Kachina

by Rada, J. R.

  Lou would certainly hear some jokes about his weight when he got to the other side of the sump.

  Gary swam with Lou back up to where Christine was waiting. Together, the three of them floated to the surface. As Gary’s head broke the surface, the first thing that he saw was another tunnel that continued into the darkness.

  Will it ever end? he thought to himself.

  CHAPTER 34

  Sarah woke up from her nap an hour after the sun went down. She had slept the entire day away after returning from burying her grandfather in the place he had shown her two years ago. She thought about what lay before her tonight and felt a heavy sense of sorrow at the duty she had to perform. She wished it could all be some sort of bad dream. She was alone now. Both her grandparents were dead. Her mother was off in some big city somewhere, which was as good as dead as far as Sarah was concerned. And, she had never known her father.

  She blinked and then rubbed her eyes. She could tell by looking out the window that the sun was down, but it still seemed very bright inside the bedroom. She looked at the doorway into the main room. It looked as bright as midday in there.

  Sarah climbed out of bed and walked to the doorway. David had lit a large fire in the fireplace and all three oil lamps. He was sitting in the chair beside the window staring out into the dark.

  The heat from the fire had warmed the small room to at least eighty degrees when the outside temperature was probably sixty.

  “Why did you start a fire?” Sarah asked.

  David jumped and spun around in the chair. He put his hand on his chest. “You startled me. I didn’t hear you get up.”

  “Why did you start a fire? You’re not cooking and it’s not cold enough to use it for heat.” She waved her hand around the room. “And why do you have all three lamps burning? You’re staring outside. You won’t be able to see anything out there with all this light. Wood is scarce around here, as is money to buy oil for the lamps.”

  David looked at the ground. “I feel more comfortable this way.”

  Sarah put her hands on her hips. “Are you cold-blooded or something?”

  David shook his head.

  Sarah walked around to each of the lamps and turned the wicks down until the flames went out. As each flame was extinguished, Sarah thought she saw David shudder. Was it possible he was afraid of the dark? If that was so, he must have been terrified in the caves being in complete darkness.

  David moved from the window and sat down in front of the fireplace.

  “What were you staring at out there?” Sarah asked.

  “I was just wondering if the last Bow Clansman would come after me here. I haven’t received any more visions from him. Does that mean he hasn’t received any from me? Am I out of range for this psychic thing to work?”

  “I don’t know, but I can’t hide in here with you. I have work to do.”

  Sarah picked up her canteen and canvas bag filled with jerked beef and piki. Then she headed for the doorway.

  “What work?”

  “I have to make sure my grandfather reaches the spirit world.”

  Kel´hoya awoke disappointed. He had hoped the dark kachinas would show him another vision of where Pahana was. Kel´hoya had tried to let his mind travel outside his body, but there was nothing attracting it.

  Had Pahana somehow shielded his mind?

  No, that was impossible. It couldn’t be done.

  Perhaps after his failure and the death of To´chi, the dark kachinas felt he was no longer deserving of the visions.

  To´chi’s body lay in the corner of the cave already stiffened because his spirit had left his body. How could To´chi have been so foolish as to underestimate his enemy? His mistake had cost him his life.

  Kel´hoya’s stomach growled. He put his hand on it to quiet it. He had not eaten since he left the sipapu. If he did not eat soon, he would be too weak to kill Pahana.

  Kel´hoya laid his pa´tuwvota flat on the ground, and then sat on it. It was time to hunt for food. If he could eliminate the hunger that gnawed at his stomach and mind, he might receive a vision of where he might find Pahana and redeem himself. Besides, there were no supplies left. Their journey to Tu´waqachi was supposed to have been a short one.

  The Bow Clan must survive at all costs. If To´chi had to die to continue the secrecy of Kuskurza, so be it. If Kel´hoya had to die to free the dark kachinas, he would.

  The pa´tuwvota rose off the ground about a foot and moved toward the exit from the sipapu.

