Offerings

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.