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

by Belinda Vasquez Garcia

  He talked fast, reciting the facts of the massacre.

  “If anyone comes in, just pretend you’re lost. The way out is to the left, then two rights, then another left, then a right, then two lefts. Don’t mention me, please,” he said.

  “I won’t. Thank you for everything.”

  “I don’t see many living Indians. Guess you all don’t leave your lands much in case of grave robbers,” he said, laughing.

  He walked to the door, swinging a tool box, his sandy hair flopping.

  She placed the cloudy Jell-O-like tears under the microscope and placed her eye to the lens.

  Like bacteria, thousands of white…zeroing in on one speck…zooming out…what she thought of as bacteria was really…

  “Well, I’ll be damned,” she said, her breath rushing out.

  In each tear drop were piles of tiny skeletons.

  Her head trembled when she placed her eye back on the microscope lens.

  Slowly, from the lamp heat, her mother’s tears melted.

  No. No.

  She clawed at the microscope light switch to cut off the heat source, but the tears dissolved. The tiny skeletons dissipated to calcium specks floating in the liquid.

  She zipped the baggie shut and dropped it in her purse.

  Now, the only skeletons were the human-size ones in this room.

  She sighed and walked around the floor, sweeping up bones that must have belonged to a hand, dropping the bones in a box, collecting more unhinged skeletons, thighs, feet, and an arm. There was a chest, hip bones, and ass bones. Another set of bones, nearly a whole

  skeleton, languished in a corner, along with a breast bone, and an entire rib cage.

  Butterflies fluttered in her stomach at shelf after shelf lined with coffin-shaped boxes stacked haphazardly to the ceiling. The words were barely readable on a seal glued to the side of a box because several boxes on the lower shelves twisted sideways. The faded print read: This side up. Store in a dark place. Caution. Fragile. Human Waste.

  On the furthest shelf were coffin-shaped boxes, child-size, stacked to the ceiling.

  She jerked open one of the file cabinets and cringed at piles of bones.

  A child’s skull stared at her from the table that held the Sand Creek Massacre collection. A lot of these skulls were child-sized but this one attracted her with its droopy eye sockets. The skull fit in the palm of her hand, and the wide-eye sockets seemed to sag even more. Who was this Cheyenne child; boy or girl? From the size of the skull, maybe six years old.

  This child should have been buried in Colorado or Kansas so grass and flowers could grow over her and a tree could shade her in summer, a place where her parents could have visited from time to time; except, soldiers probably murdered her mother and father, right before her very eyes.

  Grandfather said one should listen with one’s heart, that the dead person’s spirit lives in his bones. She hugged the skull to her chest, released her breath slowly and concentrated while rubbing a scar on the bony forehead. A feeling like a jolt of electricity streaked through her body and her hair stood on end like someone lifted a fork to her scalp. A vision appeared of a little girl, running in a circle with a group of children, laughing and screaming as they chased each other.

  Hollow-Woman pressed her cheek against the child’s skull and closed her eyes. Their encampment at Sand Creek blossomed before her. She was not transported to the scene like with her dream catcher, but could see through the child’s eyes, as if inhabiting the little girl. The name Shy-Dove fluttered from the skull like a bone splinter.

  Shy-Dove hid behind her mother’s skirts and peeked out at the Chiefs Black Kettle, Niwot, and White Antelope who rode into camp and dismounted from their horses.

  “All these battles because of the white man’s gold, a curse upon our lands, have ended. The white man will have his gold and no longer disturb us. Let us feast tonight and celebrate the peace treaty we have made this morning at Camp Weld,” Chief Black Kettle said.

  She licked her chops.

  The chiefs sent off the warriors to hunt, patting their backs and wishing them a bountiful return.

  She and the other children—who stayed behind, besides the men too old to hunt and the women—ran behind the horses, waving at their backs. Her stomach grumbled as visions of elk meat danced in her head. She fell to the ground in mock ecstasy, rubbing her stomach and laughing with her friends.

  Mama nursed baby brother, while grandparents gathered wood for the fires.

  The adults sang while they worked no longer acting worried.

