by Will Hobbs
I figured out a way to ask my question in a round-about way. “Do any of you happen to play the flute?” I asked.
No response. Nothing about the music that had filled the valley.
“How come you asked?” Heidi wondered.
“Oh, I heard some beautiful flute music one time,” I said. “I’m looking for someone to teach me.”
14
The rain continued all night the second night. When a pause came I ventured outside, restless as ever. A brand-new crescent moon was setting in a break in the clouds. I climbed up on Dusty’s back and we went down to check on the fields. Everything looked fine until we discovered a coyote in the melons. Dusty’s a big dog, and she has no hesitation about chasing a single coyote. That’s what she did, and I fell from her back before I could get a good grip.
I hid under a canopy of melon vines until Dusty returned for me. We surveyed the melons, then discovered that the coyote had also been in the squashes and the corn. The coyote hadn’t really eaten much of anything; nothing was ripe yet. A nip here and a bite there, just enough to open up a melon or a squash or the corn and ruin them—that was his style.
On our way out of the field, we came across deer mice in my mother’s strawberries, at least a dozen of them. Already out of temper, I flew into a rage. We chased them until they disappeared under the greenhouse. The rain started again, and I headed for shelter in the rimrock.
Again, in the hour before dawn, the music of the flute filled the valley.
Again, no one heard it but me.
The first thing I did that morning was check the greenhouse. Ringo didn’t have a way into the greenhouse, so if the mice had been getting in there from underneath, in a closed space like that, it could be a bad situation. Hantavirus City.
I opened the door and peeked inside. The windows were all open, and I could feel a steady draft moving through. That was reassuring. With my hand over my nose and mouth I made a tour, looking closely for droppings. The greenhouse looked good and clean.
The rain showed no sign of letting up. Inside the cabin, my mother was baking and my father puttering and singing. They’d declared a holiday for as long as it kept raining.
Mid-morning I put on my rain jacket and went out to see if any of the late-season beans might be sprouting. They’d be the first of our recent plantings to germinate. I knew I was jumping the gun, but I always do. I’ve always loved to see the way different plants hit the surface. With beans, the seed itself appears out of the ground like the head of a goose tucked up against its long, rising neck, and then the head lifts up and out, splits open, and reveals … leaves.
None of the beans had sprouted yet, but the blue speckleds and Cocopah whites were close, the ones Cricket and I had planted only a few days before. I could see the soil lifting slightly where the beans were pushing up from below.
I sensed that someone besides Dusty was there with me. I looked up and found Cricket standing right by me. His clothes were streaming wet and his straw hat was dripping like a sieve. “Those beans—pretty soon now,” he said.
“Pretty soon,” I muttered, still surprised to see someone standing right there. Dusty was nuzzling his hand. “I’ve never seen ’em come up this fast,” I added. I wanted to know more about this strange old man.
We walked around the fields together. Our feet led us to the chilies, where I thought I’d show off by eating a couple of chiltipines. They’re the wild relatives of the chilies people grow. They’re tiny, about the size of a wild strawberry. I like them, but they’re so hot they’ll take your head off. With a glance at Cricket, I ate a couple. As always, it felt like steam was coming out of my ears. Then Cricket ate a handful of them, just like they were berries. “These are good,” he said. The chiltipines didn’t even make his eyes water or his nose run.
In the afternoon a small blue opening in the clouds widened, and the sun shone through. At once, my mother brought out her fresh bread, and we sat out on the picnic table and enjoyed it, my parents and Cricket and I.
Cricket was saying, “The bread is good,” when Ringo dropped out of the low limb of the pinyon there, right onto his shoulder.
My mother was delighted, and my father’s mouth was hanging open. The ringtail was so shy, nobody but us had ever laid eyes on him. Even we had never seen him in the daytime before.
Ringo preened on Cricket’s shoulder, flicking his flashy tail. Cricket began feeding him bits of bread. A minute later the ringtail vanished back into the trees.
My mother went back inside and returned with a big bowl of fresh strawberries. “Are those washed?” I asked quickly. “I saw some mice in the strawberries.”
“I washed them a bunch. They’ll be fine.”
“I suppose so,” I said. All the same, I didn’t touch them.
The blue hole in the sky closed with surprising swiftness and the rain began again. Cricket put his hand out and let it fall on his palm. “The female rain,” Cricket said. “It’s soft, it’s good.”
The rain fell a third night, soft and steady. I listened for the flute and music came again in the hour before dawn. The rain fell softly all that fourth day, as if it might never stop.
My mother and father spent that afternoon in the rain, completely soaked, holding hands and walking a slow tour among all the different vegetables. I met up with them in the corn we’d planted in the middle of May. It was fully a foot higher than it had been four days before. It looked like it might even tassel soon.
“It’s a tropical frenzy!” my father declared.
They were so happy they were giddy. Other than their straw hats, my parents had no protection from the rain and didn’t want any. They said they wanted to get soaked, “just like the ground,” and they sure accomplished that. It was a warm rain as our rains go, but I think I would have been chilled without my rain jacket. On they went into the beans. Like everything else, the beans had exploded with growth in the last few days. “Holy jumping garbanzos!” my father declared. My mother answered with, “Great leapin’ limas!”
