Listening Woman jlajc-3

by Tony Hillerman

  That’s some woman, McGinnis said, mostly to himself. His watery old eyes were almost closed. Leaphorn had nothing to add to that. He was thinking of the expression on Father Tsos face when Tso had told him to leave the girl. The God Tso had worshipped was no more than a distant abstraction then. The girl stood against his side, warm and alive, though at this stage of the Fall of Father Tso lust hadn’t been the enemy. Tsos enemy, Leaphorn thought, would be a complicated mixture. It would include pity, however sadly misplaced, and affection, and loneliness and vanity. Lust would come later, when Theodora Adams wanted it to come and Tso would learn then how he had overestimated himself.

  Certain kind of woman likes what she cant have, McGinnis said. They hate to see a man keep a promise. Some of em go after married men. But you take a real tiger like that Adams she goes gets herself a priest. He sipped the bourbon, glanced sidewise at Leaphorn. You know how that works with a Catholic priest? he asked. Before they’re ordained, they get some time to think about the promises they’re going to make giving up the world, and women, and all that. And then when the time comes, they go up to the altar and they stretch out on the floor, flat on their face, and they make the promise in front of the bishop. Psychologically it makes it mean as hell to change your mind. Just one step short of getting your balls cut off if you break a promise like that. McGinnis sipped again.

  Makes it a hell of a challenge for a woman, he added.

  Leaphorn was thinking of another challenge. It was obsessing him. Somewhere in this jumble of contradictions, oddities, coincidences and unlikely events there must be a pattern, a reason, something that linked a cause and an effect, which the laws of natural harmony and reason would dictate. It had to be there.

  McGinnis, he said. He tried to keep his voice from sounding plaintive. Is there anything you’re not telling me that would help make sense out of this? This secret the old man was keeping what could it have been? Could it have been worth killing for?

  McGinnis snorted. There ain’t nothing around here worth killing for, he said. Put it all together and this whole Short Mountain country ain’t worth hitting a man with a stick for.

  What do you think, then? Leaphorn asked. Anything that would help.

  The old man communed with the inch of amber left in the Coca-Cola glass. I can tell you a story, he said finally. If you don’t mind having your time wasted.

  Id like to hear it, Leaphorn said.

  Part of its true, McGinnis said. And some of its probably Navajo bullshit. It starts off about a hundred twenty years ago when Standing Medicine was headman of the Bitter Water Dinee and a man noted for his wisdom. McGinnis rocked back in his chair, slowly telling how, in 1863, the territorial governor of New Mexico decided to destroy the Navajos, how Standing Medicine had joined Narbona and fought Kit Carson’s army until, after the bitter starvation winter of 1864, what was left of the group surrendered and was taken to join other Navajos being held at Bosque Redondo.

  That much is the true part, McGinnis said. Anyhow, Standing Medicine shows up on the army records as being brought in 1864, and he died at Bosque Redondo in 1865. And that gets us to the funny story. McGinnis tipped his head back and drained the last trickle of bourbon onto his tongue. He put the glass down, carefully refilled it to the copyright symbol, capped the bottle, and raised the glass to Leaphorn. Way they told it when I was a young man, this Standing Medicine was known all around this part of the reservation for his curing. Maybe I told you about that already. But he knew every bit of the Blessing Way, and he could do the Wind Way, and the Mountain Way Chant and parts of some of the others. But they say he also knew a ceremonial that nobody at all knows anymore. I heard it called the Sun Way, and the Calling Back Chant. Anyway, its supposed to be the ceremonial that Changing Woman and the Talking God taught the people to use when the Fourth World ends.

  McGinnis paused to tap the Coca-Cola glass-just a few drops on the tongue. Now, you may have another version in your clan, he said. The way we have it around Short Mountain, the Fourth World isn’t supposed to end like the Third World did, with Water Monster making a flood. This time the evil is supposed to cause the Sun Father to make it cold, and the Dinee are supposed to hole up somewhere over in the Chuska range. I think Beautiful Mountain opens up for them. Then when the time is just right, they do this Sun Way and call back the light and warmth, and they start the Fifth World.

