You and I would agree, I think, that heaven such as the one anticipated by “true believers” does not exist.
That your Plains Indians heroes and the armies that killed them do not reside on gold-lined streets or answer to either a benevolent or judgmental deity.
But that the many dead whose lives drained out on our nineteenth-century high plains land are still sensed by, still known in spectral form to their native descendants. Or, if they died in blue with their boots on, alternately saluted in spirit by a handful of those in thrall to the U.S. military’s false and wicked glory.
Truth be told I suspect you didn’t dwell too much on what came after this life. Your life. There were sturdy genes in your family. You’d lived long enough to begin to feel the edges of immortality.
And you never laid your keyboard to rest.
You have long since forgotten or refashioned our time together. Such is reality. Not unlike what we all do with every bit of the history we purport to know. It was you who put DeVoto in my hands!*
Still, now, this day, in whatever ephemeral space your spirit occupies, I would wish you these gifts:
Your hearing restored. So that you could be returned to the trills of “Garry Owen;” the drums and shouted commands of Trooping the Color; the soaring pathos of Gounod’s “Faust;” the “Mikado’s” three little maids; the rollicking chorus of “Bringing in the Sheaves.” To the comfortable conversations with historians and park superintendents and admirers whose questions and praise and misdeeds suffused your years.
Energy and sure-footedness. Your mornings launched with the exhilaration of an early run—days anticipated, paragraphs crafted in your head.
Sweet and peaceful cocktail hours. That sunset-radiant time you savored at the end of a week’s work—negotiation, explanation, inspiration.
Perhaps lazy afternoon chats with the very people whose lives you examined and explored. Pulling from memory the questions that archives never answered. Custer himself and Elizabeth; Geronimo; Billy the Kid; Sitting Bull; a barracks full of soldiers somewhere in the West; a campfire coterie of natives whose memories and words have eluded historians.
The heady, joyful tension of getting up to speak.
Just maybe a gray cat to curl up at your feet. Maybe not.
Color and pageantry.
And time alone. Quiet time. The grace and breadth of eternity. ©
*“Biography is the wrong field for the mystical, and for the wishful, the tender-minded, the hopeful, and the passionate. It enforces an unremitting skepticism—toward its materials, toward the subject, most of all toward the biographer . . . . His job is not dramatic; it is only to discover evidence and analyze it. And all the evidence he can find is the least satisfactory kind, documentary evidence, which is among the most treacherous phenomena in a malevolent world. With Luck he will be certain of the dates of his subject’s birth and marriage and death, the names of his wife and children, a limited number of things he did and offices he held and trades he practised and places he visited and manuscript pages he wrote, people he praised or attacked, and some remarks made about him. Beyond that, not even luck can make certainty possible. The rest is merely printed matter, and a harassed man who sweats out his life in libraries, courthouses, record offices, vaults, newspaper morgues, and family attics. A harassed man who knows that he cannot find everything and is willing to believe that, forever concealed from him, exists something which, if found, would prove that what he takes to be facts are only appearances.
Bernard DeVoto “ The Skeptical Biographer” used at the beginning of Wallace Stegner’s The Uneasy Chair
