Wild Sorrow (7 page)

The old man looked at me approvingly, noting that a white girl—and a yellow-haired one, no less—had demonstrated a respectful manner. “My name Sevenguns.”

I smiled. “Sevenguns. I like that name.”

“Me, too,” he said, moving to the corner and picking up a long wooden pole, which he used to poke at the flaming embers in the kiva-style adobe fireplace. Even though it was cold outside, he seemed fine with leaving the door open, perhaps in order to welcome hoped-for tourists bringing a little revenue to the tribe's coffers. His fire gave off a considerable amount of heat, and the thick adobe walls retained and reflected the warmth. He continued to tend the little blaze he had provoked and said, “I will talk with the governor about traps. The war council make all the decision about pueblo land. Maybe about a week, you come back and I will know.”

“I can't wait that long. The she-lion was wounded by one of your shepherds. She's thin and starving, and if she dies, her cubs will die. They don't have a week. I'll talk to the rancher up north; maybe he will let me put traps on his land.”

The old man stopped poking his fire and studied me. “Where you want to put a trap?”

“Out on the mesa where the reservation abuts the Pueblo Peña parcel, not far from where that old ruin sits on the rim of the canyon.”

The Indian searched my eyes as if he were studying a map. His expression never changed, but I felt as if he had taken a lightning-speed journey along some line of thought our conversation had evoked.

To be sure he knew where I meant, I went on: “There's an old, abandoned Indian boarding school near there.”

Sevenguns began to nod his head slowly, and he kept nodding.

A long silence followed, and I knew better than to speak and break the fragile intimacy created by it. I stood still, slowed my breathing, kept my eyes respectfully somewhere around Sevenguns's chin, and yet not averted. The old man continued to study my face, and though his nodding had slowed, his head still bobbed up and down ever so slightly.

“Lot of people this time do not know,” he finally said, “what it means to be hungry.”

I tipped my face to one side and looked directly into his eyes, encouraging him to go on.

“When I am a boy at that old school, I am always hungry. Always hungry. I still remember that in here.” He held one hand to his middle and began to rub in a circle as if his stomach still ached for food. The other hand held the long wooden pole that he had used to stir the embers of the fire. It reminded me of seeing a storyteller holding a staff at a ceremony the previous summer. Momma Anna had referred to the eloquent man at that event as being “good with talking stick.”

I knew better than to utter a word now that Sevenguns had opened a door into a tale from his past. I even tried to keep my breathing quiet so that I would not distract this grandfather who seemed poised to tell a story.

“They boil everything: potato, rice, vegetable. They boil meat, not enough meat to make good taste in a stew. One time my brother work in the kitchen, and he say they put a mouse in the soup, you know, say it is more meat and will boil until it is clean. I believe him.” Sevenguns's eyes seemed to be looking off into the past and seeing all that he was describing. “I am so hungry that I look in my bowl for that mouse, but I eat the soup anyway. I eat everything I can get, and I am still empty here.” He patted his stomach. Then he looked at me, as if he expected me to make a comment.

I felt a dull aching in my own gut to hear this story. “I have been to that school,” I said. “I could tell it was an unhappy place.”

The old man nodded again. “Every day, we get up, and it is dark, you know, and the prefect make us stand on a cold floor while he walk around and look for wet bed. If someone wet the bed, he get a beating right there. We stand and wait, and my feet are so cold on that floor. We wash, we march to church for prayer, and my stomach is growling. Then we get breakfast: mush or bread. Mostly mush. Sometime we get a cup of milk, mostly on Saturday. They have a few chickens there, you know, but the priest and the prefect and the teachers eat all those eggs.

“We go to work next. We do all kind of work. Big boys, they work in the barn and they also blacksmith. They build the fence and they plaster the school wall with mud. In summer we tend garden and those priest they want to grow potato—but you know potato do not like to grow there and they only grow small and hard like a rock. Sometime we are so hungry we eat a hard little potato right out of the ground with dirt on it and then later we have stomachache from eating them raw. We also have some apple tree over on one side of the school and need to bring water up from the river in the wagon for those tree. That is a good job, go out in the wagon get water.

