The Big Wander

by Will Hobbs

  A little later Clay heard a sound like a stone plunging into the river. “What was that?”

  “My father. Now he’s bathing in the river. It’s so hot in there, it feels really good when you jump in the river.”

  “Have you done it before?”

  “Sure. Hosteen Clay liked it a lot. If you want, we can go in there. My father is finished.”

  “I will if Uncle Clay did.”

  Clay peeled off his clothes and followed Russell inside. The stones were still glowing faintly. “You were right about how dark it is in here,” Clay whispered. Russell reached out and closed the door tight. “Still pretty hot too,” he whispered.

  “It must have been really hot when your father came in here at first.”

  Clay heard the hiss of steam as Russell sprinkled water from a canteen onto the stones. Instantly, a blast engulfed both of them and he ducked his head to avoid it. “Wow,” he said. “That’s really hot.”

  “You like it okay?”

  Moisture was gathering all over Clay’s arms, his legs, his hair—all over. He didn’t know if it was steam or sweat or both. “I like it,” he said.

  Russell sprinkled some more water on the stones, and another blast washed over them.

  Just when Clay thought he couldn’t stand it anymore, Russell parted the flap and they both went outside. The moon hadn’t risen over the canyon of the San Juan yet, but he could see his friend’s profile by starlight. He waded knee-deep after Russell, then plunged in alongside him.

  It felt cool and cleansing and … purifying. Clay got out and stood on the shore. He felt lighter than air. Suddenly dizzy, he sat down in the sand. The dizziness passed as quickly as it had come. He thought he had never felt better than he did right now.

  Clay could feel Curly’s wet nose on his arm, and he reached out to hug the little dog close. Now it was time to dress and to rejoin Russell’s father by the campfire. Now it was time to learn what it was Sam Yazzie was so reluctant to tell.

  13

  “Three of our horses ran off the year before …” Russell’s father began. The big Navajo man looked only into the fire. He cleared his throat, then continued.

  “We knew they’d be spooky and it would be hard to catch them. It was early in the summer, just after we’d come to the summer hogan with the sheep. The yucca was still blooming. Three of us, we searched for four days in all these canyons. We were about to give up. Then we came across your uncle. He rode an Appaloosa horse with two burros behind.

  “We were surprised to find a biligaana—a white man—in such a place. One of us joked that he must be looking for Pish-la-ki, a silver mine only white men believe in. He had no digging tools, we found out later, only things a man needs to live.

  “I asked if he had seen any horses. He knew where they were, he had seen them. He led us to them. That’s when we found out how much he knew about handling horses. The People are good horse wranglers from way back. Navajo people raided for horses a long time ago, we traded for horses, horses are in our blood as you say. But your uncle had his own way of gathering up horses. No one had seen anything like it.

  “We invited him to come to the summer hogan and he came along with us. We only found out much later that he was a big rodeo star. Some people at the trading post recognized him and told us he used to be in all the big rodeos, that he was ‘All-Around Cowboy.’ Hosteen Clay had never told us that himself, and he lived with us the whole summer.

  “All the kids liked him and would follow him around in a pack. The old people liked him, everyone liked him. The first time my sister—”

  Sam Yazzie paused and looked straight down at the ground. It seemed to Clay almost as if Russell’s father had seen something. Quickly the man looked back into the fire and continued, by force of will it seemed. “The first time my sister saw him, she liked him. I saw it, I was there. I knew her feelings. She hadn’t married—no one could arrange a husband for her. She was a strong woman. But when she first saw this man it was different.

  “Everyone could see that Hosteen Clay had deep feelings for her the first time he saw her. He didn’t speak to her for three days, he was so shy.

  “I told my mother not to speak to him again because he would be her son-in-law. She said she didn’t need to be told, she already knew it.

  “He hoed with us in the cornfield and in the bean field. He rode out with the sheep and kept them company every day. He worked on the stone corral where the stones had fallen down. He wanted to learn how to make silver, and I began to teach him. He wanted to know the Navajo words too. He wanted to learn everything, but quietly.

  “Often we would talk about horses. He learned that we like the spotted ponies the best, the pintos. We told him that the best horses were the old mustangs, the wild ponies. They weren’t big but they could run all day and never slipped and fell even in country like this. From way back, Indian people especially liked to catch the painted mustangs and breed them for their colors.

  “Hosteen Clay wondered if there were any mustangs left on the reservation. We said no, just broomtails like ours that ran off. Maybe there are still mustangs in the Escalante Mountains in Utah, we said. Across the San Juan River and across the Colorado. We told him that the People used to trade with the Mormons in that country ever since way back. Jewelry and blankets for sheep and horses. Sometimes the People traded for those mustangs. But nobody had been over there since before the war.

  “About this same time he was asking me about how Navajo people are married. I knew his heart before he told me that he wished to marry my sister, of course. He told me he had never married, he had no children. Now he wanted to be married to my sister for the rest of his life—how should he go about it properly?

  “I asked him if he wanted to take her away and marry her in a church. He said no, he wanted to marry her here, in the Navajo way if that was possible. I told him that he would need someone to speak for him who was not of her family, a friend or relation of his. The go-between would suggest the marriage and propose the dowry, jewelry or horses usually.

