The Ghost of Milagro Creek

by Melanie Sumner

  Just as I was getting ready to tear out of there, Earl called, “Door!” and the doorkeeper dropped the blanket down over the east door. It was pitch black in there except for that pile of glowing red coals. I could see faces in those coals, and they weren’t pretty faces. Earl dipped the horn in the bucket and said something in Indian, and then he poured water over those faces until they sizzled and told us to pray.

  “Father,” I prayed. “I don’t think this is a good idea.”

  “You sit down and shut up,” he said. “See if you can learn something.”

  That’s how I learned about the sweat lodge.

  Like I said, I retired when I came up here to Taos. I had my trailer out on the mesa, a 1954 Sportsman with a pump toilet and some new yellow paint, an Olds Vista Cruiser that ran more often than not, and my PTSD check coming like clockwork on the third day of the month—sooner if the third was a Saturday or Sunday. I had a good woman, and I was even thinking about getting a dog. It wasn’t Florida by a long shot, but a man could do worse.

  Then one morning I had a vision. It was early—the Steller’s jays were bickering in the mesquite, and before I knew it, I had turned into a bird myself. I don’t know what kind. I was up in the branches of that aspen that grows right outside my window. A big rain had knocked the dust out of the air, and them golden leaves was flashing all around me like new pennies in the sun. Just as that song started swelling in my throat—Lord, it felt so good—a shadow fell over the tree, and a band of white feathers unfurled across my eyes.

  Kee! Kee! Kee! cried that ugly hawk, digging her talons into my neck as she swooped me high into the air. The view was great, but I thought it was my last one until Creator spoke up. He said, “Son, you ain’t finished your work.”

  “Yes sir,” I said. “I thought I was done.”

  “That’s what you thought,” he said.

  “I’m kinda tired,” I said.

  Then the hawk dropped me, and I woke up on the floor beside my bed. When I came out of the dream or whatever it was, I fixed myself two hotdogs with mustard and popped open a can of Mountain Dew. While I was eating my lunch, I thought of some more reasons not to go back to work.

  1. There was a fire ordinance in Taos County.

  2. I didn’t have access to a water line.

  So I prayed some more about it.

  “Chief, you don’t listen too good,” God said. “I told you to build a sweat lodge.”

  “I ain’t got no wood,” I said.

  “Git you some,” he said.

  “Then I got to find the willows and soak them in a creek.”

  “Git on it,” he said.

  It takes some people a week to build a lodge, but a bipolar man can do it in a day if he leaves his pills in the bottle and catches himself on the upswing. On the morning of our first sweat, I dragged them boys—Mister and Tomás—out of bed before the sun had opened one eye.

  We got eighteen willows out the creek where we had set them to soak the week before and hauled in nine loads of stone to cook in the fire. Cords of firewood, buckets of water, blankets and tarps for insulating the lodge—my mind whipped along the list. Sometimes I got to talking faster than I could think, and the boys would slide uneasy glances at each other, but I kept them moving at a respectable clip until a little red Chevette pulled up in a cloud of dust. You could hear that alternator a mile away. Raquel O’Brien was coming down the road.

  Zappety-zip! The shirts flew off their backs, and the axes came down on those logs.

  “Buenos días,” said Tomás, when she got out of the car, and Mister just grinned.

  “Hey,” she said.

  She’s Tomás’s girlfriend, he was always telling me, and I’d say, It’s the Indian’s land.

  Once we got the stones cooking in a big fire, we started on the lodge. We dug the two-foot pit the Indians call the Hand of God and measured a ten-foot circumference around it. The willows bent real nice once we had sharpened the ends and stuck them in the ground, and we tied them over with strings of the stripped willow bark so the aspirin would come out in the heat. We built the altar halfway between the east door of the lodge and the fire, using the pile of dirt we had taken from the hand of God.

  “This is the womb,” Ignacia told Rocky as they tied the quilts across the frame. “That’s why the women do it.” She showed her how to tie off the corners and line rocks along the bottom edges to keep it dark and tight.

  “Yes ma’am,” said Rocky, dipping her chin. She was not what you’d call a sweet girl, but she had taken to Ignacia. When she first started coming around to the house, she was blade thin and dressed in black with her hair all spiked up like a cactus. She wore high heels that could shave off a man’s ear, and she looked like she wanted to. Silence surrounded her like a coming storm.

