The Holy Road

Chapter XXX

Though he had worn them for many days he could not get comfortable in the white man clothes. They bound him in places where his joints met, scratching, chafing, and itching his flesh.

But the irritation of strange clothes was nothing in comparison to the processes of thought. He had not expected the pressure to be so great. It suffocated and squeezed him in every waking moment. It danced in his sleep, and no matter how much rest he got, there was no sensation of renewal in waking. His mind was so exhausted by the rigors of navigating an alien world that it was sometimes impossible to close it down and go to sleep.

Locating her, he thought, would be the easiest part of his mission. But it was not, and the white man pretending to be a white man quickly realized that he could not inquire about her whereabouts without knowing her white name. Without that his search was entirely dependent on luck.

The dying men of the corn train had swung open long-closed doors to remembrance with their cries for mercy. Like Stands With A Fist, he was startled at how easy it was to find his mother tongue and use it. But he had also recalled how huge the white man's country was. She might have been sent to one of countless villages and towns far to the east. The rangers might have killed her and Stays Quiet. Maybe they had contracted a white man disease and died and been put into the ground. Thoughts like these intruded without warning and had to be beaten down with the same vigor a fire is beaten with a blanket. The one scenario he did not torture himself with was the possibility that Stands With A Fist might want to remain among the whites. That was inconceivable, and he never thought of it.

It had been difficult to cut his own hair, more so his son's. The boy had begun to cry something he was not known to do, as the knife sawed through handfuls of his hair. He had continues to sob off and on through the whole of one day, then became sullen, speaking only when spoken to. If his father called him by name, he would answer, “Snake In Hands is not here. He's lost."

Always Walking continually pestered him with the complaint, “Father, I don't feel good."

Trying to keep his children content was, however, the least of his problems. From the moment he began the charade, Dances With Wolves felt the penetrating stare of white eyes. Wherever he went he felt watched, as if he were moving about the white world unclothed.

In the early days of their search the trio had kept to themselves, traveling at night to avoid contact with the whites. They had stolen saddles for their horses from a farmer's barn, and the theft went unnoticed until they were well away.

But as they journeyed deeper into the country of the enemy, clothing the children became essential, and on the fourth day of their quest, after secreting them on a high hill, Dances With Wolves swung into the saddle and rode down to the settlement that lay below. He rode with as much confidence as could be expected. He had practiced the old language to the point of tedium and had discovered a wad of white man paper money in a pocket of the dead driver's trousers.

As he passed the crude buildings that comprised the settlement he saw dry goods through a window and turned his pony in that direction. Stepping off, he straightened himself, brushed his jacket, and went inside.

The storekeeper, a short man with red hair on his face, eyed him but said nothing, and Dances With Wolves browsed the shelves for a minute or two, rehearsing what he would say. The corpulent merchant's attention had sharpened at the sight of a stranger. Strangers were an uncommon commodity. Sometimes they meant trouble. The stranger's hair was odd, more chopped than cut, and his skin looked scorched, as if he had been sleeping in the sun. A drunk often did that, and drunks never had money. This man didn't look like a drinker, and he didn't stink of liquor, but he seemed tentative in his every movement, whether he was fingering some item or just gazing at the shelves. By the time his strange customer paused in front of the modest supply of clothing on hand, the shopkeeper had seen enough. He slipped around the counter, walked up to Dances With Wolves, and stopped.

"Help you?"

Dances With Wolves slowly turned his head and stared down into the storekeeper's eyes. He could see the words in his head but was fearful that his tongue would not know what to do. When he spoke, his voice seemed to come not from his throat but from someplace deeper, and the flat, ominous sound of it sent a shudder up the merchant's spine.

"Need clothes."

For a moment the red-bearded man could not find his own voice, and when he did the words came out tangled.

"Clothes. . uh. . yes. . clothes for whom?"

Dances With Wolves had not taken his eyes off the white man.

"Boy," he said slowly. The word was so weighted that it seemed suspended in the air between the two men. "And girl."

Having never encountered a man like this, the merchant stood transfixed, as if hypnotized, his urge to turn away overridden by the stranger's spell.

"A boy and a girl," he repeated mechanically. "How old?"

Dances With Wolves shifted his view from the corpulent man to the empty space in front of his face. He had not thought of numbers. He searched frantically now for the memory of them and how they might work, but his mind remained blank.

After a few seconds he looked down at the storekeeper again and raised a flat hand level with his ribs.

