An Amicable Nativity Story: David Eagle Wing

The hair on the back of David Eagle Wing’s neck rose, causing him to pause and look around. There was something about this night that seemed different, but he couldn’t say why.

It wasn’t the fact that he was working in Walgreens in the middle of the night. He had gotten used to living life under the glare of florescent lighting. Strange as it sounded working the night shift was not as bad as one might imagine. David had always chaffed under the watchful eye of management and there was a certain amount of independence working through the night. There was enough to do, but he could decide when to do what. Occasionally, in the middle of the night, a customer would come in needing assistance, but otherwise he could set his own pace without someone always standing over him.

On his knees now David began unpacking a large box of disposable diapers and putting them on the shelf, his thoughts were drawn back to the couple he had passed on his way to work. He had seen some desperate people and situations since he had arrived in Springfield, but this was, without a doubt, the most miserable. By the sounds he had heard, as he walked by, it seemed, unbelievably, that the woman was in the beginning stages of labor. Her cries had been filled with fear and pain.

Such desperation was not new to David, who had grown up on the Crow Creek Reservation. David Eagle Wing’s family was part of the Sioux tribe. Locked on the reservation, David’s people had always felt trapped and desperate. The land was desolate and hard. Southeast South Dakota had never been good farm land and the Sioux had never been farmers. The Sioux had had a proud tradition as warriors and hunters before the arrival of the Europeans. They had always been nomadic, following the migration of the wild animals. For many generations now his people had been left behind, lost between two worlds; unable to live by past traditions, unable, and unwilling, to conform to “the ways of the white man”.

“Hello, David.” The voice startled and frightened David. He sprang to his feet and twirled around. Standing before him was a tall black man, all dressed in black.

“Don’t be frightened, David. You remember me, don’t you?”

The fear in David’s face softened to uncertainty and bewilderment. “Hel …, ah … Hello, Gabe.” At a loss for words David began to straighten his Walgreens vest, which had gotten twisted in his abrupt rising. In the moment of awkward silence, David’s mind filled with a multitude of questions. How is this possible? How did Gabe find me here? Is this really just a coincidence? What is going on?

Seeing Gabe reminded David of the feeling, only minutes earlier, of the hairs on the back of his neck rising. It was the same feeling as the first time he had met Gabe. Suddenly other memories began to fill David’s head and tears began to well up in his eyes, as the pain of those days returned. David remembered how his younger brother, Sam, had committed suicide. Sam seemed to have been filled with the disconnectedness and uncertainty, the desperation and helplessness of his people.

Like so many of his friends, Sam found the pain easier to bear with alcohol. It had been an easy slide down into the use of various other illegal drugs. David had tried to stop his younger brother’s downward spiral, but how was he supposed to convince Sam to look for hope and be of good cheer, when he himself had so little of both.

Sam’s suicide devastated David. For weeks he wandered the reservation aimlessly. He had started to drink heavily, trying to drown the pain that engulfed him. It was in a drunken stupor, as David lay on an isolated hillside, his face turned toward the starlit sky, that suddenly the hairs on the back of his neck rose. David forced his eyes to focus and there standing before him was Gabe, dressed then, as now, in black. Filled with fear, David sat up.

Then, as now, Gabe had said, “Do not be afraid.” There had been something reassuring in Gabe’s voice and David’s fears melted away. Their meeting had been brief. It was Gabe who suggested that David leave the reservation for a while and go in search of himself. So David began his own personal “walkabout,” which had brought him to Springfield, Illinois, and, for a while at least, the night clerk’s job at Walgreens. That night meeting on a lonely hill in South Dakota was the only time David had seen or talked to Gabe. And now here was Gabe, standing in front of him.