by Alice Walker
Back before I got this sickness it didn’t bother me much. It was like a ritual that happened. To tell the truth, we were all pretty used to it. You know—in Australia they still have aboriginals who go on walkabout. They go to visit what we Westerners call “sites” on the land. Places that mean a lot to them. Doesn’t matter what white man’s job they’ve been hired to do. Off they go for a while. Could be a weekend, could be a week. The land itself calls them. They hear it and go. Immediately. They drop everything. Pronto.
And do the women also go on walkabout? asked Kate. And did they in the old days just drop the mistress’s brat?
Hugh laughed. I don’t know. You never hear about the women roaming, but I’m sure some of them did. Probably dressed as men though because rape of aboriginal women was always as common, and as accepted, as looking at them.
They had been sitting with their legs crossed. Hugh straightened his so that his feet, blistered from the heavy rubber boots they wore most of the time, stuck out in front of him.
So there we’d be with our thirty-pound turkey and whatnot—you know, every SUV and gadget under the sun. And some old, old Indian out of nowhere would show up.
He paused.
You would have to know our ranch. It’s big. So big I’m embarrassed to tell you.
Bigger than Kansas?
Almost. I’m joking, he said. But sometimes it feels that size. You can roam around it for days, never seeing a soul. A lot of the newer fencing is electric. We have guard posts.
He chuckled. Squinted at the river.
Some old Indian shows up with a plastic jug and wants water from the spring. For the bones.
Hugh rubbed together two pebbles the size of robin eggs, loosely, in his fist. Looking at them absently he flung them into the river.
So, he continued, looking briefly at Kate, one of us tells him to wait out back until we’re through with dinner. Ruined now, because of him. Though nobody wants to admit it. Ruined also of course if he didn’t show up. . . . So eventually it’s my turn to take him. Different Indian, you understand, but same old man. I take him in my Grand Cherokee. Which is red. We bounce along. He doesn’t say a word. I make small talk—the weather, the cows—we have about six thousand. The ruts in the trail. By now we’re way the hell away from the house and he just sits there with his plastic jug stuck between his knees. Everything he has on is tattered; next to him I feel conspicuously well dressed, even though I’m wearing a shirt from the Sundance catalog and an old pair of jeans.
Before we get there he tells me to stop and then he goes the rest of the way on foot. His hair is in two long braids and he’s tied them with red string. I look at them as he’s walking toward the spring. Try to imagine what he’d look like without them. How much less Indian. How much more like us. I figure that without them he could pass as one of America’s newer immigrants.
I know the place well. Nothing there but a few cottonwood trees and a clump or two of white sage. This pitiful little spring that just keeps bubbling up no matter how dry it gets. And in Utah it can get pretty dry. I can’t see him but I know he’s sprinkling tobacco and praying. When I was a boy I used to sneak up behind him and watch. Then he’d reach over into the spring with the jug and take some of the water. After coming all that way, wherever it was he came from, he didn’t even fill up the jug.
By the time he came back I would have finished my third or fourth cigarette. He got in the jeep, settled the half-filled jug between his knees, and off we went. Depending on my mood I would take him out by the main gate—where I’d lecture Harvey, the gatekeeper, about doing a better job of things—or I’d go back to the house and let him walk the three miles to the road.
Kate had no trouble imagining the old man. She lingered over his braids. Was it really red string, she wondered, plaited through them, or very frayed ribbon? She thought it was old ribbon. The kind Indians all over the Americas—Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras—liked to wear.
She said, And all he said, all any of them said about the water, was, The bones?
Yep, said Hugh. All they said. My grandmother thought the water might be a cure for arthritis, which she had pretty bad. It wasn’t.
She tried it? asked Kate.
She tried it. Hugh smiled.
Well, years go by, said Hugh, turning slightly on his side. The old man comes one time with his son. A sullen middle-aged Indian and obviously a drunkard. Two Indians instead of one made us nervous. Like maybe they were planning some kind of attack. He laughed. I didn’t care for the son nor he for me. He looked like that Indian leader Dennis Banks only meaner.
