AMANDA turned towards home after her encounter with Old Larky, completely abandoning the half-formed project of visiting Mrs. Cunningham. She found that the memory of her hour with Calise had lost all its magic. The atmosphere of singular purity in that orderly room, her own involuntary frankness, and Calise’s talk of God and content and mountain flowers, all seemed slightly ridiculous in retrospect. Perhaps this was in part due to Luther Mablett’s comments on Calise in the mine office, “batty as a March hare, sees ghosts and stuff,” but it was largely due to Amanda’s fear that she might again betray her thoughts and that mention of her preoccupation with the Pueblo Encantado would elicit from Calise even less approval than it had from Dart. She had no reason for this conviction, but it was nevertheless a certainty.
She reached home again about one o’clock, ate some bread and jam and drank some tea, then looked longingly at Anthony Adverse, the last book Jean had sent her. She had already been entranced by its opening pages, and the atmosphere of romantic passion and derring-do. There was, however, a pile of Dart’s shirts to be pressed, and there was mending, and at both tasks she continued to be remarkably inept.
“When duty whispers low, Thou must, The youth replies, I can," she thought, flinging the heavy black sadiron on the stove. Except I don’t want to; what do you do about that, stern daughter of the voice of God?
So Amanda compromised. She ironed three shirts, mended two pairs of Dart’s socks, hoping that the puckered darns would not give him blisters, and then she threw herself across the bed on her stomach, and propped up Anthony Adverse. She became so engrossed that she did not at first hear a knock on the door. The second one roused her and she shut the book reluctantly, and walked across the room still in a daze of emotion with the lovers and the cruel Don Luis.
A plump copper-skinned Indian with ear-length hair, a black felt hat, red plaid shirt, and faded levis stood on her doorstep looking up at her with a grave scrutiny.
Amanda stared down at him blankly.
“You Dartland’s woman?” asked the Indian, examining her in one glance, then averting his eyes.
“Why, yes. I’m Mrs. Dartland. What is it you wanted?”
The Indian had a round, good-natured face, though he did not respond to her tentative smile, nor did he answer her question at once. He simply stood there by the doorstep, his unwinking black eyes fixed upon the giant saguaro at the corner.
That these ceremonious moments of silence between speeches were Apache etiquette, Amanda naturally did not know, and she repeated with some impatience, “What is it you want?”
He moved his gaze to a small gray brittle bush which grew by the path and said, “I have message for Dartland.”
“Well, he’s up at the mine,” said Amanda. “You could find him up there. Or give me the message.”
There was another silence, then the Apache said, “I don’t go to the mine. I wait here for him.” He pulled a bent cigarette from his pants pocket, lit it and sat down on the doorstep.
Amanda quelled a desire to laugh. She stared down at the stolid red-shirted back. “But you can’t sit there for an hour or two! Who are you and what do you want?”
The Indian puffed on his cigarette, and the smoke drifted out of his broad nostrils. “I have message for Dartland,” he repeated with an air of remote patience. “I wait here.”
Nor until Dart came home did Amanda get any further satisfaction. The Indian sat upon her doorstep and smoked. He would not come inside, he would not accept a cup of coffee, he would not amplify his one remark.
When at six o’clock the Lizzie chugged into the yard and Dart got out, Amanda rushed to the door and watched, as Dart showed pleased surprise. “Why, hello, Cleve—” he cried, holding out his hand to the Indian who advanced to meet him. “I thought you were at San Carlos. Have you come for your old job back at the mine?”
Cleve shook Dart’s hand solemnly. “No, Nantan—” he said. “Never while Burton is there. He is a very bad man. He is too dangerous.”
Burton? thought Amanda, wasn’t that the name of that ratfaced little pipsqueak in Mablett’s office that day? How funny.
Dart seemed to think it funny too, for he laughed. “Oh, Burton’s okay. I’m surprised you let him get your goat. What are you here for then?”
“To see you, Nantan.” And then to Amanda’s annoyance the Indian continued in Apache. She listened to the explosive guttural sounds, and watched Dart’s face anxiously, because after the first minute, the color seeped out of it, leaving a grayish hue under the tan. His lips tightened and she could see the pupils of his eyes dilate, but he made no sound until the Indian stopped speaking.
Then he nodded his head and said a few incomprehensible words.
This, the first time that Amanda had heard her husband speaking Apache, gave her a strange sensation and she rushed up to the men, clutching at Dart’s arm. “Oh, what is it?” she cried. “What’s he been telling you?”
