House Made of Dawn
Page 7
From the first he presumed to approach her officiously, on the basis of his own prejudices: a jealousy for Aesop and the ring of Genesis, an instinctive demand upon all histories to be fabulous. Thus he went on for several minutes. The town, he said—though not in so many words—observed an old and solar calendar, upon which were fixed the advents and passiontides of all deities, the last, least whisper of all oracles, the certain days and years of all damnation and deliverance. She listened. She listened through him to the sound of thunder and of rain that fell upon the mountain miles away, that split open the sky and set an awful tremor on the trees. She heard the touch of rain upon the cones and evergreen spines, heard even the laden boughs bending and the panes of water that rose and ran upon the black slopes. And this while he spoke and the heat of drought lay outside upon the windows and the walls. She had a craving for the rain. Her eyes smarted for it, and the lines at her mouth deepened. Directly he fell silent, aware of her behind him. He turned and looked at her for the first time. She seemed very small in the dark room. He waited for her to speak. “‘Oh my God,’” she said, laughing. “‘I am heartily sorry…for having offended Thee.’” She laughed. It was hard and brittle, her laughter, but far from desperate, underlain with perfect presence, nearly too controlled. And that, even more than the meaning and the mockery, horrified him. He stiffened. There was nothing then but her voice in the room, going on wearily, without inflection, even after he had ceased to hear.
Afterward, when Father Olguin returned to the town, the streets were filled with people. Children shouted to him and animals darted in front of the car, chickens and dogs and sheep. He drove down upon them and they scattered. He leaned on the horn and swerved. Out of the corner of his good eye he saw a child leap out of the way and fall. The child rolled over and laughed. Suddenly the walls of the town rang out with laughter and enclosed him all around. He turned here and there into the streets, and the streets led only to an endless succession of steep earthen walls, and the walls were lined with people, innumerable and grotesque. Everywhere he caught sight of men and women, bloated or shriveled up with age, children running and writhing on the sheer tide of revelry; and a sameness of distance upon all their eyes, their one timeless enigmatic face constrained into idiocy and delight. Fear and revulsion jarred upon his brain. The car lunged under him, veered sharply around a blind corner of walls, and the tire nearest him lay over upon itself and the sharp edge of the tread blasted the sand of the street into the metal about and beneath him; and there, directly before him, were the high covered hoops of a wagon, the iron bands of the wheels and the small black cavern of its depth. He slammed on the brakes and heard the tires slice and fold into the sand and lock upon the packed earth. He felt the whip of momentum pass through him, the enormous weight of motion that fell upon the engine and drove it down on the coils. Then in the ebbing pitch and rock that followed, as the cloud of dust and laughter drew down upon him, he saw the cradle-board fixed to the wagon. And just above and beyond the bobbing ornament of the hood, at the level of his own eyes, was the face of the infant inside. Its little eyes were overhung with fat, and its cheeks and chins sagged down in front of the tight swaddle at its throat. The hair lay in tight wet rings above the eyes, and all the shapeless flesh of the face dripped with sweat and shone like copper in the sunlight. Flies crawled upon the face and lay thick about the eyes and mouth. The muscles twitched under the fat and the head turned slowly from side to side in the agony of sad and helpless laughter. Then the wall of dust descended upon the face, and the cries of the children became a shrill and incessant chant: “Padre! Padre! Padre!”
Thunder cracked in the sky and rolled upon the mountains. It grew deep and filled the funnel of the canyon and reverberated endlessly upon the cliffs. Lightning flashed, rending the dark wall of rain, casting an awful glare on it, and the rain moved into the canyon, almost slowly, upon the warm and waning gusts of drought, and the golden margin of receding light grew pale in the mist. And there behind the squall the still-invisible torrents coming on, like the sound of a great turbine, the roar of the wind and the rain on the river and the rocks, the heavy drift borne up and set loose to spin into the pools and collide on the banks, and the faint falling apart of the earth itself, breaking and shifting under the weight of water.
