Silence the Dead

by David Crossman

  “This letter,” said Murphy, smiling and holding up an envelope. “This letter will explain everything.”

  “Will it?” Thomas took the envelope and read the address. ‘Master Thomas Conlan, Boston, Massachusetts, United States of America.’ Then, in the lower left hand corner, ‘Addressee Unknown. Return to Sender.’ He looked up at the priest, who returned the look with a simpleton’s smile. He withdrew the letter, smoothing it out on his knee. The priest’s motive energy charged the atmosphere, but Thomas couldn’t be rushed; first, because he was still a ponderous reader and second, because he needed to get his reading glasses from his pocket. As he went about this simple task, the priest was on the verge of exploding but, with effort, refrained from speaking until the old man finished reading, which he did aloud.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  “ ‘July 28th, 1898

  Dear Mr. Conlan,

  “ ‘My name is Father Duffy. I am serving as interim priest here in Farran since Father O’Shield’s death. I administered last rites to the good Father, and heard his final confession. It is that confession about which I am writing.

  “ ‘You are aware that a priest must vow never to repeat things said in confession. That is why Father O’Shields could never write you of this matter himself. However, since the confessor left no progeny . . . ’ ”

  Thomas raised questioning eyes at Murphy.

  “It means children,” the priest explained.

  “Ah,” Thomas nodded.

  “ ‘Since the confessor left no children and Father O’Shields had no desire to take to the grave a secret whose demise would mean the continuance of a great injustice . . . ’ ”

  Again Thomas raised his eyes.

  “Read on,” said Murphy, “it’ll become clear.”

  Thomas doubted, but read on.

  “ ‘ . . . great injustice, he begged that I make what follows known to you. I wrote it down exactly as he said it, and now transcribe it for your benefit.

  “ ‘Thomas, my boy, I pray this letter finds you. You will never know how often my dreams were visited by the image of you, Tiffin, and little Katy walking away down the lane. I was wrong, most grievously wrong, to let you leave. My duty, before Christ, was to extend to you all the protection of the church, slim as our resources may have been – whatever the landlord might say – for however long it might take to establish you safely elsewhere.’” Thomas began to fold the letter. “He’s got nothin’ to apologize to me for, Father. He was good to us. Saved our lives, more than likely, and things in America . . . ‘ ”

  Murphy clasped Thomas’ hand urgently. “Read on, Mr. Conlan. Please. Read on.”

  Thomas looked down at the letter, unfolded it, and continued. “ ‘On November 4th, 1893, Ledger Flanagan fell off Headly Cliff and suffered fatal injuries.’

  “Flanagan was the landlord’s foreman,” Thomas explained.

  “I see. Go on.”

  “ ‘Before he died, he asked me to hear his confession. For years I have kept its terrible burden to myself. Now, as I lay dying, I realize I have a greater responsibility to my fellow man than to a man-made vow. I pray your forgiveness, and that of God the Father, for my false allegiance. The substance of Flanagan’s confession is this: first, that – having loved your mother, (so he fancied) from a young age – he forced himself upon her one night as she was returning from a ladies’ meeting in the lower town. He told her that, if she ever spoke of it to anyone, he would deny it, and have the landlord evict you all from your home. He died believing that your sister, Katy, is his daughter, the offspring of this unfortunate union.’ ”

  Thomas dropped the letter to his knee and stared at the wall for a long time. His mother and Flanagan? Katy? He was too old and experienced of life to let his blood boil in anger, but he hurt desperately for what his mother must have gone through. In time, he picked up the letter, adjusted his glasses, and plodded on.

  “ ‘Further, and more terrible, Flanagan confessed to killing your father.’ ”

  Thomas’ heart skipped a beat.

  “Can I get you something?” Murphy asked. “I’ve got some brandy.”

  “I think . . . yes. I’ll take some,” said Thomas. He held out his hand and waited. In a moment, Murphy gave him a glass containing a hefty measure of pungent, honey-colored fluid, which Thomas drank off at a swallow. It burned his throat and esophagus and he choked, but somehow his head seemed clearer. “That means . . . ”

  “Yes, it does,” said Murphy. “Read on, there’s not much more.”

