Adobe Palace

by Joyce Brandon

  Elaine had been fortunate. Each night her soul lifted out of her and flew back to the Flute kiva, where it hovered under the ceiling, watching Tuvi meditate. She had come to love Tuvi even more than her grandmother or sisters. He was sweet and beautiful and kind. Each night he looked up at her and smiled.

  Her nightly trips made life bearable. And once she realized the white teachers did not intend to kill her, she learned quickly and even enjoyed her lessons. She liked Mrs. Parker, who had warm, smiling eyes, and with her help, Elaine soon discovered that the English language was an interesting and unpredictable challenge. She studied the dictionary in her spare time. Soon she used words even Mrs. Addison didn’t know. Elaine was taken from class and paraded before inspecting dignitaries to convince them how readily the Indians could learn, if given the proper circumstances. Some discounted her, saying she was only part Indian. After this, Mrs. Addison had Elaine put her hair in a bun and wear a poke bonnet so they wouldn’t see its striking redness. Then the school received proper credit and continued government funding.

  Elaine pitied the children who had no way to go home. But after a while, even her soul trips were less frequent. By the time she was twelve they had stopped altogether. She didn’t know if she had lost the ability or the desire. Perhaps as she grew older her body became stronger and her soul weaker. Her changing body stirred strongly at times, and she lost interest in meditating. The days in the kiva became dim memories.

  Back at the mesa during the summers, her school name, Elaine Norman, was shortened to Elunami. The Hopi had no patience for queer white names.

  It was the summer of her fifteenth year, when she returned to the pueblo at Oraibi, that she saw Yellow Fox for the first time. A Sioux, like Gray Deer, he was taller and straighter of limb than the Hopi. Young Hopi men, with their round bodies and moon faces beneath straight bangs, looked soft as women compared to him. Yellow Fox had broad shoulders and a deep chest. The sun gleamed on his strong, muscular arms.

  Elunami noticed Yellow Fox the first day she arrived at Third Mesa. Though he showed no sign of noticing her, she knew he had. One evening when she went for water, she was not surprised to see him waiting at the well. She pretended to ignore him, but his bold gaze followed her. Unlike the white men who had looked too closely at her, Yellow Fox radiated dark power that spoke to her body. Her heart pounded as if she’d run up a steep hill.

  “In my tribe you would be called White Buffalo Woman,” he said, his deep voice teasing her.

  “I know nothing of this Buffalo Woman. In my tribe, they are smart enough to call me by my name,” she said.

  Yellow Fox sneered. “Is this what happens when they let Hopi girls go to away school?”

  Elunami’s heart drummed, singing the song of dashed hopes. She was sorry she had antagonized Yellow Fox, but she had never heard of this Buffalo Woman and did not like being called by names she did not understand. She especially did not like being sneered at because she had been taken against her will to the white school.

  Yellow Fox pushed her aside, lifted her full bucket out of the well for her, and turned toward her family’s pueblo. At her door he handed the bucket to her. “Meet me at the well after dinner.”

  She barely touched her food. Her grandmother had seen her with Yellow Fox. She was angry and told her he was a dirty Sioux. Her face twitched when she spoke of him. Elunami helped with the dishes and then went outside with her sister, who told her that Yellow Fox was a member of the war society. He was the fastest runner, the best marksman, the most audacious leader. She said it was a great honor to be courted by Yellow Fox, who had bested every young man in the games. She admitted not everyone looked up to him, a Sioux, but she did. Elunami did, too. She valued the ability to fight and felt dizzy with the thought of being courted by him.

  Surprisingly, Yellow Fox was waiting at the well. They walked away from the pueblos. Her cousin saw her with Yellow Fox and smiled. Elunami’s lips trembled with the effort to keep her face from showing her great agitation. Her cousin would tell everyone that Yellow Fox courted her. Her grandmother would not be happy, but Elunami was a woman. She was old enough to make up her own mind. Many of her friends who had stayed at the pueblo had married and borne children already.

