Watershed, page 8
Feeling a little shy and a lot awkward, I found myself waiting in the cold for Hiram as men came into the tent. A couple of Plata introduced themselves to me and paused to chat briefly, but most just nodded amiably and walked on by. I liked that. Finally Hiram showed up.
He said, “Let’s get inside. It’s too cold out here.”
A circle formed around the fire, around the wall of the teepee, stopping a few feet from either side of the entrance. The fire felt good. I took off my coat and sat on it to separate my ass from the cold ground. When Hiram seemed to break off from a conversation on his other side I said, “Hiram, these aren’t my ways. Do you think I should take the medicine?”
He looked at the fire, his eyes already a little glazed, and said, “I have seen many miracles taking the medicine.”
I thought, of course, you’ve been taking hallucinogenic drugs. “So, you think I should?”
Hiram nodded. “Don’t take a big handful, though.”
“Okay.”
Hiram seemed so much more serious now than he had the other times I had been near him. I would be lying if I said that he didn’t frighten me just a little. He leaned over to me and pointed to the fire with an open hand. “The ground looks very nice,” he said.
*
Billy sat by the door and was up frequently to tend the fire, adding wood and sweeping away ashes. Two young men shared a drum and sang. The drum was a skin stretched over a short, cast-iron kettle that was filled with water. The singers drank from the drum through the skin and struck it with a stick, pressing on the skin with their fingers to find the pitch they desired. The singing was repetitive, hypnotic, and beautiful. Much of the beauty was in the disposition of the singers and in the listeners’ reception. The teepee became almost hot from the fire. There was an occasional breath of cold air when Billy had to leave and enter with more wood.
There were several items laid out between Hiram, who was “putting up” the meeting, and the fire circle. There was a wand made of eagle feathers, and tobacco, and the ground-up peyote in a jar, and a large tin pot of tea made from the peyote. The men took turns praying in Plata, occasionally offering some words of English—for my benefit, I believed. They welcomed me and then forgot me. The meeting was for Louise’s mother I learned during a long prayer from Hiram. Between songs and prayers there was time to chat. The man on my left was old and very fat and it struck me that I had seen very few fat Indian men. His name was Elijah and he nodded his head when he talked.
“You are a friend of Hiram’s?”
“Yes.”
“Is this your first time in a meeting?” he asked me.
“Yes.”
“Good,” he said. He stared at the fire for a while. “I knew a lot of black men in the army. Do you have Indian blood?”
“I don’t know. Supposedly my grandmother was half Lumbee, but I don’t know.” I looked at the dark red stone on the ring he wore. “Is that a birth stone?”
He shook his head. “No, it’s just something I bought at the Trading Post.”
“It looks like a garnet,” I said.
“I guess,” he said. “I like red.”
“Do you know Louise Yellow Calf?” I asked.
He nodded and said, “Not very well. She was around for a while, but they say she went back to Chicago.”
“I heard she went to Los Angeles.”
Nodding, he said, “I hadn’t heard that. It could be true though. I don’t know her very well.”
The medicine came around and Hiram suggested that I take a modest amount from the jar and place it in the palm of my hand. I took less than I saw him take and I tossed it into my mouth as he did and passed the jar to Elijah. The taste was truly awful, horrendous, almost alarmingly so, deeply nasty, and it sent a shiver crawling through me. Unhappily, as it was a powder, it wedged in between my teeth and continued to explode in my mouth after the initial eating of it. The pot, more a bucket actually, of tea that had been made from the cactus came around and we drank from the dented tin ladle. The tea tasted as terrible as the powder, but at least it went by my tongue quickly and served to rinse my mouth.
