A Rainbow in Paradise

by Susan Aylworth

  He smiled knowingly. "There aren't any. Unlike the Kisani," he said, using the Navajo word for their Pueblo neighbors, "the People didn't enjoy living close to their neighbors. It was our style to live in separate family units, each in its own hogan surrounded by acres, sometimes miles, of cornfields and pastures. We never grouped together as others did, except for ceremonies. It made us easier targets for small raids, but—"

  "—but safer against large military conquests," Eden finished, recognizing how difficult it would be for an army to round up thousands of people, one small family at a time.

  "Exactly," he answered, apparently proud of his pupil. "Between the scattered nature of their dwellings and the natural fortress of this canyon maze, our Old Ones held out for a very long time."

  Eden read the sadness in his voice, recognized the sorrow in Logan's quiet acceptance of his ancestors' eventual defeat, even while she heard his pride in their achievement. "I'm sorry," she said, commiserating.

  Something shifted in the mood between them. She felt it instantly, even before Logan's eyes snapped up, pinning her with their gaze. Eden wriggled under his stare, like an insect pinned to a cork board. "Why are you sorry?" he asked.

  She stammered. "For th-the conquest, the loss."

  "What was your role in it, Eden? Did you wield a rifle? Send your husband out to buy you new slaves for your kitchen? Send your young men out to slaughter our stock where they grazed in the fields, hoping we'd all starve to death over the winter?''

  Eden stammered, not knowing whether to feel hurt or angry. "I—Of course not," she choked.

  "Then don't apologize!"

  Eden felt her spine stiffen. "I... I wasn't. It was meant to be... sympathy."

  "Sympathy? What makes you think I need your sympathy?"

  Eden bristled. She didn't know what she'd done to start this, but she didn't like it one bit. She stiffened her backbone and fixed him with a stare as icy as his own. "I didn't say you needed my sympathy," she answered, her voice as sharp as his. "I offered it out of friendship, Logan." She tempered her next words. "Listen, I've obviously touched a nerve here. I didn't mean to. Maybe we should start back now."

  Logan's face darkened, and then paled. He stared at her and choked out a rough apology. "I... I'm sorry, Eden. I guess I've had my fill of bleeding hearts who want to take personal responsibility for everything that ever happened to my ancestors, then use that as an excuse to make me into some kind of project—or the object of their pity. It was wrong of me to assume—" He stopped, tongue-tied. "Sorry," he said again, finishing lamely.

  His sincerity cooled Eden's own pique. "I can understand that," she said quietly. She'd often felt like more of a project than a daughter to her father—at least since her mother's death. Before that, she’d meant nothing to her father. "Pity can be a terrible burden to bear."

  When have you ever experienced pity? he thought, barely able to keep himself from speaking it aloud. You, the beautiful woman who has had her way paved through life. When have you ever been told to smile and be thankful for the trucks full of other people's hand-me-downs with broken zippers and holes in the knees? When have you and your buddies been herded like sheep into a tent full of people with clipboards, jeans bagging around your ankles while some white-suited physician spent two minutes poking and prodding, then handed you over to another white suit who'd hit you with five different needles before she walked away? When have you eaten week-old bread and moldy cheese under the smug gaze of overfed government workers? He thought all those things, but what came out was, "You seem to know something of pity."

  Eden, prepared for a sharp response, was uncertain how to respond. "I suppose it comes in all forms," she said, planning to let the subject drop. Then she realized he expected her to share as he had, and she prepared to tell him a little of her life.

  Chapter Five

  "My mother died when I was in high school," she began, still not sure how much she wanted to say. "My father was never very... very warm or involved in our lives. My high school counselor referred me to a social worker when I took Robbie—he's my little brother—to class with me one day. He'd had chicken pox, but the scabs were healing, and I'd already missed all the school I thought I could afford to miss, staying home with him, so I took him with me."

  "Where was your father?" Logan asked.

  "That was what the counselor wanted to know." Eden took a deep breath and blew it out in a sigh. "The truth was, I didn't know. We hadn't seen him in a couple of weeks."

