People of the Sky (4 page)

“After the Blue Star people left, the East Pacific War started and after that, the Colorado Water Wars started the Western Secession that split the old United States. The technology pulled out and moved to new planets then being settled.”

Kesbe crossed her arms over her knees and laid her chin on her forearms. She knew the reasons why the believers in the Blue Star prophecy had left. Drought, desertification, despoilment. Not enough water to grow corn, that center of traditional society. Development, hi-tech industry, foreign wars, clashes over water rights, kids turning their backs on all things Indian. But there was something missing.

“There’s something more than just reasons,” she said, with the stubbornness of a ten-year-old.
“There’s a story too. The story of the last kachina dances.”

He was quiet for a long time. At last he said, “I can not tell you the story…”

Kesbe, listening, felt a sharp pang of disappointment and her feelings rushed away with her.
Because I am a girl-child. Because despite the fact girls and women now can do anything we want and no one gives a second thought to it. But that doesn’t matter when we come back to the reservation. Here women grind store-bought corn and are kept from what remains of the old ceremonies. It’s not fair!

But before she could explode into indignant protest, Bajeloga was looking at her quizzically. “My Bluebird, you have not heard me. You were off on a flight of your own, into the dark sun of anger.”

She looked down, ashamed that her feelings had been so easily read in her face. That too was a
pahana
thing. It reminded her that her mother and her father were both more white than Indian in their attitudes and behavior. Like apples, red on the outside, white on the inside. And the red covering, like an apple peel, was so thin and easily torn.

“It just doesn’t seem fair,” she burst out, and then found herself unable to articulate the thoughts that were swirling around inside her. Gently, Bajeloga coaxed her past the muteness of a child who did not have the words or the abstractions to express what she felt.

“The boys and men got to do all the fun stuff, like foot races, the Snake Dance and the kachina dances,” she said, rubbing the calloused heel of one bare foot against the ankle of the other. “All the women got to do was the Bean Dance and knock corncobs together. And no one thought that stuff was important.”

“So your mother’s been teaching you about the old ways,” Bajeloga said. He sounded a little gruff.

“What’s the matter? Is she wrong?”

“No,” the old man answered gently. “Lisa just sees things in a different way.”

“She’s smart,” Kesbe said, lifting her chin in pride for her mother’s accomplishments. “She’s one of the best ethnopologists in Arizona. She was picked to help analyse the new dig at Betatakin and she figured out all sorts of new stuff from broken pots.”

“Ethnologists,” he corrected.

“Anyway, she is,” Kesbe said, undeterred.

“Do you want to be an ethnologist, like your mother?”

“Naw” She settled closer to him. “I’m gonna be a pilot like you. Fly those big spaceships, whoosh!”

The old man was quiet, looking out over the blowing dust and rabbit-brush. She knew he didn’t pilot spaceships. He made his living coaxing the last airworthy hours out of crates that anyone else would have abandoned long ago. He flew freight,-salmon from Alaska and then, when that petered out, hydroponic cucumbers from island growers off the coast of Florida. He had hauled everything from engines to ocelots, in every kind of flying contraption invented in the last hundred years. She grinned. The ones she had seen looked and sounded as if they had been in service that long.

His father had done it before him and his grandfather, too. It was puddle-jumping, bush-flying, barnstorming, the dirty unglamorous side of flying. Like steelworking and construction, flying was an occupation open to Indians and minorities. It became critically important when the easing of prejudices against them was abruptly reversed during the setbacks that followed the wars and turmoil of the late twenty-first century.

As more Anglo pilots sought the high-status orbital shuttle and space transport jobs, the
grubbier work was handed down to those willing to do anything to earn their living in the air and earn an honest paycheck, enduring the ramshackle condition of the craft they flew, the endless stretches of boredom punctuated with moments of sheer terror, as one writer had described the pilot’s existence

Bejeloga didn’t pilot spaceships
, Kesbe thought.
He could have if he’d been given the chance.

Cheerily she announced, “When I graduate from space-pilot school, I’m gonna give you a ride in my ship. And make you an honorary space-captain.”

