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MAY 9TH, 1912.
You are
falling
The night opens its arms to you, kisses your neck and whispers welcome home. This is where your eyes work best, this is where you move in the most unseen kind of way. This is where you can rest, or move, or exist with the most ease. But you are not here to rest; you are here to follow.
Six paces out is your prey. He is no less shambling out here in the Yellowstone, which is where you are, than he is in his own church. He limps his way across your people’s land inch by inch, the stench of him so sour it fills up your nose and your tongue in until the taste of him is all you know for days. On the final days, you crouch down and watch him make camp, build a fire so tall it crowds over him. You smell on him that he thinks this will keep you away.
He is wrong.
You watch him as he blinks between fits of waking and sleep, hours and hours of forcing his eyes to remain open. On the second hour, you tip-toe yourself away and then run full tilt to where you have made a home, at least temporarily. In this place, you have hidden Christ, his pale and wooden form waiting for you in your dug out. His head is still gone, of course. You say to him: “We are going on one last trip, you and I,” in Aamsskáápipikan, and then you tie him to your back and begin the run back the way you came.
As you close in on him, your prey in his black robes and grey hair, you can smell the sleep coming over him. It’s here you begin your work: placing his statue opposite him, twice trying to keep the wood steady, and then creeping off back to the shadows to wait, to watch.
He nods awake in fifteen minutes, and jumps so fast and so badly you can smell it on him. He stands, rounding in your companion of some weeks, and then you slip into the warm place where he had been, moments before. When he turns to you, you can smell the fear on him; you can taste the resignation. You grin at him.
When you open your mouth, his taste is back on your tongue. You try not to gag. “I would welcome you to Nittowsinan,” you say, in a drawl, “but the Pikuni no longer let you napikwan in like that.”
“How did you find me -”
You scrunch up your nose. “When was the last time you bathed, Three-Persons?”
He does not answer you. Arthur Beaucarne, instead, takes it upon himself to try and sit; to shift the headless form of his God to the right a bit, and finds the wood too oppressive. Too heavy. Fitting; funny.
You move so fast you know it startles him. You take the body and tilt it towards the fire. “Here,” you say, like you are doing him a favour, and set the body of Christ alight. You smell on him that he is praying it won’t burn, but it does. It burns all the way through.
You are speaking to each other, about Golden Calf. The conversation isn't all that important now, in hindsight. What is important: “We aren’t done yet, Three-Persons,” you say softly, your tongue against your teeth, your lip curling.
“You know that’s not my name.”
Your head tilts, and you hold him there, for a moment, and then turn to look back out towards the night. “This is almost where the first of the buffalo men were found,” you say, casually, unbothered. You mean the skinned men, of course. The ones drained, and then skinned, and then painted.
“We call them humps, not buffalo men,” he says, enough of him awake to sound affronted.
“You think I should have called them blackhorn men,” you drawl, mouth curling into a grin. “They don’t deserve a word like that, though. I know where they come from.”
You do know where they come from, these humps.
“California? They come from San Francisco, Good Stab. You brought them from there.”
You know better than Arthur; you know something he does not and this pleases you.
“If that’s what you say, Three-Persons,” you say, as slow as he is.
“I was going to die out here,” he says, like this means something. Like this is supposed to appease you, somehow.
Your grin goes downward into a sneer. “The Pikuni would carry your bones back across the river. To keep them from touching with ours.”
“What have I done to you?”
What he has done to you, you will make him say. You will pry this out of him before the Sun begins its long stretch across the Summer. You will have him say it before you speak your own last sin.
But it is your sin which will be the bait. “You haven’t heard my last confession. You don’t know the true count of dead I carry.”
“I can hear that number now, here,” he says with his hand over his chest, like the heart in there is open, and pure, and good. I listen with a good heart, he tells you, every Sunday. You know this is not true.
“No,” you say. “We do it in your holy house, where we started. It’s also where we finish.”
