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

by Belinda Vasquez Garcia

  This afternoon, Jack ran into my tent, claiming he saw a ghost decked out in feathers climb from the hidden kiva. The ghost chased him with an ax.

  I heard a ruckus outside, figured my dead servant’s family paying me a visit, but then I don’t know how his relatives would find out this quickly about his being fired. I picked up my gun and took a look see. I opened the tent and Jack stood there, looking like a cantaloupe was caught in his throat. I smacked him on the back and told him to whip into shape because it’s just the sun that’s got him. We’re all edgy. But then Jack clutched his chest, fell forward and hit the dust. I yelled for a doctor, but was too late. Jack either died from a heart attack or suffocation.

  ‘What should we do with him?’ I whispered. I shuddered yet tried to act strong in front of my team but Jack, with his tongue rolled back into his throat, looked monstrous; his eyes bugged out of his head. I clutched my stomach to keep from losing my lunch.

  ‘We’ll have to bury Jack at Pecos. His body will soon decompose,’ Jim said.

  The hardest thing I ever did, planting Jack at Pecos but Jim’s right. This accursed sun is so hot, even at October’s end, yet the nights are so cold. The only thing we can do is leave Jack behind. We hammered a piece of wood with his name carved on it. Jack wasn’t religious. He was a man of science.

  I asked Martin to write Jack’s mother and tell her.

  November 6, 1915

  None of our vehicles will start. The mechanic’s gone into Santa Fe for parts. This accursed sun and freezing nights have taken their toll on not only us but our transportation. It’s snowing. The bones are loaded into the trucks, raring to brave the icy roads. The trucks barely had room for all the skeletons. Afraid some of the fellows and ladies broke. Itching to get back to civilization and leave the ruins behind.

  Tonight I heard my tent flapping about. I complained to Jim about the wind but he swore the air was still. I’ve placed a guard outside my tent.

  November 8, 1915

  The vehicles are fixed but we’ve had another funeral, a freak accident. A driver stepped on the gas; the truck shot backwards and ran over Martin. How gruesome; the tires cut his body in half. The driver swears he set the gear to drive forward.

  I’ve fired the mechanic against Jim’s advice. Jim’s shaken up about this Ruler of the Underworld business. I took him by the shoulders and told him snap out of it; Kachina magic is mere superstition. I reminded him other digs have had accidents before and other archaeologists killed in the line of duty, and weren’t we lucky all these months nothing happened until now? We’re all jittery after living in this godforsaken land for so many months with all the priests murdered here and the holy church burned to the ground. Maybe the underworld really is situated beneath the kivas and all this time we’ve been standing above hell.

  I’ve booked us on the train for Boston leaving Santa Fe mid-morning. I’ve ordered my driver to stand by. I intend to stay awake all night with the lantern burning. Jim’s here with me; he doesn’t want to sleep in his own tent.

  And that was his last entry.

  She stuffed the diary in the leather case with jerky movements but held onto the photo. In the picture, some distance behind Kidder, was a pile of skeletons. The bones were unwilling immigrants, transported from another time, another world.

  She yawned and stretched. Nothing like a good read to relax.

  Brr, she covered Grandfather with his blanket then wrapped her chest with a sweater, inhaling vanilla fabric softener.

  She brooded at the photo of Kidder and the skeletons. Her head grew heavy and she nodded off.

  She jerked up, thinking herself back in the campground at Cherry Creek.

  She pushed the toe of her tennis shoe against the ashes of a dead fire.

  Old-fashioned dusty tents and turn-of-the-century camping gear were scattered about the area.

  The largest tent from which a light glowed beckoned her like a desert beetle to a bulb. The tent was filled with rusted archaeological stuff. She waved her hands at cobwebs that crisscrossed the tent opening.

  Groping on her hands and knees, she poked her head further in. More copper-colored dirt covered a few ancient instruments. A cot was at the furthest end from her along with a stone bathtub-looking thingy with faded scratches that looked like odd writing, almost like hieroglyphics. A cluttered desk dominated the center of the tent. A soap box, turned upside down, was in front of the desk. The soap box was dusty, except for the imprint of a man’s rear-end.

