Death Chants (2 page)

Lives Far
screamed.

Navana and Winter
Gatherer ran outside.

They expected
danger but saw none.

Just Lives Far
alone, her eyes red with weeping, sprawled in a heap in the dust.

"What's wrong,
little one? Spider bite you? See a snake?" asked Navana with loving concern, suddenly conscious
of clenched fists and relaxing them.

"He's dead," she
said.

"Who's dead?" said
Winter Gatherer suspiciously, her eyes flashing darkly.

"My husband,
Thomas," said Lives Far. "Mostly it's the drink I blame. It's what caused most of our trouble
too. I always said it would be the death of him. And now it's taken him away forever. But he
wouldn't listen to me. He just wouldn't listen, so he got into a fight in a bar and another white
man stabbed him. Left me and the children all alone."

Navana wiped his
face with his hand, anxiety plain in his face.

"Now I have to ask
you if we can go bring the children to stay with us. It isn't right that the children should be
home alone when I work. I know I'll have to work. Thomas fed us at least, but
with him gone, it'll be up to me," said Lives Far solemnly,
regarding each of them gravely.

"I'm sorry to hear
he's dead," said Navana, not sure if he liked this sudden turn of events. If this meant an end to
her strange make-believe and a return to being his little five-year-old girl, then Navana was all
for it. But he had little real hope.

"We have to go get
the children," insisted Lives Far.

"You don't have a
husband and you don't have any damn children!" said Winter Gatherer, arms thrust out angrily at
her side. She was like an angry snake, coiled to strike.

Navana looked at
his wife, shaking his head no. "I'll handle this."

He bent down and
put his arm around the frail child. He gently wiped the tears from her eyes.

"Listen to me,
Lives Far. If we go to find your children, and there are no children, no Thomas, dead or
otherwise, will you put aside this dream once and for all?"

"What dream?" asked
Lives Far. "Please, Father, they are blood of your blood. You have to go with me to pick them
up."

Navana decided to
take the challenge.

"All right, little
one, do you know the road to take?"

"West," said Lives
Far. "Until we reach the great rock shaped like a turtle, there we turn left and then follow the
stream bed. That's where they buried Thomas this morning. And my chil­dren will be just down the
road from there."

Navana stood up,
looked to the west and then nodded once, having come to a decision.

"Then west we shall
go."

"Leave me out of
the we," said Winter Gatherer. "I'm sick of the whole business."

Navana looked at
her for a moment as if seeing her for the first lime, and not exactly liking what he
saw.

"No need for you to
come," said Navana. "I'll saddle up just the
one horse for me and Lives Far."

"Eat supper first.
Man's going to be a damn fool, he ought to at least have a full belly first."

"I've got a full
belly of something already," he said and he look Lives Far by the hand and led her to the
barn.

While they were
saddling up the horse, they heard the back door of the house slam.

"Isn't Winter
Gatherer coming to see her grandchildren?" asked Lives Far.

"No," said Navana
grimly, tightening the cinch strap under the belly of the horse. "I figure she's heading into the
trading post. Probably to visit a couple relatives of hers that live in bottles. We don't need
her anyway."

"How far do you
reckon this place is?" said Navana, leading the horse out of the barn.

lives Far trotted
along at his side. "Years and years in Indian time," said Lives Far. "It's not far at
all."

Navana swung up
easily into the saddle. He bent down, reached for the child and swung her up gracefully behind
him on the horse.

They trotted down
the long dusty road to the west. The sun walked across the sky. The air was as dry as dust under
a dead snake and the heat rose off the road in waves. Sweat soaked them both and they swayed
dizzily in the saddle with the heat.

As the afternoon
moved toward evening, Navana noticed that Lives Far was blood-red with the sun and the heat. She
was barely conscious, her arms, loosening moment by moment around his waist.

"I've been down
this road a thousand times, little one, as far west as it goes and I've never seen a rock shaped
like a turtle."

With an effort the
child opened her eyes, and moved her head so that she could see past him.

"There!" she cried.
"There it is! Just like I said."

Navana turned and
his eyes widened in horror.

A landslide had
dumped a pile of rocks across one side of the road as it entered Devil's Canyon. Seen from a
distance, the tumbled heap of stones did indeed look very much like a turtle.

"Funny nobody ever
told me about that landslide," said Navana, shaking his head in bewilderment. "I was through here
just last week and there was nothing like this."

"This is where we
turn," said lives Far. "Hurry, Father. We're almost there."

Reluctantly, with
no sense of the make-believe coming to an end, Navana turned the horse and they moved
on.

The horse almost
stumbled as it moved down into the bed of a long-dry stream.

"Now just follow
the stream bed and we'll be there soon," said Lives Far. "I can't wait to see my
children!"

Heartsick and
feeling a growing uneasiness, Navana let the horse follow the stream bed at a walk.

The light of day
was beginning to fade. The long shadows of night began marching across the sky. Now the stream
bed seemed to melt under their feet and the sky was vanishing into darkness.

"Child, in all my
years, I don't recall a stream being here. It's near dark and getting hard to see the way. We
ought to be home. Maybe we better turn back now."

"But we're almost
there," cried Lives Far. "See over there, that's the graveyard!"

She was pointing
off to the right.