“But—”
This last thought does not leave him. You move quick, lunging in onto him like you’ve told him you can do. Your teeth find his neck, and you can taste the blood under the skin thudding like a weak drum. You do not want this blood, however; even in your hungriest days, you would not drink this blood. But your teeth do close down - your human teeth, heavy against the leathery canvas of his neck. On him, you smell his fear, you smell his shame, his desire, his everything. His eyes are staring at you, and you worry the skin between your teeth, clamping down on the artery until the blood dams and slows, and Arthur Beaucarne falls back, unconscious.
-
You told him, in those early days, that your strength had just been that of a normal man. This had been true, but back then you had been just a newborn. Now you are older, you are eighty or so winters and your strength has improved with age. It’s easy to carry him on your back, sprinting back towards the place he calls Miles City, and towards the Church he calls home.
Inside this place is where your real work begins. You take his bibles and his hymn books and turn them into blackened paste. You cover the windows with it until the Church is in perpetual night. You lock the doors, too. For two days you set to work on this, turning his house of God into a blacked out pit. First its the windows, and then you need the other things, too, and this takes some more work. Sometimes Arthur stirs, and so you press your teeth back against the artery of his neck and send him backwards into dreams again.
On the second night, you do your final thing, which is to take his cross and lay him out against it. You tie him the way his God had been tied, arms spread out wide, legs crossed and head bowed in sanctimonious woe. You push the cross back up to its post, Arthur Beaucarne upon it, and then begin to arrange the rest of your audience.
Arthur wakes some time after this, jerking in his restraints as you light the candles in the pews, to better illuminate your audience. The bodies, side by side, pew by pew: Sheriff Doyle, first. You glance at Arthur on his cross, your mouth curling upwards, pleased. You take a candle to the next body, Livinius Clarkson wrapped in the red, white and blue of his flag, and nod. “Thank you for sending him out to me, Three-Persons,” you say as Arthur’s face twists. “I would have drank him just so he would know who was killing him. I would have, but he’s been touching that flag for too long, and I don’t want that inside me, would rather eat another mole, or a wagon train of moles.”
You say this and tilt the candle towards Livinius’ decaying body, right towards the flag and it ignite it. Inside something in you purrs, pleased. Or sighs, or stretches, or screams with relief. You shield your eyes from the light and step back, move onto the next thing.
The burning corpse smells, of course. The decayed flesh fills up your nose, but if you’re really honest, Livinius Clarkson smells the way all napikwan smell to you now. He lights all the way up, illuminating the other pews, and your four other guests. You watch as Arthur takes all this in, thrashing in his bindings the way you imagine his God must have done all the back in Judaea.
You move towards the shadows, now. You move slow, towards him. Your mouth curls again, sneer crowding your face. “Would you preach to them, Three-Persons?” you drawl. “Would you instruct them on how to live a life without sin?”
His eyes snap closed, head shaking back and forth like a wounded animal. You come up behind him, lean in so close you can taste his unwashed skin again, the fear, and then still, even under all this, his desire. At his ear, you breathe: “Would you tell them that killing is wrong?”
He thrashes more and more and at his ear you grin, looking out at your hard work. The burning body, the others sitting in wait; the painted windows, the stench of death so strong it wants to crawl back inside you and find your marrow, make a home there. Then, at Arthur as he twists and shakes his head, eyes closed so tightly as though this will undo everything you’ve built for him.
You move again, back towards the pews. You take the bowler hat from Early Tate and place it on Livinius’ smoking head. You push him down to redirect the firelight, uncaring, unbothered by his smouldering flesh and its smouldering flag. Arthur has opened his eyes, however, and you see that he now sees the seventh corpse; the first one you ever left for him.
“I know you think I drank his blood,” you say, rounding in on this body, hand landing heavy on its decomposing shoulder, “but the corruption in him is worse than that other one’s flag.”
“So you killed him just to kill him?”