  David stepped out onto the street and watched Sarah. She walked across the plaza to the truck and looked back at him.

  “Are you coming with me?” she called.

  As a reply, David jogged across the plaza toward her. Sarah had the truck started by the time he jumped into the cab beside her.

  “Are we going to a cemetery?”

  Sarah shook her head. “We’re going to a canyon about half an hour away from here. I buried my grandfather on the Navajo reservation, but what they don’t know won’t hurt them.”

  “Why can’t we go in the morning? What’s this thing you have about doing stuff in the dead of night?” David asked.

  “I have to watch the body for the next four nights. I can’t let anything happen to it that might impede my grandfather’s spirit getting into the spirit world.”

  They were silent for the rest of the drive. Not even the radio was playing. When Sarah pull off the highway onto a dirt road in the middle of nowhere, she turned her headlights off and navigated by starlight. She parked at the mouth of a small canyon her grandfather had shown her two years ago and got out of the truck.

  David followed her as she walked into the canyon. Sarah climbed up a narrow trail that ran along the side of one of the mesas that bordered the canyon. About one-hundred feet up, she stopped and squatted down.

  “You buried your grandfather here?” David said when he joined her.

  Sarah nodded. She patted the rock at her back. “His body is behind here. I have to make sure it stays safe until Sunday morning at dawn.”

  David squatted down beside her and leaned against the mesa wall. He turned on his flashlight and let the beam play over the walls of the mesa. Sarah watched him.

  “Try it without the light,” she said.

  David shook his head. “Not yet. Maybe when all this is over.”

  “They won’t get you here, David.”

  “How do you know?”

  Sarah shrugged. “I don’t know. It’s something I feel inside. Maybe I’m a little psychic, too.”

  A stone, dislodged by a passing animal, fell from high up the side of the mesa. David jumped to his feet and looked around in all directions. Sarah grabbed hold of his arm and pulled him back to the ground. Once he was seated, she continued to hold onto his arm.

  “Thank you for coming tonight. I know this is probably the last place you want to be.”

  David nodded. His eyes still darted around looking for the source of the noise. “I liked Adam even though I only knew him a short time. He saved my life in the hospital. I owe him a lot. Right now, any understanding I have about this situation came from him. I only wished I could have helped him when he needed it,” David said.

  “My grandfather was an old man. He has seen the Hopi go through many changes. Some have even fallen away from their beliefs in the legends of our people. My grandfather always believed in the legends. He taught me to believe, and he tried to teach my mother to believe when she younger, which was probably why she rebelled. Dying answered his unknown question as to whether his faith had been correctly placed in the beliefs. He died knowing the legends were true. I don’t think he would be sorry about that.”

  “That may be, but I think I’ll still miss him.”

  Sarah leaned against David.

  “I will too.”

  CHAPTER 35

  Sarah and David drove back to Old Oraibi when the sun started to peek over the horizon. David staggered into the rooms in the pueblo and fell onto the
bed that had been Adam’s. He had only slept a few hours during the day yesterday and none at all last night. If he had been more awake, he might have felt uncomfortable about sleeping in a dead man’s bed, but he was too tired to be choosy.

  He dreamed of a great pueblo even larger than all of the small pueblos in Old Oraibi combined. It towered eight stories and was probably two-hundred yards wide. In his dream, he stood away from it in the twilight of a day. The pueblo was nestled into the crevice formed by the ground meeting a receding wall from the mountain. David tilted his head back to try and see where the mountain ended and the sky began.

  It didn’t.

  There was no sky, only a stone ceiling. But then where did the light come from? Was this Kuskurza?

  Sarah woke him at eleven. He tried to push her away, but she kept shaking his arm.

  “Come on. We’ve got to be in Hotevilla,” she told him.

  “Why?” David asked trying to pull a blanket over his head to keep the sunlight out of his eyes.

  “There’s a snake dance.”

