The Almanac of the Dead

by Leslie Marmon Silko

  Lecha had stopped for gasoline in Willcox. Sterling was glad to get to the men’s room. He had been careful not to drink any of the coffee in the thermos Lecha had brought along because of his aging bladder. Seese seemed exhausted; she had hardly stirred in her sleep even when the car door slammed. Out of Willcox heading for the New Mexico state line, Lecha had talked about the gunmen. Ferro had got the drop on two of the gunmen right away. Zeta had shot the third gunman through the back of the head as he had tried to flee across the patio. The gunmen were coyote food now. Lecha was taking Seese and leaving Arizona for a while as a precaution. They would return when the heat was off—Lecha had laughed at her pun. Would the heat be off for Sterling with his own people? Lecha had invited Sterling to come along. She and Seese were headed for South Dakota to the secret headquarters where Wilson Weasel Tail and the others were making preparations. Lecha wanted Sterling to join up because they could use him. Weasel Tail had plans to ally his Plains army with Mohawk forces.

  Sterling had thanked Lecha for her kind offer. He told her he thought his grandnephews might let him live in the stone shack at the family sheep camp. The next time the Navajo sheepherder quit to celebrate the Navajo Tribal Fair, Sterling thought he could probably have the job. Sterling didn’t care to return to Aunt Marie’s house in Laguna village. It wasn’t the banishment order from the Tribal Council that stopped him. Sterling knew if a person stayed away for a year or so, the way he had, usually no one mentioned the banishment, unless of course there was trouble again. To return and see Aunt Marie’s empty armchair by the window would have caused Sterling too much sadness, and Sterling was not sure he could endure much more sadness.

  He knew he could never again live as he had before. Aunt Marie and the other old folks used to scold Sterling when he came home from Indian boarding school to visit because he wasn’t interested in what they had to say and he wasn’t interested in what went on in the kivas. Sterling had only been interested in his magazines and listening to the radio as he did at boarding school. Sterling had never been disrespectful of the old folks’ beliefs, he just had not cared either way about religion. This indifference had been used against Sterling during the banishment proceedings of the Tribal Council. Before, it seemed Sterling had not known enough and had not caught on fast enough, and that had got him in deep trouble with the Tribal Council over the movie crew. But now, after Tucson with all the violence and death, after everything Lecha had revealed, Sterling felt as if he knew too much, and he would never be able to enjoy his life again.

  On the long drive, Sterling had awakened and for an instant forgot where he was and what had happened. But the instant he saw Seese huddled in the front passenger seat, Sterling had remembered. Somehow Seese had been crushed by whatever had happened the night of the shoot-out at the bar. All Sterling knew was two others in the room with Seese had been killed by the police. Since that morning, all Sterling had said to her was “Can I bring you anything?” and “I hope you’re feeling better” because even the most simple words seemed to break Seese down, and tears had welled up in her eyes whenever she tried to speak.

  Lecha had stopped in Albuquerque for gas before they headed west. Albuquerque still looked normal, as if nothing were happening because Albuquerque was five hours by car from the border—a distance safe enough that those fleeing Tucson and El Paso had relocated there. Albuquerque appeared to be booming. Sterling looked out the window at people walking to their cars from the shopping malls and from the K marts. The faces he saw were placid. The shoppers didn’t seem to have a clue about what was happening. Maybe they had noticed a few more U.S. government cars on the street, or increased military-helicopter flyovers, but that was all. On the West Side, Sterling could tell the people didn’t know either, because the faces had been excited, happy, even joking. They didn’t know, and Sterling knew even if someone told them, they would not believe it. Sterling had not believed the old prophecy either, but he had seen what was happening in Tucson with his own eyes.

  Lecha had claimed certain human beings sensed danger and began reacting without being conscious of what they were preparing for. They had no idea others like themselves existed as they worked alone with feverish plots and crazed schemes. But all that mattered was, they were making preparations. When the time came, all these scattered crazies and their plans would complement and serve one another in the chaos to come. The people would be smarter this time. They had learned from Watts and from police bombs in Philadelphia; the people would head for the fancy high-rent districts so when police firebombed the protest marchers, the Ferraris and the fur coats would go up in smoke too.

