The bird rests its head on her hip, unblinking, barely breathing, but watching keenly. Watching and understanding. It’s such an alien feeling coming from a bird that I want to apologize to it too and tell it to hold on, help is on the way, but I stop myself. I’ve allowed a lot of stuff today, but speaking to a bird like it can understand me, even if it can, might be the straw that sends the camel to the nuthouse.
I pull down the collar of the woman’s sweater, and I’m thinking how maybe I can open up that airway to buy her a little more time. The damage is severe. Her neck looks like a crumpled piece of tin. Still, I could get a knife and a pen. It might give us another ten minutes. Or it might kill her. I start looking around the room, and that’s when I see the leather bag and the painted sticks from before, only the sticks have both been snapped in half and the leather bag has been ripped open. Next to it is a beautiful box that looks like it’s made of ivory or bone. It’s been snapped in two as well. The top half is upside down next to the bottom half, and inside is nothing but a handful of fine black sand. Some of it is scattered around the floor. I get the feeling that whatever was there is gone.
“I’m going to try to do something to your neck, to help you breathe,” I say. I make a move to get up, but she holds me and eyes me with the same frank assessment as the bird. She shakes her head and squeezes my hand, and I realize that she is going to die here with me. The thought hits me with such force that I sit down on my rump next to her and sort of slump like an old doll. She pats me on the knee, her breath crackling like paper. She still watches me like she knows me. She is remarkably unafraid. Ben’s pleading is softer, more diminished. There is a stretch of silence. He is listening, too.
“Who did this to you?” I ask.
“Police,” she says, then she waves it off with a tiny brushing motion of her finger. I understand. It no longer matters. It is a thing that was done. What matters now is what happens next.
“The crow,” she says. “Stone crow. He takes.” I look back at the bone box. So there was a stone crow in there. Already I’m linking it to what Ben told me about Joey Flatwood. I know it was more precious, and far more dangerous, than any mere ornament or jewel. She pulls weakly at my hand, and I lean closer. She closes her eyes and speaks in lilting Navajo. It sounds like wind whistling through trees.
“God, I wish I understood you,” I say, helplessly. “Maybe Ben can—” but she quiets me with the barest hint of a squeeze of my hand.
“Wrong thinking,” she says.
“What’s wrong thinking?”
“The stone crow. Is important. But only guardians.”
“Guardians? Guarding what?”
She drops my hand and snakes her own back up to her neck, and I think for a moment that she is looking for the source of her pain, for the source of her death. But then she slips her hands into her collar and grasps something on her chest. She carefully pulls it out, and in her hand I see a small silver bell hung around her neck with a simple leather strap. It is no bigger than my thumb. In a way it’s no different from something you might see hanging on a Christmas tree, but there is a powerful weight to it that I can see with the same sight that shows me the colors. It is a weight so heavy that it is warping the faint silver strands that are what remains of her life, bowing them out and away like a powerful magnet. If we exist in one place, and Joey Flatwood another, and those that have passed from us exist on a third, then this thing that is a bell and not a bell cuts through all of those places like a hot knife through butter. I can see this just by looking at it.
Ben’s grandmother sees what I see. She sees it in my eyes, and she sighs with a smile that says to me I have chosen correctly.
“The stone guards the silver,” she says, and she hands it to me. I reach out for it. I am drawn to it, but before I can take it, she stills me with a look.
“No ring,” she says, and her eyes focus to pins. I see that she has her thumb firmly on the tongue of the bell. The crow titters, and its broken wings twitch. They don’t have much time left.
“No ring,” she says again. “Never ring.”
“No ring,” I say, nodding.
She looks at me for a moment longer, and I get this feeling that she knows all about me. Knows everything I think and feel as surely as if I had lived with her in this room all of my life. She gives one final nod.
“Take,” she says.