  “Pretty soon he asked me how to find the crossings on the San Juan and the Colorado. I knew what he wanted to do. ‘There might not be any mustangs left over there,’ I told him. ‘There’s only one way to find out,’ he answered. I let him go. It was the kind of idea that made him happy. Before he left my sister saw him stacking rocks up high in the corral, higher than they’d ever been before. She kidded him about if he thought we had flying sheep, to make a pen that high. I never told her, but I think when he left the next day and said he would be back, she knew he’d be bringing horses for her father.

  “Two weeks later he returned with these two horses you’ve seen today. No one had seen ponies as beautiful as these. He ran them right into the corral. No one pointed out that he had delivered the dowry before the go-between asked if it might be accepted.

  “Along with the horses he also brought his go-between, a cowboy who helped him wrangle the horses across the rivers. The cowboy suggested the match to my father, who accepted the horses and set the date for seventeen days later, the first of September. The cowboy returned to the Escalante country.

  “We built a new hogan for Hosteen Clay and my sister to be married in and to live in. I asked my sister if she thought her new husband would stay and live among us, or if they would leave sometime and go somewhere else. She said he was happy here and had said he didn’t care to live anywhere else, but if he changed his mind one day it wouldn’t matter to her.

  “It troubled him that he couldn’t help build the hogan. We laughed and told him to go out and watch the sheep. It was only a summer hogan anyway—a brush shelter. He could help when it came time to build a hogan of wood and earth at the winter place near Navajo Mountain.

  “When the day came he was married in the Navajo way. He entered the hogan first, passed around the south side, and seated himself at the rear of the hogan facing the door which is east. Bringing the basket of boiled cornmeal, the bride entered
with her family and took her place next to him on his right. I myself was the master of ceremonies and it was a happy day for me. The groom was my friend and the bride was my sister. Everyone could tell they would be together from that day into old age. I put the water jug in front of my sister and handed her the gourd ladle. I poured water into it and asked her to pour the water onto his hands. When he had washed his hands, he then poured the water onto hers.

  “I brought out my bag of corn pollen and sprinkled pollen over the basket from east to west, and from north to south. I proceeded to do everything as it should have been done. The bride and the groom ate from the boiled cornmeal and the pollen in the correct places, in the correct order. When they were finished I instructed everyone to begin eating the wedding feast.

  “They stayed in their hogan for four nights and four days, as is expected.

  “For a month all was beautiful and peaceful. Then Hosteen Clay suggested that he and his wife would return to Escalante to buy several more mustangs for themselves, from the man Barlow who had sold him the others. I told him I would go along, my son as well, so that both of us could cross the Colorado and see that Escalante country as my father had, and trade with the Mormons as he and his father had. I made new silver—rings, bracelets—and brought some of my old silver too.

  “We forded the rivers. It was autumn and they were low, but not so low the horses didn’t have to swim. We climbed up through the tall Hole-in-the-Rock where the Mormons had made their wagon road down to the Colorado long ago. I had heard of these places but never seen them. On top it was beautiful, all rock up there.

  “My sister was feeling sick, but we didn’t know it until we’d ridden half the way from the river to Escalante. She had a bad pain in her stomach, and it kept getting worse. It was so far back home we knew we had to keep riding toward Escalante because it was closer.

  “We got to the corral at the head of Coyote Canyon where Hosteen Clay had bought the mustangs before from the man named Barlow. This time there weren’t only two in the corral, there were thirty or more. They were being loaded into cattle trailers, all crazy, fighting, screaming, breaking everything including their own bones. Two of them were destroyed right there.

  “That’s when we learned what was going on, from one of the cowboys. This man Barlow was bringing the horses out of the mountains and keeping them for a while at his corral at Coyote Canyon until the slaughterhouse sent trucks for them. We learned that the horses were being made into food for dogs and chickens, and turned into fertilizer. This man Barlow held back only the spotted ones because he knew people would pay well for them.

  “Hosteen Clay kept his anger over these horses inside. He was concerned for his wife, to get her to a doctor as fast as he could. The cattle trucks left with the wild horses. Three pintos were left behind in the corral. We weren’t going to buy or trade for them now—my sister was in bad pain. Barlow’s cowboys were driving off fast with their pickup trucks and horse trailers. Hosteen Clay told Barlow he had to have a ride for his wife to get to the doctor. Barlow was the only one left. I could see he didn’t like one of his kind being with us, worse that he was married to one of us.

  “Hosteen Clay said he was afraid his wife might have appendicitis. Barlow laughed and said she probably had indigestion from eating too much frybread. He said he wasn’t taking any squaw to the doctor. He just drove off and left us.

  “We tried to ride on to Escalante. No more trucks came. It was too great a distance. My sister died in the night. Hosteen Clay took her away in the morning and buried her himself. When he came back he said he had buried his heart. He returned with us to Diné Bikéyah—Navajoland—but it wasn’t long before he went away again.

