At the conclusion Uncle Bill raised the whistle—made from an eagle fibula and trimmed with a breast feather—he sometimes wore around his neck only to drop it. I begged him to blow it; Aunt Dorene passed him a glance, and he said, “I better not, boy. No telling what I might call up into this room.”
Eagle-bone whistle
Ever vigilant Aunt Tott said to the other women, “Now we have pantheism over there among the children. Rank, barefaced pantheism!” Because she from time to time also decried him as an atheist, I struggled to understand how many gods were the equivalent to no god. “Wilbert,” she warned, “desist in front of young minds!” and with that Uncle Billy raised the eagle whistle and blew four shrill notes into the house. Quietly, he said to the boys, “Okay, my little braves, we’ll see now.”
When we sat down to the meal, Aunt Tott rose and stepped to the head of the table where my father sat, and in full apostolic authority she intoned, “All churchly heads bowed!” Preemptively, she aimed the sentence like a carbine shot right at Uncle Billy. As she powered up, slowly, ever so slowly warming to godliness, he pulled his spine painfully erect, stood, his old head lifted toward the chandelier, his scrawny arms raised with palms upward, precisely in the manner an Osage gives thanks. Before reaching his full position, he whispered to my bowed head, “If old What’s-His-Name comes out from down under where you’re looking at, holler.”
The prayer moved from exordium on and on and through to the peroration. After her first words, as usual, my father and brother sat more bent than bowed, quietly shaking. With the last benedictory line, they raised their heads, faces crimson with suppressed laughter—not at the prayer but rather at its high tone and length.
Before yielding the floor to the baked turkey, Aunt Tott wished to introduce us to a new ceremony she had witnessed at the bishop’s house. In the center of the table she placed an empty, silver bowl alongside an earthen crock filled with pinto beans. Each person was to pick up a bean, express gratitude or a prayer for something, and drop the pinto into the silver bowl—which she called a chalice. In order to force more soulful inquiry, an entreaty for personal or national salvation was acceptable, but only one per person. We were to continue until we transferred the one-pound package of pintos to the chalice.
As head of the house, my father, uncomfortably, was assigned the first bean, his token of thanks for the gathering. Around the beaning went, gratitudes for a plenteous table, for a touch of gout cured, a graduation with honors, successful cataract surgery, a baby sister, and so on until, running low on blessings, we all began more noting the remaining beans than listening to the thanksgivings. When I tossed in a bean in appreciation for my new BB gun, I had to remove the pinto and try again.
After his initial offering, Uncle Billy had done nothing but turn each bean into a wish—for a better fit on his upper denture, for less ear hair, for more on his head, for improved urinary flow, for death to tyrants. At his next turn, with the crock nowhere near empty, he stood again, picked it up, dumped the remaining beans into the chalice, and said, “With these little fellers from the earth—every blessed one of them—I hereby wish for a gold Cadillac and a thick slice of hot turkey on my plate!”
His abrupt response quieted the table. That surely was something close to what Aunt Tott had hoped to induce, because she pulled out a final pinto, apparently tucked away somewhere on her, raised her arm on high, and in full victory intoned, “With this tiny gift from Thy loving Hand, O Lord, I thank Thee for providing the young, the impressionable, those whose souls can so easily depart from the path of righteousness, we thank thee for this lesson in pagan mockery and greed.”
My brother showed me two fingers on his right hand, one on his left: Pagans, two; Bean Counters, one.
The meal lurched on, powered by the good cooking. When it came time for the course of pinto soup always served last to honor the customary request of the old Osage, we learned this Thanksgiving we’d have canned-tomato soup, since Aunt Tott had usurped the pintos for her ceremony. Uncle Billy said nothing, but my brother held up two fingers on each hand.
