Wild Indigo (4 page)

My body was stiff from lying on the cold ground. I sat upright, pulled the edges of my Pendleton around me, and continued to watch the stars twinkle and fall across the night sky. I could smell the mountain sage and the spicy incense of
trementina
, the sap of the favored piñon wood the locals loved to burn in their fireplaces and woodstoves. Here in the mountains of northern New Mexico, the late summer nights were already growing cold in contrast to the hot days created by the intense, high-altitude sunlight. Momma Anna had taught me that this was the time called Paw' epana, Lake Moon time. Mountain lay beside me on the ground, his long legs trembling as he dreamed of the chase. He whimpered a little and I reached out a hand to soothe him, stroking his thick ruff.

An owl hooted softly in a grove of junipers on the slope above my cabin. The local tribes believed the owl represented either death or witches. It seemed a fitting tribute to have one singing to me tonight. The meteor shower I had been witnessing all evening had seemed like a heavenly sendoff with fireworks—but the owl's persistent voice haunted me like the images of Santana's death.

A rustling sound on the ground to my left forced my attention from the sky, and I watched as a lone coyote emerged from some scrub and padded across the flats toward the rocks and higher ground above my cabin. Mountain woke instantly and rolled onto his stomach, ready. He raised his head and then lowered it, ears back, watching. “Shhhhh…,” I told him, my hand on his neck. “Let coyote go.”

And then we heard the sound of a car approaching in the darkness. The wolf's ears rotated, alert. The vehicle came from far away, its engine growing louder as it turned and barreled down my long, ungraded dirt and rock road. Lights flooded over me as the automobile pulled in front of the house. The engine stopped, the lights died, and a car door opened and closed. Steps came toward me, and the figure of a man emerged from the shadow of the cabin walls. Mountain got up and ran to greet him, tail wagging. The man came toward me and stood above me, looking down. We were both silent. Finally, he spoke. “I saw you in my headlights when I was coming down the road.”

I opened my blanket to him. Kerry Reed, the forest ranger who had been gracing my life lately, sat down beside me and pulled the edges of the blanket around him. He smelled like the woods, campfire smoke, and
man.
I felt us both softening—like two dancers taking position—before beginning the ritual of greeting. First, he engaged my eyes: a slow, sensual drinking-in. Then, that little, half-crooked smile of his: loaded, sexy, full of mischief. He leaned forward and brushed his lips over my nose, my cheeks—so soft, so delicate, like butterfly wings, only the suggestion of touch, making me long for more. His mouth found mine, pulled at my lower lip as his fingers touched mine. “Babe, you're freezing,” he said, clutching my hands. “Are you okay?”

Something about his voice, his concern for me, made me want to cry. I didn't speak.

He put a warm arm around me and pulled me close, my forehead against his chin. I could smell his neck; that wonderful fragrance of soap and warm flesh. He stroked my hair. “I heard about the stampede at the pueblo.” He rubbed my shoulder softly, looking up at the sky.

After a few minutes, I said, “I watched someone die today. I couldn't help him.”

Stroking my arm, my back. “Talk to me.”

“I've seen a lot of death.”

“I know.”

“This one was different.”

“Tell me.”

“I don't know. It's not over.”

“What do you mean?”

“I don't know.”

We were both quiet again.

“So, you're okay, though, right?” He looked at me.

“Sure. But wait till you see my Jeep.”

“I don't give a damn about your Jeep, as long as you're okay.”

I couldn't help it, I smiled at him. He was a beautiful man: brown hair cut short and neat, eyebrows that yearned to merge across his prominent brow, eyes full of light and tenderness; a narrow face with a tiny scar beside one eye, another to one side of his mouth, two larger ones on the underside of his chin—each one with a story.

“So what are you doing out here?” he asked, looking around.

“Sometimes I just feel like I have to get outside. You know? I used to spend all my time outside before, when I was riding range. I feel closed in after a while. I have to get out and talk with the stars.”

Kerry rubbed his face, his heavy growth of daily stubble making a sandpaper sound against his hand. “So, you've been talking to the stars, huh? What are they saying to you?”

“You really want to know?”

He nodded, putting a warm arm around my back and pulling me toward him.

“Oh, they're lying. They're telling me what they always do—that everything's right with the world. That everything is beautiful and in its place. That there is magic all around us, all the time, and there's nothing else to life than that.”

“And you think they're lying?”

“Yeah. And I've been listening to an owl over there, too. The owl agrees with me. Something's not right.”

