Running Horse had scrawled his name on the board, taking care not to do it too well. After his name he drew a stick figure of a galloping pony, that to let Lucia know what his name really was.
“Winona,” said Lucia, “please come to the board.”
The slim brown girl bashfully left the bench. She sat in the rear of the room, and none of the boys would sit close to her. She was barefoot, to save her moccasins for more important times, when the weather would be cold.
When she reached the board she dropped her head shyly.
Joseph Running Horse was still there.
“You may return to your seat, Joseph,” said Lucia.
Winona drew from memory, rather than wrote, her name on the board, forming the letters of the white man as carefully as she might draw a diagram in the sand. Then she added the sign for first daughter, which in Sioux is the word Winona. Lucia had known that there were no other daughters, or sons. Winona was the only child of Old Bear, her father. Her mother had died somewhere away from the reservation.
Joseph Running Horse, who had not left the board, stood watching Winona.
He’s wondering how many horses she’d cost, thought Lucia, who was promptly ashamed of herself.
Joseph Running Horse, still holding a piece of chalk, then drew a circle on the board, which included his stick figure of a galloping pony and the sign of the first daughter.
Winona’s eyes flashed in anger, and she hissed a word at him in Sioux. It meant “Short Hair,” or an Indian who cuts his hair to be like a white man. Her back straight, she returned in pride to her bench.
One or two of the boys in the room laughed.
Tears of shame burned in the eyes of Running Horse, the chalk snapped in his hands.
“Go to your seat, Joseph,” insisted Lucia.
Running Horse turned to the board and angrily drew a head, a circle surmounted with a stick feather. Through the throat of the head he scraped a horizontal line, and added the sign of the galloping pony.
He was Indian-Sioux-he, Running Horse!
The cutthroat tribe, thought Lucia to herself, and was troubled.
“Go to your seat, Joseph,” said Lucia softly.
Joseph Running Horse stood angrily for a moment, and then abruptly returned to his bench, sat down with his knees hunched up, and stared at the floor.
Outside the wind began to rise, and through the window Lucia could see the high brown grass flowing toward the south. The strip of tar paper in one corner of the window snapped as the wind tugged at it.
Winter, thought Lucia another winter.
I won’t stay, she thought.
She rapped again on the desk for attention, as if by this action to restore the small world of that single room once more to the past, to begin the morning once again.
But it would not be the same, she thought, for she realized that tomorrow either Winona or Running Horse, probably both, would not return to school, nor the day after, nor the day after. Winona was, as Lucia recognized, a woman, and Running Horse, a young man, had in his way spoken for her, and had been refused. No longer were they her children, no longer could they be her children.
Winona had said “short hair” to Joseph Running Horse, and in that instant, for the first time, really, Lucia understood the depth of that insult. How even the gentle, quiet Winona, who worked with such care and scarcely moved in class, hated the white man, how she had spat out that epithet, how stung had been Joseph Running Horse that she had said this thing to him.
How they must hate us, thought Lucia. We have taken their land, exterminated them, taught them whiskey and seeds, plows and disease.
We have taken everything, she thought, and we have given nothing.
And here she stood before them, white, to teach them to sign their names and read the words of white men, whom they hated.
For a moment Lucia wanted to touch them, to speak to them of more than letters and words, but she could not.
But she told herself that what she wanted, really wanted, more than anything, was simply to leave this place-this terrible place-as they could not. She wanted to return to a city, to Saint Louis, to a brick school, libraries and music, to leave the prairie to see carriages again and hear the iron-rimmed wheels roll on the cobblestones, and see street lamps, and yards with grass in them, to sew on Sunday afternoons and wait for the young men to call.
I will leave, said Lucia to herself, I will leave. Aunt Zita may stay if she can, but I will leave.
Lucia was about to summon the next pupil to the board when she looked back, past the unlit stove, over the heads of the pupils, to the open door of the little frame building.
In the threshold stood Drum.
He was the son of Kills-His-Horse, now a legend among the Hunkpapa. Kills-His-Horse had taken many scalps and counted coup more than a hundred times. He had owned seventy ponies and could kill five buffalo with five arrows in the time a man’s heart could beat a dozen times. Twelve years ago, in the winter, not far from the frozen Powder River, Kills-His-Horse, attacked by a Crow war party, wounded, had cut the throat of his pony and fallen behind it, and managed to kill six of his enemies. Out of ammunition he had limped forward, knife in hand, to charge the war party. It had circled him, moving away from him as he charged, keeping him always in the center of the circle. Then he had sat crosslegged on the frozen grass in the snow and waited for them, and one of the Crows had shot him through the back of the head. Kills-His-Horse had had six sons, and five had died, two at the Little Big Horn. His remaining son, Drum, had now come into his manhood, and had not yet earned the eagle feather of the warrior, nor would he, thought Lucia, for the days of the eagle feathers are gone.
Drum regarded her and she dropped her head, unaccountably confused, blushing.
Drum must have been in his mid-twenties, and had known women, and she felt this as he looked at her, sensing his dispassionate gaze cut away the cotton of her clothing, seeing her not as a teacher, but as hated, as white, as female.
The Sioux had too little respect for women.
Lucia had been called a good woman by an old Indian once and he had said it as he might have said good horse, or good rifle. To the Sioux the purpose of woman was clear. She was for the use of man, like his horse, his weapons, his blankets his robes. Like the antelope and the vanished buffalo. For his use.
Foolishly the thought crossed her mind that women could now vote in Wyoming, and that in Boston they might elect members to the school board. But of course not the Indian women. Nor Indian men.
“Have you come to school?” asked Lucia, raising her head and looking directly into Drum’s eyes.
Drum’s eyes were shrewd, sharp, deep, unfriendly. His straight, hard lips wrinkled in a small sign of distaste.
Lucia knew that he understood little English.
“Have you come to school?” she repeated, more slowly, enunciating each word.
Winona, eyes sparkling, translated the words for Drum.
His expression did not change.
He and Lucia looked at one another over the benches. None of the boys stirred. Lucia became acutely aware of the sound of the wind outside.
His arms folded, the young Indian continued to stand motionless in the doorway, the wind from outside moving the long, rawhide-bound braids of his hair. He wore moccasins and a breechclout, leggings and an unusual buckskin shirt. It was dyed scarlet, and on the chest, in bright yellow, was the rim of a rising sun. Buckling in the shirt was a beaded belt, from which hung a long-handled steel hatchet. Lucia hadn’t seen the Indians dress like that except twice a year at the dances.
“Ghost Shirt,” whispered William Buckhorn to the fat, stolid-faced little boy who sat next to him, pointing to Drum’s bright scarlet buckskin with its flaring rim of a morning sun.