Felicia said, “Francesca was here for two weeks that first month, Mr. Fortune. She told me in her first note. Just that it was wonderful here, a great moment, she knew who we were. So I came to see.”
“That’s all she said? All you knew? Not about your father?”
“Not then, no.”
“Now you know,” I said. “What else did Francesca learn?”
The young Indian, Paul Two Bears, said, “She talked to my grandfather. He says he’ll talk to you too. Come on.”
I followed them out. The man at the desk was still adding his column of figures. I had the feeling that he would sit and add all winter until he got the answer he needed, or until the answer was so obsolete it could be forgotten. He didn’t look discouraged. He sat back, lighted a cigarette, and considered what to do next to make the figures add to what he needed.
Paul Two Bears and Felicia led me down a worn path, and across the dry river bed. Nothing grew anywhere. The only animals were the horses. There were no electric lines, no gas pipes, and the only telephone line reached the trading post and stopped there.
“Is there ever water in the river?” I asked.
“Sometimes,” Paul Two Bears said.
Felicia said, “When the white ranchers upriver open their dams because they have too much water. The whole river is dammed, the ranchers own the water. They’ll kill any man who tries to get it from them, make them share with the Indians.”
“How many Indians are there here?”
“In the area, thousands,” Paul Two Bears said. “On the Agency just two hundred and ten. It’s all ours.”
He laughed as he waved an arm to encompass the whole, barren countryside, and we climbed the opposite bank. The trail wore up over the rim of the valley, and down again into a narrow arroyo where three hogans clustered. We went into the middle hogan. An old man sat on rugs against the rear wall.
“This man has come to talk, Grandfather,” Paul Two Bears said to the old man.
The old man was short and heavy. His dark brown eyes were alert in a face incredibly wrinkled and creased with ridges that looked as hard as rock. His face was the color of wet leather. He watched me with his lively eyes.
“About what you told my sister,” Felicia said, and added, “Grandfather.”
The word was awkward on her lips, strange to her, but eager, too. The old man smiled at her, and spoke to me:
“What I told her was for her.”
He had a soft, clear voice with no real accent. An educated voice. He was dressed in older Indian clothes as if he had spent his life here, but his voice had been other places. I guessed that he was very old, as everyone said.
“She’s dead,” I said. “I want to find who killed her.”
“Why?” he said.
“To know that the person won’t kill anyone else.”
The old man thought about it. “She was my granddaughter. It’s good to find a granddaughter at my age. This one here is also my granddaughter. She is alive. Is there danger for her?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “There might be.”
He nodded. “You want to know, but you must know already, or you would not be here.”
“I guess, I don’t know,” I said. “Your granddaughter came looking for her father, your son, but what did she find?”
“Only she could have told you that.”
“What had her other grandfather told her?”
“That my son was her true father.”
“She knew that from someone else. Is your son alive?”
“Only my son knows if he lives,” the old man said.
“Was he killed in the escape from prison fifteen years ago?” I said.
The old man sat for a time. He didn’t close his eyes, but he wasn’t seeing the interior of the hogan anymore. Then his old body seemed to sit straighter.
“My name is Two Bears Walk Near, I am ninety-six years old,” he said, speaking lower but harder. “The white men do not know who I am, who we are. We live inside the invisible walls of our ways. The white men say they know who we are, but they don’t, and that is good. What a white man knows he must take. He cannot help himself, it is his way to take. He took our land, our water, our freedom, and our life. He took our tribe. On the documents we are called Apache. We live as Navajo. We are one with all Indians. But we are really Comanche. A remnant lost when I was young, and the white men wrote us down as Apache, so we lost our past. They took our names, made them empty names. There was a Sioux once called Man Afraid Of His Horses. That was not his name. His name was-Young Men Are Afraid Of His Horses, because he was a greater trainer of horses that the enemy feared. But the white men stole his true name. In our language my son has a name-He Who Walked A Black Wind. His name was given on the day as a boy he dared to walk out alone toward a tornado while the rest of us hid. The white men made him ‘Blackwind,’ so stole his name. What no man can steal is his life. Each man alone knows his own life, knows if he lives or only walks.”
Now he closed his eyes. Not because he was tired-I sensed that he could talk all day-but as if to listen to his own words again, and see if he had said it the way he wanted to. For him, conversation was a form of art, of literature.
“That is philosophy,” I said. “I have to deal with the smaller facts. A lost daughter wants to come home, wants a live father.”
“Perhaps home is not a good place,” the old man said, his eyes open again. “I’ll tell you about my son. Another story. History this time, not philosophy, Mr. Fortune. At my age all I have are stories. Our stories are part of our whole lives, not separate works of art. There is no difference between a story and an event. Our stories are your facts, too.”
His eyes remained open, but became distant again. “Many years ago when I was a very young man, perhaps fifteen, there was nothing here but our camp on the reservation. The nearest walls and white men were at Fort Johns. We young men were angry, violent. A lot of bad things had been done to us by the settlers and soldiers. Remember, this was 1890. The Apache were still free, still at war. We young men listened to the tales of the Apache, and we were angry to be men like them. So we planned a raid on Fort Johns.
“There were only thirty-five of us, but Old Nana had once terrorized all of the Southwest with only ten Apaches. We were Comanche, better than Apache. We were very brave, very young. So we prepared our raid. The old men were against us, but they were afraid to stop us, or even talk against us. Many of them were as foolish as we were. All but one old chief. In Council he stood up and spoke against us-we were fools, children; our weapons were useless; we hadn’t fought in our lives; our whole small tribe hadn’t fought for twenty years; we didn’t know how to fight, or what war was like; the soldiers at Fort Johns were veterans; we wouldn’t even get near the Fort unseen; the only way for our tribe to survive was to keep our ways and bide our time and stay away from the white man until there was a new day. That was what he said.
“And he said that if the Council did not stop us, he would do it alone. The Council failed to agree. The raid was to go on. That one old man got on his horse and started for Fort Johns. He told us that he would warn the soldiers. He rode off alone, so we killed him. Ten of us rode after him and killed him.
“That old man was my grandfather.”
20
“The raid failed, of course, we were all killed or captured after a few shots. We went to prison, our tribe was severely punished, almost broken, and we have been poor and weak and forgotten here ever since. But that is not my story.”
He was an artist in his way, that old man-an artist with words, the oral tradition of literature. In that hogan
