Wild Sorrow

by AULT, SANDI

  “We go now,” Momma Anna said. She started down the path to the gate in the churchyard wall.

  “I’ll be right there,” I called after her. I turned to Sister Florinda. “Was the priest here for mass this morning?”

  “No. He was at Taos Pueblo conducting the morning mass there.”

  “So, do you give communion when the priest is not here?”

  “Yes.” Sister Florinda smiled. “The priest consecrates the Eucharist, and I then deliver it to the parishioners.”

  “Can you hear confession also, with some predispensation from the priest?”

  “No, not technically speaking, although sometimes one of the Tanoah will unburden himself to me and perhaps I can offer some counsel. But I cannot give absolution. And confession is not complete without contrition and absolution.”

  Momma Anna stood at the churchyard gate waiting for me. “Come,” she barked, waving her hand for me to come.

  “I better go, Sister,” I said. “Just one more thing: did you, by chance, take communion to Cassie Morgan sometimes? Was she involved with this church, maybe through her work at the Indian school?”

  For an instant, Sister Florinda seemed to melt inside her habit, her shoulders softening from their square, upright placement, her face drooping, revealing a slight hint of suffering. But then she recovered, speaking in a clipped voice, “I am sure that you are aware that I cannot answer that.”

  “Okay, I understand. I was just wondering. Thank you for answering my other questions. I was curious about how all this worked, you being here without a priest.”

  “You are full of questions, Miss Wild. We have not uttered two statements between us, it has all been questions. Did you ever hear that curiosity killed the cat?”

  Momma Anna and I hurried to the home of her mother, Grandma Bird Woman Lujan, an elder whose age was reputed to be nearing the century mark. No one was sure about either the year or the day of her birthday, because at the time she was born, birth certificates were not issued for Indian babies on the reservation. She still lived in the old part of the pueblo and was cared for by her two daughters, Momma Anna and her sister, from day to day. The men in the family—old and young—offered help by providing firewood and hunting for meat for their beloved matriarch.

  When we arrived at Grandma Bird’s house, we went in through the turquoise-washed door and found Grandma sitting on a bench by the fire in the dark. She had risen alone this morning and dressed herself. She was wrapped in a colorful wool blanket, and her long silver hair was gathered into one loose braid down her back. I went to greet her, taking her slender brown hand tenderly as I made a slight bow. “You take me,” she said.

  I helped her stand up.

  She pointed at a folded blanket on the nearby bed. “Take,” she said.

  I picked up the blanket, and Grandma Bird took hold of my arm and clenched it tightly for support. Momma Anna made for the door and held it open. I helped Grandma Bird out the door without knowing where we were going. Anna led us back the way we had come, to the center of the plaza, walking slowly and quietly in front of the thick brown adobe walls of the homes facing onto the square. On we went, past the churchyard and right up to the snow-covered banks of the río that spilled down the slopes of Sacred Mountain and gave the village of Tanoah Pueblo life. All the members of the tribe who had come out to observe the sunrise were now standing in the snow at the river’s edge, some of them on each bank. They were clustered in family groups, clutching babies and the hands of small children, quieting adolescents; and many had helped elders to the water’s edge just as Momma Anna and I had. Even as we approached, more Tanoah came from their houses toward the river from both sides of the pueblo—individuals, couples, and whole families.

  Grandma Bird had shuffled slowly along beside me, holding on to me for support as we came across the plaza. But when we got to the riverbank, she suddenly let go of my arm. She slipped the blanket off of her shoulders and handed it to me. Then, to my surprise, she slipped off her dress, under which she wore nothing. Her body was tiny, brown, and shriveled. Her spine was slightly bent, but there was a lean, sinewy strength to her that seemed to defy age. Her small breasts had shriveled to almost nothing, and her belly made the shape of an empty spoon. Grandma Bird grabbed my arm again and kicked off her moccasinlike boots, then let go and walked right through the snow and into the río at a place where fast-flowing, frigid water surfaced between large floes of ice. Up and down the riverbank, the elders went in first, wherever there was a break in the frozen canopy.