She saw that Dart had forgotten her; it took a moment for his eyes to focus on her face, then he said, “It’s my mother, she’s dying. Cleve has come from the Reservation to tell me.”
She stared up at him stricken. “Oh, darling—” she breathed, “how dreadful. I’m so sorry. What shall we do?”
“Leave just as soon as I tell them at the mine that I’m going!”
He saw the question which she did not quite dare ask, and he said, “Yes. You, too. She wants to see you. It’ll be a tough experience for you but I guess you can take it.”
“OF COURSE I can. I’ve always wanted to see Saba, and I want to be with you—to help you....” Her eyes filled with tears.
“Good girl,” he said and bent down and kissed her, while the Indian turned away.
Later Amanda never could remember much of that wild ride through the night to the reservation. Dart drove back along the dizzy mountain roads which had so frightened her on her first arrival in Lodestone. He drove at a speed which felt to her like eighty, though she knew very well the car was not capable of anything like that. She was too inexperienced to realize that despite their break-neck pace Dart’s judgment and splitsecond decisions were always right. But Cleve, the Indian, knew, and though he bounced around on the back seat in utter silence, as they did on the front, he viewed Dart’s performance with admiration. The Nantan was a real man and showed his warrior blood, for what else had made the fiber of the great Apaches but cool courage and the ability to judge risks correctly?
There had been no rain for many days, and the washes were all providentially dry, so that it was only nine o’clock when they emerged from the mountains, crossed U.S. Highway No. 70 at Cutter on the reservation, and finished the next thirteen miles of comparatively flat but extremely poor road into the San Carlos Agency. Here there were stone pillars and a welllighted avenue of substantial-looking buildings all new, for the Agency had only last year been moved from its old site called Rice, down by the Gila River. That site now lay deep under the blue waters impounded by the Coolidge Dam. These new buildings of stucco and tufa stone along the tree-shaded avenue included the homes, offices, school, hospital, and churches lived in and provided by the white man for the soul and body nurture of the Government’s wards. The effect was of comfortable suburbia, most surprising to Amanda.
But Dart did not pause at the stone pillars nor enter the avenue, he drove straight on past the island of civilization and into darkness again; then he spoke for the first time, turning his head toward Cleve. “Do I turn left here? I’ve forgotten.”
Cleve grunted assent. “Up Blue River,” he said.
“Hang on tight, Andy,” said Dart. “This’ll be pretty rough, but we’ll make it if the wheels stay on.”
They were running up a dry creek bed, hurtling over small stones and bushes, skirting boulders and larger holes; until at last they rounded a little curve and the Indian muttered something. At once Dart turned the car right and plunged up the bank into an apparent wall of desert broom and burro brush. They emerged, however, onto a road of sorts which ran along the desert toward a clump of tall mesquite. And clustered near the trees, Amanda saw the dim beehive shapes of Apache dwellings—the wickiups.
“I get off here,” said Cleve. “You go little way on.”
“Yes, I know now.” Dart stopped the car. “Thanks, Cleve.”
The Indian said something brief in Apache and Dart answered him. The noise of the car had attracted several figures who materialized silently from the darkness and came up peering and murmuring. They were women. Amanda saw the long flowing hair and the billowing flounced skirts. Cleve, who had been halfway out of the car, uttered a sharp exclamation and clambered back in the car and slammed the door. One of the women gave a little cry, half mirth, half dismay, then they all turned and scuttled into the darkness. Dart started the car and drove on.
“Why didn’t Cleve get out?” asked Amanda, glancing back toward the Indian. “What upset him?”
“Those were some of his wife’s relatives,” answered Dart hurriedly. “He must never see them. They practice avoidance. It’s the old custom.”
“Oh,” she said. This was no time to question, no time to bother Dart with curiosity, or timidity, or the need for reassurance in this setting which seemed to her increasingly fantastic. The stars were there, the desert scenery, the distant mountains, the familiar car, and Dart whom she loved, but she felt herself increasingly alone and disoriented, surrounded by enigmas to which she might not bring the patronizing amusement of the tourist, but in which she would soon be required in some measure to share. Without preparation, without understanding, she must now accept her husband in the one aspect she had come to dread, as part of an alien and hostile race; and in her veins she felt the stirring of the ancient atavistic fear.
The car had jounced a mile or so farther along the rutted tracks when another grove of trees appeared, taller than the last, for here there was water from a spring, and willows grew amongst the arrow-weed and broom.
There were several wickiups and Dart stopped the car near the furthest one. Smoke curled up through its brushthatched roof and out the open door where firelight flickered.
