He tries to remember the Lakota word for raven. Was it kagi taka or kan˙gi? He can’t recall. He’s losing his own language.
It doesn’t matter now.
Paha Sapa sits cross-legged in the grass and takes out the heavy revolver. It smells of gun oil and warm metal. He’s left one chamber empty under the hammer so he doesn’t accidentally blow his foot off—advice from a Seventh Cavalry Crow scout who’s been dead for more than fifty-five years—but a loaded chamber revolves into place as he thumbs the hammer back.
He has decided that he’s not going to draw this out. No Death Song nonsense. No ceremony. He’s decided on the right temple and sets the muzzle there now.
“Wait. You promised me… about the cremation.”
Paha Sapa lowers the pistol only slightly.
—I wrote it out. On a napkin. In the bathroom at the diner.
“I don’t believe you.”
—Where were you? Dozing?
“I don’t pay attention to everything you do, you know. Especially at times like that. Where is it? Is it somewhere people will find it?”
—It’s in my shirt pocket. Will you please shut up a minute? Just one minute.
“Show me the note.”
Paha Sapa sighs—truly irritated—and carefully lowers the hammer. He removes the napkin from his shirt pocket and holds it in front of his own eyes, thinking that Custer is being a shit to the last second of his unfairly extended existence. The note in pencil begins “My Wishes” and is only one sentence long.
—Satisfied?
“You misspelled remains—it’s not manes. There’s an I.”
—Do you want me to go back to town to the diner and get the pencil I borrowed from the waitress?
“No.”
—Good-bye, Long Hair.
“Good-bye, Paha Sapa.”
Paha Sapa lifts the revolver, cocks the hammer back, and sets his finger on the trigger. The sun is warm on his face. He takes a deep, sad breath.
—Mr. Slow Horse!
It’s not the ghost; it’s a woman’s voice. Paha Sapa is so startled that he almost pulls the trigger by accident. Lowering the cocked hammer and then the pistol and looking over his shoulder, he sees two women moving in his direction through the tall grass.
His body was turned away from them such that it’s probable that they did not see the pistol. He hurriedly slips the Colt into the canvas bag and awkwardly gets to his feet. Everything in him cries out in the pain of rising.
—Mr. Slow Horse! It is you, is it not? The motorcycle was Robert’s, I know. I’ve seen the photograph a thousand times. He gave it to me. I saw the photograph of you but did not get to keep it.
The women are dressed in expensive and stylish dresses and wide-brimmed hats. The older of the two looks to be in her late thirties and her accent seems to be French. The younger woman, who bears some resemblance to the first, can’t be older than seventeen or eighteen. Her eyes are a brilliant hazel.
Paha Sapa is very confused. He looks back toward the road and sees a long, sleek 1928 Pierce-Arrow sedan stopped there. The sun has come out from beneath the fast-moving clouds and turns the expensive white automobile into something too dazzingly beautiful for this world. There’s a mustached man standing by the car and Paha Sapa realizes stupidly that the man is a chauffeur.
The older woman is still speaking.
—… so we did not arrive at the Mount Rushmore until yesterday, and Mr. Borglum was very gracious, very sorry that we had missed you. All of our letters and telegrams had gone astray, you see, since we had been trying to reach you via the name William Slow Horse de Plachette, the name and the Keystone address Robert gave us in his delirium—and the returned letters said “undeliverable”—and we also wrote the mission on the Pine Ridge Reservation. But Mr. Borglum said you would be here at the Custer Battlefield, so I told Roger to drive like the very wind, and here we are and… oh!… you are Mr. William Slow Horse, are you not? Paha Sapa to your friends and family?
He can only gape stupidly. The Colt in its canvas shroud lies heavy at his feet. Finally he can make noises that simulate speech.
—Borglum? Borglum didn’t know where I was going. Borglum could not have told you…. No one knew where I was…
He stops, beginning to understand what the woman has said.
Her voice, with the accent, is almost musical.
—Oh, yes. He was quite certain about where you were headed… is “headed” the right word? He even told us that you would be at this second hill, not the first, where the big monument is.
