The Blue Tattoo: The Life of Olive Oatman

5. Lorenzo's Tale

53 5 Lorenzo’s Tale A boy of fourteen years with the mangled remains of my own parents lying near by, my scalp torn open, my person covered with blood, alone, friendless, in a wild, mountain, dismal, wilderness region, exposed to the ravenous beasts, and more, to the ferocity of more than brutal savages and human shaped demons! I had no strength to walk, my spirits crushed, my ambition paralyzed, my body, mangled . | lorenzo oatman, Captivity of the Oatman Girls With their immediate family slaughtered and their relatives in Illinois too far away to help them, Olive and Mary Ann had every reason to believe they were alone in the world, buried in the mountains beyond the reach of white culture. But they weren’t alone. On the night of the attack, while the girls stood by as the Yavapais devoured the remains of the Oatman larder at the first camp, Olive had regarded the full moon, an inappropriately lovely moon, while back at the Gila River, Lorenzo lay bathed in its brilliance—blinded and paralyzed in the ravine where he’d been rolled toward—but not to—his death. He had witnessed the culmination of the assault : his mother shrieking, “In the name of God, cannot anyone help us?” followed by the groans of his siblings and the lengthening silences through which his family, one by one, fell away from him.1 He heard the agitated murmurings of Indians and recognized Olive’s voice but couldn’t tell who was with her. Lorenzo fully believed he was dying—his body, he felt, was al- 54 Lorenzo’s Tale ready dead and his mind was stalling out. As the footsteps on the hill subsided and the voices receded, he hallucinated lavishly. He sensed a light above his head, dwindling to a pinpoint, and then he was moving for what seemed like hours through a gallery of paintings levitating in open space. He heard grating and scraping sounds, then rapturous music. He had no idea who he was, but he was happily engaged, drunk on the distractions his mind threw up as a buffer for his pain. And then it was morning. The sun was shining. He wiped the caked blood from his eyes and took in the spectacle of the new day, then he clasped his head as a thundering pain slammed through it. His scalp was torn and blood still oozed from his ears and nose. He was certain his brain was loose in his skull; he knew he was not physically right. But he could move now. He pulled himself up on his hands and knees, and fell, tried again, and fell again. He saw a ribbon of blood that led up the mesa—a clue, surely, to how he’d ended up in the ravine into which he now inexplicably found himself . Where was everyone? His eyes followed the trail to the top of the bluff where the bowed struts of the abandoned wagon floated like the mast of a ghost ship, and the gothic memory of the previous day rolled back and flattened him. His family was dead; his sisters were gone. The coda to the attack , he remembered, was the sound of Mary Ann crying as the two girls’ voices faded into the desert. And now, somehow, his friends from Illinois were standing around him; boys he had pitied because they would never make the journey west and start a new life; boys who’d grieved when he’d left and warned him not to go because of the danger, and because they would miss him. He begged them to help him, gesturing toward the ridge and sputtering about the carnage on the hill, but they were home in Illinois—he could see their houses behind them—and they were happy. Partly standing now, he tried to get up the incline and managed to crawl fifty feet, then he peeked over the rim to see his family’s bat- Lorenzo’s Tale 55 tered bodies and scattered belongings. He edged over, picked up a few crusts of hard bread, and ate them. Fearful that Indians might see him, he turned back and continued his crab dance along the path from which the Oatmans had come, toward Maricopa Wells. When he stopped to rest under a dry shrub, the massacre replayed itself relentlessly and his mind whirled with the torture he imagined his sisters...