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House Made of Dawn

Page 11

by N. Scott Momaday


  Did you see? Oh, they were beautiful! Oh Vidal, Oh my brother, did you see?

  An awful stillness returned on the water, and without looking away Vidal pointed. Abel could barely see it then, the dark shape floating away in the blackness. And when he waded after it, the current was slow and steady and there was no sound on the river. The bird held still in the cold black water, watching him. He was afraid, but the bird made no move, no sound. He took it up in his hands and it was heavy and warm and the feathers about its keel were hot and sticky with blood. He carried it out into the moonlight, and its bright black eyes, in which no terror was, were wide of him, wide of the river and the land, level and hard upon the ring of the moon in the southern sky.

  Milly?

  The moon and the water bird.

  Milly?

  What, honey? What is it?

  Oh Milly oh God the pain my hands my hands are broken.

  He tried to open the other eye, both eyes wide, but he could not. He stared into the blackness that pressed upon and within him. The backs of his eyelids were black and murky like the fog; microscopic shapes, motes and bits of living thread floated obliquely down, were buoyed up again, and vanished in the great gulf of his blindness. He did not know how to tell of his pain; it was beyond his power to name and assimilate.

  Oh Milly the water birds were beautiful I wish you could have seen them I wanted my brother to see them they were flying high and far away in the night sky and there was a full white moon and a ring around the moon and the clouds were long and bright and moving fast and my brother was alive and the water birds were so far away in the south and I wanted him to see them they were beautiful and please I said please did you see them how they pointed with their heads to the moon and flew through the ring of the moon….

  “Milly?”

  “Yes, honey.”

  “Did you like it, Milly? It was good again, wasn’t it, Milly?”

  “Oh honey, I liked it.”

  “I’m going out tomorrow, Milly. I’m going to look for a job.”

  “You bet. You’ll find a good job if you keep looking. Sometimes it’s hard.”

  “I’m going to find one tomorrow, Milly. You’ll see.”

  “I know it, honey.”

  “Listen, I’m going to get a good job, and Saturday or Sunday you and me and Ben, let’s go to the beach, O.K.?”

  “Oh yes, I hope so.”

  “It was good again, Milly.”

  “It was lovely. I love you.”

  They made love in the afternoons when she came home early from work. Sometimes he wasn’t there when she came in, and she knew that he was drunk again, sick, in trouble maybe. Then she kept still and waited for the night, and when it came she listened to music or ironed clothes or went to the movies. And afterward she undressed and got into bed and lay very still in the dark, listening. And at such times she was very lonely and afraid, and she wanted to cry. But she did not cry.

  And somewhere beyond the cold and the fog and the pain there was the black and infinite sea, bending to the moon, and there was the cold white track of the moon on the water. And far out in the night where nothing else was, the fishes lay out in the black waters, holding still against all the force and motion of the sea; or close to the surface, darting and rolling and spinning like lures, they played in the track of the moon. And far away inland there were great gray migrant geese riding under the moon.

  She had been in Los Angeles four years, and in all that time she had not talked to anyone. There were people all around; she knew them, worked with them—sometimes they would not leave her alone—but she did not talk to them, tell them anything that mattered in the least. She greeted them and joked with them and wished them well, and then she withdrew and lived her life. No one knew what she thought or felt or who she was.

  And one day he was there by her door, waiting for her. It was a hot, humid afternoon and the streets were full of people when she walked home. And he was waiting for her. They had not known each other very long, and he was still full of shyness. He was waiting for her, glad just to see her, and she knew it. He was saying something, trying to tell her why he had come; and suddenly she realized how lonely they both were, how unspeakably lonely. She began to shake her head and bite her lip, and the tears rolled down her cheeks and she made no sound except that now and then she had to catch her breath, crying as an old person cries. And through her tears she saw all his confusion and alarm, how pitifully funny he was, and she had to let go of all the sobbing laughter that was in her—and later on, when their desire was spent, a little of the pain.

  I was a dirty child with yellow hair and thin little arms and legs that were big at the joints. I didn’t wear shoes, and the soles of my feet were hard and cracked and black with dirt. I could run like a rabbit. Once, when Daddy was fencing off a lot behind the barn, I ran into a strand of barbed wire and cut myself deep across the chest. Here, give me your hand. These are the scars, almost invisible now—the skin is shinier and a little lighter in color, that’s all—and if you lift or squeeze me there so that the skin is relaxed, tiny ridges form in the scars. There are little blue and purple veins beneath the scars, blue mostly. Isn’t it funny how the veins go here and there, back and forth, all over, all over?

