"Good for a sore butt," he said.
10
T he wind followed Leaphorn's carryall half the way across the Nokaito Bench, enveloping the jolting vehicle in its own gritty dust and filling the policeman's nostrils with exhaust fumes. It was hot. The promise of rain had faded as the west wind raveled away the thunderheads. Now the sky was blank blue. The road angled toward the crest of the ridge, growing rockier as it neared the top. Leaphorn down-shifted to ease the vehicle over a corrugation of stone and the following wind gusted past him. He drove across the ridge line, blind for a moment. Then, with a shift in the wind, the dust cleared and he saw the place of Alice Endischee.
The land sloped northward now into Utah, vast, empty and treeless. In Leaphorn the Navajo sensitivity to land and landscape was fine-tuned. Normally he saw beauty in such blue-haze distances, but today he saw only poverty, a sparse stony grassland ruined by overgrazing and now gray with drought.
He shifted the carryall back into third gear as the track tilted slightly downward, and inspected the place of Alice Endischee far down the slope. There was the square plank "summer hogan" with its tar-paper roof, providing a spot of red in the landscape, and beyond it a "winter hogan" of stone, and a pole arbor roofed with sage and creosote brush, and two corrals, and an older hogan built carefully to the prescription of the Holy People and used for all things sacred and ceremonial. Scattered among the buildings Leaphorn counted seven pickups, a battered green Mustang, a flatbed truck and two wagons. The scene hadn't changed since he had come there to find Emerson Begay, when the Kinaalda had only started and the Endischee girl had been having her hair washed in yucca suds by her aunts as the first step of the great ritual blessing. Now the ceremonial would be in the climactic day.
People were coming out of the medicine hogan, some of them watching his approaching vehicle, but most standing in a milling cluster around the doorway. Then, from the cluster, a girl abruptly emerged-running.
She ran, pursued by the wind and a half-dozen younger children, across an expanse of sagebrush. She set the easy pace of those who know that they have a great distance to go. She wore the long skirt, the long-sleeved blouse and the heavy silver jewelry of a traditional Navajo woman-but she ran with the easy grace of a child who has not yet forgotten how to race her shadow.
Leaphorn stopped the carryall and watched, remembering his own initiation out of childhood, until the racers disappeared down the slope. For the Endischee girl, this would be the third race of the day, and the third day of such racing. Changing Woman taught that the longer a girl runs at her Kinaalda, the longer she lives a healthy life. But by.the third day, muscles would be sore and the return would be early. Leaphorn shifted back into gear. While the girl was gone, the family would re-enter the hogan to sing the Racing Songs, the same prayers the Holy People had chanted at the menstruation ceremony when White Shell Girl became Changing Woman. Then there would be a pause, while the women baked the great ceremonial cake to be eaten tonight. The pause would give Leaphorn his chance to approach and cross-examine Listening Woman.
He touched the woman's sleeve as she emerged from the hogan, and told her who he was, and why he wanted to talk to her.
"It's like I told that white policeman," Margaret Cigaret said. "The old man who was to die told me some dry paintings had been spoiled, and the man who was to die had been there. And maybe that was why he was sick."
"I listened to the tape recording of you talking to the white policeman," Leaphorn said. "But I noticed, my mother, that the white man didn't really let you tell about it. He interrupted you."
Margaret Cigaret thought about that. She stood, arms folded across the purple velvet of her blouse, her blind eyes looking through Leaphorn.
"Yes," she said. "That's the way it was."
"I came to find you because I thought that if we would talk about it again, you could tell me what the white man was too impatient to hear." Leaphorn suspected she would remember he was the man who had come to this ceremonial three days before and arrested Emerson Begay. While Begay was not a member of the Cigaret family as far as Leaphorn knew, he was Mud clan and he was probably some sort of extended-family nephew. So Leaphorn was guilty of arresting a relative. In the traditional Navajo system, even distant nephews who stole sheep were high on the value scale. "I wonder what you are thinking about me, my mother," Leaphorn said. "I wonder if you are thinking that it's no use talking to a policeman who is too stupid to keep the Begay boy from escaping because he would be too stupid to catch the one who killed those who were killed." Like Mrs. Cigaret, Leaphorn refrained from speaking the name of the dead. To do so was to risk attracting the attention of the ghost, and even if you didn't believe this, it was bad manners to risk ghost sickness for those who did believe. "But if you think about it fairly, you will remember that your nephew is a very smart young man. His handcuffs were uncomfortable, so I took them off. He offered to help me, and I accepted the offer. It was night, and he slipped away. Remember, your nephew has escaped before."
Margaret Cigaret acknowledged this with a nod, then she tilted her head toward the place near the hogan door. There three women were pouring buckets of batter into the fire pit, making the ritual cake of the menstruation ceremony. Steam now joined the smoke. She turned toward them and away from Leaphorn.
"Put corn shucks over all of it," Mrs. Cigaret instructed them in a loud, clear voice. "You work around in a circle. East, south, west, north."
