Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart_ A Novel - Alice Walker [45]
They were sitting outside his hut at a place where the river dropped half a dozen feet, creating a shallow waterfall. The sound was gurgling and slow. He said it lulled him to sleep at night.
Back before I got this sickness it didn’t bother me much. It was like a ritual that happened. To tell the truth, we were all pretty used to it. You know—in Australia they still have aboriginals who go on walkabout. They go to visit what we Westerners call “sites” on the land. Places that mean a lot to them. Doesn’t matter what white man’s job they’ve been hired to do. Off they go for a while. Could be a weekend, could be a week. The land itself calls them. They hear it and go. Immediately. They drop everything. Pronto.
And do the women also go on walkabout? asked Kate. And did they in the old days just drop the mistress’s brat?
Hugh laughed. I don’t know. You never hear about the women roaming, but I’m sure some of them did. Probably dressed as men though because rape of aboriginal women was always as common, and as accepted, as looking at them.
They had been sitting with their legs crossed. Hugh straightened his so that his feet, blistered from the heavy rubber boots they wore most of the time, stuck out in front of him.
So there we’d be with our thirty-pound turkey and whatnot—you know, every SUV and gadget under the sun. And some old, old Indian out of nowhere would show up.
He paused.
You would have to know our ranch. It’s big. So big I’m embarrassed to tell you.
Bigger than Kansas?
Almost. I’m joking, he said. But sometimes it feels that size. You can roam around it for days, never seeing a soul. A lot of the newer fencing is electric. We have guard posts.
He chuckled. Squinted at the river.
Some old Indian shows up with a plastic jug and wants water from the spring. For the bones.
Hugh rubbed together two pebbles the size of robin eggs, loosely, in his fist. Looking at them absently he flung them into the river.
So, he continued, looking briefly at Kate, one of us tells him to wait out back until we’re through with dinner. Ruined now, because of him. Though nobody wants to admit it. Ruined also of course if he didn’t show up. . . . So eventually it’s my turn to take him. Different Indian, you understand, but same old man. I take him in my Grand Cherokee. Which is red. We bounce along. He doesn’t say a word. I make small talk—the weather, the cows—we have about six thousand. The ruts in the trail. By now we’re way the hell away from the house and he just sits there with his plastic jug stuck between his knees. Everything he has on is tattered; next to him I feel conspicuously well dressed, even though I’m wearing a shirt from the Sundance catalog and an old pair of jeans.
Before we get there he tells me to stop and then he goes the rest of the way on foot. His hair is in two long braids and he’s tied them with red string. I look at them as he’s walking toward the spring. Try to imagine what he’d look like without them. How much less Indian. How much more like us. I figure that without them he could pass as one of America’s newer immigrants.
I know the place well. Nothing there but a few cottonwood trees and a clump or two of white sage. This pitiful little spring that just keeps bubbling up no matter how dry it gets. And in Utah it can get pretty dry. I can’t see him but I know he’s sprinkling tobacco and praying. When I was a boy I used to sneak up behind him and watch. Then he’d reach over into the spring with the jug and take some of the water. After coming all that way, wherever it was he came from, he didn’t even fill up the jug.
By the time he came back I would have finished my third or fourth cigarette. He got in the jeep, settled the half-filled jug between his knees, and off we went. Depending on my mood I would take him out by the main gate—where I’d lecture Harvey, the gatekeeper,