Ceremony

by Leslie Marmon Silko

  The old man pointed to the back of the circular room. “The west side is built into the hill in the old-style way. Sand and dirt for a roof; just about halfway underground. You can feel it, can’t you?”

  Tayo nodded. He was standing with his feet in the bright circle of sunlight below the center of the log ceiling open for smoke. The size of the room had not been lost in the clutter of boxes and trunks stacked almost to the ceiling beams.

  Old Betonie pointed at a woolly brown goatskin on the floor below the sky hole. Tayo sat down, but he didn’t take his eyes off the cardboard boxes that filled the big room; the sides of some boxes were broken down, sagging over with old clothing and rags spilling out; others were jammed with the antennas of dry roots and reddish willow twigs tied in neat bundles with old cotton strings. The boxes were stacked crookedly, some stacks leaning into others, with only their opposing angles holding them steady. Inside the boxes without lids, the erect brown string handles of shopping bags poked out; piled to the tops of the WOOLWORTH bags were bouquets of dried sage and the brown leaves of mountain tobacco wrapped in swaths of silvery unspun wool.

  He could see bundles of newspapers, their edges curled stiff and brown, barricading piles of telephone books with the years scattered among cities—St. Louis, Seattle, New York, Oakland—and he began to feel another dimension to the old man’s room. His heart beat faster, and he felt the blood draining from his legs. He knew the answer before he could shape the question. Light from the door worked paths through the thick bluish green glass of the Coke bottles; his eyes followed the light until he was dizzy and sick. He wanted to dismiss all of it as an old man’s rubbish, debris that had fallen out of the years, but the boxes and trunks, the bundles and stacks were plainly part of the pattern: they followed the concentric shadows of the room.

  The old man smiled. His teeth were big and white. “Take it easy,” he said, “don’t try to see everything all at once.” He laughed. “We’ve been gathering these things for a long time—hundreds of years. She was doing it before I was born, and he was working before she came. And on and on back down in time.” He stopped, smiling. “Talking like this is just as bad, isn’t it? Too big to swallow all at once.”

  Tayo nodded, but now his eyes were on the ceiling logs where pouches and bags dangled from wooden pegs and square-headed nails. Hard shrunken skin pouches and black leather purses trimmed with hammered silver buttons were things he could understand. They were a medicine man’s paraphernalia, laid beside the painted gourd rattles and deer-hoof clackers of the ceremony. But with this old man it did not end there; under the medicine bags and bundles of rawhide on the walls, he saw layers of old calendars, the sequences of years confused and lost as if occasionally the oldest calendars had fallen or been taken out from under the others and then had been replaced on top of the most recent years. A few showed January, as if the months on the underlying pages had no longer been turned or torn away.

  Old Betonie waved his hands around the hogan. “And what do I make from all this?” He nodded, moving his head slowly up and down. “Maybe you smelled it when you came in.

  “In the old days it was simple. A medicine person could get by without all these things. But nowadays . . .” He let his voice trail off and nodded to let Tayo complete the thought for him.

  Tayo studied the pictures and names on the calendars. He recognized names of stores in Phoenix and Albuquerque, but in recent years the old man had favored Santa Fe Railroad calendars that had Indian scenes painted on them—Navajos herding sheep, deer dancers at Cochiti, and little Pueblo children chasing burros. The chills on his neck followed his eyes: he recognized the pictures for the years 1939 and 1940. Josiah used to bring the calendars home every year from the Santa Fe depot; on the reservation these calendars were more common than Coca-Cola calendars. There was no reason to be startled. This old man had only done the same thing. He tried to shake off the feeling by talking.

  “I remember those two,” he said.

  “That gives me some place to start,” old Betonie said, lighting up the little brown cigarette he had rolled. “All these things have stories alive in them.” He pointed at the Santa Fe calendars. “I’m one of their best customers down there. I rode the train to Chicago in 1903.” His eyes were shining then, and he was looking directly into Tayo’s eyes. “I know,” he said proudly, “people are always surprised when I tell them the places I have traveled.” He pointed at the telephone books. “I brought back the books with all the names in them. Keeping track of things.” He stroked his mustache as if he were remembering things.

  Tayo watched him, trying to decide if the old man was lying. He wasn’t sure if they even let Indians ride trains in those days. The old man laughed at the expression on Tayo’s face. He wiped his mouth on the sleeve of his shirt.

  “She sent me to school. Sherman Institute, Riverside, California. That was the first train I ever rode. I had been watching them from the hills up here all my life. I told her it looked like a snake crawling along the red-rock mesas. I told her I didn’t want to go. I was already a big kid then. Bigger than the rest. But she said ‘It is carried on in all languages now, so you have to know English too.’” He ran his fingers through his mustache again, still smiling as though he were thinking of other stories to tell. But a single hair came loose from his thick gray mustache, and his attention shifted suddenly to the hair between his fingers. He got up and went to the back of the hogan. Tayo heard the jingle of keys and the tin sound of a footlocker opening; the lock snapped shut and the old man came back and sat down; the hair was gone.

