Judith Freeman

Wyatt & Hela

WYATT & HELA

The following is a chapter from The White Mules, a novel-in progress.

      He woke up much later than usual, and now he was sitting in the shade just outside the back door of his house on a bench facing the creek, looking through the mail that had accumulated in his mailbox over the last week.

      There was a letter from his cousin Benny who still lived on the reservation, telling him of the annual reunion of the Intermountain Indian School where he and Benny had spent their junior high and high school years as boarding students, housed along with hundreds of other Navajo kids in the barrack-style buildings set up against the western slope of the Wasatch Mountains in northern Utah.  You should come down for it, Benny wrote, it’s going to be a great reunion and you can stay with us in the trailer and sleep on the couch and we’ll all drive over to Wheatfields Lake together.

       He would not be going to the Indian School reunion, or seeing Benny, or driving with him over to Wheatfields Lake which, as he remembered it from the last and only time he ever attended a reunion there, had become one of the most economically depressed places on the reservation---and that was saying a lot.  He’d have to come up with some excuse for why he couldn’t come even though Benny would surely see through it.   He put the letter aside and continued sorting through the mail.  Utility bills, a plea from the local library for a donation, a postcard from his clients in Missoula thanking him for the willow chairs he’d just delivered.  When he’d looked through all the letters and bills he opened up the latest issue of the weekly paper, The Manard Courier.  It was even thinner than usual----only six pages, three of them filled with obituaries.  He read about the 5th District High School Rodeo taking place over the weekend in Cary and the upcoming concert in the park in Manard and a cowboy tent revival meeting on Sunday, to be held in a field south of town.  He briefly considered the ad for the old time fiddlers’ convention in Shoshone and wondered if Hela might be interested in driving down with him for that.  He liked fiddle music.  He decided he’d call her later and float the idea.  He looked at the Senior Center News, not that he ever went to the center but he liked to peruse the menus listing what they served every week just to see what he was missing (fish and fried potatoes, beef stroganoff, potato bar, banana pudding, and something called Frogeye Dessert, whatever the hell that was.  He wouldn’t have minded the banana pudding).  

        He noticed the new ad for North Canyon Rehabilitation Center in Gooding where he’d gone for therapy after the doctors had taken his left foot off last year, the result of his battle with diabetes.  The ad showed a picture of a man who looked like a young Robert Redford being helped by a woman who looked a lot like Ali McGraw and who held his arm as she smiled down at him.   Not the kind of people he’d encountered there, though his therapist, Nancy, had certainly been nice enough even if she did resemble Kathy Bates more than Ali McGraw.  Beneath the picture the words:  Large enough to offer the full-service health care you need, but small enough to provide the personal one to one care you deserve.  They’d been good to him there.  He couldn’t complain.   He scanned an announcement for the 99th Annual Pioneer Picnic in the park---he wouldn’t be going to that either---and then he read the 4-H News and the report of the last meeting of the Porky Pigs 4H Club.  Everyone was present.  Kylie, Connor, Rayann and Cheyane did demonstrations.  Kylie did hers on “How to Build a Pig Pen.”  Connor did his on “Pig Breeds.”  Rayann did hers on “How to inject a pig.”  And Cheyane did hers on “Things you can Wash your Pig with.”  We weighed our pigs and walked them.  After that we had hotdogs and chips---yum, yum.  The next meeting is July 11 at the 4-H park. 

        He liked that yum yum.  It made him smile.  He wondered what exactly it was that you could wash a pig with.

        There was nothing else in the paper to read except the minutes of the County Commissioners meeting and he wasn’t that desperate.  He folded up the paper and put it on top of the pile he used to light fires.

