Black Hills

Chapter 17 Jackson Park, Illinois

PAHA SAPA RISES HIGH INTO THE AIR.

This does not alarm him. He’s flown before. And this time he is being borne aloft in a device made up of more than 100,000 precisely machined parts, mostly of steel, including the largest axle in the world, which weighs—according to the Fair brochures—142,031 pounds. Paha Sapa believed it when he read that no single man-made item of that weight had ever been lifted before. And certainly not to its middle-of-the-wheel height of 148 feet.

The price of a ticket for a ride on Mr. Ferris’s Wheel was the same as the price for entry to the Fair—fifty cents. But this time, forewarned, Paha Sapa had his dollar out and ready to pay for his and Miss de Plachette’s tickets.

The Wheel, which opened for business fifty-one days later than promised just two weeks ago on June 21, is by far the most popular attraction at the Fair, but by some stroke of clever timing or pure luck, there are only five other people—an older couple who look like grandparents to the three nicely dressed children—in this car that can hold sixty people and which has swiveling seats for thirty-eight. And there is also one mustached, gaudily uniformed guard, sometimes called a conductor, who stands at either the south or north bolted door, both locks and guard there presumably to prevent suicide attempts, but who’s also there to soothe those who discover their fear of heights during the ride.

Paha Sapa has heard through some of the Wild West Show’s cowboys that these conductor-guards, each in his absurd uniform that looks to be part lion tamer’s and part orchestra conductor’s, have had to take instruction in boxing and wrestling and each also carries a three-pound bag of shot—a sap—in his pocket under that heavy tunic. Just in case fear drives a passenger insane.

Miss de Plachette—Rain—obviously has no such fear. Rather than sit on one of the thirty-eight round, tufted velvet chairs, the lady rushes to the almost floor-to-ceiling windows (each with its own wire mesh, also to prevent suicides, Paha Sapa assumes) and exclaims as the car begins to move slowly. Paha Sapa thinks he has seen the huge Wheel revolving in both directions, and today it is revolving east to west over the top. They are facing east as the car rises—the loading platforms are so cleverly arranged below that six cars can be emptied and loaded at the same time—and as they rise, Miss de Plachette watches the Midway Plaisance recede in size and the view of the White City beyond appear.

Her voice is sincerely and joyously breathless.

—Incredible!

Thinking—This from the lady who has been up in the far taller Eiffel Tower—Paha Sapa joins her at the window wall. He holds on to the gleaming brass railing, even though there is very little swaying. As if by instinct, the two of them have moved to the farthest corner on the eastern side of the mostly empty car, away from the quiet family and the conductor. The car, with its opposing north and south doors, each locked (the guard-conductor carries the key in his pocket), seems quite homey. There is a floral-pattern carpet and, in a corner, a huge brass cuspidor that is emptied regularly. The wire mesh in the large windows and door glass is so fine that it does not obstruct the view. Paha Sapa glances up and sees the glass-shaded rows of electric lights running around the perimeter of the ceiling and over both doors. He realizes that the lights are probably very dim so that they do not ruin the view at night and thinks that the view of the White City at night—with all of its searchlights and spotlights and thousands of electric bulbs illuminating the larger buildings and domes—must be as spectacular as Miss de Plachette had described. The lighted Ferris Wheel cars must also be a sight at night, seen from the Midway, with the bright carbide lights illuminating them from below and each carriage lighted from within by its own internal electric lights.

They continue rising.

One glance back over his shoulder toward the east through the opposite wall of windows makes him blink with vertigo. Looking into the spidery maze of spokes and steel girders at thirty-five other moving cars like their own, at the silhouettes of many hundreds of other people in those thirty-five cars, and at the giant turning axle with the truly gigantic support towers on either side makes Paha Sapa dizzy. The height is somehow magnified by looking through the giant wheel toward the more western exhibits along the Midway Plaisance so far below. And everything is turning, revolving, falling, and spinning at once. It is like being an insect caught inside a huge, revolving bicycle wheel.

Paha Sapa closes his eyes.

Miss de Plachette shakes his arm and laughs in delight.

The first of the two revolutions they are to receive for the price of their tickets is the slower one—their twenty-four-foot-long by thirteen-foot-wide car will stop at six different altitudes and positions on the wheel as more cars are loaded below. Their first loading stop is a quarter of the way up and when the car stops, it rocks ever so slightly back and forth on the horizontal bar that holds it, bearings and brakes below making the softest of sounds. Both Miss de Plachette and the grandmother at the opposite end of the car are also make squeaking noises—the older lady in terror, and Miss de Plachette, he is certain, in pure delight.

The conductor, who Paha Sapa heard introduce himself to the grandparent couple as being named Kovacs, clears his throat and gives a superior chuckle.

—Nothin’ to worry about, ladies and gents… and little ones. Nothing at all. These here steel posts we’re hangin’ from—trunnions, they’re called—could hold ten times the weight of this fine car, even if we were fully loaded.

The seven passengers watch silently as the car begins rising again and the eastern end of the Midway Plaisance and the domes of the White City appear. Beyond the domes, sunlight makes the band of Lake Michigan glow bright and visible above the trees and giant buildings. They see a cluster of ships in the harbor—mere masted points of horizontal blackness from their exhalted position—and a ferry bringing more Fair visitors to the end of the long arrival pier.

Closer in, the Midway Plaisance stretches east beneath them, filled with happy dark specks. Below and to their left are the red roofs and forested grounds of the German Village. To the right of the Midway rise the domes and minarets and odd spires of the Turkish Village. Beyond the Turkish Village on the right is the large, round, strange structure that holds the simulated Burmese Alps exhibit, and opposite that across the Midway is the Javanese Village known as the Dutch Settlement, across the street from the main Dutch Settlement.