  Next, Momma Anna followed suit, heaping her blanket in my arms on top of Grandma Bird’s spare blanket and the one she’d been wearing, creating a mound that I had to stretch my neck to look around because I could not see over it. My medicine teacher pulled her dress over her head, then wriggled out of the leggings and undershirt she wore beneath, and into the water she went.

  All along the banks of the río, the other Tanoah men and women of her age did the same. They splashed the water over their bodies without complaint, wetting all of their exposed skin with the freezing fluid. And down the line it went, through the generations. Family members took turns holding one another’s things as they ritually bathed in the life-giving water that moved through the center of their world. Adults came out and adolescents went in. Then the young children, some holding the hands of their toddler siblings. Finally, parents dipped naked, crying babies into the icy water.

  First to go in, Grandma Bird Woman had also been first to come out and up the banks in the snow. She grabbed at the heap of things I was holding, pulling Anna’s blanket off the top and throwing it over my head, finally getting to the spare, folded blanket at the bottom that she’d had me bring. When I uncovered my face, I saw the old woman wrapping this toga-style around her chest, shivering as she tucked one corner of the blanket in at the top to hold it in place. She bent over and pulled on her moccasins, then raised up and grabbed the blanket she’d worn for a wrap, which she threw around her shoulders. She took her braid in her two hands and squeezed the water out.

  By this time, Anna was dressing. No one had spoken a word, not to me, nor to one another. The sound of toddlers shrieking and babies crying at the shock of the cold water had been the only human sounds. One by one, the Tanoah emerged from their icy baths and wrapped or dressed on the banks.

  Grandma Bird faced the east, the sun struggling to rise over the mountains while a mass of thick clouds tried to push it down. Grandma closed her eyes and began to move her lips almost silently in prayer, her voice only a breath, a mere whisper. I watched as the others did the same, up and down the banks of the río. The sun did climb, but it slipped behind the deck of clouds, and so it offered little light. Grandma Bird muttered something aloud in Tiwa, then grabbed my arm and turned back toward her house as if to say, Let’s go.

  After we had gotten her back home, we lit the gas lanterns hanging from the ceiling, stoked the fire, and made sure that Grandma had coffee and some thick slices of pueblo bread with butter and homemade chokecherry jam for breakfast. I made ready to leave, pulling on my coat and hat, and said my good-byes to Bird Woman. Momma Anna stepped out the kitchen door with me. She pulled her blanket over her head. “Last time,” Momma Anna said.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “That what my mother say at river. Last time. She is ready now go join my father, join her ancestor, all the one who travel beyond the ridge.”

  “I don’t know. She still looks pretty spry to me. I wouldn’t be surprised if she was still around next year for the old blue bath in the river.”

  “Not next year. Not next time. Last time.”

  Once again, Momma Anna and I were entering the cultural gap between my world and hers that concerned the matter of time. I was beginning to understand that the Tanoah did not see time as linear, but rather as a journey in which the self was always at the center, therefore always in the “now.” There was no other time. However, since there was both memory and anticipation, Momma Anna
often referred to any time outside of the immediate—whether past or future—as “next other time.” The Tanoah sense of self was as a moving element in a moving universe. Like a hoop dancer stepping and twirling at the middle of a host of spinning hoops, the Tanoah were always ritually dancing at the core of life, and the events of their own journey, and of their ancestors’, were always circling around them, never static. In other words, everything was always in motion, including the self, and especially the now. Therefore, for Momma Anna, there was no moving into the future or into the past, as she always took the now with her wherever she went.

  I was quiet a moment. “I miss Grandma Bird already,” I said, meaning it.

  “Me, too,” Momma Anna said. She started to go back in the kitchen door, but she turned and looked back at me. “This time, you think Indun.”

  26

  Top of the List

  I started my workday on Monday morning at the BLM with a phone call from Diane. “You all right?” she asked.

  “Yeah, I’m good.”

  “Kerry stay at your place with you over the weekend?”

  “Yes.”

  “I wanted to make sure you were okay. Hey, that rope you found—they’re working on it at the lab in Albuquerque. We’ll keep our fingers crossed for some DNA evidence.”

