Ceremony (24 page)

“What are you doing here?”

The voice came from the yard. She was standing under an apricot tree, partially hidden by a bushy canopy of gnarled limbs sweeping so close to the earth the slender leaves touched the ground in the wind. The shadows made her skin and hair look dark.

“I couldn’t drive past the washed-out bridge. So I left the truck there and rode the horse.” The sun had gone down, behind the mesa below the rimrock. The sky and clouds on the horizon were bright red.

“Who sent you?”

“I’m looking for some cattle. They belonged to my uncle.”

“Somebody sent you,” she said, and he noticed she was holding a small willow staff, slightly curved at one end. A cool wind blew down from the northwest rim of the mountain plateau above them and rattled the apricot leaves. He got off the mare and loosened the cinch; the horse tried to shake off sweat and fatigue. The leather and steel fittings on the saddle and bridle clashed together violently. She stepped out from under the tree then. She was wearing a man’s shirt tucked into a yellow skirt that hung below her knees. Pale buckskin moccasins reached the edge of her skirt. The silver buttons up the side of each moccasin had rainbirds carved on them. She wasn’t much older than he was, but she wore her hair long, like the old women did, pinned back in a knot.

“Can I get some water for the horse?”

She gestured with her chin in the direction of the corral. Her eyes slanted up with her cheekbones like the face of an antelope dancer’s mask.

“Help yourself,” she said.

Her skin was light brown; she had ocher eyes. She stood in the yard and watched him lead the mare away.

The wind was blowing harder, and the mare’s long tail streamed around them like tall dune grass; the corral gate bumped back and forth in the wind. The mare was thirsty; she sank her nostrils under water and came up only to breathe. He rubbed her behind the ears where the bridle made sweaty creases in the hair. He smelled leather wet with horse sweat, and damp clay from the edge of the pool where the mare stood knee-deep; he smelled winter coming in the wind.

He tied the horse in the corral and pulled off the saddle. He untied his bedroll from the back of the saddle and looked for a sandy sheltered place to unroll his bed. The wind and sand were blowing so hard he didn’t hear her walk up from behind. He turned and she was there.

“Come inside,” she said loud enough to be heard over the wind. She pulled the handwoven blanket up around her shoulders and head, and walked into the stinging sand with her head bowed. He followed her with his head down and his eyes squeezed shut against the sand; but he did not miss the designs woven across the blanket in four colors: patterns of storm clouds in white and gray; black lightning scattered through brown wind.

He followed her down the long screen porch to a narrow pine door. When she opened it, he smelled dried apricots and juniper wood burning. The inner walls were massive and all the doorways were low. The smell of clay and mountain sage stirred old memories. He touched a whitewashed wall as he went through a doorway, and rubbed the powdery clay between his fingers. His heart was beating fast, and his hands were damp with sweat.

The fireplace was in the corner of the room; the flames blazed up, snapping the kindling and sucking at the wind that came down the chimney. He stood in front of the fire and held out his hands to get warm.

“Sit down. Eat.”

He took off his jacket and laid it on the bench beside him. He watched her move lids and pots on the small cookstove. She put a bowl and spoon in front of him. The chili was thick, red like fresh blood, and full of dried corn and fresh venison. She stood by the window and looked outside.

“The sky is clear. You can see the stars tonight.” She spoke without turning around. He felt a chill bristle across his neck, and it was difficult to swallow the mouthful of stew.

He had watched the sky every night, looking for the pattern of stars the old man drew on the ground that night. Late in September he saw them in the north.

He had left Laguna before dawn and drove all day until he came to the big arroyo where years of summer rain had gradually
eroded the clay bank away from the narrow plank bridge, cutting a deep new channel between the road and the bridge.

He got up from the table and walked back through the rooms. He pushed the porch screen door wide open and looked up at the sky: Old Betonie’s stars were there.

 

 

 

He watched her face, and her eyes never shifted; they were with him while she moved out of her clothes and while she slipped his jeans down his legs, stroking his thighs. She unbuttoned his shirt, and all he was aware of was the heat of his own breathing and the warmth radiating from his belly, pulsing between his legs. He was afraid of being lost, so he repeated trail marks to himself: this is my mouth tasting the salt of her brown breasts; this is my voice calling out to her. He eased himself deeper within her and felt the warmth close around him like river sand, softly giving way under foot, then closing firmly around the ankle in cloudy warm water. But he did not get lost, and he smiled at her as she held his hips and pulled him closer. He let the motion carry him, and he could feel the momentum within, at first almost imperceptible, gathering in his belly. When it came, it was the edge of a steep riverbank crumbling under the downpour until suddenly it all broke loose and collapsed into itself.

He rearranged the goat hides under the blankets and rolled over on his back. Under his leg he could feel the damp wide leaf pattern that had soaked into the blanket where she lay.

 

He dreamed about the cattle that night. It was a continuous dream that was not interrupted even when she reached out for him again and pulled him on top of her. He went on dreaming while he moved inside her, and when he heard her whisper, he saw them scatter over the crest of a round bare hill, running away from him, scattering out around him like ripples in still water.

She got up before dawn. When she left, he got dressed and followed her. The air felt damp and cold like the ground after the snow has melted into it, making it dense and rich. He stood on the steps and looked at the morning stars in the west. He breathed deeply, and each breath had a distinct smell of snow from the north, of ponderosa pine on the rimrock above; finally he smelled horses from the direction of the corral, and he smiled. Being alive was all right then: he had not breathed like that for a long time.

