THE KILLING SPIRIT: Wavoka's Lament (84)

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
WAVOKA’S LAMENT



To the doctors, nurses and medical professionals, it was a miracle. To Jerico, it was a conscious choice.

They disconnected the life sustaining machines: machines that breathe, machines that pump blood, machines that deliver water and nourishment, machines that monitor the heartbeat and brain activity. They disconnected all the wonders of medical technology, pulled out the tubes and waited for the patient to expire.

They shook their heads, consoled the family, some prayed, and assured Jerico’s loved ones that his journey into the last goodnight, the sea of eternal darkness or light, the supreme mystery of death, would be gentle and painless.

The bullet lodged so close to critical nerves and brain functions, it was pronounced inoperable, hopeless, beyond the reach of medical science, so when he rose from his bed to embrace his mother, none could doubt they had witnessed a miracle.

Jerico would have gone freely to the other side but it was not his time. Looking into his mother’s eyes, feeling her heartbeat, he knew it was right. A quiet woman, she was also the strongest person he had ever known. When times were hard, she bit her lip and did what must be done. When his father abandoned their home, she taught herself to drive, took jobs as a housekeeper, a teaching assistant, bookkeeper, secretary and librarian, working long hours and never complaining.

Jerico did not realize how long he had been gone until he looked into his mother’s eyes. He saw the years of his absence and the worry that had grown in her. She had always supported him, never criticized, and never spoke of the sorrow his decision to leave had caused her. He wondered now if he had been wrong. He had chosen the road of a pilgrim, never knowing how long and trying that road would be. He believed in destiny but now he questioned everything except the warmth of her embrace.

The doctors informed him that he would have to undergo a series of tests before they could release him. He refused. They implored him and he refused. They demanded that he submit and he defied them. His physical wounds were healed and he did not wish to spend another minute in the confinement of a cold and sterile hospital.

When news of his recovery broke, the swarms returned to the hospital and the doctors quickly decided they could not hold him against his will.

Jerico began the last leg of a long journey home. He climbed into the back of an old Ford station wagon his mother bought for three hundred dollars, which grandfather and some neighborhood boys managed to keep running.

His mother and grandfather talked about everything that had happened in Lakota country since Jerico left but he could not focus on their words. Marriages, newborn babies, friendships, crimes, divorces, deaths and money problems: It was as if he had never left and nothing had changed. Only everything had changed. They were all a decade older, a decade wiser and less certain, and a decade closer to death.

They would have a sweat when he was ready, when his strength was fully recovered, and they would hear the story of his journey and his vision. Until then, they would speak of old times. They would trade stories and share the warmth that comes from the return of a long lost child. Baby boy blue had come home a man, a warrior, tested by adversity, tried by fire, triumphant and true.

Word spread across the white man’s wires as swift as thunder trails lightning, as powerful as the prophecies of Wavoka at the turn of the century. The Lakota, Crow, Cheyenne and Arapaho gathered at Pine Ridge and were soon joined by the Iroquois, Nez Perce, Omaha, Mohawk, Pawnee, Choctaw and Kiowa. A gathering of tribes, unheard of since the days of Tecumseh or the Ghost Dance, was converging on the Dakotas and the authorities were beginning to take note. The people of Pine Ridge and Rosebud opened their homes, their lands, and teepees spotted the landscape.

They wanted to see the new strange man of the Oglala. They wanted to know if he would raise an army of warriors. They wanted to hear him promise, as Wavoka had, that the red nation would rise again, that the ancestors would return, that the buffalo would repopulate the plains, and that all would be as it was before the white man’s greed and his constant companion, the killing spirit, crossed the great waters and claimed their land.

Jerico was startled at the sight of them from the window of the moving station wagon. He thought the clock had turned back to the time of Crazy Horse, Gall and Sitting Bull, when the last great gathering of tribes assembled at the Greasy Grass to await Custer’s foolish assault. But there were houses, shacks, paved roads, silos, barns and an assortment of vehicles, old and rusting, battered and misshapen, the discards of the prospering class. He thought it must be a dream and wondered aloud what was happening.

“They have come to see you, my son,” his mother said.

“They have come to hear the telling of your vision,” grandfather said.

He closed his eyes and found himself in the camp of the Paiute, near modern day Pyramid Lake, where thousands of pilgrims from across the west gathered to pay their respects and hear the words of the prophet Wavoka. In a fevered vision, he had foreseen the return of the ancestors, the return of the buffalo, and the return of the old ways to those who kept faith alive within their beating red hearts. He told them to dance in a great circle and gave them the words that would summon his vision.

