It was a good day when they branded them. Big fluffy clouds that were high on the west horizon in the morning were dark blue and low by the afternoon, and a sudden rain shower came and washed down the dust of the corral and the sweat from the work. The cows already had big Mexican brands on their sides, extending across their ribs, a brand so big you could see it for a half mile, Josiah said. And Robert nodded, and added, “That’s about as close as you can get to them anyway.” The brand wasn’t like American brands, which were initials or letters or even numbers; it looked like a big butterfly with its wings outstretched, or two loops of rope tied together in the center. They added Auntie’s brand, a rafter 4, on the left shoulder of the cows and calves, and let them go. They galloped away, kicking up red clay dust; they were still going south.
Josiah went to see her the day after the cattle were delivered. He talked to Tayo in a low confidential tone and told him not to let Auntie or old Grandma find out. They were outside at the woodpile, each with an arm full of kindling, but he whispered to Tayo as if Auntie were only a few feet away from them. He straightened up and glanced over Tayo’s head at the sun, which was almost down, and spoke in a more natural tone. “Anyway,” he said casually, “I’m only going up there to thank her again for letting me in on a good deal.” He changed his shirt and put on a stiff new pair of Levis and wiped off his fifty dollar boots with the towel that was still damp from drying his arms and face. He told Tayo to get the sharp scissors out of Auntie’s sewing basket, and he trimmed the hairs in his thin mustache. Tayo followed him outside into the cool dim evening. Josiah looked at his own reflection in the truck window, stroking the hairs of his mustache into place. He made Tayo promise to tell Auntie and Grandma that he had gone to Paguate on business. Tayo nodded, but he figured they already knew where Josiah was going anyway.
She was sitting in the shade on her wicker chair; her eyes were closed and her face was relaxed. He liked to look at the way her light brown skin had wrinkled at the corners of her eyes and her mouth, from too much laughing she liked to say. She knew he was standing there because the stairs up to the second floor porch were loose and squeaked. “Sit down,” she said, without opening her eyes, “enjoy the springtime with me.” He liked the way she talked. There was something in her eyes too. He saw it the first time when she had said, “I’ve seen you before many times, and I always remembered you.” Josiah could not remember ever seeing her before, but there was something in her hazel brown eyes that made him believe her. He sat on the straight-back chair beside her and looked over at the big cottonwood that grew next to the porch, its branches sweeping and wide, hiding a portion of the northeast sky.
On the fourth day something buzzed around inside the jar.
They lifted the buckskin and a big green fly with yellow feelers on his head flew out of the jar.
“Fly will go with me,” Hummingbird said. “We’ll go see what she wants.”
They flew to the fourth world below. Down there was another kind of daylight everything was blooming and growing everything was so beautiful.
The hot weather and the fact that Lalo had always bootlegged beer to the Lagunas and Acomas brought him there one day when she was sitting in the shade of the porch outside the bar. She spoke first, asking if he had a cigarette paper. Josiah was surprised that a Mexican woman had spoken to him, and he gave her the paper without looking at her face. He stared at the sack of Bull Durham in her lap and watched the way she rolled the cigarette without spilling any tobacco. He was suddenly aware that she was watching him, and he mumbled something about it being a hot day, and then left with his paper sack full of cold beer. But the rest of the afternoon, and that night too, he had an uncomfortable feeling that he had forgotten or lost something at Lalo’s. After supper he went out to make sure his work gloves were on the seat of the truck. He reached into his pocket and counted the money to make sure Lalo had given him the right change. He didn’t sleep well that night either, and even while he dreamed he was still aware of this feeling, that something had been left behind. So the next day he went back to Cubero. It wasn’t until he drove past the Cubero store and found himself looking to see if she was sitting on the porch that he realized his heart was beating like a boy’s, and it was too late. He knew then what it was he had left behind.
She looked up and smiled as if she had been waiting for him. She got up from her chair as he came up the steps and gestured at the bright sun and cloudless sky. “It’s too hot down here,” she said, walking to the stairs at the end of the long porch. He didn’t say anything; he just followed her up the spiral stairs.
“Some things I don’t remember too well,” she said, “names of the places, names of the people, or even their faces. These small towns like El Paso and Socorro were full of people passing through the way I was. I danced. That was all that was important.”
She got up from the bed and disappeared through the curtains across the doorway. Josiah heard her cranking the Victrola; the needle scratched over the flamenco music. She brought out the shoes from a trunk under the bed. They had been wrapped carefully in white tissue paper: shiny black leather with high square heels. She hitched the blue silk dress higher on her wide hips and held the edges of the fabric in both hands as she arched her back and tossed her head. At first, all he was aware of were the heels of the shoes beating rapidly against the floor, and he wondered if Lalo and the afternoon customers in the bar downstairs could hear it. But as the music gathered speed, he forgot about how she made the room shake, because the spinning and tossing of her body and the momentum of the music had gathered him close, and he found himself breathing hard and sweating when the Victrola finally ran down.
She sat back down on the bed beside him and wiped the shoes on the hem of the blue dress before she wrapped them up again and put them back in the trunk. “They called me the Night Swan,” she said. “I remember every time I have danced.”