"Boy,” he intoned, "like this." He lowered the hand to a spot just above his waist. "Girl, like this."

With trembling hands, the shopkeeper pawed through the stock and succeeded in picking out a woolen shirt and trousers and a light plaid dress that Dances With Wolves found acceptable.

Hugging the garments to his chest, the confounded shopkeeper hurried around his counter, quickly ripped a length of wrapping paper, and folded it over the clothes. Ashe was binding the packet with twine he glanced up to see Dances With Wolves advancing toward him. The customer's eyes were devoid of all expression yet relentless and, in an instant of horror, the shopkeeper imagined himself a deer paralyzed at the closing of a panther.

Somehow managing a knot, he slid the package toward this other-worldly figure and smacked his lips, trying to get some moisture into his mouth. Though the day was clear and unseasonably cool, beads of sweat had broken out on the fat man's face.

"Ah, let's say. . three dollars."

Dances With Wolves let his eyes slide down to the pocket that held the paper money. Using one hand to hold it open, he slid the other in and drew out the rolled bills. He could not remember what three looked like but hoped it would come to him as he deliberately peeled a bill away and placed it on the counter.

Once again he lifted his menacing gaze, hoping to find a clue in the red-bearded man's face, but all he saw was a widening of his eyes.

"More. .," the merchant whispered, "please."

Dances With Wolves unrolled another bill and slowly placed it next to the one already lying on the counter.

The shopkeeper was gripped with the notion that the stranger's eyes were looking through him. The man across the counter was staring with the unmistakably quiet, potentially lethal, expression of a wolf.

The merchant's heart began to pound audibly in his chest. His breathing became rapid.

"Mister," he gasped, "where are you from?"

Dances With Wolves blinked calmly and the shopkeeper recoiled at the heavy, mystifying words that marched out of his mouth.

"Far. . away."

His mouth agape, the perspiring storekeeper, certain that he was in the presence of something he could not understand, lurched backward, only to find his progress halted by the solid wall behind him.

He bobbed his head at the packet on the counter and tried to cry out but the words came in an urgent hush.

"Take it. . I give it to you for nothing. . take it. . take it!"

Dances With Wolves' serene and deadly gaze fell on the packet, then rose once more to the terrified man behind the counter. The storekeeper's hands now held the shelving at his side in a death grip.

"Take it," he gasped again. "Nothing. . you owe me nothing."

Dances With Wolves ran a couple of fingers through the twine, hoisted the parcel, and turned for the door. A few steps later he passed outside and his image disappeared in an explosion of blinding, morning light.

Pressed against the wall, in the throes of apoplexy, the shaken storekeeper struggled a few moments to recover. Then he hurried to the door, locked it and pulled the shade, then staggered for the sanctuary of his back room and the earthen jug of spirits he kept there. He was fully inebriated before noon, by which time Dances With Wolves and his newly outfitted children were on their way to the next settlement.

For more than a week they searched with no success. Unable to make inquiries without giving himself away, Dances With Wolves clung to the thin hope that he might catch sight of her. He talked to a few white people as they wandered from town to town, and his fluency in English improved. But as one futile day ran into the next, he despaired more and more.

At the same time the oddness of the dark-skinned man with the two shoeless, speechless children elicited notice wherever they went. It seemed only a matter of time before they would be found out, for no day could be completed without a near-disaster of one sort or another.

They tried to take their breakfast in a crowded eating place, but when a piece of beefsteak hit his palate for the first time, Snake In Hands spat it onto the floor and cried out in clear, concise Comanche, "It tastes awful, Father!"

Because Always Walking could not be deterred from defecating in public any time she felt the urge, Dances With Wolves was often accosted by irate citizens who demanded that he control his child.

On one hot morning, they had just entered a sizable village of several hundred souls when, drawn to the commotion of women screeching on a boardwalk, they saw a large rattlesnake, obviously in flight, slithering along a crease where the ground met the walkway. Townsmen were racing from several directions to aid the screaming women, but before Dances With Wolves could react, Snake In Hands had scissored off his pony, and, arriving first in the vicinity of the big snake, startled everyone in view by reaching down and deftly picking the serpent up by its tail. Then, with no more care than a boy might take to shuck an ear of corn, he pinched the snake's head between the fingers of his other hand, coiled it twice around his neck, and, cradling the reptile, pulled himself back into the saddle.

