Walk Till You Disappear

by Jacqueline Dembar Greene

  Miguel was startled. “You ran away from home?”

  Rushing Cloud looked puzzled. “No, I am running to my home. Why would I want to leave my family?” He jabbed the roasting cactus with a stick and turned it to char the other side.

  Miguel swallowed hard. “What if—if your family wasn’t who you thought they were? What if suddenly nothing was the same?”

  Rushing Cloud shook his head. “People do not change. Maybe the outside looks a little different, but we trust what is inside.”

  Miguel’s entire body felt heavy, as if he carried a weight he could not bear. He had lost trust in his own family. Each of them had known the story of Aharon ben Avraham, yet they had deliberately hidden it from him. Once again, they thought of him as a child, not a young man. Perhaps he had proven that they were right. Now he didn’t know if he could even trust himself. He wasn’t sure whether what was inside him was still the same. Miguel couldn’t ask Rushing Cloud where he had run from, or he would have to admit what he had done.

  “Dinner,” Rushing Cloud said. He speared a shriveled piece of snake meat and handed it to Miguel.

  Miguel pulled off the burnt papery skin and tentatively nibbled at the meat. He wiped the juices from his mouth with the back of his hand. “What about you?” he asked. “Aren’t you going to eat some?”

  Rushing Cloud skewered a cactus pad and waved it in the air to cool off. Carefully, he took a bite. “My people do not eat rattlesnake,” he said. “The . . .”

  “. . . elders tell it,” Miguel chimed in, finishing the sentence.

  Rushing Cloud smiled. “You are learning,” he said.

  Miguel’s stomach rumbled its hunger. He tried to forget what he was eating, and now took a large bite. Instead of sinking into thick meat, Miguel’s teeth crunched against bones. The snake was a mass of sturdy ribs, as if the meat were hidden in a ring of toothpicks.

  Now his companion couldn’t hold back a laugh. “You are so hungry you eat bones?”

  “I didn’t even know snakes had bones,” Miguel muttered sheepishly.

  Rushing Cloud shook his head in disbelief. “I never eat this creature, but still I know it has bones.”

  Miguel took another bite, gnawing carefully at the stringy meat and pulling it away from the ribs where it held fast. The snake meat was tough, with a slightly bitter aftertaste. But the more Miguel ate, the more he grew accustomed to it. He stopped thinking of it as cooked rattlesnake and simply appreciated it as food. Before long, Miguel was cracking bones with his teeth to pull out every last shred of meat. When he finished the last piece, he wiped his hands on his pants.

  Rushing Cloud collected the discarded pieces—bones, skin, head, and innards—and tossed them onto the still smoldering stones. He covered the pit with sand and wiped away traces of their meal with his feet.

  “We need more water,” Miguel said. “Let’s go back to the hole you dug.”

  “Not safe,” Rushing Cloud said. “We must stay out of sight.” He sliced two more prickly pear pads from a different plant, pried out the spines, and made a cut across the top of each. He handed over one pad, and Miguel saw liquid dripping out. He licked at the moisture, then sucked the cut edge.

  “It is not like water from the olla,” Rushing Cloud noted, “but it will keep us.”

  “How do you know about getting water from a cactus?” Miguel asked.

  Rushing Cloud responded with his own question. “How do you live in the desert and not know these things? Do you not see the rabbits and javelinas that chew cactus to get moisture? Do you not see anything around you?”

  Miguel felt his face flush with embarrassment. It seemed that until now he hadn’t looked at anything in his life with open eyes. He understood that it was time to think with his mind open, as well as his eyes.

  The rattlesnake meat and the cactus juice satisfied his hunger and his thirst. Just a week ago, Miguel would never have been content with just one small meal each day or been able to survive in the desert with so little water. Perhaps he had become more like the scorpion. Maybe gaining power from another only meant that you learned new ways.