There was no sound of traffic, no hum of electrical current, the land was the land that nature intended, the water pure and the air as clear as a holy man’s vision.

It was winter and all the pilgrims had gone home. Word of the Wounded Knee Massacre traveled westward more rapidly than the vision of Wavoka traveled east, leaving the prophet alone, in mourning, to contemplate the consequence of his words.

Jerico sat before him in humble silence. He witnessed the sorrow that would haunt him for all his remaining days on the earth. It would tear at his soul and challenge every thought. He would never speak again without doubt.

“I did not preach rebellion,” Wavoka said. “I never said the ancestors would rise from the grave. I never told them the white man’s bullets could not pierce their flesh. I asked them only to dance and chant in a sacred manner, to hold the old ways in their hearts, to pledge their lives to the red road, and in this way, the ancestors would live forever.

“But the people heard what they wanted to hear. They put words into my mouth. Some wanted to raise a great army. Most only wanted to feel alive with a sense of hope and pride in desperate times. Some told the white man’s generals that the red man was rising in revolt.

“I never intended for my words to bring death and suffering to the Lakota but I did what I had to do. The Great Spirit gave me the vision of the Ghost Dance and the power to speak.”

He paused to smoke from a red clay pipe, a sacred pipe given to the prophet by a Lakota spirit guide.

“Once my vision gave hope,” he said. “Now it only summons the memory of Wounded Knee.”

Jerico reached out to share his pipe and his sorrow. He wanted to give the great man comfort and realized that only truth could pierce the darkness surrounding him.

“I have been to Wounded Knee,” said Jerico. “I have heard the voices of the dead and the living pilgrims who come to pay tribute. You are not to blame for the white man’s bullets. You are not to blame for the killing spirit in the white man’s heart. The vision of the Ghost Dance lives and it will always give hope to those who still believe in the way of the ancestors.”

Jerico sensed that his words had struck true. No longer would the prophet mourn. He would begin the great healing.

He opened his eyes as they pulled up to his mother’s home. He did not speak to those who had gathered but only nodded and walked inside, where he would remain in silent meditation and prayer for days. He was not Wavoka and the Ghost Dance was only a part of his vision. He knew the people wanted more than he could give yet he would speak to them for, like Wavoka, he had no choice.

He began taking visitors, one by one.

“Open your eyes,” he said. “The buffalo has already returned. It is not for the ancestors to protect our sacred brothers and sisters. It is for us.”

He said nothing about the red nation rising, only that all native peoples must be as one. He said nothing of the earth swallowing the white man’s soldiers of greed and war. He said that the enemy was not the white man but the killing spirit that takes root in the souls of many men. He warned that the killing spirit could hide under red skin as well as white.

The people heard his words and gave signs of knowing and understanding. “Hoka ho!” and “Hou, cola!” It is good. But when they spoke to others and took their turns before the cameras, they said that the Indian nation would rise again and that Crazy Horse had returned to lead them in battle.

It was as though they had forgotten their own history. It was as though they had forgotten that words such as these, false and twisted, words that brought fear to the white man’s soul, killed Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse as much as the white man’s weapons.

Word spread and more people gathered with tents, trailers, busses and recreational vans. Soon there were more whites than Indians, demanding to see the chosen, the prophet, the new strange man of the Lakota. Many carried black bibles, white crosses, and preached endlessly about the Day of Judgment. Jerico was crowned king of kings, Son of God, blood of the lamb, lord and savior – an irony beyond their grasp. Others proclaimed him the antichrist, the great destroyer and feared the day of reckoning. Those who held him up bowed down before him while those who came to crucify showered him and his followers with angry, venomous words.

Jerico came to understand Wavoka’s lament and returned to his silence. The people heard only what they wanted to hear. They twisted his words and bent their meaning to their own purposes. It was not his vision that interested them. It was their own.

He returned to the small circle of friends and family that knew him before his journey began. He turned away from the gathering throng, the mindless mob, the idolaters and detractors, the media circus and their endless followers. He returned to himself.

When he told grandfather he was ready for the telling, grandfather smiled.

“At last, you have awakened.”

“Hou, cola!” replied Jerico.

They laughed and at once renewed the special kinship that had served them in all the years of Jerico’s journey.

“It is good to have my grandson back.”

They talked well into the night, emptying the contents of their hearts, sharing thoughts and experiences, hopes and sorrows, until the calm inside their souls was equaled by a profound silence surrounding them.

“Now that you have awakened,” grandfather said, “get some sleep. Tomorrow we ride for the Black Hills.”

Jerico slept in peace and his dream world enfolded him in her arms.