The Blessing Way jlajc-1

by Tony Hillerman

  Leaphorn had been talking to a young woman from over near Toadlena and had missed the point of the fun, but he gathered from the shouted remarks that it was bawdy. He had, by now, been talking for almost six hours and had lost all count of the number of people he had questioned. Most of them, like this young Salt Water woman from Toadlena, seemed to know nothing at all about subjects which interested Leaphorn. But he had been able to confirm again beyond any shade of doubt that Horseman had returned to this country after the affair in Gallup and to learn that Billy Nez was at the Stick Carrier's camp. The plump young man with the horn-rimmed glasses had told him that. And Horn Rims had been out looking for a stray mule and had seen Horseman walking along a sheep trail back toward the Lukachukais. Horseman was his second cousin and he had stopped to talk and had given Horseman some tobacco.

  "I think his wife had gone off with somebody and he was coming back to his mother's family," Horn Rims had said. He then explained that Luis was a "worthless son of a bitch." In Navajo, the insult came out literally to the effect that Horn Rims' second cousin was a stunted male member of a litter produced by a collie bitch. Navajo is a very precise and unambiguous language and the statement left no question that Horn Rims strongly disapproved of his second cousin. But almost two weeks had passed since Horn Rims had seen Horseman and he had no other information to offer, except that Billy Nez was with the Stick Carrier.

  The long afternoon of chatting on the subject of the witch had been even less productive. Leaphorn felt he had fairly well confirmed what Sandoval had implied-that the identity of the witch was not exactly known. Not known, at least, by name, and family, and clan. Leaphorn's instinct told him that several of the Red Forehead clan he had talked to, mostly kinsmen of Tsosies, or members of their extended "outfit," thought of this witch as a specific person, with a specific face, and shape, and habits. It was nothing he could confirm. Leaphorn was a stranger to this clan and he faced the traditional caution of The People where witchcraft was concerned. He had noticed one man slip his hand into his overalls to finger a sacred shape in the medicine bag tied to his loin cloth. The gesture was typical of what he knew others had felt. How did they know that Leaphorn himself was not a witch? And perhaps seeking those who knew of him to make them his future victims? And yet among the garrulous ones, the gossips, there had been some specific details. Several had said the witch was a man, had indicated he was a tall man; all references to him were on foot, none had him riding a horse. The accounts Leaphorn had collected of the witching incidents were conflicting and overlapping and some were obviously wildly imaginative. But he concluded there probably had been at least two or three persons bothered in addition to Tsosie. He had jotted some names in his notebook, but even as he did it he wondered why. The laws he enforced had been taken by the Tribal Council from the white man's laws and the white man did not recognize witchcraft as an offense.

  It would become an offense only if some specified crime was involved. There had been a case of extortion once, nothing they had ever proved, but enough circumstantial evidence to indicate a conspiracy between a Star Gazer and a Singer to diagnose witchings and split fees for the curing ceremonial.

  Agnes Tsosie came out of the ceremonial hogan now and went to the brush shelter with a crowd of women relatives and the Singer from the Stick Carrier's camp. Leaphorn saw that one of the women was rubbing tallow on her chin and juniper sap on her forehead. Inside the hogan the same thing would be happening to Tsosie and the other male kinfolks who would be taking part in the attack on the scalp. They would be blackened more thoroughly with the ceremonial ashes, as Monster Slayer had been to make himself invisible before his attack on the Ye-i. If Leaphorn's memory of the ceremonial was correct, Agnes Tsosie would only watch the attack, with a male relative serving as her stand-in during the ritual. The Singer wasn't needed during the blackening and Leaphorn saw Old Man Sandoval talking to the Scalp Shooter, who had been sitting all afternoon beside the hogan entrance, guarding a pile of ashes.

  Scalp shooting required a professional, although his role in the ceremonial was simply to shoot the scalp with an arrow and sprinkle it with symbolic ashes to signify its death. Leaphorn thought he had seen this man before, helping Singers at other ceremonials. He wondered idly what Sandoval was using for the symbolic scalp. Ideally, it would be something from the witch's person, a clipping of hair if that could be had, something with his blood on it, or some article of clothing which had absorbed his sweat. Since this witch was unidentified, the symbolic scalp would have to be something else. Leaphorn guessed they might use a pouch of sand from a footprint or something else they thought the witch had touched.

