Hunters and Gatherers

by Francine Prose

  Could evil thoughts keep you from lifting the statue, or were evil deeds required? What was the relation between sin and upper body strength? She didn’t think she’d committed a major sin, unless you counted sleeping with Dennis, and anyone would agree that she’d been punished for that already.

  It didn’t matter, it wasn’t her ceremony. She wasn’t waiting in line. And really, Joy was probably right—they had no business watching.

  As the believers prepared to mount the three shallow steps to the altar, a sudden epileptiform charge energized their limbs. With swift, tense gestures, they crossed themselves, whispered a prayer, then lunged for the statue. They were trembling when they picked it up, but every one of them managed to lift it, and even from far away Martha could feel their terror and their relief.

  “Awesome,” said Sonoma. “Look at all those people hugging that sick wooden mummy.”

  The saint was exceedingly mummylike: a walnut-colored wooden corpse lying on its back and wrapped in a satin brocade cloak to which worshippers hurriedly pinned hand-written prayers and notes. The statue so effectively suggested rot and decomposition, it was a miracle in itself that all these people wanted to touch and even kiss it. Everyone in line was either Papago or Mexican. No Germans, New Agers, or tourists waited to test their clear or guilty consciences.

  Martha looked from face to face—and at last gave a stifled gasp of surprise. There—at the end of the line—was Isis.

  Isis caught her eye and beckoned, and Martha burrowed into the crowd, using elaborate and, she hoped, unmistakable body language to communicate that she was just visiting and not breaking into the line.

  “I have to do it,” Isis confided. “I suppose it’s yet another ordeal I feel compelled to endure. If we want some major transformation to happen this week, it would be good to know what kind of baggage we’re bringing with us. I’m not doing this for myself but for the group. So it may be the group’s fault—the weight of our collective sins, I mean—if I can’t lift the damn thing. What sins? What am I saying? Oh, it’s all so awful! You can take the girl out of Catholic school but you can’t…oh, well. Waiting on this wretched line is the first stage of the test. Why do we do these things to ourselves?”

  “It’s pretty brave,” Martha said. “I don’t know if I’d…”

  But Isis had already drifted off into the same pacified state of unfocused wariness as the Papagos around her. Martha lingered nearby, but finally moved away when Isis’s eyes rolled up in her head and she slipped into some sort of trance.

  The bobbing and lifting continued while the worshippers shuffling toward the altar turned further inward, perhaps examining their hearts for one last hidden sin. Even if Isis weren’t the only Anglo in line, she would have stood out in her black chiffon caftan with gold ribbons criss-crossed vestal-virgin-style over her bodice. But only the tourists and the Goddess women were paying her any mind. The Indians stared at their relatives, slowly approaching the saint.

  Isis drew nearer the altar. The chapel was hot and cloyingly sweet. Once, when Martha was a girl, the scent of nightblooming lilies in her mother’s garden had so disturbed her as she tried to sleep that she’d got up and gone outside and pulled them out of the ground. Well, that’s who she was, even as a child: the cranky, pleasure-denying puritan Dennis saw in her, the withholding standoffish person who couldn’t relax and hug strangers, the prude Hegwitha had spotted, the girl who could take off her gym suit without showing an inch of flesh. If Martha tried to pick up the statue, the saint would know all that, and the stems of those night-blooming lilies would bind it to the altar. But what was her sin exactly? Modesty? Shyness? Pride?

  How nervy of Isis to make the attempt when any lifetime contained so much that could weigh the statue down. Isis must truly believe in an accepting Goddess who would love and forgive you—bad thoughts, bad deeds, and all. Whereas Martha still envisioned a punitive old man with a special problem regarding disobedience in the garden. Martha counted the people between Isis and the statue: four. Then three. Two more.

  Isis took a deep breath, crossed herself, then put her hands together, fingers pointed down, and mounted the steps to the altar. Martha saw Isis as she must once have been: a tense girl at her First Communion. Isis knelt, took the saint in her arms, and yanked at it, mumbling and straining.