  “ ‘It happened one night at the tavern in Cloghane – six long months after your mother had died – where Flanagan, in a drunken state and long haunted by the demons of his sin, misunderstood a chance comment someone made to your father in regards to little Katy and the Song of the Landlord’s Daughter. Somehow, it made him think that Josh had found out. He feared for his life, for he’d met your father’s anger before.

  “ ‘On the way home that night, he waylaid your dad and shot him. Then, knowing you and the children were at the MacAuley’s, he took the body to your house, put the famous gun in your father’s hand, and . . . you know the rest.

  “ ‘I pray this letter finds you, my boy, and that you can return and put Joshua’s body beside his wife, your blessed mother, where it belongs. No one here knows exactly where he’s buried, though I have looked, believe me. There is, of course, no record in the church register, and the bog is so grown-over these days, and so long unused, it baffles my memory.

  “ ‘Please forgive me, my dear Thomas, and Tiffin, and Katy. I must now answer to God.’ ”

  Father Murphy was bursting to be helpful. “Of course, once you locate the . . . your father’s grave, we’ll have him . . . his remains, that is . . . moved at once.”

  Thomas didn’t respond for a minute. Something in him wanted to say, “If he wasn’t good enough for you then, you’re not good enough for him now.” But he knew pride’s voice by now, and that its fruit was always bitter. “Thank you, Father. That’s very kind. I’ll see to it first thing in the mornin’. Perhaps you’d come along with me?”

  “Of course! I’d be honored. Eight o’clock, shall we say?”

  “Eight o’clock it is.”

  “Pardon my asking, but where will you be spending the night? I have a spare bedroom in the . . . ”

  Thomas held up his hand. “That won’t be necessary, Father. I think I’ll wander up the hill to the old place.”

  “The old place? You mean . . . the old croft?”

  “Aye.”

  “But . . . it’s nothing but a ruin now.”

  Thomas smiled as he made his way to the door. “Ain’t we all?”

  “Yes, but, I mean, there’s no roof, only tumble-down walls. You’ll be out in the open!”

  “Imagine that,” said Thomas, and with a final tip of the hat, he departed.

  Father Murphy sat and listened as the old man’s footsteps resounded through the church. The knocker on the big front door clattered its customary farewell as it opened and closed behind him. “Remarkable,” he said. “I wonder how he lost his arm.”

  Conllan Ridge, New Mexico

  February 4th, 1885

  The first time he saw them, he thought they were ghosts. A deceptive early thaw had brought game out on the mountain, and the Jicarilla had followed them north from their winter grounds in Abiquiu. Of course, Thomas had heard their story from Soledad, but even she, being half Spanish, stood outside the circle of their most intimate sufferings.

  “There are two bands – what you would call clans – in the tribe,” Soledad had explained one night. They were sitting on the porch of their new cabin, he in the rocking chair he had built with his own hands, and she cross-legged on the floor at his feet, as she preferred, loosely wrapped in her Navajo blanket. He wondered if her refusal to sit in the chair was an indication of her opinion of his carpentry skills.

  Thomas, though his personal domain extended only to the ten acres of rough, ridgetop
land T.D. and Josefina had given them as a wedding present – hardly enough to qualify as a ranch in the New Mexico scale of things – was, nonetheless, master of a view encompassing thousands of square miles of unimaginably beautiful wilderness. A tapestry extending to the jagged horizon in every direction, whose aspects changed from hour to hour, season after season, year in and year out. Never twice the same.

  “The Olleros and the Llaneros.”

  Thomas looked down at the top of his wife’s head. “Did you say something?”

  The head shook slowly from side to side. “You asked me about the Jicarillas.”

  “Oh, right,” he said. “My mind was wandering.”

  Soledad lay her weaving in her lap, and she looked out over the valley. “There is plenty of room to wander.”

  “Sorry. I really want to know.”

