PROLOGUE

A long time after their awakening from the bundles, the goddesses began to be unhappy with their lives and with each other. Uretsete, who was now called Iyatiku, Corn Woman, saw that Naotsete was always trying to get the better of her. She noticed that Naotsete would go off and spend long times alone, avoiding her company. She saw that they were not as happy as they had been. Iyatiku would go to Naotsete and would try to comfort her. She would ask Naotsete why she had changed.

Iyatiku and Naotsete had awakened at the same time, but Iyatiku liked to believe that she was the elder. Once, Naotsete complained that Iyatiku had gotten to bring more of the things in her bundle to life than she, Naotsete had. She wanted a chance to use her bundle more often. But Iyatiku argued. She said, “No, I am oldest. That’s why I use the things in my basket more.”

“That’s not true,” Naotsete had said. “We were sung to life at the same time, long ago, when they called you by another name. Don’t you remember that?”

But Iyatiku was adamant. She enjoyed singing the things in her bundle into life, and instructing them in their proper ways. She didn’t enjoy it as much when Naotsete did the instructing. Because of this, she would not admit that they were the same age.

Naotsete said, “Let us have a test to see which one of us is right. Tomorrow, when the sun rises, let’s see who it shines upon first. I say it will strike us both at the same time, for we were created equally.”

Iyatiku agreed to this. But she worried that Naotsete was going to trick her somehow, and make the sun strike her first. To outwit her sister, she went to the magpie and instructed it to fly far to the east, not stopping for any reason, and to spread its wings over the rising sun in such a fashion that it would shadow Naotsete from the sun’s rays. The magpie agreed. But on its flight it stopped for food at a place where a puma had killed a deer. And in its haste to eat, it got the deer’s blood on its back, wings and tail, but did not notice. It flew on as instructed, arriving at the sun’s house in plenty of time. Placing its wing over the door of the sun’s house, it made a shadow that would shield Naotsete from the sun’s rays. So the sun shone on Iyatiku first, and triumphant, she claimed to be the elder. When the magpie returned, Iyatiku punished it for stopping to eat, contrary to her instructions. “From now on,” she scolded, “you will not know how to kill your own meat. You will have to eat only what others have killed, and much of the time that meat will be rotted. And you will carry forever the blood stains that are splattered all over you now.”

So the unhappiness between them grew. Naotsete spent more and more time alone, roaming the hills and the plains, even staying away for weeks. Once in her wanderings when she felt very lonely, she lay on a rock to watch the sun as it rose over the desert floor. It moved toward her, streams of light. In rose bright joy and power it grew toward the mesa she lay on. Slowly, the sun, Utset, sometimes called Uretsete, came. Filled with longing, Naotsete lay, legs opened to the light. She raised her hips so that her vulva was open, exposed to the rosebright rays as they came toward her. She held the lips of her vulva wide as the sun fell upon her thighs. She let it enter her womb. She lay there, open to the bright, warm splendor of the sun until it was gone, passing over her head on its way. After it was gone she lay for a long time, waiting.

In the proper time, Naotsete gave birth to twin sons. Iyatiku was with her and helped her in her labor. She helped Naotsete with rearing them. But the Spider came to them, angry that the twins had been born. They had been instructed to avoid pregnancy. Indeed, they had no need of children at that time, for they had much work to do. The Spider, She Who Dreams, told them that since they had chosen to follow their own inclinations instead of her instructions, they would be on their own from that time. “I will not help you in your work anymore since you have seen fit to take things into your own hands,” she said. This did not distress Iyatiku and Naotsete, who indeed were glad to be left to their own decisions. So the women lived happily enough while the boys grew up. Naotsete gave one of them to Iyatiku as her own son, and for some time the tasks of rearing and instructing them took the women’s attention and they were content with their lives and with one another.

But the trouble between them had not been completely banished, and after some time they became unhappy with each other again. At last, after thinking long about their trouble, Naotsete, Sun Woman, said to Iyatiku, “We aren’t happy together. I think we should share whatever we still have in our bundles and then separate. I have many things left in my bundle. Look,” she said, “here are domestic animals. I will share them with you, but remember that they will take much caring for.”

Iyatiku refused the animals saying, “No, I don’t think I want them. It will be too much trouble to care for them, and my children won’t need them,” she said.

Naotsete looked again into her bundle and found some seeds that had not yet been planted. They were seeds of wheat and certain vegetables and fruit trees. She said, “Here are some seeds we have not yet planted. These too take much care, but I will share them with you.”

Iyatiku again refused the offer. She did not want them, and she thought that those plants she had already planted would be fine for her children. “See,” she said, “I will not need those plants. I have corn and squash, beans and pumpkins already. I have tobacco and other foods as well. It will be enough,” she said.

In Naotsete’s bundle were many metals, and these she offered to Iyatiku saying, “I will share these metals with you, but remember that the use of them will entail much work.” Iyatiku, Mother of the Indians, again refused these, thinking that she and her children had all they needed from her own bundle, and that Naotsete’s offers might be tricks.

When Naotsete had looked very deeply into her bundle, she found something with writing on it. She offered this to Iyatiku, but again Iyatiku refused. Naotsete said, “There are many things that are good for food in my bundle, but I know that all of them will require much caring for. Why is it, sister, that you are not thankful? Why do you refuse to take any of what I have offered? I am going to leave you. We both realize that we will give life to a great many of our own kind, and in a long time from now we shall meet again, and even though much will have changed with us we will still be sisters. If you take none of the things I have offered you, I will have the best of you in that later time, and again we will be troubled in our hearts with one another. I don’t want it to be like that when that time comes.”

But Iyatiku persisted in her refusal, saying that she did not want any of the trouble that Naotsete’s gifts would entail.

So, taking the child she loved with her, Naotsete went away to the East. Iyatiku stayed on where they had always been and she was sorrowful and lonely for a long long time. But she comforted herself as best she might, saying often to her son, who Naotsete had left with her, “Let us live here with all that the Spider has given us.” Thus they lived alone for a long time, until the boy grew up. When he was grown, he became Iyatiku’s husband, and she named him Ti’a’muni. Then she bore many children and the first, a girl, she named for Naotsete’s clan, Sun clan.

Now Iyatiku came fully into her power. She did all her work in the ways she had been instructed: she took the babies when they were four days old and held them up to the sun as she had been taught when she came into the light, and she put pollen and corn meal that she had empowered with her own breath into each infant’s hand. She taught this to every child she bore. And the brothers and the sisters all lived together, marrying one another and having children of their own. Iyatiku was the Mother and ruled.

And whenever a girl was born to Iyatiku, she gave it the name of a clan, teaching each the ways of the people as the Spider had instructed her so long before.

After A Longtime, Naiya Iyatiku Went Away

She lived on an island in the center of the lake. Her house was closed to everyone. Only the outside cacique was allowed to see her. He took her instructions and gave them to the people and the katsina as she commanded.

The people lived around the lake, near her. But she was seldom seen by them from the time she had ordered the villages and the caciques, named the clans and instructed the people in all of the rituals. She put her power into the sacred ears of corn, so that they might use that power when they had need. Only the cheani and the outside cacique would use it in the power ways.

When she made the corn maiden, she told the outside cacique to guard her house. No one was to come near. The path to her door was made of white abalone shell. It lay, soft and pale, tinged with pink, open to the sun and rain, open to the moon. Only Iyatiku walked upon it. Only she watched it, and only she knew what it meant. When she made the corn maiden, she took the power that was in the pale, glistening shell and placed it within the hollowed ear. She placed honey in the hollow, to bathe the shell in, to keep its glisten, its light. She breathed her breath into the hollow. She made the opening secure. When she did this, she remembered Naotsete, who was gone to the East, to the place of the sun’s brightness. Remembering her sister, she breathed and she sealed the corn maiden. She gave it to the outside cacique. She told him that its power was love. It was the bond of honey and of golden morning light.

She instructed the people, in the last days of her tenure in their world. She taught them dances and prayers. She taught them the proper use of the corn maiden. She gave them dances for their pleasure. She gave them toys for their entertainment, and taught them games to play with them. This was after the people had moved to the beautiful white village she had designed and helped them build. She had told them to move there where they could raise their growing numbers in peace. Where there was sufficient land and good pasture. Where there would be sufficient rain, as long as they remained peaceful and respected her and her creations.

But good living affected them. After they learned to dance for pleasure, after they mastered the games, the young men among them got the idea that they could make up a game of their own. They made up a game that they could play in the kiva. It was a gambling game. They became so interested in this gambling that they forgot to go to the ceremonies. They neglected to pray. They forgot to plant the prayer-sticks. They stayed in the kiva sometimes during the dances.

And while they gambled they began to make up songs about the women, songs ridiculing the aunties and the clan mothers. Iyatiku was angry. And some of the old men were angry too. But the young men continued to sing their songs of ridicule and dishonor. They kept playing the gambling game. They got worse and worse, finally making songs that ridiculed Iyatiku, and when the outside cacique heart about it, he scolded them. He told them they must stop. Stop the gambling. Stop the songs.

