Return of the Bones: Inspired by a True Native American Indian Story

by Belinda Vasquez Garcia

  “I, Grand Inquisitor of Santa Fe, sentence you to death by strangulation, Witch.”

  Two hands snaked from behind and grabbed her.

  Through the haze of her membrane she watched skeletal fingers wrap around her neck. The bones of Fray Alonso de Benavides rattled as he shook her neck so that her head rolled around her shoulders.

  He spun her and she looked into the hood of his robe.

  His skull grinned even as he squeezed her throat.

  The skeleton lowered his teeth to her mouth and kissed her.

  He seemed amused by her choking noises…then…blessedly…everything went black.

  Her dream catcher abruptly stopped spinning and hurled her back to the semi-present.

  Bones flew from the center of her dream catcher and a large bone, perhaps the femur, poked against the back of her throat so that she gagged, choked and smothered.

  She pulled the femur bone from her throat and sat up on the mattress, gasping for air with her fist shoved between her teeth. Scary, shitty nightmare. Her mouth still tasted like rancid bone. Just thinking about the dream tightened her chest. The nightmare had seemed so real, she coughed to rid herself of the sensation of choking to death.

  Beside her, the old man snored.

  She kicked him for sending her a nightmare.

  He merely turned on his back and grunted, once more blowing puffs of air between his lips.

  She rubbed her sore toe; he was bonier than she guessed.

  Chapter Eight

  Of course Grandfather knew about her dream. While she prepared breakfast, he hovered like a hawk, swinging his burlap sack in his hand.

  He wolfed his food down, and then waited for her to finish eating. He tapped his tennis shoe and twiddled his thumbs. He shoved his face in hers as soon as she poked the last mouthful in her mouth.

  “The Pecos held another lady in such high esteem they did not abandon her when they left their home,” he said, opening his bag.

  He unfolded a piece of burlap and handed her a wooden slab shaped in an arch that reminded her of the tablets of the Ten Commandments. A carving of the Virgin Mary, in high relief, protruded from the slab.

  “She is the Patrona of the Pecos people, Our Lady of Light who once hung on the ancient church doors of Pecos,” he said.

  She gasped at the same high lady of Santa Fe known by many names, but time ravished this Lady and rubbed her head bald so her forehead appeared big and smart.

  “How ironic, don’t you think that the Lady at St. Frances Cathedral once called La Conquistadora, is today known as Our Lady of Peace?” he said.

  Before she could answer he walked away to the park bathrooms.

  ”You’re called by so many names,” she said to the Patrona. She outlined the circular head and flicked at each dot that formed a halo. Her wooden heart sounded hollow yet she prayed, “Lady of Peace, Lady of the Rosary, Lady of Light.”

  She scrubbed at the Lady’s image but could not make the Lady sparkle. Like that other lady, La Conquistadora her twin sister, this lady was fashioned from brittle wood but unpainted, worn, and draped in poor clothing.

  She rewrapped the Lady in burlap and placed her on the truck floor.

  When he returned from the bathroom, they entered the Trail of Tears State Park visitor center. She paid ten bucks to tour the exhibits.

  He clung to her hand as they looked at haunted pictures of Cherokees looking out from a concentration camp located near Charleston, Tennessee.

  “We are lucky we have always been pueblo dwellers and not nomads hunting after our food,” he said.

  “Were we, Governor? Listen to this Trail of Tears history.”

  She opened the pamphlet and read.

  “In 1830, President Andrew Jackson passed the Indian Removal Act. The Cherokee Indians had the misfortune to have gold discovered on their Georgia lands. Even though the Supreme Court ruled for the Cherokees, President Jackson took their Constitutional rights away. This Trail of Tears State Park is a memorial to nine of the Cherokee groups, forced to march a thousand miles, most barefooted, to an appointed reservation in Oklahoma. On December 15, 1838, the Cherokees reached this site in Illinois where they spent the rest of the brutal winter.”

  “1838 is when our people were forced to abandon our pueblo,” he said.

  She squeezed his arm and continued reading.