  They walked to the rim of the mesa and looked south at the painted desert stretching to the horizon. Overhead, birds cried out. The evening wind cooled her face and arms. Beneath her plain cotton dress, her insides trembled with awareness of Yellow Fox.

  “So you are the rainmaker?” he asked.

  “I was, but no more.”

  “What did it feel like to have so much power?”

  She did not think of it as power, but as a gift from the Great Mystery. When she lifted her arms to the sky, and the rain fell, she felt at one with the elements. It was not like power to her, but like surrender and belonging.

  She could not find the words to explain this to Yellow Fox. His eyes intimidated her. “What does it feel like to be a powerful brave?” she countered.

  Yellow Fox laughed, but she could see he much preferred the conversation to focus on him. The tension between them passed. He took her wrist and lifted her hand. “Did they tell you I am a fortune-teller?”

  “No.”

  “Good. At least they do not lie about me.”

  They laughed, but he did not let go of her hand. They walked the rim of the mesa and watched the ever-changing colors of the sky until darkness fell.

  It felt good to realize he, too, worried about how others perceived him. She felt closer to him.

  Yellow Fox had come to live with his sister and her Hopi husband. These were hard times for the Sioux Nation. The horse soldiers harried them relentlessly.

  He told her that the horse soldiers had killed his mother and younger sisters when he was eleven. They rode into the camp, left temporarily unprotected while the men hunted buffalo, killed the few old guards and all of the women and children. Big and smart for his age, he had been with the men.

  He told her how much he missed the sweet, fat meat of the buffalo, the endless plains waving with yellow grass, and the vast sky overhead. His heart ached for his people, who had been herded onto terrible land by the soldiers. They spent most of their time trying to escape to find decent food, running from the soldiers, or fighting them. He alone had managed to get away.

  She fell in love with Yellow Fox that evening. A part of her that had burned within, seeking expression, attached itself to Yellow Fox, and she looked with pride upon everything he did. When he kissed her, she felt weak with desire for more kisses.

  The night of the full Cactus Moon, he lifted her skirt and touched her loins.

  “No,” she whispered, shoving his hand away.

  “Are you afraid? Don’t be afraid.”

  “It is not right.”

  Yellow Fox laughed. “Saying no is for old women with hanging skin.” His hand found her again. This time it was harder to push his hand away.

  “No…”

  “You are young and beautiful. It will be all right.”

  She tried to say no, but her head was bad—weak from his kisses and the fire within. They became lovers. Elunami knew it was not right to do this before marriage. Hopi girls were strictly enjoined against lovemaking until after the marriage vows had been spoken. But her body was stronger than her soul.

  He was so handsome, so strong. His arms around her promised that she would never be lonely again. Afterward she expected him to speak to her grandmother, but he simply left her at her front door. It was customary, when a couple made an impetuous mistake, to go immediately to the parents, who would scold them and make the marriage arrangements.

  Instead, Yellow Fox came to her pueblo the next evening and said he was not going to call for her again. Her chest felt as though someone had filled it with cold spring water.

  “But why?”

  Yellow Fox looked angry. “I will marry Antelope Dancing.”

  Yellow Fox would not speak further about it, but
Elunami got a flash of intuition. His brother-in-law wanted to be a chief. His good friend, the chief of Kykotsmovi, a village at the base of Third Mesa, had a marriageable daughter—Antelope Dancing. Yellow Fox was politically ambitious. He would rather be the husband of a chief’s daughter. Yellow Fox did not call on her again. Soon he appeared in the plaza with Antelope Dancing, who smiled up at him with proud eyes. Elunami felt sick to her stomach whenever she saw them together.

  In the fall, she returned to school as Elaine Norman and applied herself earnestly to her lessons. In the spring, because she was such a good student, she graduated and received a beautiful diploma printed in gold ink on parchment. Mrs. Addison wrote a letter to Lololma, telling him what an exemplary student she had been. She showed Elaine the letter before she mailed it and asked her to stay and work at the school. Elaine promised to consider it after her visit home.