  “We didn’t hear from him all winter. In the spring he wrote a letter and said he wasn’t going to let Barlow take the last horses out of the mountains to be slaughtered.

  “He rounded them up himself. He ran them down the canyons of the Escalante River, pushed them all the way down to the Colorado as he had hoped. We were there to help him swim them across the Grey Mesa where no one lives and where Barlow would never get them. We brought a few across the San Juan for ourselves.

  “Nine days from now he’ll run another bunch down the canyons of the Escalante. They could be the last mustangs in all that country. We’ll be there to meet him. He won’t know his nephew will be with us. That should bring some joy once again into his heart.

  “That is all,” Sam Yazzie concluded.

  Clay saw the man glance in his direction, then look away. “Life is for the living,” Sam Yazzie said. “Let’s speak no more of the dead.”

  14

  They feasted him. Clay squatted on the hard-packed dirt floor inside one of the shelters topped and sided with cut branches, and he feasted on frybread and mutton ribs and coffee. He’d never liked coffee before. He’d always said to his mother, “Who’d want to drink bean juice?” But when Russell’s gray-haired grandmother, the old woman he’d encountered at Oljeto, made a pouring motion with the pot and glanced his way hopefully, he nodded “Yes, please.”

  The coffee was good. Maybe because it was brewed on an open fire, he thought. Russell’s mother forked a new piece of frybread from the hot oil and gave it to him, smiling. The frybread tasted especially delicious with the coffee. They were pleased with his appetite. The kids wanted to make sure he was getting enough ribs. Yes, please, I’ll have some more.

  Clay’s eye was drawn to the weaving on the loom behind Russell’s mother. A blanket of dazzling color and complexity was nearing completion. How could she make that design, and make it right out of her head? And they thought he was something special. What had he ever done?

  He was welcome here. He could feel it in all their faces, from the smallest kids to the old people. But who were all these people? Relatives, somehow. Russell tried to explain but it was hard to follow. They didn’t call each other by their names. It was always something like, “My brother who is the son of my mother’s youngest sister.” They were two families of all the generations joined together, he’d figured out that much.

  Many of them couldn’t speak English, including Russell’s mother. It didn’t matter. They made him feel welcome. He was their second Clay. Everyone knew his sadness on learning of his uncle’s great loss. It was theirs as well. No one mentioned his uncle or the woman from among them who’d fallen in love, married, and died.

  In the evening Curly was attempting to help the sheep-dogs keep the flock in line as they blatted and funneled their way into the stone corral for the night. The children were all laughing at Curly’s shrill barking, the way he ran back and forth not really knowing what to do but looking back to Clay all the while for approval. “What kind of sheep are those?” Clay asked his friend, as he pointed out one cluster with horns and especially long fur.

  Russell laughed. “Those kind of sheep are called goats.” The other kids were laughing too, and it didn’t take a minute before the story was on its way to everyone in camp.

  Clay went to sleep happy. He felt a great contentment. And tomorrow was all arranged. Russell would make the trip to the trading post with him, one day there and one day back. They’d go on horseback and take Pal to carry their supplies. He was looking forward to pulling on his cowboy boots again. He’d make his phone calls; his brother would be astonished at all the news. And Weston would be glad to hear he didn’t have to come looking for him. Even better, he’d get his mail. He could see it now, a stack of letters from Marilyn. How many? Six? Eight? He could almost make out her handwriting, he could almost make out her face….

  * * *

  “Got two,” the trader said. The man wore red suspenders and had an oversized face, puffy like dough.

  “There must be more than that.”

  “No, there’s only two. One from a Mike Lancaster and one from a Marilyn Blanchford.”

  Thank goodness, Clay thought. At least there’s one from her. A letter from Marilyn!

  “This one here sure smells goo
d,” the trader teased, holding up a pink envelope. “This one from the Marilyn …”

  Indeed it did. Clay could smell her perfume just as plain as if she were present.

  The trader handed the letters over slowly, just to tantalize him.

  Clay was blushing, he knew it. He wanted to get out of there and he wanted to read her letter as fast as he could. Russell was waiting outside on the bench. His eyes seemed to ask if Clay had good news. Clay didn’t know yet. He sat down on the far end of the bench and tore open the envelope. The shark’s tooth fell out of the envelope into his hand.

  The blood pounded in his temples. He could barely breathe.

  Dear Clay,

  When I gave you my address in Red River, I thought you were going to send me a postcard. I hardly even know you, and here you’re writing me these long letters.

  Clay had a bad feeling in the pit of his stomach. Suddenly he felt weak all over.

  Russell left the porch, taking a polite walk over to the horses.

  You think about a lot of things, that’s kind of interesting. But you get carried away. Boy do you get carried away. “I think of you under these same stars,” and all that—“Love,” “Lovingly,” and so on—it’s really embarrassing. You obviously don’t care about making a big fool of yourself. My parents are kind of worried about this and my mother thinks you’re some kind of weirdo. And that shark’s tooth! There are lots of things I’d rather wear around my neck than a shark’s tooth. So while you’re out there in the “Back of Beyond,” GET LOST! And don’t write me any more letters, please.