  “Weaned too early,” Abuela said, and she started feeding her sopapillas with honey and warm milk. She trimmed her nails and rolled some of the clippings in a glove that had belonged to her abuela Leonora and slept with it under her pillow. At night, she prayed for her.

  Slowly, the girl began to fluff out. After a few days, she lost that cold look in her eye, and pretty soon you could walk up behind her without making her jump. Before long, she was following Ignacia around, tripping over her feet to take the wash off the line or hanging out in the kitchen, canning tomatoes, plucking chickens, learning how to roll out a tortilla. One day she showed up in a pair of black orthopedic shoes just like the ones Ignacia wore, and not long after that she began to call her Abuela.

  There were six of us at the first sweat lodge: Ignacia, Mister, Tomás, Rocky, a woman from Santa Fe who called herself Rising Dawn, and yours truly. Rising Dawn was gambling friends with Rocky’s dad and caught wind of the sweat through him. She looked somewhat older to me, more like Early Afternoon, but you never know with women. Ignacia’s hair went straight up when they met. Right off, she asked her what her real name was, and the two of them faced off.

  “My earth name is Karen,” said Rising with her lips all pursed up, “but I prefer to use my spirit name. If you don’t mind.”

  “You’ll have to cover yourself up, Karen, before you go in the sweat,” said Ignacia, who was wearing a long flannel nightgown, like the women did in the old days. When Ignacia looked poor Karen up and down and told her to change her attire, I can tell you—there was no mercy in her eyes.

  I admit I had taken a couple of looks myself. The lady was generously endowed and was showing Creator’s handiwork to its advantage in a swimsuit top. On the bottom she had on something between a pair of shorts and a skirt. It kept flapping open and closed, but there were shorts under there.

  I have seen women come to sweats in worse. Back in Texas, one young lady showed up in just her bikini—no towel, no shoes, nothing else—just two tiny scraps of cloth, one little triangle on the bottom and a band of silky stuff not as wide as my hand stretched around the top. Her shoulders were as smooth and pale as the boiled white of an egg, and them thighs … it would have been easier on the men if she had just taken it off. One boy got so distracted guessing at what all was underneath he dropped a rock on his foot and broke two toes.

  Most people do what Ignacia tells them to do when she gets them icy eyes, but that gambling woman from Santa Fe had chiles in her blood.

  “In the Rainbow Tradition,” said Rise and Shine, “we do the sweat sky clad.”

  “Naked?”

  “Nude.” She looked over Ignacia’s beat-up old nightgown like maybe moths would fly out of it, and then she put on a sharp little smile that went like a claw into my own heart.

  “I’m Apache,” said Ignacia. “And we do it decent.”

  “Is that right,” she said.

  I knew then that it was going to be one hot sweat.

  “If you’ve got a prayer request, now’s the time to make it,” I said as I sprinkled sage on the altar. The women had cut some strips of prayer cloth: white for the North and the white man, red for the West and the red man, yellow for
the East and the yellow man, and black for the South and the black man, and tied these around wads of tobacco. I put a red one and a yellow one down, and two unlit cigarettes.

  One by one, we walked clockwise around the prayer mound and then got on our hands and knees to crawl inside the lodge. I was behind Karen, but by that time, she had covered herself up. “Y’all take off any watches or jewelry,” I said. “Anything plastic will melt, and gold and silver will burn.” Inside, we crawled clockwise around the Hand of God, east to south to west to north, men on one side, women on the other.

  When we were all inside, Mister pushed the first glowing stone through the door on a pitchfork, past our shoulders and into the Hand of God. “These rocks are our grandfathers,” I reminded him. “Try not to drop any.”

  “Thank you, Grandfather,” I said as I brushed the dust off the stone with a pine bough. We take seven stones in the first round.

  “If it gets too hot,” Abuela told Rocky, “pull the edge of the quilt* back like this, and lie against the cool earth. Don’t lie on your back; that’s how dead people lie, and don’t spread your legs.”

  “Chief,” said Karen. “Do you mind if I sit by the door? If I get too warm, sometimes I have to slip out.”

  “That’s where the doorkeeper sits,” I told her. She didn’t say anything for a minute, but you could tell she would. “You’re in your Mama’s womb,” I reminded her. “Babies don’t go in and out.”

