Eating Stone (17 page)

My brother and I never became monks. Father Piccolo of Palermo likely did little of the above. Father Piccolo had an agenda. He had in mind the systematic evangelization of a wilderness people. He believed that lives so brief and full of misery needed the hope of heaven. Any fantasy that we might filter through three centuries obscures the blunt fact that the end result was genocide.

I would like to think that the right way to survive in this harsh desert is on the edge between wilderness and garden. The errant padres lived thus, yet they doomed the very culture that knew how to stay alive here, that knew how places like that black chasm could hold both food and fear.

Streamlining the complexities of history, you could say that, in livable areas, the padres left a legacy of irrigation and horticulture that sustained rural Baja California well into the twentieth century. One had to grow things. One had to be resourceful. The garden did not compromise the wild. This lifeway too, is now ephemeral.

Today, we will leave the big arroyo and head north to the border, stopping to fish the bay with the yellowtail jack and sunlit islands—the sea, again—and to revisit the onyx spring, where we will find no sheep. We will bear home, triumphantly, not a trophy borrego turd but a dog-eared postcard sold by a Mexican conservation group that helped introduce bighorns to Isla Tiburén across the Gulf.

The postcard shows a muscular bighorn ram on a pale granite outcrop, skylining in full profile. The Comcáac (Seri) of Isla Tiburén call the wild sheep “mojet.” The Comcáac world is like a planet in a mirror of water, the tall cactus around them an ancient race of cape-wearing giants turned into cardan.

My field notes, my splintered mirror of this desert, are full of questions that will draw us back to Baja California to ask them again. My pages bulge with fish and palm trees and pome-
granates in mission gardens, with ocotillos and boojums, the goat skeleton beneath the fallen cardén cactus. My notes are full of mojet.

Desert bighorns may bring you to places where they live, but they may not show themselves to you. This does not matter. What matters is this: Look.

The Hopi Indians of northern Arizona describe dawn, and all stages of creation, in three phases. When I entered one of their villages, an ancient cluster of sturdy brown stone and adobe houses perched atop First Mesa, it was qöyangnuptu, the violet darkness that first outlines the shape of a man.

A slice of moon rode the western sky. Venus hovered above the distant “calendar ridge.” From this ridge, the Hopi tell time, noting the seasonal movement of sun, moon, and stars against its silhouetted buttes, knobs, and other markers. From stone and stars, the Hopi know when to unfold the year in ritual.

Late winter brings the Powamu, a time of purification and discipline, a consecration of the farming season to come, and one of the great winter ceremonies that mark the arrival of the kachinas, ancestral spirits who come to the mesas from their home in the San Francisco Peaks, far across the brown winter-bare desert to the south, to live among the Hopi until midsummer.

Below sky as dense as ink, the horizon slowly grew yellow, the color of corn pollen: sikángnuqa, the dawn light that reveals man's breath of life. Two elderly women wrapped in fringed shawls stood at the sheer edge of the mesa. With gestures made in the air, they scooped the pollen of the horizon toward their mouths in cupped hands and swallowed it. Their thin brown hands waved the invisible yellow across their hearts. Beside them, pahos, or prayer feathers tied to wands of willow, whipped in a hard, gusty wind pungent with juniper smoke.

I waited in the rough-hewn doorway of a friend's adobe house,
battered by dust and grit, my chin tucked into the wrap of my fleece blanket. When the wind dropped, I opened my eyes to see a kachina walking the passage near my post. This first kachina was, appropriately, Talavai, the Early Morning Singer, clothed in the red sunrise glow of tálawva, the third phase of dawn. A stiff fan of eagle feathers framed his head. His cheeks were painted with terraces of white clouds, and a fox skin hung from his white cotton kilt, grazing high-top moccasins of brown suede. He held a bell and a bough of evergreen and walked as if floating. A curtain of raven black hair spilled down his back.

