Foxfire (26 page)

The simple act of pounding corn in the metate seemed
to
provide her with a sort of passport and admit her into the freemasonry of women. She looked up, to hear soft laughter behind the ramada and to see Susie, Rowena's little sister, standing there round-eyed beside an older woman who held a halfmade tray basket in her hand. Rowena turned from a pot of beef stew she had been stirring and said something to them in Apache. The woman and the little girl came nearer, whispering. They watched Amanda for a moment and then they squatted down near the fire. The woman's nimble fingers began to weave yucca strands back and forth between curving sumac withes. She was making a ceremonial basket for Susie, whose sponsor she would be in the little girl's imminent puberty rite. Susie and Rowena dragged a fresh cowhide out of the pile on the ramada, and spreading it on the ground began to scrape the hair from it with a toothed metal blade.

After they had worked in silence for a while they began to smile shyly at Amanda and they began to talk. Rowena, with instinctive tact, included the white girl in their conversation by keeping most of it in English, which Susie, who had been away five years to the Indian school, spoke as well as she did. The older woman whose Agency name was Lizzie Canning did not speak much but she understood and gradually as the hours went by Amanda learned a good deal about their lives.

Here at Blue Springs they were all of the clan which had once been Tanosay's. And though many of the Indians had taken on white man's ways, here they liked to live pretty much in the old way, keeping the customs. It made one happier. True it also made more work but it was good work, and the Indians who bought or begged all their food from stores, and got drunk on stolen whiskey, and slept in Agency-built houses also seemed to be the ones who spent a lot of time in jail.

They talked of Susie's coming-out party which would be given next month, even if Saba had “gone away,” for Saba had requested this. The puberty rites were very important to ensure little Susie's happy life and health. There would be four days of feasting and ceremonies and dancing, and she would be in the center of it all, living in a special sacred wigwam and called “White Painted Woman,” who was a kind of goddess who dwelt in the sky but who would mingle and become one with Susie during the time of the ceremony. Here the child who had been listening with a rapt expression forgot her shyness and asked Amanda if she would like to see the ceremonial costume.

Amanda admired the exquisite buckskin dress with genuine awe. It was soft as yellow velvet, embroidered with jeweled beadwork and symbolic figures, and along the swaying front fringes there was a row of tiny metal amulets which tinkled like bells. The costume had just been finished and not yet blessed by the shaman, so Susie might still try it on. She disappeared modestly into the wickiup and came back dressed in the costume and glowing with pride. Her soft fawn eyes shone with a mystical exaltation very touching to Amanda, who could think of nothing in her own girlhood that had given her any such obvious feeling of dedication and importance.

Amanda listened to plans for the community expeditions the women would go on soon. First the journey south into the mountains to gather mescal, and a gay few days of picnic and temporary camp during the roasting of the succulent portions of mescal in great pits. Then later expeditions into the high Pinals to gather acorns and trips to the lower deserts for yucca and cactus fruit and mesquite pods. These trips and the sundrying and preserving of their harvests were all women's work, as were the building of shelters, and tanning of hides, besides the many operations necessary for any household's smooth management, and the rearing of children. But Amanda saw that the conventional white view of lazy buck and downtrodden overworked squaw had little foundation among these Indians.

The women were on equal footing with their men, they held positions of dignity, their work was of equal importance in the structure of the clan, and the men—though no longer able to win glory and material gain in warfare—still went hunting and were now at last regaining their independence and selfrespect through a belated recognition of their problems by the Government. Neither heavy-handed suppression, nor the attempt to force the men into agriculture, had produced anything but trouble. But cattle-raising was an acceptable solution, particularly as it meant the restitution of grazing lands on their reservation; lands which had for long been nonchalantly pre-empted by white cattle men.