  If it's hair, Leaphorn thought, it's going to mean that Sandoval and some others have been lying. If it was hair or something bloody he would have to confiscate it after the ceremonial ended. He would have the lab check it with Horseman's and, if it matched, have a messy murder investigation on his hands. But he was fairly sure Sandoval hadn't been lying. Linking Horseman to the witching case had never really made sense, never really been more than a faint possibility where no other possibilities were offered. As far as Leaphorn could pin down the witching gossip, Horseman had hardly returned to the Lukachukais when the incidents started, and at least one had happened before the knifing in Gallup. Besides, the types suspected of witchcraft were always older, usually with a lot of material possessions and a lot of enemies.

  There was the sound of chanting from the ceremonial hogan now, and the thudding of the pot drum. Sandoval came through the curtain, followed by Tsosie, two cousins, and the uncle who was representing Agnes Tsosie. Even their loin cloths had been blackened with ashes, and each held in his right hand a raven beak, secured to a juniper stick with yucca and buckskin thongs. The Scalp Shooter picked up his basket of ashes and was walking north-northeast. It was the direction, Leaphorn noted, of the higher central peaks of the Lukachukais. Over the peaks, a tremendous thunderhead was rising, its top boiling in relentless slow motion into the stratosphere, its bottom black with shadow and trailing the first thin curtains of rain.

  Sandoval will know his medicine is working, Leaphorn thought. He has called for Thunder to kill the Wolf and Thunder has come to the appointed place. It was interesting that the Singer from the Stick Carrier's camp had placed the scalp so carefully north-by-northeast of the hogan. That meant they believed the Wolf was now somewhere in that direction.

  Leaphorn trailed along with the crowd. The Scalp Shooter had stopped at a dead creosote bush about two hundred yards from the hogan and was sprinkling something under the bush with ash. He stepped aside and Tsosie and his kinsmen poked at the object with their raven bills, killing it with this symbol of contempt. Leaphorn pushed through the crowd. The spectators were silent now and he could hear the attackers muttering, "It is dead. It is dead," each time they struck the symbolic scalp.

  The object the crowbills were striking was a high-crowned black hat.

  Instantly, Leaphorn correlated this new fact with other information, with the bulky stranger trying on hats in Shoemaker's, with the question of why a worthless hat would be stolen and a valuable silver concho band left behind.

  The hat was thoroughly coated with ashes now, but there was still a dark outline against the faded felt, the outline of linked circles where heavy silver conchos had once protected the dye from the sun.

  When I look in the hatband, Leaphorn thought, it will be size seven and three-eighths. The Big Navajo was the Navajo Wolf. But why was he the witch? This was why the Hand Trembler and Sandoval had decided to prescribe an Enemy Way. The Navajo Wolf was a man nobody knew. A stranger to the clan and to the entire linked-clan society of the Lukachukai slopes. But what had he done to be singled out for this terrible proscription of The People? Death within the year by his own witchcraft-turned against him by the medicine of the Enemy Way. Or, Leaphorn thought grimly, death much sooner if the Tsosies or the Nez family happen to catch him.

  The high slopes of the Lukachukais were obsc
ured now by the darkness of the cloud. Light from the setting sun glittered from the strata of ice crystals forming in the thin, frigid air at its upper levels. Deep within it, the structure of the cloud was lit by a sudden flare of sheet lightning. And then there was a single lightning bolt, an abrupt vivid streak of white light pulsing an electric moment against the black of the rain, connecting cloud and mountain slope.

  If the witch was there, he's dead enough, Leaphorn thought. And he couldn't blame himself for that. Not the way he would blame himself if The People found the Wolf before he did and executed this sentence of death.

  Chapter 11

  There had been intermittent thunder for several minutes. But, even so prepared, McKee had been startled by the sudden brighter-than-day flash of the lightning bolt. The explosion of thunder had followed it almost instantly, setting off a racketing barrage of echoes cannonading from the canyon cliffs. The light breeze, shifting suddenly down canyon, carried the faintly acrid smell of ozone released by the electrical charge and the perfume of dampened dust and rain-struck grass.

