I’ve been asking people to read my chapter “Kuruk” about cultural appropriation. We had an interesting discussion about it on Sunday. A well-published writer friend who has lived here in Mexico for many years responded to my query with the following:”Much debate about all this these days. Someone just gave me a copy of AMERICAN DIRT, a novel about Mexicans fleeing violence written by a gringa that got glowing reviews and the author got a shitload of money for it. And Chicana authors praised it. Now there’s a backlash.Personally, I think fiction is free territory and you can inhabit infinite voices and characters. I thought your chapter was beautiful and human and universally true, a fine example of what fiction can do. But especially as a white male you will be scrutinized for this sort of thing by the fiction police, especially these days. I say. Write on.”
Fiction police is a little harsh. But we do belong to the group that committed a displacement and gradual genocide against the people who lived here before. They have been reduced in our memory to a vague savage enemy. Looking back, there is little record of who the Apache were, what they thought and felt. There is a great empty hole in their history, a little like the Holocaust.
Kuruk
While Frank and Rosa Marta waited for their first child, the old Mescalero Apache Kuruk waited for the death of Apóni, his wife of forty-three years. It was spring, the season of Apache Regeneration, the mild season when their son and daughter had emerged into the light, born in silence with a stick between Apoóni’s teeth because they lived hidden from stalking Mexican bounty hunters who regularly got 100 pesos for a scalp, two ears, a hand or a head, as according to the so-called Fifth Law, passed by the Chihuahuan State Legislature and signed by Governor Trías in 1846.
But then their children had fallen back into darkness, during the late so-called Apache Wars of the 1880s. The 10-year-old boy Kaliska trapped and shot dead in a dried creek bed. A year later, and for another 100-pesos, the 8-year old girl Zuni, surprised while picking back berries, chased by men on horseback who cut her throat, then decided to take the whole head, perhaps because she was so pretty.
Before burying them, each time, with reddened eyes, Kuruk had gone after them, running for hours, following them until nightfall, waiting until they slept, then, one by one, with a hand over their mouths and pinching their nostrils, he cut their throats from ear to ear in complete silence, holding them down with the weight of his own body. Three of them the first time for his boy. Four the second time. For little Zuni.
And now, years later, the children’s mother Apóni was passing to the other side, wracked by coughing and blood. All that muffled by a mountain juniper stick between her teeth. She talked in rasps, about seeing her children again. He talked, as if to himself, about the evenings they had spent together on carpets of moss, caressing each other beneath pines and pepper trees in shivering silence and stiffled moans. Naked beneath the emerging stars.
Now, Mexican cavalry or more informal scalp hunting outriders had drifted closer. She had taken out the juniper stick so she could speak more clearly and had whispered, “Pinch my nostrils, Kuruk so that I go and you stay here and are safe, my love.”
He took the juniper stick into his own hands. He leaned over to kiss her on her bloody lips.
“Open your teeth, my love,”
“What teeth?” she answered with a crooked smile.
The juniper stick was back in her mouth. Her young smooth thighs and breasts were now thin and shriveled. But that was not how he saw her.
“I am leaving you, my love,” she rasped.
“I will come find you, Apóni.”
And then he had held her against him as the horses came closer, their canteens clanking softly. The Chihuahuan State Treasurer no longer paid bounties. Getting an Indian scalp had become more a thing of sport. Something to dry out and put on your mantlepiece as a conversation piece.
He placed his mouth over her nose and breathed into it to give her air. The horsemen had stopped and were listening. There were three of them. When they had passed, he saw that she too had left. He took the stick out of her mouth and listened for her breath. Had she drowned on her own blood? Had he done this to her? He closed her mouth and kissed her for the last time. Then he put the stick in his own mouth and wept and held her all that night while her warmth left her and she grew cold.
And then, when dawn came, he carried her body to a secret spot at the base of a black cliff that dripped water and where vines with small five-pedaled white flowers hung down and swayed little in the air. He made the hole with a sharp digging stone. He folded her favorite bead work dress and laid it on her chest. On top of that he placed her talisman, a dried badger paw that had hung on her cradle as a child, then on Kaliska’s cradle and then Zuni’s. To ward off danger. Maybe there was still time for it to work. He piled rocks over the spot so that animals could not reach her. He smoothed the earth and scattered leaves and brush.
Then he climbed a nearby mountain and sat naked at the top, far above any trails. There he wept and sang and rocked forward and back with the same juniper stick between his teeth, so that only Apóni could hear him from down below, sleeping in her earthen bed.
Kuruk sat in that place for three days without food or water, at times passing out.
Finally, he came down off the mountain to their dwelling. In a blue cloth, he wrapped dried deer meat and old corn bread that he had baked earlier. He gathered all the ammunition he had, fifteen cartridges. They were for the Model 1894 Winchester rifle the Texas Ranger Phillips had traded against Kuruk’s much older octagonal-barreled Winchester because, the lawman said, it was the same as his childhood rifle.
He made a strap for his deer hide bag so he could carry his food and ammunition looped over his head and one shoulder. He made another strap and sewed it to his deer hide sleeve so he could carry the Winchester over his shoulder and wrapped so it didn’t rub against his thin seventy-year-old skin.
He looked around their hut, slowly, so he would remember. Then he brought in dried moss, leaves and twigs from outside. He built them up in a small teepee on the fur robes and blankets that he and Aponi had slept on. He struck his flint on his striking stone until a small flame flickered to life among the dried moss. He fed the growing flame with leaves, then dried wood, last of all with Apóni’s juniper stick. He backed outside and stood hidden and watched until the fire ate the entire hut and burned hot. And then, because the smoke and fire could attract scalp hunters and because the heat drove him back, he closed his eyes and told Apóni that he loved her. He said he loved Kaliska and little Zuni and that he would take all of them with him wherever he went, and not to worry.
And then he struck out for the border and the place Frank Holloway had told him about. Mogollon. In New Mexico. Walking only at night and by day hiding in places high up where he could see all around him and sleep until darkness fell and he could start walking northward again, always guided by the Star That Never Moves.