No Matter How Much You Promise

by Edgardo Vega

  He was zoned in now, the machinery beneath him responding to his touch in much the same way as the tenor saxophone. He felt that strange power he always experienced while he was playing and opened up and devoured the highway; flying past Ventura, Carpinteria, Santa Barbara, heading inland at Gaviota and then up to Los Alamos, Santa Maria, and San Luis Obispo. With the sun setting, he stopped to get gas and something to eat, and then got back into the Mercedes and, rather than continuing on 101, veered off and kept to the coast road. It was as if somehow he needed to feel the edge of America, the last frontier, seeing the Pacific Ocean ahead of him and to his left, its vastness, like the infinite reaches of space, dark, foreboding.

  His theory teacher at Berklee, who knew the West Coast and had jammed at Bob Cooper’s Lighthouse, the Drift Inn, and Shelly’s Manhole in the early sixties, and knew all the sidemen from Stan Kenton’s orchestra—Pete and Conte Candoli, Charlie Mariano, Bob Holloman, Shorty Rogers, Maynard Ferguson, Boots Mussilli, Charlie Ventura, Lee Konitz, and Hank Levy, who had arranged some of the Kenton orchestra’s charts in the seventies—and the rest of the musicians who were involved in the West Coast jazz movement, told him that West Coast jazz was the outgrowth of a Miles Davis innovation. He had played a record for Wyndell; it was a little scratchy but because of the freshness of the music had totally knocked him out: Birth of the Cool, with Lee Konitz, Gerry Mulligan, J. J. Johnson, and Kai Winding alternating on certain cuts, and the same thing being true for Kenny Clarke and Max Roach on drums. “Move,” “Jeru,” “Budo,” “Boplicity,” and a bunch of other tunes in which you heard, besides the regular instruments, tuba and French horn.

  “When do you think they recorded this?” the teacher asked him.

  “It sounds pretty modern, so I’d say maybe 1965,” Wyndell had said. “Around there.”

  “Nope,” the teacher said. “Recorded in 1949 and 1950 in New York City. And that’s not all. John Lewis played piano on some of the cuts. The Modern Jazz Quartet’s style and musicality emerged from the refinement that Miles created out of his time with Charlie Parker’s quintet. In many ways the MJQ, because of its coolness and involvement with classical music, began to bring jazz into a more acceptable consciousness.

  Wyndell Ross turned off the radio as he was approaching Morro Bay and slid in the tape of Birth of the Cool and settled into listening and watching the moonlight shimmering on the water below. He stopped in Monterrey to stretch his legs and to check everything, oil, water, tires, and fill up before going on again. To Santa Cruz, and then, choosing to stay close to the coast, to the end of America, its precipice, wanting to go as far as he could before falling off, he thought, up Highway 1 to Pebble Beach, Half Moon Bay, Pacifica, Daly City, before turning inland once more, to San Francisco proper. Then, before getting on the Oakland Bay Bridge, calling up Sue McCallister to make sure she was home.

  She had written to him last year, reminding him that he had once shown her Berklee and it was time for her to return the favor and show him Berkeley. After getting back into the car he drove across the bridge, loving the lights and the magnificence of the structure, recalling Sonny Rollins’s composition, “The Bridge.” Man was a daring being, he thought, and began thinking of how he could orchestrate his own composition, “Pacific Rim.” He thought that of all the instruments the French horn had the most potential to illustrate the vastness of the ocean. He wanted to make sure, when it was played, that the soloist, someone like Julius Watkins, had the freedom to stretch out.

  When he arrived at Sue McCallister’s in Berkeley, where she now taught in the English department, she and her husband, Martin Travis, who taught in the history department, greeted him warmly and made him feel at home. Martin said that he was welcome to stay as long as he needed to. The house was a beautiful modern structure on a hill overlooking the city. There was a hot tub, and he luxuriated in it, talking art, music, and literature with Sue and her husband. That evening they had supper and then talked some more, and about ten o’clock he began to doze off and went to his room. Before he fell asleep he wondered if he’d ever be able to make any money from his music. Sue’s father was the CEO of some plastics company that had its hands into everything from dishware to parts for the space program. He’d met her walking along the Charles River one spring afternoon. She was with her friend Lee Harwell from Atlanta.