  David finally surrendered to Sarah’s urgings and rolled out of the bed. He stood up and looked around the room.

  “Where’s the bathroom?”

  “There is none,” Sarah told him.

  “Then where am I going to shower?”

  “The only running water is at the cultural center, but you don’t have time to go there. There’s a pitcher filled with water and a basin in the main room. Wash yourself there.”

  David sighed and shook his head. He unbuttoned his shirt and walked into the living room. After pouring water into the basin, he splashed his face, which woke him up almost immediately. After that, he was able to wash himself quickly. It wasn’t hard. He wanted as little of the cold water touching him as possible.

  When he had changed into a clean shirt and jeans, he and Sarah drove north on the mesa to Hotevilla. This was the first town they had passed through when they came to Oraibi two nights ago. Hotevilla looked much newer than Oraibi. It wasn’t in such dire need of repair as the older village was. Then again it hadn’t been inhabited for eight centuries like Oraibi had.

  “Many of the traditionalists that used to live in Oraibi now live here,” Sarah explained as they parked. “Many years ago, there was much controversy in Oraibi over whether to accept the white man’s ways or not. When the controversy ended, the traditionalists left Oraibi and formed this village and Bakabi, which is next to it.”

  There was a crowd of people surrounding the plaza. Cars were parked two or three abreast along the road. David noticed that many of the people in Hotevilla were white. They had come from outside the reservation to see the Hopi Snake Dance.

  David and Sarah found an empty place to sit on the second level of one of the pueblos. The plaza was formed by the back walls of four pueblos built to form a square courtyard.

  “Is this a dance put on for tourists?” David asked.

  Sarah shook her head. “No, this is a dance for rain so that our crops will survive. The tourists are allowed to come, but they can’t take pictures. This is a holy dance.”

  The crowd around David suddenly fell silent. He heard chanting, but it wasn’t coming from the crowd. A single line of costumed men shuffled into the plaza singing their solemn chant.

  “Those are the antelope priests,” Sarah whispered in David’s ear.

  The antelope priests circled the plaza and lined up along one side and waited. David found himself watching anxiously. The air seemed tense and exciting by the time the snake priests entered the plaza, opposing the antelope priests.

  For the first time, David noticed a small bower made of cottonwood branches in the center of the plaza.

  “That is the kisi. The snakes are kept there,” Sarah told him when he pointed the bower out to her.

  In front of the kisi was a wooden drum. Nothing more than a heavy plank sitting across a pit in the ground.

  “That,” Sarah whispered pointing to the hole, “symbolizes the sipapu. The snake priests stomp on the drum to notify the gods of the underworld that the ceremony is beginning.”

  As the two groups of spectacularly attired and painted priests faced each other across the plaza, the gourd rattles tied to the priests legs vibrated sounding like giant rattlesnake. A deep, sonorous chorus reminded David of an approaching storm. As the song increased in volume, the lines of the priests swayed back and forth until, at a climax in the song, they separated.

  The snake priests reformed themselves in groups of three men, and these groups danced with a strange leaping motion entirely different from any dance step David had ever seen.

  As the first group of dancers passed the kisi, the first man in the trio reached in among the boughs of cottonwood with one arm. David wondered if their idea was to get bitten by the rattlesnakes inside.

  “There’s a snake priest hidden in the kisi. He hands each dancer a snake,” Sarah said.

  “He’s sitting in there alone with a lot of snakes?” David couldn’t believe it.

  The dancer pulled out his arm and he was holding a snake in his fist. He immediately placed the rattlesnake in his mouth, grasping it with his teeth and lips a few inches in back of the reptile’s head. The snake writhed and rattled, but it did not turn and bite the man who held it in his mouth. The second man put his arm over the shoulder of the man carrying the snake, and the third man walked behind the other two.

  “Why doesn’t the snake bite the dancer?” David asked.

  “The snake knows the dancer won’t harm it. As long as the dancer remains pure of heart, the snake will sense it,” Sarah told him.