Bajeloga let a smile onto his weathered face and said that he liked that idea very much. He put one hand on Kesbe’s shoulder and with the other, slapped the sandstone of the mesa. “I live with the past and the future in one. It’s Indian time, all mixed up, hey?” He chuckled and she broke up into giggles, yet when she stopped laughing, she felt strangely solemn. Being with him was like that.

Yes, she was going to be a space pilot and ride the trails between the stars. But her mother had told her that if she had been born on this mesa in the difficult times that followed the Water Wars and the East-West schism, her choices would have been dictated by the times. The fierce competition for jobs and resources led to the resurgence of prejudice and renewed discrimination against Indians. Grieved and bitter, the few remaining Pueblos isolated themselves on their mesas.

If she had been born then, she would have spent her life in the endless tasks of grinding corn and making a life for the man she married. She would never have dared to dream. Her mother had dared to dream, not of the stars, but of a better life her own mother had lived.

Lisa—it was funny to think of her mother by name—had dreamed of college, education and a profession. And perhaps, like Kesbe, she also had dreamed of the kachina dances and ceremonials that she was prohibited from joining because of her sex. Perhaps that was one reason why Lisa Temiya had chosen to become an ethnologist and to turn around and study her own people from a point outside their culture. As an enthnologist, she could see paintings and recreations of the ceremonies she had been denied. And she could analyse them down to the minutest detail. She was well-known and acclaimed for her papers on Pueblo religious symbolism.

And yet there seemed to be an emptiness and an anger that crept between the words of academic text. Kesbe had read as much as she could of her mother’s work, though she had to ask for help with the hard words. And, though she was proud and impressed by what Lisa had done, there came a feeling that could not be denied.
Yes, she knows it
, Kesbe thought.
But she has not lived it. Bajeloga has lived it.

“Little Bluebird,” said her grandfather. “Don’t you want to hear the story of the last kachina dances?”

She turned to him, feeling her eyes grow wide. “I thought you couldn’t tell me because I’m a girl.”

“You didn’t listen to what I was saying,” he chided. “My words were, ‘I can not tell you the story in English because the words are not there. If you can remember the Hopi I taught you, I will tell it that way.”

“Oh yes!” She hugged her knees and wiggled on her bottom, all the anger swept aside by eager expectation.

Carefully he began, in the cadences of the old tongue, to tell her the story. The carefully spoken syllables brought rich pictures into her mind even as she struggled to understand the subtleties of meaning in the old Hopi words. As she listened to her grandfather’s voice against
the soft wailing of the desert wind, she felt as though she were there, in this same village, more than two hundred years before, watching as the kachinas began their last dances.

Dawn. Grey, cold. Frost rimes the adobe, coats the rusty vehicles parked outside the pueblos. December is the season of Wuwuchim, the first of the great cycle of ceremonies. Outside, in the white man’s world, people are engulfed in the frenzy of Christmas shopping. Here too there is excitement, but it is deeper, more controlled.

The people gather in the plaza, wrapped in blankets. Their breath steams in the cold clear air over the mesas. Children blink, sleepy-eyed, their hair ruffled. They knuckle the scratchiness of sleep from their eyes and force back the yawns. Soon the kachinas will come.

There will not be very many, the children know. The kachinas are getting tired. Or perhaps they sense that the people of this land no longer need them. Rain is brought by cloud-seeding and climate control. By cash paid to the government or to the Navajo. And still there is not enough to grow corn.

But still the children wait, wanting to see the magical beings who live in the dolls that hang on pueblo walls. The kachina dolls are set above the reach of little hands, for they are old and too precious to be played with. The cottonwood from which they were carved is depleted. Some are still carved in pine or balsa, or the dense foamed plastic brought from Japan. But the children know that those dolls are not real and the kachinas spurn them. The new kachina dolls are for the visitors that crowd the mesa each summer. But there are no tourists here today. This dance is for the people themselves.

A distant high jingling brings the thoughts of children back to the approach of the kachinas. They wait, looking across the plaza with solemn eyes as the bells grow louder. But the sound is so weak and so is the tread of dancing feet. Could it be that there is only one kachina coming?

