Leslie Silko - Ceremony

Tayo got up to leave after he heard Josiah’s truck pull out of the yard. But before he got out the door, Auntie turned around and looked at him; she didn’t seem to care if old Grandma heard what she said or not. “I was always happy he didn’t get married,” she said grimly, “but now, worse things are happening. The way he goes off every night reminds me of our old dog, Pepper. That dog was the same way every time a female dog was in heat. Just like that. I try to tell him to stay with our own kind; but he doesn’t listen to me. That woman is after anything she can get now.” Old Grandma nodded her head and said, “That’s right, that’s what will happen.” Auntie sat down on the bench by the table, triumphantly. She folded and refolded the damp dishcloth on the table in front of her. Tayo was aware of how dim the room was then with no light except the faint twilight still coming in the windows.

“Remember what happened to that dog?” She seemed to be talking to both of them, although Tayo had never even seen Pepper. Her voice seemed to come from every part of the room. “Pepper got run over on the highway, chasing some she-dog in heat.”

He remembered when his mother died. It had been dry then too. The day they buried her the wind blew gusts of sand past the house and rattled the loose tin on the roof. He never forgot that sound and the sand, stinging his face at the graveyard while he stood close to Josiah. He kept his head down, staring at small round pebbles uncovered by the wind. Josiah held his hand as they walked away from the graveyard. He lifted him into the front seat of the truck and gave him a candy cane left over from Christmas. He told him not to cry any more.

He knew the holy men had their ways during the dry spells. People said they climbed the trails to the mountaintops to look west and southwest and to call the clouds and thunder. They studied the night skies from the mountaintops and listened to the winds at dawn. When they came back down they would tell the people it was time to dance for rain. Josiah never told him much about praying, except that it should be something he felt inside himself. So that last summer, before the war, he got up before dawn and rode the bay mare south to the spring in the narrow canyon. The water oozed out from the dark orange sandstone at the base of the long mesa. He waited for the sun to come over the hills. He tied the mare to a juniper tree at the mouth of the canyon, and walked up the narrow trail, with the cliffs closer on both sides as he walked farther into the canyon. The canyon was full of shadows when he reached the pool. He had picked flowers along the path, flowers with yellow long petals the color of the sunlight. He shook the pollen from them gently and sprinkled it over the water; he laid the blossoms beside the pool and waited. He heard the water, flowing into the pool, drop by drop from the big crack in the side of the cliff. The things he did seemed right, as he imagined with his heart the rituals the cloud priests performed during a drought. Here the dust and heat began to recede; the short grass and stunted corn seemed distant.

The air smelled damp and it was cool even after the sun got high enough to shine into the canyon. The dark orange sandstone formation held springs like this one, all along the base of the sandstone where wind and erosion had cut narrow canyons into the rock. These springs came from deep within the earth, and the people relied upon them even when the sky was barren and the winds were hot and dusty.

The spider came out first. She drank from the edge of the pool, careful to keep the delicate eggs sacs on her abdomen out of the water. She retraced her path, leaving faint crisscrossing patterns in the fine yellow sand. He remembered stories about her. She waited in certain locations for people to come to her for help. She alone had known how to outsmart the malicious mountain Ka’t’sina who imprisoned the rain clouds in the northwest room of his magical house. Spider Woman had told Sun Man how to win the storm clouds back from the Gambler so they would be free again to bring rain and snow to the people. He knew what white people thought about the stories. In school the science teacher had explained what superstition was, and then held the science textbook up for the class to see the true source of explanations. He had studied those books, and he had no reasons to believe the stories any more. The science books explained the causes and effects. But old Grandma always used to say, “Back in time immemorial, things were different, the animals could talk to human beings and many magical things still happened.” He never lost the feeling he had in his chest when she spoke those words, as she did each time she told them stories; and he still felt it was true, despite all they had taught him in school — that long long ago things had been different, and human beings could understand what the animals said, and once the Gambler had trapped the storm clouds on his mountaintop.

When the shadows were gone, and the cliff rock began to get warm, the frogs came out from their sleeping places in small cracks and niches in the cliff above the pool. They were the color of the moss near the spring, and their backs were spotted the color of wet sand. They moved slowly into the sun, blinking their big eyes. He watched them dive into the pool, one by one, with a graceful quiet sound. They swam across the pool to the sunny edge and sat there looking at him, snapping at the tiny insects that swarmed in the shade and grass around the pool. He smiled. They were the rain’s children. He had seen it happen many times after a rainstorm. In dried up ponds and in the dry arroyo sands, even as the rain was still falling, they came popping up through the ground, with wet sand still on their backs. Josiah said they could stay buried in the dry sand for many years, waiting for the rain to come again.

Dragonflies came and hovered over the pool. They were all colors of blue — powdery sky blue, dark night blue, shimmering with almost black iridescent light, and mountain blue. There were stories about the dragonflies too. He turned. Everywhere he looked, he saw a world made of stories, the long ago, time immemorial stories, as old Grandma called them. It was a world alive, always changing and moving; and if you knew where to look, you could see it, sometimes almost imperceptible, like the motion of the stars across the sky.

The horse was dozing under the tree. Her left hind foot was flexed and resting on the toe, the way horses did when they had to stand in one place for a long time. He rode slowly through the groves of dry sunflower stalks left over from better years, and it was then he saw a bright green hummingbird shimmering above the dry sandy ground, flying higher and higher until it was only a bright speck. Then it was gone. But it left something with him; as long as the hummingbird had not abandoned the land, somewhere there were still flowers, and they could all go on.

The next day he watched the clouds gather on the west horizon; by the next morning the sky was full of low dark rain clouds. They loaded the shovels and hoes into the back of the truck and went to the fields. While they waited, they pulled weeds around the chili plants and shoveled dirt around the low places in the rows of corn where the water might be lost. When they stopped to eat the bread and tamales Auntie had packed for them, they could hear a low rumble of thunder in the distance, from the direction of Tse-pi’na, Mount Taylor. The wind came up from the west, smelling cool like wet clay, Then he could see the rain. It was spinning out of the thunderclouds like gray spider webs and tangling against the foothills of the mountain. They joined the other people who had fields there, by the main ditch, and nobody went back to work after lunch. They stood around, smiling and joking, keeping an eye on the clouds overhead while they waited. As the first big drops began to splatter down on the leaves of the corn plants, making loud rattling sounds, Josiah motioned for Tayo to walk to the truck with him. The rain made a steady thumping sound on the cab of the truck. Josiah wrote in the little spiral notebook he carried in his shirt pocket; he tore out the blue-lined page and folded it carefully.