  “Yeah, good. Listen,” I said. “I’ve been thinking. If you can’t tie the phone call about the elk to someone at the power company, all I’ve got to go on is that ATV chase I got involved in several days back. I’m going out to talk to the shepherd who shot the cougar again. I’m going to ask him if he has seen or heard anyone riding ATVs in the area where he grazes his sheep.”

  “We’re way ahead of you. Remember, you described it as a larger-sized all-terrain vehicle? That’s a UTV. Only two people at Tanoah Pueblo own UTVs, or at least that’s all that we know of now. And one of them has a strong motive and has moved to the top of a short list of suspects.”

  “You have a list of suspects?”

  “We do. Remember, I told you the Silver Bullet works fast and smart. And it gets better—we think we might have the date of death now, because of the housekeeper’s schedule and the number of bottles of wine in the kitchen. Cassie Morgan ordered a case of wine delivered every two weeks, and she was in the habit of drinking a bottle a day, except on Sundays, according to her cleaning lady.”

  “It sounds like you’re making good progress. But the stakes are still high for me until we figure it out. So I’m still going to go talk to that shepherd. I need to check on my traps anyway, so I have to go right by him. I’ll let you know what I find out. When I come back, I’ll return the sweatpants I borrowed. Want me to drop them by your house?”

  “That will be fine, just throw them in the front door. It doesn’t lock, as you know. I’m on the way to the courthouse to file a complaint against the landlord to dispute that eviction notice. They have to hear my complaint within seventy-two hours, so I’d like for you to stand ready to appear as a witness.”

  “You can count on me,” I said.

  “Likewise.”

  As I was walking down the hallway to leave the BLM, Roy called me into his office. He held up a bunch of papers. “You’re scheduled to go to BLM ranger training this spring. Have you given any thought to what you’re going to do with that wolf when you go?”

  I had been dealing with this by avoidance so far, but here it was confronting me in the person of my boss. “I don’t know. Maybe Kerry could come stay at my place with Mountain.”

  “Kerry? I don’t think he’s going to be here. I heard he has applied for a public lands job posting in Washington State. Looks pretty good for him, too—I think he’s the best-qualified applicant and has the most seniority.”

  “My Kerry? A job out of state?”

  “Yeah. Forest supervisor. He didn’t tell you about it?”

  “It must have slipped his mind.”

  The Boss looked down. “Uh-oh. Looks like I just stirred something up,” he muttered.

  “Could we talk about this another time?” I was barely able to contain the mixture of distress and anger that was welling up within me.

  “Sure. Go on. You can get back to me later on that wolf-care thing.”

  I left the BLM upset and confused. Not only was I conflicted and concerned about leaving Mountain with anyone else, but I was stunned that Kerry had not mentioned applying for a job out of state. My chest felt crowded, and I blew out a big breath to make room for all the feelings clamoring to be recognized.

  27

  Counting Sheep

  When a winter day is warm and pleasant—like Saturday had been—the residents of northern New Mexico know to bring in more firewood for the weather that will follow. And—true to form—Sunday had been a cold and cloudy solstice with snow falling off and on throughout the day. This morning, too, had started cold but still when I came to work in the dark. Now, as the sun struggled to climb higher in the sky, it grew weak from the effort, and the winter wind charged triumphantly across the high mesas, pulling a train of frigid air and slamming it into the slopes of the Sangre de Cristos.

  I found Daniel Kuwany huddled against the red-dirt wall of an arroyo, squatting on a square of soiled carpet. The wind made it impossible for him to have a fire, so he had pulled several blankets around him, creating a woolen cocoon. His flock conjoined in a narrow—a dark face occasionally popping up here and there out of the one great wall of wool that stretched from one side of the draw to the other.

  As before, I kept Mountain on a lead hooked to my belt with a carabiner. As we approached, the shepherd stood and looked warily at the wolf. “Don’t get up,” I yelled over the wind, signaling with my hand for him to duck back down out of the icy blast.

