“We’ll look at the blue garden together and then we’ll go home,” Hattie said. In the full moon’s light the arching bowers of white bougainvillea and white wisteria appeared a luminous silver, and Indigo was reminded of the Messiah and his family and all the dancers in their white blankets all shimmering in the light reflected off the snow.
That night Indigo dreamed she and Sister Salt were running naked in the high dunes; a cool damp wind that smelled of rain swept in low-hanging blue-violet clouds of fog and rain mist. Below them on the sandy floodplain were the Messiah and the dancers, wrapped in sky blue shawls delicate as rain mist, and then the mist swirled around them and they all disappeared.
When Indigo woke the next morning after the ball, the light from the window was dim, and she heard clicks against the window glass and a faint drumming sound overhead. It was raining! She went outside barefooted, delighted at the sensation of the wet lawn between her toes. She could hear the excited cries of the parrot as she neared the aviaries. By the time she reached the parrot’s cage the wet cloth of her dress and petticoat were clinging to her body. The parrot was excitedly flapping his wings while dancing up and down the length of his perch with his head turned to the sky, beak wide open to catch the raindrops.
♦ ♦ ♦
The Masque of the Blue Garden was the most successful yet, and the bishop himself offered a mass of thanksgiving in Susan and Colin’s private chapel the following Sunday to give thanks to God and to Susan and the other aid society women for the princely sum, which exceeded last year’s amount considerably.
Only five days after the ball, they boarded the steamship Pavonia for Bristol. The weather was overcast with light rain and the sea was choppy as they steamed out of New York Harbor. Indigo pulled the edge of her coat around the parrot cage as the breeze swept up from the last edge of land disappearing behind them. She watched the dark blue water gracefully encircle the ship; the white mouths of the waves smiled at her. “Don’t be afraid, we won’t hurt you,” they seemed to say. Now she really was far from home. It was too late to jump from the ship. She was crossing the same ocean that the Messiah crossed long ago on his way to Jerusalem. After they tried to kill him, he returned over the dark moving water; Indigo had seen him herself that night as he blessed all the dancers. She took heart because the Messiah and his followers visited the east and returned; she would too.
Part Five
SISTER SALT dreamed Indigo was in a beautiful place full of big shady trees and water and green grass. It was such a lovely dream she didn’t cry for her sister when she awoke. She told Maytha and Vedna, two Chemehuevi girls who shared the bunks next to hers.
“Sounds like she died and went to heaven,” Vedna said. “No such place exists here.” Their faces were nearly identical but Maytha wore braids while Vedna twisted her hair into a knot at the back of her neck. Maytha frowned at Vedna and shook her head to silence her, but Sister Salt didn’t care what she said. Indigo was smiling and singing in the dream, so Sister Salt knew she was all right. Maytha and Vedna were Chemehuevis so they didn’t have much in common with the other girls, who complained about their strange ways and odd sense of humor. Vedna said that the Sand Lizard people were even more strange than the Chemehuevis, so maybe that’s why they were friends. The Cocopa, Yuma, and Mojave girls were not unfriendly but they stayed to themselves, and so did the Apache girls.
Vedna claimed she and Maytha only teased her to cheer her because they loved her. That was their private joke, and it was the signal for the teasing to begin.
“Strange way to show your love,” Sister Salt replied, and that set them off. Still laughing, Maytha exclaimed, “We Chemehuevis are strange—it’s a relief to know Sand Lizard people are stranger still!” Of course only they and their dear friends, like Sister Salt, were permitted to tease them or make jokes about the Chemehuevi people; the twins were proud and ready to punch any stranger who dared insult their tribe.
Sister Salt laughed. Stories about the peculiar behavior of the Sand Lizard people were known all along the river. In battle, as soon as the Sand Lizards started to win and get the best of their enemies, they’d stop fighting and go home instead of taking prisoners. No wonder the Sand Lizard people were almost gone. Two Sand Lizards on surveillance duty were eavesdropping on enemies when one of the Sand Lizards rustled the leaves of the tree he was hiding in, and the enemies looked up. Desperately, the Sand Lizard imitated the woodpecker’s squawk again and again until an Apache threw a rock and knocked him out of the tree. His companion, hidden on the ground, started laughing, and the Apaches got him and killed him, but his companion who imitated the woodpecker got away. Here the Chemehuevi twins laughed out loud, and Sister Salt joined them—these were everyone’s favorite Sand Lizard stories. Sister Salt teased them back; she asked where were all the stories about the Sand Lizards’ wild sexual practices?
