Growing Up Native American (23 page)

Then Moses pulled at one of his dark braids and said, “It was probably a lover's fight.”

Belle studied his face. Moses was trying to push away his fear. It made her twice as cautious, as if to make up for him. “And if it wasn't?” she said, but before he could answer, she was on her feet. She took a pistol from a cabinet. It was a small handgun, one she used to frighten coyotes away from her nervous chickens. She loaded it. Moses said nothing.

Upstairs, the girls slept in Lettie's bed. It was hot. In the dim light of the lamp, they looked vulnerable in the large bed. Lettie watched over them. She also held a pistol. She straightened the sheet tenderly over them and smoothed the hair back from their damp faces. She wanted to hold them, to offer solace, but their breathing was deep and the waking world was dangerous, so she left them to the gift of sleep.

After a while, Belle relieved her of her watch, and the old woman set up her own silent vigil over the girls. But Lettie was overwhelmed with a feeling of loneliness, and around two in the morning, she returned to the bedside of the girls. She looked haggard. She wore a dark, worn robe. “Go on now, Mama,” she said. “You need rest.”

But Belle made no attempt to leave the room. “I can't sleep anyway,” she said. Lettie was insistent, though, until Belle pulled herself up from the chair and went down the hall to her own room. She was restless, gripped in a hot fear, afraid for Rena and Nola.

She sat at the mirror. Out of habit, she brushed her long silver hair while she thought. In the dark, sparks flew and snapped through the air around her. She was sure something was afoot. She put the brush down.

Moses seemed to sleep. Through hell and high water, Belle thought, he always slept, and she was angry at him, but then she noticed that his breathing was uneven. He turned over.

Belle rocked herself in the rocker and gazed out the window. The floor creaked. She was watchful as she looked into the dark. She wanted to read the deep night and decipher the story of what had happened to Grace Blanket. She believed it was a plot since Grace's land was worth so much in oil. All along the smell
of the blue-black oil that seeped out of the earth had smelled like death to her.

Belle climbed into bed beside Moses and tried to sleep. The old wood house settled and creaked. It was too hot. The sheets felt stiff against her skin. She climbed out of bed once more, and crept down the staircase. The furniture downstairs was dark and heavy, with ominous silence living in the shadows. Belle checked the latches on the doors.

Moses pulled on his pants and followed her downstairs. In the kitchen, he poured water into a glass and carried it over to Belle. “I'll stay up,” he said. “You go rest.”

She smiled at him. His wide chest looked soft beneath his undershirt. She laid her head against his chest briefly, long enough to hear his heart, and then she went back up the stairs.

Moses sat at the kitchen table in the darkness. He was waiting for his daughter, Louise, and her white husband, Floyd, to return home. By now, he thought, they were drunk and driving in from the city. The thought made him angry. He put his elbows on the oilcloth.

Once, before dawn, when the house made a noise, Belle climbed out of bed and in her big dressing gown, she looked out the window. In the gray light, she could have sworn a man was standing at the edge of the berry grove. “Moses!” she called down to him, but by the time Moses reached the window, the man was gone. She went down the stairs and peered out the window. He followed. She tried to convince him. “Someone was there. I saw him.”

In the bedroom, Lettie Graycloud sat beside the sleeping girls. She held the pistol on her lap. She was uncomfortable with the weapon, but the murder, even if it had been a crime of passion like her father thought, had struck too close to home. A cool breeze from the window blew in across her face and hair.

In the first red light of morning, both girls breathed softly. Exhaustion had overcome even Nola's grief. But her face, almost overnight, had begun to look somehow hollow and older. Her skin was tight across her bones. Gazing at her, Lettie felt the first pain of her own loss, the first ache of missing her friend, Grace Blanket.

Lettie studied Nola's dark skin, the widow's peak, the distant quality that had once prompted Lettie to remark to Grace that if anyone's prayers were going to be heard in this life, she knew Grace's would.

Lettie's mind went back to the time when Grace had first traveled down from the bluffs above Watona and moved into the Graycloud house. Grace and Lettie became fast friends. They'd lived together in this same room, slept in this bed as their bones grew longer. They'd whispered together at night, and now here was this girl, the same bone, blood, and skin as Grace. Lettie felt overwhelmed with love for the girl, whose dark, slender hand hung peacefully over the side of the bed.

