Hunters and Gatherers (16 page)

Martha ventured onto the terrace overlooking the pool, gingerly avoiding the cracks in its concrete floor. Below, the landscaping impersonated a Zen pebble arrangement around a shriveled cactus and two puckered aloe plants. Had she lived in another place, had another job, Martha might have wound up in a hellish Southwestern condo not unlike this hotel. Another job? What other job? At least she would
have
a job. Martha remembered her meeting with Eleanor and went back inside and lay down.

She stretched out on the cool woven spread and played with the remote control, settling on a medical program about valley fever, a chronic lung disease contracted from breathing desert air. Martha took a deep breath, and down in her chest something snagged and burned. She rolled onto her side to study a catkin of hair and dust that clung to the air conditioner. She watched it flutter in the breeze until she dropped off to sleep.

She awoke in time to shower and dress and ride out to the mission, where now the afternoon heat was reversing all the good effects of the shower. Martha eyed the dust devils blowing great swirls of valley fever at her. She concentrated on the ceremony, the priest, the wailing old women, the
cantoras
, who, Diana said, were descended from the Meso-American priestesses.

Finally the singing stopped. The priest inscribed three crosses on the air between himself and the congregation, then hurried, trying not to run, up the path to the mission.

“Look at that jerk,” said Joy. “Checking back over his shoulder to see if the Indians are gaining on him.”

“That was so powerful,” Bernie said. “If we had a ritual like that, I’d be moving more easily through the stages of mourning Stan. The way their dead are still with them—”

“Very much with them,” said Diana. “The Papagos believe the dead hang around for three days and three nights. They leave their doors open and set out food and deal them in at card games—”

“And the only ones who come through those open doors are the anthropologists,” Joy said.

“Oh, cram it,” said Diana. Being able to say that to Joy was a tonic for Diana, who, just since the start of the trip, already seemed less bleary and resentful. Martha hoped that Diana and Hegwitha were becoming an item.

“Let’s go to the church!” cried Freya, running up, slightly breathless. “The crucial part of the ceremony is about to begin. The Indians file past the altar, past the wooden statue of their saint, and they try to lift it. They believe that only those without sin will be able to pick up the statue. Only the pure in heart will have the strength to move it, and the others—the sinners—can’t budge it with a crowbar—”

“We heard all about that, Mother,” said Sonoma. “Diana told us sixty times in the van. What planet were
you
on?”

“Sonoma, dear,” interceded Bernie. “I think Diana was talking about that at lunch when your mother wasn’t there. So that’s why she didn’t hear it.”

“Yes, that was at lunch,” Titania said, and they all fell silent, darkly contemplating the latex tortillas they’d eaten while Freya was savoring her wild-mushroom-and-blue-corn tamales.

“Right,” Sonoma said. “Mom was out there hustling her career while we were eating shit. As usual.”

“Oh, sin, sin, sin,” mused Isis. “What a phallocratic concept. The god with the scales and balances punishing wrongdoers, in this case with the public humiliation of being unable to heft some penile wooden object that babies can probably pick up in one hand.”

“How heavy
is
the statue?” asked Sonoma, tipping her head back slightly, braced for whatever fresh idiocy the adult mind had cooked up.

But Freya was already rushing up the hill to the mission, and Sonoma’s question went unanswered as the others followed. A group of Papago men in jeans and straw hats paused to watch a parched hot breeze lift Freya’s, Titania’s, and Isis’s filmy skirts.

“They think we’re their ancestors’ ghosts!” Starling said.

“I doubt it,” said Diana.

Inside the mission, the cool air was thick with spicy botanical incense. The walls were painted a checkerboard pattern, red and yellow and blue cubes ascending in dizzying diagonals.

At the main altar a priest was saying mass, assisted by two yawning acolytes and ignored by the crowd milling near the side chapel, the source of a steady drone and buzz of movement and hushed conversation. Babies were crying, mothers genuflecting to spit-wash children’s faces, while a long procession inched through their midst toward the side-chapel altar.

