House Made of Dawn

by N. Scott Momaday

  I had been there for a while. He was awake and he could open one of his eyes, but his face was partly bandaged and it was hard for him to talk. I was going on about everything, you know, like it was going to be all right; that’s when I made up those plans. Pretty soon she came into the room, and I knew right away who she was. She was all dressed up and good-looking and you could smell the perfume she had on. I was kind of embarrassed and I didn’t know what to do and I got up to leave. But she said it was all right and please don’t go, and she came over and shook my hand and thanked me again. My being there didn’t seem to bother her at all, and right away she started talking to him. She said she was sorry he was sick, and she was sure he would be well again soon. She went on talking kind of fast, like she knew just what she wanted to say. I felt funny being there, but she didn’t seem to mind, and she started telling him about her son, Peter. Peter was growing up, she said, and she had wanted to bring him along, but Peter was busy with his friends and couldn’t come. She said that she had thought about him a lot and wondered how he was and what he was doing, you know, and she always thought kindly of him and he would always be her friend. Peter always asked her about the Indians, she said, and she used to tell him a story about a young Indian brave. He was born of a bear and a maiden, she said, and he was noble and wise. He had many adventures, and he became a great leader and saved his people. It was the story Peter liked best of all, and she always thought of him, Abel, when she told it. It was real nice the way she said it, like she thought a whole lot of him, and I could tell that story was kind of secret and important to her, you know, and it made me kind of ashamed to be there listening. She said she was awfully glad that I had called her, because she wouldn’t have missed seeing him again for the world. I was glad that she had come, and I guess he was, too, but he didn’t ever say anything about it afterward. I couldn’t tell what he was thinking. He had turned his head away, like maybe the pain was coming back, you know.

  Ei yei! A bear! A bear and a maiden. And she was a white woman and she thought it up, you know, made it up out of her own mind, and it was like that old grandfather talking to me, telling me about Esdzá shash nadle, or Dzil quigi, yes, just like that. How was it? I remember, yes; you drink a little wine and you remember. A long time ago it was dark, and you looked in the fire and listened, and he was going on with his work and talking, going on about all he knew, and he knew everything and there was no end to the stories and the songs.

  And after those things happened, the people came down from the mesas. And they were afraid of Esdzá shash nadle. They buried the Calendar Stone and wrapped blankets made of feathers around their dead; they ran away, leaving their possessions. And there on the rock where they lived, they left the likeness of a bear.

  Grandson, it was here, here at Kin tqel that they killed two of the cave people. There were twelve brothers and two sisters. It was time for the sisters to marry. And there were two old men, the Bear and the Snake. They went to the top of a mountain and bathed themselves. They put on fine clothes and were changed into men; they became young men, strong and good-looking. They smoked pipes, and the smoke was sweet, and it rolled down the mountain. The sisters came upon the trail of sweet smoke and were enchanted, and they climbed after it to the source. “Where do you come from?” the elder sister asked. “I came from the mountain,” said the Bear. “And I came from the plain,” said the Snake. The sisters drew smoke from the pipes and fell asleep. And when they awoke they knew that they had lain with a bear and a snake, and they were afraid. They ran away, the elder sister to the summit and the younger to the plain. The elder sister came at last to the great kiva of the Yeí bichai. Four holy men and four holy women came out to greet her. The women bathed and anointed her; they touched her with corn meal and pollen, and she was beautiful. She bore a female child. There were tufts of hair in back of its ears and down on its arms and legs. And then the Yeí told the people to sing the Mountain Chant, and from that time on the elder sister was called the Bear Maiden.

  Afterward a male child was born, and the Bear Maiden left it alone. The child cried, and an owl heard it and carried it away. The child grew and became strong. He was going to be a hunter, and the owl was afraid and meant to kill him. But the wind spoke to the child and told him to run away; he must follow the Río Mancos to the east.

