Grayfox (19 page)

After everything had broken up, I waited a few minutes, then walked toward Laughing Waters where she was still sitting and sat down beside her. The fire was burning low, and most of the tribe had returned to their tents and shelters.

“You must have made me sound braver than I was to your father,” I said with an embarrassed laugh.

She smiled over at me, and I thought my heart was going to melt!

“I just told him exactly what happened,” she said. “You were
very
brave, very cunning, just like he said. You saved me from that bad man. My father is very pleased with you.”

I stared down into the glowing coals.

“Your father will be pleased with you too,” she added.

She seemed aware of my silence.

“Where is your father, Zack Hollister? Is he a man like Hawk?” she asked.

“My family is in California,” I said.

“Why are you so far away from them? Will you see them soon?”

“I joined the Pony Express. Then I got hurt and Hawk took care of me. That's why I am here.”

“My sister and I lived in California for a while, at a mission.”

“Hawk told me something about that. I have three sisters.”

“Tell me about them.”

“Corrie's the oldest—she's, let me see . . . she would be twenty-four now. Then there's Emily, who's two years younger than me, so she's now twenty. But she doesn't live at home anymore—she's married. And Becky would be eighteen. I have a younger brother too, Tad. He's the runt of the family. He'd be, let's see . . . sixteen. How old are you, Laughing Waters?”

“I am nineteen,” she answered, a little shyly I thought.

“I wish you could meet my sisters. I would love for you and Corrie to know each other. She's been a lot of places too, just like you.”

“Why does she go places?”

“I guess you'd say she's the adventurous sort. Also, she's a writer.”

“A writer?” asked Laughing Waters in astonishment.

“Yeah, Corrie's really something,” I said, realizing how proud I was of her. “She's been writing in journals of her own for longer than I can remember. Now she writes for a newspaper in San Francisco.”

“I would like to know her.”

“Maybe you'll meet her one day,” I said.

“Tell me about your mother,” Laughing Waters said.

“She's dead.”

“I am sorry.”

“She died probably not far from here, crossing the desert on our way west nine years ago.”

“Was it from . . .”

She hesitated.

“No,” I assured her. “It had nothing to do with any Indians. It was very hot. She died of a fever.”

“It must be very hard for all of you not having a mother.”

Briefly I told her what had happened.

She continued to ask questions, and before I knew it I had told her everything about Pa and what had happened since.

By this time the fire had died to a few glowing embers and the camp was quiet. I think we were the only two still awake. I asked about her family, and she told me about her parents, about all her brothers and sisters, and about the time she and her sister Sarah had spent away from their Paiute family.

We talked on for another hour into the night, about so many things I can't even remember them all.

Finally we both fell silent, and I think we both knew that this quiet time neither of us wanted to end had finally come to an end. We sat a long while without a word being spoken. It was Laughing Waters who finally broke the still night hush.

“Will I ever see you again, Zack Hollister?” she asked.

It was not a question I expected. Neither was the answer one I planned.

“Yes . . . yes, you will see me again, Laughing Waters.”

“When?”

“I don't know, but I will find a way.”

That was the end of our conversation. A minute or two later, we both rose and softly made our way to our tents in opposite directions.

The following morning, at sunrise, Hawk and I left the camp of the People.

It's funny how things change.

When the Paiutes brought us into their camp all tied up, I'd never been so scared in all my life, and I figured we were both about to die.

Now, only a week and a half or two later, I almost didn't want to leave.

I'm not sure what Hawk was thinking. He was real quiet as we rode along. So was I, but I
knew
why I was quiet. I couldn't stop thinking about Laughing Waters and wondering if I'd ever see her again.

It wouldn't be for a while that I
would
find out what was on Hawk's mind that day. As it was,
my
mind was filled with a dusky face and lithe form and especially the black-green laughing eyes. So the question he asked me seemed like it didn't have much to do with anything. But it got us talking again, almost like we were picking up the conversation we'd had riding into the Paiute camp, and we talked steadily for an hour. And it had more to do with what Hawk was thinking about than I realized when he said it.

“Let me ask you a question, Zack,” said Hawk as we rode along. “Why do you figure God made fathers?”

Like everything Hawk said or did, by now I'd learned he likely had more in mind than what it might seem like right off. I was learning not to give hasty answers to things he'd say, but to think about his words.

“I don't know—what do you mean?” I answered.

“I mean, why did God make fathers? Just so they can have sons and daughters and keep the race of men and women alive? Or do they have some other purpose?”

“I guess to provide for them and to teach their sons and daughters,” I said.

“Provide for them and train them?”

“I reckon.”

“Your pa do a good job of providing for and training you, Zack?” Hawk asked, looking at me out of the corner of his eye. Over the course of our months together, gradually I'd told him everything about Pa's past and how he'd left years ago, so Hawk knew the answer well enough. But he just kept looking at me, waiting for an answer.

