Song of Dewey Beard by Philip Burnham

Author:Philip Burnham [Burnham, Philip]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: BIO028000 Biography & Autobiography / Native Americans
ISBN: 9780803269415
Publisher: Bison Books
Published: 2014-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

Francis guided us the last few miles over a road he hadn’t been on in years. I tried to imagine Beard riding this distance to town, or his children going to school on horseback, traipsing over a sea of prairie where the only thing that followed you was a fence line or a stray cloud. It wasn’t barren or uninviting, but rolling rangeland where badlands come into view when you come up over a draw. We passed fields of wheat and alfalfa and stands of cottonwood and pine until we reached the meadow where the Beards made their home.

The old log buildings were gone. We drove across the flat where the barn stood. Then we moved up the ridge and parked near a modest frame house. The yard was filled with half a dozen auto carcasses and a stack of tires, and Francis went over to talk with a tenant at the back door. The land had gone out of family hands in the 1940s, and they didn’t know the name Beard at all. The corral was over there, Francis pointed, and he recalled a herd of at least a hundred head. It was an anticlimactic trip for me, the original buildings long absent, but Francis seemed moved by the visit. “When you come back next year, I won’t be here,” he said as we got back in the car. He meant the cancer was going to get him.

On the drive back to Kyle I didn’t recognize a thing. The land was twisted all around and backward. The clouds had changed shape. Like someone blindfolded, I could have drifted for days without finding my way back to the main road. But Francis never hesitated, the forking paths as clear to him as a teacher turning the pages of a school reader. The road meandered as much as the conversation, a fact that suited him just fine.

I asked him about Wounded Knee, a family preoccupation. It made him angry, he said, that the family never got anything in the way of reparations. “The government called it a war so they didn’t have to pay us anything.” Sometimes Grandpa Beard talked about that day, Francis said, but you couldn’t get him to do it on your own. If people pestered him, he would say, “I left all that, and I don’t want to mention it.” Francis was impressed that Beard went to church every Sunday, considering all he’d been through.

As often happens on Pine Ridge, the lure of military service trumps the tragedy of family history. The future Father Apple did a stint with Uncle Sam himself when he enlisted in the 101st Airborne in the early 1950s. “When I went to the Korean War,” he recalled, “Grandpa Beard gave me some advice.”

I asked him what it was.

Francis got real quiet. A long silence passed as we rolled down a two-track. He didn’t want to answer me, or he just wasn’t ready yet.

Instead he told me how he transferred to a demolitions unit and worked with blasting caps.

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