The Portrait of Time

By Jon Foyt

Come to Trinidad, Colorado to witness the triptych of Natural Law, Religion and Eternal Love as a Zuni Pueblo artist vies with a cyberspace evangelist for one woman’s womb. Whose 2018 manifesto decreed the Indian War of Words? Who masterminded the Indian Casino Massacre of 2048? Who will take command in 2084?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jon Foyt
• Release date: Sep 17, 2010
• ISBN: 9781452375090

Jon Foyt

Striving for new heights on the literary landscape, along with his late wife Lois, Jon Foyt began writing novels 20 years ago, following careers in radio, commercial banking, and real estate. He holds a degree in journalism and an MBA from Stanford and a second masters degree in historic preservation from the University of Georgia. An octogenarian prostate cancer survivor, Jon is a runner, hiker and political columnist in a large active adult retirement community near San Francisco.

Book preview

The authors, Lois Foyt and Jon Foyt, have written this novel, The Portrait of Time, based on their original screenplay, Painted Waters, so that they could more fully express the characters’ innermost thoughts in a structured complex storyline, a literary novel’s narratological mission.

The Portrait of Time

by

Lois Foyt and Jon Foyt

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2010 by Lois Foyt and Jon Foyt

All characters in this novel are fictitious, and any resemblance to real persons living or dead is coincidental. This book is available in print at the authors’ website.

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment. Movie Producers, Directors or Actors who wish to option production rights to this novel may contact the authors.

Discover other titles by Lois Foyt and Jon Foyt at Smashwords.com

Last Train from Mendrisio

Red Willow Brew

Postage Due

Marathon, My Marathon

The Landscape of Time

The Test of Time

The Architecture of Time

The Portrait of Time

Part One

In his personal quest for reaffirmation of Pueblo Zuni values, he was returning to canoe again the sacred Indian lakes in the wilderness of the north woods where years ago, listening to his father’s stories, he had heard the heartbeat of their Native American cultural heritage.

• • •

Disquieted by its singular message, Joseph stared at the Indian Chapel, its steeple and white Christian cross silhouetted against the turquoise blue sky. Up there in Heaven, the little chapel preached to him, lies a glorious utopia for your soul, but only if you obey the commandments set down for you in the Holy Scriptures during the time your mortal body exists here on Earth. It’s that simple.

Even after the transcontinental bullet train had sped on, and the chapel had vanished from view, Joseph thought for a long time about this symbol that rose from out of the dust of the Wounded Knee battleground. Perched atop a knoll on the Great Plains of South Dakota, this prairie church, given the name Indian Chapel, was meant to commemorate. To Joseph it served instead to defile the spirits of the victims, disturbing their peace in the same way the fundamental principles of its two-thousand-year-old religion were disturbing him.

Better, he thought, to mark this 19th-century tragedy with upright poles of an undraped conical tepee than to erect a house consecrated to the god who was brought to this continent by Europeans, whose descendants, almost two hundred years ago along Wounded Knee Creek, massacred his Lakota Sioux brothers and sisters.

As his father recounted the bitter history those many years ago on their canoe adventure, Joseph had learned that Wounded Knee was not a planned strategy like 1876’s Little Big Horn, orchestrated by the genius of Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse with their successful battle plan against Lieut. Colonel George Armstrong Custer meant to recapture lands from which they had been dislodged bit by bit by bit. Nor was Wounded Knee secretly plotted for weeks in advance, as was the Great Pueblo Revolt of 1680 against the Spanish led by that genius from the Taos Pueblo.

Popé, the great revolutionary you were named for, Father, Joseph remembered interrupting with pride. He felt again the gentle response of his father acknowledging his statement with that tender kiss on his forehead. Their wilderness experience brought them together, Joseph reflected, if only for a few precious days. Even now, he could still feel his father’s presence and hear the emotion in his voice.

"Wounded Knee is another of our many tragic stories, my son. It began when a self-proclaimed visionary, a Nevada Paiute named Wovoka, told his followers they would see the return of the sacred bison and the disappearance of the white man if they would practice his ghost dance religion." His father had gone on to tell how Wovoka’s followers danced themselves into a state of delusive deliria.

Joseph could still hear Popé’s studied words echoing Wovoka’s rallying cry: Take back these lands that since the beginning of time have rightfully been ours. His father had recounted how, as Wovoka’s doctrine spread from tribe to tribe, the native landscape flowered with revolt. Among the Lakota Sioux of South Dakota, Kicking Bear and Short Bull were quick to assume the role of Wovoka’s disciples and to beat the drums for the downfall of the white man. Yet the dancing magic failed to lift the alien yoke, and innocent Indians were targeted in the soldiers’ rifle sights. The awful truth was that hundreds of men, women and children died at Wounded Knee—shot down in cold blood by the savage Army of the United States of America. Days later their broken bodies were ignominiously thrown into a mass grave.

