Sing Down the Moon (8 page)

Spring came overnight, with fleecy clouds and larks soaring from the grass. It made us happy to know
that winter was behind us. Then there was word that we were only two suns march from the end of the trail, from a place near Fort Sumner.

The place was called Bosque Redondo and we reached it at noon of the third day. It was in a bend of a big looping river, flat bottomland covered with brush.

We were on a small rise when we looked down upon it first. My mother had not cried since we left our canyon. But she cried now as she stood there and looked down upon this gray country that was to be our home.

I planned to go out in search of the little girl's mother the next morning after we reached Bosque Redondo. But the child woke me before dawn with her cries, so I minded her all day and sent Running Bird to look for her mother. She came back about dark, not having found her. That night the medicine man came and touched the little girl and we had a sing.

The night was half over and I was sitting beside the fire with the little girl in my arms. She held one of my fingers tight in her small fist and I was singing a song to her about a bird in a pine tree. I sang another song to her and another before I was aware that she was no longer listening, that she had died quietly in my arms.

In the morning I went out to search for her mother. I went to hundreds of lean-tos and fires and when night came I lay down in the brush and went to sleep, wondering what I could say when I found her.

In the morning I started out again. A young man told me that he had seen the girl I described to him and she was living on the bank of the river near a tree, which he pointed out. It was far away and it took me until noon to make my way through the hundreds of people working to make shelters for themselves.

I saw her before I reached the river and she saw me. We ran toward each other through the thick brush.

There was an open place covered with pale grass and we both stopped as we came to it and looked at each other.

It was a short time that we stood there yet it seemed long. Then I went over to her and put my hand in hers. I could not think of anything to say, but I did not need to. She had been crying and I knew that her other child had died too. We put our arms around each other and stood together in the spring sun without speaking.

T
HE GRAY FLATLAND
between the banks of the river was divided among the clans. Everyone shared alike and each family built some sort of a shelter—a cave in the earth, a brush lean-to, or a hut of whatever things could be gathered.

Our hut was made of driftwood we found along the river and strips of old canvas. It kept out the sun but not the winds and it was hard to walk around in without bumping your head on something.

Food was soon gone, so the Long Knives passed out
parcels of flour to all the families. There were few among us who did not get sick, for the flour was made of wheat, which we were not used to eating. And the water from the muddy river was bitter.

There were several hundred Indians already living at Bosque Redondo. They were Apaches who had been driven out of their country and were being held prisoners by the Long Knives.

The Apaches are smaller than we are, but thick and very strong. They are also quarrelsome. They want their way about everything and if they do not get it they fight. They fought with us as soon as we came, saying that the land belonged to them and that we were stealing it.

My father and two other headmen from the clans told them that the Navahos did not like Bosque Redondo. If the Apaches wanted it they could have it. All we wanted was to live on it until the Long Knives found us a better place. These words did not please the Apaches and they tried to hurt us whenever they could.

When every family had shelter and food the Long Knives sent all the men who were able to work with a hoe to break up the earth and plant it with corn and with wheat, which we did not like. Then they set them to digging ditches to carry water from the river into the fields.

Thus summer began at Bosque Redondo, our new home. My mother and sister and I, like all the other women, had little to do. There was no corn to grind. Wagons came filled with flour. White soldiers stood in it up to their knees and passed it out to us on big wooden shovels. There were no sheep to tend or wool to shear and weave into blankets. There were no hunters to bring in hides to scrape and stretch and make into leggings. We were idle most of the time.

It was the same with Tall Boy. He would come over every morning after breakfast and sit around in front of our hut until the sun was well up. Then he would wander down to the river and lie in the sun some more. He liked to show the other young Navahos the big white scar on his shoulder, where the Spaniard's bullet had struck him. Only he told them it was one of the Long Knives who had given him the scar.

The other men were also idle most of the time, once the fields were planted and the water ditches dug. Like Tall Boy they enjoyed talking about the days before they came to Bosque Redondo. They sat around and bragged about things they had done. They made threats against the Long Knives, but the threats were weak and spoken quietly. They gossiped worse than the women. The heart had gone out of them. The spirit had left their bodies.

It was a bad summer in Bosque Redondo. There were ghosts and witches everywhere and many people sickened and died. Then the first crop failed. There was little rain and our men had trouble leading water up from the river. Some of the fields were planted again, but winds blew the seeds away and fall came without a harvest.

There was much talk after that about the Long Knives who lived in the gray-walled fort in the midst of our fields. Hardly a day went by that some new story did not spread from hut to hut about them. The wheat flour would run out before winter came. The flour was cursed and if we went on eating it we would all die. The Long Knives wanted us to die and so we would, in some way or another.

One story came to use from three different men, who had been in a place fifteen days' journey to the north. Each man brought the same story, so it was surely true. The place was called Sand Creek and it was near a town which was in the mountains. They said that a village of Cheyennes and Arapahos were asleep in their lodges. There was a white preacher and he rode out from the town with some men and when they came to the sleeping village he gave an order: "Kill and scalp all Indians, big and little," he shouted, "since nits make lice."

Without warning, every Indian was killed. After
ward scalps were taken and shown to the people in the town.

This story was told many times and everyone feared that the same thing would happen to us. The Long Knives would steal out from their fort and kill us all while we slept. Yet our men did nothing. They sat and shook their heads, but made no plans to defend themselves or their families should the Long Knives come. Even Tall Boy did nothing but talk about the soldiers and how they wanted to see us die.

One day I asked him, "What are you going to do if the Long Knives fall upon us in the night? Will you cover your head and wait to be slain?"