  With her arm circled around her best friend, the two girls watched Chief Black Kettle put up the white man’s flag.

  He patted her head and Shy-Dove smiled back at him.

  “The war is over, children. Colonel Chivington promised these stars and stripes will keep soldiers from attacking us. Now run along and play.”

  The wind flapped the flag about, sounding a bit like a drum.

  Thunder pounded in the distance announcing the coming of a mighty storm.

  Her heart pounded. Hundreds of men in blue uniforms charged towards the camp, some with rifles aimed and others with swords above their heads.

  “The army tricked us. Quick! Gather the children together,” Chief White Antelope yelled.

  Black Kettle raised a white flag but still, the soldiers fired at their camp, splattering blood on the American flag.

  She ran towards her family.

  Bam!

  A club bashed against Mama’s skull.

  “Mama,” she screamed as blood spotted her dress.

  Baby brother lay like a doll with a knife in his heart, his little legs fluttering, and blood oozing from his chest. He didn’t even know how to walk yet, much less run from the soldiers.

  Chief Black Kettle grabbed her around her waist and ran with her.

  A soldier plunged a knife into his stomach and they both tumbled to the ground.

  Her head banged on a rock and the camp spun around her. Blood gushed from her nose and she clamped a hand over her mouth and smothered her sobs like Mama taught her.

  The chief of the soldiers had a beard, a moustache and a forehead like an egg because his hair grew so far from his eyebrows. His eyes burned like coals.

  “Colonel Chivington? You,” Chief Black Kettle said, holding his wounded stomach. In answer, Colonel Chivington twisted the blade of his knife and blood gurgled from his mouth. Chief Black Kettle lay there gasping, “When we signed the peace treaty you bragged what a Christian you are and a Methodist preacher who opposes the slavery of black men.”

  “Damn any man who sympathizes with Indians! I have come to kill Indians, and believe it is right and honorable to use any means under God’s heaven to kill Indians,” Chivington screamed.

  The girl watched with dazed eyes the soldiers slice ears to be worn as earrings and chop off fingers to steal the rings.

  A couple of soldiers kneeled at White Antelope’s corpse and cut off his ears and his nose. One soldier chopped off his testicles and held them up, laughing. “I can make a tobacco pouch with these,” he bragged.

  The soldiers took their knives to foreheads. Father always said the Indian never knew about scalping a human being until the white man taught them.

  They cut off noses, for souvenirs, a soldier said but the shouting and screams faded as her blood flowed. She felt only numbness, even as she watched soldiers scalp baby brother.

  The soldiers lifted the women’s skirts, even the old, and sliced off their private parts. Some of the women screamed so loudly, it unstopped her ears so she could hear.

  “Remember, we need to send the skulls to Washington,” Chivington said. He then pointed at some soldiers who took their knives to necks and sawed off the heads.

  “Empty the tipis of everything you can sell,” he ordered others.

  Some soldiers loaded up the Cheyenne horses and rode off, while others burned the tipis.

  Shy-Dove floated above her body, between
smoke and the sun and a soldier kneeled by her side. He wiped a bloody knife on her skirt then the blade felt cold against her neck. She silently screamed in agony as the rough blade sawed against her skin in jagged lines.

  Now the soldier waved her head from his hand, grinning. Jagged pieces of her neck appeared like someone ripped it from her shoulders.

  She wanted to run from him but couldn’t move her legs. Where are my legs? My pretty moccasins Mama made?

  He set her head on his lap and took a knife to where her forehead met her scalp…

  Hollow-Woman touched the scar on the small skull. Right there is where the child had hit her head. She kissed the damaged spot, then set the skull down and swallowed bile. Oh my god, Grandfather was right about the bones being alive so that would mean their spirits were aware when all the horror took place.

  Which skull belonged to Chief Black Kettle and which skull was Chief White Antelope’s?

  Hollow-Woman touched the dent of one skull and shuddered, feeling the blow of a club.

  She rubbed the scar on the forehead of another and cringed at the jab of a knife.

  Skulls stared expectantly at her with wide open sockets and teeth clenched in their skulls.

