Danny Blackgoat, Navajo Prisoner

by Tim Tingle

Every thought of his home ended the same. He saw his sheep lying on the ground in red puddles of blood.

  Chapter 6

  A New Navajo Family

  One morning at breakfast the driver said, “We’re getting close. In only a few hours we’ll be at Fort Davis.”

  Danny couldn’t understand, but he knew the driver wanted to tell him something. He pointed down the road. Danny followed his gaze and saw nothing. Over and over the driver pointed down the road.

  “Fort Davis!” he shouted. He stood up and waited until Danny returned his look. “Fort Davis,” he said again, more quietly.

  “Fort Davis,” Danny repeated, pointing in the direction they were going. The driver smiled and slapped Danny’s shoulder in a friendly way.

  “That’s right, son. Fort Davis. You’re learning to talk.”

  Danny looked to the ground. A fear crept over him. Soldiers lived at Fort Davis. Soldiers had burned his home and killed his sheep. Soldiers did not like Navajos.

  The driver patted Danny on the shoulder. When Danny looked up, he pointed to himself and spoke.

  “Rick,” he said. “My name is Rick.”

  “Rick-uh,” Danny said. “Rick.” He pointed to the driver and repeated his name. “Rick.”

  Rick said, “Yes,” then he waited. He pointed to Danny and shrugged his shoulders.

  “Danny Blackgoat,” Danny replied. No white man had ever asked him his name. Rick grabbed Danny’s shoulder and smiled.

  “I am Rick and you are Danny Blackgoat,” he said. “They told me to call you Fire Eye, but I knew that wasn’t your name. You are Danny Blackgoat. I like that.”

  An hour later the wagon stopped shaking. Danny knew they were nearing the fort, where the road would be more traveled. He looked out the rear of the wagon. Purple mountains surrounded the fort, mountains topped with shiny white snow.

  As they pulled through the gates of the fort, Danny closed the cloth curtains and scooted to a dark corner. He didn’t want to see the soldiers and their mean blue uniforms. The wagon came to a halt.

  “Hello!” Rick shouted. “I’ve missed you.”

  “I’ve missed you, too,” said a woman.

  “She must be Rick’s wife,” thought Danny.

  He didn’t understand what they said, but he heard the warmth in their voices. He crept to the curtains and opened them just enough to see Rick and his wife. She was Navajo!

  “That’s why he was nice to me!” Danny thought. “He is married to a Navajo woman. He likes Navajos!”

  Danny closed the curtains and pulled his knees to his chest. He felt confused.

  “Why would a Navajo woman marry a bilagaana, a white man?” he asked himself.

  The biggest surprise was yet to come. Danny peeked through the curtains again. A young woman appeared beside her mother. She seemed shy, even with her parents. She looked to the ground and waited while her mother and father embraced.

  When they kissed, she turned her head away. Danny smiled.

  “She is so shy,” he thought. “She looks more like her mother too, more Navajo. Her shiny black hair. And how she bats her eyes, those sweet brown eyes. They are like my sister’s, only softer.”

  “Danny!” Rick shouted. “There’s somebody I want you to meet.”

  Danny pulled the curtains shut and crawled to the back of the wagon.

  “I hope they didn’t see me watching!”

  “Come on out, Danny,” Rick said. “I saw you watching us.”

  Lucky for Danny, he didn’t understand a word Rick said. But he still felt caught! Rick opened the curtains and motioned for Danny to climb down.

  “Come on, Danny.”

  “I don’t want to meet that girl,” Danny lied to himself.

  He scrambled from the wagon and his heart fell. A sadness swept over him. Rick and his wife stood before him, but the girl was gone!

  “This is Danny Blackgoat, from Canyon de Chelly,” Rick said. “The soldiers call him Fire Eye, but his name is Danny Blackgoat.”

  “Yá’áhtééh, greetings,” Rick’s wife said. “My name is Susan. My mother’s clan is Bead People, my father’s is Bitter Water. My grandmother’s is Many Hogans and my grandfather’s is Near the Mountain.”

  Rick stood watching and listening as Danny Blackgoat and Susan greeted each other in the proper Navajo way.