  I never heard a version quite like that, Leaphorn said.

  Like I said, maybe its bullshit. But there’s a point. There is a point. The way the old story goes, Standing Medicine figured this Way was the most important ceremonial of all. And he figured Kit Carson and the soldiers were going to catch him, and he was afraid the ritual would be forgotten, so . . . McGinnis sipped again, watching Leaphorn, timing his account. So he found a place and somehow or other in some magic way he preserved it all. And he just told his oldest son, so that Kit Carson and the Belacani soldiers wouldn’t find it and so the Utes wouldn’t find it and spoil it.

  Interesting, Leaphorn said.

  Hold on. We ain’t got to the interesting part yet, McGinnis said. Whats interesting is that Standing Medicines son came back from the Long Walk, and married a woman in the Mud clan, and this fellers oldest son was a man named Mustache Tsossie, and he married back into the Salt Cedar clan, and his oldest boy turned out to be the one we called Hosteen Tso.

  So maybe that’s the secret, Leaphorn said.

  Maybe so. Or like I said, maybe its all Navajo bullshit. McGinnis’s expression was carefully neutral.

  And part of the secret would be where this place was where Standing Medicine preserved the Sun Way, Leaphorn said. Any guesses?

  My God, McGinnis said. Its magic. And magic could be up in the sky, or under the earth.

  Out in that canyon country it could be anywhere.

  Its been my experience, Leaphorn said, that secrets are hard to keep. If fathers know and sons know, pretty soon other people know.

  You’re forgetting something, McGinnis said. Lot of these people around here are Utes, or half Utes. Lot of intermarrying. You got to think about how a die-hard old-timer like Hosteen Tso, and his folks before him, would feel about that. That sort of makes people close-mouthed about secrets.

  Leaphorn thought about it. Yeah, he said. I see what you mean. The Utes had always raided this corner of the reservation. And when Kit Carson and the army had come, Ute scouts had led them betraying hiding places, revealing food caches, helping hunt down the starving Dinee. Standing Medicine would have been guarding his secret as much from the Utes as from the whites-and now the Utes had married into the clans.

  Even if we knew what it was and where it is, it wouldn’t help anyway, McGinnis said. You probably got an old medicine bundle and some Yei masks and amulets hidden away somewhere. Its not the kind of stuff anybody kills you for.

  Not even if its the way to stop the world from ending? Leaphorn asked.

  McGinnis looked at him, saw he was smiling. That’s what you birds got to do, you know, McGinnis said. If you’re going to solve that Tso killing, you got to figure the reason for it.

  McGinnis stared into the glass. Its a damn funny thing to think about, he said. You can just see it. Somebody walking up that wagon track, and the old man and that Atcitty girl standing there watching him coming, and probably saying Ya-ta-hey whether it was friend or stranger, and then this feller taking a gun barrel or something, and clouting the old man with it and then running the girl down and clubbing her, and then . . . McGinnis shook his head in disbelief. And then just turning right around and walking right up that wagon track away from there. McGinnis stared over the glass at Leaphorn. You just plain know a feller would have to have a real reason to do something like that. Just think about it.

  Joe Leaphorn thought about it.

  Outside there was the sound of hammering, of laughter, of a pickup engine starting.

  Leaphorn was oblivious to it. He was thinking. He was again recreating the crime in his mind. The reason f
or what had happened at the Tso hogan. must have been real desperate and urgent even if it had been done by the sort of person who laughed as he ran over a strange policeman beside a lonely road. Leaphorn sighed. He would have to find out about that reason. And that meant he would have to speak with Margaret Cigarette.

  You were right about Mrs. Cigarette not being home, Leaphorn said. I went by there to check. Nobody there and the trucks gone. You got any ideas where she is?

  No telling, McGinnis said. She could be anyplace. Id guess visiting kin, like I told you.

  How did you know she wasn’t home?

