The Turquoise Ledge: A Memoir

by Leslie Marmon Silko

  Two days ago on June 15 the first clouds—small and round, fluffy and fast-moving—passed through headed northeast. Some of them resembled birds flying backwards, or flying antelopes in threes and twos, and a bear crossing the sky, followed by a frog and a squirrel. They fill the horizon, fleecy on the edges from the winds above that push them. A swimming snake, a swimming fat man who just lost his flipper. A reclining nude woman with two heads. Out of the west, long thick strands of clouds parallel one another, like herds of elk and herds of buffalo. Clouds are constantly changing, especially these fast-moving clouds, that remind me of wild horses with wind whipped manes and tails. It is possible to communicate with the clouds—I don’t know why—I just speak to them.

  One hundred eight degrees Fahrenheit. The air itself is hot and heats my silver bracelets and earrings. I learn to cover my brown skin with loose white cotton or linen; I never go out without dark glasses or a wide brim hat.

  Occasionally I take a different route. Not long ago I walked north of the Gila Monster Mine, past an old digging, and toward the hill with the arresting orange rock. Distances and the rough terrain of the desert can be deceiving; I wanted to have some idea of how long it might take me and how difficult it would be to reach the orange rock.

  The desert brush was heavy and the terrain was rocky at the foot of the hill. I decided to put off the orange rock for another day. I found the easiest path was to walk down the center of the small arroyo to avoid the catsclaw and mesquite along the edge. I saw deer tracks and javelina tracks there. The mountain lion and bobcat probably hunt around here.

  I feel I must share the well water with the wild creatures. When my last horse, the sweet Prince Charming, suddenly got sick and died, the horse water trough in the corral was no longer required. I’d have more water for us humans if I stopped filling the trough in the empty corral. But too many wild creatures had come to depend on the water in the corral in the thirty plus years that people kept horses and water there, from javelina, deer, bobcats, coyotes and all number of birds—including owls and hawks. I call it the “memorial water trough” in memory of my two beloved Arabian horses Hudson Bay and Prince Charming.

  I try to keep the troughs and dishes completely full of water so small creatures can climb out if they fall in. Alas this morning I found a half dozen hatchling Gambel’s quail drowned in one of the round flat water tubs down at the old corral. I felt so badly because I didn’t anticipate such an accident with the tiny quail. I set out the dead chicks where hungry creatures might find them; this is the only consolation the desert offers for death. Long ago the Tibetan Buddhist priests were given “sky burials” under the stars, on remote mountains where hungry creatures could find and consume them.

  I’ve lived here thirty years and I still have so much to learn about the desert and its living things. The round water dishes needed large gravel, and small stones on the bottom to create secure footing, and shallows so that rocks would protrude above the water’s surface allowing the tiny quail hatchlings to climb out if they fell in, as in natural water holes.

  Even after I filled the water dishes with stones and made a ramp into the water trough, I found a single tiny quail drowned the following morning. I added more rocks and so far it’s not happened again.

  In the intense heat there is silence. The molecules of air expand so far apart that vibrations can’t bridge the gap between them, and the sound stops. There is no wind; nothing moves.

  We are waiting for the rain. Along the high plateaus, veils of blue mist trail out of the clouds’ blue bellies; even when the big-bellied dark blue clouds amass around the mountains’ peaks, the air is so hot and dry the raindrops evaporate before they hit the ground.

  In fewer than three hours the sun will reach the “North Corner of Time” as the old-time people at Laguna Pueblo called it, or the summer solstice. In the old days down here, the Tohono O’Odom women harvested the carmine red fruits of the giant saguaro cactus with their long poles made of saguaro ribs. They brewed a sacred wine from the ripe fruit and drank it in order to visit with the ancestors and beloved family members who had died.

  Last week a Tucson newspaper printed a list of the city’s most memorable summer storms. The first date was my favorite: on July 11, 1878 five inches of rain fell on Tucson in seventy minutes and caused a sea of water to wash away most of the downtown area.