  Logan swallowed, feeling her pain. He thought of the child she'd been. Perhaps Eden did know something of pity. Maybe she had even deserved some. "What happened?"

  "The social worker was in the process of setting us up in a foster home when Dad showed up and threw a tantrum, demanding they give us back."

  "And did they?"

  She nodded. "My father could always talk his way out of whatever trouble he got into—with my mother, or later, with the authorities."

  Logan nodded, this time with some sympathy of his own. "You weren't close to your father."

  "I hardly knew him." She sighed. "I still hardly know him."

  Logan continued nodding, but his next words seemed more for himself than for her. "It can be difficult to feel such distance from one's own blood," he said. Eden started to ask what he meant, but he shook himself, as though driving painful thoughts away. "Where is your father now?"

  "Southern California. He remarried recently, and moved out there with his new wife."

  "Leaving dear little Eden to clean up after him," Logan said, referring to the house he had been painting when they'd been together last.

  "Yes, in a way you can say that, but it turns out the house was my mother's only, not in joint possession with my dad, and she left it to Robbie and me. I'm really doing my own work when I'm busy getting the house ready for sale."

  "I think you're cleaning up after a lazy father who never cut you much slack," Logan said. "I suspect you've spent much of your life since your early teens cleaning up his messes in one way or another—''

  "Not really, Logan. He just—"

  "And making excuses for him in the process," he added, starting the truck's engine. "Come on," he said. "It's time to get some lunch."

  Still frustrated over Logan's too-perceptive observations about her relationship with her father, Eden spoke little as they drove away.

  They continued driving for a time, commenting to each other on small things they noticed. Eden was amazed at the way the canyon changed. Sometimes the two walls seemed fairly close together. Other times the canyon widened until one wall seemed distant and the other almost out of sight. Sometimes there were several homesteads across the width of the canyon; other times a single rancheria seemed to fill the canyon completely, and other times there were no hogans or mobile homes or tarpaper houses, no sign of people at all. After a while Logan turned in at the dooryard of one small hogan and waited for the homeowner to come out to greet them, then negotiated in Navajo for several ears of native corn that had been roasted in the husk. That settled, he bargained with the Navajo householder—a slim, middle-aged man in jeans and red plaid flannel, his legs bowed from long years in the saddle—for a half-dozen fresh peaches.

  Though the bargaining seemed fierce, Eden noticed that they reached an agreement quickly. Then, when the farmer brought his peaches out for inspection before money changed hands, he turned them over to her, silently acknowledging her as Logan's companion. It was a heady feeling, almost as if Logan's people—personified in this one man—had opened their arms to take her in. She wondered if Logan had noticed, and whether he'd say anything. Warming under the man's gaze, Eden thanked him profusely as she accepted the proffered fruit.

  "These peaches are beautiful," she said to Logan as they drove away. "I've never seen anything like them."

  "You're probably used to the peaches in the grocery store," Logan answered. "They're always picked a little green so they won't spoil on the way to the store. The
se ripen on the tree. The family picks them at the peak of their flavor." He nodded toward the fruit she held. "This is a late-ripening variety, so the peaches we bought just now were probably picked late yesterday, or even this morning. They should be some of the best you've ever eaten."

  "They're certainly among the biggest I've ever seen," Eden said, as she turned a softball-sized fruit in her hand. "And the reddest! I didn't even realize there were fruit trees up here—let alone trees that grew fruit like this."

  "You didn't think we had fruit trees?"

  Logan's voice held an unusual hint of something. Eden couldn't tell whether the underlying tone was humor or offense. "I guess I just didn't think about it," she answered quickly. "Everything I've ever seen of reservation lands always seemed so barren and dry. I know there's never enough water anywhere in northeastern Arizona, so I guess I just assumed there wouldn't be enough water to grow fruit orchards up here, either."

