The Last Mayan (The Alan Graham Mysteries)

by Malcolm Shuman

  Minnie O’Toole kept up her pleasantness, which lightened the gloom spread by April’s surliness on the one hand and Durán’s wariness on the other. The workers, once they realized I was willing to try my rusty Mayan on them, began to delight in pointing out trees and plants to see if I knew their Mayan names, and Santos, the crew boss, began stopping by our unit to make jokes and tell me stories that had been handed down in his family. I jotted most of it down, because I realized that in another generation or two Yucatec would be a lost language. Santos seemed to have the same urgency.

  “In the old days, during this time of the year, they made rain,” he volunteered one morning, squatting in the shade of a ceiba tree while we took a break from the sun.

  “Chhachaac,” I said. “The rain ceremony.”

  He nodded. “Now they have pumps. Who needs Chhachaac?”

  “So nobody does it?”

  “Some,” he said, then gave me a sidelong look. “Have you ever been to one?”

  My turn to nod. “A long time ago, up near Tekáx.”

  “Ahhh.” He got up and the other workers followed, but I knew they’d heard our conversation.

  Two days later he stopped and asked if I wanted to go to a Chhachaac.

  “Where?”

  “The village, here.”

  “Who’s the h-men, the rainmaker?”

  “A man from Chetumal. He was taught by my grandfather.”

  I said I would be pleased to attend.

  That night, at dinner, I told the others.

  Blackburn leaned back in his chair.

  “Well, everybody’s been working pretty hard. And I know once the workers have made up their minds to have the thing, they’re going to do it regardless, so we might as well forget about work for the day. We’ll just call it cultural anthropology.” He sighed. “Besides, I ought to spend some time with Emilio, my godson, and his family. I have to make arrangements for his education. I don’t want him to end up as just another campesino, with nothing to look forward to but six kids to support.”

  “What does the rest of the family say?” I asked.

  “His father was one of our workers the first year, but now he has a job working construction at Cancún. The family expects me to take little Lio to the States when he’s older. Right now they’re angling to have me take his older sister, María. For some reason they think the future’s brighter in the States.”

  “Imagine that,” I said. “So what will you do?”

  He shrugged. “The best I can.”

  “Well, the rain ceremony sounds intriguing,” Minnie said. “I mean, I’ve read about Mayan rain ceremonies, but to actually attend one …”

  “Yeah, well it’s really just an excuse to eat a lot and get drunk,” Blackburn said. “But as long as they want to kill a few turkeys, I’ll buy a couple of bottles of rum.”

  Durán said nothing and April looked as if she couldn’t have cared less. No surprise there.

  The surprise was Paul Hayes. He didn’t say anything at the table, but when Pepper and I got up he followed and caught up with us on the beach.

  “Did I hear you say Santos’s grandfather was a h-men?”

  “That’s what he told us.”

  “Funny he never mentioned it to me. I wonder if the old man is still alive.” He clicked his tongue. “I’ve chased all over south Quintana Roo looking at damned h-men books and getting Santos’s opinions about the ones I’ve found. I wonder if the rascal’s been holding out on me.”

  “You’ll have to ask him.”

  “Believe me, I will.”

  The Chhachaac began the next evening. As invited guests, we sat in chairs a few yards behind the wooden table that served as the h-men’s altar. The altar table had been placed in the rear of Santos’s house lot, near the edge of the village under the shade of some poplars, and at the back of the table sat a small arch of woven vines framing a foot-high wooden cross covered by a tiny huipil, or smock, as if it were a woman. In front of the cross were seven votive candles, five gourd bowls containing a liquor from the balché tree, thirteen cigarettes, and some leaves.

  Santos had met us on our arrival, introducing the h-men, a man named don Plutarco, who came from just outside Chetumal. Plutarco, he assured us, had served the area for many years.

  The rainmaker, a wiry little fellow of fifty who wore shoes instead of sandals, assured us that if he did Chhachaac, rain would certainly follow, though I didn’t ask him when. He shook each of our hands and then returned to his chair.

