The priest opened the door and smiled when he saw who it was. “Come in! What brings you here this evening?”
The priest walked toward the kitchen, and Leon stood with his cap in his hand, playing with the earflaps and examining the living room, the brown sofa, the green armchair, and the brass lamp that hung down from the ceiling by links of chain. The priest dragged a chair out of the kitchen and offered it to Leon.
“No thank you, Father. I only came to ask you if you would bring your holy water to the graveyard.”
The priest turned away from Leon and looked out the window at the patio full of shadows and the dining-room windows of the nuns’ cloister across the patio. The curtains were heavy, and the light from within faintly penetrated; it was impossible to see the nuns inside eating supper. “Why didn’t you tell me he was dead? I could have brought the Last Rites anyway.”
Leon smiled. “It wasn’t necessary, Father.”
The priest stared down at his scuffed brown loafers and the worn hem of his cassock. “For a Christian burial it was necessary.”
His voice was distant, and Leon thought that his blue eyes looked tired.
“It’s O.K., Father, we just want him to have plenty of water.”
The priest sank down into the green chair and picked up a glossy missionary magazine. He turned the colored pages full of lepers and pagans without looking at them.
“You know I can’t do that, Leon. There should have been the Last Rites and a funeral Mass at the very least.”
Leon put on his green cap and pulled the flaps down over his ears. “It’s getting late, Father. I’ve got to go.”
When Leon opened the door Father Paul stood up and said, “Wait.” He left the room and came back wearing a long brown overcoat. He followed Leon out the door and across the dim churchyard to the adobe steps in front of the church. They both stooped to fit through the low adobe entrance. And when they started down the hill to the graveyard only half of the sun was visible above the mesa.
The priest approached the grave slowly, wondering how they had managed to dig into the frozen ground; and then he remembered that this was New Mexico, and saw the pile of cold loose sand beside the hole. The people stood close to each other with little clouds of steam puffing from their faces. The priest looked at them and saw a pile of jackets, gloves, and scarves in the yellow, dry tumbleweeds that grew in the graveyard. He looked at the red blanket, not sure that Teofilo was so small, wondering if it wasn’t some perverse Indian trick or something they did in March to ensure a good harvest, wondering if maybe old Teofilo was actually at sheep camp corralling the sheep for the night.
But there he was, facing into a cold dry wind and squinting at the last sunlight, ready to bury a red wool blanket while the faces of his parishioners were in shadow with the last warmth of the sun on their backs. His fingers were stiff, and it took him a long time to twist the the lid off the holy water. Drops of water fell on the red blanket and soaked into dark icy spots. He sprinkled the grave and the water disappeared almost before it touched the dim, cold sand; it reminded him of something, and he tried to remember what it was because he thought if he could remember he might understand this. He sprinkled more water; he shook the container until it was empty, and the water fell through the light from sundown like August rain that fell while the sun was still shining, almost evaporating before it touched the wilted squash flowers.
The wind pulled at the priest’s brown Franciscan robe and swirled away the corn meal and pollen that had been sprinkled on the blanket. They lowered the bundle into the ground, and they didn’t bother to untie the stiff pieces of new rope that were tied around the ends of the blanket. The sun was gone, and over on the highway the eastbound lane was full of headlights. The priest walked away slowly.
Leon watched him climb the hill, and when he had disappeared within the tall, thick walls, Leon turned to look up at the high blue mountains in the deep snow that reflected a faint red light from the west. He felt good because it was finished, and he was happy about the sprinkling of the holy water; now the old man could send them big thunderclouds for sure.
* * *
1. Laura Coltelli. Winged Words: American Indian Writers Speak. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. 1990. 151.
TURTLE MEAT (1983)
Joseph Bruchac III
In this strange great story about an elderly Native American who has been living for many years with a debilitated woman, Bruchac writes one of the most extraordinary fishing scenes in literature. Bruchac (born 1942) is an Abenaki poet, storyteller, and editor who lives in Greenfield Center, New York, in the Adirondack foothills.