It was always astonishing to Kate that you didn’t see Indians in America unless you looked for them. The decades of genocide against them had left survivors with a deep fear of being seen. No mystery either why many did pass themselves off as “newer immigrants.”
So we drove out there and the two of them walked into the little glade where the spring was. The old man was showing it to him, I guess. Maybe he’d been away in prison somewhere, he had that kind of paranoid vibe. He didn’t seem impressed. When they came back he bummed a smoke. The old man had never asked for anything.
The next time the old man came he brought his grandson. The old man was almost blind and when they walked toward the spring the boy placed the old man’s hand on his shoulder. I tried to imagine one of my sons or grandsons walking patiently like that with me. My grandsons play with a little gadget that looks like a handheld TV. They seem to look up from it only when it’s time to eat. When they came back to the car the child looked thoughtful and as if a serious charge had been laid on him.
I told the old man about the energy development company that was going to be digging in the area. He asked when. I told him in the summer. He asked would the spring be dug into. I said yes because that’s where it looked like coal deposits might be found. He asked if we could stop it. I said no.
The next year around Thanksgiving the two of them came again. I told them that what used to be a spring was now a lake. In fact, an underground lake had been found to be the source of the spring.
The old man, completely blind now, didn’t seem surprised. Old Indians never seem surprised though, said Hugh. I don’t know if you ever noticed that.
Kate laughed. She laughed so hard she began to cough. Hugh leaned over and patted her on the back. He looked at her quizzically.
I bet if you offered to give him his land back, she said, catching her breath, he would have looked surprised. After saying this, another wave of laughter shook her.
Hugh didn’t laugh and in fact Kate could see her laughter made him sad.
He was holding his plastic jug, he continued, solemnly. A new one, I noticed, with a stopper instead of a screw top. I was always noticing things about him, his jug, his clothes, his braids, but I never was able to notice him. There was like a fence.
We went out to the lake, which could be seen well before we came to it. At first they just sat looking at it. The boy looking, and the old man asking questions in a language I’d never heard in my life. But a language that the hills all around us and the old trees and the streams knew well. I actually had this thought. It sneaked into my consciousness. But then I squelched it. Then creakily the old man got out of the car and then the boy. And they walked toward the water.
Well, said Hugh, the lake lasted for several months. Then it dried up. The energy development folks were glad because it meant they could drill deeper with less fuss. They’d always intended to get under the lake.
The next year the old man didn’t come. Neither did the boy.
There was a long silence.
And I wish they had because when the digging up of the lake bed was well under way what do you think the development people discovered, not at the bottom of the lake but underneath it?
The bones? asked Kate.
Exactly, said Hugh. The bones of the old man’s people from thousands of years ago. Resting there forever with a huge body of water separating them from any d
isturbance, and with only a tiny, trickling spring to connect them with the living.
It changed me, said Hugh. Even before I got sick.
I can see how it would, said Kate.
His devotion, he said, seeming to choke on the word.
Yes, she said.
Oh, so that’s what it means to love, I thought. And had I ever loved? I thought not.
How did he, did they, even know their ancestors’ bones were down there? asked Kate. And beneath a lake?
A gorgeous multilegged bug, green and gold and red, landed on Hugh’s shoulder. Very carefully he removed it and studied it as he talked.
How adequate is word of mouth? How reliable is family? Kinship? How can something precious be kept that way across ten to thirty thousand years?
The old man must have felt so grateful, said Kate. To be who he was, to have had those people before him, shaping him into who he was.
Hugh was scanning the bug closely so as not to reveal the wetness of his eyes. The geologists thought, he said, that there had been a cave, a burial cave, then an earthquake, then, who knows, the ice age. . . . But they didn’t really know. They made something up, you know, What the White Man Knows About Folks He’s Never Known, and printed it in their journals. But they didn’t inspire a lot of confidence. The old man though, he knew. And he taught what he knew to his grandson.
