Ceremony (6 page)

The wind didn’t blow as hard up there as it did on the clay flats. Harley stopped at the top of the hill and took a piss. The burro chewed the dry tufts of grass as close to the gray shale as it could and strained against the reins to reach another sparse clump of grass. But the mule stood alert, its milky staring eyes wide open. They were the same—the mule and old Grandma, she sitting in the corner of the room in the wintertime by the potbelly stove, or the summertime on an apple crate under the elm tree; she was as blind as the gray mule and just as persistent. She never hesitated to tell them that Rocky had promised to buy her a kerosene stove with his Army pay, even after Tayo came home from the hospital and she knew the sound of Rocky’s name made him cry.

“Don’t cry, Tayo, don’t cry. You know he wanted me to have it. And he didn’t want you to cry.” So finally Auntie took forty dollars of the insurance money and sent Robert to town, and he brought home an old heater with an automatic thermostat, so that once it was lighted, all it needed was a barrel of fuel oil on the wooden rack outside. She ordered that kind because she didn’t want to impose on any of them to look after her stove for her. Last year, on the coldest day of the winter, when San José creek froze solid and Auntie had gone to the store and old Grandma was all alone, the fire in the wood stove went out. This story always made Auntie stop whatever she was doing then, to say, “Mama, the coals were still warm when we got home,” and old Grandma always pretended she didn’t hear this, and she continued on about the things Rocky was going to do for her. They all mourned Rocky that way, by slipping, lapsing into the plans he had for college and for his football career. It didn’t take Tayo long to see the accident of time and space: Rocky was the one who was alive, buying Grandma her heater with the round dial on the front; Rocky was there in the college game scores on the sports page of the
Albuquerque Journal.
It was him, Tayo, who had died, but somehow there had been a mistake with the corpses, and somehow his was still unburied.

He started to cry, and when Harley looked back at him he did not wipe the tears away or pretend it was the dust and wind in his eyes. He was suddenly hollow; his fingers loosened and fell from the reins, slippery with sweat. The force of gravity seemed to surge up at him and pull him down. He hung with both arms to the mule’s neck, but he was caught and being dragged away. Rolling end over end in a flash flood in a big arroyo. After his hands slipped loose, his knees hit muddy ruts and there was screaming and the sound of bone crushing, hollow white skull bone beaten to bayonet edges by the jungle rain. The flood water was the color of the earth, of their skin, of the blood, his blood dried brown in the bandages.

Harley helped him up; he brushed the sand and weeds from Tayo’s shirt and handed him his hat. He walked with him to the shade at the foot of the mesa. He hobbled the mule and tied a long rope to the burro and let them graze on the thin, bluish green leaves of salt bushes growing at the entrance to the canyon. The sand felt cool. He squeezed it in both fists until it made little rivulets between his fingers. Harley sat down beside him and wiped his face on the sleeve of his shirt.

“Sunstroke. They always warned me about it, Tayo. We should’ve stopped to rest sooner.” He looked at Tayo closely. “Are you okay?”

Tayo nodded. He wanted to make a joke about himself, say something like “Sunstroke hell, the wind blew me off,” but he didn’t have energy to move his lips, to even form the words. Beyond the shade everything shimmered in waves of heat and the wind. The cliffs across the little wash, the junipers growing among the big orange boulders, and the hazy pink sky were bright colors of a dream, and the longer Tayo stared at them, the more he knew he was going to be sick. So he scratched a hole in the dry sand beside him, and when the glare of that light finally blinded him, he turned to his right side and vomited into the hole.

When he got off the train at New Laguna, his legs were shaky and the sleeves of his coat smelled like puke, although he had tried to rinse out the coat in the washroom sink on the train. He didn’t want them to know how sick he had been, how all night he had leaned against the metal wall in the men’s room, feeling the layers of muscle in his belly growing thinner, until the heaving was finally a ripple and then a quiver.

