by John Saul
“Sure,” Jed replied. “They could have a decent life—real kitchens and bathrooms, and television, and everything else people have now.”
“But what would it look like?” Judith pressed. She turned to gaze at the ancient structure once more. It spread along the rim of the mesa, a series of two- and three-storied stone, timber, and adobe structures, each of them built around a small central courtyard. The walls were thick—nearly four feet on parts of the lowest floor, and the roofs were flat. The only concession to the modern world the old pueblo seemed to have made was the installation of windows in some of the rooms; worn wooden casements with small panes, which even despite their own age, looked oddly out of place in the primitive adobe construction.
“Well, I guess it would have to look kind of different,” Jed finally admitted. “I mean, you’d have to do some remodeling to get plumbing and wiring in—”
“You’d have to start over again,” Judith told him. “You don’t just start remodeling something like that. The pueblo’s more than six hundred years old; at least parts of it are. You really think they should start tearing it apart just for some plumbing and electricity?”
“But what about the weather?” Jed asked, instantly wishing he hadn’t, since he knew just as well as Judith that there was practically no better insulation available than those thick walls.
Judith didn’t bother to respond. “Shall we see if your grandfather’s home?” she asked instead.
Now Jed looked distinctly uncomfortable, and refused to meet her eyes.
“How long has it been since you’ve seen him, Jed?”
Jed shifted his weight in the saddle, but finally looked up, chewing uneasily at his lower lip. “I don’t know,” he mumbled almost inaudibly. “A while, I guess.”
“Five years?” Judith asked, making a guess she was almost positive could not be far from the mark. Jed shrugged, but didn’t deny it. Judith sat silently for a few moments, taking in the graceful beauty of the Kokatí pueblo and the lake that flooded the canyon on whose lip the pueblo sat. Finally she gazed out into the distance. Though the town of Borrego was invisible from here, the signs that it existed were scattered everywhere over the desert. “Look around, Jed,” she said softly. “Look around the way you used to do, when you were a little boy, and tell me what you see. Tell me what looks right and what doesn’t.”
Jed cocked his head slightly, his eyes taking on a puzzled look, but Judith kept her face impassive, determined not to give him any clue as to what was in her mind. At last Jed’s eyes shifted away from her, and as she watched, he began scanning the landscape around him. “I guess maybe the pueblo looks okay,” he finally, reluctantly, admitted. “Except you have to wonder why anybody would want to live in it. But it sort of looks like it’s part of the mesa.”
“What else?” Judith pressed.
Jed grinned sourly at her. “What is this? A test?”
“Maybe. But there aren’t any grades. Just look around some more.”
Jed began to scan the landscape once more, finally focusing on the lake. “I don’t like the lake,” he said at last. “I like the part of the canyon below the dam, where the cottonwoods grow along the stream and there are all kinds of birds and animals.” A memory stirred inside him, something he hadn’t thought of for a long time. “Grandpa always said the lake looks too much like the sky, and the sky doesn’t belong in the canyon. I never really thought much about it, but maybe he’s right. Look …” He pointed down into the narrow chasm that held the lake. “See how the water’s eating away at the sandstone? And there’re stains running up it from the surface, where more water’s soaking in. The whole damned thing’s going to crumble some day. But of course it won’t matter, because the whole canyon will be filled up with silt from upstream long before the walls start caving in. It’s kind of stupid, when you think about it—I mean, to wreck the whole canyon just so you can get electricity for maybe a hundred years.”
“What else?” Judith asked.
Jed’s eyes moved on, roaming over the broad expanses of the desert. Once, three years ago, he’d ridden up here late in the afternoon and come to the top of the mesa just in time to see the sun setting in the west as the full moon rose in the east. Around the horizon, five separate thunderstorms were raging, so far away that even as the lightning bolts shot out of the sky, the thunder itself was a barely audible rumble. He’d sat down on a rock and just watched the sky for nearly an hour, until the sun had finally disappeared and the storms moved on, fading away past the horizon until only the glowing light of the moon illuminated the desert, casting long black shadows from the mesas in the distance. The night noises had begun, and he’d listened to them for a while, leaving only when the lights in the oil field and the refinery came on, wrecking the whole thing.