The change in custom had again stilled conversation as we sipped at the tomato soup. Uncle Billy took the opportunity to rise and move next to Aunt Tott as if to offer a toast. Leaning over her as he spoke, he paused to rub his left eye, the one shot out by Buffalo Bill or stolen by a trained crow or whatever. As he did, the Dresden glass-eye dropped free and into Aunt Tott’s soup before bobbing to the surface to stare redly at her. Looking heavenward, neither she nor anyone except my brother and me saw it. When Uncle Billy sat down, as if he’d forgotten what he intended to say, she—knowing the family maxim, He who hesitates, listens—resumed talking, all the while absently dipping into her bowl, the Dresden eye sliding away from her spoon, until a fatal dip caught the eyeball, and up it came, cradled in her spoon as she lifted it to her mouth. Glassily it looked down her throat, and it was then she caught the unnatural red gleam. For a moment she stared in terror as if the eye were her own, then she dropped it back into the soup, and cried out, “My God, Wilbert! This time you’ve gone beyond forbearance!”
He apologized unconvincingly and scoffed, “It’s just an eyeball from a half-blind Indian.” And then, perhaps remembering something from his missionary schooling, he said scripture he must have prepared for the children: “ ‘Hear now this, O foolish people without understanding, who have eyes and see not and have ears that hear not.’ ”
We boys were now standing to watch the slowly bobbing eye. Aunt Tott raised her soupspoon, took aim, and smote the eye, splattering us with tomato soup, and she retorted, her lips curling around her carefully formed words: “If thy left eye offend me, I’ll pluck it out and cast it from me!”
In a quiet as if Judgment Day had come and gone, that was the end of the Thanksgiving meal. Later, my brother said, “I think the game’s over, but you tell me the winner.”
Such was the last Thanksgiving of Whispers-to-Hawks. He died the following March when his car hit a strip of black ice on Highway 99 just south of Bigheart, Oklahoma. He was driving a beat-up Cadillac he had, with a brush, painted gold.
The following November, Aunt Tott, now able to move unvexed and triumphant through the holiday, made her stained-glass pauses in her sesquipedal blessing of the meal longer than ever, long enough in fact for my brother to stand, lift his head toward the chandelier, arms raised and palms upward. I followed, and our father did not tell us to sit down.
APPROACHING THE INEFFABLE
It’s not unusual for a writer’s brain to function visually as it draws up images the way some other minds fetch up numbers or formulas or theorems. In my case, that probably explains both my utter ineptitude in spherical trigonometry and my tenure as a photojournalist. A pictorial approach is a means of trying to comprehend things ultimately incomprehensible, and it suggests to me a Cro-Magon, in the light of a flickering, tallow lamp, daubing iron oxide and ocher onto a cave wall to make an aurochs. Despite certain insufficiencies, the ancient method of using visuals to share visions of what is mostly unfathomable can be as functional as other approaches to the great ineffabilities. After all, a writer’s goal is to bring the reader to his shoulder: “Do you see what I see?”
Prairie and Plain
POINT OF BALANCE. A dozen miles northwest of Smith Center, Kansas, stands a narrow stone pyramid not much higher than a six-footer wearing a top hat, and from the peak flies an American flag. If the surface of this country were a uniform plane, the forty-eight contiguous states would balance delicately atop the flagpole like a ballerina en pointe. This place is the geographic center, and the people here take pleasure in the core of America being a stretch of their easy prairie hills which, only a few miles west, begin to merge with the High Plains. It’s a land splendidly open, clean, uncluttered, a spot symbolically suited to be the heart of a spacious nation. Outsiders’ comments about the tedious and cultureless prairie and plain do not usually annoy these Kansans, accustomed as they are to the old, blindin
g bias of woodland peoples who believe any place not marked by timber must be a wasteland of withered vegetation with intellects to match.
THE HAND INVISIBLE. If you would see what made the prairies and plains, look up. It’s there in the cloudless sky, invisibly above as if a god: air currents, relieved of their wetness by the Rocky Mountains, move eastward over a land where the degree of evaporation just about equals the precipitation. These invisibilities create a place of equilibrium favoring plants that keep vital parts snugged in the damper realm belowground—cooler in summer, warmer in winter—a place where winds cannot tear and rupture nourishing cells. To survive, the prairie plants send up only what they must, and they make it expendable. Let drought and wildfire come on, this native vegetation will idle underground while the trees wither and die and open the land to those waiting below as if in service to the unseen master hand.
