Chapter One
Papa's Melon - and What Happened Next
Outside on this New Mexico morning the dandelions add
festive color to our yard while I sit inside casting back
in my memory for autobiographically useful material. I
intend this to be a recitation of good luck and happy
outcomes but my mind turns up only fiascos and misfortunes.
The first memory popping up is of sitting on our front
porch in Sacred Heart on a torrid Oklahoma Sunday watching
Papa trudging up the section line carrying a huge Black
Diamond watermelon. The Black Diamond is the most
delicious fruit known to humanity and this was more than a
normal Black Diamond. Papa had been nurturing it all
summer on the Old Hillerman Place, picking off competitive
melons and, when it wilted, helping it along with a couple
of lard buckets of water in one of his agronomy
experiments. The previous Thursday he had declared it ripe
and rigged up a little arbor of sticks and leaves to give
it cooling shade. He announced that after Mass Sunday he
would carry it home, put it in a washtub of well water to
chill it, and when the cool of twilight came we five
Hillermans would eat it, inviting anyone who happened to
pass on our dusty street to come in and have a slice.
Alas, it was not to be. During the long walk in the humid
heat Papa's perspiration had made the melon slippery. As
he reached for our gate latch it slid from his grasp,
crashed to earth, and shattered. I recount this incident,
trivial though it sounds, because seventy something years
later I still recall my reaction was as much confirmation
assorrow. At some level in my psyche even then I had
sensed that this Black Diamond was too good to be true. I
must have mentioned this to Mama when she was comforting
us kids, because it's the first time I recall hearing her
favorite aphorism.
"Blessed are those who expect little," Mama would
say. "They are seldom disappointed."
I was about five then and probably didn't appreciate the
doubled-edged irony in that beatitude. Looking back at
life, I find I have often received more than I ever
expected and suffered less than my share of
disappointments.
The absolute earliest memory I finally managed to retrieve
also involved a fiasco and, like so many to come, it
produced a positive effect. I was sitting on one of those
little hills red ants form of the tiny bits excavated from
their tunnels. We were living on the Old Hillerman Place
then, which means I was a toddler. I was scooping up sand
and pouring it into the ants' exit hole. Why? Perhaps to
block this passage and keep occupants from swarming out to
attack me. Alas, those already out were crawling all over
me, biting away. Before Mama heard my howls and rescued
me, I had accumulated enough bites to make this incident a
sort of family legend.
The next affair that pops from the memory bank is the
dismal afternoon at Oklahoma A&M when I fell so soundly
asleep in College Algebra that I toppled from my chair
into the aisle and the professor sent me off to get a drop
card. Turning away from that, I dredge up the terminal
night of my career as an infantryman when I had gone along
on a dinky little raid intended to capture two German
prisoners. My role was to tote the stretcher on which we
would carry a captive in case we wounded him. Instead I
rode back on it myself. Part of the way, that is. The
fellow carrying the front end stepped on an antipersonnel
mine, which killed him and broke the stretcher. I'm a
little hazy about the rest of that trip, recalling the
final lap was made with me the passenger in a "fireman's
carry" formed by a couple of friends, recalling being
dropped into a frigid February creek, reviving while being
strapped onto a stretcher on a jeep, and being aware I was
going somewhere to get some sleep.
Next to come to mind was my original literary agent
delivering her verdict on my first novel. Don't want to
show it to anyone, she said. Why not? It's a bad book.
Have to think of your reputation as well as mine. Why bad?
It falls between the stools, halfway betwixt mainstream
and mystery. No way to promote it. And where does the
bookseller shelve it? Stick to nonfiction, said my agent.
I can sell that for you. How about me rewriting it? Well,
if you do, get rid of the Indian stuff.
Unpleasant as those affairs sound, every one was lucky in
a way. The sleepy tumble into the classroom aisle resulted
in an Algebra grade of W (for withdrawal) instead of the
otherwise inevitable F with its negative effect on one's
grade point average. The fiasco at the Alsatian village of
Niefern provided the "Million-Dollar Wound" for which all
sane members of World War II infantry rifle companies
yearned and which got me home at just the right time. My
agent's advice caused me to seek a second opinion, which
sent me to Joan Kahn, the Einstein of mystery editors, who
saw possibilities in the Navajo cultural material and
subsequently forced me to be a better plotter than I had
intended.
Even the lost contest with the ants had a good outcome. It
established me as a kid from whom not much should be
expected. It remains a vivid memory because through my
boyhood I heard it described at countless family
gatherings. It provoked grins and chuckles from uncles,
fond head pats from aunts, and helped establish my
reputation among cousins. They used it to illustrate my
tendency to be impulsive ("Antnee didn't worry about those
ants already out. He just tried to put the stopper in."),
stubborn ("Antnee wasn't...