Scarborough Fair and Other Stories (6 page)

They drove down the street in a split second, just as Tony was leaving. Moonshadow, bundled into Jeannette's arms, mewed plaintively and Drew pretended to make over her. “Don't let him near you, Moon!” Mustard cried. “He tried to kill you!”

As Drew stuck out his hand to stroke Moonshadow, she crouched back against Jeannette, laid her ears back, hissed, spat, and tried to rip his hand open, despite her illness.

Drew pulled his hand back just in time, then hissed back at her, “
Traitor
,” he spat, and then tried to look wounded. “She must be delirious. Doesn't seem to know me,” he said to the others.

It was Mustard's good luck that Tony and Jeannette were who they were.
They
didn't think he was white and recognized him too. Furthermore, they seemed to understand him. While Tony was examining Drew's scratches right there in the driveway, Jeannette called Susan and Diane over to look at his shirt. The pocket was ripped and a small bag of the tainted catnip sprinkled its contents down to mingle with the still-wet blood.

“Just what is this?” Jeannette demanded.

“A treat for the cats,” Drew said. “OUCH,” as Tony washed out a scratch.

“It smells funny. You don't mind if I analyze it, do you?”

“It's a special kind and it cost me a lot. But hey, nothing's too good for my kitties, huh?”

“Is that why Moonshadow is afraid of you?” Jeannette said. “Because you gave her this?”

“Afraid of me? Why should she be afraid of me? When
Diane
wouldn't let Moonie in the house because Rasta gave her too much shit,
I
took her in. But when Diane threw me out, did Moonie so much as catch me a mouse to get by on? Hell no! And Susan—she wouldn't even hold my hand but she treated those cats of hers like royalty and wanted me to do it too! She wouldn't even pay for me to go to a movie with her but she spent thirty bucks every two weeks on food for
them
.” His eyes, which had always seemed blue, were now blazing green with jealousy. Yep, no doubt about it. The guy was one jealous dude—even of the cats. And if Mustard was right, he had
been
a cat himself. But then, cats were jealous of other cats. Mustard himself, for instance. He began licking his right front paw in embarrassment while the questioning continued. It didn't take long to wring a defiant confession from Drew.

As he had already said when he let the cat out of the bag, he had poisoned Mustard, Blackie and Moonshadow because he was angry with Diane for throwing him out and with Susan for breaking up with him—which Mustard actually hadn't realized happened. Human mating habits weren't of particular interest to him, after all.

Mustard told all of this to Mu Mao and the others later, as they kept vigil over the still body of Boston Blackie.

“But why did he hurt the cats he had taken such care to befriend?” Paka asked.

“Well, I guess he had a long record as a con man who got nasty when his victims turned. He was nice to us because that was a good way to get him close to single, cat loving independent ladies like Diane and Susan. He tried to go back on what he said about trying to punish them for rejecting him and said he was just trying to upset them so they'd turn to him in a crisis because they thought he was sympathetic to their love for us.”

“And with your Susan, it almost worked,” Mu Mao said.

“She's sweet, but not always real bright,” Mustard admitted. “But at least the neighborhood should be safe from that particular danger now.”

“You've done good work, my brother,” Mu Mao said and Mustard noticed that he said “brother” instead of “son.” “Will you be returning home to Susan again, even if she thinks of you as a white cat?”

“I've thought about it,” he said. “But I'd like to know a little more about this place and there's a shelter full of kittens who've never had a good home. Susan will fall in love with some, the kitten will play with them and the old girl will have her usual tantrum. But she'll be okay.”

“It isn't just that Susan didn't know you and it hurt your feelings is it?” Paka asked.

“No, no,” he said, though perhaps that was part of it. “I was never her top cat. I think I see why now. I always hated all of the others—even hated her for loving them. But, you know, it took all of us to figure it out.”

“You're too modest,” Mu Mao said. “You overcame your jealousy of your housemates to save their lives. You are evolving very quickly, my brother, and growing in enlightenment.”