  He had been at Berklee a year and Sue and Lee were seniors at Harvard, Sue very blond and WASPish and Lee very black and revolutionary, but so close as friends that to listen to them it was hard to tell that they hadn’t been raised in the same household. Lee’s father was a judge in Atlanta and she was headed for Harvard Law after graduation. God, she had ended up working in Thurgood Marshall’s office in Washington one summer. Sue had written recently and said that Lee was going to run for the State Legislature in Georgia. Wyndell and Lee had gone on a couple of exploratory dates, but Lee reminded him of Garlande and Davina, his sisters, and that took the romance out of it.

  Things didn’t work out in San Francisco. He met some musicians, they jammed, but they all said the same thing. “You’re crazy leaving L.A., man. That’s where all the movie and television and advertising money is. You wanna starve, stay up here. What you gonna do, teach?”

  Wyndell remained and continued trying, calling people and making contacts, but there was no work. In the evening he would return and sit at Sue’s piano, working out the orchestration for “Pacific Rim” and playing passages from it for Sue and her husband. He explained that it was part of a series of compositions on the U.S. “Not quite Dvoák’s New World Symphony, or Ferde Grofé’s work, but not unlike it,” he said, invoking two composers who wrote of America. He played the familiar, lilting passage from Dvoák’s work, which has formed the thematic structure for those lighthearted lilts in westerns. “Ambitious, but not pretentious,” he’d added, self-deprecatingly. They laughed, and Sue’s husband poured more wine.

  Two weeks later he said goodbye to Sue and Martin and packed his car, the feeling of bitterness making his mouth taste as if he were sick and would never recover.

  “Don’t be defeated,” she said. “I know you’re very proud, but if it gets to be too much, please come back. You can stay here as long as you want. I want you to finish ‘Pacific Rim.’”

  He thanked her and then with all his gear back in the car, now freshly washed, he got in and left, driving through the beautiful Berkeley hills, the homes expensive and neat, everything exclaiming the greatness of the country. He sped up and got on the freeway, concentrating now on the steady flow of traffic, finding his way to U.S. 80 heading for Sacramento. From Sacramento it was a little over a hundred miles to Reno. The city seemed like a woman who is used to clubs—beautiful at night, but in the daytime glaringly unhealthy-looking. Recalling his nightlife in Los Angeles, he sped through Reno and headed still farther inland, away from the edge, seeking the comfort of his soul. Wadsworth, Lovelock, Winnemucca, Battle Mountain, and then Elko, where in 1883 his great-grandfather Ingram Ross had gone on a cattle drive as a young cowboy soon after he married his Cherokee wife, Rowena Spike. The drive got caught in a freak spring blizzard and he and the other cowboys had used the cows as cover from the snow. They’d gathered the horses together in the middle of the herd, taken their horse blankets, hooked them onto the cattle’s horns and stretched them to make a shelter, taking turns all night dumping the snow off the blankets and keeping an opening in the drifts created by the huddled cattle. When the storm was over the cows on the periphery of the circle facing the storm were frozen solid. When they finally gathered what was left of the herd and began moving south, the frozen cows looked like someone had sculpted larger than usual cattle. Ingram Ross had lost a couple of toes to frostbite and walked with a limp, but he still rode in all the rodeos and worked on his ranch until the age of seventy-seven, when he went riding one afternoon and on his way back had a heart attack and just slumped over the neck of his horse. The horse made its way back to the ranch but Ingram Ross was dead. �
�Talk about dying in the saddle,” his grandmother, Mimi Ross, said whenever she told the story of her father.

  She told other stories, too. He especially liked hearing the stories about the Cherokee. He couldn’t recall ever seeing his grandmother in a bad mood. Even when Grandpa Henry died, she sat quietly, humming something which his father said was a prayer, but there was a slight smile on her face as if she knew that Grandpa Henry was safe and happy somewhere. She and her husband were second cousins, with both Ross and Spike relatives, their families going back to the Trail of Tears migration of the Cherokee.

