The Blessing Way

by Tony Hillerman

  “Looks like it,” Leaphorn said.

  Bitsi squatted, examining the face. He was a short, middle-aged man, tending to fat, and he grunted as he lowered himself. He sniffed at Horseman’s nose and lips.

  “Alcohol. You can just barely get a whiff of it.”

  Leaphorn was looking at Horseman’s legs. McKee noticed they were rigidly straight—as if he had died erect and tumbled backward, which wasn’t likely.

  Bitsi was still examining the face. “I saw one that looked like that two, three years ago. Crazy bastard had made him a brew out of jimson weed to get more potent and it poisoned him.”

  Leaphorn was looking at Horseman’s left arm. The watch on his wrist was running, which would mean he had wound it the previous day—probably less than twenty-four hours earlier. It was a cheap watch, the kind that cost about $8 or $10, with a stainless-steel expansion band. Leaphorn stared at the left hand. The arm lay across Horseman’s chest with the wrist and hand extended, unsupported.

  “Pretty fair booze,” Bitsi said, holding up the bottle. The label was red and proclaimed the contents to be sour-mash whiskey. About a half ounce of amber liquid remained in the bottle.

  “Looks like he overdid it,” Bitsi said. “Looks like he strangled. Fell down while he was throwing up, and passed out and strangled.”

  “That’s what it looks like,” Leaphorn said.

  “Might as well haul him in,” Bitsi said. He rose from his squat, grunting again.

  “No tracks at all?” Leaphorn asked the policeman.

  “Just Begay’s. Where he got out of his pickup and came over to look at the body. Nothing but that.”

  There were plenty of tracks now. Mostly Roanhorse’s, Leaphorn guessed.

  “Where was the bottle?”

  “Four or five feet from the body,” Roanhorse said. “Like he dropped it.”

  “O.K.,” Leaphorn said. He was looking across the flat through which Teastah Wash had eroded, an expanse of scrubby creosote bush with a scattering of sage. At the lip of the wash bank, a few yards upstream from the road, two small junipers had managed to get roots deep enough to live. Leaphorn walked suddenly to the nearest bush and examined it. He motioned to Roanhorse, and McKee followed.

  “You pull a limb off this for anything?”

  Roanhorse shook his head.

  There was a raw wound on the lower trunk where a limb had been broken away. Leaphorn put his thumb against the exposed cambium layer and showed it to McKee. It was sticky with fresh sap.

  “What do you think of that?”

  “Nothing,” McKee said. “How about you?”

  “I don’t know. Probably nothing.”

  He started walking back toward the body, through the creosote bush, searching. Bitsi, McKee noticed, had climbed back into the carryall.

  “Look around across the road there,” Leaphorn said, “and see if you can find that juniper branch.”

  But he found it himself. The frail needles were dirty and broken. McKee guessed it had been used as a broom even before Leaphorn told him.

  “That looked pretty smart, Joe,” McKee said. “Where does it take you?”

  “I don’t know.” Leaphorn was looking intently at the body. “Notice how his legs are stretched out straight. He could have pushed ’em out that way after he fell down, but if you do that laying on the ground, looks like it would push your pants cuffs away from your ankles.” He stood silently, surveying the body. “Maybe that’s all right though. It could happen.” He looked at McKee. “That wrist couldn’t happen, though.”

  He squatted beside the body, looking up.

  “Ever try to pick up an unconscious man? He’s limp. Absolutely limp. After he’s dead two-three hours, he starts getting stiff.”

  That’s why I noticed the arm, McKee thought. It doesn’t look natural.

  “You think he was dead, and somebody put him here?”

  “Maybe,” Leaphorn said. “And whoever did it didn’t know it was going to rain so they brushed out their tracks.”

  “But why?” McKee asked. He looked around. Here the body was sure to be found and down in the wash it could have been buried, probably forever.

  “I’ve got better questions than that,” Leaphorn said. “Like how did he die? We can find that out. And then maybe it will be who did it, and why. Why would anyone want to kill the poor bastard?”

