Remember the Horses

Endings in an Age of Antichrist

ONE. “So let us begin anew,” a new President once exhorted the nation, and so we’ll begin again here at once in the tumult of remembrance, the clamor of word and sign… begin by considering, as the Lord suggests, the birds of the sky.

Birds neither sow nor reap, they gather nothing into barns, yet our Heavenly Father sustains them: the cardinal, the wren, the mockingbird, the chickadee perched on the dying sunflower nodding in the garden. Even the turkey vulture — Cathartes aura — circling high and slow in the realm of the terrible sun, sniffing out the dead. Are we not more important than they? Can any of us by worrying — about decline or despair, apostasy or Antichrist — add a single moment to our lives?

But still, after all this — what next?

Saint Ephrem the Syrian, himself a singer, saw in the birds of the sky not simply a sign of God’s beneficence, His loving-kindness toward creation, but also a mark of His ultimate condescension, after that creation went astray. “The air will not carry the bird,” Ephrem noted, “unless its wings confess the Cross.”

Yet evidence suggests that birds were not always birds, and have not always preached, as Ephrem promised, Jesus Christ and Him crucified. Rather, these creatures of the fifth day began their march of time on Earth as something else entirely, shaped through aeons of God’s inexorable Providence from, of all things, dinosaurs, those ‘terrible lizards’ that — in a world already steeped in immeasurable, unimaginable waves of life and death — haunted the land and sea and sky of the Mesozoic era, for 186 million years, until finally themselves falling into ruin and oblivion 66 million years ago. Except, of course, for those remarkable hollow-boned survivors of the late Jurassic, already feathered in some fashion, shifting, changing, living and dying but also enduring, growing steadily smaller, more delicate, more agile, until finally, like a dream, taking wing.

Stand a child before the fossil remains of a tyrannosaur and watch her quake with delight. Show her in the same moment a bluebird and call it kin, and she’ll call you a liar — it’s too wondrous to be believed.

“Unless a grain of wheat fall to the ground and die,” you might tell her, “it cannot bear fruit.” Show her then in the lizard become the bird not simply her daily bread, not simply the Passion that saved her, but also a promise of her own resurrection, the promise of future perfection, of her glorified body bearing the “image of the heavenly one” — subtilitas, agilitas, claritas, impassibilitas — the bird no longer monstrous but now dancing, like Wisdom before the Throne, from branch to branch and off into the sky, singing praises.

Ernest Hemingway counseled that all stories, if continued far enough, end in death. Even his own, of course, like so many men these days — with the double barrels of a shotgun pressed against his forehead. For the Christian, that promise of death brings also the promise of life — but only if one endures to the end, learns how to die, learns to sing the love song that is the end of the world.

Out here on the plains, on the frontier, that “outer edge of the wave — the meeting point between savagery and civilization,” we brought death with us, we found death already waiting. It comes as no surprise. How much of what’s at work in the world — the striving, the strife, the mad idolatry of progress, of a manifest destiny — works to hide the simple fact that we, even we, America the beautiful, are born to die? We simply can’t believe it could be so — that the world keep on moving, still, even as the body stops. But how could we be so foolish, when even the birds of the sky confess the Cross? How could we be so foolish as to declare, like Peter, I do not know the man?

“Last night the Cock crowed five times,” recorded Francis Chardon, factor of the American Fur Company stationed out here on the plains, at Fort Clark on the Upper Missouri, 1800 miles upriver from St. Louis, in May 1837, “bad News from some quarter is expected from all the Men.” The following month a Company steamboat, christened St. Peter’s, arrived bearing passengers and supplies infected with smallpox. For the Mandan Indians living in proximity to the fort — with whom Lewis and Clark’s Corps of Discovery had overwintered a generation before, and where they’d met the Shoshone girl, Sacagawea — it was end of days. Scarcely more than a hundred survived. “I keep no a/c of the dead,” Chardon wrote in mid-August, “as they die so fast it is impossible.”

The epidemic spread throughout the northern plains — to the Hidatsa, the Arikara, the Assiniboine, the Lakota, the Cree, and the Blackfeet. Given its virulence, the smallpox was quite likely hemorrhagic, with bleeding, pain, and disfigurement accompanied by “a peculiar state of apprehension and mental alertness… unlike the manifestations of any other infectious disease.”