  McGinnis frowned at him. That don’t take any great brains, he said. She come through here three or four days ago. Had one of Old Lady Nakais girls driving her truck. And she ain’t been back. He stared belligerently at Leaphorn. And I knew she didn’t come home because the only way to get to her place from the outside is right past my place here.

  Three or four days ago? Can you remember which day?

  McGinnis thought about it. It took only a moment. Wednesday. Little after I ate. About 2

  P.M.

  Wednesday. The Kinaalda where Leaphorn had arrested young Emerson Begay would have been starting about then. Begay was a member of the Mud clan. His niece was being initiated into womanhood at the ceremony.

  Whats Mrs. Cigarettes clan? Leaphorn asked. Is she a Mud Dinee?

  She’s a born-to Mud, McGinnis said.

  So Leaphorn knew where he could find Mrs. Cigarette. For a hundred miles around, every member of the Mud People healthy enough to stir would be drawn to the ritual reunion to share its blessing and reinforce its power.

  There’s not many Mud Dinee around Short Mountain, McGinnis said. Mrs. Cigarettes bunch, and the Nakai family, and the Endischee outfit, and Alice Frank Pino, and a few Begays, and I think that’s all of them.

  Leaphorn got up and stretched. He thanked McGinnis for the hospitality and said he would go to the sing. He used the Navajo verb headstall, which means to take part in a ritual chant. By slightly changing the guttural inflection, the word becomes the verb to be kicked. As Leaphorn pronounced it, a listener with an ear alert to the endless Navajo punning could have understood Leaphorn to mean either that he was going to get himself cured or get himself kicked. It was among the oldest of old Navajo word plays, and McGinnis grinning slightly replied with the expected pun response.

  Good for a sore butt, he said.

  » 10 «

  T

  he wind followed Leaphorns carryall half the way across the Nokaito Bench, enveloping the jolting vehicle in its own gritty dust and filling the policemans nostrils with exhaust fumes. It was hot. The promise of rain had faded as the west wind raveled away the thunderheads. Now the sky was blank blue. The road angled toward the crest of the ridge, growing rockier as it neared the top. Leaphorn down-shifted to ease the vehicle over a corrugation of stone and the following wind gusted past him. He drove across the ridge line, blind for a moment. Then, with a shift in the wind, the dust cleared and he saw the place of Alice Endischee.

  The land sloped northward now into Utah, vast, empty and treeless. In Leaphorn the Navajo sensitivity to land and landscape was fine-tuned. Normally he saw beauty in such blue-haze distances, but today he saw only poverty, a sparse stony grassland ruined by overgrazing and now gray with drought.

  He shifted the carryall back into third gear as the track tilted slightly downward, and inspected the place of Alice Endischee far down the slope. There was the square plank summer hogan with its tar-paper roof, providing a spot of red in the landscape, and beyond it a winter hogan of stone, and a pole arbor roofed with sage and creosote brush, and two corrals, and an older hogan built carefully to the prescription of the Holy People and used for all things sacred and ceremonial. Scattered among the buildings Leaphorn counted seven pickups, a battered green Mustang, a flatbed truck and two wagons. The scene hadn’t changed since he had come there to find Emerson Begay, when the Kinaalda had only started and the Endischee girl had been having her hair washed in yucca suds by her aunts as the first step of the great ritual blessing. Now the ceremonial would be in the climactic day.

  People were coming out of the medicine hogan, some of them watching his approaching vehicle, but most standing in a milling cluster around the doorway. Then, from the cluster, a girl abruptly emerged running.

  She ran, pursued by the wind and a half-dozen younger children, across an expanse of sagebrush. She set the easy pace of those who know that they have a great distance to go. She wore the long skirt, the long-sleeved blouse and the heavy silver jewelry of a traditional Navajo woman but she ran with the easy grace of a child who has not yet forgotten how to race her shadow.