No. Not really. “I opened his neck over an empty little grass-eater hole and let his heart push all his blood down into there, but it wasn’t empty, the hole, it was only empty of little grass-eaters. A crawls-on-his-belly came up through that blood hissing and striking at the air.”
“A snake?”
“A snake, yes.” You watch as Arthur begins to cough as the smell of rot and death finally settles into his old lungs. You tilt your head again. “Do napikwans taste the same on the air as Pikuni do, Three-Persons?”
He doesn’t answer with words. Livinius’ corpse begins to bubble and boil, and you watch him wretch and splutter on his cross until drool hangs heavy from his bottom lip, hanging all the way down to his chest. He begins to sob after this. Your mouth curls in disgust, but you do not let him see this.
He asks you: “Why?”
You repeat this back to him. Why? Why, why, why.
“His name was Benjamin Flowers,” he says, about this first body you left him. “And I don’t know why you would do him this indignity, this—this injustice.”
You repeat this back to him again: “Injustice,” slow, drawling. You grin just as slow. You wet your lips, and even now his eyes follow the shape of your tongue. “You Black Robes can have no children, can you?”
“Monasticism isn’t required. Our founder fought against that.”
You nod, slow. You ask if he could take a wife, if he would have wanted to. You are leading him down a path. One foot in front of the other. “Did you ever wish you had children?”
“My children are my parishioners. The children of our one Father are all brethren with each other. His seed is . . . it’s unvergänglich. That means imperishable.”
This is nonsense to you, of course. This is a lie. “What does that mean, Three-Persons?”
“It never dies.”
“Oh,” you say, grin wider. "They can die,” and you spread your hands out, towards the eighth, the ninth, the tenth corpses, beside this Benjamin Flowers. Young men, one fifteen. You have skinned these too. The youngest, is -
“That one shares my name, I know,” he says, as though he is finally understanding.
“Was he named after you?” you ask. “I’m not the first Good Stab among the Blackfeet. Wolf Calf wasn’t the first of his name.”
He is not quite there yet though. “Why would he be named after me?”
You shrug, turning your attention to the boy. You look at him, his face; the red hair, the shape of his eyes. You can see it; he can’t. You will come back to Arthur Flowers, though. “I’m not the first Pikuni you ever saw, am I?”
“Do I have to be up here like this?”
You shrug again. “Not much longer.”
“What do you want from me, Weasel Plume?”
Something in you boils with rage. With anger. Your hand closes into a fist. “You don’t call me that.” This is not his right. This is not his to take from you.
“Because your cat man killed him? Your white buffalo, or the child you used to be before—”
You shift in your anger, dragging the black rob from your body in a fluid motion. Directed energy; you spin on him after this, eyes narrowed behind your glasses. “You’re asking me to kill you.” You will not be baited into this. Not here. Not yet. “But I know this game, Three-Persons. Pikuni enemies taunt us like this the same when we have them tied by the fire, and they see the night stretching long before them. Peasy taught us not to listen to their insults.”
“If you won’t kill me, then what is it you want from me?”
You inhale. You refocus your energy. You - “I would know what happened to your toes.”
You watch him look down at his own feet, where you have attached three new ones in place of his three missing. You had thought this would be funny; it is, still, even as you sit with your anger. But you don’t laugh.
You think about what he said, about Weasel Plume. Your son. Your white-haired calf. Your namesake. “Yes,” you say. “It was the Cat Man, returned, who killed Weasel Plume. Do not things like this happen in your holy book? He had been living like a weasel in the Backbone, eating small things at first, when he was weak and dead and nothing, and then bigger and bigger things over the years, until he finally found a band of hunters, or trappers, or even Pikuni.”
“You said you were going to tell me the number of your dead,” he snaps.
Your mouth curls again. “You first.”
“My toes, then,” he says, and tells you about the snow. About wrapping them. You ask him if he knew how to wrap them, against the cold. You ask -
“Did Joe Cobell wrap his legs? Did Joe Kipp?”
