Hillerman, Tony - [Leaphorn & Chee 03] (11 page)

“Then arrange the corn-shuck crosses all across it. Start from the east side and work around like I said.” She swiveled her face back toward Leaphorn. “That’s the way it was done when First Man and First Woman and the Holy People gave White Shell Girl her Kinaalda when she menstruated,” Mrs. Cigaret said. “And that’s the way Changing Woman taught us to do.”

“Yes,” Leaphorn said. “I remember.”

“What the white man was too impatient to hear was all about what was making the one who was killed sick,” Mrs. Cigaret said. “I would like to hear that when there is time for you to tell me, my mother.”

Mrs. Cigaret frowned. “The white man didn’t think it had anything to do with the killing.”

“I am not a white man,” Leaphorn said. “I am one of the Dinee. I know that the same thing that makes a man sick sometimes makes him die.”

“But this time the man was hit by a gun barrel.”

“I know that, my mother,” Leaphorn said. “But can you tell me why he was hit with the gun barrel?” Mrs. Cigaret thought about it. The wind kicked up again, whipping her skirts around her legs and sending a flurry of dust across the hogan yard. At the fire pit, the women were carefully pouring a thin layer of dirt over newspapers, which covered the corn shucks, which covered the batter.

“Yes,” Mrs. Cigaret said. “I hear what you are saying.”

“You told the white policeman that you planned to tell the old man he should have a Mountain Way sing and a Black Rain ceremony,” Leaphorn said.

“Why those?” Mrs. Cigaret was silent. The wind gusted again, moving a loose strand of gray hair against her face. She had been beautiful once, Leaphorn saw. Now she was weathered, and her face was troubled.

Behind Leaphorn there came a shout of laughter. The kindling of split pinon and cedar arranged atop the cake batter in the fire pit was flaming. “It was what I heard when I listened to the Earth,” Mrs. Cigaret said, when the laughter died out. “Can you tell me?” Mrs. Cigaret sighed. “Only that I knew it was more than one thing. Some of the sickness came from stirring up old ghosts. But the voices told me that the old man hadn’t told me everything.” She paused, her eyes blank with the glaze of glaucoma, and her face grim and sad.

“The voices told me that what had happened had cut into his heart.

There was no way to cure it. The Mountain Way sing was the right one because the sickness came from the spoiling of holy things, and the Black Rain because a taboo had been broken. But the old man’s heart was cut in half. And there was no sing anymore that would restore him to beauty.”

“Something very bad had happened,” Leaphorn said, urging her on. “I don’t think he wanted to live anymore,” Margaret Cigaret said. “I think he wanted his grandson to come, and then he wanted to die.” The fire was blazing all across the fire pit now and there was a sudden outburst of shouting and more laughter from those waiting around the hogan. The girl was coming—running across the sagebrush flat at the head of a straggling line. One of the Endischees was hanging a blanket across the hogan doorway, signifying that the ceremonial would be resumed inside. “I have to go inside now,” Mrs. Cigaret said. “There’s no more to say. When someone wants to die, they die.” Inside, a big man sat against the hogan wall and sang with his eyes closed, the voice rising, falling and changing cadence in a pattern as old as the P. “She is preparing her child,” the big man sang. “She is preparing her child.”

“White Shell Girl, she is preparing her, With white shell moccasins, she is preparing her, With white shell leggings, she is preparing her, With jewelry of white shells, she is preparing her.”

The big man sat to Leaphorn’s left, his legs folded in front of him, among the men who lined the south side of the hogan. Across from them, the women sat. The hogan floor had been cleared. A small pile of earth covered the fire pit under the smoke hole in the center. A blanket was spread against the west wall and on it were arranged the hard goods brought to this affair to be blessed by the beauty it would generate. Beside the blanket, one of the aunts of Eileen Endischee was giving the girl’s hair its ceremonial brushing. She was a pretty girl, her face pale and fatigued now, but also somehow serene. “White Shell Girl with pollen is preparing her,” the big man sang. “With the pollen of soft goods placed in her mouth, she will speak.

“With the pollen of soft goods she is preparing her. With the pollen of soft goods she is blessing her. She is preparing her. She is preparing her. She is preparing her child to live in beauty. She is preparing her for a long life in beauty. With beauty before her, White Shell Girl prepares her. With beauty behind her, White Shell Girl prepares her. With beauty above her, White Shell Girl prepares her.”