“OLD MAN, COME in. I need you!”
The old woman’s cracked voice carried out to the woodshed near the overgrown field. Once it had been planted with corn and beans, the whole two acres. But now mustard rolled heads in the wind and wild carrot bobbed among nettles and the blue flowers of thistles. A goat would like to eat those thistles, Homer LaWare thought. Too bad I’m too old to keep a goat. He put down the ax handle he had been carving, cast one quick look at the old bamboo fishing pole hanging over the door and then stood up.
“Coming over,” he called out. With slow careful steps he crossed the fifty yards between his shed and the single-story house with the picture window and the gold-painted steps. He swung open the screen door and stepped over the dishes full of dog food. Always in front of the door, he thought.
“Where?” he called from the front room.
“Back here, I’m in the bathroom. I can’t get up.”
He walked as quickly as he could through the cluttered kitchen. The breakfast dishes were still on the table. He pushed open the bathroom door. Mollie was sitting on the toilet.
“Amalia Wind, what’s wrong?” he said.
“My legs seem to of locked, Homer. Please just help me to get up. I’ve been hearing the dogs yapping for me outside the door and the poor dears couldn’t even get to me. Just help me up.”
He slipped his hand under her elbow and lifted her gently. He could see that the pressure of his fingers on the white wrinkled flesh of her arm was going to leave marks. She’d always been like that. She always bruised easy. But it hadn’t stopped her from coming for him . . . and getting him, all those years ago. It hadn’t stopped her from throwing Jake Wind out of her house and bringing Homer LaWare to her farm to be the hired man.
Her legs were unsteady for a few seconds but then she seemed to be all right. He removed his arms from her.
“Just don’t know how it happened, Homer. I ain’t so old as that, am I, Old Man?”
“No, Amalia. That must of was just a cramp. Nothing more than that.”
They were still standing in the bathroom. Her long grey dress had fallen down to cover her legs but her underpants were still around her ankles. He felt awkward. Even after all these years, he felt awkward.
“Old Man, you just get out and do what you were doing. A woman has to have her privacy. Get now.”
“You sure?”
“Sure? My Lord! If I wasn’t sure you think I’d have any truck with men like you?” She poked him in the ribs. “You know what you should do, Old Man? You should go down to the pond and do that fishing you said you were going to.”
He didn’t want to leave her alone, but he didn’t want to tell her that. And there was something in him that urged him towards that pond, the pond where the yellow perch had been biting for the last few days according to Jack Crandall. Jack had told him that when he brought his ax by to have Homer fit a new handle.
“I still got Jack’s ax to fix, Amalia.”
“And when did it ever take you more than a minute to fit a handle into anything, Old Man?” There was a wicked gleam in her eye. For a few seconds she looked forty years younger in the old man’s eyes.
He shook his head.
“Miss Wind, I swear those ladies were right when they said you was going to hell.” She made a playful threatening motion with her hand and he backed out
the door. “But I’m going.”
It took him another hour to finish carving the handle to the right size. It slid into the head like a hand going into a velvet glove. His hands shook when he started the steel wedge that would hold it tight, but it took only three strokes with the maul to put the wedge in. He looked at his hands, remembering the things they’d done. Holding the reins of the last horse they’d had on the farm—twenty years ago. Or was it thirty? Lifting the sheets back from Mollie’s white body that first night. Swinging in tight fists at the face of Jake Wind the night he came back, drunk and with a loaded .45 in his hand. He’d gone down hard and Homer had emptied the shells out of the gun and broken its barrel with his maul on his anvil. Though Jake had babbled of the law that night, neither the law nor Jake ever came back to the Wind farm. It had been Amalia’s all along. Her father’d owned it and Jake had married her for it. She’d never put the property in any man’s name, never would. That was what she always said.
