When the Legends Die (2 page)

“I worry about my people,” Blue Elk said. “That is why I came.”

Charley said, “The sawmill man in Pagosa pays you to do these things.” But Charley was worried. Everyone knew it. He said, “We came here because our cornfields are burned up. We came to dry fish and berries and make meat for the winter. Nobody can make trouble of this. We did not kill sheep or cows for meat. We killed deer. You are the one who is making trouble.”

“I came to warn you,” Blue Elk said, “and to tell you that this trouble can be taken care of.”

Johnny Sour Water said, “Maybe we should let our women put you on the drying rack, like a fat fish, and smoke you, too.”

Everybody laughed at that because Blue Elk looked a little like a big, fat fish. But they didn’t laugh much. They didn’t know how this would come out.

Bessie’s man, George Black Bull, said, “We made meat for the winter, and that is all we did. We will go back now and there will be no trouble.” Bessie was proud of him.

“If you go back with me,” Blue Elk said, “1 can take care of this for you.”

“How?” Charley Huckleberry asked.

“I can get permits, and that will make it all right. When you have the permits I can get work for you and you will not have to worry about the winter.”

“We do not worry about the winter,” Charley said. “We have made meat.”

Blue Elk said, “You made meat without permits. Do you think you can keep that meat? You are not so foolish as to think that!” Then he said, “Your cornfields are burned. Your blankets are thin. Your women need new skirts.” Which was true. They had torn their clothes and worn them thin picking berries and smoking meat. “And,” Blue Elk said, “you already owe money to the trader.”

Then Charley Huckleberry asked, “What do the sawmill men pay for you making this talk to us?”

Blue Elk said, “I am an old man. I have nothing but the clothes I wear. I worry for my people. That is why I tell you now that the sawmill man will give you jobs. He has bought many more trees and he needs more men to work. He will pay two dollars a day, silver. And he will pay those dollars to you, not to me.”

There was talk, at that. Two dollars, silver, for each day’s work! The men talked among themselves, and the women talked to the men.

Charley Huckleberry said, “Don’t listen to old Fat Belly! He speaks lies about these things.”

Blue Elk didn’t answer. He went off to one side and let them talk. And Charley Huckleberry said Blue Elk was right about the permits. It was all right to go on a fishing trip and stay a few days. The council would not make trouble over that. But they had come too far and stayed too long. About that, Blue Elk was right. Probably they would have to pay a fine for that. A fine that the council would write down in the book and they would pay when they had money to pay it. That was not big trouble. And that was all the trouble there would be, Charley Huckleberry said.

But there still was this other matter, this two dollars a day, silver. The women said this might be a good thing, and even some of the men said it might not be too bad a thing. The women said they needed new skirts. They said the beans in tin cans would taste good with the meat they had made. The men said that if all of them went together to Pagosa it would be a happy time, maybe. And they said they did not have to stay very long. In two months, at two dollars a day, they would have more than a hundred dollars. The women said that was many dollars, and all silver.

That was the way it was decided. They broke camp and went back to the reservation with Blue Elk. Charley Huckleberry told the council what they had done and where they had gone, and Blue Elk said everything Charley had told the council was true. Blue Elk said that there should be a fine for this so that they would remember next time, and since they had no money he said it would be right for the council to take the meat they had made and the fish they had smoked. That was done. Then Blue Elk got permits for them to go to Pagosa and work in the sawmill so they would not have to be hungry that winter. The trouble was taken care of.

So they went to Pagosa and Blue Elk helped the men to make their sign on the papers that said so much would be kept out of their pay each week to pay rent for the houses and to buy the furniture. And on the papers it said they could buy what they wanted at the company store and it would be paid for by taking part of their wages. The papers said they could not quit and go away while they owed money for these things. Blue Elk helped them sign the papers.

T
HAT WAS TWO YEARS
ago. Some of them wanted to quit after they had been there two months and go back to the reservations, but they owed money to the company store and they had no money to pay it. Sometimes when pay day came they had only two or three dollars instead of two dollars a day. So they could not quit because they had signed the paper.

