Passage III

HUMANITIES: This passage is adapted from Bowman's Store: A Journey to Myself by Joseph Bruchac (©1997 by Joseph Bruchac). The author and his grandfather, Jesse Bowman, are Abenaki Indians.

I remember my grandfather's garden. It was around back, between my grandparents' house and the small two-room building we used for storing things.

Another of my earliest memories is walking through the furrows of that newly plowed garden with my grandfather—who seemed taller than the biggest trees then—holding my hand. I could barely walk, even on level ground, but he wouldn't let me fall. I wore the same kind of overalls that he did, and people were already calling me "Jess's Shadow."

That was how Lawrence Older put it one day when he was buying gasoline at my grandparents' filling station. "Jess," Larry said, with a twinkle in his eye," that grandson of yours stays so close to you he don't hardly leave room enough for your shadow."

Jess's Shadow? I didn't quite understand that name. My name was Sonny. I knew that for sure. That was the name my grandparents called me by. I never heard either of them speak to me or about me by any other name.

I remember the day—I could not have been more than two and a half years old—when my grandfather said to me, "Sonny, cup out yer bands." I held them out together, trying to make a really good cup. Carefully, taking the seeds out from the cloth sack he had slung over his shoulder, he filled my hands with kernels of golden corn. I stood there holding those seeds for him, watching as he took them, four at a time, to plant them.

"Yer turn now," he said when those seeds were gone, and he held out one leathery hand filled with corn. I'd watched really carefully, so I knew what to do. I did it so well that my grandfather allowed that I was already better at it than he was. Then, as I planted my first hills of corn, he talked to me about things. He always talked more when he was in his garden.

There in his garden, as be spaded or began to hoe, he would talk about the different plants, about the birds we heard singing, about how we had to watch for the woodchucks or the rabbits or the raccoons. Sometimes he would talk about the old way of plowing with a team of horses, and he would tell me the names of the horses he'd loved—the last of them dead and gone a decade before I was born. He told me how, as their plows cut their way down into the rich earth that was the same color as his face, he and bis father used to turn up arrowheads.

"Indian arrowheads," he would say.

He had a name for that work of preparing his garden for the sweet corn and green beans and butternut squash we always put in. I never heard anyone else say it just the way he did until I met Grampa's younger brother Jack, many years later, when I was a grown man. "Fitting the ground to plant." That is what Grampa called it. This is what Jack called it. This is what their father, Lewis Bowman, had called it. Fitting the ground to plant.

Another spring day, perhaps a year later, I was following my grandfather while he worked in the garden. He bad made a small hoe for me that year, and I was, as always, trying to do exactly what he did. Then he stopped hoeing. I stopped too and waited. I remember that I heard a bird sing just then, a long ululating song.

"Oriole," my grandfather said. Then he bent over and picked something up. He brushed soil from it and went down on one knee next to me.

I leaned close to look at the dark, blocky piece of flint that filled my grandfather's broad hand.

"Indian," my grandfather said. "Axhead."

He hefted it first in one hand and then the other. He did it with the same care that my grandmother used when she was gathering eggs in the henhouse and putting them into the basket hung over her arm. Then he placed that axhead into my hands.

Thirty years after that day when my grandfather put the stone axhead in my hands, I understood at last why, as I held that stone, my mind had filled with images of tall corn swaying in the wind, images of women dancing as, they held the season's harvest in their hands. Hearing a friend tell the story of the coming of con was the last stroke of the hoe that fit my own mind to the earth my grandfather had given to me. And I knew that aś long as my hands had the strength to hold a hoe, I would work that garden where corn had been cared for by my grandparents and by my great-grandparents before them. I would listen to that land just as it had once been listened to by other men and women, generations of Abenaki people and Mohawk people whose stories were told in a tongue as old as the soil. Spring would find me preparing the earth for the Corn Maiden, find me fitting the ground of my grand-father's garden to plant.