“The refinery,” he said now. “And the oil wells and tanks. Sometimes I wish I could see the desert the way it used to be, before there were roads and power lines.”
“But that’s what you like, isn’t it?” Judith asked. “I mean, without the oil, you wouldn’t even be here, would you? There wouldn’t be any reason for Borrego to exist at all. Not,” she added, “that that would make much difference to you. I understand you’re not too crazy about Borrego.”
Jed’s eyes glowed sullenly. “Why should I like it?” he demanded. “It’s ugly, and there’s nothing to do. It just sits there, and nobody cares about it. I mean, have you ever really looked at it? Jesus, everytime someone needs a new place to live, they just build another one of those crappy cinder-block houses, or drag in a trailer.” His voice took on a scornful edge. “The trailers are the worst. They only last a few years, and then people just move out of them and leave them sitting there to rust. And there’s junk all over the place—Randy Sparks’s dad must have ten wrecked cars sitting around their yard. But he doesn’t ever do anything with them. He’s always claiming he’s going to fix them up, but everyone knows he’s not!” His gaze shifted from Judith back to the pueblo. “Then you look at the Indians. At least they don’t have a bunch of crap around they’re never going to use.” He snickered as another thought came to him. “Shit, they hardly have anything!”
Judith spoke quietly. “Is that why you don’t come up here anymore?” she asked. “Because you don’t think there’s anything here?”
Jed shrugged. “Maybe,” he mumbled. “But it isn’t just that. You know how the Kokatí are—if you’re not one of them, they don’t want to have much to do with you.”
“But you are one of them,” Judith reminded him. “At least your mother was, and your grandfather still is.”
Jed shook his head. “You think that matters?” he demanded, making no attempt now to keep the anger out of his voice. “Mom’s grandmother never even spoke to her again after she married Dad.”
“Her grandmother was a different generation,” Judith reminded him. “I used to come up here when I was a little girl.” She fell silent for a few moments, remembering.
She’d been about eight the first time she’d come to the pueblo alone, riding the horse her father had given her for her birthday. Some Indian kids had been playing a game of baseball—work-ups—and she’d just watched for a while. Then one of them had asked her if she wanted to play, so she’d tied up her horse and joined the game. She’d started in right field, and slowly worked her way up to the point when she would be next at bat when someone had called the children home for lunch. It hadn’t really occurred to her not to go with them, and a little while later she was in one of the courtyards, eating the grayish pita bread the Kokatí women still made the old way, grinding the corn with their mortars and pestles, then mixing the coarse flour with water and frying it on a hot stone. No one had suggested she shouldn’t be there, and after lunch she’d gone back to the game with the rest of the kids, not getting home until late afternoon. When her mother had asked her where she’d been, she just told her she’d been up on the mesa, playing with some of the Indian kids. Her mother hadn’t told her not to do i
t again, so a week later she’d gone back. From then on she’d always gone up to the pueblo at least once a week, and soon she knew practically everyone there.
“So they let you come and play with their kids,” Jed told her. “What’s the big deal?”
Judith shrugged. “Maybe that’s the big deal,” she replied. “As far as they were concerned, I was just another kid. And I came to play with the other kids, not to stare at them. How would you like it if people were always coming up and staring at you, and asking to take your picture, as if you were some kind of exhibit?”
Jed’s expression took on a cynicism that was beyond his years. “Okay,” he agreed, obviously reluctant to give her even that much. “But did any of them ever come down to Borrego and visit you?”
Judith nodded. “Sure. Why wouldn’t they?”
Now Jed stared at her in utter disbelief. “Oh, come on—you know what most of the people in town think about the Indians.”
