Ceremony (12 page)

“I guess we will have to get along without these books,” he said. “We’ll have to do things our own way. Maybe we’ll even write our own book,
Cattle Raising on Indian Land,
or how to raise cattle that don’t eat grass or drink water.”

Tayo and Robert laughed with him, but Rocky was quiet. He looked up from his books.

“Those books are written by scientists. They know everything there is to know about beef cattle. That’s the trouble with the way the people around here have always done things—they never knew what they were doing.” He went back to reading his book. He did not hesitate to speak like that, to his father and his uncle, because the subject was books and scientific knowledge—those things that Rocky had learned to believe in.

Tayo was suddenly sad because what Rocky said was true. What did they know about raising cattle? They weren’t scientists. Auntie had been listening but she did not seem to notice Rocky’s disrespect. She valued Rocky’s growing understanding of the outside world, of the books, of everything of importance and power. He was becoming what she had always wanted: someone who could not only make sense of the outside world but become part of it. She did not like the cattle business and she was pleased to have a scientific reason for the way she felt. This cattle deal was bound to be no good, because Ulibarri was a cousin to that whore. She was almost certain it was that woman who had been talking to Josiah, telling him things which were not true, things which did not agree with the scientific books that the BIA extension man had loaned them. But it was his money, and if that’s what he wanted to do with twenty years of money he saved up, then let him make a fool of himself.

“I think it was some kind of trick,” she told Rocky and Tayo one evening, when old Grandma was snoring in her chair. Auntie glanced over at her to be sure she was asleep before she said it. “That dirty Mexican woman did it so Ulibarri could get rid of those worthless cattle. They gypped him. They made an old fool out of him.”

Rocky did not hear her; he was reading a sports magazine. But Tayo had heard; he always listened to her, and now his stomach felt tense; he was afraid maybe she was right, because he already knew she was right about some things.

“One thing after another all the time.” She looked at Tayo, and he turned away and stared at old Grandma. Her mouth hung open a little when she slept, and occasionally he could hear a snoring sound.

“Well,” she said with a big sigh, “it will give them something else to laugh about.”

Rocky didn’t say anything; but when he turned the page he looked up at her as though he were tired of the sound of her voice. Tayo knew that what village people thought didn’t matter to Rocky any more. He was already planning where he would go after high school; he was already talking about the places he would live, and the reservation wasn’t one of them.

Auntie got out her black church shoes and wiped them carefully with a clean damp cloth, putting her finger inside the cloth and cleaning around each of the eyelets where the laces were strung; she examined them closely by the lamp on the table to make sure that any dust or spots of dirt left from last Sunday had been removed. She had gone to church alone, for as long as Tayo could remember; although she told him that she prayed they would be baptized, she never asked any of them, not even Rocky, to go with her. Later on, Tayo wondered if she liked it that way, going to church by herself, where she could show the people that she was a devout Christian and not immoral or pagan like the rest of the family. When it came to saving her own soul, she wanted to be careful that there were no mistakes.

Old Grandma woke up. She asked Auntie what she was doing. She asked Tayo and then Rocky. Auntie had to speak to Rocky because he didn’t hear old Grandma the first time when she asked him what he was doing. Then old Grandma straightened up in her chair.

“Church,” she said, wiping her eyes with a Kleenex from her apron pocket. “Ah Thelma, do you have to go there again?”

 

 

 

They unloaded the cows one by one, looking them over carefully. The cattle seemed thinner than the week before in Magdalena, but as Josiah said, you couldn’t expect Ulibarri to feed someone else’s stock. Tayo swung open the big gate to the cattle chute and Robert opened the door on the truck. They bolted down the ramp nimbly, and as each cow saw the open gate ahead, she lowered her head and snorted, racing out the opening. They kept running, and they didn’t stop to look back at the big truck or the corrals until they were a quarter mile away. They bunched up, wary and skittish; when the last cow had run into the little herd, they stood for a moment, staring at the windmills and corrals and at the men beside the truck. Then they took off, heading south in a steady, traveling gait. Tayo watched them disappear over the horizon, their ivory hides shining, speckled brown like a butterfly’s wing.