“Terror and dismay are carried with it,” lamented the famed traveler George Catlin, “and awful despair, in the midst of which they plunge into the river, when in the highest state of fever, and die in a moment; or dash themselves from precipices; or plunge their knives to their hearts, to rid themselves from the pangs of slow and disgusting death.”

Among the Skidi band of the Pawnee, settled along the Loup Fork of the Platte River in present-day Nebraska, the smallpox killed primarily children. Desperate, prompted by an unrecorded dream or vision, in the spring of 1838 the band revived a long-discarded rite of human sacrifice, an offering to the Morning Star. The victim, a captive Lakota girl, after much singing and dancing, was painted black and red. Lashed to a scaffold carefully constructed from lengths of willow, elm, box elder, and cottonwood, she was shot to death with arrows. Her heart was cut from her body, and the blood allowed to drip onto the tongue and heart of a buffalo. “The flesh is now wantonly slashed off with knives,” wrote missionary John Dunbar, who lived among the Pawnee for a decade, “and thrown to be devoured by the dogs, but the skeleton remains suspended until it decays and falls.”

“What bearings these things will have on their adopting a more settled manner of life,” Dunbar concluded, describing the epidemic and its aftermath, “I cannot tell.. I hope God is preparing them by these things for the introduction of the blessings of the gospel of Christ.”

Loup Fork of the Platte River, Nebraska, 2020 - Photograph by Lydwine

TWO. In the summer of 2020, with the country in the midst of pandemic and riot, my family and I packed up the van and took a trip north from Oklahoma, across the plains, to discover and savor, as our friend Stanley Booth once put it, “the poetry of mad, blood-soaked Indian country.”

We camped each night beneath a comet smudging the northwest sky, in the same tent Rachel and I used on our honeymoon, and each night welcomed puzzling dreams through gates of ivory, gates of horn — of a green-faced devil whispering “moonlight… moonlight…”; of an angel tumbling slowly, alone, in the directionless void of interstellar space; of a stranger resurrected from a box-like tomb, his body shaking violently and streaming blood.

Somewhere in western Nebraska we passed a hand-drawn sign warning of snakes, and another, across the marquee of a shuttered movie theatre: CLOSED UNTIL REAL LIFE STOPS FEELING LIKE A MOVIE.

We came on a pilgrimage of sorts, for Nicholas Black Elk, wicasa wakan of the Lakota, who at Wounded Knee in 1890, in the midst of slaughter, charged the US Army on horseback, on a buckskin pony, with no rifle but instead a sacred bow gifted to him in the great vision of his childhood, and wearing a Ghost Dance shirt he’d made himself, adorned with eagle feathers and streaked with red lightning, rainbows, and the daybreak star. “A rain of blood,” a poet would write, “has blinded my eyes.”

Not long before the massacre, in the midst of a Ghost Dance, Black Elk in another vision met twelve men who led him to a magnificent tree in full flower, beside which waited a man, painted red, who told him “My life is such that all earthly beings that grow belong to me. My Father has said this. You must say this.”

“He was a nice-looking man,” Black Elk recounted, “As I looked at him, his body began to transform. His body changed into all colors and it was very beautiful. All around him there was light… It seemed as though there were wounds in the palms of his hands.”

After end of days at Wounded Knee, Black Elk settled down to life on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. In December 1904, aged 41, he became Catholic, on the Feast of Saint Nicholas, from whom he took his Christian name. The Jesuits at Pine Ridge appointed him catechist, in which role he’s credited with bringing over four-hundred people into the Church. He died in 1950 and is buried on the reservation, at Saint Agnes Catholic Cemetery. In 2017 he was declared a Servant of God, and a cause opened for his canonization.

My family and I wanted to visit his grave, to pay our respects, to leave an offering, but because of the pandemic the reservation was closed to outsiders. Instead, we sought communion elsewhere. We traveled first to the banks of the Greasy Grass, to the Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument, where George Armstrong Custer met his end in June 1876, in the Moon When the Chokecherries are Ripe. Black Elk was there that day, only thirteen years old, but still able enough in the dust and confusion of the battle to scalp two fallen soldiers, to shoot one in the forehead with a blunt arrow, another with a pistol.