The women stopped their work for a moment. "We haven't got it poured in yet," one of them said. "Did you say we could put the raisins in?"
"Sprinkle them across the top," Mrs. Cigaret said. "Then arrange the corn-shuck crosses all across it. Start from the east side and work around like I said." She swiveled her face back toward Leaphorn. "That's the way it was done when First Man and First Woman and the Holy People gave White Shell Girl her Kinaalda when she menstruated," Mrs. Cigaret said. "And that's the way Changing Woman taught us to do."
"Yes," Leaphorn said. "I remember."
"What the white man was too impatient to hear was all about what was making the one who was killed sick," Mrs. Cigaret said.
"I would like to hear that when there is time for you to tell me, my mother."
Mrs. Cigaret frowned. "The white man didn't think it had anything to do with the killing."
"I am not a white man," Leaphorn said. "I am one of the Dinee. I know that the same thing that makes a man sick sometimes makes him die."
"But this time the man was hit by a gun barrel."
"I know that, my mother," Leaphorn said. "But can you tell me why he was hit with the gun barrel?"
Mrs. Cigaret thought about it.
The wind kicked up again, whipping her skirts around her legs and sending a flurry of dust across the hogan yard. At the fire pit, the women were carefully pouring a thin layer of dirt over newspapers, which covered the corn shucks, which covered the batter.
"Yes," Mrs. Cigaret said. "I hear what you are saying."
"You told the white policeman that you planned to tell the old man he should have a Mountain Way sing and a Black Rain ceremony," Leaphorn said. "Why those?"
Mrs. Cigaret was silent. The wind gusted again, moving a loose strand of gray hair against her face. She had been beautiful once, Leaphorn saw. Now she was weathered, and her face was troubled. Behind Leaphorn there came a shout of laughter. The kindling of split pi¤on and cedar arranged atop the cake batter in the fire pit was flaming.
"It was what I heard when I listened to the Earth," Mrs. Cigaret said, when the laughter died out.
"Can you tell me?"
Mrs. Cigaret sighed. "Only that I knew it was more than one thing. Some of the sickness came from stirring up old ghosts. But the voices told me that the old man hadn't told me everything." She paused, her eyes blank with the glaze of glaucoma, and her face grim and sad. "The voices told me that what had happened had cut into his heart. There was no way to cure it. The Mountain Way sing was the right one because the
sickness came from the spoiling of holy things, and the Black Rain because a taboo had been broken. But the old man's heart was cut in half. And there was no sing anymore that would restore him to beauty."
"Something very bad had happened," Leaphorn said, urging her on.
"I don't think he wanted to live anymore," Margaret Cigaret said. "I think he wanted his grandson to come, and then he wanted to die."
The fire was blazing all across the fire pit now and there was a sudden outburst of shouting and more laughter from those waiting around the hogan. The girl was coming-running across the sagebrush flat at the head of a straggling line. One of the Endischees was hanging a blanket across the hogan doorway, signifying that the ceremonial would be resumed inside.
"I have to go inside now," Mrs. Cigaret said. "There's no more to say. When someone wants to die, they die."
Inside, a big man sat against the hogan wall and sang with his eyes closed, the voice rising, falling and changing cadence in a pattern as old as the People.
"She is preparing her child," the big man sang. "She is preparing her child."
White Shell Girl, she is preparing her,
With white shell moccasins, she is
preparing her,
With white shell leggings, she is
preparing her,
With jewelry of white shells, she is
preparing her."
The big man sat to Leaphorn's left, his legs folded in front of him, among the men who lined the south side of the hogan. Across from them, the women sat. The hogan floor had been cleared. A small pile of earth covered the fire pit under the smoke hole in the center. A blanket was spread against the west wall and on it were arranged the hard goods brought to this affair to be blessed by the beauty it would generate. Beside the blanket, one of the aunts of Eileen Endischee was giving the girl's hair its ceremonial brushing. She was a pretty girl, her face pale and fatigued now, but also somehow serene.
"White Shell Girl with pollen is preparing her," the big man sang.
"With the pollen of soft goods placed in her mouth, she will speak.
With the pollen of soft goods she is
preparing her.
With the pollen of soft goods she is
blessing her.
She is preparing her.
She is preparing her.
She is preparing her child to live in beauty.
She is preparing her for a long life in
beauty.
With beauty before her, White Shell Girl
prepares her.
With beauty behind her, White Shell Girl
prepares her.
With beauty above her, White Shell Girl
prepares her."
Leaphorn found himself, as he had since childhood, caught up in the hypnotic repetition of pattern which blended meaning, rhythm and sound in something more than the total of all of them. By the blanket, the aunt of the Endischee girl was tying up the child's hair. Other voices around the hogan wall joined the big man in the singing.
"With beauty all around her, she prepares her."
A girl becoming a woman, and her people celebrating this addition to the Dinee with joy and reverence. Leaphorn found himself singing, too. The anger he had brought-despite all the taboos-to this ceremonial had been overcome. Leaphorn felt restored in harmony.