  > 7 <

  OLD WOMAN GRAY Rocks leaned back against the cedar pole supporting one corner of the brush hogan and took a long pull on the cigarette McKee had lit for her. She blew the smoke out her nostrils. Behind her, the foothills of the Lukachukais shimmered under the blinding sun—gray mesquite and creosote bush, gray-green scrub cedar, and the paler gray of the eroded gullies, and above the grayness the blue-green of the higher slopes shaded now by an embryo early-afternoon thundercloud. By sundown, McKee thought, the cloud would be producing lightning and those frail curtains of rain which would, in arid-country fashion, evaporate high above the ground. He wondered idly if Leaphorn had been right—if Horseman had been hiding back in that broken canyon country.

  He refocused his eyes to the dimmer light under the brush and saw that Old Woman Gray Rocks was smiling at him.

  “The way they do it,” she said, “is catch the Wolf and tie him down. Not give him anything to eat or any water and not let him take his pants down for anything until he tells that he’s the one that’s doing the witching. Once they tell it, it’s all right after that. Then the witching turns around and the man he did it to gets all right and the witch gets sick and dies.”

  Old Woman Gray Rocks removed the cigarette and held it between thumb and first finger. It occurred to McKee that every Navajo he had ever seen smoking—including children—used the same unorthodox grip.

  “I don’t think they’re going to catch this one,” she said.

  “Why do you say that?” McKee was feeling good that his command of Navajo had returned. Two days ago he would only have said “Why?” which required a single monosyllabic guttural. He had only had time for one afternoon in the language lab listening to tapes and his pronunciation had been rough at first. Now he was almost as fluent as he had been at twenty-seven. “Kintahgoo’ bil i noolhtah?” he said, repeating the question and relishing the sound.

  “They don’t think he lives around here. He’s a stranger.”

  McKee was suddenly mildly interested. He had been feeling drowsy, the effect of an unusually heavy meal (lamb stew, floating in fat, boiled corn, fried cornbread, and canned peaches) and of a certainty, established not long after Canfield had dropped him off at the hogan, that the woman would tell him nothing useful. He had hoped he would learn something of the motivation behind the witchcraft gossip, detect the sickness, or the intra-family tensions, or the jealousies, or whatever trouble had produced a need for a scapegoat witch. This hope had grown when Old Woman Gray Rocks had proved friendly and welcomed him warmly. All morning long it had faded. But there was nothing to do now but wait for Canfield to stop on his way back from buying supplies to pick him up. if there was serious trouble in the clan, natural or human, Old Woman Gray Rocks seemed genuinely unaware of it. She gossiped cheerfully about minor affairs. The nephew of an uncle by marriage had left his wife and taken up with a woman in the Peach Tree Clan at Moenkopi. He had stolen one of his wife’s horses. One of the sons of Hosteen Tom had gone to Farmington to join the Marine Corps but they said now that he was working at the place where they mined the coal near Four Corners. They said the Marines didn’t take him because he didn’t do right on the papers.

  There had been much other information. The winter had been wet and early grazing was pretty good. The price of wool was down a little but the price of mutton was up. Some of the nephews had found jobs at the new sawmill the Tribal Council had opened. George Charley had seen trucks way over by Los Gigantes Buttes and the men told him they belonged to an oil company and that Hosteen Charley had better move his sheep out of there because they would be shooting off dynamite.
Old Woman Gray Rocks thought this was strange and McKee had not felt his Navajo good enough to undertake an explanation of how seismograph crews record shock waves in searching for petroleum deposits.

  Until now, only two of her remarks had been worth remembering. She had mentioned that a man driving a truck had stopped her sister’s husband and asked him about a road. McKee had asked her about that, thinking of Miss Leon’s misplaced electrical engineer. The road had been the one which leads into Many Ruins Canyon. Old Woman Gray Rocks said the driver had been a Belacani like McKee and the truck had been pulling a little two-wheel trailer, and it was like those they haul bread in, with a door in the back—which meant it might be a van, like Dr. Hall’s van. She didn’t know what color it was but her grandson had seen it parked in Hard Goods Canyon three or four weeks ago when he was trapping rabbits. Hard Goods was the wash that runs into Many Ruins Canyon about nine miles up from the mouth, she said.

