Return of the Bones: Inspired by a True Native American Indian Story

by Belinda Vasquez Garcia

  Dragging the ladder from rooftop to rooftop, she used the ladder as one would a staircase. On the fifth and final story, a comforting breeze blew her hair, cooling her neck, as she stood at the top of the Pecos world. Visible from here were streams nourishing crops of beans, squash and corn cultivated along Glorieta Creek.

  There existed two sets of apartment-like buildings constructed as quadrangles—a north complex and a south complex. Each apartment contained about sixteen rooms divided into five floors, all whitewashed, each neatly kept. The pueblo, big enough to house several thousand, was one impressive, massive unit connected by bridges and exterior pathways that zigzagged around the levels like streets.

  The rectangular hollow of the south complex had a huge plaza containing round pits with underground ceremonial kivas, all designed for different purposes, but each containing the hole Shipapu which connects man to his beginnings.

  Indians climbed from the kivas, no longer skeletons but flesh and blood. Women wore blankets tied at their shoulders or in some cases, cloaks made from turkey feathers. Some men adorned their blankets with buffalo hides. She blushed at the cloth covering their private parts.

  Fresh water flowed from a spring inside the pueblo.

  Farmers removed tools from the ground floors.

  Women stored grains.

  The gods blessed the pueblo because she overheard them say the storage bins bulged with a three-year food supply. They piled firewood in high columns, along with building timber.

  A man created jewelry from turquoise and her heart wrenched because he reminded her of Steve.

  Several women made pottery. Others ground corn and flour using a hand stone in circular motions over a grindstone. The odor of steaming tamales and baking bread filled the air.

  From rooftop to rooftop, wooden bridges connected the buildings and there were five plazas in all. At the extreme end of a bridge someone bathed. She spun on her toes and nearly stumbled in her haste to get away. She sneaked over to the other end of the pueblo and peeked at another waterhole but luckily no one occupied this one.

  People lived on the upper floors and her heart twisted at the sound of crying babies and children laughing.

  She peeked into one kitchen and a woman doled out breakfast cereal to bright-eyed children, handing them bowls containing ground blue corn with hot water. Another woman rolled tortillas. The women abundantly supplied the kitchen with herbs and green vegetables. Glazed pottery bowls adorned the room.

  She ran breathless to the other side of the roof and looked down below where a wall protected the pueblo. The wall stretched across both sets of the quadrangular apartment buildings. She counted approximately five-hundred well-muscled warriors who scanned the countryside for any enemies who dared approach. The Pecos Pueblo appeared like a fortress with bows and arrows, war clubs, spears and shields stored along these high tiers.

  Tension rippled across the warriors as they scanned an approaching party about three times their number, including captured Tiwa slaves. Obviously superior in the party, rode a few hundred Spanish Conquistadors on horseback, accompanied on foot by a Franciscan friar who from what she recalled of New Mexico history, made the invaders legal in the eyes of Catholic Spain. Above all else, infidels must be evangelized and their souls saved.

  The warriors marveled at the iron men who rode on animals never before seen by the Pecos. They oohed and ahed over black men who marched with them.

  From her history lessons, it was apparent the man riding in front wearing a plumed helmet and golden armor was the Spanish explorer Francisco Vasquez de Coronado. In his right hand he carried his banner which bore his coat of arms.

  She opened her mouth to assure the Indians the animals are merely horses and the men not made of iron but wear a mail coat to shield their hearts. Man and horse are not one mythical being but the quilted cotton armor of the horse only makes it seem so. The other strange animals are sheep and cattle. That is cannon the black men pull behind them. The shining man riding so proudly in front is on a fool’s quest to find Quivira and the Seven Cities of Gold.

  Don’t be frightened, she tried to yell. They are men like you. They bleed. They die. They wound.

  The black men are slaves…quick, hide the children. Don’t let them harm the babies. Don’t let them separate the children from their mothers. Don’t let them do to you what they did to the Tiwas, burn them at the stake or enslave them. See. There are Tiwas with Coronado, their wrists bound.