You watch him look outwards, across the entirety of the Church, to the windows, to the vent. You can smell the desperation on him. You can smell the understanding as it slowly creeps upon him.
“No,” he says, finally.
You lean forward. “No what, Three-Persons,” you hiss and walks towards him, cat-prowl slow.
“This is your confession, not mine -”
“Tell me you weren’t there that day on the Bear,” you say, and know he can’t. “Tell me you weren’t there whispering into the coward Joe Cobell’s ear that he should shoot Heavy Runner, tell me that here in your holy house and I walk away, Three-Persons.”
He knows now. You can smell it on him. Good, you think. Good. He should know his shame. He should understand that even after all this time, which isn’t long at all for you, that his shame will always live inside of him, and outside of him, and it will linger and linger, and fucking linger -
“We had been walking for days in that blizzard! We had orders from General Sheridan to strike them hard!”
“Them.” Them. Them. Them.
“You,” he says, sinking. “The Blackfeet.”
You shake your head. “The women and children and elders, you mean,” and you want to cry, but you can’t show him this. You turn away instead. “And did you strike us hard?” You ask this, already knowing. You breathe out harshly, add, voice thick with false misunderstanding: “But you’re a Black Robe, not a soldier. Were you there to read your holy book over the dead, Three-Persons?”
You can smell what happened on him, rising out from his blood to sit on his skin. You can smell the women dying in their lodges, their husbands brutalised, their children dead in their arms. You can smell it all as it flashes before his eyes, his history bleeding out of him quicker and quicker.
He tells you that they didn’t even fight. They couldn’t, because the pox had come for most of them. They had been sick, they had been weak. They hadn’t been prepared.
Arthur’s scream snaps you out of it. He screams so loud the Church shakes with it. “You tore out the heart of my people, Three-Persons,” you say, slowly.
He says I’m sorry, like this means something. Like this will bring your people back from what he did that day, on the Bear.
You say: “Is it wrong to kill? Is this what you tell your people who come each Sunday?”
He says yes. Then why? Then why, Arthur Beaucarne? Why?
Because we were freezing, he says. Because we were hungry. You keep pressing: WHY, THREE-PERSONS? Because those were the orders, but WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY -
They didn’t even fight back. They couldn’t. They didn’t know they would have to.
“If it wasn’t us, it would have been another regiment,” Arthur says to you. “You can’t stop a country from happening, Good Stab.”
You look at him. This pathetic, wet, wretched shape of a man who isn’t even really a man. “But we were already a nation. We didn’t ask you to come,” and he tries to counter you with what you took, too. The kettles, the guns, the horses. You ignore this. You press further. WHY, you think. You just wanted to live.
“You weren’t even there,” he says, desperate. This doesn’t matter. Your heart was. You soul was. The best part of you is still there, with those bodies.
“How,” you say, your voice shaking now. “How could you shoot us in our winter lodges?”
WHY. WHY. WHY. WHY.
“Because you were just Indians!”
There. There it is. There it is.. You understand; you tell him this. They wanted to make you cry, so they did. They wanted your land, so they took it. You tell him this. Three-Persons, you say.
“That’s not my name.”
You snicker. “Black Toe. No, Black Heart.” You hate him, you think. You hate him. He tells you do it. You say no. No. You won’t have his blood in you, his poison, his sin. He looks out at the bodies, so many of them lit up by the firelight. You sneer: “It was just napikwans.”
But you need to refocus again. You need to redirect him back to these bodies, and why they’re here. Four of them, anyway. “But to you, that’s not what they are. Look at them closer, Three-Persons. Look at them with different eyes. Taste their scent on the air like I do.”
You watch him do this. It’s slow, but he looks from face to bloated face, and sees them new.
“Your son’s son,” you say, because he won’t.
He asks you again: WHY? Why. WHY.
“Because,” you say. “Because all of your blood has to spill.”
All, except his. You have plans for Arthur. You have more for him, after this. But this is already too much, isn’t it? This has already gone on for too long.