But then, as the room lightened more, what Lettie saw frightened her. At first, she thought Nola was awake and staring at her, like a person half dead, gazing into her own watching eyes. But Nola's eyes stared through Lettie and beyond, looking through the ceiling and roof to some far distant point in the sky. While some part of her was awake, was looking perhaps at the other world, the one where her mother had gone, the rest of her slept. She breathed deeply and evenly, and she did not so much as blink her open eyes.

Lettie looked away. She felt clammy. She went to the window. Another day of heat was blowing in. Already the ground was dry, and dust filtered into the room. Lettie leaned over, to feel the thin breeze of air. That was when she saw him. The man stood in front of the house. Without changing her position, Lettie raised the pistol to the window and aimed, but even as she did, she noticed that his legs looked rooted to earth, and he stood like one of the Hill Indians, as if he'd never lived among white people or their dry goods, or the cursed blessing of oil. His face was smooth and calm. Instantly, Lettie knew he was from the same band as Grace Blanket. She lowered the gun back down to her side and buried it in a fold of her robe as if she were afraid it would fire against her will. She knew, somehow, that he was there for Nola, to help her.

The man raised his eyes. Lettie wanted to step back, out of the light, but instead she remained in full view of the watcher, and for a brief moment their eyes met. He was one of the sacred
runners from the hills. Lettie felt calm in his gaze, but as she looked out the window he seemed to vanish from her view.

Behind her, Rena began to stir. She opened her golden eyes and looked at her aunt's red and blue scarves that hung like flames on the wall above her. At first Rena thought they were burning, they were on fire, and she gasped awake, full of fear, and fought her way out of the tangle of hot sheets.

Outside, the rooster crowed and the little dog, Pippin, ran toward the road, barking at Louise and Floyd. The couple walked past the watcher without seeing him. Lettie heard their footsteps on the gravel, then the opening door and voices downstairs, and then the sound of high heels clapping up the stairs.

The door sprang open. Louise rushed into the bedroom. Rena smelled the whiskey on her mother's breath. She pulled away, remembering Grace's body and the odor of whiskey that had drifted across the pond, but Louise held tight to the girl, asking over and over, “What happened?” and saying “I can't believe it. I just can't believe it. My God.” Her shrill voice woke Nola. The girl turned over in the bed, then sat up like a ghost. She was damp with the heat and with shock. Her eyes were black and haunted-looking, with dark circles beneath them. Looking at the ash-pale girl, Lettie felt a chill wash over her skin. Even Louise went silent. The air seemed to go out of the room.

After Louise took Rena back downstairs, Lettie could think of nothing to do, so she dressed Nola in one of her own dresses. “Raise your arms,” she told her.

Nola did as she was told, and lifted both arms above her head. Lettie pulled the blue, too-large dress down over Nola's head. “Turn around now, honey,” she said. Nola flatly obeyed. She stood vacantly as Lettie pinned the back of the dress to fit her limp and silent body.

Then, out of daily habit, while Nola stood in the poor-fitting woman's dress, Lettie took a dark blue hat off one of the hooks on the wall and settled it on top of her own thick black hair. She always wore a hat, it was her custom. She pushed the hat pin through her hair, and while she looked in the mirror she saw Nola's expression change. A look of surprise passed over Nola's face as she caught sight of the watcher outside. She ran
over to the window and looked out, her face pitiful and broken. The watcher looked up. Lettie felt the whole room fill with sorrow, but she took the girl's cold hand and led her from the curtained square of light, and said to Nola, “Stay away from the windows. It's not safe.” But something tugged at the girl and she pulled out from Lettie's grasp and went into the hall. Lettie followed behind her in through the door of Belle's room. Nola pulled aside the curtain and looked out. Down on the ground, near the berry grove, was another one of the watchers.

There were four altogether. They had come in the night.

I
n
The Names,
N. Scott Momaday combines family history, mythology, and personal reminiscences to weave a poetic tapestry spanning several generations
. The Names
chronicles Momaday's personal quest for identity, a search that culminates near a hollow log in the legendary emergence place of the Kiowa people
.

In this part of his autobiography, Momaday uses the power of his imagination to envision his grandfather, Mammedaty. He conjures his ancestor with words of remembrance and regeneration from inside a drawing. For Momaday, boyhood was a time in which to begin to form an idea of himself as a Kiowa
.