“What do you want me to say?” I said finally, I suppose with a little irritation. “You know what happened.” The reminder of Pa was such an unpleasant subject to be thrown at me right in the middle of happy thoughts about the last few days.

“I just want an honest answer,” said Hawk. “What do you think, did your pa do a good job of it with you?”

“Well, if you want me to be honest about it, then I reckon I'd say no, he didn't. He was gone most of the time I was growing up, so how could he train me like he ought to? Ma had to do most of the providing, not him.”

“Still sticks in your craw some, doesn't it?”

“Yeah. Why shouldn't it?”

Hawk was poking me in a touchy spot. I could feel the edge come in my voice and that I was getting hot under the collar. Thinking about Pa wasn't pleasant, though just being around Hawk made it nearly impossible not to think about Pa. He was the kind of fellow that made you think about things whether or not you wanted to, and whether you were trying to or not.

“I'm not saying anything about what you should or shouldn't feel, son. I'm only trying to get at why God made fathers.”

“Yeah, well, whyever it was, I don't figure my pa did such a good job of it,” I said.

“He should have done a better job of it?” asked Hawk. I knew that probing sound in his voice, but today I wasn't in the mood for it.

“Yeah, I guess that's how it looks to me,” I snapped.

“So maybe that's the answer to my question, huh, Zack? God made fathers to do a
good
job of providing for and training their children. You figure that's it?”

“If he made them at all, seems he would have wanted them to do a good job, to do it right.”

“Yep, that's the way I see it,” said Hawk.

He stopped and we rode on quiet for a spell.

“'Course, most of 'em don't do a good job,” he said after a bit. “Fathers, I mean. You figure your own pa's the only father that's made a mess of it, Zack?” he asked.

“No, I don't reckon so,” I answered.

“Fact is,” Hawk went on, “in all likelihood, every pa that ever lived has made a mess of fathering in one way or another. Your pa's not the only one.”

I didn't say anything.

“Matter of fact, you might even say Chief Winnemucca back there didn't do right by his daughter—letting Demming kidnap her and all. If she wanted to, she could probably be pretty riled at him, you reckon?”

Still I said nothing.

“Seems a mite peculiar, doesn't it, Zack, that God would make fathers to raise their kids, even though he knew they
weren't
going to do it all right and that some would be downright bad fathers? That's puzzled me for a lot of years, Zack.”

We rode on for another five minutes or so. I knew Hawk had said all he was intending to say for the moment and was leaving it to me to think it over now. And I was thinking, but not exactly over what he'd said.

“Can I ask you a question?” I said after a while.

Hawk nodded.

“Why did you bring all this up now? You know all about the trouble I've had with my pa. Why'd you ask me all that about fathers now?”

“I reckon I figured that after all that happened back there, it was finally about time for you to think about facing what drove you away from home. No one can run away forever. There comes a time when a man's got to stand up and look some things in the eye. I guess I figured your time had just about come.”

I didn't say nothing more. Neither did Hawk.

He wasn't going to say nothing until I wanted him to. If I didn't care enough to think about it and try to figure it out on my own, he wasn't going to push it on me.

That wasn't Hawk's way.

We rode in near silence the rest of the way back to the camp where the Indians had nabbed us. In fact, except for general conversation about what we were going to eat and where we were going to go next, we didn't talk too much for a couple of days after that.

But Hawk's words had a way of getting inside you.

So I thought about our conversation all during the week that we were breaking up one camp and getting ready to go to another one. And as I pondered his question about why God made fathers, I couldn't help thinking about Pa a lot.

I was kinda surprised to find out I wasn't mad at him anymore. I'd just been in the habit of forcing my mind not to think about my family, or when I did to keep acting like I was mad. Sometimes you just get into a habit of thinking a certain way, even when you don't really even want to.

But now I could see that my anger was more or less gone, and I found myself wondering about Pa. In fact, the more I thought about things and I tried to pray to God about it all, the more I realized I really did want to understand what happened with Pa. Deep down, I think I wanted to find a way to forgive him and make it right with him inside myself. I just didn't know how to do anything about it.

Hawk figured all this, of course, and that's why he brought up that talk about fathers. But the subject didn't come up again till, like I said, a week or so later. And that was when I found myself asking
him
a question, even though I hadn't exactly planned it.

We'd broken camp that morning and had begun the climb back up into the high country. We were on our way back to the cave, in fact, where I first woke up with Hawk after my accident. Even though Hawk lived there mainly in winter, it still needed tending to occasionally during the summer, to make sure a family of coyotes or some other varmints wouldn't decide to make it their permanent
home, or to get water from the snow if one of the other springs ran dry.