It looked a lonely place to die, out there in the open, in the grass, under that endless, overwhelming sky. In an account written for the American Catholic Quarterly Review of 1877, Colonel John Gibbon — who like Custer fought at Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, and throughout the Appomattox campaign, arriving at the Little Bighorn only two days after Custer fell, and whose men made the first accounting of the dead — told of:

“suddenly [coming] upon a body lying in the grass. It was lying upon its back, and was in an advanced state of decomposition. It was not stripped, but had evidently been scalped and one ear cut off. The clothing was not that of a soldier, and, with the idea of identifying the remains, I caused one of the boots to be cut off and the stocking and drawers examined for a name, but none could be found. On looking at the boot, however, a curious construction was observed. The heel of the boot was reinforced by a piece of leather which in front terminated in two straps, one of which was furnished with a buckle, evidently for the purpose of tightening the instep of the boot. This led to the identification of the remains, for on being carried to camp the boot was recognized as one belonging to Mr. Kellogg, a newspaper correspondent who accompanied General Custer’s column.”

The battlefield was alive now with tourists — many of them older couples out touring the West, husbands offering enthusiastic accounts of historical minutiae, their wives shuffling along beside them, blank-faced and bored, but happy at least to be out of the house for a change. Nearby, a small herd of wild horses ran up and down the hills and across the tour road, dancing, kicking up dust. I gave my own extemporized account of the battle to the children, wanting them to envision especially the Indian encampment as it was that day, thousands of men, women, and children camped along the banks of the river, a city on the plain, stretching for miles.

“When we heard the Crow were coming to make war,” ran a Cree proverb from the days before the white men, “we sent out little boys. When it was the Mandan, we sent our old men. When it was the Lakota, we painted our faces for death and prepared to die.”

In the Fetterman fight of December 1866, when Lakota warriors (including Crazy Horse, a relative of Black Elk) tricked and trapped and cut down four score infantrymen and cavalry troopers under the command of Captain William J. Fetterman, the Indians, as was their custom, tore apart the bodies of the enemy dead — all except for the body of Corporal Adolph Metzger, a bugler, who as death overwhelmed the field began to fight hand-to-hand bravely with his bugle as a bludgeon and in doing so earned the Lakota’s respect and admiration, and so instead of cutting out his eyes or cutting off his balls, they covered his corpse gingerly in a buffalo robe, and lay his dented bugle on his chest.

For in their martial appetite, their fine palate for glory and the glorious, Black Elk’s people, horse lords of the northern plains, resembled no one so much as those warriors who fought and fell on the ancient plains of Troy: “He who among you,” Homer sang, “finds by spear thrown or spear thrust his death and destiny, / let him die.”

At the top of the ridge where Custer and his command were killed, a granite obelisk listed the names of the fallen. A man and a woman stood nearby, talking animatedly. The woman’s voice choked with emotion. She lived near Wounded Knee and was overcome every time she needed to pass near the mass grave of nearly three hundred men, women, and children there. The man — a stranger to her, I think — said in the calm, pedantic tone one might use when placating a child, that he himself had native ancestry, through the Trail of Tears, but that he was also an American. He said something else I couldn’t quite make out — about a sad time, about the saddest time, in our nation’s history.

Witness that constant American effort at summation, at explanation, to forge from the many a final account of the one, no matter what the cost.

“What is any Nation, after all?” asked Walt Whitman, “and what is a human being — but a struggle between conflicting, paradoxical, opposing elements — and they themselves and their most violent contests, important parts of that One Identity, and of its development?”

Even George Armstrong Custer himself (his remains no longer at the Little Bighorn but reinterred instead at West Point), vain and ambitious, somewhat of a fool but certainly a patriot, and always ready for a fight — the sort of man who might manage the peril of a hornet’s nest by punching his hand through the side and hoping for the best.

In November 1868 Custer and his Seventh Cavalry overran an encampment of Cheyenne and Arapaho — men, women, and children — camped along the banks of the Washita River in what is now western Oklahoma. “We just went in,” one trooper recalled, “for wiping out the whole gang.” The Cheyenne chief Black Kettle, always an advocate for peace between Indians and whites, and already a survivor of the notorious Sand Creek Massacre in Colorado Territory in 1864, was shot in the back while trying to get his wife, Medicine Woman Later, to safety. She died alongside him.

