My great-grandmother is speaking, the words rustling against my ear like the susurration of insect wings. I have been crying, red streaks on my face from the clay in our yard, a bruise over my left eye from fighting the wild boys who live across the pond in a lean-to made of tree bark and palmetto scrub. She tells me I am “meaner than cat shit” and starts in with a story to soothe me. Her reprimand holds no sting. It is my meanness she loves most. She is telling me a story about Crazy Horse, how I have his hair and eyes and I have his miracles, too. She says I am his daughter, built from the memories of him handed to her on the reservation by the old women who tended the fire and taught her to cook. She says I am given his breath and color from the wind and the sun, the same wind and sun that moved over him when he was a boy. I press deeper into her neck, smelling the sweat and tobacco that marks her more distinctly than her name. I am stretched shiny and tight by the idea that I am his child, his magic and his dreams coded into my body like the color of my eyes and the shape of my face. Sitting in her lap I am a descendant of Indian gods.
I sleep there, dreaming of horses painted with red hands, of riding a pony that carries my name in his mouth. He whispers my name to me like a totem, my belly filled with the power of it. My name drives away the hunger that chases our family and we sit and eat our fill of biscuits and cane syrup. Fat and sticky, they sing a song for me. They make my name a legend.
When I wake up my father is there, sitting on the floor with his back against the doorway. He has been smoking, the coal of his cigarette marking his face, the pitch of his mouth. His hair stands on end where he runs his hands through it over and over, a habit that makes him taller by several inches. His face is creased and black from the machine shop, his fingers bloodied and cracked from the engines that will not give up their secrets without a sacrifice from his hands. He laughs at every new cut, telling me how each one is a ceremony that binds him to the engines and that they are now his blood brothers, unable to break down and fall apart as long as his heart is still beating.
He looks invincible sitting in the dark, gesturing and telling stories that are too beautiful to be true and I love him for his lies. I know when he lies because the truth astonishes him. His face cracks open with surprise and incredulous delight. His lips stumble and fall, pitch head first into a tale they did not design or practice, pleased and uncomfortable around anything that is not a myth. He tells me so many stories I believe he is made up of words and sound instead of flesh and bone. I crawl to the window at night to fall asleep to the sound of his voice floating above me from the front porch, the crack and hiss of the match to his cigarette the only punctuation in the long string of syllables and inflections that paint the evening air. He tells me his stories are his ponies, the only horses no man can steal. It is the first thing I know of reverence.
My uncle Charles is here, clean and smug from the prison where he guards violent, broken men. His hands are soft and white but I do not let him touch me. He laughs when telling me how he teases and torments his keep, openly pleased by their inability to speak or move against him. He says he is counting coup on the men but I can tell my father thinks he is a coward. On Thursday nights my daddy goes to the same prison to preach a little, play cards and pray with the same men. They do not know he is my uncle’s brother. They give my daddy little drawings on matchbook covers or toys made of string and buttons to take back to me. He has been telling them stories about me, I know, how I think I am the daughter of Crazy Horse and his face opens up at the truth of this because even now he is making me a legend with the men on death row. I sometimes cry at night thinking about the men who will die, men whose names I have in my mouth placed there by my father, from the words I overhear from the front porch.
When I sleep I dream that these men are riding on the backs of my father’s horses and their sins fall away in the dust behind them, their hair grown long and holy from prayer and from playing cards at my father’s table. I tell my daddy about this dream and he puts me on his shoulders so I will not see that he has been crying but I know already because the smell of his tears is stronger than the smell of his coffee and cigarettes, their bitterness reaching me from my perch on his shoulders where I imagine my hands can push up the sky. I smooth his hair and tell him he is too little to play with me and we laugh. He swings me down to the floor and I help him lace up his work boots, carrying their smell of grease and leather on my fingertips long after he leaves for the day. I hold that smell to me like a medicine against the long hours until he returns and we are once again each other’s best company.
He gives me candy and a coke the day I ride to work with him. I feel huge with importance, waving crazy and proud at my cousins who run after the truck and flick their sticks against the tires until we are too fast and too far for them to reach. I feel like I am flying away from them and the clicking of their branches stays with me only a little while, a tiny noise and movement behind my ribs that I begin to lose as we bump over the dirt roads leading to the machine shop that calls my daddy away from me every day and returns him tired and slow, his stories and humor dragging home behind him long after I have gone to bed. Today I will carry his lunch and his stories home for him, hoping that together the weight of all he knows and all he must carry will seem easier between us. I want to be woven into who he is, become part of his shirt, thread and button of the cloth that embraces him.