I was astonished at the blue speckleds and the Cocopah whites that Cricket and I had planted, the ones that had appeared ready to break through only yesterday. They now stood four inches tall and had already unfolded two sets of leaves. While my parents lingered in the beans, I raced over to the squash, a little apprehensive. The vines were lusher, with much larger leaves, than any we’d grown before. Despite the thinning I’d given them, many young squashes of all sizes and shapes and colors had endured.
I caught up with my parents again in the gourds, where they were visiting with Cricket. Cricket was soaked too, his bare feet caked with mud. My dad was talking about the new gourd vines at their feet. They’d run five feet since I’d seen them only days before, and were in full flower. At the base of the female flowers, striped gourds were swelling, already the size of walnuts. “A botanist we call Mr. K. sent us this seed,” my father was explaining to Cricket. “And most of our other seeds as well. I’ve never seen anything like these gourds. We planted them only a couple of weeks ago!”
Cricket was looking them over. “They’re doing good,” was all he said, and then he waded into the rest of the gourds, inspecting them carefully. My father followed. It was obvious that Cricket must have some familiarity with gourds. Cricket stopped among the vines of another variety of wild gourd that we were growing for the first time, from a batch we’d planted in early May. “What do you know, one of them’s nearly ripe!” my father exclaimed, pointing to a small orange gourd with green stripes.
“Do you know about this gourd?” Cricket asked him.
My father shook his head. He was dying to know whatever it was Cricket knew.
“Did you know it was sweet?”
My father was amazed, and so was my mother. We’d heard my dad say many times that a wild gourd that just happened to be sweet was probably the ancestor of all squashes and pumpkins.
My dad whipped out his pocket knife, and to my surprise he snipped the gourd from th
e vine and bit into it just as Cricket yelled, “Don’t do that!” There was a look of shock on my mother’s face, but nothing like the shock on my father’s. He immediately doubled over with the dry heaves.
It looked like my dad might fall over; my mother steadied him. “Art, are you going to be okay?”
As soon as my dad could quit retching, he spit three or four times, and then he turned to Cricket and said, “I thought you said it was sweet!”
“I said it was sweet,” Cricket replied. “That was before Coyote grumped on it.”
My mother couldn’t help it, she burst out laughing. And so did my father, who thought it was the best joke he ever heard. He always did like jokes that were on him.
My mother suddenly felt chilled, and my parents went back to the cabin. Cricket and I went over to the corn to see how it was coming along. My father’s sixty-day corn had just sprouted. We weren’t the only ones who had noticed. A raven was flying by overhead, looking right down at the new corn. “Here’s trouble,” I said.
“Oh, yes,” Cricket agreed, as the raven flew off with a noisy squawk. “He’s already telling the others.”
Ravens will go from one corn sprout to the next, pulling them out of the ground. They’re so smart, they know that tugging on the leaf will bring up the kernel. “You stay here while I get some things that might scare them away,” I told Cricket. It took me a while to round up the poles I’d need, plus parachute cord, a wheelbarrow load of bones, strips from old bedsheets, and other geegaws that would flap in the wind.
On my way back, as I came within sight of Cricket, I noticed a raven just a few feet away from him. Cricket was leaning forward as if talking to the raven. When I got close enough, the huge black bird flew away on thrashing wings. As ravens often do, it gained altitude, then tumbled topsy-turvy with a laughing croak before flying on.
“What were you saying to the raven?” I joked, as I lugged my poles into place. “Making a deal with him?”
“You guessed it,” Cricket said with a sparkle in his eye. “Raven hears, raven sees, raven knows, raven decides. I told him if he’d leave this particular farm alone—for good—I’d play a trick on Coyote that would be as good as any that Raven played back in the Distant Time. Raven enjoys getting the best of Coyote.”
“Did he go for it?”
“We’ll find out, I guess.”
The rest of the day, no ravens showed up. I wouldn’t have to worry about the ravens pulling out my Picture House corn. It wasn’t sprouting.
In the evening the rains finally stopped. The skies cleared with a sunset as remarkable as the sunrise that had begun it all. Even so, the day closed on a worrisome note: my mother had a fever and a cough. “It’s just from standing out in the rain all afternoon,” she assured my dad. “Make me a pot of rose-hip tea. I’ll be fine.”
15
In the wake of the rains, the night sky blazed with stars. The crescent moon was setting in the western sky. I heard the flute again, this time in the middle of the night. That melody seemed to be calling; I had the feeling it was calling me alone. It made a song of water trickling, the wings of eagles, my parents’ voices, the silence of Picture House, wind in the grass, bread baking, plants growing. Dusty and I left the rimrock for the fields below, hoping to find the source of that beautiful music.
The music of the flute was here, there, and everywhere. Finding its source may have been as impossible as arriving at a rainbow’s end, but I’d never quit chasing after rainbows either.