  “Jesus,” Hayes swore, taking a tug from a bottle of Presidente. “This guy’s a city slicker.”

  “They come in all shapes and sizes,” I reminded him.

  He sighed. “True enough. I met one once in Telchaquillo who wore silk slacks and a gold watch, spoke Spanish and Mayan, and smelled like he lived in the barbershop, but that man could sing a chant to the honeybees like nobody else. And I’ve run into others in the villages who go around barefoot, can’t read at all, and have all their prayers and chants committed to memory.”

  “I think I knew the one in Telchaquillo,” I said. “Don Andres Coh was his name. He’s dead now.”

  “Yeah, a horrible death.”

  “What happened?” Minnie asked.

  Paul Hayes shook his head. “He became a uay-miz—a were-cat—and climbed on top of somebody’s hut and they shot him.”

  “What?”

  “Down here, h-menoob are respected, but they’re also feared because of what they know,” I explained. “Some of them only specialize in certain ceremonies—-rain, corral blessing, first fruits—but most heal, too, with herbs and prayers. Yet the power to heal also scares people because it has another side, at least in their imaginations.”

  “You mean the power to curse,” she said.

  “That’s right. Or to turn into a were-creature. So if a particular h-men was especially respected in his lifetime, fantastic stories tend to pop up about him after he’s gone. Maybe a kind of tension release.”

  “Fascinating,” Minnie said. She leaned forward and lowered her voice. “You don’t think this fellow’s going to suddenly turn into a were-something-or-other, do you?” she asked mischievously.

  “Not until at least three of these bottles are gone,” Blackburn volunteered. “Then everybody’ll be seeing all kinds of things.”

  The girl April got up then, swaying slightly. “So is that the famous talking cross?” she asked, nodding at the little cross on the table with its white, flower-bordered smock.

  “Well, just about every village has its own talking cross,” Hayes explained. “At least in this part of the peninsula. Trouble is, most of the crosses don’t talk very much, because their interpreters have forgotten how.”

  “But it’s wearing a huipil,” she said.

  “That’s because to the Maya the cross isn’t an object so much as a deity, representing the sacred ceiba tree that units the upper and lower worlds,” Hayes went on. “The symbolism far predates the arrival of Christianity. When the friars came, the Maya could relate to the symbol of the cross because they already had something similar. So they just adapted the cross to their own religious system. The cross is feminine in their thinking, hence the huipil. And that’s why when the cross in Chan Santa Cruz first started to talk in 1850, telling the Maya to rise up and drive out the whites, it made perfect sense: There’s an old pre-Columbian tradition of the prophets hearing voices and going into trances. That’s how the prophet Jaguar, or Chilam Balam, first predicted the coming of the Spanish. Before they even arrived.”

  “But that was an interpolation,” I said. “Something stuck in after the conquest to validate the old religious system.”

  Hayes smiled and reached for the bottle. “Are you sure?”

  April turned and walked back toward Santos’s hut. “I gotta pee.”

  Hayes sighed. “I’m afraid that girl’s father’s wasting his money.”

  “She’s unhappy,” Minnie said. “She just has to find herself
.”

  “I’m more worried about what she’s already found,” Eric said then. “You see how she’s walking?” He leaned toward Durán. “José, is she taking pills?”

  The Mexican shrugged. “Who knows what she’s taking? She doesn’t consult me.”

  Blackburn leaned back. “Whatever.”

  By eleven that night, only we, the village men, and don Plutarco, the h-men, were left to keep vigil. Nothing would happen until tomorrow; the rest of the night would be given to storytelling and simply waiting, with a few prayers and chants from time to time. Some of the men had put up hammocks and a few sat in chairs, like ourselves. A campfire generated thick clouds of smoke, to keep away the mosquitoes, though we’d also brought coils and Hayes puffed on his cigars. April had returned around suppertime, talked in a low voice with Durán, and then wandered back away. When I asked, Santos said she was in one of his hammocks, asleep.

