Desert Hearts (35 page)

“What was it, Michael? A bad dream?”

Just nod, he thought. Just reassure her that he was fine. Just cling to her and he would forget.

But he could still see the faces, so it wasn’t just a bad dream. He needed her to think he was all right, though. So he tried to say,
Yes, it was just a dream
, but he choked on the words. He was choking on grief and rage that seemed to have come out of nowhere and he started to turn away to hide it. He needed to protect Elizabeth…he needed…. Em, he needed her arms around him, he thought, and he turned back as she pulled his head down and murmured his name. Then he was in her arms and sobbing and she was comforting him.

“Hush, Michael, hush, I am here and I love you,” she murmured over and over.

She didn’t realize what she had been saying until his crying stopped. She wasn’t sure whether she wanted him to have heard it or not.

When he pulled away abruptly, her heart stopped. He didn’t love her and didn’t want her to love him. But she had no choice in the matter. She had said the words without thought, right from her heart.

He sat up against the wall and she lay very still. It seemed like an eternity before he said anything.

“Elizabeth?”

She could say nothing. He slid down again and pulled her against him. “Did ye mean what ye were saying, Elizabeth?”

She nodded against his chest. And now it was her turn to cry, hard enough so that she couldn’t hide it from him.

“ ‘Tis all right,
muirneach
,” he said comfortingly.

“It is not all right for me to have told you,” she cried. “Not when you don’t love me.”

“Don’t love you? Don’t love you? Haven’t I been loving you for a long year or more? Haven’t I been hazarding my immortal soul for the love of you, Elizabeth? Why in the name of God do you think I married you?”

“Because we were friends, Michael. That’s what you said.”

“And what else could I have said to a newly widowed woman? That I was dying for love of her? You didn’t need to be feeling responsible for my feelings, Elizabeth. You needed a quiet place to be mourning your husband. You needed a home and a husband’s protection.”

Elizabeth was quiet. He was right. She had needed him as a friend, first and always. But now she also needed him as a lover.

“Do you really love me, Elizabeth. As much as you loved Thomas?” Michael was ashamed of himself for even asking that question.

“So much more than I loved him, Michael. So much more,” she sobbed, turning and burrowing into his shoulder. “I have felt so ashamed of myself that I wanted you the way I did. I never wanted Thomas like that and I felt so disloyal to his memory.”

“I love you, Elizabeth. With all my heart and soul. I always will.”

She could feel him getting hard through his nightshirt. “I didn’t want to make love tonight, Michael.”

“Then we won’t,” he reassured her.

“Because I thought you’d be too tired,” she added.

“Sure and since I fell asleep immediately, why wouldn’t you think that,” he said with a soft laugh.

She reached up and stroked his face. “Do you want to tell me what woke you, Michael?”

He groaned and clung to her. “I can’t speak about it now. Not even to you. Maybe one day….”

Elizabeth pulled herself out of his arms, and unbuttoning her nightgown, pulled it over her head. When he realized what she was doing, Michael took his own nightshirt off. Her body was warm and welcoming and he buried himself in it, taking her slowly and gently. Or maybe she took him. He couldn’t tell and neither could she. When they climaxed, it was together and for the first time the release was as emotional as physical, for they both cried out words of love as they shuddered in each other’s arms.

* * * *

Her uncle’s hogan was burned and the peach trees destroyed. Antonio had told Serena twice, but she still couldn’t take it in. She could close her eyes and almost smell the scent of peach blossoms that filled the canyon in the spring. She could remember how the fuzz of the peach skin felt against her lips when she bit into a ripe one and the sweet juice ran down her throat. Serena had spent all the summers of her childhood visiting her mother’s brother and had expected to bring her children there and watch them climb trees and play in the warm, wet sand of the creek. And they would have brought their children. Something more than the orchards had been destroyed, she realized. The trees were important for something beyond the fruit they bore: they had been there for so many years that they held the memories of past generations and promises for the generations to come.