  The first day of summer is 110 degrees Fahrenheit by 2:00 p.m. I was up early and sat outside to watch the fat fluffy clouds along the southwest horizon. I tried to sketch them but they seemed to evaporate into the heated sky.

  Late in the afternoon thunderclouds began to roll in from the west. The spine of the Tucson Mountains and the highest peak are in full sun but here on the northeast slope my house is temporarily in the shade of a huge cumulus cloud as the other clouds gather around the black mountain peak. Across the valley to the east over the high blue mountains, tall waves of bright white and dark blue clouds rise in the forms of great cliff s and giant mountains fifty thousand feet high.

  Two days later I opened the door early in the morning and the air smelled heavenly—rain! The scent from yesterday’s clouds took all night to reach us down here. I walked outside and it was so cool. All the living beings from the palo verde trees with their green bark to the ring-neck lizards are drinking up the precious moist air through their skins. I can feel my hair drink the moisture in waves and the skin on my face feels refreshed and cool.

  It was such a lovely morning I didn’t want to go back indoors, even to put on my clothes. I don’t care who sees me in my nightgown which is nothing more than a very long t-shirt. I walked down the hill to the corrals to check on my new arrangements of the water dishes and the new ramp into the water trough.

  As I walked I looked at the dark basalt hills, and at the cactus and shrubs and trees; all of them were in harmony with one another, and I felt within that beauty. In an instant I saw that even man-made things—the roll of old fence wire, the old rail ties withered by sixty years of the heat and the sun—were in the light of that beauty. In that beauty we all will sink slowly back into the lap of the Earth.

  CHAPTER 44

  Yesterday the temperature reached 111 degrees Fahrenheit. No wonder the clouds suddenly vanished while I was trying to sketch them. The heat evaporated the clouds. When I went outside to spray the macaws, there was a breeze and the hose spray wet down my clothes and the breeze cooled me so 111 didn’t seem quite so bad.

  But now the humidity is coming, and it will make the air feel hotter.

  I brought the garden hose to the pots of water. The bees didn’t like the disturbance but the water was so low it would have been gone before morning. I dumped the water buckets and rinsed them clean before I refilled them; not one of the bees gave even the slightest hint of anger. They are accustomed to my commotion with the hose and buckets.

  Ah the wind off the thunderstorm on the other side of the mountains is cool and sweet with the smell of rain!

  The first rain of summer. The air smells magical, the rain on the trees and shrubs releases leaf resins and rare balsams—invigorating scents of bark splashed with rain, all these subtle perfumes loosed and carried by the wind.

  The raindrops were so few and far between they left the dirt speckled and dotted, “pinto” with darker damp spots.

  The one-legged macaw, Sandino, is very fond of Tigger, the old pit bull dog who cleans up the parrot food he scatters with such glee. Seeds and parrot formula are nothing for Tigger. The dog once ate fresh rattlesnake dung as I looked on in revulsion and disbelief.

  This is Sandino’s first summer indoors in the room where I work. He gets around on one leg very nicely in the big cage. He uses his beak and flaps his wings for extra lift if he wants to move quickly. Sometimes he shrieks in alarm if shadows of large flying birds cross the sky outside his windows. Luckily music soothes him. He enjoys all the Carlos Santana albums I listen to while I write.

  Sandino plays tug of war with his rubber bal
l with the bell inside, and he rings the copper sheep bell I hung in his cage. I never really got to know him before the owls killed his mate, Bolee. She was fiercely possessive of him and flew at me to drive me away from their outdoor cage.

  Now the one-legged macaw is possessive of me and sometimes he reminds me of a bad boyfriend. Parrots are notorious for their jealousy. He demands a great deal of attention from me; otherwise he hangs by his beak upside down from the top of his cage and flaps his wings and screams. I wear headphones while I write so his screams don’t deafen me more than I already am.

  Yesterday raindrops and thunder. Again today there are rain clouds and thunder. On a green paper in white chalk I drew the horizon line which is the spine bone of the black mountains and towering high above, mountainous white and gray clouds.

  Later, as the huge white rain fell minute after minute, it occurred to me that I might have inadvertently written down the Nahuatl words to a rain cloud spell.