TWO MILES SOUTH OF BAZAAR, KANSAS. On this upland, the trees—slippery elm, hackberry, walnut, cottonwood—keep to the vales where the broken limestone creeks run clear, and they leave the slopes and level crests to the tall grasses—big and little bluestem, grama and Indian grasses—and miles of wildflowers with names suitable to their blossoms: indigo, gay-feather, silver-leaf nightshade, shooting star, downy gentian. This long stretch of tall prairie is one of the last left in the country. Of the quarter of a billion acres of tallgrass once reaching from Indiana to just beyond here and from central Canada to Texas, only about 3 percent remains, most of it in these Flint Hills of Kansas. A traveler may now drive eight-hundred miles across the Middle West and never know what tall prairie means, even though it remains one of the very emblems of America. Let me say it: To know America one ought to stand at least once in grass running from elbow to a horizon that appears knee-high because everything in the Heart of America partakes of that far rim and its sky and openness and gift of light.
SIX MILES WEST OF FAITH, SOUTH DAKOTA. Overwhelmingly here, there’s a sensation of being on top, a feeling of aboveness that comes not from elevation, for this is a place of undulating levelness, but rather from a horizon visible in all of its 360 degrees, visible even when one sits. You need climb nothing to see the slight curving of the earthen ball. This stretch of short grass along U.S. Highway 212 is not properly prairie but the eastern edge of the High Plains that lie beyond the ninety-eighth meridian where rainfall drops to twenty inches and dwindles with each westward mile as the elevation rises from twelve hundred feet to five thousand in a fairly regular tilting that most woodlanders will see as flat. Here, unlike true prairie, trees do not lie in wait to steal land from forbs, legumes, and clump grasses, those plants evolved to live in a realm where all is minimal except wind and sun, the primal abundances of the Plains.
Toole County, Montana
THE RAIN SHADOW FROM PIKES PEAK. I have two memories of my first visit to the summit in 1952: the steep ascent up the cog railroad, and the vast, afternoon umbra the mountain cast down the eastern slope and across the foothills all the way, it seemed, to the great plane of Kansas where once plesiosaurs swam. Years later, when I learned about a phenomenon poetically called a rain shadow, I remembered that massive dusk creeping onto the plains. The metaphoric name is apt, for the mountains can stop clouds as they do sunsets, and it’s those rock barriers that determine the life beyond them and seemingly out of their reach. As a stockade shapes the character of a fortress, so it is here: What gets kept out makes all the difference to what lives within. The annual precipitation in western Nebraska is fifteen inches, and in eastern Iowa it’s almost three feet. That twenty-inch difference led explorer Zebulon Pike in 1806 to call the trans-Missouri west the Great American Desert, a term both then and now inaccurate in its implications of waterlessness and barrenness. Yet the description did serve briefly to give tribal peoples a few extra years of freedom before the great westering incursions of settlers changed everything. Believing Pike and thinking the absence of trees meant infertile soil, homesteaders were slow to take up this territory before the myth broke and farmers learned that bluestem and buffalo grass are often better indicators of fecundity than an oak or hickory; some settlers were led on by another skewed notion that “rainfall follows the plow,” the belief that tilling grassland would change humidity and increase precipitation.
THE DESERT BREADBASKET. Pike, who understood little of the xeric world he passed through, recommended that the federal government seize the land west of the Mississippi River and trade it to Spain for Florida. In 1988, just four of the states in the “great desert” produced more than a billion-and-a-half bushels of corn, about one-billion bushels of wheat, and a half-billion bushels of soybeans. Never mind the rump roasts and cutlets.
THIRTY-THOUSAND FEET BELOW. From this Boeing 737, I can look down on some thousand-square miles of Nebraska and see a shape born in Thomas Jefferson’s brain. Across the undulations of grasses and crops lies a great grid so insistent that only the most crumpled and dissected landform can interrupt it. His township-and-range system of 1785 brought a surveyor’s tidy schematic to the country in order to help establish “clear” land titles and to take wilderness and turn it to the ends of white settlement. Below me is the largest physical expression of eighteenth-century rationalism in America, perhaps on the face of the Earth. A fellow passenger described it as “a lovely counterpane,” but I have never seen much beauty in those cardinal-direction grids that so ignore, even deny, natural forms. It is, of course, convenient to drive across Oklahoma or North Dakota or Iowa and never lose a sense of direction as you travel, where the roads, fences, houses, and probably even the bedsteads and sleeping bodies lie only due this way or that. From nearly seven miles up, I can count the mile-square section lines of gravel roads or barbed-wire fences for half a minute and figure the speed of the 737. I can also wonder whether road travelers in eastern Colorado would see the beauty of the plains more readily if their routes followed not ruled lines but the sinuous arcs of the slight hills and the eccentric bends of creek beds. What if they traveled on roads expressing not an engineer but the land itself, on highways that call upon the full range of a dashboard compass?