The instant the motor stopped, a half-dozen Indians emerged from the wickiups. They surrounded the car, four men and two women; the women stared silently, then dropped their eyes, but the men greeted Dart with low cries. “Shikil” My friend. And one who was taller than the rest, nearly as tall as Dart, rested his hand for an instant on Dart’s shoulder and called him by his boyhood nickname, “Ish-kin-azi.”
Amanda stood uncertainly in the shadows, waiting. She was faint with hunger and very tired, the Apache voices, the dark faces and the silent domed wickiups swirled round her in a vague menacing dream.
It was only an instant though before Dart came and drew her forward. “These are my relatives, Andy,” he said. “Second cousins, descended from Tanosay’s brothers.”
“How do you do—” she murmured and the six pairs of black eyes rested without expression on the girl’s white face and the short wind-blown fair hair. “How do you do—” answered several voices and one male voice added, “Welcome.”
Dart turned in the direction of that voice and smiled. He indicated the tall young Indian who had greeted him most warmly and said, “This one I grew up with—we were close as brothers when I was here on the reservation—” He hesitated, knowing that he must name him for Amanda but observant of the inviolable taboo. The real name is sacred and may not be mentioned, many nicknames are discarded, he could not say to Amanda, This is “my grandfather's nephew,” as he would to an Apache.
The young Indian solved the problem himself. “I’m John Whitman,” he said to Amanda, giving his Agency name, and his eyes smiled a little.
She held out her hand impulsively, hearing in the voice a slight resemblance to Dart’s, feeling some kindliness at last, but the Indian hesitated and she drew her hand back, flushing.
“We ... they don’t go in much for handshaking," said Dart. “John means no offense.”
“I know—it’s all right—” she murmured, and she looked up at Dart anxiously. Why, when they had pelted through the night to get here, was there now this delay at Saba’s doorstep? Why didn’t Dart rush in to her?
He understood her question and answered it. “One of my cousins has gone to prepare Shi-Ma, my mother. When you go in, Andy, it will make her happy if you call her Shi-Ma too. They say she’s wandering a bit. It may be hard for her to place you.”
Amanda nodded and leaned silently against the car, staring at nothing.
The group of Indians had dispersed as noiselessly as they had appeared, all except John. He stood with Dart and they conversed in Apache, while John gave Dart much information which had been lacking from Cleve’s knowledge. During the last months, Saba had been growing very thin and tired. She no longer took interest in anything, even her basketry. Soon she almost ceased eating and lay all day on her blankets, looking out through the open door toward the Natanes Mountains where she had spent her youth. The women had all taken turns caring for her most tenderly but she had not grown better, though they had summoned the shaman from Bylas, the one whose power came from the Mountain Spirits. He had performed his special curing ceremony, and they had held the sacred masked dance for her too, but it had done no permanent good, only for a little while.
“Why didn’t you let me know sooner,” said Dart sadly, for he knew the answer.
“She did not wish it. You understand that. She knows that you must follow the white trail forever now. That no man can ride two horses.”
“What else has been done for her?” asked Dart. “If she can travel, I mean to take her at once to the Agency hospital.”
“No,” said the Indian. “She will not go.” And John went on to explain that the superintendent of the Agency himself had heard of Saba’s illness, and he had come to visit her, bringing the doctor with him. But the white doctor had said at once that it was hopeless. That she had a growth that was eating up her stomach and the hospital could do nothing.
And then the Lutheran minister had come to pray with her. Saba was no church member, but all the Indians liked this minister who spoke Apache almost as well as they did themselves. So they had let him into the wickiup, and Saba had listened peacefully while the minister read to her from the white Bible, and prayed for her. So everything had been done. Both the white man’s and the Indian’s medicines for body and spirit had been invoked, and now all was in readiness for her going-away.
Dart bowed his head, and the two young men stood together in silence, until John’s young wife, Rowena, a pretty girl in blue calico, glided out from the wickiup and touched Dart on the arm. He nodded and said, “Come—” to Amanda who followed them through the low door into the bark and canvas dwelling.
At first Amanda’s eyes were so blinded by smoke that she saw nothing clearly, but she heard the low choking voice cry out, “Shi-ja-yeh! My son!” and a kindly hand pulled Amanda to the far end of the wickiup. Here where the smoke was thinner, Amanda stood confused and uncertain looking down at Dart and his mother.