“So if fathers ain't gonna do a good job of fathering,” I blurted out as we rode, “why do
you
figure God made fathers?”

Hawk looked over at me with a thoughtful expression. “You asking what I think?” he said.

“I am. You said it puzzled you a long time. So you must have got it figured out eventually.”

“I don't know about
all
figured out,” he said, “but I did figure a few things out about that mystery.”

“Mystery?”

“Doesn't it seem like a mystery to you? It sure does to me.”

“How do you mean?” I said.

“Well, the first thing I gradually figured out,” Hawk said, “was why I think God made fathers. He did it to make a picture of what
He's
like. God's called the Father, isn't he? So earthly fathers must have been made to show us what God's heavenly fatherhood is like.”

“Makes sense, I guess.”

“Well, you see, everything else is that way. Everything God made is a picture of Him somehow. The sky, eggs, plants, animals—everything! So it must be the same with fathers.”

I just nodded and waited to see what he would say next.

“But fathers don't do a very good job of showing us what God is like,” Hawk went on thoughtfully. “That's the mystery. Why did God make something that is supposed to show us himself but that doesn't work, that's broken? It's a mystery, I tell you, Zack! A downright mystery.”

By this time we'd arrived at the mouth of the winter cave.

Hawk motioned to me to stay where I was, sniffing at the air as he dismounted with a look of concern on his face.

“What is it?” I asked.

“Got a feeling we might have company,” he said, walking slowly toward the cave.

He inched his way toward the opening and disappeared inside. Then a moment later he came running back out, grabbed his rifle from behind his saddle, shot a few rounds into the air, and started yelling wildly. I just stared at him, wondering what was going on.

A few seconds later a brownish-colored bear came lumbering out, stopped to sniff at the wind, looked at us mildly, then headed off down the hill.

“That critter's a long way from where his kind usually go,” said Hawk with a sigh. “How'd he ever get this far up in the desert?”

Slowly we walked in, and Hawk inspected the place. The bear hadn't done too much damage, and the best thing of all was that the bear seemed to be a bachelor.

As we were looking about, Hawk took down a cracked, blackened looking glass that was sitting on a rock shelf and held it up to my face.

“What do you think, Grayfox?” he said with a smile.

“Is that me?” I exclaimed, peering into the wavy, blackened glass. I could tell I looked different from when I started out—my beard, for one thing—but it was really hard to tell much of anything in that cracked, wavy glass.

He laughed.

“It's you, all right.”

“But I can't hardly tell in that thing!”

“Well, this mirror may not give the best reflection in the world, but it's you, there's no denying that. How 'bout some coffee?”

“You bet.”

“Let's get some water from down below.”

We made a fire, then Hawk lit a torch and we walked deeper into the cave to get some of the snow water he stored, still looking about to make sure we were the only creatures in that cave.

Thirty minutes later we had water boiling on the fire and coffee brewing.

“So,” I asked while we were enjoying our coffee in the coolness of the cave, “tell me how you figured out the mystery about fathers.”

“Well, I finally started thinking that God knew all along that the father system was broken. He never figured it would work perfectly.”

“That doesn't seem like an altogether smart way of doing it.”

“I admit it didn't make a whole lot of sense to me, either. But then nothing in the world shows us what God's like
perfectly
. Everything God made only shows a little, incomplete piece of him. So why should it be any different with fathers?

“Fathers, I think, weren't ever supposed to be perfect pictures, just partial ones. They reflect God like that little looking glass over there reflected you. You said you could barely make out your image,
but it still looked a little like you! Looking in it, I could get a basic picture of what you're like.”

I thought a minute about what Hawk said. But he didn't give me much chance to get it lodged into my brain before he threw out a new idea that was even harder to get to the bottom of.

“You know what my greatest realization was?” Hawk asked.

“What?” I asked him back.

“Let me ask you another question,” he went on. “Whose job is it to see what's in the mirror?”

I looked at him kinda funny.

“Who's supposed to figure out what the image in the mirror's reflecting?” he explained. “Is that the mirror's job, or is it up to the person looking into the mirror?”

“It's the person's job, I reckon,” I said.

“Sure it's the person's. How can a broken old mirror have anything to do with it? You could have closed your eyes and refused to look when I held it up to that scruffy face of yours. Or you could have said, ‘I don't believe that's my face I see in there!' So it's
your
job to look and make sense of what you see, not the mirror's.”

“I guess I still don't exactly see what this all has to do with God and fathers,” I said.

Hawk laughed.

“All right, son, let me try to make it plain for you. Leastways, this has helped me understand a lot of things better. I picture it like this. Our pas are standing there, and they might not even know they're supposed to be showing us what God's like. But all faulty and imperfect as they are, God still says that we're supposed to learn about him from them. All right, you got the picture of a mirror in your head?”