  An Indiana-Jones style hat lay on the middle of the makeshift desk. The owner must have recently removed the hat from his head because fresh sweat soaked into the band. The tent was saturated with men’s cologne intermixed with sweaty underarms, arrogance, and enough of a recklessness to make her shudder.

  A black spider spun its way down a web from the ceiling to atop the hat. The spider had enormous pupils. The spider hopped to the edge of the hat and snapped its fangs at her.

  She yanked her head back and shuddered at the spider.

  Someone caught her sneaking out.

  She stretched her neck and looked up at Alfred V. Kidder.

  He was not impressed by her. He shoved her aside, spun on his heel and barked out orders.

  Men ran bustling from tents, scurrying around the camp like prairie dogs.

  They dug at fast speed, and made her dizzy from chattering that spun her ears like rewinding tape.

  Ka-choo! Flying dirt made her sneeze.

  Men shouted and dug, and packed and dug, and dug some more. They threw baskets in the air, carefully handled pottery bowls, wooden rosary beads, smashed Kachina pieces, and whatever other antiquities they unearthed.

  Finally, they struck ivory.

  Kidder strutted about a circle of oohing and aahing men. In his arms he swung a skeleton with long black hair hanging from its skull. A tag hung from its toe with the number one scribbled in bold black. The skeleton slung a bony arm across Kidder’s back. A dull-looking turquoise ring circled the index finger bone of its skeletal hand.

  A man walked over to Kidder and yanked the ring off the finger.

  The skeleton’s skull cocked at Kidder and appeared to grin at him with its big teeth.

  Thunder cracked.

  Lightning flashed.

  Everyone looked up at the sky.

  The skeleton turned its skull and gripped Kidder’s jacket so that the fabric rumpled at his shoulder.

  When the lightning show ended, no one but her seemed to notice the skeleton had moved. The skeleton stared at a tree, the bones on its face drooping and its eye sockets flattening to its cheekbones. There at the base of the tree, a moccasin peeked out.

  She tiptoed over from the other side of the tree and sneaked up on the spy.

  He may have been a thirteen-year-old boy instead of a ninety-eight-year-old man, but his eyes were just as passionate as the old man who slept in her camper.

  She stood silently behind Grandfather, not wishing to embarrass him. On his face was such anguish. She didn’t feel any special connection to the skeletons the grave robbers took, but the thought of anyone digging him up and shipping his bones to who-knows-where devastated her.

  The archaeology crew loaded the trucks, circa 1915 with skinny tires, unlike modern delivery trucks with monstrous sixteen wheels. The truck sides were partially open, and reminded her of chuck wagons, allowing a driver to transport more inventory because items could stick out from the sides. The trucks were about the size of today’s minivan.

  Strangers bent to their knees and lifted the skeletons into their arms. It seemed their bony hands clung to the earth in protest or perhaps grasped a chunk of homeland, red dust dripping from bony fingers.

  Men carried the skeletons to the trucks but their dry, brittle skulls could not cry out; their mouths opened in a silent scream.

  The crew tossed the bones into the trucks: men, women, and children, some of them crunching. A few skeletons broke.

  Skeleton piles in the trucks gre
w higher until the drivers climbed behind the wheels and their colleagues smiled from passenger seats.

  Others climbed into cars, the archaeologist sitting real important-like in the biggest car, puffing on a cigar, and flecking the ashes at the red earth.

  Others stayed behind, to clean up the camp, she supposed.

  The engines roared to life and tires rolled across the dirt road, stirring up dust like a bull in a ring.

  Bones stuck out the open truck sides. There was a crunch and a crack. No cushioning to protect the bony truck occupants.

  Nineteen skulls peeked out the truck openings, looking towards Pecos with teeth bared and eye sockets longing for home.

  Their bony arms reached out towards Grandfather, who had his own arms outstretched as he ran after the trucks.

  “Governor,” she yelled in a voice strangled with sobs but it seemed he could not see her.

