Left to Die of Grief at Her Child's Grave - A Lakota Chief Sat With Her & Gave Her a Reason..

[00:00:00]left to die of grief at her child's grave. A Lakota chief sat with her and gave her a reason. The third time I came back, she had moved the stones. Only the one, the small, flat one, she kept her hand on while she slept. She had pushed it closer to the head of the mound. Such a small thing. I sat down across from her and did not let her see I had noticed. That was the first thing she had done in 3 days that I would call living. and I knew if I made too much of it, she would undo it. The grass was high that summer. The creek ran low. The hollow she had lain down in sat between two ridges with no shade but what the cottonwoods kept by the water, and she had not crawled to the cottonwoods once.

[00:00:45]The sun had burned her face the color of brick. Her lips were cracked open. Flies sat on her without her brushing them. I came every day and brought a skin of water and a piece of meat or bread, and most days she did not touch what I left.

[00:01:01]I did not speak. I sat at a distance where she could see me, but not feel crowded by me. I stayed as long as the sun let me. Then I rode back. She had no name to me yet. I did not know her people or where she had come from, how the child under the stones had died. I knew only this. On the day the wagons rolled past my ridge, the whole long line of them creaking west toward the river crossing and not slowing. One wagon had pulled aside in the tall grass. A woman had got out and a boy had got out with her. Not a man, a boy by the look of him. They had carried a small bundle into the hollow and dug a hole with a flatbladed shovel that flashed in the sun when the boy lifted it. They had laid the bundle in the hole. They had covered it. The boy had wiped his face with the back of his hand and walked back to the wagon. He had called to her. She had not moved. He had called again. The wagon waited. The wagon waited a long time.

[00:02:03]Then the boy climbed up onto the seat, and the wagon went on, and the dust of it hung in the air over the ridge and faded, and the woman sat down by the small mound and did not get up. I watched all of that from the rise where I had been hunting. I had a hand on my horse's neck. He stood quiet. I told myself she would follow when she had her grief out. I rode home. The next day I came back and she was where she had been. I came back the day after and she was where she had been. E only she had to crawl to make a small pile of stones over the dug place and she had laid down on her side with her hand on the mound.

[00:02:41]She did not lift her head when my horse came near. She did not lift her head when I dismounted. The third day she had moved the flat stone. A man does not always know why he does what he does. I will not pretend I did. Sh. I had a band to feed and the buffalo were thin that year, and I had been hunting since dawn, and I should have been moving north with the older men to find the herd. Instead, I rode down off the ridge toward the hollow with one rabbit on my saddle and a feeling under my ribs I could not name. To me, when I dismounted that first day, I left the rabbit on a rock about 10 paces from her and sat down on my heels 20 paces farther. She watched me. Her eyes were the only thing alive in her face. They followed my hands.

[00:03:29]When I sat back, she stared at the rabbit, but did not move toward it. I sat until the sun crossed over her and shifted onto her chest. Then I rose slowly and walked back to my horse and rode away. The rabbit was still on the rock when I came back at evening. By morning it was gone, whether she had taken it or a coyote, and I did not know. I left another. I was 47 years old that summer. I had been the chief of my band for nine winters. four that I had been the second man under my older brother, who had been chief before me, and before that I had been a hunter, and a man without distinction, except that I had quiet hands, and could ride a long time without tiring. My brother had taken sick with the white sickness when I was 38, and he had died bad. I took the lodge after him. I had two wives at that time. The older one had also died of the same sickness the same winter.

[00:04:27]Three lodges of us died that winter and the younger one had gone home to her brother's people after because she did not want to be in a lodge where so many had died. I had let her go. I had no children.

[00:04:40]I had a brother's children and a sister's children and I called them mine and they called me uncle. In the right way of it, I had no children of my own that came up out of my body. I tell you this because it matters to what came after.

[00:04:56]I will tell you something about silence first because the rest will not make sense without it. In my band, the old men taught the young men to sit. They did not put it that way. They said, "Do not be a noise." They said, "If you ride into a place, let the place know you before you know it." They said horse sees you better than your own brother does. They meant and I learned it slowly. The way you learn anything that does not have a word that a thing under pain is louder than you. If you are louder than it, you cannot hear it. You will trample it and you will not know you did. So I sat. That is what I knew how to do. My father had done it with my m mother when she lost the last child, the one before me. That did not come right. He had sat with her under the tippy flap for I do not know how many days. He did not speak. He brought her water. She did not drink. He sat with her again. I was a boy and I asked my older brother why our father did not say anything and my brother said, "He is speaking." That was the way of it. I did not bring my father to mind when I started going down to the hollow. I did not think anything. I only saw that the woman would die there if she was not seen and that no one had been sent to see her and that my horse stood quiet under me as if he had been told what to do and was waiting for me to catch up.

