The Crying Dance

The raven came to look for them amid the Sierra peaks. The old men shouldn’t even be alive any longer, but they were—they’d been together as part of the landscape for over 150 years. Wu was Chinese, a refugee of the Opium wars and the Taiping Rebellion. He’d sailed across the Eastern Ocean to California at the behest of Dizang the bodhisattva. Francisco was a Yokuts Indian captured by the Spanish army and raised by the friars at Mission San Luis Obispo. After his escape he’d become a bear shaman. The two men’s fates have intertwined in such a way that their lives have gone on and on as they wandered the Sierra. The old men even danced the Ghost Dance together in an attempt to restore Francisco’s people and the life of the landscape. The raven told the old men there was someone coming – JR, a cowboy of the Sierra foothills whose sad ass cowboy economics and PTSD from serving in Iraq have left him ready to fall off the edge of the world. His life is empty, but the mountains and rivers have conspired to bring him together with the old men

John Spivey is a writer and studio furniture maker living in Santa Barbara, California.