One day Blue Elk came to the house and told Bessie that she and George must get married. Bessie said, “George is my man. That is enough. That is married, as it always was.”

Blue Elk said, “There is the boy. You must be married for the boy, and he must be baptized.”

“What is this ‘baptized’?” Bessie asked.

“The preacher sprinkles him with holy water and gives him a name.”

“I wash him with water when he is dirty,” Bessie said. “I have given him his name. Can the preacher do more than this?”

“It must be done,” Blue Elk said. “It will cost five dollars.”

“I do not have five dollars,” Bessie told him. “They take my man’s money and do not pay it to him.”

“I will see that he gets five dollars this week,” Blue Elk said. And he did. George got the five dollars from the man at the pay desk and gave it to Blue Elk and he took them to the preacher. The preacher said words and wrote on a paper and they were married. Then he asked what they wanted to name the boy. Bessie said, “He is Little Black Bull. He will choose when he needs another name.”

The preacher said he must have another name now, and he said Thomas was a good name. They could call him Tom, he said. And Bessie said it didn’t matter because Little Black Bull would pick his own name when the time came. So the preacher sprinkled water on the boy’s head and Bessie laughed when it ran into his eyes and down his nose. The preacher said, “I christen this child Thomas Black Bull, in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Ghost.” So Bessie and George were married and the boy was baptized when he was two years old, almost three. George got no pay at all at the desk the next week because he had gotten that five dollars to pay Blue Elk for the marriage and the baptism.

They were in Pagosa all that winter. When the aspens came to leaf the next spring Bessie said she wanted to go back to the reservation. George told the man at the sawmill he was going to quit. The man looked in the book and said George owed forty-two dollars at the company store and he must pay that money before he could quit. George said he did not have that money. The man said it was less than four weeks’ pay and if George worked four more weeks and paid that money he could quit. George told Bessie this and she said they would stay four weeks. She could wait that long. But when George went to the pay desk the next week the man gave him only seven dollars because they kept part of his wages for rent and the furniture. And the next week the man gave him only five dollars because the sawmill broke down and didn’t run for one day that week.

In four weeks George saved fifteen dollars. But that was not enough to pay the company store, so they could not go back to the reservation. It would take longer, George said. But he would save that money. He hid it in his lunch pail. But someone stole his lunch pail. Nobody saw the thief; but Frank No Deer, who was a mixed-blood from the Jicarilla Apache reservation in New Mexico, bought a new hat and new boots that cost exactly fifteen dollars. George accused Frank No Deer of stealing his money and Frank laughed at him and said he had won that money in a dice game. Nobody knew of a dice game where Frank No Deer or anyone else had won fifteen dollars, but George could not prove this thing. So he started again to save his money to pay the company store.

It was August before he had saved fifteen dollars again. He put the money in a bean can and buried it in the back yard and did not even tell Bessie where he had buried it. One morning he found holes where someone had dug in the back yard in the night and the money in the bean can was gone. He went to Frank No Deer and said he had stolen that money, and Frank No Deer laughed at him again. There was nothing George could do about it. But Frank No Deer had bought a suit of clothes, the coat as well as the pants, and the man at the store said it cost exactly fifteen dollars. George had a fight with Frank No Deer and tore the coat off his back, and Frank said, “You will buy me another coat.”

They did not go back to the reservation that summer, and that fall they did not go back either because now they owed fifty dollars at the company store. But all that winter George saved money again. This time he saved it in green paper money because the paper did not make a noise like silver. He kept his green paper money in his pocket where he could feel it with his hand and nobody could steal it from him. He saved forty dollars that way, and two days ago he had told Bessie that in another two weeks, maybe three, he would pay the company store and they would go back to the reservation. They would go back even if they were hungry next winter. Bessie said that would be a happy time.