[00:06:21]So we went down. It was 11 days before she would look at me. It was 13 days before she drank from a skin was while I was watching was 19 days before she said a word. I am giving you those numbers because I counted them and they mattered to me then and they matter to me now. A man can count a long time at the side of a thing if it has a reason to be counted. What I did day after day was small. I left water. I left food. I sat.

[00:06:50]I did not speak. When she would not drink and the sun was high, I came closer and uncapped the skin and set it nearer her. And I waited and went back.

[00:07:00]when she had a fever in her on the seventh day, her face wet and her lips talking to nothing in a voice that did not come from this country. I went to the creek and soaked a strip of my own shirt and laid it on her forehead. She did not look at me. She did not push my hand away. I sat by her until the strip was warm and I soaked it again. I did that until the sun went down. Then I rode home. First night I did not go home was the ninth night. There was a wind off the plains and the temperature dropped and I knew she would freeze in the clothes she had on which were what a woman wears to bury her child. A dark dress thin, no shawl, no coat. I had a blanket on my saddle. I came down the slope after dark with my horse going slowly and I laid the blanket over her without waking her and I sat down beyond the stones and put my back against a cottonwood and slept that way. In the morning, she had pulled the blanket up to her chin, and her eyes were open and watching me when I stood. She did not say anything. I did not say anything. I went to the creek and brought back water and bread. I cannot say I had a plan. I cannot say I knew what I was doing. The I had been a chief long enough to know that not everything a man does is for a reason he can give. I knew only the way you know it is going to rain by the way the grass turns that I was supposed to come back the next day. So I came back the next day on the 10th day it rained.

[00:08:33]It rained the way it rains on the plains in the summer is to say it came in fast and hard from the west and the sky went black above the ridges and the lightning walked across the country in long white lines and the thunder shook the ground.

[00:08:49]There was no shelter in the hollow. The cottonwoods were too far from the mound.

[00:08:54]I had gone home in the afternoon when the sky was still clear because I had been called for a council and the rain came suddenly while we were sitting. And as soon as I felt the first cold drop on my arm, I got up and walked out of the council. Without a word, and I went and got my horse and rode for the hollow. I did not know if she would have moved into shelter. I did not think she would.

[00:09:18]When I came over the ridge, the rain was coming sideways. I rode down through it.

[00:09:24]I found her where she had been lying on her side with her hand on the small mound. And the rain was running off her in sheets and her eyes were closed and her lips were blue. I dismounted. I picked her up. She was very light, lighter than I had expected.

[00:09:41]And I carried her into the cottonwoods.

[00:09:43]I set her down at the base of the biggest one. I went back out into the rain and I cut six long willow branches with my knife and I came back and I jammed them into the ground in an arc over her and I lashed them together at the top with cord from my saddle and I took the blanket I had brought before which was now wet and I laid it over the willow frame to make a small roof. It was a bad shelter. The water came through it but it was something. I sat down beside her under the frame and I held the blanket up with one hand where it sagged and I my other hand on her shoulder and I waited for her to come back. She came back. Her eyes opened slowly. She looked at me. She did not speak. Teeth were chattering. I took off my shirt and I wrapped it around her shoulders. I had a dry shirt under it. I always carried a spare because planes do not promise you weather you can use. She let me put the shirt around her. She did not lift her arms to help, but she did not stop me. When the rain finally slacked off, she was warm enough to sit up. She looked out at the small mound, which was holding under the rain because she had built it well, and the stones were heavy. She looked at the willow shelter I had made. She looked at me.

[00:11:03]She did not say thank you. She did not have words yet, but she looked at me a long time. And then she lay back down on the wet ground beside the cottonwood and she pulled the blanket and my shirt around her and she went to sleep. I sat with her until dawn. Then I went home and got a fresh blanket and came back.

[00:11:24]The willow shelter held for the next 3 days until the weather cleared.