If she had not been so young, she would have realized that he was nothing, that the power she was feeling had always been inside her, growing, pushing to the surface, only its season coinciding with her new lover. But she was young and she had never felt the power of the dance so strongly before, and she wanted to keep it; she wanted it with a great ferocity which she mistook for passion for this man. She was certain about him; he could not get enough of her. He would lie beside her under the blanket and his eyes would be fevered even after he was limp and incapable of taking any more from her. She kept him there for as long as she could, searching out the boundary, the end to the power of the feeling. She wanted to prowl those warm close places until she discovered the end because at that time she had not yet seen that the horizon was an illusion and the plains extended infinitely; and up until that final evening, she had found no limit.
She knew it before he spoke. His eyes were still feverish as he spoke and his fingers quivered like the legs of a dreaming dog; at that moment he wanted her more than he had ever wanted her. And it was for that she would not forgive him. She could have accepted it if he had told her that her light brown belly no longer excited him. She would have sensed it herself and told him to go. But he was quitting because his desire for her had uncovered something which had been hiding inside him, something with wings that could fly, escape the gravity of the Church, the town, his mother, his wife. So he wanted to kill it: to crush the skull into the feathers and snap the bones of the wings.
“Whore! Witch! Look at what you made me do to my family and my wife.”
“You came breathlessly,” she answered in a steady voice, “but you will always prefer the lie. You will repeat it to your wife; you will repeat it at confession. You damn your own soul better than I ever could.”
He grabbed her shoulders; his mouth was twisted open and the breath was hot and short; but it was his own body, not hers, which shook. Then his hands went limp and fell with their own weight from her shoulders.
“We will run you out of town,” he said. “People listen to me. I’m somebody in this
town.”
That night she danced he was already a dead man, a living dead man who sucked life from the living, desiring and hating it even as he took it. The ecstasy he found in her had illuminated the dead tissues and outlined the hollow of his spirit. She danced, spinning her body, pulling her thighs and hips into tight sudden motions, bending, sweeping, veering, and lunging—whirling until she was the bull and at the same time the killer, holding out her full skirts like a cape.
The men sitting around tables at the edge of the dance floor pushed themselves away, some stumbling over chairs, spilling their beer in a panic that pounded in their chests like her heels against the floor. The bartender left a towel stuffed in the glass he had been wiping. But they watched; pressing close to one another, shivering in the farthest corner of the bar, they watched her; and when the guitar player finally laid his instrument on the floor and held his head between his hands, she danced on.
“I knew nothing of minutes or hours. There were changes I could feel; the boards of the dance floor began to flex and glisten. The creaking of the wood became a moan and a cry; my balance was precarious as if the floor were no longer level. And then I could feel something breaking under my feet, the heels of my dancing shoes sinking into something crushed dark until the balance and smoothness were restored once again to the dance floor.” She looked up at Josiah and pulled at a blue thread hanging from the sleeve of her dress.
“His wife came into the bar screaming. The damp cold of the snowstorm wind followed her through the door she had thrown open wide. Memory is strange. I don’t remember her face or her name, but I remember her feet. There was new snow on her bare feet where she had run from her house to the cantina; they were pale and small on the dark oiled-wood floor. I watched the snow melt into little streams between her toes while she accused me.”
She paused and rolled herself another thin cigarette. “There had been some kind of accident with his horses late that night,” she said as she lighted it, inhaling deep and shaking her head slowly. “His screaming woke her up. She ran into the snow like that—nightgown and bare feet—and found him in the corral. His own horses had trampled him. That was all.” Her hazel eyes were shining; she smiled at Josiah. “Who listens to the stories wives tell?” She squeezed his arm. “But all that was a long time ago—I don’t even remember how many years ago that happened in Las Cruces.” She poured him more beer in a thick pottery cup with yellow flowers painted around it. “I’m a grandmother now. My daughter in Los Angeles has two beautiful little daughters. And when I dance now, I dance for them.”
She moved closer to him on the bed. “One day I got up and walked down the main street of Socorro. The wind was blowing dust down the little side streets and I felt like I was the only one living there any more. The drought was drying out the land, stealing away the river, so that even the cottonwoods and tamarics along the banks were drying up. I had a feeling then—something inside me beginning to shrink thin and dry like old newspapers gone yellow in the bottom of a trunk. I rode the bus this far. I saw the mountain, and I liked the view from here.” She nodded in the direction of the mountain, Tse-pi’na, the woman veiled in clouds.
She shook her head slowly and emptied the last of the beer into her cup. “Old age,” she said, laughing, “the first sign of old age is all this talking when we could be doing something else. . . .” She winked at him and Josiah pulled her close, promising himself he would never ask her what it was about the mountain that caused her to stop there.
At first the Cubero people were upset about the Night Swan’s choice of a retirement place. Lalo was sullen when anyone asked, and he said it was his wife who had rented her the rooms above the bar. He always added that they were old and dusty and no one else would live up there because the juke box played loud and drunks yelled and stomped up and down the long porch downstairs. Of course only that kind of woman, used to that kind of life, would tolerate such things.
