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

by Belinda Vasquez Garcia

  Two other skulls touched in a lipless kiss.

  The bony fingers of one skeleton bent into fists, and the tips of its finger bones dug into the palms of another’s bones, as though grasping to hold hands.

  Despite her vows to harden her heart, her chest filled up with marshmallows. All this time, she wrestled with visions of her ancestors and denied them but now, witnessing evidence of their ordeal, such love burned in her chest, she might melt from the emotion. Her shoulders shook with sobs so deep, her shoulder blades touched. She never expected to care so much, but skulls with sunken eye sockets, longing for home, stared up at her.

  She could hear his voice as they stood that day at the ruins, surrounded by ghosts. Your family lived on this red earth since the year 1300. They were born here. They married here. They made love here. They died here.

  Though many of these bones were far removed from her generation, here were the aunts, uncles, and cousins she always longed for, perhaps even her grandmother, great-grandparents, great-great-grandparents and beyond. During her peyote hallucination the visitors in her adobe kitchen had said to her: How we have missed you, Child. We have always loved you. In your heart you have known us.

  Some of these skeletons were Franciscan friars killed during the revolt, the one with a large crucifix perhaps twenty-six-year-old Fray Pedrosa, the friar who stayed behind at the Pecos Convento while his superior, Velasco, fled and was ambushed by rebels before he could reach Galisteo.

  Even the Catholic Church abandoned her people in 1782 when the Pecos mission was declared part of the mission of Santa Fe. Priests rarely visited after that, leaving the people without the sacraments and no spiritual leader to bury their dead. The missionaries abandoned the Lord’s vineyard for more potent wine in rich Santa Fe.

  Some skeletons were buried with possessions to take to the afterlife. One lay on the floor grasping a hoe in his skeletal fingers.

  Nowhere were there adult skeletons hugging child skeletons since Kidder separated the mothers from their children.

  From one box, a small skull peeked out with wide eye sockets.

  “A child who wishes to play once more at Pecos,” she whispered.

  She picked up a ball made from worn buffalo hide, placing the ball, along with a child-size bow and arrow, into a box of little bones.

  On the floor was the remains of a miniature Indian lodge village that must have busted; perhaps the parents upset at his death. She placed the pieces into a box that contained a skeleton, the size of a three-year-old.

  Pecos children buried with their toys so they can play in the afterlife.

  Were any who survived the trek to Jemez here in this room? He said the people always went back to their roots; even the ones born at Jemez were buried at Pecos.

  Here is your family, his voice whispered in her ear.

  His presence vibrated in this room; he had followed her from the Aztec and Mayan exhibits.

  Steve touched her shoulder.

  She turned to him and he hugged her, both of them laughing and crying at the same time.

  The curator patted her on the back.

  “How do you feel?” he said.

  “Seeing my ancestors’ bones is like what the Jews felt when seeing pictures of Nazi death camps and corpses unearthed from mass graves. Look how they’ve desecrated my people. I always believed Grandfather was my only blood family, but he was right. Here lays my family, these bones,” she said, her voice breaking.

  She knelt and scooped up a bit of reddish dust.

  “This Pecos earth is my family. See. I am not alone after all,” she said, smiling through her tears.

  She pointed her arms at the boxes and addressed the bones in Towa.

  She and Steve stood in a moment of silence with their heads bowed, holding their hands in prayer.

  When she finished, she unclasped her hands and her arms hung limp at her side.

  “What did you say?” the curator said.

  She shook her head in the negative, too choked up to speak.

  “Holly asked the bones if they wish to go home to Pecos. The bones all answered her with eagerness, ‘Home is what we long for. Home is where fields of maize grow and ceremonial kivas are. Home is where the others wait for us’,” Steve said.

  “I love you,” she whispered in Steve’s ear.

  He lifted her off the ground and swung her around.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Steve flew back to Albuquerque to finalize the burial arrangements. She wasn’t taking any chances with her family and would accompany her ancestors on their journey home.