  And so, on that evening and similar evenings, she would tell of her people, the Apaches, their tribal groups – the Cuartelojos, Carlanas, Sierra Blancas, Achos, Calchufines, Palomas and, of course, the Jicarillas – the bands of each tribe, the families of each band, the stories of each family and their Born-To relationships. He was amazed how her memory roamed easily back and forth across hundreds of years as if there were no impassable border between the past and present; how she would recall names and events as well as tribal practices and rituals whose roots and meaning were unrecorded in any written language; and chillingly, how she would narrate what to him were atrocities, but to her people, the glories of battle.

  Her telling was unadorned by superfluous words, yet in its simplicity the story stirred Thomas’ imagination, binding him with the blood and bone of her people. Most of all, he learned of the struggles of the Ollero, Soledad’s band, to obtain a homeland from the U.S. government. She could quote from memory a report written by Sam A. Russell – the special agent of Indian affairs in Tierra Amarilla – to his superiors in Washington:

  “ ‘The Jicarilla have no home. As a people, they have no country they can call their own. No incentive to improvement has been placed before them. They have been left by a paternal government without a home, and compelled to become wanderers, by being driven from place to place when they have attempted to locate and cultivate the soil. For years they have, through me, been begging a home: a place where they could farm and have schools for their children. It has thus far been denied them.”

  “The Anglos have their Declaration of Independence,” she said in conclusion. “This is the Jicarilla Declaration of Sorrows.”

  Still, somehow, it had all seemed ancient history to Thomas. By the time he and the grading crew had battled their way over the mountains through sheer, brute, back-breaking labor, arriving in Chama in December of ’80 – just ahead of the tie, rail, and spike crews – it was a rough-and-tumble railroad town: the lawless, sometimes violent embryo struggling to give birth to a city to advance the inevitable tide of Anglo civilization that had created Boston, New York, St. Louis, and Colorado Springs. He’d subconsciously taken it for granted as destiny that the west should be transformed in the American image.

  He knew nothing of the Spanish heritage of the southwest, other than that his Uncle Theo had fought for the Mexicans against the Americans many years ago. Why? Who knew? Certainly he didn’t. He knew even less of the Indians’ still more ancient roots in the land. His preconception had been that they were barbarians who would either benefit from intercourse with civilization, or perish. That’s the way it was and always had been. He remembered the stories Tiffin read from his history books.

  It was not until Soledad, upon hearing his own history, drew a startling parallel between the Irish and the Jicarilla that he came to have a more balanced view of the Indians’ situation. She was right. Just like the Indians, the Irish had been a subject people for hundreds of years, largely tribal, and for that reason, regarded as wild and barbaric by the English. At the same time, in his own view of the Indians, he was able to appreciate the mindset of the English toward the Irish.

  It was all based on ignorance, defined by differences.

  One night, after a long conversation on these lines, Thomas dropped down beside his wife, wrapped her in his arms, and declared: “But I’ll tell you this, my Solly, there’s one big difference between Irish and Indian.”

  She never asked, ‘What’s that?’ to such questions, as might be expected of a woman; instead, as might be expected of an Indian, she waited.

  “There is no joy in the Indians’ suffering.”

  “Joy?”

  “Aye. Name me one good, rollickin’ Indian sufferin’ song.”

  She tilted her head and arched her eyebrows.

  “Can’t, can ye? Well, I could start singin’ rollickin’, mournful, tear-your-heart out, foot-tappin’ Irish songs right now, and keep singin’ ‘em ‘til . . . ‘til Sadie stops swearin’ . . . an’ never sing the same one twice!” And he got the wheezy old squeezebox he’d picked up in Chama and played and sang a joyful Irish lament.

  Still, until tonight, his experience of the Jicarilla had been those few he’d seen in town, often drunk, stumbling in and out of the numerous saloons. Or sitting – endlessly sitting on their haunches in the dust by the side of the road, as if waiting for the madness to end and the world to revert to the way it was before the white man cast it in his likeness.