  Leaphorn stopped the carryall and watched, remembering his own initiation out of childhood, until the racers disappeared down the slope. For the Endischee girl, this would be the third race of the day, and the third day of such racing. Changing Woman taught that the longer a girl runs at her Kinaalda, the longer she lives a healthy life. But by .the third day, muscles would be sore and the return would be early. Leaphorn shifted back into gear. While the girl was gone, the family would re-enter the hogan to sing the Racing Songs, the same prayers the Holy People had chanted at the menstruation ceremony when White Shell Girl became Changing Woman. Then there would be a pause, while the women baked the great ceremonial cake to be eaten tonight. The pause would give Leaphorn his chance to approach and cross-examine Listening Woman.

  He touched the woman’s sleeve as she emerged from the hogan, and told her who he was, and why he wanted to talk to her.

  Its like I told that white policeman, Margaret Cigarette said. The old man who was to die told me some dry paintings had been spoiled, and the man who was to die had been there. And maybe that was why he was sick.

  I listened to the tape recording of you talking to the white policeman, Leaphorn said. But I noticed, my mother, that the white man didn’t really let you tell about it. He interrupted you.

  Margaret Cigarette thought about that. She stood, arms folded across the purple velvet of her blouse, her blind eyes looking through Leaphorn.

  Yes, she said. That’s the way it was.

  I came to find you because I thought that if we would talk about it again, you could tell me what the white man was too impatient to hear. Leaphorn suspected she would remember he was the man who had come to this ceremonial three days before and arrested Emerson Begay. While Begay was not a member of the Cigarette family as far as Leaphorn knew, he was Mud clan and he was probably some sort of extended-family nephew. So Leaphorn was guilty of arresting a relative. In the traditional Navajo system, even distant nephews who stole sheep were high on the value scale. I wonder what you are thinking about me, my mother, Leaphorn said. I wonder if you are thinking that its no use talking to a policeman who is too stupid to keep the Begay boy from escaping because he would be too stupid to catch the one who killed those who were killed. Like Mrs. Cigarette, Leaphorn refrained from speaking the name of the dead. To do so was to risk attracting the attention of the ghost, and even if you didn’t believe this, it was bad manners to risk ghost sickness for those who did believe. But if you think about it fairly, you will remember that your nephew is a very smart young man. His handcuffs were uncomfortable, so I took them off. He offered to help me, and I accepted the offer. It was night, and he slipped away. Remember, your nephew has escaped before.

  Margaret Cigarette acknowledged this with a nod, then she tilted her head toward the place near the hogan door. There three women were pouring buckets of batter into the fire pit, making the ritual cake of the menstruation ceremony. Steam now joined the smoke.

  She turned toward them and away from Leaphorn.

  Put corn shucks over all of it, Mrs. Cigarette instructed them in a loud, clear voice. You work around in a circle. East, south, west, north.

  The women stopped their work for a moment. We haven’t got it poured in yet, one of them said. Did you say we could put the raisins in?


  Sprinkle them across the top, Mrs. Cigarette said. Then arrange the corn-shuck crosses all across it. Start from the east side and work around like I said. She swiveled her face back toward Leaphorn. That’s the way it was done when First Man and First Woman and the Holy People gave White Shell Girl her Kinaalda when she menstruated, Mrs. Cigarette said. And that’s the way Changing Woman taught us to do.

  Yes, Leaphorn said. I remember.

  What the white man was too impatient to hear was all about what was making the one who was killed sick, Mrs. Cigarette said.

  I would like to hear that when there is time for you to tell me, my mother.

  Mrs. Cigarette frowned. The white man didn’t think it had anything to do with the killing.

  I am not a white man, Leaphorn said. I am one of the Dinee. I know that the same thing that makes a man sick sometimes makes him die.

  But this time the man was hit by a gun barrel.

  I know that, my mother, Leaphorn said. But can you tell me why he was hit with the gun barrel?

  Mrs. Cigarette thought about it.

  The wind kicked up again, whipping her skirts around her legs and sending a flurry of dust across the hogan yard. At the fire pit, the women were carefully pouring a thin layer of dirt over newspapers, which covered the corn shucks, which covered the batter.

  Yes, Mrs. Cigarette said. I hear what you are saying.