  Whenever he spent time at her house outside of Denver, she joked with him and told him of the Nunnehi, the little people, who were responsible for everything that happened. If a stroke of good luck came her way, it was the Nunnehi; if something was misplaced, it was the Nunnehi at it again, playing a trick on her. The Nunnehi men had beards, long gray hair, and hairy toes, and they lived in bushes and rocks. The Nunnehi women were very beautiful. All the Nunnehi were Cherokee and they spoke the language. His grandmother would sometimes point out of her kitchen window as she stirred a pot of stew and tell him she’d seen a Nunnehi. He’d climb up on the counter and look out the window into the pines and bushes, peering with all his might.

  “Where, Grandma?”

  “There, behind the tree,” she’d say. “Concentrate. But don’t look at the girls too long.”

  “Why, Grandma?”

  “They’ll bewitch you and you’ll fall in love and go off with them to live in the woods.”

  He’d get down off the counter and his grandmother would give him a gingerbread cookie and tell him that he mustn’t let anyone know that he’d seen the Nunnehi.

  “Why, Grandma? I saw them.”

  “Oh, they don’t want anyone to know that they’re there, because then they’d be blamed for everything. Please take them a cookie. The little people love cookies. Go.”

  And he’d go out into the backyard, feeling the coming of winter in the air and he’d place the cookie behind a pine tree and come back into the house. The next day he went behind the pine tree and the gingerbread cookie was gone.

  “They ate the cookie, Grandma.”

  “Of course they did. The little people wouldn’t pass up a gingerbread cookie. You want another one?”

  “Yes, Grandma. Thank you.”

  He was six years old and the following year his father’s friends came over to play music in the den and left their instruments there while they went upstairs to eat and he’d tried playing Mr. Pearson’s tenor saxophone which smelled of tobacco because he smoked so much. He’d removed the mouthpiece guard, picked up the instrument from the table, and blown into it. He was startled at the big sound, but he’d liked it and tried to play a tune but couldn’t figure out how to do so. He kept trying different things until his sister Garlande came to get him. When he wouldn’t listen his father came down and asked him if he liked the saxophone. He’d nodded, and his father asked him if he wanted to learn how to play it. He smiled and his father said he’d get him a clarinet first. He could start on that, and maybe he’d take him over to Mr. Pearson’s to learn.

  Thinking about his childhood made him want to be home and he sped up as he neared the Utah border, watching the sun set behind him so that in his rearview mirror it was light and ahead of him approaching darkness. Beyond the darkness he could see the silhouettes of the Wasatch Mountain Range of Utah, and Wyndell Ross’s soul began slowly to mend itself. He went up and down the high plateau road heading toward Salt Lake City, and then drove the rest of the way through the Salt Flats, listening to the car’s tape deck and stereo system surround him with Miles Ahead, The Modern Jazz Quartet with the Stuttgart Symphony directed by Gunther Schuller, Charlie Parker with Strings, and The Thelonious Monk Orchestra at Town Hall, with Charlie Rouse on tenor and Phil Woods on alto discoursing eloquently on “Friday the Thirteenth” and “Little Rootie Tootie,” so that as each hour passed, rather than making him drowsy, the music filled him with greater determination to complete the journey and perhaps not give up on his dreams.

  In Salt Lake City he checked into a motel, carrying his suitcase and his ax from the car, endured the disapproval of the clerk and went into his room. If you were black you had to be up to no good. Something as simple as getting some rest turned into high drama. He showered and changed and went out to eat. When he returned to the motel, it was eleven o‘clock. He dialed the desk and asked for a seven-o’clock wakeup call, stripped naked, got into bed, and was asleep within seconds.

  Five hours later, however, he was wide awake and eager to go. He washed, dressed, and packed everything back up. He wasn’t hungry now but bought juice and prepacked sandwiches. He sat and mapped out the trip, tracing a meandering line with his pen. When he was done he had the gas tank filled. Once again inside the car, he looked at the map and decided against taking U.S. 80 into Cheyenne, Wyoming, and U.S. 25 to Greeley and then home to Denver. He chose instead the narrower U.S. 40, which had less traffic and gave him a chance to travel a part of Colorado he didn’t know, even though he’d be driving through it during the night. He felt intense pride in his citizenship in the state. It had its problems, but it was his home and as his father and mother insisted, “It’s our country,” meaning the United States, “and it’s our state, and we have a history here. It’s up to us to change it. In spite of prejudice and small-mindedness, it’s up to us.”