That money was in his pocket when he had gone to work yesterday. It was there when he quit work to eat his lunch. He went to get his lunch pail and someone had taken it. He went out to where the other men were eating and Frank No Deer had that lunch pail. George went to Frank No Deer and said, “You are a thief. But this time you did not steal my money because it was not in my lunch pail and it was not in a bean can. It is here in my pocket.”

Frank No Deer said, “I took your lunch pail because you did not buy me a new coat for the one you tore.”

George said, “ I did not buy you a new coat because you stole my money to buy that coat,” and he took his lunch pail. Frank No Deer tried to take it back and they had a fight. They fought and wrestled on the ground. The other men said George should give Frank No Deer a good beating, but George did not want to make bad trouble. He sat on Frank No Deer and pounded his head on the ground. Then he let him up and Frank No Deer went away. He did not come back to work all afternoon. After Frank No Deer had gone, George felt his pocket and his money was gone. Frank No Deer had taken it from his pocket while they wrestled on the ground.

George had told this to Bessie last night. He said, “I am going to kill Frank No Deer for this. Three times he has stolen my money and tomorrow I am going to kill him.”

Bessie remembered all these things. She looked at the boy and thought it would be good to go away from here. The boy should know the old ways.

In her mind was one of the old songs that her mother had sung when Bessie was the age of the boy. It was a song about the roundness of things, of the grass stems and the aspens and the sun and the days and the years. Bessie sang it now, softly, and she added words of her own about the roundness of a little boy’s eyes and arms and legs. The boy smiled as he heard it, this old song about the roundness of life. And Bessie sang about the roundness of a bird’s nest and a basket, which was coiled and woven and complete, a part of the roundness of the whole.

She thought of the peeled willow twigs and shook her head. There were willows and there were black-stem ferns on Horse Mountain. She would leave the willow twigs here, as though she was coming back.

The meat was cooked. She smelled it. They went inside. She said to the boy, “You will eat well. Then you will sleep before we go.” They ate, and it was sunset. She put the boy to bed and he put his head against her and touched her cheek with his hand. Then he went to sleep and she waited for the deep darkness, saying thanks that there would be no moon.

T
HE STAR THAT WAS
a hunter with a pack on his back was halfway down the sky in the northwest when she went out on the step and listened. Everything was quiet. She had made no light in the house, so her eyes could see in this darkness. As she waited, listening, she saw the horseweeds in the starlight and the shadowy trees and brush on the hillside beyond the valley. She went down the path to the alley, and nobody was there. As she came back she saw the ax beside the kindling pile. She had forgotten the ax. She set it on the step, then went around the house. Nobody was in the street. There was a light in the house where Fred Badger and his woman, Sally, lived, and there was another light down the street. But nobody was watching. She knew this.

She went inside and wakened the boy. She smoothed the bed, then whispered to the boy, “Do not talk. Stay close to me. When I let go your hand, hold to my skirt and walk where I walk. We will make a game.” She picked up the pack, put it on her shoulders, and they went out and closed the door behind them. She took the ax.

They went to the alley and turned left, not the way her man had gone. After a little way she let go the boy’s hand and he held to her skirt and they followed a path up the hillside. They came to a street and crossed where there was no light and followed the path through the brush again. Her feet knew the way. She had gathered wood for the fire from this hillside for almost two years.

They came to the top of the hill and waited to catch their breath. In the starlight she could see the road at the foot of the hill. The road led west, toward Piedra Town. If she followed the road seventeen miles she would come to the road that came up from Arboles, on the reservation. There she would turn north. But tonight she would go only half that far, to the stream for which she had no name. That would be as far as the boy should walk tonight.

They went on, keeping to the hillside above the road, following the paths the goats had made first, then the women used when they went to gather wood. In the starlight her eyes saw an owl, two rabbits, a striped cat from town, a jay sleeping on a branch. She wanted to tell the boy, tell him how to see these things in the starlight. But not tonight. Later, other nights. They were going away tonight, and they were not talking.