Very carefully, she transfers the bell to me. I slip the leather over her head. She lets up on the tongue last, and I clamp my own thumb over it. I feel like silencing that bell is, in all likelihood, the most important thing I have ever done in my life. I take it, and it doesn’t make a sound. Physically it’s actually quite light, but only because I expect it to be so heavy. It gleams a thick, milky silver color, creamier than normal silver, richer and more pure. It’s also cold. Very cold. Tin-mug-in-the-freezer cold. It almost burns, but I’ll be damned if I’m gonna take my thumb away from that clapper.
She nods appreciatively. Then she puts her thin lips together and shushes me.
“Secret,” she says. “You, and Ben.”
I nod.
She starts singing. Ben is still quiet on his end of the line, listening.
I don’t know what it is she is saying, but I do know that it is a final song. A song of endings. I don’t need to know the words to know that she is giving thanks. It is not sad, not particularly. It simply is, in the Navajo way. She closes her eyes, and I know she is seeing beyond herself now, bidding farewell to the path she has walked and welcoming the path ahead. It sounds like she is greeting an old friend, and when I see tears fall from the corners of her eyes, I feel that they aren’t tears of pain or sorrow, but tears of joy. And I feel the same soft brush that I felt in the hospital after my patient died. The crow feels it too, because it twitches its silky black head and tracks the unseen movement of something terrible and beautiful walking through the door and over to this woman dying in front of me. The thing that walks in is the thing she sings for. The rhythm of her song slows. I press the bell tighter, holding it still with every fiber of my being, because it’s burning in earnest now. It’s calling out to whatever has walked into this room. It wants to be with this new thing, not with me. Perhaps it is even one and the same with this new thing. It wants to ring, but I won’t let it.
I am not afraid, because I know in my heart that this thing, which I can only call Death, isn’t here for me, isn’t concerned with me, may not even see me. But it is here for the grandmother. There is a soft breath of air, and the silver strands of color that are the woman’s and the crow’s break and float away. The song is over. Both are dead. There is another movement in the air, barely a flutter, and then Death is gone too, and I am alone.
I let up on my grip and look down at the bell. I lift my thumb, but there is no longer any tongue there. The clapper is gone. Now the bell looks more like a candlesnuffer. But I know I felt the clapper when the grandmother was dying. I know it was there. I think it’s still there, where I can’t see it. It’s just waiting.
I slip the necklace and bell that isn’t a bell over my head and tuck it close to my chest. It is still ice cold but not burning cold anymore. I would say goodbye to the grandmother, but I know that she is long gone. What is left on the floor is more one with the shattered glass and splintered wood around it than the flesh and blood she was. Ben heard the final song as well as I did, but he is talking now. Quietly. His voice sadly diminished through the tiny speaker of my phone. He is saying his own goodbye, and I leave him to it.
I hear sirens. They are close. I stand and gather myself, and that’s when I remember the other body, the one that trailed the blood out of the back door. I follow it out into the back yard and come upon the man. I am expecting the intruder, but I know I’m wrong. This man has been stabbed. He has died clutching his stomach and trailing his heart’s blood, but he is otherwise unscathed. He was not the one the crow died defending the grandmother from. As I bend down closer to his face, I see an instant resemb
lance. He has the same soft slope of the forehead and boxy cheekbones, the same soft brown skin.
Ben’s father.
Did he come home and stumble upon the intruders? Did he try to defend the grandmother too? Whatever happened, when he was stabbed, he wanted to be here, out here in the back. I follow his path, the one cut short when he bled out, and I see that he is reaching for a pyre of rocks just outside of the lawn. To further confuse things, he is smiling. It’s plain on his face. Not a grimace, either, or a death snarl. It is a genuine smile.
When death came for Ben’s father, he was happy about it.
Chapter 15
Ben Dejooli
The Navajo are not sentimentalists in death. My mother seems to have forgotten this. She has been away too long. She wants a fresh cut pine box for both Gam and Dad and a ceremony with speakers and eulogies and suits and ties and tears. She fights with the people of the Arroyo, with whom Gam and Dad shared their final wishes for burial in the old style. She screams at them until I have to hold her back. I see reappearing shades of the blank horror that wiped her mind when Ana vanished. She is all too used to this type of thing.
