The Way We Bared Our Souls
Page 20
“Atta girl,” Kit said, stopping to high-five her.
“Thanks, Kit,” Ellen said, blushing a bit.
The higher we climbed, the more triumphant I felt. Here were five people who’d never hung out together before last Saturday, and now we were taking the world—or at least one of its peaks—by storm. Though I still had some nervous energy I didn’t know what to do with, I felt pretty good. Proud even. Of myself and of my friends.
Thomas seemed especially to enjoy the mountain air. After several miles, he hadn’t even broken a sweat.
“This reminds me of when I used to take walks in the hills with my little brother,” he said. “Before the war.”
“Lucita and I hiked around here once or twice,” Kit said. “She hiked barefoot, if you can believe that. Said it gave her better traction. Plus it was a lot quieter, so we didn’t scare off the animals. We used to see the deer even before they saw us.” He reached down to help Ellen negotiate a large rock in the path. For a second I didn’t think she was going to accept his hand, but then she took it gratefully.
“Do you smell something, Lo?” Ellen said at my back. “Like smoke?”
“I don’t smell anything,” Kit said.
“Don’t worry,” I said. “The fire’s almost under control.”
Ahead of us on the path, Thomas turned around and smiled broadly at us, eyes shining. Then his face changed. He became deadly serious. He held up his hand for us to stop walking and then pointed to something behind us.
We all turned to look. Kaya was trailing us by several hundred yards. She walked slowly, as if in a trance. How long had it been since she’d said anything? Maybe twenty minutes? We’d all been giddily chatting away and hadn’t noticed her dismal silence or her retreat to the back of the group.
“Kaya?” I said. “Are you okay?” She didn’t answer. She just kept walking robotically, lost in her own dark world. As if by instinct, we looked to Thomas for guidance.
“We need to be careful,” he said. “If we push her, she could snap. Let’s just keep a close eye on her.” We stood aside as Kaya passed us without acknowledging our presence. We exchanged glances as she began to speed up. Then she veered off the trail at a jog.
We struggled to keep up with her, following her through the thickening underbrush. In a short time we reached a ravine. It was so dry that fissures ran through the earth at its bottom. It looked as though someone had recently pulled aside the vegetation along the bank to reveal its thirsty depths. Rocks and boulders of all sizes populated the ravine as if they’d fallen from the cliff above. Then my attention turned to the other white objects littering the scorched hollow.
At first I thought they were the skulls of steers. Misshapen steers. But no. I looked more closely and saw they were human skulls. And arm bones. Leg bones. Pelvic bones. The ravine held the scattered remains of human skeletons. I remembered the skull that the coyote had whisked through the ceremony on Saturday night. Maybe I hadn’t imagined it after all. My heart began to pound. And then Kaya turned to us with a remote look in her eyes.
“We were a small tribe,” she said hypnotically. “And that was our home, as far as you can see below. The Americans thought they’d find gold on our land, so we had to be removed. We were rounded up and told we’d be taken care of, given food and medicine, if we surrendered to federal authority. The American soldiers at the fort told us that we’d be protected. So we showed up in Santa Fe, trusting, emaciated. We stayed for weeks and weren’t given our rations. Still starving, we decided to take our chances and return to our village. Then one night the American soldiers came with guns. We tried to escape by running up the mountain, but they hunted us. They shot us in our backs, stole what little we had. Mutilated our bodies. I can see it happening. It’s happening right now. They threw our corpses in this ravine.”
I stood staring at her in shock. We all did. This fugue state was similar to the one at the airfield, but more emphatic. More . . . focused. And a thousand times more powerful, considering that she was standing among the evidence of the destruction she described.
Kaya squatted in the ravine and trembled as if from some deep reservoir inside. She seemed to be experiencing the massacre herself, in real time.
“Here’s where my mother was shot,” she said, fingering the dirt. “She was trying to protect me. She wore my baby sister in a papoose on her back. The vigilante came up and ripped her from my mother’s body. He threw her in the ravine, which flowed with water back then. ‘Nits make lice,’ he said. Then he stabbed me through the heart with his bayonet. He pulled my kachina doll from my hands, said he’d keep my teeth for himself as trophies and give my doll to his daughter as a souvenir. He cut off my mother’s private parts.”
