When the Indians came to town, Charlie Tabor, the barber, called old Dock Middleton and asked him to come by the barber shop. Then Charlie Tabor needed an excuse to keep the Indians at the barber shop till Dock Middleton could get there, so he told the Indians they’d have to wait until Pink Issacs came to town to give them permission to go out to Bead Mountain. Pink Issacs did indeed own Bead Mountain, but nobody needed permission to visit the place. Charlie Tabor called Pink and Pink said it was a curious story, but he guessed it was true. Bead Mountain was called Bead Mountain, after all, because of all the clay Indian beads that used to lay scattered about. Pink said he wouldn’t mind meeting the Indians and taking them, but he was, that day, too damn busy pulling rusty pipe on his windmill and he said to tell them to feel free to camp there if they felt like it.
Charlie Tabor had taken charge of the Indians that morning because he’d been the first to see them. He’d been walking to the barber shop about 7:30 and he’d seen them parked down by the Home Creek bridge where they’d spent the night. He didn’t know they were Indians, but Charlie Tabor was always bound to check anything, so he’d walked to the bridge. At first he’d guessed they were Mexicans, but Mexicans weren’t apt to be traveling about in touring cars and certainly not apt to be camping beside Home Creek. So as Tabor had walked up on them, he’d decided they must be gypsies.
There were four of them, two men dressed in denim overalls, a woman, and an old man wearing a dirty, shapeless wool dress suit. When Tabor saw that the old man was wearing braids, he realized with surprise that these had to be Indians. Charlie Tabor had never before seen an Indian. He’d come to west Texas as a young man from Alabama thirty years after the last Indian had gone.
So Charlie Tabor had introduced himself and spoken of the fine morning and the younger of the two men in overalls had answered him carefully and none too happily.
“You people traveling, are you?” Charlie Tabor had asked the young man and the young man had said they were. Charlie Tabor asked where they’d come from and the young man said Oklahoma. Charlie Tabor had asked where they were going and the young man had seemed hesitant to answer. Charlie Tabor, who was bound to do his best to understand everything, had decided there was something about these Indians camped on Home Creek that he needed to know.
Charlie Tabor never was a man without words, so he had talked. He had talked nonsense, passing the time of day, commenting on the weather and how the creek was low and he supposed he’d go up to the Blue Hole one of these evenings and catch some perch. The young man appeared confused; the old man paid no attention. The other man in overalls, he had seemed to listen.
The two in overalls had stood by the car while the old man had squatted by the dying breakfast fire as if to soak up heat, though it was August and the old man was wearing a woolen suit. The woman had cleared dishes.
The man who seemed to listen had finally spoken. He said, “My name is Amos Horn. This is my son; he’s called Brian. And this is my father. That woman there, she’s my old woman.”
Charlie Tabor had introduced himself and asked again, “You folks just traveling?”
Amos Horn had said, “We brought my father. This is the country where he was born and lived. He was a child over by that big mountain.” Amos Horn pointed east and Tabor guessed he meant Santa Anna Mountain. Twelve or fifteen miles east, Santa Anna Mountain was the only hill in that part of Texas which might deserve the name mountain.
“We camped there a few days,” Amos Horn had said, “and then my father wanted to come here to another place.” Charlie Tabor had glanced at the old man who still had paid no attention. “There is another mountain over that way,” Amos Horn had said as he pointed to the southwest. “He says it’s the other side of these hills.” Low wooded hills banked the south side of the creek. Tabor guessed he meant Bead Mountain. It wasn’t a mountain like Santa Anna Mountain, but setting as it did on the prairie alone, it was a widely-noted landmark and could be seen from miles in any direction: Bead Mountain was maybe four miles away, on the other side of the breaks of Home Creek. Being down in the creek bottom as they were, they couldn’t see it.
So Charlie Tabor had decided to situate them in his barber shop till he could check all this over more carefully and he’d told them he’d call Pink Issacs, the man who owned Bead Mountain.
Had his universe not turned itself upside down so unbelievably, he would have spent the balance of all his days with no mysteries at all — with everything fitting exactly in the place it should have fit. But nothing fit anymore.
