I

I BEGIN where it was the highest pitched for me, at Duck Valley, on the Nevada–Idaho border. One hot July afternoon we stopped at Mountain City for a sandwich. It was a particularly western restaurant, varnished pine, fixed in the style of “mountain-outwest”—what the stereotype dictates but which is not really so common. For all that notorious motif, westerners tend to use the same materials people do everywhere else. We had a beer. There were Indians. I looked at them by now almost casually as my special subject, other men seemed part of the blurred background. One Indian in cowboy clothes came over to our booth, from the bar, and asked if he could have a ride on north. Yes.

The road enters the reservation shortly after you leave Mountain City. Then, across several miles of reservation, it comes around the point of a rib of mountains, toward Owyhee, going northwest. There was a tall and slender butte with sides nicely curved out to the base on the first horizon across the valley, the sun lay back of it. The butte rose flat and black against the evening sky. Below, Duck Valley, broad and green, the hay fields scattered in squares over the valley floor.

We arrived at Willie Dorsey’s house late the next afternoon, on our way out of the reservation. Willie Dorsey is 102 years old. He was born before the treaty of Fort Bridger. He is a Shoshoni. We had heard earlier in the day from his great-grandson that there was such a man, of such an age. This man’s picture had been taken, he had been interviewed by state historians. He was probably the oldest living being in Idaho or Nevada.

The road was along an irrigation canal, six-inch dust, velvet fine, spraying before the wheels of the car and accompanying it as a cocoon in the still air. It was the center of the valley floor—willows along the canals and ditches, clouds of mosquitoes. To the east a high ridge with bands of lava rock, to the west the varying pitch of horizons and the butte, Chinaman’s Hat, the Indians call it, not Hat Peak as it is on the map. There was a group of three houses, wooden clapboard structures. An old man, who had the first store in the valley when it was homesteaded by whites, told me the Indians had adopted that style from the settlers. That habit of building was only now being replaced by the modern brick ranch-style houses which a progressive Indian builds, or the government-sponsored community project houses which are less pretentious but do resemble lower-class tract houses at the edge of a small white town. Willie Dorsey lived in one of these three houses among a grove of tall Lombardy poplars. The trees were planted by the whites. They are old, the boles of some of them of great circumference. In the bowl of the valley these groves occur in the distance like flecks and invariably there is a house which one cannot see under the high, cool vaulting of the trees.

There were three gates to be opened, and then closed. Small, crooked aspen poles hung on rusty strands of barbed wire and hooked by a simple (but complicated for the novice) stick and hoop of wire. There were dogs, the skinny, hungry-looking Indian dogs, mongrels of mongrels, and they rushed out barking viciously but were finally friendly, wagging tails. We went through the last gate to a well and short-handled pump set up on a wooden platform. Two of the houses were near the pump and it didn’t look as if there were anyone around. The other house, away from the trees, looked abandoned. It didn’t occur to us until the last moment Willie Dorsey might live there. It was a hot afternoon and the whole affair had in it the press of lateness, the peculiar quality of last minute attention. In fact, that other house, in the full sun, seemed out of everything and when I did go to the screen door on the other side of it, over a path through high grass and up onto the low platform of the back porch, and looked through the screen and saw the old woman, the very very old woman, the oldest creature I ever saw, with a faded blue bandana covering her whole head right down to the middle of her eyes, I was somehow calmed, because of her, from the shock of what it was I was doing and what it was I saw, the heat, the vociferous mosquitoes in the building’s shade, the slightly moist filth at the back door. Not spectacular filth, most everyone has witnessed that in America, but the grim weight of bad condition, not especially outlined, more heavy with despair than one could possibly arrange with rubble.

