The Turquoise Ledge: A Memoir

by Leslie Marmon Silko

  Two of my old English mastiffs, Rosie and Macho, spend nights and most days in the summer in the same room with Gray Bird. She knows their names and calls them just as I do.

  Gray Bird watches children’s educational television every morning. This season there are a number of children’s cartoons with dogs in them including Clifford the Big Red Dog and Martha the Talking Dog.

  The cartoons with the dogs seem to interest her more because she knows what the words “dog” and “dogs” mean. She also knows the dogs have individual names. She never makes a mistake with the names of the six mastiffs, even when I sometimes confuse the two silver fawn mastiffs; Gray Bird always knows which is Thelma and which is Osa.

  Gray Bird makes up nicknames for herself. She heard me sing a song about a little gray bird with a little black beak and a little red tail, and she started repeating “Black Beak” and responded to it when I said it; so “Black Beak” became Gray Bird’s first but not last nickname. She also goes by “Chippy Bird Song,” and of course terms of endearment like Gray Baby and Baby Bird.

  But just recently Gray Bird called herself “Gray-bee,” her contraction of Gray Baby. If she wants to be called Gray-bee or Black Beak we are happy to oblige to encourage her inventions with names and other words.

  Gray Bird is a big fan of Elmo. She knows the names of the other Sesame Street puppets as well, and she knows what time the program is broadcast. She can sing the Sesame Street theme song, and she sings other songs that I sing to her, songs I made up so that Gray Bird is always the subject of the songs.

  I enjoy Sesame Street sometimes, so I watched it with Gray Bird which helped reinforce her attention to the program. She likes to watch the Barney program, but I let her do that by herself.

  In Africa where the gray parrots live, the tribal people revere them as sacred beings, and their red tail feathers which they shed from time to time are used in prayer bundles and other objects of spiritual power.

  CHAPTER 59

  I thought about the owl attack on my macaws in January. The man and machine and the violence he committed against the arroyo had disrupted the area, and must have driven the nesting owls to great lengths. To have three large macaws attacked in two separate aviaries on the same night seems strange and out of proportion.

  At first I wondered: Was it the Owl Being, angered by the portraits of the other Lords of the Night and his portrait not yet begun by me? Or did I give someone macaw feathers that somehow found their way to a ritual that costs the macaw’s life in order to heal the human?

  No. It was the dust and noise that disrupted that part of the arroyo; it was the damage done to the great horned owls’ habitat by the machine which was just as ferocious and out of proportion as the attack on my beautiful macaws.

  I’d already sent county authorities out to survey the private sand and gravel pit; I’d sent letters with photographs I’d made of the progression of the damage; I’d made phone calls to people who could see nothing wrong with gouging boulders from the big arroyo.

  The idea had been developing for a while. I mulled it over as I practiced walking past the broken boulders and gouged earth without reacting, averting my gaze, taking deep breaths, not allowing myself to be upset by the widening pit of broken rock and torn up sand. I tried not to notice the new damage, the smashed limestone that once formed part of the bank.

  I had to do something. At least I had to try. I recalled many years ago, a group of animal rights activists tried to protect the helpless pure white baby seals from bludgeoning by hunters. The animal rights people stained the baby seals’ white coats with a non-toxic dye. The stain lasted until the baby seals got older, and their coats darkened naturally and became less valuable to the hunters.

  What if I painted the emblem of the Star Beings on the rocks that the machine man was about to rip out of the arroyo? This thought crossed my mind and I knew who sent it.

  My initial reaction was what good would the paint on the boulders do? Did the dye on the white coats of the baby seals save them? The Star Beings reminded me it might take years before the boulders crushed the man on his machine; if I wanted to speed things up I must do something.

  But I was directed by the Star Beings to act: to use children’s washable white tempera to paint the boulders and rocks in danger. It was a long shot, a last try because the man clearly intended to damage and remove more boulders that he’d already begun to excavate.