  Rushing Cloud settled down in the shelter, folding his shirt for a pillow. Miguel stretched out beside him. “You never told me why you’re traveling alone,” said Miguel, hoping he wouldn’t have to confess his own reason for becoming lost. Rushing Cloud lay on his back, staring up at the brush he had piled overhead.

  For a long moment he was silent. Miguel wondered if his companion was hiding something, just as Miguel was. Then, in a challenging voice, Rushing Cloud said, “I ran away from the mission school.” When Miguel offered no protest, Rushing Cloud began to share more.

  “Many sleeps past,” he said, “when the planting season was upon us, a white man with hair upon his face came to our rancheria driving a wagon. I see my cousins and other children from our village are already in the wagon. My father was away tending our fields, and my mother and sisters were under the ramada. If only I had gone to help my father that day, I might be there still.” He paused, as if regretting what might have been. “This man tells my mother that all Indian children must go to a place where they will learn the new ways of white men. He said nothing about being forced to pray to their god.”

  Miguel swallowed the words that nearly leapt from his mouth. That is my God, he thought. The only God. Should he try to lead Rushing Cloud to the faith now? Clearly the missionaries had already tried to do that. And now Miguel was uncertain of what he had once believed was his calling.

  “My mother tried to shield me from the hairy face man. With gestures, she tries to explain I am her only son—I am needed to work in the fields so we will have enough to eat. But the white man holds a paper my mother cannot read and tells her it is written that if she does not send me to this school, the white chiefs will lock my father in their iron cage. With tears flowing from her eyes, my mother scoops beans into a covered basket for the journey and fills an olla of water. As the man takes me to the wagon, my grandmother pulls me to her and whispers one last piece of wisdom for me to carry away. I did not forget her words.”

  Miguel sensed his friend’s sadness and tried not to interrupt for fear that Rushing Cloud would stop speaking. “We traveled a long trail, through other villages where more children are taken and other wagons come to carry them. At each rancheria, the women give us dried cornmeal and fresh water. Soon everything I know is left behind. I never see my family again.” Miguel guessed that the cornmeal was to make the same pasty pinole he had eaten along the trail. It was a poor meal—just enough to keep you alive.

  “After four sleeps, we come to a white man’s village, with wide trails leading to mud buildings. Women wearing strange clothes take all the girls away, and the boys are brought to a ramada. Some of the boys try to go after their sisters, but they are held back. Under the shade of the ramada, a man with an iron tool cuts off all our hair. If any boy fights against him, he is held down like a sheep losing its coat. Finally, we wash at wooden bowls and our clothes are taken away. The white men make us squeeze our feet into pinching boots. They show us how to make a button crawl into a hole in a cloth shirt. Everything is so tight against my skin that I feel that I cannot breathe.”

  Rushing Cloud sighed. “Never before did any Tohono O’odham boy cut his hair. We are ashamed to look upon each other.” Then his voice rose in anger. “What had we done to make these people cut off our hair?” The question echoed off the rocks.

  Rushing Cloud’s short hair was the first thing Miguel had noticed, and it had reassured him that Rushing Cloud wasn’t an Apache warrior. Miguel’s own hair was long, and now it was dirty and matted. He even wore a headband like his captors, but that didn’t make him an Apache.

  Rushing Cloud hadn’t chosen to cut his hair. He would have been the same even if his hair had reached his shoulders. Still, Miguel knew he would have been more afraid. Rushing Cloud kept talking as if a dam had opened, unleashing a stream of thoughts.

  “Soon we are tak
en to a room where we must sit on long benches with our hands folded upon a board of wood. This they call a table, but we have never seen such a thing before. At the rancheria, we eat sitting on blankets spread on the soft sand and sleep on straw mats. At the school, bad-smelling food is put in front of us and the women make motions with their hands, telling us to eat. We try, but we cannot swallow such strange things. Day after day this is the only food they give us. Finally, we must eat or starve. The mission women become red in their faces if we do not eat everything placed before us. They whip us with sticks. But this food makes us sick, and we must run often to the wooden shed.”

