Leslie Silko - Ceremony

Tayo and Robert laughed with him, but Rocky was quiet. He looked up from his books.

“Those books are written by scientists. They know everything there is to know about beef cattle. That’s the trouble with the way the people around here have always done things — they never knew what they were doing.” He went back to reading his book. He did not hesitate to speak like that, to his father and his uncle, because the subject was books and scientific knowledge — those things that Rocky had learned to believe in.

Tayo was suddenly sad because what Rocky said was true. What did they know about raising cattle? They weren’t scientists. Auntie had been listening but she did not seem to notice Rocky’s disrespect. She valued Rocky’s growing understanding of the outside world, of the books, of everything of importance and power. He was becoming what she had always wanted: someone who could not only make sense of the outside world but become part of it. She did not like the cattle business and she was pleased to have a scientific reason for the way she felt. This cattle deal was bound to be no good, because Ulibarri was a cousin to that whore. She was almost certain it was that woman who had been talking to Josiah, telling him things which were not true, things which did not agree with the scientific books that the BIA extension man had loaned them. But it was his money, and if that’s what he wanted to do with twenty years of money he saved up, then let him make a fool of himself.

“I think it was some kind of trick,” she told Rocky and Tayo one evening, when old Grandma was snoring in her chair. Auntie glanced over at her to be sure she was asleep before she said it. “That dirty Mexican woman did it so Ulibarri could get rid of those worthless cattle. They gypped him. They made an old fool out of him.”

Rocky did not hear her; he was reading a sports magazine. But Tayo had heard; he always listened to her, and now his stomach felt tense; he was afraid maybe she was right, because he already knew she was right about some things.

“One thing after another all the time.” She looked at Tayo, and he turned away and stared at old Grandma. Her mouth hung open a little when she slept, and occasionally he could hear a snoring sound.

“Well,” she said with a big sigh, “it will give them something else to laugh about.”

Rocky didn’t say anything; but when he turned the page he looked up at her as though he were tired of the sound of her voice. Tayo knew that what village people thought didn’t matter to Rocky any more. He was already planning where he would go after high school; he was already talking about the places he would live, and the reservation wasn’t one of them.

Auntie got out her black church shoes and wiped them carefully with a clean damp cloth, putting her finger inside the cloth and cleaning around each of the eyelets where the laces were strung; she examined them closely by the lamp on the table to make sure that any dust or spots of dirt left from last Sunday had been removed. She had gone to church alone, for as long as Tayo could remember; although she told him that she prayed they would be baptized, she never asked any of them, not even Rocky, to go with her. Later on, Tayo wondered if she liked it that way, going to church by herself, where she could show the people that she was a devout Christian and not immoral or pagan like the rest of the family. When it came to saving her own soul, she wanted to be careful that there were no mistakes.

Old Grandma woke up. She asked Auntie what she was doing. She asked Tayo and then Rocky. Auntie had to speak to Rocky because he didn’t hear old Grandma the first time when she asked him what he was doing. Then old Grandma straightened up in her chair.

“Church,” she said, wiping her eyes with a Kleenex from her apron pocket. “Ah Thelma, do you have to go there again?”

They unloaded the cows one by one, looking them over carefully. The cattle seemed thinner than the week before in Magdalena, but as Josiah said, you couldn’t expect Ulibarri to feed someone else’s stock. Tayo swung open the big gate to the cattle chute and Robert opened the door on the truck. They bolted down the ramp nimbly, and as each cow saw the open gate ahead, she lowered her head and snorted, racing out the opening. They kept running, and they didn’t stop to look back at the big truck or the corrals until they were a quarter mile away. They bunched up, wary and skittish; when the last cow had run into the little herd, they stood for a moment, staring at the windmills and corrals and at the men beside the truck. Then they took off, heading south in a steady, traveling gait. Tayo watched them disappear over the horizon, their ivory hides shining, speckled brown like a butterfly’s wing.

“They are really beautiful, aren’t they?” Josiah said.

Tayo nodded. The truck driver slammed the door and started the diesel engine. Robert joined them.

“Well?” Josiah said.

“Well, how far will they run?” Robert was smiling. “I haven’t seen anything so fast since the horse races at the State Fair.”

They had unloaded them on the Sedillo Grant because the grass was still good down there. Josiah wanted to give them a good start because they would be calving later on. But a week later, when they went to check on the cattle, they didn’t find them around the windmill where they had unloaded them. Ordinary cattle would have stayed near the water unless there had been rain or many other places for water. Josiah stopped the truck and got out; he pulled his leather work gloves from his hip pocket and put them on. Tayo untied the horses and opened the gate on the stock rack. He backed the big sorrel out first.

They rode south with the sun climbing up in the east, making the sky bright, almost blinding. There were no clouds and the air still smelled cool. He wanted to remember the morning, bright and clear as the leaves on the little green plants which grew low and close to the sandy ground. It had the clarity of the sky after a summer rainstorm, when the dust was washed away, and the colors of the hills and the shadows of the mesas had an intensity which made everything he saw accessible, as if he could touch all of it, even the little green rabbit weed growing close to the sand, its tiny leaves clustered like stars.

He looked over at Josiah. He was blowing little puffs of smoke from the thin cigarette he had rolled; he looked very satisfied too, as if he were satisfied with everything that morning, even that his cattle had wandered away. He was thinking about something. Probably the cattle. They’d left the windmill, so they would have to travel until they found more water. Herefords would not look for water. When a windmill broke down or a pool went dry, Tayo had seen them standing and waiting patiently for the truck or wagon loaded with water, or for riders to herd them to water. If nobody came and there was no snow or rain, then they died there, still waiting. But these Mexican cattle were different. Josiah grinned at Tayo and nodded. Tayo smiled and nodded back at him.

When they got to the Sedillo fence, they dismounted and walked along a thirty-foot section where the tracks crisscrossed and the cattle had milled around before they broke through the fence. There were tufts of hair snagged in the barbs of wire, and in some places a strand of wire had been pulled loose from a fence pole and was hanging slack like old clothesline.

“Well, I guess we have to expect this too,” he said, pulling some of the hairs loose from the wire and letting them blow away in the wind.

“What if they just keep going, you know, crossing fences all the way back to Mexico?”

“They try that the first two or three days after you move them, but they’ll settle down. We can handle them, Tayo.”