Avram Davidson - The Avram Davidson Treasury - a tribute collection

The sunbaked earth is cracked and riven. A few dirty sheep and a handful of scrub cows share its scanty herbage with an occasional swaybacked horse or stunted burro. Here and there a gaunt automobile rests in the thin shadow of a board shack, and a child, startled doubtless by the smooth sound of a strange motor, runs like a lizard through the dusty wastes to hide, and then to peer. Melon vines dried past all hope of fruit lie in patches next to whispery, tindery cornstalks.

And in the midst of all this, next to the only spring which never goes dry, are the only painted buildings, the only decent buildings in the area. In the middle of the green lawn is a pole with the flag, and right behind the pole, over the front door, the sign:

U.S. BUREAU OF INDIAN AFFAIRS.

TICKISALL AGENCY

OFFICE OF THE SUPERINTENDENT

There were already a few Indians gathering around that afternoon, the women in cotton-print dresses, the men in overalls. There would soon be more. This was scheduled as the last day for the Tickisall Agency and Reservation. Congress had passed the bill, the President had signed it, the Director of the Bureau of Indian Affairs had issued the order. It was supposed to be a great day for the Tickisall Nation — only the Tickisalls, what was left of them, didn’t seem to think so. Not a man or woman of them spoke. Not a child whimpered. Not a dog barked.

Before Uncle Fox-head sat a basket with four different kinds of clay, and next to the basket was a medicine gourd full of water. The old man rolled the clay between his moistened palms, singing in a low voice. Then he washed his hands and sprinkled them with pollen. Then he took up the prayer-sticks, made of juniper — (once there had been juniper trees on the reservation, once there had been many trees) — and painted with the signs of Thunder, Sun, Moon, Rain, Lightning. There were feathers tied to the sticks — once there had been birds, too …

the old man chanted, shaking the medicine-sticks.

The old man’s skin was like a cracked, worn moccasin. With his turkeyclaw hand he took up the gourd rattle, shook it: West, South, Up, Down, East, North.

The snakes rippled across the ground and were gone, one by one. The old man’s sister’s son helped him back to his sheepskin, spread in the shade, where he half-sat, half-lay, panting.

His great-nephews, Billy Cottonwood and Sam Quarterhorse, were talking together in English. “There was a fellow in my outfit,” Cottonwood said, “a fellow from West Virginia, name of Corrothers. Said his grandmother claimed she could charm away warts. So I said my great-uncle claimed he could make snakes. And they all laughed fit to kill, and said, ‘Chief, when you try a snowjob, it turns into a blizzard!’… Old Corrothers,” he reflected. “We were pretty good buddies. Maybe I’ll go to West Virginia and look him up. I could hitch, maybe.”

Quarterhorse said, “Yeah, you can go to West Virginia, and I can go to L.A. — but what about the others? Where they going to go if Washington refuses to act?”

The fond smile of recollection left his cousin’s lean, brown face. “I don’t know,” he said. “I be damned and go to Hell, if I know.” And then the old pick-up came rattling and coughing up to the house, and Sam said, “Here’s Newton.”

Newton Quarterhorse, his brother Sam, and Billy Cottonwood, were the only three Tickisalls who had passed the physical and gone into the Army. There weren’t a lot of others who were of conscripting age (or any other age, for that matter), and those whom TB didn’t keep out, other ailments active or passive did. Once there had been trees on the Reservation, and birds, and deer, and healthy men.

The wash-faded Army suntans had been clean and fresh as always when Newt set out for Crosby, but they were dusty and sweaty now. He took a piece of wet burlap out and removed a few bottles from it. “Open these, Sam, will you, while I wash,” he said. “Cokes for us, strawberry pop for the old people… How’s Uncle Fox-head?”

Billy grunted. “Playing at making medicine snakes again. Do you suppose if we believed he could, he could?”

Newt shrugged. “So. Well, maybe if the telegrams don’t do any good, the snakes will. And I’m damned sure they won’t do no worse. That son of a bitch at the Western Union office,” he said, looking out over the drought-bitten land. “‘Sending a smoke-signal to the Great White Father again, Sitting Bull?’ he says, smirking and sneering. I told him, ‘You just take the money and send the wire.’ They looked at me like coyotes looking at a sick calf.” Abruptly, he turned away and went to dip his handkerchief in the bucket. Water was hard come by.

The lip of the bottle clicked against one of Uncle Fox-head’s few teeth. He drank noisily, then licked his lips. “Today we drink the white man’s sweet water,” he said. “What will we drink tomorrow?” No one said anything. “I will tell you, then,” he continued. “Unless the white men relent, we will drink the bitter waters of The Hollow Places. They are bitter, but they are strong and good.” He waved his withered hand in a semi-circle. “All this will go,” he said, “and the Fathers and Mothers of The People will return and lead us to our old home inside the Earth.” His sister’s son, who had never learned English nor gone to school, moaned. “Unless the white men relent,” said the old man.

“They never have,” said Cottonwood, in Tickisall. In English, he said, “What will he do when he sees that nothing happens tomorrow except that we get kicked the Hell out of here?”

Newt said, “Die, I suppose…which might not be a bad idea. For all of us.”

His brother turned and looked at him. “If you’re planning Quarterhorse’s Last Stand, forget about it. There aren’t twenty rounds of ammunition on the whole reservation.”

Billy Cottonwood raised his head. “We could maybe move in with the Apahoya,” he suggested. “They’re just as dirt-poor as we are, but there’s more of them, and I guess they’ll hold on to their land awhile yet.” His cousins shook their heads. “Well, not for us. But the others… Look, I spoke to Joe Feather Cloud that last time I was at the Apahoya Agency. If we give him the truck and the sheep, he’ll take care of Uncle Fox-head.”

Sam Quarterhorse said he supposed that was the best thing. “For the old man, I mean. I made up my mind. I’m going to L.A. and pass for Colored.” He stopped.

They waited till the new shiny automobile had gone by towards the Agency in a cloud of dust. Newt said, “The buzzards are gathering.” Then he asked, “How come, Sam?”

“Because I’m tired of being an Indian. It has no present and no future. I can’t be a white, they won’t have me — the best I could hope for would be that they laugh: ‘How, Big Chief—‘Hi, Blanket-bottom.’ Yeah, I could pass for a Mexican as far as my looks go, only the Mexes won’t have me, either. But the Colored will. And there’s millions and millions of them — whatever price they pay for it, they never have to feel lonely. And they’ve got a fine, bitter contempt for the whites that I can use a lot of. ‘Pecks,’ they call them. I don’t know where they got the name from, but, Damn! it sure fits them. They’ve been pecking away at us for over a hundred years.”