Amos Horn and Brian sat on straight wooden benches in the barber shop and the old man and the woman waited in the car while Tabor did his calling.
Dock Middleton didn’t need a haircut and he couldn’t figure out why exactly Charlie Tabor was anxious to get him to the barber shop. Charlie Tabor was a man who liked to talk, but there were enough loafers in Valera that Tabor never lacked for conversation. Dock Middleton, nevertheless, pulled on his boots and took out for the barber shop.
Dock Middleton was seventy-two years old. He’d lived in western Texas all his life. His childhood had been spent on the Llano in the hill country and he’d come to Coleman County to cowboy when the range was still open and run by the big cow outfits. He’d lived here ever since, first cowboying and later raising cows himself down on the Colorado — except for a time in the early seventies when he’d joined the Frontier Battalion of the Texas Rangers to chase Indians and horse thieves.
The Ranger service — that was the reason Charlie Tabor had wanted Dock Middleton in his barber shop; not the Ranger service itself, but the mold of mind it seemed to have given Dock Middleton. And, particularly it was a conversation Dock Middleton had carried on in the spring; that conversation, Tabor’s memory of it, had led Tabor to call. Middleton and an old doctor named Zeller had been sitting on the wooden benches, killing time, when Dock Middleton had complained about a pain. He’d said he guessed it was his liver hurting him. The old doctor had asked him where exactly was the pain and Dock Middleton had pointed out a patch of midriff which Doctor Zeller told him couldn’t possibly be the liver because that wasn’t where the liver was located and he was a doctor and he ought to know. But Dock Middleton had strongly disagreed. He’d said he didn’t know much about doctoring but, by God, he’d damn well cut open enough dead Indians when he was a Ranger that he knew exactly where the liver lay.
Charlie Tabor had been amused and a bit shocked to hear the old man say such a thing. It was an image he couldn’t grasp, this skinny, cowboy-hatted old man, two generations earlier, butchering the dead bodies of human beings. It was a curious thing to Charlie Tabor. And Charlie Tabor, the man who checked everything, naturally remembered that conversation when he saw the Indians that morning down by Home Creek.
Burned Black Horn had never been greatly sentimental and it was not sentiment that had led him to wish a return to the localities of his childhood and young manhood. It was, instead, a mystery which sent him back. Burned Black Horn was not of a philosophical turn-of-mind either. He had little need to understand the universe or his place in it. Indeed, had his universe not turned itself upside down so unbelievably, he would have spent the balance of all his days with no mysteries at all — with everything fitting exactly in the place it should have fit. But nothing fit anymore; the universe which should have fit right-side-up was right-upside-down. Burned Black Horn had been much younger when things flip-flopped, but then he had seen no particular mystery. It had been the whitemen who were out to turn it and if the whitemen could have been destroyed, then the universe would have stood upright. The People were, in the end, unable to stop the whitemen, so the universe had no protectors. But of course, as a young man Burned Black Horn had not really thought in such terms at all. What he really had thought was something like this: The Tejanos have killed my relatives at The-Place-Where-Salt-Seeps and therefore, I must kill me some Tejanos. And this thing that he had thought had meant the exact same thing as if he had planned some defense of a right-standing universe.
It was after Burned Black Horn had passed middle age that he had begun to have flashes that something was more dreadfully wrong than he had suspected. True, many of his relatives and friends had died a long time ago at the hands of the Tejanos and the army and true, he and his surviving relatives and friends had been in most ways confined and kept from the haunts and pursuits of earlier days. But still the Wichita Mountains where the Burned Black Horn family camped was a good place and the Burned Black Horn camp was full of his friends and relatives and many descendants. Burned Black Horn was never very hungry — those Wichita Mountains provided better than the white agent provided.
And in the part of his self that listened, Burned Black Horn heard the same murmuring of that-which-is-and-was-and-will-be that he had always heard. Burned Black Horn was neither particularly philosophical nor, in the mumbo-jumbo terms of the whiteman’s explanation of religion, was he particularly religious. It was just that the part of his self that could hear always clearly heard the sweet murmur of that-which-is-and-was-and-will-be. This was what Burned Black Horn heard every moment of his life until one bad hot August when he was past middle age and then he didn’t hear anything at all.