Beyond these structures are the Irish Village on the left, with its popular Donegan Castle and Blarney Stone; the round amphitheater on the right for the animal show; and—farther down, marking the east end of the Midway—the twin and opposing glasswork buildings, Murano on the right and Libby on the left.

As he thinks the word Libby, Paha Sapa feels a dull stirring in his skull and wonders if General Custer’s ghost is watching through his, Paha Sapa’s, eyes, listening through his ears. Damn him if he is.

It is while they are stopped next, waiting for another six cars below them to load quickly, that the little boy, no older than five, breaks away from his grandparents and comes running around the car, waving his arms as if he is flying. The boy’s fingers brush Paha Sapa’s bare wrist above his gloves as the child flaps and flutters by.

He realizes then what an attuned state of sensitivity he is in, for at once there is an into-the-person vision flash of images and thoughts from the child. Paha Sapa has to clutch the railing at the window and close his eyes as vertigo assails him again.

The elderly couple at the other end of the car, even now calling the wayward child back to them, are named Doyle and Rheva. They are from Indiana. Paha Sapa noticed that the man has a droopy left eye and a strangely downturned mouth, and now—through the little boy’s unfocused memory—he learns of the stroke the year before that caused it. Doyle has a long, thin nose, and Rheva, a slightly plump former beauty with full, flushed cheeks, kind eyes, and shorter-than-the-fashion wavy silver hair, has always been embarrassed by her behind. Everyone in the family—even the little boy—calls it the “DeHaven Butt.” It is Rheva’s greatest secret, known only by the entire family, that she has never had to purchase or wear a bustle in order to be seen as wearing a bustle. The little boy does not know what a “bustle” is.

The boy’s name is Alex and he has been so inspired by the exhibits at the Fair—especially Mr. Tesla’s and Mr. Edison’s—that his new goal in life is to grow up to invent a mechanical adding machine that can think.

Paha Sapa shakes his head to rid himself of these unwanted, swirling images and words and names and child-memories. His sensitivity to inward-seeing visions right now is as heightened as he’d feared, all because of his proximity to Miss de Plachette… and all the more reason to avoid any possible skin-to-skin contact with Miss de Plachette. He does not want to see into her mind or memories. It is very important to him that he does not do that. Not now. Not yet. With luck, never.

He realizes that she is whispering to him.

—Paha Sapa, are you all right?

He opens his eyes and sees that her gloved hand hovers too near his wrist.

He moves his arm away and smiles.

—Perfect. Wonderful. I just discovered that I’m afraid of heights, is all.

The guard-conductor with the waxed mustache, Kovacs, looks over at Paha Sapa suspiciously, as if this nonwhite passenger with the long braided hair may go berserk and begin battering the walls, shattering glass, and bending the iron of the door in his wild effort to escape, even though they are a hundred feet up, just as another height-crazed passenger was reported to have done just a week earlier. In that incident, so the newspaper accounts went, a woman finally stopped the crazy man by removing her skirt and throwing it over the man’s head, immediately causing him to become docile.

Paha Sapa knows that such a blinding hood works with panicked horses. Why not with crazed Ferris Wheel passengers? More effective than the sap filled with shot purportedly in the guard’s pocket.

Brakes release, the car wobbles again, and they resume their rise.

It is at the apogee of their circle—apogee being a word Paha Sapa learned when the three Jesuits at the tiny tent school on the mountain above Deadwood attempted for a year to drive Greek into his unwilling head—that Miss de Plachette does something… extraordinary. And changes his life forever.

The car stops suddenly at the top of the Wheel and begins rocking more noticeably than at their previous two stops. Rheva and her granddaughter let out moans. Little Alex shouts with joy at what he probably thinks to be their imminent destruction. Long-nosed Granddad Doyle pats the boy on the head.

The conductor’s mouth slacks open. He cries out—

—Miss!

The shout is due to the fact that Miss de Plachette has suddenly moved to the center of the car, gathered her long skirt, jumped up onto one of the low, round plush velvet chairs, and is now standing there, balancing easily, very straight, arms full out from her sides, palms down, head back, eyes closed.

—Miss, please… you mustn’t, ma’am!

The guard, Kovacs, sounds sincerely alarmed, but when he moves toward Rain, Paha Sapa instinctively steps forward to come between them. No man is going to touch Miss de Plachette while he is around.

Smiling broadly, head still far back as if tasting ocean air, Rain seems ready to leap forward and begin soaring out—magically, because of the glaze and wire mesh—through the windows into the blue Illinois sky. Instead, she lowers both arms and offers her right hand to Paha Sapa.

—Your hand, please, dear sir?

Paha Sapa takes it—grateful for his gloves and hers so that there can be no contact of skin on skin that might trigger any into-vision—and she steps down lightly and gracefully. The guard, Kovacs, returns to his post at the bolted south door and literally saves face by stroking his waxed mustache.

Miss de Plachette speaks softly, no apology audible in her voice.

—I just wanted to be the highest person in Illinois—perhaps in the country—for a few seconds. I’ve got that out of my system now.

The Wheel begins to move again.

Paha Sapa realizes in that second that he is going to love this woman for the rest of his life.

Paha Sapa says nothing. The two move to the west-facing windows now—the grandparents Rheva and Doyle and little Alex and the other two children giving the madwoman room, but also smiling.