Saba lay propped on a pile of blankets which were protected from the dirt by a cowhide rug. Her iron-gray hair, cut square above the eyebrows, flowed loose in strands over the shoulders of her faded cotton blouse. Her emaciated face with the skin stretched tight over her high cheekbones, straight nose, and sharp jawline was the color of old ivory, and on her chin there were six blue tattoo marks. Her hair and shoulders were dusted yellow with the sacred life-giving pollen the shaman had sprinkled on her.
Dart knelt beside her pallet, and from the hollow eyesockets her brilliant black eyes caressed his bent head with an expression of burning love. Her hand, knotted and veined but small as that of all Apaches, lay lightly on his shoulder, and from her lips there came a soft crooning murmur, nearly formless words in both English and Apache—of lullaby, of greeting, and of farewell.
It was Saba who first realized that Amanda stood there; she turned her head and looked up at the frightened girl and the shadow of a smile came into the burning eyes. “So it is you, my son’s—wife,” she said in a clear voice. “Come here to me.”
Amanda knelt on the cowhide beside Dart, her heart beat thickly and her eyes were blinded with tears. “Yes, Shi-Ma—” she whispered. “I am here.”
Saba lifted her hand from Dart’s shoulder and touched Amanda’s cheek. She took Dart’s right hand and Amanda’s left and clasped them together. “It is well,” she said and the words drifted through her pale lips like the sighing of the wind. Her hand dropped from theirs and she sank back on the blankets. “Now leave me with Shi-ja-yeh—with my son.”
“My cousins’ll take care of you, Andy,” said Dart very low, then he turned back to his mother.
Amanda rose, and at once the young Indian girl Rowena. John’s wife, came forward. “Come with me—” and she led Amanda from the wickiup, and through the darkness to her own dwelling. In here there was a smaller fire, and a rickety camp cot as well as a pile of red and gray store-bought blankets. Seeing that Amanda looked dazed and very pale, the Indian girl pushed her gently down on the cot. “Sit here. I’ll give you some tulapai. You’ll feel better.” She went out to the ramada, an open twig and branch lean-to, to fetch the tulapai jug.
Amanda sat on the cot and gazed around the wickiup. It was made of willow sapling, laced with yucca leaves, and thatched with bear grass. Strips of canvas and old flour bags insulated the outside, where in the old days they would have used deer hides.
Inside on the stamped earth floor there was no furniture except the cot, and an obsolete treadle sewing machine. An iron pot, bought in Globe, hung on a tripod over the fire and emitted a rank odor which mingled with the smell of stale sweat from the blankets. A faint noise attracted Amanda’s attention and upon examining its source in the shadows by the doorway, she discovered a plump baby, tight-swaddled and strapped on a cradle board, propped against the brush wall. The baby was thus sleeping bolt upright, with a contented smile on its face.
His mother reappeared with a gallon can of tulapai, and giggled when she saw Amanda. “You like my baby? Pretty soon you have one too, mebbe so?”
Amanda smiled faintly. “Someday. I hope so.” She could think of nothing but food and sleep, and she did not know how either was to be obtained. Her hostess offered her an enamel cup full of tulapai, which turned out to be a strange grayish concoction made of fermented corn and mesquite beans, with the addition of yeast and raisins to make it strong, and a dash of tobacco juice for flavor. Amanda, fearful of offending, gulped down a little of it, and the heat in her stomach revived her and gave her the courage to say, “Could I beg a little something to eat from you? And do you know where I could rest for a while?”
“Sure,” said Rowena. “You sleep here with me and my little sister. John go someplace else.” She picked up the cradle board from which there had come a snuffling cry. She went outside a minute and came back with a cold tortilla and a strip of jerky in her hand. She held them out to Amanda. “Here,” she said smiling. “Eat. Drink more tulapai. It will make you not so sad. Then rest on the cot.”
She squatted down on the pile of blankets holding the cradle-board flat on her lap. She raised the short blue Mother Hubbard blouse and began to nurse the baby.
Amanda nibbled a little at the clammy tortilla and the tough salty beef. She docilely sipped the tulapai. She had had nothing to eat since the bread and jam at home after her walk up the canyon. Twelve hours ago according to her wristwatch and it felt like weeks. This Amanda who sat in an Apache wickiup while her husband kept vigil with a dying mother seemed disembodied from all the other familiar Amandas; the one who was Dart’s passionate and responsive mate or the discontented little Lodestone housewife. These seemed as remote as did the earlier Amandas of New York and Greenwich and Vassar and Europe.