“I’m not asking, Amalia,” that was what Homer had said to her after the first night they’d spent in the brass bed, just before he’d dressed and gone back to sleep the night away in his cot in the shed. He always slept there. All the years. “I’m not asking for any property, Amalia. It’s the Indian in me that don’t want to own no land.”
That was Homer’s favorite saying. Whenever there was something about him that seemed maybe different from what others expected he would say simply, “It’s the Indian in me.” Sometimes he thought of it not as a part of him but as another man, a man with a name he didn’t know but would recognize if he heard it.
His father had said that same phrase often. His father had come down from Quebec and spoke French and, sometimes, to his first wife who had died when Homer was six, another language that Homer never heard again after her death. His father had been a quiet man who made baskets from the ash trees that grew on their farm. “But he never carried them into town,” Homer said with pride. “He just stayed on the farm and let people come to him if they wanted to buy them.”
The farm had gone to a younger brother who sold out and moved West. There had been two other children. None of them got a thing, except Homer, who got his father’s best horse. In those years Homer was working for Seneca Smith at his mill. Woods work, two-man saws and sledding the logs out in the snow. He had done it until his thirtieth year when Amalia had asked him to come and work her farm. Though people had talked, he had done it. When anyone asked why he let himself be run by a woman that way he said, in the same quiet voice his father had used, “It’s the Indian in me.”
The pond was looking glass smooth. Homer stood beside the boat. Jack Crandall had given him the key to it. He looked in the water. He saw his face, the skin lined and brown as an old map. Wattles of flesh hung below his chin like the comb of a rooster.
“Shit, you’re a good-looking man, Homer LaWare,” he said to his reflection. “Easy to see what a woman sees in you.” He thought again of Mollie sitting in the rocker and looking out the picture window. As he left he heard her old voice calling the names of the small dogs she loved so much. Those dogs were the only ones ever give back her love, he thought, not that no-good daughter. Last time she come was Christmas in ’68 to give her that pissy green shawl and try to run me off again.
Homer stepped into the boat. Ripples wiped his face from the surface of the pond. He put his pole and the can of worms in front of him and slipped the oars into the oarlocks, one at a time, breathing hard as he did so. He pulled the anchor rope into the boat and looked out across the water. A brown stick projected above the water in the middle of the pond. Least it looks like a stick, but if it moves it . . . The stick moved . . . slid across the surface of the water for a few feet and then disappeared. He watched with narrowed eyes until it reappeared a hundred feet further out. It was a turtle, a snapping turtle. Probably a big one.
“I see you out there, Turtle,” Homer said. “Maybe you and me are going to see more of each other.”
He felt in his pocket for the familiar feel of his bone-handled knife. He pushed the red handkerchief that held it deep in his pocket more firmly into place. Then he began to row. He stopped in the middle of the pond and began to fish. Within a few minutes he began to pull in the fish, yellow-stomached perch with bulging dark eyes. Most of them were a foot long. He stopped when he had a dozen and began to clean them, leaving the baited line in the water. He pulled out the bone-handled knife and opened it. The blade was thin as the handle of a spoon from thirty years of sharpening. It was like a razor. Homer always carried a sharp knife. He made a careful slit from the ventral opening of the fish up to its gills and spilled out the guts into the water, leaning over the side of the boat as he did so. He talked as he cleaned the fish.
“Old Knife, you cut good,” he said. He had cleaned nearly every fish, hardly wasting a moment. Almost as fast as when he was a boy. Some things didn’t go from you so . . .
The jerking of his pole brought him back from his thoughts. It was being dragged overboard. He dropped the knife on the seat and grabbed the pole as it went over. He pulled up on it and it bent almost double. No fish pulls like that. It was the turtle. He began reeling the line in, slow and steady so it wouldn’t break. Soon he saw it, wagging its head back and forth, coming up from the green depths of the pond where it had been gorging on the perch guts and grabbed his worm.
“Come up and talk, Turtle,” Homer said.
