Leslie Silko - Gardens in the Dunes

Indigo opened the trunk to the compartment with the dresses and her light wool coat; she took them off the hangers and folded them carefully in stacks on top of the open wool coat. She tied the arms of the coat around the bundle and turned to Sister.

“Maybe we can trade someone this stuff for some beans and corn, and maybe some meat.” Sister gave a short laugh at the mention of meat. The people here were Christians but they were still poor. Who could afford to trade food for a dress? Only the trader and his wife might have the money. It would be better to sell them in Needles, if only Needles were not so far and rides on the mail wagon didn’t cost so much.

That afternoon Indigo put Linneaus and Rainbow in their cages, and Vedna snapped the huge padlock on the door of the little house; they were off to the trading post with the dresses bundled in the wool coat. They were disappointed to learn the trader was gone to Yuma, and they almost left the store before the trader’s wife asked if they had something they wanted to sell.

First she reached for the wool coat, but Indigo held on to it, and told her it wasn’t for sale. The wool coat was part of her bedding. The woman held up the dresses at arm’s length and examined them carefully, although a number of them had not been worn even once. She bought all the dresses, then called her Chemehuevi laundress from the back room to boil the dresses. Indigo protested that the dresses were clean, but the other girls shook their heads to quiet her. As it was, the trader’s wife allowed them only $7 in trade for all the dresses.

The twins motioned for Sister to come to the rear of the store, where the three of them huddled and discussed something — Indigo wasn’t sure what it was about. They left the trading post with big sacks of beans and cracked barley, a little coffee, a small can of lard, and a big sack of colored candy balls; they still had the sugar and the wormy flour Hattie gave them.

It wasn’t much for the lovely dresses trimmed in blue satin ribbon, made especially for Indigo, but it was better than starving. They walked back to the house with their mouths full of candy balls and smiled. The cracked barley was to brew beer or something similar to it; they didn’t have all the other ingredients but they’d watched Big Candy and they figured they could get the recipe close enough to brew beer or ale or something to get people drunk. Maybe the Christian Chemehuevis at Road’s End would not buy it, but the twins said drinkers would come from miles around. At least they could make enough money from the brew to feed themselves until the garden fed them.

They put on a big pot of beans to simmer on the coals all day while they all pitched in to prepare the garden to plant the winter seeds. The land the twins bought from their old auntie was across the road from the best farmland, irrigated by a system of ditches from the river. At one time the ditches brought water to their land too, but they were buried under the sand now.

In the rich moist fields close to the river, tiny green sprouts could already be seen; seeds planted too early sprouted, but quickly got scorched to death in the fierce autumn sun. If they didn’t get their seeds planted now, later the ground would be too cold to germinate the seeds.

Among the old and broken hoes and rakes the twins found when they moved in were tobacco cans of seeds saved by their auntie. Maytha and Vedna argued over the worth of old seeds, but Maytha was right; these seeds were all they had except for the seeds Indigo brought; those seeds might not know how to survive here. At least a few of the seeds in the cans were bound to germinate, so they all worked away with rakes and hoes; none of them had gloves, so their hands got blisters and calluses. The twins and Sister joked farming wasn’t any better than laundry for a lady’s hands.

For their winter garden, they planted amaranth and all kinds of beans and black-eyed pea seeds they found in the cans. Indigo planted only a few of the seeds from her collection; all the others she intended to plant in the old gardens when they got home.

Linnaeus learned to follow along behind Indigo without disturbing the seeds she just planted, but Rainbow was naughty and hopped off her shoulder to rake his beak through the sand to expose the seeds and eat them. His parrot waddle was so cute she couldn’t bear to scold him or lock him in his cage. She picked him up and kissed him and told him to stay put on her shoulder, then replanted any seeds he ate. But Linnaeus was a good worker; with his sharp eyes and quick fingers he caught sucking beetles and cutworms and ate them head first.

When they took a break for lunch back at the house, Indigo opened the trunk to the compartment with her seed collection; she untied the drawstrings on the cotton sacks of gladiolus corms Laura gave her and felt each one to make sure they remained healthy. At the time Laura gave her the seeds, Indigo used her color pencils to write the color names on the envelopes of gladiolus seed. Now she couldn’t resist the temptation to plant just a few gladiolus corms among the pea seeds Aunt Bronwyn gave her. Since she and Sister probably would be moved back home by the time the corms grew blossoms, Indigo decided to plant just a few gladiolus.

Then Indigo found she had a great many black gladiolus corms, so she planted them for a border around the peas; between the beans and the spinach she planted two each of the scarlet, purple, and pink gladiolus. As she planted them, she imagined how this corner of the field would look, and she added white and yellow corms too. What a surprise the twins would have in a few months!

Later that day, when the planting was finished, Sister sent Indigo and her pets down the road to the neighbors’ corral to look for long strands of tail hair the horses might have snagged. Sister and Indigo wove horsehair snares the way Grandma taught them and carefully strung them in the weeds around their garden; later that evening they had fresh rabbit meat to go along with the beans.

After dinner they sat outside to smoke and watch the stars before bed; there was no moon and the stars seemed to shine closer and brighter than Sister ever saw; Grandma Fleet said the stars were related to us humans. The twins agreed; at Laguna they’d heard stories about the North Star, who acted as a spy for Estoyehmuut, Arrow Boy, the time his wife, Kochininako, Yellow Woman, ran off with Buffalo Man. The North Star tipped off Arrow Boy, otherwise he never would have found her.

At first he was uncomfortable outdoors at night, but quickly Big Candy got reaccustomed to the soldier’s life out on the trail. He didn’t build fires and slept with his shotgun in his hand. The mule was young and stout; but on the morning of the fourth day of the chase, the mule pulled up its left hind leg and refused to leave Tonopah. Big Candy traded the mule for dried apricots and mutton jerky, and an old handcart he towed with a strap around his chest. That first day the miles blistered his feet, but he shot a covey of quail before dark and cooked himself a feast. His feet healed after he took a knife to the boots and cut them open at the heels and the toes.

This wasn’t a race. He would keep on her trail steadily, and he would find her. He didn’t care if he had to follow her all the way to Mexico City and back; she wasn’t getting away with his money. The days were still hot but nothing like the summer, and the nights were almost cold enough to want a fire.

The next day the going got harder, as the trail left the Aguila valley and ascended the stony brush mountains of Gila Bend. Here the wheels of the cart hung up on lava rock outcrops in odd shapes that reminded Candy of the mushrooms he once stuffed and cooked for Wylie.