They did not gamble or sing the shameful songs while he was in the kiva, but when he would leave they would resume. They even said that playing the game was more likely to result in gain to the players than the ceremonies of Iyatiku ever could. And hearing this, Iyatiku was angry. She said, “Then, if this is the way you are thinking, I will leave you to yourselves. Then you may see if it is not due to my teachings and my rules that you have prospered and have all that you will ever need.” She told them she would disappear from their lives and remain silent. They would not hear from her again. And when she had spoken, Naiya Iyatiku disappeared.

But she told the outside cacique to keep watch over the people, “For they are my children, and I am always their Naiya Iyatiku. I will wait for them at Shipap, there in the center place, and I will greet them when their life is over.”

This was the first time death was mentioned among them.

When Tommy died, the cheani, priests, had remembered him, her baby. Stephen had seen to that. He told her about doing that as he sat with her in her grieving. But she could not even thank the men who had done whatever they had done. She did not know what that might be. Only that the child had been with her and then had gone. She no longer longed to be reborn.

Still it was true, even in that brief space, that she had loved him. Probably too well. That’s what the Christians would say. He had been perfect, brightness, the light of her eyes. He had loved the light, had gone in search of it, could not agree to darkness. That was what she had said, what she had believed.

But some had whispered about the little people. Maybe it was they who had claimed him. And there were those who had wondered about other things. About the hauntings or whatever they were, the strange, half real, half unreal visitations that too often had shocked her from her drowse, or from full sleep. The beings who were taking aim for her. Firing. She had thought they existed only in some dream space, but Thomas had assured her that she had not been asleep on one particular occasion when they came. Only she could see those beings, whose green, green arrows were aimed at her head. And she was helpless to stop them. She did not know what to do.

And some thought that the baby had taken the blow meant for her, the blow, curse, hex, whatever it was, taken it to deflect it from her, from the rest. Tommy had loved the light, that was true. He had chosen, perhaps, to just go home. The men in the kiva were silent about it. She did not go to confession to ask the Catholic priest. There had been no sin she could confess. Bless me father, for I have sinned. They say I was born a witch. Didn’t they say that witches’ babies die?

The spirit guide had said that the tiny bright baby had never been. But how could that be? Who had she held, then. Fed and sung to? Who had come from her own womb, hidden there behind his brother? Who had been the one the doctor wouldn’t believe, all the long months of her pregnancy, was there? Who was it then that she mourned?

There were those who would never accept her grief. Would know that the dead child was a boy, and so was not to be mourned. Some of those, she knew, who were secretly glad. And others, glad for other reasons, that she did not know. Perhaps one of their arrows, realization of their anger, envy, the arrows that were so glowingleering green, appeared from the time she had not yet lived. Perhaps one of them, thinking evil in her direction, had aimed for her, for what was bright, for what was male, and he had died. Didn’t jealous witches kill someone’s babies?

Or perhaps it was as the doctors said. He had died because he could not breathe.

The Place Where The Four Sides Meet

The katsina had appeared near the meadow where Ephanie had been standing. She saw him and walked to his side. He was very tall and wore a mask. It was carved out of soft wood and painted. It was snouted with a long snout, the lip edges painted black. Or was it a mask. Or was it just how he looked. There was one horn that curved upward from the right side of the mask’s crown. The eyes were ringed black. He wore spruce branches in a ruff around his neck. His body was painted white, with black stripes at elbow, forearm and wrist. She could see that his skin hung loosely from his arms. He showed her the convergence of four rivers. He indicated that the rivers were associated, identified, with the convergence of four books, and that the rivers and the books each flowed from one of the four directions, coming together as a cross. But they became one river, one book in a place they all met. She watched this, the coming together place that seemed eternal, infinite, still, trying to understand. He said that when the four waters had merged she would marry.

Long after that dream she understood. In her small quiet alone room, hunched within her books and papers, she read something and understood something that made it clear. The katsina was showing her the origin. The place of the mother. Shipap. The place of memory, the place of dream. The place where all rain, all knowledge, all connection comes from. The place that first and finally is home.

Stephen had been nearby in the dream. He had stood to one side, near a rise. The others stood on the rise and beyond it. He wore wedding clothes. White pants, a red shirt belted with the green, red and white woven belt of the people. He wore turquoise and silver jewelry and tall, soft moccasins. Maybe he was her guide to that place. Maybe he was the witness. Maybe he was the cheani, the priest.

Years before the time of her alonebeing, before she met, married Thomas, she had that dream. She had looked in shops and books in the years since then, searching for that katsina, his representation, but she had only seen a picture of one mask that resembled the one he wore. She had never seen a kachina doll made up to look like he appeared in that dream. After a while she had given up thinking about it. Dreams don’t mean much, she had thought then, even when they were about the messengers of the gods.

But the sound and smell of the water. The image of the old spirit man’s arm, halfway between elbow and shoulder, stayed clear in her mind over the years. In heaven, the Christians said, there is no time. The sagging, crepey skin told her that the katsina was very old.

Later On, She Went Home

It had to happen sometime. She had seen it in the apple tree that lay on the ground, split, almost dead. And in the tiny spring that used to be fresh, clear, cold, now scummy. She supposed she’d known all along how deep it went, that knife, looking in Teresa’s eyes. She and Teresa had stopped for coffee on their way back to California after a visit to Guadalupe. The visit had released a certain strangeness in Ephanie’s mind, stirring memories, fusing understandings of things she had run so far to deny.

Ephanie’s eyes registered Teresa’s face with affection. Over the years of their friendship she had grown very fond of the planes and lines of it, the pale, freckled skin, the wide blue-green eyes that slanted slightly at the tips. It was a sturdy face, broad and flat, framed by lank, dark hair that curled slightly in a damper climate, but here in the dry air, hung heavy almost to Teresa’s shoulders. Ephanie had felt very warm and safe with Teresa since they had wandered around the village together. Ephanie had pointed to certain things—the apple tree, the spring, the deep, wide arroyo, telling stories about them, laughing, reflecting quietly, sitting or standing for long moments in silence. And her friend had listened with animation, or had stayed quiet when Ephanie fell silent, or laughed when Ephanie told a humorous tale. The apple tree had taken much of their attention as Ephanie told Teresa about the hours she and Elena had spent secure within its sturdy branches, dreaming away the hours as girls will, pretending to be warriors or stolen children, or just lying quietly along some thick branch’s length, amiable in their long summers. The tree was almost dead now. Only some parts of it still leafed. Ephanie felt fury rising in her at the thought of it lying against the ground, split in two. She remembered the sweet blossoms it had borne, pale and rosy like shells once. Now the old tree could bear no blossoms, no fruit. The sight of it made her rage, want to weep. She became enraged at whatever Teresa said, irrationally, a breath taken, a swallow of coffee; a knowing what she was rose in her like lies, like filthy, like the once clean air now burdened everywhere with death.

She knew that she was little more than a complex of molecules, like Stephen had so long ago said, and that those dancing elements were subject to all the vagaries of what she ate, what she breathed. That she was at the mercy of the air, that her thoughts were no more than the after effects of molecules combining and breaking down. A tape, she thought, a program. A biocomputer. A charade. And felt her thoughts leering and jeering at her, a vicious clown within that would not accept her rage, the pain of her grief.

She felt rise within her words and pictures, understandings and interpretations that were not hers, not her, alien, monstrous, other than her, in her, that wanted her dead, wanted her to kill, to destroy whatever was of meaning or comfort to her, like Teresa sitting here, like home, left behind.

She wished she could tear out the monstrous other in her, reveal or find the one within that matched her, loving, passionate, wild and throbbing, but the stiffness in her chestbackarms, anger and contortion face, waves of imprints not so like a machine that they could be changed like a tape, like a record. They were too familiar and warm for mechanical transposition, disorienting her somewhere in the lost space between eye and nerve, sympathetic gaining over parasympathetic, she supposed, but no remedy applied—mechanical, medicinal or otherwise.

Certainly there was no cure, no rewiring possible to change this lifelong duality, dichotomy, twinning of her own self with a monstrous other. They were so completely intertwined. She hid carefully behind her eyes, suddenly cunning, sly, wary of Teresa’s worried regard. She lowered her lids like shutters are lowered during bright day, blinds drawn so she couldn’t see herself looking openly through the alien eyes that sometimes took over hers, looked through them. What was wrong?

Within her, no new words, no soft feeling, no magic lens to change, nothing that would diffuse the spasm-intestine coiled in her belly and weighing on her tongue. She could feel her feelings, the ones that were calm, clear, sweet, only like far dim echoes that were rapidly drowning in the waves of unwanted, terrifying, alien rage that surged through her round, round body.

She sat, frozen. Told Teresa that this was happening. Saw herself lost, Ephanie, moving away, clear away from the table they sat at, but fighting panic reaching with her hand and body across it with her eyes, “I am angry, I am furious with you. But it’s not with you, this isn’t about you, it’s what happened when you didn’t understand what I said a minute ago, what happened to me at the apple tree, what happened at the spring, about how it’s all dying, all filthy and rotting and dying. I’m furious with you. It seems like with you. But it’s someone else who wants me to be mad at you—only it, whoever, feels like me. Someone, something, trying to turn my mind, my eyes away from what I saw, we saw, what I said, what I know, about the dying apple tree.” Begging Teresa with her silence to understand, to explain what was happening to her now, as they sat, facing each other across the table, the familiar face of her friend so alien, so strange. Teresa, help me, Ephanie prayed silently. Say something I can understand. But did not say that, could not make those words out loud, silently begging, desperate to be understood. She could not speak, could not shape the terror building in her in this strange, strange place. Knowing what she was saying could mean she was losing her mind, was disassociating, projecting, denying, that it was true, but not the way it seemed, that she was losing her mind, her safe fitting within it, it being taken over by something else, something that didn’t want her to know the truth that she couldn’t fight, she didn’t know how.