I nodded to Hiram and felt dreadfully nervous. I didn’t know what to expect. I could feel my heart racing, not from the drug but from anxiety. The thought of experiencing a vision was exotic to me, as I had, I imagined, a typical if naive fascination with the spiritual life of these people. I felt like a tourist, but guilty as I didn’t want my curiosity to seem frivolous or vapid. I waited and waited, took the medicine twice more as it came around, and then I waited some more, listening to the songs, the prayers in Plata, the chatting in between, staring at the fire, hoping the dancing flames might trigger something in me, watching Billy rake away the ashes and rake away the sweat from his forehead. Nothing happened. No sound, nor light, nor shadow became altered in my perception. The east-facing door began to show glimpses of the breaking morning as Billy collected more wood. I experienced no vision, saw no little coyote drive by the fire in a tiny station wagon, saw nothing but the morning come and felt nothing except for the numbing of my butt and the stiffening of my legs from having sat so long.
Contained in the inferior occipital fossae and stationed beneath the occipital lobes of the cerebrum and separated from it by the tentorium cerebelli is the cerebellum. It is flattened from the top down and is oblong, measuring 3.5 to 4 inches transversely and about 2 inches in the center. It is made up of gray and white matter, the gray matter here being darker than in the cerebrum and occupying the surface. The white matter is inside. Unlike the cerebrum, the surface of the cerebellum is not convoluted, but etched with many curved troughs or solci, varying in depth.
When the sun was up we filtered out into the light through the new deep blanket of snow. We waded, up to our knees, across the yard, stomping our boots on the back porch, and entered the Yellow Calf house where Mary Brown and some other women had food waiting. Mary Brown smiled at me. Her eyes were soft and I trusted them.
I nodded hello to her. “How are you?” I asked.
“I am good,” she said.
“How is your sister?” I asked.
“She’s in the hospital again.”
I had already learned that in the meeting.
“How about you?” Mary Brown asked.
“I’ve been better.” I looked at the plate of food she had handed me. Chokecherry gravy, fried bread, and dried meat. “I’d really like to find Louise,” I said.
“I don’t know where she went,” Mary Brown said.
“Someone told me she went to Los Angeles and then someone else told me Chicago.”
The woman looked about as if to see if anyone was listening and then whispered, not terribly softly, “She has a cousin in Denver who works in the big post office, the one by the airport.”
“Why are you telling me?”
“I want you to find her,” she said and I could see the concern in her eyes.
I looked at my plate and then out the window.
“You must find her,” she said. “She’s getting into trouble. I worry about her.”
“Ms. Brown, I’m sorry, but I don’t really know Louise. I just want to ask her a couple of questions.”
Mary Brown touched my arm. Her touch was soft, but insistent. Her hand said please.
“I’ll see if I can find her,” I said.
Mary Brown nodded. “Louise didn’t grow up here. She doesn’t know.”
“Doesn’t know what?” I asked.
“Doesn’t know.”
“I’ll try,” I said. At least a trip to Denver to find Louise was far more reasonable and likely to be successful than either a trip to Chicago or Los Angeles. I was moved and frightened by the trust in me Mary Brown was showing. I studied the old woman’s face and her unwavering eyes, and I knew right then that I was being manipulated by a pro. She had me. “What’s the cousin’s name?” I asked.
“Florence St. John.”
I sat and ate, listening to bits of conversation, about the high-school basketball team, about the tribal council, about how the ranchers wanted to take the water, about how someone named Riverfish had stolen artifacts from a cultural center and stuck them into his archive at the mission, about how one word could make five hundred Indians say shit and that word was bingo. I then stepped outside, hoping to find Hiram before I left. He was standing by my truck.
“Leaving?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said. “I ought to go check on my house and make sure the snow is on the roof and not the floor.”
He smiled.
“Hiram, may I ask you something?”
“Of course.”
“In the meeting, I took the medicine three times. But nothing happened. Why? Is that normal? Nothing changed in what I saw or heard.”
He looked at the ground by my truck as if to check my tires, then said, “How do you know?”
“I guess I don’t,” I laughed softly and opened my door. “I’ll see you later.”
“See you later,” he said.
I drove slowly over the terrible roads, which were not as bad as the night before simply because I could see where I was going, north and toward the big mountain. I wondered if Davies or Karen were waiting for me at my cabin.