Navana turned in
horror and saw a small area of ground, fenced off with wrought iron. It was the kind of fence the
white men used around their burying places. Navana felt raw pulsing terror rising in
him.

Lives Far let go of
his waist and slid off the horse. She hit hard, overbalanced and fell forward on her face. She
bounced to her feet, ignoring her injuries, and began running toward the grave­yard.

"Thomas!" she
cried.

"Wait!" screamed
Navana. "Come back!"

Lives Far ran
through the front gate and dashed through the rows of tombstones, thrusting up into the night
like the pale white stone fingers of dead men.

Navana jumped down
off the horse and ran after her, scream­ing for her to stop.

She was lost to
sight from him somewhere in the cold gray rows of stone.

He stumbled through
the growing dark, calling out her name.

He couldn't find
her anywhere.

His terror and
panic grew. Each step seemed to take him deeper into darkness. He passed by a group of small
tombstones at
the
far end of the graveyard and then he heard her
voice.

"Poor Thomas. I
loved you once." That was Lives Far's voice coming eerily from somewhere off to the
right.

He staggered toward
her.

"Lives Far!" he
screamed.

A cloud passed
overhead and the new moon cast a gray light on the graveyard.

In the distance he
thought he saw her hunched over a small tombstone, her back to him.

"Lives Far, come
away from there! You are disturbing the dead and doing them a dishonor! None of our people are
buried here. Come away, child. I know you are sick in your mind. Very sick, Lives Far, and I am
going to take you home now!"

Resolutely, he
moved toward her, past the ice palaces of cold speechless stone.

"Don't you want to
pay your respects to Thomas, Father?"

He came and stood
over her, like a sad shadow in the moon­light.

"My poor little
one," he said and he bent down to take her in his arms. But as he stooped over, the moon plainly
illuminated the lettering on the gravestone.

HERE LIES THOMAS
MORGAN

BELOVED HUSBAND OF
LIVES FAR MORGAN

1830-1873

Navana backed away
in terror.

"Where am I? Where
is this place?"

"Father," said
Lives Far. "We have to go now. My children are just down the way."

"No, child," said
Navana, his voice high with fear. "We must go back the way we came!"

"But I don't want
to go back," said Lives Far. "I don't want to be a child back there. I belong here."

"Where is here?"
asked Navana.

"Why, 1873 of
course," said Lives Far. "The year I lost my husband, Thomas."

"We have to go
back!" he cried, terror etching the lines of his face. He turned and looked at the lettering on
the gravestone. He knew that the date had to be right, but it could not be! When
h
e had gotten up that morning, it was as the white men had umbered it, 1845, not
1873!

"I can't leave my
children," said Lives Far. "You can't make e go back! I won't go! You're dead anyway now." Lives
Far started to back away from him. "Wait! Listen to me!" he cried but she turned and began to un
from him. "Go back!" she said. "You're dead here. And my hildren need me."

Navana wanted to
run after her but terror held him like a dark other embracing a night child.

She seemed to grow
as she ran away from him. Gone were the hort little legs of a child, coltish and awkward. Now she
ran with e grace of a young girl, as if now seeking the first ground-evouring strides of
womanhood. And then as she passed finally into the distance, she seemed to run with the
full-legged gait of a woman.

"LIVES FAR!" His
anguished cry chased her all through the moonlit night.

The child was
gone.

As much as he
wanted to run after her, a certainty as black as night itself, held him back.

He knew that on the
other side of that graveyard, somewhere in 1873, his child was a woman grown with children of her
own nd he was a tree of nothing but bones, shaking no more wind in its white branches.

Navana stood there
like a lost deer in the night wind. He looked back the way he had come and thought now of the
childless house back there waiting for him, the empty maternal looms, the dust gathering on
soon-to-be-forgotten toys.

Could a life be
lived in that house now? His thoughts turned Unhappily to Winter Gatherer and to the rest of
their journey of days together.

What did he have to
go back to, with Lives Far gone from him?

A man without
children was no better than a wind in the grave.

He squared his
shoulders and began to walk in the direction

Lives Far had gone.
If the living can see the dead, then the dead

can see the living,
this was in his mind.

He
stepped
outside the back gate of the cemetery and his feet

began
to
sink into the ground.

So this is what
death is like, he thought.

Then he made a
great effort to straighten his shoulders once more and again walk in the direction Lives Far had
gone. With each step, he sank deeper as the dark earth reached up to pull the white bones down
through his skin. His skin seemed to run away like water into the thirsty earth, seeking its own
level.

He did not die as
he left the cemetery. He could not die.

In Lives Far
Woman's world, for five cold long years, he had already been dead.

The sun burned in
the reservation sky like a fever dream animal. The old woman stood outside the house and looked
out over the dead land, staring at nothing. There was no feeling in her, no pain or hope or even
a sense of loss.

That morning she
had seen how things were in the darkened room and she was not sorry.

Even now, as she
waited for him to die, to sing his death song, the shadows that had walked through all her days
made her still and quiet within herself.

A lone hawk wheeled
above her, screaming in the sky.

She stared up at
it, seeing its deadly wings slashing across the blue sky like angry knives.

From inside the
building, that crumbling stone and brick ruin that
had contained the larger part of their life together and now held their end, all was
quiet. Almost too quiet.