Your pipe is empty again, Good Stab.
into the night.
The night opens its arms to you, kisses your neck and whispers welcome home. This is where your eyes work best, this is where you move in the most unseen kind of way. This is where you can rest, or move, or exist with the most ease. But you are not here to rest; you are here to follow.
Six paces out is your prey. He is no less shambling out here in the Yellowstone, which is where you are, than he is in his own church. He limps his way across your people’s land inch by inch, the stench of him so sour it fills up your nose and your tongue in until the taste of him is all you know for days. On the final days, you crouch down and watch him make camp, build a fire so tall it crowds over him. You smell on him that he thinks this will keep you away.
He is wrong.
You watch him as he blinks between fits of waking and sleep, hours and hours of forcing his eyes to remain open. On the second hour, you tip-toe yourself away and then run full tilt to where you have made a home, at least temporarily. In this place, you have hidden Christ, his pale and wooden form waiting for you in your dug out. His head is still gone, of course. You say to him: “We are going on one last trip, you and I,” in Aamsskáápipikan, and then you tie him to your back and begin the run back the way you came.
As you close in on him, your prey in his black robes and grey hair, you can smell the sleep coming over him. It’s here you begin your work: placing his statue opposite him, twice trying to keep the wood steady, and then creeping off back to the shadows to wait, to watch.
He nods awake in fifteen minutes, and jumps so fast and so badly you can smell it on him. He stands, rounding in your companion of some weeks, and then you slip into the warm place where he had been, moments before. When he turns to you, you can smell the fear on him; you can taste the resignation. You grin at him.
When you open your mouth, his taste is back on your tongue. You try not to gag. “I would welcome you to Nittowsinan,” you say, in a drawl, “but the Pikuni no longer let you napikwan in like that.”
“How did you find me -”
You scrunch up your nose. “When was the last time you bathed, Three-Persons?”
He does not answer you. Arthur Beaucarne, instead, takes it upon himself to try and sit; to shift the headless form of his God to the right a bit, and finds the wood too oppressive. Too heavy. Fitting; funny.
You move so fast you know it startles him. You take the body and tilt it towards the fire. “Here,” you say, like you are doing him a favour, and set the body of Christ alight. You smell on him that he is praying it won’t burn, but it does. It burns all the way through.
You are speaking to each other, about Golden Calf. The conversation isn't all that important now, in hindsight. What is important: “We aren’t done yet, Three-Persons,” you say softly, your tongue against your teeth, your lip curling.
“You know that’s not my name.”
Your head tilts, and you hold him there, for a moment, and then turn to look back out towards the night. “This is almost where the first of the buffalo men were found,” you say, casually, unbothered. You mean the skinned men, of course. The ones drained, and then skinned, and then painted.
“We call them humps, not buffalo men,” he says, enough of him awake to sound affronted.
“You think I should have called them blackhorn men,” you drawl, mouth curling into a grin. “They don’t deserve a word like that, though. I know where they come from.”
You do know where they come from, these humps.
“California? They come from San Francisco, Good Stab. You brought them from there.”
You know better than Arthur; you know something he does not and this pleases you.
“If that’s what you say, Three-Persons,” you say, as slow as he is.
“I was going to die out here,” he says, like this means something. Like this is supposed to appease you, somehow.
Your grin goes downward into a sneer. “The Pikuni would carry your bones back across the river. To keep them from touching with ours.”
“What have I done to you?”
What he has done to you, you will make him say. You will pry this out of him before the Sun begins its long stretch across the Summer. You will have him say it before you speak your own last sin.
But it is your sin which will be the bait. “You haven’t heard my last confession. You don’t know the true count of dead I carry.”
“I can hear that number now, here,” he says with his hand over his chest, like the heart in there is open, and pure, and good. I listen with a good heart, he tells you, every Sunday. You know this is not true.
“No,” you say. “We do it in your holy house, where we started. It’s also where we finish.”