One thing hadn’t changed after Jay’s ritual: Kaya still couldn’t cry.
“Kaya,” I pleaded, unable to raise my voice above a whisper. It wouldn’t have mattered if I’d screamed. She was somewhere else.
We hadn’t read about this massacre in school. We’d never heard of this mass graveyard on the mountain. No marker or monument commemorated the deaths. How had Kaya known? She seemed to have a photographic memory for events that happened long before she was born. Even before her great-grandparents were born. But that couldn’t be. Could it? Maybe if we just . . . waited it out, these images would disappear, like the ones on her legs that my swimming pool had swallowed.
Ellen started to retch in the sagebrush. Thomas, Kit, and I huddled together, unable to do anything but listen.
“I’d already seen the soldiers kill my father,” Kaya went on. “He was a great warrior. But he didn’t try to fight. It didn’t matter. They shot him in the back as he rode away. Then they stole his horse.” Kaya was getting more agitated the more she abandoned herself—and us—to her story. She began to pace back and forth in the ravine, touching the bones one by one.
“Kaya,” I said, “talk to me. Where are you right now?” She closed her eyes.
“Riding through a canyon pass. Shots ring out. I think my eardrums will burst from the sound. Artillery fire echoes off the canyon walls. My father. . . .”
I thought of the reassuring sound of my dad’s cough in the night.
“What is this feeling?” Kaya shrieked. “There’s a bullet in my chest. It’s moving through my lungs. It’s sharp, it’s terrible, it makes me want to be dead. What are all these feelings that make me want to be dead?”
I thought of what it must be like for people who’d been deaf their whole lives to hear for the first time. Or for blind people who could suddenly see. But this was the opposite of one of those miracles. Kaya’s bold entry into the world of pain was catastrophic. She wasn’t prepared. In that moment, if I could have given back her analgesia, I would have, without hesitation. One person should not have to feel so much.
“History forgot us,” she howled. “History stampeded over us, over my people. The settlements and cities of America are built on bloody ground.” She hugged a small skull against her chest.
“Come on, Kaya,” Thomas said gently. “It’s getting cold. We need to make camp. We can’t fix the past tonight. But we can talk about it, together.”
“The bones,” she said. “My family, lost. We were a great nation.”
“You still are,” I said. But then, shamefully, the first image that came to my mind was an old Indian man I’d recently seen curled up behind the gas station with a bottle in a brown paper bag. I thought of everything that had been stolen from him.
“Nothing,” Kaya said, “will ever be the same.”
I thought I heard a baby crying. It was as if the sound was coming from the bones. The smell of burning wood flooded my nostrils.
Looking to Thomas for help, I saw from his collapsed shoulders and distressed eyes that he felt as impotent as I did. What could we possibly do for Kaya? I felt like one of the scientists of the Manhattan Project as I watched my b
omb explode on the horizon, my black hole of all that is good. I regretted my callous experiments.
Kaya took off running through the ravine and began scrambling up the cliff face that towered over it. Thomas tried to grab her, but she was too quick. Within moments she had climbed to the top as skillfully as a wild mountain sheep. She stood dangerously on the edge of the precipice, her proud body silhouetted against the darkening sky. She pulled something from her pocket. Her bear totem? No, a razor.
“Oh my god,” I said. “Thomas.” I reached for his hand.
“She’s reliving something up there,” he said. He was spellbound by the sight of Kaya’s figure on the cliff. He gazed up at his burden-sister with what looked to me like profound understanding. He could see how bad it really was. I felt terrible for him. For Kaya.