  And then Old Woman Gray Rocks had returned to the subject of the decline of the younger generation, and mentioned a cousin of her nephews had cut up a Nakai in Gallup and stolen a car and run away.

  “I heard about that at Window Rock,” McKee said. “I heard his name was Luis Horseman.” He checked an impulse to tell her that Horseman was dead and to ask her if the cousin of her nephews had come home to hide. It was better to let her talk.

  “That’s his name,” Old Woman Gray Rocks said. She spit on the ground. “He always acted like he didn’t have any relatives. Got drunk all the time and fought people. His mother wasn’t any good either. Run off from her children.” She lit another cigarette.

  McKee wondered how far Leaphorn’s news had spread. “Did he kill that man in Gallup?”

  “They say he got well,” she said. “A policeman came to Shoemaker’s and said that, and said he should come in to talk to Law and Order. It would be better if he did that.”

  “How’s he going to know?”

  Old Woman Gray Rocks looked toward the Lukachukais. “They said somebody went back in there and told him about it,” she said. “I think it was one of those boys in the Nez outfit went to tell him.”

  And that, McKee thought, will tell Joe Leaphorn that he guessed right about Horseman coming home to hide. And maybe it will tell him somebody named Nez saw Horseman the evening before his body turned up. That gave him a chance to return one of Leaphorn’s many favors.

  And now it seemed that this gossipy woman knew more about the witching incidents than she had been willing to admit. He thought about her statement that the Wolf was a stranger. A few hours earlier he would have rejected such an idea as incongruous. The witch should be one of the clan, a known irritant or target of envy. But now he was faced with a new set of facts. There seemed to be, if Old Woman Gray Rocks was well informed, none of the usual causes to produce a scapegoat witch. The cause, when he found it, now would likely be something isolated and outside the usual social pattern. He decided to pursue this point very gingerly.

  “Who is the Navajo who says this Wolf is a stranger?” McKee asked.

  “I heard that from my husband. He said they told him that one of the Tsosie boys found the place in an arroyo over that way”—Old Woman Gray Rocks made a vague gesture with her lips toward the Lukachukai slopes—“where the Wolf had camped. It was a dry camp and there was a spring just a mile up the arroyo. If he lived around here he would have known where the water was.”

  “How did they know it was the Wolf’s camp?” McKee asked.

  “They said to my husband that the boot tracks were the same tracks that Tsosie Begay found around his sheep pen after the Wolf came there.”

  So, thought McKee.

  “Is this boy of the family of Charley Tsosie?” he asked.

  “It is the son of Charley,” Old Woman Gray Rocks said. “He didn’t get married so he is still with the clan.”

  “And the Tsosie place is the one the Wolf came to?”

  “That’s what is said. Charley Tsosie was one of them he bothered.”

  “Do you know the name of the other ones?” McKee asked. Before their meal she had assured him that she didn’t know the identity of anyone who claimed to be troubled by a Wolf. McKee considered this small lie, now gracefully retracted, not as an indication of a Navajo secrecy but as a further demonstration of the mystery of womanhood. He had no theory concerning why Old Woman Gray Rocks had withheld this information earlier, and no theory concerning why she had decided to confide it to him now, and no idea whether she would tell him more. McKee had concluded years ago that the intricacies of feminine logic were beyond his comprehension.

  Old Woman Gray Rocks seemed not to have heard the question. She was looking down the slope toward the pole corral, where two young grandsons were putting a saddle on a scrubby-looking horse.

  “I heard at the trading post that the other one the Wolf came after was a man they called Afraid of His Horse,” McKee said. “But someone else said that wasn’t right. And someone else told it was a fellow named Shelton Nakai, but they didn’t know where he lived now.”

  “Who told you it was Afraid of His Horse?” Old Woman Gray Rocks asked.

  “I don’t remember who it was now,” McKee said. It had been Mr. Shoemaker at the trading post, and Shoemaker had also told him that Afraid of His Horse was the son-in-law of Old Woman Gray Rocks.

  “Maybe it was Ben Yazzie the witch was after,” the woman said slowly. “I don’t know where he lives now. He used to graze some sheep way up on the high slopes over there by Horse Fell and Many Ruins Canyons. That’s where he used to have his summer hogan.”