  The Star Beings directed me to paint their glyph, the white cross figure of the star, on all sides of the boulders, and especially on the scars left by the metal claw of the machine or cracks or other damaged inflicted by the machine.

  What if the machine man didn’t care about small white crosses painted on the boulders, and he and his machine ripped the boulders out of the arroyo anyway?

  Then I realized: once the Star Beings’ small white crosses were painted on the boulders and rocks in the arroyo they worked a kind of magic. All human beings were put on notice that the boulders were under the protection of the Star Beings and must not be disturbed or damaged; all violators would pay terrible consequences.

  The ancient petroglyph the ancestors incised into the boulder in the big arroyo was done only for the most important spiritual purposes.

  I carried a small day pack with the paint, a jar of clean water, a rag and a paintbrush. I was on a mission for the Star Beings so I didn’t take along my camera.

  The sun was very warm for early November. I hoped not to be interrupted while I painted because a number of hikers and horseback riders use the public right-of-way corridor the arroyo provides.

  I worked for more than an hour to paint the small white crosses on the boulders and the rocks the man had already started to excavate. Then I went to work on the others nearby. There were a lot of boulders and rocks to paint star symbols on. In the bright sun and the heat, I wore myself out. When I got finished the place looked as if there had been a great meteorite shower of small white crosses on the boulders and rocks in the damaged area.

  If others mistook them for Christian crosses, it would be fitting, because Jesus Christ was also known as the Morning Star or Venus among indigenous worshippers in the Americas.

  I was hot and tired when I finally packed up the paintbrush and the leftover white poster paint. But before I headed home I surveyed and savored the white crosses on the rocks and boulders; the scattered white stars transformed the gouged earth and shattered rocks just as the Star Beings intended. Now instead of dread filling my heart when I walked up the arroyo past the gravel pit, I’ll see the constellation of white crosses, the sign, the warning from the Star Beings, and my heart will be filled with happiness and hope.

  I realized the notice I painted to him from the Star Beings might set off the man’s mania. But he intended to destroy those rocks before the small white crosses appeared, so it was worth a try.

  Later it came to me (from the Star Beings again) each cross represents a fracture, a broken bone in the body of the man who dares to harm the boulders and rocks. It doesn’t have to happen here in the big arroyo with a boulder that crushes him and his machine—the broken bones—as many fractures as there are painted stars—could easily come to him in a car crash in Tucson traffic.

  On my way home from my mission for the Star Beings I found a chrysocolla nugget the size of a bean, and a piece of turquoise rock the size and shape of an apple wedge.

  Mid-November now. I went to photograph the rocks I painted yesterday. I took a different path over the new open space land the old neighbors gave to the county. I never realized a smaller arroyo parallels the big arroyo for a short distance. I crossed it to get back to the big arroyo and in the brushy deep shady bottom I found the skull, spine, ribs and feet of a large javelina with long curved incisors. Dried meat bits remained on the bones, enough that I knew some large predator would be back to chew the bones clean.

  The large size of the javelina and its tusks made me realize only a pack of coyotes or a powerful large predato
r would have dared attack such a big javelina. Mountain lion, I’d guess, because the coyotes are pack animals and in a matter of hours, they would have eaten or carried away all trace of the javelina. Mountain lions are solitary beings, except in mating season. The rest of the year they live and hunt alone and stash their kills so they can return and feed on them.

  It occurred to me the ancestors might not have passed up those bones, especially not in lean times when the marrow in the bones would have sustained the people another day, enough time to find something else to eat. Boil those bones a long time with some chilitipines, some palo verde beans and cactus buds and you’d have a tasty stew.

  Sometimes, at odd moments—such as tonight as I shut the refrigerator door—I hear what sounds like Dolly barking in her yard. All the other dogs were indoors bedded down for the night, and they remained quiet. The one year anniversary of her death is this week.

  My noble Thelma dog has another infection in her foot—the same foot that we treated with high-powered antibiotics a few months ago. We took her to the vet office to x-ray her sore paw. She got up on the waiting room bench and stared out the window at the parking lot. She knew which vehicle brought her to the vet office and she looked at the old white car longingly; she knows if she can just get back to it, she will be able to return home.