  “Of the 15,000 Cherokees forced to relocate, 4,000 died, which is why their path from the concentration camps of Tennessee to Oklahoma is called the Trail of Tears or in the Cherokee language, Nunna daul Tsuny.”

  The old man chewed on his fist and looked down at the floor.

  “Ah, there now, Governor, though they lost over a quarter of their population, it says here the Cherokees are today the biggest Native American nation,” she said.

  “Before the white man came, I have heard there were ten million native sons and daughters of America. It took the white man three hundred years to decrease the Indian population to one million. Regardless of their deaths, whether through diseases the white man brought, bloodshed, or starvation, the whites are to blame.”

  “Did the 1830 Indian Removal Act force our people to leave Pecos?”

  He handed her the royal ceremonial staff and wobbled towards the bathroom, holding out his arms.

  A walk to stretch her legs before the long drive seemed like a good idea. She left the visitor’s center and maneuvered a concrete pathway, carrying the staff in her arms like a baby. How ironic the Trail of Tears State Park was located in Jackson, Missouri, a town probably named for President Andrew Jackson, a man instrumental in their tragedy.

  At a storyboard for the Bushyhead Memorial a painting of a minister dominated the center of the story.

  The memorial consisted of a tomb in front of a small brick wall, covered by a canopy. In the background grew a cluster of trees and grass. A brass marker on the concrete tomb read: Here is buried, Princess Otahki, daughter of Chief Jesse Bushyhead, and wife of Sam Hildebrand. One of the several hundred Cherokee Indians who died here in the delayed (by ice) crossing of the Mississippi River in the United States forced exodus from Tennessee, North Carolina and Georgia to the Indian Territory (now Oklahoma) in the severe winter of 1838-1839.

  A note attached to the tomb corrected the eulogy. Jesse Bushyhead, a Baptist minister, was actually the brother of Nancy Bushyhead Walker Hildebrand, otherwise known as Princess Otahki.

  She leaned against Nancy’s tomb, claiming the right to call her Nancy because she, too, was born a princess. She nervously pounded the royal staff against the concrete as if she was really somebody, Princess of all Pecos. Being the last of a species did not give her a rare priceless feeling but the sensation of being hunted. She imagined Nancy once felt hunted when the army rounded up the Cherokees.

  Yes, Nancy’s spirit was here, restless to tell her story.

  A vision flashed before her of Nancy, crossing the Mississippi with her husband.

  Nancy sat on the ferry but could still feel the freezing water, though the sun peeked through the clouds and melted shards of ice, causing the river to overflow. Others, who already made the crossing, scampered to higher ground.

  Her stomach gnawed her intestines because the day before she ate only a piece of salt pork, half-frozen.

  No matter how much her husband Lewis hugged her, the cold would not abate and her breath skated across her icy lungs making her cough.

  Her brother Jesse touched her forehead which he complained of being hot—yet her heart chilled at the ice, twelve inches thick, that again floated on the Mississippi, preventing them from crossing.

  Barely aware of Lewis and Jesse speaking in low voices, she shivered under both Lewis’ blanket and her own. The frigid ground burrowed into her back and the wind howled through the trees, struggling to lift the blanket from her.

  Lewis may have held her but she wasn’t sure.

  Her heart froze solid like an iceberg at thoughts of her children. Where did the soldiers take Sara an
d Ebenezer? Were her son and daughter even alive? White troops rode to their home near Cleveland, Tennessee and broke down their door. Soldiers threatened them at gunpoint, allowing them precious little time to collect their belongings.

  Her pottery shattered with a crash when the soldiers purposefully knocked the butt of their rifles against their household goods, trying to do as much damage as possible. But these were sins of individuals with no respect for Cherokees. Only a monster country would separate a mother from her children.

  All she had left of Sara was her favorite doll that she grabbed from the table when the army man grabbed her by her hair because she refused to leave her home. Since then, she hugged Sara’s doll close to her heart, consumed with guilt that she angered a soldier so he sent Sara and Ebenezer away to another stockade. The doll offered scant comfort; and a tapping in her chest cracked her heart like a cube of ice.