  McKee thought she looked nervous, and he thought he knew why. She didn’t want her son-in-law connected, even in gossip, with witching, so she was turning his attention to Yazzie. He would find Charley Tsosie, Ben Yazzie, and Afraid of His Horse later, and talk to them, but now he would change the subject. He wanted to learn more, if Old Woman Gray Rocks would tell him, about why this witch was thought to be a stranger.

  “I don’t know why they think this Wolf doesn’t live around here,” McKee said. “Maybe he made that dry camp in the arroyo because he thought somebody would come to the spring and he didn’t want them to find him.”

  “Somebody saw him one night,” the old woman said. She spoke very slowly, weighing what she would say, and how much she would say. “Witches come out mostly when there is a moon and there was a moon that night. This man he woke up in the night and heard a coyote singing and he went out to see about some lambs he had penned up out there and he saw the witch there in the moonlight. It wasn’t anyone who has his hogan around here.”

  McKee started to ask the name of this man, and thought better of it. This “someone” would be Afraid of His Horse, the old woman’s son-in-law.

  “But how did this man know he was seeing a witch?” McKee asked. “Maybe it was just somebody walking through there.”

  McKee thought, for a long moment, that Old Woman Gray Rocks would ignore the question. He let it hang in the heavy silence. Behind the winter hogan, the dogs began to bark and McKee heard the sound of the pickup truck—Canfield coming back from Shoemaker’s with the groceries.

  “The way I heard it,” Old Woman Gray Rocks said, still slowly, “this witch had a wolf skin over his back and he was down where those rams were penned, killing them with a knife.”

  Canfield arrived from Shoemaker’s with $43 worth of groceries in the camper, a case of beer, and a letter from Ellen Leon, postmarked Page, Arizona. She planned to spend a day or two checking the trading posts around Mormon Ridge and the Kaibab Plateau in the northwest section of the Reservation. And then she would come to Chinle on Thursday and drive over to Shoemaker’s trading post and find out where she could meet them. Canfield had left a note and a penciled map telling her they would be camped about five miles up the main branch of Many Ruins Canyon and showing her how to get there.

  “Works out good for everybody,” Canfield said. “You’ve got your witchery business going on in the neighborho
od, and if we have time, we can look around up in there and see if we can find that green van.” He grinned. “Let’s hope we don’t find it. We’ll get out my guitar and serenade her and spend bacchanal evenings under the Navajo moon.”

  “I don’t know if I’ve got any witchery business yet,” McKee said. “I’ve got to find this Tsosie family and find out what their trouble is, if anything. According to the old lady, Charley usually has his summer hogan just a few miles south of where we’ll be camping, so that should be easy. Then maybe the Tsosies can tell me where to find Afraid of His Horse. The old lady didn’t want to talk about him. They don’t like witch trouble in the family.”

  “What are you going to do about Horseman?”

  McKee thought about it. “I think I ought to go on back to Chinle tomorrow and call Leaphorn about it,” he said.

  “Your cop really think it wasn’t a natural death?”

  “I don’t think he knows,” McKee said. “But he guessed right about Horseman coming back in here to hide.”

  Canfield let the pickup idle along the hard-packed sand of the canyon floor, turning occasionally to side canyons to check his map and his memory of where cliff ruins he would inspect were located. The sun was low as they penetrated the upper canyon. Here the cliffs closed in, rising in sheer, almost smooth walls nearly four hundred feet to a narrow slit of sky above. Here in this slot of eroded stone darkness came early. Canfield had switched on his headlights before he found a likely camp—a hillock of rocky debris which had collected enough soil to support an expanse of grass and even a growth of young cottonwoods and willows.

  By the time they had Canfield’s working tent pitched and supper cooked, the first stars were visible over the canyon walls. A nighthawk flashed past them, hunting. Up canyon a rasping hoot touched off a dull pattern of echoes.

  “Saw-whet owl,” Canfield said. He grinned at McKee. “If Leaphorn was right, maybe that’s Horseman’s ghost enjoying the night out.”

  They ate and then sat in the silent darkness, watching the light of the early moon light the top of the canyon walls. From some infinite distance came the faint sound of barking.