Ceremony (31 page)

 

“Death isn’t much,” she said. She was sitting on the sand, with her feet out straight in front, arranging short willow twigs into bundles, tying them with fluffy cotton string that she had twisted by hand. They had found a calf in the arroyo that morning; small black ants were already making trails across the head, from the nose to the eyes. The belly was bloating out as the sun climbed higher in the sky.

“Sometimes they don’t make it. That’s all. It isn’t very far away.” She looked up at him intently, and then continued.

“There are much worse things, you know. The destroyers: they work to see how much can be lost, how much can be forgotten. They destroy the feeling people have for each other.”

He took a deep breath; it hurt his chest. He thought of Josiah then, and Rocky.

“Their highest ambition is to gut human beings while they are still breathing, to hold the heart still beating so the victim will never feel anything again. When they finish, you watch yourself from a distance and you can’t even cry—not even for yourself.”

He recognized it then: the thick white skin that had enclosed him, silencing the sensations of living, the love as well as the grief; and he had been left with only the hum of the tissues that enclosed him. He never knew how long he had been lost there, in that hospital in Los Angeles.

“They are all around now. Only destruction is capable of arousing a sensation, the remains of something alive in them; and each time they do it, the scar thickens, and they feel less and less, yet still hungering for more.” She gathered up the bundles of twigs and started walking southwest.

“Old Betonie said there was some way to stop—”

“It all depends,” she said. “How far you are willing to go?”

 

They walked together over the sandy ridge above the wash, across stones that had tumbled down from the clay mortar of walls washed away by time, the geometric patterns of rooms and kivas flowing into the white arroyo sand, where even the shards of pottery were rolled to pebbles, all their colors and designs soaked back into the earth.

The position of the sun in the sky was delicate, transitional; and the season was unmistakable. The sky was the early morning color of autumn: Jemez turquoise, edged with thin quartz clouds. He breathed deeply, trying to inhale the immensity of it, trying to take it all inside himself, the way the arroyo sand swallowed time.

She was looking at Pa’to’ch, and the hair was blowing around her face. He could feel where she had come from, and he understood where she would always be.

 

 

 

The she-elk was bigger than life, painted in pale lavender clay on the south face of sandstone, along the base of the cliff. Her great belly was swollen with new life as she leaped across the yellow sandrock, startled forever across the curve of cliff rock, ears flung back to catch a sound behind her. The priests who painted her each year always cried when they stood back from the cliff and saw her. “A’moo’ooh! A’moo’ooh! you are so beautiful! You carry all that life! A’moo’ooh! With you, the cliff comes alive.”

 

 

 

They restacked the stones that had fallen. She laid the willow sticks she had tied inside the small square enclosure, and he laid a flat sandstone over the opening at the top. The rain and wind were overtaking her, rubbing away the details of her legs; the sun was bleaching her hooves into faint outlines, merging into the cliff.

“It’s almost gone,” he said.

“The clay is washing away,” she said. “Nobody has come to paint it since the war. But as long as you remember what you have seen, then nothing is gone. As long as you remember, it is part of this story we have together.”

They stayed until the sun had gone to the end of the valley and the she-elk was a dark blue shadow on the cliff.

 

She laid a dry piñon branch on the coals; smoke curled out of the gray scaly bark like woolly hair until yellow flames burst around it. He saw her face in the light that came suddenly and bright; she was crying. He wanted to kneel down and put his arms around her and tell her not to cry, but his connection with the ground was solid; his arms clasped his knees to his chest like arms of another person, pulling numb legs to a strange chest. Only his brain moved, wet and heavy against the contours of his skull, favoring curvatures of bone and concave niches. When he spoke, it was from a mouth independent of himself, and he had to listen to the sound of the words to know what he was saying.

“What is it? Why are you crying?” The anger in his voice surprised him. She looked at him. The skin on her face was darker where she had smeared the tears with the back of her hand.

“The end of the story. They want to change it. They want it to end here, the way all their stories end, encircling slowly to choke the life away. The violence of the struggle excites them, and the killing soothes them. They have their stories about us—Indian people who are only marking time and waiting for the end. And they would end this story right here, with you fighting to your death alone in these hills. Doctors from the hospital and the BIA police come. Some of the old men from Laguna come too. They drive over there in their patrol cars.” She pointed across the big arroyo to the place where the sandy wagon road was washed out. “They walk this way. The doctors have medicine to quiet you. The others bring guns. Emo has told them you are crazy, that you live in the cave here and you think you are a Jap soldier. They are all afraid of you.” Her eyes filled with tears again. “They’ll call to you. Friendly voices. If you come quietly, they will take you and lock you in the white walls of the hospital. But if you don’t go with them, they’ll hunt you down, and take you any way they can. Because this is the only ending they understand.”

“How do you know?”

His stomach churned up a hot taste in his throat. She stared up at the sky for a long time; a shooting star arched from west to east, scattering light behind it like dust on a trail. When she did not answer, he knew; like old Betonie, she could see reflections in sandrock pools of rainwater, images shifting in the flames of juniper fire; she heard voices, low and distant in the night.

“One thing,” she said finally, looking down at the red coals in the ring of white ash, “there are only a few others with Emo. The rest have been fooled; they’re being used. Tools. The Army people don’t know. They don’t know about stories or the struggle for the ending to the story. White people are always busy. They will ask themselves: what is one Indian veteran living in a cave in the middle of some reservation? They won’t have much time for you. The only reason they come is because Emo called them.”

“And the old men from home?”

“They come very reluctantly, because the Government people ask them to come along. They don’t like white people coming around anyway. The only thing is: they haven’t been able to agree.”

“Agree on what?”

“They are trying to decide who you are.”