Burned Black Horn wouldn’t have been able to say that he’d lost the murmur in the part of his self that heard. And he wouldn’t have been able to say that, at long last, these years later, the universe was truly turned upside down. But after a generation of silence in the part of his self that heard, he had said to his son Amos, “I want to go back to the places I lived when I was a boy.”
Dock Middleton was called Dock because his full first name was Dockery which had been his mother’s maiden name. Most every new acquaintance assumed he was a doctor. Dock didn’t much care. God knows he’d done his share of horse and cow doctoring and he’d cut bullets and a stray arrow or two out of men and set more than one old boy’s broken leg. But Dock Middleton didn’t in any way consider himself a doctor. In most ways, it never occurred to Dock Middleton, a cowman too old and stove-up to work cows — old Dock Middleton, whose wife Audrey died in 1912, who had two sons, one in San Angelo trying to sell real estate and one in Eldorado raising sheep — an old man who played dominos and wasn’t any too clean.
Dock Middleton was an old man in Valera, Texas, during the Great Depression, right now hobbling on his bad left leg — that leg damaged these forty years since one of Clay Mann’s bad horses fell on it — hobbling beside the deserted black-topped highway into the center of town toward Charlie Tabor’s barber shop. Dock Middleton had by now ceased to wonder why Charlie Tabor had phoned. Dock Middleton never had much truck with mysteries. He was not a religious man, but he’d been raised a good hard-shelled Southern Baptist, and that is a religion largely without mystery.
He hobbled into Charlie Tabor’s barber shop and sat down quickly to take the weight off his bad leg. There were two Mexicans sitting on one of Charlie’s benches and a couple more in a car parked outside — the only stray automobile parked in downtown Valera. Charlie Tabor was cutting old man Lawlis’ hair. He introduced Dock to the Mexicans. “This is the Horn family,” the barber said. “They’re Indians from up in Oklahoma.” Dock looked them over and, by God, they weren’t Mexicans. They were right enough Indians. Tabor pointed his scissors toward the strange automobile. “That old man out there, he was born and raised around here.” Dock Middleton squinted his near-sighted eyes to see Burned Black Horn with his braids and dirty, black woolen suit. They were right enough Indians and it had been many a year since Dock Middleton had looked upon any Indian.
“The old man out there,” Charlie Tabor said, “he used to live around Bead Mountain and he wants to go out there. Pink thought maybe you’d show them the way.” Dock looked at Charlie Tabor and he thought, Pink didn’t think any such thing. Charlie Tabor had to stick his nose into everybody’s business and if there wasn’t no business, Dock thought, then Charlie’d make some up.
Amos Horn shook hands with Dock Middleton and introduced his son. Dock Middleton looked at both their faces and he was reminded of things he had not, in years, remembered. He was reminded of no particular event; he was, instead, reminded of the way it had been — of the way it had felt then.
In the spring of 1873, Dock Middleton was camped not ten miles from here with Captain Maltby’s company on Home Creek when word came from Camp Colorado that Ross Hubbard had lost sixteen horses and had trailed a band of a dozen Indians south along the Mukewater. So the company broke camp and headed for the Trickham country hoping to cut their trail. Seven or eight miles north of Trickham, they cut trail. A rock house was still smoldering. The house belonged to a man named Stoddard. Dock Middleton knew him by sight, but Dock Middleton didn’t recognize him. Stoddard was scalped and disemboweled. Hot coals from the house fire had been heaped into his belly cavity. Stoddard’s boy, who was maybe fourteen, was dead and scalped, a mesquite limb thrust through his nose. A baby lay in a mass of gore. It would have been much better if the baby’s mother had been dead, but she wasn’t — yet; she wouldn’t die for another three or four hours.
