Barbara Kingsolver (23 page)

I let the subject go. As the twig is bent, so grows the tree, Doc Homer used to say, referring mostly to the bone structure of the feet but it applied to moral life as well. And who knew how the kinks happened; they just did. I ought to know. As Hallie had bluntly pointed out in her letter, I’d marked myself early on as a bad risk, undeserving of love and incapable of benevolence. It wasn’t because of a bad grade on a report card, as she’d supposed. It ran deeper than that. I’d lost what there was to lose: first my mother and then my baby. Nothing you love will stay. Hallie could call that attitude a crutch, but she didn’t know, she hadn’t loved and lost so deeply. As Loyd said, she’d never been born—not into life as I knew it. Hallie could still risk everything.

Loyd and I dangled our feet over the side of the roof, looking out over the plaza and beyond, to where the plaza ended suddenly, perforce, by the drop of a sheer cliff. I could only see this precipice as a threat, and wonder how toddlers lived to the age of reason without toddling over it, but many little feather-bedecked children were running along its edge as if it were nothing more than the end of a yard.

I heard a drum and a brief burst of what sounded like sleigh bells. Then nothing. If anything ever did happen, we’d have a good view. We’d climbed a ladder to get where we were. Jack had given a long, dejected look up the rungs as if he might consider the climb, if he weren’t so dignified. Now he lay curled at the bottom keeping watch. Old wooden ladders and aluminum extension ladders were propped everywhere; second-and third-story roofs served as patios. All around the plaza, legs hung like fringe over the sides of buildings. I spotted Inez and some other relatives across the way. Inez’s owlish glasses were the type that turn dark outdoors; two huge black disks hid her round face as she sat, hands folded, inscrutable as a lifeguard.

Not far from us in a sheltered corner of the roof was a wire pen full of geese and turkeys muttering the subdued prayers of the doomed. “Does your mama know you were a cockfighter?” I asked Loyd.

“No.” He hesitated. “She knew Dad did it, and that he took Leander and me to the fights when we were little, but she didn’t care for him doing that. She never knew I went on with it. And you better not tell her.”

“I’m gonna tell,” I said, poking him in the ribs. “I’m going to look up in my
Keres
-English dictionary, ‘Your son is a dirty low-down rooster fighter.’”

Loyd looked pained. Pleasing his mother was nothing to joke about. He’d given up cockfighting for Inez, not for me, I now understood. I’d just been the cricket in his ear. But that wasn’t insignificant, I decided. I could settle for that. I looked down at the plaza, whose quilt of fresh snow remained a virginal white, unmarred by
tracks. This seemed miraculous, considering the huge number of people crowded around its edges—a good two hundred or more. People must have come from outside the Pueblo. Jicarilla Apaches looking for knockout wives.

“How come those houses over there near the edge of the cliff are falling down?” I asked. Their adobe plaster had cracked off, revealing the same artful masonry as Kinishba, in a state of collapse.

“Because they’re old,” Loyd said.

“Thank you. I mean, why doesn’t somebody fix them up? You guys are the experts, you’ve been building houses for nine hundred years.”

“Not necessarily in the same place. This village was in seven other places before they built it up here.”

“So when something gets old they just let it fall down?”

“Sometimes. Someday you’ll get old and fall down.”

“Thanks for reminding me.” I shaded my eyes, looking to the east. Something was happening near the kiva, which was a building with a ladder poking out through a hatch in its roof. Loyd had suggested I shouldn’t show too much interest in it.

“The greatest honor you can give a house is to let it fall back down into the ground,” he said. “That’s where everything comes from in the first place.”

I looked at him, surprised. “But then you’ve lost your house.”

“Not if you know how to build another one. All those great pueblos like at Kinishba—people lived in them awhile, and then they’d move on. Just leave them standing. Maybe go to a place with better water, or something.”

“I thought they were homebodies.”

Loyd rubbed his hand thoughtfully over my palm. Finally he said, “The important thing isn’t the house. It’s the ability to make it. You carry that in your brain and in your hands, wherever you go. Anglos are like turtles, if they go someplace they have to carry the whole house along in their damn Winnesotas.”

