A FEW DAYS before Carlisle’s eviction date, the Indian stopped by. He argued that one final symbolic gesture concerning the highway was in order. At first Carlisle objected, not being inclined toward what he saw as token behavior.
But, listening, he decided the Indian was not talking about tokenism. Symbolism, yes, but not tokenism. The Indian spoke of Crazy Horse, the great Sioux warrior; and Sweet Medicine, the Cheyenne medicine man; and Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce. He talked about long, forced marches through the snow and the smell of burning villages. To the Indian’s way of thinking, the highway was not an isolated occurrence, but rather a plain and obvious continuation of what had gone before. Now, however, as he pointed out, the whites had turned on their own, distrusting anyone making a try for freedom or asking for consideration of ideas beyond the white man’s customary way of doing things.
“Builder, we must proclaim again that some of us stand for another way. If we want to be certain our deathbed memories cause us to smile, we must stand for that other way, just as Crazy Horse and Sweet Medicine and Joseph did. As in your culture’s tale of the man Odysseus, someone has chosen to open the bag and release all the contrary winds against people such as you and me, or so it seems. But if we cannot have the winds with us, then we must let it be known that we will at least not bend, no matter how hard they have chosen to blow, no matter if they are winds from the graveyard. We must, in our own way, shout into those winds, even if our words are blown back into our faces and are heard only by ourselves. If you find that idea uncomfortable, then I have misjudged you.”
Carlisle had talked to the Flute Player several times about the Lakota Sioux somehow blocking the highway to protect the sacred ground. Maybe they could save that much, if nothing else. But the Indian would say only that the People were considering it. Carlisle and Susanna drove down to the capital and met with Lamont Crow Wing of AIM, a tough veteran of the Indian struggles. He had been at Wounded Knee with Frank Black Horse, Loreli Decora, and the rest when the federal government laid siege to it in 1973. He’d been part of the protest in 1972 after Raymond Yellow Thunder was beaten, stripped from the waist down, and paraded around an American Legion dance in Gordon, Nebraska, where the celebrants were invited to kick Raymond Yellow Thunder, after which he was stuffed in a car trunk and died there.
Lamont Crow Wing was no soft reservation Indian. That was obvious. In an old workshirt, jeans, and surplus army boots, he sat behind a gray metal desk and looked at Carlisle, then at Susanna.
“Of course, I have heard about what’s going on up in Yerkes County. I respect you for your struggles, Mr. McMillan. But let’s talk straight. I do not care about your house. It is unfortunate the highway will destroy your home, but from our point of view, that’s all it is, unfortunate.
“The highway is a complex matter for us. Even within a given Indian tribe there is much controversy over the best path to the future for us. Some traditionalists hold out for the old life ways, others see an acceptance of white attitudes toward economics and development as our only hope for survival. In other words, if you go down to the reservation, you might be surprised to find support for the highway in some quarters. Unemployment is a serious problem for us, and some believe the highway will bring new jobs. Also, some of the tribal leaders can be bought off easily. That’s already happened in the past, and it will happen again.
“The T-hawks—that’s sad, and pardon me if I’m overly blunt, but you people worry about the extinction of a few birds while we worry about the extinction of entire cultures. We are being obliterated, just as surely as if the horse soldiers were still slaughtering us with their guns. It’s a little slower now, but no less painful.”
He listened when Carlisle argued that saving the T-hawks would save the burial mounds and vice versa, then Crow Wing repeated much of what Susanna had already said about the Indians’ problems. He finished by saying, “A lot of the People have just given up and don’t think it will do any good to try to stop the highway by legal means, in spite of the burial grounds near Wolf Butte. We have no faith in white man’s law, and there’s no reason why we should, given our past experience with it. However, just to make you aware of it, AIM has filed a request for an injunction to halt the road while the disposition of artifacts is discussed. Because of the speed with which the highway project has proceeded, we were late in the filing and have little hope our request will be granted. Concern for the past is no match for the promises of economic development.”
