Winter Rain

“Bring in the crops,” he said aloud. Startled that he had said it in English.

Autumn—a time he remembered working his young muscles alongside the others from those moments before dawn until every last sliver of light had been pushed from the evening sky, then eating his supper although he was half-asleep. Stumbling off to bed where his weary, joyous muscles sang in praise of a long night’s rest before they would get up and do it all over again. Day after long autumn day, until the crops were in and his father would once more turn the ground in anticipation of winter.

One final turn, the man had taught them. The better to soak up what moisture winter’s snows brought them.

He recalled how the ground would often-steam, the warm undersoil resurrected into the cool air of a chill autumn morning much like this one. Just the way the belly of a slain buffalo would steam into the frosty air of a winter morning as the men and women set about butchering their kill.

It was then that Tall One remembered with his own seeing the great, incomprehensible litter of rotting carcasses that stretched mile after endless mile across the rolling prairie now far above him. Those great piles of bones and skulls where gathered the carrion eaters always brought a great pain to him—this dying of something without its chance to regenerate. Up there on the buffalo ground, the grasshoppers and locusts and other winged ones had descended from the pale autumn skies to seize dominion over the tall, withered grasses. Fewer of the shaggy beasts now to graze upon that land.

Those white hide men. Come to take without returning something in the great cycle of life.

His first father had been a white man. Yet for a reason he could not name, Tall One sensed that the man in some unspoken way understood that mystical circle of life. If for no other reason than his father always turned the soil, Tall One believed that his first father did indeed understand that he must return something back to the soil for what he had taken from it. So it was the man had turned over the warm, fertile ground, and with it turned under the stalks and roots, the stems and leaves, all of it to nourish once more the dark loam as it lay under the white breast of winter, where it would once more await the call of spring’s awakening.

At the edge of the creek he knelt, bent forward, and leaned far out over the water by supporting himself on his elbows. There he drank of the cold water, then drew back and wiped his mouth. Staring down at his rippling reflection. Something about it—the eyes, maybe the nose. Tall One gathered his long hair in one hand and pulled it behind his neck. Staring, studying that reflection intently. Uncanny, how it made him think of his father.

No, his first father.

Sensing now the teasing recollection, the dim memory of so many people telling a boy how much he favored his pa.

Memories were dim, had for the most part remained very dim over the years—until he really studied his reflection in the smooth surface of that stream. Would now the man have hair touched with the iron of many winters? Or like his second father—Bridge—would his first father have only a touch of gray at the temples?

And how many wrinkles would he have? Would the seams carve themselves deeply into his face, like the faces of the old ones in this camp in the canyon?

What of his hands—those hands that had brought calves and piglets and foals into the world, those hands that had struck out as he corrected his children, hands that had also caressed his sons and daughter with his crude, unsteady love. Would those hands now be gnarled and deformed as he had seen the hands of the old warriors become? Or would they still be strong and sure, unshaken as he took the reins of a team and moved them toward the field in need of planting?

Hands that would remain forever young with the elixir of a young boy’s dream.

Try as he might, even staring down at this wavering reflection in the cold stream, Tall One could not make himself believe this was a true picture of his father. The man would surely be much, much older now. After all, Tall One was himself.

Suddenly a cautious part of him reminded Tall One that it likely did not matter. Something mocked him—saying the man who had been his first father no longer existed. He had not come home from that war he marched off to fight, leaving his family behind. And even if in the realm of slim possibilities that man did survive the war… in the end his first father had simply ceased to exist.

No more did that life on that farm mean anything to him. It was something too remote, too foreign, too long ago to matter anymore. And those dimly focused people from his memories, the people who had shared his long-ago days and nights, the fights and the loving, the laughter and the tears—they too had simply ceased to exist in this new world of the Antelope People. That is, every one of those memory people except his brother, Antelope.