We didn’t find who was playing the flute but we did find Cricket, sitting cross-legged in the O’odham squash. His head was tilted back, his straw hat had fallen off. Apparently Cricket had come out to the field to watch the stars, and he’d fallen into a dream or trance. It was very odd. His eyes were rolled back in their sockets so that only the whites were showing. His face looked ancient and still as death in the starlight.
Afraid that the old man had died, I sprung to his knee and leaned against his chest, listening with the packrat’s keen ears. I could feel under his shirt whatever thin object hung from his neck by the cotton string. I thought I knew what it was.
His heart beat soundly, with all the power of a drum. He began to speak, though his head was still tilted toward the stars. His eyes remained rolled back in his skull, and his lips never moved. “The stars you call the Milky Way, they are white tepary beans. Coyote scattered them there, making mischief one day.”
I had never heard that story before. Of course I liked it.
“My name is Tepary,” I told him. “Sometimes I call myself the Human Bean.”
Without moving a muscle, the man called Cricket laughed. “‘The Human Bean’—that’s a good one!”
I was so amazed he had understood me. I was afraid all he’d heard was the squeaking of a rat.
“It’s because of you,” Cricket continued, “your mother and father, and others like you, that I stay. Not long ago, I thought the day was coming when there’d be no more use for me. Like the other one, I was close to going.”
“Going where?” I asked.
“To the stars,” he replied, and then he fell silent.
I said, “I don’t know what you mean.”
“But I would miss this world,” he continued with a sigh. “Sometimes it’s still as beautiful as it ever was“. But all things pass eventually, and even my days are numbered.”
I didn’t think about what I was doing. But I had to tell my secret at last, share my loneliness. I found myself saying, “I’m not really a packrat, you know.”
“I know,” he said. “You just told me your name was Tepary. I know this Tepary Jones you’re talking about. It seems we’re both changelings.”
I blinked and saw in the old man’s place an insect something like a large green grasshopper or locust, maybe more like a katydid. It had large eyes and antennas as long as its body. They were probing in my direction as the insect lifted its wings and began to play beautiful music by vibrating its transparent wing covers so fast they blurred. It sounded exactly like a flute; in fact, it was the same music I’d been hearing all this time. The playing warmed the night and brought back the memory of the warm, moist air that had arrived just before the old man walked up the road and into our lives.
“You are a good flute player,” I said.
“Thank you,” the insect answered.
“I heard your flute…. before you ever got here.”
“Yes, you have the hearing of a changeling. You know, I heard someone playing a flute, too, or trying to play it. I came a long way to find out who this new flute player was. I think it must have been you, Tepary Jones.”
“It was me,” I told the insect. “I tried to play a flute I found, but I didn’t really know how to—it wasn’t mine. It belonged to a man who’s been dead for almost a thousand years.”
I went on to explain to the insect how I’d gone up to watch the eclipse of the moon at the ancient ruin we call Picture House, and how the pothunters had come and broken into the medicine man’s grave behind the wall.
“What did this medicine man look like? What does this place look like?”
“Well, he was an albino. He had pink skin, light hair…. Picture House has five kivas, forty-three rooms, and two towers, and it sits under the roof of a wide cave.”
“Ever since I came here, I’ve been remembering a place close by … I think I’ve been to that place you’re talking about, several times. I think I knew this pink-skinned man. The flute you’re talking about didn’t belong to him either. It was passed down from the Distant Time.”
“How could you have … do you mean … did the flute belong to the humpbacked flute player himself? Did it belong to Kokopelli?”
“One of them.”
“There was more than one Kokopelli?”
“There were two.”
“You said, ‘One has gone.’ Is that what you meant? Kokopelli has gone?”
“Yes, and one remains.”
Before I could pu
t into words what I was thinking, the insect said, “Now let me guess, you tried to play this flute…”
“I didn’t really play it, I only blew on it a little.”
“That’s all it took! That’s how you became a magical person! You see, with that flute, you can change into an animal or back to a person. That’s its magic. That flute goes back to the very earliest days, when people and animals traded places all the time.”
“Why do I keep changing back and forth every day and every night?”
“Did you play the flute during the eclipse?”
“Yes, exactly when the moon was blacked out.”
“Then that must be why.”
“Well, I lost that flute!”
“That’s too bad! That was some flute!”
With that, the large green insect was gone, and the old man we called Cricket was back, his eyes still rolled back in his skull.
“Cricket,” I asked, “You still have your flute, don’t you? Is that a flute you keep under your shirt?”
He drew it out and showed it to me. It was identical to the bone flute I had lost. “Is it made from the wingbone of an eagle?” I asked.
“Yes, Eagle gave it to me,” he replied.
“May I … may I have your permission to say your name?”
“Certainly.”
I tried to speak, but the word wouldn’t come out. My heart was beating so fast I couldn’t even breathe. “It’s hard for me to say it!” I blurted out.
He laughed.
I took a deep breath, then tried again. “You are … Kokopelli.”
The old man’s ancient eyes glinted with the starlight of the eons. “There, you said it! I’m one of two…. yes, ‘Kokopelli’ is what the People always called me.”
