J. Jance - Day of the Dead

“When I went off to school on the bus that first day, Roseanne cried and cried. Our grandmother was a mean old woman, and Roseanne didn’t want to be left alone with her. When I came home, I told Roseanne there were kids her age in another class, and she begged me to take her along. The next day, I told my grandmother that Roseanne was supposed to go, too. It was a lie, of course, but Grandmother didn’t know any better. She let us go.

“When we got to school, everything was fine until Roseanne realized that she couldn’t be in the same class with me. She got scared and started to cry. She cried so hard that finally the principal came. He was a big man-a huge man. He picked Roseanne up and carried her under his arm like a sack of potatoes. She kicked and screamed the whole way down the hall. I went after him and kept telling him to put her down, put her down, but he didn’t. He carried her all the way back to his office. He threw her into a closet-a coat closet with no light inside it-and slammed the door. Then he made me go back to class. I heard her crying all the way down the hall.

“I didn’t see her again until after school-until it was time for us to get on the bus. When she did, Roseanne’s face was still wet like she had been crying the whole time. On the way home, I tried to get her to talk to me and tell me what happened. She wouldn’t answer-wouldn’t say a word. And she never talked again. Not to me, not to my parents, and especially not to anyone at school.

“She went to school because my father made her. She never answered questions in class or turned in papers. My parents took her to a bunch of doctors, here and in Phoenix, too, but they couldn’t find anything wrong. When the doctors couldn’t help her, my father even took her to a medicine man. He said she was retarded. There was nothing he could do-that’s how she was.”

Brandon Walker looked down at his own white skin and was suddenly ashamed. He felt a surge of anger toward that brutish grade school principal whose actions had so traumatized an innocent four-year-old girl that she had damned herself to a lifetime of silence.

The worthless son of a bitch! he thought. Somebody should have thrown his ass in jail.

“Two years later there was a new principal, a nice one,” Andrea continued. “When the school secretary told him what had happened, he fixed it so Roseanne and I were in the same class. She was my shadow.”

“Ehkthag,” Brandon said.

Andrea Tashquinth looked Brandon full in the face and smiled for the first time. “Yes,” she agreed. “Roseanne was my ehkthag.”

“Whatever happened to the first principal?” Brandon asked.

Andrea shrugged. “Nothing,” she said. “He left. Went somewhere else. When Mil-gahn do bad things on the reservation, they leave, but nothing ever happens to them. That’s the way it is-the way it’s always been.”

After Philip staggered off, a humiliated Delia Cachora stood on the sidewalk looking at Fat Crack Ortiz, this ghost from her distant past. She had felt this same way the day her father had come to Ruth’s house in Tempe to collect Eddie and take him back to the reservation.

When they arrived in Tempe, Ellie Chavez had planned to stay with Sister Justine’s friend, Ruth Waldron, just that one night. They arrived late in the evening because it had taken so long to get the car running. Then they’d encountered a summer rainstorm that made the washes between Quijotoa and Casa Grande impassable. They’d had to wait for the water to go down.

When they finally stopped in front of the small frame house, they had passed through the worst of the storm, but a fitful rain still fell. It was late. Eddie had fallen sound asleep in the backseat. As soon as the car stopped, an outside light flashed on and a tall bony woman-the tallest Mil-gahn woman Delia had ever seen-emerged onto the porch. A cloud of mouthwatering fragrances drifted out of the house behind her, and Delia realized she was hungry.

Ellie stepped out of the Falcon. Taking Delia by the hand, they hurried up onto the porch and out of the rain. “Miss Waldron?” Ellie asked tentatively.

Ruth Waldron stretched out both hands in greeting. “You must be Ellie,” she said. “Please call me Ruth.” She turned to Delia, who wavered on the edge of the porch like a wild thing poised for flight. Ruth bent down until her face and Delia’s were on the same level. “You must be Delia,” she added with a toothy smile. “Now where’s that brother of yours? Where’s Eddie?”

Delia pointed to the car. “He’s sleeping,” she whispered.

“I’m sure you’re all worn out,” Ruth said kindly. “Sister Justine called and told me you were on your way. Go get Eddie and come in. Supper’s waiting. By the time we finish eating, maybe the rain will be over so we can bring in your suitcases.”

The next day, however, much to Delia’s surprise, her mother didn’t go apartment hunting after all. Instead, they stayed on with Ruth for the next four years-for as long as Ellie Chavez was in the undergraduate program at ASU. While Ellie was busy studying, Ruth Waldron, a phys ed teacher at two Tempe elementary schools, became Eddie and Delia’s surrogate mother. She was good to the kids. She took them to ball games, to the zoo, and to the Arizona State Fair. She helped them with homework and attended PTA meetings when Ellie couldn’t.

Delia loved school. At first she was far behind other kids in her class. She was lumped in with the slower ones and pretty much ignored, but with her own natural capabilities and with Ruth’s nightly tutoring sessions at home, Delia soon bubbled to the top.

Neither Delia nor her brother saw their father again until four years later, the summer Eddie turned six and Delia twelve. Delia Chavez was within days of promotion to the eighth grade when, on a warm spring afternoon, she came home from the library with an armload of books and with her little brother in tow. As they approached the house, an unfamiliar pickup truck was parked in the front driveway. Manuel Chavez stood on the front porch, shouting at Ruth Waldron and at Ellie. Delia knew at once her father was just as drunk and angry as she remembered him.

“I want my son!” he yelled for all the neighborhood to hear. “You’d better give Eddie back to me before you turn him into an Anglo and a queer, too.”

Eddie had been so young when they left Sells that he had no recollection of this man who claimed to be his father, but if this loud stranger wanted to take Eddie somewhere in a shiny pickup truck, the boy was eager to go.

While the children looked on, the argument raged back and forth. In the end Ellie agreed that Eddie would return to the reservation with his father.

To Delia, the whole thing was incomprehensible. It had taken the next several years for her to come to terms with what had happened that day on Ruth’s front porch. How could her mother bear to send Eddie off with a horrible drunk who was a virtual stranger? How could she let him go without putting up a fight? It wasn’t a matter of legal custody. As far as Delia knew, there had never been a divorce or a court order or any exchange of legal documents. Ellie simply handed Eddie over even though she must have known what the consequences would be. She must have guessed that once Manny drove away with her son, she would never get him back. He would disappear into the world of the reservation and into his father’s family and be lost to her forever.

That was exactly what happened. Ellie and Ruth may have spoiled Eddie, but his Grandmother Chavez in Big Fields was far better-or worse-at spoiling. Eddie had grown up fat and lazy and every bit as much of a drunk as his father. When he graduated from eighth grade, he quit going to school, and Manny made no attempt to change his mind. Eddie contacted Delia only when he needed money-when he had wrecked his latest pickup or when he had been let out of jail and needed something to get by on until he could find a job for day wages.