Writer, poet, and artist, N. Scott Momaday (Kiowa) was born in Oklahoma in 1934. His novel
House Made of Dawn
won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1969. He has published a number of books including
The Way to Rainy Mountain,
a compilation of myth and personal memory. His most recent novel is
The Ancient Child.
Momaday holds a Ph.D. in English literature from Stanford University. He currently teaches at the University of Arizona in Tucson
.

 

C
HILDREN TRUST IN LANGUAGE. THEY ARE OPEN TO THE POWER
and beauty of language, and here they differ from their elders, most of whom have come to imagine that they have found words out, and so much of magic is lost upon them. Creation says to the child: Believe in this tree, for it has a name.

 

If you say to a child, “The day is almost gone,” he will take you at your word and will find much wonder in it. But if you say this to a man whom the world has disappointed, he will be bound to doubt it.
Almost
will have no precision for him, and he will mistake your meaning. I can remember that someone held out his hand to me, and in it was a bird, its body broken.
It is almost dead
. I was overcome with the mystery of it, that the dying bird should exist entirely in its dying. J. V. Cunningham has a poem, “On the Calculus”:

I can almost see into the summer of a year in my childhood. I am again in my grandmother's house, where I have come to stay for a month or six weeks—or for a time that bears no common shape in my mind, neither linear nor round, but it is a deep dimension, and I am lonely in it. Earlier in the day—or in the day before, or in another day—my mother and father have driven off. Somewhere on a road, in Texas, perhaps, they are moving away from me, or they are settled in a room away, away, thinking of me or not, my father scratching his head, my mother smoking a cigarette and holding a little dog in her lap. There is a silence between them and between them and me. I am thoughtful. I see into the green, transparent base of a kerosene lamp; there is a still circle within it, the surface of a deeper transparency. Do I bring my hands to my face? Do I turn or nod my head? Something of me has just now moved upon the metal throat of the lamp, some distortion of myself, nonetheless recognizable, and I am distracted. I look for my image then in the globe, rising a little in my chair, but I see nothing but my ghost, another transparency, glass upon glass, the wall beyond, another distortion. I take up a pencil and set the point against a sheet of paper and define the head of a boy, bowed slightly, facing right. I fill in quickly only a few details, the line of the eye, the curve of the mouth, the ear, the hair—all in a few simple strokes. Yet there is life and expression in the face, a
conjugation that I could not have imagined in these markings. The boy looks down at something that I cannot see, something that lies apart from the picture plane. It might be an animal, or a leaf, or the drawing of a boy. He is thoughtful and well-disposed. It seems to me that he will smile in a moment, but there is no laughter in him. He is contained in his expression—and fixed, as if the foundation upon which his flesh and bones are set cannot be shaken. I like him certainly, but I don't know who or where or what he is, except that he is the inscrutable reflection of my own vague certainty. And then I write, in my child's hand, beneath the drawing, “This is someone. Maybe this is Mammedaty. This is Mammedaty when he was a boy.” And I wonder at the words.
What are they
? They stand, they lean and run upon the page of a manuscript—I have made a manuscript, rude and illustrious. The page bears the likeness of a boy—so simply crude the likeness to some pallid shadow on my blood—and his name consists in the letters there, the words, the other likeness, the little, jumbled drawings of a ritual, the nominal ceremony in which all homage is returned, the legend of the boy's having been, of his going on. I have said it, I have set it down. I trace the words; I touch myself to the words, and they stand for me. My mind lives among them, moving ever, ever going on. I lay the page aside, I imagine. I pass through the rooms of the house, slowly, pausing at familiar objects: a quiver of arrows on the wall, old photographs in oval frames, beaded emblems, a Bible, an iron bedstead, a calendar for the year 1942. Mammedaty lies ten years in the ground at Rainy Mountain Cemetery. What is there,
just there
, in the earth, in the bronze casket, under Keahdinekeah's shawl? I go out into the yard; the shadows are long to the east, and the sunlight has deepened and the red earth is darkened now to umber and the grasses are burnished. Across the road, where the plain is long and undulant and bears the soft sheen of rose gentian and rose mallow, there are figures like fossils in the prisms of the air. I see a boy standing still in the distance, only his head and shoulders visible above the long, luminous grass, and from the place where he stands there comes the clear call of a meadowlark. It is so clear, so definite in the great plain! I believe that it circles out and out, that it touches like ancient light upon the thistles
