Changing Woman Ways

by Conda V. Douglas

  Mora opened her eyes to see Anne tearing the black-and-white photo of herself off the pole. Anne tore the photo into pieces. Cutting pains sliced into Mora’s hands. With a cry, she jumped away from the pole.

  “Hey!” Anne yelled. The pole fell, and Anne grunted as it struck her shoulder.

  Mora started to reach for the pole again and then noticed the blood dripping from her hands. Along the side of her palms, where once she’d had fingers, long gashes bled, as if the doctors had just sliced into her hands to rob her of her extra appendages.

  “Splinters,” Anne said. She must have spotted Mora’s blood.

  Mora stared at the pole and saw no jagged splinters, rough spots or protrusions. Instead she saw her own blood smeared around the dancing coyotes.

  “You’d better get those cuts bandaged,” Anne straightened and gasped. The pole had dug into her shoulder, tearing at the fabric, ripping the expensive cloth. As if the loom objected to this antiseptic room with its elaborate, half-completed displays.

  Mora stared at the scattered pieces of the loom, trying to focus her thoughts away from the pain in her hands. “Wait,” she said, “where’s the rug?”

  “Rug?”

  “The Changing Woman rug that Auntie Aggie never finished, where is it?”

  “She must have finished it, like she’s finished with everything else.” Anne laughed, an echo of Auntie Aggie.

  The pain screaming in her hands, Mora fled the room, leaving a trail of blood drops as she ran, Anne’s laughter following her.

  * * * *

  Someone else, not her, perhaps Anne and a workman she’d bullied, had set up the loom. The next day Mora saw it there, looking naked without the Changing Woman rug. When she saw it there, in a corner of the room, finished and empty of any rug, a piece of furniture, Mora felt foolish. How silly to be frightened by splinters of wood and a woman’s laugh.

  Why had Anne laughed? Also, why was Anne so different from the other Navajo Mora had known? Why was she so angry? Was Auntie Aggie more than another extended family member? How had Anne known Auntie Aggie had died? Too many questions. Under the bandages, Mora’s hands itched. She knew she would have to try to find the answers. She knew one person she could ask. George, the Navajo tribal policeman.

  She found him in his usual morning break spot, the new coffee shop across the street from the museum. The coffee shop complemented the museum well, with its modern mauve and lavender accents, its potted plants, and ‘health’ menu. Still, it could not quite escape its coffee shop soul and existed on the sales of coffee, steak-and-egg breakfasts, hamburgers and donuts.

  George sat in his usual booth. Mora suspected he used the booth as a sort of central information center. People joined him there and told him what he needed to know.

  She slid in across from him. Seeing his calm, welcoming face made her feel better. Her fears seemed like nebulous, hysterical imagining. An old woman dies, and her loom is donated to a museum. What could be more natural? Mora’s torn hands were only an accident.

  They sat together in companionable silence for several moments, giving Mora a chance to gather her thoughts. For her, the Navajo custom of not leaping into conversation worked well.

  George finished his snack, coffee and an apple bran muffin. No donuts for him, he kept his body trim, so that it looked sleek and tight under his crisp, pressed uniform. He took his amulet off his belt. He turned the tiny leather bag, filled with corn pollen, over in his hands. Attached to the bag by safety pins were buttons, a tiny toy gun, a piece of turquoise, and a silver feather.

  He handed her the amulet, and she held it tight in her right hand. The pain faded from her wounds.

  “Snow before nightfall,” George said.

  Mora stared out the window at the clear blue skies. She didn’t doubt George’s word, and wished she’d remembered to put on her snow tires.

  A furtive shadow in front of the museum made her stare. A coyote sniffed around the front entrance. Only people who had never seen a coyote thought they looked like dogs.

  Coyotes, were lean, sway-backed and yellow-eyed, they prowled, their heads low between their shoulders. Feral. Wild. No wonder the Navajo didn’t like having the beasts lurking around. Not to mention the rabies outbreaks that sometimes occurred on the reservation.

  Mora had never seen one in town during the day. Not in broad daylight, not around people. She knew that sometimes the coyotes made night raids on the garbage cans and the cat and dog populations of the towns. “Look,” she said.

  “I see it,” George said. “Must be too old and sick to hunt anymore. I’ll call the animal shelter and have them pick it up.”

  Now that Mora watched closely, she could see the age in the too lean animal. Its fur was missing. Large bald patches showed raw sores. Starving, no doubt, and driven into town to search for food.

  The coyote turned and seemed to stare across the street at her, its lolling tongue making it seem to be laughing.

  She remembered the coyote out at Auntie Aggie’s hogan, and then she thought of the hogan, a true death hogan now, crumbling beneath a shroud of snow. She shivered.

  “What is it?” George asked. He frowned, a deep furrow appearing beneath his brows, and for a moment he had the face he would have as an old man. She liked his old face.