  He moved down the road again, crossing into Colorado at Dinosaur, with Miles’s muted trumpet talking to him, making him laugh and say damn; Paul Chambers’s bass beating inside of him as if it were his heart; at times unable to help himself and singing as Miles played “If I Were a Bell,” going “ding-dong-ding-dong-ding” and feeling enormous joy in his heart. Blue Mountain, Elk Springs, Maybell, Lay, places that probably never had blacks living in them, maybe never even passing through them, except perhaps his great-grandfather Ingram and his great-grandmother Rowena. Rowena Spike, the Cherokee’s daughter, had talked about other black Cherokee cowboys in that part of the country and how she had fallen in love with the handsome Ingram Ross and followed him, traveling from her parents’ home in the Oklahoma panhandle, which shares a border with Colorado.

  Wyndell changed tapes and listened to Charlie Parker with Strings, the engine humming and he alone in a time capsule traveling through the darkness of his land, because it was his as much as anyone’s. An hour later the sun began surfacing in the east, the orange-and-gray dull haze quickly giving way to full sunlight. Hayden, Milner, Steamboat Springs, and then south through Arapaho National Forest to Kremmling.

  His grandmother Mimi had said once that one of her father’s sisters, Blossom Spike, had taken up with an Arapaho in the late 1850s. Blossom had died with her children at a place called Sand Creek, to the north of the Arkansas River, up near Fort Lyon. He’d asked what had happened. She shook her head and said that’s all she knew. Her grandfather Sandford Ross, who’d been a blacksmith at the army fort, had told her father, Ingram, the cowboy, about it.

  He continued to ask questions, writing home to his father to urge him, much as Lee Harwell—to whom he’d sent a fifty-dollar check, for her campaign to become part of the Georgia legislature—was urging him, to look into his family’s background. He’d asked his grandmother so many questions at Thanksgiving that Mimi Ross took to locking the door to her room whenever he came into the house. When he came home for Christmas, one of his presents from his father was Atlas of the North American Indian, by Carl Waldman. The book had considerable information and maps on every tribe.

  Wyndell read about the Sand Creek Massacre, the anger rising slowly in him until he was shaking. He became obsessed and returned to those pages time and time again, reading with shocked fascination, so that from then on he couldn’t watch a film depicting Indians without an overwhelming feeling of rage. He read the book overnight, devouring each page and finally getting to the place that no doubt held the history of his grandmother’s aunt.

/>   In the course of the next outbreak of violence—sometimes referred to as the Cheyenne-Arapaho War or the Colorado War of 1864-65—a tragedy occurred that served to unite many of the Plains tribes in their distrust and hatred of whites. Because of the rapid growth of mining interests in Colorado after the Pikes Peak Gold Rush, Governor John Evans sought to open up Cheyenne and Arapaho hunting grounds to white development. The tribes, however, refused to sell their lands and settle on reservations. Evans decided therefore to force the issue through war and, using isolated incidents of violence as a pretext, ordered troops into the field under the ambitious, Indian-hating territorial military commander Colonel John Chivington.

  In the spring of 1864, while the Civil War raged in the east, Chivington launched a campaign of violence against the Cheyenne and their allies, his troops attacking any and all Indians and razing their villages. The Cheyenne, joined by neighboring Arapahos, Sioux, Comanches, and Kiowas in both Colorado and Kansas, went on the defensive warpath. Evans and Chivington reinforced their militia, raising the Third Colorado Cavalry of short-term volunteers who referred to themselves as “Hundred Dazers.” After a summer of scattered small raids and clashes, Indian and white representatives met at Camp Weld outside Denver on September 18. No firm agreements were reached, but the Indians were led to believe that by reporting to and camping near army posts, they would be declaring peace and accepting sanctuary. A Cheyenne chief by the name of Black Kettle, long a proponent of peace, led his band of about 600 Cheyenne and some Arapahos to a camping place along Sand Creek, about 40 miles from Fort Lyon, and informed the garrison of their presence.