  Miguel could never forget the rank smell of cooked horsemeat and the way his stomach had churned when he tried to eat it. Yet the Apache ate the meat with relish and laughed at his revulsion. He didn’t think he would have grown to like horsemeat if he had lived with the Apache forever. Miguel could never erase the memory of seeing Doc Meyer’s dead horse beyond the campfire.

  Rushing Cloud spoke fiercely, his voice rising. “Some Pima boys are at the mission school too. Tohono O’odham are no friends of Pima. They laugh and call us Papago—Bean Eaters! Of course, we must fight for our honor.” He pounded his fist against his chest. “We are Tohono O’odham, we tell them, People of the Desert!”

  Miguel had always heard the Indians in Tucson called Papago. The women who came into town selling ollas and baskets, and the men who sometimes worked at the ranch, were all called Papago. It was the only term Miguel had ever known. Had he and his family been insulting these people without realizing it?

  Miguel coughed. “Why didn’t you and your cousins run away?” he asked.

  “We are forbidden to speak our own tongue at the mission school, so we cannot make a plan together,” said Rushing Cloud. His voice began to sound drowsy, but he kept talking. Miguel’s eyelids drooped.

  “At first, we do not understand English words, so how can we know that our own talk is not allowed?” he asked bitterly. “Whenever we spoke in our words, we were beaten and sometimes locked into a hot wooden box. There we sit and try to think of what we have done that is so terrible. Slowly, slowly, we learn the strange new talk. When we first come to the mission school it is the time of planting, when the earth is black with rain. By the time the corn stands tall our mouths only make the white man’s sounds. Our own words begin to disappear like water hiding under the sand.”

  “You must trust the inside,” Miguel said, using Rushing Cloud’s own advice. “Your language is always in you.”

  Rushing Cloud turned his head toward Miguel, his eyes downcast. “We can accept the gods of the mission church, but we must not lose our own. Our sacred stories must be told every year, in the same words, always. It keeps our life in order. It makes the rain come and the fields to sprout. What will happen to my people if they forget their own tongue?”

  Miguel thought of his ancestor’s code. Maybe hearing Aharon Ben Avraham tell his story would keep his family’s life in order too. Miguel realized that he had to at least listen.

  Chapter 12

  Back to the Blanket

  When Miguel had started school in Tucson for the first time, all the students were required to speak English. He learned quickly, but still spoke Spanish with his friends, and at home. No one tried to make him forget his first language.

  The Abranos’ ranch had been part of Mexico until a huge swath of land was sold to the United States years before Miguel was born. It meant nothing to him until Papá explained that their family had suddenly become Americans with just the stroke of a pen. Inside, as Rushing Cloud would say, the family was still Mexican and they still spoke Spanish. No government could erase that. But they were American, as well.

  Miguel shared Rushing Cloud’s outrage that the missionaries had forbidden the native children from speaking their own languages. They could have taught them English and still let them use their own words outside the classroom.

  A vision of his ancestor’s tattered leather book flashed into Miguel’s mind. If the Hebrew words were forgotten, who would be able to read the book again? Perhaps if you learned a new language—or a new religion—you could use one and still not throw away the other. Was that what his ancestor had done? What about Papá and Mamá?

  Jacob Franck became the messenger carrying his ancestor’s words. He relayed a story Papá cherished, and now Miguel felt ashamed of his lack of understanding. His angry words must have hurt Papá terribly. He tried to shake the image.

  Miguel wondered if Rushing Cloud would someday tell his children and his grandchildren about the mission school. What had happened was too important to be forgotten. The story would remain part of the family’s history only if it was passed on, just like his own. Miguel was part of the chain that could save his own family’s story.

  “How long were you at the school?” Miguel asked.

  “Almost two hot seasons have passed,” Rushing Cloud said. Two years, Miguel realized. “It is almost time for the planting rains to fall again.” Rushing Cloud pulled his fingers through his short hair. “When I return to the rancheria I will never let my hair be chopped again. It will grow as long as my memory.”