After the battle of the Washita, enjoying the spoils of war, Custer chose a captive Cheyenne girl, Me-o-tzi, as his concubine. His troopers, engaged in an official policy of total war, rounded up and butchered over six hundred Cheyenne ponies. Their bones lay piled at the site until well into the twentieth century, until finally carted off for use as fertilizer.

“There is little to note in the way of improvement among the Indians,” reads a report of the Pine Ridge Agency from October 1893, after the shooting stopped and the old world of war had fallen away, “They are still the same shiftless, improvident people, and, withal, careless and happy, patient under hardship, and with a faithful trust in the future that is exasperating. Naturally they learn thrift and economy very slowly.”

Bureaucratic memory will never cease to underwhelm. The National Park Service, which manages both the Washita and the Little Bighorn Battlefields calls what happened out here on the plains “an example of [a] tragic clash of cultures…” But leaving such obvious bromide aside and sorting through the boots of the dead so to speak, we might again suggest what poetry Homer sang for those ancient plains of Troy, of Priam’s supplication before Achilles:

“I have gone through what no other mortal on earth has gone through; / I put my lips to the hands of the man who has killed my children.”

Or perhaps offer only the words of a present-day Cheyenne chief, Gordon Yellowman, who left a handwritten note at the Washita Battlefield’s Visitor Center which reads, simply:

“Remember the Horses.”

Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument, 2020 - Photograph by Lydwine

THREE. We drove east toward the Black Hills across the blonde, burnt plains, through the Crow Agency and the rez of the Northern Cheyenne, volte-face of the route by which Custer’s Seventh Cavalry hurried toward their doom. After the quiet of the plains the Black Hills were agitating, unsettling — the crowds and the traffic; the RVs and trailers with evocative brand names like Shasta, Cougar, Lariat, and Silverado; the souvenir shops peddling dreamcatchers, jewels, fossils, and gems; the billboards hawking caves, campgrounds, ‘50s diners, helicopter tours, ziplines, and personal injury attorneys specializing in motorcycle accidents; and behind it all an intricate web of historic preservation dedicated to the greed for gold, to whores and gunslingers — a land completely conquered and overrun… the heart of everything that is.

We bought pizzas at a casino hotel in Deadwood. The staff and patrons there seemed bewildered, each oddly disconnected from their surroundings, going through the motions with strange apprehension, as though they couldn’t quite believe anyone else was truly real.

The ambience of the Black Hills in the summer of 2020, that summer of pandemic and riot, called to mind something of the first newspaper accounts of Wounded Knee in 1890, the reportage of the Hotchkiss guns blasting the Indians to kingdom come, and good riddance, “a complete annihilation is the only cure,” alongside such shameless advertising copy as:

“ON THE WARPATH — The Indian trouble has caused considerable excitement throughout the country, but not so much as the great bargains offered at the O.K. Shoe and Clothing House — Four-ply linen collars + cuffs, all wool shirts + knitted underwear.”

On the same page, no less, as “complete annihilation.” Filthy lucre. The love of money is the root of all evil.

Yet, “the business of America is business,” as President Calvin Coolidge declared. Coolidge himself came to the Black Hills in 1927, as drilling began on the Mount Rushmore National Memorial. “The union of these four Presidents,” Coolidge remarked at the dedication, “carved on the face of the everlasting hills of South Dakota will constitute a distinctly national monument. It will be decidedly American in its conception, in its magnitude, in its meaning and altogether worthy of our Country.”

Mount Rushmore, it turns out, is a lot like Graceland, in that one just doesn’t know what to think. A handsome monument, surely — well-situated, eye-catching, perfect for a camera. A parking garage and a café, an avenue of flags and self-guided audio tours in English, Español, Deutsch, Français, and even Lakota. Yet in all of this still so startling, still so out of place, so seemingly random in its conception — like waking from sleep and finding nude statuary somehow grown in the night from your bedroom carpet.

Gutzon Borglum, the sculptor who designed the memorial, said that its purpose was “to communicate the founding, expansion, preservation, and unification of the United States” — a country with the temerity and force of will to carve from bare rock the likenesses of its idols in the sacred land of a subjugated enemy, the Lakota, who first took the land themselves by force of war from their own enemies.