“Maybe it's the owl who's lying.” He gave me a squeeze.

We were both quiet awhile, listening.

Then I said, “I'm the one who's a liar.”

He pulled away so he could look in my face. “What do you mean?”

“I filled out a report that was politically correct, playing down a gut instinct, something I saw, something I can't prove. But I can't stop thinking about what happened today, going over and over it in my mind. Something was wrong with Jerome Santana, the man who was killed in the stampede. He acted like he was high on something. There were welts on his back, like he'd been whipped—or clawed by some large animal. He looked like he was out of his mind.”

“Crazy?”

“No, that was the weird part. He looked clear, like he was experiencing some strange ecstasy.”

“Why? What was he doing?”

“It was like he was going toward something wonderful—something he loved—instead of going to his death. Like he'd already left his body in pursuit of it. All that was left was…” I searched for an explanation, but before I could find one a loud whooshing sound rushed toward me, the sky darkening as the swooping dive of massive wings blocked out the light of the stars. An abrupt thwack of hard talons scudded against my scalp, pulling at my hair as the owl soared past and climbed into the night sky behind us.

Both Mountain and I shot upright, the blanket falling back to the ground and over Kerry's head. “Did you see that?”

He found his way out of the drape of the Pendleton. “Wow! Maybe you better go talk to Tecolote,” he said.

“Tecolote? The old
bruja
?”

“Doesn't her name mean ‘owl' in Spanish?”

I rubbed my scalp. “Yes, it does.”

“I think you're right. There's something strange going on.”

The next morning I drove to a market in Taos and ordered four large fruit baskets. I hated to leave Mountain alone again after last night, but the doorless Jeep wouldn't hold him and this was a task that could not be postponed. While the baskets were being made up, I shopped. I bought four of everything: cans of coffee, canned peaches, packets of Kool-Aid, plus four large bags of roasted Hatch green chiles—the smell of these permeated the air throughout August, as vendors roasted the vegetables in dirt drives and parking lots, selling them by the sackful.

I stopped by the butcher counter. “Hey there, Jesse,” I said to the man with the red-stained apron and the big knife in his hand.

“Señorita Wild.
¿Cómo está?
”

“I'm good, Jesse, I'm good. How 'bout you?”

“I can't complain. My wife is mad at me. I didn't go to mass today, but I told her I had a lot of work to do. You have to make a living, so what are you going to do?”

I smiled.

“Hey, I kept back some juicy trimmings for Mountain. Is he in the car?”

“Not today. But I hoped you had some for him. And I'll need to buy some meat to mix with his food.”

“We got some good ground lamb over there in that cooler,” he said. He went in the back and came out with a jumbo bagful of meaty bones, beef parts and pieces, and trimmings from the roasts and steaks he cut to order for his clientele.

“Mountain will love you for this,” I said.

“Too bad he's not here. I was going to hand him this leg joint personally.” He held up a large, gristly cow fibula, then wrapped it in some waxed butcher paper and taped it up.

“Oh, man, you're going to be that wolf's hero.”

“You tell El Lobo this is from Jesse,” he said as he handed the plastic bag and the paper parcel over the counter.

“He knows you're the man,” I said.

When the fruit baskets were ready, I loaded everything in the backseat of my Jeep and drove five miles north of town across Grand Mesa in the direction of the Colorado border, then turned off the highway just before the parking lot of Tanoah Falls Casino, busy even at this hour on a Sunday. I drove toward the mountains and took the winding road through the village of Cascada Azul, a tiny town that catered largely to winter skiers and the few summer tourists visiting Tanoah Pueblo, a back-roads, less-well-preserved sister to the larger, more popular Taos Pueblo. The village was all but deserted now—late summer, the pueblo closed to visitors, and the imminent beginning of the school year urging tourist families back home. I turned off the main street onto an unmarked dirt lane, Rattlesnake Road—the back way into Tanoah Pueblo. From there, I drove behind the wall at the western side of the old village. I parked near a corral and separated out a fourth of the packaged goods into one sack. I took this, one of the large bags of chiles, and one of the fruit baskets and climbed the steps leading over the wall.

I knocked at a door washed with turquoise paint, stark against the pinkish tan adobe walls it was set within. When the door opened, Momma Anna's sister, Serena, peered out at me. “Oh, Jamaica.” Then she turned and spoke to someone in Tiwa, the door still only slightly ajar. I heard her say my name.