  “My mother’s clan is Towering House and my father’s is Sage Brush Hill,” Danny said, in a quiet and respectful voice. “My grandmother’s is Many Goats and my grandfather’s is Dear Spring.”

  “I am glad to meet you,” Susan said. Danny nodded.

  “And this is our daughter, Jane,” Rick said, pointing to the doorway of a building.

  Jane took two small steps from the shadows. She never lifted her eyes to look at Danny.

  “Yá’áhtééh, greetings,” she said, then vanished behind her mother’s skirt.

  “All right, Danny,” said Rick. “Back in the wagon.” He opened the curtains and Danny climbed inside. Rick laughed and turned to his wife.

  “It didn’t take those two long to fall in love,” he said. She slapped him on the shoulder, but she was laughing too.

  “I wonder where they live?” Danny thought.

  But he never had a chance to ask. Rick and his Navajo wife disappeared inside the building. Soon a soldier flung back the curtains. He was stout and strong, with a dark mustache above his lip and a mean look on his face.

  “Get down here, Fire Eye!” he shouted.

  Danny climbed from the wagon and hung his head. The soldier saw the chains on his feet. “Good,” he said. “I won’t have to worry about you running anywhere.”

  He grabbed Danny’s long black hair and pulled. Hard. Danny fell to the ground. He felt every muscle in his body tense up. He flexed his biceps and clenched his fists.

  “Don’t do it,” he told himself. “Now is not the time. Let him think he has won. Then you will have a chance.”

  “I give you a week and we’ll be dragging your body to the desert,” the soldier said.

  He started to walk away, then turned and kicked Danny in the stomach.

  “Here,” he shouted to a group of soldiers, “give me a hand with this one. Carry him over to the prison barracks. Chain him to a bed. If he gets away, you’ll be chained yourself, so do it right!”

  Danny spent his first night in a white man’s bed surrounded by fifty other prisoners. They were from the Confederate Army, fighting against the United States in the Civil War.

  But Danny didn’t care about white men fighting other white men. He wanted to be home. While the other prisoners slept, Danny stared through the window at the bright yellow moon, wishing he were home at Canyon de Chelly.

  Chapter 7

  Mean Mr. Dime

  The next morning, Danny was led to a cotton field outside the gates of the fort. Prisoners stood in a small clump of trees, getting ready for the day’s work.

  Five guards, armed with shotguns, surrounded the prisoners. Seeing the Indian boy, the guards aimed their guns at Danny.

  “Just give me a reason,” said a guard, “and I’ll blow you to kingdom come.”

  Danny didn’t understand the words, but he understood the message. The prisoners laughed.

  “What’s your name, boy?” a prisoner asked.

  He was short and stout. His arms hung to below his knees and rippled with muscles. Danny kept his eyes to the ground.

  “I’m asking you a question, boy!” the prisoner said.

  “He’s just a dumb Indian,” said another prisoner. “He talks Indian talk.”

  “I ain’t working with no Indian,” said the stout man. He lifted Danny’s chin and leaned in close to his face.

  “See if you understand this, boy,” he said.

  He swallowed and rolled a wad of spit in his mouth. He leaned back his head and spit in Danny’s face. Danny covered his face with his hands and the prisoner shoved him hard in the chest. Danny fell to the ground.

  “Understand that?
” the prisoner shouted. “We don’t like you!”

  The others laughed and the prisoner turned away. But the day’s battle had just begun.

  Danny leaped to his feet. While the guards and prisoners watched, Danny snuck up behind the bullying man. He tapped him on the shoulder, softly. When the stout man turned, he showed surprise on his face.

  “Well,” he said with a sneer.

  That was all he had time to say. Danny bent his knees, crouching low and clenching his fist. He leaped up and smashed the man in the face, knocking him to the ground.

  “You’re gonna be sorry you did that, boy,” he said, wiping blood from his lip and scrambling to his feet. He grabbed Danny by the collar.

  “No more!” a voice shouted.

  A powerful arm fell like a tree trunk between Danny and the bully. The powerful arm belonged to a prisoner, an older man with a huge chest and round belly. He had a gray beard and white hair.

  “Give him a chance,” said the man. “Let’s see if this Indian boy can work.”

  “Jim Davis, you saw what this boy did,” said the bully. “I’m gonna kill him for it.”

