Winter Count Read online

  On this same trip I met a man who lived at the western end of the valley, in a small adobe house at the confluence of the dry creeks of Blue and Willow Divide canyons. The first time I saw him he was sweeping a large area of the desert with a broom. As there was no vegetation where he swept, all he could be doing was removing small bits of rock and loose soil. I watched him from behind creosote bushes until some quality of dance or music in his sweeping finally brought me out. I remained concerned as I walked toward him that he might be adrift in another world. My father had told me never to approach such men.

  He was pleasant enough, but I could soon see I was imposing somehow. He stopped working while I stood there and did not encourage the conversation. I finally gave an excuse and left. All the way back to the tent I wondered at the improbability and awkwardness of this meeting, feeling that I had ruined something. When my companion returned from a trip to Steadman I told him what had happened. He thought perhaps the man only wanted to be left alone, that I shouldn’t have intruded.

  As I thought about watching him from the bushes, I thought how most of us come so late to understanding any need for privacy. I had even asked the man why he was sweeping the desert floor. He said it was an opportunity—an impossible task at which to work each day, as one might meditate or pray. He said he lived on land passed down with his family, that he mostly read—Bernal Diaz, when I asked, the volumes of Bernardino de Sahagún on the Aztec, as they became available, Copernicus—and he said he did not mind the loneliness. Several times a year he went to Steadman. Occasionally he would go on to Tucson, where he had grown up but had not been in a while. I understood him to mean the town had lost its heart, as a place that is photographed too much ceases to seem real.

  I returned to the valley in 1973, alone, and—to put it honestly—driven. I wanted to see him again. In my memory his grip, even of what little of his life I had seen that day—the rhythmic sweeping, the distant house and garden shaded under mesquite and paloverde—his grip seemed sure, as though whatever it was he was doing was as good as one might hope to do.

  The first evening in the valley I camped by myself and slept hardly at all for the breezes that came and stayed the night. The following morning I walked from the end of the bad road to his house, not more than a mile around the sweeping point of a high, chalky bluff. I noticed as I approached the arbor that sheltered his home that the area he had been sweeping that day was now covered with thousands of stones, seemingly without pattern, though it was impossible to miss the intent of a design.

  It was late in the fall, very pleasant weather if you are not used to the heat. He was at home—he remembered me and said I should stay for lunch, if I wished. I experienced a relief at this moment I could not have anticipated. He had just baked bread. There was celery and lettuce from his garden and a kind of small melon I didn’t know. Its cool, yellow flesh reminded me instantly of boyhood days in California. When I said this impulsively he raised his spoon and eyebrows in knowing salute, nodding with his own mouth full, as though this were one of the less mysterious things about food.

  His shaded garden he irrigated with water from an artesian well. The water tasted slightly of cedars and made me think of the lush, humid fragrance of hothouses. In addition to vegetables growing there he had several peach trees and ten or twelve rosebushes.

  I was there all afternoon. We spoke a little of domestic plants, and the tinkling notes of black-throated sparrows in his garden, but there were long moments of silence.

  In the evening he fixed a stew of jackrabbit and quail. When I asked, he said he caught them in snares made from strippings from mesquite roots. Had he known the Pima who had lived here, or read the work of Gibson and Santander? Or ever seen Harrington, who learned to speak the Pima language but whose extensive field notes lie buried and unread? No, he said, he knew little in this area: his interests outside reading and tending his garden were only mathematical puzzles and playing a clavichord that stood in the room. I didn’t know what to expect from the instrument; when he played it later that evening he imparted a sweetness, a fragility to the notes that evoked poignant memories.

  Though he was not talkative he did not seem to mind my asking questions. I remember thinking of him that evening as a large bird like a night heron, who might rise and glide away through one of the windows and out across the valley.