  "In most cases, there isn't," Logan acknowledged. "The rez is always painfully short of water, and most areas are pitifully dry, but because of the streams that flow through the canyon, there's water here all year long, and the families who keep homes here take full advantage of that. The canyon hosts many fruit orchards, and there used to be many more," Logan said. "In fact, in the days before the Long Walk, the People prided themselves on the peach orchards of Canyon de Chelly. Some of those orchards had been carefully tended for more than five hundred years—old stock replaced by new over the generations, mothers handing down the orchards to their daughters who passed them along to their daughters throughout half a millennium. In fact there were more than eight thousand peach trees in this canyon then."

  "Eight thousand?" Eden mused, once again feeling staggered by the size of the numbers. She looked at the wide, flat fields in the canyon's bottom and imagined them filled with peach orchards, all in blossom. The canyon must have been something to see in those days! "What happened?" she asked.

  "Kit Carson happened." Logan's voice was flat, without emotion.

  "Not the Kit Carson, the famous explorer who helped to open the West?"

  "One and the same," Logan answered. "Colonel Christopher 'Kit' Carson—but whether he 'opened the West' or not may be up to some debate. From the point of view of my people, the West was plenty open before he showed up and brought the blue-coated pony soldiers with him."

  "I suppose that's true." Eden hadn't realized she was walking into a verbal minefield, but now that she knew she was in one, she determined to watch her step. "I always thought he worked farther east, like Texas and New Mexico."

  "He did, to begin with. He had a big career as an Army scout, got a more literate friend to help him write up his adventures, and then quit. By the time the Confederacy split from the Union and the United States went to war against itself, Carson was comfortably retired from active military service and working as the government's Indian Agent for the Utes up in the Utah Territory. Then in 1861, when the war in the East broke out, he reenlisted, expecting to be sent back East to fight for the Union." Logan paused meaningfully. "I've often wondered if he would have bothered to sign up again, if he'd known he was going to be sent down here to put down 'the Navajo uprisings.' I rather doubt he would have."

  Once again, Eden was surprised by the tone of his voice. "You sound like you feel sorry for him."

  Logan considered that for a moment. "In a way, I suppose I do. He had been a friend of many of the native people he encountered. He even married a native woman and had children with her. Among my people, he had earned the name Rope Thrower, and a reputation as a caring, honest man." Logan sighed. "I'm sure he signed up expecting to be sent to the East. I know he didn't want to get stuck rounding up 'wild Navajos.' "

  Logan looked up at Eden and grinned broadly, one of those quick smiles she had learned to expect when he was about to make a joke at his own—or his people's—expense. "Unfortunately for us," he said, "Carson went all-out on any job he was asked to do. When he was given the task of rounding up the Dineh for transport to a prison camp in eastern New Mexico, he decided to do it right." He looked very sad as he added, "The man who had been among our greatest friends became our greatest enemy."

  Logan pulled the truck up beneath a spreading sycamore. There was a small, neat patch of grass there, alongside the stream. "I thought this would be a good place for lunch," he said as he set the parking brake and turned off the engine.

  "Looks great," Eden answered, lumbering out of the high cab of the truck. As they spread a blanket on the shady grass beneath the tree, she asked, "Tell me about Kit Carson and the peach trees."

  "It's not a lunchtime story," Logan warned.

  "That's okay. I have a strong stomach."

  "Well, all right then. But remember I warned you." Logan set out the roasted ears of corn, the fresh peaches beside them, and offered her a seat beside him on the blanket. He handed her a canteen, took a long drink from a matching one he kept for himself, and began talking again.

  "The Utes and the Dineh were traditional enemies. I suppose we had been fighting each other since we both came to this area centuries ago. Anyway, that made the Utes, and the Utes' agent, well qualified to work for the Army in bringing the People to heel. By then, the war Colonel Miles had declared was well into its third year and he hadn't succeeded in rounding up more than a couple of hundred men. When he did capture a few, they just slipped away again and disappeared back into the canyon. I expect it was fairly frustrating for the colonel."

  Eden tried to keep a straight face. "I expect it was."