  It filled McKee's nostrils with nostalgia. There was none of the odor of steaming asphalt, dissolving dirt, and exhaust fumes trapped in humidity which marked an urban rain. It was the smell of a country childhood, all the more evocative because it had been forgotten. And for the moment McKee dismissed the irritation of J. R. Canfield and reveled mentally in happy recollections of Nebraska, of cornfields, and of days when dreams still seemed real and plausible. Then a splatter of rain hit; big, cold, high-velocity drops sent him running to the tent for his raincoat and back out into the sudden shower to rescue the eggs frying on the butane stove and the bedrolls spread out on the sand beside a jumble of boulders.

  When he reached them the rain stopped as abruptly as it had begun. McKee dropped Canfield's blankets and cautiously inspected the slice of sky visible above the canyon. Up canyon it was blue-black, with a continuing intermittent rumble of thunder. Directly overhead, the clouds were a mixture of gray and white. Down canyon to the south and east there was the dark blue of open sky and, nearer the horizon, the violent reds and yellows of the setting sun. The breeze had shifted back to the southwest now and he saw the rain was drifting across the canyon higher in the mountains. Only the trailing edge of it had touched here.

  McKee decided it would be safe to leave the bedrolls out. He walked back to the butane cooker, forked an egg onto a piece of bread and folded it into a sandwich. The sunset now was flooding the canyon with eerie rose light, which made the eroded sandstone and granite of the cliff seem to glow. McKee heard the water then, a small sound, moving down the canyon floor below him. The rain had been little more than a heavy sprinkle here but northwestward on the mesa it had been heavy enough to send runoff down the network of washes which fed Many Ruins Canyon. It would have to rise into a torrent eight or ten feet deep before it topped the high mound of talus where the camp was and McKee estimated the stream, now spreading across the flat sand on the canyon bed below him, was no more than six inches deep. It was muddy, carrying a burden of sticks, pine needles, and assorted debris, but it wouldn't get much deeper unless the rain upstream turned into something like a cloudburst. If that happened, it might be a little tough driving on the canyon bottom tomorrow. That turned McKee's thoughts again to Canfield.

  Ever since his return to the camp he had alternated between uneasy worry that some inconceivable something had led Canfield to sign a false name to his note, irritation at himself for such foolishness, and then irritation at Canfield for causing this uneasiness. He was all the more irked by the thought that, when Canfield returned and explained the signature had been inspired by some ridiculous Canfieldian whim, the whole affair would seem too asinine and trivial for complaint.

  "Silly bastard," McKee muttered. He folded the third egg into a sandwich, poured himself a mug of coffee, and scrubbed out the frying pan with sand. By now the light in the canyon had faded from rose to dusky red and McKee's mood had shifted with it, back to irritation with himself for being nervous.

  It was about ten when he finished going through his accumulation of notes in the tent and planning his activities for the next day. He would have to stay in camp at least until Canfield returned because tomorrow Miss Leon was supposed to arrive. If Canfield was finding anything interesting in his digging, he wouldn't want to stop-and someone should take the girl up into the labyrinth of canyons to try to locate the van truck. It might, or might not, belong to her electrical engineer, but it shouldn't be too hard to find. Not if it was still parked in Hard Goods Canyon, and not if, as Old Woman Gray Rocks had said, the canyon ran into Many Ruins nine miles up from the mouth. That would make it only about four miles up from their camp.

  He turned off the butane lantern and stood at the tent flap a moment, letting his eyes adjust to the night before walking back to the bedrolls. He felt tired now, ready for sleep. He left his boots beside the bedding, rolled his shirt in his trousers for a pillow and slid into the blankets. The storm cloud had drifted away and he heard, far to the northeast, the faint suggestion of thunder. His side of the canyon was in total darkness but the top of the sheer cliff on the west side was tinged now by the dim yellow light of the rising moon. It would be about three-quarters full tonight, McKee thought, and he felt a sudden inexpressible loneliness, a loneliness almost as intense as in a dream he sometimes had. In the dream he floated in a great airy blackness, wanting to shout, but remembering-dream fashion-that he had shouted before and his voice had been lost in an infinite echoless distance. Remembering this would sadden him because it told him there was no one anywhere but him. When he had this dream, sometimes when he was overtired and depressed, it would awaken him and he would sit on the side of his bed and smoke a cigarette, and sometimes two or three.