[00:11:30]That night I told my sister-in-law that I had been visiting a sick woman. Hike Brenette would not be home for evening meals for some time. And she looked at me and she asked one question, which was, "White woman?" I said, "Yes." She did not ask anything else. She wrapped two pieces of cornbread in a cloth and put them in my hand and told me to take her bread instead of mine because hers was better. I told her I knew her bread was better. That was no news. She laughed at me. I rode out the next morning with her cornbread. The 11th day, I was sitting in my usual place and she sat up and looked at me just for a moment. Her eyes were a pale gray. I had not seen them before because she had not opened them all the way. She looked at me as if I were a thing she had to understand or her mind would come apart.

[00:12:22]I held her look. I did not smile. I did not nod. A nod would have been a lie that day. I held her look until she closed her eyes again. Then I set down the bread and went back to my place. The 13th day she drank water in front of me.

[00:12:37]Had set the skin down at the usual rock and was sitting back when she sat up slowly like a creature that has been hit and is checking which legs still work.

[00:12:48]And she dragged herself the few feet to the rock and she lifted the skin and she drank. Her hands shook. She drank a long time. Then she set the skin back and lay down on her side again. with her hand on the small mound. She did not look at me, but she had drunk in front of me. That was a thing. The 15th day, she ate the cornbread in front of me. The 16th day, she dragged herself to the creek and washed her face. I sat where I was. I did not turn my head. When she came back, her hair was wet and stuck to her cheeks, and she did not look any less broken. She had washed her face. That was a thing. The 17th day she lay back down on the mound and would not move.

[00:13:32]I think the small living she had done the day before had cost her and she had gone back to where the cost was less. I did not ask her to come up out of it. I sat. I left bread. I left water. I went home at dark. On the 19th day she spoke.

[00:13:46]I had brought her a small clay bowl that my sister-in-law had given me with broth in it. meat broth with onion and the wild turnip that grows in the bottoms and a wooden spoon. I had been bringing dry food and water and not enough else.

[00:14:02]I set the bowl on the flat stone and sat back. She sat up. She had been sitting up more the last days. She picked up the bowl. She held it on her lap and she looked at it and she said very quietly in English. Thank you. That is what she said. Two words. Thank you. I had a few English words. I had traded with white men at the fort south of us for buffalo skins and metal pots and bolts of cloth and salt. And I had learned enough English to count and to bargain and to tell a man to leave my camp. I knew thank you, I said. You are welcome. That was my English. It came out of me stiff because I had not used it for a long time. She looked up at me when I said it. Gray eyes had got their color back a little. In those days, she had been eating. She had washed her face more than once. She looked at me a long time.

[00:14:55]Then she said, "My name is Ruth." I said, "Ruth." She nodded. I told her my name. I will not write it here in the way my people say it because that is for my people. The trade name I went by with the white men at the fort. The name they could put their tongues around was Joseph.

[00:15:14]My father had been given an English name by a missionary when he was a boy. He had passed it to me. I had used it at the fort for years and I had stopped caring whether the white men called me by it or not. I gave it to her now because it was a word she could say and because I did not want her struggling with my Lakota name in the state she was in. I said my name is Joseph. She said Joseph. We sat there a while. The broth got cold in her lap. She picked up the spoon. She started to eat.

[00:15:45]I watched her eat and tried to look like I was not watching her eat. When the bowl was empty, she set it down on the flat stone next to the mound. Then she lay back down on her side with her hand on the mound and she closed her eyes.

[00:16:00]But she had eaten the whole bowl, and she had given me her name. I will not pretend the days that followed were quick. They were not. A thing that has come undone takes longer to come back together than it took to come apart. She would speak a little, then she would go quiet for two days. She would sit up and brush her hair with her fingers. Then she would lie back down and stare at nothing. I came every day. I did not stop coming. I came in the gray dawn and I went home in the dusk. My sister-in-law sent food. My older nephew began to ride out with me partway and to stop on the ridge so that the woman would see only me come down. He understood without being told. Sometimes my nephew brought back a deer for the family while I sat with her. He did the hunting I should have been doing. He never complained about it. He had been my brother's son. He was a quiet boy. I would tell you his name, but it would mean nothing to you. He is dead now anyway of a long sickness 20 years gone.

[00:17:03]A moon or so in. I was not counting anymore. Ruth told me about the child.