Burned Black Horn sat in the backseat of the touring car with his daughter-in-law and stared straight ahead. Burned Black Horn was a study in blankness; Burned Black Horn was a master of blankness. He did not approve of his son’s continual insistence on dealing with local whitemen. No whiteman needed to tell him how to find the landmarks of his past. He was quite sure he knew this land better than any whiteman could. Still now, Burned Black Horn knew every landmark, minor and major, between Chihuahua and the Kansas plains. The Comanche Crossing of the Pecos was as familiar to him, still, as was his son’s horse pasture on Cache Creek. Whitemen, quite imponderably, professed to the strange notion of owning this land, but never seemed to know the land they professed to have won. In the old raiding times, raiding parties had little trouble hiding within plain sight while white pursuers obliviously passed them by. The whitemen rarely seemed to even notice the land — at least the army whitemen and bands of outraged stockmen who would chase the raiders. The son-of-a-bitch Tejanos Diablos, they were hard to hide from and they were bad to fight. Burned Black Horn remembered his relatives at The-Place-Where-Salt-Seeps, he remembered when he and the other raiders had come in from Mexico only hours too late. He remembered how the old men’s bodies had been castrated, how the women’s breasts had been cut off. He remembered how his uncle had no skin at all. The son-of-a-bitch Tejanos Diablos would skin dead people and make bullwhips and quirts and sometimes moccasins from their hides.
Whitemen, quite imponderably, professed to the strange notion of owning this land, but never seemed to know the land they professed to have won.
Amos Horn had been born to his father’s middle age and he knew little of the life the old man had lived in this country. Amos Horn was a Methodist preacher and a fairly successful cattleman. He got along with whitemen. Any affection he had for the old life was akin to racial memory and, as in most first generations after immigration, his racial memory was dim and usually not very important. He loved his father, though — and respected him — so when the old man had asked to return to Texas, he’d felt compelled to undertake the trip. Amos Horn had enjoyed the trip. He enjoyed seeing sights he’d not seen before. He even enjoyed dealing with the whitemen. He enjoyed watching their initial surprise turn to a kind of amazed friendliness when they’d talked with him for a few minutes. These Texas whitemen seemed surprised that an Indian could talk to them — and certainly surprised that he could be a Methodist preacher. A white Methodist preacher in the town of Santa Anna at the foot of the mountain had taken them home for supper — and so far as Amos Horn knew, it was the only time in his father’s life that the old man had sat at a whiteman’s table.
Amos took the old whiteman out to the car. They’d drive to the mountain, but they had to wait a few more minutes for the barber to finish cutting the other old man’s hair. The barber wanted to go along. The barber, thought Amos Horn, was a man bound to involve himself in everything. Amos Horn noticed nothing out-of-the-ordinary about the old-whiteman who was to guide them. He looked like any other old white cowboy, like many an old man Amos Horn had bought cows from and sold cows to. The old man limped like many another stove-up old cowboy.
“This is my father,” Amos Horn said to Dock Middleton, motioning toward Burned Black Horn. “And, this is my old woman,” he said motioning toward his wife, who was named Elsie and was an Osage Amos had met when she’d come to Cache as a young girl with her brother who was a great breaker of horses.
Dock Middleton did not glance at Elsie Horn; his eyes snagged on the face of Burned Black Horn.
Dock Middleton was not a philosophical man and he did not think in philosophical terms. Thus, the thing that came to him now had no exact words to define it, but a new thing did come to Dock Middleton that morning on the street in Valera and if he could have defined it, he would have asked himself finally, at the age of seventy-two, stove-up and no fancier of mystery, How did I come to be the human being that I am? What was the thing that made me who I am? What enigma has formed this old man without enigma? Dock Middleton, had he been another man than Dock Middleton, might have asked those questions, but Dock Middleton was Dock Middleton and so his eyes hung on the face of Burned Black Horn.
And this was the thing that Dock Middleton really thought. He thought without anger or even resentment, What are these people doing here? We fought them and we beat them. We drove them north of the Red River. What reason brings these people back here? What right do these people have here?
Burned Black Horn looked at Dock Middleton and he thought, Well, this one is no Methodist preacher.
Brian Horn wished he’d never come on this trip. In his own way, he’d wanted to come as badly as had his grandfather. Like most second generation after immigration, Brian Horn had a passionate regard for pre-immigration people and places. He’d wanted to see the places of his grandfather’s young manhood. He’s wanted some way to grasp the reality of his grandfather as a raider and hunter and killer and man of place. He had been sorely disappointed. The countryside was scarred by countless hardscrabble dry-land farms and maintained by sad, almost pathetic whitemen who wore looks of defeat in their shapeless clothing and in their desperate eyes. In the mythology of Brian Horn’s childhood, this land of the Penateka was a glorious place of great wars and great warriors. Brian Horn could see only the southern edge of a worn-out dustbowl, the pathetic end of a westering whiteman condemned forever to patched overalls and the ass-end of a flea-bit mule. Good God, it was worse than Oklahoma.