Thinking, I’m not even sitting here. Someone else is. Then who am I here. Who is she across the tablecloth from me. The panic rising in her lashing her in waves over the length of her body. Because they have taken my body. They have taken my mind. Just like Thomas said. Because I don’t live here in me. Because I have nowhere to go. Because I can’t get out of here. Because you can’t hear me, can’t understand the danger I’m in. Because it is so real to me here, and it was as real in the apple tree, and in the spring and in the doorway of the house that wasn’t there anymore, because they have stolen my name.

And that’s what I don’t want to know, to see, to say. I am possessed by someone who sees through my eyes, enraged. Someone who wants me to die, to kill. Someone who wants you to leave me to them. She said that to Teresa who sat regarding her with troubled eyes. Ephanie struggled to make clear what all of this meant so that Teresa wouldn’t confuse her words with what a psychiatrist would say about her, her fear, with what a psychiatrist had said to her about this same event when it had happened in other times. And as she talked, the room seemed to grow darker, the shadows along the wall moved in to surround her, suffocating. “Let’s get out of here,” she said. “I can’t breathe.”

And led the way out, paying for the coffee on the way to the street and open sun, carefully not looking directly through the darkened edges of her eyes, looking instead at windows, ways to buy something shiny, to anchor herself securely to the street she was walking. She and Teresa agreed that Ephanie should be as deeply in this whole experience as possible later, perhaps when they were safely private, because Ephanie did not want to say, there in the face of red and white checked tablecloth and moonfaced strangers, those terrible words of accusation that were clamoring at her tongue, twisting her mouth and throat in the frantic raging effort to escape her lips. She bit down hard, bringing blood, bringing tears.

Which were not hers but which would be in her mouth, powered by her breath, driving Teresa away, destroying and destroying and which she must never say except in a way that made clear to both of them why they had to be said. Those words that were not about Teresa, never about her, but that came toward her anyway and would find release one way or another. Better some other way found to say them. Like with the shrink. Who was so far away.

Chanting, She Knew Them

She began her calming chant in her mind, shouting within herself to be heard over the panic and raging din, the flood. I am Ephanie Atencio. Ephanie Kawiemie Atencio. I am myself. This is Teresa who walks beside me. The sun is shining and I am on my way back to California. I know who I am. I will not give in. This is my hand. These are my eyes. My mouth belongs to me. I am Ephanie Atencio. Ephanie Kawiemie Atencio. No one else can possess me. No one else can control me. No one else can speak for me. Through me. This is my hand. My sturdy, strong, brown hand. These are my eyes. I know what I see. I am no one else. I am myself. These are my eyes. Ephanie’s huge dark eyes. This is my hair. Ephanie’s thick hair. This is my body. My small square round stubby body. I am on my way to California. I don’t live in the apple tree spring any more.

But she knew that others owned such bodies, such eyes, such hair, such hands. That her own had come to her from another time and from people who were not her, who invaded her so long ago, before she was born. She looked like many others and she knew that even her flesh was not hers to own.

If my own dear mind, the words, the memories, the beliefs, the understandings, if the mesas I see in memory, the water my skin recalls, the food my tongue thinks it tasted, the painful, tearing, ugly, beautiful, loving, tender words my ears think they heard, my mouth thinks it ever spoke are not true, not mine. If I cannot believe that one single thing in me, in my mind, in my body, my brain, is of me, is mine, is me, then how will I know which is me and which is the other, the others, the not-me?

Which is I. Which them. And wondered how she had come to believe herself possessed, how she had known, decided the possession was final. I must be psychotic, she thought. I must be mad. They don’t burn witches anymore. Possession does not, cannot exist. That’s what the shrink says and I must believe her. Or I’m lost. I’ll never be able to live.

Shaking She Speaks This Time

They had gone to visit some friends of Teresa’s on their way to Guadalupe. That was in Colorado. The women were political types. Wilderness buffs. They believed in a lot of things. They raised food. They wore natural fiber clothes. They organized things. Ideas that they put people in. Within. They sneered a lot. At people who lived in suburbs. At people who watched television. At people who worked the land and raised livestock and talked with a drawl. At women who wore pantyhose and aprons. At universities and students and professors. At doctors, lawyers and Indian chiefs. No, they drew the line at Indian chiefs. Maybe out of deference to her. They winked at her conspiratorially. Like she knew what they knew. And agreed. They talked a lot about Indians. About massacres and victims and Sand Creek and Wounded Knee. They snorted and shrugged, railed and analyzed. They treated her like she was the wooden Indian outside the trader’s store. When she spoke, they waited, hanging on her every word. They laughed hugely at her jokes. They twinkled at every grin in her eyes, on her mouth.

After three days there she had begun to lose any sense of who she was. Of what she thought about anything. She wanted to like them, these friends of her friend. Who viewed her as an artifact, quaint, curious, fragile, wronged. She began to feel wronged. Fragile. Innocent and helpless. She wanted to be understood. They winked and nodded as though they understood, and she believed them. She talked more than she should. She said things they hadn’t the remotest idea how to understand. She thought they understood. She didn’t remember that they couldn’t. Not from the point of view they occupied. Not from the snorting and sneering and analyzing space they inhabited with familiar grace and ease.

One night, late, they were sitting around the kitchen, talking, drinking herbal tea sweet with honey from their own precious bees. They were talking about old Indian ways. Medicine men. Power. Black Elk. The centuries-long war. That was never over. About the tribal ways. About peace. About the mining companies. The uranium tailings piled up on nearby hills, that seeped radioactive water down into the creeks during runoff time. That radiated everything. About the people of Guadalupe who lived with the mines just beneath their feet. About the work that could be gotten because of it. About the money that had poured in. About the affluence and what it cost.

They spoke glowingly about the famous medicine man who had spoken so powerfully, so movingly at the survival gathering they had attended, spoken about the sacredness of mother earth, how the whiteman had desecrated it.

She told them about how this same medicine man had lashed out at some women she knew. He was angry and contemptuous because they were lesbians. How he had told them he ought to rape them. How they had put him out of then car. How hurt, puzzled they had been. How afraid.

They told her about the Navajo woman they had spoken to who had been so eloquent about being moved from her homelands to the other side of the reservation because the whiteman wanted her land to drill on. “We have to help these people,” they said. “They are being moved off their own land. Again. Why doesn’t the government leave them alone? Greed and profit is all it cares about. All America cares about,” they said.

She told them that the disputed land was Hopi land, and that the relocation of the Navajos was a result of a decision made by the U.S. Government at the request of the Hopis who did not get along with Navajos since time immemorial.

They told her about the rising incidence of cancer among the Guadalupe Indians and some others that they had read about in some recently published book.

She told them that the stories weren’t true, that there was no higher incidence of cancer among the Guadalupes since the mines than before them, and that the cancers they did get were more likely caused by excessive sugar and refined carbohydrate consumption than yellowcake from the mines.

Through it all she found herself getting angrier and angrier, her face burning and the muscles tight as she tried to speak quietly, simply, convincingly.

They told her about how Indians were dying of booze and lousy working conditions and ignorance and squalor.

She told them about the Vista worker who had come to Guadalupe and wanted to teach her mother how to keep house properly. About the government people who wanted to make sure everyone had indoor plumbing, so they got toilets installed for everyone. But some people had to put the toilets in the kitchen, and it disgusted them. “They refused to use them, of course,” she said laughing. “One old man said he’d die before he’d do his business in his own house!”

They didn’t crack a smile.

She finally gathered herself together enough to ask, “Where are you all from?” And grinned, gleaming, triumphant, sly and sick when they replied, “Back east.”

“Of course you are,” she said. “Of course.”

Teresa had burst out laughing then. “You have to understand how westerners feel about easterners. They think you believe all westerners are primitive cowboys. That you see westerners as not very bright. Cowboys and rednecks. Indians and Mexicans. Who are exotic and bizarre. Who need to be educated in how to be proper, civilized Americans.” She had sat there quietly through much of the discussion, so Ephanie was startled when Teresa spoke. But she knew Teresa was trying to convey something. Maybe she wanted them to change the subject. Find things in common to talk about.

She couldn’t drop it. Some contrary sprite had hold of her tongue. She found herself getting mad. Madder. Because she had wanted to like them. To be understood. To understand. And all they knew was what they read. In some weird magazine. That told them how to think. What to say. In their red, white and blue handbook of western American culture. She thought. Anger pulling at her eyes. Making the room seem full of smoke. Making it hard for her to see.

