Pilgrimage

Trust me, I could tell you her story. I've been living with it for five years, although the Covid year (and more) can't be counted inasmuch as the tribe determined the entire Cheyenne River Reservation off-limits to anyone but its own. I couldn't get to Eagle Butte, South Dakota, even if I had tried, couldn't get in. She leveraged her own considerable tribal clout to get me in, but the quarantine wouldn't budge, even though Governor Noem, who was not her favorite anyway, got hoppin' mad about it. 

(Let's just say this about that. Marcella LeBeau, a matriarch among her Cheyenne River people, was never hesitant about becoming an old Testament prophet, found it her role, in fact, more than once during her many, many years.)

But she couldn't get me in, so the work stopped and the book never really got finished before she died just last week, 102 years old. Cancer got her finally, took her home to the Spirit World, she would say. 

You may have read her obituary. The Associated Press did one, and it got picked up by newspapers all over the country. She was a war hero, an Army Nurse during the Battle of the Bulge. There may well have been more Lakota Army nurses during WWII, more Native American nurses, but I don't know of any. She was most proud of serving her country, a country she was not at all ashamed or afraid of criticizing angrily for the way it has treated this nation's Indigenous, including, of course, the Lakota people.

I won't try to tell the story. It's been condensed wonderfully and is now available all over the internet. Here's the AP's obituary.  My version is 150 pages longer.

So, I missed the funeral. Misdirected or mistaken, I arrived exactly one day late. Things like that happen on the reservation, but they're not supposed to happen to old white men. The funeral was Saturday; I was sure it was Sunday, a massive snafu, but it all worked out, as things often do way out there. Had I been in Eagle Butte on time on Saturday, I would have been one of a huge crowd. I wouldn't have had much time with her family. Yesterday, I sat in her house for the last time with a goodly bunch of LeBeaus who were sitting around remembering, occasionally dabbing at their eyes. That was a blessing I wouldn't have had.

I'd planned to go to Promise, the town where she lived as a child. I'd been there before, with her, seen all the important places. Her church (or at least the contemporary manifestation there of)

And her neighborhood--a house her father built long, long ago

"Neighborhood" doesn't quite seem to cover it really. Yesterday, alone, I visited the immense landscape in which she was raised (she'd be happy I said it that way, so proud she was of her heritage). My best camera is simply not big enough to get that landscape in, but here's a fragment

And the cemetery (see it?--behind the convoy of trees) where her mother and father, her sister and brothers, already gone, greeted her, I'm sure. 

That's where I found her, a place I'm sure she wanted to be--

I was alone, which is maybe the best way to visit cemeteries anyway. But yesterday's mile-long caravan that came all the way out to the Promise cemetery from Eagle Butte--a long trip, considerable chunks of which are on gravel--had left its mark all around, including this touching imprint, a child's hands in the dirt--

The funeral was live-streamed on Facebook, I was told, so I can watch it at my leisure. The pilgrimage I needed to take was a trip alone to a little town named Promise, where I'd been before when I'd asked Marcella to take me to the places most near and dear to her heart. I'd stood here before to meet her mother, who died here when Marcella was just ten years old

And her father, an Irish-American who'd come out to the reservation to work for the government, putting up housing, when he met a woman. . .well, you know that story.

I was out there, alone, Sunday, November 28, 2021, my own mother's birthday, among a people not much my own

and yet, yesterday, out there very much my own, among fellow pilgrims in this incredibly wide and limitless world, this immense, jaw-dropping creation of an Almighty who is, it seems, forever bigger than our fullest grasp, always out of reach but never far away.

It was a holy experience, a Sabbath all its own.