  He came of age and married the elder daughter of a great chief, and he was then a medicine man. But the younger daughter was beautiful, and he thought about her. He lay with her and she did not know who he was. But then she knew. She was going to bear a child and was ashamed. And when the child was born she hid it among the leaves. The child was found by the Bear.

  With beauty before me,

  With beauty behind me,

  With beauty above me,

  With beauty below me,

  With beauty all around me…

  It’s dark and rainy up there on the hill, and last night it was cool and clear. We went off by ourselves, you know, and we could hear the singing and see the stars. It’s funny, but we didn’t want to turn around. We knew the lights were there, all the rows and squares of light far below, and it was beautiful. I guess we knew without looking that it was great and beautiful, that everything was there, and beyond there was nothing but the black water and the sky. But we didn’t want to turn around. We could hear the singing and see the stars. There was a faint yellow glare like smoke on the sky, but the sky was too much for it, and at the center we could see the stars, how small and still they were. And he was going home.

  I prayed. He was going home, and I wanted to pray. Look out for me, I said; look out each day and listen for me. And we were going together on horses to the hills. We were going to ride out in the first light to the hills. We were going to see how it was, and always was, how the sun came up with a little wind and the light ran out upon the land. We were going to get drunk, I said. We were going to be all alone, and we were going to get drunk and sing. We were going to sing about the way it always was. And it was going to be right and beautiful. It was going to be the last time. And he was going home.

  4

  The Dawn Runner

  Walatowa, 1952

  February 27

  The river was dark and swift, and there were jagged panes of ice along the banks, encrusted with snow. The valley was gray and cold; the mountains were dark and dim on the sky, and a great, gray motionless cloud of snow and mist lay out in the depth of the canyon. The fields were bare and colorless, and the gray tangle of branches rose up out of the orchards like antlers and bones. The town lay huddled in the late winter noon, the upper walls and vigas were stained with water, and thin black columns of smoke rose above the roofs, swelled, and hung out against the low ceiling of the sky. The streets were empty, and here and there were drifts of hard and brittle snow about the fence posts and the stones, pocked with soil and cinders. There was no telling of the sun, save for the one cold, dim, and even light that lay on every corner of the land and made no shadow, and the silence was close by and all around and the bell made no impression upon it. There was no motion to be seen but the single brief burst and billow of the smoke. And out of the town on the old road southward the snow lay unbroken, sloping up on either side to the rocks and the junipers and the dunes. A huge old jack rabbit bounded across the hillside in a blur of great sudden angles and settled away in the snow, still and invisible.

  Father Olguin was at home in the rectory. He was alone and busy in the dark rooms, and in seven years he had grown calm with duty and design. The once-hectic fire of his spirit had burned low, and with it the waste of motion and despair. He had aged. He thought of himself not as happy (for he looked down on that particular abstraction) but in some real sense composed and at peace. In the only way possible, perhaps, he had come to terms with the town, and that, after all, had been his aim. To be sure, there was the matter of some old and final cleavage, of certain exclusion, the whole and subtle politics of estrangement, but that was easily put aside, and only now and t
hen was it borne by a cold and sudden gust among his ordinary thoughts. It was irrelevant to his central point of view, nothing more than the fair price of his safe and sacred solitude. That safety—that exclusive silence—was the sense of all his vows, certainly; it had been brought about by his own design, his act of renunciation, not the town’s. He had done well by the town, after all. He had set an example of piety, and much in the way of good works had accrued to his account. Once in a great while he took down from a high hidden shelf the dusty journal of Fray Nicolás. He regarded it now with ease and familiar respect, a kind of solemn good will. It lay open in his hands like a rare and wounded bird, more beautiful than broken, and with it he performed the mild spiritual exercise that always restored him to faith and humility.

