The Blue Corn Murders

by Nancy Pickard

  All in all, it felt like a black day in the kitchen.

  As recorded trumpets soared gloriously above the clatter of food preparation, Bingo was thinking about Naomi, too, although somewhat indirectly. She was thinking about how some women on the Indian reservations still processed corn the old way: pounding it, sifting it, then allotting the smaller kernels to cornmeal, the larger ones to hominy. Naomi’s management style was like that: to delegate the smaller jobs to people who couldn’t handle anything bigger yet, and the larger jobs to people who could. Some people said Naomi thought she was the only one “who could,” and that’s why so many things were getting screwed up these days.

  Once, on a Cherokee reservation, Bingo had watched a Cherokee woman with a North Carolina accent burn a corncob in a bowl to seal in the natural oils so it could be used to hold liquids.

  “We’re leaking,” Bingo muttered to herself, “like an unoiled bowl.”

  Sweat dampened the white terrycloth band she wore to keep her short black hair back off her face as she cooked. The knife she wielded looked much too large for her hand, but she flailed it with the grace and panache of a samurai, cutting the red meat of the tomatoes cleanly, dicing evenly. Only the barest minimum of juice flowed on her cutting board.

  She was also thinking of the food she’d bought Sunday for the menu that now she wasn’t going to be able to prepare. Some of it she could save, freeze, and use later, but some of it would spoil if she couldn’t use it today. Bingo hated waste. She hated what it did to her budget, much less what it did to the earth.

  “We’re leaking like a sieve,” she muttered. “And if we don’t get plugged up soon, this whole place is just going to drain away.” Just yesterday one of the housekeepers had told her Naomi was ordering way too much of the wrong cleaning supplies and not enough of the right ones.

  Whack!

  Bingo missed the tomato and sliced into the cutting board.

  “Dammit!” she yelled.

  As one, her crew flinched, glanced at one another, worked faster.

  There was something else Bingo had heard on that Cherokee reservation. The old tribes had a tradition where the widow of a great chief would be designated the Beloved Woman. She got to decide whether they’d go to war, and whether captives lived or died.

  “That’s power,” Bingo muttered. “Life or death.”

  She sliced cleanly, viciously, through another tomato.

  Her crew stayed out of her way. The symphonic kettledrums pounded. The strings wept their dramatic, dolorous song. Bingo glanced up at the kitchen bulletin board, where she posted everything from Naomi’s pink morning memos to family photos—her staff’s families—and her own personal favorite quotations.

  Her glance went automatically to a three-by-five index card that she had thumbtacked in the very center of the board. Once white, but now yellow and greasy from hanging around in a kitchen for so long, the card contained a quote from the jacket notes of an album of music by her very favorite composer in the whole world. The composer was Alan Hovhaness, who was of Armenian descent, just like her. His real last name—Chakmakjian—was the same as hers, so most people assumed he was a distant cousin, or something. He wasn’t, but what he said, in the quote on the card, was Bingo’s philosophy of life and of cooking.

  For probably the thousandth time in her life, she read:

  “Things that are very complicated tend to disappear and get lost. Simplicity is difficult, not easy. Beauty is simple. All unnecessary elements are removed—only essence remains.”

  It made perfect sense to her.

  “The essence of this camp is truth,” Bingo decided, as she slid the chopped tomatoes out of the way to make room for green peppers. “But if that’s the case, why does everything seem so complicated all of a sudden?”

  She felt furious all over again and took it out on the peppers.

  Ten

  The first time Genia woke up on Monday morning, it was to the sound of whispering, but it sounded like an argument.

  “How could you lose it!”

  “I didn’t lose it! It’s just gone. Maybe it fell out, or somebody took it—”

  “Why would somebody take a bottle of shampoo?”

  “I don’t know! Oh, this is just the worst thing that could happen! Maybe they needed shampoo, for God’s sake. I don’t know what happened to it. It’s just gone.”

  “Are you sure? Did you look?”

  “I emptied everything out.”

  “God, if somebody finds it—”

  “Dead. We’re dead.”

  “Not if I kill you first.”