“They are really beautiful, aren’t they?” Josiah said.

Tayo nodded. The truck driver slammed the door and started the diesel engine. Robert joined them.

“Well?” Josiah said.

“Well, how far will they run?” Robert was smiling. “I haven’t seen anything so fast since the horse races at the State Fair.”

They had unloaded them on the Sedillo Grant because the grass was still good down there. Josiah wanted to give them a good start because they would be calving later on. But a week later, when they went to check on the cattle, they didn’t find them around the windmill where they had unloaded them. Ordinary cattle would have stayed near the water unless there had been rain or many other places for water. Josiah stopped the truck and got out; he pulled his leather work gloves from his hip pocket and put them on. Tayo untied the horses and opened the gate on the stock rack. He backed the big sorrel out first.

They rode south with the sun climbing up in the east, making the sky bright, almost blinding. There were no clouds and the air still smelled cool. He wanted to remember the morning, bright and clear as the leaves on the little green plants which grew low and close to the sandy ground. It had the clarity of the sky after a summer rainstorm, when the dust was washed away, and the colors of the hills and the shadows of the mesas had an intensity which made everything he saw accessible, as if he could touch all of it, even the little green rabbit weed growing close to the sand, its tiny leaves clustered like stars.

He looked over at Josiah. He was blowing little puffs of smoke from the thin cigarette he had rolled; he looked very satisfied too, as if he were satisfied with everything that morning, even that his cattle had wandered away. He was thinking about something. Probably the cattle. They’d left the windmill, so they would have to travel until they found more water. Herefords would not look for water. When a windmill broke down or a pool went dry, Tayo had seen them standing and waiting patiently for the truck or wagon loaded with water, or for riders to herd them to water. If nobody came and there was no snow or rain, then they died there, still waiting. But these Mexican cattle were different. Josiah grinned at Tayo and nodded. Tayo smiled and nodded back at him.

When they got to the Sedillo fence, they dismounted and walked along a thirty-foot section where the tracks crisscrossed and the cattle had milled around before they broke through the fence. There were tufts of hair snagged in the barbs of wire, and in some places a strand of wire had been pulled loose from a fence pole and was hanging slack like old clothesline.

“Well, I guess we have to expect this too,” he said, pulling some of the hairs loose from the wire and letting them blow away in the wind.

“What if they just keep going, you know, crossing fences all the way back to Mexico?”

“They try that the first two or three days after you move them, but they’ll settle down. We can handle them, Tayo.”

The Mexican cattle settled down and moved more slowly, but they still had little regard for fences. They watered and grazed at the Cañoncito windmill for a few days before they started traveling again. It was simple to keep track of them because they were always moving south. By the end of May they were all the way to the flats by Fernando’s place; but they still ran if the men on horseback tried to get close; and if they were pushed into a corner where fences intersected, they lunged through the wire without hesitation and trotted away to a safe distance, where they stood in a semicircle to watch the horsemen.

They had not bothered to brand the cattle because they had a bill of sale which acknowledged their Mexican brands. But when they saw how the cattle kept moving, Josiah got worried and decided to brand them in case they got off reservation land. So in the middle of June, Tayo and Rocky and Robert went to help Josiah with his cows. It took almost the entire day to round them up because they were so wild. As Robert said, it was okay as long as they were in flat open country with only a few places to water; they could be found then. But he would hate to see them get up into the hills in the thick junipers and piñons where they could hide. “You’ll never get them then, except with a thirty-thirty,” Robert said, and Josiah nodded. There were three calves born when they corralled them, and two of the cows looked as if they would calve within a few days. The little calves reminded Tayo of new shoes, bright white with light brown speckles, silky and untouched by mud and sand. It was difficult to see how these calves would grow according to Josiah’s theories. They were the same color as their mothers and they had the same wild eyes. But Robert had to admit that the calves were stocky through the shoulder and hip, showing at least some trace of the fine registered Hereford bull that Ulibarri had insisted and sworn was their sire. They still ran like antelope in the big corral, bawling to escape the men with ropes. But Josiah said they would grow up heavy and covered with meat like Herefords, but tough too, like the Mexican cows, able to withstand hard winters and many dry years. That was his plan.

