An Excerpt from Albert's Manuscript by Jamie Lee

Dear friends and family,

Following is the story Grandfather Albert told me over a five day period in the summer of 2001. His notes were a hodgepodge of pages scribbled over many years, and he needed time to organize his thoughts. When he was ready, I tape recorded his words as he spoke them, and later transcribed the manuscript that appears here.

We took frequent breaks and, during some of those breaks, Grandfather continued to scribble more notes that I didn’t read until later. I’ve added those into the manuscript in italics because I didn’t want to leave out the smallest flavor of his thoughts.

My thanks to Katie who helped me organize it all into what I hope is a readable and honest telling of the story that guided Grandfather’s life.
                
Sincerely,

                           Jilly

Day One
Morning Recording Session

“So we begin at last, Jilly.”

“Yes, Grandfather. I’m almost ready.  Can you talk a little so I can get the levels right?”

“All right. My bones ache. When I was a young boy   I used to look at my grandfather, and see his bones beneath his thin skin.  I’d wonder how he managed to crawl out of bed each day and force those old bones to carry him around. Now, I have become him. I am old and need to tell this story before I cross over.   I will begin now.

Outside the morning sun is bright and yellow over the land. At last, I take the time to get this story down. I have carried it so long it feels like a part of my bones. I wonder, when it is told will       I get as light as air and drift off into the clouds?

My hands don’t work so well anymore so I am telling this story to my granddaughter Jilly, a pretty, twenty-three-year old college student home for summer break. It is slow work for her, sitting nearby as I sort a blizzard of paper scraps. My memories have come to me in bits and pieces and I scribbled them down on whatever was handy. Such an odd collection, words on the backs of napkins and placemats, stuffed into small notebooks bought at convenience stores for a buck. But Jilly is one of the new ones, they told me, the children that would walk out of the long storm and make a new world.
She winks at me, my girl, as I record these words. They are wise, these new children of earth. And it is for them that I write, so they can better understand who they are, and why they have come at this time. They are the seventh generation.  Isn’t that right, Jilly?”

“What, Grandfather?”

“Nothing. You look like my secretary sitting there with your little recorder.”

“I just want to be sure I get it all. If I record it first and then transcribe it, I won’t miss anything. I can’t write as fast as you can speak. Besides,” she smiled at me. “I just want to listen. Do you want another cup of coffee?”

“Please. It will give me a minute to organize my thoughts.”

 “Here you go, Grandfather. All the levels are set.  You can begin.” 

My grandfather lost his wife and baby at Wounded Knee, shot down dead in the snow. His name was Gerald and his wife’s name was Tilde. They say when he heard the news of Tilde and Sarah’s deaths, he went blind in one eye, as if he couldn’t stand to see but half the world after that terrible winter day. Grandfather lived to be seventy-four. I am seventy-two, nearly as old as he was when he died, but  I can’t die yet, not until my story is written down.
After Wounded Knee, my remaining relatives stayed on Pine Ridge Reservation, although Grandfather was Minneconjou. When he remarried, he married an Oglala Lakota woman named Kathryn. They had three sons and two daughters but, of the five, only one made it into adult life—my father, Joseph. There was a lot of death in those days. There still is. My mother once told me this was because the souls of the living went in search of the dead. I believe what my mother said was true, about the living looking for the dead. I know I tried mighty hard to die.

Joseph married Clara in 1927 and together they had eight children. Four died before the age of ten. I was one who lived, the oldest boy.
When I was eighteen, my father was shot in the head. A hunting accident, they said, but death on Pine Ridge is never an accident. Mother said he was shot by history, that history holds a shotgun to all of our heads. I didn’t know what she meant at the time. Now, as I look back, it is clear.

By age twenty, I was already hardening into a drinking, fighting young man. Oh, I was angry, so angry, and I felt staked to the ground by all I saw.   I was the color of anger—always figured that’s why they call the Indian a “red man.” How can I des-cribe what it felt like? Living in that twenty-year-old body was like living in the center of a volcano. Anger so hot and deep I was about to explode.

I lived with my Mamma and two sisters in a little cabin on the north edge of Pine Ridge Village. It was 1948. I would have been in the army except my father’s death relieved me of duty. My duty was to my mother—not that I was much good to her. She needed me to be the man of the family but I was a hothead drunk, and had been since my father was shot.

It was summer, near the fourth of July. There was going to be a big pow wow and feast celebrating the returning vets, those that came home wounded, those that came home in a box, and those that could still walk. My father’s death had even robbed me of what little status I may have gained serving in what nowadays people call “the last real war.” I wanted out of there, one way or another. The night before the pow wow, two buddies and I started celebrating early with cheap whiskey and the booze stirred the volcano cooking in my middle.

I stumbled home still drunk the next morning. Mamma met me on the stoop. Just the sight of her standing there on that beat up stoop in her bathrobe threw me over the edge. She’d been crying.

“I need you Albert,” she said. “I need you to be a man now. Your father is gone, and I can’t do this alone.” Mamma spoke Lakota so I grew up hearing English and Lakota mixed up in my head like word soup. She took a step toward me. “He isn’t coming back, Albert.”