  “It’s not my fault—”

  It was Teri and Judith, Genia decided, with her eyes still closed. Fighting like children. Or maybe she was dreaming. She turned over under her covers. The whispering abruptly stopped. Genia went back to sleep immediately.

  “Genia?” Again a whispery voice roused her. Sleepily, she thought, Not again! This is getting annoying. “Do you want to sleep in, or should I wake you up for breakfast?”

  “Heavens,” Genia said, opening her eyes fast and blinking in the strong sunlight that was now pouring in the windows of the hogan. She looked up into the pretty face and blue eyes of Gabriella, who was smiling hesitantly down at her. “I’ll get up. Thank you! How much time have I got?”

  “It’s seven forty-five.” Her roommate gave her a cheery wave, said, “See you later,” and exited, leaving Genia alone in the hogan. She hadn’t heard Teri or Judith leave, but she vaguely recalled overhearing them argue about something. What was it? Shampoo? Surely not—she must have been dreaming. Once she’d been compelled by nature to get up in the dark, fumble into her robe and slippers, and make her way as quietly as possible out the door of their hogan and down the path to the women’s restroom. At first it had seemed a terrible bother, and cold and a little scary to boot. But once she had got outside and looked up at the sky, the sight of all those millions of stars shining just for her had turned her nocturnal errand from nuisance to gift.

  Knowing she had over an hour before the kitchen closed, she lay for a few moments in contented comfort, snuggled under two wool blankets. She thought she smelled piñon smoke, again, and garlic. It was that last smell that tugged her out of bed by her nose and got her up and showered and dressed and finally walking down the path toward the dining hall. She was overjoyed to find it was a gorgeous morning. Composing an imaginary postcard to her children, she described the day as “cool and fresh as a glass of orange juice, crisp as bacon, sunny as scrambled eggs.” Genia laughed at herself and walked a little faster. She knew she must be really hungry, to be describing weather as if it were food!

  Suddenly, from behind her back, came a thundering herd.

  “Excuse me!”

  “Sorry, ma’am!”

  “Pardon us!”

  The shouts were from a crowd of teenagers who appeared, running, seemingly out of nowhere, then converged upon her and flowed around her as if she were a slow leaf in a fast stream. The words were loud, but Genia noted they were quite polite, spoken with a pronounced drawl—“Axcyuze myeh! Sawreh, mayham! Pahrd’n uhyus!”

  Three adults zoomed around her, too—a woman and two men—and the woman grinned at Genia as they trotted by. “Please excuse us. It’s a stampede.” Genia smiled back at her and came to a snap conclusion: These were the sixteen honor students. Jon Warren, the assistant director, was taking them on a camp-out starting today, and those other two adults must be teachers who had accompanied them—from Texas, judging by the accents.

  She watched the kids race up the steps of the veranda to get dibs on the rocking chairs, where they sat chattering and laughing at top volume, while the three adults caught up to them. Jon Warren climbed the stairs to face the kids, but the woman and the other man slumped onto a bottom step and stayed there. With the kitchen open for another forty minutes, Genia decided breakfast could wait a little while longer; she’d find a comfortable rock and stick around to see what was going on her
e.

  Jon wore khaki shorts this morning and a faded T-shirt over well-scuffed hiking boots and thick socks that sagged a bit at the cuffs. Seen now in daylight, Genia decided he was a very attractive man behind his beard and mustache, and she suspected that several of the young girls on the porch would have crushes on him before the week was out. Probably a few of the boys, too, she corrected herself, because that’s how the world was and always had been and no doubt always would be. She watched him lean his upper back casually against a post, as if he had all the time in the world to wait for the kids to settle down. On the bottom step, the teachers did nothing to contain the happy chaos but appeared quite willing to turn the stampede over to him.

  A couple of kids looked over at Jon, and then shushed their neighbors. Soon they were all looking at him expectantly. Genia thought they were adorable; fresh-faced and rambunctious as the young calves on her ranch in the spring. Stampede had been the right word for it.