  Goosebumps slid up Hollow-Woman’s spine when she recalled Kidder’s diary and a part she hated most. His words haunted her: I found an ancient doll and considered sending the doll home to Mother; she is a collector. But, Mother is hygienic so I will ship the doll with other relics back East.

  For some freakish reason, this doll found at Pecos upset her more than any skeletons dug up and shipped to Boston.

  She placed her hand against her empty womb and pressed her back against Nancy’s tomb. She had a doll with human hair connecting her to her own mother. She dreamed nightmares of lying with her mother in her grave, daughter and mother clinging to each other for all eternity in death, the way they could never touch each other in life. The lump in her throat nearly choked her because Kidder expressed his sympathy for a double find, a woman skeleton holding an infant skeleton in the crook of her arm: Sadly, I have found a mother and child who perished together, so he wrote.

  Then contrarily, he bragged about his discovery, ‘a rare find’ he labeled it.

  What did the mother feel when she held her dying child? Perhaps the child suckled weakly at her breast while it lay there dying, or maybe the mother wasted away from a broken heart since her baby died. Conceivably, all the life sucked out of the baby because it killed its mother at birth.

  Kidder must have lifted the bones from their graves and pulled apart mother and child since he made separate piles of adult skeletons and children skeletons. The fragile baby skeleton turned to dust soon as he ripped the baby from its mother’s arms. The mother lay there, her eye sockets sunken, her shoulder bones slumped, her arms empty, her mouth open in a silent scream.

  During the holocaust, Nazis placed parents on one train and children on another train, to transport them to concentration camps where certain death awaited them.

  She closed her eyes and imagined a dead mother and baby. Flesh melted from the woman and child, and they looked like zombies. Their bodies decayed until they turned to skeletons and broke apart. Mother and daughter separated, both screaming. The girl’s bony hands reached out to her mother’s bony wrists.

  Once more, laughter of children filled the air, like in her first dream which had hurled her back to Pecos Pueblo. Such unbearable longing filled her, she groaned and doubled over.

  Their laughter turned to cries of Cherokee children dying from hunger, crying from thirst, screaming from soldiers’ blows upon their little bodies, moaning from disease, longing for toys they left behind. Sobs shook beneath this earth. They cried out, “Mommy, Daddy, where are you?”

  Baby, I’m here. Nancy lay in her tomb like that skeleton mother at Pecos, her eye sockets sunken, her shoulder bones slumped, her arms empty, and her mouth open in a silent scream.

  She wrapped her arms around Nancy’s tomb, as best she could, and hugged the cold slab.

  “I’m sorry, so sorry. I hope your children lived.”

  “I’m sorry, so sorry…”

  Over and over apology flowed from her lips until strong hands gripped her arms and pried her away from the tomb.

  Grandfather picked up the ceremonial staff and led her away from the Bushyhead Memorial.

  He stroked her hair with a petrified hand.

  “Don’t grieve so, Child. One would think she was your mother.”

  Chapter Nine

  They drove north on I-55. He snored lightly, his chin resting on his chest. He always slept this way but never complained about an aching neck, so he must have rubber bands for ligaments. His head traversed a circular route when he napped, stopping every 90 degrees while he blared out snores like a trumpet.

  They stopped for lunch in St. Louis and munched on hamburgers and fries, followed by apple pie.

  “You look tired,” she said.

  “It is time for my lunch nap,” he said, stretching and yawning.

  He opened the camper shell so he could lie down. He grunted, rolled on his side and hugged the royal staff in his arms.

  She caught I-70 east and drove with the radio on.

  When they stopped for gas in Springfield, he bought a bag of suckers and sat beside her in the truck licking and sucking on the candy.

  She cracked, blew and popped her gum, playing bass to his tongue violin. Between them they played a gum pack of symphony movements all the way to Columbus.

  She pulled into an RV park at dusk, helped him down from his seat and handed him his staff.

  “The ground is uneven and there are rocks around,” she warned, holding onto his arm.

  He used his staff while they walked to the bathrooms. It seemed as if they were deep in the woods with moss clinging to large rocks and ferns growing about.

