June Tabor - Joseph Cross lyrics

rate me

There's word from the café

that the old mans ailin'

His eyes are pailin'

and the weather took his hands

They say the ring on his finger

was shaped from a bone

from some white man in Missouri

that spilled whiskey on his wife

He has traveled in a sacred circle

and he has traveled on a white man's train

He's killed for hunger his buffalo brother

He's killed for anger and a white man's name

His name was Joseph Cross

and he was raised by the mission

Just one of a hundred Indian boys

that wouldn't tie his shoes

He cried the night his grandpa died

and told him in a vision

"Stay close to the ways of the rattlesnake

stay close to the ways of the grizzly."

In the 1919

chill of December

the bear and the rattler

coil sleepin' hardly breathin'

It's a penny to the kitchen boy

to run get sister Lydia

"Now you tell her that old Indian

is sleepin', hardly breathin'."

Someone said it just weren't right

to give him a white man's funeral.

Someone said they'd just as soon as not

float him on down the river

But no one touched the ring

and no one said a thing about his chest

where it looked like a bear had ripped him

and a rattler kissed his cheek.

Because . . .