Lamont Crow Wing grinned sardonically, looking straight and firm at the man and woman across the desk from him. “You know what we used to sing as part of our ghost-dance ritual? ‘The whites are crazy / The whites are crazy.’”
He promised, however, to talk with some other members of AIM and certain of the reservation Indians about the highway, the birds, and the burial grounds. He was mostly concerned about the burial grounds and said so. Carlisle had not heard from him after that.
ON A COOL April morning, under heavy clouds and threat of rain, Carlisle and the Flute Player formed a two-man picket line just north of where Route 42 intersected the red dirt of Wolf Butte Road leading to Carlisle’s house. Construction workers and machines had reached the intersection and were preparing to move up the road, doing initial site work for the heavy construction to follow and taking dead aim at Carlisle’s place and the T-hawks. Word had flashed via the Yerkes County telegraph that he and the Indian were out there obstructing progress, and inside of forty minutes around two hundred people had gathered, creating a traffic jam nearly blocking 42.
Huge yellow machines were moving back and forth in what seemed to be almost random patterns to a casual watcher. If the earth could have talked, it would have been screaming as tons of it were dug and pushed and loaded and hauled. The scene resembled a military battle: red dust rising into the air, the roar of trucks and earthmovers and bulldozers, people shouting, men operating jackhammers tearing up Route 42 where it would be rebuilt to accommodate an exit from the new interstate highway, allowing tourists to visit Antelope National Park and Ray Dargen’s Indian Mysteryland.
As Carlisle would later say, “In spite of how you feel about road construction, you have to admit there’s something awful virile about it, all those big machines, all that power. In terms of dominating nature, it doesn’t match nuclear weapons, but it’s next best.”
Carlisle was dressed in faded jeans, his old leather jacket, and work boots, his hair reaching to his shoulders, yellow bandanna tied around his head. The Indian wore his standard uniform of jeans and denim jacket, black hat and cowboy boots, western shirt. Each of them carried a small wooden flute, and they stood side by side, directly in front of a bulldozer that had crossed Route 42 and was beginning to move up the dirt road.
Carloads of people were still arriving. Most left their autos on the highway, turning it into a parking lot, and walked up to within fifty yards or so of where Carlisle and the Indian had positioned themselves. People were talking to one another, nodding, pointing at the two, shaking their heads. A few were smiling and laughing, most were not. Somehow, what was occurring moved Carlisle’s earlier arguments from the level of easily dismissed abstractions to a hard, obvious reality.
More red dust rose into the air, drifting over the spectators, and far back, locked in the traffic jam, were the sirens and revolving blue lights of state patrol cars. Ralph Pluimer, on-site manager for F. J. Remkin & Sons, contractors for the portion of the road within the state, moved forward and spoke to Carlisle and the Indian, thinking he could frighten them into giving up their foolish stand. “I’m asking the two of you to please get out of the way. But I’m only asking once. After that, it’s your asses, not mine.” Carlisle said nothing, the Indian said nothing.
Pluimer turned and walked away, motioning for the lead bulldozer to move forward. The driver, wearing a blue baseball cap and mirrored sunglasses, shifted gears and the machine jerked toward Carlisle and the Indian.
A woman from the crowd, Mar
cie English, ran to Carlisle and the Indian, crying, pulling on Carlisle’s jacket. “Carlisle, this is insane, you’re going to get hurt. Please stop. It’s over, can’t you see that?” Though she was screaming, the noise of the approaching machinery almost overpowered her words.
“Go back, Marcie. Dammit, go back! I don’t know what’s going to happen here.”
Carlisle tore her hand from his jacket and she retreated, wiping her eyes on the cuff of her rain slicker. He could see Susanna Benteen off to one side, about thirty yards away, a look of concern on her face. Susanna had serious reservations about the wisdom of this demonstration and had said so. But Carlisle and the Indian had already decided they were going to do it.