Paha Sapa licks his lips. He cannot tear his gaze from the two women’s faces. On the fence far behind him, one of the ravens makes an accusatory noise.
—I’m sorry, miss. I’m… confused. What did you say your name is? You say you knew my son?
The woman blushes and for a second looks angry at herself, or perhaps as if she wants to cry.
—I am so sorry. Of course. You never received my letters… we know that now. Nor the telegrams the past months.
She holds out her hand. She is not wearing gloves.
—I am Madame Renée Zigmond Adler de Plachette. Your… what is the phrase in English? Yes. Daughter-in-law. I married Robert in November of nineteen eighteen… November fourteenth, to be precise. My father, Monsieur Vanden Daelen Adler of Belgium, was, of course, concerned about the marriage because Robert was…
She pauses. Paha Sapa prompts.
—An Indian?
Madame Renée Zigmond Adler de Plachette laughs softly.
—No, of course that was no problem. No problem whatsoever. It was that he was a… the word in English escapes me… a gentile. Yes, gentile. We are Jewish, you see, from one of the oldest diamond-cutting families of Jews in all of Belgium. But in the last few years… Well, you understand the situation growing in Germany and Europe, Herr Hitler and all… so Father is moving his business and our family to Denver and New York. To Denver, you see, because Flora’s fiancée, Maurice, has always wanted to start a—how do you say it?—a beef cows ranch, and of course to New York because of Father’s diamond business, since he was, it is not immodesty to say, the preeminent diamond cutter and then diamond merchant in Belgium and he hopes to build the same reputation here in America. Flora and I have come ahead in order to… Oh, my! Oh, dear!
She puts her hands to her cheeks.
—I have been so excited to meet you, my dear Mr. Slow Horse. I am chattering on like, how do you say it? A house aflame. My dearest apologies for forgetting to introduce… My darling Flora, I apologize to you as well.
She speaks in quick French or Belgian to the waiting, silent young woman with the so-familiar hazel eyes and then turns back to the stunned, numb Paha Sapa.
—Monsieur Slow Horse, may I present to you our daughter, my dear Robert’s and mine, and your granddaughter, Mademoiselle Flora Daelen de Plachette. Her fiancée has stayed behind in Brussels to help my father with the last of the business there but should be joining us next month in…
But the young woman has extended her hand, and all sound fades away as Paha Sapa stares at that hand. The shape and form and length and delicacy of the pale fingers—and even the mildly bitten nails—are so totally familiar to Paha Sapa that they make his old man’s heart hurt.
He takes her hand, that hand, her hand, in his.
And it is as if the bullet has been fired after all.
Bright lights explode in his skull. There is a final blinding flash, a terrible sense of all boundaries collapsing, a rushing in and flowing out, a terrible tsunami of noise that drowns all thought and sensation, and he is falling forward toward the astonished women… falling… falling… fading… gone.
25
HE HEARS THE RAVEN WINGS FLAPPING AND FEELS THE TALONED impact as one raven snatches up his nagi spirit-self and bears it and what is left of him aloft, away from the high-grassed earth.
The spirit of Paha Sapa’s first reaction is anger. He realizes that he has come to not believe in a
ny continued existence after death, and now that that existence is proven to him—as the raven rises higher with its mate beside it and Paha Sapi’s nagi in its talons, flying toward the clouds and sky and Milky Way where Paha Sapa’s spirit will have to walk forevermore—he realizes that he doesn’t want to walk, even reunited with his ancestors, in the Milky Way. He wants to stay on the high-grassed Earth and talk to this woman who says she is his daughter-in-law, his lost son’s wife, and with the young woman who looks so much like his darling Rain that seeing her made his heart hurt so much it felt as if he’d been pierced by a barbed war arrow.
Paha Sapa suddenly realizes that he can see, but not through his own eyes. He is being carried by the raven and he is the raven.
It is a new and frightening experience. Paha Sapa has flown by magic before, but it has always been a lifting-up sort of flight—rising like a balloon as a boy with arms spread wide, being lifted in one of the Six Grandfathers’ giant palms, floating upward in the magical car of Mr. Ferris’s fine Wheel—and this flapping, hurtling, forward-motion-through-the-air sort of flying is breathtaking.
