Komatke Gold. Benjamin Vance
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Neither of the kids were my father’s biological children as far as I knew, but they and their mother actually got what my mother deserved for raising me on her own. The things I went through over the following months, thanks to those four, could drive one to drink. Things usually work out for the best though, especially when you work hard at it, and you believe in forcefully applied Karma.
Those creeps managed their deception because I was naive in the ways of theft, bribery, and deceit. They don’t teach you those things in the Army. Despite my initial disgust, I was willing to treat them as equals if my father desired. However, I found out pretty soon he didn’t. Once we were alone for the first time and once it finally sank into his drugged brain who I was, we had a long and enlightening conversation. He emphatically insisted that I have a last will and testament drawn up leaving the “leeches” (his words) completely out of the estate. I complied with his wishes, but he never signed the will, or if he did no one knew it. It simply disappeared from the hospital during a brief period of my absence.
Also, a lot of other small things disappeared after I finished at the shack. Most of it disappeared at night as if someone were systematically searching for something. I’d return in the morning to find someone had been there. I left it unlocked after I removed everything I thought was useable or of some value to charity. Everything left in the shack seemed worthless to almost anybody. I always figured the culprit was one of my father’s “friends” who having stolen and gone through the trailer’s contents, thought there may be cash hidden somewhere else around the shack, or in the walls. Yeah … I could have been a little more perceptive!
Nonetheless, I tried to concentrate then, as now, on the good things that happened during my visit. I was fortunate enough to visit with my father at length for the first time in my life, and I was lucky to be able to meet some genuinely good people my father had known. I learned the importance of a “death blanket” to some people, and I got to place him in his beloved Arizona dirt in a dignified manner. I also learned my father had more friends and acquaintances than I believed possible, considering how he was living when La Paz County took charge. Most of his real friends turned out to be Native Americans. Until then I thought Native Americans paid no taxes. I was wrong again.
During the funeral, several folks commented about what a good tax man my father was. One round, brown, gray-headed lady with beautiful copper-flaked tear-streaming eyes, introduced herself as Lucy Page. Her family name was very familiar, but I asked no questions. She told me she would have found my father an Eagle feather, had she known he wanted one. I mourned with her for a while, after she squeezed the air out of me in a big hug. I couldn’t imagine what she was talking about, but I was polite. As a matter of fact, I wondered a lot about what was going on in Yuma and Parker with regard to the native rumor mill. It seemed almost everyone knew as much about my situation as I did. Lucy mentioned a little bird told her about my father’s request, but it came a little too late. I later learned who the little bird was, but never dreamed she would share those intimate things with her grandmother.
Chapter 1.
It seemed like a lifetime of years since I laid my father to rest, but the little bird who told her grandmother about my father’s eagle feather request still looked the same in my mind. Her name was Myra. She had large, almost copper-colored eyes, the high cheek bones of a princess, brown skin as translucent as china and she forever took my breath away. She maintained her jet-black hair in the proper tight bun at the very back of her head, but it always gave several beautiful loose strands permission to taunt me. Myra Page was a preceptor nurse on my father’s ward. Much younger than me, she’d graduated from Northern Arizona University, but was doing her on-the-job training in the County’s hospital. She said she was a Chemehuevi and Hopi Indian hybrid, and laughed her sparkling, beautiful musical laugh.
I can always close my eyes to see the brilliant teeth and dimples belonging to her quick, open smile. She said her father was Hopi from the only credible Hopi reservation in Northern Arizona and he and her mother met at the Phoenix Indian School, had fallen in love and been “properly married” on the Colorado River Reservation where she was born. She said she had hybrid vigor. I took her word for it back then, in a misty and bemused way, but know it for certain now!
She was responsible for the “dirty work” in my fathers’ quarantined room. She lived in the Parker area, but traveled to Yuma two or three times weekly for her many shifts, and stayed in a nurses’ billet while in Yuma.
I went to see my father every day and stayed with him awhile when he was up to it. I believe they changed his bandages twice a day and I did not want to be present for that. I revered nurses like Myra who could take that sickeningly sweet smell without retching. I’ve seen people in parts, and smelled ten-day old bodies, but that smell ... . There were plenty of good nurses around Parker back then, the majority in Yuma being Hispanic or Indian. One night I went by the hospital, on my way back to base. My father was asleep so I just sat with him awhile, watched his fragile chest rise and fall and did some deep thinking. Right in the middle of my distant, deep and serious thought, I was suddenly aware of this brown angel in a crisp white uniform. I vaguely realized she must be part of the 11:00 p.m. shift, and I figured it was high time I hit the road to the Marine base. However, after getting my few things together I just sat with them on my lap, as if paralyzed. I’ve never quite understood why.
I must have been mesmerized by her presence or maybe just bone tired. Perhaps it was my whole physiologic state of being at the time. I’ll never know. I was loyally married, and fairly happy I thought, but her simple and polite conversation carried me away, gently. Perhaps being as tired as I was, her Native American accent was a siren’s song, “How are you Mr. Wayne?” she said. “I’m really sad to hear about your father’s disease. Are you O.K.? Are you staying here? Do you have many relatives in Yuma or in Parker? Are you still in the military?” I finally realized I wasn’t answering her and felt my face flush. She took pity on me, politely turned her gaze away and ever so slightly … blessed me with a dimpled smile.
I can still remember my ears ringing, my throat tightening and the sense of drowning in those beautiful eyes and cheekbones. I finally got a few wits about me and probably said some unintelligible things, not unlike an embarrassed schoolboy. I certainly wasn’t a school boy though, nor did I have a similar mentality ... normally.
I was six feet tall, about a hundred and seventy pounds, in the best shape of my life, had a full head of auburn hair and wasn’t that bad for a guy. I guess some ladies liked me because I listened … and remembered … and cared. Anyway, after I got my head together, she didn’t seem to mind the bumpkin from Virginia and we chatted often after that; ephemerally at first, then often, and later … silently. It was mostly my fault. It happened because I made sure I was there after 10:45 p.m. every possible evening.
During those wonderful days I learned volumes about Myra and her lineage, and I learned more about the Indian School in Phoenix than I ever wanted to know (and I was born and raised in South Phoenix). I learned about Indian history on the Colorado River Reservation, about the Central Arizona Project taking water belonging to the Tribe, about the propensity of some instructors in Nursing School to think that Indian “squaws” were slow and un-teachable and much, much more about her horizons, and of her aspirations … and passions. All the while, she was taking care of other patients as dutifully as she was my father. What was so exasperating was that she could pick up our conversation exactly where we left off ten minutes ago, or twenty hours ago. I never tired of listening, but got seriously sidetracked late one night when my father finally went into a coma from which he would never wake.
The doctor estimated his death, almost to the hour. His came as most deaths do from the insidious disease we call cancer. He sank into a coma about six in the evening and gradually faded away with a few agonizing breaths about 10:00 a.m. the next morning. Although Myra knew he went into a coma she didn’t reveal if she knew he had less than twelve hours to live. She said goodbye with sad eyes and left about an hour late at 8:00 a.m.
Many things happened before the 10:00 p.m. shift-change that evening. My father’s body was removed to the mortuary in Parker and I left for Parker before Myra came to work. There was much to do at the mortuary and at the La Paz County Office of vital statistics. I was also