Sand Lizard mothers gave birth to Sand Lizard babies no matter which man they lay with; the Sand Lizard mother’s body changed everything to Sand Lizard inside her. Little Sand Lizards had different markings, and some were lighter or darker, but they were all Sand Lizards. Sex with strangers was valued for alliances and friendships that might be made. In Needles the people were too kind to mention Sister Salt’s lighter hair and skin to Grandma Fleet or Mama; but down here at Parker, on the Colorado River reservation, Sister Salt found the others looked at her differently. Maytha and Vedna said long time ago some of the other tribes used to smother their half-breed babies because they were afraid of them. This was during the time the white armies came and robbed the people of their fall harvests to starve them, the people killed the half-breed babies. Chemehuevis never did that, the twins assured her. See! Chemehuevis were different too, like the Sand Lizards!
Sister Salt was laughing when suddenly her eyes filled with tears. Yes, her Sand Lizard people were strange, and she felt strange and lost without Mama and Indigo.
For a long time after she and Indigo were parted, Sister Salt dwelled in the numb half world only a step outside the everyday world. She did not remember taking the step outside, only finding herself there after that terrible day she watched the train move away, slowly at first, then faster, until off in the distance it appeared to be the size of a snake, and then it was gone. Her body went numb; her hands and feet felt strange and distant from her; she opened her mouth to yell “Indigo!” but gasped instead. She could not get her breath and sank to the ground, and cried into the hot hard-packed dirt. Though no one could see, a part of herself was torn loose, and the bleeding filled her chest and stomach with a strange weight, so that for days Sister Salt lay motionless on her bunk and managed to swallow only water and a little corn meal soup Maytha and Vedna brought her. All the other girls avoided her; the Mojaves whispered she was suffering from ghost sickness, and the school staff feared typhoid, though she had no fever. The twins brought her the fresh datura root she requested, and she rubbed it against her cheeks and forehead to ask its help.
After the numbness in her body subsided, Sister Salt began to ask about Mama whenever she met Paiute or Mojave people who might know the whereabouts of the people arrested at Needles last winter. Yes, they’d heard about that, but no one seemed to know where the arrested people were taken—maybe to Fort Yuma or even Fort Huachuca. She missed Indigo so much, especially in the night, when she dreamed Indigo was lying beside her talking to her, only to awaken alone in the sweltering dormitory. She cried until her tears dried up and the other girls warned she’d go blind.
Next she sought out the Sand Lizard people Grandma Fleet had talked about, the ones who moved years ago to the Parker reservation on the river. But only a few people she spoke with had even heard of her people. Most thought the Sand Lizards were all gone. An elderly Mojave woman who cleaned houses for the white people took her aside and whispered she should be cautious because the Sand Lizard people were still remembered for their odd ways. The woman smiled and patted Sister on the arm as she said this; the old-time Mojaves had a g
reat deal of respect and affection for the Sand Lizard people, who used to hide the Mojaves whenever the Mexican slave catchers pursued them. The help they gave others was one reason the Sand Lizard people got killed off; Grandma Fleet used to say there never were many Sand Lizards in the first place.
The superintendent of the Colorado River Indian agency referred to the old army barracks as “the school,” but there were no teachers or books; the school taught them how to boil the dirty laundry of the superintendent and his wife and the other government employees in big steel tubs of soapy water over hot coals. Sister Salt knew all about laundry because Mama did the hotel’s laundry in Needles. But the other young women—Cocopa, Yuma, and Mojave—were used to washing their clothes in the muddy water of the river, or not at all.
