Welcome To The Bullpen
American Money
Ray Busler
The women must think I am deaf, or a child. I hear then say my granddaughter is to marry a white man. When the pain goes away, I will rise and kill them both. Better for her to be dead, and it is a long time since I killed a white man.
The French priest comes by every day now. He brings medicine. He reads from the black book, and I sleep. I do not think I ask for his medicine, but I am no longer sure.
I was a man once. Now my belly grows like a woman with child. I travail like a woman. I lie here listening for the wagon that brings the priest and the medicine.
A guest, Crooked Nose, has come from Ft. McLeod. He was just a boy when his father and I rode with the Lakota. Now his legs trouble him and he walks with a long stick. All the way from Ft. McLeod with his long stick. This will end soon. He would not have come otherwise.
“Can you see?” Crooked Nose raised the lamp wick until it smoked, and then lowered it a little. He pulled a tobacco sack from his vest pocket and emptied it into my hand.
“What is this? What have you given me?”
“A piece of money, but not King's money, not from Canada. See it is American money, new money, a new thing.”
There was a buffalo. I had not seen a buffalo in many summers. “Tatanka, in your father’s time they covered the Earth, the dust of the herds put out the sun.”
“Yes, yes I know all this. The buffalo is good medicine, but there is better, turn the money over. Tell me what you think.”
“I think it is one of the People, an Indian.”
“Look closer at this Indian.”
”It cannot be.”
“Look again, and tell me that!” Crooked Nose ordered.
The man on the coin looked older than I remembered. His fierceness vanished into stiff dignity, like those reservation Indians who stayed in America and posed for any photographer who offered a drink of whiskey, but it was him. I was certain it was him. “Two Moons. This Indian on their money is Two Moons.”
A grin broke across Crooked Nose’s face and he laughed. He held my hand and laughed until I forgot the fire in my belly. I joined him, and I was, for this moment, once more a young man. I felt summer heat. I heard blood singing in my ears, and a taste of iron filled my mouth. All that once was then became now- it became today. I saw all as today, as happening now.
I saw the sloping hill above the Lakota village on the Greasy Grass River, the waters white men call the Little Big Horn. I saw horses, blue shirts, and arrows. I watched Two Moons raise his arm, bloody to the elbow, high above his head.
I saw the yellow hair in his hand.
“May I keep this?” I asked Crooked Nose.
He put the money back into the tobacco sack and tied it around my neck with a leather thong. It was a good sign that he came to see me. I no longer think I asked the French priest for his medicine. I do not think I have ever asked a white man for anything.
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