As he stared out the train window, Joseph felt their spirits were only now appropriately hallowed by the prairie buckwheat grasses, which waving in the life force of the wind, bid them farewell.

In retrospect, Joseph blamed Wovoka as much as the bluecoats for the massacre of Wounded Knee. Calling himself a Messiah, Wovoka had promised his faithful followers a paradise free of the white man, but given the incompatibility between that steeple’s singular message of salvation and the twelve-thousand-year-old beliefs of his own people, the divide between the two cultures that had existed since 1492 couldn’t be bridged by the imagination of one self-appointed prophet. The chasm was as wide and deep as the Grand Canyon of the Colorado.

The white man believed their god created the Earth and put man and the animals upon it; whereas his people, whether Lakota Sioux or Pueblo Zuni, knew that since the beginning of time, they and the animals had held Mother Earth’s hand in partnership. The spirits of their ancestors resided here, too, protected by Mother Earth and honored by their descendants, not delivered up into the sky to a utopia called Heaven. Yes, Wovoka had bastardized the teachings of his people by incorporating the messiah-salvation dogma of the white man’s creed, and he deserved defeat on that icy cold December day in 1890.

Joseph would always remember that his father had marked Wounded Knee to be the end to Native American uprisings—a last gasp at reclaiming a continent. As a consequence of that atrocity, they entered what his father called the beginning of their Dark Age. Their leaders, Geronimo, Sitting Bull and Chief Joseph, had been purged. Their nomadic sovereignty had been overthrown. The white man’s diseases of syphilis and small pox would take their toll. Hunger and poverty would reduce their people to a survival state so that time devoted to the humanities would be non-existent during this bleak period.

Joseph was tempted to label this period in time as an Indian holocaust—a calculated destruction of human beings by other human beings. But having listened to the optimist in his father, he knew their people possessed an inner strength that couldn’t be completely bent. After all, they’d triumphed through the droughts and the rains of twelve thousand years.

The bullet train slowed for its stop in Pierre. Joseph looked into the faces of the white men waiting on the platform and had to remind himself that his father was not Native American. Yet everyone said Popé thought like an Indian and spoke the Zuni language in a clear, resonate voice, expressing the wisdom and the magic of the natural world.

According to his mother, Nia, the celebrated legend of Popé had begun even before his stormy birth atop that sacred mesa in the Four Corners in the year 2000. Among the Zuni, Popé’s coming was heralded as the rebirth of the spirit of the ancient Anasazi—those prehistory people from whom they had descended. For years the Zuni had revered Popé’s mother, Anna Ardmore, an eminent Southwest archaeologist who was noted for her dedication to all the Pueblo peoples and the preservation of their sacred prehistoric ruins. When she died giving birth to Popé, the Zuni sought to raise her baby, whom they believed to be the Chosen One.

Popé’s father, Worthington Rhodes, the powerful transportation czar behind the design, construction and financing of the nexus of bullet trains that now crisscrossed the continent, had wrestled day and night with the Zuni’s request to raise his son. He finally concluded that the spirit of Popé’s mother would be honored if her son were to be adopted by the Zuni.

And so it came to be that Joseph’s father grew to manhood among the Zuni Pueblo Indians of New Mexico. Young Popé’s physical similarities to the immortal Indian idol, Crazy Horse, were striking. He, too, was called Curly because of unruly hair. He rode his own white horse with crazy abandon. Yet his intense blue eyes showed a studious side. The elders of each clan taught Popé the spiritual meanings of their sacred dances by narrating the stories of their beloved kachinas.

Joseph smiled to himself as he recalled how these deified ancestral figures had been defiantly painted on the white plastered walls inside the ancient 17th-century adobe church by a 20th-century Zuni artist. These bold kachinas had effectively overshadowed the teachings of the foreign priests and had inspired his father to honor, above all else, his adoptive family’s beliefs.

Joseph recalled Popé telling him one night around their campfire that it was a white man, a man whom his father had never met in person, who proved to be a tremendous influence on his career path. Popé had related the account of how Frank Hamilton Cushing, a U.S. government ethnologist, lived with the Zunis during the 1880s, and of how he earned acceptance as one of them. Cushing’s story, his father said, had guided his own maturation. From Cushing’s rare photographs, sketches and meticulous journals, Popé became intrigued with primary source material heretofore unwritten in any history book, and he vowed to devote his life recording for posterity the truth of Pueblo Zuni history. First, he realized that, as had Cushing, he must prove himself to the people of Zuni. Again, Cushing’s journals showed him the way.

