The Grey Pilgrim (12 page)
Authors: J.M. Hayes
She had grown up on a successful Ohio farm where the kitchen never produced meals that were less than bountiful. She owed her figure to genetic predisposition, youth, and metabolism, not a succession of diets. Nothing she’d ever done prepared her for those four days. Giving up cookies for Lent as a little girl just wasn’t the same thing. Even then, she’d thought of nothing but cookies from the moment she gave them up. It was like that for the first three days in the hut. Grey Leaves, or occasionally one of the younger women, sat with her and droned on and on about a woman’s place in the tribe, her duties and expectations. They showed her how to weave cloth and baskets, how to throw a pot, how a house should be laid out—all of it invaluable to an ethnographer—but she couldn’t concentrate. All she could think of was food, and they made it worse by giving her recipes and explaining how to identify edible roots and berries.
Actually, the first part of the first morning she was more cold than hungry. She’d wondered when she would get a chance to take her next bath. She hadn’t anticipated it would be a shower nor so public and so soon. When they ran out of ice water they bundled her in robes and blankets and dried her. They gave her a cotton shift like those of the People. Grey Leaves had made it for her. They led her into the low, rounded hut where a mesquite fire smoldered behind a shield of rocks so that Mary could not see it. A woman being purified should not look on fire. It was comfortable in the hut and she soon stopped shivering and began feeling hungry.
The fourth day was different. She wasn’t hungry anymore. That was the day Grey Leaves told her how Earthmaker made the world out of a ball of dirt. How he danced on it, flattening it till it reached the edges of the sky. Then, with a great noise, another being who was
Itoi,
sprang out, and together, they shaped the world. Coyote, who had been in the world from the beginning, helped them. There were people in the world also, but they were evil and
Itoi
and Coyote agreed to destroy them with a flood. They wagered that whichever of them first returned from his hiding place after the flood should be Elder Brother and make the new people.
Itoi
won the honor. He shaped the new people from clay and taught them how to live. Earthmaker grew jealous and sank back into the ground because
Itoi
and Coyote had supplanted him. But perhaps Earthmaker, or Coyote, had their revenge, because
Itoi’s
people quarreled with him and tried to kill him. So
Itoi
went into the earth also, and found there the
O’odham
. He led them out onto the surface where they drove away the ancient ones who left behind only their ruins. Then Elder Brother taught them how to bring rain and how to keep happiness in the world.
The old woman continued her hypnotic recitation, telling Mary of the great magicians who live at the corners of the world and have houses along Father Sun’s path. And there was much more. At some point it all began to make sense, to take on special meaning. Mary began to understand, to see that beneath the words lay a great truth of immense magnitude. If only she could clearly grasp it, carry it back to her people and do justice in its explanation, she would do all mankind a tremendous service. She listened and puzzled and then she did understand and a marvelous peace came to her. And then it was over.
They led her out of the hut into a frosty dawn. A melting drop hung at the tip of a mesquite thorn and the sun shone through it, exploding into a rainbow of hues. The air was filled with its own prism of scents—damp earth, creosote, wood smoke, people, horses. It was all clearer, brighter, sharper than she’d ever sensed before.
When the old man walked her into the desert, she continued to see small details she would normally have missed, heard as the crunch of their footsteps divided into the sound of each bit of earth and gravel displacing itself against its fellows.
“Your true name shall be Many Flowers,” he told her when they were away from the others and he could not be overheard. “It is your secret name. You must not reveal it to anyone whom you do not absolutely trust.”
“Many Flowers,” she said, trying it. She smiled. “It is a beautiful name. Thank you.” She knew he was right. Many Flowers was, indeed, who she was and always had been.
They gave her a thin broth and some jerked beef, and, when she was done, loaded themselves and their belongings on horses and rode across the desert beneath a stunted range of dark peaks. She was very weak. She sat behind the
Siwani Mahkai
. She had to concentrate in order to remember to hold on.