He walked to the corral and untied the mare. He led her to the tall grass around the pool and held the reins while she grazed, watching how she took great mouthfuls, working the bit with her tongue so that it didn’t interfere with chewing the grass. He squatted down by the pool and watched the dawn spreading across the sky like yellow wings. The mare jingled the steel shanks of the bit with her grazing, and he remembered the sound of the bells in late November, when the air carried the jingling like snowflakes in the wind. Before dawn, southeast of the village, the bells would announce their approach, the sound shimmering across the sand hills, followed by the clacking of turtle-shell rattles—all these sounds gathering with the dawn. Coming closer to the river, faintly at first, faint as the pale yellow light emerging across the southeast horizon, the sounds gathered intensity from the swelling colors of dawn. And at the moment the sun came over the edge of the horizon, they suddenly appeared on the riverbank, the Ka’t’sina approaching the river crossing.

He stood up. He knew the people had a song for the sunrise.

 

He repeated the words as he remembered them, not sure if they were the right ones, but feeling they were right, feeling the instant of the dawn was an event which in a single moment gathered all things together—the last stars, the mountaintops, the clouds, and the winds—celebrating this coming. The power of each day spilled over the hills in great silence. Sunrise. He ended the prayer with “sunrise” because he knew the Dawn people began and ended all their words with “sunrise.”

The horse had stopped grazing and was standing still; whether she had eaten all the grass she could reach and was waiting for him to move her, or whether she had paused the way the mule deer stop grazing at dawn, he did not know. Maybe the dawn woke the instinct in the dim memory of the blood when horses had been as wild as the deer and at sunrise went into the trees and thickets to hide.

He tied her in the corral again and walked back to the house. The massive walls had been plastered with red clay mud, but the weather had exposed the straw in the plaster; under a broken tin rain gutter, plaster was peeling away, exposing brown adobe bricks. He tried to determine when it had been built, but except for the sagging screen all around the long porch, the house was like the mesas around it: years had little relation to it. Along the south wall, tall orange sunflowers were still blooming among dry corn stalks; the wind of the night before had twisted the sunflowers around the brittle corn stalks, so that in the early morning light the dried-up corn plants were bearing big orange sunflowers that dusted the hard-packed earth beneath them with orange pollen. Somebody had planted blue morning-glories below each of the four wide windows, and the vines of the blue flowers were climbing cotton strings that had been nailed to the window frames. The morning-glories were open wide, themselves the color of the sky, with thin white clouds spreading from the center of the blossoms into the bright blue.

She fed him cold roast venison and coffee. She sat at the other end of the table examining buckskin bundles and rawhide pouches. Occasionally she laid a round shiny pebble on the table, and once he saw animal teeth and claws in one bundle she unwrapped. He wanted to ask her what she was doing, but something about the way she ignored his eyes kept him quiet. She worked intently with the rocks. A few were light colored and appeared to be sandstone, an ocher yellow sandstone with a powdery fine texture he had never seen before. She unwrapped a pinkish gray stone from a muslin cloth and laid it on the table beside a powdery blue stone; she rolled the strings that had been wrapped around the muslin bundle into a tight ball, and looked at him abruptly. She still said nothing, but worked more slowly now, conscious that he was watching. She reached into a flour sack by her feet and brought out bundles of freshly gathered plants. She sniffed them and blew on them before she matched the plants with the stones, putting a sprig of blue-gray mountain sage with the blue stone. The dark yellow plant from the rocky mesa top smelled like wet tobacco; she laid it beside the ocher sandstone. And then she pulled out a long vine covered with tiny white flowers with six sharp petals like fallen stars. She shook the vine gently, and small black ants that had been clinging to the leathery green vine fell to the floor, making a circle around her feet until the crumbs around the stove lured them away. Sunshine from the window made a big square on the floor, and something in the silence of the room was warm and comfortable like this sunlight.

He finished the coffee in the tin cup and stood up.

“Thank you,” he said. She looked up from the vine and nodded.

The trail was parallel to the top of the orange sandrock mesa. It was almost too narrow for a horse, and the mare sent a stream of pebbles and small rocks rolling down the steep slopes. He leaned forward over her shoulders to make the climb easier. The sun was moving higher into the sky, and the cliffs of the mesa radiated the sun’s warmth. He stopped her near the top and tied his jacket behind the saddle, over the bedroll and sack of food. He looked at the sky: it had a bright blue intensity that only autumn and the movement of the sun from its summer place in the sky could give it. He studied the sky all the rest of the way up; the mare had only one direction to go because the trail had become too narrow even for her to turn around. At the top, the wind was cold. He stopped to put on his jacket and rest the mare. Below, the house was hidden by the foothills, but the country beyond it spread out before him in all directions. To the east was the Rio Puerco Valley, where the river had cut a deep narrow arroyo that now carried the water too low to benefit the valley land. Years of wind and no rain had finally stripped the valley down to dark gray clay, where only the bluish salt bush could grow. Beyond the Rio Puerco, to the southeast, he could see the blue mountains east of the Rio Grande, where the rich valley was full of their cities. But from this place there was no sign the white people had ever come to this land; they had no existence then, except as he remembered them. So for a while he forgot, and sought out the southern peaks that were thin blue and skeletal in the great distance.