“I guess so,” I said.

“So God reaches down and holds a mirror right in front of our fathers and then says to
us,
‘Now look into that mirror, and you'll see a reflection of me.' We're standing alongside our fathers, and they might not even know the mirror's there. God's talking to
us,
not them. But while he's talking, he's still sticking that mirror in front of our
fathers
and saying that if we want to learn what
he's
like as a heavenly father, then we've got to start by looking in that mirror at our
own
pa. 'Cause even if he doesn't know it, he's reflecting God just because he's a father, even if for no other reason.”

I was trying hard to follow him, but it was all pretty confusing.

“You see, it's
our
job to find out what that reflection looks like, not our pa's. It's the person's responsibility, looking into the mirror, to see what can be gotten from the mirror, however warped and broken it might be.”

“That seems backwards,” I said.

“Yep, it does,” replied Hawk. “Like I told you before, just about everything is backwards from how it looks.”

Hawk turned quiet and thoughtful for a moment.

“It's us who oughta be looking to see what's in our mirrors,” he went on, “cracked though they may be. We'd be pretty foolish to ignore what's supposed to be going on and say we're not going to look at God's reflection just because it's a broken mirror. That ought to make us look all the harder, knowing that the image isn't perfect. That ought to make us try all the harder to see what God is like. Wouldn't you have been a mite foolish if you'd have shut your eyes and refused to look when I held up the mirror to your face?”

“Yeah, I reckon you're right,” I said, laughing. “But there's still something about it I don't understand.”

“Go on,” said Hawk, pouring us each some more coffee.

“You're making it sound like no matter how bad a boy or girl might think things are, there's still good in their fathers for them to see God in, if they look hard enough for it.”

“That's something like it.”

“But what if there just ain't nothing good there? What if the mirror's turned black or all broken to bits? What if a man's just downright bad through and through? What about orphans that ain't got no pa? What about folks that don't know who their pa is? And that half-breed Tranter? How does he find good in
his
pa, who hated him? Don't look to me like there's any good for him to find.”

Hawk sighed.

“You ask mighty hard questions, Zack,” he said. “I ain't sure I got the answer to all of 'em. Lots of questions don't have easy answers.”

“Tell me what you think, then,” I said.

“Well, the way I figure it is that most folks—maybe ninety-five percent of 'em—have fathers with a lot more good in them than they realize. So they're the ones who've got to learn to see even though the mirror's broken. But the others, the five percent, where the mirrors are just piles of dust or the men are just plain varmints
and don't reflect God at all, and orphans or kids who don't know their pa, I figure that God still has to use the image of a father as the doorway to himself.”

“I don't see how he can if there ain't nothing good there.”

“For them maybe it won't be in the way of learning to see good in their own fathers, since maybe they don't even know their fathers. Maybe it'll be just in thinking about their fathers or learning from somebody that isn't their father, or even in thinking what bad men their fathers are, in a way that'll make them look up and find God's fatherhood.”

“So that's what folks like Demming and Tranter could do?”

“Right. Even people with bad fathers can look up and seek God, can't they?”

I nodded.

“Tranter and Demming could have said to themselves, ‘My father was a bad man. Therefore I better look up and find what true manhood and true fatherhood is. I don't have an example in my own pa, so I got to seek all the harder to find the truth.'”

“They didn't do that.”

“No. They chose a different pathway. Every man and woman's story in life is different, Zack. Most folks have to learn to see God's reflection in their fathers. A few have to take something that maybe
doesn't
reflect God at all and use it to learn to look up to find God. Your story won't be like mine, Demming's won't be like Tranter's.”

“Like we're different books?”

He nodded. “Different, yet in
every
man and woman's story—yours, mine, Demming's, Tranter's, Laughing Waters'—God will use earthly fatherhood kinda like a tool, even though he uses it to accomplish different purposes in each of our cases.”

I thought a minute or two about everything he'd said.

“I think I get what you mean. So what you're saying is that God will use earthly fatherhood even in the life of an orphan?”

“Even an orphan can say to himself, ‘I don't know anything about earthly fatherhood. I don't have a broken mirror. I don't have any mirror at all! Therefore, I have to look all the more carefully to find out what it means that God is my father.'”

“It must be hard for orphans.”

“There's lots of broken mirrors around, Zack—lots of orphans, lots of young'uns with rascals for fathers, or whose fathers don't
live with them, lots of different kinds of stories people's lives have to tell. But we still all gotta learn to look up and find our heavenly Father somehow.”

Neither of us said anything for a bit.

“Trouble is,” Hawk went on, “most folks, seeing that the mirror of their own pa is either broken or blacked out or gone, they turn their backs and walk away, and then they never find out what God's fatherhood is like at all.”

Hawk paused a minute, a look of sadness coming over his face.