The dancer emerges into the plaza. His mask is brightly, almost savagely painted. Feathers sweep from top and back, cascading down in a brilliant mix of color, startling in the grayness of dawn and the dull brown of the pueblos. The kachina’s steps are slow and leaden, but as he approaches, his feet pick up tempo, forcing the drumbeat to follow him, instead of dancing to the drum. The people lean forward. The children hear their parents muttering above their beads, hear in-drawn breath. They try to remember. Have the kachinas ever danced like this?

No. There is anger in his steps and in every shake of his feathers. His feet do not tread the earth, they strike it, they beat it. They force the drumbeat, distort the rhythm. Something is wrong. Never has the kachina’s dance been one of bitterness.

Yet the older men sigh and look on with a glitter in their hawks’ eyes, as if they knew this would happen and are satisfied that it has. A few babies wail and are carried away by their mothers. The deer-hoof rattles on the kachina’s legs crack sharply, the bells no longer jingling but shrill. Something is terribly wrong, the children think, but do not know what. The older children think that they will leave the pueblo when they grow up.

And then with an angry leap, the kachina kicks both booted feet against the earth and howls, the sound reverberating inside the wooden cylinder of his head. Tears start to the eyes of the children. The one kachina who came has gone mad. Men rush toward the dancer, but they come too late. One of the kachina’s hands claws his head, wrenches it sideways, tips it over and off. It falls, revealing the agonized features of a young man and a voice that cries out that the dance is a lie and he can no longer bear to perform it.

Many children feel their parents’ hands come down over their eyes or feel themselves lifted and clasped against blanketed breasts to block out the sight, but like the men running to the
dancer, it is too late. They have seen the kachina beheaded. They know now that the glorious mask is just a painted cylinder of wood, and underneath was only a man.

Murmurs run through the crowd, first in the scratchy voices of old men, then taken up by everyone. The prophesy has come true. As foretold, a kachina has danced in the plaza and taken off his mask before uninitiated children. It is the end of things, the people say The ceremonies have withered, now they will die.

Stunned, the villagers retreat into their pueblos and begin their daily work. Hands carve kachinas, make pots, weave plagues, prepare corn, but souls are frozen. The village’s grief is the sound of its children crying for the kachina.

Her grandfather’s words faded and Kesbe found herself wiping moisture from her eyes. She too had cried for the kachina.

“Why did the dancer do that?” she asked Bajeloga in English. “Did he want to hurt all those kids? Was he crazy?”

“There is no answer to that, Little Bluebird. It was a time of great pain. Perhaps he felt it more than most. Or perhaps he believed in the prophesy and wanted it to come true.”

Kesbe wrinkled her nose and scowled. “It was a bad prophesy.”

Bajeloga laughed and ruffled her hair. “Do bluebirds judge priests and prophets? Do you fly so high already,
chosovi
? All things must come in their time. Beginnings, endings. That dance was an ending, but it was also a beginning. The kachina who tore off his mask was not the last kachina to dance in the plaza. There was one more. But this kachina did not dance for children.”

Again he slipped into the Hopi tongue to tell the remainder of the tale.

Several weeks went by after the Wuwuchim dance. Christmas passed, then the New Year. The villagers wrenched themselves out of their lethargy and went on with their lives. The kivas were carefully sealed, for they would not be used again. Young people went out and looked for housing outside the pueblos. Quietly, almost serenely, the village began preparations for its own dissolution.

And then, one evening, a new kachina appeared, dancing in the twilight shadows across the square. He bore the image of a bright four-pointed blue star on a black case mask. Above the mask was a fan of feathers and below a ruff woven of Douglas fir branches. The kachina wore a red-brown kilt with a wide sash, wore black body paint except for yellow shoulders, forearms and calves, carried a yucca whip and rang a bell.

He brought a new message to the village. Yes, Hopi ceremonialism on Earth was to end as the prophesy foretold. But it would find a new birth on another world. The cycle of migration through the First, Second, Third and Fourth worlds had not ended. A Fifth World lay ahead.