  The second week after her arrival at the pueblo, Lololma’s daughter invited all the maidens of all the pueblos to take part in the spring plaza dances, all-day ceremonies customarily led by the chief’s oldest unmarried daughter. The girls dressed as kachinas. During the ceremony it was customary for the watching people to concentrate their thoughts in a community prayer for the spirits to bring rain.

  As the invited girls emerged from the kiva to dance in the plaza, Yellow Fox stepped forward and pointed his finger at Elunami. The girls stopped dancing.

  “She must not go. I lay with her in the sand.”

  Elunami’s mouth felt suddenly as if the desert sun had sucked all the moisture out of it. Her heart hammered so loudly she could hear nothing else.

  The chief’s daughter gave Elunami a chance to repudiate Yellow Fox’s claim, but she could not. Her lips felt frozen. She stumbled away from the kiva and ran to her family’s house, where she lay on her blankets and refused to speak to anyone. From the plaza she could hear the dances until nightfall, but rain did not come.

  Everyone knew and felt sorry for her, but their sympathy didn’t help. She wanted to rip out Yellow Fox’s heart and stuff it into his betraying mouth, but she was too filled with shame and guilt to leave the pueblo. If not for her little sister’s kindness and persistence she might have starved.

  Elunami lay on her bed of skins and tried to think why Yellow Fox would do such a thing. Her people had no ritual in which girls who had erred were humiliated. Why had he stepped forward with information that no one had asked for?

  Two days later, Tuvi called on her. She walked to the door of the pueblo, saw him, and fought back tears. She could maintain her composure with anyone else, but she loved Tuvi so much that just to see him was to feel a great sense of love and an overwhelming sense of inadequacy.

  His eyes were not like the eyes of anyone else in the world. When she looked into them she seemed to look beyond the physical eye to a tiny silver disk. Her mind had puzzled about this many times. Perhaps what she saw was the reflection of an image from below. It was only visible for a second, and from a certain angle.

  The first time she noticed it, she made opportunities to look into the eyes of the other priests and found they were all different. Some had only one or two spots of silver with the rest of the disk covered by what looked like brown moss. Some were half silver and half mossy. Only Tuvi’s whole disk was silver with no mossy spots.

  Once, Tuvi had caught her peering into the eyes of the other priests and had smiled at her. He seemed to know everything and say nothing. She longed to ask him what her own eyes looked like inside, but she was too shy.

  It was a great honor that Tuvi would come to her house. She was so nervous and self-conscious she could hardly breathe. They walked to the southernmost tip of the mesa. It was good to feel the warm air on her face. She had felt suffocated in the small pueblo.

  They sat on a boulder and watched the sunset. For more than an hour, Tuvi said nothing. Finally he looked at her.

  “It did not rain.”

  Elunami realized that he connected her humiliation to the lack of rain. Her heart dropped. She wanted to beg his forgiveness, but words stuck in her throat. She wanted him to castigate her, punish her.

  “It is time for you to have the holy words.”

  Elunami could not believe it. She had meditated for years with him and he had never offered her the holy words he shared only with his most trusted disciples.

  “Now?” she croaked. “After what I have done?”

  “The Great Mystery chooses the time. Who are we to question him?”

  He told her the holy words and made her repeat them until he was sure she had memorized them. She felt dizzy with excitement and honor.

  “Come to the kiva. Meditate. How can you make rain if your head is closed and your heart is not pure?”

  That night Elunami tried to go to the kiva, but her feet would not climb down the ladder. Sweat broke out on her face, her hands shook, and her heart felt as if it would burst. She could not. She knew her soul disk must be covered with moss. Her heart felt like it would break. Tuvi had finally given her the holy names, but she could not use them. She was not pure.

