Leslie Silko - Ceremony

Harley was looking down the road with his head turned slightly to the side, listening to something.

“I think I hear a car. Yeah. Okay, Tayo.” Harley’s voice was excited. “If they stop for us, let’s leave the burro and the mule here. There’s a windmill over there. We can come back and get them later on.” Harley was already untying the rope around the burro’s neck to use for a hobble. Tayo could see the outline of a car coming from Acoma; it had an umbrella of road dust above it. Harley stood on the side of the road and started waving his arms to flag it down.

“Tuesday nights are slow,” the bartender said. Harley finished his second beer and joked with the bartender about how far they had come just for a cold beer. Tayo held onto the beer bottle, feeling moisture condense on his fingers. The bar didn’t change; whatever the color of the walls, they were always dirty, dark grime of stale beer and cigarette smoke; it always smelled the same too, a lingering odor of urine and vomit. Even the light bulb above the pool table shined dim soiled light. He was glad he noticed it now, before he drank the beer. He had seen the color of that light once before, but he had never been sure if it was the light or the beer he was drinking. He drank the beer slowly and waited to feel it spread from his belly, warming him all over. He finished the bottle and leaned back in the chair. He wanted to remember Rocky’s face again, and to think of them together.

Rocky was standing in a small clearing surrounded by thickets of scrub oak. It was still early in the fall and only a few of the coppery yellow leaves had fallen from the oaks. Tayo had to strain to see the deer in the tall yellow grass. He crossed a narrow dry gulley, and then he could see the antlers. He approached the deer slowly. It had fallen on its right side with its forelegs tucked under its belly; the hind legs were curled under to the left as if it were still sleeping in the grass. The eyes were still liquid and golden brown, staring at dark mountain dirt and dry oak leaves tangled in the grass.

When he was a little child he always wanted to pet a deer, and he daydreamed that a deer would let him come close and touch its nose. He knelt and touched the nose; it was softer than pussy willows, and cattails, and still warm as a breath. The bright blood in the nostrils was still wet. He touched the big mule-size ears, and they were still warm. He knew it would not last long; the eyes would begin to cloud and turn glassy green, then gray, sinking back in the skull. The nose would harden, and the ears would get stiff. But for that moment it was so beautiful that he could only stand and feel the presence of the deer; he knew what they said about deer was true.

Rocky was honing his knife; he tested the blade on a thread hanging from the sleeve of his jacket. The sun was settling down in the southwest sky above the twin peaks. It would be dark in an hour or so. Rocky rolled the carcass belly up and spread open the hind legs. When Tayo saw he was getting started, he looked at the eyes again; he took off his jacket and covered the deer’s head.

“Why did you do that?” asked Rocky, motioning at the jacket with the blade of his knife. Long gray hairs were matted into the blood on the blade. Tayo didn’t say anything, because they both knew why. The people said you should do that before you gutted the deer. Out of respect. But Rocky was funny about those things. He was an A-student and all-state in football and track. He had to win; he said he was always going to win. So he listened to his teachers, and he listened to the coach. They were proud of him. They told him, “Nothing can stop you now except one thing: don’t let the people at home hold you back.” Rocky understood what he had to do to win in the white outside world. After their first year at boarding school in Albuquerque, Tayo saw how Rocky deliberately avoided the old-time ways. Old Grandma shook her head at him, but he called it superstition, and he opened his textbooks to show her. But Auntie never scolded him, and she never let Robert or Josiah talk to him either. She wanted him to be a success. She could see what white people wanted in an Indian, and she believed this way was his only chance. She saw it as her only chance too, after all the village gossip about their family. When Rocky was a success, no one would dare to say anything against them any more.

Rocky slit the throat. Blood spilled over the grass and into the dirt; it splashed on his boots. He didn’t believe in drinking the warm blood as some hunters did. Tayo held a hind leg; it was beginning to get stiff. Rocky cut off the musk glands and testicles. He slit the belly open carefully, to avoid spilling the contents of the stomach. The body heat made steam in the cold air. The sun was down, and the twilight chill sucked the last of the deer’s life away — the eyes were dull and sunken; it was gone. Josiah and Robert came then and unloaded their rifles and leaned them against a scrub oak. They went to the deer and lifted the jacket. They knelt down and took pinches of cornmeal from Josiah’s leather pouch. They sprinkled the cornmeal on the nose and fed the deer’s spirit. They had to show their love and respect, their appreciation; otherwise, the deer would be offended, and they would not come to die for them the following year.

Rocky turned away from them and poured water from the canteen over his bloody hands. He was embarrassed at what they did. He knew when they took the deer home, it would be laid out on a Navajo blanket, and Old Grandma would put a string of turquoise around its neck and put silver and turquoise rings around the tips of the antlers. Josiah would prepare a little bowl of cornmeal and place it by the deer’s head so that anyone who went near could leave some on the nose. Rocky tried to tell them that keeping the carcass on the floor in a warm room was bad for the meat. He wanted to hang the deer in the woodshed, where the meat would stay cold and cure properly. But he knew how they were. All the people, even the Catholics who went to mass every Sunday, followed the ritual of the deer. So he didn’t say anything about it, but he avoided the room where they laid the deer.

They marked the place with Tayo’s T-shirt spread across the top of some scrub oaks. It was getting dark when they started hiking back to the truck. Tayo wrapped the liver and heart in the clean cheesecloth Josiah carried with him. An early winter moon was rising in front of them, and a chill wind came with it, penetrating feet and hands. Tayo held the bundle tighter. He felt humbled by the size of the full moon, by the chill wind that swept wide across the foothills of the mountain. They said the deer gave itself to them because it loved them, and he could feel the love as the fading heat of the deer’s body warmed his hands.

Harley slid another bottle of Coors across the table to him and said, “Hey, man, we didn’t come here to stare at the walls. We can do that anytime. We need some music.” He walked over to the juke box. “Something to get us happy right now.” Harley was a little nervous; he remembered the time Tayo went crazy in the bar and almost killed Emo. He remembered how Tayo had sat staring at the wall, not saying anything all afternoon while the rest of them had been laughing and drinking beer and telling Army stories. Harley told the others not to bother him, but they were drunk and they kept after him. Finally, Tayo jumped up and broke a beer bottle against the table; and before they could stop him, he shoved the jagged glass into Emo’s belly.

Tayo smiled and looked over at Harley. “I won’t push any broken bottle into your belly, Harley. Your belly’s too big anyway.”

Harley laughed. “You sure scared us that time, man. Skinny as you are, it took three guys to pull you off him.”