The door opened wide now, and a tiny old woman wrapped in a thin blanket came toward me exuding a long wail, an emotional greeting that contained gratitude and suffering all at the same time. “Oh-h-h-h-h-h-h,” she said. “Jamaica. Come in. Sit. Sit. You must eat.”

“Grandma Bird,” I said, taking her hand with the tips of my fingers, as Serena slipped the bags out of my arms to help me unload them.

Grandma embraced me, her eyes full of tears. “Did you come, our grandson?” she asked.

Serena spoke again in Tiwa. Grandma inhaled a gasp, her eyes growing large and round beneath her shawl. Then she looked at me again—obviously Serena had told her about my presence at Jerome's death. “You need ceremony,” Grandma said, and she scurried away to the mudroom, where personal belongings and food stores were kept. Serena took the things I had brought into the small kitchen.

In this old part of the pueblo, there was no running water or electricity, and it was mostly elders that kept life in the old ways. Serena came every day to care for her mother and father, Bird Woman and Nazario Lujan, to bring water for them from the pump over the wall, and to keep the wood fires going against the cold that clung to the adobe walls from the cool mountain nights. The cooking was shared by Serena and her sister, Anna Santana, and Grandma Bird still cooked a little, too. The men in the family—Serena and Anna's brothers and their sons and grandsons—cut firewood and kept a large supply of it piled against the wall. It took a lot of firewood to keep the kiva fireplace in the corner of the main room going all the time, and more still for the cooking. The men also hunted rabbit, deer, pheasant, grouse, elk, and even bear to provide meat for all the family.

Grandpa Nazario sat on one of the two twin beds in the corner of the room, the gas lamp hanging from the ceiling making shadows against his face. He was rocking and humming to himself. I went to him and took his hand, squatting down to put my eyes lower than his. I looked up at him and he smiled at me. He patted the bed beside him and I sat down. He gripped my hand tightly, and with his free hand, he beat against his thigh in a steady rhythm. Grandpa Nazario was once the head drummer at Tanoah Pueblo. He knew only a few words in English. He turned to look at me. “Burn cedar,” he said. “You pray.”

Just then Grandma Bird came back from the mudroom and handed me a deerskin pouch tied with a piece of leather thong. “This,” she said. Then she bent down and whispered into my ear, “You—no clothes tonight; bathe in spring, water move, you know? Rub”—she made a gesture to demonstrate rubbing the skin, then pointed to the pouch—“this.” I nodded my head. Then she handed me a turkey feather. “After, throw in water for one we lost. Come back, four days, ceremony.”

I stood and started for the door. “No!” Grandpa Nazario barked. “You eat!”

I let out a long breath. I really wanted to get back for Mountain, but there was no escaping it. I would have to eat, and eat well. The feast at the elders' home was a tradition for all family rites and rituals. There was nothing more insulting than refusing the nourishment these generous people provided. Serena brought me a Styrofoam plate full of rich venison stew in red chili sauce, posole made with buffalo meat, a spoonful of spicy beans, and two thick slices of the beautiful rose-scented bread baked in the
hornos
, the beehive-shaped adobe ovens outside every home in the pueblo. I pulled back one of the rickety wooden benches that had been set around the plywood and sawhorse table erected for the family feasts normally taking place at this time of the year—now being used to feed the mourners who came to pay their respects. A red-and-white-checkered plastic tablecloth was spread over half of the large sheet of plywood, a white vinyl shower curtain over the other half. In the center, where they met, stacks of Styrofoam cups, paper napkins, and plastic tableware formed a high-tech, white, disposable centerpiece. Serena brought me a cup of orange Kool-Aid. “Eat! Eat!” she said. I ate.

While I was dining, the door opened and Hunter Contreras, Serena's boyfriend, came in with Serena's two small grandchildren in his arms. Dressed in a traditional apron over his jeans, and with his hair bound at the nape of the neck, he gave me a beaming smile and set the children down in order to greet me further with a hug. After we exchanged greetings, Hunter sat beside me, and the children went to the other side of the plywood table. Serena brought steaming plates of food for each of them.

“We've been at ceremony,” Hunter said, “and the children were getting too restless. They needed to come home, take a nap.”

“It's good of you to care for them while Serena's handling the feast,” I said.