  Kuwany squatted once more, and rearranged his blankets. One started to slide off his back, and he tried repeatedly to tug it back over him, but his attempts only unfurled more layers. I reached out a hand and grabbed a corner of the wool and pulled it across his neck and shoulders where he could clasp it from the other side. “Thank you,” he muttered, shifting his eyes from me to Mountain and back again.

  I gingerly lowered myself into a crouch beside him, my legs and back still sore. I was thankful for the windbreak offered by the slope of the draw. “I wanted to ask you a couple of questions.”

  He turned his head slightly, still shrouded by the blankets. “I never did see your cougar. I told you it was a ghost.”

  I nodded and observed a minute of deliberate quiet. He had not seemed to mind that I had mentioned questions. I decided to try one. “Any more attacks on your sheep?”

  “Nope.”

  I smelled alcohol. Kuwany had been drinking, probably had a bottle tucked under his pile of blankets, thinking the booze would keep him warm. “It’s pretty cold out here. That wind is gruesome.”

  “Unh.”

  “Anyone ever come out here on an ATV? You know the four-wheelers with the ying-yang-sounding engines?”

  “I know what it is.”

  I remained silent.

  “One guy got one of them big ones. He carries firewood in the back, got a big cargo box on it.”

  “Do you know who it is?”

  “He comes through here a few times lately. It always scares my sheep and they scatter. Makes a lot of work for me.”

  “Someone from the pueblo?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “I’d like to know his name.”

  Kuwany turned to face me. He squinted one eye, and the corner of his mouth rose on that side, contorting his face into a skeptical expression.

  I held his gaze and did not flinch.

  “You know Rule Abeyta?”

  I nodded my head, but didn’t speak.

  “He got one of them big ones. He comes all the time through here, even when I told him not to mess with my sheep. He doesn’t give me any firewood for the trouble, neither, and I could use it. Nothing but sagebrush out here to burn.”

  I simply nodded again, as if I were comm
iserating with him. After a minute or so, I started to get up.

  Kuwany held up a hand. “Do you know a wolf like that can bring the fog?” He puckered his lips and pushed his chin toward Mountain, who had curled up in a donut next to me and tucked his nose underneath his tail. The shepherd went on: “When a lone wolf howls, it will sometime bring the fog in at night. That kind of fog, made by wolves howling, people get lost in that, sometime they stay lost forever.”

  28

  Trapped

  I drove back far enough toward town to see a couple signal bars on the Screech Owl’s network indicator. I planned to let Charlie Dorn know I was headed out to check on the cougar traps, but before I could pull over and dial, the thing sounded off with its customary shrill shriek. I looked at the screen before answering. The call was from the BLM.

  “Well, what do you know?” Roy said. “She answered her phone. Will wonders never cease?”

  “Very funny. What’s up?”

  “You got a call here at the office from Lorena Coldfire,” Roy said. “Under the circumstances, I figured I better not give out your cell phone number, so we took the message. They got a lion in one of those traps.”

  “The she-lion? Or one of the cubs?”

  “Sounds like they got your mama cat.”

  Since I was close by, I took Mountain to the pueblo and left him with Momma Anna. When I got to the Coldfire Ranch, Lorena was parked in the place where I had previously pulled up to check the traps from a distance. “The cubs are nowhere to be seen,” she said as I got out of the Jeep. She had her binoculars trained on the trap containing the mother mountain lion. “I drove back to the house to call you the moment I saw her. Scout and Charlie Dorn are waiting on a crew to come with the trailer. They’ll be along shortly.”

  Charlie and I approached the cage on foot to assess the condition of the cougar. Weak with hunger and the gunshot wound, the tawny tiger sat upright in the cage, her injured thigh revealing the meat and sinew of her muscle where she had licked the hair and skin from around the black, oozing hole where the bullet had entered her body. Her eyes fixed on Charlie and me, and the dark tip of her long, muscular tail flicked up and down in the cage in a pendulumlike rhythm that tapped out the tempo of her mood—a panicked but calculating meter. Her broad face tracked us like a sunflower does the sun, turning slowly, her large, amber eyes trained on me, her broad, rose-colored nose emitting pulsing vapor clouds as her breath steamed in the cold.