  Thelma weighs two hundred twenty pounds, too heavy for Dr. Christo, his assistant and me to lift onto the x-ray table. But I recalled that back in the waiting room Thelma had the bad manners to get up on the shaky bench intended for people. I told the vet Thelma would get up on the bench, so he dragged the wooden bench into the x-ray room. Thelma seemed to understand we were trying to do something important so when I asked her, she climbed up onto the bench which we pushed up against the x-ray table. She graciously allowed us to lift her huge left front paw onto the x-ray table. Not once did Thelma try to move her paw or get off the bench, although she is strong enough to do anything she wants.

  The vet and I agreed we’d postpone antibiotics, and instead give Thelma medicine for the pain while we tried to boost her immune system with supplements and herbs. I soaked her foot in a strong tea made from dried greasewood leaves.

  Greasewood, or chaparral, is a mighty plant, a powerful medicine that repels harmful organisms. It protects against insects including the dreaded assassin beetles that suck blood and trigger allergic reactions. But it also heals insect bites and skin inflammations, wounds, and pre-cancerous skin lesions, and even dries up warts and moles. A caution too: I once managed to use greasewood salve too frequently on myself and got mild itching and redness in the area, which went away as soon as I stopped using it.

  Thelma got sick all over the place during the night. This morning she refused to eat. The vet prescribed soft salty food with pumpkin for bulk but she refuses to touch it.

  Thelma is a silver fawn “classic” old English mastiff with a short wide head, and broad chest and rib cage; she is robust but not fat. She is full of only good energy and good will toward all humans, and toward other dogs and other living beings. When she is happy her whole body wags along with her tail. She is eight years old which is the beginning of old age for a mastiff.

  One day later. Thelma refused to spend the night in the house last night. It was a warm night in the high fifties, but I worried she was getting ready to die. During the night I heard her bark and I wondered if the ghost dogs had come to prepare her to go with them to Paradise.

  I got up at dawn to go out to check on her. I expected to find her dead, but raindrops were falling and she was up and wagging her tail, ready to come indoors out of the rain. Later she ate all her food and I knew she wasn’t going to die. What a relief!

  One of the cockatoo sisters, Mrs. Rambo, died this morning, November 25. I felt so badly. I felt I might have noticed something was wrong if I’d been doing the feeding and watering of the cockatoos instead of working every available moment on this manuscript. So I took back the feeding and watering of the parrots. I enjoy the time I spend caring for them a great deal.

  The fall has been warm so I’ve put the fine mist sprayer on the hose to give the military macaws in the octagon aviary a treat. The misting gets them excited about bathing and they go to the stainless steel soup caldron after I fill it with clean water and they begin to dip their beaks and heads into the water while perched on the rim of the pan. Then they dip their wings to skim the water and flick their wings back on themselves so the water showers their head and back. Gracefully at first then exuberant and joyous as they sprinkle more water on themselves, macaws at their bath are one of my glimpses of Paradise.

  Four days later. A warm rain out of the southeast fell gently all night. The rain barrel overflowed.

  Tomorrow I will hike to the round rusty orange rock on the hillside that faces the dance plaza of the deer and javelinas. This seems like a good way to end the year of walks along the trail. I want to visit the little white crosses on the rocks to see what effects all the rain had on the washable paint.

  The last day of November. I decided to make a new walking trail—off the back of the ridge and down to the small arroyo which the wild things, mostly the javelina, use for travel and as a sanctuary.

  My plan was to walk to the rusty orange rock on the side of the hill, just a short distance on the old burro trail from the Gila Monster Mine pit. Although I was going north from my house, the ridge is very steep and rocky and I didn’t want to fall, so I took my time. I stopped or detoured to take a look at odd rocks or strange formations that caught my eye.