  “No, Mr. Dime. You’re not killing anybody this morning,” said Davis. “You’re going to work, same as the rest of us.”

  “You better listen to him,” said a soldier, nudging Mr. Dime with his rifle. “No more fighting today. It’s time to work.”

  Mr. Dime shook his fist and gave Danny a long, mean look.

  “This ain’t over yet,” he said, and turned to the cotton fields.

  “Davis!” said the soldier. “Help this boy get started. See what he can do.”

  “What’s his name?” asked Davis.

  “The officer called him Fire Eye. He said he was a troublemaker. Didn’t take him long.”

  “Well,” said Davis, “the boy didn’t start it. But he sure picked the wrong man to fight.”

  The soldiers moved to the fields to guard the prisoners. Davis turned to Danny, who was leaning against a tree and staring at the ground.

  “Fire Eye!” he said. Danny didn’t move. “That’s not your name, is it?”

  Danny said nothing. Davis picked up a hoe and took Danny by the arm.

  “Let’s get started, son. I’ll figure out what to call you later. For now, you’re Fire Eye.”

  He led Danny as far away from Mr. Dime and his friends as possible, to the far side of the cotton field. He finally halted in a patch of thick weeds at the base of a hill.

  “Here,” he said, “watch what I do.”

  Davis grabbed the hoe by the handle. He cut a new row into the hard, dry ground and then yanked out the weeds by the roots. After five minutes of hoeing, he tossed the hoe at Danny’s feet.

  “Your turn,” he said. “Give it a try.”

  Danny picked up the hoe and continued cutting the row Jim Davis had started. He didn’t look up. He went about the work as if he had been doing it every day for weeks. He pulled the weeds, shook off the dirt from the roots, and tossed them in a pile.

  Davis wiped the sweat from his brow and smiled.

  “I believe you know how to work, son,” he whispered to himself.

  Davis looked across the fields at the other prisoners. They were leaning on their hoes and talking. If a soldier hollered, they returned to work, but as soon as the soldier turned away, they stopped.

  “We could all learn something from this young man,” Davis said.

  Thirty minutes later, Davis touched Danny on the shoulder.

  “Fire Eye, I think you know what you’re doing. I’ll get another hoe and start at the far end. Meet you in the middle!”

  Danny said nothing, but he saw the smile on Jim Davis’s face. He nodded and went back to work. He watched as Davis began hoeing at the other end of the row.

  “We will meet in the middle,” he thought. “I like this man. I acted like a fool and he saved my life.”

  Chapter 8

  Danny Saves a Friend

  “Lunchtime!” a guard shouted. The sun shone high overhead. Danny looked to Jim Davis, who leaned on his hoe only twenty feet away.

  “We done good this morning,” Davis said. “You’re a good worker.”

  The prisoners laid down their tools and made their way to the shade of the trees. They sat in groups, on logs and on the ground. A cook served bowls of beans from the back of a wagon.

  Davis sat beside Danny, protecting him from Mr. Dime.

  “You can’t watch him forever,” Dime said. “I’m gonna kill that boy. You wait and see.”

  “Your killing days are over, Dime,” said a guard. “I’m tired of burying anybody you pick a fight with. No more, you hear me?”

  When the day’s work was finished, they returned to the prison barracks. As they neared the building, a guard yanked Danny’s arm and dragged him through the door. He shoved him on his bed, face down, and chained his hands and feet to the bed.

  “Any more trouble out of you and I will kill you myself,” he said and turned to go.

  After a week of hard work, Danny earned the respect of the guards, and some of the prisoners. He was no longer chained to his bed. But many times a day he felt the mean glare of Mr. Dime, waiting for his time to get even.

  One morning, as the prisoners finished their coffee by the campfire, Davis stood up.

  “Time we get to work,” he said.

  The prisoners tossed back their final swallow of coffee. But Davis didn’t take another step. Instead, he grabbed his chest with both hands.

  As Danny watched, Davis slumped over and began breathing hard. His face turned white and his eyes rolled back in his head. The men laughed.

  “Did somebody shoot you, Jim?” a prisoner asked.

  Davis didn’t reply.

  The prisoners laughed harder, thinking Davis was joking. Davis rocked back and forth. His arms fell to his sides.

