Paint the Wind

by Cathy Cash Spellman

  It pleased Hart that his son took after him in stature, both because it reminded him of his father, his brother, and his own childhood, and because he knew Charles' way would be a hard one due to his mixed ancestry.

  The women smiled or waved in greeting as the man and boy passed by, for they were of the People. Hart's deeds in battle were recounted by the campfire now, as were the other warriors', and since his vision quest, he was no longer an outsider. Hart measured his strides to his son's, so the smaller legs could keep up. He smiled as he looked at the sturdy little boy, with his Indian complexion and straight jet hair, and thought once again how precious his son and wife were to him, and the new baby daughter who had just been born.

  "Father, why does the hunter put blue corn meal on the nose of the deer after he kills him?" the boy asked, and Hart knew the child had spotted the deer tracks by the side of the path.

  "He gives honor to the deer tribe, son, and thanks the deer for his great sacrifice. He tells him that his life has been given to feed and clothe the People, and that nothing of his gift will ever be wasted. The People never take without giving back, for that is the Way. Sometimes honor is the greatest gift we have to give."

  Hart saw his son looking up earnestly into his eyes, and in that instant he understood the perfect faith in his own wisdom that resided in the boy. Just as he had thought his father knew everything, so did this trusting child look to him for truth. He reached over impetuously and clasped his son to his heart.

  "Why did you hug me, Father?"

  "Because I love you, son, and because your questions give me a chance to tell you all I have learned that is important."

  The boy smiled, satisfied by the answer, and they started down the path again.

  "The Way must be followed by man as well as by animals, Charles. We must remember to take only what we need, never more than our share. And we must always remember to give thanks to the Great Spirit when we take from nature. In my other world we called Him God."

  The little boy looked up with real interest. He could learn the

  Way from anyone, but of the white man's world only his father knew the truth.

  "Why do your 'other' people try to kill us, Father?" Charles asked ingenuously.

  "Because of ignorance, I think, son. Because they've been made to think the People are savages and must be hunted like the coyote or the deer."

  The little boy walked in silence a moment, then spoke again. "Does that mean we are the weak ones, Father? The coyote and the deer are always taken by the hunters."

  The question startled Hart with its sophistication; he thought he must take great care with his answer.

  "The white men think so, Charles... but it is true in some ways and not in others. The white men are many and they have weapons stronger than ours, so they believe this means the People are weak. But there is much wisdom the People possess, which the white man does not... there is much honor and truth and courage and integrity in the People that the white man doesn't understand... and there is knowledge of the Earth Mother and her children that the whites know nothing about. So, you see, in these things the People are stronger."

  "But if the white man has better weapons, Father, then he* can kill us, like the hunters killed the coyote and the deer."

  "Are you afraid of death, Charles? A man can feel fear when there is real danger and he needn't be ashamed."

  "Sometimes I'm afraid, Father," the boy answered slowly. "Mother wouldn't know how to fight the white soldiers if they tried to hurt her."

  Hart felt a tightening in his chest; the boy worried about his mother, not himself.

  "I will be here to protect your mother, son."

  "But you go hunting, Father, and to battle. Sometimes she is alone."

  "Then you must practice your skills with the bow and club, my son, so that you may be her protector when I am not in camp."

  Charles Paint-the-Wind nodded solemnly, accepting this great responsibility from his father's hands. He would practice extra hard to be worthy of such an honor.

  "I am strong, Father," he said with shy pride. "Not as strong as you, but I am bigger than the other boys."

  "Then you must always use your strength wisely, son. When a man grows bigger than other men, he has a responsibility not to use his strength unfairly—and he must learn to be very gentle with women, Charles, for we could harm them if we're not careful."

  The two walked in thoughtful silence for a while, then Charles tugged on his father's buckskin shirt to stop him.

  "Can you hear the tree thoughts, Father?" he asked, listening carefully, and Hart shook his head.

  "They each think different thoughts," the boy said. "The white pines laugh with the aspens and tease the little pinons... but the pinons are proud, because they feed the People with their nuts. Sometimes I can hear them talk to each other like Mother can."

  My son is an Apache in his soul, Hart thought.

  "Mother told me we have two bodies, Father. The one we can't see is made of spirit stuff. It's called your Shadow and it hears the tree thoughts."

  "You're luckier than most, son. You have the wisdom of two worlds to learn from. Your mother knows things I can never know, and I know some things that would seem mysterious to her. You can have all that learning."

  "Then my Shadow will grow big and strong, Father. Mother says sometimes you must be very brave to strengthen your Shadow-body. She says it's easy to choose honor on the battlefield because everyone wants to be a great warrior. But other times there isn't any glory or fun in following the Way... only hard work and doing things right, even when you don't want to, but that strengthens your Shadow most of all."

  Hart felt a great surge of love for both mother and child. "What else did she tell you about your Shadow-body, son?" he asked, and the little boy seemed pleased to be able to expound on such an important subject.

  "Mother said you must keep your Shadow very strong, even if you have to pass the hardest tests to do it, because when your earth-body dies and you go to the Shadow World, it's all that's left of you."