The village lay among a collection of sooty caves. They arrived about noon and the old man led her to a cave where the mouth had been partially walled shut with mud and brush. He showed her a sleeping mat, and she lay down. The next thing she knew, it was night, and a grand celebration was beginning. Her presence was required, Grey Leaves explained. She was the guest of honor.
In the morning she rose with the women, helped them prepare breakfast, and begin the day’s many tasks. As soon as it was fitting for her to do so, she sought out the
Siwani Mahkai
. Already, the wondrous truth she’d beheld from the vantage of her semi-starved state was gone. Intellectually, she realized that, explained to her now, she would likely find it neither wondrous nor true, but it had certainly seemed so at the time. She regretted not having found some way to set it down, to have recorded it for later analysis. And there were so many other things she had learned. She needed her notebooks. She needed to start recording facts, details, impressions. She wanted to start the job she’d come for.
She had expected to find her personal belongings in the cave she shared with the
Siwani Mahkai’s
extended family, but none of her things were there when she woke and no one seemed to know where they might be found. So she went looking for the old man.
He had climbed a ridge above the camp and was sitting with his back to the mountain. He was gazing toward where distant snaggle-toothed peaks had taken a bite of a freshly rinsed sky, across a rolling desert several shades greener than before the rain. His people went about their business, work and play, at his feet.
Despite the feast and a good night’s sleep, she was still weak from her fast. She was struggling for air by the time she reached him.
He waved his hand at the sweep of endless cactus and stone and creosote. “We shall pass and be no more,” he told her, “but our land shall remain and change not.”
Profound, she thought, but familiar.
“The priests of my people tell us something similar,” she said. Her tongue felt as stiff and uncomfortable, fitting itself to the People’s language, as her feet would in a new pair of shoes. “I don’t think I can translate it to
O’odham
. Do you speak Spanish?”
“A little.”
She tried it. “One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh, but the earth abideth for ever.” Ecclesiastes. She had memorized it once for Sunday School.
His eyes twinkled. “So, maybe I heard it at the Mission.” Was he teasing her?
“May I ask something of the Chief Medicine Man?” she ventured hesitantly.
“I have been expecting you,” he replied, his expression serious now. “You are wondering where your belongings have gotten to, and what has become of the gifts you brought us.”
She hadn’t noticed that the gifts weren’t about, hadn’t even thought about them, just her notebooks. Not too observant for a trained observer. She nodded agreement.
He waved his arm at the village below. “As you see, as you have seen, we are an old-fashioned village. Many of the ways and tools of the Americans and the Mexicans have intruded here and been adopted by us, but more have not. We avoid them. We try to remain true to the teachings of Elder Brother and in harmony with our desert. As Chief Medicine Man of my village, it is my duty to guide my people. It is a difficult task, often complex and unpleasant, but it is my responsibility. I must seek out the proper direction for us to follow and then I must persuade and cajole an often reluctant people to accept it. That requires a good deal of gentle nagging and some heavy-handed flattery. Those are my tools.
“We have largely followed the old ways during my lifetime. We have stayed away from the White Man and his wonders because such things are not natural to our world. But is it clear yours is a young and energetic race. Perhaps Elder Brother has brought you from the bowels of the earth to replace us, just as he once brought us to replace the
Hekihukam
.
“Perhaps, too, the old myths are just stories. The world may be a much wider place than we have dreamed. If that is so, we must learn to adapt to it or be shoved aside and destroyed. These are things I do not know, things I need to know. There are matters I must decide. And on my decisions will rest the fate of my people.
“As your people have touched us more and more through the years, we have retreated from you. There remain few places into which we can retreat. Soon you will touch us anywhere in our desert that you choose. Casually, thoughtlessly, you may brush us aside if we stand in your way.
“I have decided that we must understand your people better. When I learned that you wished to come and live with us, I decided it would be an opportunity for us to exchange information. You may live among us, see how we exist and what we hold important, on what our lives are centered. And I, too, can question you about your people’s ways and learn who you are and what makes you so.