Joseph ran his fingers over his father’s buckskin jacket, lingering on the beadwork that formed into a design as intricate as his father’s multicultural character. How appropriate to wear something of Popé’s on this return journey into the north woods. The sweet smell of the buckskin brought back a flood of memories, both pleasurable and painful, that would have to be sorted out during his forthcoming canoe adventure if he was to secure a vision for the remaining half of his life.

In telling of his own tale of passage into the inner world of Zuni manhood, his father had spoken of fear—fear of failure—leaving him neither white nor Indian, adrift in a no-man’s culture. Popé had described how, in Cushing’s day, a young man, in order to prove his mettle, was sent out of the pueblo to find and capture the spirit of a wild animal by killing it. Only then would he be permitted to ride off with a Zuni war party and scalp an enemy of his people. Of course, by Popé’s time, endangered animals and Indians were protected by laws. So, his father had concluded, his only recourse was to strike out on his own into the wilderness where he would fast in the hope of capturing a vision of 21st-century passage into Zuni manhood.

Camped at the El Morro watering place beneath Inscription Rock in the far reaches of the Zuni lands, Popé read the prehistory Native American petroglyphs along with the names of every European trespasser since 1540—conquistador, explorer, trader, pioneer, immigrant settler, railroad surveyor—who had inscribed into this prodigious sandstone cliff the dates of their passings, their hopes, their loves, their missions.

At that point in telling his story, his father had voiced indignation, What those raiders didn’t record was their plundering and desecration of pueblo nations along the way. In a long diatribe, Popé cursed grave robbers for defiling the dead by digging up funerary pottery and selling the sacred artifacts to the highest bidder; he railed against amateur archaeologists for digging up the bones of Zuni ancestors from hallowed grave sites and carrying them off to laboratories; and he verbally lashed others for bartering for Zuni art treasures with worthless trinkets, alcohol and guns and whisking away the riches to museums and private collectors around the world.

Popé said that he knew the largest cache of Zuni property was stowed in the Smithsonian Museum in Washington, the majority of the collection hidden away in vaults, purportedly awaiting future study and cataloging by scholars. That night, while sleeping under the stars, his father had a dream in which he saw himself retrieving these treasures and returning them to the Zuni people, thus fulfilling his rite of passage.

Popé had smiled with self-satisfaction as he told Joseph how he hurried back to the pueblo to tell Dancing Drum, the medicine man of the Bear Clan, about his dream. "Diplomatically I asked for an interpretation. Dramatically Dancing Drum declared a vision of tribal healing had been revealed, and he announced, ‘You will consult with the elders of the tribe. I predict that, chewing peyote with these wise men in the sacred ceremonial kiva, you will see your dream transformed into a plan of action. Yes, my son,’ Dancing Drum foresaw, ‘the return of these treasures will take the place of bringing back the scalp of an enemy’."

At first, Popé admitted, he had thought about asking his own father, who was, after all, one of the most powerful men in Washington, for help. But he had quickly concluded that relying on family connections would be the white man’s way, not the way of a young Zuni. Emphatically Popé had declared to young Joseph, A Zuni brave must meet any challenge with his own strength and wit.

And so, at age seventeen with his knife and his resolve, Popé set out for a distant Washington, not ticketed on his father’s bullet train, but hitchhiking, often walking, frequently running, as he crossed the High Plains of New Mexico, the Llano Estacado of the Texas panhandle, the Great Plains of western Oklahoma, the former Indian nation of eastern Oklahoma, through what was left of the forests of the Ozarks, across the muddy Mississippi, up and down the hills and through the hollows of Tennessee, across the mountains of North Carolina and Virginia, down onto the Tidewater and finally, by swimming the Potomac, he entered the nation’s capital.

There, dressed as a Pueblo Indian, an eagle feather braided into his curly hair, a necklace of rabbit-leg bones serving as his protective charm for his long journey, his face symbolically painted with tears of sadness for the long lost artifacts he was determined to retrieve, his knife encased in the sheaf by his silver belt buckle and sturdy moccasins sewn with sinew and decorated with horsehair, he walked in upon the Smithsonian’s curator, Natalie Case.

Natalie’s screams summoned armed security guards who, with guns drawn, arm-wrestled Popé toward her office door. His plaintive plea for a hearing quieted Natalie’s hysteria and piqued her curiosity. Here was a handsome young white boy, dressed as an archetype of a Pueblo Indian brave, who intrigued her. She dismissed the guards and told Popé to explain himself.

To his perplexity, Ms. Case reacted to his rehearsed demands with, What are you willing to offer me in return?

Years later, passing through puberty, Joseph came to question his father’s story from this point on, speculating with his own version of the ensuing scenario, wherein he imagined the young Zunian ambassador’s tryst with a sexually excited forty-year-old