  Hart marveled at the precocious little boy and wondered how he could ever transpose such a spiritually open mind into the confines of the white man's constrained universe.

  "Paint-the-Wind," Hart said, and the boy looked up curiously, for his father nearly always called him Charles. "Don't you ever stop seeing life like the People see it. The white man is stuck with only what his body eyes can see, and what his body ears can hear most times he doesn't even know he has a spirit mind, and most times he doesn't care.

  "But you have the bounty of two worlds to fill you up with wisdom, son... and that may make some men jealous... they might even make fun of you because their spirits have no Shadow. But if that happens, I want you always to remember that your daddy is so proud of you he could burst wide open, because you have the chance to be the best of two great people, son... and nobody in this whole wide world can take that away from you."

  Charles Paint-the-Wind McAllister stood up very tall after that, as he walked by his father's side, so his Shadow would have plenty of room to grow.

  The journal had grown worn through the years and hardships. Hart turned the scratched leather in his hands with a kind of reverence, for it held his life between its battered covers.

  Memories, in word or sketch, suspended moments that chronicle all that a man has been... and more. His dreams and aspirations, the secrets too mad to be entrusted to the living, left in testament to the time and place. Perhaps a child or grandchild would one day hold the journal dear, and learn from it of the man who had been Hart McAllister. He glanced at his sleeping family, opened to a page and began to write...

  "We are few and hard-pressed. I can see no way out that is not disastrous now. Yet, in many ways, it is the best of times.

  "The tribe is like a single living entity, each cell a part of the whole. We would breathe for each other if we could. Soon the tribe will be no more and the world will be less because of the loss of suc
h love and camaraderie.

  "I will miss the wind, when I go back. We have so little now, only each other and nature—so nature fills the void, each tree becomes a friend, the warmth of each sunrise a miracle, the wind is a living whisper in my soul. Civilization cannot offer such awesome communion with the Unknown... its comforts close our ears and eyes to God.

  "I saw Geronimo ask a swarm of bees to share the flowers with us today. 'We mean you no harm,' he said, 'harm us not. We will take only what we need, little friends, we will leave the rest for you.' The bees swarmed back, so Destarte and the other women could gather the medicines they sought. Could any president or potentate command the same respect? I am changed irrevocably by what I've seen.

  "We are so close to the land, we depend on its bounty, we see the place of each rock in the scheme. When my Power speaks through me, I am another man. How can I ever shut my newly opened senses away in the imprisonment of simple reason when I now know there is so much more?" Hart laid the pen aside and rested his head in his callused hands. When he again raised his eyes to the paper, they were wet with tears.

  "The end is near, " he wrote. "The Witness waits."

  Chapter 98

  Destarte bounced the little girlchild on her knee until the baby laughed aloud; she was an extraordinarily beautiful baby, with long straight hair as black as coal, and her eyes were a startling blue. From the moment of her birth Hart had felt drawn to those eyes, for even staring out at him from an Apache face, they were pure McAllister. What strange convoluted trick of genetics had conspired to produce that breathtaking blue-violet so like Chance's eyes, he wondered, for he'd thought that the darker genetic component always won out in such mixed parentage, and had expected his daughter's eyes to be dark as his son's.

  "Sonseearay..." the mother whispered playfully to her baby daughter, to teach the infant what her name was. "Sonseearay is so beautiful even the birds in the trees stop singing to look at her."

  The moment she said the words aloud, Destarte stopped to listen; the birds had indeed grown strangely silent for so lovely an afternoon. Instinctively, the young mother looked around her to find where her son had gone. He was a boy of nearly five summers now, tall for his age and adventurous as the cub of a mountain lion.

  "Paint-the-Wind," she called out softly, pressing the baby to her breast as she hastily gathered up all her belongings from the ground. "Charles..." she called, not wanting to cry too loud in case the prickling sensation that stood the hair on the back of her neck on end presaged real, not imagined danger.

  Destarte could not see her son, and frightened, she ran in the direction of the woods where he and little Dahteste had been playing; she had nearly reached the edge of the clearing when a crashing sound at the far border of the trees whipped her head around. She glimpsed her son and his companion running toward her wildly, just as the blue-coated soldier swooped down on little Dahteste, yanking him off his feet and up onto his saddle.

  "No!" Destarte cried, as six more horsemen broke the cover of the trees. She saw with horror that her small son had been scooped up into a soldier's grasp and that he flailed out fiercely with kicks and punches... she also saw the defiant look on her son's face turn to incomprehension, as a bayonet pierced his body back to front, and lifted him suddenly skyward. The little boy, who was heir to the wisdom of two worlds, stared down at the deadly steel protruding from his stomach, and tried in his agony to push it away with his hands. He did not cry out as the soldier tossed him, broken and bleeding to the ground, as heedless of the boy's suffering as if he'd been a discarded doll.

  Immobilized by the thundering troops that whirled past her, and by shock, Destarte stood stock-still and clutched her blue-eyed daughter to her breast, as two-dozen soldiers raced past her down the hillside toward the unprotected camp. The men were far away and only women, children, and the aged would be available for their slaughter.