It was a good day when they branded them. Big fluffy clouds that were high on the west horizon in the morning were dark blue and low by the afternoon, and a sudden rain shower came and washed down the dust of the corral and the sweat from the work. The cows already had big Mexican brands on their sides, extending across their ribs, a brand so big you could see it for a half mile, Josiah said. And Robert nodded, and added, “That’s about as close as you can get to them anyway.” The brand wasn’t like American brands, which were initials or letters or even numbers; it looked like a big butterfly with its wings outstretched, or two loops of rope tied together in the center. They added Auntie’s brand, a rafter 4, on the left shoulder of the cows and calves, and let them go. They galloped away, kicking up red clay dust; they were still going south.

Josiah went to see her the day after the cattle were delivered. He talked to Tayo in a low confidential tone and told him not to let Auntie or old Grandma find out. They were outside at the woodpile, each with an arm full of kindling, but he whispered to Tayo as if Auntie were only a few feet away from them. He straightened up and glanced over Tayo’s head at the sun, which was almost down, and spoke in a more natural tone. “Anyway,” he said casually, “I’m only going up there to thank her again for letting me in on a good deal.” He changed his shirt and put on a stiff new pair of Levis and wiped off his fifty dollar boots with the towel that was still damp from drying his arms and face. He told Tayo to get the sharp scissors out of Auntie’s sewing basket, and he trimmed the hairs in his thin mustache. Tayo followed him outside into the cool dim evening. Josiah looked at his own reflection in the truck window, stroking the hairs of his mustache into place. He made Tayo promise to tell Auntie and Grandma that he had gone to Paguate on business. Tayo nodded, but he figured they already knew where Josiah was going anyway.

 

 

 

She was sitting in the shade on her wicker chair; her eyes were closed and her face was relaxed. He liked to look at the way her light brown skin had wrinkled at the corners of her eyes and her mouth, from too much laughing she liked to say. She knew he was standing there because the stairs up to the second floor porch were loose and squeaked. “Sit down,” she said, without opening her eyes, “enjoy the springtime with me.” He liked the way she talked. There was something in her eyes too. He saw it the first time when she had said, “I’ve seen you before many times, and I always remembered you.” Josiah could not remember ever seeing her before, but there was something in her hazel brown eyes that made him believe her. He sat on the straight-back chair beside her and looked over at the big cottonwood that grew next to the porch, its branches sweeping and wide, hiding a portion of the northeast sky.

 

 

 

 

The hot weather and the fact that Lalo had always bootlegged beer to the Lagunas and Acomas brought him there one day when she was sitting in the shade of the porch outside the bar. She spoke first, asking if he had a cigarette paper. Josiah was surprised that a Mexican woman had spoken to him, and he gave her the paper without looking at her face. He stared at the sack of Bull Durham in her lap and watched the way she rolled the cigarette without spilling any tobacco. He was suddenly aware that she was watching him, and he mumbled something about it being a hot day, and then left with his paper sack full of cold beer. But the rest of the afternoon, and that night too, he had an uncomfortable feeling that he had forgotten or lost something at Lalo’s. After supper he went out to make sure his work gloves were on the seat of the truck. He reached into his pocket and counted the money to make sure Lalo had given him the right change. He didn’t sleep well that night either, and even while he dreamed he was still aware of this feeling, that something had been left behind. So the next day he went back to Cubero. It wasn’t until he drove past the Cubero store and found himself looking to see if she was sitting on the porch that he realized his heart was beating like a boy’s, and it was too late. He knew then what it was he had left behind.