  She ran behind him and the distance, between them and the trucks, grew.

  He lifted his head to the sky at a hawk and looked as though he wished he could turn into a bird and fly.

  He ran harder, for miles.

  He sickened from hunger and exertion, yet he chased after the bones.

  His muscles weakened.

  His head lightened.

  His lungs collapsed.

  His legs crippled, and he fell.

  She lay beside him in the dust, both of them spread eagle, feeling the earth rumble, their heads grumble and their hearts tumble as they pushed their ears to the ground, hearing the roar of the trucks grow fainter.

  He sat up and screamed.

  Don’t cry, she said but only mouthed the words. Even she couldn’t hear herself speak.

  He rose to his rocky feet and staggered in the middle of the road. Dust covered his face and mucus bubbled from his nose.

  He stood alone. She was simply an observer who counted the wrinkles on his face and knew that at thirteen, he was the last surviving Pecos Indian. The look on his face made her afraid for him. Surely he wondered if he would end up the only one buried at Pecos.

  All alone, no other bones in the ground to keep him company.

  With rounded shoulders, he slugged back to the pueblo.

  She followed and when he returned, he stumbled upon a leather case leaning against a wall of the church ruins.

  He leafed through the diary with a desperate look on his face, unable to read Kidder’s words, no clue where the bones had gone.

  She awoke from her dream, sobbing quietly at the phobia on Grandfather’s face that they would come for him, too.

  Eskimos died and an anthropologist impatiently boiled the flesh from their bones.

  Grandfather still snored beside her on the bench at Union Station.

  She hugged him as if she might soak his bones into her body. (Pecos Pueblo Archaeological Dig)

  Chapter Eighteen

  Grandfather sat on the bench, sipping a cup of coffee.

  She tapped her shoe, waiting for the train due at any minute.

  She closed her eyes, imagining a man at the Santa Fe Station standing on the platform dressed in sweat-soaked clothing of an archaeologist. His crew loaded the bones onto crowded freight cars and with his lips moving silently, he counted boxes of skeletons stuffed like sardines.

  With one hand, he checked his pocket watch, and with his other hand he clutched the fingers of a little skeleton girl who grasped in her skeletal hand a doll that looked like it was dug from a landfill. He planned to give the child to his mother, an avid collector of dead children.

  A ghost train screeched to a halt on the tracks.

  Workmen scuttled about carrying coffin-shaped acid-free boxes on their shoulders and loading them into windowless train cars.

  The freight cars’ metal doors slammed shut.

  Locks snapped into place.

  Kidder dragged the kidnapped child onto the train, patting her skull and holding her bones close to his waist.

  The train moved, rolling along the tracks with skeletons crunching and shaken, rattling in fear along thousands of miles, the dark not comforting like their graves, and the train chugged further away from Pecos.

  “The train’s here,” Grandfather said, jolting her out of imagining.

  “How exciting, we’ll arrive in Boston less than seven hours from now and tomorrow…”

  “Yes,” he said, interrupting her. His voice sounded flat and his eyes looked hollow. He peered down the length of the station.

  “Don’t worry so. I’ve arranged for your mattress to follow on a freight train. One more comfortable night and then you’ll sleep on your rusty, smelly magic,” she said.

  He gave her a resigned look as she grasped his arm to board the train.

  He sat by the window, looking out as if he didn’t want to miss a thing.

  The top of his head lined the window short enough so that they both could enjoy the passing scenery.

  A dull ache twisted her heart at the thought of Steve. She concentrated instead on the rattling along the tracks. It seemed trains snaked across America through the ugliest parts of cities, garbage dumps, industrial wastelands.

  The train rumbled along stopping occasionally, and at other times, bypassing platforms where people waited with biting nails.

  They bought dinner from a trolley and he wolfed down two sandwiches, an apple, and a slice of chocolate cake, washing it all down with a bottle of water.

  He leaned his chair back, let out a whopper of a burp, and was soon fast asleep.