He had a loud, clear voice, and he used it. "With beauty before her, White Shell Girl prepares her."
The big man glanced at him, a friendly look. Across the hogan, Leaphorn noticed, two of the women were smiling at him. He was a stranger, a policeman who had arrested one of them, a man from another clan, perhaps even a witch, but he was accepted with the natural hospitality of the Dinee. He felt a fierce pride in his people, and in this celebration of womanhood. The Dinee had always respected the female equally with the male-giving her equality in property, in metaphysics and in clan-recognizing the mother's role in the footsteps of Changing Woman as the preserver of the Navajo Way. Leaphorn remembered what his mother had told him when he had asked how Changing Woman could have prescribed a Kinaalda cake "a shovel handle wide" and garnished with raisins when the Dinee had neither shovels nor grapes. "When you are a man," she had said, "you will understand that she was teaching us to stay in harmony with time." Thus, while the Kiowas were crushed, the Utes reduced to hopeless poverty, and the Hopis withdrawn into the secret of their kivas, the eternal Navajo adapted and endured.
The Endischee girl, her hair arranged as the hair of White Shell Girl had been arranged by the Holy People, collected her jewelry from the blanket, put it on, and left the hogan-shyly aware that all eyes were upon her.
"In beauty it is finished," the big man sang. "In beauty it is finished."
Leaphorn stood, waiting his turn to join the single file exiting through the hogan doorway. The space was filled with the smell of sweat, wool, earth and pi¤on smoke from the fire outside. The audience crowded around the blanket, collecting their newly blessed belongings. A middle-aged woman in a pants suit picked up a bridle; a teen-age boy wearing a black felt "reservation hat" took a small slab of turquoise stone and a red plastic floating battery lantern stenciled haas; an old man wearing a striped denim Santa Fe Railroad cap picked up a flour sack containing God knows what. Leaphorn ducked through the doorway. Mixed with the perfume of the pi¤on smoke there now came the smell of roasting mutton.
He felt both hungry and relaxed. He would eat, and then he would ask around about a man with gold-rimmed glasses and an oversized dog, and then he would resume his conversation with Listening Woman. His mind had started working again, finding a hint of a pattern in what had been only disorder. He would simply chat with Mrs. Cigaret, giving her a chance to know him better. By tomorrow he wanted her to know him well enough even to risk discussing that dangerous subject no wise Navajo would discuss with a stranger-witchcraft.
The wind died away with evening. The sunset had produced a great flare of fluorescent orange from the still-dusty atmosphere. Leaphorn had eaten mutton ribs, and fry bread, and talked to a dozen people, and learned nothing useful. He had talked with Margaret Cigaret again, getting her to recreate as well as she remembered the sequence of events that led up to the TsoAtcitty deaths, but he had learned little he hadn't already known from the FBI report and the tape recording. And nothing he learned seemed helpful. Anna Atcitty had not wanted to drive Mrs. Cigaret to her appointment with Hosteen Tso, and Mrs. Cigaret believed that was because she wanted to meet a boy. Mrs. Cigaret wasn't sure of the boy's identity but suspected he was a Salt Cedar Dinee who worked at Short Mountain. A dust devil had blown away some of the pollen which Mrs. Cigaret used in her professional procedure. Mrs. Cigaret had not, as Leaphorn had assumed, done her listening in the little cul-de-sac worn in the mesa cliff just under where Leaphorn had stood looking down on the Tso hogan. Leaphorn had guessed about that, knowing from the FBI report only that she bad gone to a sheltered place against the cliff out of sight of the hogan; he had presumed she had `been led by Anna Atcitty to the closest such place. But Mrs. Cigaret remembered walking along a goat trail to reach the sand-floored cul-de-sac where she had listened. And she thought it was at least one hundred yards from the hogan, which meant it was another, somewhat smaller drainage cut in the mesa cliff west of where Leaphorn had stood. Leaphorn remembered he had looked down into it and had noticed it had once been fenced off as a holding pen for sheep.
None of these odds and ends seemed to hold any promise, though sometime after midnight Leaphorn learned that the child who had reported seeing the "dark bird" dive into an arm of Lake Powell was one of the Gorman boys. The boy was attending the Kinaalda, but had left with two of his cousins to refill the Endischee water barrels. That involved a round trip of more than twelve miles and the wagon probably wouldn't be back before dawn. The boy's name was Eddie. He was the boy in the black hat and it turned out he wouldn't be back at all after loading the water barrels; he was going to Farmington.
Leaphorn sat through the night-long ce
remonial, singing the twelve Hogan Songs, and the Songs of the Talking God, and watching sympathetically the grimly determined efforts of the Endischee girl not to break the rules by falling asleep. When the sky was pink in the east he had joined the others and chanted the Dawn Song, remembering the reverence with which his grandfather had always used it to greet each new day. The words, down through the generations, had become so melded into the rhythm that they were hardly more than musical sounds. But Leaphorn remembered the meaning.
Tony Hillerman - Leaphorn & Chee 03 - Listening Woman Page 9
