One day, while I was examining my camera to see if it’d been damaged in the fighting, I discovered an unbroken glass-plate negative inside. I almost threw it away. Once a wet plate dries, it’s worthless; and any image that might have been laid down on the silver is gone. But something made me develop it. I realize it’s beyond the realm of science and possibility, but the negative bore the image of Crazy Horse. It was as wonderful a find as the image of the dead Christ’s face on the Shroud of Turin, seen for the first time since His crucifixion, when it was photographed three years ago. Who can say how His face was imprinted on that ancient rag? Who can say how — whether by happenstance or the mysterious workings of fate — the image of Crazy Horse came to be on my negative? Unless.
“Unless?”
The plate was exposed by the radiance of his bones — the fat light blooming from Crazy Horse at the moment of his ecstasy.
“You read too many books of the wrong kind. What’s that you’re reading now?”
From the Earth to the Moon.
“Jules Verne again! I tell you, Stephen, he’ll drive you crazy with his fantastic notions. He’s the worse kind of author for an impressionable mind like yours. A photograph of a dead Indian chief taken by his bones! Radio, isotopes — whatever do they mean?”
Words from the future, Jay, carried backward down the stream of time in Crazy Horse’s dreams, like gold in a sluice — no, not gold, for his dreams were too ominous to be objects of desire; say, rather, that I picked them up from the gravel, like broken bits of shell. I almost knew their meaning. Almost. Let’s say I knew it the way a diviner knows hidden water by his rod: He feels it and — in his heart — knows it.
“I’ve never heard such lunacy!”
I’ve kept the secret of Crazy Horse’s picture to myself for more than twenty years. I’m only safe in telling you now because, not long ago, I destroyed the plate.
“Why would you do such a thing?”
Are you laughing up your sleeve at me, Jay?
“Not at all! I’ve always admired you as a storyteller. Nobody can beat you and Mark Twain for exaggeration and invention. It’s the only reason I’ve stayed your friend for as long as I have.”
You don’t believe a word of what I’ve been telling you.
“I wouldn’t say that, Stephen. I’m sure you’ve told a few truths, only I’d need a rocker box to separate them from the gravel of outrageous fabrications. What possessed you to spoil the negative of that Indian, if it was worth so much?”
Something tells me I’ve come to the end of my thread. The thread that sewed my life in whipstitch to Whitman, Grant, Lincoln, Durant, Jackson, Custer, Crazy Horse. I swore to him — took an oath the last time he came to me in my sleep — never to let another person see his face. In his life, he had dreamed himself onto the other side of our world — the visible one, which he knew, in his wisdom, is only shadows. It was his great gift to sift from the illusory Phantoscope of images what is real. During the year of my headaches, he showed me it; and, what’s more, he showed me the future from the vantage of the afterlife. He was a shaman, after all, and a most powerful personality — a seer, like Sitting Bull. Seers believe that the future already exists, and maybe they’re right. How else do you explain prognostications and the glimpses of it that come to clairvoyants and oracles? Crazy Horse saw almost clear to the end, and so did I, although I recollect only a fraction of what he revealed to me in dreams — his dreams, which were like a lens trained on what will happen next. what’s already happened on the other side, as though he’d been granted a fabulous and frightening look at an encyclopedia published centuries hence.
It was harrowing for me — that year of visions. I used to wear his medicine bundle to bed, afraid I’d disappear into the future or wake up insane or not wake up at all. I wish I’d never seen what lies waiting for us. Was it for this that Spotswood told me to wait? But a vision cannot be refused or denied.
“What did you see that was so terrible, Stephen?”
I’ll tell you what I remember. But first, I want to tell you about the Mexican girl I found outside Lamy. I was a mail clerk for the Santa Fe Railroad at the time. This was in 1879. I gave up the railroad — that is to say, I gave up the need to be in motion, which obsessed me my whole life — and opened the studio when I settled here in Lincoln in ’82. I contented myself with making portraits of “stiffs,” reading in no particular order books borrowed from the library, going to concerts and lectures on the Pygmies and the Hottentots, illustrated with magic lantern slides. It’s a sickness in some people, a kind of extreme restlessness: the wish to be always moving. It must be what drives so many millions to pack up and go west. I was fed up with it. Ever read anything about such a disease in your medical books?
“Never. Seems a subject more in line with the authors you favor. Perhaps in the morbid imaginations of Poe or Hoffmann you might find such a notion. A dose of salts would have done them both good. And you, too.”
I never put much stock in salt.
“If you’re ribbing me about my shares in Lincoln’s salt wells, you needn’t bother.”
I don’t mean to smile, Jay.
“If you’d told me you were in contact with a fortune-teller, I wouldn’t have taken a bath. Damn it, you remember the surveyor’s report: ‘There is no question of the vast wealth that will someday be derived from this region.’ Lincoln salt was supposed to be finer and more plentiful than Syracuse’s!”
Whiskey need refreshing?
“I won’t say no. You shouldn’t be drinking, Stephen. Not with your heart.”
Just half a jigger.
“You’ve got the heart of a man twice your age.”
That would make me a hundred and six. And more than likely dead.
“My point exactly. But I won’t lecture you.”
I’ve learned that the most determined hearts can be undone by a small thing. It might as well be a shot of bourbon as a bullet.
“Well, aren’t you going to tell me about the Mexican kid?”
Sorry, I seemed to have jumped the track. In those days, it was my habit to explore the countryside whenever we were stopped for any length of time. So when the train put into Lamy — a fly speck on the map — to repair the boiler, I hired a mule and went out onto the desert to take pictures. You’ve never been in New Mexico, have you, Jay?
“I’ve never in my life been south of Kansas City.”
The desert’s worth seeing.
“So I’ve been told.”
In the desert, there’s a drought of water, and there’s also a dearth of light when the sun is swallowed by piling clouds and the thorn trees, the cactus, the sedge grass are quenched. They appear to die the instant the light goes out of them, but although they wither, turning brown and brittle, they’re only dormant, because they hold within themselves water and also light — maybe no more than a symbol’s worth of both, but enough. And when the rain comes, the trees, bushes, and grass vivify; and when the dark clouds go, they shed their radiance once again. Jackson used to say that what the photograph can do better than the human eye or an artist’s hand is to render the austerity of the world, which is the place to look for the world’s purpose and meaning. And I’ve found no greater austerity than in the desert.
“The girl, Stephen.”
I found her sitting by the body of a dead Mexican. She was cried out and nearly dead herself with thirst. The man — he was her father — had been shot through the chest. His serape was stained with the rust of dried blood, and his big mustache was stiff with it. She looked to be four or five years old. I gave her water and a little food, and when she could speak, she told me two men had shot her father and taken his horse and saddlebag. My Spanish isn’t the best, and when a spate of Mexican would bubble up from her, I couldn’t follow. From what I was able to understand, her mother had died of fever the day before, and her father had been taking her to stay with an aunt. I couldn’t discover where the aunt lived; I suppose the girl didn’t know herself. I climbed to the top of a hill bristling with acacia, but I could see nothing except more desert. So I thought it was best to take the girl, whose name was Carmelita, back with me to Lamy.