The Bones of Paradise by Jonis Agee Page A

her eyeswild as a bird in a grass net, stay. I close my eyes so I will not see what is in the hole with me or watch her disappear, but soon they are opened by the men’s voices.
    â€œFirst you taste the meat, then you drink the blood,” says the man with one eye that searches for me while the other eye looks at my mother, held by her hair, a knife at her throat. She won’t look at me, but I can’t stop seeing her. I feel at my waist for my small skinning knife, but I dropped it while we played chase the prairie hen, so already my story is not the story I meant to tell and I have confused that morning with the day before and the day before that.
    Maybe the dancing had not yet begun . . . the sacred tree was in the middle where we danced but we were not allowed to include it in our game. Our older brothers in their mission school clothes played on the other side of the camp, their hair shorn, the backs of their bare necks embarrassed; they tried to act as if they were too old to play the fox and hen game. I saw Lame Dog, with the deep scar on his calf where he was attacked by a dog before he was taken away to the school. He was watching me the way he’d always watched me, knowing as I knew that one day we would share our tipi and have many fine children. I had seen it many times and not told anyone except my sister, Rose, who sees as I do. He was there playing a boy game, a contest of rock throwing, or stick fighting, or fighting. It made me happy, I know that, to feel him across the camp, my husband-to-be, and so we were not dancing, not seeing the buffalo, and in my haste to tell this story I have poured all the stories into one, so when the medicine man threw the handful of dirt in the air—and it must have been powerful, because we were seeing the road and also doing our morning chores, and also playing, and all of this in that moment when the buffalo hooves touched the earth again, and the birds cried out a warning of salvation and loss—the gun fired. At first we did not know what the sound meant, and thenthe big gun, the Hotchkiss, and the Springfields, the Colts, their horses branded front and back, numbers and letters, their hides scorched, shook their heads, the curb chains rattled, the flash of sabers and spurs and somewhere the tinkling of bells, of silver spur chains, of men loading guns, the guns.
    The boys go down, all at once as if in a game, and I open my mouth to scream. The buffalo are running across the camp, over the hills, up the ravines, follow us, they cry, and we do, though people fall all around me, and the crying grows louder than the guns or the pounding hooves, and my mother is forced to lie with her legs spread and the other man, the tall, thin one with the blond hair and narrow face, holds a saber point at her heart and smiles while crooked eye pulls down his pants and shoves inside her, my mother keeps her eyes closed and bites her lip against the pain, blood drips on her cheek, and it makes crooked eye both hungry and angry, for he begins to beat her while he does his business, then he trades places with skinny man, and crooked eye mounts her from behind like a dog, holds her hair while she rears back but cannot throw him off, and crooked eye beats her about the head and that isn’t enough so he curses her and pokes her with his knife and kicks and pulls her to pieces. By the time they are through, they have stabbed and cut chunks of flesh and each takes an ear, then crooked eye her scalp. Skinny man cuts off her breast and scrapes away the flesh to make a pouch, he says, for his coins. As he shoves it in his shirt, a small gold object falls out unnoticed and drops into the snow at his feet.
    If this were your story, you might tell it differently, the pieces in order, the way I waited in that hole, crying without sound for hours, my shoulders shaking dirt loose until I hoped to be buried alive, anything but having to wait for dark when I crawl out, find my