“But—”
This last thought does not leave him. You move quick, lunging in onto him like you’ve told him you can do. Your teeth find his neck, and you can taste the blood under the skin thudding like a weak drum. You do not want this blood, however; even in your hungriest days, you would not drink this blood. But your teeth do close down - your human teeth, heavy against the leathery canvas of his neck. On him, you smell his fear, you smell his shame, his desire, his everything. His eyes are staring at you, and you worry the skin between your teeth, clamping down on the artery until the blood dams and slows, and Arthur Beaucarne falls back, unconscious.
-
You told him, in those early days, that your strength had just been that of a normal man. This had been true, but back then you had been just a newborn. Now you are older, you are eighty or so winters and your strength has improved with age. It’s easy to carry him on your back, sprinting back towards the place he calls Miles City, and towards the Church he calls home.
Inside this place is where your real work begins. You take his bibles and his hymn books and turn them into blackened paste. You cover the windows with it until the Church is in perpetual night. You lock the doors, too. For two days you set to work on this, turning his house of God into a blacked out pit. First its the windows, and then you need the other things, too, and this takes some more work. Sometimes Arthur stirs, and so you press your teeth back against the artery of his neck and send him backwards into dreams again.
On the second night, you do your final thing, which is to take his cross and lay him out against it. You tie him the way his God had been tied, arms spread out wide, legs crossed and head bowed in sanctimonious woe. You push the cross back up to its post, Arthur Beaucarne upon it, and then begin to arrange the rest of your audience.
Arthur wakes some time after this, jerking in his restraints as you light the candles in the pews, to better illuminate your audience. The bodies, side by side, pew by pew: Sheriff Doyle, first. You glance at Arthur on his cross, your mouth curling upwards, pleased. You take a candle to the next body, Livinius Clarkson wrapped in the red, white and blue of his flag, and nod. “Thank you for sending him out to me, Three-Persons,” you say as Arthur’s face twists. “I would have drank him just so he would know who was killing him. I would have, but he’s been touching that flag for too long, and I don’t want that inside me, would rather eat another mole, or a wagon train of moles.”
You say this and tilt the candle towards Livinius’ decaying body, right towards the flag and it ignite it. Inside something in you purrs, pleased. Or sighs, or stretches, or screams with relief. You shield your eyes from the light and step back, move onto the next thing.
The burning corpse smells, of course. The decayed flesh fills up your nose, but if you’re really honest, Livinius Clarkson smells the way all napikwan smell to you now. He lights all the way up, illuminating the other pews, and your four other guests. You watch as Arthur takes all this in, thrashing in his bindings the way you imagine his God must have done all the back in Judaea.
You move towards the shadows, now. You move slow, towards him. Your mouth curls again, sneer crowding your face. “Would you preach to them, Three-Persons?” you drawl. “Would you instruct them on how to live a life without sin?”
His eyes snap closed, head shaking back and forth like a wounded animal. You come up behind him, lean in so close you can taste his unwashed skin again, the fear, and then still, even under all this, his desire. At his ear, you breathe: “Would you tell them that killing is wrong?”
He thrashes more and more and at his ear you grin, looking out at your hard work. The burning body, the others sitting in wait; the painted windows, the stench of death so strong it wants to crawl back inside you and find your marrow, make a home there. Then, at Arthur as he twists and shakes his head, eyes closed so tightly as though this will undo everything you’ve built for him.
You move again, back towards the pews. You take the bowler hat from Early Tate and place it on Livinius’ smoking head. You push him down to redirect the firelight, uncaring, unbothered by his smouldering flesh and its smouldering flag. Arthur has opened his eyes, however, and you see that he now sees the seventh corpse; the first one you ever left for him.
“I know you think I drank his blood,” you say, rounding in on this body, hand landing heavy on its decomposing shoulder, “but the corruption in him is worse than that other one’s flag.”
“So you killed him just to kill him?”
