“Everywhere the Indians are dancing,” the men said, as they came nearer and nearer, mistaking the Ghost Dance for a rite of war, not noticing the white flag, not noticing that women, too, danced side by side with the men. “We begged for life, and the white man thought we wanted theirs,” Red Cloud cried.
The soldiers demanded the Indians’ guns, searched their tepees, spilled food from bowls, tore animal skins from sleeping children. Women screamed. Yellow Bird blew an eagle-bone whistle and told his people not to fear — they would be protected by their Ghost Shirts.
The soldiers found about forty old guns, but not Black Fox’s, which he carried under his blanket. The women chanted and cried. And seeing this, all of this, Black Fox took out his gun and fired into the line of soldiers he hated.
Immediately the troops retaliated, shooting at point-blank range at the unarmed Indians. Some Indians had knives or war clubs and fought hand to hand for their lives. At this time another troop positioned up the hill joined in — firing nearly fifty rounds a minute into the women and children who had gathered together and were standing off to the side.
Yet another ring of soldiers killed those who tried to escape into the hills. From four sides the white men fired. Within minutes hundreds were dead. Women and children who attempted to escape by running up the dry ravine were followed and slaughtered. Their bodies afterward were found for more than two miles. A few survivors, mostly children, hidden in the brush, were told they had nothing to fear. Little boys who crept out were surrounded and butchered.
Later, a member of the burial party said that many of the women were found dead with their shawls pulled up over their heads, covering their faces in that last second as the soldiers raised their guns and took aim.
They were buried in a mass grave. Most were naked. Souvenir hunters had taken the bloody Ghost Shirts from their backs. Soon after the massacre was complete, a great blizzard swept over the Plains and covered the dead with snow. It was hard to get some of them into the grave, frozen as they were into the various grotesque postures of violent death.
It was New Year’s Day, I89I.
If you had listened carefully, you could have heard through the snow, some distante away, a chorus of auld langsyne.
“It was so thick on the engine-room floors that we used to walk through it like snow.”
Bill had been a welder at the shipyard. He sat with us now at dinner. He was gaunt and haggard and he gasped for breath. My father put food on his plate.
“Please eat,” Dad said in a whisper.
“They gave us asbestos clothes to wear for protection. In ‘7 2 they started paying us dirty money to work in certain areas.”
“I’ve got people dying here every two weeks,” the business agent for Local 24 said, Fletcher told us.
“Please try to eat something,” my father said.
He was dying from a disease called mesothelioma.
I did not know then how much was ended. When I look back now from the high hill of my old age, I can still see the butchered women and children lying heaped and scattered all along the crooked gulch as plain as when I saw them with eyes still young. And I can see something else died there in the bloody mud and was buried in the blizzard. A people’s dream died there. It was a beautiful dream.
Black tlk
“Johns-Manville,” he carved into a postcard, “made a conscious, cold-blooded business decision, in utter flagrant disregard of the rights of others.”
“A. H. Robins, manufacturers of the Dalkon Shield, an intrauterine device.”
“You sip these incredible drinks through a straw,” Grandpa Sarkis says, “and the men dressed in white dinner jackets pass out cards for bingo. You can play bingo all afternoon in the sun if you want — or put your chips on the Wheel of Fortune.”
“The white man shall never kill me. If they try to, it is they who will die. They will fall down as if they had no bones. They will suffocate in a great landslide. They will be burned by an enormous wall of fire. They could put bullets through me, they could chop me up into little pieces, they could burn me until I glittered in the palm of their hands, and still I would live.”
“We used to walk through it like snow. We walked through drifts of it to do our job. Later some of the children got it, too — from playing with our work boots or sitting on our laps.”
From Detroit he sent me a postcard of the Ford plant. Only my address appeared on the back.
The ceremony of burying the dead is ended with tears, wailing, howling, and macerations. They tear the hair, gash the skin.
“Greetings from the Land of Lincoln,” the front of the postcard reads in bright red letters, the famed log cabin in one corner, a dark silhouette in the other. “Dow Chemical,” my brother scrawls. “Much evidence that Dow knew as early as the mid sixties that exposure to dioxin (Agent Orange) might cause serious illness, even death, but withheld this knowledge and continued to sell to the Army and public.”
I have read a hundred times the messages he has scribbled on the backs of these cards. I have looked into the eyes of the fisherman for help, stared at the lobsters he holds to the sky like children. I have read and reread my brother’s long litany of betrayal and pain: DLS, asbestos, Agent Orange; Lilly, Johns-Manville, Dow Chemical. They lie like scars on my tongue. Then silence — nothing more — a horrible stillness.
There in the distance another Fletcher rises out of murky water. He crawls onto the shore clutching a bayonet. He claws his way into the thick bush where he lies shivering. It could be anywhere: Argentina or Chile, Vietnam or Cambodia. He sits up. It’s Fletcher all right. He is hunched over and counting something. Sweat collects on his forehead. He wipes it away with a filthy sleeve. Wasps gather around his head. He tries to bat them away, but they keep coming and coming like helicopters in the endless night. Waves of nausea overcome him. His boots are golden with vomit.
My brother looks so different forced into the brutal postures of war. I barely recognize him at all. He is covered with sores. His legs seem longer, larger somehow. “Best for running, Vanessa,” he whispers through the wide leaves. He tears a handful of leaves from a tree to wipe his mouth and brow. Patches of brow n and gray and green have grown on his arms. His skin looks tough like a lizard’s or snake’s. A second skull has grown around his head, hard as a helmet. His insect eyes bulge red.
He has become the kind of person who wants only to survive, only to stay alive. “Nothing else matters, Vanessa,” he shouts through the thick foliage. A monkey screams. More planes come. A tarantula is stunned motionless on a banana leaf. The air is filled with snakes. He begins to shake uncontrollably. He does not know where he is.
Trees burst into flames as he watches them. He hears drums, he thinks, in the distance, but perhaps it is his own heart he hears. He closes his eyes. His lids are thick. He covers his face. “You could not do it without the drugs,” he says. “No one could.” He thinks someone injects the high white clouds with poison. He tries breathing into his hands to keep out the fumes. The clouds mushroom and explode, red and black, igniting the sky. “The sky is burning, Vanessa,” he says. He laughs hysterically. His shoulders move up and down frantically as if he were shrugging over and over in fast motion. He is drenched in sweat. He turns suddenly. The brow n rice in barrels looks dangerous to him. The sandal of a child makes him weep with fear. Urine flows down his pants leg. “Vanessa,” he says, “help me. The sky is burning.”