            He’d returned late the night before from a trip up to Montana and Wyoming and what he’d been thinking about as he drove back into Idaho via the Swan Valley and the Mormon-infested city of Idaho Falls was just how different Montana was from Idaho.  It was as if when he’d crested the summit of the Chief Joseph pass and dropped down into the Bitterroot Valley of Montana he’d entered a lush paradise, a world of rivers and thick forests, tall trees and little meadows pocked with ponds, water every where, flowing in fresh clear streams and pooling alongside the road beneath the magnificent peaks still patchy with slubs of old snow, the whiteness now standing out against the bright blue sky.  Near Darby, the peaks of the Bitterroots had looked as sharp as pencil tips and in other places they formed massive granite plinths that rose almost vertically from the lower slopes.  It seemed a world different in all ways than the landscape he’d left behind, with its treeless dry hills in hues of red and orange, the arid sagebrush valleys and sandstone scarps and the rock slides that came down to the edge of the road between Challis and Salmon where he’d driven along the River of No Return, following the same route once used by Lewis and Clark.  Just south of Salmon he’d seen four big horn sheep right next to the road---a buck and three ewes----foraging peacefully along the banks of the river and he’d pulled over in the truck and sat for a long while just watching them as they ate, occasionally lifting their heads to study him in return.  The only trees in sight had been the blackened stumps of lightning-struck pines and little snags rising out of rocky crevices and the clumps of stunted yellow pines with their tops flattened by the heavy winter snows.  The landscape had given off a terrible heat.

            Then, Montana.  So green and wet, a beauty not to be found in southern Idaho with its high prairies and desiccated valleys --- or not at least to be found in the parts he’d traveled through.  In Challis he’d stopped at a café and flirted with a waitress half his age, a girl in skimpy denim shorts and a cropped halter top that revealed a belly-button ring, and she had played along with him for a while which lifted his spirits considerably.   The trip had taken him in a big circle, from the prairie up through Sun Valley and over Trail Creek pass which was only open in the summer months, along the Lost River range and past Mount Borah, the highest peak in Idaho, and through Challis and Salmon into Montana.  He’d delivered the chairs he’d made, a pair of willow rockers he’d worked on for the past several months.  Then he’d spent the night there in Missoula in a played-out motel and left the next morning at sunrise and made his way down through Yellowstone Park, its narrow roads clogged with dawdling Winnebagos, and dropped off two more chairs to clients in Jackson Hole before finally heading home across the Arco plain, the most desolate place he encountered on the entire trip, where in the 1950s the government had built fifty two nuclear reactions amidst the spent cones of ancient cinder volcanoes, a landscape that never failed to depress him.  It was almost one a.m. when he’d pulled into his driveway, his headlights sweeping across the corral where he kept his mule Alfred and he was glad to see Alfred standing at the rail in the darkness, his big ears swiveling slightly as he watched him pull in, as if he’d  been there for days, just waiting for him to come home. 

            The weather felt unsettled, as if it might rain before the day was through but at this time of year it never rained that hard.  There was a great depth to the sky this morning---a sense of a fractured dimension, one layer and then another layer of clouds stacked and sequenced and parting here and there to reveal a swath of blue and the beautiful infinity that lay beyond.  The word heaven came to mind:  he felt as if he were looking beyond the ordinary sky into the hallowedness above.   As he looked up at the vibrant mutating sky, he remembered something an old-timer had once said to him when he’d first moved to the prairie, how in Idaho there were five skies every day.  Five different skies.  The weather always changing, the world above in flux, never the same as the day progressed.   It seemed to him this was true.  Five skies every day.  And this was just the first of today.

           He’d run into an old timer once in the post office and they’d exchanged greetings.  He’d ventured to say it looked like a nice day, at least there was no wind, and the old man had looked at him and said, Day’s not over yet.

           Day’s not over yet.  He thought of that phrase quite often.

           He had begun to think about making another pot of coffee and getting some breakfast together when the phone rang.   He thought if he just let it ring long enough it would stop but it did not stop and he finally realized he’d have to go inside and answer it since he had no answering machine to pick up for him.  By and large he didn’t care much for machines and owned as few as possible, limiting himself to those he considered essential, like his ‘69 Chevy step-side pickup, painted forest service green, and the even older motorcycle sitting out in the shed, waiting for repairs. 

            He headed inside, leaning on his homemade crutch since he’d not yet taken the time to attach his artificial foot, and crossed to where the phone hung on the wall and picked up the receiver and said, Yup?

            Wyatt?  That you?

            This amused him.  Who else would it be?   No one else lived at this number.

            Who’s this? he asked, which seemed the far more pertinent question.

            It’s Delbert, the voice said, then added, you know, J.R.

            This, too, amused him.  His neighbor Delbert, who sometimes called himself J.R. when he wasn’t calling himself Delbert.