If Tim could see me now, she thought, but not with amusement, rather with a remote wonder that life which had always seemed all of a piece could offer such extraordinarily disjointed contrasts. What sure continuity was there but ego?—and love perhaps. It was because of love that she was here. She had thought during the wild ride through the night that there might be another link. Deep down, suppressed beneath the sympathy for Dart and the sadness of their mission, there had been a hope that if Saba were not too sick she might ask her about the lost mine—about the Pueblo Encantado. For Saba, who had put the relics in the basket, might feel differently from her son about the search. But during those minutes in the other wickiup she had felt shame for her thoughts, and she had known that even if Saba were well she could never ask her.
There was a soft pad of footsteps at the door, and a little girl of twelve slid in and stopped dead at the sight of Amanda. The child flung up her hands to cover her mouth, and her round fawn eyes grew black as dewberries. Rowena said something quick in Apache, but the little girl shook her head and backed out of the wickiup.
Rowena laughed a little, lowering her blouse and propping the baby against the wall. “That was my sister. She is afraid because you are here. She will not come in.”
“I’m sorry,” said Amanda softly. “Is there any other place I can go?”
The Indian girl shook her head. “They wouldn’t let you in. We don’t like white people to come into our homes, especially those of us who live in the old way. But for John and me it’s different. He is blood brother to Ish-kin-azi—to your husband, and we’re not afraid of white people. We went many years to the Indian school.”
“You hate us.... ” said Amanda sighing.
“No. Not all. Only those who want to change us, only those who come asking rude questions, and taking photographs, and laughing at us behind their hands. Only those who make us ashamed because we could no longer feed ourselves and must take charity.—But it’s better now.” Rowena got up and brought a blanket from the pile over to Amanda. “Now we have the cattle. Our own herds to sell for ourselves. Our clan here at Blue Springs”—she added, her eyes shining—“owns many fine head of cattle.... Sleep now, our cousin’s • wife,” she said, putting the blanket over Amanda. “The tulapai will make you sleep.”
Amanda tried to say something, but her weighted lids dropped. She stretched her legs out on the hard canvas cot and the flickering firelight on the grass and brush ceiling dissolved into darkness.
She awoke at six to see Dart’s face bending close to hers, his gray eyes looking down at her with anxious affection and some humor. Forgetting where she was, she gave a soft cry of welcome and put her arms around his neck. He kissed her and said, “How’re you doing? I gather you got some sleep.”
She struggled up on her elbow, staring around the dim, deserted wickiup. She looked down at the rumpled gray blanket, at her camel’s hair top coat in which she had slept. Then she remembered.
“She’s much weaker but peaceful. The women’re tending her. She says that she will go away as the sun sets. I think she knows.” Instinctively he used the Apache euphemism for death.
“Come along,” he said briskly. “I’ve rustled up some coffee for us. Then I’ll take you downstream a bit. We could both use a wash.”
She clambered stiffly off her cot and shook herself. She took her pocket comb and compact from her purse. “Holy heaven, what a mess—” she murmured trying to comb her hair. “Dart, I itch all over,” she looked up at him startled, scratching vigorously at her stomach. “Fiery itches. What’s the matter with me?”
He bent over, pulled up her cotton shirt and examined her stomach. “Fleas—my love.” He grinned at her expression. “Maybe one or two other bugs as well. I’ll delouse you as soon as we’ve eaten.”
She moistened her lips, her eyes moved from his amused face to the blanket, and it seemed to her that all her flesh crawled. “Disgusting.” she whispered. Filthy savages—she thought. Nothing would induce me to spend another night in this horrible place. And Dart could laugh. Could laugh because he was really—She clamped her lips tight over the sudden bitter words that rushed against them.
“Come get your coffee,” Dart said. Her thoughts were transparent enough and he was no longer smiling. “I can get someone to take you back to the superintendent’s house at the Agency. They have modern plumbing and all the comforts. They’ll let you stay there until—until I can come.”
She said nothing. She followed him out to the outdoor cooking fire and accepted the tin mug of coffee he poured for her. She ate one from Rowena’s stack of cold tortillas, and some small cakes like hamburgers made from acorns, and the dried sticky fruit of the giant saguaro, all of which Dart handed her silently. She found that she was so ravenous that the strange flavors were unimportant.
While they ate nobody came near them. Rowena was in with Saba. John had ridden off into the hills with the other men to look for newborn calves amongst their clan herd. There were people around the more distant wickiups, women walking in and out of the ramadas in their flounced, brightcolored dresses, and children playing, but nobody even glanced in their direction.