  Her last night in Boston she lay blinking at the ceiling of her hotel room. Her heart beat with dread because her dream catcher spun counter-clockwise. She clenched the sheet with white knuckles. Tomorrow, the bones would leave the Peabody Museum and head back to the Pecos ruins. She fulfilled her promise. Why then did the dream catcher taunt her?

  The Pecos Pueblo stretched before her. She lifted her hand to her forehead and squinted.

  It was the crack of dawn. One Indian stood like a statue on the roof of a pueblo apartment with his eyes fixated on the east, like so many had done before him, waiting for Montezuma to return with the sun to Pecos.

  Another man leaned against the wall and gazed listlessly back at her.

  A lone dog barked and a scrawny chicken ran in circles.

  Wagons rolled by the pueblo carrying settlers, trade goods and traveling priests.

  None of the wagons stopped at the pueblo.

  The few surviving Pecos Indians watched Spanish settlers build a village nearby and claim the surrounding land as their own, land that really belonged to them by royal decree. Just because land is vacant due to dwindling population, does not mean the land is not theirs.

  The winds of time blew matted buffalo hides around the pueblo.

  From the outskirts, a band of people staggered through the pueblo gates and into the outside world, blinking their eyes like ghosts imprisoned for a hundred and sixty-one years. Thirty Pecos Indians trudged across their trail of tears. With dull eyes and skin graying like the ashes of their pueblo, they carried few possessions. It was obvious from their haggard appearance that they were abandoning their home, once the mightiest and richest pueblo in New Mexico but now crumbling to ruins. They undertook their eighty-mile journey to the Jemez Pueblo, taking turns lugging their Patrona, a testimony to their faith. Their own trail of tears stretched before them, yet they chose to carry her wooden slab when they could have brought more wild berries with them. They appeared weak from hunger and would probably have to share the burden of carrying their patron saint. The strong supported the elderly and weak. Two women pulled a litter upon which a man moaned.

  Hollow-Woman followed with a heart of stone, thinking it would take them at least three days to make their journey.

  She looked back at the pueblo, remembering from her first dream how it looked in its heyday three centuries ago with 2,000 residents and 500 warriors looking down from the rooftops. Now, the roofs crumbled and in many buildings, walls caved in as if some god took a mighty fist and pounded the pueblo. The cathedral was the only building that stood tall and upright though it, too, showed signs of wear.

  Her ancestors’ acreage had dwindled since in the distance squatters’ homes of Spanish settlers and their Pecos Village trespassed upon the land belonging to Pecos Pueblo.

  The trees around the pueblo were bare in keeping with their promise to keep Montezuma’s fire burning. Ghosts floated above the demolished roofs, looking towards the sun, waiting for Montezuma.

  She opened the pueblo gate and it creaked with rust.

  A flickering light shone from a kiva and she climbed down the ladder. From the walls echoed Alfred V. Kidder’s words from his May diary entry.

  Old Jonesboro will turn green with envy. We have discovered ceremonial kivas of the pueblo religion still intact. The kivas are small rooms below the earth, reachable by ladder. We climbed down the ladder to enter a ki
va from the entrance hole through which the sun’s rays pitifully shone. The kiva lies between the underworld, which the Puebloans believed in, and the world above, so a bit like the Catholic purgatory, cool but confining. Wooden vigas support the wood ceiling and I must snap my hat off to the Indian genius in building such a spectacular cellar. There is even a fire pit. I am claustrophobic, a curse for an archaeologist. I began to hyperventilate as I wondered how it might have been when Indians and smoke filled the kiva, though there is that entrance hole, which acts as a ventilator and there is a deflector. It must have been elbowroom only then. The kiva has a hole in the floor, the Shipapu, which represents the place from which humans first emerged into daylight. The Indians believe spirits dwell there still. I expected one of these ghosts to rise from the hole and grab my ankle. I felt buried alive in this hellhole and yelled for Jack to come help me exit the kiva. My legs shook so bad when I climbed to the open air Jack helped me to my tent. I now know what an ant feels like.

  Hollow-Woman saw no such spirits but could make out from the flicker of a dying fire, twelve virgins sleeping. The virgins were supposed to keep the fire continuously burning until Montezuma’s return. She nudged one lazy virgin with her toe, but the girl would not awaken.