Shortly before Borglum unveiled the newly carved head of Thomas Jefferson for the public in 1936, Nicholas Black Elk (who worked in those years at an Indian pageant put on for tourists on the road between Rapid City and Rushmore) was taken to the top of the mountain and allowed to pray with his pipe for “the unity of my people and the whites in the name of brotherhood.”

Whether amity, in the spirit of Black Elk’s prayer, will someday reign, or whether Whitman’s “struggle between conflicting, paradoxical, opposing elements” will continue unabated, and some new master, some rough beast, come slouching toward the Black Hills or elsewhere in America, with a belly hungry for the spoils of war, to conquer the conquerors, remains to be seen.

After Rushmore we drove to Custer State Park, to see the buffalo. We found them out on the Wildlife Loop Road, where the herd had tumbled over the pavement and fetched up against a fence, trapping a long line of traffic in its midst, all of us stuck there in our cars like fools for ten, fifteen, twenty minutes, afraid to push forward, laughing, watching the bulls mount the cows, watching them butt one another and chew the grass, Rachel telling the children to “Roll up the windows! Roll up the windows!” — until finally a lone biker pushed on through, gunning his engine and blaring AC/DC at top volume. The buffalo parted, slowly, and we followed the biker through the midst of the herd, still laughing, until suddenly free and clear and smiling. Up ahead another biker tried to execute a clumsy three-point turn, not looking, and so appeared to be pulling off to the side of the road, but when I tried to pass he swung out in front of the van and began yelling at me. I backed up, and as he zoomed past, heading back down toward the buffalo herd, we heard him yell “Moron!” and this tore away our laughter and our smiles, and reminded me, suddenly, there used to be tens of millions of buffalo on the plains, tens of millions, but now nearly gone, killed for kicks, their bones left to bleach in the sun, killed for their tongues and their hides, torn apart by buffalo skinners so foul and barbarous, so covered in gore, they were serviced by a special class of whores.

Before we left South Dakota we drove east out of the Black Hills, through Rapid City, past the Badlands and Pine Ridge and Black Elk’s grave, beyond nowhere, it seemed, to Stanley County. Years ago my paternal grandmother and her siblings acquired a quarter section of farmland out there, 160 acres, part of that endless grid whereby the US Government endeavored to divide the entirety of the West. The details of the purchase have always been unclear, as are the reasons why, after all these years and nothing to show for it, the acreage sitting as empty as the day it was bought, the heirs are still reluctant to sell. My father told me they’d had some trouble a few years back, with an adjacent property owner grazing cattle onto the family land. They’d hired a private investigator to sort things out. It seemed an awful lot of trouble, and an odd thing to be concerned about, out there under the endless, overwhelming sky.

Off the interstate we followed dirt farm roads for the better part of an hour until finally, at a bend in the road near a small creek, we got as close as we could get. I got out of the van and took a picture, of a low ridge of land a mile or more away, at the far edge of a field studded with rolls of hay and busted old buildings. Beyond that ridge was our land, our legacy.

My father, who inherited his mother’s share of the quarter section when she died, would periodically tell my brother and me he was ready to pass us his claim on the land, tired of managing it among his cousins, tired of paying taxes on nothing but grass and sky. We’d say, “Sure, whatever you need to do. We’re ready.” But he never managed to follow through.

I carried with me on that trip across the plains a bundle of sage I’d gathered at the Washita Battlefield, where Black Kettle was killed. I’d hoped somehow to present it as an offering, if not on Black Elk’s grave, then somewhere close by. Failing that, I wondered about leaving it out here on the family land. But the only roads out that way, beyond the ridge, were barely roads at all, only pasture, and no kind stranger happened along that day to help us on our way.

I stood there at the edge of the road a few more moments, then got back into the van. The children were curious, “Daddy, where are we?”

“We’re going home,” I said.

Stanley County, South Dakota, 2020 - Photograph by Lydwine

FOUR. While we were in the Black Hills, in the summer of 2020, knowing the reservation was closed to outsiders, knowing we wouldn’t make it to his grave, I prayed for Nicholas Black Elk’s intercession, for a way forward, and heard in response quite clearly in my heart, “Don’t worry — you don’t need to come to me. I’ll come to you.”

