Foxfire (24 page)

That these ceremonious moments of silence between speeches were Apache etiquette, Amanda naturally did not know, and she repeated with some impatience, “What is it you want?”

He moved his gaze to a small gray brittle bush which grew by the path and said, “I have message for Dartland.”

“Well, he's up at the mine,” said Amanda. “You could find him up there. Or give me the message.”

There was another silence, then the Apache said, “I don't go to the mine. I wait here for him.” He pulled a bent cigarette from his pants pocket, lit it and sat down on the doorstep.

Amanda quelled a desire to laugh. She stared down at the stolid red-shirted back. “But you can't sit there for an hour or two! Who are you and what do you want?”

The Indian puffed on his cigarette, and the smoke drifted out of his broad nostrils. “I have message for Dartland,” he repeated with an air of remote patience. “I wait here.”

Nor until Dart came home did Amanda get any further satisfaction. The Indian sat upon her doorstep and smoked. He would not come inside, he would not accept a cup of coffee, he would not amplify his one remark.

When at six o'clock the Lizzie chugged into the yard and Dart got out, Amanda rushed to the door and watched, as Dart showed pleased surprise. “Why, hello, Cleve—” he cried, holding out his hand to the Indian who advanced to meet him. “I thought you were at San Carlos. Have you come for your old job back at the mine?”

Cleve shook Dart's hand solemnly. “No, Nantan—” he said. “Never while Burton is there. He is a very bad man. He is too dangerous.”

Burton? thought Amanda, wasn't that the name of that ratfaced little pipsqueak in Mablett's office that day? How funny.

Dart seemed to think it funny too, for he laughed. “Oh, Burton's okay. I'm surprised you let him get your goat. What
are
you here for then?”

“To see you, Nantan.” And then to Amanda's annoyance the Indian continued in Apache. She listened to the explosive guttural sounds, and watched Dart's face anxiously, because after the first minute, the color seeped out of it, leaving a grayish hue under the tan. His lips tightened and she could see the pupils of his eyes dilate, but he made no sound until the Indian stopped speaking.

Then he nodded his head and said a few incomprehensible words.

This, the first time that Amanda had heard her husband speaking Apache, gave her a strange sensation and she rushed up to the men, clutching at Dart's arm. “Oh, what is it?” she cried. “What's he been telling you?”

She saw that Dart had forgotten her; it took a moment for his eyes to focus on her face, then he said, “It's my mother, she's dying. Cleve has come from the Reservation to tell me.”

She stared up at him stricken. “Oh, darling—” she breathed, “how dreadful. I'm so sorry. What shall we do?”

“Leave just as soon as I tell them at the mine that I'm going!”

He saw the question which she did not quite dare ask, and he said, “Yes. You, too. She wants to see you. It'll be a tough experience for you but I guess you can take it.”

“OF COURSE
I can. I've always wanted to see Saba, and I want to be with you—to help you....” Her eyes filled with tears.

“Good girl,” he said and bent down and kissed her, while the Indian turned away.

Later Amanda never could remember much of that wild ride through the night to the reservation. Dart drove back along the dizzy mountain roads which had so frightened her on her first arrival in Lodestone. He drove at a speed which felt to her like eighty, though she knew very well the car was not capable of anything like that. She was too inexperienced to realize that despite their break-neck pace Dart's judgment and splitsecond decisions were always right. But Cleve, the Indian, knew, and though he bounced around on the back seat in utter silence, as they did on the front, he viewed Dart's performance with admiration. The Nantan was a real man and showed his warrior blood, for what else had made the fiber of the great Apaches but cool courage and the ability to judge risks correctly?

There had been no rain for many days, and the washes were all providentially dry, so that it was only nine o'clock when they emerged from the mountains, crossed U.S. Highway No. 70 at Cutter on the reservation, and finished the next thirteen miles of comparatively flat but extremely poor road into the San Carlos Agency. Here there were stone pillars and a welllighted avenue of substantial-looking buildings all new, for the Agency had only last year been moved from its old site called Rice, down by the Gila River. That site now lay deep under the blue waters impounded by the Coolidge Dam. These new buildings of stucco and tufa stone along the tree-shaded avenue included the homes, offices, school, hospital, and churches lived in and provided by the white man for the soul and body nurture of the Government's wards. The effect was of comfortable suburbia, most surprising to Amanda.

