'Buffalo Dance?' said Felker. 'I didn’t know there were buffalo around here.'
This seemed to please Basil Henrick. 'There weren’t. War parties ran into herds of buffalo around the Kentucky salt lick.' He stared at the dancers and nodded his head to the beat of the drums. 'They said, ’What in the hell are those?’ Couldn’t get over it.'
Felker found himself smiling. 'What were they doing way down there?'
'Fighting Cherokees. They fought pretty regularly everywhere from Maine to South Carolina, and from the Atlantic to the Mississippi. Any place farther than that, I figure they just went once in a while to steal women.' The old man looked at Felker. 'You know Janie from college?'
'No,' said Felker. 'I met her through a mutual friend.'
'Yeah,' said Basil. 'You look over there at Janie, the first thing you notice ain’t her mind. You don’t say, ’Now, there’s a scholar.’ ' He gave a hoot, then said, 'Her daddy used to bring her up here when she was little. They’d go up to Toronto and see a show or something and then come down here and put on the blanket and be Indians again. Fine man. When he fell, must have been five or six hundred people went to the mourning council down in Tonawanda.'
'Fell? What do you mean?'
'He was working a construction job. Big bridge out west somewhere. A cable snapped and down he went.'
'Terrible,' said Felker.
'It’s good money, and the Iroquois crews have always been able to get work because we’re not afraid of heights, but people die.'
'You’re really not afraid of heights?'
Basil shrugged. 'I sure as hell am. I was a railroad man myself. I got to see plenty, but I saw it from ground level. I think the part about not being afraid is bullshit. An Iroquois just trains himself to tolerate it. They used to say a warrior needed a skin seven thumbs thick.' He pinched his arm. 'Mine is maybe five thumbs thick.'
The buffalo dancers danced out the door to cheers from the crowd.
'She putting you up at Jimmy’s?'
'Yes,' said Felker.
'I figured. Mattie loves to have young people around.'
'Has she brought other people for visits? I mean, strangers?'
Basil looked at him slyly. 'Can’t say.'
The drums grew louder, there were rattles and clicking sticks, and the door flew open again. This time it was twenty-five men, all in breechcloths and paint, wearing feathers and bells on their knees, ankles, and arms. The dance was quick with sharp, violent movements, and the music was different now.
'What’s this one?' asked Felker.
'War Dance. The Wa-sa-seh, that’s the real name. It means Sioux dance. I figure when Great-Great-Grandpa had fought his way past the Mississippi, that’s who he ran into in the open country. It made an impression.'
'They lost?'
'My guess is that’s an understatement. A war party that far out was probably no more than thirty fellows. On the average day out there, it wouldn’t have been too hard to run into a couple hundred Sioux warriors out for their morning pony ride, and those guys weren’t about to take any shit from us. Grandpa probably beat it back to the woods as quick as he could.'
'You sound like you wish you’d seen it.'
'With binoculars,' said Basil. 'Not up close. In the good old days, sometime around 1650, they took a census. They put one kernel of corn in a big basket for each person. That would have been maybe seventeen or eighteen thousand people. Throw in the rest of the Iroquois tribes, it was maybe fifty thousand. That’s not a lot to fight the whole world.'
When the warriors disappeared, Felker looked for Jane, but he couldn’t pick her out in the crowd. Two men walked to the middle of the floor and sat down face to face, with a drum and a pair of rattles. They sat quietly talking to each other for a few seconds, and nobody paid much attention to them beyond not stepping on them. Finally, the drum and the rattles started, the two men nodding their heads together to keep time, and at an invisible signal they began to sing.
'Fish Dance,' said Basil. 'Come on. I’ll show you.'
He waited for the column of dancers to pass, then stepped into its wake, dancing backward, and pulled Felker with him.
Felker’s eye caught a movement to the side, and he turned to face Basil. As he did, Jane stepped between them and began to dance with Basil. Two young women Jane had been talking to across the room stepped in together and began to dance with Felker.
'Two partners, John,' said Basil. 'Only honored guests get two.'
Felker grinned and gave a little bow to his two dancing partners. They were both dressed in Indian skirts, with elaborate embroidery at the hem and up the front to look like flowers. They had deerskin leggings with a slit in the front to show the beadwork on their moccasins, and they wore long silver earrings that glinted against their long black hair. All of their movements were precisely simultaneous. When they turned to dance forward, they spun like a pair of matched horses and took him by surprise so he had to glance over his shoulder to be sure he could change direction without stumbling.
The two singers in the middle picked up the pace gradually, and their volume went up with it. In the noise of the feet of so many dancers and the song of the two men, it was possible to forget that this was a world that was gone. The two young women were unmistakably a kind of offering to a warrior who had come in from some battle, and they were still that. They weren’t some pale echo of an old tradition because here they still were, no less real than they had ever been. They were more than a ceremonial welcome, more than a symbol of abundance: They were the antidote to death. Their ornaments said so. It was written in all the colorful flowers embroidered on the clothes of these women from a nation that was always at war.
The dance ended and the two women shook his hand. One of them said, 'I’m Emma. You’re catching on very well.'
Felker said, 'Thank you. I appreciate your giving me a chance to learn.' In his peripheral vision he was watching as the other girl whispered something to Jane, who made a wry face and pinched her so she had to retreat, laughing.
The music started again, and Jane stepped in front of Felker and began to dance. 'Enjoying yourself?'
'I’ve been in tighter spots than this,' he said. He glanced around. 'Hey, my interpreter’s gone. What’s this one called?'
She said, 'It’s called Shaking the Bush.'
The people regrouped as the clear, melodious voices of the singers cut through their murmuring. Emma stood before a young man who looked like an Indian warrior in a movie, and Felker recognized him as one of the war dancers. The warrior and Felker were shoulder to shoulder, dancing with Emma and Jane. All over the room these double pairs formed, the women choosing their partners and then all four dancing to the sound of the drums and rattles.
In the heat and the noise, Felker’s mind began to lose the simple habit of insisting that it see only what was in front of his eyes. He looked across at Jane in her blue jeans and white blouse, and Emma in her costume of an ancient Seneca woman, and the two images began to merge and then to trade places. There was no difference at all. They could have been sisters—for all he knew, were sisters in the strange, ornate family system they had—or even the same girl seen at different times or in different aspects, like a ghost. Emma was smiling, but Jane was staring straight into his eyes, as though she was reading something there.
He studied her closely and then said, 'Why is it called Shaking the Bush?'
'It just is.'
He leaned closer and realized that her eyes were glistening, welling up. 'What’s the matter?'
'Nothing,' she said, and quickly looked away. After a second she brushed her sleeve across her eyes and looked straight into his gaze again, unflinching.
After a time the music stopped. The man who had been singing stood up and gave a loud and apparently serious harangue in Seneca. Women went to the end of the room and collected covered dishes and put jackets on sleepy children. Young couples drifted out into the darkness with their arms around each other.
