Gardens in the Dunes (70 page)

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Indigo woke up before the others and took Rainbow and Linnaeus for a walk along the river; the sun had just come up and she thought the early start might get them more food. The first day she walked the river, Indigo realized others from the settlement of houses by the church walked along here to search for greens or other plants to boil and eat. Before the government drew reservation lines, there was plenty for everyone to eat because the people used to roam up and down the river for hundreds of miles to give the plants and animals a chance to recover. But now the people were restricted to the reservations, so everyone foraged those same few miles of river.

Up in the sandhills and high foothills, Indigo's luck was better; she knew the higher ground and what grew there better than she knew the riverbank. Anyway, long ago when they asked why Sand Lizards refused to live along the river, Grandma Fleet told them that too much time along the river put one at risk for fevers.

Indigo found a stand of sunflowers gone to seed near the mouth of an arroyo; ordinarily she would have only taken some and left the rest for the next hungry being who came along, but she was afraid her parrot would suffer if she did not take all the seeds, so she filled the pockets of her skirt. Linnaeus loved the seeds too, and Indigo began to plan a small winter garden for peas and greens and beans. Too bad the sunflowers had to be sowed in June, but next season she would sow rows and rows of the giant sunflowers. Next year she would harvest the big flat faces full of seeds for them all; but this year they were going to have to sell some of her clothes and things to buy food.

When she returned with her cache of sunflower seeds, the twins were
snoring in unison, but Sister was sitting up on her bedding with the little grandfather at her breast. She proudly showed Sister all the greens and seeds she'd collected for the monkey and parrot. “What about me?” Sister asked. “Won't you offer me any?” She made the words sound like they were a joke, but Indigo knew there was truth in the joke too—if they barely had food for themselves, how could they spare food for pets?

Indigo opened the trunk to the compartment with the dresses and her light wool coat; she took them off the hangers and folded them carefully in stacks on top of the open wool coat. She tied the arms of the coat around the bundle and turned to Sister.

“Maybe we can trade someone this stuff for some beans and corn, and maybe some meat.” Sister gave a short laugh at the mention of meat. The people here were Christians but they were still poor. Who could afford to trade food for a dress? Only the trader and his wife might have the money. It would be better to sell them in Needles, if only Needles were not so far and rides on the mail wagon didn't cost so much.

That afternoon Indigo put Linneaus and Rainbow in their cages, and Vedna snapped the huge padlock on the door of the little house; they were off to the trading post with the dresses bundled in the wool coat. They were disappointed to learn the trader was gone to Yuma, and they almost left the store before the trader's wife asked if they had something they wanted to sell.

First she reached for the wool coat, but Indigo held on to it, and told her it wasn't for sale. The wool coat was part of her bedding. The woman held up the dresses at arm's length and examined them carefully, although a number of them had not been worn even once. She bought all the dresses, then called her Chemehuevi laundress from the back room to boil the dresses. Indigo protested that the dresses were clean, but the other girls shook their heads to quiet her. As it was, the trader's wife allowed them only $7 in trade for all the dresses.

The twins motioned for Sister to come to the rear of the store, where the three of them huddled and discussed something—Indigo wasn't sure what it was about. They left the trading post with big sacks of beans and cracked barley, a little coffee, a small can of lard, and a big sack of colored candy balls; they still had the sugar and the wormy flour Hattie gave them.

It wasn't much for the lovely dresses trimmed in blue satin ribbon, made especially for Indigo, but it was better than starving. They walked back to the house with their mouths full of candy balls and smiled. The cracked barley was to brew beer or something similar to it; they didn't have
all the other ingredients but they'd watched Big Candy and they figured they could get the recipe close enough to brew beer or ale or something to get people drunk. Maybe the Christian Chemehuevis at Road's End would not buy it, but the twins said drinkers would come from miles around. At least they could make enough money from the brew to feed themselves until the garden fed them.

They put on a big pot of beans to simmer on the coals all day while they all pitched in to prepare the garden to plant the winter seeds. The land the twins bought from their old auntie was across the road from the best farmland, irrigated by a system of ditches from the river. At one time the ditches brought water to their land too, but they were buried under the sand now.

In the rich moist fields close to the river, tiny green sprouts could already be seen; seeds planted too early sprouted, but quickly got scorched to death in the fierce autumn sun. If they didn't get their seeds planted now, later the ground would be too cold to germinate the seeds.

Among the old and broken hoes and rakes the twins found when they moved in were tobacco cans of seeds saved by their auntie. Maytha and Vedna argued over the worth of old seeds, but Maytha was right; these seeds were all they had except for the seeds Indigo brought; those seeds might not know how to survive here. At least a few of the seeds in the cans were bound to germinate, so they all worked away with rakes and hoes; none of them had gloves, so their hands got blisters and calluses. The twins and Sister joked farming wasn't any better than laundry for a lady's hands.

For their winter garden, they planted amaranth and all kinds of beans and black-eyed pea seeds they found in the cans. Indigo planted only a few of the seeds from her collection; all the others she intended to plant in the old gardens when they got home.

Linnaeus learned to follow along behind Indigo without disturbing the seeds she just planted, but Rainbow was naughty and hopped off her shoulder to rake his beak through the sand to expose the seeds and eat them. His parrot waddle was so cute she couldn't bear to scold him or lock him in his cage. She picked him up and kissed him and told him to stay put on her shoulder, then replanted any seeds he ate. But Linnaeus was a good worker; with his sharp eyes and quick fingers he caught sucking beetles and cutworms and ate them head first.

