Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart (12 page)

It Was the Bones

It was the bones. always. That is what they said. Generation after generation of their people said this to generation after generation of mine.

His name was Hugh. Kate had never met a Hugh before. How did one name a baby, defenseless, small, and new, Hugh? She thought this too might have something to do with “the generations.” It did.

In the early days of moving west, clearing and claiming it, said Hugh, you could settle as much land as you could control simply by taking it from the Indians—with the help of the U.S. Cavalry—and keeping them off it. Every rancher I’ve talked to, if I could get him to talk about it at all, has a similar story to tell. He paused, looked at the river. Sighed.

We have rivers in the springtime, he said. In the summer they dry up or go underground.

So they’re not really dry? said Kate. She liked the idea of underground rivers. She was beginning to think that human beings had underground selves, always running, limpid, clear, even when everything in the personality appeared used up, dusty, and dry.

They seem to be, said Hugh. Actually some of the first settlers died of dehydration because they thought there was no water. The Indians would just bend over, put an ear to the ground—and unbeknown to the settlers they’d be standing in a dry riverbed—poke a reed in the ground, and drink. Imagine how astonishing that must have seemed to someone from London.

It must have been maddening, continued Hugh. They knew every river, every stream, every rock, every tree. And they could eat off the land too. Slugs and bugs and plants—even cactus. It must have been really challenging starving them out.

The winter would do it, said Kate.

Right, said Hugh. Without shelter, sick, grief-stricken because so many of their people had died—then
boom,
subzero weather. Even so, it took a while for all of them to die. They were some of the healthiest people on earth. And to the great surprise of everyone, in each succeeding generation, all the way from great-grandfather Hugh Brentforth, some of them didn’t. With time it almost became a joke. There we’d be on our considerable spread, all fenced in and secure, always around Thanksgiving too. All of us hale and hearty and addicted to fine brandy and snowmobiles, and then right in the middle of congratulating ourselves on what a good time we’re having and how clever we and our ancestors are . . . Hugh laughed. The area around his eyes was delicate and very pale, as if he wore dark glasses a lot. His eyes, a green that changed to hazel in the shifting light, were wide and blinking, as if he’d recently been surprised.

They were sitting outside his hut at a place where the river dropped half a dozen feet, creating a shallow waterfall. The sound was gurgling and slow. He said it lulled him to sleep at night.

Back before I got this sickness it didn’t bother me much. It was like a ritual that happened. To tell the truth, we were all pretty used to it. You know—in Australia they still have aboriginals who go on walkabout. They go to visit what we Westerners call “sites” on the land. Places that mean a lot to them. Doesn’t matter what white man’s job they’ve been hired to do. Off they go for a while. Could be a weekend, could be a week. The land itself calls them. They hear it and go. Immediately. They drop everything. Pronto.

And do the women also go on walkabout? asked Kate. And did they in the old days just drop the mistress’s brat?

Hugh laughed. I don’t know. You never hear about the women roaming, but I’m sure some of them did. Probably dressed as men though because rape of aboriginal women was always as common, and as accepted, as looking at them.

They had been sitting with their legs crossed. Hugh straightened his so that his feet, blistered from the heavy rubber boots they wore most of the time, stuck out in front of him.

So there we’d be with our thirty-pound turkey and whatnot—you know, every SUV and gadget under the sun. And some old, old Indian out of nowhere would show up.

He paused.

You would have to know our ranch. It’s big. So big I’m embarrassed to tell you.

Bigger than Kansas?

Almost. I’m joking, he said. But sometimes it feels that size. You can roam around it for days, never seeing a soul. A lot of the newer fencing is electric. We have guard posts.

He chuckled. Squinted at the river.

Some old Indian shows up with a plastic jug and wants water from the spring. For the bones.

Hugh rubbed together two pebbles the size of robin eggs, loosely, in his fist. Looking at them absently he flung them into the river.

So, he continued, looking briefly at Kate, one of us tells him to wait out back until we’re through with dinner. Ruined now, because of him. Though nobody wants to admit it. Ruined also of course if he didn’t show up. . . . So eventually it’s my turn to take him. Different Indian, you understand, but same old man. I take him in my Grand Cherokee. Which is red. We bounce along. He doesn’t say a word. I make small talk—the weather, the cows—we have about six thousand. The ruts in the trail. By now we’re way the hell away from the house and he just sits there with his plastic jug stuck between his knees. Everything he has on is tattered; next to him I feel conspicuously well dressed, even though I’m wearing a shirt from the Sundance catalog and an old pair of jeans.

Before we get there he tells me to stop and then he goes the rest of the way on foot. His hair is in two long braids and he’s tied them with red string. I look at them as he’s walking toward the spring. Try to imagine what he’d look like without them. How much less Indian. How much more like us. I figure that without them he could pass as one of America’s newer immigrants.

I know the place well. Nothing there but a few cottonwood trees and a clump or two of white sage. This pitiful little spring that just keeps bubbling up no matter how dry it gets. And in Utah it can get pretty dry. I can’t see him but I know he’s sprinkling tobacco and praying. When I was a boy I used to sneak up behind him and watch. Then he’d reach over into the spring with the jug and take some of the water. After coming all that way, wherever it was he came from, he didn’t even fill up the jug.

By the time he came back I would have finished my third or fourth cigarette. He got in the jeep, settled the half-filled jug between his knees, and off we went. Depending on my mood I would take him out by the main gate—where I’d lecture Harvey, the gatekeeper, about doing a better job of things—or I’d go back to the house and let him walk the three miles to the road.

