Flesh of Their Flesh, and: Goodbye Dance

Abstract

Flesh of Their Flesh, and: Goodbye Dance Donald Platt (bio) Flesh of Their Flesh Cousin Tom gave methe photo at the memorial service for Uncle Frank who died one month shy of his one hundred third birthday. It shows Frank and his younger brother,Donald, my dad, who would die a decade before him from Alzheimer’s,skinny-dipping as teenagers in a small lake in the Cascade Mountains. The water must be freezing. They are in it up to their thighs, and both have the same shit-eating grinas they hold their arms out in front of them, hands forming the point of a V, as if they are aboutto dive into that ice-cold, scrotum-shrinking, lake water. They are mugging for their older brother, Martin, who took the black-and-white photo. It must be 1930.The water reflects sky, a steep, stony bank, and stunted pines. Two years earliertheir father, Thomas Oliver Platt, had died from diabetes and gangrene poisoning. [End Page 96] The doctor amputated his right leg. He had fought against the Sioux, rode for the Seventh Cavalryat the Wounded Knee Massacre. Though he rarely spoke about it, he had helped killone hundred seventy women and children in addition to one hundred Oglala warriors. Shells from the Hotchkiss guns exploded among the tipis. He chasedfleeing girls on his bay horse and shot them in the back as they ran.At each kill, he shouted, “Custer’s Revenge!” The counterattacking Sioux yelled, “Hoka hey! Hoka hey!” Years later, he still heard the moans of the wounded and dying lying in clustersin the ravine raked by a Hotchkiss gun commanded by Corporal Paul H. Weinert,who would be awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor, and kept screaming, “By God, I’ll make them pay for that!” A bullet had hit the pocket watch of Lieutenant Hawthorneand propelled its steel wheels and gears like miniature shrapnel into his gut.That night the pools of blood froze. Snow fell and covered the bodies in flimsy white shrouds. The burial party dug a trench ten feet wide, six deep, sixty long,and threw the frozen bodies into it “like so much cordwood,” [End Page 97] a journalist wrote,stacked one on top of the other. They were stripped of their ghost shirts and buckskin dresses decorated with dyed porcupine quills, all of which would be sold as souvenirs.George Trager photographed the contorted body of Chief Big Foot in the snow. He holdshis hands up like a crow’s claws. Head wrapped in a scarf, he struggles to rise. Trager also shot the medicine man Yellow Bird, first facedown, then flipped him over so he laysprawled on some other corpses with his genitals exposed. Trager inked the penis outof the photo, on the back of which he stamped: “Everything of interest in the late Pine Ridge War are held by us for sale.” In my photo of the two brothers skinny-dipping their genitals are alsonot visible, only their buttocks chalk-white next to the tan of their backs.I am flesh of their flesh of their flesh. When Thomas Oliver Platt got drunk on a Saturday night, as he liked to do, and started beating up Bessie, as he often did,my father at eight years old told his father, “Don’t you ever hit my motheragain!” I don’t know what happened next. Whether Thomas stopped slapping Bessie [End Page 98] long enough to swing at my father. No one breaks free from history’s grip. In the photo, Frankand Donald will dive into that cold clear water, which is the runoff from melting snowin the Cascades in late May eighty-seven years ago. It is runoff from the past. It is spring-fed by the future. The two brothers will dive naked into it, emerge gasping and yelling. They’llsplash cold water at each other, flesh flushed as boiled lobsters. Goodbye Dance The Goodbye Danceis me on our front porch, doing jazz hands and high cross kicks like some cartoon of a chorus girl and grinning like an...