Brother Paddy licked Mustard's ear affectionately and for once, Mustard didn't mind. “Not only that but he's smart. Mustard was always the smart one. Why, now he's a real detective, just like in those books of Susan's.”

“Or on TV,” Blackie mumbled, stirring and sitting up. The other cats surrounded him, licking and purring and he responded with a weak purr himself.

“The Mystery series,” Sister Paka said. “That's right. Oh, Mustard, you have to stay now, won't he, Master Mu Mao?”

“If he wishes, of course. It's entirely up to him. But it would add very much to our order to have our very own Brother Catfael among us.”

by

Elizabeth Ann Scarborough

The old woman had carried Dezbah when she could no longer walk. The same one had told the frightened child stories of their people, of Monster Slayer, Born-for-Water, and Changing Woman, to make her heart strong. The same one had been the one to calm her when Dezbah was torn from the bodies of her murdered parents. This grandmother, this same one who had helped Dezbah on the twenty day forced march from Fort Defiance to Hweeldi, or Bosque Redondo as the soldiers called it, now ran naked and screaming toward the fort. The soldiers gathered outside their adobe houses to watch and mock and throw things.

Dezbah was frightened, for herself as well as the grandmother. The soldiers weren't shooting yet, instead they made bets and tried to hit the old lady with clods of horse dung. The dung of their horses.

All the tame horses of the Dine' were dead. Dezbah, who was more commonly called Horses Talk to Her, had heard them screaming, and the wild ones too—wondering why? The Dine' treated them like brothers, like the valuable beings they were. Why had they died, and the other animals? Men who would do that to the animals, to babies, to elders, who would shoot a woman going into labor because she slowed the progress of the march, that sort of man would do anything.

“Awww, for the luvva Jaysus, wouldja lookit yez!” It was a funny sounding voice that rang out so suddenly, from within the group of soldiers. Dezbah should not have been able to understand what it said, but she did. A man with hair as black as her father's and skin almost as dark, pushed his way through the other men and stood with both fists on his hips. A blanket dangled from one hand and he turned almost absently and threw it to Dezbah.

She caught a thought with it. The man's face was a mask of disgust but his thought, urgent as it was, was kind. “Wrap it round her, girl, and away with you both.” Ah! She knew him now, though she did not think she had heard him speak aloud before he began scolding the soldiers. She had heard his thoughts before, but this was the first time she knew who the thinker was. Perhaps it was because she saw, as much as heard, what he thought, that she could understand him though he spoke none of her tongue and she had learned only some of the English the soldiers spoke during the Long Walk. He had been on the walk too. She had seen him before and taken no notice. When she heard his thoughts before, she realized she mistook them for those of a Navajo. Only the first time, she realized now, she would have known the thought for what it was, had she not been so sick from all of the other disasters striking like lightening into the canyon. Through all of the dying, his thought had fallen like a dead pine needle from among the soldiers lining the rim of the canyon like a dead lrsf. “My God, what are we doing to these people?”

Dezbah picked up the blanket from the ground while the soldier made big movements with his hands and walked back and forth between the soldiers and the grandmother and her. He was yelling at the other men and said he would tell the white leader that the soldiers didn't have anything to do, that they made sport over some naked old granny. Better send away for their wives quick, he said. Better send them to town soon, because they were pretty bad off to act that way. She knew, somehow, that he was being funny as he said it, making himself look sillier than the grandmother, so the men would listen to him and let Dezbah take the old woman away. Dezbah ran after the grandmother, who was stumbling now on feet that had become very bad during the walk. Dezbah caught her and folded the ranting old woman in the plain green wool blanket. With one hand she tried to tuck the grandmother's straggling, dirty gray and black hair up into the traditional bumblebee hairdo at the back of her head. She was afraid to look at the soldiers but heard the man still scolding them in a lewdly humorous way about their own mothers and grandmothers.

“Go!” his voice said in her head and she didn't need to be told again.