Teresa looked at her, arching an eyebrow. “It’s not that we aren’t all those things,” she said. “But we have a certain lifestyle, an ecology, a balance among ourselves, that makes our lives not the same as they sound when you describe them.” Her look seemed to say to Ephanie, “Let me take care of this,” but Ephanie ignored it. She knew that Teresa had some pretty strange ideas of her own. That she didn’t understand, really, either. That somehow she, Ephanie, must tell them. Something. So they would know how it was for her. For all of them. Here. Filled with the same spirit, perhaps, they ignored Teresa too. Instead they began to talk about the traders who, they had read, stole jewelry from Indians, taking it in trade for merchandise that they sold at inflated prices, trading against the jewelry at far less than it was worth.

“Worth to who?” she asked.

“To somebody else. Like this belt,” one of them said, pulling at the bright silver concho belt she wore around her slim waist so Ephanie could see it. “Do you know that I had to pay over seven hundred dollars for it? It’s Indian pawn.”

“Where’d you get it?” Ephanie asked.

“Oh, at a pawn shop that handles a lot of Indian stuff in Denver.”

“Oh,” Ephanie said. “It’s very nice. You got it for a good price, too,” she said.

“But I heard that a belt like this, some Indian might only get two hundred dollars for it from the trader—if that. Then he’ll sell it to a broker and make a bundle off it.”

“Sure,” Ephanie said. “That’s business.” And didn’t say that the trader and the broker made money because people like the concho-belt woman would pay seven hundred dollars to show off their awareness of Indians. Or that the two or three hundred dollars the Indian got was a lot of groceries. Or that the trader charged a lot for his goods because he had to pay a lot for them. That independent grocers and merchants didn’t own the subsidiary companies that huge supermarket chains did. And that the local trader often carried people “on credit” for years, without repayment, without hope of repayment, and without once asking for money on that account. Because they knew the people. Knew they would pay when, if, they could. Something that huge grocery chains, or pawn shops in big cities didn’t do. Or that the traders she knew cared about the people they lived off of, putting up bail when someone was thrown in jail, paying for lawyers for them, giving them counsel. She knew that wasn’t the official line about traders, and that there were plenty of traders who used the people badly. And that there were plenty of the other kind too. She didn’t mention the losses that some of the traders took from theft of their stock over the year either. She knew she would just sound contentious, wrongheaded. That these fine people didn’t want to hear that everything worked two ways, at least. That Indians were people too. Strong, capricious, willful, gentle, malicious, kind, vicious. People. Human beings. Not noble denizens of a longlost wilderness. Not romantic leftovers of some past age. Not downtrodden savages with boots on. But real live human beings, full of piss and vinegar, as the saying goes.

Instead, she cleared her throat and her brain. Began to talk of other, safer things. Of the white housewives who were dying of booze. And the college kids. And the squalor the radical fringe lived in. And the lousy working conditions at the restaurant where she sometimes worked. And realized she had fallen into some sort of trap. Knew she was run through on the tip of her own sharp tongue.

Knew it was pointless to argue with people who had read so much, who knew so much. Who were so sure.

“You sure seemed sure of yourself last night,” Teresa said to her the next morning. “I’m surprised. You don’t usually put up such a fight.” She was smiling, but something on her face, in her eyes, made Ephanie think she was not pleased. I have angered her. I have made her mad. I should have kept quiet.

“I should have kept quiet,” she said, eyeing sidelong her friend. Keeping her head down, watching the ground.

“No, you shouldn’t have.” Teresa spoke with quiet intensity. “I was fascinated by what you were saying. I wish you had said more.”

“Really?” Ephanie felt better. But unsure. “What else could I say?”

“I think they, we, don’t have much of an idea about how you live. All of you. We think in terms of the movement. Any movement. All the movements. We think in terms of black and white. Good and bad. Cowboys and Indians. We think about things in the west like things in the east are analyzed. Are thought about. We try to transfer what we know about cities and industry and government to this.” She gestured around her. At the hills. The blue soaring peaks of the San Juan mountains. “Maybe we don’t understand. How you see them.”

“Maybe,” Ephanie said. “But probably I don’t know anything anyway. Probably it’s just like they say it is, and I don’t know any better. Probably I’m too dumb to know what’s really going on.”

“Well, I don’t think you’re dumb.” Teresa stopped and faced her friend. She put a hand on either of Ephanie’s shoulders. “You’re different. You’ve lived all of it. We haven’t. We live something else. Someplace else. Maybe it isn’t a matter of who is right and who is wrong. Maybe it’s a matter of how many ways there are that things go.”

Ephanie averted her eyes. She didn’t want to look into Teresa’s blue ones. However fondly, sincerely, the woman looked at her. However she tried to understand. Ephanie felt a surge of anger. That she put carefully away. Somewhere in the place she had for such things. Safe and far from her eyes, her voice, her mouth.

“Ephanie,” Teresa said. “Don’t you think you’re overreacting? Don’t you think you’re just tired, or upset? It’s been a long trip. This is a strange place, filled with strangers. You haven’t had much of a break from stress, from trouble, from pain. Maybe you should be kinder to yourself. To the rest of us.” She dropped her hands, shoved them into her pockets. “You know I care about you,” she continued in a low voice. “I hate it when you’re down. I wish I could help, could take your pain and throw it away, far away where it wouldn’t ever come to you again.”

“I know.” Ephanie felt embarrassed by her stubbornness. Her inability to take what her friend offered, freely. To hug it, her, to her. To respond to her plea, the look on her face, the tone of affection, trouble, puzzlement in her voice. “I guess I’m a little weird,” she said finally. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to upset you, or your friends. They’re nice people. I’m sure they mean no harm.”

“Dammit, that’s not the point!” Teresa was flushing. Red. “Dammit, Ephanie, you know that’s not what I mean! Why are you so bitter?” Then she stopped. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that,” she said. “It’s just that it’s so hard to understand. And you don’t make it any easier, you know.”

“I know,” Ephanie began to walk faster. Trying to calm her agitation. She knew Teresa was reaching for something. To understand. To say. Wanting to make it easier for her. To protect herself. She bent to pick up a rock. Put it into her pocket. “Well,” she said, conciliatory, “but maybe what they say is true. About the traders. About the cancer. About the medicine men. About everything. I don’t know what’s going on in Hopiland. Maybe we’re talking about different things. We probably are.”

“You probably are,” Teresa agreed. “I read that they are relocating Navajos and Hopis from that area. Because of some deal with the mining outfit. And that the people there are really mad, but that they haven’t been able to do anything about it. I know several people who have gone out there to help. Or are raising money, holding benefits… And I read just recently in a secret government report someone leaked that the cancer incidence among Indians in New Mexico, around the mining area, is a lot higher than it used to be. But they aren’t letting anyone know about it.”

“So maybe the tribal council is lying,” Ephanie said without conviction. Thinking, they probably are. Everyone probably is. Why. Because they couldn’t do anything about it. Because they needed the money. The jobs. Because the income from the uranium made everyone’s life easier. Made them feel almost human in the whiteman’s world where having enough money, white style houses, white style food and clothes and cars and schools made them feel like they might live. A few deaths of this one or that one from radiation, from working in the mines, drinking the water, eating food raised in polluted ground might seem a small price to pay against the alternative. The death of everything they cared about. Of everything they knew. Of the tribe itself. Maybe. Or maybe they were just bought. By the money. The power they wanted. That held them hostage in a world they could never enter, one they could never leave.

She felt exhaustion creeping over her. Felt the ache that filled her grow too strong to ignore. Felt the futility of trying to explain, to ever explain to anyone, to Teresa, to the people back in the house they were now walking toward, to herself. Felt the craziness building, building, rising in her like a summer flood when the dam up in the mountains would burst and the terrible water had come rushing down, carrying huge boulders, metal, trees, everything in its path downstream, raging and untamed.

“I guess what I mean is howcome everybody thinks it’s the other guy who’s responsible for what happens to Indians and never themselves? That’s what makes me mad. They point a finger at everyone else, but never at themselves.”

“Yes,” Teresa said. “I know what you mean. I have to wonder about that too. But.”

“But, nothing.” Ephanie said, knowing what her companion was about to say. “But some are worse than others, right?”

“Ephanie,” Teresa said, sounding exasperated, “you need to keep in mind that most people don’t even care about Indians. Or ever give them a thought. I know that’s terrible. A whole country full of people who never think about where they’ve gotten everything they have. But it’s true. And these people at least have an awareness of that.”

“Yes, of course,” Ephanie said. “But what’s the use of awareness if it only leads to more of the same thing? I mean, the words are different but the song’s the same. You know?”

“No, I don’t know! I don’t think it’s the same thing. Not at all!” Teresa looked pale. Her nostrils were pinched. Her mouth tight. She looked like one of the nuns when somebody stepped across some moral line and was about to get punished for the transgression.

But once again, the imp had hold of Ephanie’s tongue. She wanted the conversation to go somewhere else. But she couldn’t let go. “The people who use Indians to demonstrate their own personal nobleness are just as dangerous to us as the ones who rip us off in more direct ways. More dangerous, maybe.”

“Ephanie, I don’t know what’s gotten into you! You know better than that.” Teresa was walking faster, showing with her haste and agitation, her desire to leave the conversation and her arguing friend behind. “Do I?” Ephanie asked. “How do you know what I know? What I know is that no matter which side of this stupid discussion wins, it’s Indians who suffer and it’s Indians who die.”