at Saddle Mountain, upon the broken floor of Boke's store, upon the thin shadows that follow on the current of the Washita. And round on the eastern shelves I see the crooked ravines which succeed to the sky, a whirlwind tracing a red, slanting line across the middle distance, and there in the roiling dust a knoll, a gourd dance and give-away, and Mammedaty moves among the people, answers to his name; low thunder rolls upon the drum. A boy leads a horse into the circle, the horse whipping its haunches around, rattling its blue hooves on the hard earth, rolling its eyes and blowing. There are eagle feathers fixed with ribbons in the braided mane, a bright red blanket on the back of the black, beautiful hunting horse. The boy's arms are taut with the living weight, the wild will and resistance of the horse, swinging the horse round in a tight circle, to the center of the circle where Mammedaty stands waiting to take the reins and walk, with dignity, with the whole life of the hunting horse, away. It is good and honorable to be made such a gift—the gift of this horse, this hunting horse—and honorable to be the boy, the intermediary in whose hands the gift is passed. My fingers are crisped, my fingertips bear hard upon the life of this black horse.
Oh my grandfather, take hold of this horse. It is good that you should be given this horse to hold in your hands, that you should lead it away from this holy circle, that such a thing should happen in your name
. And the southern moon descends; light like phosphorus appears in the earth, blue and bone, clusters of blue-black bunch grass, pocks in pewter. Flames gutter momently in the arbor and settle to the saffron lamps; fireflies flicker on the lawn; frogs begin to tell of the night; and crickets tell of the night, but there is neither beginning nor end in their telling. The old people arrive, the thin-limbed, deep-eyed men in their hats and braids, the round-faced women in their wide half sleeves and fringed shawls, apron-bound, carrying pots and pans and baskets of food—fried bread, boiled cracked corn, melons, pies and cakes—and for hours my grandmother has been cooking meat, boiled beef, fried chicken, chicken-fried beefsteaks, white and brown gravies.
Cohn' Tsotohah, Tsoai-talee, come here; I want to tell you something
. I sit at an old man's knee. I don't know who he is, and I am shy and uncomfortable at first; but there is delight in his eyes, and I see that he loves me. There are many people
in the arbor; everyone listens.
Cohn', do you see the moon
? The full, white moon has receded into the southeast; it is a speckled moon; through the arbor screen it shimmers in the far reaches of the night.
Well, do you see?—there is a man in the moon. This is how it happened: Saynday was hungry. Oh, everyone was hungry then; the buffalo were keeping away, you know. Then Saynday's wife said to him, “Saynday, tomorrow the men are going on a hunt. You must go with them and bring back buffalo meat.” “Well, yes,” said Saynday. And the next day he went out on the hunt. Everyone found buffalo, except Saynday. Saynday could find no buffalo, and so he brought some tomatoes home to his wife. She was angry, but she said to him, “Saynday, tomorrow the men are going hunting again. Now I tell you that you must go with them, and you must bring back buffalo meat.” “Well, yes,” said Saynday. And again he went on the hunt. Everyone found buffalo, except Saynday. He could find no buffalo, and so he brought tomatoes home to his wife again. She was very angry, but she said to him, “Saynday, tomorrow the men are going hunting again. You must go with them, and you must bring back buffalo meat.” “Well, yes,” said Saynday. And Saynday went out on the hunt for the third time. And it was just the same: everyone found Buffalo, except Saynday. Saynday could find no buffalo, and so he brought tomatoes home to his wife again. She was so angry that she began to beat him with a broom. Saynday ran, but she ran after him, beating him with the broom. He ran faster and faster, until he got away, and then he wanted to hide. He hid in the moon. There he is now in the moon, and he will not come down because he is afraid of his wife
. My people laugh with me; I am created in the old man's story, in his delight. There is a black bank and lightning in the north, the moon higher and holding off, the Big Dipper on a nail at the center of the sky. I lie down on the wide bench at my grandmother's back. The prayer meeting goes on, the singing of Christian hymns in Kiowa, now and then a gourd dance song.

 

There would be old men and old women in my life.