  She closed her eyes and soon dreamt she was back at the ruins and Grandfather a ten-year-old boy, burying his father. Graves surrounded him as he wandered amongst his dead relations with ghosts and skeletons walking alongside him, twisting their hands and beating their chests.

  The winds flattened the mounds of graves.

  Sunsets and clouds swirled around, moving time forward. He returned to the ruins, appearing to have grown a few inches, no longer a ten-year-old but a boy on the verge of his teen years.

  The rocks he placed to mark the graves of his family vanished. Men scurried about with shovels, digging at the ruins and searching for archaeological treasures.

  Grandfather ran in circles, dropping to his knees now and then and using his hands to dig. “Where are they? Where did I bury them?”

  The train chugged across the tracks and jiggled her awake, her heart flopping about.

  Beside her on the train seat, he whimpered, his face scrunched in pain.

  She squeezed his hand and leaned his head across her chest.

  “Sh. It’s alright, Governor. I have been dreaming and you have shared my dream, and lived your sadness again.”

  “Granddaughter, my tongue has never been good with words, but I swear I have always done my best by you. I wish I had done more.”

  “You worked so hard all your life to feed me, to put clothes on my back, to shelter me, to try to keep me healthy. What else could you have done?”

  “I might have treated you like a beloved granddaughter. We could have picked flowers from yellow fields of the sun. I ought to have laughed with you under the stars as we danced by the rays of the moon. I should have looked at you as a grandson and dragged you into the kiva to share the secrets of the Kachinas.”

  “Sh. It’s okay. I understand.”

  “I would have kept you with me if worry had not ruled me. You were delicate, and I feared to break you so I placed you with the nuns like a bull in a pottery shop.”

  “Yes, Sister Catherine would have agreed with your description of me,” she said, yawning.

  “I had a distant uncle going way back, a carpenter by the name of Agustín Guichí. You get your stupidity from him I think.”

  “I’m not stupid,” she said.

  “It’s a matter of interpretation, to use your words,” he said, shrugging his shoulders. “Some say the beginning of the end for our pueblo actually occurred in 1760 when Bishop Tamarón, head of the Jesuits, blessed Pecos with a visit. The priests actually
filed a lawsuit against the Franciscans to control New Mexico,” he said, laughing, “And the bishop was trying to muscle in.”

  “I’m not stupid like great-great-whatever Uncle Agustín,” she repeated, narrowing her eyes.

  “Believe what you wish. Anyway, after the bishop’s visit, Agustín and two friends rode in on asses, masquerading as Bishop Tamarón and his assistants. They wore makeshift costumes and in a three-day mockery Pecos held fiestas poking fun at the church. It was all in jest and after hearing confessions and dispensing tortilla bits of Holy Communion; Agustín went to work in his fields. A bear mauled him but ignored the corn, very odd since a bear never turns its back on food. The bear pranced back up the mountain and was Catholic because he only wished to kill Agustín for his blasphemous mimicry. The Catholic god has no sense of humor, unlike our sacred Kachina clowns.”

  “So, like I’ve always said, Montezuma and the god of the Spanish, both punished Pecos. It seems we come from godless people,” she said, aiming to hurt him as he hurt her.

  “It’s true God has no love for us,” he said, making her instantly regret her words.

  He stared out the window at the passing scenery. “Twenty-one years after Agustín died, the god of Moses sent a plague of locusts called smallpox that swept across all the pueblos, killing a fourth of the population, some five thousand souls. Pecos Pueblo was so poor by then, Charles III excused them from having to pay the Spanish war tax to help the Americans win their Revolutionary War,” he said in a voice so soft she barely heard him.

  He turned to her and lifted her chin, locking his eyes with hers. “I am as poor as a pueblo mouse. I only have the bones to give you at my death but remember that a man of science so valued these bones that he stole them. Don’t ever forget the Spanish mined the Pecos Indians as if our pueblo was one of the Seven Cities of Cibola—in these bones we travel to bring home are pots of gold. For there is no value one can place on family and a man’s soul and in these bones lives 2,067 souls.”