But Black Elk didn’t show himself up there, in the sacred land of his people, but rather in Dallas, later that summer.

I drove into the city from the southeast, from Nacogdoches, and on approach, in early evening light, saw again that familiar city skyline, like in my dream, silhouetted against the sky. My hotel was downtown on Commerce Street, close to where Jack Ruby’s Carousel Club once stood. I dropped my bags and started walking — I wanted to get down to Dealey Plaza before sunset.

The streets were in shambles. Human shit smeared on the sidewalks, and the homeless wandering aimlessly, or sprawled on the ground, drugged and dirty. I never saw it so bad. Over everything and everyone, rich and poor alike, that strange apprehension and disconnection I noticed in the Black Hills, as if nothing was real — and so anything, everything, might be permitted.

Dealey Plaza was empty, and traffic light. I took a few pictures, said a few prayers. A young man sat on a bench nearby, his face slack, his eyes blank, a makeshift drug pipe dangling from his fingers, made from the plastic barrel of a ballpoint pen.

I felt a growing disquiet in my heart, creeping toward outright anxiety. I started walking back to the hotel, more and more certain I needed to get back to my room quickly, to safety, before dark. It seemed, as though in a moment of apocalypse, I could feel the presence of innumerable souls all around me, on the streets, in the traffic, even tucked away in the buildings looming overhead. All of us present in that moment, but all of us alone, and lonely, as if there were no longer any ‘we’ at all, but only you or me or them to show for it. Every man an island, every woman an empty heart, but all headed toward some inevitable confrontation, some necessary reckoning.

It felt like a dry forest with lightning moving in.

I tried to explain it to myself as nerves or fatigue, but remembered later a detail from Black Elk’s great vision, in which the saint was given both the power to make live and the power to destroy, a vision of the people in a time of difficulties, a time of black clouds and the people walking a black road, and “each one seemed to have his own little vision that he followed and his own rules and all over the universe I could hear the winds at war like wild beasts fighting.”

Outside the hotel a man stopped me to beg for money, and when I handed him a handful of bills he grew enthusiastic, started talking about buying a meal, about the great hot dogs they served down the block at the 7-Eleven.

Dealey Plaza, 2020 - Photograph by Lydwine

FIVE. But still, after all this, what next?

Consider, I might suggest, the horses. They started here, you see, on the grasslands of ancient North America, some 55 million years ago, but died out around the time the first humans came wandering into the continent from the north. A few survivors, though, galloped their way out of the Americas and into the Old World, into thousands of years of domestication and development, until the Spanish Conquistadores loaded them onto galleons and brought them back to us from across the ocean in the 16th century.

In 1680, after the great Pueblo Revolt that drove the Spanish from their territories in what would one day be the American Southwest, the Spanish horse herds were released into the wild, where they were captured and re-tamed by Indian tribes living a precarious existence on the edge of the plains. Sweet Medicine of the Cheyenne prophesied the coming of the horse, and what it would mean for his people — of an animal who:

“will carry you on his back and help you in many ways. Those far hills that seem only a blue vision in the distance take many days to reach now; but with this animal you can get there in a short time, so fear him not. Remember what I have said.”

So rose and fell the great horse lords of the American plains, the very image of the West, not only for our own nation but for the world as well. Even Franz Kafka, nestled in Prague, the death of his own world already set in motion:

“If one were only an Indian, instantly alert, and on a racing horse, leaning against the wind, kept on quivering jerkily over the quivering ground, until one shed one’s spurs, for there needed no spurs, threw away the reins, for there needed no reins, and hardly saw that the land before one was smoothly shorn heath when the horse’s neck and head would be already gone.”

Consider then, like the birds of the sky, the horses of the plain, a sign not simply of daily bread nor the Passion, but a promise of perfection, of life come to its full summation in glory, bearing “the image of the heavenly one.”

Unless a grain of wheat fall to the ground and die, it cannot bear fruit…

When we first came to Oklahoma, our first Sunday, after Mass, we drove to Holy Trinity Cemetery in Okarche, northwest of Oklahoma City. We went there on pilgrimage, to visit the grave of Father Stanley Rother, the martyr, before his remains were exhumed and his relics translated to a new resting place in the city.