When they took a break for lunch back at the house, Indigo opened the trunk to the compartment with her seed collection; she untied the drawstrings on the cotton sacks of gladiolus corms Laura gave her and felt each
one to make sure they remained healthy. At the time Laura gave her the seeds, Indigo used her color pencils to write the color names on the envelopes of gladiolus seed. Now she couldn't resist the temptation to plant just a few gladiolus corms among the pea seeds Aunt Bronwyn gave her. Since she and Sister probably would be moved back home by the time the corms grew blossoms, Indigo decided to plant just a few gladiolus.

Then Indigo found she had a great many black gladiolus corms, so she planted them for a border around the peas; between the beans and the spinach she planted two each of the scarlet, purple, and pink gladiolus. As she planted them, she imagined how this corner of the field would look, and she added white and yellow corms too. What a surprise the twins would have in a few months!

Later that day, when the planting was finished, Sister sent Indigo and her pets down the road to the neighbors' corral to look for long strands of tail hair the horses might have snagged. Sister and Indigo wove horsehair snares the way Grandma taught them and carefully strung them in the weeds around their garden; later that evening they had fresh rabbit meat to go along with the beans.

After dinner they sat outside to smoke and watch the stars before bed; there was no moon and the stars seemed to shine closer and brighter than Sister ever saw; Grandma Fleet said the stars were related to us humans. The twins agreed; at Laguna they'd heard stories about the North Star, who acted as a spy for Estoyehmuut, Arrow Boy, the time his wife, Kochininako, Yellow Woman, ran off with Buffalo Man. The North Star tipped off Arrow Boy, otherwise he never would have found her.

At first he was uncomfortable outdoors at night, but quickly Big Candy got reaccustomed to the soldier's life out on the trail. He didn't build fires and slept with his shotgun in his hand. The mule was young and stout; but on the morning of the fourth day of the chase, the mule pulled up its left hind leg and refused to leave Tonopah. Big Candy traded the mule for dried apricots and mutton jerky, and an old handcart he towed with a strap around his chest. That first day the miles blistered his feet, but he shot a covey of quail before dark and cooked himself a feast. His feet healed after he took a knife to the boots and cut them open at the heels and the toes.

This wasn't a race. He would keep on her trail steadily, and he would find her. He didn't care if he had to follow her all the way to Mexico City and back; she wasn't getting away with his money. The days were still hot but nothing like the summer, and the nights were almost cold enough to want a fire.

The next day the going got harder, as the trail left the Aguila valley and ascended the stony brush mountains of Gila Bend. Here the wheels of the cart hung up on lava rock outcrops in odd shapes that reminded Candy of the mushrooms he once stuffed and cooked for Wylie.

He camped outside town at Gila Bend so he could scout the trails to the west and south to make sure she did not double back on him and head for Yuma after all. The extra miles to sweep the trails left Candy too exhausted to eat that night. After the first week, the waist of his dungarees was too loose to button; he tightened his belt two notches and recalled the old stories Dahlia told about their Red Stick ancestors who trailed enemies for months through the swamps and bayous as silent and swift as water snakes. Those first days he dreamed about the trail and the tracks he followed by day, over and over; if he thought about Wylie or Sister and the baby, he quickly refocused his thoughts on the pursuit.

When he did not turn back at the Sand Tank Mountains, Delena realized how bitterly determined her pursuer was; so she took the long hard way across the mountains to give the fat man a good workout. After the first day, she doubled back to see if he gave up and turned back yet; but no, there he was, trudging along with his food and supplies in a pack strapped to his back. He abandoned the handcart, which wasn't suited to the narrow trails. He was thinner now but still looked strong.

Seven dogs drank a good deal of water, so he tried to anticipate her trail according to her dogs' requirements for water; he didn't know about the big canvas water bags each dog carried in its pack. At Quilitosa, the tracks of the woman and her dogs abruptly changed course and followed a dim old path into the mountains to the west. This could be a trick, or she could be headed for Yuma after all. She must know some spring or rainwater pool not shown on the map. The water he carried should last him three days if necessary, and according to the map, he'd be out of the Sand Tank Mountains in two days. He was wrong, but by the time he realized his error, he was too far to turn back.

In the mountains she and the dogs were concealed and it was cooler, so they traveled by day. Every morning she rationed out the water to the dogs as they sat in a row to wait their turn for water. From each dog's
pack she took its water bag and filled the tin pie pan. They lapped up the water eagerly, then looked up into her eyes to beg for more; they were hungry too—even the pack rats were scarce in these mountains; the dogs had only found grubs and roots since the day before. She smashed pine cones for the green nuts and built a small fire just to roast the agave hearts and roots she gathered. She didn't care if the fat man saw the smoke—he'd never catch her.

Later that day, a breeze came up from the southwest, followed by big fluffy clouds moving rapidly overhead. “Stop awhile over these dry hills,” she said to them, though one look around told her something was wrong here. Too much taken away and not enough given back—the clouds avoided places where people showed no respect or love.

Distances were deceptive in the dry clear air but she had not counted on the broken rock or the steep incline of the trail. When they finally came down out of the mountains, she had finished off her water and the dogs' water, and they were still a day and half or two days from water. The risk to herself and the dogs was worth it; these mountains would stop the fat man. To save her strength, she no longer bothered to double back to spy on the fat man's progress after he followed her into the mountains; if he turned back now it was still too late for him.

The following day she figured the fat man was just about finished, but now she would be lucky to get herself and the dogs to water before they died. She and the dogs traveled much more slowly now, and they stopped to rest more often. The clouds still passed overhead in great woolly herds, though not as fast as before; in the shade with the dogs lying around her, Delena began to think about her comrades in the south; they fought the federal troops from ambush with sticks and rocks. What a difference repeating rifles would make!