But Auntie stared at him the way she always had, reaching inside him with her eyes, calling up the past as if it were his future too, as if things would always be the same for him. They both knew then she would keep him and take care of him all the months he would lie in a bed too weak to walk. This time she would keep him because he was all she had left. Many years ago she had taken him to conceal the shame of her younger sister. Now she stood over the bed and looked at him, and if he opened his eyes, he knew he would see her probing for new shame, the anticipation of what she might find swelling inside her. What would it be this time? She remembered what that old fool Josiah had done; it wasn’t any different from Little Sister and that white man. She had fiercely protected them from the gossip in the village. But she never let them forget what she had endured, all because of what they had done. That’s why Tayo knew she wouldn’t send him away to a veterans’ hospital.

He lay with his face in the pillow. She had always watched him more closely than Rocky, because Rocky had been her own son and it had been her duty to raise him. Those who measured life by counting the crosses would not count her sacrifices for Rocky the way they counted her sacrifices for her dead sister’s half-breed child. When Rocky died he became unassailable forever in his frame on top of her bureau; his death gave her new advantages with the people: she had given so much. But advantages wear out; she needed a new struggle, another opportunity to show those who might gossip that she had still another unfortunate burden which proved that, above all else, she was a Christian woman. That was how it would be; he figured it out the first afternoon he was home.

At the end of the first week, she came into the room and pulled the sheets and blankets from all the beds, and he realized then she changed the beds as if Josiah and Rocky still slept there, tucking the dark wool blankets around the corners of the clean sheets, stuffing the pillows into starched white pillowcases she had ironed the day before. Finally he heard her step close to his bed and lift the lid on the slop jar to see if it needed to be emptied.

“How are you feeling?”

He knew she wanted him to get out of the bed while she changed the sheets. He sat up and swung his legs around to the floor. He got up unsteadily and moved toward the chair at the foot of the bed, but she took his arm and guided him to Rocky’s bed. He wanted to pull out of her reach and go to the chair, but he was swaying with nausea. She pushed him into the bed and brought the slop jar. He pulled his knees up to his belly and writhed in the bed, fighting back the gagging. He felt the old mattress then, where all the years of Rocky’s life had made contours and niches that Tayo’s bones did not fit: like plump satin-covered upholstery inside a coffin, molding itself around a corpse to hold it forever. He called for help, and he drew his legs and arms stiffly to his sides and arched his back away from the mattress. His heart was pounding louder than his calls for help; he could hear old Grandma answering him, but Auntie did not come. Finally she came in from the porch. The sleeves of her dress were rolled up, her hands were damp and smelled like bleach. She pulled him from the bed, her face tight with anger.

He pointed at the windows. “The light makes me vomit.”

She pulled down the shades, and he knew she was staring at him, almost as if she could see the outline of his lie in the dim light. But his advantage was the Army doctors who told her and Robert that the cause of battle fatigue was a mystery, even to them. He felt better in the dark because he could not see the beds, where the blankets followed smooth concave outlines; he could not see the photographs in the frames on the bureau. In the dark he could cry for all the dreams that Rocky had as he stared out of his graduation picture; he could cry for Josiah and the spotted cattle, all scattered now, all lost, sucked away in the dissolution that had taken everything from him. Old Grandma sat by her stove, comfortable with darkness too. He knew she listened to him cry; he knew she listened to the clang of the enamel lid of the slop jar as he removed it and leaned over to vomit.

In the beginning old Grandma and Robert stayed away from him, except to say “Good morning” or “Good night”; the sickness and his crying overwhelmed them. Auntie had taken charge of him. In low clear tones that Tayo could hear, she warned them to be careful to make no mention of Rocky or Josiah. Tayo could see what she was trying to do.

When he heard Robert come in from a trip to the ranch, he sat up on the bed and called him.

“The bay mare had her colt. A horse colt. Sorrel with a blaze. Sort of crooked down his face, like this.” Robert spoke slowly and softly, indicating the marking on the colt’s forehead by outlining it with a finger on his own face.

