``There's people would like our songs, Granma, but we have forgotten them. You still remember. You can sing them, tell the stories. If we can record them we could sell them. Make our songs known.''
They dreamed of fame, or if not fame at least a measure of recognition. They saw their CD in the World Music section at Music Millennium. They were brother and sister who had returned to the reservation only three times in their city born lives. Educated. Articulate. Elegant.
Their grandmother was stuffing newspaper round the edge of the window where the east wind liked to enter. She forced the paper in with the point of a long knife. She did not turn to speak with them.
``There's Pepsi in the ice box,'' she said. But she was thinking. She'd blown her check in Reno at the Black Jack table and a hungry month stretched ahead. The children did not know that the songs she sang were sacred. Could not be recorded. Could not be heard in public places. But the old elders were the only ones who'd cared and they were all gone weren't they? Sam Twosnakes lingered without sight or hearing. Who was to know?
``The dead,'' she thought, ``the dead will know.'' But would the dead care? Perhaps there was a way to find out.
So she sang the getting ready for war song and she beat on the table with her big, arthritic fists and they listened and recorded and they thought this isn't what we want but still the music broke their hearts.
``We will eat first, then we will go to Roaring Mountain,'' she said, ``to find out if the dead care if I give their secret music to the world.'' They ate boiled rabbit and fry bread with jam. Night was coming on.
The Honda did not make it far on the rough dirt road. It was built too close to the ground. ``City car,'' said their grandmother.
They wrapped blankets around themselves and walked through the dark at the old woman's heels. She stopped at some anonymous spot in the sagebrush.
``It is here we will hear,'' she said. The wind tore at them, penetrating everything they wore and warning their naked selves to get away to shelter but still they stood and waited for a sign.
It could have been a train or a truck on the freeway or a crowd at a football game. A roar of sound that came and went from the hill above them.
``What do the dead say?'' they asked.
``Nothing I can figure,'' said their grandmother.
As they turned to go home the Pond people's horses came down off the mountain to drink at Dog Creek as they did every evening. The horses streamed around them as though they were not there. In a moment they were gone. Brother and sister stood transfixed. ``It is them,'' they said, ``it is them.''
``The Pond people's horses,'' their grandmother said.
Back at the house she said ``The dead told me nothing.'' But the young ones knew that the dead had spoken to them in the form of horses and they said nothing.
Their grandmother looked at the half empty propane tank.
``I will sing the songs, tell the stories. If the dead don't care there is no harm.''
The grandchildren recorded all her songs, all her stories and morning was green in the east when they finished. They put a twenty dollar bill on the kitchen table and they drove away and they knew that never, never would they sell the music or even let the white ones hear.
In her cold house the grandmother marked the twenty with a special pen to make sure it was good and she cursed her grandchildren for paying her so little for the treasure of her life. Then she went to bed.