CLICHÉ, SIMILE, ERRORS. Between the Ozark Mountains of western Missouri in the east and the Black Hills of South Dakota in the west, between the Cimarron River in southern Kansas and the Souris in North Dakota, the prairies and plains lie grandly sloped from the foothills of the Rockies almost all the way to the Mississippi River. It’s a drop of some four-thousand feet or nearly four Empire State Buildings stacked one atop the other. The terrain is hardly a rampart, but covering as it does about eight-hundred horizontal miles, it surely isn’t “like a pool table” except in popular misconception. This angled landscape is so roused with risings and fallings, with hills and valleys and stony encrustations, it looks as if a cosmic hand had wadded it up in frustration for its not being something else, and then in remorse tried to smooth it out again, only to be unable to quite flatten the crinklings: the western Ozarks, the Black Hills, Flint Hills, Red Hills, Smokey Hills, Sand Hills, Wildcat Hills, two disheveled and jagged Badlands, the Missouri Breaks, the Killdeer Mountains, Turtle Mountain, and a thousand and more bluffs, cliffs, ridges, knobs, knolls, humps, buttes, mesas, peaks, pinnacles, pillars, hogbacks, mounds, moraines, drumlins, kames, eskers, escarpments, cuestas, and even more valleys and vales and dales and dells, gullies and gulches, ravines, arroyos, draws, coulees, and bottoms. Pool table? Not even bumper pool.
THE RIVER. Only one watercourse touches all six of the Near West states. A deceptive thing of snags and sawyers and sand shallows, an unpredictable siltiness that eats its own banks like a dreamer chewing at his bedcover. The Missouri River shapes the earthly topography and political geography, the economics, institutions, the history. Initially, the Euro-American empire moved far up its contorted course into the plains, until people on the overland trails decided only its lower leagues were useful to reach a jumping-off place like Kansas City or Council Bluffs. First into the Near West by river went French explorers and
voyageurs opening a way for Americans of many silks: Lewis and Clark pressing the quest for a route to Cathay, followed by soldiers, surveyors, scientists, writers, artists, and settlers beyond numbering. Against the current, in pirogues, canoes, flatboats, skiffs, keelboats, steamboats they came: Thomas Nuttall, Stephen Long, Prince Maximilian, John Frémont, Francis Parkman, and the three greatest early western artists: Karl Bodmer, George Catlin, John James Audubon. And in 1837 aboard the paddlewheeler St. Peter’s came a passenger named Variola that would remake the human face of the Great Plains: smallpox, decimator of native America. All of them—atop the great earthen Missouri, the longest river in the country before engineers meddled with it—all of them came into the middle country.
A MANDAN VILLAGE. A few years ago when the grasses had turned russet and the wild roses were bare stems thrashing thorniness in the wind, I was walking along the west bank of the Missouri River a few miles south of Bismarck, North Dakota. An early snow was on the way. Every so often behind me a car whipped up the highway toward the capital, and below, the water moved south, although its current was invisible in the reservoir formed behind Oahe Dam a couple-hundred miles downstream. The twentieth-century lay at a distance, but where I stood were grassy mounds of the Huff archaeological site, once a prehistoric, palisaded village of something more than a hundred houses, most of them aligned in tidy rows parallel to the river, their back walls to the north wind. People lived here more or less peacefully at a time when Europeans were sending men off to drive infidels from a presumed holy land, a kind of prefiguring of what would one day happen here. The native dwellings depended minimally on timber and much more on grasses and the soil itself. In those earth-contact lodges (architects would reinvent them a millennium later), the people ate bison, elk, deer, catfish, and mussels, and they grew maize, beans, and squash in gardens cultivated with hoes made from bison shoulder blades. What they called the river or their village or themselves, we don’t know, but we can assume they liked the place because they stayed here for ten generations.