  Ca! Caca! Aye! Frog!

  Cacalachitli! Clay rattle!

  Cacalotl! Raven!

  Cacapaca! Clapping!

  My poor garden in clay and plastic pots is a disaster. The summer was cooler and wetter than usual so my plants in pots should have thrived. Instead, they died of overwatering for two reasons. First, I was not counting on there being so much rain in the afternoons. I always watered in the morning when the sky was clear, but later in the day, the rain came and the result was too much water.

  Second, all my anxieties (about the manuscript, finances etc.) seemed to surface while I watered. On hot days it is healthy and natural for plants to wilt temporarily, not from lack of water but to protect themselves from the heat.

  After the air cools, the wilt disappears and the plants are fine. I knew this, but whenever I saw a wilted plant, against all common sense and reason I had to give it water; this was a compulsion, although I knew overwatering during the heat kills the plants at once.

  The alyssum is drought-resistant but I overwatered all the pots of alyssum and killed them; ditto for the datura, even my rare blue single hybrid that I killed when it was at its prettiest. For three years I coddled three large brugmansia plants, a pink, a double yellow and a double white. I put their pots on rollers and moved them indoors in the cold months and out to the shade on the hottest days. The yellow and the pink brugmansias bloomed in the winter months, but the white never did. This summer I managed to overwater all three and that was the end of them. Only the rain lilies were able to survive my anxious overwatering during the heat.

  I tried to grow gourds but the squirrel or Ratty the pack rat ate them almost as soon as the seeds sprouted. One or two gourd sprouts grew a few inches and got my hopes up for them before they were eaten that night.

  The cacti managed to escape overwatering. But I perched one of them in a clay pot atop another overturned clay pot that sat on a steel table. The steel table becomes a solar grill by day. By the time I noticed, the cactus had baked.

  Once again the rolls of robust blue cumulus clouds hug the black mountain peak as they did yesterday about this time in the afternoon. Now a cool wind, the sky a deep solid blue behind the peak, and then a high bank of blue blue storm clouds. At first they were tall and resembled canyons, mesas and mountains; then they transformed themselves into great blue temples of stone at Cholula and the massive stone towers of Teotihuacan and Tikal. But later when I looked for the clouds they had vanished without a trace I thought until this morning at dawn when I inhaled them as the rain scent in the cool air.

  This lovely late June day the air is calm down here but overhead the wind must be racing, because the nimbus and cumulus clouds are stampeding across the blue sky, the fast winds driving them to the mountain peaks of Utah and New Mexico. Some of the clouds are shaped like sea mammals—dolphins and small whales; one has the shape of a pelican. But cloud-shapes are human whimsy. The clouds have a language but it’s not one of shapes.

  One rain cloud broke into two rain clouds.

  I was only gone inside long enough to wash some dog dishes. I heard thunder in the distance while I was putting the dishes away. I came back outside on the porch and all the big silver blue fluffy clouds had transformed into pale purple violet tendrils of rain that reached down to the black mountain peak but evaporated before they reached the ground.

  A sudden shift in the wind blocked the sun with thick masses of clouds that cooled the air even faster. In the old days they used to say that San Juan Day, June 28, was the beginning of the rainy season in the Southwest. The villages had big fiestas for San Juan probably because John the Baptist sprinkled water on people. Long before San Juan, traditional Pueblo and Nahua people used to attract the rain by sprinkling precious water on everyone who turned out for the summer gathering.

  Although the blue violet clouds and their raindrops don’t reach us, still we Earth creatures find cool comfort in the damp breeze that blows steadily off the peak. The wild bees are still out so that means they think we won’t get wet.

  The white wing and the mourning doves drink water from the pots in my front yard. I had to adjust the safety grill on the blue plastic water dish out back because another baby quail drowned. I no sooner filled the two water pots full to overflowing than a redheaded house finch and his plain gray mate came for a drink.