Elsie Horn was having a nice enough time on their trip. She saw her husband was enjoying himself and that made her happy. Elsie Horn was a woman without many needs, physical or emotional. She had never shared her husband’s passion for the Methodist religion; she cared little for any religion. Elsie Horn had seen both her mother and father die of measles despite the best ministrations of an Osage medicine man. He had called powerfully for the intervention of spirits. Had any spirits existed, Elsie Horn had reasoned, they likely would have responded. None had. Elsie had not been distraught to discover there were no spirits; she had not even been surprised. But Elsie Horn did truly love her husband and her son and whatever things they needed, she needed. So she was glad to have come; she was glad to see her husband enjoying himself. Elsie Horn had no idea if her father-in-law was enjoying himself. Burned Black Horn had lived in her household for seventeen years, yet she understood almost nothing of what he thought. Elsie Horn had never spoken to her father-in-law, for he only spoke Comanche and she understood no Comanche. Her husband and everyone she knew spoke English to her. She supposed she had no talent for picking up other languages, but she cared little.
Amos Horn could understand and speak English well. But, like most people meeting Dock Middleton the first time, he misunderstood Dock’s given-name. In translating it to Burned Black Horn, he told his father that Dock Middleton was a doctor. Amos Horn was a bit surprised that Dock Middleton should be a doctor. The old man was obviously a cowman, but Amos Horn guessed that among these Texans, who were widely known as cattlemen anyway, even a doctor might be a cowman.
Burned Black Horn was not so surprised. He was, in fact, somewhat pleased. He’d seen whitemen’s doctors before and never had they impressed him as doctors. They were nervous men with shifty eyes or else they were fat, clumsy, red-faced men. None of them seemed possessed of the power he expected in a man deemed doctor. But this one did seem to be doctor material.
Dock Middleton wasn’t too sure of Charlie Tabor’s motivation, but he was certain that Charlie Tabor had arranged this strange trip. His initial impulse had been to beg-off, beg previous business, beg illness. Then he’d looked again out the barber shop window at Burned Black Horn outside in the touring car and that thing had come to him, that ill-defined mystery had seized itself upon him and he’d ceased to care about Charlie Tabor and Charlie Tabor’s manipulations. Now he stood a bit uncomfortably beside the touring car while Amos Horn spoke to Burned Black Horn in Indian, explaining, Dock Middleton assumed, who he was and what was to happen now.
Charlie Tabor didn’t know what would happen. That was the fun to Charlie Tabor. Charlie Tabor wasn’t a bad man, nor did he mean badly with the games he played. He was a man who found the dynamics of human existence eternally intriguing. And he was a man who found no reason not to sweeten the intrigue. Cutting old man Lawlis’ hair, Charlie Tabor examined what had happened up to now this morning and he was pleased.
Burned Black Horn paid no attention at all to Charlie Tabor. That whiteman was a man who chattered like a woman. He was a man who knew not the essential dignity of silence. He was like too many whitemen.
Though Burned Black Horn spoke no English, he had never known a time when whitemen were not about. Even in his earliest childhood there in the Penateka camp by Two-Flows Creek in the shadow of Santa Anna Mountain, even then, there were whitemen and rumors of whitemen all about. The men of his band raided south to the whiteman’s town San Antonio and along the San Saba and sometimes even so far south as the coast of the ocean. They brought back whitemen’s things — rolls of red cloth they loved, and umbrellas and tall silk hats. Already when Burned Black Horn was a young man, the existence of the whiteman had imposed a kind of definition, a kind of border onto the lives of the People. But always, the center held; no one guessed the whiteman might even approach the center — no one could possibly have guessed the whiteman might indeed someday destroy the center. Such change had Burned Black Horn seen in his life. But Burned Black Horn was not one to dwell upon the obvious.