No. Not really. “I opened his neck over an empty little grass-eater hole and let his heart push all his blood down into there, but it wasn’t empty, the hole, it was only empty of little grass-eaters. A crawls-on-his-belly came up through that blood hissing and striking at the air.”
“A snake?”
“A snake, yes.” You watch as Arthur begins to cough as the smell of rot and death finally settles into his old lungs. You tilt your head again. “Do napikwans taste the same on the air as Pikuni do, Three-Persons?”
He doesn’t answer with words. Livinius’ corpse begins to bubble and boil, and you watch him wretch and splutter on his cross until drool hangs heavy from his bottom lip, hanging all the way down to his chest. He begins to sob after this. Your mouth curls in disgust, but you do not let him see this.
He asks you: “Why?”
You repeat this back to him. Why? Why, why, why.
“His name was Benjamin Flowers,” he says, about this first body you left him. “And I don’t know why you would do him this indignity, this—this injustice.”
You repeat this back to him again: “Injustice,” slow, drawling. You grin just as slow. You wet your lips, and even now his eyes follow the shape of your tongue. “You Black Robes can have no children, can you?”
“Monasticism isn’t required. Our founder fought against that.”
You nod, slow. You ask if he could take a wife, if he would have wanted to. You are leading him down a path. One foot in front of the other. “Did you ever wish you had children?”
“My children are my parishioners. The children of our one Father are all brethren with each other. His seed is . . . it’s unvergänglich. That means imperishable.”
This is nonsense to you, of course. This is a lie. “What does that mean, Three-Persons?”
“It never dies.”
“Oh,” you say, grin wider. "They can die,” and you spread your hands out, towards the eighth, the ninth, the tenth corpses, beside this Benjamin Flowers. Young men, one fifteen. You have skinned these too. The youngest, is -
“That one shares my name, I know,” he says, as though he is finally understanding.
“Was he named after you?” you ask. “I’m not the first Good Stab among the Blackfeet. Wolf Calf wasn’t the first of his name.”
He is not quite there yet though. “Why would he be named after me?”
You shrug, turning your attention to the boy. You look at him, his face; the red hair, the shape of his eyes. You can see it; he can’t. You will come back to Arthur Flowers, though. “I’m not the first Pikuni you ever saw, am I?”
“Do I have to be up here like this?”
You shrug again. “Not much longer.”
“What do you want from me, Weasel Plume?”
Something in you boils with rage. With anger. Your hand closes into a fist. “You don’t call me that.” This is not his right. This is not his to take from you.
“Because your cat man killed him? Your white buffalo, or the child you used to be before—”
You shift in your anger, dragging the black rob from your body in a fluid motion. Directed energy; you spin on him after this, eyes narrowed behind your glasses. “You’re asking me to kill you.” You will not be baited into this. Not here. Not yet. “But I know this game, Three-Persons. Pikuni enemies taunt us like this the same when we have them tied by the fire, and they see the night stretching long before them. Peasy taught us not to listen to their insults.”
“If you won’t kill me, then what is it you want from me?”
You inhale. You refocus your energy. You - “I would know what happened to your toes.”
You watch him look down at his own feet, where you have attached three new ones in place of his three missing. You had thought this would be funny; it is, still, even as you sit with your anger. But you don’t laugh.
You think about what he said, about Weasel Plume. Your son. Your white-haired calf. Your namesake. “Yes,” you say. “It was the Cat Man, returned, who killed Weasel Plume. Do not things like this happen in your holy book? He had been living like a weasel in the Backbone, eating small things at first, when he was weak and dead and nothing, and then bigger and bigger things over the years, until he finally found a band of hunters, or trappers, or even Pikuni.”
“You said you were going to tell me the number of your dead,” he snaps.
Your mouth curls again. “You first.”
“My toes, then,” he says, and tells you about the snow. About wrapping them. You ask him if he knew how to wrap them, against the cold. You ask -
“Did Joe Cobell wrap his legs? Did Joe Kipp?”
You watch him look outwards, across the entirety of the Church, to the windows, to the vent. You can smell the desperation on him. You can smell the understanding as it slowly creeps upon him.