  “Okay, cowpokes,” he said casually, in a pleasant, clear voice that carried easily down to Genia’s rock. It was, she decided, definitely the same voice she’d heard on the telephone. “First: Remember the names of the three main prehistoric cultures in the American Southwest. Mogollon. Say after me—”

  “Mo—gol—lon!”

  “Hohokam.”

  “Ho-ho-kam!”

  A few of them got the giggles at that and started chanting “ho, ho, ho” like demented Santa Clauses. Jon Warren merely smiled, as if he’d heard it before, and gave them a bit of time to get it out of their systems. There was a lot of laughter, and Genia chuckled, too. They were an infectious bunch, carrying the germ of high spirits.

  Finally, Jon spoke again. “Anasazi.”

  “An-a-sa-zi!”

  “Think of the Mogollon as covering parts of Arizona, New Mexico, and old Mexico. The Hohokam were in Arizona.” Genia’s ears perked up. A clue! she thought. Maybe it was Hohokam who had made her pottery and seashells. “And this is Anasazi land, which also touched Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, and even Nevada. There was a smaller group, the Fremont, who were also in Utah, and a mysterious little bunch named the Sineaqua down near Flagstaff, Arizona. All three of the main cultures we’re talking about go back to about 200 A.D. Say after me—”

  “Two-hun-dred-eh-dee!”

  He laughed, and so did they.

  “Starting about 1150 A.D., the Anasazi, suddenly and for reasons that are still mysterious to us, started building large and sophisticated communities in canyons and up on cliffs. Then an astonishing thing happened. After all that brilliance and effort, they abandoned those sites. By 1250 A.D., only a hundred years later, there was hardly anyone left in any of those places. That’s the two-part mystery: First, why did they build them, and second, why did they abandon them?”

  Hands shot up, as if he meant for them to answer.

  Genia saw him smile and then pat the air with his hands, to calm his listeners. “Wait. Don’t jump to conclusions. You’ll have the next four days to visit actual sites, examine evidence, and come up with your own brilliant ideas. Maybe you’ll think of something no scientist has ever thought of before.” Genia saw three or four of the kids look at each other, as if that idea seemed reasonable and pleased them. “Keep in mind that the people themselves did not disappear, as is commonly and mistakenly thought. It’s not like they were abducted by aliens.” The kids laughed. “Over time they drifted south, mostly, and became the ancestors of some of our existing Indian nations. Direct descendants of the Anasazi are as close to us now as the nearest Pueblo reservation.”

  One of the hands that had shot up was still raised, and now it waved insistently. Jon pointed to the boy attached to it. “Yeah?”

  “I’ve heard the Pueblos hate the name Anasazi. Is that true?”

  “Many do, yes, because it’s a Navajo word. It was given to that particular group of Ancient People by a man named Richard Wetherill who was the first white man to discover the ruins on Mesa Verde. In Navajo it means “Ancient Ones” or “Ancient Tribe” or “Enemy Ancestors,” depending on who’s doing the translating. The Pueblos prefer their own name, Hisatsenom. Problem is, the name Anasazi has caught on with everybody except the Pueblos, so it’s probably going to stick. I use the two names pretty much interchangeably, depending on who I’m talking to. What do you think we ought to call them?”

  “Hisatsenom” was the boy’s quick answer, although he stumbled on the pronunciation, and Jon had to coach him a couple of times before he got it right.

  “Heesahtseenome.”

  All up and down the line of rocking chairs, the kids experimented with the unfamiliar sound of it. It seemed to be settled quickly; these white, brown, black, and golden children wanted to call the Ancient Ones by the name given to them by their own descendants.

  That settled, Jon said, “Next: In the early days of discovery and exploration by white people, prehistoric sites were plundered before anybody realized the importance of preserving them. By and large, they weren’t in much danger from Indians, because native people tended to consider them sacred or taboo and leave them alone. The Utes lived on Mesa Verde for centuries, for instance, without ever touching the artifacts left in the ruins. But when white people got wind of them—both scientists and amateur pot hunters—it took only a short time to strip them of practically everything that had been left in them. The empty ruins you see now were not always that way. If you could have seen them when they were first discovered, you’d have been amazed: they were full of pots, turquoise, beads, weapons, feathers, blankets, even preserved food and clothing, some skeletons—in fact, thousands of artifacts that were stolen for private collections, or sold, or to put into museums.