They walked the rest of the way back to the house in silence. Stony. Like the pink and pale gold rocks that studded the road they walked on, the yard.

She Left Again

Driving back to California. The long road there. Through Albuquerque, to Gallup. Where the red red rocks loomed, brooding and grand, edging the sky. Through Holbrook and Winslow, where so many Indians lived. Where the Harvey House had stood. Where the picture of a longlost aunt had hung. Her face young and fierce, a savage’s face with thick hair cascading over blanketed shoulders, strong, bold jaw jutting. Rich, sensuous lips slicing straight across her jaw without a smile. Deep set eyes brooding. Savage. Like the redrocks, like the untamed sandstone cliffs. To Flagstaff where the godmountains stood, aloof, intent on other things, taking no notice of the puny works of the tamed people buying and selling, getting and spending on their slopes. To the Mohave. The grey and deep rocky spiney green stretching endless for miles, sliced by the straight black highway that stretched endless for miles between rocky, desolate mountains that stood aloft in the distances, growing smaller and less forbidding as they grew closer on the way.

And along that long journey, Ephanie talking. Thinking. Sitting quiet and huddled in the corner of the car. Driving with one hand on the steering wheel, puffing endlessly at her cigarettes. Talking, singing, talking. Sometimes squaring her jaw to keep the tears, the fear, from rising out of her control. In rage lashing back and forth with the power of her thoughts, her mind like the powerful tail of a wildcat, lashing. Back and forth. Back and forth.

“I can’t understand what happened. The trip has been so pleasant. Everyone well at home. The kids looking good. Seeming so grown up. Except Tsali, of course. But he’s doing great. He likes spending time with grandma and grandpa. He’s happy living with Thomas. And Sally just dotes on him. Like he’s her own son. I’d like to see more of him, of course, but I’m glad he’s got this time with his grandparents. And Ben and Agnes too. I’m glad I get some time alone. But I can’t understand why I freaked out like that. Like this.”

“Maybe you’re just still reacting. The baby’s death and everything couldn’t be so easy to get over. It will take time,” Teresa said.

“Of course. Even though it’s been three years I don’t think the effects have gone away. But still.”

“Well, maybe somebody did something that set you off.”

“Maybe.”

“What happened that made you mad? What have you been thinking about, chewing on?” Teresa, who was driving then, took her eyes off the road for a long moment to examine Ephanie’s troubled face.

“Well, the main thing is what happened when we were in Colorado. That and then going on home and seeing everything so, so different.” Ephanie looked out the window, ignoring Teresa’s gaze. “I can’t, it’s hard to make sense out of things. Like being in Colorado at those people’s place, the things we talked about. I know much of what they were saying is the truth. I don’t know why it gets me so mad. They’re good people, and they care a lot. I liked them, mostly.”

“But.” Teresa said.

“Well, being there, then going home, being there for Feast. Seeing the folks. Who never look like pathetic oppressed victims to me. They look like people. People I love a lot, or people I like a lot, or people I’ve always known. Like the Letos. Did you know their boy was killed in some freak accident? He was drinking. Probably on some dope of some kind. The car went over the bridge across the river. It exploded. Poor things.”

“They seemed okay. Those were the people we ate with, the second time?”

Ephanie laughed. “Yeah. The third house we went to was the Costi’s. They were the ones with the beautiful daughter, Agnes’ friend.”

“Oh, yes. I remember. That wonderful cake we ate there.”

“Yep. That’s what I mean. How many of the people you saw looked like down and outers, helpless, cowering victims of some vast conspiracy?”

“Well, no one. But you know that’s not what it’s about.”

“I know.” Ephanie sighed. She sat for a few miles silent. How to find the words. How to shape the thought. That was about the truth or that aimed at it at least.

“I know that so much that’s awful, horrifying, has happened. I read the same books your friends read. I even listen to some of the same people—Indian activists, experts, anthros, media people, radical politicians. But somehow I can’t shake the feeling that what I think, based on what I know, what I have lived in my own life, isn’t much like what your friends think when we hear the same story.”

“I’m sure you’re right about that. But I don’t think that’s what upset you so much. You were really scared, panicky.” Teresa reached across the seat and put her hand on Ephanie’s. Ephanie began to tremble. A violent spasm passed through her. She let her breath out slowly, like the therapist had taught her.

“I know. Maybe it’s because I agree with them. In my mind. But my body remembers wonderful cake and fry bread and warm, caring, good times. You know, a lot of my family are traders. Some good, some not. But I know them. They’re my people.”

“So maybe that’s it.”

“Yeah. Maybe so. Nothing’s so simple, is it? I don’t know who to be, how to judge anything. I can’t come to easy solutions. There’s always someone or something in my own life that contradicts any judgment I ever make.” She began to weep, silent, the tears flowing silently down her face. She didn’t raise her hand to wipe them. She just sat, head straight, looking at the road ahead, weeping. “What do you do when you love everybody on every side of the war?” she asked in a low, low voice.

“Oh, my dear.” Teresa said, her voice low and husky too, her eyes filled with tears. “I don’t know.”

There’s Four Sides To Every Question

It was inevitable, she supposed. That she did not know where she belonged or where to go. She had left, after all. She was always leaving. Fleeing terror and delusion over each next rise. Fleeing death. The infinite fool. She did not understand the nature of limitation. Could not understand that some things could not be understood. This lent to her character a certain obstinacy, and with it, a certain strength. She had dreamed one night of a grey-striped kitten that in the dream had been skinned by Teresa’s Colorado friends. The pitiful little thing had bled, its bare flesh pink and oozing. But it had roused itself and walked to its dish. It had begun calmly to eat.

That described the nature of her peculiar dilemma, she supposed. To not understand that she had had enough. To not understand when it was time to lie down and quietly die. Not that she was obviously stubborn, or obviously strong: her muscles did not ripple, her gait did not command. But she stood, wavering, tirelessly. Almost, it seemed, forever. Weaving, bobbing, leaving, but never giving up. Like water. At some point she knew it all came together somewhere.

But this time the leaving had been hard. She could barely get out of the two rooms she had rented for the summer after her visit home. She had difficulty expanding her awareness even so far as the kitchen or the tiny hall. She seldom thought of the entryway or of the sunrainstreets beyond her tiny apartment. Her contact with the world beyond these two rooms—one a livingroom where she sat and read and worked and talked on the phone and slept, and the other a tiny bathroom just beyond. The only good Indian is a dead Indian they said. She wasn’t very good, then. She wasn’t yet dead. She asked no quarter, but sat, brooding.

Like her grandma and her mother she could not go back. Though she had tried. To go back to confession, to husbands, to Stephen, to children, to dreams that stuck in her throat, unrelenting, to lovers’ arms. She had gone back often to walk the mesas and the road that curved around the village. But there was nothing she could hold on to there. Maybe you could go back, but only if the places and the people from some remembered time did too, she thought.

One thing she could not go back to, though she had tried symbolically, in dreams, in books, was the old heathen tradition. She had never been to a masked dance. She had not been allowed. Even her mother had not been there since she was a small child, taken by Grandma Sylvia, Shimanna, across the spaces between one village and the next, around the lake that was no longer there, to the square to see the katsinas, the gods, enter and bowing, stepping, dance, the spruce collars dipping and swaying gravely with their steps.

“I never saw them,” she said, quiet, wistful, “because they left, and left me out.”

When Sylvia left, when Ephanie’s mother grew up and married out as well, those doors had closed.

Her Name Was Nightshade. She Bloomed In The Dark

Her name had been Shimanna. Nightshade. Ephanie remembered her. How she, Old Woman, Grandma, had come to talk to Ephanie as she wandered once along the cliffs near Old Oraibi. How she had come there to show Ephanie the way of waiting. Of keeping time. Oraibi, the oldest inhabited village in North America, where Ephanie had gone with Stephen to see Snakedance but had instead seen her long dead grandmother. Grandma had waited all the years of her life through. Even on the other side of the world she waited. Still. She did not tell Ephanie what she waited for, only that waiting and watching was for her, Ephanie, to do.

Shimanna, called Sylvia by the others, had gone to the Presbyterian mission school in Albuquerque. Then she had gone to the Indian school in Pennsylvania called Carlisle, where she had studied literature and latin and arithmetic and classical history. Western history, not any other kind. And in the summers she had worked for nearby white people as a servant, as part of the education she was being given. The man who had founded the school had pitied Indians. He had loved them. He was loath to see them die. He wanted to save them. He founded his school to teach them how to live down being Indian. He thought they would be able to survive if they’d just forget their homes and their languages and their ancient ways. Anyway, that’s what he said when he went to Congress and whoever to raise money for his famous school. Famous in Indian country, anyway. He got the money because he was not only kind and concerned, but because he was a Colonel who had distinguished himself in the Indian wars.