[00:17:08]We were sitting on either side of the small mound. She was on the side she always sat on. I was on the other. The day was hot. The wind was dry. The grass smelled like grass burned in an oven, which is what grass smells like in late summer on the plains. She put her hand on the mound and she said his name was Samuel. He was four. He liked horses.

[00:17:30]The fever took him in two days.

[00:17:33][clears throat] We had buried him in the morning before her brother had to drive the wagon on with the others. She said her brother, the boy on the wagon, was 16 and he was the only family she had left and he was going to her aunt in California and she had told him to go because he was a boy and he needed to go on and live. She had told him she would catch up. She had not meant to catch up. Shh. She said this without any tears now. She had cried herself empty. Her voice was a flat, dry voice. She said her husband had died of a different fever 5 months before on the trail back in Kansas and she had buried him there and gone on because she had Samuel and Samuel needed to go to the aunt and then Samuel had gone too. She said I had nothing else to do but lie down here with him. I said nothing for a long time. Then I said in English because she had given me English and that was the language we had. He is here. You are here. He knows you stayed.

[00:18:34]She looked at me when I said that. I said he was not alone. She put her face down in her hands and she cried. And this time it was not crying that came from the same well as before. It came from somewhere else. It came from a place that was alive. I sat where I was.

[00:18:51]I did not go to her. I did not put a hand on her. I sat with her the way I had been sitting with her for 30ome days. and I let her cry until she was finished. When she stopped, she wiped her face with the heel of her hand and she looked at me across the small mound and she said, "Thank you." I said, "You are welcome, Ruth." She could not stay in the hollow. I had known that for a long time. The summer was burning out.

[00:19:19]The cottonwoods were turning. In a moon the cold would come down off the high country and there would be frost in the grass and after that the snow and a woman lying in a hollow on the plains and snow is a woman who does not see spring. I told her this on a day in early autumn.

[00:19:37]I told her in pieces of English and pieces of sign and pieces of the few Lakota words I had given her over the weeks. I told her the cold would come and she could not be here when it did. I told her I had a band to the north along a creek where there was wood for the winter and meet we would put up against the snow. I told her she could come and stay in my sister-in-law's lodge until the spring and after that she could go go where she wanted to go. I told her I would build a small lodge for for her if she wanted to be alone.

[00:20:11]I told her my band would not harm her. I told her she could come back to the hollow in the spring whenever she wanted. The mound would not go anywhere.

[00:20:20]I would see to it that no one disturbed it. I would put a marker. She would know. She listened. She did not say anything at first. Then she said, "I cannot leave him." I said, "You are not leaving him. You are coming back. You are going through one winter. He is here. He will be here when you come back." She looked at the mound for a long time. She put her hand on it. Then she looked at me. Her eyes had a question in them. And the question was not whether to come with me. The question was whether I was a real thing, whether the man who had been sitting at the side of her grief for 30ome days was a real man with a real lodge with a real band of people would do what he said he would do and not vanish like a thing dreamed in a hard sleep. I held her look. I let her see me. I did not nod. I did not speak. I let her look until she had her answer. she said. All right. I built a marker for the mound that afternoon. I made it of four good cottonwood branches lashed together to stand above the small pile of stones so that any rider coming through would see something there and ride around. I cut a piece of leather from my belt and tied it to the top so the wind would move it and it would be seen from far off. Helped me with the last lashing.

[00:21:41]Her hands were shaking, but she held the cord. She had not done a thing with her hands besides put them on the mound for a very long time. Her fingers had got soft and pale. When she pulled the cord tight, she made a small sound under her breath like a person who has not used a muscle in a season and is finding it still.

[00:22:03]The next morning we left, she rode behind me on my horse with her arms around my waist. She was lighter than a child. She did not cry. She did not look back. I felt the small ridge of her cheekbone against my shoulder blade for the first hour of riding. And then I felt nothing because she had fallen asleep against my back. And I rode with my hand, reaching back to keep her from sliding off. And the horse walked under us slow and even, and we went home. I will tell you what I expected and what I got, because they were not the same. I expected my band to be cautious of her, and they were. I expected my older nephew to be the first to soften, and he was. He had been riding out with me for weeks, and he had seen her at a distance, and he had a way about him that drew animals and children and broken things, and within 4 days, she would let him sit on the same side of the cook fire as her, which was 4 days sooner than she would let any other man do that. What I did not expect was that within a moon she would be sitting beside my sister-in-law in the smoke of her cook fire learning how to scrape a hide and that within two moon she would be telling the small children's stories in broken lot and they would be laughing at her words and that my sister-in-law would come to me one evening and say Joseph she used my trade name because Ruth used my trade name and the whole camp had started to by And Joseph, this woman of yours is a good woman and she works hard and she does not whine and her hands are getting strong and I am keeping her. I said she is not mine. My sister-in-law looked at me. She was older than me by 10 years. She She had been my brother's wife and after my brother died, she had raised her sons in my lodge for two winters until she married my brother's old friend who had also lost his wife in the bad winter.