He spoke to the five-year-old girl in Tiwa and she smiled, but obediently returned the meat she had been eating with her fingers to the plate and took up a fork. The younger child, a boy not quite two, ate no more than a few bites, then came to Hunter and wanted to be held again. Contreras put the toddler in his lap and held him, stroking him with one hand as he ate with the other, smiling affectionately and offering small bites of his food to the boy, who laughed and pushed his hand away. It was good to see these children treated so tenderly, as were most of the children in the pueblo. Although they were technically no relation to Hunter, Serena's grandchildren were clearly accustomed to his care and attention.

“Are you still teaching Tiwa to the children?” I asked.

“Yes, they gave me a spot at the Indian Center, in the new lab.”

“So you're in the same space where they have the Computer Project for Tribal Youth?” I didn't mention Jerome Santana, who had been in charge of that program, and had written the grant—which paid for the portable metal building used as a lab, and also the computers—so the young people of Tanoah Pueblo might have a fighting chance in today's world of technology.

“Yes, we use the same space. The children from Head Start come in the morning, the elementary school children come in the early afternoon, and we're all out of there by three o'clock, when the older kids get out of school and come to the computer lab.” He mopped up red chili with a wedge of bread.

“It's good you're doing that,” I said.

“We don't want our young people to grow up without their native ways and their language, and many of the parents are not teaching these things to the children. This way, we keep our culture alive through the future generations.” Contreras continued to eat and to talk in between bites while he mopped up meat gravy with the slices of freshly baked Pueblo bread. “You can usually tell the age of a person from Tanoah Pueblo by how much English and how little Tiwa he speaks. Like Grandma and Grandpa: they struggle with English and can barely get by. But they can talk up a blue streak in Tiwa. That's the elders. Now you take Serena—she's quite a bit younger than her sister, Anna. Serena speaks fluent English so she doesn't bother to talk to her kids or her grandkids in Tiwa. Those young ones wouldn't even know their native language if it weren't for this program. But on the other hand, Anna—because she is older—grew up with mostly Tiwa and so taught her children Tiwa first.” He pushed his foam plate away.

Serena's granddaughter was finished with her meal, too, and she came to stand beside Contreras, clutching his massive arm as if she were hugging a tree. He smiled at her. “Did you get enough to eat, little one?”

She grinned shyly and nodded her head yes. She ducked under his arm and climbed into his lap. At this, her brother got down and went to lie on the bed beside Grandpa Nazario.

“I'm so happy that Tanoah Pueblo has kept its culture intact,” I said. “It makes it a magical place to me.”

“Well, one reason we have held on to what we have is just a matter of luck. We have never been relocated to another place, had to march hundreds of miles and be confined like other tribes. But we have suffered other things. When the Spanish tried to take our children and make them into slaves, we hid them—up in the mountains. If we couldn't take them, we trained them to run, told them where to go, where to hide and wait until it was safe to come back. We stayed together as much as we could. We have always been here.” He tapped the table with the end of his index finger. “Right here.”

“I guess that's what makes Tanoah Pueblo so special.”

He nodded his head in agreement. “But even so, we see more and more of our traditions dying, eroding, being stolen. That's why we've become so protective of our culture. We guard it carefully. When you come to the pueblo on a feast day and the dancers are drumming and chanting and singing, you can see that much of our culture is contained and transmitted in sound, in vibration. As a people, we are but a vibration, a breath of the Great Spirit—and we came into being on that breath, that resonance.

“Our pueblo—this old part inside the walls right here where Grandpa and Grandma live—it is designed to resonate with the earth around it, and to give the people who live within it the experience of vibrating with Grandmother Earth. Our language is an extension of that. Our chants and songs, the drums we make here at the pueblo—all these are sacred. Our language is sacred. It is a life-or-death matter for our culture. To lose it would be to lose our very souls. It is our means of existing, our way of weaving in and out of the world of nothingness and the world of Creator's breath. This is why we made a decision a long time ago to keep the Tiwa language an oral tradition.”

I was so moved by Contreras's words that I could not speak. I wanted to thank him for his eloquence in sharing with me what I had never fully understood, yet now—due to his careful teaching—knew to be true about my medicine teacher and the family that had welcomed me in their midst. Their language, their culture, and the sacredness of these—this was what drew me to be right where I was at that very moment.

Serena poked her head out of the kitchen and said something in Tiwa, her voice soft, submissive, a kind of sustained cry so typical of the flat, extended tones of the language.

The big man lifted the child to the floor and patted her bottom as she scampered toward the bed to join her brother in a nap. Then Contreras rose from the wooden bench and extended a large brown palm to me. “It was good to see you again, Jamaica,” he said.