Mrs. Dorsey unlatched the screen door as though I were simply an animate object appeared one day, some moment, at her door and when I entered she motioned with no particular meaning to the room beyond, where I could see a small wood-burning stove. I went into that room. Mr. Dorsey sat on the edge of the bed with his feet on the floor, a piece of cotton over his thighs. He looked up at me with clear eyes, the eyes of the ancient, bright, but the shine from behind a milky covering, a tough overlay almost a protection formed by the years. Brightened only by a sudden cognition which in turn seemed a completely self-determined generosity. Very old animals have such coats over the eyes, a privacy impenetrable from the outside. He made a shaking motion with his finger, trembling in space, toward a chair. The room itself was overpowering. I was struck right off and singularly by his beauty, the sense of the power of his presence I later remembered I felt immediately, but I also saw myself as a curious paleface. My attention was suddenly arrested—this man was a great deal more than old. I was looking at the scene, and at myself, in a mirror, seeing the looking. The chair was covered with spilled water and bits of debris from his eating. I sat down on it, and without, I told myself, thinking to prove anything. It was difficult to do it. I felt crossed by an embarrassed confusion: what and who I was compressed all at once into one consideration, again I watched myself as I might think of a god watching, and there was in me at the same moment the hopelessly practical hesitation to soil my seat and the public willingness to do so—followed by a self-censure for having thought of it in either sense. The point in any case for me was moral. I must sit in this man’s refuse.

He began by pointing to the areas of his ailment, around his lower back and chest. The volume of his voice, the force of his gesture, were low keyed but so articulate and registered I could hardly make the adjustment, no matter how I intended to know, to align with his sense. His engagement with the room and all in it was pure. Life for him had turned into full rite, the tone of his existence was self-measuring. The act of his presence was a total rhythmic manifestation from his gesture to the inward mirrors of his eyes. He barely moved, only his lips were the agents of the muscles of his neck and eyes, the ends of a network of force around his head. His English seemed fair, the problem was his hearing, I thought.

The place was intensely neglected, I gradually saw, and not just filthy as it looked to be at first glance. It was simply the remains of a life, and one must not forget a century is a difficult space of time for a man gone to the utter end. There was a safe, or cupboard, in the corner. It had some things in it, back of the glass. The light too dim to tell what. There were two beds. His wife, nearly as old and even frailer than he, went every now and then to his ear and spoke in the whispered endings and stopped throat tones of the Shoshonean speaker. He made low, nodding, assentive replies. She should have died, by the rules of our biology, thirty years ago. But it was evident that she would stay on, the weaker of the two, until he smelled the summary message in his nostrils, then she would be free. Once in a while she went to the edge of her bed and curled up on her side to rest. A discontinuous sound came from her throat. A chant she barely said. Her final spark was deeply internal, wrapped in the unending wrinkles; silent, nearly departed, she lived to administer his last service. And trying the sense of their relationship with my own subjectivity, at that moment it seemed to me here was the contrary of my own Western notion that one goes through the portal of death alone to greet some large blank which hopefully might be an extension of a “personality,” whether that be God or oneself as a continued state. Thus wrapped in the service of their ritual antiquity, they formed an effective edge of the real, an area of existence both life and death, neither morbid nor quite quick. A substantial prayer of flesh, plasma, spirit, all one fluid. And so, if this all sounds religion, I hope it does in no orthodox sense, more religare—to tie back: the nearly absolute briefness of ceremony, its power an intense spark, renewable as each time it reconstitutes the entirety of creation, the Every Thing. I did not for one instant look upon that qualified vitality as mystic. This man and woman were the most profoundly beautiful ancestors I’ve witnessed go before me. He is the spirit that lies at the bottom, where we have our feet. The feet which step between the domains, the visible sign, the real evidence of the coming event, and which one can see on the Humboldt fragments from Mexico, or on a linguistic map where this man’s low, incantatory verbs spill down across the plateau and basin, between the mountains into the final plexus of the great Uto-Aztecan image of the world he sings in his daughter tongue. My point is that one can hardly think to be merely in Idaho, or Nevada, and that his beauty is that simple one would not treat it as anything special, not more Indian than man, still as much the flower as the fruit.