“They think a lot of stupid things,” Judith replied. “And most of them just don’t apply to the Kokatí. Sure, there’s a lot of Indians who spend too much time getting drunk, but there’s plenty of white people in Borrego who do the same thing Nothing to do is nothing to do, whether you’re Indian or white. And I think maybe that’s why the Kokatí have always stuck so close to the old ways. They have a lot to do in the pueblo. They’re still farming their fields the old way, still hauling their water up from the canyon, still doing everything else just the way they’ve always done it. They don’t have time to go out and get drunk, and they won’t even accept any money from the Bureau. Of course,” she admitted, “they’re a lot luckier than most of the tribes. They still have almost all their old land, and they were never displaced.”
Jed’s expression reflected his scorn. “If everything in the pueblo is so great, then how come my mother didn’t stay there?” he asked.
Judith held Jed’s eyes with her own. “It seems to me,” she said, “that maybe that’s a question you ought to ask your grandfather.”
Jed was silent for a moment, and when he spoke, his voice was hard. “All right,” he said. “Let’s do it.”
Digging his heels into the flanks of the black gelding, he clucked to it, slapping the reins gently against the horse’s neck. Immediately the big animal broke into a fast trot, and Jed guided it directly toward the pueblo.
They slowed the horses to a walk as they approached the pueblo, finally dismounting when they were still fifty yards away, tying the reins to a rail where five mules stood, their ribs showing clearly through their skin. They were work animals, nearly worn out from years of climbing up and down the steep trails that led from the mesa to the desert floor, their backs deeply swayed from the heavy weight of the ollas they carried as they hauled water up to the pueblo. They whinnied softly as Jed and Judith tied the two horses up, and shied away from the bigger animals, as if resenting their presence. For their part, Blackie and Ginger ignored the mules, choosing instead to begin munching on the straw that was strewn around the hitching rail.
Jed and Judith skirted the edge of the pueblo’s ancient cemetery, then made their way down a narrow alley between two of the main structures of the pueblo. The alley opened into a plaza after fifty feet, and they paused to look around.
In the decade since Judith had last been here, nothing seemed to have changed at all. A few women were working in the courtyard, constructing pots out of coiled ropes of clay. A little girl, no more than two, was playing with a wad of the soft clay, already trying to imitate the actions of her mother, rolling the clay between her tiny hands, looking almost surprised when bits of it dropped away into the dust in which she sat.
For a few moments the women didn’t seem to notice them at all, but finally one of them looked up and smiled. “Jed! You finally decided to come up and see us again?” Then her eyes shifted to Judith and suddenly lit up. “Judy Sheffield!” She began speaking fast in Kokatí, and a moment later Judith was surrounded by five women, all of them asking questions at once.
Jed watched the warm welcome Judith was receiving, and wished he hadn’t agreed to come here at all. Once again he felt like an outsider, while Jude, who wasn’t one of them at all, was being treated like a long-lost relative. One of the women turned to him. “Are you looking for your grandfather?”
Jed felt himself flush slightly, but nodded his head.
The woman tilted her own toward another of the narrow alleys. “He’s in the kiva.” Then she turned her attention back to Judith, and a moment later Jed, feeling as if he was being watched from every dark door and window in the pueblo, crossed the plaza and stepped into the shadows of the narrow passageway.
He followed the alley, emerging onto the wide apron that lay between the pueblo and the rim of the canyon. Midway between the pueblo’s wall and the lip of the precipice, a low dome rose up a few feet. From its center a ladder emerged from a hole in the dome, along with a steady wisp of smoke from the small fire that almost always burned within the kiva. Jed paused, uncertain what to do, gazing at the mouth of the kiva. Since he’d been a little boy, it had always seemed a dark and forbidding place. It was in the kiva that the Kokatí men gathered to carry out their spiritual rites. It was the place from which they emerged on festival days, wearing their elaborate costumes to dance in the courtyards.
But it was also the place they went to be alone, to chat quietly among themselves without the distractions of their wives and children, or to just sit and think, or commune with the spirits who resided beneath the kiva’s floor.
Could he really do it? Simply walk up to the hatch in the roof and climb down inside? But he was only a boy, not even a member of the tribe.