In the end, she exhausts herself and sleeps for many hours, and the people of the Arroyo take my father and my grandmother away. I help. When they are laid on the cliff, the men who carried them along with me strip and burn our clothes and sweat in a hogan for some time. I think I pass out. I find myself in a small circle of campers later, by a fire, underneath a blanket with a diamond weave of stars above me. Nobody bothers me. Nobody speaks as I dress in the clothes that were left out for me, and I find my truck and drive back to my house. On the drive out, I see a flickering fire in the distance, and I know that the Arroyo men have burned the hogan where Gam held my Evilway.
There is nothing for me here anymore. I appreciate the purification rituals that the men of the Arroyo gave me. I know that they are simply trying to wash death off of me, but the truth is, I don’t care if death finds me anymore. I would welcome death, now. A clean Navajo would never set foot in a house of the dead, which is what my house has become. But I am not clean. No matter how much I sweat, I am marked. I know this now. I know this because the crows follow me.
The crows are bolder by the day. They hop from tree to tree as I walk. They soar high above me, cutting on the currents and then doubling back again to hover just behind me. They sit on the lawn of my boarded-up house with blood still staining the floor. They coat the roof like ink. They make the barren winter trees sway again with dark life. And they are completely silent. Even when I go to shoo them, they never squawk or titter. They are mourning, I think, much like I am. They are mourning the big one. The big red crow that Caroline found dead by my grandmother.
Or perhaps they are simply waiting. The way that their hundreds of black-tar eyes glisten in the hollow sun gives me a feeling like a pressure drop before a storm. Perhaps they are waiting for the thundercloud to break. Perhaps they are waiting for me.
My mom won’t go near the house. She holes up at a motel off the highway while I survey the scene of the crime. By now the cops are long gone. Danny called me himself to take my statement. I asked if he wanted to walk the house with me, but he said he’d already been there and didn’t want to see it again. That tells me it’s bad. I asked him if there was conclusive evidence pinning it on the Feds. He was quiet for a moment, and I knew he was contemplating letting me down easy, but that’s just not Danny’s way.
“No,” he said, simply.
Of course not. They would be pros. Still, I want to check it out. Danny tries to dissuade me, but ultimately he lets it be. He knows I have to close that door myself.
I step over the police tape and walk up to the front door as the sun is setting. It’s been nearly three days since it happened, and this is the first time I’ve come home, although I can’t rightly call it home anymore. I fish around in my pocket for my keys, and I’m surprised to find that my hand swims in my pocket now. This is a fitted uniform I’m wearing. Or it used to be. I pull out my hand and study it like it’s foreign to me. Bony, thin. My fingers remind me of my grandmother’s. I can loop my thumb and pinkie around my wrist. I touch my neck and find bones there too, bones everywhere. I run my hands through my hair, and it comes away in feathered clumps. I clamp my hat down on my head like it’s the only thing keeping the top of me from blowing away. Behind me the crows shuffle their wings.
I step through the doorway and flick on the lights. I see what Caroline described. The place was ransacked as they searched for the crow totem. There are evidence markers strewn about the living room: little tents with numbers on them that lead me through the house like some nightmare museum exhibit. Everything is shattered and strewn except one picture of me and Ana. The frame is broken, but standing. I step over to it and pick it up. Pieces of glass fall to the ground. I barely recognize myself. I remember when this was taken. It was after I graduated from high school. We had a party in the back yard. The picture was supposed to be just of me, but Ana was messing around and shouldered her way into the frame, pushing her face next to mine. The photo has been damaged. It looks like it was scratched up during the fall, because now there are two long gashes under Ana’s eyes and her face is warped. She looks a lot like she looked when I hallucinated seeing her in the hogan during the Evilway.
I almost drop the picture in my hurry to set it down. It wobbles and falls flat on the mantle with a clatter that makes me jump. I stare at it a moment longer, half expecting it to move, but it doesn’t. I chide myself. The world isn’t falling apart, it’s just me. The only bogeyman here is the one in my head.
I follow the evidence markers down the hall, into the kitchen, flicking on all the lights as I go, just like I would if I was coming home from work and getting ready to sit at the table and eat some of Gam’s leftovers or maybe try to coax Dad into a conversation and have a beer or two before watching TV until I fall asleep. But not anymore.