  At last something gave. Isis lifted the saint’s shoulders a few inches off the altar. She hesitated, then continued, apparently unsatisfied with the slight upward lift which had sufficed for the Indians. She seemed to be trying to pull the statue all the way up to her breast.

  The effort threw her off balance and, as if in slow motion, she tripped—first gracefully, then less so—backward down the steps. The statue fell and thumped the altar with a resounding hollow thunk that boomed throughout the entire church and brought everything to a standstill.

  For a long time no one moved or spoke. Mercifully, the statue hadn’t fallen to the ground, but the saint’s feet hung off his resting place at an awkward angle. His robe was rucked up, revealing a naked brown wooden leg. Several of the messages pinned to his cloak fluttered to the church floor.

  Crouching, Isis duck-walked around, gathering up the fallen notes and frantically refastening them to the saint’s garment, lest prayers go unanswered because of her. But this left unsolved the problem of the crooked statue, which was still sticking out from the altar as everyone stood around staring.

  Helping Isis this time was more problematic than saving her from drowning. For one thing, her life wasn’t in danger. Nor would an expanse of ocean screen Martha’s rescue efforts from the curious eyes of the crowd.

  This time it was Sonoma who rushed to Isis’s aid. She pushed and straightened the statue with swift nurselike competence, tucked the saint’s robe under him so that everything was as before, and even gave him a tender pat, as if to make sure he was comfy. Only now did a collective shudder pass through the onlookers: Sonoma was wearing her cowboy hat and satin miniskirt. At last the priest and the altar boys ran over, their faces frozen in the dutiful grimaces of football players jogging onto the field, or of firemen hustling into a burning house.

  The procession had started moving again; the devotees lifted and kissed the statue. Relieved, the priest and the acolytes stayed for a moment, then retreated.

  With her arm around Sonoma’s shoulders, Isis fled the church, and the other Goddess women flocked anxiously behind them. Martha didn’t catch up till they were halfway down the dusty road to the graveyard.

  From afar, Martha saw clearly the familiar configuration: Isis talking and talking, the others hanging on every word.

  Drawing nearer, she heard Isis say, “It was a life-and-death struggle I felt in every cell, as if every ounce of patriarchal power was concentrated in that statue. It was struggling to withhold the tiniest smidgin of female empowerment, battling my whole childhood, my entire previous life, every minute of Catholic school and its power for evil—and I faltered underneath that weight, I became a statue myself…Oh, thank you, Sonoma, bless you for getting me out of that mess…”

  Once more Martha wondered if Freya and Starling might have been right about Isis attaching herself to her latest savior. But it would be too humiliating to be jealous of Sonoma!

  Martha noticed everyone staring at a spot beyond her, and she turned to see the red fireball of sun slipping under the horizon, bouncing twice on the desert before it disappeared. The sky above the brushy hills blazed a nuclear orange. The cactus turned black, and its backlit spines took on atomic white auras.

  “OH, THANK GODDESS!” CRIED Starling. “Am I ever grateful to blow that dump of a town!”

  “Whew!” said Joy. “I didn’t want to mention it till we were on our way, but several Tucson streetcorners are Number One on the EPA list for having the highest concentration of pollutants, a carcinogenic cocktail for the Guinness Book of Toxic World Records.”

  “And in this heat!” said Freya. “Everything’s so much worse. My friend Michael—the
curator—said he has never experienced an October anywhere near this broiling.”

  “We know he’s the curator, Mother,” Sonoma said. “Why do you have to keep bringing him up?”

  “I still think it’s a lovely city,” said Bernie. “Though the urban sprawl is appalling.”

  They felt light-headed with that particular pleasure—one of the joys of travel—the special delight of leaving a place where you haven’t been happy, and of realizing that you can leave, because your life is somewhere else. How superior, how successful they felt for being smart enough not to live there!

  Beneath this cheer was the disaffection, the negative side of unhappy travel, the fear that their failure to enjoy the place had been their own fault. Last night, Bernie had made yet another mistake, telling the hotel desk clerk that they’d just returned from the mission. The pretty blond clerk turned out to be a graduate student in cultural anthropology, writing her thesis on Papago kinship patterns. She said the best part of the All Souls’ Eve celebration came after the mass, in the graveyard, when the Papagos lit candles and decorated their loved ones’ tombs with wooden crosses and paper flowers, had family picnics on the graves, and sang all night long to their dead.