There were occasional flashes as rude anthropologists or sightseeing boors took illegal snapshots. As if to compensate for their bad manners, Martha tried to be discreet as she studied the unreadable patient faces awaiting their turn in the chapel. Which were the secret sinners steeling themselves against public exposure, against the statue betraying them, turning to lead in their arms? Martha’s own conscience was demoralizingly clear, except for having had evil thoughts about Dennis, Lucinda, Eleanor, and, all right, some of the Goddess women…

Could evil thoughts keep you from lifting the statue, or were evil deeds required? What
was
the relation between sin and upper body strength? She didn’t think she’d committed a major sin, unless you counted sleeping with Dennis, and anyone would agree that she’d been punished for that already.

It didn’t matter, it wasn’t her ceremony. She wasn’t waiting in line. And really, Joy was probably right—they had no business watching.

As the believers prepared to mount the three shallow steps to the altar, a sudden epileptiform charge energized their limbs. With swift, tense gestures, they crossed themselves, whispered a prayer, then lunged for the statue. They were trembling when they picked it up, but every one of them managed to lift it, and even from far away Martha could feel their terror and their relief.

“Awesome,” said Sonoma. “Look at all those people hugging that sick wooden mummy.”

The saint was exceedingly mummylike: a walnut-colored wooden corpse lying on its back and wrapped in a satin brocade cloak to which worshippers hurriedly pinned hand-written prayers and notes. The statue so effectively suggested rot and decomposition, it was a miracle in itself that all these people wanted to touch and even kiss it. Everyone in line was either Papago or Mexican. No Germans, New Agers, or tourists waited to test their clear or guilty consciences.

Martha looked from face to face—and at last gave a stifled gasp of surprise. There—at the end of the line—was Isis.

Isis caught her eye and beckoned, and Martha burrowed into the crowd, using elaborate and, she hoped, unmistakable body language to communicate that she was just visiting and not breaking into the line.

“I have to do it,” Isis confided. “I suppose it’s yet another ordeal I feel compelled to endure. If we want some major transformation to happen this week, it would be good to know what kind of baggage we’re bringing with us. I’m not doing this for myself but for the group. So it may be the group’s fault—the weight of our collective sins, I mean—if I can’t lift the damn thing. What sins? What am I saying? Oh, it’s all so awful! You can take the girl out of Catholic school but you can’t…oh, well. Waiting on this wretched line is the first stage of the test. Why do we do these things to ourselves?”

“It’s pretty brave,” Martha said. “I don’t know if I’d…”

But Isis had already drifted off into the same pacified state of unfocused wariness as the Papagos around her. Martha lingered nearby, but finally moved away when Isis’s eyes rolled up in her head and she slipped into some sort of trance.

The bobbing and lifting continued while the worshippers shuffling toward the altar turned further inward, perhaps examining their hearts for one last hidden sin. Even if Isis weren’t the only Anglo in line, she would have stood out in her black chiffon caftan with gold ribbons criss-crossed vestal-virgin-style over her bodice. But only the tourists and the Goddess women were paying her any mind. The Indians stared at their relatives, slowly approaching the saint.

Isis drew nearer the altar. The chapel was hot and cloyingly sweet. Once, when Martha was a girl, the scent of nightblooming lilies in her mother’s garden had so disturbed her as she tried to sleep that she’d got up and gone outside and pulled them out of the ground. Well, that’s who she was, even as a child: the cranky, pleasure-denying puritan Dennis saw in her, the withholding standoffish person who couldn’t relax and hug strangers, the prude Hegwitha had spotted, the girl who could take off her gym suit without showing an inch of flesh. If Martha tried to pick up the statue, the saint would know all that, and the stems of those night-blooming lilies would bind it to the altar. But what was her sin exactly? Modesty? Shyness? Pride?

How nervy of Isis to make the attempt when any lifetime contained so much that could weigh the statue down. Isis must truly believe in an accepting Goddess who would love and forgive you—bad thoughts, bad deeds, and all. Whereas Martha still envisioned a punitive old man with a special problem regarding disobedience in the garden. Martha counted the people between Isis and the statue: four. Then three. Two more.

Isis took a deep breath, crossed herself, then put her hands together, fingers pointed down, and mounted the steps to the altar. Martha saw Isis as she must once have been: a tense girl at her First Communion. Isis knelt, took the saint in her arms, and yanked at it, mumbling and straining.

At last something gave. Isis lifted the saint’s shoulders a few inches off the altar. She hesitated, then continued, apparently unsatisfied with the slight upward lift which had sufficed for the Indians. She seemed to be trying to pull the statue all the way up to her breast.