I smiled. “Winnebagos. They’re named after an Indian tribe.” It occurred to me too late that Loyd already knew both these things.
For months, I think, I’d been missing his jokes. Empress of the Universe, instructing the heathen.

“We’re like coyotes,” he said. “Get to a good place, turn around three times in the grass, and you’re home. Once you know how, you can always do that, no matter what. You won’t forget.”

I thought of Inez’s copious knickknacks and suspected Loyd was idealizing a bit. But I liked the ideal. The thought of Hallie’s last letter still stung me but I tried to think abstractly about what she wanted to tell me: about keeping on the road because you know how to drive. That morality is not a large, constructed
thing
you have or have not, but simply a capacity. Something you carry with you in your brain and in your hands.

I’d come on this trip knowing I still had to leave Loyd in June, that Grace wouldn’t keep me, but maybe I was just keeping to the road. I felt guilt slip out of me like a stone. “It’s a nice thought,” I told him. “I guess I’ll probably carry something away with me when I leave Grace.”

He looked at me carefully, started to speak, then stopped. And then did speak. “It’s one thing to carry your life wherever you go. Another thing to always go looking for it somewhere else.”

I didn’t respond to that. I blinked hard and tried to look unconcerned, but the guilt nudged back along with the sharp glass edge of my own rationalization, recognized for what it was. I wasn’t keeping to any road, I was running, forgetting what lay behind and always looking ahead for the perfect home, where trains never wrecked and hearts never broke, where no one you loved ever died. Loyd was a trap I could still walk out of.

I listened to the sad geese in their pen, and realized the crowd was quiet. The snowy plaza was marked with a single line of tracks: in the center of the white square stood a tall young woman in a black dress that hung from one shoulder. Her other shoulder was bare. Her waist, her upper arms and wrists, and her buckskin moccasins were all decorated with garlands of colored yarn, fur, and sleigh bells; at the crest of her head was a tuft of white eagle down. The sun shone purposefully on her hair. It was cut like Inez’s, but
hung loose to her waist, swaying as she moved slightly from one leg to the other, her feet barely leaving the ground. She looked graceful and cold.

The sound of drums and then the drummers themselves emerged from the kiva. The four old men took their position at the edge of the plaza and propped their huge drums on their knees without missing a beat. They began a soft chant. A second line of men with blankets draped over their shoulders climbed down from the kiva, also singing, and took their places behind the old drummers.

Then deer arrived, from everywhere. They were men and boys with black shirts and leggings, white kilts, and deer antlers. Their human features disappeared behind a horizontal band of black paint across the eyes. They moved like deer. They held long sticks in front of them, imitating the deer’s cautious, long-legged grace, and they moved their heads anxiously to the side: listening, listening. Sniffing the wind. The woman in black stepped forward shaking her gourd rattle, and they followed her. They
became
deer. They looked exactly as deer would look if you surprised them in a secret rite in the forest, moving in unison, following the irresistible hiss of a maiden’s gourd rattle.

I was entranced. More people climbed down out of the kiva. Some were dressed and armed as bow hunters who stalked the deer with patience. One man, who didn’t seem to have any realistic function in the drama, was nearly naked and bizarrely painted. His body was ringed with black and white horizontal stripes, he had black rings painted around his eyes and mouth, and his hair was pulled up into a pair of corn-tassel horns. He bounced around like a hysteric, possibly in the interest of keeping warm.

“Who’s the striped guy?” I asked Loyd.

“Koshari,” he said. “A kachina. He has to do with fertility. His home’s in the East.”

This struck me as humorous. “The East, as in New York? Area Code 212?”

“The East as in where the sun rises.”

“That’s all part of his job description?”

“All the kachinas have whole histories and families and live in one of the important places.”

“I thought a kachina was a little doll.”

“That’s right.”

“And also a person dressed up?”

“Yep. And a spirit.”

“A spirit with a family and a mailing address.”

“That’s right. When the person dresses up a certain way, the spirit comes into him. And into the doll, if it’s made right.”

“Okay,” I said.

“What?”

“Nothing, just okay. I understand.”

He smiled at me sideways. “You think it sounds voodoo?”

