“Every surgeon carries within himself a small cemetery,” a famous French doctor wrote in his memoir. I myself carried multiple cemeteries within myself, though only one of them was small: the cemetery where the women I’d loved and lost were buried. Others—the crime victims whose bodies and bones I’d studied; the donated corpses whose decay my students and I had scrutinized and charted—numbered in the many hundreds by now.
But most numerous in my cemeteries were the Arikara Indians, some six thousand of them, carefully shelved and kept one floor beneath me, in the vast, cavernous recess beneath the stadium’s south end zone. And as I locked the building—full of the dead, but emptied of the living—and headed home, it was the ghosts of the Arikara I seemed to hear whispering as I wound my way downriver alongside the dark, spooling currents of the Tennessee.
They whispered of loss: the loss of their lands, their civilization, their women and children and homes. They whispered of slaughtered bison and ferocious bears and wounded hunters. Above all they whispered of life and love, and the tenuous, fragile, crucial entwining of one with the other.
CHAPTER 13
I HAD A DREAM, AND IN MY DREAM, I WAS STANDING on a grassy shore, water lapping at my work boots. It was night, and the moon was full and bright, reflecting off the rippling water. At my feet was a grave—circular, to minimize the amount of digging needed in the hard prairie soil—and within the grave, gleaming faintly in the moonlight, were bones, half covered by a buffalo robe. The skeleton was flexed into a fetal position to fit within the grave; atop and alongside and among the bones was a profusion of grave goods: heaps of beads and bangles and carved birds and bears.
Reaching down into the grave, I lifted out the skull. It was a woman’s skull, an adult, and as I held it up in the moonlight, I recognized it as the skull of Kathleen, my own wife, whom I myself had buried in this spot years before. “I’m so sorry to disturb you,” I said, “but I have to move you. They’ve dammed the river, and the water’s rising. I’ll go get a box and come right back to get you.”
I laid the skull gently on the grass and headed to the tent camp my students and I had pitched on the flattened, grassy shelf above the water. Except for the gentle lapping of water on the shore and the soft sigh of wind through the grass, the camp was silent, the white canvas tents shining. Even the inside of my tent was faintly illuminated by the moonlight filtering through the canvas.
I knew that I had an empty bone box in the tent, but for some reason I couldn’t find it. I rummaged through everything once, twice, three times, confused and growing agitated. Where was Kathleen’s box? What if I’d lost it? Finally, tucked beneath my army cot, I found it. Nestling it beneath one arm, I hurried back to the shore.
But the grave was gone: vanished beneath the rising waters. “Kathleen,” I called, stricken, “where are you?” The only answer was the sound of small waves lapping at my feet. Frantic now, I set the box down on the embankment and dropped to my knees, groping the submerged ground, seeking the curved edge of the circular pit. Nothing.
The water continued to rise. Soon it was up to my thighs, and then to my waist. I kept searching, now taking a deep breath and submerging myself, swimming blindly in the murky water, feeling for the grave, the buffalo robe, the bones, anything. At last my fingers closed around the straight, smooth shaft of a long bone, a bone so stout it could only have been a femur. Gripping tightly, I fought to free it. By now the water was deep, completely over my head, and I braced my feet on the muddy bottom to pull. The bone came free, and with the last bit of air in my lungs, I kicked to the surface and swam, exhausted, to the shore with the bone.
But it was not a bone. It was only a bare, brittle branch, and when I saw it, mocking in the moonlight, I knew Kathleen was lost to me forever. Dragging myself from the water, I lay in the grass and wept.
At some point in my dream I must have fallen asleep, for I felt myself awaken. It was still night; the moon still up, though low in the western sky, casting a broad, shimmering track across the rippling water: a river of moonlight. Suddenly the moon river was shattered into sparkling shards, and I saw something—someone—swimming through it, swimming down the dancing light, swimming directly toward me. Then, some distance short of the shore, the swimmer stopped and stood. It—she, an Arikara woman—was waist-deep in the water, her black hair slick and shining, water sheeting off her shoulders and dropping, like shining quicksilver, from the undercurve of her breasts and the dark tips of her nipples.