The Indian began to play his flute, its timbre cutting through the roar of machinery, his melody counterpointed by the wail of state patrol sirens back along the highway. The lead bulldozer was thirty yards in front of them and moving forward. Carlisle brought up his own flute and began to play, the two of them harmonizing on a short, repetitive melody.
Rain began, turning the raw earth to a slimy red gumbo. WFC Television had arrived from Falls City, a cameraman and a reporter positioning themselves behind Carlisle and the Indian. A photographer and a reporter sent by the High Plains Inquirer to cover the destruction of the T-hawk forest joined the television crew.
Rain coming harder . . .
Clank of machinery . . .
Sheriff’s department strobe lights off to one side, coming across open ground from the east . . .
Bulldozer treads turning bright red, earth color . . .
Sirens . . .
Men yelling . . .
Ralph Pluimer shouting at the bulldozer operator: “We’ve put up with these sonsabitches for too long . . .”
Bulldozer coming on . . .
Carlisle and the Indian playing their flutes . . .
Cameras filming the Indian and Carlisle and a person known as the duck-man standing beside them who was wearing a large overcoat with a bulge that seemed to move around beneath the gathered lapels . . .
Reporter excited, gabbling into her microphone . . .
State trooper forcing his way through the crowd and attempting to drive a patrol car across the increasingly muddy terrain. Other troopers running, slipping, sliding, toward Carlisle and the Indian . . .
Ten feet from the Indian, Carlisle, and the duck-man, the bulldozer stopped, distorted images of the three men reflected in the rain-washed blade, elongating their faces and bodies into otherworldly shapes—a little tin-pot army from another time. Still the Indian and Carlisle played their simple melody, and the duck-man clutched his coat lapels, pulling down his knit cap with his other hand. The bulldozer beginning to inch forward again. The operator dropped the blade and began to push a growing mound of earth toward the three men.
Simultaneously, four state troopers reached the Indian, Carlisle, and the duck-man, and a fifth began shouting angrily to the bulldozer operator, who stopped his machine and shut off the engine. The rain began to fall with more intensity. Suddenly, the entire construction site was quiet. All machines were shut down, everyone simply was watching. It was absolutely silent, except for the rain and the voices of state troopers talking to the three protesters. One of those watching from back in the crowd was a big man with a black beard, who wore an old green army jacket and a cap with EARTH WARRIOR on the crown. People stood apart from the stranger but glanced at him and whispered to one another when he walked over to the witch and talked to her.
A patrol car worked its way across the mud and halted twenty feet from where the conversation between the troopers and protesters was taking place. Carlisle was shaking his head in response to the words directed at him. The Indian continued playing and was ordered to stop by one of the troopers.
He continued anyway, and the trooper yanked the flute from his hands, shouting at him, “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
The Indian replied, “I am watching the buffalo.”
The duck-man was silent, still clutching the lapels of his overcoat with both hands and his eyes flicking rapidly in all directions. There was agitated movement beneath the coat.
Carlisle, the Indian, and the duck-man were handcuffed, taken to the patrol car, and put in the backseat, while a trooper held the mallard duck and wondered what to do with it. Susanna Benteen offered to take the duck, and Marcie English, in turn, took it from her, saying they would keep it safe on their ranch.
The doors on the patrol car were slammed shut, and with red lights flashing and siren howling, the car fishtailed across red mud, back wheels spinning. Through the mud-splattered rear window, three blurred heads could be seen as the patrol car maneuvered through the crowd and onto Route 42, heading toward Livermore. The same thought was on everyone’s mind: This surely must be the end of the Yerkes County highway war, and it had come down finally to the mud-and-rain-blurred images of two handcuffed, long-haired men and another one regarded as the town crazy riding east in a state patrol car on a wet April morning.
When the reporters asked for comment from the bystanders, most refused. Some were clearly pleased that Carlisle and the Indian had been arrested, others just shook their heads and turned away when attempts were made to interview them. Marcie and Claude English refused to talk. Susanna Benteen had disappeared.