  The earth where we lived was hard and dry and brick red, and Daddy plowed and planted and watered the land, but in the end there was only a little yield. And it was the same year after year after year; it was always the same, and at last Daddy began to hate the land, began to think of it as some kind of enemy, his own very personal and deadly enemy. I remember he came in from the fields at evening, having been beaten by the land, and he said nothing. He never said anything; he just sat down and thought about his enemy. And sometimes his eyes grew wide and his mouth fell open in disbelief, as if all at once he knew, knew that he had tried everything and failed, and there was nothing left to do but sit there in wonder of his enemy’s strength. And every day before dawn he went to the fields without hope, and I watched him, sometimes saw him at sunrise, far away in the empty land, very small on the skyline, turning to stone even as he moved up and down the rows.

  Daddy loved me; it wasn’t anything that he could put into words or deeds beyond the simple act of turning each day against the land, but I knew it. It was a deep, desperate kind of love; there was no laughter to it at all. “Listen,” he said, “you’ve got to get away,” and his eyes were almost wild with the thought of it. He gave me the money that he had been saving against that moment for seventeen years, and together we walked to Fletcher’s farm, and Daley Fletcher drove us to the railroad in his father’s truck. The train came and Daddy handed me the suitcase, and when I took it I touched his big, scarred, sunburned hand, and it was hard and gnarled like a root and good to smell like deep, dark earth that has just been turned, and I said, “Bye, Daddy—Daddy, goodbye.”

  And I never saw him again, and I remember still how he looked at the railroad station in his overalls and striped coat and the shiny black shoes that I saw him wear only two or three times in all those years. And after a while the money he had given to me was gone, but I was big and strong and I knew how to work and I worked as a waitress after school and got up before daylight to read and study. And in my last year at school I fell in love with Matt and married Matt. We were happy and nothing bad happened to us for a while. We had a baby; she was soft and beautiful and we named her Carrie. And when Matt went away and did not come back, I gave all of my love to Carrie; it was all right because of her, because of Carrie. I found a job and someone to stay with Carrie, and on weekends I played with Carrie and sang Carrie to sleep and in the afternoons if the weather was good I took Carrie to the playground and pushed her in the swing and Carrie held on tight with her little hands and laughed and laughed, Carrie laughed.

  And Carrie was four. She was crying and I went into her room and she was burning up with fever, and in the night she had gone sallow and pale and weak. Her voice was strange and thin, and there were dar
k circles under her eyes. She seemed very small and delicate and beautiful. I went downstairs and called the doctor from the drugstore on the corner. And as I was leaving, Mr. Hitchcock spoke to me—hello, I guess, or can I help you—and I looked at him and his mouth fell open and I saw all my fear and helplessness in his face. And for no reason at all he laughed; the sound of it seemed to horrify him.

  The doctor came and took Carrie away in an ambulance. She seemed to know what was happening to her, and at the hospital she lay very still, looking at the ceiling. She seemed not afraid but curious, strangely thoughtful and wise. To me that was the most unreasonable, terrifying thing of all: that my child should be so calm in the face of death. She seemed to come of age, to live out a whole lifetime in those few hours, and at last there was a look of infinite wisdom and old age on her little face. And sometime in the night she asked me if she was going to die. And do you see how it was? There was no time for deceit, and I didn’t even have the right to look away. “Yes,” I said. And she asked me what it was like to die, and I answered, “I don’t know.” “I love you, Milly,” she said; she had never called me by my name before. In a little while she looked very hard at the ceiling, and her eyes blazed for a moment. Then she turned her head a little and closed her eyes. She seemed very tired. “I love you so much,” she whispered, and she did not wake up again.

  He had to get up. He would die of exposure unless he got up. His legs were all right; at least his legs were not broken. He brought one of his knees forward, then the other, and he managed to get to the fence. He struggled for a long time, and at last he was sitting up with his back to the fence. Upright, his mind cleared, and for the time being there was no longer any danger of fainting. He gathered his feet under him and braced himself against the fence; by pressing first the back of his head and then his shoulders to the fence, using his legs to force himself upward and backward, he stood up. Then he began a long and tortuous journey through dark alleys and streets. Sometimes cars passed through the streets, and he waited in the shadows for them to go by and flattened himself against the walls of buildings. At some point along the way there was a truck, a three-quarter-ton pickup with a covered bed, open at the back. The lights were on. He leaned over the open tailgate and rolled himself inside. In a while someone came and got into the cab; the truck pulled away and Abel gave himself up to pain and exhaustion. And later the truck stopped and he got out and went on again through the shadows and along the walls. Once a man came around a corner and saw him. The man’s mouth opened as if to say something, and for a moment he stopped and stared; then he walked away, hurriedly, out of sight.