  But she could only mouth her words as the sun melted the flesh from the warriors until hundreds of skeletons now stood on the roofs, their bows aimed at the approaching Spanish, their brittle bones no match for the armor of the Conquistadors, their arrows toothpicks compared to the Spanish firesticks, the famed harquebus, the latest in 1540 firepower.

  Your spears cannot penetrate armor. Rocks and slingshots are no match for the mighty catapult which can hurl boulders. Shields are no protection from cannon; war clubs are useless on Spanish helmets. See the dents on Coronado’s helmet made by your fellow Zunis. But her warnings hung silently in the air.

  The party stopped marching and Coronado cuffed his mouth with his hands and he yelled up at the pueblo walls.

  The warriors scratched their heads in puzzlement.

  She could understand no better than the warriors his Spanish words.

  A Franciscan friar hammered a large cross into the ground at the foot of the pueblo, while beside him a soldier played the trumpet and others fired their harquebuses into the air.

  The final pound of the friar’s hammer jolted her back to the camper and her mattress. The dream catcher began to spin and she sighed with relief at the clockwise direction.

  There it was still, whisperings, only this time a smattering of Spanish intermixed with the Tiwa and Towa languages.

  The dream catcher changed directions and spun counter-clockwise and the whisperings turned to screams.

  Was it her imagination or did a mist cover the camper?

  It seemed Grandfather did indeed bring Pecos ghosts with them.

  She glared at her dream catcher. Enough for one night! I have to drive tomorrow.

  The spinning stopped.

  Chapter Six

  The next morning she felt in better spirits and so did the old man. He gave a short grunt and pounded a fork and spoon against the picnic table but his eyes sparkled.

  She suspected he knew about her dream and tried hard to keep his mouth shut.

  “In Coronado’s time the people called our pueblo Cicuye,” he blurted out.

  “Did they, Governor?”

  She conversed with him affectionately over breakfast.

  He even helped her clean up, throwing the paper plates in the garbage can, a tradition he normally called woman’s work.

  They drove out from the campground, still in an amiable mood.

  “I have a surprise for you, Governor,” she said, rolling her eyes at him.

  In Oklahoma City she merged onto I-44 and maneuvered the truck over to the National Cowboy Hall of Fame and parked.

  They entered the building and the glass room where a statue of The End of the Trail stood.

  They stared silently up at the white sculpture of a horsed Native American, slumped over his weary horse, slugging along towards surrender.

  “It says here that the sculptor, James Earle Fraser, finished the statue in 1915,” she said.

  “So the year the thief stole the bones, this man fashioned for all time the agony of defeat in stone. Ah, agony of the soul is eighteen feet tall and weighs four tons. I am not surprised.”

  “The statue is not made of stone, Governor, it is plaster.”

  “This Indian belonged to a healing society,” he said, pointing at the giant white medicine bag. “Of what pueblo did he come from?”

  “He represents all the plains Indians.”

  “Ah, like our friends the Apache.”

  “It appears the wind pushes him towards his destiny,” she said.


  “The destiny of the Indian did not include defeat until the white man stuck his nose in our business and muscled in. All this suffering for the white man’s gold,” he said.

  “And the lust for land,” she added.

  “I feel small with such tall pain before me but I can relate. Some may think the wanderers suffered more than the pueblos because the invaders did not push us from our lands, but our Spanish conquerors kept coming, one after another with their various punishments. They, too, searched for gold and when they found no precious metals, they mined the Puebloans.”

  It brought tears to his eyes when he recalled the story told him by his friend Joe Yellowhorse about an ancestor from Acoma Pueblo who had to be dragged around on a blanket because he had but one foot. The Spanish may have cut off his foot but not his tongue, as generation to generation handed down the story of how in 1598, Spain replaced the conquistadors with a pacifier, Don Juan de Oñate, first colonial governor of New Spain Province of New Mexico. He was like a feudal king, issuing commands from his adobe palace.