  “I don’t take any chances,” he said as he got settled on the goatskin again. Tayo could hear his own pulse sound in his ears. He wasn’t sure what the old man was talking about, but he had an idea. “Didn’t anyone ever teach you about these things?”

  Tayo shook his head, but he knew the medicine man could see he was lying. He knew what they did with strands of hair they found; he knew what they did with bits of fingernail and toenails they found. He was breathing faster, and he could feel the fear surge over him with each beat of his heart. They didn’t want him around. They blamed him. And now they had sent him here, and this would be the end of him. The Gallup police would find his body in the bushes along the big arroyo, and he would be just one of the two or three they’d find dead that week. He thought about running again; he was stronger than the old man and he could fight his way out of this. But the pain of betrayal pushed into his throat like a fist. He blinked back the tears, but he didn’t move. He was tired of fighting. If there was no one left to trust, then he had no more reason to live.

  The old man laughed and laughed. He laughed, and when his laughter seemed almost to cease, he would shake his head and laugh all over again.

  “I was at the World’s Fair in St. Louis, Missouri, the year they had Geronimo there on display. The white people were scared to death of him. Some of them even wanted him in leg irons.”

  Tayo did not look up. Maybe this time he really was crazy. Maybe the medicine man didn’t laugh all the time; maybe the dreams and the voices were taking over again.

  “If you don’t trust me, you better get going before dark. You can’t be too careful these days,” Betonie said, gesturing toward the footlocker where he kept the hairs. “Anyway, I couldn’t help anyone who was afraid of me.” He started humming softly to himself, a song that Tayo could hear only faintly, but that reminded him of butterflies darting from flower to flower.

  “They sent me to this place after the war. It was white. Everything in that place was white. Except for me. I was invisible. But I wasn’t afraid there. I didn’t feel things sneaking up behind me. I didn’t cry for Rocky or Josiah. There were no voices and no dreams. Maybe I belong back in that place.”

  Betonie reached into his shirt pocket for the tobacco sack. He rolled a skinny little cigarette in a brown wheat paper and offered the sack to Tayo. He nodded slowly to indicate that he had been listening.

  “That’s true
,” the old man said, “you could go back to that white place.” He took a puff from the cigarette and stared down at the red sand floor. Then he looked up suddenly and his eyes were shining; he had a grin on his face. “But if you are going to do that, you might as well go down there, with the rest of them, sleeping in the mud, vomiting cheap wine, rolling over women. Die that way and get it over with.” He shook his head and laughed. “In that hospital they don’t bury the dead, they keep them in rooms and talk to them.”

  “There are stories about me,” Betonie began in a quiet round voice. “Maybe you have heard some of them. They say I’m crazy. Sometimes they say worse things. But whatever they say, they don’t forget me, even when I’m not here.” Tayo was wary of his eyes. “That’s right,” Betonie said, “when I am gone off on the train, a hundred miles from here, those Navajos won’t come near this hogan.” He smoked for a while and stared at the circle of sunlight on the floor between them. What Tayo could feel was powerful, but there was no way to be sure what it was.

  “My uncle Josiah was there that day. Yet I know he couldn’t have been there. He was thousands of miles away, at home in Laguna. We were in the Philippine jungles. I understand that. I know he couldn’t have been there. But I’ve got this feeling and it won’t go away even though I know he wasn’t there. I feel like he was there. I feel like he was there with those Japanese soldiers who died.” Tayo’s voice was shaking; he could feel the tears pushing into his eyes. Suddenly the feeling was there, as strong as it had been that day in the jungle. “He loved me. He loved me, and I didn’t do anything to save him.”

  “When did he die?”

  “While we were gone. He died because there was no one to help him search for the cattle after they were stolen.”

  “Rocky,” Betonie said softly, “tell me about Rocky.”

  The tears ran along the sides of Tayo’s nose and off his chin; as they fell, the hollow inside his chest folded into the black hole, and he waited for the collapse into himself.

  “It was the one thing I could have done. For all of them, for all those years they kept me . . . for everything that had happened because of me . . .”

  “You’ve been doing something all along. All this time, and now you are at an important place in this story.” He paused. “The Japanese,” the medicine man went on, as though he were trying to remember something. “It isn’t surprising you saw him with them. You saw who they were. Thirty thousand years ago they were not strangers. You saw what the evil had done: you saw the witchery ranging as wide as this world.”

  “And these cattle . . .

  “The people in Cubero called her the Night Swan. She told him about the cattle. She encouraged him to buy them. Auntie said that—”

  The old man waved his arms at Tayo. “Don’t tell me about your aunt. I want to know about those cattle and that woman.”

  “She said something to me once. About our eyes. Hazel-green eyes. I never understood. Was she bad, like Auntie kept saying? Did the cattle kill him—did I let the cattle kill him?”

  The old man had jumped up. He was walking around the fire pit, moving behind Tayo as he went around. He was excited, and from time to time he would say something to himself in Navajo.

  Betonie dug down into the cardboard boxes until dust flew up around his face. Finally he pulled out a brown spiral notebook with a torn cover; he thumbed through the pages slowly, moving his lips slightly. He sat down again, across from Tayo, with the notebook in his lap.