[00:24:03]She had a face like a flat stone with a smile somewhere inside it that did not come out often. She said, "She is not yours yet." I did not answer her. That winter was a hard one. The buffalo had moved farther than usual, and we ate thin. Ate the same as the rest of us, which was not enough, and she did not complain. She wore the clothes my sister-in-law had given her, the deerkin dress, the leggings, the moccasins my sister-in-law's daughter had sewn for her, and she wore them like a woman who had chosen them. She braided her hair.

[00:24:38]She learned the words. By mid-inter, she could tell a small story in our language well enough that the old women laughed at the right places, even if she got the small words wrong. The children of the camp followed her around like a string of gosslings. She was not anyone's mother. She was the woman who let them lean against her while she worked. And that is not nothing to a child. Halfway through that winter, in the worst of the cold moon, a sickness ran through three lodges. It started with pile child and my younger sister's family, a boy of six, and it down the boy and then his mother and then his aunt. Within 4 days, the boy was very bad. He could not keep water down. My younger sister had not slept for two nights and was past tears and past anger and had reached the place where a person stops being a person and becomes a thing that holds vigil. Ruth went to that lodge. I did not send her.

[00:25:38]She went, she sat down beside my younger sister and took the wet cloth out of her hand and started doing the cool cloth work on the boy's forehead. and she did not stop for a day and a night. The boy lived. I do not know if it was Ruth's hands that did it, or my younger sisters, the medicine man's, or just that the sickness was not for that boy that winter. But Ruth had sat with that boy. She had sat with him the way I had sat with her. She had used what I had given her, and she had given it back to someone else. After that, the women of the camp did not look at her sideways anymore. After that, she was one of us, even if her hair was still pale and her eyes were still gray. She lived in my sister-in-law's lodge for the whole winter. She did not come to mine. I did not ask her to. I would not have asked her to. That was not the way of it. In the spring, when the grass came up and the creek ran high and the wagon started moving west on the trail again, I took her down to the hollow, I had said I would, and I did. We rode together. The marker was still up. The stones were where she had left them. She knelt beside the mound for a long time. She did not cry. She put her hand on the flat stone. She had moved closer to the head all those moons ago. She said, "Hello, my boy." She said, "I came back.

[00:27:03]I told you I would." She told him about the winter. She told him about the children of the camp. She told him she had helped a boy live who had been sick like him. She told him she had thought of him every day. She told him she would come back again. I sat on a stone about 10 paces away. I had sat for so long that the stone had a hollow in it that fit me. I let her have her time. When she was finished, she came over to where I was sitting. She stood in front of me.

[00:27:32]She said, "I would like to go back to the camp now. I would like to stay in the camp. I do not want to go to California." I said, "All right." She said, "I will come back here when I need to." I said, "Yes." She said, "I want to come back here with you." I said, "Yes."

[00:27:49]She nodded. She had said what she wanted to say. We rode back to the camp. I will tell you about one bad night because I want you to know that it was not a smooth thing. A few moons into the summer after our return, when the days were long and hot, and the camp was alive, with children and dogs and old men sitting in the shade complaining about the heat, woke in the night, and walked out of my sister-in-law's lodge with nothing but the dress she slept in, and no moccasins.

[00:28:19]She walked south the way to the hollow.

[00:28:22]It was about a day and a half on a horse. on foot. It would have been four days if she had made it, which she would not have because the country between us and the hollow had wolves and rough water and a stretch of bad grass where a person can lose lose herself and walk in a circle for a day. A boy saw her go. He was one of the boys who stood the night watch for the horses. He came and woke me. I rode out after her. I caught her up about 3 mi south of the camp. She was walking in the dark, barefoot, dress catching on the prairie thistle and her feet bleeding. The moon was a quarter moon and gave just enough light to see her shape against the grass. I rode up alongside her and I did not say anything. I rode at her pace. I let the horse walk slow beside her. After a while, she said without looking at me. I am sorry, I said. Do not be sorry, she said. I had a dream about him. I had to go. I said I will take you tomorrow. We will go together. She stopped walking.