  “This Oñate led Franciscan friars, colonists, and soldiers to the promised land of the Puebloans. The Promised Land, the sun baked valley of the Río Grande, belonged to the Summer People who emerged from Shipapu, yet Oñate claimed for the Spanish king everything, including the Puebloans. He is the man who named our pueblo Pecos and impressed our people with the pageantry of knights. He staged a mock battle at Pecos of the Moors defeat against the Christians. Moors fighting with spears and Spaniards blasting them with harquebuses, like a turkey shoot, blinded our people to the truth. I hear Oñate was addicted to laxative pills, so perhaps he had a conscience. Because of Spanish rifles, the Puebloans had no choice but to welcome the intruders and bow to their whips.

  “This man from Acoma, related to Joe, was not always an animal who had to crawl on all fours, but once a warrior. A man’s pride shined in his eyes when in 1605 he joined his friends to hurl several vigilante soldiers from the mesa top at the Sky City of Acoma. The soldiers had demanded a double food tax and had roamed Acoma stealing water, wood, clothing, and food, and would have left the pueblo to starve for the winter. The friars declared a just and legal war for the Spanish to retaliate in revenge for the murders. Just because of thirteen dead Spaniards, they killed eight hundred Acoma.”

  “But their deaths did not satisfy Spanish vengeance,” he said, pounding his hand with his fist.

  “After Oñate set fire to Acoma, he ordered all men twenty-five winters and older to have one foot chopped off, including Joe’s ancestor. His wife was sold along with other women to the soldiers, the administrators and the friars to become their whores. Oñate gifted the friars the children under twelve and he tried those over twelve as adults. The Spanish enslaved over five hundred Acoma men, women and children for twenty years.”

  “After destroying Acoma, Oñate condemned all the innocent pueblos for the rebellion there,” he cried out, covering his heart with his hand.

  “Shush, everyone is staring.”

  “Let them stare. It is time they know the truth about the Puebloans.”

  She rolled her eyes and dragged him by his arm to view a painting of a group of bare-chested Indians on horseback standing on a ridge with spears. The artist painted with an uncanny sensitivity.

  “Look. Here’s a letter written by the artist, C. M. Russell in 1920: ‘I have eaten and smoked in your camp and as our wild brothers would, I call you Friend. Time only changes the outside of things. It scars the rock and snarls the tree but the heart inside is the same. In your youth you loved wild things. Time has taken them and given you much to want. Your body is here in a highly civilized land but your heart lives on the back trails that are grass grown and plowed under. If the cogs of time would slip back seventy winters you wouldn’t be long shedding to a breech cloth and moccasins. Instead of being holed up in a manmade valley-you’d be tailing with a band of Navajos headed for the buffalo range. I heap savvy you cause there would be another White Injun among the Blackfeet hunting hump backed cows. My brother, when you come to my lodge the robe will be spread and the pipe lit for you. I have said it.’”

  “I never heard of this white man Russell. Had I known of him, I would have invited him into my sweat lodge, offered him a smoke, and asked his help to bring home the bones,” he said.

  Tears dampened his cheeks and she took his arm. They left the Cowboy Hall of Fame, as silently as they had entered, like two Pecos ghosts.

  They drove away from the parking lot.

  She tightened her hands on the steering wheel, opening her mouth several times but could not speak to him of her own experience with Oñate.

  The miles slipped by.

  “I have another surprise for you, Governor, this one more pleasant, I hope,” she said veering the truck off I-40 to 7.

  At dusk they pulled into an RV area at Hot Springs National Park in Arkansas.

  He changed into his undershorts and with skin loose as a turkey neck, settled into the Hot Springs, sighing with delight.

  “Ah, this feels like my sweat lodge,” he said.

  She laughed and splashed him with water.

  He splashed her back and they giggled like children.

  She literally pushed him out of the springs and worried about the hot water and his blood pressure, not to mention other complications of his age though he claimed to be in better spirits than her.

  She readied for bed, climbed in the camper and counted minutes under her breath until he returned from the bathroom.

