Ride the Rainbow Home (21 page)

She'd also learned about the dances themselves: that the Hopi believed in Emergence; they knew this as the Fourth World and taught that the ancestors of the modern Hopi had climbed up through the sky of the third world to emerge into this one at a sacred place somewhere near here, known only to initiated members of the tribe; that the snakes were messengers, children of the Snake Maiden and the Snake Hero who were born human and then transformed into reptiles and who now served the purpose of carrying messages from the people to the gods of the natural world. When Jim told her this, she had asked if this was essentially a rain dance and Jim had answered, "Essentially, yes. It's a prayer for the rain and the harvest and general good weather."

"Do they get the rain they pray for?" she had asked skeptically.

Jim had answered with a perfectly straight face. "I brought two umbrellas."

Meg had also learned that the elders of the Snake Clan had been watching snake dens near their pueblos for some time, waiting for the day when they could lure and capture the inhabitants, bringing them to Second Mesa for this ceremony. Jim had further explained that the dances were the culmination of many ceremonies that had already been going on for days.

What she hadn't learned, and the one thing she wanted most to hear, was what they did with the snakes when they got them here. Jim had said, "They dance with them,” and Meg had tried to picture it, but the only image that would form in her mind was a sort of cartoon of traditionally dressed Hopi men facing one another as if for square dancing, each of them partnered with a tall, slinky friend who stood erect on the end of its tail. She wondered what would happen when the call came to "swing your partners" and the partners had no elbows.

It had been nearly two hours since their arrival at the pueblo. They'd walked down from the place designated for the off-mesa visitors to park through narrow alleyways between the walls of the first American apartment buildings, some of them nearly a millennium old. The pueblos rose two and three stories high, built of stone and adobe. People reached the upper levels by climbing handmade ladders, and even the oldest Hopis seemed comfortable scaling their way up and down.

Many doors had been open as they came through and Meg had seen into the Hopi homes, their floors hard- packed red earth, some flagged in stone; their walls whitewashed and sometimes painted in dark geometric shapes. Lines were strung across the walkways, some draped in drying laundry, others hung with strips of raw meat that would soon become jerky.

They had finally come to the flat surface near the pueblo where Hopi men—some in ceremonial dress, others in jeans and flannel shirts—had designated the area for the dances and had carefully warned each watcher that cameras or recorders would be confiscated. Jim explained that the snake dances had not been photographed since 1911 and surviving photographs were few.

“I wish I’d seen them,” Meg said. “That might have helped to prepare me for this.”

“You’ll be fine,” Jim assured again as he took her hand. “You’re stronger than you think, and besides, I’m here too—if you need me.”

“Thank you,” Meg whispered. She found a tender sweetness in both his confidence and his support.

Now they sat in the proscribed circle, waiting, Meg's stomach tensing more with each passing moment.

“You know you’re lucky to be able to see this,” Jim said, gently stroking her fingers.

“Lucky? How’s that?”

“Look around you. How many white faces do you see?”

She looked and counted. “Not many.”

“These dances used to be open to tourists, if they behaved themselves,” Jim explained. “Now they’re only open to outsiders who have been specifically invited. It’s a long, sad story why, but let’s just say that some visitors didn’t behave themselves very well. The Hopi take these ceremonies very seriously. Even those tribal members who don’t generally practice the Hopi religion see this as a primary way of holding onto their ancient culture—well, this and using the Hopi language.”

Then he added, “And before you ask, no. I don’t even dream of speaking Hopi. Navajo is an Athabascan language, Hopi a Shoshonean tongue.”

Meg smiled. “Not at all the same, I gather?”

Jim shook his head. “I’m glad you get that. Lots of people think that just because I can speak the one, I should automatically be fluent in the other. That’s a lot like saying that someone who can speak Korean should be fluent in Mongolian just because they’re both Asian languages.”

Meg laughed. “I’m glad I knew better than that. It sounds like you’ve been around that block before.”

“A few times,” Jim said, but his voice was calmer as he went on to tell her that the snake dances had been closed to most outsiders since a popular comic book had characterized their deities as “evil kachinas,” or avenging spirits back in 1992.

“I’m sorry,” Meg answered. “Everyone ought to have the right to expect that what is sacred to them will be respected by others.”

“I agree,” Jim said, giving her another of those admiring looks she was learning to love.

They had arrived early enough to take positions at the inner edge of the circle, but as the time for the dances came nearer and more people joined them, the demand for inner-circle seats grew. Jim, apparently following custom, had relinquished his front-row space and stood behind her. As the crush of watchers deepened—Meg estimated there were several hundred now—someone, an older Hopi man in dark jeans, had crowded between them. She could still hear Jim's voice and even touch him if she reached back between the other watchers, but she wanted his closeness. She wanted him at her back the same way he had been there when they had faced the rattlesnake in the desert.

People were clearing the circle and a hush had fallen over the crowd. From within the low adobe building nearby, a drumming began, slow and steady. Then a few men emerged into the circle. Meg stared, awed by their appearance. During high school she'd seen several demonstrations of Native American dance. They all featured people in elaborate costumes of leather and bells and bright feathers, the kind that cost hundreds of dollars in the tourist shops. The men Meg saw now looked nothing like that.

They wore only long loincloths, their feet in moccasins, their faces and bodies painted. Meg recognized a few of the body markings. She had seen them before in local art or in the petroglyphs Jim had shown her in the canyon. One jagged line represented lightning; another sinuous stripe was a snake. Others were as foreign to her as everything else she was seeing.

The men began dancing, moving trancelike, eyes partially closed or rolled back, heads lolling. More dancers joined them, similarly dressed, and soon there were eight or ten, all moving in the same trancelike state, each with his left hand upon the shoulder of the man before him. The dancing continued for several minutes, but still there were no snakes.

