they
went to burn the spines from the cholla and prickly pear. They stood
back by the wagon and watched the cows walk up to the cactus
cautiously, sneezing at the smoldering ashes. The cows were patient
while the green pulp cooled, and then they brought out their wide
spotted tongues and ate those strange remains because the hills were
barren those years and only the cactus could grow. . . .
Josiah
said that only humans had to endure anything, because only humans
resisted what they saw outside themselves. Animals did not resist. .
. .
old
Ku’oosh waited until the voices of the women could no longer be
heard before he moved the chair closer to the bed. He smelled like
mutton tallow and mountain sagebrush. He spoke softly, using the old
dialect full of origins, as if nothing the old man said were his own
but all had been said before and he was only there to repeat it. . .
.
She
danced, spinning her body, pulling her thighs and hips into sudden
motions, bending, sweeping, veering, and lunging — whirling until
she was the bull and at the same time the killer, holding out her
full skirts like a cape.
The
men sitting around tables at the edge of the dance floor pushed
themselves away, some stumbling over chairs, spilling their beer in a
panic that pounded in their chests like her heels against the floor.
The bartender left a towel stuffed in the glass he had been wiping.
But they watched; pressing close to one another, shivering in the
farthest corner of the bar, they watched her; and when the guitar
player finally laid his instrument on the floor and held his head
between his hands, she danced on. . . .
The
liars had fooled everyone, white people and Indians alike; as long as
people believed the lies, they would never be able to see what had
been done to them or what they were doing to each other. He wiped the
sweat off his face only the sleeve of his jacket. He stood back and
looked at the gaping cut in the wire. If the white people never
looked beyond the lie, to see that theirs was a nation built on
stolen land, then they would never be able to understand how they had
been used by the witchery; they would never know that they were still
being manipulated by those who knew how to stir the ingredients
together: white thievery and injustice boiling up the anger and
hatred that would finally destroy the world: the starving against the
fat, the colored against the white. The destroyers had only to set it
in motion, and sit back to count the casualties. But it was more than
a body count; the lies devoured white hearts, and for more than two
hundred years white people had worked to fill their emptiness; they
tried to glut the hollowness with patriotic wars and with great
technology and the wealth it brought. And always they had been
fooling themselves, and they knew it. . . .
The
flowers were all colors of yellow that day — silky yellow petals
like wild canary feathers, and blossoms as dark as the center of the
sun. . . . Up ahead, a snake stopped and raised its head alertly; the
tongue slid in and out and then stopped when it located him. It was a
light yellow snake, covered with bright yellow spots, like the wild
flowers pulled loose and traveling. . . .
The
cinders made hollow crunching noises under his boots. He had come a
long way with them; but it was his own two feet that got him there.
a book to read again & again
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