Delia Ortiz and Fat Crack Ortiz’s in-law relationship

Delia Ortiz and Fat Crack Ortiz’s in-law relationship is defined by a tension between gratitude and conflict: he repeatedly altered the course of her life, yet their years together included public disagreements that Delia could not resolve before his death. At his funeral, she finally gives voice to both truths, recognizing him as an honorable man whose care had reached her long before she was ready to accept it.

A Rescue That Opened a Way Out

When Delia was seven, her parents were struggling and her mother needed to leave the reservation to study in Tempe. The nuns at Topawa offered the family a broken-down car, but it would not run. Fat Crack arrived in his old tow truck and spent the day getting it working. Delia later described that repair as the act that made it possible for both her mother and herself to receive an education. For her, the help was not an abstract kindness: the working car made departure possible and opened a future beyond the family crisis.

Delia understood this childhood intervention as one of two occasions on which Fat Crack had saved her life. The second came years later, when she was living in Washington, D.C., and having trouble in her marriage. Fat Crack offered her a job back home on the reservation. She initially refused, but she knew that refusing him and making the refusal stand were different matters. His offer gave her a route back at a moment when she barely knew where to turn, repeating in adulthood the practical rescue he had provided when she was a child.

Family Ties and Disagreements

After Delia returned, Fat Crack’s influence became part of the family life she rebuilt. Delia recalled that her aunt Julia Joaquin worried she would never find a suitable husband. Wanda Ortiz told her that she and Fat Crack had reached a similar conclusion about their sons, Baby and Leo Ortiz, whom they regarded as confirmed bachelors. Delia wondered whether Fat Crack had helped change their prospects through the Peace Smoke; in time, Baby married Christine, and Delia married Leo. Her recollection treats this possibility lightly, but it also shows Fat Crack’s place in the family as someone whose presence seemed to extend beyond practical help.

Their closeness did not mean unbroken agreement. Delia acknowledged that she and Fat Crack had disagreed over the years, and her relationship with him had been publicly contentious enough that she believed people at his funeral knew about it. She nevertheless judged him careful and serious in his work as a medicine man, a role he had not really wanted but had accepted. In her account, the disagreements coexist with respect: she calls him a good and honorable man and says she will miss him every day.

The Funeral and a Changed Understanding

Delia had not planned to speak at the funeral. The eulogy had left her feeling that Fat Crack deserved better than an account that failed to honor the man his community knew. Although Wanda had not asked her to speak, Delia rose when the opportunity came. As she stumbled on the steps, Baby, the older son she had rejected, steadied her; Leo and Baby then nodded encouragement from the front row. Their support helped her begin.

In her remarks, Delia described the two turning points Fat Crack had made possible: the repaired car that enabled her mother’s education and her own, and the job that drew her back to the reservation during marital trouble. She also credited him with being a serious, honorable medicine man, without pretending that their disagreements had never happened. Gentle laughter greeted her account of the family’s former bachelors and their eventual marriages, allowing affection and humor to sit alongside grief.

Delia’s response to Lani Walker’s speech exposed another complication in her bond with Fat Crack. Pregnant, grieving, and feeling old and jealous, Delia initially resented Lani’s presence at the funeral and questioned her right to speak as a member of the Ortiz family. Yet Lani had said nothing Delia could fairly fault, and Delia began to recognize that Fat Crack had exerted the same kind of influence on Lani’s life that he had on her own. She reconsidered her judgment and accepted that Lani had a right to grieve and speak.

That recognition does not erase Delia’s remorse. She leaned on Leo and cried, suspecting that her public grief had let Fat Crack down one last time and that, with him dead, she could no longer make amends. The relationship’s ending is therefore not a clean reconciliation but a belated, painful recognition: Delia can name what he gave her, understand his importance to others, and honor him, but cannot settle every old disagreement or undo the hurt she believes she caused.