  I asked about his family, where were they from? Up from Sonora, now scattered. I asked about his education. Through the early grades in Nogales and Tucson, several years in college in Flagstaff, then only reading. I asked about his work. He had had many jobs, moving around Arizona and New Mexico, the Imperial Valley in California, until he was in his forties. In 1958 his grandfather died, bequeathing him the land and a small inheritance. He worked in Steadman now when he needed money.

  I became slightly anxious at twilight, not being sure of the way back to the car, and having come to realize that I had perhaps asked too many questions.

  We sat in silence for a time. He read. I listened to the air moving through the trees outside. The air was so dry it barely held the fragrance of his garden; only the roses, faintly, if one went to the window and inhaled. I was reminded again of my boyhood in doing this, for there had always been flowers present in the house, especially camellias.

  He played something I did not know on the clavichord, which he said was Bach’s First Partita, and a few pieces by Eric Satie, one called Trois Avant-dernières Pensées, and then he made fresh coffee, very dark and thick. He asked me where I was from, and of my life. I was surprised to find myself so at ease. I answered him simply, without elaboration. He was interested in my father. I told him about coming to the valley with him to look for a kind of cactus. When I described it he seemed amused by the idea of its discovery. He had used it to treat depression, he said, making an ablution from its juice and fiber to rub over his hands, which he then allowed to dry in the air. Was he often depressed? I asked. He answered by indicating the landscape beyond, as though the answer were self-evident, one growing out of the other, no more to be avoided than cactus spines or the rocks under one’s feet. “Only once in a great while,” he said.

  I wanted to ask him about the coffee, how he had managed to keep it so fresh. Did he buy only a little and use it up right away? He smiled as if the question pleased him. As one grew older, he said, one learned that with enough care almost anything would keep. It was only a matter of choosing what to take care of. “I have taken great care of a very old instrument,” he said. “Come and see.”

  In the corner of the other room in the house, where his books filled the walls, was an orrery. It looked at first like a standing globe but was a compact set of inset spheres and geared wheels that drove planets and their moons around a central sun. Another clockwork mechanism linked the planets with their satellites, so that they moved relative to each other in imitation of the movements of the solar system. The machine was made of iron, bright brass, and a dark oiled wood like mahogany. There was about it something powerful and immediate.

  I could barely step forward to touch it. He waved me closer impatiently, both acknowledging my awe and dismissing it with the same gesture. He put my hands on its parts and I stood transfixed as he demonstrated the intricacies of its movements. Mercury turning inside Venus; Ganymede, the largest moon of Jupiter, turning with Io and the others around its mother planet; and beyond Saturn nothing—Uranus, Neptune, Pluto all undiscovered. As he explained its history and the mathematical relationships of its parts he spoke of celestial winds—and I asked at that moment if the winds in the valley seemed peculiar to him, celestial or even otherworldly? Yes, he answered, as though this were the very point he wished to make. Yes, they did.

  He stepped out into the garden, into the bright November evening, and I followed as he led through brittle brush where I was afraid of stepping on rattlesnakes. After a few minutes we came to the open area I recognized as the place where I had first seen him. The wind was just noticeable to me then, but it wa
s evidently blowing hard enough at a distance to disturb some of the stones set down on the cleared plain. He motioned for me to keep my place and went on. I could see by his clothing as he moved away that he was walking into hurricane winds, that they snapped all around him, though I could still feel only a slight breeze and hear no sounds.

  He moved several stones, seemed to orient himself, and amid spurts of dust I saw the stones lift off the ground. As they rose from the earth, they began to move in an arc across the sky, turning finally overhead in a dark shape like a pinwheel, some four or five hundred yards across. Now there was a waterfall sound, but only the lightest feeling of a breeze against my cheeks. The man came toward me, acknowledging my dumbstruck stare with a conspiratorial nod that indicated he thought it was impressive too. Perhaps because of friction, each of the thousands of stones now glowed, and they assumed the shape of a galaxy against the dark blue sky, like a bloom of phosphor rolling over in the night ocean.

