Leslie Silko - Ceremony

“I don’t know, Grandma,” he had answered then. But now he knew.

He had been so close to it, caught up in it for so long that its simplicity struck him deep inside his chest: Trinity Site, where they exploded the first atomic bomb, was only three hundred miles to the southeast, at White Sands. And the top-secret laboratories where the bomb had been created were deep in the Jemez Mountains, on land the Government took from Cochiti Pueblo: Los Alamos, only a hundred miles northeast of him now, still surrounded by high electric fences and the ponderosa pine and tawny sandrock of the Jemez mountain canyon where the shrine of the twin mountain lions had always been. There was no end to it; it knew no boundaries; and he had arrived at the point of convergence where the fate of all living things, and even the earth, had been laid. From the jungles of his dreaming he recognized why the Japanese voices had merged with Laguna voices, with Josiah’s voice and Rocky’s voice; the lines of cultures and worlds were drawn in flat dark lines on fine light sand, converging in the middle of witchery’s final ceremonial sand painting. From that time on, human beings were one clan again, united by the fate the destroyers planned for all of them, for all living things; united by a circle of death that devoured people in cities twelve thousand miles away, victims who had never known these mesas, who had never seen the delicate colors of the rocks which boiled up their slaughter.

He walked to the mine shaft slowly, and the feeling became overwhelming: the pattern of the ceremony was completed there. He knelt and found an ore rock. The gray stone was streaked with powdery yellow uranium, bright and alive as pollen; veins of sooty black formed lines with the yellow, making mountain ranges and rivers across the stone. But they had taken these beautiful rocks from deep within earth and they had laid them in a monstrous design, realizing destruction on a scale only they could have dreamed.

He cried the relief he felt at finally seeing the pattern, the way all the stories fit together — the old stories, the war stories, their stories — to become the story that was still being told. He was not crazy; he had never been crazy. He had only seen and heard the world as it always was: no boundaries, only transitions through all distances and time.

He turned. The moon was rising above the last mesa he had crossed from the east. A transition was about to be completed: the sun was crossing the zenith to a winter place in the sky, a place where prayers of long winter nights would call out the long summer days of new growth. Tonight the old priests would be praying for the force to continue the relentless motion of the stars. But there were others who would be working this night, casting loose countermotions to suck in a great spiral, swallowing the universe endlessly into the black mouth, their diagrams in black ash on cave walls outlining the end in motionless dead stars. But he saw the constellation in the north sky, and the fourth star was directly above him; the pattern of the ceremony was in the stars, and the constellation formed a map of the mountains in the directions he had gone for the ceremony. For each star there was a night and a place; this was the last night and the last place, when the darkness of night and the light of day were balanced. His protection was there in the sky, in the position of the sun, in the pattern of the stars. He had only to complete this night, to keep the story out of the reach of the destroyers for a few more hours, and their witchery would turn, upon itself, upon them.

Arrowboy got up after she left.

He followed her into the hills

up where the caves were.

The others were waiting.

They held the hoop

and danced around the fire

four times.

The witchman stepped through the hoop

he called out that he would be a wolf.

His head and upper body became hairy like a wolf

But his lower body was still human.

“Something is wrong,” he said.

“Ck’o’yo magic won’t work

if someone is watching us.”

The headlights appeared suddenly from the northeast, tiny points of light, blinking as the vehicle bounced over the road. The small hairs on his neck bristled, but he reasoned with himself: many land-grant people and white ranchers used that road too. He would know soon if the vehicle kept going west or if it turned south down the sandy road overgrown with weeds, and came toward the mine. Cold moved over him when the headlights turned, bigger now, visibly weaving down the road; he could hear the hum of the engine now. They were coming.

He ran past the shaft to the boulders that had been bulldozed away from the opening. The night was getting colder; he could see the steam from his breath in the moonlight. He climbed up boulders big as boxcars and squeezed himself into a hollow space between them. It was warm there, the sandrock still held the sun’s heat. He leaned forward and pressed his forehead against the narrow opening so that he could see everything.

He expected Leroy’s pickup truck, but as the vehicle rounded the last curve before the mine, he could see it was a car. For an instant he thought it might be land-grant people, and his muscles tensed, ready to jump down and run to flag them down for a ride. But there was something too familiar about the sound the car made, a broken muffler sound he had heard before. Emo.

Someone got out and raised the car hood. The other door opened and two more got out. He could hear voices and the sound of water splashing on the ground. He recognized Pinkie’s laugh. He smelled a fire and saw three figures bending over a small fire. It flared up suddenly and he saw their faces: Leroy, Pinkie, and Emo. But Harley was missing. They were feeding dry tumbleweeds to the fire, holding them high over their heads and circling the fire before they let go and the tumbleweeds exploded into fiery balls that lighted up the area around the windmill where the car was parked. They had a bottle they passed between them, and Leroy staggered when he walked down the old barbed-wire fence, gathering tumbleweed tangled in the bottom wire. Pinkie pounded on the hood of the car, and the metallic booming echoed against the sandstone across the narrow valley.

Tayo’s knees and elbows hurt from resting against the rock. He dropped to his belly and pulled his head back, away from the crack between the rocks. The destroyers. They would be there all night, he knew it, working for drought to sear the land, to kill the livestock, to stunt the corn plants and squash in the gardens, leaving the people more and more vulnerable to the lies; and the young people would leave, go to towns like Albuquerque and Gallup where bitterness would overwhelm them, and they would lose their hope and finally themselves in drinking.

The witchery would be at work all night so that the people would see only the losses — the land and the lives lost — since the whites came; the witchery would work so that the people would be fooled into blaming only the whites and not the witchery. It would work to make the people forget the stories of the creation and continuation of the five worlds; the old priests would be afraid too, and cling to ritual without making new ceremonies as they always had before, the way they still made new Buffalo Dance songs each year.

Emo pulled down the collapsed frame of the watchman’s shed and threw the boards on the fire. The flames extended the circle of light. Pinkie dropped the tire iron; it clattered down the front fender to the ground. They stood behind the car, passing the bottle, taking long swallows, pointing over to the mine shaft and into the rocks where he was hiding. He wondered if they knew he was there, or if they were only planning something else. He wondered if they had tracked him like a thirsty animal, certain they would find him near the only source of water in that area.