Keeping her arms around the grandmother to hold the blanket in place, Dezbah bundled the old woman as deeply among their people as she could. Most made their houses, which were nothing more than holes dug into the ground, covered with whatever they could find, in the Pecos River Basin, on the eastern side of the river. Since the soldiers controlled all food except for the scarce amount the people could hunt or grow themselves in this desolate place, the people needed to stay closer to the Fort than they would have liked. The soldier's compound squatted in the middle of the forty mile square of desert imprisoning the Navajos.

Bosque Redondo was far from their own lands and within that of the Comanche. The Comanche raided the unprotected Navajos, taking children and women since there were no horses to take, and those raids made living on the outskirts of Hweeldi even worse than living within constant sight of the soldiers, who forced the people to build adobe houses that were supposed to have been for themselves, but in reality were built so that only the soldiers could use them.

At first Dezbah had tried to stay farther away, but when the grandmother had begun acting in this way, the girl could not stay away from her long enough to make trips to the fort to collect their rations, take water from the river or gather droppings for a fire.

When she returned with the grandmother to the miserable pit house she had dug from the ground with her own hands, she sat down outside it with the old woman, who began picking up sand and flinging it hard at Dezbah berating her and calling her a killer.

People came out of their houses and looked at them.

“You should tie her up, maybe.” The suggestion came from Blue Bead Woman, who had been relieved of the beads she was named for, along with her man and her two oldest sons, before she took the younger children to Fort Defiance. Three of them had perished on the great journey and Blue Bead Woman, once prettily plump, was now wasted so that you could see sunlight through the flesh between her arm bones.

Dezbah said nothing, just shook her head. She ducked another handful of sand.

“I wish I had tied up that boy I had,” Blue Bead Woman said. Dezbah nodded. They all knew how, during the seige in Canyon de Chelly, her younger son had gone crazy from the thirst and heat and had suddenly run out of their hiding place in full view of the soldiers. They had cut him down, wounded him real bad, and when his father and brother tried to go out there and save him, the soldiers got them too.

They'd had lots of practice with their guns, killing the people's horses and sheep, their cows, even the dogs. And then they had chopped down and burned the beautiful peach orchard. It was that Kit Carson told them to do it, Dezbah had heard someone say. He used to be friends with the Dine' but the soldiers paid him a lot of money to betray the People. Because he knew all about them, he was able to cut the heart from them, their horses and trees. And their relatives.

Several other people were standing around watching and the children with enough energy left to play began making fun of the grandmother too. Dezbah threw sand at
them
.

“Don't be mad at them, little one,” Hastin Yellow Horse told her. He was still young and handsome when they left the Fort but the soldiers shot his leg when he tried to protect his wife and baby and now he could only walk with help. He looked old enough to be married to the grandmother now. “This woman is not the one who helped you. A dark wind has blown through her and taken her away. It makes her do these dumb-ass things—the children are right to mock her. She is going to make more trouble for you and all of the rest of us if she keeps this up.”

“She needs a sing,” said a woman called Her Yarn Has Lumps. She was not from the canyon, but by now Dezbah knew almost everyone as if they were her own relatives. But no one knew the grandmother and it was not polite to ask names. Names gave you power over people. That's why she was never called Dezbah by anyone but her own family, who were now dead. No one would speak her name again, she realized suddenly, and tears began falling.

“Who will sing for her with our singer dead?” said Many Goats Woman, whose now had only one skinny goat. Her others had been killed and rotted in the sun while she watched from her hiding place during the seige.

“Barboncito could ask Manuelito if maybe a singer could get himself caught,” Blue Bead Woman said. She knew that the chiefs were in contact with each other, something the People were able to keep from the soldiers. Barboncito had purposely allowed himself to be taken so he might help his people and he had helped a lot. During the long walk he got the soldiers to sometimes let the little ones and the elders ride in the wagons. He had a good way of talking to the white men, and found whatever heart they had in them and appealed to it to get help for the people. Maybe the man who thought in Navajo was like that too, Dezbah thought. Maybe he could think at her Old One and get her to act right again. Someone with the magic to make others hear his thoughts, even in a different language, who knew what such a one could do?

It didn't occur to her that she and many of the children she knew could understand perfectly well what the animals said and make themselves understood as well. She didn't like to think about the animals now, poor things.