One Mr. Gabe O’Rourke, however, did respond tersely to a reporter’s question. When asked what he thought of the drama that had just occurred, the accordion player offered only the following enigmatic statement: “It was a first-class tango. One of the best I’ve ever seen.”
SO THE BUILDER and the Flute Player and the duck-man made their stand, a symbolic stand, but not a futile one. Carlisle understood that when he saw their reflections in the bulldozer’s blade. They had lost but not succumbed. They had shouted into the wind.
Public records show a man named Carlisle McMillan and another identified as Arthur Sweet Grass, who gave his age as “old” when asked by the booking sergeant. Told that was unacceptable, Mr. Sweet Grass changed it to 105. They were charged with a misdemeanor and jailed for a few hours, then released when Carlisle paid their nominal fines for creating a public disturbance. It should be noted, however, that Mr. Sweet Grass indicated he was perfectly willing to work off his fine in jail time. After attempting to interview the duck-man, the magistrate recommended he be released with no charges filed against him.
Afterward, sitting in Carlisle’s living room area, Susanna said, “Arthur was right, it was worth doing. At least you stood for something besides concrete. He once said that if you cannot fasten your message on the horns of a buffalo, then send it on the wings of a butterfly. At least you sent a message, even if it rode only on a butterfly’s wings.”
And the people of Yerkes County would remember the stand and talk about it for years to come. How a white man and an Indian and a man dismissed as loony had challenged the bulldozers, flutes playing, refusing to be moved by the arguments of progress, even when it was clear to almost everyone else that the white man and the Indian and, of course, the duck-man were wrong. On top of that, the Inquirer’s photographer eventually won a Pulitzer for his shot of Arthur Sweet Grass, Carlisle McMillan, and a man in a long overcoat reflected in a bulldozer blade.
HEAVY RAIN halted construction on the highway for six days after the Indian and Carlisle were arrested. When work resumed, Susanna and Carlisle drove west of Salamander, parked the truck, and walked across the fields of early May to a hill overlooking the T-hawk forest and the place Carlisle had built for Cody.
They found a spot where the warming sun hit the earth nice and soft, sitting there and watching the first of the Caterpillars crawling north along the gravel road. The driver wore a blue ball cap and mirrored sunglasses. Behind him was a truck carrying men with chain saws.
When the Cat turned into Carlisle’s lane, Susanna wrapped both her arms around one of his, tears running down her cheeks. He gritted his teeth, listening to the Cat-skinner shift his machine
into successively lower gears. The driver never paused, just kept shifting down and moving up the lane, a grinding, surreal, unremitting symbol of something called progress. Susanna was digging her fingernails into Carlisle’s arm without even realizing it.
The bulldozer crushed into the atrium first and hit the south wall of Cody’s tribute thirty seconds later. Carlisle could hear the splintering redwood shriek as nails he had hammered one by one wrenched free, the house first leaning, then twisting into a grotesque shape. And he thought about Cody and about all the long days in the sun and nights he’d slept in the truck with a yellow tomcat while snow blew around them, working by the light of a gasoline lantern, sanding and smoothing, preparing the surfaces and finishing, and doing everything else in between in the right way. He could see the piles of lumber he had scrounged and Gally coming up a twilight lane and Susanna naked in the loft with a yellow feather in her hair. He could see it all, and all of it was disintegrating as he stared down at what had been his thirty acres.
In less than ten minutes, the place was leveled. After that, the workshop went down in one push, and the bulldozer moved toward the pond. The dam was earthen, so it was no problem, and pond water flooded into the creek channel. Down the lenses of his binoculars, Carlisle could see bluegills washing through the cut. While the bulldozer took care of the pond, a workman started a chain saw and began cutting the two oaks standing near where the house had been. They came down easily, crushing the bat houses as they hit the ground.