  A whippoorwill sounded its whistling call far down the canyon and was answered by an echo. And then it was eerily silent.

  Directly overhead McKee picked out the stars of the Pleiades-six in two parallel rows and the seventh trailing to close the double line. From these, McKee remembered, the seven Hard Flint Boys of the Navajo myth had descended to follow Monster Slayer on his heroic odyssey among the evil things. And to spread their own mischief among the Dinee. And to receive ceremonial offerings of cornmeal every spring from a thousand sheepherders in a thousand little sacred shrines on a thousand mesas and mountains across the Reservation. McKee located two stars, each surrounded by the hazy light of a nebula, which represented the Hard Flint Woman and a contestant in the Bounding Stick Game. He couldn't dredge up the name of the other Holy Person but he vaguely remembered that in the myth there was an argument over the outcome and a solution based on the trickery so inevitable in both Greek and Navajo myth. Far up the west rim of the canyon, a coyote yipped twice, and then poured out its soul in a full-throated bay. The sound seemed to float down from the stars, the voice of some primeval hound drifting infinite sorrow across the sky.

  It might be my coyote, McKee thought, the one that got into Yazzie's ram pen. He would go back tomorrow to find out how, if his guide duties with Miss Leon allowed. He shifted his weight on the packed sand and felt suddenly less sure that he would find any way a coyote could have invaded that tight little enclosure. In this silent darkness mystery seemed suddenly natural, almost rational. Down the canyon the whippoorwill called again and then there was the odd, rasping cry of a saw-whet owl, sounding, McKee thought, like an ogre filing off his chains. He reached for his cigarette pack, decided against it, and thought again of the note Canfield had left, and why Jeremy Robert Canfield, whose first name was part of a private anthropology faculty joke, would sign "John" to this note. He drifted uneasily on the margin of sleep.

  The sound jerked him abruptly up from the blankets, wide awake, staring across the canyon. It had been the clatter of a falling pebble, bouncing down the eroded cliff and dislodging a small shower of other pebbles. The residue of faint echoes lingered a second in the stillness and then faded. McKee sat stock-still, listening,
feeling the tenseness of muscle fiber flooded with adrenalin and the taste of primitive fear in his mouth. He slid his legs out of the bedroll and slipped them into his trousers, put on his boots, picked up his shirt, and stood. The moon had risen halfway up the sky and the west wall of the canyon was flooded now with pale light. McKee stood in a rigid crouch, listening, studying the worn outcroppings of sandstone from which the sound had come. There was nothing but the silence. A sinister shape half hidden by juniper at the foot of the outcrop became, as McKee's eyes better adjusted to the half light, an oddly eroded boulder. McKee relaxed slightly, feeling the panic leaving him. It could have been an animal. And, as he thought this, it seemed ridiculous to think it could be anything but an animal-perhaps a night-prowling porcupine. He stood there, feeling suddenly slightly weak and very foolish. But still there was something primitive within his mind signaling danger and urging caution. Five black rams with bloody throats and the wrong name signed to a simple note. A burrowing owl glided slowly down the moonlit side of the canyon floor, scouting for night-feeding kangaroo rats. It swerved suddenly away from the outcrop, flapped its wings wildly, and disappeared in the darkness down canyon from McKee. And, as it disappeared, his fear returned. Something had startled the owl. It would not have been frightened by anything small.

  He moved cautiously away from the bedroll, farther back into the darkness up the talus slope toward the east cliff, taking each step carefully, climbing slowly over the smaller boulders, carefully skirting the larger ones. In a pocket of water-cut rock directly under the overhanging cliff he stopped and turned back to look behind him, surprised that he was panting from the brief exertion and fighting to keep his breathing silent.