Grayfox (21 page)

While Hawk and I stood there talking and holding onto that mule, a clump of black clouds was drifting in from the west. Now they were directly overhead, blocking the sun. And suddenly a downpour erupted, threatening to drench us.

We ran to take cover in the mouth of the cave and then stood watching the rain come down in sheets. The way it cooled the hot air and the ground sure felt good.

“I sure wouldn't have expected that,” I laughed as we stood watching the rain from under the overhanging ledge.

“If it doesn't rain once in a while, the plants won't grow,” replied Hawk.

“Aw, nothing much grows out here, anyway,” I said, not really thinking what I was saying.

“Come on, Zack—how can you say such a thing after all this time?”

“You're right. It was a dumb thing for me to say. But still, it doesn't seem like one thunderstorm would do much good after days and days of baking sun.”

“Out here it doesn't take much to do what it needs to do. You've seen what it's like after a rain—whether it's a ten-minute shower or a two-day storm. It might be messy for a while—with the flash floods and the high winds. But afterward the land is refreshed.”

Hawk was quiet a minute, and I could tell from the look on his face that he wasn't thinking of the rain anymore.

“You know, Zack,” he said after a while, “before you left home, you might have been a little like the desert—dry, tense, knowing that something needed changing. You joined the Pony Express, and you finally wound up out here with me. This is your time of storm, your time to get refreshed, your time to grow, your time to let the rain clean out some places inside you. You see what I mean?”

“I think so,” I said.

“Anger's like a storm. It can spill out just like the rain out of those clouds a minute ago. But things always calm down afterward. In people, just like on the desert, a storm can bring refreshing, and even new kinds of life.”

“You saying anger's a good thing?” I asked.

“No. It's not exactly like a rainstorm, just sorta like it. I doubt anger's ever too good a thing between folks. But sometimes it can have the effect of a rainstorm, and maybe some new growth can come because of it.”

And then suddenly Hawk was back to what he was talking about before the rain interrupted us.

“Tell me, Zack,” said Hawk after a bit, “which do you figure would be harder to do—get on the back of a wild stallion and try to tame it, or look another man in the eye and tell him you were wrong about something—tell him you acted selfishly and then apologize to him for it?”

I thought a while but didn't say anything.

“Is it harder to talk tough or to swallow your pride and eat crow?” he asked.

“Well, swallowing your pride's never easy,” I said.

“My point is, what most men figure is being manly and tough doesn't really take much. That's one of the lessons my pa could've taught me if I'd been able to see him for who he really was. By the time I learned it, he wasn't there for me to share it with.”

Again his mind seemed to drift off into the past for a minute, but then he went on.

“It's a sight harder to face up to your own shortcomings,” Hawk went on, “and even admit them. That takes a different kind of courage! A courage that looks inside, where the
real
fearsome things are! Most men never learn to look inside themselves. So they go through their lives trying to earn their manhood by showing how brave and self-reliant they are toward the outside things.

“That's easy. Lots of men can do that. All it takes is being tough. But it takes a real man to face the stuff inside, to grow into all that a feller is supposed to be, to lay down those pieces of yourself that are not what they ought to be.”

“So what did you mean, a while back,” I asked, “when you said it was time?”

“I meant, are you ready to
really
look down inside yourself, Grayfox?” Hawk asked. “Down deep . . . down where you never looked before . . . down where maybe nobody's ever seen except the God that made you?”

I shrugged, but didn't answer him. In my own way I'd already been trying to make my peace with the past. That kind of thing's never easy. Even when you want to grow and change, there can still be pain that goes along with it. And when the growing requires cutting on your own self, and you're holding the knife in your own hand, there's a part of you that always shies away from sticking it in too deep.

Hawk kept waiting. He wouldn't say more unless I gave him leave.

“Yeah, I reckon,” I said finally.

He looked at me a minute longer, seriously, but with eyes that were full of love. I knew he cared about me, and so I trusted him to say anything he wanted to me.

“What have I been teaching you all this time we been together?” he asked me finally.

“To look inside things,” I said.

“You're a good learner, Zack. You got a good head on your shoulders. You know how to use it. The Paiutes knew what they were doing when they called you Grayfox. But there's lots of smart folks in the world that don't know the first thing about using their brains for the most important thing those brains were given to us for. Learning how to see inside things ain't much good if you don't use it to see inside the one thing we gotta look inside of the most. You know what that is, don't you, Grayfox?”

“I reckon so.”

“Yep, it's looking inside your own self—
that's
why we gotta train our inner eyes. So now, young Grayfox, it's time to see if you're really ready to be a man.”

My eyes had wandered down to the ground as I'd been listening to Hawk. But with the words about being a man, I glanced up.