Snake In Hands was so intent on calming the snake with soft strokes along its back that he didn't realize the impact of his simple act until his father nudged him to attention and motioned for him to start moving. It was only then that Snake In Hands discovered that the handful of white people around him had ceased all activity.

Rattlesnakes were universally thought of as deadly pests, to be eradicated wherever they might be found, and the sight of a mere boy picking one up and fondling it in a way usually reserved for a favorite pet had produced looks of confused wonder on those who were watching. It also produced a quick exit from the vicinity for the odd trio.

The white man money was quickly used up and they had been surviving on a dreary diet of rabbits, squirrels, and other small game for several days when they reached the outskirts of a large settlement called Vernon.

Like his children, Dances With Wolves had grown weary of a search that seemed more implausible with each day's passing. He was tired of reminding his son and daughter not to behave in the way they were raised. He was sick of white man clothes, white man talk, squalid white man towns, ugly white man roads, and gameless white man country. Most of all he was sick of pretending. It made him feel dirty, and after repeating the distasteful chore of cautioning the children once again, he led them into Vernon with the thought that if they did not find Stands With A Fist in this place, they would turn for home and be done with it.

The outskirts of the town were strangely devoid of life, as were its main street and the mismatched collection of structures that fronted it. They were halfway down the muddy thoroughfare and had not seen a single resident when Dances With Wolves spied a large congregation massed at the far end of town. He halted his pony and listened to the faint hum of voices in the distance. Something special enough to interrupt routine life was happening up ahead.

What might be taking place was no clearer when they pulled up at the fringes of the crowd, whose animation was strangely muted. Men sat their horses in little groups, gangs of children roosted on wagons, while others milled aimlessly through a considerable crowd of pedestrians who had gathered in front of a strange edifice which provided the center of attention.

Traders moved through the throng, promoting the sale of drinks, fans, and colorful flags, but their excitement was strangely muted, too, and it occurred to Dances With Wolves that the people were like children at play, fearful of raising their voices lest they wake some powerful entity sleeping nearby.

The hushed buzzing of the crowd rose as a small group of men ascended a flight of steps attached to the platform and faced the onlookers. One of them, a huge man with black skin, stood still as the others, who were white, scurried about performing small chores of readiness.

A white man wearing a metal star on his breast stepped forward, and, looking at a sheet of paper in his hand, began a short talk which silenced the audience.

The man with the star was quickly followed by another man, dressed in black, who clutched a book of the same color. As he spoke, a loop at the end of a stout rope hanging from a beam was slipped over the black-skinned man's head and tightened against his neck. The white man who did this stepped back a few paces, gripped a lever and, at a signal from the man with the star, depressed the long stick.

Suddenly the black-skinned man fell straight down, and when his feet were just inches from the ground, the rope went taut. As he had dropped the crowd moaned, but as his neck broke with an audible crack, all breath seemed to go out of the audience. Spontaneous cheers erupted from some of the watchers as the black-skinned man hung lifeless. Others broke into applause, and shortly after the casual chatter of friends and neighbors filled the air as a handful of somber men, working in the shade beneath the wooden platform, fussed around the body of the black-skinned man.

It had happened too fast for Dances With Wolves to analyze, but as he watched the incongruous scene before him he remembered the thing called hanging. It repulsed him to see men, women, and children kill a man without fighting him, and he instinctively turned to his children. They were sitting, ashen-faced, on their horses, their expressions helpless, and at that instant Dances With Wolves decided they should go home.

But before he could move, something extraordinary happened. The breeze, which had been lifting and falling all day as if it could not decide what to do, suddenly made up its mind in the spectacular form of a titanic surge that knocked both children off their horses and nearly sent Dances With Wolves to the ground.

For a split second he saw his children up and chasing their horses, but he was already in the air and, as he pitched to and fro on the bouncing, stiff-legged pony, the refuse that the audience had scattered over the ground filled the space about his head.

At the same moment he got his pony under control the wind inexplicably died, and when Dances With Wolves looked up, trash was still flying, the crowd was gathering itself in stunned disbelief, and the children had recovered their ponies. He was as dazed as anyone and was wondering where such a wind could come from when a stiff aftergust shuddered past.

Again refuse swirled up and a broadsheet of newsprint wrapped itself around his pony's face. Before the pony could explode, however, Dances With Wolves reflexively snatched the paper off his animal's eyes and was about to toss it into the breeze when his glance fixed momentarily on the paper.

A drawing of a woman stared up at him. It was Stands With A Fist. Stays Quiet was sitting on her lap.