Hell-hole Creek is wider than Dog and Skinner Canyons. The sides of Hell-hole Canyon are only moderately steep, thus providing a more expansive bare surface area for runoff generation. Here, as in Dog Canyon, bedrock outcroppings exert influence on the disposition of terraces, ledges, and soils and affect markedly the lateral and vertical migration of the stream trough.
The stream bed of Hell-hole Creek traverses bedrock and alluvial matter. It is contained within a wide flood plain. High-water marks and flood debris were observed with widths as much as 125 feet. Three terraces are distinctly visible.
Flow was estimated using standard equations approximately seven miles from the confluence with Plata Creek. There the creek was cut into lime and mudstone. Flow values ranged from 1,300 to 2,700 cubic feet per second. (See attached calculations.)
When we speak of the education of the Indians, we mean that comprehensive system of training and instruction that will convert them into American citizens, put within their reach the blessings that the rest of us enjoy, and enable them to compete successfully with the white man on his ground and with his own methods. Education is to be the medium through which the rising generations of Indians are to be brought into the fraternal and harmonious relationship with their fellow citizens, and with them enjoy the sweets of refined homes, the delight of social intercourse, the emoluments of commerce and trade, the advantages of travel, together with the pleasures that come from literature, science, and philosophy, and the solace and stimulus afforded by a true religion.
When I arrived at my cabin I found a note crammed into the crack between the knob and jamb. It was from Karen and I didn’t bother to read whatever was written above her name. I unlocked the door and walked inside, stuffed the note into the cold stove, making certain the ashes smothered it, and sat down in the big chair. Glancing over at my tying table I saw that it was beginning to collect dust; the tail feathers sticking high out of the big jar were especially dusty. What I really wanted to do right then was go fishing, but I knew I wouldn’t. Although I was sitting there without a fire I didn’t want to be cold at that moment, I didn’t want to be uncomfortable, so I got up, grabbed my duffle from the closet and tossed some clothes into it, underwear and socks mostly, as I had clothes already at my place in Denver.
6
My father said he didn’t want me to be in the house alone. That was why he woke me to make the drive with him way out to Hopper in the middle of the night so he could see a patient. I was groggy, still a little asleep, I think, as somehow I ended up dressed and sitting in the cold car beside him. We drove out of the city and into the swallowing blackness of the countryside. It seemed so dark out there, so empty and scary, and I remembered all those stories about cars with dead headlights coming up silently behind black people at night. We rolled on for about forty minutes as the heat in the car finally blew too hot to be comfortable. We pulled up to a long, narrow house set on short pillars of brick. I could see under the dwelling as our headlights’ beams swung across the yard when we crunched to a stop on the gravel. There were lights on in the windows and I could see heads moving about the rooms. My father and I walked up the steps onto the porch. I remember being frightened by a dog lying beside the steps, although the animal didn’t move, just followed us with his droopy eyes. A woman screamed inside.
A tall, lean man let us in. He had a snaggle-toothed grin and very large hands. He almost bowed to my father and called him “Doc Hawks.” My father pointed me over toward the sofa without saying anything and was then met by an old woman with a yellow scarf tied about her head.
“You’ve got a problem, Ms. Jenkins?” my father said.
“It’s too much for me,” the woman said, shaking her head.
Whoever was in trouble screamed again and my skin crawled and I huddled into the corner of the sofa, staring at the fire behind the black slats of the potbellied stove. The man who had let us in sat in a bentwood rocking chair closer to the heat. My father disappeared into the back of the house. I watched the man rock, a slow rhythm, and after every five or six rocks he’d come up to his mouth with a bottle he held down on the floor and take a swig. I could smell him, a sourness. The woman howled again.
