Where the Lost Wander(27)

The three old men sit beside it in their buffalo robes, sleepily peering at the coals. They don’t have shaved pates or bristled forelocks in the old Pawnee way. Their hair is long and white, their hoary heads almost identical—their faces too—and I can see why they are simply called the brothers, with no distinction between them.

I sink down across from them, waiting silently for them to acknowledge me. Charlie sits beside me, his thin legs folded, his hands loose at his sides, but I am not fooled. This is a first for him too. After an interminable silence, I state my purpose, eager to be gone.

“Captain Dempsey wants you to move north of the Platte.” There. I have done my duty.

The old men mutter, puffing away with bowed backs and bent heads. I don’t think they have heard me. I don’t really care. I begin to rise, but the brothers lift their heads in affront.

“And how long before they ask us to move again? Does Dempsey speak for all the whites? Does he speak for the Sioux or the Cheyenne?” one asks, his trembling Pawnee words pricking my conscience.

“Ka?ki?’,” I answer. No.

“Do you think we should move? Did your people move?” the same brother asks.

I think of my mother’s village. Missouri is no longer the land of Pawnee. I’m not sure it ever was, though my Pawnee grandmother told me the Pawnee nation spread from sea to sea when her great-grandfather hunted the buffalo. I don’t know if that is true or if it was simply the wistful myth of a dying people. But Missouri is no longer the home of the Shawnee or the Potawatomi either. It belongs to others now and is dotted with homes made of brick and stone. The Pawnee don’t migrate like the Sioux. The Pawnee grow corn and build lodges from the earth.

“There are not many Pawnee in Missouri,” I say.

“Soon there will not be many Pawnee anywhere,” another brother replies. “Dempsey wants us to leave so he does not have to deal with us. We are a nuisance to him. But if we move, we will never stop moving, and we were here first.”

I have no doubt that what he says is true, and I have no response.

“Who are your people?” the last brother asks me.

It is a question I have never been able to answer, and it is the question everyone eventually asks. “My father is a Lowry. My mother was Pawnee. I am . . . both. Pítku ásu’.” I shrug, turning my palms up.

“Pítku ásu’,” the brothers murmur, nodding their heads as if it makes complete sense, and they fall silent again. I think they have fallen asleep, and Charlie wriggles beside me.

“What should I tell Captain Dempsey?” I ask. “I will tell him whatever you wish me to say.”

They all begin speaking at once, mumbling over the top of one another, and I don’t know who says what.

“Tell him the Kanzas are below us. The Sioux above. Cheyenne too.”

“They steal from us. We steal from them. We understand each other. But we don’t understand the whites.”

“They trample on the sacred burial grounds of our ancestors. The wagons go through—we see the tracks of their wheels.”

“One man makes a promise, we sign a treaty, and another man breaks it.”

Their anger is palpable, and they glower at me as if I am to blame. I am grateful I am speaking to old men. I suspect Dog Tooth and his war chiefs would run me out. Or run me through.

“You tell him we will stay right here,” a brother says.

“Let him fight the Sioux with his cannon. We do not want to fight them,” another adds.

“I will tell him,” I say, but I know it will do no good. Someone will visit the village again, asking the brothers to go, and they won’t take no for an answer. I tell them that a wagonload of corn and flour will arrive in their village, a gift from Captain Dempsey, but this time when I rise, they don’t look up at me, and Charlie follows me out. When I step from the big lodge, my eyes adjusting to the light, I see that the village has repopulated itself as though the old men and the smoke from their fire have called their people home. The corn has been delivered from Fort Kearny, the flour too, and the women are unloading it; they glance up at me in suspicion and pause in their work.

In Pawnee, I ask them what else they need. Their eyes widen with surprise, the typical response when I speak the language. But they scoff.

“Are you going to get it for us, half man?” one woman says.

Half man. It is a new twist on the more common half breed. I was run out of my mother’s village enough to know that I am no more welcome among the Indians than I am among people like Lawrence Caldwell. It was a stupid thing to say. I do not have the power to grant them anything or give them what they need.

Charlie tugs on my arm. “Can you find your way back to the fort, Mr. Lowry? Or would you like me to run with you?”

“I can get back, Charlie.”

He claps my shoulder, his eyes sober. “Thank you for letting me ride your horse. It was a good day. I hope I will see you again.”

I nod. “I would like that.”

“And I hope you find your way,” Charlie adds.

It is not until the village is behind me, the prairie and the Platte stretched before me, that I wonder if perhaps Charlie wasn’t talking about returning to the fort.



I report back to Captain Dempsey, who doesn’t seem surprised by the response but sighs and makes a notation in his ledger, like he is keeping a record of his attempts at peaceful removal. Then I write a letter to my father and another to Jennie and post them with a trapper who says he’ll take them to St. Joe. I don’t know why I write two—I assume they will share them—but with my father I can never be sure, and I do not speak to them in the same way. To my father I report the condition of the mules and Captain Dempsey’s reaction to their quality, size, and overall demeanor. I also tell him Captain Dempsey says good, amenable breeding jacks are in great demand and that I will be able to sell stud services at every fort and trading post from here to California. Pott and Kettle are mine, though the contract for the mules was my father’s. I don’t tell him the particulars of the deal, only that the full contract payment will be made to his account in St. Joe. Then I tell him I’m not coming home.