The Holy Road

Chapter LI

Two days before their scheduled departure, the meeting with the generals at the War Department took place. As the delegation filed out, Ten Bears paused at a balcony while the others down a long line of steps to a convoy of carriages which were to them to an afternoon portrait session at one of the city's leading photographic studios.

His position behind the balcony's stone railing afforded a comprehensive view of the sprawling city, and as Ten Bears filled his eyes with the evidence of white proliferation, he was struck with a question that had been haunting his thoughts.

A high-ranking, crisply groomed colonel had escorted the delegation to the exit, and, seeing Ten Bears standing alone, he sidled over and commented on the grandeur of the view.

Ten Bears responded with an uncomprehending nod, then thought to himself, Maybe this soldier knows.

The old man caught the attention of one of the interpreters, calling him over with a few flicks of a hand. Out of courtesy Ten Bears asked for a translation of the colonel's remark.

“Yes,” the old man replied. “I have never seen a village of this size.”

He glanced at the colonel, then at the interpreter.

"There is something I do not understand,” he announced.

"Perhaps I can help you," the colonel offered.

"I have seen the white people feasting in the rooms where they pay money. I see them eat lots of meat. I see this in the pay money rooms. Do the families eat meat in their lodges as well?”

"Yes," the colonel affirmed. He waved a hand over the city. “Almost every house you see has a room for cooking meat and other foods.”

Ten Bears squinted skeptically at the vast settlement.

"But I see no one hunting. I see no game being brought in. How does the white man make meat?”

"We slaughter it," the colonel answered matter-of-factly.

"Slaughter it?"

"We kill animals in a big house.”

"Where is this big house?" Ten Bears asked and the colonel pointed north across the city.

"The biggest one is over there," he said.

"I will go there," Ten Bears stated.

The colonel and the interpreter looked at one another helplessly.

"But you are to have your portrait made this afternoon,” reasoned the colonel.

"I don't care about that," Ten Bears grunted, looking in the direction the colonel had indicated. "I want to see how the white man makes meat."

Leaving Ten Bears to wait outside with the interpreter the colonel disappeared into the offices of the war Department, where he relayed the visitor's request. After twenty minutes of bureaucratic maneuvering it was decided to grant Ten Bears' wish.

To the colonel's consternation, no one else could be persuaded to go and, within an hour he, the interpreter, and the old Comanche man were breezing through the city streets on a course for the great slaughterhouse that supplied much of Washington's meat.

End-of-day shadows were beginning their march across the landscape when Ten Bears' carriage came to a stop in front of a sprawling maze of stock pens, many of them crowded with the condemned.

Two unhappy-looking men, their clothes lightly spattered with blood, waited for the visitors at the head of a track that cut between the pens and terminated in front of a cluster of massive, dark, almost windowless buildings.

"You Colonel Bascom?" one of the men asked dully.

"Yes, and this is our guest, Ten Bears, and his interpreter, Mr. McIntosh," the colonel replied.

The man who had spoken made a little nod of acknowledgment and, with his companion, turned up the track leading to the gloomy set of structures.

“He want to see anything in particular?” the dull man asked over his shoulder.

"I don't think so," Colonel Bascom replied.

"We're doin' hogs right now," the man offered a remark to which Colonel Bascom did not reply.

Ten Bears had not been able to imagine the white man's place of making meat and was totally unprepared for what he saw as they passed pen after pen. He had never seen so many animals enclosed in one place, nor had he ever encountered such wholesale misery.

Many of the pens held what he recognized as the four-leggeds the whites held in high regard and called "cows'" A large number of the enclosures held a much smaller, hairless four-legged the whites called "pigs." He came upon a pen of horses and paused to stare in shock at the forlorn animals. Ten Bears had eaten the flesh of horses a few times in his life, but only to keep from starving. To think that any race would willingly kill and devour horses was incomprehensible, even if they were as poor as these.

That they would soon be killed was evident from the attitude of the animals themselves. Like the cows and pigs, the horses seemed fully cognizant of their fate and stood about in pronounced gloom, their heads hanging sadly a few inches from the ground, moving only when jostled by other animals. Some of them were suffering from broken limbs and a few carried ghastly wounds on their flanks or hips or chests where slabs of flesh hung open as if a butchering had been interrupted.

The strongest animals churned incessantly about the pens, whinnying, snorting, lowing, and squealing in abject terror, their eyes bulging to the whites as they danced in the ankle-deep quagmire of waste.

Ten Bears had killed animals all his life yet he knew them as brothers, and he pitied these, for the expressions on their faces were the same he had seen in his village when a child died in sickness or a warrior failed to return from a raid or a mother succumbed in childbirth. It was the same expression of abandonment he had seen on the faces of the men who returned from the battle at Adobe Walls, the men who had witnessed a nation of buffalo dead on the plains.

Through helpless eyes the animals in the pens asked the same questions over and over: Where is the Mystery? How can life end in this way?

As they neared the entrance to the gigantic box that was the largest in the group of sullen buildings, the dull man stopped and pointed to the end of the structure. Ten Bears was barely aware of Mr. McIntosh's translation, for he had already seen what the man had pointed out and was watching it carefully.

A long path, enclosed on both sides, angled up from the holding pens and went through a hole high up on the box. On the path were the beasts called pigs. They were moving forward in a single line, being driven by men on either side who were hitting them repeatedly with heavy sticks. The white men yelled angrily as they beat the animals, but this rough encouragement was muted by the shrill, cacophonous screams of the pigs themselves as their round, thick bodies vaulted and twisted and bucked in hopeless denial of what was about to happen.

Colonel Bascom did not want to go inside. Neither did Mr. McIntosh, and a brief squabble ensued before it was decided that Ten Bears would not need an interpretation of what he was about to see.