But it was not of past injustice that the women talked as they worked with Amanda through the spring morning, and shared with her the beef stew thickened with mesquite flour and flavored with a can of store tomatoes. They gossiped a little and told jokes about the last social dance near Bylas, and they spoke of their last trip into Globe a month ago; the amusement they had had walking down Broad Street, looking in the shop windows and finally after long deliberation buying a can opener and rhinestone barrette in the ten-cent store.

They asked Amanda no questions at all, because it is not polite to ask questions, and also because they pitied her. So thin and pale, dressed in trousers like a man, with the restless harried eyes so many white women seemed to have. Perhaps her husband was not good to her, though this seemed unlikely, for Ishkinazi, in the old days when he came to them summers, had been well liked. Still he was not really an Apache, and there was no use trying to understand the peculiar relations between white people.

Nor did they speak of Saba, though they loved her deeply, because an evil spirit, a Tshee-dn, might be hovering near, and it is bad luck to give it encouragement by speaking of those who are going away, or have gone. But the two older women quietly watched the door of Saba's wickiup for a sign and they saw Dart appear and beckon, when Amanda's less keen eyes could see nothing.

“Your husband calls you—” said Rowena. “Go. We come soon.”

As Amanda approached the isolated wickiup the shadows were lengthening and far to the west above the Pinal Mountains the sun dipped into flaming rose. As she came nearer she heard the muffled beating of a little drum and softer yet above the drumbeat she heard the sound of chanting. She entered and crept silently to stand beside Dart. In the back of the wickiup near the shaman there were dim silent shapes.

Saba's pallet had been moved and she lay just within the door where the fading light fell upon her. Her eyes were closed, her hands crossed on her breast which still moved. She lay waiting, listening to the tolling of the drum and the chant of the old shaman as he sang:

 

To the east a spring of black water lies on a plain of jet,
         It will cool you.
To the west a spring of yellow water lies in a sky of coral,
         It will cool you.

 

For Saba there had been much pain these last months, pain grimly born without lament as befitted those who were of “Dinneh” blood, but now she was at peace. Her son was near and her son's wife, they would go on and away together into that other world to which they belonged, and this was fitting, this was their destiny.

For her there were the springs of cool water of which the shaman sang, the eternal life-giving waters—so precious a concept to desert people, and to other desert dwellers in a different land, too. “As the hart panteth after the water brooks....” The Lutheran minister had read this psalm to her when he came to her bedside. In the spirit there was no cleavage, she in whom two races mingled knew that now. The outward paths were different, the forms, the customs, the shape of body or of thought might be different—but deep inside the soul the yearning and the promise were the same for all.

Her eyelids fluttered and she looked up at her son and the white girl who stood beside him. Her lips moved as she tried to tell them this, but no sound came. Her dimming gaze moved to the distant mountains—purple in the eastern afterglow. She smiled a little and was still.

The drumbeat hushed. The shaman bowed his head and from the throats of the Indian women there came a harsh wailing cry.

The Apache burial rites were simple, and hurried, for all ties must be cut at once. No reminder must hamper the escaped spirit, nor pull it back to earth. The women kept up a chanting dirge as they painted Saba's face with carmine red and dressed her in her own girlhood doeskin costume and the long moccasins with the turned-up tips, the turquoise and shell jewelry she had from Tanosay, and the old garnet and pearl necklace her husband Jonathan had given her also. Her scanty possessions must be destroyed, except those which would accompany her spirit on its journey. They “killed” her earthen cooking pots by driving holes in the bottom, and they piled her beautifully woven baskets—all but one, her favorite—in the center of the wickiup with her blankets and clothing.

At dawn they placed her body on a pole and yucca stretcher. Dart and John Whitman carried the stretcher and only three people followed it—Amanda and Rowena and Lizzie Canning. These were Saba's closest relatives. It was not deemed fitting for anyone else to attend.

Saba was buried a mile up a canyon behind the camp, in a hidden spot which the Indians never revisited except at these times. Her grave was dug near Tanosay's, though there was nothing to distinguish where his had been, except his favorite gun, rusted now with the passage of twelve years, and the bleached bones of his horse which had been killed at the grave site, as was the ancient custom.