  What would these people in Albuquerque do when they heard about the twin brothers and their followers? How would the Native Americans and Mexican Americans in New Mexico react when the U.S. military opened fire on the twin brothers and thousands of their followers, mostly women and children? How many of these Chicanos and these Indians had ever heard the old stories? Did they know the ancient prophecies? It all seemed quite impossible, and yet one only had to look as far as Africa to see that after more than five hundred years of suffering slavery and bloodshed, the African people had taken back the continent from European invaders. Sterling shuddered when he remembered the terrible price the tribal people of South Africa had had to pay while the nations of the world had stood back and watched.

  Lecha warned that unrest among the people would grow due to natural disasters. Earthquakes and tidal waves would wipe out entire cities and great chunks of U.S. wealth. The Japanese were due to be pounded by angry earth spirits, and the world would watch in shock as billions of dollars and thousands of lives were suddenly washed away. Still there would be no rain, and high temperatures would trigger famines that sent refugees north faster and faster. The old almanac said “civil strife, civil crisis, civil war.” Allies of the United States would decline to intervene or send military aid. England and France would cite the distances and the costs and point out that no “armed force” threatened the U.S. border, only thousands of defenseless and hungry refugees from the war-torn South. Lecha’s reading of the old book had Canada alone proclaiming herself a U.S. ally in this last big Indian war. The Germans would follow the lead of the Japanese, who wanted to watch and to wait until the dust settled. Of course all of the northern European nations would find themselves in similar predicaments with massive onslaughts of refugees from the South. Lecha had even dreamed the streets of downtown Amsterdam were full of Indians from all the tribes of the Americas. She had seen only Indians crowding the streets of Amsterdam and no Dutch; many of the Indians had looked pale, as if they had been born there.

  When Sterling caught a glimpse of the distant blue peaks of Mt. Taylor, his throat tightened and tears ran down his cheeks. Woman Veiled in Rain Clouds was what the old people had called the mountain. Sterling was home. Sterling asked Lecha to drop him off near Mesita Village where Interstate 40 cut through the red sandstone. Seese had been crying too hard to say good-bye; she had clung to Sterling. “It’s all right,” he heard himself say over and over, “don’t worry,” but the roar of the vehicles that sped past had obliterated his words. The emergency lane of Interstate 40 was no place for long good-byes. Lecha had pulled an envelope from her purse. “You might need some money,” she said. They shook hands. Seese had hugged Sterling one last time, tears streaming down her face, and then Sterling had slammed the car door, and the old white Lincoln had roared off.

  HOME

  STERLING HIKED over the little sand hills across the little valley to the sandstone cliffs where the family sheep camp was. The windmill was pumping lazily in the afternoon breeze, and Sterling washed his face and hands and drank. The taste of the water told him he was home. “Home.” Even thinking the word made his eyes fill with tears. What was “home”? The little stone shack seemed to be deserted although Sterling had found an empty Vienna sausage can on the little wood-burning stove. On the shelf there were two coffee cans; inside he had found dry pinto beans and so
me sugar.

  Sterling didn’t think what he was experiencing was depression; it felt more like shock. For three days Sterling lay stunned; he could barely swallow water. On the fourth day Sterling awoke and no longer felt exhausted, but he had felt different. He didn’t have the heart to look at his magazines anymore. He didn’t even glance in the direction of his shopping bags. The magazines referred to a world Sterling had left forever, a world that was gone, that safe old world that had never really existed except on the pages of Reader’s Digest in articles on reducing blood cholesterol, corny jokes, and patriotic anecdotes.