Below them to the west, Paha Sapa and Miss de Plachette look down on the pretend turrets and towers of the Old Vienna attraction. Music from the multiple-domed Algerian Theater filters up to them. Farther up the Midway, a string of ostriches and reindeer from the Laplander Village mingle in wonderful but obscure mixed metaphor. To the north, there is a dark smudge above the city of Chicago and Paha Sapa realizes it must be from all the industry and smokestacks and locomotives and other machines there. He wonders how dark the sky gets in the winter with the hive-city’s tens or hundreds of thousands of coal fires burning. Chicago, he has already seen, is the Black City to the Fair’s pretend White City.

Miss de Plachette smiles and points to the captive balloon farther west along the Midway Plaisance and to their right. The balloon is at least a hundred feet up on its thick tether, but it’s below them. (Three days later, on July 9, Paha Sapa will watch from the Wild West Show grounds as dark clouds gather, a funnel cloud appears, and then cyclone winds of more than 100 miles per hour lash the Midway, the Ferris Wheel, and all the buildings and exhibits. Huge glass panes will blow off the Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building and a forty-foot segment of roof will be torn off the dome of the Machinery Building. The sudden winds will catch the empty captive balloon before it can be hauled down and the beautiful mushroom of colored silk he and Miss de Plachette are looking at now will be ripped into nine thousand yards of silk rags, many scattered more than a half mile away. Mr. Ferris’s Wheel, on the other hand, filled almost to capacity when the storm strikes it, will weather the wind’s impact without a problem.)

They swoop down and start up again. There is no more loading or pausing. The second revolution is more wonderful than the first.

Paha Sapa knows that the boilers that provide the steam for Ferris’s Wheel, for aesthetic reasons, are more than seven hundred feet away across Lexington Avenue, but he imagines as the great wheel accelerates that he can hear the boilers roar louder. He knows that he can hear the steam pressure in the giant cylinders of the thousand-horsepower engine at the base of the wheel rise in volume. One glance at Rain de Plachette’s flushed features and bright eyes tells him that she hears this as well.

The rest is silence. Not even Doyle and Rheva and Alex and the other two children in the opposite corner make a noise. The conductor has turned his back to them and is at the door looking out his own window. The only hint of sound now is the whoosh of the large cabin through the air and the occasional creak of the cage shifting on the overhead trunnions or a low, almost inaudible grind from the gigantic central axle more than seventy feet from them.

The Wheel rises higher, higher, the White City in the east distance coming back into full view as they rise smoothly and silently. Paha Sapa looks out past the wooded island and lagoons and treetops, out to Lake Michigan, and sees the high afternoon sun break through the clouds and shine a single shaft of light down on the waters of the lake. The shaft of sunlight is so bright that everything else seems to fade and darken—the Midway, the White City, the trees and lagoons, the people, the harbor and lake itself—until there is only that powerful searchlight of pure sunshine pouring down on a limited circle of Lake Michigan wave tops far to the east.

Why is that image so hauntingly familiar? Why does it move him so?

Paha Sapa realizes and remembers just as the car heads up over the curve of the high arc, leaving the White City, Lake Michigan, and the prophetic shaft of light behind; then the car completes its voyage over the top and shows them all the western end of the Midway Plaisance and the distant prairies again. Even this view is striking, with the many shades of green and brown receding to the distant horizon—toward the prairies he knows so well a thousand miles west—but also with a web of train tracks and moving locomotives moving in toward Chicago, streaking the sky with their plumes of dark smoke.

But it is not the view that grips Paha Sapa and—he is sure, with no vision tricks necessary—Rain de Plachette on this second revolution and downward rush. It is the pure thrill and pleasure of speed and movement through space. Paha Sapa is surprised at the thought that strikes him next—Only the wasichu can do such things. The Fat Takers are wakan in their own way, and it is a powerful magic.

Then it is over and they are stopped and the guard has taken his brass key and unlocked the north door and they are all disembarking the cabin as mobs wait to board on the opposite, south side. The platforms and steps under girders and metal arches around and beneath the huge Wheel are an environment out of Jules Verne. (The friars at the Deadwood tent school, for some inexplicable reason, had English-language versions—he was sure the friars had translated them themselves—of Voyage to the Center of the Earth, From the Earth to the Moon, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, and the newest, Around the World in Eighty Days hidden away in a trunk in their own tent, and Paha Sapa crept in and stole—borrowed—and read all of them within weeks of his learning to read.)

Miss de Plachette’s expression is one of pure joy. She seizes his forearm in a death grip that shuts off all circulation.

—Oh, Paha Sapa… I would give anything to experience that again.

Paha Sapa removes from his pocket another dollar, a week’s wages for him, gently takes her by the elbow, and leads her around through the Jules Verne world-of-the-future girder-and-metal-arch maze to the back of the growing line waiting to board on the south side. He surreptitiously checked his watch while they were still riding. They have time.

THEIR FIRST TWO TIMES AROUND, they were almost alone and hardly spoke at all. Their second two times around, there are at least twenty-five people in the car, but Paha Sapa and Rain de Plachette speak the entire time—softly, privately, secure in their own world somewhere between the Jackson Park–Midway Plaisance earth and the blue-sky-and-scattered-clouds Illinois heavens.

—You’ll pardon me for asking a personal question, Miss de Plachette, but isn’t Rain an unusual name for wa… for white people? Beautiful… very beautiful… but I haven’t heard it before.

Paha Sapa’s heart is pounding wildly. He is terrified of giving offense, of making her pull away from him—literally, as she rests her right shoulder against his left, but also in terms of offending her in any way. But he is aching from curiosity.

She smiles at him as they rise on the eastern part of their first slow revolution.