As Talavai floated off, the sounds came: faint bells, the shake of seeds in a gourd, a rattle of deer hooves inside a hollowed tortoise shell. The sounds were made by a throng of masked figures with melon-shaped clay heads or faces painted with lightning, constellations, or bear tracks. Some masks bore halos of eagle down, their tips dyed red. Turquoise hung from ears; ruffs of spruce ringed several necks. Shell anklets gave each step a dry clatter.

A kachina draped in the soft fur of a gray fox climbed the gnarled wooden ladder of a kiva, the circular chamber in which rituals are held. He emerged as if he had just arrived from an underground flight from the San Francisco Peaks. He danced atop the kiva roof, beating the surface as if it were a drum.

The kachinas emerged from the kivas, then passed through the village, handing out gifts to the children who poked their heads out of the doors, watching for these masked men while they gathered their day packs and books for school. Bright sunlight now filled the plaza, where, on narrow ancient streets, a full-size yellow-and-black school bus could not maneuver a tight bend choked with parked cars. The bus was stuck. Inside, some of the kids pressed their faces to the window glass and laughed with delight.

Bordered on the south by the Little Colorado River, sur-
rounded on all sides by the Navajo reservation, most of Hopi country sits atop First, Second, and Third Mesas, the southerly peninsular extensions of Black Mesa. Perched above a gently rolling sea of rock and sand, the villages at first seem naturally hewn from the mesa tops, a crenellated skyline, rather than human architecture, until you spot the spiky mantle of antennas, solar cells, and satellite dishes.

Looking at the high-set Hopi towns from the outlying flats, you have the illusion that it is the mesas, not the clouds of a winter sky, that are moving, as if all the houses and villagers were sailing across the desert floor.

The Hopi claimed their rocky, broken country a thousand years ago, drawing lifeblood from the underlying aquifer that emerges as springs at the bases of the cliffs. Their pueblos are among the continent's oldest continuously inhabited sites; the waters are among the most blessed. This year's Powamu would claim centuries of ceremonial lineage.

Priests and lunar observation, not the Anglo clock and calendar, set the date of the Powamu, or Bean Dance. I did not know I was coming here until friends called to say that it had begun. I drove, because the Hopi mesas are near home. Imagine trying to book a flight on Delta by phases of the moon instead of time set by the Greenwich Meridian. For the Hopi, these days fall in a continuum of religious life deeply embedded in everyday life. The dawn pollen bathes you. Kachinas walk the streets and plazas. The bus gets stuck.

From late winter until summer's Niman, or Home Dance, when the kachinas return to their distant mountain peaks, the Hopi live among a rich pantheon of masked beings. Through the kachinas, the people's prayers are carried. The ceremonies and dances include a kachina in a white shirt and body paint, a neck ruff of Douglas fir, and a black mask with a short snout. This kachina has blossoms for ears and two curving horns: the Pang

Kachina, who leans on a cane. Pangwú, the mountain sheep, brings rain and makes the grass grow.

Since December's solstice, the village had been busy with winter rites. The Powamu brings out the So'yokos, powerful ogres who make their rounds in the village to discipline young children. As I watched, they moved down the alley with a retinue of monster assistants. I lowered my eyes as they passed my post.

The ogres stopped at a house off the plaza and grunted, stomped, growled, banged the door, and scraped sticks across rusty crosscut saws. Their terrifying black-and-white heads had bulging eyes, shivering feathers, long snouts, and movable jaws that clacked open and shut over red mouths filled with sharp white teeth.

At the group's periphery stood an ogre with bugged-out eyes, stringy hair, and a red tongue sticking out of beaklike jaws. She was a So'yoko-mana, a woman figure. Deliberately slow-moving in a crow black cape, she needed no gesture to convey her power. She carried a slender white crook for snagging her victims.

The So'yokos scraped and vibrated their saws. They hammered on the doorway of the house. When a woman opened the door, the So'yokos reprimanded the child inside for disobedience. They threatened to haul him away in the baskets on their backs, then eat him alive. His mother offered a meager ransom of food to satisfy these noisy monsters.