  She told him about visiting Auntie Aggie, about Anne’s anger, about the loom appearing without its distinctive rug. George listened without comment until she had fallen silent. Mora knew he would not mock her fears or laugh at her attempts to understand Navajo behavior.

  “The coyote’s gone,” he said, after a moment.

  Mora looked. The coyote had disappeared from sight.

  “Perhaps it’s just as well. Perhaps it’s better if the beast crawls away and dies on its own, instead of being trapped and destroyed,” George said. “It’s not easy to tell what is the best way.”

  George turned his head to look out the window again, and Mora saw the double knot tied with white cord at the back of his head. His Navajo heritage, often hidden beneath his hat.

  “Auntie Aggie was Anne’s grandmother,” he said. “Anne lived with her mother and grandmother until she was nine. Her mother drank. I think it was only Anne who ever made any money for the family.”

  Mora thought of the photograph.

  “Her mother disappeared. Not sure if she died, never did find her or a body. If Auntie Aggie was a witch, and she sure enjoyed that reputation, maybe she kept the body around.”

  At Mora’s stare, George shook his head. “You think just because I’m Navajo I’ll understand the ways of another Navajo. Child services discovered Anne begging, and found out she’d never been to school. So they took her away from Auntie Aggie. She lived with a Mormon family somewhere in Utah, at least until she ended up in juvenile detention when she was sixteen.”

  “She got caught between two worlds,” Mora said. She knew how that was. She felt trapped working at the museum while desperate to live every moment painting.

  “When they first built the new hospital,” George continued, as if it were the same subject, “the Anglos who built it, they were so proud of it. Trouble was, they’d bring some old man or woman to the hospital, cure ’em, save ’em, and then the old folks would walk out into the desert and die. Do you want to know why?”

  Mora nodded, feeling her hands ache. She wondered if the wounds beneath the bandages had opened again.

  “Because there was a morgue in the basement, and the old folks didn’t want to bring the evil of ghost sickness to their families,” George said. He reached out and stroked the edge of the bandage on Mora’s right hand.

  “They say Auntie Aggie was a witch, a shape changer, a ghost. Me, I think maybe she was just an old, mean woman. But you be careful, hand trembler. Death can be catching.”

  He left Mora sitting
there, with more questions than answers.

  The rush to open the museum for the Christmas season kept Mora occupied. Although she doubted Anne’s assurances that there would be a Christmas season.

  “With the new road, our museum will do a booming business,” Anne often boasted, as if a pavement could ensure tourists, as if they would be hypnotized by the new asphalt, compelled to follow the winding gray road to the new museum.

  To give Anne her due, she had sent out thousands of invitations to the grand opening on December the twenty-first. A grand opening complete with demonstrations of Navajo arts and crafts, including dancing, sand painting, silver-smithing―and loom weaving.

  When Mora saw that on the invitations, she went in search of Anne. She hated the thought of someone sitting at Auntie Aggie’s loom. She remembered how the loom had seemed determined not to be set up, how it had torn at her hand. Fanciful imaginings, perhaps, but Mora avoided the loom. Around it, she could still hear Auntie Aggie’s mocking laughter echoing in her mind.

  Mora found Anne sitting at the loom. Swearing. Her skirt hiked up so she could sit with her legs to one side, her expensive jacket sleeves pulled up around her elbows. She looked like an accountant trying to be a mechanic. Mora giggled. Anne swiveled and glared at her.

  “You think this is funny? You want to try it?”

  “Sorry. What are you doing?”

  “What does it look like I’m doing? I’m setting up a weaving for the demonstration.” Anne shrugged out of her jacket and went back to work.

  Mora watched Anne as she wove the black wool thread in and out with a heddle. Then she beat it down with a wooden comb. Thump. Thump. Thump.

  “The Changing Woman pattern,” Mora said.

  “Only pattern I know,” Anne said. “Course I can’t finish it. That doesn’t matter, not for the demonstration.”

  “You’re doing the demonstration?”

  “Yeah, what a hoot.” Anne laughed. “Shame I didn’t keep Auntie Aggie’s clothes. Looks like I’ll have to scrounge something to look ‘authentic.’ Do you think my hair will fit into a hair knot?” Anne pulled back her short-cropped locks. “Maybe you have a string for it, eh, hand trembler? Or maybe a black string, like my mother.”

  “Auntie Aggie, is that who you mean?”

  Anne only laughed again, and the rage in that laugh drove Mora from the room. As she left, the thump, thump, thump of the comb chased her.

  In the rush before the grand opening, Mora managed to ignore the rustle in her hands every time she thought of Anne at the loom. It intruded into her thoughts only once, when George called her.

  “Just so you’d feel at ease, I found out what happened to Auntie Aggie. She came in DOA to the hospital. That’s okay, though; the autopsy showed she died of a plain old heart attack. So don’t go imagining ghosts where they aren’t,” he finished.