The raven glances below and Paha Sapa sees the battlefield falling far behind and farther below. The white Pierce-Arrow looks as tiny as a white bone lying in the grass.
He would like to have looked at that 1928 Pierce-Arrow closely, perhaps taken a ride in it. Even while flying to the afterlife in the sky, Paha Sapa thinks that his Belgian daughter-in-law’s family must be very rich to afford such a fine car.
The raven looks to its left and Paha Sapa sees the other raven flying there, its feathers so black they seem to drink the sunlight, its pinion muscles working easily. The other raven’s eye looks nothing like a human being’s eye: it is perfectly round, surrounded by small white beads of muscle that look to Paha Sapa like the sintkala waksus sacred streambed stones he sought out for his sweat lodge ceremony during his hanblečeya, and the round raven eye is an inhuman amber in color, a predator’s color, more like a wolf’s eye than a man’s. But behind that unfeeling raven’s eye, Paha Sapa catches just a second’s glimpse of the dancing blue of Long Hair’s bright eyes—the same blue eyes the young Paha Sapa looked into sixty years ago at the second of Custer’s death. So Long Hair’s nagi spirit-self is also being borne aloft.
Paha Sapa wants to shout to the Custer-carrying raven—I told you you were a ghost!—but his spirit-self has no voice.
And yet the blue human eye behind the round raven eye seems to blink at Paha Sapa in a final, bemused farewell just before that raven breaks off in its flight and heads north while Paha Sapa’s continues east and a little south. Whatever Long Hair’s destiny is after being finally released to real death—and Paha Sapa can only hope that it includes Libbie—it lies elsewhere and Paha Sapa will never know it.
Paha Sapa’s raven climbs and climbs and climbs until the horizon curves downward at both ends and the blue sky here above the clouds becomes almost black. The stars are coming out.
But then the raven ceases climbing. They are not going to the Milky Way. Not yet.
The raven looks down and Paha Sapa is not surprised to see the Black Hills dark in its surrounding heart muscle of red-ringing rock, the tiny island in the endless ocean of autumn-brown grass. Wamakaognaka e’cantge—the heart of everything that is.
Suddenly he is surprised as the raven begins to descend.
He is surprised again to see that the great sea has suddenly surrounded the Black Hills again, obscuring all sight of the land beneath the waters. He wonders if he is about to be punished by having to view yet again the Vision of the Wasichu Stone Giants rising from the Black Hills and exterminating the buffalo and his people’s way of life.
No.
There are no voices in his head, no Six Grandfathers speaking to him this time, but he suddenly understands that the great waters he sees with Wakan Tanka’s bright beam of light shining on them are the tides of time.
The raven folds its wings and dives, becoming in the graceful awfulness of that ancient motion the ultimate predator swooping down on its not-yet-visible but already hapless, helpless, and infinitely hopeless victim, and then the diving raven, wings still folded back flat against its ebony body, crashes beak-first and unblinkingly into the tidewaters of time. The water is as cold as Hell.
IN AN INSTANT the waters are gone. The skies are blue and cloudless. The raven flies steady and even some thousand feet or so above the earth. But everything is… different.
Paha Sapa sees Matho Paha, Bear Butte, ahead to the left, but the butte itself looks different. It is, he remembers in his son’s high, happy voice, a lacolith: an intrusive body of igneous rock, uplifting earlier sedimentary layers that have largely eroded away. This intrusion is of magma forcing itself into cooler crustal rock during the Eocene period. Paha Sapa has no idea when the Eocene period was, but he clearly remembers Robert telling him that Bear Butte shares a similar geological history with the Devil’s Tower in Wyoming and with the Black Hills themselves.
But now the butte rises in a changed landscape.
The nonvoice in his mind informs Paha Sapa that he is looking at his beloved Black Hills and Great Plains sometime between 11,000 and 13,000 years before Paha Sapa was born. It is late summer, early autumn, but the air is cooler, and as the raven descended, Paha Sapa sees total snow cover on the Grand Tetons and Rocky Mountains to the west. Those peaks are usually shed of all but the tiniest remnants of snow by the end of August or early September, but now they are a wall of white rising in the west.