The wind rose up under the eaves, and the rooms of the Benevides house quaked and grew black. Angela drew herself up and waited. The intermittent drops of rain upon the roof seemed almost to subside; then the first great slanting sheets of water drove against the gutter and ascended the north wall; it beat down on the windows and the eaves like hail and set a deafening roar on the iron roof. So sudden and loud was the descent of storm that she dug her nails into the heels of her hands and cowered instinctively. She arched her throat and her eyes glanced upward to the dark ceiling and source of so much sound. The intense wake of the sound engulfed her and she flung open the door and looked out. She could hear only the roar of the rain and the peal of thunder, breaking low and overhead in the hanging darkness. She could see only the flashes of lightning and the awful gray slant of the flood, pale and impenetrable, splintering upon itself and cleaving her vision like pain. The first, fast wave of the storm passed with scarcely any abatement of sound; the troughs at the eaves filled and flowed, and the thick ropes of water hung down among the hollyhocks and mint and ate away the earth at their roots; the glaze of rain water rose up among the clean white stones and ran in panels on the road; and across the road the rumble and rush of the river. And again the wind rose up and the thunder struck and the rain leaned out across the canyon. It drove into the open end of the porch like shot and glanced off her bare legs. At the source of the rain the deep black bank of the sky swelled and roiled, moving slowly southward under the rock rims of the canyon walls. And in the cold and denser dark, with the sound and sight of the fury all around, Angela stood transfixed in the open door and breathed deep into her lungs the purest electric scent of the air. She closed her eyes, and the clear aftervision of the rain, which she could still hear and feel so perfectly as to conceive of nothing else, obliterated all the mean and myriad fears that had laid hold of her in the past. Sharpest angles of light played on the lids of her eyes, and the great avalanche of sound fell about her.
The feasting had begun, and there was a lull on the town. The crippled old man in leggings and white ceremonial trousers shuffled out into the late afternoon. He dried his eyes on his sleeve and whimpered one last time in his throat. He was grown too old, he thought. He could not understand what had happened. But even his sorrow was feeble now; it had withered, like his leg, over the years, and only once in a while, when something unusual happened to remind him of it, did it take on the edge and point of pain. So it was that as he made his way along toward the Middle and smelled the food and fires of the feast, he wondered what his sorrow was and could not remember. Still the wagons came, and he heard in the distance the occasional laughter which brought them in. It had the sound of weariness now, and it rose up less frequently. It would soon be time for the Pecos bull to appear, and the smaller children made ready to attend. Out of the doorways he passed came the queer, halting talk of old fellowship, Tanoan and Athapascan, broken English and Spanish. He smelled the odor of boiled coffee, and it was good. He cared less for the sweet smell of piki and the moist, broken loaves of sotobalau, the hot spicy odors of paste and posole; for old men do not hunger much. Better for their novelty were the low open fires of the wagon camps, the sweet fat which dripped and sizzled on the embers, the burned, roasted mutton, and the fried bread. And more delicious than these was the laden air that carried the smoke and drew it out in long thin lines above the roofs, swelling in advance of the rain. The immense embankment of the storm had blackened out the whole horizon to the north. The compressed density of its core, like a great black snake writhing, drew out of the mouth of the canyon, recoiled upon the warm expanse of the valley, and resumed the slow, sure approach upon the intervening gullies and hills and
fields above the town. And the old man had an ethnic, planter’s love of harvests and of rain. And just there on the obsidian sky, extending out and across the eastern slope of the plain, was a sheer and perfect arc of brilliant colors.