Kate had no trouble imagining the old man. She lingered over his braids. Was it really red string, she wondered, plaited through them, or very frayed ribbon? She thought it was old ribbon. The kind Indians all over the Americas—Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras—liked to wear.

She said, And all he said, all any of them said about the water, was, The bones?

Yep, said Hugh. All they said. My grandmother thought the water might be a cure for arthritis, which she had pretty bad. It wasn’t.

She tried it? asked Kate.

She tried it. Hugh smiled.

Well, years go by, said Hugh, turning slightly on his side. The old man comes one time with his son. A sullen middle-aged Indian and obviously a drunkard. Two Indians instead of one made us nervous. Like maybe they were planning some kind of attack. He laughed. I didn’t care for the son nor he for me. He looked like that Indian leader Dennis Banks only meaner.

It was always astonishing to Kate that you didn’t see Indians in America unless you looked for them. The decades of genocide against them had left survivors with a deep fear of being seen. No mystery either why many did pass themselves off as “newer immigrants.”

So we drove out there and the two of them walked into the little glade where the spring was. The old man was showing it to him, I guess. Maybe he’d been away in prison somewhere, he had that kind of paranoid vibe. He didn’t seem impressed. When they came back he bummed a smoke. The old man had never asked for anything.

The next time the old man came he brought his grandson. The old man was almost blind and when they walked toward the spring the boy placed the old man’s hand on his shoulder. I tried to imagine one of my sons or grandsons walking patiently like that with me. My grandsons play with a little gadget that looks like a handheld TV. They seem to look up from it only when it’s time to eat. When they came back to the car the child looked thoughtful and as if a serious charge had been laid on him.

I told the old man about the energy development company that was going to be digging in the area. He asked when. I told him in the summer. He asked would the spring be dug into. I said yes because that’s where it looked like coal deposits might be found. He asked if we could stop it. I said no.

The next year around Thanksgiving the two of them came again. I told them that what used to be a spring was now a lake. In fact, an underground lake had been found to be the source of the spring.

The old man, completely blind now, didn’t seem surprised. Old Indians never seem surprised though, said Hugh. I don’t know if you ever noticed that.

Kate laughed. She laughed so hard she began to cough. Hugh leaned over and patted her on the back. He looked at her quizzically.

I bet if you offered to give him his land back, she said, catching her breath, he would have looked surprised. After saying this, another wave of laughter shook her.

Hugh didn’t laugh and in fact Kate could see her laughter made him sad.

He was holding his plastic jug, he continued, solemnly. A new one, I noticed, with a stopper instead of a screw top. I was always noticing things about him, his jug, his clothes, his braids, but I never was able to notice him. There was like a fence.

We went out to the lake, which could be seen well before we came to it. At first they just sat looking at it. The boy looking, and the old man asking questions in a language I’d never heard in my life. But a language that the hills all around us and the old trees and the streams knew well. I actually had this thought. It sneaked into my consciousness. But then I squelched it. Then creakily the old man got out of the car and then the boy. And they walked toward the water.

Well, said Hugh, the lake lasted for several months. Then it dried up. The energy development folks were glad because it meant they could drill deeper with less fuss. They’d always intended to get under the lake.

The next year the old man didn’t come. Neither did the boy.

There was a long silence.

And I wish they had because when the digging up of the lake bed was well under way what do you think the development people discovered, not at the bottom of the lake but underneath it?

The bones? asked Kate.

Exactly, said Hugh. The bones of the old man’s people from thousands of years ago. Resting there forever with a huge body of water separating them from any disturbance, and with only a tiny, trickling spring to connect them with the living.

It changed me, said Hugh. Even before I got sick.

I can see how it would, said Kate.

His devotion, he said, seeming to choke on the word.

Yes, she said.

Oh, so that’s what it means to love, I thought. And had I ever loved? I thought not.

How did he, did they, even know their ancestors’ bones were down there? asked Kate. And beneath a lake?

A gorgeous multilegged bug, green and gold and red, landed on Hugh’s shoulder. Very carefully he removed it and studied it as he talked.

How adequate is word of mouth? How reliable is family? Kinship? How can something precious be kept that way across ten to thirty thousand years?

The old man must have felt so grateful, said Kate. To be who he was, to have had those people before him, shaping him into who he was.

Hugh was scanning the bug closely so as not to reveal the wetness of his eyes. The geologists thought, he said, that there had been a cave, a burial cave, then an earthquake, then, who knows, the ice age. . . . But they didn’t really know. They made something up, you know, What the White Man Knows About Folks He’s Never Known, and printed it in their journals. But they didn’t inspire a lot of confidence. The old man though, he knew. And he taught what he knew to his grandson.

And did the grandson come back to the ranch?

Not yet.

Devotion,
thought Kate. Hugh Brentforth V wanted to know devotion.

The more I thought about it, he said, it seemed the only thing worth knowing.

Kate lay in her hut, which was open on all sides, and quite damp from the frequent showers that, according to Armando, “never came in October,” and she thought about devotion.

What was she devoted to?

To her sons, Henry and Charles, one lost to her in the United States space program of which she knew little and feared much. Space colonies? she’d asked her son. How can you get behind anything that’s colonial? The other, Charlie, an itinerant saxophone player and jazz man perpetually fulfilling the stereotype by being stoned on grass nine days out of ten. On the tenth day he looked for his supplier. Suppose something happened to one of them, she thought. What would I do? And then she thought: But it’s already happened to them and there was nothing I could do. I could and did say to Henry: Be careful of joining any endeavor that is too “complicated” to tell your mother. And to Charles, since high school, I ranted, raved, and cajoled against overuse of marijuana. He’d laughed. Everybody is doing it, Mom, he’d said, as if I were the only human being on earth who was not.