  The next morning she went to Flagstaff to live with her older sister, Margarita, and her Mexican husband, Luis. She learned Spanish and to love Mexican dances. Life would have been good, except that Luis tried to grab her every time she walked past him. No matter what he was doing—eating, drinking, even half-asleep—his hand would snake out, groping for her breasts or her loins. Margarita yelled at him, but he didn’t stop. Finally she suggested that Elunami go back to the pueblo. A year has gone by, she said, they will have forgotten. Elunami resisted, but Margarita talked her into going for a short visit, just to see how things were.

  Elunami arrived at Third Mesa in the month of the Water Moon. Icy winter winds blew across the high mesa, chilling her to the bone. She had forgotten how cold it could be this time of year. People seemed to have forgotten her shame, except for the mothers of eligible young men. They looked at her with suspicious eyes. Every time she saw one of them watching her it was like being exposed all over again.

  Dancing Antelope no longer looked at Yellow Fox with proud eyes. She was married to him, but she did not look happy. She had no child in her cradle board, and her belly was still flat. Her eyes told Elunami that she already feared she would remain childless.

  After Elunami had been home a week, Lololma sent for her. Lololma was relatively young for such a powerful chief. He was head of what the white people at the school had called the “Friendlies,” a group who did not wish to resist the white invasion. He opposed the “Hostiles,” or “Traditionalists,” who wanted to guard their Hopi way of life against the attempts by the whites to change them into good Americans.

  Lololma’s house was clean and sparsely furnished. He led her to a feathered headdress hanging on one wall.

  “See this feather headdress?”

  Elunami nodded.

  “Many years ago when I visited the Great White Leader, Chester Arthur, I was given this headdress. Now I give it to you.” He bent to open a chest and took out an embroidered white deerskin dress. “This was given to me for my wife. Take it, too. On my journey I saw great cities with buildings as tall as these mesas. I saw white men who could build bridges across wide rivers, men who could build ships as big as villages.”

  Elunami had seen pictures of these things in her schoolbooks. She nodded.

  “There are many wise men among us who have not seen these things. And because they have not, they do not know the true power of the white man. They think that all we have to do is kill a few of them and they will go away. But men who can build cities as tall as mountains will not be discouraged by a few arrows. I want to send these wise men to visit the new Great White Leader. Then they, too, will see these things and know that it is no longer good enough to live as we have. Our young people must be educated in the white fashion. I want you to go as their interpreter. And you must wear these ceremonial clothes,” he said, lifting up a long, white, feathered headdress and the p
ure white beaded dress.

  Confused, Elunami touched the finely worked leather, which was soft as silk. “These are not ours—”

  “They were a gift from the white leader to all of us.” He paused. “Do you know the school that has been opened for us in Keams Canyon?”

  Elunami nodded.

  “Five of our elders refuse to let the children of their clans attend. If they continue to refuse, the white soldiers will be called, and many will die.” He paused. “Will you go?”

  Elunami frowned. “I am not worthy.”

  A look of impatience crossed Lololma’s broad face. “Even worth must be decided differently in this new world.”

  That evening she was presented to the elders. Two were her own great-uncles, chiefs of villages on Third Mesa. Two were chiefs from First and Second Mesa. Tuvi would accompany them. He smiled at her. She couldn’t tell if he blamed her for running away. He would probably never say.

  The great number of cities they passed during their long train journey caused the elders to mutter and shake their heads. Seeing the enormous numbers of white men wilted them. Elunami realized that the whites they saw from the train windows were merely little waves of an unstoppable ocean. Five thousand Hopi did not stand a chance against millions of white men. Tuvi watched everything with solemn eyes. The elders were less good at hiding their unhappiness. With each noisy, crowded town they sank deeper into their blankets.

  In the bustling city of Washington, D.C., they were met by a crowd of white men, all intent on taking their pictures for newspapers or interviewing them. She was so busy that she did not have time to meditate. Her presence was needed from early in the morning until late at night. In honor of Tuvi’s presence, each dawn she rose to meditate, but she kept falling asleep.