 

I invented history. In April's thin white light, in the white landscape of the Staked Plains, I looked for tracks among the tufts of coarse, brittle grass, amid the stones, beside the tangle of dusty hedges. When I look back upon those days—days of
infinite promise and steady adventure and the certain sanctity of childhood—I see how much was there in the balance. The past and the future were simply the large contingencies of a given moment; they bore upon the present and gave it shape. One does not pass through time, but time enters upon him, in his place. As a child, I knew this surely, as a matter of fact; I am not wise to doubt it now. Notions of the past and future are essentially notions of the present. In the same way an idea of one's ancestry and posterity is really an idea of the self. About this time I was formulating an idea of myself.

Miss Johnson said Mayre not Mary why doesn't she talk the way she's supposed to and that Tommy the dirty rat I'll knock his block off and not care if he tells he tells everything and the time Billy Don and I got spanked because we were throwing snowballs and broke a window the one on the side not the driver's side and the lady was smiling until that happened driving slowly and smiling and the glass went crack it was only cracked and then she got mad not really mad but oh oh now we have to do something about that this and that you'll never know just how much I love you I didn't want to go to Mrs. Powell's because she has all those nice things in her house and you have to sit still and she watches you and one time she wouldn't even let me eat an orange in her car it smells she said and your fingers get sticky she said and I don't like her crummy cactus garden either well I like it but there are a lot of better cactuses over by Billy Don's dad's place I wonder who that girl was the soldier's girl on the library lawn and they were having their picture taken and the soldier was trying to touch her down there and she was giggling and I heard the twins laughing about it and I wanted to laugh too but the girl was pretty and I thought she should not have let him do that she's really good and decent probably maybe she was ashamed and didn't know what to do but laugh that's the way I am sometimes oh my gosh mom and dad heard me yesterday and I was singing You're in the army now you're not behind the plow you'll never get rich you son of a bitch and they heard me and weren't mad but said not to sing that even if all the other kids were singing it I think dad wasn't sure and said he said son of a bee didn't he and mom said yes he did and I did but I didn't know it I really didn't know it
and one time in the arbor Lucius told me I said some bad words and Aunt Clara heard me and I didn't know I had said them how could I just forget like that Lucius and Marland and Justin Lee and Ponzi we used to play around the arbor and the outhouse and tell jokes and smoke why did Burt tell me he was smoking oak leaves and that was all right well he's a lot older but I bet that wasn't oak leaves maybe it was anyway John was in the shower and I was playing at the sink in the kitchen and I wasn't trying to make the water hot but he thought I was well what's today Wednesday or Thursday no Saturday Saturday at the show when the crook came out on the porch and he started to smoke a cigarette and everyone thought Bob had got killed I didn't though the crook fell then and we all yelled like crazy next time old Bob will get in trouble again and Hopalong Cassidy is coming to the Reel Fred Jackson is a sergeant is he yes but he got busted someone said for fighting for hitting his commanding officer he's pretty okay to me why does he like those records Glenn Miller and Tommy Dorsey and Harry James Sleepy lagoon mom and dad too dad likes that music I think maybe at the Avalon When the lights go on again all over the world oh Billy Don and Burleigh those dumb guys this morning no yesterday no this morning I had to keep them quiet because mom was sleeping she loves to sleep late I don't like it though I like to get up but I had breakfast in bed I made it eggs and toast and jam and I took it to my bed and ate it in bed well I don't do it all the time I pledge allegiance to the flag indivisible My country 'tis of thee sweet land of liberty oh gosh Guadalcanal it isn't so bad to get shot I guess if it's a flesh wound get the medic but they strafe the beach John says the Zeros are more maneuverable but a lot slower than the P-39s and the Mustangs what do they call the P-38s they're so awful fast I'm in a Bell P-39 okay no a Flying Tiger okay sons of the rising sun this is for my kid brother ha gotcha oh oh there's a Zero on my tail eeeeeeooooooooooow lost him in the clouds just dropped down and let him go over me and climbed up oh he can't believe it he's in my sights cross hairs there Tojo that's for the Sullivans well Chuck you can paint four more Zeros on old Sally here no I'm okay thanks honorable colonel we must stop Momaday he comes from nowhere from the sun I tell you he's not human
they say he's an Indian that he wears an eagle feather has the eyes the heart of an eagle he must be stopped there son of the rising sun that's for Major Anderson eeeeeeeeeooooooooow what oh another medal oh it was nothing sir it was for my kid brother sir he got his over Burma it was for the Sullivan boys and Major Anderson what lead the eagle squadron yessir thank you sir it's a great honor