Saba was buried with her best basket and her purse which contained many dollars, for she had been frugal with the tiny inheritance left her by Jonathan. Also they put beside her some food and a pot of water and her cooking ladle for her use on the journey. They covered her grave with stones and leafy branches of the manzanita arranged in the shape of a cross.

And then they left her, walking slowly and sadly back, but the women no longer sang their dirge, though their cheeks were wet with tears. Flames leaped high in the smoky air as they returned to camp. Saba's wickiup had been fired by those who remained and already it was half-consumed, with all its contents.

Amanda and Dart ate a little of the food Rowena offered them, then they turned to the car and prepared to leave. Rowena and John followed them silently. “Good-bye—” said Dart in a low voice. “You've been good to us, you were good to her.”

John stepped forward and the tall young Indian looked deep into Dart's eyes. “This is truly farewell, Ishkinazi, my brother, is it not?” he said in Apache. “She who has gone away wished it so.”

“Yes.” Dart bowed his head. The men's hands came together in a long, quiet grip, then dropped. “Get in, Andy—” said Dart quickly.

She obeyed, climbing into the car, all the conventional expressions of thanks or farewell left unsaid. She and Rowena had smiled at each other once across the quiet barrier. There could be no more.

As they drove away, she looked back and waved. The Indian couple raised their arms once, palm upward in response, then turned and moved together out of sight. The smoke from Saba's burning wickiup filled the eastern sky.

T
HE IMPRESSION
on Amanda made by the visit to the Apache camp faded very soon into a dream. It had brought her closer to Dart and given her more understanding of him but he quite naturally did not wish to speak of the visit and became at once immersed in the mine again, working doubly hard to make up for lost time. She was left as before to her own devices and the annoyance of distasteful chores. To these was added a burden of worry. Roy, the carrier's, Monday and Wednesday trips into Lodestone had brought her no letters from home.

“Telly-phone them collect—” suggested Tessie after the Wednesday disappointment in the post office and that night Amanda had gone to Mattie Thompson's home and waited beside the antique switchboard while Mattie's fat old fingers fumbled with switches and bad connections until Amanda reached her mother's New York number. But there was no answer. Then she tried Jean's house in Greenwich, but there was no answer there either.

She left the call in and promised to bribe Bobby Pottner, who lived across the street from Mattie, if he would run up to the Dartlands' the minute he was signaled, and she waited anxiously all Thursday but Bobby did not come.

By five o'clock, while she prepared their supper in the hot little kitchen, she was in a state of nervous frenzy which she tried to calm with the logic of a dozen reasonable explanations. It was well into March and the days were growing very warm. She stood by the sinkboard slicing kidneys and onions, when Hugh stuck his head through the open back door.

“Hello—” he said, “you sobbing to yourself in here?”

She put the knife down. “No. It's the onions—but I don't feel too cheerful at that.” She gave him a feeble smile, glad to have someone to talk to. “Come on in. I can stop this fiddling. Dart won't be down off the hill for hours, of course. It was eight-thirty last night.”

“Conscientious type—” said Hugh. “But I gather he's really pretty necessary up there.”

She made a wry face. “He's in love with that damn mine. Fixation.....You act a bit more amiable than the last time I saw you. I didn't particularly enjoy that little byplay you put on with me and Maria.”

Hugh shrugged and sat down on one of the kitchen chairs. “The fair Maria is at this very moment cheating on me with a mine hardware salesman, I believe. She's breaking my heart.” He chuckled and lit a cigarette.

“You haven't got a heart. I don't blame the girl. You treat her like—like——”

“A dog is the usual simile. Apt in this case for I don't like dogs. They bore me. Have you got anything to drink in this shack?”

She walked to the cupboard and pulled out a partly empty bottle. “What's left of that stuff you gave us last month, but we were saving it to drink before the Mablett party tomorrow. We'll need it.”