  The area was peaceful, save for a fox that spied on them from the woods.

  He seemed more refreshed after dinner.

  He made a round trip to the bathroom then threw the diary at her.

  “Read,” he said and rolled a cigarette, closing his eyes as he puffed, sighing with contentment.

  “June 1, 1915.

  I am having trouble sleeping. I close my eyes and dream of sifting through trash looking for buried treasure. My tent has a rotten tomato stench though I have not had a salad in a fortnight. I am awaiting oranges from Stanford University. I placed a bet with my old roommate, Dr. Jonesboro, that I would make an amazing find here in New Mexico dust. He laughed at me. Ha. Jonesboro owes me a crate of fresh oranges. My dig marks the coming of age of American Archaeology! We have found our greatest treasure, the Pecos Indians themselves.”

  “Bah. They found treasure. They searched for ivory but found only bones. The white men did indeed return to Pecos to find buried beneath the earth a ghost pueblo. Still, their greed was the size of the plains, and they dug and dug to steal the pottery and baskets. They were not content with straw and clay. They lifted our people from their graves and desecrated our land,” Grandfather said. He motioned with his hand to continue.

  “With today’s rubbish pile, we found some skeletons,” she read.

  “Rubbish? He dares call our people rubbish?” he said, spitting and flicking his cigarette away.

  “Well, earlier he said he sifted through centuries of trash piles. That’s what an archaeologist does. Calm down and listen to what’s next.”

  “At this solemn moment I ordered everyone to remove his hat while we said a prayer for these poor souls. A smallpox epidemic, the result of European invasion, raged across this land from 1519 to 1524 like the Black Death in Europe and killed half the native population. I wondered if any of these Pecos Indians died of smallpox.

  Ha. I stared into the empty eye sockets of one fellow and asked him to tell me his name, but he just lay there with his bones spread across the ground. The skull grinned at me with big teeth, and I somehow felt the poor fellow laughed at me. I knocked on his empty skull and asked him what secrets his bones held but he remained closed-lipped. I drove into Santa Fe to see if anyone there knows the Towa language. I just wanted to hear what these people may have sounded like.”

  “He thinks we are a stupid people, with empty heads, like white men before him thought. Just because he cannot spe
ak to us in our language, he thinks we are dumb,” Grandfather said, clenching his fists until his knuckles turned white.

  “Do you want me to stop reading?”

  “Go on.”

  “Someone pointed out an old Indian sitting at the plaza selling blankets. He could say but one word in English—no. I asked a boy, his grandson, if his grandfather could speak Towa for me. The boy said they were from the Nambe Pueblo and spoke Tewa. He suggested I travel to the Jemez Pueblo to hear the Towa language. Perhaps another day since Jemez is about eighty miles. On the way back to the ruins, I debated what to do with the skeletons. I am a Christian man and the thought of desecrating the graves of these poor souls disturbs me, yet I am a man of science, and this is a find of the greatest magnitude. What Harvard might gain from study of these indigenous ancients, both in prestige and future grants, outweighs my conscience.”

  “Wait. What is indigenous?” Grandfather said.

  “It means of the earth from where one is found.”

  He nodded his head, satisfied.

  She continued reading.

  “I shall request the university order acid-free boxes to pack the bones for shipment and storage.

  I posed for some photographs. Well done.”

  “Stop, I cannot hear any more,” Grandfather said, squeezing his eyes.

  “I don’t understand why you have me read to you, if it only upsets you. I must warn you that from this date his papers take on a more morbid tone because he became obsessed with the remains of human bones. Over the next several months, he unearthed warriors, women, children, tiny skeletons.”

  He raised his eyebrow at her.

  Aha. The sly fox complained just to gauge her reaction.

  “This is like a history lesson, informative but dull,” she said, stuffing the diary back in the case and shifting her eyes, anywhere but at his haggard face and his eyes…she disappointed him again. “You have always taught me to speak the truth, Governor.”

  “Do you know why you are called Hollow-Woman?”

  “To torment me?”