“But we have resisted your ways for a long time. It was not easy for me to persuade my people to take you in. To do so, I had to promise them we would accept only you and none of your gifts, not even your personal possessions. This may seem foolish to you, for you will see that some of us wear articles of American clothing and we use many of your tools. Still, there was concern that your coming could be dangerous to us, and that the danger was compounded by the things you brought.
“Your gifts and belongings are cached several days’ journey from here. They are safe, but they must remain there, at least for the time being. As my people come to know you, to trust you, I think I can arrange for some of your things to be brought in. Then you may have access to the items you need, but for now you must be patient.
“You may feel you have been tricked, but I hope you will accept what has been done and stay with us a while. If you feel you cannot, I will personally escort you back to the ranch from which you came. But I hope that will not be necessary. I hope you will stay with us for a time and let us learn to understand each other. I believe we both have much to gain.”
Quite a soliloquy, Mary thought. When it ended, he sat, watching her, waiting for an answer. She didn’t know what to say. What kind of ethnographer just ethnos and doesn’t graph? The rest of her stuff didn’t matter, at least for now, but how could she make records, keep straight all she was being exposed to without her notebooks? The presents were theirs. They could do what they wanted with them. But she needed her notebooks.
“I must make a history of my time with you,” she told him, wondering if there was room to bargain. It was clear he almost desperately wanted her to stay. Still, it could be an all or nothing proposition. “Without that ability I would have to live with you for most of my lifetime in order to know and understand everything I need to take away with me. It is like your calendar sticks. If you did not have them to key your memory, how could you recall the long, complicated history of your people? Without my notebooks there will be too much I cannot remember.”
He nodded. “I will argue with the men that you be allowed to have them, but I will not overrule them. I do not honestly believe I can persuade all of them until you have been with us long enough for them to learn to trust you. I could tell you it may be very soon, but that would be false. I doubt it will be before the arrival of the Lean Month.”
Jesus! That wasn’t until January. What a choice. Pack it in and start all over somewhere else or try to commit an alien culture to memory. Well, she’d planned to spend as much as a year with them, but she’d hoped it would be off and on, with plenty of time back in the comfort of Tucson, transcribing notes and digging through the literature in search of contradictory conclusions and evidence that needed double checking. She had an awfully good feeling about the ceremonies that had initiated her into the village. She didn’t think it likely that another village would allow her to take part in such intimacies. And she felt good about the
Siwani Mahkai
. If she could give him the kind of information he wanted, he could prove to be an incredibly valuable informant to her as well.
“All right,” she agreed, reluctantly. “Let’s give it a try. I should have some sort of feel for how I’m going to get along with the rest of the village in a week or so, and whether I’m going to be able to win their trust in a reasonable amount of time. If it doesn’t feel right by then, I’ll take you up on your offer. In the meantime, I’ll tell you what I can about my people and you can tell me about yours.”
“Good,” he said. “Let us begin now.”
He started asking questions and she began wondering who was the anthropologist and who was the informant. But she did her best to answer.
Bill Burns was five years younger than J.D. and looked ten years older. The sun had exacted a toll on his face, and prematurely grey hair that protruded, thatch-like, from under his straw hat, added to the impression of age. The land he had chosen to conquer was a harsh and unforgiving one. His face was evidence of the price demanded from those who would wrest a living here.
He was a big man with sun-darkened arms of sinewy muscle and ropey veins, visible to where he wore his work shirt rolled up above his elbows. His fingers were stained with nicotine from the incessant stream of cigarettes he smoked down to minute stubs.
J.D. had visited him once before, shortly after Mary went into the field. Jesus agreed they needed to put out the word to ranchers in the neighborhood, and when he got over the lost feeling that swept through him when Mary left without a word, he’d started to wonder if she might have somehow managed to put herself into Jujul’s band. It was a pretty silly thing to worry about. There wasn’t likely to be a band less desirous of having an outsider in its midst than one on the run from federal and tribal authorities. Still, he’d decided Jujul might have brought his people in this general direction and even though Mary shouldn’t have been his primary concern, Burns’ ranch was one of the first places J.D. stopped. Besides, there was that name, Jujul—Zigzag—and the unpredictable nature he’d begun to suspect belonged to the man behind it.