After a number of years away among the whites in the east, Shimanna had returned to Guadalupe. She brought pots and pans with her when she came home, they said. She walked in balance, they said, because even though she cooked on a whiteman’s stove, she baked her bread in a beehive oven and she ground her chili and her corn on the old grinding stones. She wore her special shawl to the dances, even though she married a white and bore his children. She wept when the clanuncle would come to see her. Ephanie’s mother told her about that, saying, “I hated that old man. He made my mamma cry.” She was a Presbyterian, but she never entirely lost her heathen ways. Did she reconcile the differences, or was she cut in two?

Ephanie couldn’t know. She didn’t dare ask. But she knew that the clanuncle didn’t think much of Shimanna’s arrangement. She knew what they did to those who married out. She herself had received too many blows from those who hated the strangers, even if they carried within their bodies the people’s seeds.

“Just like a bunch of danged dogs,” her mother would say. “Come up and sniff you, and if you’re smelling a little strange they try and murder you.”

She had shown Ephanie how that was when once Ephanie had caught a bird, young, picked it up because it had fallen from its nest. “Poor thing,” she had said, crooning over it. “Poor thing. Mother, what shall we do?” Her mother looked at the tiny creature in her daughter’s hand. “Well,” she had said, “probably we can’t do much. If you put it back in the nest it’ll smell of your hand. Its mother won’t feed it. Might peck it to death.”

Ephanie felt sick. She had only tried to help. To be kind. To save the poor shivering pathetic creature. But sadly she put it back in the nest, as her mother advised, saying, “Put it back right away. Maybe not too much harm’s been done yet.” She put it back in the nest, praying that her hands hadn’t made it smell unbirdlike. She had peered into the nest the next day, climbing high up in the tree to see. It had died.

When Shimanna died they had buried her in Albuquerque next to her white husband. There had been no water jar broken and placed over her grave. Maybe that meant she didn’t have to return to the village as the rain. Maybe the Shiwanna, the rain people, excluded her. But it didn’t mean she didn’t care. She still came back, if only to her granddaughter, to tell her how to wait. With no water jar, how could she bring the rain?

They Left Even When They Didn’t Go Away

Ephanie’s family had lived in the village, but they might as well have lived in Timbuktu, as her mother used to say. People didn’t come to their house on Feast Day, not even the relatives who would have been expected, required by duty, to come and eat on that certain, central day. They were shunned. Not overtly denied, confrontation was not the people’s way. But covertly.

Ephanie remembered with pain and shame the time she had been visiting Guadalupe with Thomas. Her father had mentioned at lunch that one of the nearby Guadalupe villages was having corndance that afternoon, and suggested she take Thomas to see it. They had driven up the road to the village, parked and walked to the danceground. It was around two in the afternoon, about time for lunch to be over and the dancers to come out again. The square was completely deserted. There was a slight wind, stirring the summer dust around them. It was very hot, and there was no shade to stand in. They could see that dancing had been going on. People had left chairs and belongings scattered here and there, but no one came out to greet them, to invite them inside for some food, as was their usual custom. Nothing but the wind and dust moved. After waiting in the bright hot sun for some time, maybe thirty or forty minutes, she had shrugged. Looking down at her shoe, she had mumbled to Thomas that they had better go. Hurt and pain had stuck in her throat, making her voice harsh and whispery. Sad, angry, bereft, she had turned away then, leading the way back to their forlorn car. She had not tried to go to corndance ever again.

She knew that her mother had felt the rejection, the ostracism keenly. Lived in an isolation that was almost complete. She did not talk about it often, only sometimes alluding to it but not to how she felt about it. She just kept to herself, tending her family and her house, growing a few things in the garden that she, unlike the rest of the villagers, kept; growing plants that were sturdy and self reliant—hollyhocks, geraniums, wild roses, marigolds, zinnias, and a few stalks of corn.

The only family that welcomed them in their home, who came often to Ephanie’s home, was Stephen’s family. His father Ben and his mother, Margaret. His brothers, tall and warm, smiling, quiet, hardworking, shy. His sisters, much older than Stephen, but always ready to laugh and joke, filling the kitchen with strength and a certain joy that for Ephanie was the most exact sign of home. Those women she had called Aunties. They had taught her to cross stitch in the Guadalupe fashion on aprons they taught her to sew. She learned to make the perfect, tiny stitches that with patience became roses, deer, antelope and rainbirds.

But none of Stephen’s family was her own age, and Ephanie, taking her mother’s cue, stayed apart from the rest of the villagers too. Or maybe they avoided her, and she thought she was the one avoiding them. However it was, she had made friends with Elena, a Chicana girl her age, almost, who was also an outsider, a stranger. Together they had made up a world that filled and satisfied their needs, one that they were cowboys and Indians in, one that was composed of thunderheads and mesas, rambling and imagination. One that was private, but not lonely, not alone. Because of Elena, she supposed, she had not noticed how solitary her life, her family’s life, really was. Until now when she found herself alone in the city, living in her summer rented apartment, cut off from everyone she knew.

She didn’t like solitude. The shadows, the noises the building made, frightened her. She was most afraid to go to her closet, one that was too large for a closet, too small for a room. One with a highhigh ceiling. With a heavy pipe that ran across the narrow width, high above her head. She always thought she could hear voices there. Though there was no one, no place they could have come from in such a way that only the closet contained the sound.

In her childhood she had heard the talk of spirits and ghosts. The koko man, as she and her sisters called the katsina who initiated everyone into being one of the people. They had tortured her with his name. She had wakened at night crying in fright because she thought the koko man had gotten into their house and was coming for her.

She had listened to the older ones talking about those who had loved too much to ever leave, of lakes that dried up when the lake katsinas left for other places. Lost, beyond recall. Had seen that happen, the lake vanished in the dirty air of what at Guadalupe they called bad thoughts. They said the angry, jealous people did that. The disobedient ones. The ones who mocked the holy ones. Or who did not believe. And that because of them the lake spirits had to leave. She thought it was the suicides that had finally made them go away. The lake had dried up after the war, when so many soldiers came home, uncleansed, changed. Angry and twisted up inside. Wanting things they’d never had. Hating themselves and their futility they had begun to kill themselves and each other. Wanting to be done with the old ways, the holy things, they had lately begun to hate the Spider, to ask why their God was not a man. She thought it was also because of the land, which allowed too much mockery, abuse, and did not demur. She thought it was the heavy presence of the new fundamentalist churches there, the missions they called them, sent from the easterners to spread death.

And pondered these things in the night watching the shadows move along the walls, dark on dark, questing in her mind the course of these things, not comprehending what it was she understood, seeing in the light of remembered fires that flickered on midnight mysterious hills around the longago village, some necessary counterpart of home and daylight, of comfort unseen but not less known.

And that was far different from what she had been taught all those years inside a dark box on her knees trying to find comfort in heavy velveteen curtains and knowing joy on mesa, on treetop perch, where she sang to the sun and the clouds, the very sky singing with her, a counterpart to her joyous pealing. Or from the confessional to run behind the convent where she lived as a little girl, to run behind it to the alfalfa field and throw herself down among the sweet blooming stems to hide and watch the sky, the clouds, wheeling. To weep. How foolish I have been, she whispered as she realized what had been done. To her. To all of them. They made me be like this. The sisters at the school. The priests in the box. And clenched her fingers tight against her palm. Helpless with grief. With rage.

As a child there in that alien place, she had learned to believe that the god of the boxes would sing, would bless her when she knelt down within their musty velvet to confess and to pray, crossing herself with the sign of disease: “Bless me father for I have sinned.” Shrinking inward. Closing off her body like spoiled fruit, trying to feel the sinning, herself in the act of sinning, the accompanying thrill of hot intense shame, of guilt, of release, that she would ever after experience in the arms of her lovers. Hoping then that in that progression of emotion, of sensation, would come blessing. Which later she recognized to be what it was, the terrible infestation that had taken place in her own only beloved body’s soul.

Kurena, sunrise. Fingers touching thumb. Spreading. Blessing another. Saying, “The sun.” Shiwanna, the people who live in Shipap. The rain.

“Bless me, Naiya Iyatiku, for I have been wronged. Make me remember to understand. To send the evil away.”

She would sit for hours, comparing memories. Making in clear and exact detail pictures of the places she had been, the people in them, the words. What she had thought. What she had understood.

She grew to understand that there was no meeting between the several sets of memories, experiences, she carried in her mind. The sheepcamp meals. Sandy, gritty beans. Flavored sweet with small chewy bits of salt pork or rendered pork rind. The bread hot from the beehive ovens of her grandmother’s yard. The chili, hot and biting, laced with tender bits of fat and meat. The coffee, almost creamy it was so thick. The calm voices. The laughter. That was one set. The other was something quite different.

Long, empty, polished corridors. Silent white faces of women whose whole heads and bodies were encased in black heavy fabric. Whose rosaries hanging dark and heavy down their legs clinked with every quiet step they took. Of those white faces, almost always unsmiling. Of those white hands that never touched a child. Of those white faces smiling, tight and stiff, as though that simple expression caused great pain. Who said she must pray. Must ask to be forgiven. Must remember to walk quietly. Never to run. Never to climb a tree. Never to have messy hair. Or a dirty dress. Never, never wear jeans. Must sit quietly at the table. And never ask for more. Who must eat when told, sleep when told, wake when told, play when told, work when told, study when told, piss when told, shit when told, and must never never use too much paper to wipe her butt. Her tiny child’s butt.