  “What graveyard?” demanded Bernie. “I hate to think we left the mission too early!”

  “The graveyard,” said Sonoma. “It was right below that little hill where that asshole priest and those weird old ladies were singing.”

  “Sonoma!” said Freya. “Your language!”

  “Oh, the observational powers of the young,” Isis said. “How much we lose as we age! I myself didn’t see the graveyard, though I must have been staring right at it. But you, Sonoma, with your unclouded eyes, picked up on it right away, just as you noticed the trouble I was having with that beastly statue—”

  “I saw the cemetery,” Hegwitha announced.

  “Of course you did, Hegwitha,” said Isis. It was obvious why Hegwitha might register graveyards, though none of them—except Martha—suspected the new urgency it signified now.

  Hegwitha had been quiet through much of the trip. She’d hardly spoken during lunch and their frustrating drives around Tucson. When she did talk, she whispered to Diana, to whom she’d attached herself with the gluey persistence with which she’d once stuck to Martha. Martha missed Hegwitha’s company, though she’d never exactly liked it. The loss of Hegwitha’s constant presence, irritating as it was, left Martha feeling strangely bereft, insecure, and friendless.

  She twisted around to see Hegwitha, who didn’t look at all well. Her eyes had a mucid, syrupy glaze, and she sat at a funny angle, as if at any instant she might slide off onto the floor.

  “Hegwitha,” Martha said softly, “are you okay?” She knew it wasn’t a good time to ask, but she couldn’t help it.

  Scowling, Hegwitha didn’t reply.

  “What isn’t okay,” Joy said, “is this fucked-up vehicle. I cannot believe that creep couldn’t get us another one. We should have known from the beginning—we should have been smarter than to agree to even get in a vehicle called a Ram.”

  Then they all fell silent, recalling the scene this morning with Pete, the travel agent, who had driven the van away last night, presumably out of their lives forever, and reappeared this morning in the exact same defective van. Pete claimed that his mechanic had checked the engine and replaced several vital parts. No one pretended to listen to his list of auto hardware.

  One by one, like tag-team wrestlers, the women waded into the fray. First Starling, then Joy, then Titania, then Freya, then Isis took up arguing with Pete, who just turned his big palms up and smiled a silly grin—his friendly male amusement deflecting their viragoish female hysteria.

  Finally Titania said, “I guess that’s it, girls. Once again, female disempowerment in the face of male entitlement, embodied here in this glorified cowboy schmo.” Befogged with soupy dread and defeat, they’d filed back into the van.

  “If we break down in this heat on this road,” said Joy, “we’re vulture delicatessen.”

  But Joy’s concern seemed alarmist—they were still on the highway amid a stream of traffic and drivers quite ready to assist a vanload of stranded Goddess worshippers. Or maybe Joy was simply expressing the disquiet all of them felt: the sense that bad luck had its own momentum, and once small things began to go wrong…

  “Delphi!” exclaimed Isis. “What a superb name for a town!”

  “Delphi,” echoed Bernie. “Why couldn’t we be stopping here?”

  “Because there’s no here here,” Titania said. “Where is the town, exactly? This convenience store?”

  “Oh, relax,” said Starling. “From what I’ve heard, Maria’s place makes Delphi look like Times Square.”

  Isis said, “Maria told me that where she lives, there is nothing around but desert, and the loudest sound you hear at night is the howling of the coyotes.”

  “Happy day!” said Diana.

  “Coyotes?” Martha said.

  “Delphi?” Freya was saying, first dreamily, then louder. “Delphi, Arizona? Christ! I can’t believe it!”

  “I can’t either,” Diana said. “What amazing synchronicity! That the place we’re going is named for the temple where the Oracle spoke with women’s intuitive power to see the future—”

  “Maria isn’t in Delphi, exactly,” said Starling. “Her place is somewhere near it.”

