Leslie Silko - Ceremony

The smell of mountain sage surrounded him, and he realized he had skidded through a sage bush; twigs of sage and oak leaves were caught in his hair and crumbled down the back of his neck. When he tried to move, the inside of his head pounded; so he lay flat and spat out the gritty mountain clay. His ribs hurt when he breathed, but he could move his fingers and lift both legs. He closed his eyes, telling himself that he could afford to rest a while longer, lying to himself the way he had on cold winter mornings when the room was still dark and there was no fire in the stove.

“Where were you going so goddamn fast?” The voice was hostile, and it had a drawling Texan sound. He raised himself up on one hand and looked at them. They were both tall and lanky, with light brown hair; and except for their faces they were the same: boots scuffed and dusty, jeans faded to the same shade of blue; even their shirt-sleeves were rolled to the elbow in the same manner. But the one with the narrow face was agitated and angry. He kept demanding to know what Tayo was doing there.

“Poaching deer?” he said, stepping so close to Tayo’s hand that he could feel weeds, crushed by the boot, pressing against his fingers; and for an instant he thought he might step on his hand to make him talk.

“Maybe you were rustling yourself a little beef, huh?”

He would let them believe anything they wanted. The other man had a small round face and no chin, but his eyes were calm.

“Are you hurt?” he said. “Can you stand up?” He put his hand on Tayo’s left arm and squatted down beside him to get a better grip. Tayo kept thinking about the cattle and the gaping hole in the fence; but they didn’t act as if they had noticed anything except him. Behind the drumming pain inside his head, he had one thought: to keep them occupied with him, to keep them away from the next ridge.

“You better go back for the truck,” the cowboy with the round face said. “I think he might be hurt.”

“Shit! There’s nothing wrong with the son of a bitch! Let him ride behind the saddle with me.”

As they pulled him to his feet, his vision spun away, pulling his head into a shower of bright lights. He stumbled against the big palomino; it snorted and shied away.

“Whoa! You jackass! Whoa!” They boosted him up, behind the creamy-colored tooled leather saddle. His ears buzzed and he had to grip the saddle strings tightly to stay erect. The horse sidestepped nervously, feeling the awkward load shifting from side to side on its back. Just as the Texan swung his long thin leg over the saddle, Tayo leaned over and vomited all over the sagebrush.

The pain swelled out of his head, pounding through his ears until it hit his belly, and waves of nausea surged up. The sun was going down, and the round-faced man was hunched over on a boulder, with his back to the cold wind. He had his hands in his pockets and was chewing tobacco, working his jaws furiously and spitting savagely, sending the brown juice all over the ground around his feet. He saw that Tayo was awake, but he didn’t speak. The skin on the cowboy’s face was wrinkled; it had been rubbed dry and red by the wind and sun. Under the blue bandanna he wore around his throat, the skin was still milky and tender. He wasn’t much older than Tayo; maybe they both had been in the war together. He acted as if he wanted to forget the whole thing and let the Indian go. But the Texan had gone back for the truck; he wanted to take the Indian back. Maybe because their boss expected them to do something once in a while: shoot a coyote or catch a Mexican. But it was getting late, and the wind was bitter with the snowstorm that had masked the peaks. It would be dark by the time they got him back to the ranch headquarters, and then they would have to drive him all the way to the jail in Grants. It was a lot of trouble just for an Indian; maybe it would be too much trouble, and they would let him go.

Black pebbles and the ancient gray cinders the mountain had thrown poked into his backbone. He closed his eyes but did not sleep. He felt cold gusts of wind scattering dry oak leaves in the grass. He listened to the cowboy collect tobacco juice in his mouth and the squirting liquid sound when he spat. He was aware of the center beneath him; it soaked into his body from the ground through the torn skin on his hands, covered with powdery black dirt. The magnetism of the center spread over him smoothly like rainwater down his neck and shoulders; the vacant cool sensation glided over the pain like feather-down wings. It was pulling him back, close to the earth, where the core was cool and silent as mountain stone, and even with the noise and pain in his head he knew how it would be: a returning rather than a separation. He was relieved because he feared leaving people he loved. But lying above the center that pulled him down closer felt more familiar to him than any embrace he could remember; and he was sinking into the elemental arms of mountain silence. Only his skull resisted; and the resistance increased the pain to a shrill whine. He visualized each piece of his own skull, fingering each curve, each hollow, testing its thickness for a final thin membrane worn thin by time and the witchery of dead ash and mushroomed bullets. He searched thin walls, weak sutures of spindle bones above the ear for thresholds. He knew if he left his skull unguarded, if he let himself sleep, it would happen: the resistance would leak out and take with it all barriers, all boundaries; he would seep into the earth and rest with the center, where the voice of the silence was familiar and the density of the dark earth loved him. He could secure the thresholds with molten pain and remain; or he could let go and flow back. It was up to him.

He heard the truck motor stop and doors slam. The voices were muffled by the distance, but the Texan had not come back alone.

“Hey! I found something! Remember those lion tracks we found last spring? Well there’s fresh ones all over the place! Around the number twelve windmill. A big son of a bitch! Tracks the size of my palm!” The new voice was high pitched with excitement.

The cowboy got up from the boulder stiffly and spat out the last of the tobacco wad.

“Well, what about this guy?” he said. “I thought you wanted to take him in.”

The Texan cleared his throat. “Shit,” he said, “greasers and Indians — we can run them down anytime. But it’s been a couple of years since anybody up here got a mountain lion.”

“Okay, okay. You were the one that wanted to mess with him, not me.”

“Shit, by the time we got him back, the lion would be long gone.”

“Just leave him where he is and let’s go get the lion hounds before it gets dark.”

“Yeah, we taught him a lesson,” the Texan said, his voice fading in and out with the wind. “These goddamn Indians got to learn whose property this is!”

When he woke up again they were gone, and the wind had calmed down; but the air was heavy and damp. The sky was full of storm clouds. The pain and the pounding inside his head were gone, but when he sat up he had to move slowly to avoid jarring the soreness inside his skull. His feet and hands were numb from the cold, and his legs were stiff from lying still so long. He sat rubbing his legs and feet, with a cold breeze at his back. If he went a few yards over the top of the ridge, he would be in the scrub oaks, out of the storm.

The oaks grew thick and close to the ground. He knelt at the edge of the thicket, looking until he found a narrow winding trail through the fringes of oak. The deer made trails through every thicket, and some of the big thickets had two or three trails running parallel to the top of the ridge; they moved into the thickets after sunrise and spent their days in the thickets, sleeping and feeding on acorns, crossing a clearing only to reach another stand of scrub oak. The leaves accumulated in deep layers of years, and his feet sank under the new copper leaves that had already fallen this year. The deer made beds in shallow niches deep within the thickets where the oaks grew tall and made canopies of limbs and branches.