Read Online Scarborough Fair and Other Stories by Elizabeth Ann Scarborough - Free Book Online Page B

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
.
    â€œDon’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.”
    â€œShe 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.
    â€œWho 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.
    â€œBarboncito 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