A Prayer for Wendell

Three hospital beds

 Since I last sat down to write, my friend Wendell DeerwithHorns left this world.

 I just told a little story in my most previous post about some stone cultural features I’d shown a drawing of to Trudie Richmond when she was still at the Institute for American Indian Studies - and I’ll add that there was also a photograph I’d shown her of another. I’d come across a flat boulder that had two other stones on it. One of those stones I had at first thought was a cow’s skull but it turned out to more resemble a bear’s head which turned out to be balanced on the platform of that flat boulder, beside it another oddly shaped stone, just to the right of the Bear’s Head.

 When I showed her the Bear, Trudie asked me, “Have you been having bad luck lately?” And I replied that no, I hadn’t. Again she asked what Wendell thought about these stones and once again I had to say I didn’t really know.

 I guess that’s how I found myself sitting in Nancy and Wendell’s kitchen for the first time, drinking a cup of coffee. We’d become closer friends since I’d first met him at a couple Pow Wows when my wife Roberta’s mother Beth was at Waterbury Hospital during the last days of her life. I guess you could say we were staying there too, right by her side, sleeping on chairs and on the window sill, a little nest of blankets and pillows Wendell had brought us because he was working there at the hospital at the time. Wendell took care of us during that difficult time and my family will always remember his kindness, will always be grateful.

 In the DeerwithHorn’s kitchen, there was an abalone shell with sage and cedar on the table. Wendell struck a match and started the mixture smoldering. I still smoked a corncob pipe in those days, and as I filled my pipe, I also added a bit of tobacco to the shell because it seemed the right thing to do. Previously, a couple people and I had helped Wendell set up the circle for a PowWow, marking out spaces for the Families and other Traders who were planning on attending, and the first thing he had done was put down that same  shell, to smudge us and send a prayer up to Thunkashila, “Grandfather” in Lakota.

 I showed Wendell the photo of the two stones on the boulder and I remember his first words as “Just like at home,” which I took to mean back in South Dakota. “When you look at these things,” he said, “Throw down some tobacco.” He also suggested that the odd shaped stone was a fire starter, the concave edge a place to put a shell full of tobacco.

 Well, I did do that next time I walked up to that Bear’s Head. I brought along a quahog shell and found that the edge fit perfectly into that stone, right where it rested on the boulder. There were some pits in the top part of the stone and I imagined that would be a good spot to place the tip of a fire starter into a ball of cedar bark. I had earlier noticed a depression chipped into the top of the Bear’s Head stone and when I tried to fit the shell to it, I heard an audible “click” when it fell into just the right spot.

 I eventually found a couple Connecticut references to allude to tobacco offerings, hunting, and burning a tobacco mixture, but that’s another couple of stories for another time.

 There’s a second hospital bed in this story – and it’s my hospital bed on the last day of January 2011.

 I woke up hearing my friend’s voice speaking in Lakota, recognized that word for Grandfather, realized that he was praying over me. I’d had three stents placed in three veins going into my heart hours earlier – and the doctor had somehow confused me with someone else and had just told my wife Roberta and my sister Joan that I probably wouldn’t make it through the night. I drifted back into a drug induced sleep and Wendell went to go check on the situation. He then put my family at ease, straightening things out, letting them know I would be just fine.

 The third hospital bed in this story is Wendell’s, set up in his front room, by the big picture window.

 He took my hand in his, held onto it for a long time before he let go. I pulled up a chair and we talked.

 We talked about old times, good times.

 "I'm with the Spirits a lot now," he said at one point.

  We laughed a little, talked about dreams, and were comfortably quiet in between.

  When I said goodbye, I just didn’t know it would be the last goodbye.

 Those few short hours I now see as a great blessing, sitting here by my front room windows watching the sunrise, saying a little prayer for my friend…

Monday, March 25, 2024

 

Spring Equinox Story (Nonnewaug)

For Wendell, my "Twin Brother"

  After showing a drawing of a sunset over some possible stone cultural features, a Schaghticoke elder who worked at a local museum had asked me, many years ago, “Well, what does Wendell think about this?” She knew that Wendell DeerWithHorns, who was born either seven days after I was (or possibly a week less than a year before) on the Cheyenne River Reservation in South Dakota, and I had become friends and she was genuinely interested.

   I was able to answer her very quickly.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

   So I guess that is how it came to be that on the next vernal equinox, Wendell and I were walking over to a sort of triangle made of stones and boulder, in a seemingly abandoned and neglected apple orchard. We crossed some hayfields, following a stone wall, had to cross a ditch and then another little stream as well, walking on fallen tree trunks that the roses and barberries were trying their best to cover up, just then sprouting the first green of the new year.  

   We talked about the local history and I told him about bringing a Paugussett war chief we both knew over to look at the twisted trees of great age and the boulders that seemed to point out where the sun set on the equinoxes and maybe the summer solstice. We talked about Medicine Wheels...

  I don’t have photos but somewhere there’s a drawing of the two of us as stick figures along with a diagram and compass points of two sunsets, documenting the time we witnessed this springtime event. We watched the sun go down and decided to stay because Venus was becoming more visible as the sun when behind the hill over the stones. It looked as if it was following the same path and we were curious to see if the planet would also set on the same spot on the hillside marked by the boulders.

  Well, you know Venus surely did set over the stones – which shouldn’t have been a surprise since the moon and all the planets follow this ecliptic path in the sky.

  Getting darker by the minute, we started back toward that tangle of trees and thorns over the swampy little stream, a darker spot in the distance.

   That was when we both realized that neither of us had thought to bring along a flashlight...

Nancy and Wendell DeerwithHorns