Leslie Silko - Ceremony

Tayo had never heard Robert talk that way before; he had never seen him angry before. Tayo felt lightheaded and weak. Robert sounded sad.

“You know how people are about things like that. White people are that way too. The Army might send someone to take you back.” Lightning flashed across the dark blue clouds, but for Tayo, the bolt zigzagged slowly up the dark mountain peaks of cloud, taking longer than Robert’s words had taken to reach him.

“Maybe if you came back for a while. You know, so they could see that you are all right. So you could talk to them, and then they could see what a liar Emo is.”

He nodded at Robert, but he was involved with other things: memories and shifting sounds heard in the night, diamond patterns, black on white; the energy of the designs spiraled deep, then protruded suddenly into three-dimensional summits, their depth and height dizzy and shifting with the eye.

Raindrops rattled on the hood of the pickup. Robert kicked at the left front tire; the recap was beginning to peel loose.

“Thanks,” Tayo said, “thanks for telling me.”

He watched Robert drive away. The rain ran down his hair into his shirt; it had grown below his ears and touched his neck. He thought of Emo then, always with a GI haircut.

“Death isn’t much,” she said. She was sitting on the sand, with her feet out straight in front, arranging short willow twigs into bundles, tying them with fluffy cotton string that she had twisted by hand. They had found a calf in the arroyo that morning; small black ants were already making trails across the head, from the nose to the eyes. The belly was bloating out as the sun climbed higher in the sky.

“Sometimes they don’t make it. That’s all. It isn’t very far away.” She looked up at him intently, and then continued.

“There are much worse things, you know. The destroyers: they work to see how much can be lost, how much can be forgotten. They destroy the feeling people have for each other.”

He took a deep breath; it hurt his chest. He thought of Josiah then, and Rocky.

“Their highest ambition is to gut human beings while they are still breathing, to hold the heart still beating so the victim will never feel anything again. When they finish, you watch yourself from a distance and you can’t even cry — not even for yourself.”

He recognized it then: the thick white skin that had enclosed him, silencing the sensations of living, the love as well as the grief; and he had been left with only the hum of the tissues that enclosed him. He never knew how long he had been lost there, in that hospital in Los Angeles.

“They are all around now. Only destruction is capable of arousing a sensation, the remains of something alive in them; and each time they do it, the scar thickens, and they feel less and less, yet still hungering for more.” She gathered up the bundles of twigs and started walking southwest.

“Old Betonie said there was some way to stop—”

“It all depends,” she said. “How far you are willing to go?”

They walked together over the sandy ridge above the wash, across stones that had tumbled down from the clay mortar of walls washed away by time, the geometric patterns of rooms and kivas flowing into the white arroyo sand, where even the shards of pottery were rolled to pebbles, all their colors and designs soaked back into the earth.

The position of the sun in the sky was delicate, transitional; and the season was unmistakable. The sky was the early morning color of autumn: Jemez turquoise, edged with thin quartz clouds. He breathed deeply, trying to inhale the immensity of it, trying to take it all inside himself, the way the arroyo sand swallowed time.

She was looking at Pa’to’ch, and the hair was blowing around her face. He could feel where she had come from, and he understood where she would always be.

The she-elk was bigger than life, painted in pale lavender clay on the south face of sandstone, along the base of the cliff. Her great belly was swollen with new life as she leaped across the yellow sandrock, startled forever across the curve of cliff rock, ears flung back to catch a sound behind her. The priests who painted her each year always cried when they stood back from the cliff and saw her. “A’moo’ooh! A’moo’ooh! you are so beautiful! You carry all that life! A’moo’ooh! With you, the cliff comes alive.”

They restacked the stones that had fallen. She laid the willow sticks she had tied inside the small square enclosure, and he laid a flat sandstone over the opening at the top. The rain and wind were overtaking her, rubbing away the details of her legs; the sun was bleaching her hooves into faint outlines, merging into the cliff.

“It’s almost gone,” he said.

“The clay is washing away,” she said. “Nobody has come to paint it since the war. But as long as you remember what you have seen, then nothing is gone. As long as you remember, it is part of this story we have together.”

They stayed until the sun had gone to the end of the valley and the she-elk was a dark blue shadow on the cliff.

She laid a dry piñon branch on the coals; smoke curled out of the gray scaly bark like woolly hair until yellow flames burst around it. He saw her face in the light that came suddenly and bright; she was crying. He wanted to kneel down and put his arms around her and tell her not to cry, but his connection with the ground was solid; his arms clasped his knees to his chest like arms of another person, pulling numb legs to a strange chest. Only his brain moved, wet and heavy against the contours of his skull, favoring curvatures of bone and concave niches. When he spoke, it was from a mouth independent of himself, and he had to listen to the sound of the words to know what he was saying.

“What is it? Why are you crying?” The anger in his voice surprised him. She looked at him. The skin on her face was darker where she had smeared the tears with the back of her hand.

“The end of the story. They want to change it. They want it to end here, the way all their stories end, encircling slowly to choke the life away. The violence of the struggle excites them, and the killing soothes them. They have their stories about us — Indian people who are only marking time and waiting for the end. And they would end this story right here, with you fighting to your death alone in these hills. Doctors from the hospital and the BIA police come. Some of the old men from Laguna come too. They drive over there in their patrol cars.” She pointed across the big arroyo to the place where the sandy wagon road was washed out. “They walk this way. The doctors have medicine to quiet you. The others bring guns. Emo has told them you are crazy, that you live in the cave here and you think you are a Jap soldier. They are all afraid of you.” Her eyes filled with tears again. “They’ll call to you. Friendly voices. If you come quietly, they will take you and lock you in the white walls of the hospital. But if you don’t go with them, they’ll hunt you down, and take you any way they can. Because this is the only ending they understand.”

“How do you know?”

His stomach churned up a hot taste in his throat. She stared up at the sky for a long time; a shooting star arched from west to east, scattering light behind it like dust on a trail. When she did not answer, he knew; like old Betonie, she could see reflections in sandrock pools of rainwater, images shifting in the flames of juniper fire; she heard voices, low and distant in the night.

“One thing,” she said finally, looking down at the red coals in the ring of white ash, “there are only a few others with Emo. The rest have been fooled; they’re being used. Tools. The Army people don’t know. They don’t know about stories or the struggle for the ending to the story. White people are always busy. They will ask themselves: what is one Indian veteran living in a cave in the middle of some reservation? They won’t have much time for you. The only reason they come is because Emo called them.”