Rother was born in Okarche on March 27, 1935. “I’ll never forget it,” his father remembered, “We had the worst dust storm that we had during the Dust Bowl days. And the day that Stan was born, I had my firstborn colt, a baby colt, and he had his leg broken — we had to splint the colt the same day that Stan was born. I thought, ‘Boy, is life gonna be like this? Have a baby one day and have a dust storm, with a broken leg on a colt the same day?’”

The Rothers were German-Catholic farmers, hard-working, raising livestock and growing wheat, oats, and alfalfa. Young Stan grew up a quiet boy, good with his hands, good with machines, devout. His high school yearbook, one biographer notes, was dedicated to Our Lady of Fatima.

Rother was ordained a priest on May 25, 1963. Of the ten men ordained alongside him, five would leave the priesthood by decade’s end. In 1968, Father Rother volunteered for service at the Catholic Mission of Oklahoma in Santiago Atitlán, Guatemala, offering the sacraments, training catechists, and helping the Tz’utujil Indians of the region work their land.

“Tz’utujil Catholics have an unusual and striking practice of prayers during Mass. During the Eucharistic Prayer, the women cover their faces with their scarves and the men hold a hand in front of their face, like Moses hiding his face on Mount Sinai, and they all pray aloud but softly. The overall audible effect is a low hum throughout the church. To an observer these prayers seem to have a peculiar intensity.”

Father Rother was quiet. He had a temper. He was not an intellectual. “Stan was good to people,” one friend recalled, “whom other people avoided.”

By the late 1970s the political situation in Guatemala began to deteriorate. Faced with insurrection, the government made war on the poor, and on the Church. Events became unbearable, and normal parish life nearly impossible to sustain. Father Rother watched friends disappear. He stood with frightened widows, helping them identify the corpses of their husbands. “To shake the hand of an Indian,” he explained, “is a political act.”

In March 1981, on a visit home to the United States, Father Rother was asked to speak at Saint John the Baptist Catholic Church in Edmond, Oklahoma, a suburb of Oklahoma City. Hearing his account of events in Guatemala, and especially his criticism of the American military aid being offered to the Guatemalan government, some parishioners in attendance took issue. An anonymous letter was sent to the Military Attaché of the Guatemalan Embassy in Washington, D.C. Stanley Rother was now a marked man.

On July 28, 1981, having returned to Santiago Atitlán, Father Rother was murdered in his rectory by a group of masked men in the middle of the night. He was shot twice and mutilated with a knife. Knowing full well the import of what had happened, the Carmelite sisters who cleaned the room in the aftermath gathered what blood of his they could into an empty peanut butter jar.

Father Rother’s body was returned to Oklahoma. His heart and blood were left with the Tz’utujil in Guatemala.

“The truth is that Jesus begins by making His followers suffer,” the writer J.K. Huysmans wrote, “and explains himself afterwards.”

Stanley Rother was beatified on September 23, 2017. The Archdiocese of Oklahoma City built a $40 million shrine in his honor, on the site of a former golf course near the southern edge of the city, a project for which the Archdiocese launched its first-ever capital campaign. The shrine, “designed in the Spanish Mission style… features stucco, arches, tile roofs, exuberant detailing at important doorways, covered walkways, and paved terraces,” all of this meant to recall “the character of the Guatemalan village where Father Stanley served the poor and was martyred.”

We missed the beatification, and also the dedication of the shrine, but last summer I finally drove down to the city to see it. It’s right off the interstate, tucked behind a jumble of other businesses — a gas station, a tattoo parlor, a sex toy emporium — seemingly out of place in the confused sprawl of a western city, a little like Graceland or Mount Rushmore in that one just doesn’t know what to think. Inside, in the church built to seat two thousand, the antiseptic newness of an Airbnb, and a cricket chirping underneath the empty pews. But in the chapel beyond, where Rother’s body is entombed in the altar, beneath a mural of martyrs welcoming him into the presence of the Risen Christ, the palpable nearness of a saint, of Presence billowing in wave upon wave. “‘And the poor have the Good News preached to them’ So be it.”