  “She is not strong, that young woman,” he said, taking a seat near the altar table where the h-men sat. He leaned toward the don Plutarco. “Can you tell us, don Plutarco, about the ppuz men?”

  The shaman nodded and took a swallow of rum from the glass he kept in front of him.

  “You want to know about the ppuzoob?” he asked. “Yes, I can tell you.”

  And, in the light of the flickering candles, he told us the story, in Mayan, of the little hunchbacked race, or ppuz men, who had lived on the earth until the time of a great flood. They had tried to escape the waters by climbing into the grinding stones that lay scattered throughout the fields, archaeological relics of Mayan civilization. But though the grinding stones bore a superficial resemblance to canoes, they were too heavy to float and the ppuz men drowned.

  “Letié,” don Plutarco finished, “uch ti u epoca Noe.”

  “What was that?” Hayes asked. “I didn’t catch …”

  “He said it happened in Noah’s time,” I said.

  “I love it.” Eric stretched. “One more case of combining Judeo-Christian and Mayan mythology.”

  Hayes got up and walked over to Santos. He offered him a cigar and then gave one to the h-men. Both men took the gifts without words.

  “Santos, you didn’t tell me your grandfather was a h-men, too.”

  The Mayan looked away.

  “Is he still living?”

  “He was my teacher,” don Plutarco broke in. “A great h-men.”

  Santos said nothing and Hayes got up, came back to where we were, and sat down, arms folded. “Pretty evasive. I caught a glance of this guy’s book, by the way. Bunch of scribblings in a school tablet. Not likely to be anything in there.”

  “And if there were?” Durán asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Would you try to buy it?”

  “Buy it? What do you mean?”

  “Borrow it, then.”

  “I’d try to photograph it, of course, just as I have the others.”

  “Of course.” Durán picked up the rum bottle and took a swig.

  Blackburn laughed. “Come on, Josç. Paul isn’t a gringo imperialist.”

  Durán rose then and walked into the darkness.

  “Touchy national sensibilities,” Hayes sighed. “Thinks we’re down here to steal the artifacts and rape the women. I thought better of the man.”

  “He’s okay,” Eric said. “It’s the rum.”

  I looked over at Pepper, wondering what she made of the exchange, but her eyes were closed.

  Sometime after midnight Plutarco began a chant in a high voice, dipping one of the leaves into the gourds and shaking out drops of sacred liquor onto the altar. His words ran together and I’d been away too long to make out many of them, but he was telling the gods that rain was needed.

  Pepper shifted beside me. “Have I been asleep long?”

  “Couple of hours.”

  “Missed anything?”

  “Not really.”

  “What’s he doing now?”

  I told her. “There are four Chaacs, or rain gods, one for each cardinal direction. In the old days, the tapir was associated with water because of its long snout. When the Maya first saw horses, they thought they were just big tapirs. And when they heard about the archangels from the Spanish friars, they decided they were the same as the rain gods—they figured that the Spanish just got it wrong. So now the four rain gods have angels’ names, and the Maya think they ride horses.”

  “I love it. I guess that’s how the culture’s survived so long.”

  “That’s right,” I said. “They adapt. Just like how, in the old days, they wouldn’t have let women this close during the ceremony and the whole thing would’ve lasted three days.” I winked. “Imagine: No sex for three days.”

  “No wonder they cut it down to one.” She got up. “I need to walk around. Will I miss anything?”

  “Probably not. There’ll just be storytelling and some prayers until tomorrow morning. That’s when they dig the pib, or earth oven, and put the sacred bread in to bake and sacrifice the turkeys and hens.”

  “Sacrifice?”

  “Well, they give them some liquor to drink first. Then they slit their throats, cook ’em, offer some to the gods, and everybody eats.”

  “I can’t wait.” She started away.

  “I’ll come with you,” I said. “I need to stretch my legs.”

  We walked alongside the hut, with its sleeping occupants, and out into the narrow lane. Here and there a candle flickered inside a hut and from one or two came the steady glow of an electric light bulb. I tripped on a stone and a dog skittered away in the darkness.