  “I’m beginning to see something,” he said with his eyes closed, “yes. Something very important.”

  The room was cooler than before. The light from the opening in the roof was becoming diffuse and gray. It was sundown. Betonie pointed a finger at him.

  “This has been going on for a long long time. They will try to stop you from completing the ceremony.”

  The hollow inside him was suddenly too small for the anger. “Look,” Tayo said through clenched teeth, “I’ve been sick, and half the time I don’t know if I’m still crazy or not. I don’t know anything about ceremonies or these things you talk about. I don’t know how long anything has been going on. I just need help.” The words made his body shake as if they had an intensity of their own which was released as he spoke.

  “We all have been waiting for help a long time. But it never has been easy. The people must do it. You must do it.” Betonie sounded as if he were explaining something simple but important to a small child. But Tayo’s stomach clenched around the words like knives stuck into his guts. There was something large and terrifying in the old man’s words. He wanted to yell at the medicine man, to yell the things the white doctors had yelled at him—that he had to think only of himself, and not about the others, that he would never get well as long as he used words like “we” and “us.” But he had known the answer all along, even while the white doctors were telling him he could get well and he was trying to believe them: medicine didn’t work that way, because the world didn’t work that way. His sickness was only part of something larger, and his cure would be found only in something great and inclusive of everything.

  “There are some things I have to tell you,” Betonie began softly. “The people nowadays have an idea about the ceremonies. They think the ceremonies must be performed exactly as they have always been done, maybe because one slip-up or mistake and the whole ceremony must be stopped and the sand painting destroyed. That much is true. They think that if a singer tampers with any part of the ritual, great harm can be done, great power unleashed.” He was quiet for a while, looking up at the sky through the smoke hole. “That much can be true also. But long ago when the people were given these ceremonies, the changing began, if only in the aging of the yellow gourd rattle or the shrinking of the skin around the eagle’s claw, if only in the different voices from generation to generation, singing the chants. You see, in many ways, the ceremonies have always been changing.”

  Tayo nodded; he looked at the medicine pouches hanging from the ceiling and tried to imagine the objects they contained.

  “At one time, the ceremonies as they had been performed were enough for the way the world was then. But after the white people came, elements in this world began to shift; and it became necessary to create new ceremonies. I have made changes in the rituals. The people mistrust this greatly, but only this growth keeps the ceremonies strong.

  “She taught me this above all else: things which don’t shift and grow are dead things. They are things the witchery people want. Witchery works to scare people, to make them fear growth. But it has always been necessary, and more than ever now, it is. Otherwise we won’t make it. We won’t survive. That’s what the witchery is counting on: that we will cling to the ceremonies the way they were, and then their power will triumph, and the people will be no more.”

  He wanted to believe old Betonie. He wanted to keep the feeling of his words alive inside himself so that he could believe that he might get well. But when the old man left, he was suddenly aware of the old hogan: the red sand floor had been swept unevenly; the boxes were spilling out rags; the trunks were full of the junk and trash an old man saves—notebooks and whisker hairs. The shopping bags were torn, and the weeds and twigs stuck out of rips in the brown paper. The calendars Betonie got for free and the phone books that he picked up in his travels—all of it seemed suddenly so pitiful and small compared to the world he knew the white people had—a world of comfort in the sprawling houses he’d seen in California, a world of plenty in the food he had carried from the officers’ mess to dump into garbage cans. The old man’s clothes were dirty and old, probably collected like his calendars. The leftover things the whites didn’t want. All Betonie owned in the world was in this room. What kind of healing power was in this?

  Anger propelled him to his feet; his legs were stiff from sitting for so long. This was where the white people and their promises had left the Indians. All the promises they made to you, Rocky, they weren’t any different than the other promises they
made.

  He walked into the evening air, which was cool and smelled like juniper smoke from the old man’s fire. Betonie was sitting by the fire, watching the mutton ribs cook over a grill he had salvaged from the front end of a wrecked car in the dump below. The grill was balanced between two big sandrocks, where the hot coals were banked under the spattering meat. Tayo looked down at the valley, at the lights of the town and the headlights and taillights strung along Highway 66.

  “They took almost everything, didn’t they?”

  The old man looked up from the fire. He shook his head slowly while he turned the meat with a forked stick. “We always come back to that, don’t we? It was planned that way. For all the anger and the frustration. And for the guilt too. Indians wake up every morning of their lives to see the land which was stolen, still there, within reach, its theft being flaunted. And the desire is strong to make things right, to take back what was stolen and to stop them from destroying what they have taken. But you see, Tayo, we have done as much fighting as we can with the destroyers and the thieves: as much as we could do and still survive.”

  Tayo walked over and knelt in front of the ribs roasting over the white coals of the fire.

  “Look,” Betonie said, pointing east to Mount Taylor towering dark blue with the last twilight. “They only fool themselves when they think it is theirs. The deeds and papers don’t mean anything. It is the people who belong to the mountain.”

  Tayo poked a stick into the coals and watched them lose shape and collapse into white ash. “I wonder sometimes,” he said, “because my mother went with white men.” He stopped there, unable to say any more. The birth had betrayed his mother and brought shame to the family and to the people.