  “Somebody call a doctor!” joked the prisoner.

  The men howled with laughter. But Danny knew that Jim Davis was not making a joke. He was dying in front of them and the men were laughing.

  Danny had watched his grandfather save Mr. Begay’s life seven years ago. Mr. Begay had grabbed his chest and fallen to the ground. His grandfather beat him on the chest with both fists. When Mr. Begay’s face turned white, he blew air into his mouth.

  Danny closed his eyes and remembered every detail. He was only nine years old, but he never forgot the day his grandfather saved Mr. Begay’s life.

  When Davis fell backwards and landed on the fire, the men grew silent.

  “He is hurt,” the prisoner said.

  Danny knew what to do. He leaped to his friend. He rolled him out of the fire and on his back. While the soldiers and prisoners watched, Danny took a deep breath. He opened Davis’s mouth and blew air into it. Then he doubled up his fist and pounded hard on his chest.

  For several long minutes, as the others stood frozen, Danny Blackgoat pounded his friend’s chest and blew air into his lungs. Finally, Davis opened his eyes.

  “Wha . . . wha . . . what did?” Davis stammered, unable to speak.

  More than ever, Danny wished he had the words to say. He patted Davis on the chest and looked into his eyes. Davis closed his eyes again, but Danny felt his chest move up and down.

  “He is breathing,” he thought. “He will live.”

  “Let’s get him to the doctor,” a soldier said.

  As three strong prisoners carried him away, Davis moved his lips, searching for the words. He lifted his head, looking for Danny. When he spotted him, he took a deep breath.

  “You saved my life, Fire Eye,” Jim Davis said.

  Danny nodded and lifted his palm to his friend.

  “Back to work!” a guard shouted.

  Danny took his hoe and hurried to the far side of the cotton row. The prisoners moved quietly back to the fields. No one spoke. Everyone walked with their eyes to the ground. Jim Davis was the only man that every prisoner respected and every prisoner liked. He was their friend.

/>   Danny worked with a madness. He raised his hoe high and flung his whole body into the swing, burying the blade deep into the cracked brown dirt.

  “Why did this happen to Jim Davis?” he asked himself.

  Over and over he swung his hoe, until it slipped from his grip and sailed over his head. Danny watched the hoe and his eyes grew big. The hoe was flying toward a group of prisoners and Mr. Dime was one of them! He was on his knees, planting cottonseed.

  The wooden hoe handle struck Mr. Dime in the back of the neck. He fell forward, but not for long. He jumped to his feet and picked up Danny’s hoe.

  “It’s that Indian boy’s hoe!” shouted a prisoner.

  Mr. Dime slowly turned to face the boy. Danny stood and waited. When Mr. Dime started walking in his direction, Danny wanted to run. He knew what Mr. Dime would do to him, with no Jim Davis to stand in his way.

  But today was not a day for running. Jim Davis had almost died. This was a day for facing his enemy. Mr. Dime expected him to run.

  “Circle him, so he can’t get away!” he shouted.

  Now Danny Blackgoat ran, but not as Mr. Dime expected. He ran as fast as he could, straight at the bullying man. When Danny grew close, Mr. Dime crouched into a fighting stance and lifted his fists. Danny didn’t slow down. He didn’t circle his enemy like a boxer would do.

  No, he ran faster still. When he was five feet from Mr. Dime, he planted his left foot hard and jumped. He hit Mr. Dime in the right kneecap with both feet.

  “Ooooow!” Mr. Dime cried out.

  He rolled on his belly and grabbed his knee with both hands. Danny leaped on his back and grabbed his hair, just like Mr. Dime had done to him that first day in the fields. He slammed his head in the dirt, three, four, five times.

  But Mr. Dime was strong. He was also proud. He ignored the pain in his knee and reached behind himself. He took Danny’s wrists and flung the boy over his head and to the ground. Then he rose and walked toward Danny.

  He leaned over and picked up Danny’s hoe. Without stopping, he whipped the hoe handle and landed a hard blow to Danny’s back. Danny felt a flash of pain through his whole body. Mr. Dime smiled and flipped the hoe from one hand to the next. He now held it so the next blow would sink the blade into the troublemaking Indian boy.