Debra Nystrom

Down the prickly cow path to the creek we journeyed as if we were insects making our way along scars in the hide of a buffalo whose fur brushed us when the wind passed like a tide across the high grasses down the prickly cow path to the creek in chigger-shade where thoughts of time making our way along scars lost what they meant up at the house when the wind passed like a tide across the high grasses we pulled from our pockets matches swiped in chigger-shade where thoughts of time tasting of sulfur at the tips lost what they meant up at the house listening to bug-hum and bird-chatter and watching bubbles we pulled from our pockets matches swiped the surface of the water trembling tasting of sulfur at the tips once by the creek we found rocks with shells in them listening to bug-hum and bird-chatter and watching bubbles then carried the rocks back for Uncle Ralph to examine the surface of the water trembling the prairie had been a giant sea he told us once by the creek we found rocks with shells in them Grandma June says everything was sky not sea I said then carried the rocks back for Uncle Ralph to examine none of us sure what we believed the prairie had been a giant sea he told us we journeyed as if we were insects Grandma June says everything was sky not sea I said in the hide of a buffalo whose fur brushed us none of us sure what we believed

Nothing to do but scuff down the graveyard road behind the playground, past the name-stones lined up in rows beneath their guardian pines, on out into the long, low waves of plains that dissolved time. We'd angle off from fence and telephone line, through ribbon-grass that closed behind as though we'd never been, and drift toward the bluff above the river-bend where the junked pickup moored with its load of locust-skeletons. Stretched across the blistered hood, we let our dresses catch the wind while clouds above dimmed their pink to purple, then shadow-blue— So slow, we listened to our own bones grow.

Wounded Knee Years since I’d been back to the memorial; I’d forgotten it was up on a rise above the killing ground. Two kids appeared in the dust with things to sell—once coming from the far end of the chain-link, two kinds of dream-catchers hanging from his arm; and the girl, hunched on the broken steps under the arch’s improbable cross, cradling a Tupperware bowl of beaded star-necklaces in her lap. Her pink- and-silver t-shirt read PRINCESS. I shut my car door, and a grouse startled off the fence, veered away over bent switchgrass. The girl— Allie—said her little sisters made the jewelry, in the gray house at the base of the hill; maybe her price included the pictures I walked behind her to take: the marker for 1890, then the more recent graves, in ground seared and hardpanned by wind and snow and desolation; tied, bandana-pouches of tobacco, and ribbons, like fists and fingers shifting and fluttering; a few tough bright flowers left; gray-blue sky rolling above to the edges of horizon all around, spitting, cooking up a storm. I stood and turned back toward the arch again, where Allie and her friend, if he was a friend, hadn’t spoken a word to one another. For the first time in my life I wished I’d had some cigarettes— to smoke with them, at least offer, something to do with strangers you might sit a while beside till maybe one of you thought of something to say. A little thunder crackled, and we said goodbye; I drove on toward the shaft of rain above Manderson.  No reason to think I’d be any memory to them; a dream- catcher sold, a brilliant blue necklace. I passed a knocked-over vote Democrat sign, and two younger kids working on a bike upside-down, and remembered the small bowls, empty now, brought and offered at the graves surrounded for miles by graves never found. Rain would fill them, lift the reservoirs, clear the air. I thought of reaching over to pop the camera-back open; turned from dirt onto narrow blacktop, the road out, that was steaming.

Day by day the Missouri dropping lower under empty sky that had drained Okobojo, No Heart Creek, Whiteman Draw; every night still no moisture. Finally, a season late, the raw parched air turned and gathered over hardpan above Oahe, grumbling then breaking open all at once, sending runnels across the flats to spread and join and drag toward the river’s edge snatches of roots torn from ground where wind had settled the seeds once. Afterwards Will and Ellie, tromping in mud, scanned the rutted cow-paths for arrowheads that might've surfaced—traces of Black Buffalo, Big Foot, Touch the Clouds—quartz or chert or flint notched, chipped to different sizes and points for buffalo, deer, pheasant flushed out with a human howl, maybe with fire lit to the grasses, bitter scent of ash twisting in dust Ellie could smell like her own name unraveling, as she poked a glittering rock with her stick, heard the  meadowlarks question change to sputter, last flick of wings. Whatever she and Will might lift, turn over in their hands, take home, hide among their things—even relief after rain did not belong to them.

Dream of Mom’s red parka gone— someone stole it right out of the closet of the burned-down house—what good could it do anybody else, broken zipper that always got caught, she’d jimmy it loose, just part of putting it on—and she was so tiny, the arms too short even for me, too-tiny gloves in the pockets, thumbs stubby, practically useless to anyone but her—they deserve it if they shove in a hand, find the tissue she used and then left there who knows which cold day, what she needed it for, or why.

Vinnie Two Crow from the trailer at the school crossroads has walked up through the snow, bringing a loaf of pumpkin bread. Takes her big boots off and sits for coffee.Clem’s always treated us good. —You up here had too much trouble. I open the bread, and she asks about the quilt in my hoop. Stray lightning quilt, charred toys quilt—I don’t need to say that.If you want, she says,I brought some sage along. Good smoke might take away the bad, I told Clem out at the barn. —If you got an old bowl or something to burn it in.

She never said I’m going to die. I was with her nearly every minute that week, reading, sleeping on the cot beside the high-tech bed that kept shifting her slight weight while the window shadowed over, then grew brighter, and she drifted or got changed or was given another shot. None of us said it, though finally when she was barely talking anymore, I asked something like Mom, are you ready?—I just want Brad to be ok was what she replied. I told her he would be, as if her wish or mine could preside at his sentencing hearing. After that she was almost entirely silent, but when Dad came the last afternoon, edgy without a cigarette, checking over the monitors, Mom said she wanted to see him for a while alone, and he was startled.Pull the door closed, I heard her tell him, and he did. Out in the hall, staring at the pattern of alternating tiles, I thought of Saturday mornings when Brad and I were little, and Dad and Mom’s room would be not just shut for a time, but locked. Secretly I tried the knob once. In that house nobody was allowed to lock a door but Dad. Grandma would shoo us to the TV with cinnamon toast to watch cartoons, one fool panic after the next—bolted dungeons, lies and threats, a saw-blade inching toward the tied-up body. Then real people like us, finally: Roy Rogers saving them with his amazing calm.

Is it some turn of wind that funnels them all down at once, or is it their own voices netting to bring them in—the roll and churr of hundreds searing through river light and cliff dust, each to its precise mud nest on the face none of our own isolate groping, wishing need could be sent so unerringly to solace. But this silk-skein flashing is like heaven brought down: not to meet ground or water—to enter the riven earth and disappear.