Leaphorn found himself, as he had since childhood, caught up in the hypnotic repetition of pattern which blended meaning, rhythm and sound in something more than the total of all of them. By the blanket, the aunt of the Endischee girl was tying up the child’s hair. Other voices around the hogan wall joined the big man in the singing. “With beauty all around her, she prepares her.” A girl becoming a woman, and her people celebrating this addition to the Dinee with joy and reverence. Leaphorn found himself singing, too.

The anger he had brought—despite all the taboos -comffth ceremonial had been overcome. Leaphorn felt restored in harmony. He had a loud, clear voice, and he used it. “With beauty before her, White Shell Girl prepares her.” The big man glanced at him, a friendly look.

Across the hogan, Leaphorn noticed, two of the women were smiling at him. He was a stranger, a policeman who had arrested one of them, a man from another clan, perhaps even a witch, but he was according-cepted with the natural hospitality of the Dinee. He felt a fierce pride in his people, and in this celebration of womanhood. The Dinee had always respected the female equally with the male—giving her equality in property, in metaphysics and in clan—recognizing the mother’s role in the footsteps of Changing Woman as the preserver of the Navajo Way. Leaphorn remembered what his mother had told him when he had asked how Changing Woman could have prescribed a Kinaalda cake “a shovel handle wide” and garnished with raisins when the Dinee had neither shovels nor grapes. “When you are a man,” she had said, “you will understand that she was teaching us to stay in harmony with time.” Thus, while the Kiowas were crushed, the Utes reduced to hopeless poverty, and the Hopis withdrawn into the secret of their kivas, the eternal Navajo adapted and endured. The Endischee girl, her hair arranged as the hair of White Shell Girl had been arranged by the Holy People, collected her jewelry from the blanket, put it on, and left the hogan— shyly aware that all eyes were upon her. “In beauty it is finished,” the big man sang. “In beauty it is finished.” Leaphorn stood, waiting his turn to join the single file exiting through the hogan doorway. The space was filled with the smell of sweat, wool, earth and pinon smoke from the fire outside. The audience crowded around the blanket, collecting their newly blessed belongings. A middle-aged woman in a pants suit picked up a bridle; a teen-age boy wearing a black felt “reservation hat”

took a small slab of turquoise stone and a red plastic floating battery lantern stenciled HAAS; an old man wearing a striped denim Santa Fe Railroad cap picked up a flour sack containing God knows what. Leaphorn ducked through the doorway. Mixed with the perfume of the pinon smoke there now came the smell of roasting mutton. He felt both hungry and relaxed. He would eat, and then he would ask around about a man with gold-rimmed glasses and an oversized dog, and then he would resume his conversation with Listening Woman. His mind had started working again, finding a hint of a pattern in what had been only disorder. He would simply chat with Mrs. Cigaret, giving her a chance to know him better. By tomorrow he wanted her to know him well enough even to risk discussing that dangerous subject no wise Navajo would discuss with a stranger—witchcraft. The wind died away with evening. The sunset had produced a great flare of fluorescent orange from the still-dusty atmosphere. Leaphorn had eaten mutton ribs, and fry bread, and talked to a dozen people, and learned nothing useful. He had talked with Margaret Cigaret again, getting her to recreate as well as she remembered the sequence of events that led up to the Tso-Atcitty deaths, but he had learned little he hadn’t already known from the FBI report and the tape recording. And nothing he learned seemed helpful. Anna Atcitty had not wanted to drive Mrs. Cigaret to her appointment with Hosteen Tso, and Mrs. Cigaret believed that was because she wanted to meet a boy.

Mrs. Cigaret wasn’t sure of the boy’s identity but suspected he was a Salt Cedar Dinee who worked at Short Mountain. A dust devil had blown away some of the pollen which Mrs. Cigaret used in her professional procedure. Mrs. Cigaret had not, as Leaphorn had assumed, done her listening in the little cul-de-sac worn in the mesa cliff just under where Leaphorn had stood looking down on the Tso hogan. Leaphorn had guessed about that, knowing from the FBI report only that she had gone to a sheltered place against the cliff out of sight of the hogan; he had presumed she had been led by Anna Atcitty to the closest such place. But Mrs. Cigaret remembered walking along a goat trail to reach the sand-floored cul-de-sac where she had listened. And she thought it was at least one hundred yards from the hogan, which meant it was another, somewhat smaller drainage cut in the mesa cliff west of where Leaphorn had stood.