“So many are going in to Fort Defiance. What will we do, husband?” she asked Antonio that night as they huddled together for warmth. They had taken refuge in a small cave, once the home of the Ancient Ones. It was early to go to sleep, but it was so cold that they had crawled under the few blankets they had and kept the baby warm between them. They had scattered their fire after cooking the last of their food. Firewood was scarce and smoke might have led the
bilagaana
to them.

“Manuelito will not surrender,” said Antonio.

“I admire him for that. I don’t want to leave Dinetah either. But I do want to eat,” she added sharply. “Manuelito is not the mother of a new baby.”

“Your milk is still coming in strong. We can gather piñon nuts and wild potatoes to keep us going.”

“I feel cowardly, husband. But a new baby makes you feel that way. What I would do if I were alone is different. The soldiers have promised food and clothing at the Bosque.”

“I will leave it up to you, wife,” said Antonio after a heavy silence.

Serena sighed. “Let us see how the winter goes. If we do not have to travel too much and if we can forage enough food so that I can feed her,” she said, stroking their sleeping daughter’s head with trembling fingers, “then we will stay.”

“You are an amazing woman,” said Antonio, holding her close.

“No,” she said tartly, “I am Diné, and no more than you or your uncle do I think it right to leave this land. But I am also a woman who has lost one child. I don’t think I can survive the loss of another.”

“Nor I,” Antonio whispered.

By the middle of February, Elizabeth had become used to the sight of hundreds of campfires around the fort. Colonel Chavez had estimated that there were already over a thousand Navajo there, with more arriving every day.

They were coming in because Rope Thrower had won. He had chosen to fight a different kind of war, one in which a warrior could not fight directly. The enemy in this war was hunger and cold, and against these foes the Diné could not win. And so they surrendered, starving and suffering from exposure.

A few times a week, Elizabeth would collect as much leftover food and scraps as she could and bring it out to the families closest to the fort. Some of the women at the fort just laughed at her. “Why ever would you want to feed them, Mrs. Burke?” they would say. “We have them right where we want them, weak and starving.” But most were touched by the plight of their former enemies and would give her an old skirt or worn-out army blouse to bring with her.

It was nothing, what she was doing. More families came in every day, gaunt and exhausted. They joined the others who were just waiting, for food, for clothing that never came. And for the army to bring them to their new home.

“Except it can’t be home to them, Michael. This is their home and leaving it is making them as ill as hunger and cold,” she cried one night at the table. She pushed her half-eaten food away. “How can I eat when I know that others are starving almost at my door. All I can think of is Antonio and Serena. They may be out there; one of those fires could be theirs and I’d never know.”

Michael reached over and gently pushed her plate back in front of her. “Eat,
a ghra
. You’re not eating won’t help anyone.”

Elizabeth wanted to cry out, but you are not eating either, Michael. Or sleeping! But she couldn’t. Unless Michael chose to share his troubles with her, she could not force him. But it was hard to wake in the middle of the night and realize he was gone, driven from sleep by whatever nightmares plagued him.

By March, more than two thousand Navajo were camped at the fort and Chavez sent them on their way to Fort Sumner at Bosque Redondo with a company of his volunteer troops.

“
Día
,” muttered Michael as he watched the ragged groups of Indians start on their more than three-hundred-mile walk.

Sergeant Elwell came up behind him. “What do you think, Burke?”

“I think it will be a miracle if any of them make it.”

“You know I am no Indian lover like you, Michael, but even I am appalled. And even more are coming in as these leave.”

* * * *

Within a few days the number of campfires was increasing again and Elizabeth, who had not been outside the fort for over a week, gathered up some leftovers and, leashing Orion, went out for a walk.

She didn’t recognize them and would have passed them by had she not out of the corner of her eye seen Antonio’s bay. Her first thought was, That bay gelding looks like Antonio’s, but he’s too old. The horse looked almost like a skeleton, his coat dull and his eyes lifeless. But there was something about his face that was so familiar that she turned back to have another look. And then she saw them.