  The following day the clouds that fly past are large and in the shapes of flying birds. A great cloud is Lord Macaw with long tail feathers streaming behind him, rain that reaches the earth. I can make out eagles and woodpeckers, all flying in the opposite direction of the wind.

  Now the clouds amass thickly; a giant frog face snake of silvery blue cumulus. Raging rivers, great ocean waves crested in silver foam—the layers of cumulus swell out of the sky in large masses that resemble nude humans at an orgy.

  Later on the evening news the weatherman reported the clouds brought dry storms full of lightning that sparked wildfires in the Rincon Mountains southeast of Tucson.

  I have two Nahuatl-English dictionaries. One is compact, palm-sized but thick, and is modern and practical. The other is Bierhorst’s old dictionary that grew out of the translations of Cantares Mexicanos, the epic poem of the Nahua people written in glyphs and paintings on folios of folded amate paper the color of white clay.

  Some days I don’t feel like working on the manuscript so I read my two Nahuatl dictionaries for coded messages that may inspire me to write. It is possible to do a great deal with a language we don’t speak or understand, as long as we freely employ our imaginations and have access to good dictionaries. Today as I browsed through the a’s and the c’s (Nahuatl has no b), my eyes were attracted to the Nahuatl words that appear to me to be onomatopoeic; but I also look for rhyme or the repetition of sounds in a single word. I used the “ca” sound of Nahuatl to write my rain cloud spell awhile back, so I started with “ca” again.

  “Ca” means because of you.

  “Cacahtli” means water dweller with a loud croak.

  “Cacacuicatl” means toad song.

  “Quiahuitl” means rain.

  “Oquiah” means it rained.

  “Ehecaquiahuit” and “yehyecaquiahuitl” both mean rainstorm.

  Are the “Eh” and “Yehye” sounds before the word for rain intended to be exclamatory or prayerful?

  “Quiahuatl” means rainwater.

  Just after I wrote down the list of words in Nahuatl and English suddenly a white rainstorm arrived out of the southeast with only a little thunder and lightning. White and gray nimbostratus clouds roll over the hills. Now we are in the clouds!

  As the huge white rain fell minute after minute, it seemed there might be something about Nahuatl words written in ink on paper that works as a rain cloud spell. I will have to continue to experiment with this.

  As I browse in the Nahuatl-English dictionary I also watch for words that are combinations of other words; the Nahuatl word for cloud is “mixtli” the Nahuatl for snake is “coatl” the Nahuatl for tornado is “mixcoatl” but �
��mixcoatl” is also a cloud companion, a ghost warrior or ancestor. “Cuahtilli-n-totolye mochiuh ocelomixcoatl” means: he’s become an eagle, a jaguar, a cloud companion!

  The Bierhorst dictionary shows a number of meanings for each word. Often a double meaning refers to the ghost warriors. For example the Nahuatl word “celiya” means to take root, to sprout or to grow green again, but it also means returned ghost warrior. The word “cempohualxochitl” means marigold but also means revenant warrior. It is apparent that many Nahuatl words have a double meaning which links them to ghost warriors so the revenants hold a central position in the Nahua cosmology. Could it be that the revenants are responsible for bringing rain?

  “Calli” means house.

  “Mixcocacalli” is the House of the Cloud Companions, the dance hall or music room where the ghost singers perform the ghost songs, often in the form of lullabies.

  “Ahua conetel!” means Hail little baby and is used by the ghost singers to address the revenants. “Ahuitzotl,” little longed for child, is another term of endearment used to call the revenants.

  “Olini” means to stir, to come to life as the ghost warriors do when they arrive on Earth.

  “Matlahuah calli” is a pack basket used for carrying the revenants from Paradise to this world.

  “Malina” means to be spun or whirled, and refers to the ghost warriors as they emerge from the matlahuah calli.

  CHAPTER 45

  Another gardening error—fatal for my double white daturas. I misidentified some voracious speckled red bugs as ladybugs. These flying red bugs are the same size and shape as ladybugs and mimic the ladybugs’ red color. They lack the precise black spots of the ladybugs and have instead asymmetrical black splotches. I thought they were a variation of the ladybug.