Paha Sapa’s educated eye sees other things that are subtly wrong. There are too many trees on the plains and foothills and some of those trees are tall species of pines and firs that do not grow near Bear Butte.
The grasses on the prairie are taller and greener than any Paha Sapa has seen even in spring, much less near the end of summer. They have not been grazed down anywhere.
The raven passes over a river and Paha Sapa knows at once that there is too much water in the river for this time of year and that the water rushing there is a milky blue, filled with fine dusty particles carried from remnants of glaciers in the west and north.
Glaciers.
The raven flaps, moving at miraculous speed, swooping up, then down, and Paha Sapa’s spirit soars with it.
The animals!
On the plains, the buffalo graze by the million, but there are other grazers there as well, and not just antelope and deer. The bison themselves look larger, with longer horns, but moving in herds nearby are tiny rawhide-colored horses of a kind Paha Sapa has never seen. These are not a tended herd as in his boyhood days, not horses descended from those who escaped the Spaniards a century or two earlier, but smaller, wilder, strange-looking horses that belong to this place 11,000 to 13,000 years before his time.
Moving between herds of bison and smaller herds of the wild horses comes a line of elephants.
Elephants!
The raven gracefully circles only a few hundred feet above the family group of pachyderms. Not circus elephants—these are some sort of mammoth, although not as woolly as the one he saw pictures and bones of with Rain in a display at the Chicago World’s Fair. The mammoths’ ears seem small but the males’ tusks are long and curving. A baby elephant, no more than six feet tall at the shoulder—what does one call a baby elephant?—holds its mother’s tail as the giants pound gently across the springy turf. As the herd approaches the river, the lead male trumpets and somewhere in the pine forests on the other side of the river, another mammoth trumpets back.
And a lion coughs. Farther away, wolves howl.
If Paha Sapa had his body, he would cry now.
He sees a pride of lions, half hidden by low foliage, lazing near the river. They are just… lions… as one would see in the Denver Zoo, but also not like that at all. They are free, majestic, unagitated, in their own environment. A lioness is doing the work, stalking slowly toward small groups of antelope and horses drinking at the river’s edge.
A shadow passes o
ver the raven—his raven—and the black bird banks away in some panic. The cause of the shadow is a huge bald eagle high above, circling to watch the lion cubs below. Paha Sapa wonders—Would an eagle, even one this size, be so brazen as to try to pluck even the smallest of lion cubs out from under the careful watch of its parents?
He’s lived long enough to know that anything that eats flesh will kill and eat anything else if it gets the chance. Sometimes, Paha Sapa knows, the killing, even among the mostly utilitarian birds and big animals, is more for the joy of killing than for the eating.
Paha Sapa glimpses other large animals he can’t even identify—something like a very-long-necked camel; then something else, broad-legged, long-necked, and small-headed and almost as large as a small bison, moving through the undergrowth toward the trees with the comical slowness of a sloth.
Paha Sapa wants to think he’s dreaming but knows too well that this is no dream. The camels, the sloths, herds of strange small horses, the lumbering mammoths, as well as the stalking lions and jaguars and oversized grizzlies, are all real in this world, whenever in the past this world is. It is a Vision but not a dream.
Perhaps spooked by the eagle’s presence, his raven flies south past Bear Butte to the Black Hills, climbing all the time. Mount Rushmore does not exist. The Six Grandfathers mountain is intact and untouched.
But before the raven left the prairie and plains and forest and river, Paha Sapa had caught a final glimpse of something strange—a small group of human beings approaching from the north. They were not Ikče Wičaˇˇsa or any other tribe or band he might recognize: their faces were hairy, they wore rude, thick animal skins, and they carried spears far cruder than anything the Plains Indians would make.
Were they his ancestors or his ancestors’ ancestors or just strangers? But he was sure that they were just arriving from the north after having wandered for many years across lands just revealed by retreating seas and glaciers.