Meatloaf in Manhattan by Robert Power Page B

straggly beard. The clothes he wears, tied somehow together by strands of string, are rags gathered from the roadside and railway sidings.
    â€˜My name is Thunder Bear,’ says the invisible mouth from within the beard. ‘Everything is gone,’ he says swigging from the bottle of whisky. He sinks to his knees, his morning melancholia gently giving way to daytime madness. He scrabbles around on the ground, whipping up the dust with his gnarled fingers. ‘Where are the braves? Nowhere for us to go to grow. The white man has won, taken everything from us. And given us this,’ says Thunder Bear, holding up the bottle to the light, staring intently at the amber liquid. ‘So braves fall off their horses, fathers rape their children. No one can trap a buffalo, there are no buffalo.’
    Little-Path listens to the old chief, saddened beyond sadness. He says nothing, unsure if the older man is even aware of his presence. Up above, the clock shows the hour and he knows it is time to go.
    After a short walk, Little-Path stands outside the simple wood-framed house on a street behind the telegraph office. Slung over his shoulder is the bag he has carried with him ever since the last night of the battle. The woman he has come to meet is looking at him from the parlour window. Eileen Kellogg is tall and thin, with white hair tied away from her face in a bun. She wears a shapeless dress of grey calico that reaches to the floor. Little-Path sees her and she sees him. Her face is expressionless. As she moves away from the window the curtain flutters. The front door opens. He walks up the pathway, knocks on the doorframe, hesitates, and then enters. He can see her sitting by the fire, a bible in her lap. There are no flames in the hearth.
    â€˜Sit down,’ she says without turning to look at him. He sits on a wooden stall, the only other seat in the room. ‘So, you have come to tell me how you slaughtered my brother. How you scalped him and cut off his ear.’ She looks up, studying this old man with the deeply lined face, with a feather in his ponytailed hair. ‘He was so battered they only identified him by his boots.’ Little-Path says nothing. ‘They told me you got your womenfolk to smash in their faces with clubs, no matter if they were dead or alive.’
    Her stare is hard and bitter. It accuses. It demands.
    â€˜I was only a boy,’ says Little-Path, ‘There were many deaths and many more in the days and years to come. I killed no one that day. I killed no one in my life. But I was there. I saw your brother when he was alive and then I saw him when he was dead.’
    â€˜You said, in the letter I received, that you have something for me, something of my brother’s.’
    Little-Path opens the bag he had found in the bush above the ravine, the bag he has kept safe down all these decades. He takes out the small book that Marcus Kellogg had been writing in as he sat on the rock above the gulch, watching the savagery and carnage below.
    â€˜How did you find me?’ she says taking the book from Little-Path.
    â€˜I searched. I think the clouds guided me to when the time was right.’
    â€˜The clouds?’
    â€˜Your brother. Although I spoke no English back then I captured the sounds he spoke that day. He said, “We can’t take the clouds.” Over and again he said those words and I held them in my mind until I could understand their meaning.’
    The woman shrugs her shoulders, ignoring the heathenness of Little-Path’s words. She turns the book over in her palm as if caressing the hand of her brother. The book is leather-bound with a metal clasp. She opens it up and looks at the neat lines of writing, the sheets of simply drawn maps, the rough sketches of cavalrymen and campfires. The writing on the final page is slanted, hurried, jumping across dividing lines. She looks up at the messenger, the boy from the battle.
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