You know those moments when time slows and you remember something so strange, so random, yet so vivid? Some memory you didn’t even know you’d latched onto? As I gazed up at Kaya on the cliff, I remembered a presentation Kit had once given in history class, about a ruthless attack on the Navajo Indians in 1805. When five hundred Spanish soldiers invaded the Diné’s sacred Canyon de Chelly in northeastern Arizona, they discovered more than a hundred Navajo women and children seeking refuge in a lofty cave. Before all the Indians were massacred, one old woman tackled a Spanish soldier who’d climbed up the towering rock. Rather than see him violate their time-honored Chelly defenses, she wrapped herself around him and then jumped off the cliff, sending them both plunging to their deaths. The Navajo call this site “The Place Where Two Fell Off.”
I needed to get to Kaya before she did something drastic. I took off running, clambered up the steep, loose rocks that led to her aerie. I barely noticed the cacti and brambles that cut into my legs, drawing blood. They would slow down anyone who might follow, but of course I didn’t feel the pain. As I reached the peak, I narrowly avoided stepping on a rattlesnake. It hissed and then lunged at my hiking boot, but I leapt out of the way. By the time I reached the top of the mesa, I had lost a visual on Kaya. Then I heard her.
“Look at me,” she said, yanking up the legs of her pants.
24
THE SAME PICTOGRAPHS THAT KAYA had drawn on her legs in black pen on Monday afternoon were now carved into her flesh. Carved, as in with a knife. Freshly bleeding. I thought I was going to faint. I could imagine how much pain she was in. And she wasn’t done. With a razor blade, she was still cutting symbols and patterns into her skin. Every time she dabbed away the blood with her shirtsleeve, her thighs glistened with pictographs we’d only seen previously in museums etched on leather and buckskin, the careful record keeping of an unknown Indian chief.
“Oh my god,” I said. “Kaya.” My wounds were nothing compared to hers. My pain was nothing.
Thomas and the others were trying to find a safe way up the incline that Kaya and I had mounted so easily. I heard the rocks tumbling under my friends as they shouted desperately for us to climb down.
“I never should have let her come,” said Thomas, slipping down the face of the cliff as he fought for leverage.
“Oh my god,” Ellen said. “I can’t get up there. What do we do? Lo, do something!” The ritual had taken us way too far. This was what Jay and Thomas had warned me about. Why hadn’t I listened?
“Tonight I represent my people,” Kaya said. “Even though my ancestors lie in the bone pits before us, their suffering is far from over.” Something barked behind her, and a coyote appeared through the rocks. Kaya stooped over and began petting her between her ears. The striped black ear markings told me that the coyote was Dakota, but I saw no sign of Jay. I longed for any adult presence, but it was just me, Kaya, a wild animal, and all of our sordid American history facing off on the cliff. Kaya stepped closer to the ledge and slipped slightly, sending small stones skittering into the ravine.
“Kaya,” I said. “Please.” With every step I made toward her, she made one in the opposite direction, bringing herself precariously close to the rocky abyss below. I stayed still, too afraid to move. Dakota retreated to a nearby bush and began licking her haunches.
Kaya looked at me intently, and at that moment I felt that she could see straight into my neurons. I felt that she could hear the music, both good and bad, that my thoughts made. I felt that she could see all my colors, all my wishes. I felt that she could see into my soul itself. And I didn’t know if the outcome of this scrutiny would be positive. My hair bristled like a coyote’s under her gaze. I clutched the deer totem around my neck.
“You already know what I’m going to do, Lo,” Kaya said. “And that’s okay. But you can’t stop me.” I had to stop her. The week couldn’t end this way. The ritual was supposed to heal us all, not destroy my oldest friend.
“Kaya,” I said. “Please. I’m begging you. It doesn’t have to be like this.”
“No,” she said. “It does. What has already happened is too grim, too devastating. I cannot stop seeing the lives that were lost. I feel them, Consuelo. In my gut, in my heart, I feel the wounds. They’re everywhere. Their history is everywhere.” She bent down and dug her fingers into the earth, then rubbed dirt into her leg where the cuts formed the body of an Indian warrior being dragged behind a horse.
“But Kaya, there’s also hope. Can’t you feel that too?” I should have taken her to Canyon Road, so she could see the rosaries hanging from the branches of the tree at sunset. I should have taken her to the natural hot springs, so she could feel the warmth penetrate her bones. I should have driven her past the peach orchards that grew along the Rio Grande. I should have taken her up in one of Thomas’s hot-air balloons so she could view these mountains from the heaven above them. I’d kept these experiences to myself while she had been alone with her tragic history. I’d been stingy with my joy, just as I’d been stingy with my burden.