  "The Utes weren't afraid of the canyon, and neither was Carson. From the outset of his involvement against the Dineh, he warned the Army that the Navajo nation would not fall until our canyon hideaways had all been routed. He started his campaign with a march through the canyon, he and his troops coming in from one end, a second command marching in from the opposite direction, intending to meet in the middle."

  "Was he chased away by signal fires?" Eden husked an ear of roasted corn as she listened.

  “He knew better, and he prepared his command to know better. Besides," Logan paused, "by then even the weather had turned against us. During the growing season, the Army harried the People so they were scarcely able to plant a crop anywhere; during the winter, the cold was so severe, it challenged their survival. The Dineh weren't able to mount an army under such conditions. About the best they could do was run and hide, and keep running and hiding."

  He paused, looking up the canyon. "The only reason that first march through the canyons was unsuccessful was Carson didn't really know where he was. I guess he was in good company. Columbus was lost when he found us, too."

  Eden chuckled. "I guess that's true."

  "You bet it is. He only called us Indians because he thought he was in the Indies. The poor fellow died without ever figuring it out."

  "You sound like you feel sorry for him, too."

  "In a way, I guess I do, though what his adventures did to the indigenous people of Hispaniola is one of the great shames of history."

  "Of course you're right," Eden said, then, trying to get back to the subject of Kit Carson and his assault up the canyon, she added an exaggerated "Anyway..."

  "Anyway," Logan went on. "It turned out the group Carson had sent to come in from the opposite side and meet him halfway was actually in a connecting fork of the canyon, the part we call Caňon del Muerto. The two groups never connected because they passed each other unseen."

  "Caňon del Muerto," Eden repeated. "Canyon of the Dead?"

  Logan nodded. "It's a fork that splits off to the east not far from here. I can take you up that way on another trip, if you'd like."

  "And will you tell me why they call it that?"

  "If you're certain you want to hear it. It's another unhappy story," Logan warned.

  "I'd assumed so," Eden answered, and husked another roasting ear.

  "Making a long story short," Logan continued, following her lead to shuck another ear o
f corn, "that first attack didn't amount to much, but Carson was undeterred. He decided the only way to force the Navajos to surrender was to starve them out, then to be sure it worked, he'd burn them out, too, so they had nothing to return to."

  "Like Sherman's march to the sea," Eden said with a shudder.

  "If anything, Carson was more thorough." Logan added his shucked ear to Eden's two and began stripping another. "Whenever his men overtook a rancheria, they burned it to the ground—all the buildings, outbuildings, corrals, all the fields and crops and personal possessions, all the pasturelands and orchards. Then they topped it off by slaughtering the livestock and leaving the carcasses to rot in the sun. In most cases, the soldiers weren't even allowed to eat the meat of slaughtered Dineh animals."

  No wonder Logan had warned me this was not a lunchtime story, Eden thought.

  "Would you like me to stop so you can eat?" he asked with a look of sympathy.

  "No, it's okay," she said. "I want to hear the rest, and I have a hunch the end is not far off."

  "No, not far," he answered, peeling the last of the roasting ears. "Carson knew that the People's heart was in Dinehtah, and that this canyon was the heart of the homeland. He continued his campaign of burning, driving the People ahead of him, while the soldiers in Fort Defiance and elsewhere offered food as an incentive for surrender. In time, some of the People began surrendering to the forts, just so their innocents—their children and old ones—could be fed, but the holdouts kept running into the canyons to hide." He paused, and then he took a deep breath. His look seemed far away when he continued.

  "The winter of 1864 was the coldest ever recorded. At Fort Defiance, near the mouth of the canyon, the mercury fell to almost forty degrees below zero."

  Eden gasped. "I can't imagine that! I don't think I've ever seen it fall much below zero, even in the coldest winters."

  "It hasn't ever gone below minus ten in my lifetime," Logan answered, "and that only once, but that one winter, all nature seemed to side with the Army and against the Dineh. By then most of the People had been marched to Bosque Redondo and only a few hundred were holed up in the canyon, but the fields and the orchards were still here." Sorrow tinged his voice.