As Amanda finished the last bite of tortilla, there was a commotion on the rutted road and a horse-drawn wagon app ... red by the side of the farthest wickiup. Some of the children began to climb up the wheels and jump into the wagon. Dart watched them a moment, then poured himself another cup of coffee. “The kids are going to drive to the Agency school,” he said. “You can go into San Carlos with them.”
She glanced at his impassive face, withdrawn from her as completely as her anger and physical revulsion had withdrawn her from him. And why shouldn’t she go? She thought of the avenue of trees and lights at the Agency, the neat stone houses, the grass plots in front of them, the sidewalks. She thought of the stone pillars at the entrance which marked the gateway between the two worlds. There were lights and baths and telephones in there at the Agency. There would, in fact, be more actual comfort than Dart had ever given her since their marriage.... And here what was she but an alien intruder, tolerated only because of Dart? Why then should she hesitate? Why should there well up from the depths of her soul a cold and secret spring of conviction that this was no trivial choice which confronted her. No logical matter of cleanliness, or even of contrast between two ways of life. For one instant only, there sitting by the morning fire in an Apache rancheria, she saw clearly, then the insight faded as arrow-swift as it came, leaving only an unconscious decision for her guidance.
“You better hurry—” said Dart, putting his cup down on the ground. “They’re about ready to start.”
“I’m not going,” and she added in the sad contrite voice of a child who has been scolded without knowing why, “I don’t want to run away.”
Dart drew in his breath. He looked at the slender little figure sitting hunched on the packing case in the crumpled camel’s-hair coat, at the delicate fair skin, blotched red in two places and filmed with dust, and at the wide blue eyes which did not meet his but rested their gaze on the distant mountains. Her sense of values was so different from his that he found it difficult to be aware of her inward and recurring battles. But his love for her partly bridged the gap, and he put aside his own deep sorrow to treat her with the protective tenderness she best understood from him.
He led her down to the little stream that flowed beneath Blue Spring, and there in the cold mountain water they bathed together, until both their beautiful young bodies tingled with vigor and renewed zest.
He assuaged her fleabites with an herbal Indian ointment he had borrowed from Rowena as they passed Saba’s wickiup and forbore to smile at Amanda’s continuing disgust. He showed her how to shake and brush her clothes with a handful of leafy twigs, and he promised her that he could scour the camp for a clean blanket that night, but he was too honest to promise her exemption from renewed attack.
“I know—” she said making a wry face. “What can’t be cured must be endured. But I’m not crazy about endurance. It’s such a wishy-washy virtue when you can get anything you want with a little gumption.”
Dart looked at her sharply. Something in her voice reminded him of one of the arguments she had used during that idiotic fight they had had about searching for the lost mine. But she had taken her compact out and was frowning over the exact line of her lipstick, oblivious to anything else, so he answered lightly. “I’m afraid Indians don’t think a few assorted bugs worth spending gumption on.... I’ve got to get back to my mother now, Andy. I don’t know what you’ll do with yourself, poor kid.”
She smiled at him. “I’ll be all right. I’ll manage.”
He left her, swinging up the trail with his light quick step. She sat on by the stream a while, watching the water purl by over the rose and white pebbles. The sun grew warm on her back, though a breeze rustled through the willows and the cottonwoods and stirred the silvery white blooms on the desert broom. A large red-tailed hawk uttering a sharp “Quee-quee” flew over her head to perch in a cottonwood. She sighed and got up, wishing she had brought a book. That would have passed the time. She wandered back to the camp and saw Rowena on her knees outside her wickiup pounding corn in a stone metate. The Indian girl called a low greeting and Amanda went over to her.
“What are you doing?” she asked idly, smiling at the baby who was wide awake, strapped in the cradle board on his mother’s back, and gazing wide-eyed at a rattle and a tiny bell which were hung in the basketry hood and dangled just before his eyes.
“I grind for meal,” said Rowena. She surveyed the disconsolate girl and her black eyes lighted mischievously. “Try it,” she said. She put the oblong stone mano in Amanda’s hand. “It’s good for women to work together. You can help me.”
“Of course,” agreed Amanda with all the enthusiasm she could muster. She squatter' down by the trough-shaped metate and attacked the parched corn. The task took more strength and skill than she expected, but gradually she discovered a pleasurable sensation of a type she had never known. Not only the joy of working outdoors, but a satisfaction generally denied to white women in the modern world—the satisfaction of companionship—of shared tasks.