—It is an unusual name, Mr…. Paha Sapa. But my mother also thought it was beautiful. The most beautiful word she’d learned in the English language, is what she told my father. When I was born and she wanted to name me Rain, Father didn’t protest. He loved her very much. Did you know that my mother was Lakota?

Paha Sapa feels a constriction in his chest and throat.

—Yes. I mean, no… that is, I heard a rumor….

She smiles again. The other passengers are making nervous noises as the large car sways and creaks on its trunnion when it stops, but they are veterans now.

—Well, the rumor’s true. Her name was White Shawl and I’m told that she was very pale for a Sioux… a Lakota. She was Father’s choir director at the agency mission and they… Did I tell you that Father was doing mission work in Nebraska when they met?

—No. Please go on. Tell me more.

Miss de Plachette looks out as the car stops and rocks again—there are afternoon cloud shadows moving over the trees and lagoon and walkways and giant buildings of the White City now—and he sees the slight blush beneath the freckles that cross the bridge of her nose and become fewer in number on her cheeks.

—That’s how Father met Mr. Cody, of course. Mr. Cody’s new ranch was right next to the agency—reservation—where father spent five years as a missionary. There were several groups… tribes… there. Lakota and Shoshoni and a few Cheyenne and Creek and one family of Cherokee. It was a small agency, but the church had been there a long time, and the people came from miles around. Not just Indians…

She blushes again and Paha Sapa smiles, encouraging her to go on. They are at the last stop before the high point of the wheel’s circle. The crowded car is alive with oohs and ahhs and gasps and exclamations.

—I mean, Mr. Cody and his ranch hands—some of them were Indians as well—of course you know that—would come over and the congregation was often more than a hundred people. Very large for that wild part of Nebraska. Mother was choir director, as I said, and she also taught all the children at the mission school there, and… well… Father and Mother fell in love and were married there…. Mr. Cody was Father’s best man at the wedding, and the Reverend Kyle came all the way from Omaha to perform the ceremony. And I was born a year later and, so my Father tells me, it was raining the week I was born that June… the first real rain in more than seven months of drought… and Mother named me Rain, and then she died when I was four and we moved East a few months later and I’ve never been back.

Paha Sapa tries to imagine this—a wasichu wičasa wakan marrying a Lakota woman in 1870 or so. It is very hard to imagine. Perhaps, he thinks, the Natural Free Human Beings are—or were—very different in Nebraska. Then he thinks—What are Natural Free Human Beings doing in Nebraska? Are they lost?

He says aloud—

—And after you left, you lived in Boston and Washington and France?

—Yes, and elsewhere… and, Paha Sapa, I’m ashamed to say that I know much more of the French language than I do my mother’s tongue. When Father and I have visited Mr. Cody’s Wild West Show, I’ve tried to use my few words and phrases to talk to the Lakota there, but the men just smile at me. I’m sure I have everything wrong.

—I won’t just smile at you, Miss de Plachette. Try out one of your phrases.

—Well, as I say, I only barely remember them, since Mother spoke English almost exclusively in the house when I was tiny, before she… before we moved… most probably at Father’s request. But I do remember some of the Lakota men talking to her at church and asking her how she was…. I’m pretty sure I remember “Hello” and “How are you?”

—Say it. I will be your audience and noncritical coach. We still have ten minutes or more of this ride left. But let’s don’t forget to enjoy the scenery.

—Oh, I assure you, Paha Sapa, I haven’t quit watching for a second. Even when I look your way, I am also looking beyond you to the south, or looking out at the prairie to the west. All right, “Hello, how are you?” in the Lakota I remember from the agency when I was four years old…Hau, Tanyan yaun he?

Paha Sapa just smiles. He can’t help it.

Miss de Plachette curls her hand into a tiny fist and hits him hard on the shoulder. Paha Sapa’s eyes widen—he’s not been struck by a woman since he was a young boy—and then he laughs, showing his strong white teeth. Luckily—his world would end then if it were not so—she is also smiling and laughing.

—What was wrong with that, Paha Sapa? I have even heard your Wild West Sioux say that to one another!

—Nothing’s wrong with it, Miss de Plachette… if you’re a man.

—Oh, dear.

—I’m afraid so. Did your mother not tell you that the Natural Free Human Beings have separate vocabularies and language rules for men and women?

—No, she didn’t. I mean, I don’t remember if she… I don’t remember so much about Mother. Too much. I don’t even know who the Natural Free Human Beings are… the Sioux?

—Yes.

The young woman seems suddenly, strangely near tears, and Paha Sapa, without thinking, tenderly touches her shoulder.

—The Lakota’s name for ourselves is Ikče Wičaśa—which more or less translates to Natural Free Human Beings, although it means more than that.

She smiles again. They have passed through the loading area and are rising in the east on the beginning of their second, faster, more exciting revolution. Other passengers squeal. Paha Sapa and Miss de Plachette grin at each other again, proud of their seasoned-Ferris-Wheel-traveler status.

—I certainly understand about feminine, masculine, and neuter nouns and verbs and such from my French and little bit of German and Italian, although the idea of an entire separate language for men and women is almost shocking to me.

Paha Sapa smiles again.

—Oh, we tend to understand each other, the Ikče Wičaśa men and women, when we talk to one another. As well as the two sexes do in any language or culture is my uneducated guess.

—So how would I, a woman, say “Hello, Paha Sapa. How are you today?”

Paha Sapa actually clears his throat. He’s very nervous and almost sorry this particular discussion began. He knows almost nothing about courting, but does know that one does not impress or ingratiate oneself with a beautiful woman by laughing at her or giving her primitive language lessons. “Courting? Is that what you think you’re doing here, you moron?” asks a voice in his head that sounds strongly and suspiciously like that of George Armstrong Custer.