  Sterling cooked beans in the tin coffeepot and went for a walk in the field of sunflowers below the windmill. He had never spent so much time before alone with the earth; he sat below the red sandstone cliffs and watched the high, thin clouds. Far in the distance, he could hear jet airplanes, Interstate 40, and the trains. But Sterling found it was easy to forget that world in the distance; that world no longer was true. He purposely kept his mind focused on the things he could see or touch; he avoided thinking about the day before or even the hour before, and he did not think about tomorrow. He watched the tiny black ants busily gather food for the ant pile. Aunt Marie and the old people had believed the ants were messengers to the spirits, the way snakes were. The old people used to give the ants food and pollen and tiny beads as gifts. That way the ants carried human prayers directly underground. Sterling had spooned out a few cooked beans on the ant hill, but he couldn’t think of a prayer to say, or even a message to send to the spirits of the earth. But the ants didn’t worry about prayers or messages; they swarmed excitedly over the beans. Sterling watched them work for a long time; sometimes the ant workers had almost been crushed under beans they were carrying. The ants worked steadily, and by sundown they had taken all the beans underground. Sterling did not understand why, but the success of the ants had lifted his spirits. He wished he had listened more closely to Aunt Marie and her sisters, for he might have understood better the connection between human beings and ants.

  The next day Sterling got up before dawn and took a bath in the shallow creek Laguna people call “the river.” Sterling gasped as the cold river clay squeezed between his toes and the cold water reached his ankles. He washed his hair with soapweed root left behind by some sheepherder too poor or too stingy to buy real shampoo. The day after that, Sterling had walked for two or three hours along the river enjoying the smell of the willows. When he stopped to rest, he realized he had walked north almost as far as the mine road. The open-pit uranium mine had been closed for years. Sterling walked away from the shoulder of the road in the weeds although there were no signs of any traffic, or other human beings for miles.

  Sterling knew what was at the mine, but he wasn’t afraid. Without realizing what he was doing, Sterling had been walking in the exact direction of the mine road where the shrine of the giant snake was. Sterling knew the visit to the giant snake was what he must do, before anything else, even before he went to buy food.

  Sterling felt stronger as he walked along. The wild purple asters were blooming, and Sterling could smell Indian tea and bee flowers; in the distance, he heard the field larks call. As long as Sterling did not face the mine, he could look out across the grassy valley at the sandstone mesas and imagine the land a thousand years ago, when the rain clouds had been plentiful and the grass and wildflowers had been belly high on the buffalo that had occasionally wandered off the South Plains. Lecha had talked about the Lakota prophecy while they were driving from Tucson. Lecha said that as a matter of fact, the buffalo were returning to the Great Plains, just as the Lakota and other Plains medicine people had prophesied. The buffalo herds had gradually outgrown and shifted their range from national parks and wildlife preserves. Little by little the buffalo had begun to roam farther as the economic decline of the Great Plains had devastated farmers and ranchers and the small towns that had once served them. Sterling had to smile when he thought of herds of buffalo grazing among the wild asters and fields of sunflowers below the mesas. He did not care if he did not live to see the buffalo return; probably the herds would need another five hundred years to complete their comeback. What mattered was that after all the groundwater had been sucked out of the Ogalala Aquifer, then the white people and their cities of Tulsa, Denver, Wichita, and Des Moines would gradually disappear and the Great Plains would again host great herds of buffalo and those human beings who knew how to survive on the annual rainfall.

  Sterling still had two miles to walk, but already the mountains of grayish-white tailings loomed ahead. He had not understood before why the old people had cried when the U.S. government had opened the mine. Sterling was reminded of the stub left after amputation when he looked at the shattered, scarred sandstone that remained; the mine had devoured entire mesas. “Leave our Mother Earth alone,” the old folks had tried to warn, “otherwise terrible things will happen to us all.” Before the end of the war, the old folks had seen the first atomic explosion—the flash brighter than any sun—followed weeks later by the bombs that had burned up a half a million Japanese. “What goes around, comes around.” Now he was approaching the shrine of the giant snake.

  Sterling tried to remember more of the stories the old people used to tell; he wished he had listened more closely because he vaguely recalled a connection the giant snake had with Mexico. Tucson was too close to Mexico. Tucson was Mexico, only no one in the United States had realized it yet. Ferro had called the exploding car bomb outside Tucson police headquarters his “announcement” that Tucson wasn’t United States territory anymore. Sterling had been terrified of Ferro from the start because Aunt Marie and the old people used to talk about how fierce the Mexican tribes were—how quickly and casually they had killed.