  She ripped a piece of fabric from the woman’s skirt and used this to protect her fingers as she grabbed a cinder from the fire of Montezuma’s Altar of the Sun.

  It seemed her theft had consequences. Montezuma’s fire fizzled to ashes and left her in darkness, screaming, and struggling to find the ladder. She tripped over perhaps a virgin or two in her scramble to emerge from the blackness of the kiva and into the light.

  The pueblo appeared even more haunting with no habitation. All the storage bins were empty of grain.

  She opened the church door and an old man with white hair to his knees shocked her. Beside him, a goat chewed on a wooden floor.

  “Welcome. You are just in time for lunch,” he said.

  He offered her a wooden bowl filled with blue corn meal, brimming with goat’s milk.

  She had no appetite but did not want to offend him so sat cross-legged on the floor and ate a few spoonfuls, keeping her eye on the decaying Catholic Church altar.

  A hissing noise came from the old man and he flicked his long tongue at her. He transformed into a snake with feathers and swiveled towards the church door, slithering across the floor with a swishing noise.

  She threw her bowl and ran after him.

  The snake seemed to grow larger but moved so fast she couldn’t catch it as it disappeared in a dust cloud the size of a tornado.

  She ran through the gate to catch up with the others and tell them she found the Altar of the Sun and their feathered serpent. If they would come back and relight Montezuma’s fire, all would prosper.

  “See, I saved a piece in case we can’t find the kiva again,” she yelled and held up the cold cinder.

  They paid no attention as they trudged up the trail with their shoulders slumped, dragging their feet.

  Huffing and puffing, it was not much of a stretch to catch up with the starving Indians.

  Along the way, she passed three who had succumbed to hunger. The others must not have had the strength to bury them.

  She skidded to a stop where a man lay, gasping for breath.

  My God, he looks just like Grandfather.

  A younger man, who also bore a resemblance to Grandfather, held in his arms the dying old man whose ribs stuck out of his chest.

  “Be strong, my son. Here is our ceremonial staff,” he said, handing his son the silver staff which was not as tarnished as in present day. “You must guard it dearly, for you are now the keeper of the pride of the Pecos. If you do not survive, pass the staff to one of your cousins in this order: Dragon-Fly, Jose, Snow-Eagle-Down, Agustín, and Flint Society Rainbow,” he said.

  “I will, Father.”

  The old man gave a deep sigh and then his head fell back.

  “Father,” the younger man moaned, tearing at his shirt.

  She could not stand to watch this man, probably her great-great-great-great-grandfather abandon his father’s body. The dead man looked too much like Grandfather.

  While the others straggled along the path to Jemez, she dug in the dirt with her hands then gave up because it was impossible to dig a grave this way. She unbuttoned her blouse and covered the old man with it.

  She dropped the large cold cinder in her pocket and stumbled towards the direction of Pecos, clothed only in a camisole and jeans.

  When she got to the pueblo gates, Grandfather barred her way.

  “I am all business today,” he said, running his hands down his black, double-breasted suit with pin-striped vest and red tie. He wore the diamond-studded cuff links that he wore the night they danced. “The pueblo is closed until the funeral decorations are ready.”

  “How many survived?” she said, her voice choking with tears.

  “Only thirteen survived the journey to Jemez Pueblo. Seventeen collapsed and died, dotting the trail to Jemez with corpses,” he said.

  “Why did nobody care that they were starving? Pecos Village was close enough, filled with Spanish settlers who encroached on the lands of our people.”

  “Pecos became of no use to other pueblos, the plains Indians, the Spanish settlers, the governor of New Mexico, or the Catholic church. Such is the lot of the poor,” he said.

  “Jemez cared about Pecos.”

  “Because our brothers’ language is also Towa so they could hear our cries. Isn’t it tragic how lack of communication turns other human beings into castaways? Do you still have the burned out cinder from Montezuma’s sacred fire or did you throw it away like trash?”

  “Of course, I have the cinder. I would never throw magic away.”