He says softly—

—Well, first of all, the Hau greeting is used only by men. And the he at the end of the sentence…

He desperately thinks back to Father John Bertrand, the fattest and smartest and gentlest friar at the Deadwood tent school, and the Latin and Greek he tried to drive into 12-year-old Paha Sapa’s thick skull… but all he can call back is the heat inside the tent in the summer, the strong smell of sun-warmed canvas and the straw that Father Pierre Marie used to lay down on the floor, as if the five boys there, two Mexican, one Negro, one white, and Paha Sapa, were barn animals rather than… no, wait…

—the interrogative form, as it were, is also used by women and men informally, but if it were an official situation, talking in council, for instance, I’d… that is a male Lakota… would have to end the question with hwo… or hunwo… or so. Oh, yes, Han means “hello” for men but “yes” for women.

Miss de Plachette sighs, but not, it seems, out of impatience, only at the first glimpse of the complexity of her mother’s people’s language. She is still smiling.

—So you’re saying that if a Lakota man says hello to me and I reply in kind, with the same word, I’m simply saying yes to anything the man has suggested?

—Well… ah… um… that is…

She rescues him before his blush darkens his already dark skin too much further.

—So how would I say “Hello, Paha Sapa”?

—Paha Sapa, Han.

—And how would a woman say “Hello, it is really good to see you” to a man? To you?

—Paha Sapa, han! Lila tanyan wacin yanke. Only you couldn’t… wouldn’t… come up and say that.

Her smile seems almost teasing.

—Really? Why not?

Paha Sapa clears his throat again. His only salvation is that, true to her promise, she has not turned to look fully at him. She keeps watching the lake and the White City as the car rises quickly—too quickly—toward the top of its arc this second and final (forever for them together! he is sure) and too-fast-for-his-taste revolution of Mr. Ferris’s amazing Wheel.

—Because, Miss de Plachette, in the Ikče Wičaśa culture, women do not initiate conversations with men. They are never the first to say hello.

—Not even with their husbands?

She is definitely teasing him. He opens his mouth to answer, realizes that his mouth stays open during the entire time it takes them to pass over the top of the arc of the wheel, and then manages…

—I’ve never been married.

Now she laughs out loud. The sound is so soft that it is almost lost in the loud exclamations and excited talk in the crowded car, but Paha Sapa will remember the pure tones of that easy, friendly laugh for the rest of his life.

She touches his forearm again.

—All right, I surrender. I won’t learn the Ikče Wičaśa’s women’s language during two turns of Mr. Ferris’s Wheel. But is there a special term that Lakota women use to say hello to someone they really like… a special friend?

Now Paha Sapa’s throat feels so constricted he can barely get the syllables out.

She leans closer to him, her eyes finally turning from the scenery outside, and says very softly—

—Maske, Paha Sapa, lila tanyan wacin yanke…

It is still wrong because… it does not matter. The power of her intimate greeting and the “It’s really good to see you”… she had stressed every syllable exactly as Paha Sapa spoke it earlier, except for that extra emphasis on the really… to hear her say this to him in his language… He will never forget it. He wonders then if it will be the last thing he chooses to think of before his death.

—We’re almost down, Paha Sapa. I’m a greedy woman. I have three more requests for you before we go meet Father at the Grand Basin at six…

She consults the tiny watch on the ribbon pinned to her vest.

—… still ninety minutes away! Three greedy requests, Paha Sapa.

—I will do anything you ask, Miss de Plachette.

—First then, at least until we meet Father and the other gentlemen, please call me Rain, as you promised and did for a short while.

—Yes… Rain.

—Second—and this is just a silly woman’s request, since you seem so… hot… with them on. Please remove those gloves after we get off the Ferris Wheel.

—Yes, Miss… Yes. Yes, of course.

—And finally, tell me what the Lakota word is for my name. For Rain.

—“Rain” is… magazu.

She tries it out. Says it twice softly as the view of the prairie is reduced, is eliminated, and the Midway Plaisance and loading platforms come up under them. Then she says very softly—

—Mother was right. It is prettier in English.

—Yes, Rain.

Paha Sapa has never more agreed with any statement. The car is slowing to a stop. The other passengers are growing louder in their laughter, exclamations, and praise of the ride.

—This qualifies as an extra request, Paha Sapa, but how do you say in Lakota—“I will see you later”?

Without thinking of gender language or anything else, Paha Sapa looks into her hazel eyes and says—

—Tokša ake wancinyankin ktelo.

—I asked for that phrase, Paha Sapa, because Father has decided that he must return to the missionary fields, and in September we will be moving to the Pine Ridge Agency in Dakota Territory…. I believe that is not too far from where Mr. Cody mentioned that you live.

All Paha Sapa has to say is No, not too far, but this time he can not get the syllables out.

The great wheel stops its turning. The car they’re in rocks, creaks, settles. The conductor—with a tin badge saying something other than Kovacs; Paha Sapa has temporarily forgotten how to read English letters or words—opens the door for them all to depart before the next sixty people squeeze aboard.

THE NEXT NINETY MINUTES are delightful and infinitely rich for Paha Sapa, but they fly by like so many seconds.