  He climbed into his sleeping bag and they lay back to back, his spine digging into her spine. He may be strong enough to lift himself up to the truck bed, but he felt so frail.

  “Good night,” she said.

  “Pleasant dreams,” he mumbled.

  She gritted her teeth, yanked the covers to her chin and trembled on the mattress, sneezing at the dust on her nightgown from the night before when the dream catcher hurled her to the Pecos ruins. Those strangers in her dream made her feel as much an outsider as their invaders were. Even with the approach of their conquerors, she envied those people. A sense of community and family vibrated at their pueblo, making her feel so alone, even with the old man sleeping beside her.

  A full moon shone through the camper window, reminding her of a similar moon on a cold windy night last year, January, 1998. After three glasses of red wine, she jumped in the back of one of the trucks that screeched to a stop in front of their house, and she yelled at Steve to go to hell. She only knew one person in the party that roared down the highway headed towards Española. Her old friend from her wild days, Laverne O’Tero, passed her a whiskey bottle. “It’s Jack Daniels, only the best,” Laverne said.

  “Where are we going?” she said, laughing recklessly and thinking, who cares where they are headed so long as it is away from Steve.

  “We travel the road of justice. It’s the Cuatro Centenario, the Four Hundredth Anniversary of the first Spanish settlement on our lands,” Laverne said.

  Over the roar of an electric saw wielded by the driver, Laverne hollered into her ear that they had driven to Alcalde, to the new bronze Oñate Monument, to cut off the tyrant’s foot in revenge for Acoma Pueblo.

  Their victory that night was short-lived because the powers-that-be would soon attach another bronze foot to Oñate’s ankle but for one magical evening, when his right foot dropped to the ground with a bang, including a star-shaped spur, they screamed and hollered for joy like a bunch of wild Indians. Like the note they left at the statue that night trumpeted: fair is fair; even if it took four hundred years to enforce justice. Spain convicted Oñate in Mexico City for his crimes against Acoma and expelled him from New Mexico for good but he won his appeal, blaming the unfortunate mess on his nephews and foolish youth, something like that. One of the King Phillips appointed him head of mining inspectors for all of Spain, where he spent the rest of his days wallowing in a bed of Spanish roses.

  A feeling of pride now made her eyes water and
her dream catcher appeared blurry. Her heart pounded as loud as the booming sound when Oñate’s foot had hit the ground. At the same time, sadness filled her that she couldn’t tell the old man about her conquest.

  “He’d just lecture me about drinking, the old hypocrite. Nor has he ever liked Laverne,” she mumbled into her pillow.

  She couldn’t remember now what she and Steve fought about that night. She had been more selfish than filled with any great passion for the Indian cause though she now tossed and turned in the camper, worrying she was too Native American and not only carried a four-hundred-year-old grudge against Oñate but also against the old man. He had abandoned her to St. Mary’s in Santa Fe when she barely reached the sink. Twenty-eight years separated her from that seven-year-old girl yet she still clucked about like a chicken, never accepting who she really was and confused as ever. Many times he pointed out she was like him. He once told her, “You cannot deny what you are. The snake marked you and this gift will allow you to see into the darkness of a man’s soul.”

  Moisture gathered at the corners of her eyes. She only pretended to be tough and trembled with terror at her spinning dream catcher, which hypnotized and paralyzed.

  The clock ticked.

  Her chest heaved.

  The stink of dirty socks invaded her sinuses mixed with Old Spice Aftershave.

  Reddish dust blew from her dream catcher’s tiny hole until she lay in the midst of a dust storm with granules flying about. Dirt piled like reddish snow drifts around the mattress.

  The truck shifted beneath her and the dirt sucked her under like quicksand.

  She kicked her arms and legs, struggling to breathe, physically feeling a lack of air like her death was really happening; her waist was locked in a vise, her lungs smashed.

  Dust covering her transformed into disturbing images of dead bodies. Corpses trampled her, each slammed back by a booming sound, burying her beneath piles that crushed her. She could see out with one terrified eye between gaps of decaying flesh.