The blood is like a painted track. Like a dragged brush that leads out the back door. It’s strange to see a thing that was inside my father on such lurid display here. It makes the murder doubly obscene. My father, for all intents and purposes, died when Ana left us. The spark that made him my dad went with her. The rest was just going through the motions. This blood would have embarrassed him. He wanted the perfect Navajo death: to leave like an old wolf, to walk out on everything and everyone without a word and sit down away from the world and die alone. Maybe underneath a tree or by a creek. His body left to nature. Burdening no one.
Sorry, Dad. Guess things didn’t really work out for either of us.
Gam’s room paints a picture. The shattered window, the broken bone box. There are black feathers everywhere, like little shadows. It looks like the forensics group tried to number them but gave up. Gam’s quilt, ancient even when I was born, is strewn across the floor. I pick it up and fold it, evidence be damned. The medicine sticks that were used in the Evilway are broken and strewn about. There was a struggle here on more than one level. There is a dried pool of blood by the door and a spattering along the wall above it. A telltale sign of a flicked knife. So Dad was stabbed here. In this room. Somehow that brings me a measure of comfort. He was coming to help Gam.
The far side of the bedroom tells another story. There are individual droplets everywhere, and most of them are on the floor. Caroline said she found the big crow in here. If I were to guess, I’d say the blood pattern follows something that might drip from a beak.
A smudge of blood mars the linoleum where Gam’s body had been. It has a Rorschach symmetry to it, as if it’s been pressed, perhaps by a knee. I picture a man kneeling down here and strangling my grandmother. I trace the ground and find another mark, a streaking like dragged fingers that leads to where the bone box lies. I picture that same man, still bleeding, having finished the killing, resting his hand upon the floor not far from where I listened to Gam’s final song.
There is blood on the bone box, too. It looks like there were
clear fingerprints on the top of the box that were then smudged. In fact, much of the blood evidence is smudged. Now that I look for it, it’s clear as day. Almost methodical: a wiped mark on the window, and on the doorframe, and on the doorknob. A smeared streak by the door and again on the screen leading out back. A big smudge in the hallway, this probably a footprint with a tread that would have helped identify the killer, now just a dirty grease smear on old wood. Danny wasn’t kidding when he said the evidence was scant.
When I step out onto the lawn, the motion sensors kick on, and I’m flooded in bright porch light. I cover my eyes, and I hear crows move like the rustling of a heavy curtain. I step under the tape marking off the back porch and try to get a sense of my father’s final crawl.
He came out here alone. After the killers left. You can see the gripping, ripping tracks of his progress: small scratches in the dust of the brick porch where he pulled himself with his left hand, his right hand no doubt staunching his gut wound. There is a level sweep mark there, most likely from his right arm, its elbow jutting out.
There is still so much blood. It’s like a railroad track. He knew he was going to die. He knew he had minutes left, and yet some deep ember inside him, not yet snuffed, called him outside to where he was always most comfortable after Ana disappeared. He came out here for a reason. I follow his ghost out to the lawn. The blood isn’t as clear here. The dry winter grass sucked it up same as water, but there is a square marker where he died, right by the edge of the lawn, where Ana’s cairn is.
Or was.
It’s gone now. Knocked down. All the stones strewn about the ground. Where once there was a careful stack there is now a haphazard pile.
From an outsider’s perspective, it would look like nothing but a pile of rocks among a dead winter garden. Easily overlooked. But to my father this was a holy place. He tended it from the day Ana left us. Building that tiny tower from the flat rocks in the backyard was one of the last things she did, and Dad was determined to keep it as it was. I’d seen him out there in storms and in snow. In wind and in rain, checking on it, making sure it still stood. In the rare times when a few stones fell or moved, he was inconsolable. He drank heavily and repositioned it exactly as it was. That pile, a plaything to Ana, became her gravestone to him. And here it was destroyed, and not by any killer or evidence team or detective or cop. I think it was destroyed by him.
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