  She thanked him.

  “Funny thing,” George said, just before he hung up. “Maybe I shouldn’t mention it, but it seems Auntie Aggie’s body disappeared from the morgue—though I suspect it’s a mix-up in the paperwork.”

  Mora wished he hadn’t told her. She consoled herself with the idea that Auntie Aggie had died and been autopsied in the best modern way. And now lay buried in a modern cemetery, forgotten. The pain in Mora’s hands was from stress.

  The day of the winter solstice came, and with it snow. Maybe it was the snow, or being so close to Christmas, or simple bad luck. The grand opening fell flat and empty. Less than twenty people showed up, a disaster. The exhibits, in the harsh overhead lights, looked shabby and worn, a Navajo garage sale.

  Even Anne, in her velvet skirt and top, all traditional, looked more like the little beggar girl she once was than a proud weaver. Her short hair had somehow been pulled back into a double knot. Was it a wig? Anne hunched over her work, her shoulders bent like an old woman’s. Mora reached out to touch her shoulder, then noticed the tips of Anne’s fingers looked rubbed raw. Had weaving done that? There was more of the rug upon the loom than Mora would have expected. How long had Anne labored at it?

  “Anne?”

  “Can’t stop,” Anne said in a low, harsh and ancient voice.

  Mora let her hand drop. “What do you mean?” she asked, but received no answer. Just then one of the few attendees bustled up with a complaint, and Mora felt relieved to be called away.

  The fiasco ended. Mora remained after everyone else departed in defeat, amidst the litter of used paper plates, empty plastic glasses, and empty plastic lives. Exhausted, she walked from new room to new room, dousing the harsh overhead lights, covering the disaster in darkness. She saved the room with the loom for last.

  After turning off the lights in the room, Mora still stood in the enveloping dark. She doubted the next year would include a new grant to keep the museum going. What would happen to her now, yet another out-of-work would-be artist scrounging on the reservation?

  As her eyes adjusted to the dark, she noticed, as if with a perverse pleasure, the storm had now cleared. Through the windows, the light of a new moon allowed her to make out the jumbled shadow shapes of the exhibits.

  The loom fell within a direct moonbeam, its rug standing out in black and white contrast. Something moved along the top layer of the rug. Was it clouds around the moon tricking the light? Peering, Mora crept closer to the loom. The thread heddle wound its way along the top of the rug, weaving yet another line into the Changing Woman pattern. She reached out and touched the rug, stroking it with her hands, wanting its power. Her wounds opened, and her blood flowed onto the rug. She cried out and fainted.

  When Mora awoke, on the cold museum floor, her cocktail dress crumpled beneath her, bright sunlight streamed in, and the loom was gone. In the crevices of her mind lurked sounds and moving shadows that scuttled away when she blinked in the bright sunlight.

  She knew where to find the loom. She crawled off the floor, bandaged her hands and staggered out to her truck. With the fresh snowfall, the road to Auntie Aggie’s was barely passable. Mora held her hands tight on the wheel, ignoring their agony, and let them find a pathway.

  Auntie Aggie’s hogan looked whole and sturdy. No one had breached the north wall, as in a death hogan, to let the evil spirits escape. If anything, with the new snow piled around it and atop its roof, the hogan looked in better condition than when Mora had seen it last. Without knocking, for she knew from her hands that she was already invited, Mora entered.

  Anne sat at the loom. Like Mora, she was still wearing her clothes from the opening. She reminded Mora of a portrait: Navajo Woman with Loom.

  Without looking up and without stopping her weaving, Anne asked, “Have you gotten what you asked for, hand trembler?”

  “Have you?”

  Silence.

  Mora looked closely at the loom and saw the dancing coyote ring looked deeper cut into the wood. Renewed. Mora had her answer.

  She ran from the hogan, stumbling and falling, catching herself with her bleeding hands. As she passed Anne’s truck, she saw that one of its tires lay flat. No matter, Anne no longer needed transportation. She had come home.

  As Mora drove back to the modern world, she wondered if she could tell George. What could she say? About a rug that would never be finished? About a woman who sometime soon would be known as Auntie Annie and thought of as a witch? That coyotes can dance and laugh? That Auntie Aggie’s body would never be found?

  Would he believe her? Perhaps. Perhaps, if she showed him what she discovered about her hands. What lay beneath the bloody bandages.

  Her sixth fingers growing back.

  About the Author:

  Conda first began writing at the age of ten. Since then she has published over sixty short stories and articles in numerous venues. She is now at work on a novel, but her first love remains the short story.

&nb
sp; “Changing Woman Ways” comes from her experiences growing up with the Navajo.

  Visit her at her blog, Conda’s Creative Center at

  http://condascreativecenter.blogspot.com.

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