  Abel sat in the dark of his grandfather’s house. Evening was coming on, and the bare gray light had begun to fail at the window. He had been there all day with his head hanging down in the darkness, getting up only to tend the fire and look in the old man’s face. And he had been there the day before, and the day before that. He had been there a part of every day since his return. He had gone out on the first and second days and got drunk. He wanted to go out on the third, but he had no money and it was bitter cold and he was sick and in pain. He had been there six days at dawn, listening to his grandfather’s voice. He heard it now, but it had no meaning. The random words fell together and made no sense.

  The old man Francisco was dying. He had shivered all morning and complained of the cold, though there was a fire in the room and he lay under three blankets and Abel’s gray coat. At noon he had fallen into a coma again, as he had yesterday and the day before. He revived in the dawn, and he knew who Abel was, and he talked and sang. But each day his voice had grown weaker, until now it was scarcely audible and the words fell together and made no sense: “Abelito…kethá ahme…Mariano…frío…se dió por…mucho, mucho frío…vencido…aye, Porcingula…que blanco, Abelito…diablo blanco… Sawish… Sawish… y el hombre negro…sí…muchos hombres negros…corriendo, corriendo…frío…rápidamente… Abelito, Vidalito…ayempah? Ayempah!”

  Abel waited, listening. He tried to think of what to do. He wanted earlier, in the dawn, to speak to his grandfather, but he could think of nothing to say. He listened to the feeble voice that rose out of the darkness, and he waited helplessly. His mind was borne upon the dying words, but they carried him nowhere. His own sickness had settled into despair. He had been sick a long time. His eyes burned and his body throbbed and he could not think what to do. The room enclosed him, as it always had, as if the small dark interior, in which this voice and other voices rose and remained forever at the walls, were all of infinity that he had ever known. It was the room in which he was born, in which his mother and his brother died. Just then, and for moments and hours and days, he had no memory of being outside of it.

  The voice was thin and the words ran together and were no longer words. The fire was going out. He got up and struck a match to the lamp. The white walls moved in upon him, and the objects in the room stood out; shadows leaped out upon the white walls, and the windows were suddenly black and opaque, terminal as mirrors to the sight. His body ached even with the motion of getting up and crossing the room, and he knelt down to place wood on the fire. He waited until the wood caught fire and he could see the slender pointed flames curling around the wood, and the wood began to crackle and the bright embers flew against the black earthen corner of the box and out upon the hearth. Then the farther walls began faintly to glow and vibrate with ripples of yellow light, and the firelight fell and writhed upon the bed and the old man’s face and hair. And the old man’s breathing was rapid and deep. The vague shape of his body rose and fell, and the voice rattled on, farther and farther away, and the eyes darted and roved.

  Abel smoothed the coat and drew it up to his grandfather’s throat. The old man’s face was burning, and his lips were cracked and parched. Abel dipped a cloth in water and pressed it gently to his grandfather’s mouth. He wanted to sponge the eyes, but they were open and roving and straining to see, and he laid it on the brow instead. There was nothing more to do, and he sat down again at the table and hung his head. The walls quivered around him and the fire began to hum and roar and a thin steam grew up on the cold black windows. There was a dull glint upon the empty bottles that stood on the table, and, through the glass, a distortion of lines upon the ancient oilcloth. The kerosene was low in the green glass well of the lamp, and now and then the merest black wisp of smoke rose out of the globe. It was growing late, and he dozed. Still he could hear the faintest edge of his grandfather’s voice on the deep and distant breathing out of sight, going on and on toward the dawn…another—one more dawn. The voice had failed each day, only to rise up again in the dawn. The old man had spoken six times in the dawn, and the voice of his memory was whole and clear and growing like the dawn.