  Bullets ripped Destarte's body in so many places, there was no way to count the wounds, and she buckled to her knees in the dirt. A soldier tried to tear the screaming baby from her dying arms, but Destarte clung to the child with the strength of desperation and the man had to dismount to pry the baby loose from her grip.

  "Christ Almighty, Sarge," he shouted, his foot on Destarte's dying breast forcing the air from her damaged lungs. "This squaw's got a white kid with blue eyes! Must've stole it from some settlement."

  "Sonseearay..." Destarte tried to say, her hands raised toward the man in supplication, but the blood bubbled forth from her lips, and the world around her dimmed so quickly she never felt the clothes ripped from her breasts, still overflowing with milk, nor felt the rutting man between her dying thighs. The soldier thought she might have murmured something about some- body's hair on fire, but he didn't care enough to listen to a dying squaw. He unsheathed his knife to cut off her breasts as trophies, but the milk that dribbled from them made him squeamish, so he changed his mind.

  Charles Paint-the-Wind clutched his hand to his belly to hold in the slithery parts of himself that were trying to come out, and dragged himself from the edge of the woods to help his mother. He actually got as far as the bad man who was hurting her, but when he tried to stop him, the pain was so great he only hit the soldier once before darkness swallowed him. The soldier looked incredulously at the feisty child, before he cut his throat. How the hell he'd gotten so far dragging his innards behind him, he couldn't guess. Most likely these savages didn't feel pain like people did.

  The raiding party returned after dark to the smoldering remains of their camp, to the dead and the dying. Hart found his wife where the soldier had left her, naked except for the blood from the bullet holes that had killed her. He saw the trail of blood and gore that marked the path his little boy had crawled, with inconceivable strength, across the clearing, in a vain attempt to protect his mother. The soldier had taken Charles McAllister's ears as a trophy of his triumph. Of his infant daughter, Hart found no trace at all.

  A battle rage woke in the one-time white man beyond any ferocity he'd ever imagined; he buried his family in the desert according to the custom of the People—there was no need to burn their possessions for the white soldiers had already done that. Firehair, the Witness, carved a marker after the custom of his own race, and placed it on their graves. It read

  Morning Mist McAllister, called Destarte by the people

  beloved wife of Matthew Hart Mcallister

  Charles McAllister, called Paint-the-Wind, beloved son

  Sonseearay McAllister, beloved daughter

  What fool has said to me,

  "God hath no wrath for the innocent"?

  In his grief, Hart fasted and called upon his Power for vengeance, but instead it was Destarte who appeared to him in a ghost-vision. She stood at the fork of the white and red rivers, ravaged by an angry wind that licked the waters and churned them into bloody froth.

  "You are the Witness, my husband," she called out to him in the voice of the wind. She said other things that were between man and wife alone, before she faded from his sight forever. Hart cried after her to stay, but she could not, so he sobbed silently over the graves of his wife and son, until there was nothing left within him that could feel pain any longer.

  On the morning following the massacre, the braves who were left set out with Gokhlaya on the last bloody months of battle. "There is not in the history or tradition or myth of the human race," a federal judge would later write, "a campaign of such prolonged resistance against such insurmountable odds."

  It seemed to Hart that the Grandfathers of the People must have ridden with the Apache on this last road of courage, for it took fifteen hundred blue coats half a year to defeat twenty-six Apache warriors and one white seeker-after-vengeance.

  "Every man's hand is against us," Gokhlaya said, but Hart no longer cared if he lived or died, so it mattered not at all to him. "If we return to the reservation, we will be put in prison or killed; if we stay in Mexico, they will continue to send soldiers to fight us
until we are no more."

  "We will make them pay in blood," Hart replied. "And perhaps they will remember us."

  Five months later, on September 4, 1886, at Skeleton Canyon in the Arizona Territory, General Miles, Crook's replacement, asked to meet with Geronimo, unarmed, to discuss a treaty; when Gokhlaya reached the parlay place, with Hart to act as his interpreter, they were surrounded and taken prisoner. Crook had resigned his post rather than be party to such treachery.

  "General Miles is your friend," the army interpreter began, glancing wonderingly at the huge redheaded warrior who stood by Geronimo's side.

  "I have been in need of friends," Geronimo replied sardonically. "Why has he not been with me before now?"

  The soldiers laughed uproariously, for they thought the Apache's reply childlike, but Hart heard the bitter irony beneath the old warrior's words and understood what was in his brother's heart.

  "Lay down your arms and come with me to Fort Bowie, and in five days you will see your families. I give you my word no harm will come to you," said the general, who was called Big Wind Double Mouth by the Apaches, but Geronimo had had experience of other generals, in other times, and knew that the long road of sorrows had merely taken another turning.

  General Miles lifted a rock from the desert floor and swore an oath upon it, and Geronimo did the same, for there were no choices left to him. The two men raised their hands together to heaven and declared they would do no harm to each other nor scheme against each other's people; the oath was to bind them until the stone had crumbled into dust.