Hawk was staring straight through me. I think he wanted to make sure I had really heard what he'd said. But his next words changed the subject entirely.

The clouds had passed by already, and the rain was over. The bright sun sparkled over the whole landscape. Everything looked fresh and clean and wet.

“I'm hungry,” Hawk said. “I got a hankering for a rabbit stew. What do you say, Grayfox? Feel like seeing if we can scare us up a coupla rabbits?”

“You bet,” I said.

“Then let's go.”

The desert was so clean-smelling from the rain. The plants almost looked pretty, with wet drops hanging from every branch and blade and thorn. But the desert had been so thirsty that in ten or fifteen minutes the sand and dirt and rocks were drying and almost back to their normal arid glare.

I found myself remembering how Hawk had first taught me about how plants grew in the desert without much water or soil, and how he'd learned from the desert how to get what he needed out of what looks like nothing. People are like that too, he said. If you send your roots deep enough, there's nourishment to be found anywhere.

“Life is everywhere, Zack,” I remembered him saying, “even in the middle of the desert. No matter what things look like, there is life in all these growing things around us. God puts his life in everything.”

For the next hour we used every trick we could think of, but in the end we only managed to bag one measly sized little animal that didn't look like he would make much of a stew. But Hawk said it would be tasty enough by the time he got finished with it. As we made our way back to the cave, he started talking again as if we'd never stopped the previous conversation.

“That's what it's all about, Zack,” he said, like he was just finishing up a sentence he'd started earlier, “being a man. And now I figure you're about ready to step up into your own manhood. You brave enough for me to keep on talking?”

“If I can do what I did three weeks back, I reckon I'd be a coward if I couldn't hear what you have to say.”

“That's the way I see it, and hearing you say so proves to me that you're ready. So here it is then. You remember when we talked about anger, Zack?”

I nodded.

“Well, you'll never be all the way a man until you learn what to do with it, how to get rid of it, and then how to swallow your pride and learn to live with the people closest to you.”

We were just getting back to the cave, so we stopped talking long enough to put down our rifles and get a fire started. I got working on the fire while he brought snow water up from what he called his cellar to start boiling in the pot. Then he pulled out his knife, took the rabbit outside, and began to skin and clean it.

“Who knows where anger comes from, Zack?” he went on as he worked. “But everybody's got it. I'd have to say most folks have got anger down inside them toward either their ma or pa, maybe both. It's a mystery that the people who gave us life would be the people we'd have the hardest time not being angry with, but that still seems to be where most anger gets its start, toward our own folks. Why do you think that is?”

“I don't know,” I said.

“I got a feeling it's on account of independence.”

“How do you mean?” I asked, throwing on some more wood, now that the fire was going pretty good.

“From the minute we're born we want to be independent. Most of us figure we got a right to be that way. Since our folks are there so close by, and since we need 'em so much when we're little, they're the ones we're always trying to be independent from. But I learned something after I got old enough to see a few things more clearly. You want to know what I learned?”

I nodded.

“I learned that a fellow will never be complete until he learns not to swagger around like he's the head honcho of the world, but to be comfortable with other folks being honcho over him. Anyone can act tough. But it takes a
real
man, or woman, too, for that matter, to know how to let somebody else be the boss. That's a lot harder.”

“It's the same for women?” I asked.

“Different . . . but the same,” Hawk answered. “Women want to be independent just like men. They just have a different way of showing it.”

I thought about Almeda and how she ran for mayor. Afterward, she'd said almost that very same thing.

“Until we learn that lesson,” Hawk went on, “especially with our own folks, but with everybody else we have to do with too, we're
bound to keep having little pockets of anger deep down inside us. I never learned it with my pa, and I'm a poorer man for it. I'll regret till my dying day that I was so slow to learn it. You see what I'm getting at, Zack?”

I nodded again.

“As long as we're thinking we gotta be independent, and as long as we don't want anybody telling us what to do, then we're gonna be angry. The world ain't set up in such a way that independence makes things work right.”

“Yeah. But, Hawk, ain't you your own boss?”

“I reckon on the outside it looks that way. But inside, I know I ain't all that independent. I know how much I depend on the rain and snow and the birds and the plants out here. I depend on the mules and the trading post. I need someone to talk to at least now and then, and I sure need the Paiute's tolerance to stay alive.

“You see, Zack,” he went on, “independence has to do with how you think about things and what you want, more than if there's somebody actually telling you what to do or not. It's the
attitude
of independence that causes folks so much trouble and breeds anger down inside.”

Hawk took the skinned rabbit in by the fire, cut it up, and threw the pieces of rabbit into the iron stewpot, then burrowed into his food sacks for salt and herbs and some jerky and a little rice. He had just a spoonful of cooked beans from last night, so he tossed them in too.