She poked the coals with a stick. “If they didn’t find you right away, the white people would get impatient.” He nodded and smiled; the squeezing around his chest faded. He knew the rest of the story.

“They won’t want to climb around these hills. They’re afraid of snakes. Their Government cars will get stuck in sand and muddy places. The old men will get tired of sitting in the hot sun, watching the white men act like fools. They’ll all go home,” Tayo said.

“That leaves Emo and the others,” she said, unrolling their blankets on the sand, “and that part won’t be easy.”

 

He held her fiercely all night, as if together their sweat and the heat of their breathing could lock out the moaning voices of the dark whirling winds. Together they made a place, remote and calm as the stars that lay across the sky. He woke up in the night and found that place as he moved close to her again. Before dawn he felt her breathing close to his face, and when he opened his eyes, she was smiling at him.

 

The cattle stood motionless in the thick yellow light from the edge of the sun, visible above the horizon. There was a density to the light which seemed to hold them, as if the sudden warmth had stopped them, and they did not move when she and Tayo walked past. Their eyes shone yellow, and the hairs of their hides caught needles of light. She stopped to examine the cattle. He stood feeling the sun on his face the way the cattle did, until she turned and faced him.

“It’s almost completed,” she said. “We are coming to the end soon.”

 

The canyon was full of long early shadows where night lingered, a damp smell in the breeze. The fire left a flat circle of white ash on the yellow sand, and Tayo remembered Betonie’s sand painting and the warning that the new ceremonies were not like the old ones; but he had never said they were not complete, only different.

She spread her blue silk shawl open and laid her things in the middle. She had done her washing the day before and had spread the wet clothes over willows to dry. When he went to get them for her, the blouses and skirts were like bright wings of butterflies settled on the branches. He was careful not to snag them as he took them off the willows, and he folded them awkwardly before he took them back. She laughed when she saw the blouses and skirts, and refolded them. She tucked the pouches of seeds and the small smooth stones between the folded clothes, and she rolled bundles of cattail reeds and willow twigs in a skirt. She tied the shawl into a bundle and balanced it on top of her head the way Tayo had seen the old women at Laguna do. She grinned at him.

“See,” she said, parading in front of him, “this is the way I will go. Just like this.”

She looked around to see if she had forgotten anything. The imminence of her leaving made him press his feet hard against the ground.

“I’ll walk you to the road,” he said.

They walked close together, arms around each other’s waist, pulling each other close. A mourning dove called from the tall grass along the wash, and below the cliffs the speckled cattle were grazing. Every step formed another word, thick like yellow pitch oozing from a broken piñon limb, words pressing inside his chest until it hurt: don’t leave me. But he sucked air through clenched teeth and breathed hard, trapping those words inside. She stopped by a juniper tree at the edge of the road and set her bundle on the ground. The road curved through red clay and junipers uphill to the northeast. Behind them the road dropped down the gray shale hill to the clay flats of the valley. A year ago he and Harley had ridden down the road on the burro and mule, but this time the grass along the road was green and thick, and to the east, south, and west, as far as he could see, the land was green again.

“Remember,” she said, “remember everything.” He hugged her close and closed his eyes tight over the tears. She picked up the bundle and balanced it on her head with one hand.

“I’ll see you,” she said, starting down the road. At the top of the hill she turned and waved to him.

 

He woke up choking on humid jungle air, but when he pushed back the blanket he was in the cave, and it was his own sweat and heavy breathing that made the air seem damp. The dream had been dark wet sand, shifting above water, quicksand with no bottom or top, no edges; it had quivered and heaved in spasms until he choked.

He knew better than to walk the road. He climbed up the big boulders, feeling his way slowly, remembering ledges and cracks in the cliff wide enough for a person to climb to the top of the mesa. He moved each foot carefully because the sound of rocks rolling down and dry branches breaking would echo in the canyon, and if they were close enough, they would know he was getting away. His heart was pounding. They were coming to end it their way.

He lay flat on his belly and looked down a hundred feet into the canyon. His lungs were burning, and his sides ached. He listened for them, but for a long time he heard nothing in the bottom of the narrow canyon but gusts of wind that strayed over the rim of sandrock and blew his hair in his eyes. The moon lacked only a night of being full, and the flat bare sandrock on the mesa top reflected its light like snow, and he could see his way clearly.

He ran north until he hit the wood-hauling road, and he followed it east to the Acoma boundary fence. He trotted along the fence.

He stopped to rest, and swallowed back his own heavy breathing until he thought his chest would burst; but he had to listen for sounds behind him. The wind was blowing from the west, and it was difficult to be certain but he thought he heard the low hum of an engine.

The wind shifted, and it was from the south then, at his back, and it pushed him along. He was running easily and thinking about what he had to do.

On the ridge south of Engine Rock, he stopped to look down at the Acoma valley and the road. Enchanted Mesa was a dark silvered shadow rising up from the valley into the sky. There weren’t any headlights on the road. He listened, but there was only the wind stirring in the juniper branches, rustling the grass around him. It was a restless, dry wind that felt as if it blew out of dusty thin years of the past; it smelled of emptiness and loss.

He had to bring it back on them. There was no other way. He worked his way down the side of the ridge, winding back and forth across the slope, the way horses did to keep their footing.

 

He eased his feet in, holding the fluted steel edge of the culvert with both hands. He slid his legs and hips inside and ducked his head under. The curved ridges of the culvert pressed against his spine, and he could feel tiny pebbles and fine sand that had been washed inside. He pushed the dry tumbleweeds farther into the pipe with his feet and tried to get comfortable; he would stay there until morning. Then he would wait for someone from Acoma to drive by, someone who didn’t know about him. The Government didn’t go to work until eight o’clock, and by then he would be far away.