On their way back to where they are to meet Rain’s father on the steps outside the domed Administration Building on the west side of the Grand Basin, they take time to poke their heads into the Fine Arts Building, with its many art galleries north of the North Pond, then take an almost running tour of the gigantic Women’s Building—Rain especially wants to stand in front of a huge mural by a woman artist named Mary Cassatt, the allegories of which would have been lost on Paha Sapa if she had not been there to translate them—and then they take their time strolling on the Wooded Island as the July afternoon slowly melts into a golden July evening. Paha Sapa is only sorry that they will not be together when all of the thousands of electric lights come on. What, he wonders again, would a turn in the Ferris Wheel be like at night?

It is on the Wooded Island, where they are sitting for a moment on a comfortable bench in the shade near the Rose Garden and having tall, iced drinks purchased from one of the ubiquitous canvas-covered refreshment stands, that Paha Sapa fulfills his promise by peeling off the too-tight, sweat-lined dress gloves and tossing them into the nearby wire wastebasket.

Rain laughs, sets her drink glass on the bench, and applauds.

Paha Sapa feels no anxiety about an accidental touch turning into an invasive contact-vision with her now. She has kept her own white gloves on and her long-sleeved blouse leaves almost no skin of her wrist exposed. Besides, it is only a few minutes until they are to meet her father.

Then she surprises him again.

—Paha Sapa, Mr. Cody has told Father that you were a friend of Sitting Bull’s.

—Yes. Not a close friend, he was much older than I, but I knew him.

—And you were with him… with Sitting Bull… when he was killed?

Paha Sapa takes a breath. He does not want to talk about this. He feels it will only put distance between the young woman, her father, and himself. But he truly is at the point where he can and will deny her nothing.

—I did happen to be there when he died, Miss… Rain. It was an accident that I was present. None of us had any idea that he might be murder… killed.

—Please tell me. Please tell me everything about it.

Paha Sapa sips his iced drink to gain a few seconds to organize his thoughts. What should he tell this young Wasicun girl? He decides… everything.

—It was three years ago, you know. Winter. December. I’d gone up to the Standing Rock settlement… and agency, really, a reservation… where Sitting Bull was living, because my tunkašila… not my real grandfather, but an honorary name for a man who helped raise me… was living there. He was there because he was an old friend of Sitting Bull’s. Wait, this won’t make any sense unless you’ve heard of a Paiute holy man named Wovoka and his teachings, especially about his advocating a sacred dance called the Ghost Dance. Have you heard these things?

—Fragments about them, Paha Sapa. Father and I were in France when all this happened, and I was only seventeen. I was more interested in grand balls in Paris than in the Ghost Dance that correspondents told Father about in letters. Please do explain.

Paha Sapa sighs. It is not a happy sound. He catches a glint of light in the trees and realizes that it is one of the thousands of little colored “fairy lamps”—tiny lights of wick and oil—that turn the Wooded Island into a magical place after dark. He very much wishes that he and Rain could wander the Wooded Island under such lights, with the White City buildings blazing in light and the Ferris Wheel steel turning, painted white by huge carbide searchlights, in the distance.

—The Paiute Wovoka’s sermons and religious teachings were as confused as your scattered fragments. I heard him talk near the Pine Ridge Agency before I went to visit my tunkašila and Sitting Bull. The Paiute holy man had taken large pieces of the Christian story—he said a messiah had come to earth to save his children from the control and clutches of the wasichus and…

—Please, what are wasichus, Paha Sapa?

He looks at her.

—Fat Takers. White people.

She blinks. Paha Sapa wonders if she feels as if he has slapped her.

—I thought we… that whites… were called Wasicun. I seem to remember Mother using that term.

Paha Sapa nods sadly.

—That term was also used, but later. Wasichus, the Fat Takers, are what we called you… whites. But Wovoka was preaching that if his followers, of any tribes, all tribes, danced this sacred Ghost Dance, there would come a sacred flood that would drown all the wasichus but leave the red man alone. And then, when the whites were all gone, the buffalo would return and our long-departed ancestors would come back and all of us, Natural Free Human Beings and all the other tribes, would live in abundance and peace forevermore.

Rain is frowning for the first time since they met at the Wild West Show.

—Your ancestors would come back? Like ghosts?

—No, I don’t think so. More like resurrected real people, like your Bible promises in Heaven. But not nagi, not spirit people, just people. We would see all our ancestors again, which is a promise that held tremendous power to us, Rain. And the return of the buffalo and the departure… deaths… of all the wasichus in our land, in the West. Well, you can see why this scared the whites, all the way up to President Harrison.

—Yes.

Her voice is flat, emotionless, for the first time this day. Paha Sapa has no idea what she is thinking. He rubs his jaw with his bare hand and goes on.

—Anyway, the summer of 1889, Ghost Dancers had appeared on all six agencies where the Lakota lived. They just… appeared. They wore shirts—special sacred shirts, Ghost Shirts, that Wovoka had promised them would stop any bullet. The whole idea was that the Ghost Dance itself, if all the Indians in all the tribes believed in it and danced it, would itself provoke the disaster that would take away all the wasichus and give the red men back their land, their old world, their universe, even their gods and protective spirits. And, if the wasichus tried to interfere, there were always the Ghost Shirts to protect the warriors….

—Did you believe in this prophecy and in the Ghost Dance, Paha Sapa?

—No.

Paha Sapa actually considers telling her the reason he could not believe in it—his own Sacred Vision from 1876, the wasichu Stone Giants rising out of the Black Hills and consuming all the buffalo and the Natural Free Human Beings themselves—but then he comes to his senses. He knows he will love this young woman for the rest of his life, whatever that life brings him, but why have her thinking that he, Paha Sapa, is as crazy as that crazy old Paiute Wovoka?

He sips the last of his cold drink and goes on.