At first, she just wanted to turn and run. Here she was, healthy and well fed, leading a dog who probably had more to eat today than they had had in the past week. How could she look them in the eye? How could they still call her a friend? She felt guilt and outrage and shame wash over her in great waves. She hadn’t seen the ocean in years, but she remembered what it had been like as a child when her parents would take her to the shore. How terrified she had been of the breakers that pushed you and knocked you down and pulled you under. She felt she was facing them again, as she turned and walked slowly over to Antonio and Serena.

“Serena?”

The woman looked up at her, dull-eyed. Her eyes were sunken and the skin stretched over the bones of her face. Her friend had had a round face, thought Elizabeth. Maybe she had made a mistake.

But then the man stood up and said her name. And some light came into the woman’s eyes and she smiled and opened the ragged blanket she had clutched around her shoulders to reveal a small, black-haired bundle.

If it hadn’t been for the baby, Elizabeth wouldn’t have been able to get any words out. But she immediately smiled and began to make the universal crooning noises women make when close to a small human being.

The baby was thin but not gaunt like her parents and looked healthy. Elizabeth was sure that Antonio had sacrificed his own food for his wife and daughter.

“I…I am surprised to see you here,” Elizabeth was finally able to say. “I had heard that Manuelito refused to surrender.”

Antonio nodded. “My uncle will remain in Dinetah. He says he would rather die there than live anywhere else. But I promised my wife and daughter we would survive this. And we cannot out there. At least they have promised us food and shelter at Fort Sumner. This is not what we want to do, but what we have to do.”

“Michael and I…we have been thinking about you, worrying about you.”

“My husband told me you married that handsome sergeant,” said Serena with a hint of her old humor.

“Yes,” Elizabeth said shyly.

Serena gave her a tired smile. “Didn’t I tell you, husband?” Her smile faded quickly, as though she were too weak, too tired to let any feeling surface for very long.

Elizabeth reached out for her friend’s hand. “We will do whatever we can for you, Serena. I have been getting food to as many as I can. And old clothes and blankets. I will bring a bundle tomorrow, if you don’t mind,” she added, suddenly self-conscious. It was one thing to be charitable to strangers, but she hated putting her friends in a humiliating position.

“Why should I mind,” asked Serena. Then she smiled. “Oh, it is another strange
bilagaana
notion. The Diné are accustomed to both giving and receiving. Sometimes one is the giver, another time, the receiver. It just depends on the times. And this is a bad time for the Diné,” she added ironically.

“I will come back the first thing in the morning. And every day,” added Elizabeth. “You will need all your strength to make it to the Bosque.” That was all she could say to them. She would not undermine their determination to survive by telling them any of the news that had reached the fort of the ones who had died of starvation and exposure along the way. Maybe they would be able to stay at Fort Defiance until the weather became warmer.

* * * *

Whenever she could, Elizabeth would visit Antonio and Serena. She started cooking twice as much as she usually did and would bring what she called the “leftovers” to the makeshift shelter Antonio had set up. She had originally imagined that in a week or so Serena’s cheeks would fill out and some of the sparkle return to her eyes.

Her friend did look better, it was true, but Elizabeth soon realized that whatever she shared with her friends, they were sharing with their people.

Michael was not able to get out as often, but when he did, he tried to bring grain he had shaved off Frost’s rations and soon the bay had filled out a little.

“So now he only looks half starved,” he told Elizabeth bitterly one night after supper. “
Día
, but I feel so helpless.” He was feeling more than that, Elizabeth knew. His nightmares were becoming more frequent and his eyes were shadowed by lack of sleep. But he had not opened up to her and she could not make herself invade his privacy. He would tell her in his own time. Or so she made herself believe….

* * * *

As March turned to April, the number of campfires increased so that the ground around the fort looked like the earth was a mirror reflecting the star-studded sky. Michael knew that very soon the soldiers would have to move this group on. He didn’t know whether he should be praying to go or to be left behind.

He was summoned by Lieutenant McLaoghlin in mid-April.