  There was a bad silence. The tines of Mister’s pitchfork eased through the doorway again, right past my ear this time, and I tried to think about Earl Koko. He used to tell some jokes when we were sitting inside the lodge waiting for the grandfathers. He told a pretty good one about a dog named Lucky, but I couldn’t think of it to save my life.

  “It’s gonna be a hot one,” I said.

  “It’s a hot day,” said Tomás. He nodded at Mister, and Mister winked at Rocky. They had a routine going.

  “How hot is it?” asked Mister.

  “Well,” said Tomás. “Today I saw a dog chasing a cat, and they was both walking.”

  “Thank you, Grandfather,” I said, and whisked the new stone clean.

  In a tuneless voice, Ignacia began to sing the only song she knew, “Lonely Soldier Boy.”

  After all of the battles are over,

  After all of the fighting is done,

  Will you be the one

  Not to be outdone, Rising Dawn sang her song. She had a strong, lonesome voice and made up every word herself. I was grateful for the foresight to put Rocky between those two women. You might think an old geezer like me doesn’t draw attention from the opposite sex. The Lord knows I’m not pretty—that’s why he gave me an extra set of pheromones. When I was younger those girls were on me like chiggers—it was a real nuisance, but I’ve gotten to where I like it now.

  After Mister had brought in seven grandfathers, he crawled in with us. Tomás fastened the corners of the door flap down, and I double-checked his work to make sure we were airtight. You couldn’t see nothing but the red hot rocks in the middle of us. After a minute, I saw Abuela’s braid of sweet grass scrape a rock, spark, and flare. Then it went out, and I breathed in deep.

  “This here is cedar,” I said, sprinkling the chips on the clean red rocks. Then I drew a gourd of water from the bucket and poured it on the hot, hissing rocks. Immediately, the steam hit us. “You won’t feel the heat so bad if you pray,” I told them. “Don’t try to pray for yourself; it don’t work.” Then I poured more water on the rocks, and more, and more to burn us clean.

  Ignacia prayed for Teodoro out in California and his first wife, the one whose boyfriend whipped Mister with the car antenna. She prayed for Karen and Jesús Cisneros and everyone else who was hard to get along with. She prayed for me. Then she prayed for Ernesto and Popolo who needed so much help and for Padre Pettit who did the best he could with what he had even if he sometimes seemed so feebleminded he could have hid his own Easter eggs. She prayed that Tomás would do better in school and not drink so much and that he would have peace. She prayed for Rocky, for her good heart and strong legs and the womb inside of her that carries life just as this womb was carrying us tonight.

  She prayed for her mother and father and for her ancestors Leonora Cow Horn and Talamante Vigil; she prayed for Ramona Mondragón and Tomás and Yolanda and Tomás’s twin sister Illuminada, who swallowed a button and died. As the sweat ran in rivulets down the creases of her neck, between her thin breasts, along the sagging folds of her belly and onto the wet quilt, she prayed for Mister.

  The heat grew into a live thing. Across from me on the south wall I could hear Karen’s fingers scrabbling in the quilt, trying to push back the edge to find the cool dirt underneath. I was soaked to the skin, but my nose hairs got so hot and dry I was afraid I might blow fire. In the darkness, I felt all of us hunkering down and shrinking back to mother earth with our hearts racing toward each other. There was no relief except in prayer.

  Ignacia prayed for her garden and for abused children. She prayed for water and the end of war. Again, I dipped the gourd into the bucket, and again the water hissed on the rocks. Again and again and again! The heat was on us now like a mountain lion—blowing his breath in our faces, making us put our heads between our knees, teeth bared.

  “Door!” I yelled. “All my relations!”

  In the second round, I said, “Your relations who have passed into the spirit world are in here with us. Maybe you liked them, maybe not; it don’t matter. If you see something that scares you, just pray harder for somebody. Pray for the living and the dead. Every round gets hotter.” I dipped the gourd into the bucket and let the steam hiss and rise. Right off, I heard Karen clawing under the quilt. By the end of the round, she’d put her face down, cheek to cheek with mother earth. Without leaning back, I knew that the willow frame was too hot to touch. The grandfathers—twelve of them now—became red glass windows. My bones were rattling inside of me like seeds in a dried sunflower pod.

