The day after the old man died, men from the village came. She was sitting on the edge of her bed, across from the woman the trooper hired to watch her. They came into the room slowly and listened to her. At the foot of her bed they left a king salmon that had been slit open wide and dried last summer. But she did not pause or hesitate; she went on with the story, and she never stopped, not even when the woman got up to close the door behind the village men.
The old man would not change the story even when he knew the end was approaching. Lies could not stop what was coming. He thrashed around on the bed, pulling the blankets loose, knocking bundles of dried fish and meat on the floor. The hunter had been on the ice for many hours. The freezing winds on the ice knoll had numbed his hands in the mittens, and the cold had exhausted him. He felt a single muscle tremor in his hand that he could not stop, and the jade knife fell; it shattered on the ice, and the blue glacier bear turned slowly to face him.
It was a long time before
I learned that my Grandma A’mooh’s
real name was Marie Anaya Marmon.
I thought her name really was “A’mooh.”
I realize now it had happened when I was a baby
and she cared for me while my mother worked.
Marie Anaya Marmon, Grandma A’mooh, in her kitchen with my sisters, Wendy and Gigi.
I had been hearing her say
“a’moo’ooh”
which is the Laguna expression of endearment
for a young child
spoken with great feeling and love.
Her house was next to ours
and as I grew up
I spent a lot of time with her
because she was in her eighties
and they worried about her falling.
So I would go check up on her—which was really
an excuse to visit her.
After I had to go to school
I went to carry in the coal bucket
which she still insisted on filling.
I slept with her
in case she fell getting up in the night.
She still washed her hair with yucca roots
or “soap weed” as she called it. She said
it kept white hair like hers from yellowing.
She kept these yucca roots on her windowsill
and I remember I was afraid of them for a long time
because they looked like hairy twisted claws.
I watched her make red chili on the grinding stone
the old way, even though it had gotten difficult for her
to get down on her knees.
She used to tell me and my sisters
about the old days when they didn’t have toothpaste
and cleaned their teeth with juniper ash,
and how, instead of corn flakes, in the old days they ate
“maaht’zini” crushed up with milk poured over it.
Her last years they took her away to Albuquerque
to live with her daughter, Aunt Bessie.
But there was no fire to start in the morning
and nobody dropping by.
She didn’t have anyone to talk to all day
because Bessie worked.
She might have lived without watering morning glories
and without kids running through her kitchen
but she did not last long
without someone to talk to.
Indian Song: Survival
We went north
to escape winter
climbing pale cliffs
we paused to sleep at the river.
Cold water river cold from the north
I sink my body in the shallow
sink into sand and cold river water.
You sleep in the branches of
pale river willows above me.
I smell you in the silver leaves, mountain lion man
green willows aren’t sweet enough to hide you.
I have slept with the river and
he is warmer than any man.
At sunrise
I heard ice on the cattails.
Mountain lion, with dark yellow eyes
you nibble moonflowers
while we wait.
I don’t ask why do you come
on this desperation journey north.
I am hunted for my feathers
I hide in spider’s web
hanging in a thin gray tree
above the river.
In the night I hear music
song of branches dry leaves scraping the moon.
Green spotted frogs sing to the river
and I know he is waiting.
Mountain lion shows me the way
path of mountain wind
climbing higher
up
up to Cloudy Mountain.
It is only a matter of time, Indian
you can’t sleep with the river forever.
Smell winter and know.
I swallow black mountain dirt
while you catch hummingbirds
trap them with wildflowers
pollen and petals
fallen from the Milky Way.
You lie beside me in the sunlight
warmth around us and
you ask me if I still smell winter.
Mountain forest wind travels east and I answer:
taste me,
I am the wind
touch me,
I am the lean gray deer
running on the edge of the rainbow.
The Laguna people
always begin their stories
with “humma-hah”:
that means “long ago.”
And the ones who are listening
say “aaaa-eh”
This story took place
somewhere around Acoma
where there was a lake,
a lake with pebbles along the edges.
It was a beautiful lake
and so a little girl and her sister
went there one day.
The older girl never liked to take care of her sister
but this day
she seemed to be anxious to take care of her sister.
So she put the little sister
on her back
That was the traditional way
of carrying babies, you know,
strapped on their back—
And so they went off to this lake
and this lake had shells around it
and butterflies and beautiful flowers—
they called it Shell Lake
shells and other pretty pebbles
where she amused her little sister
all day long.