  “And the snakes always cooperate?”

  “Not always. If a snake becomes unmanageable, the second dancer will distract it by stroking it with his snake whip.”

  The snake priests danced around in a circle with his snake four times, then he dropped it gently to the ground. The third man in the trio bent over and picked the snake up.

  The nine other trios copied the process. Then the first dancer of the first trio took another snake from the kisi and danced again. Each trio did the dance five times until a total of fifty snakes were being held by various dancers.

  David glanced away from the dance to look around and he saw a tourist off to his left raising a camera to his face.

  “Didn’t you say that cameras aren’t allowed here?” David asked.

  “Yes.”

  David pointed to the tourist. Sarah’s face flushed red for a moment. She stood up and walked over to the man.

  “Sir, cameras aren’t allowed to photograph this ceremony,” Sarah told the young man.

  “Don’t worry, squaw lady, I won’t steal their souls or anything. I just wanted to show some people back home how stupid those dancers are to hold the snakes in their mouths.”

  Sarah took a deep breath. “I’m sorry but cameras are not allowed. Either you’ll have to put the camera away or leave.”

  She stepped in front of the man to block his view of the plaza.

  “Hey, get out of my way. They’re just getting to the good part!” He reached forward to push Sarah out of the way.

  David jumped up and grabbed the camera out of the man’s hand. The man turned in his direction, and as he did, David opened the camera and pulled out the film exposing it to the sun. The man stood up on the roof of the pueblo.

  “Hey, you can’t do that,” the man protested.

  “The lady asked you to put the camera away. If you had, you might have saved the pictures you had already taken. Now you don’t get any.” David tossed the camera to the man.

  “What are you? An Indian lover or something? Is this your squaw?” As the man spoke, David could smell alcohol on his breath.

  David stepped forward surprised at the anger welling up in himself. Sarah stepped between them. He knew even as he prepared himself for a fight, it wasn’t totally this jerk’s fault. Part of his anger came from his frustration at not being able to help save Terrie and Adam from the Bow Clan
. Now he had a chance to help Sarah if only in a small way. He wasn’t going to miss it.

  “David, don’t. Not here,” Sarah pleaded. “This is a religious ceremony.

  “But...”

  “It won’t bring Adam back. You stopped this man from taking the pictures. I’m sure everyone appreciates it, but don’t hit him.”

  David backed away. “Okay.”

  The man laughed. “That’s right, Indian lover, listen to your squaw.”

  David sat down and tried to tune the man’s words out. Sarah sat down beside him and held his hand. David looked around and saw many of the people on the second level of the pueblo either staring at him or the man. He hadn’t meant to draw their attention away from the ceremony.

  “Thank you,” Sarah whispered in his ear.

  David looked at her and smiled. Then he turned his attention back to the dance.

  During the dance, a priest who had preceded the dancers into the plaza sprinkled corn meal on both dancers and snakes. At one point in the dance, several women, garbed in old-style Hopi costumes, entered the plaza. They held baskets in front of them containing finely ground corn meal. They also sprinkled the corn meal on both the snakes and the dancers.

  When all the snakes had been danced with and were being held by either the third men in the trios or an antelope priest, the priest with the corn meal used the last of his corn meal to draw a circular design upon the ground. The dancers tossed all of the snakes onto the design and the women scattered the rest of their fine meal on the writhing snakes.

  The Hopi spectators near the snakes added their spittle to the sprinkling of corn meal. Then it seemed everything suddenly went crazy. Snakes darted in all directions, and the dancers had a difficult time keeping them heaped on the cornmeal design.

  David watched the rude man climb down the ladder all the way to the ground level so he could get a good look at the snakes in the cornmeal circle. David was glad to see him go.

  David stood on the edge of pueblo so that he could see the pile of snakes clearly. He heard a group of women scream as three quick snakes darted toward them. The dancers picked them up before the snakes bit anyone and placed the reptiles back on the design.