Sunday

It was a good day to die. Those were the words of the great warrior Crazy Horse as he and other warriors of the mighty Lakota Nation faced Custer at the Battle of the Greasy Grass, called by outsiders the Battle of Little Bighorn or Custer’s Last Stand. He’d read that in a book somewhere and those words had remained in his memory even now. It had been the first and last time that Custer had fought against warriors. His legend as a great man being built on the bodies of dead women, old men and children. Of course, the papers of the day hadn’t reported that or the atrocities carried out against the helpless, unarmed and ailing, and had instead built a legend out of him.

He closed his eyes imaging the bleak atmosphere on that long ago day. The Lakota were fighting not only to protect their women, old ones and children, but for their very existence. They’d been hunted down and now, finally the opportunity had come to stand face-to-face in battle against him.

It had happened on a Sunday morning in June.

The chirping of a cricket interrupted his thoughts. He took an exaggerated drag from his cigarette and watched the smoke make odd twisted and curls in the moonlit room with shadows that crossed the floor like snakes. The chimes of a nearby church bell marked the hour as he sat back still lost in history.

After the battle, many of the Lakota women had mutilated the corpses of the 7th Calvary soldiers. No doubt it was revenge for what had occurred to so many of their sisters, mothers and daughters who had been mutilated while alive by many of these same men who had made an odd game of playing catch with the amputated breasts of Native women. Custer’s body was spared this same because of his past association with the Cheyenne during the Civil War. Instead, they had removed only one of his fingers and poked his eardrums with sewing awls, in hopes that it would help “to improve his hearing” in the next life.

He smirked as he recounted that particular event, even though he knew the Lakota’s victory was to be short-lived and that it would all end years later with many of them dead and frozen at Wounded Knee.

“Still they knew they had beaten him,” he said to his wood-paneled walls. He put his hands to his ears as the sounds of wailing women crying over dead warriors and children filled his consciousness. But he could still hear their moaning and shrieking.

He opened his mouth thinking that he could out scream and finally silence them, but their voices rose above his until his broke and dissolved into a croaking hush. Tears streamed down his grizzled cheeks as he squeezed his eyes shut. Spinning fractals circle danced inside his closed eyelids temporarily calming his distraught mind. The voices faded but remained like a distant echo as he slowly opened his eyes. He had heard them before. He knew the names and faces that belonged to each one. They were voices of history, his history and theirs. They had come like they had always come, to remind him of his past and their mutual destruction, and how like those Native American women on that long ago Sunday, would teach him how to finally listen.

The police had interrogated him, but been forced to release him because there wasn’t enough evidence and he had won his own short-lived victory. Like the Lakota he had learned to live on the run, journeying from one city to another, from one life to another, until finally he come to this moment.

Curiosity had led him to study about the Lakota. Their history had been an escape from the moments when his other self had overtaken him and forced him from being a mere troublemaker into someone who terrorized women and young girls. Even as he’d watched the eyes of his victims turn from tender expectations brought by his handsome smile, into ever-widening pleading orbs, he’d felt nothing. It wasn’t until he’d learned about the horrors visited on Lakota women and girls from over one hundred years ago that he’d begun to summon up the last dredges of his own humanity. It wasn’t until then that he’d heard the voices which came and chased him from city to city and reckoning to reckoning. It wasn’t until then that he’d realized that death can come in bitter stages or suddenly with the quick tightening of a noose.

They had brought out the last best bit of him. These warriors and their warrior women had forced him to finally listen to the voices he had silenced. He stood precariously on a stool in the middle of his wood-paneled room. Before kicking it from under him, he saw a can of canned corn sitting on his kitchen self.

“The Lakota would have called it maize,” he said to the stillness of his room.

Yes, it was a good day to die.