In another time, in an earlier time of his life, Burned Black Horn might have gone to some kind of medicine man; he might have gone to some old holy man to ask for guidance and for help. But that was another time. The medicine was gone; the medicine men were gone. How could a man go to a wise old man for help when that man needing help was by far the oldest man for many a mile around?
Amos Horn drove the touring car and Charlie Tabor sat in the middle with Dock Middleton next to the door. In the backseat, Elsie Horn sat between her son and her father-in-law. Charlie Tabor no longer even pretended that Dock Middleton had any real function here. Charlie Tabor, himself, directed Amos Horn southwest, off the highway, down into the Home Creek breaks, across the bridge — not the same one they’d camped beside, but another, newer iron bridge with timber flooring. Then, they followed, roughly, Bead Mountain Creek up out of the breaks onto the prairie and suddenly the mountain loomed before them, the only real landmark on a horizon of miles and miles and miles of rolling prairie.
Burned Black Horn was not a religious man, but even to a man of little religion, the sight of the mountain was suddenly affecting. Burned Black Horn remembered how it had been that afternoon those many years, those generations, ago. He remembered how he’d come walking up out of the breaks, not here, but south several miles; he remembered how the mountain had looked then and it was much the same as now. He had walked resolutely, carrying a blanket. Comanches carried blankets when they went seeking; they had little use for penitence. He had walked to that place, that center, that place of spirits, that place where the dead were buried standing up facing east, facing east to face the sunrise over Santa Anna Mountain. He had gone to that place of spirits and of his people’s dead. He had gone to beg for nothing because Comanches did not beg. He had not gone to prostrate himself; Comanches never prostrated themselves. He had gone to ask, respectfully and determinedly.
He had climbed the mountain and he’d spread his blanket on the east rim to face the sun to rise come morning. Four days and four nights, Burned Black Horn had sat there. And, of course, as he had never doubted, the center had held; a message had come. In twilight, a single buffalo, an old bull expelled from its herd, had approached the foot of the mountain. It had looked up, straight at Burned Black Horn and there had appeared around its head an aura, a halo of fiery orange. Burned Black Horn had become, then, Burned Black Horn.
Burned Black Horn had lived in that country not much longer after that. The army had come, and the Rangers, to gather the Penateka to go live up on the Brazos reservation and though some Penateka went, many, including Burned Black Horn, scattered themselves among other bands far north, out of reach of the army. Burned Black Horn went to the Naconis band of Peta Nacona which soon rejoined the Kwahadis and thus Burned Black Horn was among the last to come into Fort Sill, coming in with Quanah, Peta Nacona’s son. Quanah ultimately set up his camp on Cache Creek and, following his friend, so did Burned Black Horn.
The two of them, Quanha and Burned Black Horn, remained steadfast friends for all of Quanah’s life. Quanah took well to the whiteman’s way and became, among the whitemen, one of the best Indians in America. He toured county fairs lecturing and went wolf hunting with Teddy Roosevelt while Burned Black Horn stayed in his own camp never seeing whitemen for months at a time, never learning English.
Charlie Tabor directed Amos Horn off the road near the base of Bead Mountain and they drove across open prairie to park as closely to the mountain as possible. The car stopped and no one moved. “Well,” Charlie Tabor said, “well, we’re here.” No one moved. “Well,” Charlie Tabor said, “we’ll have to hoof it now.” For another moment, still, no one moved. Then, Amos Horn opened his door; then, the others. Then, they hoofed it. None of them doubted the old man would want to climb the mountain; Bead Mountain was always meant to be climbed. There was never satisfaction in standing at the foot of Bead Mountain. So, with hardly a pause, they climbed. Amos Horn and Brian helped Burned Black Horn; one took each arm, half lifting, sometimes pulling. They worked their way up the steep little mountain.
Neither Brian nor Amos had any real idea what this particular place might mean to Burned Black Horn. They had known since the beginning of the trip that this place was awfully important to him. Amos Horn never really wondered why. All the places on this trip were landmarks of his father’s long ago; that was enough for him. Brian Horn had wondered a lot and still he continued to wonder. Brian Horn wondered at it all. Brian Horn was a young man beset by mystery.
