The Bones that Were Our People
by Cindy Prater
We saw the signs, small bits of thin black cloth, shards of gnawed gold-brown wood, lying on atop the sandy clay soil just as the prairie dog had unearthed them. Their burrow entrances, scattered thinly amongst the cemetery’s headstones and wooden crosses, were not round and symmetrical like the mounds beyond the sagging fence, out in open prairie. The fence appeared to be the dividing line between what could be thought of as the active and passive uses of land. There was an irony in following through with that thought for it would be hard to prove which side really was being used in an active sense, the prairie or the cemetery. A nearby prairie dog poked his nose out of his shaded entrance just long enough to catch site of the large intruders. Producing a squeak of disgust, he quickly disappeared.
This above-ground evidence of the prairie dog’s natural or to some un-natural desecration will linger. In an area where vandalism is seen frequently in spray-painted graffiti and plywood-covered broken windows, the cemeteries on the Rosebud Sioux Indian Reservation in south central South Dakota appear to be less affected. The handwritten note, under a heavy rock, ink washed by rain, is still there. The sun-faded silk flowers, rosary beads and teddy bear with its ribbon shredded by the wind, lie undisturbed on a loved one’s grave.
Burial sites are holy places, sacred places in this land and they have been since the time of the scaffold when the Lakota people, placed their dead not in the earth, but on wooden biers high above the ground to aid them in their ascent to the spirit world. It is commonly known that the threat of disease and incoming religious convention eliminated this practice. The final act upon the dead, much changed in direction, has not diminished the sacredness of the place or the holiness of the ground.
The sacredness is instinctive, a natural awareness of the existence of a spirit world. For some, this awareness may come from the stories, passed down from older to younger, of the spirits revealed in ways that can make the telling raise faint hairs on arms and legs, in the middle of the day. The ghost stories alone may serve as a deterrent from cemetery mischief yet they may embolden the few wanting to rebel and challenge the local belief system so as to distance themselves from what they believe is a quaint cultural identity.
We walk as carefully over a grave of a hundred years, the headstone of which is unreadable, the slightly depressed earth covered over with prairie, as we do the one which has no marker yet. The mounded earth is still high, the red carnations fragrant, and the leather leaf fern is uncurled. We are careful, out of reverence, not fear, knowing that these once living bodies deserve respect. For some, this respect after death is more than they received in life.
I feel an interaction here though we are separated by time, physical space and earth. As the prairie dog slips into the opening of his burrow I am reminded that there is more than what can be seen above ground, more than just rows of simple stone monuments and weathering wood crosses. Earth envelops wood that houses cloth that drapes the bones that were our people, and still are. These people bore children, spoke sermons, and served drinks in bars. They raised our beef, corrected papers, went to war, and rode bikes with us.
We linger over the graves of young friends and we speak aloud a few thoughts knowing that our memories have been blurred by time. These were the tragedies that thrust mortality at us like a gravel stone hitting a windshield. A friend and I rode bikes with Laura on the summer evening of her death. We stopped at the drive inn restaurant in Mission at the junction of Highways 18 and 83 to talk and get something to drink before heading home. She left heading east and we headed west. I was leaning my bike against a tree in the dusk of our front yard when I heard the sirens. I sat outside until it was fully dark, anticipating something but not wholly expecting it. The call came. Laura had been struck by a car on her way home.
I barely remember Craig. He was a friend of my older brother whose tiny shingle-sided house was across the dirt street from ours. Craig’s older half-brother was back to live, at least for a time, with he and his mother. My memories as a six-year-old are of watching the red and blue flashing lights out the window and hearing the lazy screen door that usually closed in its own time being forcefully shut with a snap. The purposeful thud of the heavy wood door and the turn of the bolt were next. I no longer remember the words that were used to tell me the awful news, but whatever they were, they couldn’t have had any more impact than the unusual act of my strong wide-shouldered father shutting and locking doors in the dusk of a warm summer evening. Craig and his mother had been murdered with a knife from their kitchen and the brother was gone.