She thought about the first poor people she had ever seen. Poor scarecrow people. White people who came to live in an abandoned house on the far outskirts of Guadalupe. The children, a boy and a girl, were so pale. She thought they must be very sick. She thought they might not have enough to eat. They wore flowersacking. She wanted to get to know them. She must have been four or five at the time, but she wished for a way to make friends with those two who looked so slack, so vacant, so white. Her mother felt sorry for them. Sent a little food, as a welcoming present, she said. To let them know they were welcome there, she said. But really, Ephanie knew, so they would have something to eat. So they wouldn’t feel ashamed.

The next white people she knew, the stranger kind, were the sisters who owned the convent school in Albuquerque. They did not go without food, though the mission sisters near Guadalupe often did. These sisters were rich. They had good sheets for the beds and plenty of meat at supper. The girls who attended the convent school never went hungry, though the food they got was tasteless. Boiled for long hours. Never seasoned. In all her years there, she never tasted sweet pinto beans or hot chili stew or fresh from the oven good bread.

She remembered the two sisters who, for a brief time, did not look half dead. Sister Mary Grace and Sister Claire. Sister Mary Grace had been at that particular convent forever. For decades, at least. She wasn’t a young woman, nor a pretty one. She was so myopic that she wore thick, thick glasses, like those Ephanie’s Grandma wore. Her white face was pinched in around her thin nose, and her mouth showed strain and age.

Sister Claire was sent to the convent school when Ephanie was in high school. She was young and lovely. Big blue eyes and pink smiling lips. Tiny white teeth that she showed in laughter and smiling. Small delicate hands.

Sister Mary Grace and Sister Claire spent a lot of time together. They both taught math, and that was the reason. They said. The girls noticed that suddenly Sister Mary Grace was beautiful. That her usually pallid skin had a glow to it. That her dark eyes snapped and sparkled. They even heard her laugh.

One night during the usual after dinner recreation hour, the two sisters were clowning around with some of the older girls. Ephanie was sitting on the sidelines, watching. She was grinning a lot, too. She loved Sister Mary Grace. She liked it that the old woman was having fun. That she looked so happy. That Sister Claire wasn’t a dry, dreary woman. That they finally had someone there who didn’t sneer at them, or spend all her time scolding in sharp, bitter tones.

Sister Mary Grace and one of the other boarders were playing the piano. Sister Claire had rolled up the sleeves of her habit, pinned the long veil back, decorously, as they often did when they were going to scrub the floor, instead she began to dance. She grabbed one of the girls and began to whirl her around. Sister Mary Grace turned to watch. The tall, heavy girl and the tiny, delicate nun danced and laughed with delight. The girl playing the piano struck up another tune. A polka. The girl dancing with Sister Claire went spinning off to sprawl, laughing, on a chair next to Ephanie. They crowed with delight. Sister Claire danced up to Sister Mary Grace. She drew Sister Mary Grace to her feet. She pulled her out onto the floor. They began to dance, laughing, giggling like girls. Their faces growing rosy and gleaming from sweat and exertion. They danced the polka and laughed.

About a week later, Sister Claire was gone. Sent to another school. Or back to the mother house, the place where they were trained and where they lived when they retired. The girls talked about it in whispers. They eyed Sister Mary Grace. Whose face was heavy and dull with grief. Or with something that was not joy. They knew, sort of, what had happened. They were subdued. All of them. No one laughed or danced much the rest of the year. Sister Claire had been sent away and Sister Mary Grace must have wept.

The girls said, they must have been in love. And nodded to each other. And whispered. No one said anything about it being wrong. Ephanie thought now, all these years later, how glad they had all been that someone there was able to love. To laugh and shine and work and play and dance. And how very bereft they all felt when that love was sent away.

“I had forgotten that, I suppose, or I never knew,” she said when she was telling Teresa about what she had discovered. She was elated. She knew she had uncovered something very important, but she didn’t know why it mattered so much. But somehow it gave back to her, whole and entire, the memory of racing with the sky, the clouds, a piece of ripe juicy fruit, full of moisture and joy. She danced then, in recognition. Alive at last for that moment within that blessing so long craved, sought, prayed for, searched for through penitence and plague, that had eluded her for all these years.

Misunderstanding the significance of these things when she was too young to understand much of anything, she had grown to walk heavy and bowed with the weight of sin and grief. Like Sister Mary Grace had walked after Sister Claire had gone away. “Because they told me that only in such a burdened down way could I ever find the gold of comfort and salvation, of sanctity that was the only joy, the only lasting peace,” she raged to Teresa, and in the midst of raging, began to laugh. “What a dunce I am. I get an F.” She went over to the unused corner of the room where the stereo sat, lonely and covered with dust. She picked out a record and as its strains and pounding beat began to warm the room she turned grinning delightedly to her friend, held out both of her hands and said, “Come on, Teresa, let’s dance.”

Life Is a Vale of Tears They Taught

So in that way she discovered what it was that had been done. To her. To Sister Mary Grace. By Sister Mary Grace. Life is a vale of tears, they had often said. Those cold white faces in those black black veils. She had thought they were saying that life was a veil of tears. She understood that. How the veil could be pinned back for scrubbing the floors. But not for dancing.

Dear Agnes,

I am writing to you to tell you some stories. I hope you will understand what they mean. They are concerned with some things I have been thinking about. And with some of what I have been reading.

You know the joke about how when the whiteman came he had the Bible and the Indian had the land, and now the Indian has the Bible and the whiteman has the land? Well, I’ve been thinking about that. About what it means. We always laugh when we tell it. And we always know it isn’t exactly so. Certainly the Bible isn’t ours. Or if it is, it’s ours to prove that God likes whites more than Indians. We aren’t even in it, like the old Duwamish chief Sealth, the one they call Seattle, said.

Anyway, I was thinking about the land. And the food we eat, we used to eat. Before you were born. In a lot of cases, before I was. The way I figure it, they took the land, then they paved it. Cut down the trees. Plowed the plains. You know the story.

They took away our food, and gave us their food instead. Sugar, white flour, macaroni, rice. They took our corn and squash and beans, our herbs and condiments and meat. They tied it all up one way or another. But the strange part is this: they took it and they didn’t keep it for themselves. They just lost it.

They don’t eat good corn or potatoes or meat or fish. They eat another kind of these things, a kind that can’t feed anyone. All the nourishment has been taken out of it, one way or another. And that’s not all.

After they took our good land and food away and gave us their Bible and their idea of food—sugar, flour, macaroni, canned beans, they came back and scolded us. “Why are you eating that lousy food?” they said. “Don’t you know it isn’t good for you? And why do you drink so much booze? Don’t you know that Indians can’t handle booze? You better learn how to eat right and lay off the bottle!” they say. “We only want to help you so you won’t get sick. So you won’t keep dying young like you do.”

I just want you to know this. So you will be able to understand what’s going on. When one of them decides to save you. From themselves.

And, my sweet, that’s the history lesson for this week. Are you having a splendid time? I hope so. When you guys come here we’ll go to the museum. The natural history museum. That’s where they put Indians.

Love to you my dear one, Mom

So she understood them. The people like Teresa’s friends. Who could never replace within what they had lost. When they were tiny. Infants. Toddlers. What she had always known, in spite of pain and terror. For she had been given food. It was not she who was starving. And she understood that they looked out of their starvation eyes and saw Indians. And not really did they see Indians. They saw only their own hopeless fear. Their own unowned rage. Their own unfelt grief. So they hated Indians. Or petted them. Her. Nodding and winking. Cursing and making fun. Scolding in cold, sharp tones. Talking of the victimization they would not own. Themselves who forever died on the bloody, torturous cross. Which in their minds they forever nailed someone else to. Her. Her people. All others who had known real food. Of body. Of heart. Of mind. Don’t pity me, she thought. Pity, pity yourselves. Who have always tried to make us believe that only in pain and sorrow, only in rage and weakness, only in selfdestruction and selftorture would we be free.

“They’re always telling me what victims we are,” she said then to Teresa. “Don’t they see that they are even more victims than we are? Do they call us victims over and over so we will believe it? So we will believe that there is no hope, that we are forever and forever helpless, maimed? They tell us over and over how we have been destroyed. Isn’t that how hypnosis works? They always sound so sure. They write books and make movies about it. How can we escape the snares of pity? Of smiling, gentle eyes? Of sweet, giving, generous hands?”

“Yes. I see what you’re getting at,” Teresa said. Frowning slightly. “But Indians have been slaughtered, destroyed, forced into being like white people, Christians, slaves, workers. Their land has been stolen, with pitiful amounts left to them. That the government, in its largess, has reserved for the Indians’ use. And taken all the rest.”