Uncle George has one arm and he is setting up coffee in the office. He lost his arm in a sawmill accident and calls his stump his little piggy. He likes to shake it at me and squeal, urging me to pet it. Sometimes I cannot resist and I touch the stump. I am always surprised at how soft and alive it feels against my hand and I imagine that it is a new born pig nestled under my uncle’s arm, his skin shiny, pink and new. Other times I am too afraid to come near my uncle. Those are the days when the skin is angry from the bone rubbing at the fragile skin stretched too tight over the old and tender wound. Uncle George’s eyes are set wide apart on days like that and he smells slightly of peppermint and whiskey. That smell is a caution and I avoid his gaze.
My father is walking through the shop and out again into the fields behind the building. A giant tractor sits in the sun; faded red and rusting from her long exposure to the elements. He pats his hand against the fenders and runs it along her rough lines, touching her the way I have seen him touch my mother, her own decay not as apparent as the tractor’s but my daddy senses it and keeps her together as gently as he knows how. I hear him tell his father that she is slipping from him, into alcohol and madness. I imagine her walking into the sea, disappearing a little at a time, her hands farther and father from my daddy’s until he can see nothing more than her hair being lifted by the waves, sinking, then gone. His feet are unable to move, drawn down into the earth by the shifting of the sand and the steady erosion of the tides. This is the first I know of grief.
I watch him flick open his knife envious of the bone handle that fits neatly into his palm, worn into the grooves of his hand having been cradled there much longer than I. He tells me his father made it for him, for hunting and he uses nothing else to bring home the wild game for our family. He is sly and secret about how he hunts, murmuring to himself as he watches the woods. He tells me he is praying and making promises to the old gods. That is the only way to call the deer and the wild boar to the edge of your knife. Even now he is whispering and his eyes watch the tree line for movement or sound. There is a flash, a brown streak and my father runs toward it. A huge rack of antlers are all I see of the deer as it leaps from the edge of the woods across the pasture. He is racing my father and they turn their heads as they run, one watching the other, fixed and primitive. I can hear the heartbeat of the deer in the ground beneath my feet. His terror has a tremor and the fear in his eyes is as familiar to me as my own name. I think we are kin, the deer and I, both of us always trying to race away from the edge of a knife, the pursuit of a dangerous thing.
My father runs from me and it is only now that I am aware he has removed his boots. His bare feet slide over the ground. Already he begins to move faster than I can follow. As he runs from me toward the deer, he becomes stranger, his face holding a peculiar expression I do not recognize as my father. There is something holy in how he looks, keener and closer to God than when he preaches. I watch his body stretch into the run, each muscle a spring and coil, flexed and released with every stride, eyes light and wild while his hair flies back, flattened by the wind. The speed of his body carries him faster and closer to the deer. I can tell by the way they look in each others direction my father will win this race. In an instant he reaches the deer and I see the flash of the knife. I watch the deer surge forward and stop, his great body crashing to the ground in a sudden heap. We are motionless, all three, the deer dying without struggle, my father praying, and I am rooted to this spot, watching the animal and the warrior make their peace with the forces that brought them to this end. It is an ancient rite at the edge of the woods.
I have his eyes, my father’s eyes, light ,eerie, in a clan full of Indians. They say his blood isn’t right, my daddy’s, but he says it is the blood of a medicine man that colors him. My granny tells me he is a man held apart by choice and custom, shunned because he looks different and can see things, tells stories in a way that make you feel swallowed up by them, catch you snug in the belly of them and weave you into the pattern of time, history and myth. She tells me I am his daughter, I have his hair and his eyes, his stories, too, colored this way by the same wind and sun that moved over him when he was a boy. I think of him standing over the deer, dropping tobacco on its body and then bringing it home, the rites of hundreds of years still alive each time he draws in his breath, steadying himself for one more story, myth or lie. I do not care which it is, as long as I can see his face. “We are the sons and daughters of crazy horse,” he says, “and so our names are legend.”
I sleep that night curled in the memory of my father racing across a field filled with ghosts that trail behind him, granting him speed as he reaches for his prey. His hair has grown long and is tied into prayer knots. I reach for him but he is gone, slipping from me into shadow and dreams, a phantom, now, of memory. He is truth and myth to me, one as essential to the other as hunter to prey. He runs, looking back, eyes fixed on the curve of the world, chasing and never catching the story he always meant to tell. Now I have it in my mouth and I am his daughter. I speak and I am the voice of Crazy Horse.