  Now and then Abel stopped to rest, and a dizziness came over him and he had to go on. His mind was buckling with fatigue. He thought of the fog, stumbled and rolled his shoulders on the wet brick walls in the swirling fog, and in his pain and weariness he saw Milly and Ben running on the beach and he was there on the beach with Milly and Ben and the moon was high and bright and the fishes were far away in the depths and there was nothing but the moonlight and the long white margin of the sea on the beach.

  January 27

  Tosamah, orator, physician, Priest of the Sun, son of Hummingbird, spoke:

  “A single knoll rises out of the plain in Oklahoma, north and west of the Wichita range. For my people it is an old landmark, and they gave it the name Rainy Mountain. There, in the south of the continental trough, is the hardest weather in the world. In winter there are blizzards, which come down the Williston corridor, bearing hail and sleet. Hot tornadic winds arise in the spring, and in summer the prairie is an anvil’s edge. The grass turns brittle and brown, and it cracks beneath your feet. There are green belts along the rivers and creeks, linear groves of hickory and pecan, willow and witch hazel. At a distance in July or August the steaming foliage seems almost to writhe in fire. Great green and yellow grasshoppers are everywhere in the tall grass, popping up like corn to sting the flesh, and tortoises crawl about on the red earth, going nowhere in the plenty of time. Loneliness is there as an aspect of the land. All things in the plain are isolate; there is no confusion of objects in the eye, but one hill or one tree or one man. At the slightest elevation you can see to the end of the world. To look upon that landscape in the early morning, with the sun at your back, is to lose the sense of proportion. Your imagination comes to life, and this, you think, is where Creation was begun.

  “I returned to Rainy Mountain in July. My grandmother had died in the spring, and I wanted to be at her grave. She had lived to be very old and at last infirm. Her only living daughter was with her when she died, and I was told that in death her face was that of a child.

  “I like to think of her as a child. When she was born, the Kiowas were living the last great moment of their history. For more than a hundred years they had controlled the open range from the Smoky Hill River to the Red, from the headwaters of the Canadian to the fork of the Arkansas and Cimarron. In alliance with the Comanches, they had ruled the whole of the Southern Plains. War was their sacred business, and they were the finest horsemen the world has ever known. But warfare for the Kiowas was pre-eminently a matter of disposition rather than survival, and they never understood the grim, unrelenting advance of the U.S. Cavalry. When at last, divided and ill-provisioned, they were driven onto the Staked Plain in the cold of autumn, they fell into panic. In Palo Duro Canyon they abandoned their crucial stores to pillage and had nothing then but their lives. In order to save themselves, they surrendered to the soldiers at Fort Sill and were imprisoned in the old stone corral that now stands as a military museum. My grandmother was spared the humiliation of those high gray walls by eight or ten years, but she must have known from birth the affliction of defeat, the dark brooding of old warriors.

  “Her name was Aho, and she belonged to the last culture to evolve in North America. Her forebears came down from the high north country nearly three centuries ago. The earliest evidence of their existence places them close to the source of the Yellowstone River in western Montana. They were a mountain people, a mysterious tribe of hunters whose language has never been classified in any major group. In the late seventeenth century they began a long migration to the south and east. It was a journey toward the dawn, and it led to a golden age. Along the way the Kiowas were befriended by the Crows, who gave them the culture and religion of the plains. They acquired horses, and their ancient nomadic spirit was suddenly free of the ground. They acquired Tai-me, the sacred sun dance doll, from that moment the chief object and symbol of their worship, and so shared in the divinity of the sun. Not least, they acquired the sense of destiny, therefore courage and pride. When they entered upon the Southern Plains, they had been transformed. No longer were they slaves to the simple necessity of survival; they were a lordly and dangerous society of fighters and thieves, hunters and priests of the sun. According to their origin myth, they entered the world through a hollow log. From one point of view, their migration was the fruit of an old prophecy, for indeed they emerged from a sunless world.

  “I could see that. I followed their ancient way to my grandmother’s grave. Though she lived out her long life in the shadow of Rainy Mountain, the immense landscape of the continental interior—all of its seasons and its sounds—lay like memory in her blood. She could tell of the Crows, whom she had never seen, and of the Black Hills, where she had never been. I wanted to see in reality what she had seen more perfectly in the mind’s eye.

  “I began my pilgrimage on the course of the Yellowstone. There, it seemed to me, was the top of the world, a region of deep lakes and dark timber, canyons and waterfalls. But, beautiful as it is, one might have the sense of confinement there. The skyline in all directions is close at hand, the high wall of the woods and deep cleavages of shade. There is a perfect freedom in the mountains, but it belongs to the eagle and the elk, the badger and the bear. The Kiowas reckoned their stature by the distance they could see, and they were bent and blind in the wilderness.

 

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