=We show respect by how we step and what we say. It doesn’t feel right to let our voices intrude too loudly upon this natural stillness. We can’t alter the sounds that aren’t ours, the rumbling tractor and its plume of diesel exhaust on the nearby road or the occasional scolding of the prairie dogs. We feel we need to walk within hearing distance to speak to each other in low tones instead of shouting across the stillness. Even the wind, which is a constant here, today, causes only a gentle bend in the firmly anchored silk flowers and a slight ripple in the un-mowed native grasses. There are few tree branches for the wind to wail through except for a patchy cedar and plum brush windbreak and an occasional pine that looks misplaced, in this bare and ever so slight rise, miles from the canyons cut by the ancient flow of the Little White.
A large heavy locust rests on a flat stone. It is a blush-pink color that I have never seen. I point it out to my siblings and raise my foot to step on it, but my younger brother shakes his head and says gently, “Leave it be.” Despite its color and the fact that it is resting on someone’s stone like it is safe at home plate, to me it is still an insect that eats gardens. But I understand his unspoken reference for life in this place of death and let it alone.
A prairie dog barks shrilly in the distance and appears to have come out to roll in the dust. It is said that we began as dust and to that form we will return. I am content with returning to dust. It seems quite natural to return to the basic elements that constitute life. Not long ago we buried our mother. Her shiny casket, the color of canned chokecherry juice, draped with a folded star quilt in plum and lilac colors was elegant and fitting for a woman growing up between the Keya Paha and the Niobrara rivers and raising her children on the Rosebud. When her casket was finally closed it looked like a fortress. A fortress for the newly lifeless, providing the finest in protection when supplemented with its sturdy vault. A prairie dog could never gain entrance. Mom would like that. I don’t believe her casket will ever be dust. It’s not meant to. Uncle Lee, my dad’s brother, took a totally opposite view. He would have been no more bothered by a prairie dog in his casket than he was with the raccoons and the occasional skunk who took up residence under his four-room house southeast of the town of Rosebud.
Our hometown newspaper carried an article a few years ago about the destruction the rodent prairie dogs, carriers of disease, and yet beloved pets caused. A grainy black and white photo in the paper, displayed as best it could the cloth and shards of wood the rodent’s unearthed. Donations were sought to eradicate the pests and fill the sunken depressions left from their burrows. Before the first snow of the season came that year, the prairie dogs were thought to have been defeated. Surveying the cemetery now, the prairie dogs are back in force chattering like they’ve read my thoughts. They won. They have more holes than ever.
Gravel dust loosed by a fast-moving pick-up wafts over us and I can’t help but breathe in the chalky air. My unvoiced thoughts return to the spiritual. In a family of four children raised in one household, our thoughts on after-life issues are different, though mostly in subtle ways that we haven’t really discussed all that much. We all have expressed belief in the existence of a world beyond what we see, feel and know. I believe this is true of many, raised like we were, in such a spiritual place as the Rosebud. I personally believe that these lifeless bodies, separated from me only by a few feet of sandy earth have spirits that have flown to the creator and what is left from these bones and flesh will rise one day in perfection. I also know that my own body, through death, will join in some form with the earth and that the physical time I now try to grasp and hold on to will be no more.
Through an opening in a small mound of earth between flowers and the stone of a woman who died long before I was born, lies the tunnel that leads to a prairie dog’s den. Maybe this den, a womb in the earth, deep beneath my feet, is a cozy home sided with soft decaying wood. Maybe the prairie dog’s babies have a nest in its corner of velvety aged cloth. To me the thought is not detestable. Instead, I am strangely comforted. The prairie dog has in its own way linked two worlds. It is a link, but even more so an interaction, if you will, between the living and the dead.
C. L. Prater was born on the Yakama Indian Reservation in Washington State and grew up on the Rosebud Sioux Indian Reservation of South Dakota. She now lives in northeast Nebraska with her husband, children, and grandchildren. She teaches, writes, gardens, and dreams of a straw bale house off the grid.
From the Wayfarer archive. Autumn 2012.