She let the ogres clack their jaws awhile, long enough to remind her son of his misdeeds and scare him until he promised to reform. When they upped the ransom, she handed the ogres loaves of bread and fresh-baked sheet cake. This ritual adds a broader social dimension to parental discipline—the Hopi are great seekers of individual and community equilibrium—and helps the children grow up with good hearts.

Heheya kachinas hid among the So'yokos, ever watchful, each carrying a rope lasso. Their bodies were painted red, their shoul-
ders yellow. Tight caps of lambskin topped green masks with a “crooked mouth,” a brightly painted oval turned on its side in a wily grimace. Vertical lines zigzagged above and below their eyes. Some Heheyas wore tunics of sheepskin. Others improvised with wraps of thick polyester pile held in place by leather belts.

Heheyas, also known as Crooked Mouths, are said to be good farmers. The Heheya Uncle speaks backward and has a reputation for being somewhat of a lurker. The function of the Heheyas had not been fully explained to me, but I was warned to stay clear of them.

Like many of the infamous Hopi clowns, bane of the nineteenth-century missionaries but persistently keen in their lewd, cathartic humor, Heheyas tend to be mischievous. They help the ogres discipline children and threaten to lasso any unwary bystander. “What do they do if they catch you?” I had asked Hopi friends. “Squish you in their lassos,” they replied with a gleam in the eye, implying that there was further but currently unavailable information.

I left my post and walked down the alley, away from the So'yokos. Suddenly, an athletic young Heheya broke away from the group, alive with a feral alertness, his crooked mouth and zigzag eye lines clearly visible. Whirling his lasso above his head, he chased after two teenaged girls who were peeking around the corner of a building. The girls screamed and ran. It seemed a kind of combustible flirtation.

I continued to walk, my back to the Heheya. As a bahana (white) and no longer a girl, I could never be prey to a Crooked Mouth, I assumed. I heard a low growl and the whoosh of a rope. Perhaps I should no longer be sauntering down this alley, I thought. I quickened my pace but did not run. Running seemed like a bad idea.

A rope whizzed in my ear, lifted my hair in its whip of air. As I passed a house, a door burst open and a hand grabbed me by
the jacket collar and yanked me inside, out from under the lasso's flying loop. The door slammed shut. Curtains were drawn. Outside, the ogres’ saws rumbled.

The room was simple, tidy, warm, and fragrant with cooking. Soft-colored woven rugs covered a linoleum floor faded from use. A few house pahos were tucked in a ceiling of darkened beams. Hanging from the whitewashed stucco walls were a Pendleton wool blanket with a red-and-gold pattern against royal blue, several carved kachina dolls, ears of dried corn, and sprigs of dried herbs. On the counter, mounds of bread dough rose in bowls covered with tea towels.

A soft-spoken woman offered me a cup of hot coffee and invited me to stay until the Heheyas left. Her husband and two young grandchildren sat at a small table, eating breakfast. The children would soon leave for school, maybe ride the stuck bus. The girl told me the name of her teacher.

“I know her,” I said. “She is a friend.”

I told them that my teacher friend sometimes received curious notes from absent students, who claimed that their parents had penned their written excuses: “Melissa got the kitchen pox and went to Flagstaff yesterday. Please discuse her.” “Jerry had a conviction and the doctor said green liquid came out.” “Please excuse Raphael from class yesterday. He fell into the Grand Canyon.”

“Are you the one who fell into the Grand Canyon?” I asked the boy. He and his sister fell into a fit of giggles.

Their grandmother was finishing a marathon baking session. She baked for the So'yokos, she explained—“outside bread,” cooked in an adobe oven in the plaza, horned bread, or puffy golden loaves with yeasty peaks, moist yellow sheet cakes, and savory corn bread made with blue cornmeal. She had spent much of the night cooking and grinding corn on a metate, or grinding stone, to make the fine meal for her breads, “a corn so sweet,” she said, smiling, “the So'yokos like it the best.”

Her husband recalled the first ogre kachinas of his youth. “My friends and I were walking around the community center when we saw them. We ran like hell. Later, they came to my house and bargained with my mother.”