The simple act of pounding corn in the metate seemed to provide her with a sort of passport and admit her into the freemasonry of women. She looked up, to hear soft laughter behind the ramada and to see Susie, Rowena’s little sister, standing there round-eyed beside an older woman who held a halfmade tray basket in her hand. Rowena turned from a pot of beef stew she had been stirring and said something to them in Apache. The woman and the little girl came nearer, whispering. They watched Amanda for a moment and then they squatted down near the fire. The woman’s nimble fingers began to weave yucca strands back and forth between curving sumac withes. She was making a ceremonial basket for Susie, whose sponsor she would be in the little girl’s imminent puberty rite. Susie and Rowena dragged a fresh cowhide out of the pile on the ramada, and spreading it on the ground began to scrape the hair from it with a toothed metal blade.
After they had worked in silence for a while they began to smile shyly at Amanda and they began to talk. Rowena, with instinctive tact, included the white girl in their conversation by keeping most of it in English, which Susie, who had been away five years to the Indian school, spoke as well as she did. The older woman whose Agency name was Lizzie Canning did not speak much but she understood and gradually as the hours went by Amanda learned a good deal about their lives.
Here at Blue Springs they were all of the clan which had once been Tanosay’s. And though many of the Indians had taken on white man’s ways, here they liked to live pretty much in the old way, keeping the customs. It made one happier. True it also made more work but it was good work, and the Indians who bought or begged all their food from stores, and got drunk on stolen whiskey, and slept in Agency-built houses also seemed to be the ones who spent a lot of time in jail.
They talked of Susie’s coming-out party which would be given next month, even if Saba had “gone away,” for Saba had requested this. The puberty rites were very important to ensure little Susie’s happy life and health. There would be four days of feasting and ceremonies and dancing, and she would be in the center of it all, living in a special sacred wigwam and called “White Painted Woman,” who was a kind of goddess who dwelt in the sky but who would mingle and become one with Susie during the time of the ceremony. Here the child who had been listening with a rapt expression forgot her shyness and asked Amanda if she would like to see the ceremonial costume.
Amanda admired the exquisite buckskin dress with genuine awe. It was soft as yellow velvet, embroidered with jeweled beadwork and symbolic figures, and along the swaying front fringes there was a row of tiny metal amulets which tinkled like bells. The costume had just been finished and not yet blessed by the shaman, so Susie might still try it on. She disappeared modestly into the wickiup and came back dressed in the costume and glowing with pride. Her soft fawn eyes shone with a mystical exaltation very touching to Amanda, who could think of nothing in her own girlhood that had given her any such obvious feeling of dedication and importance.
Amanda listened to plans for the community expeditions the women would go on soon. First the journey south into the mountains to gather mescal, and a gay few days of picnic and temporary camp during the roasting of the succulent portions of mescal in great pits. Then later expeditions into the high Pinals to gather acorns and trips to the lower deserts for yucca and cactus fruit and mesquite pods. These trips and the sundrying and preserving of their harvests were all women’s work, as were the building of shelters, and tanning of hides, besides the many operations necessary for any household’s smooth management, and the rearing of children. But Amanda saw that the conventional white view of lazy buck and downtrodden overworked squaw had little foundation among these Indians.
The women were on equal footing with their men, they held positions of dignity, their work was of equal importance in the structure of the clan, and the men—though no longer able to win glory and material gain in warfare—still went hunting and were now at last regaining their independence and selfrespect through a belated recognition of their problems by the Government. Neither heavy-handed suppression, nor the attempt to force the men into agriculture, had produced anything but trouble. But cattle-raising was an acceptable solution, particularly as it meant the restitution of grazing lands on their reservation; lands which had for long been nonchalantly pre-empted by white cattle men.
But it was not of past injustice that the women talked as they worked with Amanda through the spring morning, and shared with her the beef stew thickened with mesquite flour and flavored with a can of store tomatoes. They gossiped a little and told jokes about the last social dance near Bylas, and they spoke of their last trip into Globe a month ago; the amusement they had had walking down Broad Street, looking in the shop windows and finally after long deliberation buying a can opener and rhinestone barrette in the ten-cent store.
They asked Amanda no questions at all, because it is not polite to ask questions, and also because they pitied her. So thin and pale, dressed in trousers like a man, with the restless harried eyes so many white women seemed to have. Perhaps her husband was not good to her, though this seemed unlikely, for Ishkinazi, in the old days when he came to them summers, had been well liked. Still he was not really an Apache, and there was no use trying to understand the peculiar relations between white people.
Nor did they speak of Saba, though they loved her deeply, because an evil spirit, a Tshee-dn, might be hovering near, and it is bad luck to give it encouragement by speaking of those who are going away, or have gone. But the two older women quietly watched the door of Saba’s wickiup for a sign and they saw Dart appear and beckon, when Amanda’s less keen eyes could see nothing.