  They emerged from the deer trail into the clearing at the foot of the pasture in silent procession, fleshless refugees in their own land. Soledad was making bread in her horno, the outdoor oven on the other side of the house. He went and got her, and together, they watched. “They are Ollero,” she said. As they were her people, Thomas expected Soledad to run to them. She didn’t. “They are looking for game.”

  “So I gathered.”

  “But they are not hunters.”

  “No. I remember what you told me. The Llaneros are the hunters. The Ollero are farmers.”

  “But they have nowhere to farm,” she said. “They are driven from place to place by broken promises, with no time to plant or harvest. So, they come up to the high country even at this time of the year to find food.”

  By now, there were more than thirty Jicarillas, probably three or four family groups with members of all ages, in the clearing. They saw the Conllans, but as if passing through a neighboring but disconnected dimension, took no notice of them until Thomas called out.

  A short, dignified man at the head of the band raised his arm, and those behind him stopped. Thomas and Soledad approached them through the calf-high snow. He expected Soledad to say something, but she stood silently at his side.

  “I’m Thomas Conllan,” he said, holding out his hand. The Indian merely looked at it.

  “I am Huerito Mundo.”

  “He is the headman,” Soledad whispered. “His father was Huero Mundo, a very famous leader of our tribe.”

  “Not your tribe,” said the chief.

  Soledad lowered her head humbly, which Thomas had never seen her do. “You know each other?”

  “She left The People, to go to the Spanish,” said Mundo. “Their blood is too strong in her.”

  Thomas chose to sidestep the issue. “Your people . . . you have come a long way. Will you stay and eat with us?”

  Proud as he was, the condition of his people, many of whom were children, clearly malnourished, would not allow him to refuse.

  Soledad thought of her larder. The food they had was to last through lambing. She whispered as much to her husband. He smiled at the chief. “She says she’ll need help preparing the food.”

  With a gesture, five women were chosen to assist in preparations. But presently, all the women without children dependent upon them joined in as well, until the neighborhood hummed with the pleasant cacophony of women in concert. Soon the larder was empty and the Indians, for the first time in a very long time, full. Thomas invited the clan to clear space and pitch their government-issue canvas tents in the field at the back of his property. “And any elk or deer that crosses my land, you’re welcome t
o. Only share the meat with us.”

  This was agreed.

  “One thing, though, Huerito Mundo, don’t let your people hunt on the land to the east. T.D. Burns sold that to a man named White, and he won’t allow anyone on his property. Especially . . . ”

  “Especially Indians?”

  Thomas allowed no answer to be the answer. “He usually has guards . . . what we used to call gamekeepers, back in the old country. I’m surprised they didn’t stop you before you got this far. Stay on my property and you should be all right. Just camp out by the deer and elk trails and wait. The animals will come to you.”

  In bed that night – with the smell of the Indian wood fires wafting through the chinks and crevasses in the mortar of the cabin – Soledad repeated to Thomas what she had heard among the women.

  “Huerito Mundo was part of a delegation that went to Washington a few years ago to beg the government to honor their promise for a reservation in the Chama Valley. Others went as well – Santiago Largo, Augustin Vigil, San Pablo, and Juan Jullian – honorable men of our tribe. They had their picture taken and were given more promises that they would be given a homeland, and told that the Jicarilla would continue to receive their yearly maintenance payments until Congress authorized the boundaries of the reservation. But the annuities – which should never have been distributed in the towns in the first place, but directly to the Jicarilla Council – have, predictably, been so diminished by thievery and mismanagement that the tribe would have starved had they stayed in Abiquiu. As well, when they returned, they discovered that a plan was in force to merge the Jicarilla with the Mescaleros, our enemies.”

  It took a long time for Soledad, for whom English was a third language – which she spoke slowly and deliberately – to chronicle the abuses to which her people had been subjected for over thirty years in their quest for a patch of their land to call their own.

  “They don’t like you because you’re Spanish?”

  Soledad raised her magnificent dark eyes and embraced him with an ancient, unspoken sadness. “Because I speak English, which their women despise,” she said unexpectedly. “I am outcast from three campfires,” she said. “The only place I am home is in the bed of my fellow outcast.” She smiled and squeezed his hand.