And then he remembered.
He was sixteen, and among the Kokatí that made him a man. Taking a deep breath, he started toward the kiva.
He hesitated as he came to the hatchway, then took one more breath and descended the ladder into the chamber below. It was circular, some fifty-odd feet in diameter, and had been hacked out of the sandstone of the mesa centuries earlier. Around its perimeter there was a stone bench, and a circle of heavy posts formed a smaller ring midway between the walls of the kiva and the firepit in the center. As Jed stepped off the ladder onto the floor of the kiva, his eyes began to burn from the smoke of the fire For a few moments he could see nothing in the gloom beneath the low ceiling. But after a while his eyes began to adjust to the darkness, and finally he spotted his grandfather.
Brown Eagle was sitting alone on the bench, facing eastward, his eyes closed, his body held perfectly still Jed approached him almost warily, half expecting the old man’s eyes to open and fix accusingly on him. But Brown Eagle seemed not to be aware of his presence at all. When Jed sat down on the bench next to him, the old man never so much as moved a muscle.
Jed sat nervously at first, feeling the hardness of the stone beneath his buttocks, gazing around curiously. He studied the construction of the dome carefully, examining the peeled tree trunks that extended from the walls of the kiva inward to the heavy beams that had long ago been laid on the tops of the posts, and the smaller logs that lay crosswise above the main stringers. There was a geometric orderliness to the dome, and a sense of timelessness that came from the blackened patina of the old wood. Except for the patch of sunlight that shone through the hatch, moving slowly across the floor as the sun moved across the sky above, there was little clue to what was happening beyond the confines of the kiva, and as he sat next to his grandfather, Jed found his own mind begin to drift in strange directions.
His eyes fixed on the fire and he began to imagine he saw shapes dancing in the flames.
A drowsiness came over him, and he began to feel his eyelids grow heavy. When at last he opened his eyes again, the patch of sunlight had moved far across the floor.
“How do you like it?” he heard his grandfather ask.
“I—I don’t know,” Jed murmured. “I guess I must have fallen asleep.”
Brown Eagle regarded Jed wi
th deep and impenetrable eyes. “You didn’t go to sleep. It’s something else that happens here. Something you won’t understand for years. Some people never understand it.” He stood up, stretched, then glanced down at Jed. “What do you say we go outside? Whatever happened to you is over now.”
A moment later, as they emerged into brilliant daylight, Jed blinked, then glanced at the sun. “Jesus,” he said. “I must have been in there almost three hours.”
Brown Eagle shrugged. “It happens.” Then he eyed Jed appraisingly. “You’ve grown. Not as big as your dad, but a lot bigger than any of the kids around here. Still, I see your mother in you.”
Jed’s voice took on a note of belligerence. “How come people can’t just look like themselves?”
Brown Eagle’s brows rose slightly. “What’s wrong with looking like your mother?” he asked mildly. “She was a beautiful woman, my little girl.” Then a flicker in Jed’s eyes made the Indian frown. “Is that why you came up here? To ask me about your mother?”
Jed felt nonplussed, as if his grandfather had looked right inside him. “I—I don’t know, really You remember Judy Sheffield?” Brown Eagle nodded. “I rode up with her this morning. We got to talking about the pueblo, and the tribe, and …” His voice trailed off as he began to flounder over his own words.
Brown Eagle ignored Jed’s discomfort. “I remember her I remember the first day she came up here. She started playing with some of the kids, and before you knew it, she was acting as if she’d been born here. She’s the kind who will always fit herself in anywhere she happens to be.” His voice changed slightly, taking on a wistful tone. “There’s other kinds of people too,” he said. “Just the opposite of Judy Sheffield.”
“She likes to be called Judith now,” Jed broke in.
Brown Eagle’s head tipped slightly in acknowledgment of the boy’s words, but his penetrating eyes fixed on Jed’s own. “It’s your mother you want to talk about, isn’t it? Not Judith Sheffield.”