—Anyway, the local Indian agents got very nervous—as well they should—and then the politicians got nervous and finally the army, the cavalry, got very nervous. The agents on all the reservations were ordered to use the tribal police to break up any gatherings of Ghost Dancers. The dance itself was outlawed on every reservation except little Standing Rock, way over on the Missouri River, where Sitting Bull and my tunkašila were living in little cabins rather than tipis.

—Did Sitting Bull believe in the Ghost Dance and the prophecy?

Rain’s voice is still flat, emotionless, save for curiosity.

—I don’t think so. I don’t think he’d made up his mind about it. At least he hadn’t said he had when I arrived there on the fourteenth of December, the day before they… the day before he died. But a lot of Lakota were sure that Sitting Bull was the messiah that Wovoka was preaching about. A lot of Lakota men were ready to follow Sitting Bull if the old chief had proclaimed himself that messiah. So, right at the end of November, Buffalo Bill showed up at Fort Yates on the Standing Rock Reservation with orders signed by Bear Coat… our name for General Miles… authorizing the arrest of Sitting Bull and…

—Mr. Cody arrest Sitting Bull? They were close friends! Mr. Cody talks about him with great respect and affection to this day! Father has always said that the two men were close.

Now there is emotion in her voice… true shock.

—Yes, well… perhaps that’s why the wasichus… the agents and the president… sent Mr. Cody with the arrest warrant. Mr. Cody had just returned from the successful tour in Europe with the Wild West Show. But anyway, he arrived too drunk to carry out the arrest and…

—Mr. Cody? Drunk? I thought Mr. Cody never touched spirits or liquor. I am sure that Father believes this to be the case! Good heavens!

Paha Sapa is not sure if he should—or can—continue. He starts to drink from his glass, sees that it is empty, and sets it down to consult his cheap watch. He is so disturbed that he thinks of checking the time in Lakota—Mazaškanškan tonackca hwo?—literally “Metal-goes-goes what?”

—It is twenty minutes to six, Miss de Plachette. We should cross the bridge to the west side of the Great Basin just in case your father is early and…

—Oh, no. Please finish your story, Paha Sapa. I insist… no, no, I have no right to insist… but I beseech you. Tell me how Sitting Bull died. Mr. Cody was too drunk to arrest him?

—Yes. And the wasichu military men there kept him drunk for several days. Those officers were terrified that arresting Sitting Bull, much less hurting him, would cause the very catastrophe that Wovoka was prophesying about. Anyway, after about three days, Mr. Cody sobered up and headed down the road to arrest Sitting Bull. He was traveling with another Wild West Show fellow, whom we called Pony Bob…

—Oh, my! Father and I know Pony Bob. He used to come to Father’s sermons.

—Anyway, Mr. Cody and Pony Bob ran into the agency’s interpreter, a fellow named Louis Primeau, who lied to them… told them that Sitting Bull wasn’t on the reservation. That he was on another road. By the time Mr. Cody and Pony Bob figured things out, President Harrison himself had… I’m sorry, what is the word for changing orders one has given? Reversing them?

—Rescinded?

—Yes, that’s it. The president himself had rescinded the arrest orders. Sitting Bull was safe. For the time being. That was around the first of December.

—But he died in December… did he not?

—He did. Bear Coat… General Miles… was so angry that his old adversary Sitting Bull was getting away that he sent the Seventh Cavalry in…

“Do not say anything to libel the Seventh Cavalry,” rasps a familiar voice deep in Paha Sapa’s skull.

Silence! The ghost is like a prisoner who gets out of his cell from time to time but can never escape the prison.

—Is something wrong, Paha Sapa?

—No, no, I was just gathering my thoughts. At any rate, I arrived at Standing Rock on the fourteenth of December. Sitting Bull and my tunkašila were leaving with me and a few other younger men the next day, going back to Pine Ridge—and then planning to go to Rosebud—to visit these Ghost Dance leaders and finally decide what he thought, what Sitting Bull thought, of the whole prophesy thing. But he was skeptical. I know he was skeptical.

—Didn’t you say that the Ghost Dancers were banned from all the other reservations?

Paha Sapa nods. She is obviously paying close attention.

—That’s true. The leaders Sitting Bull wanted me to meet with had taken about twelve hundred Oglala and Brulé to a place we call the Stronghold—a mesa way up in the Badlands part of the Pine Ridge Reservation surrounded by sheer cliffs on three sides. The Natural Free Human Beings have fled there in threatening times since before we had horses.

—And the cavalry pursued Sitting Bull there?

—No, he never got out of Standing Rock. The next day, the fifteenth, around six a.m…. we should have left earlier, but Sitting Bull was an old man and packed and acted slowly… the army sent more than forty local Indian policemen to his cabin on the Grand River. It was a very small cabin. My tunkašila and I were sleeping in a sort of lean-to out back where Sitting Bull kept his horse.

—So it was a tribal policeman… another Indian… who killed Sitting Bull?

Paha Sapa nods again.

—Sitting Bull at first said he wouldn’t go with the policemen. Then he agreed. They let him get dressed. It had been dark when all the policemen rode up, but it was getting light by the time the old holy man came outside. Others had gathered outside the cabin. Sitting Bull’s youngest son—still a teenager—started mocking his father for submitting to the wasichu. Sitting Bull changed his mind again and said he wouldn’t go after all. There was pushing and shoving. Someone in the crowd shot a policeman, and that policeman, before he died, shot Sitting Bull in the chest. Another policeman shot Sitting Bull in the back of the head. When it was all over, there were six tribal policemen dead as well as Sitting Bull and six of his friends and followers.

—Oh, Paha Sapa. Oh, dear.