In almost two years, she’d hardly spoken of my father. Why she chose that moment to start isn’t clear, but when she said I had to be the man now, something in my alcohol-soaked brain erupted.   I held my breath, trying to get my head to stop spinning. “Don’t, Mamma.”

“Albert.”

She said my name like it meant something. It didn’t mean anything.  Albert was no more—he’d disappeared the day my father was shot.

“He’s dead, Albert.  Gone.”

A fierce heat rose up from somewhere deep in my belly and I yelled at her. “You think he’s gone? He is not gone. He can’t be gone. I’ll get him back, Mamma.  I swear I will.” I stomped past her and went into the cabin.

She followed close behind, crying aloud now, and murmuring my name. I grabbed a duffle bag and started stuffing things into the bag, a canteen, a can of beans, and some crackers. I was a crazy man, not even clear what I was doing, hollering about how I was going to go find him and bring him back. My two sisters, Shawna and Sylvie, came out of the one bedroom still in their cotton nightgowns looking sleepy and disturbed. “Go back to bed.” I yelled at them.

“Where are you going, Albert?” Shawna asked.

“None of your business.”

Mamma tried to hold my arm, but I gave it a rough shake. She backed up and stood in front of my sisters as if afraid for them. There was fear in her eyes.  I hated seeing that fear more than anything. I had to get out of there. I turned and ran out the door propelled by hot anger, and an even hotter fear. I needed to get out of there before I covered them all with the soot and fire of my anger.

She followed me out. I set the duffle down, went to the shed and took down the saddle. I flung it over the back of poor George, our old, sway-back horse. My hands shook and I turned to my Mamma. “I’ll bring him back to you, Mamma.  I swear.”

She screamed at me. “You can’t, Albert. Don’t you see? He’s dead and you can’t reach him anymore.”

Oh, I was arrogant, and drunk, and angry enough to eat nails. “I damn well can. I’ll go to the ancestors and tell them to give me back my father.”
I climbed on George’s back and rode off. When I looked back, Mamma was on the ground, curled into her self, weeping and moaning, “Oh, my boy, my baby, don’t go. Please don’t go.”

I had only one goal as I charged off. I was going to bring my father back—or die trying. I rode like a pack of sick, hungry hounds were chasing me. I was insane with anger, drunk now on determination.

It was July and the sun, although it was still only mid-morning, was already scorching, riding above me on its own race to hell. Within minutes I was sweating, my horse was sweating, the whole world was sweating. I wanted a cold beer but, in my twisted thinking, thought the ancestors wouldn’t like it if I showed up with beer on my breath. Looking back now, I’d gone plumb crazy. My mind flickered with images, all that I’d seen and done, all that had been done to my father, all that had been done to us. It felt like history was a dark tunnel and I was riding like the wind through that damned tunnel, time flying by me, out of control. The images killed me, again and again.

I saw death, so much death. My younger brothers broken to bits in a car wreck, my dad with his brains splashed over the prairie, my uncle hanging by his neck in a shed, that same shed burning one night when I couldn’t stand to look at it any longer. Suddenly, I felt like it was raining blood down on me, a steady torrent of blood. It was getting in my eyes, blurring my vision, so red, smelling of iron and rust and death. One eye went blind like my grandfather’s, and then the other eye went blind, and I saw nothing but blackness. It scared the shit out of me. I hung on to the reins, clutching the leather as I raced forward in the dark, dark world.

Old George must have sensed he had a blind, crazy, man on his back. He slowed his pace, went to a trot and then, as if that horse knew what was about to happen, he sought the only shade for miles and miles. He clopped over to a small grove of trees and bushes and stopped just as I slid out of the saddle, collapsed on the ground, and passed out.

Later, I figured out that I was passed out beneath that grove for almost two full days. I have spent the fifty plus years since putting together all that I learned while unconscious those two days. I suspect, on reading similar reports, that  I died, but was led back to life by those same ancestors I sought in such a mad frenzy. I was led back so I could tell this story to the best of my ability. They made me a Watcher during that time. And in seventy-two years, I’ve only met a few other Watchers.  

The place my spirit woke up to while my blind and broken body lay beneath the grove of trees was not a place  I had ever even imagined. I don’t know if place is the right word to describe it, more like presence. In this presence, all around me was clearly created as energy and not form. The images and structures were shifting and changing like the northern lights. It was like standing inside of Aurora Borealis, but with the light able to fashion and refashion itself within seconds. In a moment, cities, landscapes, whole worlds formed and dissolved again only to be replaced by other cities and worlds. The changing scenes fascinated me, like the first time I ever saw a motion picture when I was a boy. I checked out my hands, my legs, my trunk and all seemed there and yet I was aware of them more as points of being rather than a whole, solid body.

Albert's Manuscript is now available for purchase for $11.95. Call 1 (800) 486 8940 to get your copies hot off the press. Be sure to think of those special readers who may appreciate one for Christmas--and add a copy of Washaka--The Bear Dreamer ($12.95) for a perfect package.

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