
in his last years the Confederate prison sickness finally turning him into an invalid and he spent his time carving chessmen and small canteens from black walnut laid in with designs of Cottonwood River clamshell and one afternoon said to her Everyone was young in Kansas in them days and she said If my eyes was good I’d think I was young (she was eighty-four);
he died from a kick of a mule, after inhaling gas when he was digging the schoolhouse well, when high water took him and the miller in the boat over the dam at Cottonwood, at the crossing under a locomotive, struck by lightning, fell off his horse into Diamond Creek and she buried him in that homemade shirt he brought from Scotland sixty-three years earlier and she tended the grave for a decade;
outlived them all and not a day went by but what she wondered who’ll attend me?
Out of the Totem Hawk Lexicon
One morning north of Elk, I was walking over an undulance of hills, the wind in my face so that I had to keep blinking, and I grew tired of it and took a rest in the lee of a ridge, a relative vacuum of quiet and warmth where I could open my eyes and my canvas coat and lie back and watch the blowing: clouds in slippage, bluestem in bondage. I dozed off, woke, sat up, and considered whether to eat or hike on.
Suddenly, over the slope, as if tethered to a cord of air drawing quickly upward, came a northern harrier, motionless but for its rising. So still was the bird—wings, tail, head—it might have been a museum specimen. Then, as if atop the wind, it slid down the ridge, tilted a few times, veered, tacked up the hill, its wings hardly shifting. I thought, if I could be that hawk for one hour I’d never again be just a man. It went into a hover near a rock ledge, twisted its tail and ruddered into position for the drop, then fell out of the wind onto what looked like a vole and began tearing open flesh. I made notes on what had just happened and concluded: hwk stlking best dun seatd. After some minutes, the harrier raised its wings but moved them only that once, and, as if again leashing itself to its invisible line, floated up into the wind (a river diver rising to the surface, catching the current) and was gone. Somewhere now the mammal heart flew in the harrier, vole turning into wings and talons, and those giving the rodent its creeping and sequestered and dark life: shapers of each other like a human making a sculpture and it making him a sculptor.
This is a chapter about hawkness and harriers, but I must tell you straight: it’s a cowlick—no matter how much I comb through it, wet it down, try to smooth it into coherence, it pops up, always insisting on standing awry. When I write, I usually try to follow the directions in the images and let details point the way so that my pencil (I always begin drafting with a lead pencil as if I were drawing) is a vehicle across the map of paper, a smudged course down parallel lines, little roads, and the best part of such a journey, the reward for the isolation necessary to it, is the unexpected encounters: travel writing is a tour twice taken, and which one is more real depends on how you value dreamtime. For me, writing is not a search for explanations but a ramble in quest of what informs a place, a hunt for equivalents. (I always envy the painter never having to ask, “Understand?” Were the choice ever offered, I’d want to be a Turner rather than a Twain.)
Now: I am in the room where I write (my pencil absently scribbled “writhe”); wadded and thrown against the wall are nine sheets of paper that were various first paragraphs of this chapter. I haven’t been falling asleep until early in the dark mornings these last few hot July nights, and I’ve become a convict of two alternating emotions, irritation and depression, because I can’t find a way into the topic. I’ve tried all my old devices to trick words out where they can reveal a course: read some Dickens or Shakespeare or Melville’s Encantadas, draw a picture of the subject, play my aboriginal cedar flute, lie on the floor and stretch, go outside and shoot baskets, take a shower, a walk, a nap (these days I lie dreaming I’m solving the riddle of hawkness, only to wake and find myself exactly where I began); above all, try to avoid anger. Still, I’ve ended up with crumpled paragraphs and the old terror creeping in that my quarry has grown too clever to be caught, that it knows what I’m after: itself revealed.
During all of this, I’ve resisted writing down what I am about to say (some things are easier to admit to than others) because it will probably be laughable; but, maybe, it’s a way in:
Six years ago, when I was first beginning to prowl around Chase County, my wife and I visited friends in Canandaigua, New York. Of him I will tell you more later. His wife, partly of Tennessee Cherokee blood, works in vocational rehabilitation; she’s a bright
woman whose bubble always seeks its own plumb. Someone had recently given her a Ouija board, which, she said, had taken to calling her Z in its responses. My wife and Z played with the board one summer evening, asking questions, laughing at the answers, until Ouija said my wife would die in a car crash in 2005.
They looked around and told me to ask it something, so I did, although their hands, not mine, followed the black pointer. I avoided destination questions and asked about the new book I wanted to write: was it a good idea? Ouija answered, YO, which I took as yes. What would be the first words? GOIN WEST, BRO. What was the subject? LAND. Ouija gave a couple more answers, both plausible and even surprising in their insight. (I must add that I’d not then talked specifically about my project with anyone.) I asked, will there be strong help in making the book? The pointer lay still, then moved slowly, W-A- (moving erratically) M- (as if hunting a lost alphabet) R-E. We waited for it to finish but it lay still. I asked what WAMRE was, and the pointer sat, sat, then again slid slowly to the letters: W-I-N-D and stopped, then started once more and, herky-jerk, spelled R-I-D-E-R. I admit my flesh was crawling. I asked what a wind rider was, and Ouija quickly spelled out H-A-W-K.
I went outside on the porch to sit in the cool dark and collect myself. I’d recently begun keeping a Chase journal of observations and ideas—a most secret thing—that I hoped would lead me into the prairie book; in it I’d written this: the harrier rides the wind as a fish the current—it treats air like a liquid. I alone had seen the notebook, and neither woman had ever heard me speak of hawks (except in bird-watcher talk), and I’d not spoken about my new notion of hawk medicine—not in a pharmaceutical meaning but in an Indian sense, of power that can infuse a mind or a beast or a bundle of collected sticks and feathers. I was hoping my journal pages would become a medicine bundle.