And In Time She Paid The Toll Of The
Smoky Huts And Became Blind.
This is a thing so long expected by
the Paiutes that when it comes they find it neither bitter nor
sweet, but tolerable because common.
There were three other blind
women in the campoodie, withered fruit on a bough, but they had
memory and speech. By noon of the sun there were never any left in
the campoodie but these or some mother of weanlings, and they sat
to keep the ashes warm upon the hearth. If it were cold, they
burrowed in the blankets of the hut; if it were warm, they followed
the shadow of the wickiup around. Stir much out of their places
they hardly dared, since one might not help another; but they
called, in high, old cracked voices, gossip and reminder across the
ash heaps.
Then, if they have your speech or you theirs, and have an hour
to spare, there are things to be learned of life not set down in
any books, folk tales, famine tales, love and long-suffering and
desire, but no whimpering. Now and then one or another of the
blind keepers of the camp will come across to where you sit
gossiping, tapping her way among the kitchen middens, guided by
your voice that carries far in the clearness and stillness
of mesa afternoons. But suppose you find Seyavi retired into the
privacy of her blanket, you will get nothing for that day. There
is no other privacy possible in a campoodie. All the processes of
life are carried on out of doors or behind the thin, twig-woven
walls of the wickiup, and laughter is the only corrective for
behavior. Very early the Indian learns to possess his countenance
in impassivity, to cover his head with his blanket. Something to
wrap around him is as necessary to the Paiute as to you your closet
to pray in.
So in her blanket Seyavi, sometime basket maker, sits by the
unlit hearths of her tribe and digests her life, nourishing her
spirit against the time of the spirit's need, for she knows in fact
quite as much of these matters as you who have a larger hope,
though she has none but the certainty that having borne herself
courageously to this end she will not be reborn a coyote.
THE STREETS OF THE MOUNTAINS
All streets of the mountains lead to the citadel; steep or slow
they go up to the core of the hills. Any trail that goes
otherwhere must dip and cross, sidle and take chances. Rifts of
the hills open into each other, and the high meadows are often wide
enough to be called valleys by courtesy; but one keeps this
distinction in mind,--valleys are the sunken places of the earth,
canons are scored out by the glacier ploughs of God. They have a
better name in the Rockies for these hill-fenced open glades of
pleasantness; they call them parks. Here and there in the hill
country one comes upon blind gullies fronted by high stony
barriers.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 45 of 70
Words from 22681 to 23196
of 35837