His feet were dirty. In the dry climate they had gone untended until, on the floor of the room at the ends of his legs, wasted to leather covered bone, they rested cracked in the dry air and drifting soil. I was aware of the presumption of my thinking he would be relieved or made happy by having his feet washed. Was he unhappy? There was no reason to suppose so. Would I dare wash his feet?

Occasionally the woman traveled into the kitchen and once, she returned with a small bowl of canned pears and placed it on the stand beside the bed. I almost involuntarily helped set it down, attempting to make a space in the clutter, taking the bowl but not exactly taking it from the extreme fragility of the movement of her hand. I was then preoccupied with what was going on, and coincident was the feeling, quite strong and uncomfortable, that I was thinking about it, again the psychological double mirror. It was very hot in their cabin. Should we be there. There was in me an oppressive thrill over the idea of my own presence. I thought of it as a ruptured cord in the consciousness, a strong confusion of the signals of my culture. I think I failed to see this as a pure event having nothing to do with me as such. I felt intrude the foolish insistence of the conception of myself, the content of my own particular conception of history raced past my head and I must say I thought of my government’s relationship to this man, I felt I would “realize” him somewhere in the cache of all my own sentience. For one thing, I smiled at the man and he smiled back, and this led each time to a new attempt to make him understand me. Did he need anything? Could we bring him something, anything possible, would he tell us what they needed? Shouted into his ear so close my face was nearly touching his, the deep texture of his rich skin an untranslatable brown geography suddenly printed on my own eye, locations I would never have to cross, the hundred years were so laid out they included my own perishing flesh. And I felt some embarrassment over the difference of our two charities. His straight short hair was evenly divided and mixed, black and bright gray.

I took the bucket from the kitchen to fill it at the well. At the back edge of the house my ear at once caught his long, high, enormously full song, it came as a near falsetto flutter of amazing strength from his thin body, the sound departing with the diminished ach’s and quavering whispered endings of Northern Shoshone. A volume of Yaa~Aaa~Aaa, but a more compacted quickness than that, embellished the ends of his periods. It was not so stunning as it was peculiarly attractive. What was happening? I looked around at the well expecting to see something material.

It is his quickness which remains in me and why I choose to begin this essay on the Shoshoni with him, the highest circumstance I have ever encountered.

The end of the visit was marked in a no less earthly way. When almost as an afterthought we offered him a cigarette his face lit up with pleasure and we all then laughed at the simplicity of the discovery. We finally had our answer. He would like cigarettes. The old woman took one but did not smoke it until it was lit for her. We all sat and smoked and laughed and then the spell was over. Back out through the three gates to the store for a carton of cigarettes and then back in through all the dust, where at one gate an approaching car stopped and a largish Indian woman, perhaps in her thirties, asked us what we were doing and when I explained gave a strange smile to the man in the front seat with her and drove on.

I had a great desire to be off, to not take any more, or give any more, to let the spiritual fact be the function of its instant and not an exposure, not a continuum. A Heathenism, of course, entirely of my own origin. For I will say it, at the risk of blunder: It is impossible for myself and my people to offer themselves in any but the standard senses. The minute there are human implications we back off. It was painful to go back, and at the screen door redo the unlatching, see again the room, take his hand again, reconsider the social and economic configurations that rise inevitably like specters in the eye of an enlightened Western mentality; not to do all that was then a problem, the cross-telling in the busy circuits of the mind in the oppressive heat for which we are the fuel. None of that. Not why did those pasty doctors at the agency hospital not come and bathe the man at least, of course not to clean him because that was certainly none of their business, his cleanliness was established far beyond what their pop-ritual of medical deodorization could manage, but to cool him? That seemed reasonable. But was it? It was I who objected to the heat and stillness of the air. Not him. It was his place, his home, that was where he was, his own chamber, own rectification. And I did not wash his feet. That meliorism, strong in me, tinged with the Methodism of my youth, I put down. I left their house. Again, his song as I first heard it, the high Shoshonean vibration and cadence.