  What do you want from me? What? What? Tell me! It was foolish talking to a bunch of skulls, even if it was only in her head. By the expressions on their face bones and sunken eye sockets, it seemed they begged a favor, but her plate already overflowed with the repatriation of her own people, some two thousand or so lost souls.

  Their empty eye sockets disturbed her so she swung to the opposite corner where a skeletal hand reached out. She bowed and shook the bony hand. How do you do, sir or lady?

  She lifted the hand and walked it over to a box.

  She dropped the hand and screamed. The bones moved. God almighty and Jesus, the bones squeezed her hand…but now…now the bones just lay there in the box with bony fingers reaching out like the hand tried to touch the other bones.

  Okay. Calm down. Don’t panic. A hand so brittle cannot squeeze back else the bones would have shattered. The handshake is simply a figment of your imagination.

  This room smelled like a freshly dug grave. It reminded her of a graveyard except the dead weren’t buried beneath the ground. This was as creepy as pictures of the Holocaust and graves unburied revealing piles of skeletons thrown, like garbage, into one big hole.

  She stifled her screams. She must leave. Now! These poor souls were so unhappy and restless they haunted her, whispering to her, pleading with her.

  First left, then two rights. Next left. Right, then two lefts.

  Breathless, she ran up the stairs, made her way to the exit and practically flew out the entrance to the subway stop.

  When she got to the Marriott and her room, she glanced at the dresser mirror and shrieked because she looked like a scarecrow with grave dust in her hair and on her nose.

  Grandfather sat alone on the edge of the bed, staring into space, his eyes rimmed red.

  The feeling that she abandoned him crushed her, as she tore off her clothes and plunged into the shower. Water splashed across her face, mingling her tears with soap.

  She slid down the shower wall, hugged her knees and cuffed her ears. The bones from the museum still cried out to her, pleading with her to take them home, screaming at her in pain.

  She scrubbed her arms and her legs raw at the spots of Cherokee and Arapaho blood.

  She jerked a comb threw her wet hair, vowing to never tell him about her tour of the Museum of Natural History or what she saw. Instead, she would tell him she visited the National Museum of the American Indian.

  Oh, Jesus, why won’t their blood come off?

  She climbed back in the shower and lifted her face to the shower head. Water streamed down her face but did not wash the blood from the Sand Creek Massacre that splattered her soul.

  She turned off the water, rested her head against the shower wall and breathed deeply.

  From the look on his face when she first walked into the room, he must have seen the atrocities at Sand Creek and all those bones at the museum. From the beginning of their trip, he gazed through her eyes just like she peeked through Shy-Dove’s eyes. His magic connected her to him; like that time he appeared at the Pecos Pueblo when she ran away from the nuns.

  I am always watching you. Do not think that because you are away from me that I cannot see what you are up to, he had said.

  She jerked her arms into her robe, sprinted to the bed, and hugged him.

  They rocked, crying, but they never spoke a word. (Arapahoe Peace Treaty Chief Black Kettle, White Antelope & Colonel Chivington)

  Chapter Seventeen

  She ordered room service for their lunch then picked at her food. He stood with his fists on his hips, glaring down at her plate.

  He stood with his fists on his hips, glaring down at her plate.

  Blah-blah-blah. His umpteenth lecture frazzled her nerves.

  “Are you rested now?” she said, chomping one more bite to satisfy him.

  “Never felt better.” He stood with bent knees and arms flexed into pea-sized muscles. He grunted and walked around the room like King Kong.

  She coughed to keep from laughing out loud.

  “We’re going to have to take the train to Boston leaving at three, so we should go after we eat,” she said.

  “I have always wanted to ride on a train. The tracks will shorten our trip,” he said.

  “Well, we would have arrived days ago if we had taken a plane.”

  “I am finished,” he said, throwing his napkin down. He opened his suitcase and packed.

  She wolfed down her dessert and half an hour later they checked out of the hotel.

  They caught the subway at the Crystal City Station, got off at Union Station and walked to the Amtrak ticket window. She purchased two tickets to Boston’s South Station. They had an hour and a half to wait for their train.