  “I can’t hear you,” Creator said.

  “Father!” I prayed. “Creator of all things! Bless the ants that walk the earth today, bless them as they carry their food and build their homes and lay their eggs; bless them as they die, God. Bless the birds that scratch the ground and fly and sing; bless the trout in the streams. Bless the four-leggeds—the bears and big cats and the sows and the boars that service them and all the piglets in the farrowing barn. Bless sister wolf. Bless the two-leggeds, Creator—bless cousin Alfie and those lesbians that live down the road and their chickens—them that just hatched and their mothers.”

  On the other side of the door, with tears running down his cheeks, Tomás prayed, Dios, por favor ayúdale a mi mamá quit drinking.

  At the end of that round, I passed the gourd. We drank and poured the cool water over our heads. That was about the finest feeling in the world. Tomás lit a cigarette, and we passed that too; inside the sweat lodge, smoking is another way to pray.

  In the third round, Karen prayed for her sister, Rosalind, and her nine-year-old niece who had been hit by a car and for all the artists who were looking at their blank canvasses and for governments hungry for power who could not feed their people and for the women, for all the women sitting at home or sitting under glass ceilings or sitting in bars or in churches not knowing how to stand up to a man. And vice versa. She prayed for the end of puppy mills and asked Creator to look out especially for the dignity of janitors and cleaning women and to pay special attention to all the kindergarten teachers of the world. Then she thanked Creator for me. Mister prayed the Blackfoot prayer I had taught him.

  Ahpistutuki, spumukihnahn (Creator help us)

  Ah-pis-tu-tu-ki, spu-mu-kih-nahn, Ah-pis-tu-tu-ki,

  spu-mu-kih-nahn (Creator help us, Creator help us)

  Ah-pis-tu-tu-ki, spu-mu-kih-nahn (Creator help us)

  spu-mu-kih-nahn, spu-mu-kih-nahn, spu-mu-kih-

  nahn Ah-pis-tu-tu-ki, gih-mu-kih-nahn, Ah-pis-tu-tu-ki,

 
gih-mu-kih-nahn (Creator have mercy on us,

  Creator have mercy on us)

  Ah-pis-tu-tu-ki, gih-mu-kih-nahn

  (Creator have mercy on us)

  gih-mu-kih-nahn, gih-mu-kih-nahn, gih-mu-kih-nahn

  Ah-pis-tu-tu-ki, oxh-do-kih-nahn, Ah-pis-tu-tu-ki,

  oxh-do-kih-nahn (Creator please hear us) …

  Ignacia hated to hear Mister pray in Indian. She didn’t like to talk about that boarding school she went to in Santa Fe, but Ernesto told me once that the missionaries put coals on the kids’ tongues if they heard them pray in Indian. Ah-pis-tu-tu-ki, he sang real low and soft, I could feel her hunched over there on the south wall. I could feel the smoke of that coal in front of my lips.

  The Hand of God held thirty-seven rocks in the fourth round. “This one is called the Buffalo round,” I said. “It gets real, real hot. Y’all don’t have to stay for it.” I thought Karen would take off like a rabbit, but she wrapped her robe tighter around herself and scooted as far back from the fire pit as she could.

  Rocky prayed that round. She prayed the Our Father and “Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep” and then she prayed for horses and her old aunt Snoopy.

  I don’t know how long I had been crying when I called, “Door!” For a minute, nothing happened, and I thought, Oh hell, Tomás is dead, but then I heard his hard breathing and a shuffle. The door flapped open, letting in a square of light and cool air, and one by one, the relations left.

  * The pattern of a quilt is like the pattern of the universe. When you tear it, you break the connections, and evil spirits can come through the holes.

  14

  Good Friday

  April 13, 2001 (evening)

  Spirals of Phosphenes

  Mister caught a ride in a beat-up blue truck with a man named Fausto. A faded serape covered the worn seat, and the rusty springs creaked as the truck bounced along the dirt road.

  “I haven’t seen you around here,” said Fausto, glancing at Mister’s empty hands. He had a deep, mellow voice, and his own sinewy hands held the steering wheel with a loose confidence. The orange handle of a machete poked out from under the driver’s seat. “Are you in some kind of trouble?”