“No more hope,” she said. “Only pain.”
“We love you,” I said, my voice breaking. “We need you. Can’t you see that? We can’t lose you. I can’t. Please talk to me, Kaya. Let me help you. We are all here for you. We promised to take care of each other. Remember?”
“The tangible me—the me with a body—is lost,” she said. “All that remains now is my soul. And it’s been seized for a higher purpose. It’s not your fault, Lo. I don’t blame you. But my soul is already spoken for. It wants to return to its native community.”
Then she wrapped her arms around me. Was her fervor due to the fact that she meant it as a last embrace? Or because she wanted to hurl me off the cliff with her, like the Diné woman from the story? Over Kaya’s shoulder, I saw Dakota running toward us. She looked murderous, as if she planned to attack. I struggled to extricate myself from Kaya’s arms and position myself between her and her savage fate.
I would fight Dakota. I would protect Kaya. I would fight history. Only my animal nature could save her.
Then I felt Dakota’s jaws clamping down on my forearm. I felt the pressure of the bite, but not the teeth themselves. I snarled at Dakota. I yelped and spurred her on, even though I could see her bite penetrate almost to the bone. I wanted her to tear off my arm and then go for my jugular. I wanted her to shred my ruined nerves. I wanted to assume all the destruction, so Kaya would be safe. When Dakota lunged at me again, I flinched. A lifetime of pain had trained me well. Burdens couldn’t be undone overnight. I still dreamed of pain. My body still had its memories.
“Kaya!” Thomas shouted from behind us. “Consuelo!” We turned to face him. Dakota released her grip. Thomas had mounted the cliff. He approached cautiously. His bare legs were bleeding from the brambles on the mountain.
“Kaya,” he said, “you’re not alone. We can get through this.”
For a few seconds she seemed to entertain this hope. Then her face became resolute again. “No,” she told Thomas. “I’m sorry, but it’s too late.”
25
AND THEN KAYA TOOK HER
position at the edge of the rock, and, before Thomas and I could reach her, she leapt.
She simply disappeared over the precipice. Silently, like sand. Like a wisp of ash. Dakota unlatched her jaw from my arm, as if to let me know her work there was done. By the time I made it to the edge of the cliff, Kaya’s body was already sprawled at unnatural angles in the ravine below.
Ellen and Kit had never made it up the steep embankment, so they were the closest to her. Ellen scrambled to Kaya’s side while Kit stood frozen, stunned. From above I stared in shock as blood pooled under Kaya’s beautiful head. I crumpled to the ground. Meanwhile Thomas sprang into action. He pulled off his shirt and wrapped it around my arm. It took me a second to recognize what he was doing. Then I saw his white V-neck turn red around my wound.
“No. Go to her. Please, Thomas. Save her.”
“Stay here,” he said, and then began half sliding and half falling down the less steep part of the cliff where he’d ascended. I stared into the ravine.
“No,” I said, as I waited for Kaya to get up. “No,” I said, as I watched Ellen and Kit try to move the boulders that encircled her broken body. “No,” I said, as I heard Ellen screaming, “She’s not breathing! Kit, she’s not breathing!” Kit pulled Ellen to him, hiding her eyes from Kaya’s traumatized figure. The blood on her bare legs formed an intricate network of streams, obscuring the carvings.
Then Thomas reached Kaya’s side. He took her pulse. He tried to breathe life back into her lungs. And then he just sat next to her, lowered her eyelids, crossed her scarred arms like a shield across her chest as she had so often held them in life. Kit pulled a blanket from his backpack and gently laid it over her body.
I smelled rich, pungent wood smoke, though I still couldn’t see any sign of fire above the trees. They weren’t burning. We were burning. I pulled my cell phone out of my pocket and stared at the numbers I needed to press. It seemed like it took me an eternity to dial 911.