“Your husband calls you—” said Rowena. “Go. We come soon.”
As Amanda approached the isolated wickiup the shadows were lengthening and far to the west above the Pinal Mountains the sun dipped into flaming rose. As she came nearer she heard the muffled beating of a little drum and softer yet above the drumbeat she heard the sound of chanting. She entered and crept silently to stand beside Dart. In the back of the wickiup near the shaman there were dim silent shapes.
Saba’s pallet had been moved and she lay just within the door where the fading light fell upon her. Her eyes were closed, her hands crossed on her breast which still moved. She lay waiting, listening to the tolling of the drum and the chant of the old shaman as he sang:
To the east a spring of black water lies on a plain of jet,
It will cool you.
To the west a spring of yellow water lies in a sky of coral,
It will cool you.
For Saba there had been much pain these last months, pain grimly born without lament as befitted those who were of “Dinneh” blood, but now she was at peace. Her son was near and her son’s wife, they would go on and away together into that other world to which they belonged, and this was fitting, this was their destiny.
For her there were the springs of cool water of which the shaman sang, the eternal life-giving waters—so precious a concept to desert people, and to other desert dwellers in a different land, too. “As the hart panteth after the water brooks....” The Lutheran minister had read this psalm to her when he came to her bedside. In the spirit there was no cleavage, she in whom two races mingled knew that now. The outward paths were different, the forms, the customs, the shape of body or of thought might be different—but deep inside the soul the yearning and the promise were the same for all.
Her eyelids fluttered and she looked up at her son and the white girl who stood beside him. Her lips moved as she tried to tell them this, but no sound came. Her dimming gaze moved to the distant mountains—purple in the eastern afterglow. She smiled a little and was still.
The drumbeat hushed. The shaman bowed his head and from the throats of the Indian women there came a harsh wailing cry.
The Apache burial rites were simple, and hurried, for all ties must be cut at once. No reminder must hamper the escaped spirit, nor pull it back to earth. The women kept up a chanting dirge as they painted Saba’s face with carmine red and dressed her in her own girlhood doeskin costume and the long moccasins with the turned-up tips, the turquoise and shell jewelry she had from Tanosay, and the old garnet and pearl necklace her husband Jonathan had given her also. Her scanty possessions must be destroyed, except those which would accompany her spirit on its journey. They “killed” her earthen cooking pots by driving holes in the bottom, and they piled her beautifully woven baskets—all but one, her favorite—in the center of the wickiup with her blankets and clothing.
At dawn they placed her body on a pole and yucca stretcher. Dart and John Whitman carried the stretcher and only three people followed it—Amanda and Rowena and Lizzie Canning. These were Saba’s closest relatives. It was not deemed fitting for anyone else to attend.
Saba was buried a mile up a canyon behind the camp, in a hidden spot which the Indians never revisited except at these times. Her grave was dug near Tanosay’s, though there was nothing to distinguish where his had been, except his favorite gun, rusted now with the passage of twelve years, and the bleached bones of his horse which had been killed at the grave site, as was the ancient custom.
Saba was buried with her best basket and her purse which contained many dollars, for she had been frugal with the tiny inheritance left her by Jonathan. Also they put beside her some food and a pot of water and her cooking ladle for her use on the journey. They covered her grave with stones and leafy branches of the manzanita arranged in the shape of a cross.
And then they left her, walking slowly and sadly back, but the women no longer sang their dirge, though their cheeks were wet with tears. Flames leaped high in the smoky air as they returned to camp. Saba’s wickiup had been fired by those who remained and already it was half-consumed, with all its contents.
Amanda and Dart ate a little of the food Rowena offered them, then they turned to the car and prepared to leave. Rowena and John followed them silently. “Good-bye—” said Dart in a low voice. “You’ve been good to us, you were good to her.”
John stepped forward and the tall young Indian looked deep into Dart’s eyes. “This is truly farewell, Ishkinazi, my brother, is it not?” he said in Apache. “She who has gone away wished it so.”
“Yes.” Dart bowed his head. The men’s hands came together in a long, quiet grip, then dropped. “Get in, Andy—” said Dart quickly.
She obeyed, climbing into the car, all the conventional expressions of thanks or farewell left unsaid. She and Rowena had smiled at each other once across the quiet barrier. There could be no more.
As they drove away, she looked back and waved. The Indian couple raised their arms once, palm upward in response, then turned and moved together out of sight. The smoke from Saba’s burning wickiup filled the eastern sky.