The turtle opened its mouth as if to say something and the hook slipped out, the pole jerking back in Homer’s hands. Its jaws were too tough for the hook to stick in. But the turtle stayed there, just under the water. It was big, thirty pounds at least. It was looking for more food. Homer put another worm on the hook with trembling hands and dropped it in front of the turtle’s mouth.
“Turtle, take this one too.”
He could see the wrinkled skin under its throat as it turned its head. A leech of some kind was on the back of its head, another hanging onto its right leg. It was an old turtle. Its skin was rough, its shell rich with algae. It grabbed the hook with a sideways turn of its head. As Homer pulled up to snag the hook it reached forward with its paws and grabbed the line like a man grabbing a rope. Its front claws were as long as the teeth of a bear.
Homer pulled. The turtle kept the hook in its mouth and rose to the surface. It was strong and the old man wondered if he could hold it up. Did he want turtle meat that much? But he didn’t cut the line. The mouth was big enough to take off a finger, but he kept pulling in line. It was next to the boat and the hook was only holding because of the pressure on the line. A little slack and it would be gone. Homer slipped the pole under his leg and grabbed with his other hand for the anchor rope, began to fasten a noose in it as the turtle shook its head, moving the twelve-foot boat as it struggled. He could smell it now. The heavy musk of the turtle was everywhere. It wasn’t a good smell or a bad smell. It was only the smell of the turtle.
Now the noose was done. He hung it over the side. It was time for the hard part now, the part that was easy for him when his arms were young and his chest wasn’t caved in like a broken box. He reached down fast and grabbed the tail, pulling it so that the turtle came half out of the water. The boat almost tipped but Homer kept his balance. The turtle swung its head, mouth open and wide enough to swallow a softball. It hissed like a snake, ready to grab at anything within reach. With his other hand, gasping as he did it, feeling the turtle’s rough rail tear the skin of his palm as it slipped from his other hand, Homer swung the noose around the turtle’s head. Its own weight pulled the slipknot tight. The turtle’s jaws clamped tight with a snap on Homer’s sleeve.
“Turtle, I believe I got you and you got me,” Homer said. He slipped a turn of rope around his left foot with his free arm. He kept pulling back as hard as he could to free his sleeve but the turtle had it. “I understand you, Turtle,” he said, “you don’t like to let go.” He breathed hard, closed his eyes for a moment. Then he took the knife in his left hand. He
leaned over and slid it across the turtle’s neck. Dark fluid blossomed out into the water. A hissing noise came from between the clenched jaws, but the turtle held onto the old man’s sleeve. For a long time the blood came out but the turtle still held on. Finally Homer took the knife and cut the end of his sleeve off, leaving it in the turtle’s mouth.
He sat up straight for the first time since he had hooked the turtle and looked around. It was dark. He could hardly see the shore. He had been fighting the turtle for longer than he thought.
By the time he had reached the shore and docked the boat the sounds of the turtle banging itself against the side of the boat had stopped. He couldn’t tell if blood was still flowing from its cut throat because night had turned all of the water that same color. He couldn’t find the fish in the bottom of the boat. It didn’t matter. The raccoons could have them. He had his knife and his pole and the turtle. He dragged it back up to the old Ford truck. It was too heavy to carry.
There were cars parked in the driveway when he pulled in. He had to park near the small mounds beside his shed that were marked with wooden plaques and neatly lettered names. He could hear voices as he walked through the darkness.
“Old fool’s finally come back,” he heard a voice saying. The voice was rough as a rusted hinge. It was the voice of Amalia’s daughter.
He pushed through the door. “Where’s Amalia?” he said. Someone screamed. The room was full of faces and they were all looking at him.
“Old bastard looks like he scalped someone,” a pock-faced man with grey crew-cut hair muttered.
Homer looked at himself. His arms and hands were covered with blood of the turtle. His tattered right sleeve barely reached his elbow. His trousers were muddy. His fly was halfway open. “Where’s Amalia?” he demanded again.
Great Short Stories by Contemporary Native American Writers Page 7
