RavenShadow by Win Blevins Read Free Book Online Page B

time.
    When I was a kid, during the 1950s, Senior was over at our place all the time, building this and that onto the cabin for Grandpa and Unchee. Since he was my dad, it didn’t seem strange. Not until I moved to town did I realize, really, that the shack my parents lived in was much poorer. My dad spent his time, energy, and dollars fixing up his parents’ house and short-changed his own family. I have not decided whether that was love for Grandpa, Unchee, and me, or the out-of-kilter behavior of an alcoholic, or something else.
    My dad was a natural builder. Give him the magic implements of his trade—as little as two kinds of hammers, a rip saw and a crosscut saw, a plane, and a sack of nails—and he could make your dream come true. He learned his craft in the Army Corps of Engineers, and he had that can-do attitude—can do anything with any materials under any handicaps in any amount of time, just point me in the right direction. He got his chops building bridges for American armies on the move up the Italian peninsula, and he was proud of it, to the extent he had any pride at all.
    You should remember some stuff about him. He built a good house for his parents and lived in a hovel himself. Most of the time he didn’t have any tools because he’d pawned them for drinking money. He beat my sisters. I don’t even know where he is now. One day he’s gonna freeze to death in a snow bank with a bottle in his hand.
    Maybe I loved my father those days, but for sure I hated him. Here’s one reason I’m walking the red road now. If I have any children, I don’t want them to say the same about me.
    Want to know how confused my childhood was? Think of all the names my own family called me. To Grandpa and Unchee, when I was a little kid, I was Dreamer. To my sisters, Angelee and Mayana, I was Bud. They wanted an English name to use for me—they didn’t speak much Lakota. So they came up with Bud, of all things. Well, Grandpa liked it because it seemed like a common, ordinary, white-man name, but also meant a beginning a leaf or flower, a little miracle—so he thought it was a perfect disguise for an Indian. Mom and Dad called me Junior. (After I got permanently mad at him and refused to call him Dad, I called him Senior.) White people and my schoolmates (after I started going to school) called me Joseph.
    Also, our family name was Good Road, but I was given the name Blue Crow.
    Altogether I didn’t know who I was.
    I just said something about going to school. That was the earthquake in my life, brought by none other than Oliver Walks Far.

The Earthquake
    T he year 1967 was a big one in the white world too. When I got into music and became a jock, I learned all about what it meant to my white friends. The summer of love in San Francisco, hippies, the Monterey Pop Festival, the beginning of flower power, Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, the Beatles, the flowing together of rock and folk and protest songs into the new music—a new era, the dawning of the Age of Aquarius.
    Which just went to show how far their life was from mine. I was a fourteen-year-old kid on the Pine Ridge rez, living far from electricity. My color TV was the Badlands, my music was the sacred song and the drumming, and my new era would start when I went on the mountain and got a vision to live by.
    Oliver Walks Far ended all that. He was a life-long acquaintance of my grandfather, I do not say friend. Oliver was a strange, solitary blanket Indian even to us blanket Indians. He had once been a yuwipi man, but no more. He liked to live way out by himself and see nobody.
    Oliver lived further back in the Badlands than we did, because (in my opinion) he was an ornery old bastard who couldn’t get along with people. I didn’t see why Grandpa and Unchee acted so respectful around him. They went even further. Theysaid, “That fellow, he knows things.” This is a quiet compliment among our people, not given to just anyone. It means, ‘That person is wise, pay