  “Why did you finally run away?” Miguel asked.

  “One morning the mission teachers carried white shirts for the boys to wear. They tell us every child will have his image made with the exploding box. They smile with their teeth, but we are afraid and wonder how we can get away before it is too late.”

  “Why?” Miguel asked. “There’s nothing to be afraid of having your photograph taken.” His family had once had a portrait made by a traveling photographer who came into Tucson. Miguel’s mother placed the photograph in a glass-covered frame and hung it on the wall.

  “Remember I say that my grandmother share some wisdom before I was taken away?” Rushing Cloud asked. “She tells me that if the white man’s flashing machine captures your image, your life will be short. She makes me promise I will not let them steal my old age.”

  Miguel had never heard anyone worry about being photographed. Still, Rushing Cloud’s grandmother believed it, and so did he. “Couldn’t you just tell the missionaries not to photograph you?”

  Rushing Cloud grunted. “These elders do not listen to the voices of the young. In secret, I beg my cousins to come away with me, but they are too afraid. Others have run many times before, and we see how they are caught and chained with iron and given no food.” His voice grew softer. “I know they can never catch me. In the night, I slip from the sleeping room. Outside, I put the white man’s boots on backward and walk until I disappear.”

  The thought of Rushing Cloud using the Apache trick to hide his tracks made Miguel smile. He imagined the missionaries following Rushing Cloud’s footprints from the desert into the building and searching under every bed and in every wardrobe. The two boys rolled to face each other and burst out laughing.

  Suddenly, Rushing Cloud’s expression grew serious. “I worry about my cousins. Maybe their lives will be too short. When they leave the white man’s school, will they be able to live with their people again if they forget the old ways? That is why I must go home—back to the blanket. I must get there, my friend, before I lose more than I can find again.”

  Miguel closed his eyes. Before sleep closed his thoughts, an idea arose in his mind. I am ready to go back to the blanket too. It is time for me to learn the old ways.

  When Miguel awoke in the shelter, he heard Rushing Cloud chanting, his voice floating on the evening air like a singing ghost. This would be their third night traveling together, and Miguel was thankful that he wouldn’t be alone in the desert again.

  He propped himself up on his elbow and looked toward the spot where the roadrunner had perched. Just beyond, Rushing Cloud sat in the same cross-legged position Miguel had seen before, facing the long clouds that stretched across the pink and violet light of the setting sun.

  By the time his companion returned to the shelter, Miguel had taken down most of the branches
. Together, they brushed over their footprints and began to walk. Miguel was still limping, but there was less pain now and he kept pace with Rushing Cloud.

  Miguel felt a pang of guilt. He should have told his friend the truth about why he had become lost so far from his own home. He had to be honest. Miguel’s mouth went dry.

  “There’s something—something I haven’t told you,” he stammered. “I—I did run away, away from my family.”

  “I know this—here,” Rushing Cloud said, touching his heart. “I know because you never talk of your people. Yet you are thinking of them much of the time. Is it not so?”

  “My father shared a story with me the night I left,” Miguel began. “It was written in a book by an elder who lived long ago. He had been captured and brought to this land as a prisoner. In the book he told how the church had tried to force our ancestors to accept their faith—the one my family follows now! Many of the family, and so many others, were killed for following their own beliefs. Their land was taken from them.”

  Rushing Cloud nodded. “This is how my people lose their lands and are made to pray to a different god.” He seemed to search Miguel’s face for some sign of understanding. “We have shared our lives, my friend, although we have walked different paths.”

  Miguel was startled at the truth of Rushing Cloud’s words. His ancestors—and Miguel’s—had fought for the right to remain on their land and keep their own beliefs. Yet Miguel had wanted to become a priest and wipe out the beliefs of natives like Rushing Cloud. A hollow feeling settled in his chest. He didn’t know if he could still think of following in Father Ignacio’s footsteps. When he had rushed from the house, his faith was firm. Now he was filled with doubts.