“When do they visit the battlefield?” I looked out the window behind him, as he studied my face.
“They come at night,” he said, “and no one sees them.” He paused again. “They have their ceremonies in the place, and we respect that.” Something brushed my sleeve. He turned. A woman held out four postcards and a dollar bill.
“This has been marvelous, just marvelous. I must tell my daughter. Her children would love this. They’re in Chicago, you know. Don’t get west very often.” The postcards in her hand hovered over a huge open purse, like hawk wings over a nest. Suddenly they plunged inside and her hand escaped just as the purse snapped shut. “But maybe with these pictures I can get them to come. We could drive down from Butte, make a day of it. Wouldn’t that be nice?”
“It beats Chicago. I’ve been to O’Hare,” the ranger said.
“O’Hare!” The woman glanced at the ceiling with a smile, crossed herself, spun around, and moved gradually away. The ranger picked up his pen, but I waited. I could tell from the music the slide show was almost over.
“The ceremonies,” I said. He held his pen up like an artist’s brush. Now the question was in his eyes: how can I trust what I tell you to be safe? Perhaps I have said too much already.
“We don’t know much about the ceremonies, just that they happen.” We both looked into the air, not at each other. We looked into a box of wind from another time, a box suspended between us, a wind blind to his uniform and my traveling clothes, a box of storm air where the real voices resided and centuries made a number with no meaning. I asked the inevitable question.
“How do you know about the ceremonies? Is there evidence left at the site?”
He looked hard at me, then away. In the auditorium, the little motor whirred to pull curtains aside from the west window. “In certain places,” he said, looking toward the auditorium door, “they leave ribbons hanging from the trees.” The door opened, and the woman came out before her man. The skin around their eyes was pale. In one smooth motion, they both put on their sunglasses.
On the trail to the battle overlook, the sharp-toed print of a doe’s hoof was centered on the print of a woman’s spike-heeled shoe. The woman came yesterday, the doe at dawn. I stepped aside, leaving that sign in the dust.
But where were the ribbons? Now hunger-vacancy sharpened my sight instead of dulling it. Wind stirred every pine limb with light, green urgency flickering in the heat, flags of color calling every tree a monument. Ribbons? Ceremony? The wind was hilarious and sunlight a blade across my forehead. All along the trail, numbered stakes held cavalry hats of blue-painted wood to mark known positions where soldiers suffered or died. On the high ground above the trail, stakes painted to resemble the tail feathers of eagle marked the known positions of Nez Perce snipers who held the soldiers pinned down all through the afternoon. Feather Feather. Hat Hat Hat. Feather. Tree. Wind. Straw-pale brochure in my hand. Brochure folded into my pocket. Vacancy. Tree. Wind. Ribbon.
Far uphill, at mirage distance, a ribbon shimmered orange from a twig of pine. Off-trail, pine duff sank softly beneath my feet. Trees kept respectfully apart. Earth sucked dry by roots from other pines made them scatter. A gopher had pushed open a hole, and cobweb spangled the smallest dew across it. Then the climb thinned my attention to one small spot of color the wind moved.
Orange plastic ribbon crackled between my fingers—the kind surveyors use to mark boundaries. Not it. Not the wisdom of the place. Not the secret her sunglasses obliterated, not the message that family from Iowa went home without. Not the secret the ranger guarded, then whispered.
A girl’s voice spoke from the grove: “The Nez Perce had only ten snipers on the high ground, but the soldiers weren’t sure how many were there.” She stopped and looked about, then led her parents and sister on along the trail, reading to them from the brochure in her hand. Somehow, she did not stumble, and they padded away through their little flock of dust and disappeared toward the river. A bird’s call broke from the willow thicket where they had passed, a watery trill. Patience settled into my mind, like a fossil leaf pressed between centuries. I threaded the trees like a memory. A crow drifted over. A single pine bough stirred, as if the wind were a compact traveler roving before me.
When I found the ribbons they were red and blue. Five strands flickered half a fathom long from a single branch of the pine growing where Five Wounds died. The ribbons knotted at eye level swung new in the breeze, and between my feet a single strand of older ribbon had fallen, bleached white by snow and sun. The age of this custom made me dizzy. The five ribbons on the limb were new as the soft needle-growth sprung from the pine candles. The faded ribbon on the ground lay among sun-bleached needles. The sun-white ribbon on the ground took me back to the hopeful recollections of bead, fur, and photograph cased in glass at the museum, while the five new ribbons conveyed me to the ceremonies of night. I stood so long the sun moved, and a cool shadow rose out of the ground.
Beside my left foot a red ant carried some white crumb by an intricate path: all the long length of a pine needle, careening impossibly over a shattered cone, then up a thin tongue of grass to tumble and rise and struggle on. Following the ant, I saw flecks of blue in its path, and then I was lying down to see tiny blue glass beads strung out along the path of the thread that had held them until it rotted to nothing. So. Before the ribbons marked this place, an older ribbon. Before an older ribbon marked this place, the beads. And before the beads? The ant was skirting around a gray sphere half-sunk into the ground: a round musket ball of lead.
A century collapsed into this moment of ground, where generations of private celebration grew outward from one story. This square yard of pine duff bound a guest register that could never be tallied, only renewed, only inhabited by the night-faithful memory that walked in the form of the people. Twenty steps east from the tree with the ribbons a ton of granite, hewn to a block and polished, was carved with the story as the U.S. Army had lived it through. That was one way to remember 1877: carve the truth in stone and draft a platoon of guardians, write books and print brochures and script slide shows and build a hall to house them all, then carve a trail with numbers like a tattoo on the hill. I was grateful for all that. All that can make a visitor ready to know. But that public way is not knowing in itself, only a preparation for knowing. Knowing is a change of heart, physical, slower than the eye’s travel across a page of text, or across a stone dressed with words.
The books, the message on stone, the trail’s configuration would all have to be revised by an act of will; the ribbons were either renewed or lost by the very nature of their fragility. Sun and rain destroyed them. Pine budded, and grew. Flowers withered, and the ribbons.
Suddenly in the heat a kind of fear chilled me—fear about my fellowship with the sometimes acquisitive tribe of patriots named America. Even in small things, we wish to map our conquest of the planet and the past. My own childhood collections flickered through my mind: stamps, stones, leaves pressed in a Bible, insects stilled by cotton soaked with alcohol and pinned to styrofoam in a box. And arrowheads. Smoky obsidian and blood-red flint. Modern habit is to lay such things away safe behind glass, and I had learned that habit well. I knew how to lift each bead with tweezers, plot and take each bullet up, sift them all out from the dust and alter them from a part of the world to an illustration of it. Could I leave the bones of the story still, and carry only its breath away in my mouth? Or would I thread five beads on a pine needle souvenir, saying softly to myself no one would know them gone?
I heard the girl’s voice reading along closer through the grove, as she led her family toward the story of Five Wounds. His promise to Rainbow, sworn brother, to die the same day in battle. If one died, the other would die before day ended. And Rainbow had died. The ribbons were a part of Five Wounds’ promise. He was a hundred years dead and they were new.
From wooden hats staked to the ground I could see where soldiers lay flat to earth in knots of two and three across the slope. The thin grass of pine shade moved, and wind made the trees glisten as sunlight shifted in them, but the hats held still as skulls, each where a soldier lived out