It made him glad to be in the midst of talk and celebration, to savor the rich relief of the coming rain upon the rows of beans and chilies and corn, to see the return of weather, of trade and reunion upon the town. He tossed his head in greeting to the shy Navajo children who hid among the camps and peered, afraid of his age and affliction. For they, too, were a harvest, in some intractable sense the regeneration of his own bone and blood. The Dîné, of all people, knew how to be beautiful. Here and there in the late golden light which bled upon the walls, he saw the bright blankets and the gleaming silverwork of their wealth: the shining weight of their buckles and belts, bracelets and bow guards, squash blossoms and pale blue stones. Had he anything at all of value, he would have liked to barter for such a stone, a great oval spider web, like a robin’s egg, to wear upon his hand. And he would have been shrewd and indifferent; he would certainly have had the better of it. Such a stone was medicine, they said; it could preserve the sight. It could restore an old man’s vision. They sang about it, he supposed, and no wonder, no wonder.
He turned in to the Middle and the holy place. The shrine for Porcingula, Our Lady of the Angels, had been raised at the center of the north side and adjacent to the kiva. It was a small green enclosure, a framework of wood and wire, covered with boughs of cedar and pine. He bowed before it, though as yet there was nothing but the bare altar and the benches inside. Tomorrow it would be made beautiful with candles and cloth and holy with incense. He would see to it, for he was the sacristan, after all. Two young boys would stand with rifles at the open side, and he would remind them of their trust. And after Mass the lovely Lady would be borne in procession from the church, and the little horse would come to greet her in the aisle, would precede her out into the Campo Santo and dance beside her in the streets; and the bull would lope all around and wheel and hook the air with its wooden horns, and the black-faced children, who were the invaders, and the clowns would follow, laughing and taunting with curses, upon its heels. The Lady would stand all day in her shrine, and the governor and his officials would sit in attendance at her feet, and one by one the dancers of the squash and turquoise clans would appear on top of the kiva, coming out upon the sky in their rich ceremonial dress, descend the high ladder to the earth, and kneel before her.
He took hold of the smooth poles and raised himself slowly up the rungs of the ladder, careful to place the crooked leg just so, where, if his weight should shift on it, the bone itself would suffice like a cane to hold him up. But it was a nearly empty precaution, not against his strength so much but against some element of doubt and fear that had lately come upon him like the shadow of his old age. His arms and hands were strong, and his shoulders bunched at the back of his neck and made a deep groove of his spine. He crept closer to the high vertical wall of the kiva, pressing the whole surface of his body against the slanting poles and rungs of the ladder, so that even the weight of his chest and shoulders amounted to nothing almost and there was no center to it; at last he laid his cheek on the final rung and saw the gray warp of the wood where the sun had dried and split it open and the red metal winding which spliced it to the poles and cut into it and stained it with rust. Then, without looking, could he reach upward and take hold of the wall itself. He drew himself over the top and stood for a moment to catch his breath. The rain had overtaken the hills above the town and the sky grew dark overhead. He felt the whirlwinds which ran upon the roofs and heard the distant bleating and lowing of the livestock, milling about on the weather’s edge. And under him the great rafters of the kiva vibrated with the sound of thunder and drums. He looked south and west in the direction of the sunlit fields; they lay out like patchwork in the pool of light; and beyond, the black line of the mesa was edged with light. He let himself down into the great earthen darkness of the room.
When he emerged with the other holy men out of the kiva, it was dusk and the rain had begun to fall in the streets, unevenly at first, spotting and pitting the dust with dark, round stains; then it grew fine and steady, and the hard earth of the Middle began to shine. The people had come out of doors, and they stood about, waiting in the rain. He drew his blanket around him and went with the others to the house from which the little horse was now made ready to come. When they got to the doorway, he opened the screen and the horse began to dance. The collar of tin shells began to tremble with sound, and at the same time the drummer began the incessant roll and rattle of the sticks upon the drum. The little horse emerged into the dim light and the rain, and the drummer and the old men followed. The horse was an ancient likeness, like the black Arabian of the Moors, its head too small and finely wrought and the arch of its throat too severe. But it was a beautiful, sensitive thing, and the dancer gave it life. The spotted hide was taut and smooth on the frame, and the framework rode hard and low on the dancer’s waist. It was he who gave it motion and mystery. He was dressed all in black, and under the bright kilt which hung from the shoulders and haunches of the little horse his black boots minced upon the earth, moving too little and too fast to follow. And his body and the body of the little horse were set in high, nervous agitation, like a leaf in the stiff wind. But all the strange and violent tremor ceased at his head, and he seemed to be standing there, perfectly still and apart, mindless and invisible behind the veil. And the black hat and the black mask of the flowing veil, which lay in the wind and rain upon the bones of the face, made a dark and motionless silhouette upon the dusk, and the blur of motion under it gave it sheer relief.