            Oh Delbert-J.R., he said.  Which should I call you today?  I think I’ll call you Delbert because J.R. makes me think of that guy on the TV program with the big white cowboy hat and I have never seen you wear anything but a big brown cowboy hat.  What can I do for you this morning, Delbert?    He spoke slowly and with a certain cadence, using his exaggerated Indian voice, just for fun.

            Delbert, who had no sense of humor as Wyatt had long ago discovered, got straight to the point.  He began explaining why he was calling.  He spoke in what Wyatt thought of as his grave buckaroo voice, extra solemn but with an exaggerated twang.  Here they were, Indian talking to cowboy.

            Delbert said he’d just gotten a call that morning from a guy at an organization called the Make A Wish Foundation, a non-profit group that helped terminally ill kids realize a final wish.  There was a fifteen-year-old boy with cancer who would be arriving in Manard sometime in the next few days, along with his parents, and staying in the local motel.  The Make A Wish Foundation had arranged everything and were paying for the trip but they needed some local volunteers with expertise to help them out and since Delbert was the president of the Manard Chamber of Commerce they had come to him.  Delbert said he was trying to line up a few neighbors to work with the kid to try and help him realize his life-long dream and he was hoping that Wyatt would, as he put it, get on board.

            And what would that dream be? Wyatt asked.  He yawned loudly to let Delbert know he was very, very tired.

            The boy’s a hunter, Delbert said, and it’s his dream to shoot a cougar before he dies.

            Shoot a cougar? Wyatt asked, feeling suddenly more awake.  He thought perhaps he had heard him wrong.

            Yeah.  That’s right.

            So the thing this boy would like to do before he dies is to kill something else?  This is a strange wish, don’t you think.

            Well it’s what he wants to do.

            Has anyone tried to talk him out of it?  Wouldn’t he instead like to maybe meet a famous baseball player or go to Disney World and get all the free rides he wants rather than take the life of a beautiful cat?

            Well the kid’s a hunter so I can understand it.  You gotta look at it from his perspective, Delbert said.

            I don’t think I own that perspective.  You know us Indians, we got bad eyesight.  That’s why the government gives us free glasses.  So we can see what you see.  Heh heh.

            Delbert made a little strangled attempt at laughter but squeezed it off fast.  

            The thing is, he said, Bill Daniels told me you mentioned to him that a cougar has been hanging around your place.  This might be your chance to get rid of it.

            What if I don’t want to get rid of it?  What if I think it’s okay for a cougar to share this place of mine with me if he feels like it?

            There was a silence on the other end of the line.  By now Wyatt had drawn up a chair before the window that looked north toward Fricky Creek.  This time of year the hills were red and green.  Later they turned yellow brown.  He liked the red green better.

            I wouldn’t think anyone would want a cougar hanging around their place.

            No it’s true I wouldn’t think you wouldn’t think that either.  Wyatt held the phone away from his ear and made a face at the receiver then pressed it to his ear again and said, So Delbert, I guess what you are asking is if this boy can come onto my land and shoot my cougar.

            Well it ain’t exactly your cougar---

            Yes yes  you’re right.  This cougar doesn’t belong to anyone but it just happens to like being near my place so I guess maybe that makes us kind of like family.

            I heard it killed your cat.

            Well it’s true my cat has gone missing so maybe it was the cougar that got it but we have no proof that the big cat ate the little cat so we can’t kill him for that.

            I heard he’s been hanging around your haystacks.

            I think he likes the mice that live between the bales.  Yum yum, he thought.

            Well since Bill Daniels and I have both given him permission to hunt on our land and since your land is in between it only makes sense that we work together on this deal, especially since we know a cougar is here, in the area.  I mean I think it’s a thing we could do for this boy, don’t you?  Since apparently he doesn’t have that long to live.   And anyways, who knows if he’ll actually be able to bag a cougar.  It’s not the easiest thing to do.  But if a fellow wanted to, he could help give him a chance.

            I’ll have to think about this, Delbert.

            You do that and let me know.  We got a couple of other guys lined up to help us.  The boy’s dad apparently is a good hunter, and if there are four or five others out there working with the kid, maybe…well…it could come out right.

            When did you say he’s coming?

            Next couple of days.  Don’t have an exact date but I can let you know.

            You do that.

            Wyatt got ready to hang up the phone but before he could, Delbert said,

            I guess you heard about Len Peterson.  It’s a terrible deal.