  “Good. Perhaps one day, you will relight the fire at the Altar of the Sun. Here, this will fortify you so that you may finish your journey to bury your family.”

  She drank the brew he offered her.

  With her last swallow, the dream catcher’s wild spinning woke her in the hotel room and tears parched her throat.

  Sunlight streamed through the window and on the pillow next to her, sparkled the cinder from Montezuma’s fire, appearing like a black pearl on the white pillowcase, like Cinderella offered a jewel.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  On May 19, a cloudy sixty degrees in Boston, a 53-foot semi-trailer filled with the bones of 2,067 men, women, and children, wound its way down Highway 90.

  Each turn of the wheels distanced the Pecos bones from their foster home. The journey to the Pecos ruins would take about three days. She would bury her family and once more be the last of her kind above the earth.

  I mustn’t think of him as dead even though he rides in the trailer, bouncing on his mattress in a wooden coffin that Steve shipped from home. The coffin was made from pine trees of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, as he requested the day she drove him to Pecos and he told her about the bones.

  He united with his Pecos skeletons with centuries of chit-chat between them. She imagined him sitting in the trailer on one of the boxes, his face shining with a healthy glow, only one wrinkle on his face. He smoked his ceremonial pipe with his arm around a relative or new friend. He threw back his head and laughed at some joke. He slapped his buddy on the back and stomped his foot as joyous tears streamed down his cheeks.

  She wanted to believe with all her heart that he at last found the peace that eluded him all his life. She had a new wrinkle on her face that showed up the day he died.

  She sat next to the driver, a rough-looking man but very nice with ice-blue eyes. She didn’t speak much during the trip. While the rig roared down the interstates, she closed her eyes and leaned her head back. The bones spoke to her and she answered. Every once in a while she would chant, singing some prayer in Towa.

  “Please keep the radio off,” she requested.

  She communed with her ancestors as the rig’s wheels spun faster towards New Mexic
o, sounding a lot like weaving machines of old, when the women made wool for winter blankets. The truck and rig sounded like sixteen weaving machines, one machine for each wheel, spinning a path towards home.

  When they stopped in Las Vegas, New Mexico for lunch, they felt restlessness in the air.

  “It’s coming from the bones. The missing ones smell the scent of Pecos. It has been eighty-four years,” she said to the driver.

  Her chanting grew louder as the driver pointed his rig southwest on I-25 and they began the last forty-five miles to the upper Pecos Valley of New Mexico.

  She instructed the driver to take the Rowe exit interchange 307.

  The rig traveled north on New Mexico 63, the three miles to the Pecos Pueblo.

  It seemed the trailer pulsed like hearts beating in a cardiac ward. At last, the bones were home.

  She pointed out to him the Pecos ruins that rose from a rocky knoll in the center of a wide fertile valley near the Pecos River that flowed from the pine-covered Sangre de Cristo Mountains. “Part of the convento where the friars lived still stands,” she said, jabbing her finger towards a bit of wall. “The friars’ workshops, tanneries, stables, corrals, kitchen, gardens and dining room melted back into the earth from where they came. I’ve seen this place in my dreams, as it once was, the land of a glorious civilization. Pecos Pueblo was wonderful to look at in those days. My people’s ways were so different; the Spanish rammed their own values and way of life down their throats. By the time the Comanches made peace with Pecos in 1786, hundreds had died at their hands over nearly a century of harassment. Trade resumed with Pecos for a dozen years and it looked like we were on our way to recovery but then the Comancheros came.”

  “What are Comancheros?” he said, picking at his teeth with a toothpick.

  “The Spanish who did not trade at fairs but transported their goods directly to the Comanches, who had by then replaced the Apaches, through brute force, as the main exporters and importers. Comancheros also traded directly with the pueblos and became the middlemen between the plains Indians, the Spanish, and the pueblos. It meant the beginning of the end for my people until they had no choice but to leave or starve. No one has lived here for the past 161 years, and much of the adobe melted back into the soil from whence it came until all that remains is a ghost pueblo. It’s almost a dream now, as if Pecos never was. The proof of its existence though is the bones in your trailer.”