She dressed the grandmother in the rags the old woman had worn on the trail, dirty and torn like everyone else's clothes. It was time to collect the rations then, and everyone had to walk to where the soldiers stood giving out the pound of beef, pound of cornmeal, pinch of salt that was supposed to last two days. The meat was maggoty, the cornmeal also afflicted with insects, but it was all that they had. They were to become farmers, the soldiers said, but the land was poor, there was no water except for the mud of the Pecos, and that was very scarce.

Dezbah's rations had run out two days ago and she was hungry but she didn't want to leave the grandmother when she was in such a state. Dezbah tried to tie their wrists together with her sash and get the old one to walk with her, but the grandmother slapped and scratched her and tried to bite her. Dezbah's stomach rumbled as she gazed sadly into those cloudy dark eyes, trying to find a trace of the wise and gentle woman who had saved her life and soothed her mind when none of her own relatives were alive to do it. Neither of them had anyone anymore, she guessed. It was one of the worst criticisms you could say of one of the Dine', “He acts as if he has no relatives.” That was how the old woman was acting, as if there was no one who would be shamed by her behavior—but from its craziness, Dezbah feared the the old one would be dead soon. And somehow that was even more terrible than the way she was now, when maybe, there was a chance she might come back.

The others returned. They looked away from her, and hurried into their houses. Dezbah knew the people were ashamed that they could not bring her rations to her as well but the soldiers kept very tight control over them. When the grandmother was not calm enough to go for her own, the soldiers would not give Dezbah both portions, even if she had two ration chits.

Many Goats Woman, Blue Bead Woman and the rest made their meals but each of them had children of their own to feed and the old woman sometimes threw food away. One child brought her a bit of corncake with a bite mark at the edge. She broke it to give some to the grandmother but the old lady knocked it out of her hand into the dirt, and it crumbled so badly that she couldn't separate the crumbs. By the time everyone disappeared into their hole houses to sleep, the sky changed from coral and deep pink to turquoise and indigo. The old woman would not go inside and Dezbah could not leave her. There was nothing to make a fire with now and they shivered, but at least they had the soldier's blanket to wrap around them both.

Her stomach growled again and she tried to sleep with her head on her knees and her arms wrapped around them. The old one fell away from her, taking the blanket with her, and snored right there in the open on the ground. Dezbah covered the old one with the part of the blanket she wasn't laying on. Her own belly felt stuck to her backbone.

And then she heard footsteps—not like the ones the people made, but boots, cavalry boots, and a man's heavy tread. She was on her feet at once but the thought-voice of the man who had distracted the soldiers spoke to her. “Aha! Didn't see you in the ration line and I figured you'd be hungry. Brought a bit of something for you and your granny. Couldn't get rations without a chit so I saved this from the mess hall.”

He handed her a bundle and she unwrapped two good sized pieces of mutton and 2 ears of roasted corn. He had a bag over his shoulder and from it he took two more items, which he gave to her-a can of peaches and even a knife to open the can with. “I'll need that back though,” he said of the opener.

“I will have one peach and give one to the Grandmother,” she said. “The rest we will save for the other people.”

He shook his head and started to open his mouth then thought, “Better not. Word may get around and someone might think you stole them. When actually, I stole them. I'm riding picket at the northern perimeter for a spell, so I won't be here to catch.”

“You aren't like the other soldiers,” she said in Navajo. He seemed to hear it in his own tongue, as she did, catching the words from the thought.

“I'm entirely like them, except that I've been on the receivin' end of a great deal of the kind of trouble your folks are in and I didn't like the feel of it.”

“Can you bring more?” she asked—thought.

“Not for awhile. I'll be up at the outpost. Can you keep your granny from getting you both killed until I get back?”

She sighed. “I am trying. They say that a dark wind has taken over her body now. It's very strong.”

“Is that so? And what kind of wind would that be?”

She made a circle with her finger to show him the whirlwind, then pictured it in her mind.

He smiled, and she could see his teeth in the darkness. “Are you some kind of Indian yourself?” she asked.