“All right, I’m narrow-minded. It sounds kind of voodoo.”

We both paid attention to the dancers for a while. I needed to keep a little distance from Loyd.

“Anglos put little dolls of Santa Claus around their houses at Christmas,” Loyd said without looking at me.

“Yeah, but it’s just a little doll.”

“And does it have a wife?”

“Yes,” I conceded. “A wife and elves. And they live at the North Pole.”

“And sometimes one guy will dress up like Santa Claus. And everybody acts a certain way when he comes around. All happy and generous.”

I’d never been put in a position to defend Santa Claus. I’d never even
believed
in Santa Claus. “That’s just because he stands for the spirit of Christmas,” I said.

“Exactly.” Loyd seemed very pleased with himself.

One of the hunters had drawn his bow and shot an invisible arrow into a deer. It gave an anguished shiver, and then the other hunters lifted its limp carcass onto their shoulders.

“I’ve seen Jesus kachinas too,” Loyd said. “I’ve seen them hanging all over people’s houses in Grace.”

Now there was a thought to ponder.

Koshari must also have been the spirit of nuisance, or a good belly laugh. The other deer dancers still followed the maiden, ignoring the hunters and their own fallen brother, but Koshari clowned and cut between them, getting in their way and generally interfering with their solemnity. But when one of the youngest dancers lost his antlers, Koshari picked up the headdress and carefully reattached it by its buckskin laces. The boy kept dancing, eyes front, paying no attention to the hobgoblin who was putting his costume back together.

At some later point, I noticed, Koshari had acquired a new-looking straw cowboy hat, which he cocked ridiculously on one of his horns. I had a feeling it wasn’t the Navajo he was aping here. He walked duck-footed with a John Wayne swagger and was using a length of two-by-four as a gun. He knelt and fired repeatedly at the dancing deer, grandly falling over backward each time. Later he stalked them, trailing his gun in the snow and tripping over it with admirably practiced body comedy.

The deer eventually retreated to the cliff, and the plaza filled with two lines of new dancers—a row of black-clad women and a row of men in white kilts—whose bodies beat a loud rhythm as they walked. Their chests were crisscrossed with lines of seashell bells. The two rows of dancers faced one another and stamped their feet, shaking the bells, crowding the air above the plaza with a loud, hollow clicking like summer insects. The men wore crowns of eagle feathers and the women wore spectacular wooden headdresses painted with stylized clouds and slanting blue lines of rain and green blades of corn. This was the corn dance, officially a summer prayer but danced at every important occasion, Loyd said, because you couldn’t pray it often enough.

“Most of the dances have to do with rain,” he said. “Here, that’s what everything hangs on.”

Santa Claus kachinas and the beauty of the spectacle notwithstanding, I still felt outside of it. “So you make this deal with the gods. You do these dances and they’ll send rain and good crops and the whole works? And nothing bad will ever happen. Right.” Prayer
had always struck me as more or less a glorified attempt at a business transaction. A rain dance even more so.

I thought I might finally have offended Loyd past the point of no return, like stealing the lobster from frozen foods that time, to get myself fired. But Loyd was just thinking. After a minute he said, “No, it’s not like that. It’s not making a deal, bad things can still happen, but you want to try not to
cause
them to happen. It has to do with keeping things in balance.”

“In balance.”

“Really, it’s like the spirits have made a deal with
us
.”

“And what is the deal?” I asked.

“We’re on our own. The spirits have been good enough to let us live here and use the utilities, and we’re saying: We know how nice you’re being. We appreciate the rain, we appreciate the sun, we appreciate the deer we took. Sorry if we messed up anything. You’ve gone to a lot of trouble, and we’ll try to be good guests.”

“Like a note you’d send somebody after you stayed in their house?”

“Exactly like that. ‘Thanks for letting me sleep on your couch. I took some beer out of the refrigerator, and I broke a coffee cup. Sorry, I hope it wasn’t your favorite one.’”

I laughed because I understood “in balance.” I would have called it “keeping the peace,” or maybe “remembering your place,” but I liked it. “It’s a good idea,” I said. “Especially since we’re still here sleeping on God’s couch. We’re permanent houseguests.”