Bad Dirt: Wyoming Stories 2. Annie Proulx
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Nothing like this has ever been done before. Nothing to equal it will perhaps, ever be done again.
Linny sighed and carefully laid the fragile paper in a folder. She picked up one of the film canisters. “War Bonnet #II,” read the faded label. Roman numerals again. “Rebellion/Reel No. I” was another. There were five Rebellion canisters. But what rebellion? She had only a hazy idea of the Indian wars. Perhaps she would go to the library. She knew better than to open any film canisters.
That evening, watching the news, when Georgina left the room to go to the bathroom, she said to Charlie Parrott, “I found somethin today might be interestin.” “What?”
“Cans a film. Letters from Buffalo Bill. Seems like he was makin a movie of the Indians and the U.S. Army fights. I guess maybe that’s the film in those cans.”
“Yeah? First I heard about a movie like that.”
“It was way back in 1913 he made it. I got a check it out at the library, see what I can find out. Might be valuable.”
“The letters probly worth somethin. What’d they say?” He turned the television sound off.
“Just legal stuff, stuff about debts and payments and some letters about the film, about them being in some place called Wounded Knee. Weird name. In South Dakota?”
Charlie Parrott snapped his head up. “Wounded Knee! My God, did that old fraud have anything to do with Wounded Knee?”
“I guess so. What about it? What was Wounded Knee, anyway?”
But Georgina came into the room and made a face at their conversation, turned the television sound back on.
“I’ll tell you tomorrow. It’s a long story.”
“What’s a long story?” asked Georgina.
“Indian history,” said Charlie Parrott. “A long, sad story that makes you want a puke.”
Charlie spent the next day sorting out the neighboring ranch’s cattle that had found a weak section of fence and breached it. When he got back at dusk, dirty and tired, Linny and Georgina had eaten and cleared the table. There was a place for him set in the kitchen.
“Georgina said keep your supper warm,” said Doreen. “But it ain’t the kind a supper that keeps good. Kind a dried out,” she said, taking a plate of steak and baked potato out of the oven. The potato had the feel of a deflated football, though smaller. The steak had curled up on the edges and showed the reticulate grain of an osprey’s leg.
Doreen talked on. “And Georgina went up to some polo meetin in Sheridan. Said she might stay over. Said she would call you around ten.” He nodded. He preferred she stay over than drive at night, when all the raging drunks were on the highway looking for something to hit.
“Anyway,” said Doreen, “I’m out a here.”
Linny came in, dressed in her bar clothes—short skirt, pee-wee boots, and a tiny halter.
“I was goin a tell you about Indian stuff?” he said. It was the ideal time with Georgina out and the long evening stretching ahead.
“Don’t bother,” she said. “I went to the library and got a stack a books.” She gestured at the counter where several books lay. He could see the library call numbers. “I’m just goin downtown for a hour. I’ll start readin when I get back.”
After she left he looked at the books. The top one was Dee Brown’s Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. “She won’t read that one easy,” he said to himself remembering his own heart-bruising time with the book years earlier.
He was surprised to hear the old Land Rover roar in a little after ten, while he was still on the telephone with Georgina telling her about chasing down Chummy King’s cows.
“I hear Linny’s truck,” he said. “Better hang up. See you tomorrow noon then? O.K., love you, honey. Drive careful.”
“You want a talk?” he called to Linny, hearing the screen door squeak.
“Yeah, but first I want a read the books and get the background. Then I will know what questions to ask. O.K.?”
“Well,” he said. “That makes sense.” But he felt a twist of disappointment. His thoughts on the subject had surfaced, his mind like a tongue probing an infected tooth. He wanted to get into the nickel misery of those crushed ancestors, measure his schizoid self against the submerged past.
“You let me know when.”
“You bet,” she said and pounded up the stairs with the books.
The next morning in the kitchen her face was swollen, both eyes red slits. “Up all night?”
“Just about.” Her voice was rough and cold. She poured a cup of coffee. He asked no more questions.
It was almost a week before they talked. The days had gone by, Linny down in the old building sorting papers and making lists, but at night, instead of heading for the bars she stayed in her room. Georgina said it was a sign the girl was settling down. Charlie thought she was reading the bitter books. On Thursday, Georgina said she had to go up to Sheridan again. There was an important match, some South American polo players of note, a gala dinner.
“I’ll stay over with Nora Bible,” she said, naming a ranch wife who ran the refreshment tables at all the polo events. “Not so many people bring their picnic baskets like in the old days when it was tailgate city. Don’t one a you want a come up for the match? Charlie, you haven’t seen one for a year, anyway. Be nice. And, Linny, I bet you never even been to a polo match.”
“Oh, I got too many things goin on right here,” said Charlie. “Take some snaps for me and tell me about it.”
Linny shook her head at Georgina and went upstairs.
The cans of film stood in a row on the dresser. She knew a great deal now about what they might show—an Indian dragging a soldier from a horse, some fake hand-to-hand fighting, Indians poking two white captive women with a stick, the Gatling and Hotchkiss guns spraying, and everywhere Buffalo Bill peering into the distance, riding at the front, his white showman’s goatee wriggling in the wind like an albino eel. She did not open any of the cans. She knew also that nothing in the film could possibly equal the tragic power of the single still photograph of Big Foot wrapped in rags lying dead on his back in the snow, his long frozen arms half-raised as if to ward off the bullets, his open ice-glazed eyes fixed forever on anyone who cared to look at him.
Charlie and Linny rinsed the dishes and arranged them in the dishwasher. Charlie never went near the machine without thinking of his mother sloshing chipped plates in an old grey enamel dishpan.
“Dad, can we talk about the Indian stuff now?” She rubbed furiously at the clean counter with a sponge. “The Indian stuff,” he said.
“Yeah. We’re Sioux, you always told me, but I don’t know what kind a Sioux, and you always said you were born on a rez, but what rez?”
“Oglala Sioux, and I was born at Wazi Ahanhan, Pine Ridge, next a Rosebud. That’s where they pushed old Red Cloud’s people after they got them out a the Powder River country. That Powder River country was the last a the old, old ways. Red Cloud ought a see it now, all full a methane gas pads and roads.”
“So Red Cloud could be a relation? I mean, we could be connected to him, right?”
“We might be.”
“Then what are we doin here with this—with Georgina?” She waved at the dishwasher, the poppies in a blue vase on the kitchen table. “Why aren’t we with our own people? Don’t I got cousins and grandparents and all?”
He’d known these questions would be coming, but the answers were still floating around in the blue sky.
“Linny, I’m sorry, baby girl—I been de-Indianized. I been out workin in the wide world since I was fourteen. The rez didn’t have