But Dart did not pause at the stone pillars nor enter the avenue, he drove straight on past the island of civilization and into darkness again; then he spoke for the first time, turning his head toward Cleve. “Do I turn left here? I've forgotten.”

Cleve grunted assent. “Up Blue River,” he said.

“Hang on tight, Andy,” said Dart. “This'll be pretty rough, but we'll make it if the wheels stay on.”

They were running up a dry creek bed, hurtling over small stones and bushes, skirting boulders and larger holes; until at last they rounded a little curve and the Indian muttered something. At once Dart turned the car right and plunged up the bank into an apparent wall of desert broom and burro brush. They emerged, however, onto a road of sorts which ran along the desert toward a clump of tall mesquite. And clustered near the trees, Amanda saw the dim beehive shapes of Apache dwellings—the wickiups.

“I get off here,” said Cleve. “You go little way on.”

“Yes, I know now.” Dart stopped the car. “Thanks, Cleve.”

The Indian said something brief in Apache and Dart answered him. The noise of the car had attracted several figures who materialized silently from the darkness and came up peering and murmuring. They were women. Amanda saw the long flowing hair and the billowing flounced skirts. Cleve, who had been halfway out of the car, uttered a sharp exclamation and clambered back in the car and slammed the door. One of the women gave a little cry, half mirth, half dismay, then they all turned and scuttled into the darkness. Dart started the car and drove on.

“Why didn't Cleve get out?” asked Amanda, glancing back toward the Indian. “What upset him?”

“Those were some of his wife's relatives,” answered Dart hurriedly. “He must never see them. They practice avoidance. It's the old custom.”

“Oh,” she said. This was no time to question, no time to bother Dart with curiosity, or timidity, or the need for reassurance in this setting which seemed to her increasingly fantastic. The stars were there, the desert scenery, the distant mountains, the familiar car, and Dart whom she loved, but she felt herself increasingly alone and disoriented, surrounded by enigmas to which she might not bring the patronizing amusement of the tourist, but in which she would soon be required in some measure to share. Without preparation, without understanding, she must now accept her husband in the one aspect she had come to dread, as part of an alien and hostile race; and in her veins she felt the stirring of the ancient atavistic fear.

The car had jounced a mile or so farther along the rutted tracks when another grove of trees appeared, taller than the last, for here there was water from a spring, and willows grew amongst the arrow-weed and broom.

There were several wickiups and Dart stopped the car near the furthest one. Smoke curled up through its brushthatched roof and out the open door where firelight flickered.

The instant the motor stopped, a half-dozen Indians emerged from the wickiups. They surrounded the car, four men and two women; the women stared silently, then dropped their eyes, but the men greeted Dart with low cries. “Shikil” My friend. And one who was taller than the rest, nearly as tall as Dart, rested his hand for an instant on Dart's shoulder and called him by his boyhood nickname, “Ish-kin-azi.”

Amanda stood uncertainly in the shadows, waiting. She was faint with hunger and very tired, the Apache voices, the dark faces and the silent domed wickiups swirled round her in a vague menacing dream.

It was only an instant though before Dart came and drew her forward. “These are my relatives, Andy,” he said. “Second cousins, descended from Tanosay's brothers.”

“How do you do—” she murmured and the six pairs of black eyes rested without expression on the girl's white face and the short wind-blown fair hair. “How do you do—” answered several voices and one male voice added, “Welcome.”

Dart turned in the direction of that voice and smiled. He indicated the tall young Indian who had greeted him most warmly and said, “This one I grew up with—we were close as brothers when I was here on the reservation—” He hesitated, knowing that he must name him for Amanda but observant of the inviolable taboo. The real name is sacred and may not be mentioned, many nicknames are discarded, he could not say to Amanda, This is “my grandfather's nephew,” as he would to an Apache.