  Long time ago, long before the Europeans, the ancestors had lived far to the south in a land of more rain, where crops grew easily. But then something terrible had happened, and the people had to leave the abundance and flee far to the north, to harsh desert land. Hundreds of years before the Europeans had appeared, sorcerers called Gunadeeyahs or Destroyers had taken over in the South. The people who refused to join the Gunadeeyahs had fled; the issue had been the sorcerers’ appetite for blood, and their sexual arousal from killing. Aunt Marie and the others had been reluctant to talk about sorcery in the presence of young children, and Sterling had not paid much attention to what his playmates had told him about the Gunadeeyahs. Still Sterling knew the Destroyers robbed graves for human flesh and bones to make their fatal “powders.” Aunt Marie had cautioned Sterling and the other children always to be careful around Mexicans and Mexican Indians because when the first Europeans had reached Mexico City they had found the sorcerers in power. Montezuma had been the biggest sorcerer of all. Each of Montezuma’s advisors had been sorcerers too, descendants of the very sorcerers who had caused the old-time people to flee to Pueblo country in Arizona and New Mexico, thousands of years before. Somehow the offerings and food for the spirits had become too bloody, and yet many people had wanted to continue the sacrifices. They had been excited by the sacrifice victim’s feeble struggle; they had lapped up the first rich spurts of hot blood. The Gunadeeyah clan had been born.

  Sterling wished for a drink of water. No wonder the blood sacrifices and the blood-spilling had stopped when the people reached this high desert plateau; every drop of moisture, every drop of blood, each tear, had been made precious by this arid land. The people who had fled north to escape the bloodshed made rules once they were settled. On the rare occasions when the sacred messengers had to be dispatched to the spirit world, the eagles and macaws had been gently suffocated by the priests; not one drop of blood had been spilled. Permission had to be asked and prayers had to be made to the game animals before the hunters brought them home. The people were cautioned about disturbing the bodies of the dead. Those who touched the dead were easily seduced by the Gunadeeyahs, who craved more death and more dead bodies to open and consume.

  Now the old story came b
ack to Sterling as he walked along. The appearance of Europeans had been no accident; the Gunadeeyahs had called for their white brethren to join them. Sure enough the Spaniards had arrived in Mexico fresh from the Church Inquisition with appetites whetted for disembowelment and blood. No wonder Cortés and Montezuma had hit it off together when they met; both had been members of the same secret clan.

  Sterling made his way up a sandy hill and then slid down the crumbling clay bank of a small arroyo. He tore a cuff on his pants crawling through the barbed-wire fence that marked the mine boundaries. Ahead all he could see were mounds of tailings thirty feet high, uranium waste blowing in the breeze, carried by the rain to springs and rivers. Here was the new work of the Destroyers; here was destruction and poison. Here was where life ended. What had been so remarkable about the return of the giant snake had been how close the giant snake was to the mountains of tailings. Two mine employees from Laguna had discovered the giant stone snake on a routine check for erosion of the tailings. Sterling had heard Aunt Marie and the others talking excitedly about a giant stone snake. At first Sterling had thought a fossil snake had been found, but then he had realized the stone snake was only an odd outcropping of sandstone. Sterling remembered his skepticism about the giant snake. He had not believed the mine employees who swore there had never been anything at the foot of the tailings before—nothing but sand and a few weeds. Sterling had thought that probably the strange sandstone formation had been lying there for hundreds of years and no one had noticed it; or if they had, the people had lost track of the rock formation after the mining began. But Aunt Marie and the others had pointed out the sheep camps nearby and the road that passed within a hundred yards of the giant stone snake. Rabbit hunters familiar with the area had come to agree with the miners, sheep-herders, and the others. No way had they overlooked a sandstone snake thirty feet long! Overnight, the giant stone snake had appeared there. The old folks said Maahastryu had returned. Sterling had forgotten all about the stone snake after that. He had heard Aunt Marie talk about the stone snake from time to time with her nieces; but back then, talk about religion or spirits had meant nothing to Sterling, drinking beer with his section-gang buddies. Back then Sterling used to say he only believed in beer and big women bouncing in water beds. For Sterling, the stone snake had been a sort of joke, and he had forgot all about the snake until the Hollywood film crew had tried to film it and all hell had broken loose.