            No I haven’t heard anything about Len Peterson.  I’ve been away a few days, just got home last night.

            Well he was killed a few days ago up at his golf course by some crazy kid he’d hired to help him put in a sprinkling system.  Kid beat him to death with a shovel then took off toward the creek.   Monty and the others are out looking for him, they figure he headed up Soldier Creek.  They’ve been organizing different search parties and some of us are taking our horses into the hills to give him a hand.  There’s a meeting this afternoon at the senior center.  Three o’clock.  If you have any interest.

            Wyatt sighed.  This was terrible news.  Len Peterson had not been a close friend but nevertheless he had liked him well enough.   This was way too much strange news to come home to---that a dying boy wanted to kill a cougar, that a crazy boy had already killed a man.

            Well I gotta run, Wyatt, Delbert said.  I’ll be in touch about this other deal.

            Goodbye, Delbert, Wyatt said with exaggerated politeness.  It suddenly felt that politeness might be a necessary means of getting through this day.

            He dressed and made coffee and looked for something to fix for breakfast but all he could come up with was a package of Ramen soup and some peanut butter and crackers.  The canned beets didn’t count:  who could eat beets for breakfast?

           It was definitely time for a trip to Twin Falls to do some shopping.  He felt suddenly cranky to think he’d let himself run so low on groceries but then he reminded himself that he’d needed to get paid for the chairs before he could do much of anything, which is why he’d taken the trip, so he could deliver them personally and get the cash in hand, muy pronto.   It was also true that he didn’t like shopping and tended to put it off.   Life without a woman to temper your shortcomings was difficult indeed.  During his last marriage, to a mixed-blood Sho-Ban from Ft. Hall named Winnie Dupree, he’d counted on his wife to do all the shopping and he’d gotten used to the idea groceries were simply something that materialized when you needed them, always there in the cupboard or refrigerator when you wanted to fix a meal.  Not that he ever did the cooking himself.  After Winnie left it had come as a great shock to him to realize that he’d have to shop for himself now or he’d have nothing to eat.  It turned out he had no aptitude at all for this task.  First of all he’d been shocked at the prices.  How could a package of bacon cost over five bucks, or a block of Gruyere, his favorite cheese, run to nearly seven?  He’d go to the grocery store in the Valley and blow eighty or ninety bucks and come home with one or two paper bags and find he didn’t have anything he knew how to make a meal out of.  He’d never been a cook and he didn’t know how to become one.  During those first few months after Winnie left there had been some pretty disgusting attempts at dinners---undercooked chicken and overcooked rice, mushy vegetables and tasteless chops, until something had happened to change the course of things. 

        It was Hela who’d finally stepped in and helped him.  This was maybe six months after Winnie had left.   Hela had not only taught him how to shop but how to fix simple and tasty meals, as well as how to make his money go farther at the grocery store.  He had not known her well at this time.  She and her husband Phil lived less than a mile away but for all he socialized with his neighbors they might as well have lived in Tasmania.  

        It was the work on the anti-trapping initiative that had brought them together.   Her dog, a little Sealyham Terrier, had been caught in a steel trap set out on public land while they were hiking in the national forest near Couch Summit and she had been unable to free him and had to leave him there for several hours while she hiked out and got help.  The dog’s leg was crushed and had to be amputated but by then he’d lost so much blood he never recovered and he died shortly after the surgery.  She’d become so angry and outraged at the idea that anyone could set out traps for anything, anywhere, at any time without regard for which animals might be caught or the suffering they’d inevitably endure that she had undertaken a campaign to outlaw all trapping on public lands in the state.  Since Idaho was about eighty percent public land she felt this would solve a large part of the problem.  But what she hadn’t reckoned on, what she didn’t understand as an outsider---and not just an outsider but a foreigner---is how her campaign would backfire, how the good old boys would band together to see that no woman and her pack of bleeding-heart cohorts were going to tell them what they could kill, or where they could kill it, and especially not how they could kill it, because to them killing was not only their God-given right but one of their very favorite forms of recreation.   Of course the initiative hadn’t passed:  instead an amendment had been proposed to the Idaho constitution guaranteeing every citizens the right to set out steel-jawed traps on public lands.