  “Synchronicity?” shrieked Freya. “I’d say synchronicity. Delphi, Arizona, is where my ex-husband, Sonoma’s father, has bought a ranch with a whole bunch of other middle-aged failed artists living out their cowboy fantasies with a slew of twenty-year-old middle-aged-failed-artist groupies.”

  “My dad?” said Sonoma. “You knew we were going to pass by my dad’s house and you didn’t tell me?”

  “I didn’t make the connection,” Freya said. “I have more important things on my mind. And since when, I want to know, since when has this man—this bastard who hasn’t written or sent either of us a penny in years—since when has he become my dad?”

  Isis leaned forward and rested her hand on Sonoma’s shoulder. Starling put aside the road map and picked up the page of handwritten directions.

  Joy slowed at the entrance to a secondary road. The jeep stalled before it turned into the desert.

  “Check the numbers on these mile posts,” Starling said. “We’re searching for a road that starts at mile post forty-four.”

  “A smaller road than this?” said Sonoma.

  In the distance, mountains rose in hostile, abrasive crags. Predatory beings disguised as harmless cacti waved their arms to distract them from counting the markers along the road.

  “One,” said the women in unison and, a long time later, “two.”

  Isis said, “This could be a marvelous centering exercise, counting slowly together. Feel the concentration…”

  “Yes, it is,” Martha murmured, but Isis didn’t respond.

  At last they counted forty-four. The jeep rolled to a stop.

  “This is a joke,” said Titania. “This is not serious. This is a dirt road.”

  “That’s what it says,” said Sterling, and read aloud, “‘Mile post forty-four. Left turn onto dirt road.’”

  Joy swung the wheel around and left the pavement. From underneath the chassis came ominous bumps and scrapes. They pitched against one another as Joy crept forward. A boulder struck the undercarriage.

  “How many miles of this?” asked Freya.

  “I can’t tell,” Starling said.

  “Five? Ten? Twenty?” asked Titania.

  “Medicine women don’t live in the suburbs,” said Starling. “Or in convenient urban centers. Shamans don’t hang out at luxe fat farms, at least the real ones don’t. The whole point of medicine-women lore is its connection with nature.”

  “Nature!” said Titania. “I’ve had it with nature, and we’re hardly out in it yet. Personally, I’d settle for the fat farm. I’d trade the medicine woman sight unseen for a good ma
sseuse.”

  In the silence they heard Sonoma ask Freya, “Do you think we could visit my dad on the way back to Tucson?”

  “Absolutely not,” said Freya.

  The jeep coughed several times and died.

  “This is suicide,” said Titania. “We’re like a bunch of Goddess-worshipping lemmings heading over a cliff.”

  Joy switched the ignition off and, centimeter by centimeter, turned the key to the right.

  “Oh, dear Goddess,” Joy prayed for them all, “help us get this piece of shit moving.” The motor sputtered encouragingly and after a moment started up.

  “We can still turn back,” said Titania. “Instead of heading further into hostile terrain in this gas-guzzling death trap.”

  “And do what?” demanded Diana. “Go back to Tucson and soak in the hot tub? Miss our chance to learn from a wise woman who might change our entire lives?”

  “Right,” said Hegwitha. “And just because some prick ripped us off on the vehicle?”

  “I’m just the driver,” Joy said. “You tell me what to do.”

  “Keep going,” Isis ordered, and even the van complied.

  Starling pored over the directions as if she might have misread how many miles they had to go, and another reading would reveal a more agreeable number. The road dipped into a canyon. Rubbly hummocks rose on both sides, so that now rocks also pelted down at them instead of just jumping up from beneath.

  Joy said, “I’m only asking, but are we in one of those killer arroyos you hear about—the ones that go from bone dry to flash flood in about five seconds?”

  “I don’t think so,” said Starling.

  “How do you know?” said Diana. “You just made that up. Starling’s been riding shotgun for half a day and already she’s caught a terminal case of male-answer syndrome.”

  Only Bernie laughed, and not for long; her tense chuckle stopped when the van collided with a rock.