This being his second visit, J.D. was able to impress Jesus with the expertise by which he navigated the unmarked track that led there. He only took a couple of wrong turns this time and caught them before he got lost. If there’d been a proper road, he could have driven from his office to Burns’ front door in less than an hour. The first time it took him over four to find it. This time he made it in two. His Ford sat in the middle of the ranch yard and made occasional wheezing noises by way of complaint, as if it would have preferred a less adventurous lifestyle.
J.D.’s first visit hadn’t been very productive, and, worse, it hadn’t relieved his anxiety either. Bill Burns had never seen those Papagos before November. They’d impressed him as a particularly remote and primitive folk because they hadn’t been skilled traders and he’d gotten an especially good deal on the cattle they herded in—that, and the fact they hadn’t known about the excitement on the reservation at
Stohta U’uhig
. Right away he’d thought theirs might be just the sort of village Mary was looking for. The very next time he’d come within range of a phone, Burns called Mary to tell her about them and how he’d put her offer to them and they’d agreed to think it over.
Burns’ Papago hired hands all seemed to know the strangers, but when J.D. tried to pin down where their village was, he didn’t have much luck. Either they moved around a lot, which was possible, or Burns’ people didn’t know or weren’t saying. But Burns hadn’t been worried, even when J.D. spelled it out. He thought there was no way Jujul would take in Mary in the first place. Besides, Papagos were about the safest, most peaceful folks around. Then he got started on the absurdity of making them register to begin with.
“What the heck’s the government doing, registering Papagos for the draft for anyway? Just a dang waste of time and money. They’s a dang literacy requirement for anybody’s drafted. Now how the heck’s somebody who can’t hardly speak English, let alone read none, gonna pass something like that?”
They were good questions, and once J.D. convinced the rancher he agreed that the whole idea was absurd, Burns calmed down and started being friendly. Burns’ arguments were similar to those J.D. hoped to use to convince Jujul of the harmlessness of the registration process. There was no way any of his people were going to be required to serve in the armed forces as long as that literacy requirement remained. He didn’t plan to mention the possibility of its being eliminated in the face of a real national emergency. White Men speaking with forked tongues was traditional. Besides, it might never happen and the important thing was to defuse this situation before it got somebody killed.
Burns and his mousey little wife Edith were helpful, but entirely unconcerned about Mary. Before J.D. left, however, they promised to let him know as soon as they heard anything from her or of anything that might suggest he was right about Jujul’s band moving into the area. J.D. hadn’t felt reassured on the drive back to town.
He’d been in his office when Burns called, even though it was a Sunday. The paperwork he’d promised himself would be done before Christmas still wasn’t, and it had to be in before the end of the year, only two days away. Burns wasn’t unconcerned anymore. Three Papagos from the village Mary had gone to study had come to his place that morning to do more trading. They claimed Mary had only sent word, and not letters, until Burns insisted there was just no way she wouldn’t have written after all this time, what with the holidays and all. Then they admitted she’d sent a pouch that contained letters, but it must have fallen out of the pack they’d carried them in because they’d lost it somewhere along the trail and were ashamed and hadn’t wanted to admit it. Bill Burns couldn’t imagine a Papago, especially a traditional one, being that careless with messages. There was too much pride and responsibility associated with being entrusted with something so powerful and important.
These three claimed Mary was well and doing fine in their village, that she had no needs of which they knew. She’d only sent greetings to her husband and friends, they assured him, so they asked that such greetings be passed along. They would return with new letters as soon as they were able to make the long journey to Burns’ ranch to trade again. And then they’d spread out a collection of pelts and baskets and started dickering. One of the things they wanted to trade for was some unusual ammunition—Sharps, .50 caliber.
There might be another of those old buffalo guns on the reservation, but the chances were awfully slim. J.D. was willing to bet money and offer odds they’d found Jujul, or at least narrowed down his location by a few hundred square miles, and that the old man had Mary.