I decided right there that since Stan Rother was not a cynic, then neither was I. Instead of shaking my head at the shrine’s ostentations, I’d give it awhile to grow on me — say five hundred years, to when the colors are faded, and the tiles cracked, and the saplings lining the parking lot are fully grown. By then the gas station, the tattoo parlor, and the sex toy shop will surely be gone. Maybe even the city itself, crumpled into the plains, empty except for pilgrim footpaths come from every direction — from San Antonio; Santa Fe; Rapid City, South Dakota. All of them arrowing here, there, and everywhere in this hallowed land — the people restless to commune with the saints, with Stan Rother, Black Elk, and all the others, as these holy ones each learned from Jesus Christ and Him Crucified how to die, and so in the face of decline, despair, and end of days… how to live.

Because end of days is upon us, is always upon us, has already passed us by.

So let us begin anew.

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Brian Kennedy is the founder of Lydwine, as well as the frontman and principal songwriter of the arthouse country band The Cimarron Kings. He lives with his wife and six children in Guthrie, Oklahoma.

Washita Battlefield National Historic Site, 2017 - Photograph by Lydwine

NOTES. “So let us begin anew…” quoted from the inaugural address of John F. Kennedy, delivered in Washington, D.C. on January 20, 1961 - Saint Ephrem quoted from The Luminous Eye: The Spiritual World Vision of Saint Ephrem the Syrian, translated by Sebastian Brock (Liturgical Press, 1992) - John 12:24, 1 Corinthians 15:49 - The characteristics of the resurrected body are outlined by Saint Thomas Aquinas in the “Supplementum tertiæ partis” of the Summa theologiae, as well as Saint Bonaventure’s Lignum vitae - Ernest Hemingway quoted from Death in the Afternoon (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1932) - For the smallpox epidemic of 1837, see Chardon’s Journal at Fort Clark, 1834-1839 by F.A. Chardon, edited by Annie Heloise Abel (Bison Books, 1997); Across the Wide Missouri by Bernard DeVoto (The Riverside Press, 1947); Great Plains by Ian Frazier (Farrar, Strauss, Giroux, 1989); Letters and Notes on the Manners, Customs, and Conditions of the North American Indians by George Catlin (Dover Publications, Inc., 1973); Smallpox and its Eradication by F. Fenner, et al. (World Health Organization, 1988) - For the Morning Star ritual of the Skidi Pawnee, see DeVoto, but also The Sacrifice to the Morning Star by the Skidi Pawnee by Ralph Linton (Field Museum of Natural History, 1922); The Skidi Rite of Human Sacrifice by George A. Dorsey (Proceedings - International Congress of Americanists, 1906, vol. II); John Dunbar’s letter of June 8, 1838 in The Missionary Herald: Containing the Proceedings at Large of the American Board of Commissioners of Foreign Missions, Vol. XXXIV (1838) - For Nicholas Black Elk see Black Elk Speaks: The Complete Edition by John G. Neihardt (Bison Books, 2014); The Sixth Grandfather: Black Elk's Teachings Given to John G. Neihardt (Bison Books, 1985); Black Elk: Holy Man of the Oglala by Michael F. Steltenkamp (University of Oklahoma Press, 1997); Nicholas Black Elk: Medicine Man, Missionary, Mystic by Michael F. Steltenkamp (University of Oklahoma Press, 2011); and Black Elk: Colonialism And Lakota Catholicism by Damian Costello (Orbis Books, 2005) - For Custer, Black Kettle and Me-o-tzi of the Cheyenne see Son of the Morning Star by Evan S. Connell (North Point Press, 1984) - Lines from The Iliad are from Richard Lattimore’s translation - Walt Whitman quoted from his Memoranda During the War (1875-1876) - Shameless advertising copy is from the Salt Lake Herald, Wednesday, January 14, 1891 - For Sweet Medicine’s prophecy see The West by Geoffrey C. Ward (Back Bay Books, 1996) - Franz Kafka’s “The Wish to be a Red Indian” was translated by Willa and Edwin Muir - For Blessed Stanley Rother see The Shepherd Who Didn’t Run by María Ruiz Scaperlanda (Our Sunday Vistor, 2015); The Shepherd Cannot Run : Letters of Stanley Rother, Missionary and Martyr (Archdiocese of Oklahoma City, 1984); as well as the film No Greater Love: The Story of Father Stanley Rother (Archdiocese of Oklahoma City, 1987/2001).