I had to pee. I tried to wiggle around on the sofa to make the urge pass, but it wouldn’t and I realized that I’d had to go since before we had left our house. I wanted to ask the man where the bathroom was, but I was frightened by his trance, the way he just stared at the fire, rocking like that, and scared by the way he smelled. I got up and he didn’t seem to notice, at least he didn’t acknowledge my movement. I walked outside. I didn’t want to pee in anyone’s front yard, it didn’t seem right and I was too shy to run the risk of discovery. I walked around to the side and found that the lazy dog was walking with me; his old bones were still stiff from sleep so he was limping. I touched his head, which he didn’t seem to mind, as he showed no reaction, but simply kept up with my pace. I relieved myself close to the house and I heard another scream. I looked through the closest window.
I couldn’t see much. I saw my father’s back and the woman with the yellow scarf standing off in the corner in front of an open closet; she was holding a fat Bible to her chest. I could just make out the top of the woman’s head. She was lying in the bed and I could see her brown knees. I saw her open mouth when she threw back her head to scream. Then I saw my father holding something limp in his hands, something wet, something important, and I saw the lips of the woman in the yellow scarf moving like crazy. My father worked over the thing for long minutes, his back to me, although from his motions I knew the look on his face, could feel it, and I forgot about being cold and watched as he finally stood and just shook his head. The woman in the bed cried and the woman with the Bible ran to comfort her.
I was back on the sofa when my father came into the room. The man in the rocker was passed out, the tips of his long fingers barely touching the mouth of the brown-paper-wrapped bottle. We didn’t say anything, just got into the car and left. Once on the dark road with the heat blowing hard and dry from the vents, I said, “So, the baby died.”
My father nodded, sighed, and looked over at me; he seemed a little surprised.
The drive to Denver was three hours long, over bad roads, through bad weather. Conditions in Denver always seemed extreme, never drizzling but flooding, never a dusting of snow or flurries but blizzards and sheets of ice, hail, tornadoes. The Karen of cities. That day the sky was a sick yellow-gray, the face of the fallen snow was scarred by pollution, and the highway was messy with traffic-dirty slush and ice. I got off the freeway and drove through downtown to escape a traffic jam. I stopped in at a little coffee shop on Larimer Square for a bite and to readjust to the atmosphere. I sat at a little table in the back and was waited on by a young woman in a way-too-short skirt and a mod haircut. I asked what kind of muffins they had and she ran down an impressive list with equally impressive speed. Finally I stopped her and asked for a simple bran muffin, to which she responded, “Bran crunch, bran flake, honey bran, bran and apple, or healthy bran?”
“Healthy bran? What are the others? Are they dangerously high in fiber?”
She popped her gum and looked across the room, waiting for me to finish my order.
“Healthy bran,” I said, “and a Coke.”
In accordance with normal procedures followed when an unidentified body is found on the reservation, an autopsy was requested by the BIA. No agents of the FBI were present when the autopsy was performed, but SA Gearing, SA William Wird and SA Daniel Price viewed the body at the PHS Hospital, Sharp Corners, CO, prior to the autopsy, and SA Richard Mums viewed the body after the autopsy. The autopsy was performed by R. B. Mitchell, Alliance, NE, who stated in his initial report that the probable cause of death was exposure.
The healthy bran muffin turned out to be the sweetest thing I had ever eaten in my life and my head was still reeling from it when I walked into my apartment. I opened the blinds and looked over at the telephone answering machine, which I had inexplicably forgotten to turn off, and saw it flashing. I sat and pressed the play button while I tried to recall living there. There were many messages from Karen that consisted of open air and then a click; a message from a new guy named Ted at the Naturalists’ Conservancy asking if I could come back to work early; a message from Special Agent Gladys Davies asking me to call; and finally a spoken missive from Karen. “Robert, so I made a fool of myself once again and I continue to do so by calling you once more. There are just so many things I want to say, but I know I’ve already said them. What did I do? What didn’t I do? Why don’t you care for me the way I care for you? You make me so mad . . . I hate . . . I love you, Robert. Please call me. I’m about to come undone. Robert? Robert? Are you there listening as I’m leaving this message? Robert?”
