.
Чтение книги онлайн.
Читать онлайн книгу - страница 14
“Then you said we could have enough land to hunt and fish on. But when you wanted it you made it smaller or took it away and sent us somewhere else.
“Then you said we could always hunt and fish on the lands you took for your people, but then these new people said we couldn’t.
“You did something we did not think was possible. You killed us without even taking our lives. You killed us by turning our land into pieces of paper and bags of flour and blankets and telling us that was enough. You took the places where the spirits talked to us and you gave us bags of flour.
“This is what you have to understand. To us the land was alive. It talked to us. We called her our mother. If she was angry with us, she would give us no food. If we didn’t share with others, she might send harsh winters or plagues of insects. We had to do good things for her and live the way she thought was right. She was the mother to everything that lived upon her, so everything was our brother and sister. The bears, the trees, the plants, the buffalo. They were all our brothers and sisters. If we didn’t treat them right, our mother would be angry. If we treated them with respect and honor, she would be proud.
“For your people, the land was not alive. It was something that was like a stage, where you could build things and make things happen. You understood the dirt and the trees and the water as important things, but not as brothers and sisters. They existed to help you humans live. You were supposed to make the land bear fruit. That is what your God told you.
“How could we people ever talk together when we each believed our God had told us something different about the land? We couldn’t and we never did.
“But you were stronger. There were more of you, so your way won out. You took the land and you turned it into property. Now our mother is silent. But we still listen for her voice.
“And here is what I wonder. If she sent diseases and harsh winters when she was angry with us, and we were good to her, what will she send when she speaks back to you?
“You had better hope your God is right. That is all I have to say.”
I sat, stunned. The eloquence and the heartbreak had caught me unawares. I felt tears in my eyes. This was the man I had met in the notebooks.
Dan said nothing. In all the time he had spoken he had never once looked over at me. Now he stood up and walked off along the ridge. I could hear him chanting that strange, tragic dirge again. Fatback trailed behind him, limping and panting, until the two of them were but small dots in my vision and his song had blended with the howlings of the wind.
CHAPTER FOUR
ONE WILY OLD INDIAN
I didn’t bring up the subject of our conversation for a few days. I figured that the old man would say more when the time was right. But I knew now that Grover had been right. The old man had an orator’s eloquence that could never be captured by piecing together notes from a shoe box. I needed to stay with him, live with him, follow him, and listen. It was my pen and my tape recorder that were going to be my most precious assets.
Dan really did live his life like Fatback. He got up when he wanted, lay down when he wanted, spoke when he wanted, stayed silent when he wanted. Unlike white people, he never explained his actions, or announced when he was going to do something, no matter how abrupt it might seem. I might be sitting and speaking with him, and he would suddenly stand up and go into his bed. Or he might stop in the middle of a sentence and start watching the television, which droned perpetually from the corner of his living room. Sometimes there were reasons. Other times it made no sense that I could understand. He was responding to some inner promptings that were not mine to know.
The days passed in this relaxed and enigmatic way. Little of purpose was actually accomplished. We mostly spent the time driving around in my truck and sitting in his kitchen or on his porch.
I became increasingly aware of how old and fragile he really was. It was as if he had etched a strength into his body over the years, and he now could call upon it when he needed it to act. But the effort was great, and there were times when he would just sink into a reverie and then gradually slide into a fitful sleep. If I happened to speak he would open his eyes and answer, but I could see that I was calling him back from some faraway place. So I soon learned to occupy myself in silence while he slept.
One time Wenonah drove up while I was sitting there waiting for the old man to awake. She gestured me to her car. “You don’t have to sit there and wait for him, Nerburn,” she said. “He won’t mind if you go.”
“It feels disrespectful to me to leave when he falls asleep,” I answered.
“Don’t worry about it. That’s the Indian way. When you are here, you are here. When you are gone, you are gone. It isn’t a problem to be gone, so long as you are really here when you’re here.”
“That’s a nice Zen sentiment,” I offered.
She just smiled and shrugged. “He likes you. That means you can do what you want to. He will respect it.”
“I’d rather sit and wait. I’d feel better.”
She smiled and walked up the steps. “I’ve got to cook him some dinner.”
As soon as the screen door slammed, the old man was awake and alert. “Been waiting for you,” he said.
“You’re one wily old Indian, Grandpa,” she retorted. He responded with something in his own tongue and the two of them broke into gales of laughter.
The old man saw me still sitting on the stoop. He called me in. “You’re getting to be like Fatback, Nerburn. That’s how she started, just hanging around.”
“Maybe you should start sleeping under the car,” Wenonah said. “It’s cheaper than that motel.”
The two of them laughed again. Dan seemed wide awake and in a good mood, so I ventured a question: “Do you mind being called an Indian, Dan?” It seemed appropriate, since his granddaughter had just referred to him as an Indian, and it was a question that always lurked just below the surface when I was involved in conversations with Indian people.
“What the hell else would you call me?”
“Oh, Native American. I don’t know. Something. Anything other than Indian.”
The old man took a deep breath, as if he had explained this many times before.
“It doesn’t bother me. It bothers a lot of our people, though. They don’t like that the name we have was a mistake. Just because Columbus didn’t know where he was, we have to be called Indians because he thought he had found the East Indies. They think it takes away our pride and our identity.”
“That seems like a fair sentiment to me,” I said. The old man waved his hand in front of his face to silence me.
“I guess I don’t mind because we have taken the name and made it our own. We still have our own names in our own languages. Usually that name means ‘first people,’ but no one would ever call us that. So we let people call us ‘Indians.’
“Does that tell СКАЧАТЬ