J. Jance - Kiss the Bees

During those two hours, doing mindless work, she was able to watch the animals from time to time and simply to be there with them. Working by herself, without the necessity of talking with anyone else, she remembered the times she had come here with Nana Dahdand with her brother Davy.

Nana Dahd. Dahd itself implies nothing more than the somewhat distant relationship of godmother, but for Davy and Lani both, Rita Antone had been much more than that. Diana Ladd Walker may have owned the official title of "Mother" in the family, but she had come in only a distant second behind the Indian woman who had actually filled the role.

Ambitious and forever concentrating on her work, there was a part of Diana Ladd Walker that was always separate from both her children. While Diana labored over first a typewriter and later a computer, the child-rearing joys and responsibilities had fallen mainly on Rita's capable and loving shoulders.

By the time Lani appeared on the scene, Davy was already eleven years old and Rita's health was becoming precarious. Had Davy not been there to pitch in and help out, no doubt it would have been impossible for Nana Dahd to look after a busily curious toddler. In a symbiotic relationship that made outsiders wonder, the three of them-the old woman, the boy, and the baby-had made do.

Long after most males his age would have forsaken the company of women, Davy stayed around. He, more than anyone, understood what it was Nana Dahd was trying to do, and he was willing to help. Whenever he wasn't in school, he spent most of his waking hours helping the woman who had once been his baby-sitter care for his little sister.

When the three of them were alone together in Rita's apartment-with the old woman in her wheelchair and with Lani on her lap while Davy did his homework at the kitchen table-it seemed as though they existed in a carefully preserved bubble that was somehow outside the confines of regular time and space.

In that room they had spoken, laughed, and joked together, speaking solely in the softly guttural language of the Tohono O'othham. It was there Lani learned that Nana Dahd's childhood name had been E Waila Kakaichu, which means Dancing Quail. Rita Antone's dancing days were long since over, but Lani's were only beginning. The child danced constantly. Her favorite game consisted of standing in the middle of the room, twirling and pretending to be siwuliki — whirlwind. She would spin around and around until finally, losing her balance, she would fall laughing to the floor.

Just as Rita had given Davy his Indian name of Olhoni — Little Orphaned Calf-Nana Dahd gave Lani a special Indian name as well, one that was known only to the three of them. In the privacy of Rita's apartment, the Tohono O'othham child with the Mil-gahn name of Dolores Lanita Walker became Mualig Siakam. Rita told Lani that the words mualig siakam meant Forever Spinning.

There in Nana Dahd' s room, working one stitch at a time, Rita taught Davy and Lani how to make baskets. Davy had been at it much longer, but Lani's tiny and surprisingly agile fingers soon surpassed her elder brother's clumsier efforts. When that happened, Davy Ladd gave up and stopped making baskets altogether.

Rita taught Davy and Lani the old stories and the medicinal lore Rita had learned from her own grandmother, from Oks Amichuda — Understanding Woman. Had Rita been physically able, she would have taken her charges out into the desert to show them the plants and animals she wanted them to understand. Instead, the three of them spent hours almost every weekend at the Arizona Sonora Desert Museum, with Davy pushing Nana Dahd' s chair along the gently graded paths and with Lani perched on the old woman's lap.

For Rita, every display in the museum was part of her comprehensive classroom. As they went from one exhibit to another, Rita would point out the various plants and tell what each was good for and when it should be picked. And on those long afternoons, if it was still wintertime, so the snakes and lizards were unable to hear and swallow the storyteller's luck, Rita would tell stories.

Each animal and plant came with its own traditional lore. Patiently, Nana Dahd told them all. Some tales explained the how of creation, like the spiders stitching together the floating pieces of earth. Others helped explain animal behavior, like the stories about how I'itoi taught the birds to build their nests or how he taught the gophers to dig their burrows underground. There were stories that did the same thing for plants, like the one about the courageous old woman who went south to rescue her grandson from the warlike Yaquis and was rewarded by being turned into the beautiful plant, the night-blooming cereus. And there were some, like the stories of how Cottontail and Quail both tricked Coyote, that were just for fun.

As the children learned the various stories, Rita had encouraged them to observe the behavior of the animals involved and to consider how the story and the animal's natural inclination came together to form the basis of the story. What was observable and what was told combined to help the children learn to make sense of their world, just as those same stories had for the Tohono O'othham for thousands of years.

Rita-her person, her stories, and her patient teaching-had formed the center of Lani Walker's existence from the moment the child first came to Gates Pass, from the time before she had any conscious memory. When Rita Antone died, the day before Lani's seventh birthday, a part of the child had died as well, but there on the paths of the museum the summer of her sixteenth year-wandering alone among the plants and animals that had populated Nana Dahd' s stories-Lani was able to recapture those fading strains of stories from her childhood and breathe life into them anew.

And each day at nine o'clock, when she finished up with one shift and had an hour to wait before the next one started, she would make sure she was near the door to the hummingbird enclosure. For it was there, of all the places in the museum, where she felt closest to Nana Dahd. This was where she and Davy had been with Rita on the day Lani Walker first remembered hearing Rita mention the story of Kulani O'oks — the great Medicine Woman of the Tohono O'othham.

"Kulani,"Lani had repeated, running the name over her tongue. "It sounds like my Mil-gahn name."

And Rita's warm brown face had beamed down at her in a way that told Lani she had just learned something important. Nana Dahd nodded. "That is why, at the time of your adoption, I asked your parents to make Lani part of your English name. Kulani O'oks and Mualig Siakam are two different names for the same person. And now that you are old enough to understand that, it is time that you heard that story as well."

Whenever Lani Walker sat in the hummingbird enclosure, all those stories seemed to flow together. Kulani O'oks and Mualig Siakam were one and the same, and so were Dolores Lanita Walker and Clemencia Escalante.

Four different people and four different names, but then Nana Dahd had always taught that all things in nature go in fours.

Fat Crack and Wanda Ortiz, Rita Antone's nephew and his wife, had stopped by the Walker home in Gates Pass on their way home from Tucson that warm September day. Wanda Ortiz, after years of staying at home with three kids, had gone off to school and earned a degree in social work from the University of Arizona. Her case load focused on "at risk" children on the reservation, and she had ridden into town earlier that day in an ambulance, along with one of her young charges.

"It's too bad," Wanda said, visiting easily with her husband's wheelchair-bound aunt in Diana Walker's spacious, basket-lined living room. "She has ant bites all over her body. The doctor says she may not make it."

At seventy-one, Rita Antone could no longer walk, having lost her left leg-from the knee down-to diabetes. She spent her days mostly in the converted cook shack out behind Diana and Brandon Walker's house. The words "cook shack" hardly applied any longer. The place was cozy and snug. It had been recently renovated, making the whole thing-including a once tiny bathroom-wheelchair-accessible. Evenings Rita spent in the company of Diana and Brandon Walker or with Davy Ladd, the long-legged eleven-year-old she still sometimes called her little Olhoni.