Then the music changed. More drums joined the rhythm and the singers beside the adobe began chanting. Another man came out of the rounded kiva and sat down beside a box next to the adobe, sheltered by its overhanging roof. The top of the box was covered with twigs and brush. Looking away from it, the man reached down, burying himself to the shoulder in the box, and then he lifted out a serpent.

Meg gasped in horror. He was holding it in his hands! She watched in sick fascination as the man handed the snake to a dancer who reentered the circle, holding up a four-foot gopher snake that writhed in his grasp. One hand held it just behind its head, the other near its tail, and with the snake held high above him, the man continued dancing. A second dancer followed him, stroking the snake with a turkey feather in mesmerizing rhythm.

One by one the other dancers went to the man beside the box. Meg watched in renewed horror as he reached through the network of branches that covered the top of the cage. Each time he was reaching in blind, his head turned away, into a box full of snakes. The very idea made her want to retch. Yet each dancer returned with a snake, holding it up as if to the skies, then dancing while it writhed in the air above him, each followed by a second man who stroked the snake with a turkey feather.

Meg wanted to shriek, to cry, to break and run. This was like a scene from one of her nightmares. At the same time, she was fascinated and couldn’t look away. As she sat transfixed, trapped by the crowd, one of the dancers came near her, close enough that she could see the snake's eyes, the patterns on its back, the rattles on its—

Meg screamed. Her face went white and she swayed, fearing she would faint. Jim hadn't warned her they used rattlesnakes!

"It's all right, Meggie." Jim's voice spoke behind her ear and she felt his warm arms go around her. She didn't know what had happened to the man who'd been standing behind her. She didn't care. Jim was there. She leaned against him, absorbing his warmth, his strength.

Once again, a spirit of peace stole over her. This was where she belonged—here, in Jim's arms. If her life was filled with snakes—real, dreamed, or metaphorical—if every day brought new problems to confront, if the world collapsed around her, dropping pieces on her head, so long as Jim was beside her she would be all right. She shivered and rubbed her head against his shoulder.

Meg didn't know how long the dances continued. It might have been an hour, maybe two, but the shock of the first few minutes was nothing compared to what followed. She saw men dance with every kind of desert snake—blue racers, sidewinders, gopher snakes, rattlers—many of them seriously venomous. She saw them hold the snakes by their tails, their heads dangling free, able to bite or strike, although apparently none of them did. Then came the sickening moment when each dancer held his snake in his mouth—in his mouth!—cradling it in his lips just an inch or two behind its head while he used one hand to move its body back and forth in the air. Later, she even saw them dancing with live rattlesnakes draped over their necks, lethal fangs poised within an inch of their hearts.

But she never saw a bite. Maybe it was the rhythm and the chanting. Maybe it was the crowds of people or the unfamiliar scents. One of the few white-faced men among the watchers near her said the Indians had defanged all the serpents they were using or they'd never risk that, but Meg knew it wasn't true. Twice the snakes came close enough that she could see their fangs, still very much intact. But the snakes were obedient to whichever gods the Hopi had invoked and there were no bites or injuries.

As the intensity of the dancing progressed, one snake fell free and made a "run" for it, slithering as rapidly as it could toward the crowd on the opposite side of the circle where tourists scattered like flies from a swatted table. One of the men, less frightened than the others, simply held out a rolled newspaper and turned the snake's head, delaying its progress long enough for the dancer who had dropped it to pick it up again and sling it around his neck.

"How can he do that?" Meg said of the watcher, as awed by his calm performance as she was by that of the dancers.

"Remember, Meg," Jim spoke calmly behind her, "that snake is more afraid of you than you are of it."

Meg shuddered, very much doubting whether that could be true. Within minutes it came time to test the theory. As the music reached a fever pitch, one of the dancers near her leaned far forward, allowing the snake in his mouth to fall to the ground where it immediately made a break for the edge of the circle. It was a rattlesnake, one of the largest Meg had ever seen, and it was headed right for her.

The crowd around her broke.

"No!" she whispered, eyes wide with terror, but she was paralyzed, unable to move. In that split second, she saw all the terrors she had ever known converging and charging at her. She wanted to run. If she could have run, she would have, but even if she’d had the strength to stand, the crowd was still too thick around her. All this went through her mind in a fraction of a second. It was time to confront her fears.

Jim put an umbrella into her hand. His voice held the eternal calm of the desert as he said, "I can't reach it, but you can. Turn its head, Meg. That's all you have to do."

Her hands shook so hard she could barely hold the umbrella, but from somewhere within her, Meg felt strength, a quiet strength like the peace of the hills. It steadied her hand and gave her courage to act. Meg held the umbrella in front of her and... and turned the snake's head. The dancer, right behind it, picked it up and put it into his mouth again.

The dances continued for a while after that, but Meg was numb to all she saw. The horror and the triumph of what she'd done stayed with her, blocking out whatever followed.

"I can't believe I really did that," Meg told Jim later as they left Second Mesa behind them. "I can't believe you made me do that."

"You're stronger than you give yourself credit for, Meggie," Jim said, clasping her hand. "You're strong enough to do anything you need to, anything you want to do."

"But if you were so comfortable with the idea, why didn't you turn the snake?" Despite her sense of conquest, she kept her tone accusing. "You could have gotten around me if you'd tried."

"Maybe," he said, "but then you wouldn't have known that you could do it."

"What?" She felt again the surge of strength that had come to her when she'd needed it, and she realized Jim had been giving to her again, only this time he had given her the strength she needed to conquer her fears for herself.

"You are strong, Meg, strong enough to take on the world, or even your own past. If you need to make something happen, you can."