And finally
toward evening
they came home to their village home.
And all was quiet in the village
there seemed to be no one stirring around or left,
and then
when they got to their house
which was a two-story house
traditional home of the Keres
she called “Deeni! Upstairs!”
because the entrance was generally from the top.
No one answered
until an old man came out
decrepit and he says
“You poor children—
nobody is here.
All our people have gone to Maúhuatl.”
That was the name
of the high place
where they all went that day
to escape the flood that was coming.
He says
“Today the earth is going to be
filled with water.
And everyone has gone
to Maúhuatl
that high mesa land
to escape drowning.
Your mother is not here.
She left early in the day
to go with the rest of the people.
Only the old people
who cannot
travel
are left.
And if you and your little sister
follow the rest
you can tell by their foot tracks.
But be sure and walk fast—
make haste
because the flood may be coming up
before you reach the mesa.”
So she said they would.
She started off with her little sister on her back and
pretty soon they began to cry
and what they cried
is a song that is sung.
Their crying became this little song.
It goes like this:
Little sister go to sleep, go to sleep.
I suppose our mother didn’t think much
of us
so she left us behind. Go to sleep. Go to sleep.
By luck we might catch up to the crowd. Go to sleep.
We might catch up to our mother who has gone
ahead to Maúhuatl. Go to sleep.
That is how the song goes.
And so the little girl kept walking
faster and faster.
By that time
the water was coming up to her ankles.
She was wading along
and as they went along
her little sister on her back
began to cry again.
She sang
Go to sleep little sister, go to sleep.
I suppose our mother didn’t think much of us
Or she wouldn’t have left us behind.
By that time
the water had come up her legs
almost to her knees
and finally they reached the bottom
of Maúhuatl which was a mesa.
And there was a trail up there
and finally the older girl
walked up the mesa steps—
stone formations like steps.
They got to the top
before the flood really reached the top
and they looked around and
saw the people—
all the people up there
who had gone before.
They looked around
but they didn’t see anything
of their mother.
They sat down,
the older girl did.
She saw the rest of them sitting around
holding their babies
and holding their little ones on their laps
so she thought she would sit down too
and hold her little sister on her lap.
Which she did.
She sat there for a little while
and then they all turned into stone.
The story ends there.
Some of the stories
Aunt Susie told
have this kind of ending.
There are no explanations.
Lullaby
The sun had gone down but the snow in the wind gave off its own light. It came in thick tufts like new wool—washed before the weaver spins it. Ayah reached out for it like her own babies had, and she smiled when she remembered how she had laughed at them. She was an old woman now, and her life had become memories. She sat down with her back against the wide cottonwood tree, feeling the rough bark on her back bones; she faced east and listened to the wind and snow sing a high-pitched Yeibechei song. Out of the wind she felt warmer, and she could watch the wide fluffy snow fill in her tracks, steadily, until the direction she had come from was gone. By the light of the snow she could see the dark outline of the big arroyo a few feet away. She was sitting on the edge of Cebolleta Creek, where in the springtime the thin cows would graze on grass already chewed flat to the ground. In the wide deep creek bed where only a trickle of water flowed in the summer, the skinny cows would wander, looking for new grass along winding paths splashed with manure.
Ayah pulled the old Army blanket over her head like a shawl. Jimmie’s blanket—the one he had sent to her. That was a long time ago and the green wool was faded, and it was unraveling on the edges. She did not want to think about Jimmie. So she thought about the weaving and the way her mother had done it. On the tall wooden loom set into the sand under a tamarack tree for shade. She could see it clearly. She had been only a little girl when her grandma gave her the wooden combs to pull the twigs and burrs from the raw, freshly washed wool. And while she combed the wool, her grandma sat beside her, spinning a silvery strand of yarn around the smooth cedar spindle. Her mother worked at the loom with yarns dyed bright yellow and red and gold. She watched them dye the yarn in boiling black pots full of beeweed petals, juniper berries, and sage. The blankets her mother made were soft and woven so tight that rain rolled off them like birds’ feathers. Ayah remembered sleeping warm on cold windy nights, wrapped in her mother’s blankets on the hogan’s sandy floor.
The snow drifted now, with the northwest wind hurling it in gusts. It drifted up around her black overshoes—old ones with little metal buckles. She smiled at the snow which was trying to cover her little by little. She could remember when they had no black rubber overshoes; only the high buckskin leggings that they wrapped over their elkhide moccasins. If the snow was dry or frozen, a person could walk all day and not get wet; and in the evenings the beams of the ceiling would hang with lengths of pale buckskin leggings, drying out slowly.