  “It’s very misleading to see the ruins as they are now. It makes you think the Ancient People packed up every single thing and took it with them when they left, but that wasn’t so. In fact, when Richard Wetherill and his brother ‘discovered’ Cliff Palace Ruin, his brother told people that it looked as if the residents had just left only a couple of days earlier and maybe even planned on coming back.”

  Another hand shot up—again, a boy.

  “Is this going to be like a museum?” He sounded disappointed. “Where we can’t touch anything?”

  “No,” Jon answered. “Don’t touch the petroglyphs or pictographs, and don’t pick up any pots if you come across them. But you can pick up pot shards, just so long as you put them back down exactly where you found them. And don’t take anything, all right? No Hisatsenom souvenirs. Not even the smallest bit of old pot. It’s illegal. Federal offense. Big time. Other than that, don’t worry, I’ll make sure you get the chance to examine plenty of artifacts very closely.”

  Sitting on her rock, Genia felt as guilty as a felon.

  Oh dear, she thought, can I put those bits and pieces back exactly where I found them? A determination began to grow within her to do what she could to preserve the integrity of the little prehistoric site on her ranch.

  A girl was waving her hand as if it were a handkerchief.

  “Dr. Warren? Don’t the Indians hate archaeology?”

  Genia watched him shake his head, and she heard the comically rueful tone to his answer. “Why don’t you ask me something easy—like who invented the wheel, and is there really a God?”

  On the steps below him, the teachers laughed out loud.

  But the kids just waited, some of them looking a little smug, some appearing not to get the joke, and none of them letting him off the hook. He freed himself by turning the question over to a young woman who had been listening from the doorway that led into the dining hall.

  “Susan?” he called to her. “You want to take this one? Kids, this is Dr. Van Sant, who may look like your little sister but is actually one of those nasty archaeologists you’re asking about. She talks funny, but she’s okay, really.” He gave her an ironic little salute and said, “Good luck, Suze.”

  She stepped into the sun at the front of the veranda.

  “Thanks
a lot, Jon” was her equally ironic retort. Genia thought her slight English accent made her words sound delightfully crisp and amused. In the morning light, with her blond pigtails and freckled face and in her shorts, T-shirt, and sandals, she really didn’t look much older than the teenagers in front of her.

  “Okay,” she began straightforwardly. “I think what you’re really asking is, are you going to be offending Native Americans by visiting these ruins? I think you’re worried about being disrespectful, am I right?”

  Sure enough, heads nodded all up and down the row.

  Genia wondered what this scientist would say in defense of her life’s work—her “destiny” to find out where the pot in her childhood dream had gone.

  “A lot of Native Americans loathe us, yes,” she admitted. “They hate it when their ancestral homes are dug up, they are deeply, deeply offended when we disturb the graves, and they just wish we would all go away, preferably back into Europe, where we came from. I have to tell you, that’s the truth. I will also say, however, that there are some Native Americans who are themselves archaeologists. And some tribes may despise what they see as the desecration of their sacred trust but they also see the political possibilities our work has for them. It’s a very tough call for most of them. But I won’t try to hide from you the fact that mostly they don’t like it. So why do we do it?”

  It appeared to be merely a rhetorical question for her, as if she had long ago worked out an answer that satisfied, for her, any nagging ethical questions.

  “I don’t know if I can give you an answer that will satisfy you. I could say we do it because that’s who we are. We seem to be a people who want to know things. We’re driven by our curiosity, half the time. Maybe that’s good or maybe it’s bad, I’ll leave that to you to decide for yourselves. But speaking only for myself, I can swear to you that I love and respect the cultures I am investigating. I believe the work I do helps to encourage the rest of the world to show more respect to the Indians.” She paused and cocked her head, as if questioning them. “I don’t know if that’s a good enough rationalization for you, or for the tribes. I do know that for all the damage we may have done in the last century, we’ve also saved a lot of important sites that would otherwise have gone under the plow, the bulldozer, or the road grader.