He looked at me and bit his lip. "The gods will tell us what to do," he said. "Now they punish us. When the time comes they will speak and we will hear them."

My father talked this way, too, and many of the other men at Bosque Redondo when summer was ending.

B
EFORE SNOW CAME,
when the first north wind blew, my mother and I and my sister started to work, strengthening our hut.

Tall Boy's father knew one of the Long Knives. I think that he gave the soldier a valuable belt of silver and turquoise. Whatever it was, the white man gave him a speckled horse, too old for the soldiers to ride any longer that they were going to kill. We borrowed this horse and went across the river and cut willow poles, which we used to buttress the thick walls and the sagging roof.

Tall Boy, besides getting the horse for us to use, helped put the poles in place and heap up the earth against them. This pleased my mother. She began to say a word to him now and then and even smiled a little when he was around.

Therefore I was not surprised that Tall Boy's father came over one evening after we finished working on the hut and talked to my father. Then the next day Tall Boy's two uncles came over and talked. The talks went on every day until the new moon and then they made a good marriage bargain, though my mother did not get the old speckled horse, which she wanted.

Relatives came to the wedding. There were so many that all of them could not get inside the hut. Tall Boy went in first, then my father and me. Tall Boy and I sat on a blanket in front of a basket of corn gruel and a jar of water with a ladle. My father crouched nearby. Relatives filed in and sat on both sides of us. Then my father made a cross with white corn pollen over the gruel and a circle around the cross.

First I dipped water with the ladle and poured it over Tall Boy's hands and he did the same to me. Then he dipped a finger into the basket toward the east and ate a pinch of the gruel and I ate a pinch also. We ate pinches from all the different directions. Then the wedding was over and everyone came forward and began to feast.

The elders, as they feasted, gave me advice about being married. One aunt told me not to scold. My unmarried aunt told me to be patient. Two others told me the same thing. My cousin told me to be polite to everyone, even to strangers. There was advice until the relatives left at sundown but I was so excited that I did not hear much of it.

Our hut was too small before Tall Boy moved in with us. Now there was no room, so we made a lean-to of willow poles and earth nearby. It was really more of a cave and in it we stored the things we did not use every day and food if we had more than we needed, which was not often.

Snow came early that year and melted and then a freeze came with a cold wind and the earth was as hard as stone. The white soldiers drove their wagons through the village every week and ladled out flour. But the ladles were smaller than they had been in the summer. Flour always ran low before the wagons came again and people began to go hungry. All but the Apaches, who were fed first.

Once more there was talk that the Long Knives wanted us to die. Before winter was over all the
Navahos would starve to death, the old men said.

Snow fell and the wind piled it up around our hut so we had to dig a tunnel to go out. People fell sick and died. Scarcely a day went by that you did not hear a chant for the dead, the wind blowing and the voices singing. Often times it was hard to tell one from the other. It was then, at the time the big snow melted when so many were dying, that I made up my mind.

My husband and I had gone down to the river, using the old speckled horse to gather firewood. After the wood was cut and loaded on the horse, we stood on the bank for a while to get our breath. The gray walls of the fort were the color of the sky and the sky was the color of the land stretching away in the sunless morning. Some soldiers marched up and down, beating on drums and blowing horns.

I said to my husband, "I think of our canyon. I see it before I go to sleep, sometimes in my dreams, and always when I wake up. I see the high stone cliffs and the trees standing against the sky. I see my sheep wandering about with no one to tend them."

"They are not wandering now," he said. "The wolves have killed them and there are none left. You had better think of something else besides sheep."

His words made me angry, though I did not show
it. "Some are still alive," I said. "That is why I see them."

He looked at me as if I had turned into a witch. "If some are alive, why is it that I do not see them?" he said. "Do you have a true eye or something that I lack?"

"I suppose I see them because I want to," I said. "And you do not see them because you do not want to."

"I never had any sheep to see," Tall Boy said. "A few goats but no sheep."

"But you can see the canyon if you look," I said. "You were born there and lived there as a boy and grew to be a man. It was your home and it still is."

His long hair was braided into two ropes that lay forward on his chest. He tossed both of them back. "I do not want to think of the canyon," he said.

"My father does not want to think of the canyon either," I said.

"This is not the time to think about the canyon," he said and shouted to the horse.

We climbed the riverbank and set off toward our hut. The white soldiers were still marching around the fort.

I said nothing more that day about the canyon or the sheep. But I made up my mind as we went back through the village, past the rows of brush huts where
people shivered and were dying. Within the rising and waning of five moons my baby would be born.

"It will not be born here, in the shadow of the gray fort," I said to myself, "not here."

T
HERE WAS NO WOOL
to be found anywhere in the village and when I asked one of the Long Knives if there was wool at the fort he did not answer. I thought that he did not understand Navaho so I made the sign of a blanket and weaving. He sat on a horse, beside the wagon that was bringing us flour. He looked away and said nothing.

Soon afterward I traded my turquoise bracelet for three old blankets of a fine black and white design. By taking one of them apart I was able to save enough thread to repair the other two. The family used them at night, but I took good care of them for they would go with us the day Tall Boy and I left Bosque Redondo.

I was a long time saving food. Every morning when I made the gruel for the family I put two pinches of the flour into a gourd and hid it away in the lean-to. At breakfast I ate two pinches less than the others so things would be even. It took me all the mornings between two moons to fill the gourd, which was enough for a journey of three days.

The next time the wagon came the white soldiers gave us less flour than before and I did not try to save any of it. Still, there was enough for the two of us if we could find some other food along the way. I told Tall Boy about the blankets and the food I had hidden in the lean-to.