Just a few months ago, I stopped out that butte again and took this picture. When the sky is gray or even when it isn't, you can't photoshop an image like this into something as beautiful as this butte already has become in my soul. When Mrs. Logterman told me that the church's faithful allowed the Rosebud Sioux their rituals up there, gave them room to practice their faith on a butte they owned, I heard in that vignette just enough respect and reconciliation for that piece of mother earth to became a symbol of peace, divine peace, and that's how I used it in the novel.
In the book, Jan Ellerbroek, a man of splintered faith who has gone west in hopes of leaving behind a broken life, tries as best he can to rebuild his faith amid darkness that includes the horrifying Massacre at Wounded Knee in December of 1890.
The novel is a long, long letter he's writing a young girl named Touches the Sky, whose life, just after the massacre, hung in the balance. He wants her to know her own story, to know she is loved. More than anything, that's what he wants to say in the story he tells.
Some lines from the end of the novel.
Two miles south of where we live a small butte rises from the flat land, maybe two acres of a tabletop thirty feet or so above the surrounding grassland. It is a holy place. Young Sioux men go there to see their visions, as they have for many years.
Some of the people in our church at Purewater think I should keep the Sioux from going there, because what it is they practice is a false religion. some believe that the Brule people will not progress until they become the good Christians we think we are. Some shake their heads at Dalitha and me; they think we're too close to the Indian people.
I don't go up there anymore. I used to. It is, after all, my land. But it is also a sacred place for the Sioux, a place where I have no place.
It seems to me that if my life and yours teach anything, it is that God Almighty wants our will, not only our fear, not only our spiritual ecstasy, not only our feelings, not only our joyful hope. He wants all of us. He wants us from the inside out. He wants us to want him. So I try to be what I am, a believer in Christ's love and his atonement; and I let the Sioux be, waiting on God's call. I try to love as God has loved me, when I can. I say only as much as these friends of mine will hear.
I have occasionally told people who mentioned the novel--especially the ending--that in my life as a writer I never felt as finished, as fulfilled, as I did when writing the last few pages of Touches the Sky, as if I had in those pages simultaneously filled my soul even as it emptied it. It was a gracious and beautiful moment, so very rare, as if what was on the page I finished left nothing more to be said, a moment in which, I suppose, I touched the sky.
I know this, Touches The Sky--I know this world can be hard. I know that, in part, it is, as the Scriptures say, a vale of tears. I have seen enough of death in my life to know that our joys here are as dependent on the seasons as are the crops I sow every spring. Rough winds can kill. Tornadoes dance across these prairies like pillars of death. Winter's cold freezes life stiff and unyielding. Prairie fires, even today, burn out homesteads as if they were little more than cord wood.
But I live here because it is my home. And what gives me life amid the changing seasons, the trials and joys, the death and the new life, is what I remember always, unseen, beneath us--a deep and life-giving sea of pure water, an ocean of life that is always there in our deepest need.
This I know. God is here. This I know, Touches the Sky.
You are very welcome to visit, trust me. We will greet you with open arms, Dalitha and I. Please do. Please do.
Fiction requires confluence of heart and mind. We create sentences and images that have not only to fit context, but also carry human emotion somehow true to what we know. What made old-line Christians wary about any kind of fiction is that it is, in fact, a lie. Jan Ellerbroek never existed. There was no Touches the Sky. There was a prototype for Dalitha, but she too never existed.
And yet she did. To me the story is very real. Even today, many years later, when I just now typed out those words, I remember and believe that what's on the page is more than mind and more heart. What's there on the page is my soul.
I suppose that's why, Karla Walkling, what you said in that wonderful note you sent, about a novel set in a place you know so well-- that's why your note is to me such a joy. You said you were up there not so long ago, that you took pictures of your place from the top. You can see your land, a centennial farm from there.
I don't live in South Dakota, but I want you to know that you can see a really long ways from that butte you're dad is protecting with trees. You can see all the way to my place.
Thanks again.
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