  “The winds,” he said, “they are like nothing else in the valley. They stand fully revealed from the moment you first see them. I threw up a handful of petals from the rosebushes. In return—this. I just had to find rocks and stones the right size, make the initial arrangement, Alpha Centauri here, stars of Boötes over there, Cassiopeia on the other side. I noticed the winds immediately—really, I think it was nothing more than throwing up rose petals summer mornings, and they blow like this. Of course, the winds here were unusual to begin with.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  He pointed to a spot where the planets around our own sun were visible.

  “This is beyond—I can’t believe this,” I said.

  “Yes,” he said. “Yes, I know.”

  The galaxy turned slowly above us. I stood with my hands holding the top of my head, the tail of my shirt lifting slightly in the breeze.

  “If one is patient,” he said, “if you are careful, I think there is probably nothing that cannot be retrieved.”

  Winter Count 1973: Geese, They Flew Over in a Storm

  HE FOLLOWED THE BELLBOY off the elevator, through a foyer with forlorn leather couches, noting how low the ceiling was, with its white plaster flowers in bas-relief—and that there were no windows. He followed him down a long corridor dank with an air of fugitives, past dark, impenetrable doors. At the distant end of the next corridor he saw gray thunderheads and the black ironwork of a fire escape. The boy slowed down and reached out to slide a thick key into the lock and he heard the sudden alignment of steel tumblers and their ratchet click. The door swung open and the boy entered, with the suitcase bouncing against the crook at the back of his knee.

  He tipped the boy, having no idea what amount was now thought proper. The boy departed, leaving the room sealed off as if in a vacuum. The key with the ornate brass fob lay on a glass table. The man stood by the bed with his hands folded at his lips as though in prayer. Slowly he cleared away the drapes, the curtains and the blinds and stared out at the bare sky. Wind whipped rain in streaks across the glass. He had never been to New Orleans. It was a vague streamer blowing in his memory, like a boyhood acquaintance with Lafcadio Hearn. Natchez Trace. Did Choctaw live here? he wondered. Or Chitamacha? Before them, worshippers of the sun.

  He knew the plains better. Best. The high plains north of the Platte River.

  He took off his shoes and lay on the bed. He was glad for the feel of the candlewick bedspread. Or was it chenille? He had had this kind of spread on his bed when he was a child. He removed his glasses and pinched the bridge of his nose. In all these years he had delivered so few papers, had come to enjoy much more listening to them, to the stories unfolding in them. It did not matter to him that the arguments were so abstruse they were all but impregnable, that the thought in them would turn to vapor, an arrested breath. He came to hear a story unfold, to regard its shape and effect. He thought one unpacked history, that it came like pemmican in a parfleche and was to be consumed in a hard winter.

  The wind sucked at the windows and released them suddenly to rattle in their metal frames. It made him think of home, of the Sand Hills. He lay motionless on the bed and thought of the wind. Crow men racing naked in an April rain, with their hair, five-foot-long black banners, spiraling behind, splashing on the muscled rumps of white horses with brown ears.

  1847 One man alone defended the Hat in a fight with the Crow

  1847 White buffalo, Dusk killed it

  1847 Daughter of Turtle Head, her clothes caught fire and she was burned up

  1847 Three men who were women came

  He got up and went to his bag. He took out three stout willow sticks and bound them as a tripod. From its apex he hung a beaded bag of white elk hide with long fringe. The fringe was wrinkled from having been folded against itself in his suit pocket.

  1891 Medicine bundles, police tore them open

  What did they want from him? A teacher. He taught, he did not write papers. He told the story of people coming up from the Tigris-Euphrates, starting there. Other years he would start in a different place—Olduvai, Afar Valley. Or in Tierra del Fuego with the Onas. He could as easily start in the First World of the Navajo. The point, he told his students, was not this. There was no point. It was a slab of meat. It was a rhythm to dance to. It was a cloak that cut the wind when it blew hard enough to crack your soul.