The medicine men presided over the little horse with prayers and plumes, pollen and meal. And elsewhere in the streets, approaching on a wave of sound, the bull came running. The clowns were close upon it, and it veered and drew up short and crouched, only to wheel among them and run on. And the black-faced clowns gave chase, shouting their obscene taunts, and the small invaders, absurd in the parody of fear, grabbed at their gored flesh and lay strewn about in the path of the beast. And the bull was a sad and unlikely thing, a crude and makeshift totem of revelry and delight. There was no holiness to it, none of the centaur’s sacred mien and motion, but only the look of evil. It was a large skeleton of wood, drawn over loosely with black cloth upon which were painted numerous white rings like brands. Its horns were a length of wood fixed horizontally upon the sheepskin head; its eyes were black metal buttons and its tongue a bit of faded red cloth. But it was a hard thing to be the bull, for there was a primitive agony to it, and it was a kind of victim, an object of ridicule and hatred; and harder now that the men of the town had relaxed their hold upon the ancient ways, had grown soft and dubious. Or they had merely grown old. The old man heard the clamor of the clowns. He knew without looking around that the bull had come into the Middle, and it was at his back and he could see it perfectly in his mind. He thought of Mariano and of running. The rain and the cold reminded him of a time long ago when the flurries of snow rose up in the dawn and his legs were hale and he ran whole and perfectly toward the town. And once he, too, had been the bull—twice or three times, perhaps. He could not remember how many, but he could remember that it was done honorably and well. He had bent far forward and crouched with the likeness of the bull on his back, the way he must, and even so, in the angle and pain of that posture, he could have run away forever from the clowns. But he must not think of that now. The solemn little horse vibrated before him; the veiled rider held its fine head high and its croup level, never once relaxing the constant, nearly furious imposition of life upon it; the black mane and tail lay out in commotion with the rain. The little horse moved here and there among the elders of the town to be received and anointed. The cacique spoke to it and sprinkled meal upon it. And the townspeople and the visitors to the town huddled in the rain and looked on. The bull went running in the streets, and the clowns
and the antelope followed.
The rain diminished, and with nightfall the aftermath of the storm moved slowly out upon the plain. The last of the wagons had gone away from the junction, and only three or four young Navajos remained at Paco’s. One of them had passed out and lay in his vomit on the floor of the room. The others were silent now, and sullen. They hung upon the bar and wheezed, helpless even to take up the dregs of the wine that remained. The precious ring of sweet red wine lay at the bottom of a green quart bottle, and the dark convexity of the glass rose and shone out of it like the fire of an emerald. The green bottle lay out in the yellow glow of the lamp, just there on the counter and within their reach. They regarded it with helpless wonder. Abel and the white man paid no attention to them. The two spoke low to each other, carefully, as if the meaning of what they said was strange and infallible. Now and then the white man laughed, and each time it carried too high on the scale and ended in a strange, inhuman cry—as of pain. It was an old woman’s laugh, thin and weak as water. It issued only from the tongue and teeth of the great evil mouth, and it fell away from the blue lips and there was nothing left of it. But the mouth hung open afterward and made no sound, and the great body quaked and the white hands jerked and trembled helplessly. The Navajos became aware of him. And throughout Abel smiled; he nodded and grew silent at length; and the smile was thin and instinctive, a hard, transparent mask upon his mouth and eyes. He waited, and the wine rose up in his blood.