Brian Horn was an educated young man. The Indian Department had sent him away east to school with the full cooperation and support of his father. Amos Horn knew that a man needed schooling. Brian Horn had spent the last summer before his schooling — eastern schooling at the age of fourteen — that summer, like all his available time, in the presence of Burned Black Horn. The old man had not been convinced there was any such need for whiteman’s schooling, but he had kept away from discussion of it. As he was about to leave, Brian had expected some kind of advice, some word from his grandfather. None had come. Burned Black Horn was not one to give advice. Brian Horn had always wished his grandfather could be a little less taciturn. Brian Horn was a young man in need of some center.
Dock Middleton had no one to help him climb and his bad leg gave him hell. He’d be damned if he’d hold up the others, so he gritted his teeth and shifted his weight with each step — and he hurt.
Charlie Tabor was impatient to reach the top. He realized that in his many years in this country, despite the fact that he’d grown used to Bead Mountain on the horizon, he’d never before climbed it. He was anxious for the top not only for whatever might happen among this bunch, but just to see what was up there.
Amos Horn climbed because he climbed; Elsie Horn climbed because her family climbed.
Burned Black Horn climbed because, in old age, to a man who had no understanding of, nor need for, mystery, there had come a mystery — there had come a mystery more important than any other that might come to a man. How could it be that that-which-is-and-was-and-will-be could have, all along, been a mistake? That old buffalo bull, he had stood there unmoving in failing light and he had looked directly up at Burned Black Horn. The old buffalo bull’s head had been bathed in unearthly fire and Burned Black Horn had smelled burning hair. He had seen and smelled a thing no man had ever before seen or smelled in such a way. So, it had meaning.
But, Burned Black Horn, truth-to-tell, being neither a religious nor a philosophical man, had taken his vision home and had lived with it all those years — all those generations — with no real idea upon this earth what it had meant. It had been a vision, a thing expected and needed to keep the universe upright, to reaffirm for him the center — and all those years, that had been enough.
But, then that thing had happened; the part of him that could hear had gone deaf. So he’d begun to wonder; a mystery had come to a man who was not meant for mystery. In another time, in an earlier time of his life, Burned Black Horn might have gone to some kind of medicine man; he might have gone to some old holy man to ask for guidance and for help. But that was another time. The medicine was gone; the medicine men were gone. How could a man go to a wise old man for help when that man needing help was by far the oldest man for many a mile around?
Burned Black Horn thought of the old white doctor and he glanced at him; he watched the old white doctor painfully climbing. It came to Burned Black Horn that the old white doctor might help him. This was a doctor of the people who lived here now, the people who saw the eastern sun rise here every day now. Maybe this old doctor himself had spoken with the spirits of this place.
Burned Black Horn thought those things and he knew there was no way he could use his son Amos as a translator to ask the old white doctor. Perhaps, he thought, he could use his grandson. He thought, When we reach the top and both of us old men are no longer suffering this climb, I will ask Brian to translate for me to the old white doctor. And, for the first time in his long life, Burned Black Horn wished he could speak the English language of the whitemen.
Dock Middleton could walk no longer. The pain was unbearable and he was exhausted. When they were a bit more than halfway up the mountain, he sat down. Charlie Tabor sat down beside him. The others paused, puffed a bit, looked around — and then, they all sat down. They were all silent in their own exhaustions, too silent for Charlie Tabor. Charlie Tabor, who was never a man without words, spoke to Dock Middleton. He asked, “Does all this country here look about like it used to?” Dock Middleton, who was in pain and without breath, looked at Charlie Tabor and could hardly restrain himself.
“I guess it does,” Dock Middleton said.
No one would say anything and Charlie Tabor was a man who abhorred silence. He tried to think of a relevant thing to say. “Were there buffalo here?” he asked Dock Middleton.
Dock Middleton was close to calling the barber a damn fool, but Dock Middleton didn’t say things like that, so he answered him, he said, “Yeah, I remember when there was buffalo here.”
Then, they climbed to the top of the mountain.
It was the east side of Bead Mountain they climbed so that when they reached the top — a flat table of several acres sprinkled with mesquite bushes and salt cedar trees — they paused, heaved breath, and turned, almost as one, to look east.