“No,” he says, finally.
You lean forward. “No what, Three-Persons,” you hiss and walks towards him, cat-prowl slow.
“This is your confession, not mine -”
“Tell me you weren’t there that day on the Bear,” you say, and know he can’t. “Tell me you weren’t there whispering into the coward Joe Cobell’s ear that he should shoot Heavy Runner, tell me that here in your holy house and I walk away, Three-Persons.”
He knows now. You can smell it on him. Good, you think. Good. He should know his shame. He should understand that even after all this time, which isn’t long at all for you, that his shame will always live inside of him, and outside of him, and it will linger and linger, and fucking linger -
“We had been walking for days in that blizzard! We had orders from General Sheridan to strike them hard!”
“Them.” Them. Them. Them.
“You,” he says, sinking. “The Blackfeet.”
You shake your head. “The women and children and elders, you mean,” and you want to cry, but you can’t show him this. You turn away instead. “And did you strike us hard?” You ask this, already knowing. You breathe out harshly, add, voice thick with false misunderstanding: “But you’re a Black Robe, not a soldier. Were you there to read your holy book over the dead, Three-Persons?”
You can smell what happened on him, rising out from his blood to sit on his skin. You can smell the women dying in their lodges, their husbands brutalised, their children dead in their arms. You can smell it all as it flashes before his eyes, his history bleeding out of him quicker and quicker.
He tells you that they didn’t even fight. They couldn’t, because the pox had come for most of them. They had been sick, they had been weak. They hadn’t been prepared.
Arthur’s scream snaps you out of it. He screams so loud the Church shakes with it. “You tore out the heart of my people, Three-Persons,” you say, slowly.
He says I’m sorry, like this means something. Like this will bring your people back from what he did that day, on the Bear.
You say: “Is it wrong to kill? Is this what you tell your people who come each Sunday?”
He says yes. Then why? Then why, Arthur Beaucarne? Why?
Because we were freezing, he says. Because we were hungry. You keep pressing: WHY, THREE-PERSONS? Because those were the orders, but WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY -
They didn’t even fight back. They couldn’t. They didn’t know they would have to.
“If it wasn’t us, it would have been another regiment,” Arthur says to you. “You can’t stop a country from happening, Good Stab.”
You look at him. This pathetic, wet, wretched shape of a man who isn’t even really a man. “But we were already a nation. We didn’t ask you to come,” and he tries to counter you with what you took, too. The kettles, the guns, the horses. You ignore this. You press further. WHY, you think. You just wanted to live.
“You weren’t even there,” he says, desperate. This doesn’t matter. Your heart was. You soul was. The best part of you is still there, with those bodies.
“How,” you say, your voice shaking now. “How could you shoot us in our winter lodges?”
WHY. WHY. WHY. WHY.
“Because you were just Indians!”
There. There it is. There it is.. You understand; you tell him this. They wanted to make you cry, so they did. They wanted your land, so they took it. You tell him this. Three-Persons, you say.
“That’s not my name.”
You snicker. “Black Toe. No, Black Heart.” You hate him, you think. You hate him. He tells you do it. You say no. No. You won’t have his blood in you, his poison, his sin. He looks out at the bodies, so many of them lit up by the firelight. You sneer: “It was just napikwans.”
But you need to refocus again. You need to redirect him back to these bodies, and why they’re here. Four of them, anyway. “But to you, that’s not what they are. Look at them closer, Three-Persons. Look at them with different eyes. Taste their scent on the air like I do.”
You watch him do this. It’s slow, but he looks from face to bloated face, and sees them new.
“Your son’s son,” you say, because he won’t.
He asks you again: WHY? Why. WHY.
“Because,” you say. “Because all of your blood has to spill.”
All, except his. You have plans for Arthur. You have more for him, after this. But this is already too much, isn’t it? This has already gone on for too long.
Your pipe is empty again, Good Stab.