        Still, it was the poster she’d made showing a red fox caught in a steel-toothed trap that had gotten his attention when he saw it tacked up on the post office bulletin board.   The fox had chewed off part of its hind leg in an attempt to get free.  He’d stood in front of the picture for a long while, looking at the little fox whose eyes gazed out from the photo as if asking him for help.   He’d written down the phone number on the poster and the next week he’d gone to the meeting at Hela’s house---the first meeting she’d called about the initiative.  Counting her husband, there were only five people there---two of them high school students who believed in her cause but were still too young to vote.   He knew then there wasn’t a chance in hell her initiative would get any support.  Still he’d been struck by her commitment, by the way she spoke about the cruelty of such traps, how the so-called hunters often never even bothered to check their traps with any frequency so that the animals died slow and terrible deaths and the carcasses were often simply left to rot.   She talked about the moral obligation to act on one’s principles, and the importance of standing up for what one believed was right and just even when the odds were stacked against you.   She said that one measure of a civilization was how it treated its animals, and in that regard she felt the United States had a long way to go.  

           He felt a powerful moral presence as he listened to her talk.  Had she been Navajo, she would have been the matriarch of a clan.  She was cool, unemotional, and yet he could feel the conviction and passion in her words.  She never raised her voice.  She didn’t need to.   She didn’t become sentimental about what happened to the animals caught in the traps, not even when she spoke about her own dog, but  instead addressed the issue with a kind of cold logic that emphasized the cruelty,  terrible suffering.  

        He felt he’d never been around a woman like her.  For one thing she was so tall she had a commanding and powerful presence, and her German accent and proper bearing conveyed a certain dignity and quiet authority he found a bit intimidating.   He thought she was a handsome woman, not beautiful, definitely not that, but nice looking: he admired the way she dressed, so simply, in nice-looking pants and skirts sweaters that looked as if she had knit them herself, with a beautiful silk scarf often draped around her neck.  Every thing about her was very neat---her short gray hair, her clear face, and smooth skin.  When she looked at you with her light blue eyes she really looked at you.   She was no longer young but he found her attractive anyway, even though he guessed she was close to seventy, at least fifteen years older than he was.  He was drawn to her in a very strong way.  From that first meeting he knew she was someone he wanted to be around, someone he felt he needed to be around.    He was still drinking then and smoking dope all day long.  His life had gone downhill after Winnie left---it was Winnie who’d gotten him into pot in the first place and it had helped to ease her absence once he was alone.  He’d begun to feel he was losing whatever hope he’d held for his future.  

       He no longer even knew who he was.  A Navajo who could never return to his reservation.  A fish out of water, an Indian in an all-white world.  He had turned his back on his family and on all that had formed him, especially on that place where he had been raised with so many unhappy memories.  He felt the reservation was by and large a death trap, a gulag, a place of great sickness and no future.   

       He knew his own relatives disagreed with him, as did most of his native friends:  they found his views heretical.  They said he should be ashamed (and he was ashamed, no question, but still it was how he felt).  For them the land was everything.  How could he not see that?   Without their ancestral land they had nothing:  without their ties to the land of the Dine and its history and their ancestors they would disperse and become no more.  But what he saw was overgrazed wastelands and poverty, children addicted drugs and video games and television and violent movies, kids with drooping pants who had no interest in their culture but instead embraced gangsta rap, adults senseless with alcohol and dope, an unemployment rate that staggered the mind, lethargy, idleness, despair, a high school graduation rate of thirty percent, domestic violence, premature death.  And so much fucking unhappiness.  

       And yet he knew his relatives were right, that he was seeing it only one way---the bad way---and that without the ancestral connections, without the land, without the tribe and the clan and the family and the community, he was lost.   For a long while he had wanted to be lost.  It seemed the best place to be, the place where no one would bother him anymore.  Where he could be nothing.  Where there was no one left to care about or to care for him.

      And then he met Hela, and he began to see himself differently.  He found he could look at himself the way she might look at him and he didn’t like what he saw.  He didn’t want her to see him as a loser even though he felt like one, even though he knew he was one.  He wanted her to see his intelligence and dignity and his strength, his warrior Dine strength, and to do this he knew he would need to change because he no longer possessed those things in any great measure or at least he could not feel them in himself and nor could he make them visible.  He would need some of her strength to change himself into a better person---in short he needed some of her power.   