[00:29:26]She stood in the grass in her bare feet.

[00:29:28]Her shoulders were shaking. She turned to me and she said, "Why are you so good to me?" I had not expected the question.

[00:29:36]I had not prepared an answer. I said, "Because you are mine." I said it before I knew I was going to say it. It came out of me like a thing that had been waiting at the back of my throat for a long time and had finally pushed past. I did not move. The horse stood still under me. Ruth stood in the grass. The wind moved through the grass and the grass made the long whispering sound it makes at night. And we both heard it and neither of us spoke. She said, "I want to be yours." I got off the horse. I walked to her. I picked her up. She still weighed almost nothing. And I set her on the horse and I got up behind her and I put my arms around her to hold the res. and we rode back to the camp like that her with her sitting in front of me and leaning her head back against my shoulder and her feet bleeding into my horse's flank. We came into the camp at dawn. My sister-in-law was up. She looked at us coming in. She did not say anything. She held the horse's bridal while I got down and lifted Ruth down.

[00:30:40]She looked at Ruth's bleeding feet. She said, "Come into the lodge. I will wash them." Ruth said, "I am going to Joseph's lodge." My sister-in-law looked at me. Her face had no expression on it at all. In her eyes was the small inside smile I have already told you about. She said, "I will bring water there." That is how Ruth came into my lodge. A summer and another winter and another summer went by. I will not give you all of those days because they were the days that make up a life and they cannot be told. We ate. We worked. The buffalo came back that next winter, and we ate well. Ruth learned more of our language, and I learned more of her English, and we made a third language between the two of us, of which only we knew the words.

[00:31:29]She lost the gauntness in her face. She gained back some of the weight she had lost. Her hair grew long. She wore a single braid in the way of our women.

[00:31:39]The children of the camp called her Ruth, and the old women called her something else, a name they had given her quietly, which I will not say here because it is hers. We built our own lodge in the second autumn. It was not a big one. I had wanted a bigger one, but she had said, "No, this is enough. This is the right size for two." So, we built it the size, she said. She painted a small marking inside the door. Not a Lakota marking, not a marking she had been taught by my sister-in-law, but a marking of her own. Four small lines like the cottonwood branches I had lashed into a roof over her in the rain.

[00:32:18]She did not explain it to me. She did not need to. She tended the mound in the hollow with me twice a year in early spring and in late autumn. She kept the marker straight. She brought small things, a flower, a flat shining stone from the creek. first cottonwood leaf that fallen and laid them by the head of the mound. She did not cry there anymore. She sat. She talked to her boy.

[00:32:43]I sat on my stone about 10 paces away.

[00:32:46]After the first year, she started bringing me into the talking. She would say, "My boy, Joseph brought you a present today." And she would lay something down, a chip of red stone, a piece of bone he had carved for her, small clay thing. And she would tell the boy I had carved it or chipped it or made it. The boy was a dead boy. I did not feel foolish about it. The dead listen. My people know this. The white people know this too if they let themselves.

[00:33:16]In the second autumn after she came to my lodge, the white men came. There were four of them. They rode into our camp in the middle of the morning on tall horses with a man in a black coat in the lead who held up his hand to show he was not armed. Behind him were three soldiers in blue uniforms with rifles across their saddles. I went out to meet them faith with my older nephew on one side of me and two other men of my band on the other. We had not been at war with the whites for some time. We had a peace at the fort. I expected this was about the peace. The man in the black coat asked for me by my Lakota name which surprised me. He had been talking to people somewhere. He said he was a missionary out of the fort and he had come about a white woman who was reported to be living in my camp. He said he had been informed by a man in California. And he gave a name that was the name of Ruth's brother, the boy from the wagon, that his sister had been left on the trail two summers back and was thought to be with my band. He said he had come to take her home. I did not answer him for a moment. I looked at him. He was a young man, 30 or thereabouts. He had a soft face and serious eyes. He had ridden a long way to come and get her and he believed he was doing a right thing. I will give him that. I said she is not held here. She has been with my people of her own choosing. She has tended the grave of her son in this country for two summers. If she wishes to go with you, you will take her. If she does not, you will not. He said, I would like to speak with her. I said, you will speak with her. I sent one of the men of my band to my lodge to fetch Ruth. Ruth came out. She was wearing the deerkin dress and her hair was in the single braid and she was carrying our youngest niece on her hip. The youngest of my sister-in-law's grandchildren, a girl about 2 years old. She walked across the camp. She stopped about 10 paces from the man in the black coat.