  He sat on a bench, napping with his chin resting on his chest.

  She sat beside him and squeezed her eyes shut, trying in vain to black out images of skeletons languishing in dusty storerooms. She still did not consider the Pecos skeletons family, but pitied their callous treatment at the hands of Kidder, who though moved by their humanity saw them as artifacts to enrich the knowledge of the scientific community and further his career. After he found the bones, he became consumed with death. He discovered at Pecos the same wealth the Spanish found, the Indians themselves. So many skeletons to unearth, not enough bones to satisfy him; not until he unburied every skeleton he could find and applied his stratigraphy techniques to the eldest layer buried beneath the rubbish. He grew quite adept at sifting through trash and finding priceless ivory. He boasted in his September entry that he dug up hundreds in the main plaza, beneath garbage piles, underneath floors, and in the center of the church, in the mass graveyard that was once Pecos Pueblo; he even found several priests. If the weather had not grown so cold, he would have dug up every Pecos who ever lived.

  Kidder dug at Pecos 51 years after the Sand Creek Massacre, fishing on a scientific expedition, unlike crude soldiers piling chopped-off heads for an archaic Surgeon General. Technology had advanced and Kidder probably assigned numbers and placed a tag on each skeletal big toe.

  I’m glad they were all taken together to the Peabody Museum; else they might have ended up scattered all over the place with no easy way to identify them. At least they’ve had each other for company. Grandfather would say she was getting sentimental about the bones, but she was just being human.

  She opened the leather case, fished out a photo and examined the picture. Kidder sat surrounded by Pecos skeletons and a few caskets containing Spanish priests, four cardboard coffins, resembling the ones at the Smithsonian. Within each lay a skeleton dressed in a Franciscan’s robe, looking rather monkish. The hoods of the friars were empty because the skeletons were headless. Black holes filled the place where their faces should have been. The skulls were tucked beneath
the armpits of their robes. Obviously, the friars lost their heads over the Indians, just like Kidder did.

  One skeleton wore spectacles. His eye sockets stared from a coffin that had the words, Agent of the Inquisition, scribbled on the side. Fray Bernal, the snakelike Franciscan of her nightmare.

  She opened the diary and read silently.

  October 22, 1915

  We will leave soon, before the first snowfall. Frankly, I jump with joy to leave here and go back East to civilization. Piles of bones we’ve unearthed so far are a distance away from my tent but I swear I heard a skeleton rattle just now, perhaps my own. My appetite is poor of late and I’ve had to poke another hole in my belt. Can hardly wait to get back to Boston and eat a square meal. I am tired of green chili stew, pinto beans, Indian fry bread and corn. I haven’t had a juicy steak in so long I can hardly remember the taste.

  October 25, 1915

  When I entered my tent, my servant fell to his knees. He opened his cupped hands and within laid the feathers of my prized roadrunner. He claims a rattlesnake entered my tent and swallowed my bird. He insists we return the Pecos bones to their graves. He claims Masawkatsina sent the rattlesnake. My bird is a warning to rebury the bones and leave the holy burial grounds in peace. The man then scared the wits out of me. “Look, a ghost,” he screamed.

  I swung my head around to the same rattling noise of last night. I shook my servant until his teeth rattled. All along this varmint has been trying to scare me. I ordered him to go back to Grants. This man sabotaged me all along ever since he found out we are not just digging up the bones for examination and then reburial, but are taking them with us when we leave. I’m beside myself with grief over my bird. I had hoped to take my roadrunner back East and put him on display. It took quite a bit of trouble for my crew to trap the roadrunner with field-mice bait. Tomorrow, we load the trucks.

  October 27, 1915

  Last night, we found the man I fired a few miles from here near the Pecos River. His skin dried up like a human piece of jerky. I am sorry for my harshness with him. I tremble with guilt because I demanded he leave in the dead of night. Then I take another whiskey drink, steady my hands, and feel I did the right thing. An uneducated, superstitious Indian like him might have cut my throat while I slept; his eyes were so crazed. He believed in this Keeper of the Dead business and the bones being alive.