Bill Burns’ certainty about Mary’s safety evaporated along with his opinion that J.D. was foolish to worry about her. It took awhile because he seemed to enjoy his guilt, having arranged for Mary to be where she was, but he finally calmed down when J.D. persuaded him she should still be safe. The only reason J.D. could imagine for Jujul wanting Mary was as a hostage. If that was the case, she would be no good to him dead or seriously harmed.
As soon as J.D. reassured Burns, he instructed him to call Larry and tell him the story the Indians had told, to tell it straight, as if he believed it and fully expected a second pack of letters from Mary in a couple of weeks, then get ready to do some hunting—manhunting. Burns agreed, and he must have kept the anxiety out of his voice because Larry called J.D. a few minutes later to pass along the happy news. J.D. tossed in his own casual acceptance of the missing letters. When he hung up he walked over to the map of the Papago Reservation he’d tacked up on his wall. It hadn’t suddenly sprouted a big X conveniently marked “Mary is here.”
J.D. had put in a call to the Pima County Sheriff’s office right after hearing from Burns. He needed help, preferably Jesus. They promised to locate the deputy and have him return the call. J.D. wasn’t happy about the delay. He wanted out of his office and into the desert. Waiting for the phone to ring made him feel about as comfortable as a cat in a sack. He buckled on his .38 in its shoulder holster and chewed his way through most of a pencil while he studied the map, paced, and waited for the phone to ring.
When it did, of course, Jesus turned out to be halfway across the county and unable to just walk away from what he was doing. J.D. thought about getting himself a Papago tribal policeman instead, then decided to wait. The tribe might take even longer. Jujul had been there for a couple of months. He wasn’t likely to go hide somewhere else in the next few hours. Jesus had been in it from the beginning. He deserved a shot at the finish as well.
Jesus came in a little before dawn. They loaded up and got J.D.’s Ford on the road in minutes, J.D. hastily refusing Jesus’ offer to drive. The deputy was tired and tried to catch a nap along the way, but J.D. was keyed up, talking almost nonstop, trying to convince himself Mary was all right and arguing over Jujul’s possible motives for wanting her.
“Hey,” Jesus finally interrupted. “What’s Mary doing out there in the first place?”
J.D. thought the question was an implied criticism, a “what business has a woman got working with primitives in the wilderness anyway?” sort of comment. He was feeling especially protective about then.
“What do you think,” he snapped. “She’s an anthropologist. She’s out there studying them, learning how they live, and what makes them tick.”
“Well,” Jesus said, “maybe she’s not the only one being an anthropologist out there.”
It shut J.D. up for a minute. It made more sense than his hostage theory. At least half the problem they had with Jujul was because of Larson’s indifference to Papago attitudes and Jujul’s lack of understanding of how Anglo culture worked. The old man had shown himself to be a clever, competent leader. What any leader needed in circumstances such as his was intelligence. Not the smarts kind, he already had that, but the knowledge of your enemy kind. What better way to get it than to swap information with an ethnographer, especially if he could keep her from realizing what he was doing? All of a sudden J.D. was sure that was exactly what was happening. Otherwise he wouldn’t have made the mistake about the Sharps. If he’d been torturing Mary for information he would have had plenty of time to get everything she knew, and she knew about the Sharps. Larry’s favorite part of the story had been what the Sharps did to terrorize Larson and his merry men. J.D. felt his panic drain away a little, though he was still damned worried. Just because Jujul hadn’t taken her for a hostage didn’t mean he wouldn’t be prepared to use her as one.
He started in on that subject until Jesus told him, in a very nice way, to shut up and let him try to sleep. From then on J.D. kept quiet, but he also made sure he hit every bump in the road with enough force to keep the deputy awake. Jesus glared at him a time or two, but they had legitimate reason to hurry, and he was being treated to the sort of chauffeuring he normally dished out. He pulled the brim of his hat down low over his eyes, held on tight, and bore his punishment in silence.