“I know, I know.” Ephanie drew a breath. Let it out abruptly. Lit a cigarette. “Of course we are victims. Who isn’t? But we have a history too. We didn’t just stand there and have all of this done to us. We helped the cause along. We are not victims. We are co-creators. They make it sound like we’re poor noble idiots. Who couldn’t do a damn thing. But we could have done a lot. Only we didn’t understand that there were so many of them. That no matter what they said, they’d wind up with everything. And that’s just what’s still happening. Now they’ve got our land and our water and our air, they want all of our power, all of our dignity, all of our ideas, all of our rage, all of our grief. First they said we had to be Christians. Now they say we have to die, to save what’s ours. Don’t you see?” She looked pleadingly at her friend. Who looked stony at her. Who tried to look friendly. Who couldn’t. Who smiled and said, “Of course. Sure. Yes, I see what you mean.” But who didn’t see, not really. And who shortly after that put on her coat. Saying, “Well, it’s been a long evening. I guess I’d better go on home.” And who left. Shutting the door behind.

Ephanie sat. Still. A long time. Staring at the closed door. Numbed. She tried to think, to read, to write something in her journal. But her thoughts were only colors, red and grey, roiling, tumbling, like clouds in the summer at home used to be. Just before a storm. Piling and piling. Up. And she couldn’t see the pages of the book she picked up, held stony in her lap. And the pen was a dagger that she stabbed the notebook with, leaving gouges several pages deep.

All she could hear herself saying, somewhere off in the foggy blue distance of some corner of her mind was that it was hopeless. She could not make Teresa, could not make herself, could not make anyone. Understand. How it was. How it had been. What had been stolen. Taken away. Destroyed, abandoned, poisoned. So that, no matter what, the people would never return to the old ways. The earth, the water, the sky had been stolen away. The dreams had been colonized. Now even Teresa had gone away.

She began to pinch herself brutally on the thigh. Began chanting, almost out loud between clenched teeth, don’t let them know, don’t let it show. And the words grew and grew in her mind.

Promise Her Anything

Dumb Indian.

Stupid Indian.

Flesh slashing Indian.

Savagebrutaldrunken Indian.

Dirty Indian.

Dirty savage Indian.

Dirty vicious hostile heathen savage drunken stupid Indian.

Injun.

That was what they said. Those were the words. Some of them. The others were nice words. Said with friendly, warm, sympathetic smiles. They worked as well. Perhaps better.

Noble Indian.

Earthloving Indian.

Wise old Indian.

Ugh. Indian.

Who guards the earth.

Who waters it with blood.

Good Indian. Dead Indian.

The First American.

The Vanishing American.

Our Indian.

Exotic quaint American.

Indian.

Thinking about it. About the picture postcard people. They were. They had become. Seeing herself, moccasined, shawled. What it meant to tourist friends. Who only cared for what they had created. Because that was all they would ever see.

Vicious.

Hostile.

Bloodthirsty.

Savage.

Yes. Her blood was thirsty. She was dying of thirst.

“Well,” she said to the spider in the corner by the stereo, “one thing’s for sure. When that old woman Gayo Kepe cursed, she didn’t fool around.”

The spider sat. Dreaming. Still.

She Dreams Another Dream

The words rose in her ears, loud and precise, in spite of her efforts at humor. She found herself cringing. Blushing. Skin hot and tight. Smile fixed against her teeth. Must not let them know. I must tighten every inch of flesh to avoid touching anyone, anything. So I won’t get anything dirty. Like Sister said. Like all the sisters said. Their pursed lips. Bloodless faces averted from mine. So they won’t have to see me. So they won’t know.

She finally saw it. Finally heard, loud and clear. What had been done.

And mouth opened wide she began to howl. Wondered where the sound came from. Did not recognize it as her own. Thinking only, filthy, filthy, I will never be clean. I must die, I must kill myself, I must die. Thinking that only by her death could she be veryvery sure not to pollute anyone, anything. My poor babies, she wept. My poor babies. I must die so I won’t get them all dirty. With my love. With me.

The wailing went on and on. She wondered who it was, making un ungodly noise like that. Did not notice her arms clutched over her belly. Her body bent almost double. Did not notice the water pouring from mouth nose eyes. Did not notice any longer the terrible crashing torrential anguish of muscle, chest, heart, bone. She had a focus, finally, for her grief. For her shame. She knew what she must do. Now.

Moving methodically through the apartment. Turning on every light. Heedless now of the curtained windows. The shades half-drawn. The rooms. Their emptiness.

Intently she went about her task. As though she was readying supper for friends. Who would soon arrive. She dug through the cupboards and chests until she found the rope she had stashed away one day, thinking maybe she would string up a small clothesline in the bathroom or out on the backporch. She rummaged through the kitchen drawers until she found her hunting knife. She carefully sharpened it until it was razor sharp. She wiped it carefully on her jeans to clear it of shavings. And all the time the intermittent wailing, the moaning, the water pouring out of her, unheeded.

Muttering. She could hear someone muttering in the closet. Where she seldom went, leaving her clothes and coat slung wherever they happened to land. Where she went now, rope in hand. Where she looked up at the ceiling’s height. The strong pipe reaching across the center of the narrow enclosure nearly a yard below the ceiling, but still far enough above her head. She estimated the height shrewdly. Returned to the kitchen for the knife, a chair. Put the chair down in the livingroom when she remembered a light highstool she had seen on the backporch last time she had gone out there. Got the stool and took it to the bedroom. To the closet. Flung the few clothes hanging there onto the bedroom floor. Cut enough rope for the job with her knife. Put the knife in her backpocket. Absently. Weeping madly sometimes. Sometimes working in concentrated silence.

And as she worked, again and again the words. All of them. Would rise up in her ears, sometimes shrill and taunting, sometimes calm and sure. The only good Indian’s a dead Indian. Die savage die. Lice. Indians are lice. Vermin. Gotta be exterminated. Terminated. They’re all alike. Sly. Cunning. Vicious. Nits breed lice. Y’all come out of there with your hands up.

She stood on the stool and slung the rope over the pipe with a sure, easy motion. She knotted it carefully, made a loop at the loose end, tying a slipknot. Good thing Elena and I wanted to be cowboys when we grew up, she thought. Feeling smug, superior. Sure. She began to hum. A cowboy song. I’m an old cowhand. From the Rio Grande. I’m gonna get me an Indian, and I’ll sing the blues. Got up on the stool. High enough off the floor. To hang herself. She was certain it would do. The work she’d just done, she thought, was good. She could kick the stool across the length of the closet, out of the way. Should die with my boots on, she thought. Sensing an urge to laugh building up in her. Uh-uh, Indian, she thought. No joking your way out of this one. Not this time. She lowered the loop over her head, drew it snugly around her neck. Kicked the stool out from under herself with her moccasined toe. Felt the jarring jolt, the knot cutting off her breath. Oh, god. What have I done.

Tried to hold onto the rope with her hands. Brain clearing, the red, the fog, moving suddenly away. Suddenly awake, aware of her peril. Oh god, oh god, help me someone. Tried to wedge herself between the narrow walls, but they were too wide for that. Reached up and held on to the rope, trying to raise herself up on it, like she had when she was a child. Tried to reach the pipe, but it was just out of her reach. Saw out of the corner of her eye a large spider lodged in the far corner of the closet. That seemed to be watching her. I’m hung, she thought. Wanting irrationally to laugh. I can’t get down. I can’t breathe. I’ll die here, alone. Panic rising in her chest, toward her throat. Her almost windless throat. Unless I can hang on until someone comes.

Knowing no one would come. Or not for days. You stupid. Stupid. You dumb woman. Dumb Indian. Now what are you going to do? Die? In such a stupidstupid way. Well, at least they won’t bury me a Catholic, she thought. They don’t bury suicides in consecrated ground. Maybe they bury us in savage grounds. In the wilderness. In the ocean. In the sky.

She closed her eyes. Trying to be calm, now. Trying to think. How to get down. How to stop what she had started. And remembered the knife.

Reached into her backpocket, drawing it carefully out. Careful because the edge was so sharp. Because she was afraid she might drop it. Depending on how badly she wanted to live. Crying in short gasping cries. Whimpering. Clenching her teeth against the pain. In her mind swearing. Cursing. Those who wanted her dead. Herself for listening to them. For ever listening to them. I won’t die, damn you. I won’t die. I will live. I swear, I will live. Drew out the sharp, gleaming knife. Raised it high above her head, grip suddenly sure, swing smooth and wide. The second slice severed the rope. She fell several feet to the waiting floor. Knocking what was left of her breath out of her.

When she finally came to, got her breath again moving through her bruised, knotted throat. After she could feel again her legs, her hands. After she could see again in the harsh light of the bare bulb that hung far above her head like a malevolent spirit, leering. After she saw that she had not landed on the knife, that she had somehow flung it across the closet in her fall. After she had lay and recovered her wits. Contemplated her actions. Her crazy need to finally do something. Do something final. Something certain, absolute, clear. Realized how close she had come to finality. After she had begun to weep, quietly, with relief, with sorrow, with comprehension. Of what had driven her. The grief, the unbearable anguish, the loneliness. The rage. She realized how grateful she was. For air. For life. For pain. Even for the throbbing pain in her throat.

I did it, she thought. With luck and determination. With intelligence. I almost did it for good. Maybe in a way I did. She turned finally on her back, letting her arms and legs stretch out, and as she looked up she saw the spider, sitting unconcerned like spiders do. It seemed to be approving of her. To be nodding, maybe even smiling. She smiled up at it and said in her husky voice, her first words since she’d fallen from her near death, “Thanks, Grandmother. I think I’m going to be all right.”