  After thirty years here I know this area a little, but the earth is constantly changing, rocks that move, pebbles that roll out from under the sole of your shoe and throw you down, shifts and changes that are new to me because they were not here, not yet visible when I last hiked here with Dolly Dog and her brother, Banana, thirteen years ago.

  I noticed a small area at the foot of the ridge where I saw a soft grainy whitish rock, a soda stone, a chalky calcite in a thin layer like petrified pancake batter. With the toe of my shoe I tipped over the thin broken piece of the light soft stone. The odd deposit of chalky calcite appeared to come from a single source. I detoured to look more closely; the thin layer of whitish stone had a somewhat circular shape as if a stone in water made ripples from a center point. I looked where I thought the center might be and lo and behold I saw a narrow crack in the ground; it appeared to be the remnant of an ancient steam spout or mud geyser. Warm water still comes out of neighborhood wells. It is “fossil water” from volcanic steam that was trapped a million years ago in pockets of lava and basalt five hundred feet below.

  I hadn’t walked very far in the small arroyo when I disturbed a small herd of javelinas. They stampeded into the thickets of catsclaw mesquite and greasewood on the bank. I caught a glimpse of a baby javelina so I knew I had to be careful because the entire herd of javelina may charge a predator if they feel a threat to one of their babies. I hurried away, down the small arroyo, but to my left, to the north I could make out a game trail out of the arroyo that led to the old jeep trail about fifty yards away.

  I crossed the jeep trail and headed for the small orange hill that lies east of the Gila Monster Mine. On my way to the small orange hill I encountered an odd patch of large round orange stones that looked as if they’d been molten then dropped in cold water. They appeared to be a large family of round orange stones like no others anywhere. They were all sizes and variations of round or egg-shaped forms; the largest were the size of sofas.

  They looked so beautiful on the ridge above a little gulley, a great saguaro two hundred years old had grown up from between the largest round stones and towered over them.

  How strange the round rusty orange rock on the hillside looked as I got closer to it, very different than it looked from the distance of the trail. With all the rain the desert shrubs and trees had grown mightily all summer and it had become difficult for me to see the rusty orange rock which I always thought appeared to be the image of a war
shield, one of the Pueblo war shields that protected supernaturally. Yet on closer examination, the rock seemed a darker shade of red brown and less orange; it did not look at all like the round rust orange rock I’d seen from the trail whenever I walked. This rock had a brown iron ore deposit in the shape of an egg, not a circle or war shield like the orange rock had. On further reflection, I decided I hadn’t reached the rock I intended but another similar rock with a dark rust center.

  From the orange hill I returned exactly the way I’d come, by intuition, not by any conscious effort, so once again I got to pass close by a clan or tribe of round rocks. I got back on the trail and continued my walk. As I neared the big arroyo, high on the ridge above it, I saw the man on his machine enclosed by the high wall that surrounds his penitentiary style structure. I had a bad feeling at once about the boulders in the arroyo.

  When I reached the arroyo I saw the machine tracks, and three of the large boulders I’d painted with white crosses had been toppled and parts broken off; then the machine had pushed them to the middle of the arroyo as if to block it. Now the man and machine were blocked from reaching the other boulders he’d partially excavated to remove. I wasn’t sure what this signaled.

  I had done as the Star Beings directed. Now life would become dangerous for that man with the machine. He was on notice the boulders and sand of the big arroyo were under the protection of the Star Beings. Now the Star Beings would show him no mercy. The Star Beings disliked human beings as it was, but they especially despised and destroyed his kind.

  The big arroyo itself is space, open space, empty space, carved for eons through the rocks by floodwater as it descends toward the sea. Slowly but relentlessly the erosion will work so the bank of the arroyo will be undermined and in a flood it will collapse, and the wall around the house will topple into floodwaters with it. The boulders and rocks taken to landscape the yard will roll into the floodwater plop! plop! They always were travelers; the detour the man and machine took them on mattered less than a molecule. They will be on their way once more to the Santa Cruz River on its way to join the Salt River then on to the Colorado at Yuma and finally the sea.