And did the grandson come back to the ranch?
Not yet.
Devotion, thought Kate. Hugh Brentforth V wanted to know devotion.
The more I thought about it, he said, it seemed the only thing worth knowing.
Kate lay in her hut, which was open on all sides, and quite damp from the frequent showers that, according to Armando, “never came in October,” and she thought about devotion.
What was she devoted to?
To her sons, Henry and Charles, one lost to her in the United States space program of which she knew little and feared much. Space colonies? she’d asked her son. How can you get behind anything that’s colonial? The other, Charlie, an itinerant saxophone player and jazz man perpetually fulfilling the stereotype by being stoned on grass nine days out of ten. On the tenth day he looked for his supplier. Suppose something happened to one of them, she thought. What would I do? And then she thought: But it’s already happened to them and there was nothing I could do. I could and did say to Henry: Be careful of joining any endeavor that is too “complicated” to tell your mother. And to Charles, since high school, I ranted, raved, and cajoled against overuse of marijuana. He’d laughed. Everybody is doing it, Mom, he’d said, as if I were the only human being on earth who was not.
She thought of Yolo. The first time she’d thought of him on this journey in a way unrelated to the stability and comfort he brought to her life. If he became sick, or say he was bitten badly by a big shark out of the novel he was reading there in Hawaii, what would she do? She’d take care of him, she knew. She could even imagine enjoying it. And surely some part of devotion was the pleasure it gave. But was this the same as loving ancestors you never saw, no one you knew had ever seen, for more than ten thousand years? But maybe these particular bones beneath Hugh Brentforth’s lake had permeated the land to such a degree that the land and the lake and the spring and the souls were one.
The next day, seeing Hugh sitting with Lalika next to the deeply wrinkled and ropy trunk of a large tree that looked like, she blinked her eyes, an old Indian man, she called softly out to him:
Hey, Hugh, I’ve been thinking about what the old man did with the water.
In fact, she had dreamed the night before that there were two burial grounds on Hugh’s property. The ancient one from which the Indian elder got the water and a much less ancient one at the opposite edge of the land. In her dream the old man had patiently walked the perimeter of Hugh’s land, holding the jug of water in his hand, until he came to a small gap at the bottom of the fence. He slid through and walked some distance into the cottonwoods. Here he stood in the center of what had been the graveyard of his tribe and of people he and his more recent ancestors had known. He knelt to pray. After praying he rose and sprinkled the water over the ground and over himself. He was trembling with exhaustion and sadness, but he was weeping with love.
In the Circle
In the circle were two young aborigines from Australia. Both very dark, one with curly black hair, the other blond. Blond straight hair was natural among these very black people. Was this perhaps the reason the English settlers were so freaked out, wondered Yolo, when they came across them? What had they made of it? he wondered. They had been programmed to think all blacks were inferior. They had also been programmed to think all blonds were superior. Yolo imagined them, the British convicts and their guards, some of the most provincial folks on earth. They must have thought they’d landed on Mars.
The two men were young, in their thirties. They had come as guests of Aunty Pearlua. The shorter of the two, with the wide thoughtful “aboriginal” eyes Yolo had seen in photographs, took the talking stick, which happened to be a small shiny gourd, and turned it over and over in his hands, inspecting it carefully. After several moments, he spoke.
We are here to represent those who are coming back from the dead, he said. He gazed around the circle of men. In our country too, for many generations now, we have watched our young men die of despair. Not knowing how to stop them from hurting themselves, not knowing why they can’t pull themselves out of the depression they’re in; not knowing what to do to exhibit an example of life. In our country, not as rich as America and with distances more vast, there have been many cases of young men being found dead on the beach or in the outback or in the towns. Beautiful young men. Some of our best.