Leaphorn remembered he had looked down into it and had noticed it had once been fenced off as a holding pen for sheep. None of these odds and ends seemed to hold any promise, though sometime after midnight Leaphorn learned that the child who had reported seeing the “dark bird” dive into an arm of Lake Powell was one of the Gorman boys.

The boy was attending the Kinaalda, but had left with two of his cousins to refill the Endischee water barrels. That involved a round trip of more than twelve miles and the wagon probably wouldn’t be back before dawn. The boy’s name was Eddie. He was the boy in the black hat and it turned out he wouldn’t be back at all after loading the water barrels; he was going to Farmington. Leaphorn sat through the night-long ceremonial, singing the twelve Hogan Songs, and the Songs of the Talking God, and watching sympathetically the grimly determined efforts of the Endischee girl not to break the rules by falling asleep. When the sky was pink in the east he had joined the others and chanted the Dawn Song, remembering the reverence with which his grandfather had always used it to greet each new day. The words, down through the generations, had become so melded into the rhythm that they were hardly more than musical sounds. But Leaphorn remembered the meaning.

“Below the East, she has discovered it, Now she has discovered Dawn Boy, The child now he has come upon it, Where it was resting, he has come upon it, Now he talks to it, now it listens to him. Since it listens to him, it obeys him; Since it obeys him, it grants him beauty. From the mouth of Dawn Boy, beauty comes forth. Now the child will have life of everlasting beauty. Now the child will go with beauty before it, Now the child will go with beauty all around it, Now the child will be with beauty finished.”

Then the Endischee girl had gone, trailed again by cousins, and nieces and nephews, to run the final race of Kinaalda. The sun had come up and Leaphorn thought he’d try once more to talk to Mrs. Cigaret. She was sitting in her truck, its door open, listening to those who were about to remove the Kinaalda cake from the fire pit.

Leaphorn sat down beside her. “One thing still troubles me,” he said.

“You told the FBI man, and you have told me, that the man who was killed said that sand paintings were spoiled. Sand paintings. More than one of the dry paintings. How could that be?”

“I don’t know,” Mrs. Cigaret said. “Do you know of any sing that has more than one sand painting at a time?” Leaphorn asked. “Is there any singer anywhere on the reservation who does it a different way?”

“They all do it the same way, if they do it the way the Talking God taught them to make dry paintings.”

“That’s what my grandfather taught me,” Leaphorn said. “The proper one is made, and when the ceremonial is finished, the singer wipes it out, and the sand is mixed together and carried out of the hogan, and scattered back to the wind. That’s the way I was taught.”

“Yes,” Margaret Cigaret said. “Then, old mother, could it have been that you did not understand what the man who was your patient said to you? Could he have said one sand painting was spoiled?” Mrs. Cigaret turned her face from the place where the Endischees had scraped away the hot cinders, and had brushed away a layer of ashes, and were now preparing to lift the Kinaalda cake from its pit oven. Her eyes focused directly on Leaphorn’s face; as directly as if she could see him. “No,” she said.

“I thought I heard him wrong. And I said so. And he said …” She paused, recalling it. “He said, “No, not just one holy painting.

More than one.” He said it was strange, and then he wouldn’t talk any more about it.”

“Very strange,” Leaphorn said. The only place he knew of that a bona fide singer had produced genuine dry paintings to be preserved was at the Museum of Navajo Ceremonial Art in Santa Fe. There it had been done only after much soul-searching and argument, and only after certain elements had been slightly modified.

The argument for breaking the rules had been to preserve certain paintings so they would never be lost. Could that be the answer here? Had Standing Medicine found a way to leave sand paintings so a ceremony would be preserved for posterity? Leaphorn shook his head.

“It doesn’t make sense,” Leaphorn said. “No,” Mrs. Cigaret said. “No one would do it.” Leaphorn opened his mouth and then closed it. It was not necessary to say the obvious. There was no reason to say, “Except a witch.” In the metaphysics of the Navajo, these stylized reproductions of Holy People reliving moments from mythology were produced to restore harmony. But this same metaphysics provided that when not done properly, a sand painting would destroy harmony and cause death. The legends of the grisly happenings in witches’ dens were sprinkled with deliberately perverted sand paintings, as well as with murder and incest. Mrs. Cigaret had turned her face toward the fire pit. Amid laughter and loud approval, the great brown cake was being raised from the pit—carefully, to avoid breaking—and the dust and ashes brushed away. “The cake is out,” Leaphorn said. “It looks perfect.”