Her Husband’s Old Age

How could I know this Indian girl? She never spoke much to me. After she lived with me a year, she said she would marry me. Just that. What could I do? I wanted her still, with me. And then her babies were mine, they needed names.

Strange as her ways were, I never left her, strange as it seems. I always took care of her, always took care that my children grew up white, right. Baptized them, raised my sons up to work rails, married my girls up to white ranchers and railmen. My wife nodded.

She was—oh, she was beyond knowing. All my life I worked those rails, laid tracks and built strong forearms, shoulders that drove stakes. She was a knot I never opened. When she got older, unbraided her hair, I knew by then her insides were coiled tight. My hands wrestled, tangled in her but never broke through to hold the small neckbone, the backbone, the bony core.

Now, finally, no one is home but we strangers, we two old folks. I think we have no memory of what to call each other; if truthfully we ever knew. We sit unmoving on the whitewashed porch, watching trains roar past. We sit and wait a decade, a long century,

and when they all come, even the dead ones, she rises to make coffee. I cannot move, can only see the departing trains they rode in on. And I know all tracks are mine, all trains are my body, my flesh and bones, loud, strong, dark, moving

across long countries. Watching trains from the wide porch, displaced, I sit next to my wife, an open skin that has forgotten everything but its name.

1849

Great-great-grandfather Moves West

What kind of a name is Abigail for an Indian woman? (you asked). I was that woman—or, rather, girl: I was, after all, only twelve (twelve summers, you said, fingertipping my face). Only thirteen when you church-married me, your hand caught (as you said) in my dark braid. You came looking for gold but found me instead, your adventure (though surely you must have known that I would be here, that I was here). You discovered me (you whispered, unlacing my dress), discovered you wanted me (you grunted, biting my shoulder). Though I always called you Schubert— except once, by accident, Pa—you always named me Turtledove, Bisonwoman. Settled, without your gold. To keep busy and support your young wife, you laid railroads. You said: for us, for our children.

A ring of iron on my finger, a long straight scar down my back, black smoke for my flying hair, a whistle-shriek at night.

In her mother’s attic, looking for me, our great-great-granddaughter finds only this on a slip of paper in a shoebox: m. Abigail Koch (sp?), a 13-yr-old Indian. I remain, in my granddaughter’s careful penmanship, between the words Sacramento, Cal and your name, written above our dozen children, eight who lived, five who worked railroads like their father. This child who has so unceremoniously discovered us kneels in a dusty tract of sunlight, cradles a shoebox full of scraps, eagerly holds a paper out to claim me; but she possesses only my name. Perhaps she imagines moccasins and soft fringe, high cheekbones, a small waist like her Indian Barbie, my stern father Grey Hawk, my proud people, my own blushing reservation. But she grasps only a single phrase, nothing more; not for you, not now for her.

Letters beaded on a page, fingernail stripes across my back, black ink for my fly-away braid, the sound of this child’s names.