The Holy Road

Chapter LX

While his friends and relatives fought for their lives on the plains, desperation of a different kind gnawed at the hearts of Kicking Bird and his fellow leaders on the reservation.

The passing of the ultimatum had swollen the reserve's population with anxious people utterly ignorant of how to navigate the holy road. The former free roamers knew nothing of the structure upon which the white man's culture was based and, though the wild people of the plains responded to peer pressure, to follow instructions from any type of central authority was as alien to them as celebrating a birthday.

People weren't used to camping in one place, often adjacent to other clans or tribes, and men of standing like Kicking Bird and Touch The Clouds found themselves struggling against a constant stream of problems.

While they tried to instill basic principles of sanitation, they also were called upon to settle disputes over pasturage of horses between feuding neighbors. When they tried to convince mothers to let their young be treated by white man doctors, they incurred the enmity of traditional medicine men. Getting people to bring their children to Lawrie Tatum's school was difficult enough, but keeping the pupils in class was even harder. Young men were constantly counseled against leaving the reservation to raid, but no inducements were offered to convince them to stay. Those in defiance of the ultimatum regularly slipped in and out of the reservation to visit family, creating even greater unrest. And though the sale of liquor to reservation residents was strictly forbidden, some people had already begun to blot out their misery with inebriation.

Confusion, uncertainty, and fear were a palpable presence inside every reservation lodge. In making a journey of little more than a hundred miles, the Comanche, like the other tribes, had stepped literally from one age of humankind to another and while Kicking Bird had expected many problems, he could not have fully anticipated his own impossibly demanding role in the transition.

His far-seeing nature isolated the former medicine man. He alone could speak the white man tongue, and he was the only one with the knowledge and influence to assure that the walk down the holy road was safe and sound.

But Kicking Bird had not been long on the reservation before he realized that the holy road was not a point of confusion for Indian people only. The whites seemed confused too. After only a few dry, of official dealings he was forced to conclude that for nearly every white there was a different perception of the holy road, and it came to him, in a queasy, haunting recognition, that the whites did not know how to operate the system they had invented. Few of them obeyed its tenets, and it was Kicking Bird's fate to engage in a long, lonely struggle against these puzzling powers.

Only half of the promised cows arrived on the first ration day, and instead of fat beeves, the hungry Indians saw a collection of half-dead animals of skin and bone. Kicking Bird complained immediately, but no one could tell him what had gone wrong. The cows could neither be rejected nor replaced. The people would have to make do, and in the end Kicking Bird was forced into the unenviable position of making certain that everyone got a fair share of nothing.

The crazy water was finding its way into lodges at an alarming rate, and Kicking Bird objected vociferously to the military and civilian authorities. The colonel in command of Fort Sill told him he had no authority to ban the sale of liquor and that the issue would have to be taken up with General Mackenzie, who, as he knew, was in the field.

The civilian who owned the store that sold the whiskey had transferred ownership to another who lived far away, and when Kicking Bird took the matter up with the head clerk, he, too, replied that he was not authorized to suspend the sale of spirits.

Lawrie Tatum shared Kicking Bird's outrage, but as commodities failed repeatedly to arrive as promised, and as the whiskey continued to flow without interruption, Kicking Bird was soon forced to alter his regard for the little Quaker. The man who had offered himself as protector, facilitator, and guardian did not have the power to carry out his avowed duties.

There were a few qualified successes, however. The Quaker agent's school began to fill up, not with children eager to learn about the modern world but with children eager for the food their attendance provided. An edict forbidding reservation-wide religious ceremonies, dancing, singing, and mass celebrations of any kind was rescinded after Kicking Bird absolved himself of all responsibility for the bloodshed to come from such a foolish command. The refugees streaming in from Comanche and Kiowa country needed protection from overzealous soldiers, and after pestering, cajoling, and browbeating the colonel, Kicking Bird was able to put in place a system of safe conduct for those who had chosen not to combat the government.

Important as they were to basic survival, these triumphs amounted to little else, and each night when Kicking Bird slipped under the covers in his lodge, he craved only the rest his body and his mind needed desperately. But the day to come would be fraught with a new tangle of events, and, invariably, he lay awake trying to anticipate all that he have to do.

Though he tried hard to keep his thoughts from drifting in a direction he dreaded, sleep never came before an agonizing contemplation those who were still out fighting the soldiers. Judging from the bands disheartened who were appearing in greater and greater numbers on edge of the reservation, the time when hostilities would be settled was fast approaching but, as much as he wanted the fighting to end, Kicking Bird felt a new river of heartache spreading across his chest each night. He loved his people, and a part of him especially loved those who were defying the white man's army.

Every grueling day of his reservation life he asked nothing. But every night, on the threshold of sleep, he cried out mutely for the Mystery to deliver from destruction the ones who still fought.