The keys never stopped chattering in those months, and as Rose learned the code, she discovered what foolishness the army believed, fed to them by frightened white ranchers and townspeople who feared Indians whenever they saw more than two at a time. In their eyes a family with children became a raid, a potential massacre.
Rose could not enter most of the stores in Rushville if she wished it. She gave drunk Crockett a monthly list of goods and he purchased them for her, giving her the few coins left over as her remaining pay. She knew he cheated her.
By late summer, the number of dancers had doubled, and Big Foot, Short Bull, Kicking Bear, and Sitting Bull’s names appeared often in the telegraphs. A man named McLaughlin, Standing Rock agent, called the Ghost Dance “demoralizing, indecent and disgusting” before he’d even witnessed it. The white men wanted her people to become Christians. They called Wovoka the devil, because he predicted the whites and their soldiers would drop dead if the people danced.
Sometimes her nighttime studies left her sluggish for work. Soon Crockett started to empty her pockets and remove her shoes at the end of each day, sometimes force her to lift her skirt and let him pat her blouse in case she was stealing—only his codes, only secrets too small for her pockets, too large for the heavy, stiff shoes with laces he made her wear instead of moccasins, so he could hear her clumping heels on the bare wood floors.
At night, she wore the moccasins her mother had made, beaded with wild roses, and she wove sly as a snake. She opened the wood file drawers and found copies of telegrams starting that summer, from the agent to Fort Niobrara and Fort Robinson to General Miles and from there to the president, congressmen, anyone who would listen, so great was the fear of a half-starved people, broken, in ruin, who only wanted to dance in hope again. The son of God is come, they said, and they danced to hold off the belly hunger, the desire of the spirit so much greater. By fall of 1890, the tone had grown harsher still, demanding the immediate deployment of troops to finish the business on Pine Ridge. She shivered in the night coolness as she read the messages.
She thought of her days in the Indian boarding school, staring out the tall windows at the corner of the cemetery where the small white crosses and short beds of humped soil sat row after row, too close together, and told the story of other Lakota children. She vowed not to be one of those who withered and died there. She pretended to be patient, obedient, and dumb so they would trust her and leave her alone.
Soon more and more troops arrived, their camp crowding her tipi until she had to sign to Crockett for permission to sleep on the office floor. He dared to pinch his nose and point at her bundle to suggest it smelled, and she smiled her not-smart smile and nodded. He shook his head, shrugged, and returned to his room to drink and sleep, despite the chattering key he couldn’t keep up with.
It was early October, and she was sweeping the worn wood planks, listening to the code, writing it in her head and deciphering the words, more news about Sitting Bull, who was an old man with little influence except over his Hunkpapas. Kicking Bear visited him and now the Hunkpapas had joined the Ghost Dance. It seemed possible the army would kill Sitting Bull, and her heart was sick as she tried to think of a way to warn her mother, who still didn’t understand about the telegraph, or the newest invention, the telephone, which captured a person’s voice and sent it across the land. Rose wondered if the voice would sound the same when it returned from its journey. The whites created tendrils like bindweed that trapped their lives together. She had to do something.
At dusk she watched for her people on their way to the dance and sent a message to her mother, who never replied, which meant Rose was to remain in town. When her cousin finally brought word, Rose asked about Star. “She is young enough to be safe,” her cousin explained. “Your mother says, ‘Too many white men here now. You must not come back yet. I will tell you when it’s safe. When the buffalo return, when we are free.’” Rose never heard from her again.
By late fall, the town had doubled and tripled with soldiers, men and women making money from the troops. Photographers from Chadron and Omaha and news reporters from Chicago and New York rode the train to Rushville and came to the telegraph office daily to send their stories home. Much of what they wrote was wrong or made up or both, but there was often a seed of truth Rose could find if she looked carefully enough. Big Foot grew lungsick and Buffalo Bill Cody visited Sitting Bull in late November to convince his old friend to cooperate with the white men and come to the Indian agency to be arrested, but the visit ended with Cody giving up in disgust. The old leader was finally killed during his arrest in the middle of December. More troops poured out of the trains. The stories grew wilder. Rose didn’t dare walk outside during the day for fear of being pushed, cursed, spit on. At night the danger was drunken white men seeking a fight, even if it meant an Indian woman.
She realized from the telegrams and the increasing troops that her people’s world had changed too fast, too hard, to make a return. Crockett would send a telegram to Washington, D.C., one day, and mere days later, more trains arrived, hissing and clanging, to disgorge soldiers and guns and horses and provisions. Her people had a few rifles and old muskets, though the army tried to take them, but they had nothing like the big Hotchkiss guns that could kill so many so easily. Her people had little ammunition, too; they couldn’t afford to shoot randomly on the chance that a bullet would strike home, no matter how much they prayed. She could see the end before it began. Again and again, she tried to send messages to her mother, begged her to flee.
Rose couldn’t bear to think of those last days in December. The troops chased the dancers to Wounded Knee, surrounded them, and when the signal to dance was given, opened fire with rifles and cannons. Afterward the troops patrolled the reservation, preventing a flood of people in search of loved ones, so she waited and heard Star was safe with relatives, but her mother was dead. Later, when she met her sister again, she learned their mother’s fate and began to plan her revenge.
The troops left as quickly and smoothly as they’d arrived. By February, Rushville was quiet and the telegraph man drank harder and fumbled through her clothing for stolen items more often. She took to wearing her skinning knife under her blouse and stole a gun from a cowboy passed out in the alley behind the saloon. The gun she wore snug against her chest on a string around her body, spinning away from Crockett before he could find it. As game flees before the hunter who has not prayed and spoken to the animal spirits, men began to avoid her. She could walk day and night across town and no one dared meet her eye. Since she’d found the pistol on the cowboy in the alley, Rose had taken to waiting in the dark outside the saloon. Sometimes she searched and stripped the unconscious men, sometimes she helped them asleep. She chose only what she needed or fancied, and would make a tiny cut on their hand or neck to count coup. Without a coup stick, she amended the ceremony to the use of her skinning knife and drawing a single drop of blood. Upon waking, the man would guess he had scratched himself when he fell. Rose thought of the old warriors feasting on the liver and heart of a downed enemy to gain his power, but she could not bring herself to even taste the blood. She learned enough from the telegraph to know the enemy was everywhere, the people vanquished.