  They were old enough then, and he took his grandsons out at first light to the old Campo Santo, south and west of the Middle. He made them stand just there, above the point of the low white rock, facing east. They could see the black mesa looming on the first light, and he told them there was the house of the sun. They must learn the whole contour of the black mesa. They must know it as they knew the shape of their hands, always and by heart. The sun rose up on the black mesa at a different place each day. It began there, at a point on the central slope, standing still for the solstice, and ranged all the days southward across the rise and fall of the long plateau, drawing closer by the measure of mornings and moons to the lee, and back again. They must know the long journey of the sun on the black mesa, how it rode in the seasons and the years, and they must live according to the sun appearing, for only then could they reckon where they were, where all things were, in time. There, at the rounder knoll, it was time to plant corn; and there, where the highest plane fell away, that was the day of the rooster race, six days ahead of the black bull running and the little horse dancing, seven ahead of the Pecos immigration; and there, and there, and there, the secret dances, every four days of fasting in the kiva, the moon good for hoeing and the time for harvest, the rabbit and witch hunts, all the proper days of the clans and societies; and just there at the saddle, where the sky was lower and brighter than elsewhere on the high black land, the clearing of the ditches in advance of the spring rains and the long race of the black men at dawn.

  These things he told to his grandsons carefully, slowly and at length, because they were old and true, and they could be lost forever as easily as one generation is lost to the next, as easily as one old man might lose his voice, having spoken not enough or not at all. But his grandsons knew already; not the names or the strict position of the sun each day in relation to its house, but the larger motion and meaning of the great organic calendar itself, the emergency of dawn and dusk, summer and winter, the very cycle of the sun and of all the suns that were and were to come. And he knew they knew, and he took them with him to the fields and they cut open the earth and touched the corn and ate sweet melons in the sun.

  He was a young man, and he rode out on the buckskin colt to the north and west, leading the hunting horse, across the river and beyond the white cliffs and the plain, beyond the hills and the mesas, the canyons and the caves. And once, where the horses could not go because the face of the rock was almost vertical and unbroken and the ancient hand-holds were worn away to shadows in the centuries of wind and rain, he climbed among the walls and pinnacles of rock, adhering like a vine to the face of the rock, pressing with no force at all his whole mind and weight upon the sheer ascent, running the roots of his weight into invisible hollows and cracks, and he heard the whistle and moan of the wind among the crags, like ancient voices, and saw the horses far below in the sunlit gorge. And there were the caves. He came suddenly upon a narrow ledge and stood before the mouth of a cave. It was sealed with silver webs, and he brushed them away. He bent to enter and knelt down on the floor. It was dark and cool and close inside, and smelled of damp e
arth and dead and ancient fires, as if centuries ago the air had entered and stood still behind the web. The dead embers and ashes lay still in a mound upon the floor, and the floor was deep and packed with clay and glazed with the blood of animals. The chiseled dome was low and encrusted with smoke, and the one round wall was a perfect radius of rock and plaster. Here and there were earthen bowls, one very large, chipped and broken only at the mouth, deep and fired within. It was beautiful and thin-shelled and fragile-looking, but he struck the nails of his hand against it, and it rang like metal. There was a black metate by the door, the coarse, igneous grain of the shallow bowl forever bleached with meal, and in the ashes of the fire were several ears and cobs of corn, each no bigger than his thumb, charred and brittle, but whole and hard as wood. And there among the things of the dead he listened in the stillness all around and heard only the lowing of the wind…and then the plummet and rush of a great swooping bird—out of the corner of his eye he saw the awful shadow which hurtled across the light—and the clatter of wings on the cliff, and the small, thin cry of a rodent. And in the same instant the huge wings heaved with calm, gathering up the dead weight, and rose away.

  All afternoon he rode on toward the summit of the blue mountain, and at last he was high among the falls and the steep timbered slopes. The sun fell behind the land above him and the dusk grew up among the trees, and still he went on in the dying light, climbing up to the top of the land. And all afternoon he had seen the tracks of wild animals and heard the motion of the dead leaves and the breaking of branches on either side. Twice he had seen deer, motionless, watching, standing away in easy range, blended with light and shadow, fading away into the leaves and the land. He let them be, but remembered where they were and how they stood, reckoning well and instinctively their notion of fear and flight, their age and weight.