After she moved in, people said the steps on the spiral staircase at the end of the porch were never dusty any more; but that was only rumor, and there were conflicting stories about where she got her money. But the facts remained: she was an old cantina dancer with eyes like a cat. The women watched the bright blue door on the second-story porch, and they imagined unspeakable scenes between the Night Swan and their husbands or sons. When Josiah started coming to see her, and his blue GMC truck was parked there every evening until midnight, the Cubero women relaxed. They could even laugh a little.
“She’s so old and wrinkled,” they whispered, “all worn out. Only some old Indian would want her anyway.” But still they watched every evening to make sure his truck was there, as if they knew the sensation in the groin of their husbands each time the men passed Lalo’s and saw the bright blue door.
“That’s what all the rumors say,” Auntie hissed at Tayo in the storeroom where she had cornered him. “I was the last one to know what my own brother has been doing. Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Because I didn’t know for sure.”
“Liars and fools,” she said, rearranging the Mason jars full of peaches on the shelf, pushing them hard against each other until he thought the glass might break.
“I’ve spent all my life defending this family, but nobody ever stops to think what the people will say or that Father Kenneth will call me aside after mass to speak with me.” She straightened herself as tall as she could, because she was short and heavyset. Her eyes were full of accusations.
“It doesn’t bother me,” she said, assuming a lighter tone of voice, “but this hurts old Grandma so much.” Her words were shaky. “Our family, old Grandma’s family, was so highly regarded at one time. She is used to being respected by people.” She stopped pushing the Mason jars around and began dusting off the table where the old shopping bags were folded and stacked.
“Young people don’t understand how important it is. To be able to walk through the village without worrying or wondering what the people are whispering about you.” She wiped tears from the corners of her eyes with the hem of her apron and walked out of the storeroom. She slammed the door behind her fiercely.
Tayo always wondered how she knew that people were whispering about her as she walked out of the church; he wondered too if Auntie was lying or if she really didn’t realize that old Grandma didn’t care what anyone said. She liked to sit by her stove and gossip about the people who were talking about their family.
“I know a better one than that about her! That woman shouldn’t dare be talking about us. What about the time they found her rolling around in the weeds with that deaf man from Encinal? What about that? Everyone remembers it!” She pounded her cane on the floor in triumph. The story was all that counted. If she had a better one about them, then it didn’t matter what they said.
“I’ve been thinking,” the Night Swan said to Josiah, one evening when they were sitting in her room. She was sitting on the edge of the bed looking into the mirror, and he was sitting on the old blue armchair in the corner. “All these years you’ve done the same things,” she said. He smiled and shrugged his shoulders. “That’s how I’ve lived so long. Up until now.” She laughed at his reference to her. “My cousin Ulibarri in Magdalena wrote,” she said, “he’s selling some Mexican cattle very cheap. They are off the desert, in Sonora, and he said he thought someone up this way might want to buy them.” “I don’t know,” Josiah said, “last time there was a drought, we had to sell everything, even the sheep and goats.” “I don’t know anything about cattle,” she said, “but he said these had been living off rocks and sand.” She laughed, and went out to the kitchen to pour them some coffee. “Why are you looking so serious?” she said as she handed him the cup. “I’m thinking about the cattle business,” he said.
By late July Josiah divided his time between the cattle, which were past Flower Mountain then, still heading southwest, and this woman. Josiah didn’t mention her much any more, not since Auntie had cornered Tayo in the storeroom. He said it was
better this way; Tayo wouldn’t have to lie if he didn’t know anything. Tayo helped him as he had promised, riding along the fence line between Acoma land and Laguna land. When they found tracks and sagging wires on the fences with bits of light hair caught in the barbs, they rode through the Acoma gate and brought the cows back again.
When they had finished with the cattle, there was always the sheep camp. Auntie insisted that they check on the sheepherder because she was certain that he would run off and leave the sheep penned up to slowly die of thirst, or worse yet, that the sheepherder had got drunk and burned up the little sheep-camp house. Even after they had driven over the bumps and washed-out places on the sandy road, and made sure that these things had not happened, she would be satisfied for only two or three days. Then she would be convinced that the sheepherder had lost all the sheep, and that he was too lazy to hunt for them, and the sheep were wandering in the red rocks, where coyotes would pick them off, three and four at a time. Tayo wondered where she got these ideas, because they never happened, but when she talked about them, they sounded possible, not likely, but possible, so they had to go again. At first Tayo thought it was because Auntie never trusted her sheepherders, but later on, he saw that she wanted to keep Josiah busy, too busy to go to Cubero. They had a good man working for them then, an Apache guy from White River, and he was probably the best sheepherder they ever had; but whenever she wanted to persuade Josiah to go check up on things, she would go into a long history of what the Apaches had done to the Pueblo people, dwelling especially on Geronimo. Once, Robert heard her as he was leaving for the fields. He winked at Josiah and Tayo, and then with a serious face he said, “I thought the sheepherder’s name was Mike, not Geronimo,” and walked out the door.
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