She felt peaceful remembering. She didn’t feel cold any more. Jimmie’s blanket seemed warmer than it had ever been. And she could remember the morning he was born. She could remember whispering to her mother, who was sleeping on the other side of the hogan, to tell her it was time now. She did not want to wake the others. The second time she called to her, her mother stood up and pulled on her shoes; she knew. They walked to the old stone hogan together, Ayah walking a step behind her mother. She waited alone, learning the rhythms of the pains while her mother went to call the old woman to help them. The morning was already warm even before dawn and Ayah smelled the bee flowers blooming and the young willow growing at the springs. She could remember that so clearly, but his birth merged into the births of the other children and to her it became all the same birth. They named him for the summer morning and in English they called him Jimmie.
It wasn’t like Jimmie died. He just never came back, and one day a dark blue sedan with white writing on its doors pulled up in front of the boxcar shack where the rancher let the Indians live. A man in a khaki uniform trimmed in gold gave them a yellow piece of paper and told them that Jimmie was dead. He said the Army would try to get the body back and then it would be shipped to them; but it wasn’t likely because the helicopter had burned after it crashed. All of this was told to Chato because he could understand English. She stood inside the doorway holding the baby while Chato listened. Chato spoke English like a white man and he spoke Spanish too. He was taller than the white man and he stood straighter too. Chato didn’t explain why; he just told the military man they could keep the body if they found it. The white man looked bewildered; he nodded his head and he left. Then Chato looked at her and shook his head, and then he told her, “Jimmie isn’t coming home anymore,” and when he spoke, he used the words to speak of the dead. She didn’t cry then, but she hurt inside with anger. And she mourned him as the years passed, when a horse fell with Chato and broke his leg, and the white rancher told them he wouldn’t pay Chato until he could work again. She mourned Jimmie because he would have worked for his father then; he would have saddled the big bay horse and ridden the fence lines each day, with wire cutters and heavy gloves, fixing the breaks in the barbed wire and putting the stray cattle back inside again.
She mourned him after the white doctors came to take Danny and Ella away. She was at the shack alone that day they came. It was back in the days before they hired Navajo women to go with them as interpreters. She recognized one of the doctors. She had seen him at the children’s clinic at Cañoncito about a month ago. They were wearing khaki uniforms and they waved papers at her and a black ball-point pen, trying to make her underst
and their English words. She was frightened by the way they looked at the children, like the lizard watches the fly. Danny was swinging on the tire swing on the elm tree behind the rancher’s house, and Ella was toddling around the front door, dragging the broomstick horse Chato made for her. Ayah could see they wanted her to sign the papers, and Chato had taught her to sign her name. It was something she was proud of. She only wanted them to go, and to take their eyes away from her children.
She took the pen from the man without looking at his face and she signed the papers in three different places he pointed to. She stared at the ground by their feet and waited for them to leave. But they stood there and began to point and gesture at the children. Danny stopped swinging. Ayah could see his fear. She moved suddenly and grabbed Ella into her arms; the child squirmed, trying to get back to her toys. Ayah ran with the baby toward Danny; she screamed for him to run and then she grabbed him around his chest and carried him too. She ran south into the foothills of juniper trees and black lava rock. Behind her she heard the doctors running, but they had been taken by surprise, and as the hills became steeper and the cholla cactus were thicker, they stopped. When she reached the top of the hill, she stopped to listen in case they were circling around her. But in a few minutes she heard a car engine start and they drove away. The children had been too surprised to cry while she ran with them. Danny was shaking and Ella’s little fingers were gripping Ayah’s blouse.
She stayed up in the hills for the rest of the day, sitting on a black lava boulder in the sunshine where she could see for miles all around her. The sky was light blue and cloudless, and it was warm for late April. The sun warmth relaxed her and took the fear and anger away. She lay back on the rock and watched the sky. It seemed to her that she could walk into the sky, stepping through clouds endlessly. Danny played with little pebbles and stones, pretending they were birds eggs and then little rabbits. Ella sat at her feet and dropped fistfuls of dirt into the breeze, watching the dust and particles of sand intently. Ayah watched a hawk soar high above them, dark wings gliding; hunting or only watching, she did not know. The hawk was patient and he circled all afternoon before he disappeared around the high volcanic peak the Mexicans called Guadalupe.
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