[00:35:24]She did not put the child down. The man in the black coat said, "Madam," and her name, her old name, which was Ruth Howerin. He said, "Madame Howerin, I have come from your brother. He is well.

[00:35:37]He is in California. He has been looking for you for for 2 years. He has asked me to bring you home." Looked at him a long time. Then she said, "In English," and the English came out of her a little stiff because she had not used much of it for a while. Please tell my brother that I am alive and that I am well and that I am thankful for him and that he should not look for me anymore. I am at home. The man in the black coat said, "Madam, are you here of your own free will?" Ruth said, "I am." The man in the black coat said, "Madam, if you wished to leave with us today, this man could not stop you. There are soldiers with me. You can leave today." Ruth said, "I do not wish to leave." The man in the black coat said, "Are you certain?" Ruth said, "I am certisman certain. I am the wife of this man. My son is buried in this country. My people are these people. Please tell my brother. Tell him I have a good life. Tell him I am loved." She said it just like that.

[00:36:37]Loved. The word landed in me like a stone dropped into a deep well. You do not hear it land for a long time, and then when you do, you feel the whole well of you ring. The man in the black coat looked at me. I looked back at him.

[00:36:52]I did not say anything. I did not need to. He took off his hat. He nodded to Ruth. He said, "Madam, I will tell him, God keep you." He turned his horse. He and the soldiers rode out of the camp the way they had come. They did not come back. When they were gone, Ruth set the child down. The child ran off to find her mother. Ruth walked across the dust of the camp to where I stood and she stood in front of me. Her face was wet.

[00:37:20]She had been crying without showing it.

[00:37:22]The way a person learns to cry in a country where you cannot always afford to. She said in my language. I should have told them in your tongue. They would not have understood but you would have. I said in her tongue. I understood Ruth. She said you are why I lived. I want you to know that when I was at the mound and you came and you sat and you did not say anything and you did not leave, you were why I lived. You did not pull me up. You sat down beside me. You waited for me to get up. I would not have got up for anyone else. I would have died down there. You gave me a reason. I did not say anything. I did not need to. She put both her hands on the front of my shirt and pause. She laid her forehead against my chest and she stood like that. Purp. And I put my hand on the back of her head and I held her there and the camp went on around us. The smoke and the dogs and the children and the old women laughing somewhere about something and we stood in the middle of it like a stone in a stream and the day moved around us. I am an old man now. Ruth is not so old as me. She is not young. Our hair is gray, both of us. We have a lodge of our own, and we have a small herd of horses. And we have a brother's son who calls us mother and father because his own mother died of a sickness when he was three, and we took him in. He is 16 now, the age her brother was on the wagon. And he is a quiet boy with my hands and her gray eyes. Though there is no blood between him and either of us, the blood went somewhere else. The boy came to us anyway. Ruth stills the hao every spring and every autumn. I still go with her, sit on my stone about 10 paces away. The mound is small intended. The marker has been replaced twice. The flat stone is in its place, puts her hand on it, and she speaks to her boy. She tells him about our boy. She tells him about the horses. She tells him about me. I hear my name come up sometimes in her telling. and I look down at my own hands and I do not say anything. When she is finished, she comes over to where I am sitting. She puts her hand on my shoulder. She stands there a moment.

[00:39:41]Then she helps me up. My knees are not what they were and [clears throat] we ride home together. She rides her own horse now. She has ridden her own horse for many years. But when the day is long and the wind is cold and we are climbing back up out of the hollow toward thee, she rides up beside me and she puts her hand on my arm and we ride that way for a stretch. Her hand on my arm and the horses walking close. That is the picture I will leave you with. Two horses on a ridge in the late evening of the year. A woman with her hand on the arm of the man she chose. a man riding home with the woman who chose him and a small mound of stones in a hollow behind them that they will come back to in the spring. I sat with her. That is all I did. I sat with her and I did not leave.

[00:40:31]And she gave me the rest of my