The young Indian solved the problem himself. “I'm John Whitman,” he said to Amanda, giving his Agency name, and his eyes smiled a little.

She held out her hand impulsively, hearing in the voice a slight resemblance to Dart's, feeling some kindliness at last, but the Indian hesitated and she drew her hand back, flushing.

“We ... they don't go in much for handshaking," said Dart. “John means no offense.”

“I know—it's all right—” she murmured, and she looked up at Dart anxiously. Why, when they had pelted through the night to get here, was there now this delay at Saba's doorstep? Why didn't Dart rush in to her?

He understood her question and answered it. “One of my cousins has gone to prepare Shi-Ma, my mother. When you go in, Andy, it will make her happy if you call her Shi-Ma too. They say she's wandering a bit. It may be hard for her to place you.”

Amanda nodded and leaned silently against the car, staring at nothing.

The group of Indians had dispersed as noiselessly as they had appeared, all except John. He stood with Dart and they conversed in Apache, while John gave Dart much information which had been lacking from Cleve's knowledge. During the last months, Saba had been growing very thin and tired. She no longer took interest in anything, even her basketry. Soon she almost ceased eating and lay all day on her blankets, looking out through the open door toward the Natanes Mountains where she had spent her youth. The women had all taken turns caring for her most tenderly but she had not grown better, though they had summoned the shaman from Bylas, the one whose power came from the Mountain Spirits. He had performed his special curing ceremony, and they had held the sacred masked dance for her too, but it had done no permanent good, only for a little while.

“Why didn't you let me know sooner,” said Dart sadly, for he knew the answer.

“She did not wish it. You understand that. She knows that you must follow the white trail forever now. That no man can ride two horses.”

“What else has been done for her?” asked Dart. “If she can travel, I mean to take her at once to the Agency hospital.”

“No,” said the Indian. “She will not go.” And John went on to explain that the superintendent of the Agency himself had heard of Saba's illness, and he had come to visit her, bringing the doctor with him. But the white doctor had said at once that it was hopeless. That she had a growth that was eating up her stomach and the hospital could do nothing.

And then the Lutheran minister had come to pray with her. Saba was no church member, but all the Indians liked this minister who spoke Apache almost as well as they did themselves. So they had let him into the wickiup, and Saba had listened peacefully while the minister read to her from the white Bible, and prayed for her. So everything had been done. Both the white man's and the Indian's medicines for body and spirit had been invoked, and now all was in readiness for her going-away.

Dart bowed his head, and the two young men stood together in silence, until John's young wife, Rowena, a pretty girl in blue calico, glided out from the wickiup and touched Dart on the arm. He nodded and said, “Come—” to Amanda who followed them through the low door into the bark and canvas dwelling.

At first Amanda's eyes were so blinded by smoke that she saw nothing clearly, but she heard the low choking voice cry out, “Shi-ja-yeh! My son!” and a kindly hand pulled Amanda to the far end of the wickiup. Here where the smoke was thinner, Amanda stood confused and uncertain looking down at Dart and his mother.

Saba lay propped on a pile of blankets which were protected from the dirt by a cowhide rug. Her iron-gray hair, cut square above the eyebrows, flowed loose in strands over the shoulders of her faded cotton blouse. Her emaciated face with the skin stretched tight over her high cheekbones, straight nose, and sharp jawline was the color of old ivory, and on her chin there were six blue tattoo marks. Her hair and shoulders were dusted yellow with the sacred life-giving pollen the shaman had sprinkled on her.

Dart knelt beside her pallet, and from the hollow eyesockets her brilliant black eyes caressed his bent head with an expression of burning love. Her hand, knotted and veined but small as that of all Apaches, lay lightly on his shoulder, and from her lips there came a soft crooning murmur, nearly formless words in both English and Apache—of lullaby, of greeting, and of farewell.

It was Saba who first realized that Amanda stood there; she turned her head and looked up at the frightened girl and the shadow of a smile came into the burning eyes. “So it is you, my son's—wife,” she said in a clear voice. “Come here to me.”