The effort threw her off balance and, as if in slow motion, she tripped—first gracefully, then less so—backward down the steps. The statue fell and thumped the altar with a resounding hollow thunk that boomed throughout the entire church and brought everything to a standstill.

For a long time no one moved or spoke. Mercifully, the statue hadn’t fallen to the ground, but the saint’s feet hung off his resting place at an awkward angle. His robe was rucked up, revealing a naked brown wooden leg. Several of the messages pinned to his cloak fluttered to the church floor.

Crouching, Isis duck-walked around, gathering up the fallen notes and frantically refastening them to the saint’s garment, lest prayers go unanswered because of her. But this left unsolved the problem of the crooked statue, which was still sticking out from the altar as everyone stood around staring.

Helping Isis this time was more problematic than saving her from drowning. For one thing, her life wasn’t in danger. Nor would an expanse of ocean screen Martha’s rescue efforts from the curious eyes of the crowd.

This time it was Sonoma who rushed to Isis’s aid. She pushed and straightened the statue with swift nurselike competence, tucked the saint’s robe under him so that everything was as before, and even gave him a tender pat, as if to make sure he was comfy. Only now did a collective shudder pass through the onlookers: Sonoma was wearing her cowboy hat and satin miniskirt. At last the priest and the altar boys ran over, their faces frozen in the dutiful grimaces of football players jogging onto the field, or of firemen hustling into a burning house.

The procession had started moving again; the devotees lifted and kissed the statue. Relieved, the priest and the acolytes stayed for a moment, then retreated.

With her arm around Sonoma’s shoulders, Isis fled the church, and the other Goddess women flocked anxiously behind them. Martha didn’t catch up till they were halfway down the dusty road to the graveyard.

From afar, Martha saw clearly the familiar configuration: Isis talking and talking, the others hanging on every word.

Drawing nearer, she heard Isis say, “It was a life-and-death struggle I felt in every cell, as if every ounce of patriarchal power was concentrated in that statue. It was struggling to withhold the tiniest smidgin of female empowerment, battling my whole childhood, my entire previous life, every minute of Catholic school and its power for evil—and I faltered underneath that weight, I became a statue myself…Oh, thank you, Sonoma, bless you for getting me out of that mess…”

Once more Martha wondered if Freya and Starling might have been right about Isis attaching herself to her latest savior. But it would be too humiliating to be jealous of Sonoma!

Martha noticed everyone staring at a spot beyond her, and she turned to see the red fireball of sun slipping under the horizon, bouncing twice on the desert before it disappeared. The sky above the brushy hills blazed a nuclear orange. The cactus turned black, and its backlit spines took on atomic white auras.

“O
H, THANK GODDESS!” CRIED
Starling. “Am I ever grateful to blow that dump of a town!”

“Whew!” said Joy. “I didn’t want to mention it till we were on our way, but several Tucson streetcorners are Number One on the EPA list for having the highest concentration of pollutants, a carcinogenic cocktail for the
Guinness Book of Toxic World Records
.”

“And in this
heat
!” said Freya. “Everything’s so much worse. My friend Michael—the curator—said he has never experienced an October anywhere near this broiling.”

“We
know
he’s the curator, Mother,” Sonoma said. “Why do you have to keep bringing him up?”

“I still think it’s a lovely city,” said Bernie. “Though the urban sprawl is appalling.”

They felt light-headed with that particular pleasure—one of the joys of travel—the special delight of leaving a place where you haven’t been happy, and of realizing that you
can
leave, because your life is somewhere else. How superior, how successful they felt for being smart enough not to live there!

Beneath this cheer was the disaffection, the negative side of unhappy travel, the fear that their failure to enjoy the place had been their own fault. Last night, Bernie had made yet another mistake, telling the hotel desk clerk that they’d just returned from the mission. The pretty blond clerk turned out to be a graduate student in cultural anthropology, writing her thesis on Papago kinship patterns. She said the best part of the All Souls’ Eve celebration came after the mass, in the graveyard, when the Papagos lit candles and decorated their loved ones’ tombs with wooden crosses and paper flowers, had family picnics on the graves, and sang all night long to their dead.