      In the beginning, he thought if he spent enough time near her some of her strength and power might rub off on him.  And it had.  In some strange way it had.  When he was with her he remembered why he had loved going to school.   Why he hadn’t minded being sent away from the reservation as a boy to live in the cold barracks in a distant place populated by white Mormons, with white teachers, required to adapt to their white world, studying both their white books and their white thinking, though later people would often pity him for being forced to do this thing.  They didn’t understand how he had loved those books.  Those ideas they exposed him to.  With Hela it was like going to school again.  Once more he had found someone with whom he could discuss books and ideas, so many ideas.  He discovered it really was much better to spend an evening walking down the old streambeds with her, chatting and looking for arrowheads and glassing passing birds than drinking himself into a stupor after a day of smoking dope, starting the moment he woke up.  She seemed to give him something back that had been drained from him many years earlier when he had been fired from the only job he ever truly loved, teaching literature to high school kids, one of whom he’d made the fatal mistake of getting pregnant.   For a long time he had thought he was finished.  And then Hela, offering a new beginning.

      He could call her now.  It was possible she might invite him to come for lunch.  She might want to hear about his trip up to Montana and Wyoming.   He wanted to talk to her about Len Peterson’s death.  And about the boy  with cancer who wanted to shoot the cougar.  He didn’t quite know how to think about these things.   He needed to talk with her.  He’d missed her while he was away.  Maybe she would even want to make the drive to Twin with him to do some grocery shopping tomorrow.  Or head to Shoshone on the weekend and listen to the old-time fiddlers.  

He picked up the phone and dialed her number but he got only her voice on an answering machine.   The thick accent.  The polite voice asking him to leave a message.  The disappointment felt heavy.

He made the ramen and ate it along with crackers and peanut butter and felt satisfied he would not need to eat again until dinner.  He found some frozen chicken breasts in the freezer and took those out so he’d have something to cook later.  He cut some lettuce in his garden while it was still cool and it had not yet wilted and he cleaned that and put it away in the fridge.  He saw the zucchini had begun to come on in his absence and he picked the first three small ones, admiring their smooth firm shapes.   The garden was dry and he set out a sprinkler and then he got the wheelbarrow and loaded it with hay for Alfred.

Mules had been his passion for years.  He had bred them and raised them and trained them and sold them.  For a while it had been how he and Minnie had made their living, sorry as it was.  That and her part time job as cashier at the market in town and the dope she sold on the side.  Now all the mules were gone, only Alfred left.  He’d sold off the two young white mules several years ago when he’d needed the money after the divorce.  Gotten good prices for them too.  A good riding mule wasn’t that easy to come by and people were willing to pay real money for one.  His neighbor Bill Daniels had bought the white pair and it had not been easy to let them go but Bill had given him $5,000 for them because they were so well trained.  Trained to pull, and trained to ride.  Mules you could trust if you knew how to treat them.  He’d stayed drunk for three days after Daniels picked up those mules and took them away.  Daniels had offered to buy Alfred as well but he could not let him go.  Alfred was his and would be his until the day one of them died.  He was the most intelligent mule he’d ever owned and he’d owned some very smart ones.   His bond with that animal was something he could never have explained to anyone and would never have tried to.  He felt that if he’d let Alfred go, a great hole would open up and this place where he lived would feel completely empty and forlorn and so would his life.  With Alfred to feed each day and look after, he never actually felt alone, though he almost always felt lonely.   

The mule was waiting for him at the gate.  He was a large mule with distinctive markings, the gray color know as gruillo, with a dark stripe running down his back and intersected by another running across his shoulders, as handsome a mule as you could find.  He stood for a moment stroking Alfred’s muzzle and then he rubbed the place just beneath his eyes, the spot where mules loved to be rubbed, and Albert half closed his eyes with pleasure and let his lower lip droop, relaxing into his touch.   He did not know what he would do when Alfred died, but he didn’t have to worry about that for a while.   Mules generally lived much longer than horses, sometimes reaching the grand age of 40.  Cared for properly, Alfred might be expected to live at least another dozen years.

He threw the hay into the manger and filled up the water trough and then headed back to the house.  He thought he’d given Hela another try.  He hoped very much that this time he might find her at home.

Published in The Limberlost Review.