Tayo realized then that as long as Josiah and Rocky had been alive, he had never known Robert except as a quiet man in the house that belonged to old Grandma and Auntie. When Auntie and old Grandma and Josiah used to argue over how many lambs should be sold, or when Auntie and old Grandma scolded Josiah for the scandal of his Mexican girl friend, Robert sat quietly. He had cultivated this deafness for as many years as he had been married to Auntie. His face was calm; he was patient with them because he had nothing to say. The sheep, the horses, and the fields—everything belonged to them, including the good family name. Now Robert had all the things that Josiah had been responsible for. He looked tired.

“I helped my brother-in-law with our fields. But they don’t expect me to do very much now. They know I’m pretty busy over here.”

“When I get better, I can help you.”

Robert smiled and nodded. “That would be nice,” he said softly, “but don’t hurry. You take it easy. Get well.” He stood up. He was a short, slight man with a dark angular face. He put his hand on Tayo’s arm. “I’m glad you are home, Tayo,” he said. “I sure am glad.”

 

He woke up crying. He had dreamed Josiah had been hugging him close the way he had when Tayo was a child, and in the dream he smelled Josiah’s smell—horses, woodsmoke, and sweat—the smell he had forgotten until the dream; and he was overcome with all the love there was. He cried because he had to wake up to what was left: the dim room, empty beds, and a March dust storm rattling the tin on the roof. He lay there with the feeling that there was no place left for him; he would find no peace in that house where the silence and the emptiness echoed the loss. He wanted to go back to the hospital. Right away. He had to get back where he could merge with the walls and the ceiling, shimmering white, remote from everything. He sat up and pushed off the blankets; he was sweating. He looked at old Grandma sitting in her place beside the stove; he couldn’t tell if she was sleeping or if she was only listening to the wind with her eyes closed. His voice was shaking; he called her. He wanted to tell her they had to take him back to the hospital. He watched her get up slowly, with old bones that were stems of thin glass she shuffled across the linoleum in her cloth slippers, moving cautiously as if she did not trust memory to take her to his bed. She sat down on the edge of the bed and she reached out for him. She held his head in her lap and she cried with him, saying “A’moo’oh, a’moo’ohh” over and over again.

“I’ve been thinking,” she said, wiping her eyes on the edge of her apron, “all this time, while I was sitting in my chair. Those white doctors haven’t helped you at all. Maybe we had better send for someone else.”

When Auntie got back from the store, old Grandma told her, “That boy needs a medicine man. Otherwise, he will have to go away. Look at him.” Auntie was standing with a bag full of groceries in her arms. She set the bag down on the table and took off her coat and bandanna; she looked at Tayo. She had a way she looked when she saw trouble; she frowned, getting her answer ready for the old lady.

“Oh, I don’t know, Mama. You know how they are. You know what people will say if we ask for a medicine man to help him. Someone will say it’s not right. They’ll say, ‘Don’t do it. He’s not full blood anyway.’” She hung up her coat and draped the scarf on top of it.

“It will start all over again. All that gossip about Josiah and about Little Sister. Girls around here have babies by white men all the time now, and nobody says anything. Men run around with Mexicans and even worse, and nothing is ever said. But just let it happen with our family—” Old Grandma interrupted her the way she always did whenever Auntie got started on that subject.

“He’s my grandson. If I send for old Ku’oosh, he’ll come. Let them talk if they want to. Why do you care what they say? Let them talk. By planting time they’ll forget.” Old Grandma stood up straight when she said this and stared at Auntie with milky cataract eyes.

“You know what the Army doctor said: ‘No Indian medicine.’ Old Ku’oosh will bring his bag of weeds and dust. The doctor won’t like it.” But her tone of voice was one of temporary defeat, and she was already thinking ahead to some possible satisfaction later on, when something went wrong and it could be traced back to this decision. Like the night she tried to tell them not to keep the little boy for Sis any more; by then she was even running around with colored men, and she was always drunk. She came that night to leave the little boy with them. They could have refused then. They could have told her then not to come around any more. But they didn’t listen to her then either; later on though, they saw, and she used to say to them, “See, I tried to tell you.” But they didn’t care. Her brother, Josiah, and her mother. They didn’t care what the people were saying about their family, or that the village officers had a meeting one time and talked about running Sis off the reservation for good.