“They have bread and butter for lunch, sometime pickle or beet. Big boys steal butter from little boys. When I am a little boy, I still remember that bread my mother bake. She bake bread every morning, you know, and that bread is warm and soft and taste like the sun melt in my mouth. Not this bread. They have hard, cold bread, taste like bird dropping. If you don't have your butter, you cannot eat it, the taste is so bad. Many times, I keep my butter but get a black eye or loose tooth from a big boy who want it.” The old man stirred the fire again, and added a small log.

Through the open door, I could smell the delicious scent of bread baking in the
hornos
, the beehive-shaped outdoor adobe ovens the Tanoah women still used every day. I wondered if this was what triggered Sevenguns's memories of food, and of bread in particular.

The old man picked up a chunk of cottonwood root from under the counter. He stood the log on one end, pulled a small knife out of a sheath on his belt, and began carving the soft wood, his eyes focused intently on the work. “We have lesson in afternoon. I am lucky boy when I get bigger. I am very good at catching things, you know. I can figure out how to make a trap or hook. So they do not make me do lesson many times. I catch the rabbit in winter, catch the fish in summer, and also the walking bird. They get spoiled meat or sometimes canned meat or just bones from the government. They boil that in soup to make it kill the germs. But they do not kill all the germs. Lot of children get sick, many die. Some, they send home sick so they will not die there, but they still die, and we hear about it later, and we are sad to know it.

“The priest and the teachers, they do not eat the stew. They use the fresh meat that I catch, you know, and we can smell that meat roasting and they give us a cold potato for our supper. I go to bed dreaming of that meat with my belly gnawing on that little cold potato, and I am so hungry that I ache.”

Toward the end of this tale, a Tanoah man wrapped in a sky blue blanket came through the door carrying a parcel, but Sevenguns was so engrossed in both his carving and his story that he did not notice. Beneath the hood made by this newcomer's blanket, I could see a tobacco-colored face marked with deep lines from his nose to the corners of his mouth, and three furrows across his prominent, high forehead. I couldn't tell whether he was pained or angry. He stood respectfully waiting for Sevenguns to finish speaking. But when Sevenguns came to the part of his tale about boiling spoiled meat and sick children dying, the man in the blue blanket grew agitated. He repositioned the package from one arm to the other. He threw the tail of his blanket over his shoulder, rearranging it around his face. He shifted his weight, rolling onto the balls of his buffalo moccasin soles as if he were preparing to sprint. He looked out the door, then back at Sevenguns, then at me, and quickly down to the floor when he saw that I was watching him.

Sevenguns, once his story was finished, looked up and noticed the new presence in the small room. He looked at me and said, “This guy name Rule Abeyta. He live on Winter side of pueblo, over there.” He pointed across the tiny río that ran through the village, dividing the old part of the pueblo into two main multistory structures, which were referred to as Summer for the south side, and Winter for the north.

Rule Abeyta nodded, but he did not speak.

“How do you do?” I said. “I'm Jamaica Wild. I work for the BLM.”

Before he could respond, an earsplitting clang boomed from the nearby bell tower. Rule Abeyta ducked his head as if to avoid a blow, nearly dropping the package he'd brought. The bell pealed again, heralding the daily morning mass. Abeyta quickly recovered, took three steps across the room, and shoved the package into Sevenguns's hands. “They left this at the gate for the governor,” he said. He nodded in my direction as he turned to leave, his eyes cast down to avoid meeting my gaze as he walked full-speed out the door.

I watched him as he hurried away across the plaza. “Wow. The church bell really startled him,” I said.

