The Spirit

The Indian had tried for weeks to remember his grandfather. His memory had been shattered by certain events the previous year, events which doctors in white robes in an Army hospital had tried to neutralize. The events themselves lived under his mind as dreams. Down there somewhere was his grandfather, too, and the stories he had told the boy during long winter afternoons.

Under the twin attacks of discomfort and sun, the Indian tried as he had tried so many times to put his memory chains together. But they lay apart, separated by bloody gaps. Here he saw a piece of hospital sheet, there a fragment of a troop carrier. And further over there was his grandfather sitting before an orange fire, rocking in his chair and talking to him. He was trying to say something, but no words came out of his mouth.

The sun climbed higher.

The Indian wondered if he was out of his own time. Perhaps the spirits had been chased away by automobiles and machinery. But he did not really believe that. He knew they lived. He knew they had lived long before the white man came into the land. They had lived long before that man was nailed to a cross. They still lived.

On the third day, flies circled the Indian’s head, attracted by the possibility of death. The Indian did not swat them. He had been drenched by a passing thunderstorm, and now it was a race between enlightenment and death by exhaustion. His mouth had dried and his tongue was swelling with thirst. The Montana valley folded upon itself and spun around. He was in a perpetual daze, in which time had slowed down and he was no longer bound to reality. His body had begun to assume the shape of the ground on which he lay. A hornet landed on his exposed skin and sank its stinger in without acknowledging him. Doomed by the loss of its single weapon, the hornet staggered back into flight.

The Indian wondered if his own existence were as futile as the hornet’s. At the instant of defiance, it had killed itself.

In the woods above he heard the whistle of a marmot. He waited for it to come and speak to him. He waited as the sun slid over the sky and darkened the valley. The Indian knew he would not see it come up again unless his spirit came. He was too weak to wave at the flies now.

A velvet shroud settled over his eyes, blocking the sky. He thought about the sun. He cried for it. But all he saw was the hot orange glow through his eyelids. The sun’s heat was heavy, like earth being piled on top of him. Soon the Indian was unaware of even that.