  “Good rum, huh?” Pepper asked.

  “I haven’t had but three or four glasses. It’s customary to drink on ceremonial occasions. It’s, well, religious.”

  She jabbed me playfully. “You’re such a spiritual person.”

  I grabbed her around the waist and pulled her to me. “I’ll spirit you.”

  She laughed, then suddenly pulled away, and I saw Durán coming up the lane toward us, his gait unsteady.

  He passed us with a nod and headed back into Santos’s yard. The spell was broken. Pepper and I followed.

  Late the next morning, as the men were removing the bread-stuffs and cooked fowl from the earth oven, Paul Hayes looked around. “Is April still sleeping? Somebody better wake her up and tell her it’s time to eat.”

  Durán walked back to Santos’s hut and peered in.

  “She isn’t here.” He turned to one of the women who was squatting outside making tortillas. “Have you seen the young gringa?”

  The woman shrugged. “When I woke up she was gone.”

  “Shit,” Hayes mumbled. “And where the hell’s Eric?”

  As if in answer, Blackburn appeared around the corner of the hut.

  “Somebody say food?”

  “April’s taken off somewhere,” Hayes said.

  Blackburn sighed. “It figures. Well, I guess we’d better find her. There aren’t more than a hundred people in this place. Somebody’s seen her.” He turned to me. “Can you and Pepper take the south half of the village? And Jose, if you and Minnie can take the other half, Paul and I will check the road to the site, in case she wandered out to the ruins.”

  Pepper and I decided to take opposite sides of the street. For the first five huts we had no luck. It was in the second block that I found her.

  I recognized her by her voice, because she was singing a lullaby. When I stuck my head in I saw two hammocks, both seemingly occupied. The nearer one, though, was gently swinging and I recognized its occupant as April. She was holding a baby close against her breast, while an old, toothless woman sat in a chair near the back door, stirring the ashes of a fire. A little girl, eight or nine, stood beside the hammock, looking down at the pale young woman and the infant.

  I couldn’t make out the form in the other hammock because of the sheets wound around it, but the form wasn’t moving.

  “Hello, April,” I said.

  She looked up
and I barely recognized her from the radiance in her face.

  “Hi. The baby’s mother’s sick. I went to see Xmari, here.” She nodded at the little girl. “She lives next door. She kept saying, enferma, sick, and pointing over here.”

  “And you came to see,” I said.

  “Yeah. I think the baby’s mother has some kind of fever. They were hoping when the ceremony’s over that we’d give her a ride to the doctor in Chetumal.”

  I looked down at the ill woman. Her eyes were closed and she was shivering.

  “Malaria would be my guess,” I said. “Sure, we’ll get her in.”

  I helped April up and she reluctantly handed the baby to the old woman. “I think this is her grandmother, but she seems to be almost blind. The baby was crying and I asked where its father was, but I’m not sure she understood, because my Spanish isn’t very good and she answered in Mayan and she kept saying kim-in or something.”

  “Cimi,” I said. “It means dead.”

  “Oh.” She looked back over her shoulder at the house.

  “It seems like such a shame. These people are so poor and this little baby …” She looked up at me. “I gave the old woman a hundred pesos. Was that all right?”

  “That was fine,” I said.

  “I hope the baby’s all right. She was crying so much. So many babies die down here and she’s so little.” Tears were running down her cheeks and I helped her into the little street. “If I lost another one …”

  “Oyé!” A man’s voice broke in and I saw José Durán approaching from the end of the block. Pepper started forward toward April and me, but Durán brushed past her. “What are you doing?” he demanded.

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “You know what I mean.” The odor of alcohol engulfed me and I saw his eyes were red from lack of sleep. “First one, and then the other, and now this one, no?”

  “You’re not making any sense,” I said.

  He reached out unsteadily and tried to knock my arm away from April’s.

  “Take your hands off her.”

  “You’re drunk,” I told him.