Blue Santa Anna Mountain trembled gently in heat rising across the prairie. A few puffy white summer clouds floated in an immense faded blue bowl of sky.
There was absolute silence on top of Bead Mountain. The entire group of pilgrims stood silently. And then, slowly, they turned to survey the circle of prairie around.
North, they could see a low range of wooded hills, dark grey-green from a growth of liveoak that fringed them. To the west: only rolling prairie so far as they could see. To the south: almost beyond vision on such a shimmering summer day, the blue-green breaks of the Colorado. A mile away to the south, buzzards floated slowly marking some place of death. No other animal nor human thing could they see, no other movement.
Dock Middleton was still irritated; he was disquieted, he supposed, by the barber’s silly questions. Yet, it was not the barber’s questions. This disquiet had begun at the sight of Burned Black Horn. Dock Middleton was suffering from some old uneasiness. What had it been like? What was it like now? Dock Middleton was not a philosophical man, but with the oppressive heavy, silent weight of late summer upon him, he suffered silently great-growing uneasiness.
Amos Horn thought the view from the top of Bead Mountain was quite nice. It reminded him, a bit, of the prairie south of the Wichitas where ran Cache Creek. Elsie Horn was glad to be no longer climbing. It was a fine place to be to her though, and she was glad to be here. She sat down.
Brian Horn was not much affected by this place. It had been much the same on top of Santa Anna Mountain; it was much the same at home in Oklahoma. Still, he sought to see whatever it was that might be seen. Brian Horn was, like many another displaced and homeless refugee, a profoundly philosophical and religious man.
He surveyed the electric vacuum of hot August Texas prairie and he wished mightily that he might see as his grandfather saw. So he turned to look at Burned Black Horn.
And he saw there had come upon Burned Black Horn a strangeness; he was, somehow, not the same. Burned Black Horn was always a composed man, but now he might be more composed. He was a man who affected blankness, but now he might be much more blank. Brian Horn ceased to study the countryside; he studied his grandfather. Then, as by command or design, Burned Black Horn turned stiffly to face his grandson.
“I want you to do something for me,” Burned Black Horn said to him. “I want you to ask the old white doctor something for me.” At Burned Black Horn’s sudden voice, all the others turned toward him. They all waited. But Burned Black Horn, try as he might, could think of no way to make the question he wanted his grandson to ask Dock Middleton. He shifted his eyes to look into Dock Middleton’s face.
Dock Middleton guessed that Burned Black Horn had meant to direct some statement at him. He tried to drag up the bits and pieces of Comanche language he’d once known. He tried to understand what Burned Black Horn wanted of him.
Having no need for mystery, Elsie Horn — who could understand none of Burned Black Horn’s words — first understood that the words hardly mattered.
Amos Horn was surprised at his father’s request and he was anxious at the desperation he heard. When he looked at Burned Black Horn, like Brian he was startled at the strangeness he saw. As Burned Black Horn turned his gaze to Dock Middleton, Amos followed. And then Amos Horn, too, understood. A man of practical and universal humanity — a man who earnestly believed that any mystery could be reduced to parable — Amos Horn saw that Burned Black Horn and Dock Middleton were now as mirror images of one another.
Brian Horn waited for his grandfather to finish and he wondered what on God’s green earth it could be that the old man should ask with such urgency. Brian Horn looked from one of the old men to the other and then he, too, caught the wordless thing that passed between them. It was a moving and memorable moment for Brian Horn. For the first time in a long, long time, he lost his own sense of loss and expectation.
Caught up as he was in a great mute union, Brian Horn understood — or at least, without clear definition, began first to suspect — that mystery itself was its own answer.
Only poor Charlie Tabor the barber didn’t understand. His eyes careened from Dock Middleton to Burned Black Horn and back to Dock Middleton and back to Burned Black Horn. What in the world was happening? What in the world was happening? A man who tolerated no mystery, he was swept up in a swirling, desperate rush he could not hope to understand.
This story is included in an anthology of Native American literature just published by the Navajo Community College Press, Psaile, Arizona, 86556, called Earth Power Coming.