—It’s time to go, Rain. We don’t want to be late meeting your father.

PAHA SAPA AND RAIN are five minutes early at the steps outside the Administration Building facing the Columbian Fountain set in the broad waters of the basin. Her father arrives twelve minutes late.

Miss de Plachette has said nothing since his story about Sitting Bull’s death. But she looks even paler than she did earlier. He assumes that she has been put off by his story—all the sordid details, from Buffalo Bill Cody showing up drunk to betray his old friend to the very real violence threatened by the Ghost Dance and its Prophet. He knows he will always love her for… if nothing else… that moment of standing higher than anyone else at the top of the Ferris Wheel, looking as if she were preparing to fly the way his spirit-self had flown more than once in his life. No, not just for that. Perhaps not for that at all. Just because he does love her and knows he always will.

But she is, after all, a twenty-year-old wasichu girl, wise, perhaps, to the ballrooms and churches and embassies of Washington and Paris and the world, but having a four-year-old child’s understanding of the West and of her mother and of Paha Sapa’s world, where great warriors like Crazy Horse and rare wičasa wakan like Sitting Bull are cut down by little men no longer Natural Free Human Beings, little men neither natural nor free, little men on wasichu payrolls who wear oversized, flea-infested, cast-off cavalry blue coats and who kill the best of their own kind on Wasicun command.

No, she will never understand Paha Sapa’s world. Even if she learned the language of the Lakota, he knows then, it would be as alien and adopted to her as French or German or Italian. More so, he realizes, since she has spent time as an adult or near-adult in those places, and remembers Nebraska and the West only in a distorted child’s blur of half memory.

And he will not see her again, he knows. He is certain of this. As certain as if he had allowed another small-vision-forward-touching to occur. Miss Rain de Plachette may or may not move to the Pine Ridge Reservation with her father this coming September, but she and Paha Sapa will not meet again. Not after the terror and distaste and—alienation, he thinks, is the word in English—the wacetug la and wo he saw in her hazel eyes as he spoke.

It doesn’t matter, he tells himself. Like so much else he’s seen and experienced and survived since the Vision of the Stone Heads emerging from the Paha Sapa and the wasichu Stone Giants rising to finish the job that is all but finished on the Plains and in the Hills, this is just one more thing that does not matter.

Reverend Henry de Plachette arrives in a huffing hurry, accompanied by three men wearing very formal tails and top hats. There are introductions, but Paha Sapa does not hear or remember the names. None of the three men extends a hand to shake—they clearly see that he is Indian, despite, or perhaps because of, his ill-fitting suit and overly polished shoes.

But the Reverend de Plachette is extending his hand there at the head of the stairway to the dark waters of the basin. He is saying something.

—… so much for escorting my daughter to our little rendezvous here, Mr. Slow Horse. It is much appreciated. I know that Rain enjoyed the diversion and I appreciate your gentlemanly offer to escort the young lady.

Paha Sapa grips the old man’s hand.

The world swirls, the Great Basin becomes a huge mural, a fresco, larger than the Mary Cassatt mural in the Women’s Building, as the water becomes a vertical wall and the images and sounds and feelings rush in.

And then everything is black.

HE REGAINS CONSCIOUSNESS lying on the topmost step. One of the well-dressed men has dipped a silk handkerchief into the basin and is applying the wet cloth to Paha Sapa’s forehead. His head is on Miss de Plachette’s lap, and she is cradling him in her arms. His head is on her lap.

Paha Sapa realizes that tears are flowing down his face. He has been weeping while he was unconscious. He shakes his head.

—Too much sun…

one man is saying.

—Perhaps the vertiginous effects of that infernal Wheel…

another man is saying.

—A problem with the heart, perhaps.

This last is the Reverend Henry de Plachette, who has taken over the mopping with the wet silk handkerchief. A small crowd has gathered, and uniformed Exposition personnel are running toward them from the direction of Machinery Hall.

Paha Sapa blinks away the tears and looks up at Rain’s face above him.

The images were few, fast, and terrible.

The prairie. Wind blowing. A winter morning.

The cemetery atop the small rise. There was one tree.

The grave with the plain pine coffin just lowered into it.

The Reverend de Plachette there, unable to conduct the funeral service. Surrendered to weeping.

And Paha Sapa there—seen through the old man’s rheumy, tear-filled eyes—Paha Sapa looking older but not older enough. Paha Sapa taking the baby from the Mexican woman, a servant of the minister’s. Paha Sapa holding the baby as he looks down at the first clods of dirt falling on the coffin of his young wife, Mrs. Rain de Plachette Slow Horse.

The image, from the Reverend’s point of view, the Reverend who is also ill and who would give all he has ever had or believed in to take his daughter’s place in that grave, the image of his Indian son-in-law, Billy Slow Horse, holding the distraught Reverend’s dead daughter’s only child—the baby who may have helped kill her in her weakened condition—the boy.

The boy named Robert.

Paha Sapa lies there on the top step of the staircase leading down to the Great Basin near the Columbian Fountain, too staggered to try to gain his feet again no matter how embarrassed he may feel at lying there with his head on this young lady’s lap with the crowd gathering around.

Her hand is stroking his forehead now. Her bare hand. She has taken her glove off. Her bare hand.

Paha Sapa receives no vision from the contact, but he receives a terrible twin certainty: she loves him already and will do everything she must do so that they will be together; there is no escaping their fate-entwined destiny.

For the first, last, and only time in his life, Paha Sapa, inexplicably, ineluctably, gasps out three words that cause everyone except Rain to freeze in place.

—Oh, dear Jesus.