The old man followed the two men with bloodstained clothes through the doors of the slaughterhouse. Inside, they climbed a long stairway which led to a catwalk that gave a comprehensive view of every thing going on below.

But all that Ten Bears saw could not be taken in at a glance. And it could not be absorbed, even over time. The sight was too bizarre, and in the course of his watching, the images that settled in the old man's eyes had the sharp, surreal quality of something dreamt.

The natural light entering through a series of small, square windows mounted high on the walls of the cavern-like place steadily lost power as it drifted downward and was swallowed by the nightmarish, yellow glow of work lamps spaced at regular intervals along the walls.

Hatted men were moving about in the tawny, submerged light. Splotches of white shone through on clothes streaked with red as they went about their gruesome work with an air of impunity.

At the far end of the trileveled floor, men wielding axes chopped mechanically at the bodies of pigs, severing heads and limbs which were then cast with practiced ease into huge wooden tubs.

At the next level, Ten Bears saw a team of three men in the act of disemboweling one of the short-legged, flop-eared animals. One worker slit open the pig's belly and, with a few quick swipes of his long-bladed knife, emptied the abdomen of what little viscera had not already spilled onto the floor.

Another member of the team grasped the animal's hind legs and spun it across the slippery, metal floor to the lip of a slide. With a push from a glistening black boot the heavy body cascaded down the slide, coming to rest in close proximity to the choppers. A third man pushed the animal's viscera with an implement Ten Bears had never seen. The tangle of intestines and other vital organs disappeared over the edge of the floor and plopped into a large barrel already half full with the bowels of countless predecessors.

Directly below him, on the third and highest work level, two big white men waited on an expansive metal floor at the foot of another slide. No white at all could be seen on these men's clothes. Though they wore extra covering, every inch of their attire was covered with blood, as was the floor they stood on.

The man holding a thin-bladed, slightly curved knife stared up at two workers looming near the top of the slide. He nodded and, following a clank of metal and a thump, a living pig, its piercing screams echoing off the walls, slid across the floor to where the two big white men were waiting. Grabbing the crazed animal by its ears, one of the white men jerked the animal's head back while the other's knife sliced through its throat. Jets of blood struck the men's chests, and a moment later, they were guiding the still-bucking body to the slide that would carry it to the disembowelers.

Ten Bears saw the process repeated again and was astonished at how quickly and smoothly the white men worked. They seemed oblivious to their surroundings and its nature, to the stench of so much blood and flesh, the earsplitting cries of their victims, the eerie light and barely breathable air.

A third pig tumbled down the chute, but as the man who held its ears tried to stretch its throat for the knife the animal unexpectedly threw its head back with such power that its human captor was knocked to the floor, losing his grip.

Ten Bears heard sudden laughter and turned to see that the man who had brought him up the stairs was laughing. He shouted something our and the man who had fallen looked up from the floor and made what Ten Bears took to be a sign of anger with one of his fingers.

The man's partner had caught the pig and was still trying to restrain it when the one who had put up his finger wrathfully pulled another knife from its place on the wall.

The laughter next to Ten Bears grew louder as the angry white man rushed across the floor. Bellowing words of rage at the struggling pig, he drove his knife into the animal's face. Then he stabbed and slashed until blood seemed to be squirting everywhere.

For some reason the man was treating the animal like an enemy and it was then that Ten Bears' head began to reel. Sound and smell and sight seemed to merge as he pushed away from the catwalk rail and followed the tops of his moccasins down the stairs.

He hardly glanced at Colonel Bascom or Interpreter McIntosh when he got outside. He tried to keep his eyes on his feet as they walked past the pens, for every time he looked up the same thing would happen. The faces of the animals, the tint of their coats, the heaving of their nostrils — all that he saw would swirl together like multicolored ripples of grease on the surface of a boiling cook pot.

As they drove away, Ten Bears asked if they could make the horse go faster and when the breeze began to pass over his face he could see clearly again.

He spoke only once more on the trip back to town, and that was in answer to a question from Colonel Bascom. The colonel recognized that the old man was shaken, and, certain that any Indian was inured to the sight of blood and death, assumed that he was overwhelmed by yet another achievement of modern civilization.

"You have seen how the white man makes meat,” the colonel stated rather smugly. "What do you think?”

Ten Bears never looked at Colonel Bascom, directing his reply instead to the space in front of his face.

"I do not believe it," he said.

As he sat talking with Kicking Bird that evening, Ten Bears tried to describe the way the white men made meat, but what he had seen so violated the basic tenets of his life that no portrayal seemed adequate.

Kicking Bird listened to Ten Bears' description in horror. To see blood, to smell death, to kill an enemy without mercy were aspects of life with which he was intimate, but hearing what had gore on in the white man slaughterhouse frightened him, and when Ten Bears told him about the choppers he had to stop the old man.

"They don't use all of the animal?" he asked, his voice hushed.

"Maybe half. They throw the rest away."

"You saw this? "

"Yes, I saw it. They didn't say any prayers, either."

"No. And one of the animals was attacked by one of the white men. . like it was an enemy."

Kicking Bird could not make sense of such a thing and the thought crossed his mind that Ten Bears might be afflicted with some sort of dementia. People of great age were often invaded by transforming spirits.

"The white man must have been insane," Kicking Bird theorized.

"I'm certain of that," the old man retorted. “There's no understanding this white man's holy road. I wouldn't be surprised to see Comanches in those pens next."

"The white people do not eat the flesh of other people, Grandfather."

"How can that be known? The river of excrement was not known. The place they make meat was not known. I don't care to find out any more about the whites. I want to go home."

"We are meeting the Great White Father tomorrow."

"Of course we are meeting him. I will sit with him and hear his words. But I will have nothing to say. I want to go home."