“Independence is a sure road to misery and disaster,” he went on, stirring up the mixture and then putting on the lid, “'cause we're
dependent
on the God that made us for every tiny breath we breathe. We're just fooling ourselves if we're bent on being independent.

“Folks that never face that and come to terms with it are gonna go through their lives being angry and out of sorts with everything and everybody. Men like my brother Jake, and Demming and Tranter, men that never want anybody telling them anything and that flare up at anyone who dares cross them, they just haven't got it figured out yet what life's all about.

“Independence, Zack—it's the root of anger, and it's standing in the way of most folks' being able to find any happiness in life. It all boils down to accepting that you can't be your own boss, no matter how hard you try. You might as well try to fly. It ain't the way the world is. You remember when we talked about courage?”

“Yeah.”

“You want to know what the most courageous thing is that a person can do?”

“Yeah, I'd like to know that.”

“Facing yourself. Facing your own independence and anger and selfishness for the enemies they are. Standing up to those kinds of attitudes face-to-face, being brave enough to take them on and battle against them, and fight them until you defeat them.

“There's a fight most men aren't man enough for. When it comes to that fight, most men turn out to be cowards. You asked about women, well, there ain't too many women can do that either. There's cowardly women as well as cowardly men, just like there's courageous women as well as courageous men. That's why I told you that nearly anyone can be brave when facing some danger coming at them from the outside. But to fight their own anger and independence and selfishness takes a higher level of courage altogether. That's where you need real bravery and humility. Takes a real man to forgive, Grayfox.”

Hawk stopped, and the two of us were quiet a long time, watching the fire shoot its flames up around the sides of the black stewpot. Both of us in our own way were thinking about all he'd said. When he spoke again, his words were real personal.

“You and I've talked some about your pa,” he went on. “If I read you right, my young friend, you've probably begun to realize some things about your pa you didn't know before. You're probably starting to see some things in that broken mirror, aren't you?”

I nodded, poking at the fire with a stick.

“But there's much more to see. So I'm going to tell you one more thing about that mirror. As cracked as it might be, the biggest problem we have in seeing it is usually our own blindness—our own stubbornness about not wanting anyone telling us what to do. Our biggest problems with our fathers have nothing to do with our fathers at all! And those problems are the things that are so hard for most folks to lay down, and most never do at all.

“That's what it takes to be a real man, Zack—humbling yourself, laying down that independent spirit, laying down your anger so you can forgive anyone you got something against—father, mother, brother, sister, whoever it is.

“You'll never be altogether who God made you to be until you become a thorough child, with the kind of humility it takes to not
think you have to be independent. And here's what's funny: To be a child like that—with the kind of childlikeness our Lord spoke of, you have to be a thorough man. Only a man can be a child, and only a childlike man can be
fully
a man. That's something my brother Jake never understood and probably never will until he meets his Maker someday face-to-face.

“Only takes half a man to be able to live out in nature all by yourself, Zack. Everything you and I have done out here together, it's something anybody with half an ounce of sense could learn to do. I don't doubt that I've done a pretty fair job of teaching you how to take care of yourself out here and how to see some things.

“But now, Zack, my friend, it's time you learned to be a whole man. What you've learned with me and what you did out there with them Indians was just getting you prepared to do it. Now you got to take the half of yourself you put together out here and put it to use growing into the other half.

“Zack,” he said—and now there was a look of pain on his face like I'd never seen before—“Zack, don't make the mistake I did of never going back! I've learned a lot of things. I know how to live in the wilds. But in a way I'm still only half a man because I didn't learn to see what the broken mirror had to show me about both my fathers until the earthly one was dead and gone. And now it's too late for me to make it complete. In a sense, I'll only be half a man till the next life, when I hope I can look my pa in the face and shake his hand. That'll be when I can tell him how grateful I am that the Father chose him to be my pa . . . and tell him how much I love him.

“Being able to say and do that, with all your anger gone and buried forever in the past, that's what makes you a full-grown human being, or at least that goes a long way toward it. It's too late for me now. I drifted too far from my pa before I realized all this. Now most of my own people are gone.”

He paused and looked away. For one of the first times since I'd known him, I saw a look of regret in Hawk's face. Then he looked straight at me.

“But it's not too late for you, young Grayfox,” he said, with an expression that made me realize how lucky he thought I was. “It's not too late for you to be brave.”

He rose and walked out of the cave to let me reflect on what he'd said . . . or maybe to reflect on his own regrets. Probably both.

When he returned it was with a handful of desert roots to put into the pot in place of vegetables like carrots and potatoes.

The stew bubbled for another hour or so. It was mighty tasty by the time Hawk was done with it.