Each week Sister Salt made an escape plan, then changed her mind; which direction should she go to find Mama? She did not want to return to the old gardens without Indigo. The boarding students were allowed to come home once a year in the summer; so she decided to wait. The soldiers and Indian police brought ragged hungry people out of the canyons to the reservation at Parker every week, and she hoped to find someone with news of Mama.
Years before, the Mojaves and Chemehuevis were given tiny reservations along the river near Needles. The reservation at Parker held all the other Indians who used to live along the Colorado River before the white people came; so it was the most populous reservation on the river, and the largest too. Unfortunately, most of the land was above the fertile river bottom, on old floodplains impossible to irrigate.
Sister Salt had never seen such an ugly place—no wonder Grandma Fleet and the others refused to come in from the hills. White farmers claimed the best river bottom land. Along this stretch of the river not even the cottonwood trees or willows wanted to grow; the ground was hard-packed clay and old floodplain gravel. Only a small portion of the reservation land was fertile river bottom land, already allotted to regular churchgoers; all the others were left to grow what they could, on land that was too far from the river to irrigate and too parched by the sun to grow much.
The Parker Indian school superintendent called it a school, but he ran the place as a moneymaker for himself; he charged the soldiers and survey crews twenty-five cents per bundle for the dirty laundry that Sister Salt and the other young women washed in the school laundry. After the first week, Sister Salt began to mutter under her breath; this was no school, this was a prison. Maytha and Vedna said that all they had to do was get pregnant and the school superintendent would tell them to go as soon as their bellies got big. Sister Salt told them she did not plan to wait that long.
Sister Salt took every opportunity to get away from the school dormitory and laundry tubs to explore. The people were not permitted to farm their traditional fields any longer, and without water nothing grew in the old floodplain gravel. A few old people tried in the beginning by carrying water on their backs uphill to their fields of corn and beans, until they were defeated by the evaporation and the heat. The alluvial plains above the river were good only for sagebrush and rabbits.
The tin shacks built by government contractors were no better than the lean-to they had in Needles. Sister Salt was saddened by the quarreling that went on between the different tribes all crowded together there. The Chemehuevis and Mojaves were lucky to have their own reservations even if they were small, and many of the people at Parker envied the Mojaves and Chemehuevis, although they didn’t have enough farmland to go around either.
At Parker, if some poor person had even one parent who was Chemehuevi or Mojave, the others might jeer and tell them to go back to their own reservation. Sister Salt waited for someone to tell her to go home, but no one ever did. The few Sand Lizard people who remained were married to people of other tribes; they went to church every Sunday and spoke English. They did not turn Sister Salt away, but they shook their heads and whispered behind their hands about the fierce young Sand Lizard woman. Poor thing! She lived out in the hills too long!
Sister Salt watched the women who sat outdoors under ramadas made of tamarisk and willow branches to escape the oven heat of the tin shacks. Here they threw the old gambling sticks and drank cactus wine to pass the day. Lard, cornmeal, salt, and a little sugar were issued once a week. She saw women quarrel over cards, scream, and pull one another’s hair until Mr. Syrup, the Parker reservation policeman, was called to take them to jail.
The men were required to show up every morning to be assigned their work for the day by the superintendent; those who hunted rabbits in the sandhills outside reservation boundaries did so at the risk of jail. The people shuffled along with eyes dulled by the heat, and the tin shacks were to blame; if the people had been allowed to dig old-style houses partially underground they could keep cool until sundown, when traditionally work began in the hot months. But the authorities feared the Indians would take the opportunity to run away, and forbade work at night, when it was coolest.
The superintendent said the Indians must learn to stay put on the new reservation because a great many changes were on the way. Utah won statehood a few years before, so Arizona couldn’t be far behind. The surveys were completed for construction of the dam, and the digging for the canal to Los Angeles was under way. No one seemed happier about the construction activity at nearby Parker Canyon than the reservation superintendent. All winter he had important visitors in suits who patted him on the back and shook his hand.