  1859 Ravens froze, fell over

  1804 Heavy spring snow. Even the dogs went snow-blind

  He slept. In his rumpled suit. In the flat, reflected storm light his face appeared ironed smooth. The wind fell away from the building and he dreamed.

  For a moment he was lost. Starlight Room. Tarpon Room. Oak Room. He was due—he thought suddenly of aging, of illness: when our children, they had strangulations of the throat, of the cure for any illness as he scanned the long program—in the Creole Room. He was due in the Creole Room. Roger Callahan, Nebraska State College: “Winter Counts from the Dakota, the Crow and the Blackfeet: Personal Histories.” Jesus, he thought, why had he come? He had been asked. They had asked.

  “Aha, Roger.”

  “I’m on time? I got—”

  “You come right this way. I want you in front here. Everyone is very excited, very excited, you know. We’re very glad you came. And how is Margaret?”

  “Yes—. Margaret died. She died two years ago.”

  1837 Straight Calf took six horses from the Crow and gave them to Blue Cloud Woman’s father and took her

  1875 White Hair, he was killed in a river by an Omaha man

  1943 John Badger Heart killed in an automobile crash

  He did not hear the man. He sat. The histories began to cover him over like willows, thick as creek willows, and he reached out to steady himself in the pool of time.

  He listened patiently to the other papers. Edward Rice Phillips, Purdue: “The Okipa Ceremony and Mandan Sexual Habits.” The Mandan, he thought, they were all dead. Who would defend them? Renata Morrison, University of Texas: “The Role of Women in Northern Plains Religious Ceremonials.”

  1818 Sparrow Woman promised the Sun Dance in winter if the Cree didn’t find us

  1872 Comes Out of the Water, she ran off the Assiniboine horses

  1904 Moving Gently, his sister hung herself

  He tried to listen, but the words fell away like tumbled leaves. Cottonwoods. Winters so bad they would have to cut down cottonwood trees for the horses to eat. So cold we got water from beaver holes only. And years when they had to eat the horses. We killed our ponies and ate them. No buffalo.

  Inside the windowless room (he could not remember which floor the elevator had opened on) everyone was seated in long rows. From the first row he could not see anyone. He shifted in his seat and his leather bag fell with a slap against the linoleum floor. How long had he been carrying papers from one place to another like this? He remembered a friend’s poem about a snowy owl dead behind glass in a museum, no more to soar, to hunch and spread his wings and tail and fall silent as moonlight.

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p; 1809 Blue feathers found on the ground from unknown birds

  1811 Weasel Sits Down came into camp with blue feathers tied in his hair

  There was distant applause, like dry brush rattling in the wind.

  Years before, defense of theory had concerned him. Not now. “I’ve thrown away everything that is no good,” he told a colleague one summer afternoon on his porch, as though shouting over the roar of a storm. “I can no longer think of anything worse than proving you are right.” He took what was left and he went on from there.

  1851 No meat in camp. A man went to look for buffalo and was killed by two Arapaho

  1854 The year they dragged the Arapaho’s head through camp

  “… and my purpose in aligning these four examples is to clearly demonstrate an irrefutable, or what I consider an irrefutable, relationship: the Arikara never …”

  When he was a boy his father had taken him one April morning to watch whooping cranes on estuaries of the Platte, headed for Alberta. The morning was crucial in the unfolding of his own life.

  1916 My father drives east for hours in silence. We walk out into a field covered all over with river fog. The cranes, just their legs are visible

  His own count would be personal, more personal, as though he were the only one.

  1918 Father, shot dead. Argonne forest

  The other years came around him now like soft velvet noses of horses touching his arms in the dark.

  “… while the Cheyenne, contrary to what Greenwold has had to say on this point but reinforcing what has been stated previously by Gregg and Houston, were more inclined …”