Sevenguns nodded. “Many our tribe have a scar inside from that time, you know. It is not good, that school. Tanoah of many age—my father, his father—many are wounded from that time at that place. Rule Abeyta is like that. They ring a bell at that school, up in that tower there, and it mean chore time, or it mean we have to pray now, or lesson time, or it time for someone get a beating, or they make us all stand and look while they have a trial and some little child they make a decision how to punish him. That bell ring and we march, we get up, we sit down, we kneel down, that bell ring and we are like children with no soul, you know? We just do.

“When they close that school, some people from Tanoah Pueblo tie that bell out there with big rope. We push sage up in that bell until it cannot make a sound, we tie it down so it cannot move. It must be silent so it never sing again that sad song that make children slaves.”

I felt such sadness that my body felt heavy, and I wanted to sit down by the fire, to not move, not think. I hadn't had much sleep, and I knew I was tired, but this story reminded me of the way I had felt in the abandoned school. After a long silence, I said, “Thank you, Grandfather, for telling me about that time.”

He nodded.

“I thought you said you weren't good at talking much.”

He smiled. “Maybe today I am good.”

It was my turn to smile.

“You want to catch that cat, put something that move.”

“I was going to hang meat. The cats are starving.”

“Cat is not raven. Cat want food that move, not food already dead.”

You'd be surprised,
I thought to myself. Then I said aloud: “This cat knows what it means to be hungry.”

The Coldfire Episode

I went to talk with Scout and Lorena Coldfire, ranchers whose spread abutted the BLM land near the ruin and the abandoned Indian school. Scout, whose family had owned and ranched the land there for five generations, turned out to be a font of wisdom about the locale. Over coffee and some delicious homemade cookies, he told me all about the historic land disputes in that area between the Spanish and the Indians, and later the Anglos—including his ancestors.

“That ruin out there looks just like a castle from a ways off,” he said. “You can see it from miles around, perched up high on that rim like that.”

“That's where the cougar had her den,” I said. “There must not be any human traffic in that area, or she wouldn't have put the cubs there.”

“I don't think anyone goes out there,” Scout said. “It's landlocked on three sides. And if someone had to come in from the west, that'd be pretty tough. It's a long piece to the nearest road out that way. It would be days of harsh badlands hiking.”

Lorena, who had been in the middle of baking when I arrived, returned from the kitchen with another plate of cookies fresh from the oven. “I think I'm probably the only person who goes out to that old school,” she said. “I take food and flowers to the graves of the children in the cemetery behind the school every year on the Day of the Dead. But I've never seen anyone else coming or going out that way, or any signs that anyone ever has.” She picked up the coffee carafe to pour me another cup and found it empty. “Just a minute,” she said. “I've got a fresh pot brewing.” She headed back to the kitchen.

Scout picked up one of the warm cookies. “Well, come to think of it, someone goes out there every once in a while. I think it's the Indians. Did you know there's a stone staircase carved into the cliff wall right there near the ruin?”

“You mean steps?” I said. “Or hand- and footholds?”

“Oh, it's real crude, just the pecked-out places to put hands and feet, like you said. It's weathered enough, I don't think many people know what it is.”

“Does it go all the way down into the canyon?”

“Sure does. I think the Indians from long ago must have carved that staircase into the rock so they could go down to get their water from the river. It has to be. I don't know how else they'd get water up there if they didn't.”

“You said you'd seen signs of people out there?”

He got up and went to a small secretary and took out a piece of paper and a pen. “Let me draw you a map.” He started sketching as he spoke. “If you go right straight out to the west from the ruin, there is a place where some big rocks sit right on the edge. Most people wouldn't think much about it but the rocks are blocking a little pathway, and you can't see it very easily. But if you can slip around those boulders—there's a pretty steep grade to it—but there's a narrow little path there that lets you down just twelve feet or so to a shelf just below the brow of the canyon rim. It's not a wide shelf, maybe six feet at best, and it's under a lip, so you can't see it from up on top. But that's where the stone staircase leads down from. And there's two small shrines there—just little cairns of rock, but I've seen them decorated with offerings from time to time.”