Murder Most Foul, Murder Most Unsolved — By Gregory Ormson
artwork by Adam Straus
It's desolate land, surrounded by the seven sacred mountains of the Apache, where the large mural of Emily Pike is painted on the town’s water tower. If you listen, you’d swear the wind is murmuring in grief. Listen again.
San Carlos is a two-hour drive east of Phoenix. The freeway overpasses are adorned with desert nature scenes and shapes. It’s out there, where wind-whipped clouds and bright skies hold secrets of crime and punishment, out there beyond purple mountains majesty and places with genteel names like Silly Mountain, and Gold Canyon.
The light-red, copperish desert bakes this hot day, broken and beautiful in a hard cactus kind of way; we sit on hard rocks in commemoration. A chain link fence keeps us back from the water tower.
Flowers, stuffed toy bears, tobacco pouches, and messages are braided into the fence. Cloth pouches and poems on paper flutter at the false binary of chain links as wind blasts me into discomfort. “Apache Strong,” in large letters accompanies the image of Emily, painted silhouettes of Geronimo and his warriors hover near her.
Two people come by and hang on the fence for a minute. Somehow, on this hard rock, I am ok with just sitting. It reminds me of the day when two feet of snow stopped everything and everyone in Michigan’s far north. I heard the winter wind and sat on a hard chair reading Crime and Punishment. Dostoevsky wasn’t Apache, but I can see it, A’tse I Bashanzhe’ except Apache has no word for punishment. Bashanzhe’ means whip or to whip.
There’s still no whipping for this crime, no incarceration either. Wrongs on every side of this manufactured split, a chained fence inside the bigger fence called “The Reservation,” inside a bigger fence called America.
On the ground nearby, broken whiskey bottles and beer cans, dirty testaments to bad history in trade. I’m bothered by the fences, by broken whiskey bottles, by this crime and no whipping for the brutal murder and dismemberment of a 14-year-old.
Yes, the red wheelbarrow matters, but the water tower and portrait of Emily, surrounded by many red handprints, also matters. So matters another broken and beautiful child of the land.
There is no on-the-fence . . . in this story . . . all I want to do is walk to the tower and place my palms there, right next to the red painted palm prints of all her relations. But the cruel fence sings a stop sign in the wind.
And the wind in its bashanzhe’ is rattling and comforting: poems fluttering, prayers singing, flags and tobacco prayer bundles doing what they do. Wind whips it all up.
Tears come from forever and
take root
here
in this grief of nations
carried on the wind and
braided into
chain
links
"Justice for Emily.”
Fourteen-year-old Emily Pike’s dismembered body was found on the San Carlos Apache Reservation on February 14, 2025. As of today, there is no arrest and no punishment.
Adrienne Pilon is a poet, essayist, educator, and booster of literary magazines. Recent work appears in Tendon; The New Verse News, Solstice, and elsewhere. She serves as a poetry reader for Kitchen Table Quarterly. She lives with her family in North Carolina and sometimes California.