We ourselves, both of us, were, as younger men, addicted to petrol sniffing.
Yolo had never heard of petrol sniffing. He leaned in toward the center of the circle to hear more.
What is it to sniff petrol? asked the young man. It is to forget that once upon a time we were one with our land and with our sea. That we lived mostly on the coasts, in tropical plentitude. That we went inland into the vastness and great heat mostly on journeys of the spirit. And to keep the land company. We learned what the land and the waters loved: to be cared for, to be interacted with, to be sung to. We did not map the land as the English did, on paper, we mapped the land by singing it. There was no place unknown to us. No place that did not have its proper song. He smiled, a fondness for his ancestors suffusing his face with light. Some of our songs were so filled with what we learned from and loved about our land that they might take six months to sing.
He was quiet for a little while, turning the gourd over and over again in his hands.
What did we lose? We lost intimacy with our motherland. Mother, land, to us the same.
And so to sniff petrol is to try to avoid the anxiety of that loss. And as we exit our own time, which is now, a present we cannot bear to endure, we enter into the fake Dreamtime. Only now it is all nightmare, whether we are waking or sleeping.
Thank you, Aunty, for having us at this council. He placed the gourd back in the circle’s center.
Jerry was there; it was he who had invited Yolo. Also the brother of Marshall, the young man who’d died. At the luau following Marshall’s funeral Yolo had been approached as he sat in a wicker chair gazing at the moon and savoring a large plate of lau lau and a blob of pasta salad.
Howz it? asked Jerry.
Not bad, he’d replied.
Say, Jerry had said, leaning over him, his own large plate of food balanced in one hand, we think you should join us for a circle.
Me? he’d asked, looking around as if Jerry had to be referring to someone else.
Yeah, said Jerry, you. You sat with Marshall at the end. You showed up like a bradda.
But what else could I have done? Yolo thought. After all, I’m black. To be black is to know your brotherness.
He smiled at Jerry. This has been one hell of a vacation, he said.
I
can imagine, said Jerry. Will you come?
Sure, Yolo had said. Will you come get me?
Where you stay? asked Jerry.
Yolo named his beige hotel.
I can sure come get you out of dere, man, said Jerry, laughing.
And, as good as his word, he’d showed up with his van and moved Yolo out of the hotel and into a spare room at Alma’s.
We can’t have you staying dere, said Jerry. What it look like, a guest of our people, coming to circle from a dead hotel? He seemed offended by the idea.
Do you mind? he’d asked Alma. But she’d looked at him like he was crazy and flung open the door to a small, airy room painted white with lots of Hawaiian art, including the large framed poster of the queen, on the walls. She was as usual drinking a beer and the smoke from her cigarette lingered in his hair.
The man with blond hair took the gourd. He must get stared at a lot, thought Yolo. Most folks would assume he straightened and dyed his hair, like James Brown used to do when he was “James Brown and the Famous Flames.” Brown’s group had dyed their hair an outrageous reddish orange and against their very dark skin, almost as black as the aborigine’s, the color of their hair had expressed excitement itself.
We have tried everything, the young man was saying. Lecturing. Cajoling. Loving. Hating. But we have not been able to prevent the young from seeing the truth. That they have lost the future. Some might dispute this statement, and that is their prerogative. I’m saying this is what it looks like to the youths who sniff petrol. There they are, poor, discarded by the society that has slaughtered their people and taken their land; they might be fourteen thousand miles from the nearest disco. A bottle of petrol is the closest they will get to a plane ticket. The closest they will get to leaving their barren environment.
He paused. Studied the gourd.
I too used to feel that way. It is a miracle I am still alive. He stopped talking and sat reflecting for several minutes; everyone in the circle remained respectful and still. He continued: My older sister, who had gone away to find work in the city, came back for me. We lived in one room at the back of her employer’s house. She said only one thing: I don’t want you to watch the master of the house, my employer. I want you to watch me, your sister.