The construction crews began to arrive in big freight wagons. Sister Salt counted the workers, then told Maytha and Vedna she had a plan: they would go into the laundry business for themselves. They hid when the others left for school, and met upriver where the clear side pools stood amid the willows and cattails. They dug soapweed yucca roots and hung them in the willows to dry first before they used them. They had no tin laundry tubs, so one night they borrowed an old oak barrel used to collect garbage from the rear of the dormitory. At first Maytha and Vedna were hesitant, but Sister Salt dumped the contents from the barrel; the stray dogs will take the blame, she told them. They rolled the barrel for what seemed like hours; the hollow noise of the barrel rolling along striking rocks set off the barking dogs, and they feared someone would alert the agency policeman, Mr. Syrup.
“Old Syrup sleeps like a rock,” Sister Salt said. “Don’t even worry about him. If he comes along right now I know where to touch him so he won’t tell anyone.” Maytha and Vedna giggled at Sister Salt’s remark; she was like the old-time people their mother talked about—before the missionaries came. In those days, the Chemehuevis really knew how to enjoy one another; only Sand Lizards knew how to enjoy sex more, Maytha joked, and Sister Salt nodded proudly. It was true: Sand Lizards practiced sex the way they all used to, before the missionaries came.
Maytha and Vedna complained the site of their laundry camp was too far to walk, but Sister Salt pointed out Mr. Syrup wouldn’t walk that far, so they’d be safe. They swore the other girls in the school laundry to secrecy and promised them a share of the money if they didn’t tell anyone. The dormitory attendants took roll only in the morning, so afterward they left the other girls in the school laundry while they hurried to the makeshift laundry along the river.
The first Saturday they walked upriver to the edge of the construction camp, only a few of the workers gave them bundles of laundry to wash. But in the following weeks the word got around: clean laundry for half the price the school superintendent charged.
Distinguished visitors from Washington, D.C., and excitement over the beginning of the aqueduct from the river to southern California kept the reservation superintendent occupied for weeks, and he did not immediately notice the decrease in receipts because more workers arrived every day. As their business grew, Sister Salt and the Chemehuevi sisters shared their laundry customers with the others girls, who used the school’s laundry facilities to make a little money.
Down along the river Sister Salt sometimes forgot everything but the sound of the water and its coolness o
ver her legs; later when she lay in the shade on the river sand, surrounded with the perfume of the willows, she imagined she was back in the previous year when she and Indigo were still together safely at the old gardens. She knew she must not permit herself to dwell on their separation for fear she might become too sad to move, too sad for her stomach to digest food. Instead, she kept busy; she scrubbed the dungarees and overalls on the flat sandstone. She began to wonder: if Jesus really was such a loving being, why did he disappear with their mother but leave her and Indigo behind?
She saved the coins from her share of the profits each week in a jar buried under a cottonwood tree by the river. The tree was old and so big that Sister Salt could not come close to reaching her arms around its trunk when she closed her eyes to embrace it and lay her cheek on its nubbly bark because she was so lonely for the touch of someone who loved her. With her arms around the tree, she thought of Grandma Fleet and Mama then, and Indigo, and she cried until her eyes felt tiny and hot. She did not know what to do next. Where was Mama? How would she get Indigo home? She saved up money, but what good was it to her? She let go of the tree and let her arms drop down to her sides as she sank down on the river sand.
Suddenly she sensed she was being watched. She jumped up and without taking her eyes off the thicket of willow and tamarisk, Sister Salt reached down and picked up a fallen branch. She carried it raised like a club in both hands as she began to make her way back to the school dormitory. They all knew stories about women and even little girls attacked by whites or black men or Mexicans who worked for them.
She was breathing hard and her heart was pounding so loudly she couldn’t tell if the rustle in the bushes was quail or an enemy. The memory of a Cocopa girl beaten and bloodied after an attack filled her with anger. She gripped the stick tighter and felt the anger lift her; her legs felt stronger and lighter; the club seemed light in her hands. Suddenly she wanted very much to find her stalker. She crept along the path next to the river silently as she did rabbit hunting, stopping frequently to listen as she held her breath. She made a circle, crawling under the tamarisks and willows on her hands and knees, dragging the club in one hand. Up ahead she heard the crackle of twigs underfoot—it was a big foot in heavy boots. From around her neck she brought out the rawhide pouch with the flint blade Grandma Fleet gave her.
Gardens in the Dunes Page 25